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If there’s one thing I’m self-conscious about, it’s the way I smell. I’m constantly applying deodorant, whether I need to or not. But instead of teaching us about body odor and sweat glands, my high school health teacher made us watch the ’70s birthing video (you know the one.)
It didn’t work, and I’m fairly sure some of my classmates conceived baby number one on prom night. I digress. Here are some facts and figures about those pesky pits of yours.
On this day in 1960, the newspaper noted that Americans were having more and more fun – to the tune of $43 billion that year, up $2 billion from the year before. Where the money was going included boating, $2.5…
The new version of the book differs subtly from the one originally slated for March, with multiple sections revised and reworded. But there is one conspicuous difference: the removal of a passage in the acknowledgments praising Agus’ former collaborator, Los Angeles writer Kristin Loberg.
“The Book of Animal Secrets: Nature’s Lessons for a Long and Happy Life” by Dr. David B. Agus
(Courtesy of David B. Agus M.D., Simon & Schuster)
“We have been working together for thirteen years, and I enjoy every moment we spend together,” Agus had initially penned to the person who co-wrote “The Book of Animal Secrets” and his three previous titles. “You are an amazing partner, an insightful thinker, a remarkably talented writer, and a good friend.”
Agus, an oncologist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine and chief executive of the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, was not the only high-profile figure to have credited Loberg with his books’ success.
“The collaboration I have had with my partner and friend, Kristin Loberg, has been truly special,” CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta wrote in the acknowledgments of his 2021 book “Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age.”
“We should all be lucky enough to have a real mind meld with someone like Kristin, who immediately understood what I was trying to convey and always helped me get there,” Gupta wrote of Loberg, who went on to produce two more volumes with him. “She is the very best at what she does, and quite simply, this book would not have been possible without her.”
For years, Loberg was a prolific and sought-after ghostwriter of health- and wellness-themed nonfiction books, a standout in the niche industry of wordsmiths who quietly craft books for authors who lack the time or experience to pen their works alone.
Between 2006 and 2022, the Los Angeles native was credited on 45 titles, nearly all released by the so-called Big Five, the handful of publishers that dominate the U.S. book industry. Books with her shared byline sold millions of copies and garnered coveted bestseller designations from Amazon and the New York Times.
Publishers often introduced her to authors seeking a writing partner, according to Loberg’s former clients and her own previous interviews.
“If the publisher, of all people, is the one doing the recommendation, that’s kind of the gold standard,” said Dan Gerstein, CEO of the agency Gotham Ghostwriters.
That changed abruptly in March. A review by The Times of Agus’ four books with Loberg found significant plagiarism: not just a recycled turn of phrase or a few missing attributions, but entire paragraphs and pages copied and pasted verbatim from blog posts, news articles and other sources.
Her two other best-selling clients, Gupta and celebrity talk show guest Dr. David Perlmutter, issued public statements saying they had reviewed their books and likewise found plagiarized material in their titles.
“I accept complete responsibility for any errors my work may have contained,” Loberg said at the time in a statement that acknowledged “allegations of plagiarism” and apologized to writers whose work was not properly credited.
Publishers pledged to review all of her books and take corrective steps where necessary. In the nine months since, they have been quietly cleaning up an editorial mess that some industry observers say is partly of their own making.
A Times investigation of books by Dr. David Agus found more than 120 passages that are virtually identical to the language and structure of previously published material from other sources.
(Los Angeles Times)
Simon & Schuster said it has released updated versions of six books by Agus and Gupta with the problematic passages either reworked or excised. Loberg’s name is scrubbed from the credits and acknowledgments in the latest editions on Amazon’s Kindle store.
Hachette Book Group released new electronic versions of the four books Perlmutter wrote with Loberg, including the bestselling “Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar — Your Brain’s Silent Killers.” Loberg’s name no longer appears in those books either.
“It seems like what they’re doing is something of a stealth new version, where they are letting corrected ones replace the ones with plagiarism relatively quietly,” said Jonathan Bailey, owner of the copyright and plagiarism consultancy CopyByte in New Orleans. “While this is much better than doing nothing, it would be much better to have first pulled the books from sale and then replaced them with clearly marked new editions.”
Representatives for Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Macmillan did not respond to multiple queries about the outcome of promised reviews of Loberg’s books. They also declined to comment on whether they have made any changes in their editorial processes.
Neither Loberg nor her attorney responded to requests to comment for this story.
It’s unclear how plagiarism of this scale evaded notice for so long. In addition to outside sources, Loberg frequently borrowed sections from her projects with other clients. The result was a sort of ouroboros of wellness content across multiple books.
For instance, multiple passages from Dr. Michael F. Holick’s 2010 “The Vitamin D Solution: A 3-Step strategy to Cure Our Most Common Health Problem” and 2011’s “Mom Energy: A Simple Plan to Live Fully Charged” by dietitian Ashley Koff and fitness trainer Kathy Kaehler appeared in Agus’ 2012 bestseller “The End of Illness.”
Parts of “The End of Illness” surfaced the following year in Perlmutter’s “Grain Brain.” A decade later, a long passage on diabetes from “Grain Brain” appeared nearly verbatim in the original version of “The Book of Animal Secrets.”
Previous Loberg clients contacted by The Times described her as a skilled professional with a warm demeanor.
“She was super to work with and very talented,” said Dr. Carl Lavie, who collaborated with her on his 2014 book “The Obesity Paradox: When Thinner Means Sicker and Heavier Means Healthier.”
In a statement posted temporarily to her website, Loberg described the errors as inadvertent.
“I have never intentionally used another author’s work without attribution,” she wrote in the statement, which was removed after a few weeks. “The most troubling part for me is thinking and knowing I was doing everything right, only to learn that I was not as meticulous and diligent as I thought. In all my years in this profession, I’ve never once had a complaint about content.”
Yet the sheer amount of work Loberg took on during those years should have raised red flags, according to people familiar with the publishing industry. Other ghostwriters working in similar genres told The Times they tend to focus on one project at a time, frequently spending a year or more on a single book. Including the original version of Agus’ “Animal Secrets,” Loberg’s name has appeared on 46 titles since 2006.
“The original sin here was not factoring in what Loberg’s workload was,” said Gerstein of Gotham Ghostwriters. “Very, very few ghostwriters who work at that level would take on that much work for a prolonged period of time.”
The Times discovered the misappropriated material by running thee manuscripts through iThenticate, a plagiarism-detection software program used frequently by researchers, publishers and instructors.
Surprisingly, Loberg once described the same program as an essential part of her own professional process.
In a since-removed 2014 post on the Los Angeles Editors & Writers Group blog, she wrote that she had started using iThenticate the previous year, and encouraged other writers to do so “to ensure that our works are bulletproof.”
“It’s far too easy to cut and paste with good intentions during the crazy writing process and later find yourself accused of plagiarism,” Loberg wrote. “So while you might think that the secret to truly original content is just great writing, let me suggest that you add, ‘And it’s been certified organic by an anti-plagiarism program’!”
Whereas Loberg and her higher-profile clients have publicly apologized for misusing authors’ words without attribution, the companies that published the books have been largely quiet.
Given that Agus issued an apology after problems with his books came to light, “it’s not that much different a context or that hard a lift for the publishers to do the same,” Gerstein said, especially considering their role in pairing Loberg with authors.
“There was nothing in her past to indicate that she was capable of this, or this was a high risk,” he said. “But given that they did recommend her, then to make a statement of some responsibility, and to acknowledge their role in it at a minimum, wouldn’t seem that much to ask.”
The muted response from publishers is “very disheartening and disconcerting, to say the least,” said Barbara Glatt, a forensic plagiarism investigator based in Chicago.
If publishers are slow to react “even when armed with incontrovertible proof,” she said in an email, “one can only imagine that going forward with the continued advances in machine learning (ChatGPT for example) that the line between plagiarism and originality will be further blurred.”
There were times, during the first two years of the Biden presidency, when I came close to forgetting about it all: the taunts and the provocations; the incitements and the resentments; the disorchestrated reasoning; the verbal incontinence; the press conferences fueled by megalomania, vengeance, and a soupçon of hydroxychloroquine. I forgot, almost, that we’d had a man in the White House who governed by tweet. I forgot that the news cycle had shrunk down to microseconds. I forgot, even, that we’d had a president with a personality so disordered and a mind so dysregulated (this being a central irony, that our nation’s top executive had zero executive function) that the generals around him had to choose between carrying out presidential orders and upholding the Constitution.
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I forgot, in short, that I’d spent nearly five years scanning the veldt for threats, indulging in the most neurotic form of magical thinking, convinced that my monitoring of Twitter alone was what stood between Trump and national ruin, just as Erica Jong believed that her concentration and vigilance were what kept her flight from plunging into the sea.
Say what you want about Joe Biden: He’s allowed us to go days at a time without remembering he’s there.
But now here we are, faced with the prospect of a Trump restoration. We’ve already seen the cruelty and chaos that having a malignant narcissist in the Oval Office entails. What will happen to the American psyche if he wins again? What will happen if we have to live in fight-or-flight mode for four more years, and possibly far beyond?
Our bodies are not designed to handle chronic stress. Neuroscientists have a term for the tipping-point moment when we capitulate to it—allostatic overload—and the result is almost always sickness in one form or another, whether it’s a mood disorder, substance abuse, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, or ulcers. “Increase your blood pressure for a few minutes to evade a lion—a good thing,” Robert Sapolsky, one of the country’s most esteemed researchers of stress, emailed me when I asked him about Trump’s effect on our bodies. But “increase your blood pressure every time you’re in the vicinity of the alpha male—you begin to get cardiovascular disease.” Excess levels of the stress hormone cortisol for extended periods is terrible for the human body; it hurts the immune system in ways that, among other things, can lead to worse outcomes for COVID and other diseases. (One 2019 study, published in JAMA Network Open, reported that Trump’s election to the White House correlated with a spike in premature births among Latina women.)
Another major component of our allostatic overload, notes Gloria Mark, the author of Attention Span, would be “technostress,” in this case brought on by the obsessive checking of—and interruptions from, and passing around of—news, which Trump made with destructive rapidity. Human brains are not designed to handle such a helter-skelter onslaught; effective multitasking, according to Mark, is in fact a complete myth (there’s always a cost to our productivity). Yet we are once again facing a news cycle that will shove our attention—as well as our output, our nerves, our sanity—through a Cuisinart.
One might reasonably ask how many Americans will truly care about the constant churn of chaos, given how many of us still walk around in a fug of political apathy. Quite a few, apparently. The American Psychological Association’s annual stress survey, conducted by the Harris Poll, found that 68 percent of Americans reported that the 2020 election was a significant source of strain. Kevin B. Smith, a political-science professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, found that about 40 percent of American adults identified politics as “a significant source of stress in their lives,” based on YouGov surveys he commissioned in 2017 and 2020. Even more remarkably, Smith found that about 5 percent reported having had suicidal thoughts because of our politics.
Richard A. Friedman, a clinical psychiatry professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, wonders if a second Trump term would be like a second, paralyzing blow in boxing, translating into “learned helplessness on a population-level scale,” in which a substantial proportion of us curdle into listlessness and despair. Such an epidemic would be terrible, especially for the young; we’d have a generation of nihilists on our hands, with all future efforts to #Resist potentially melting under the waffle iron of its own hashtag.
Which is what a would-be totalitarian wants—a republic of the indifferent.
Ironically, were Trump to win, an important group of his supporters would bear a particular psychological burden of their own, and that’s our elected GOP officials. I’ve written before that Trump’s presidency sometimes seemed like an extended Milgram experiment, with Republican politicians subjected to more and more horrifying requests. During round two, they’d be asked to do far worse, and live in even greater terror of his base—and even greater terror of him, as he tells them, in the manner of all malignant narcissists, that they’d be nothing without him. And he wouldn’t be wholly wrong.
The Trump base, however, will be intoxicated. We should brace ourselves for a second uncorking of what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk”: The Proud Boys will be prouder; the Alex Jones conspiracists will let their false-flag freakishness fly; the “Great Replacement” theorists will become more savage in their rhetoric about Black, Hispanic, and Jewish people. (The Trump administration coincided with a measurable increase in hate crimes, incited in no small part by the man himself.)
But at this point, even an electoral defeat for Trump might not significantly diminish the toll that politics is taking on the collective American psyche. “In such a polarized society, everyone is always living with a lot of hate and fear and suspicion,” Rebecca Saxe, a neuroscientist at MIT who thinks a good deal about tribalism, told me. The winner of the presidential election “may change who bears the burden every four or eight years, but not the burden itself.”
Of course, fractured attention, heightened anxiety, and moral cynicism may come to seem like picayune problems if Trump wins and some 250 years of constitutional norms and rules unravel before our eyes, or we’re in a nuclear war with China, or the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is frog-marched off to court for treason.
This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Psychic Toll.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
As the chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at UT Southwestern Medicine, Catherine Spong is used to seeing a lot of baby bumps. But through her decades of practice, she’s been fascinated by a different kind of bump: Year after year after year, she and her colleagues deliver a deluge of babies from June through September, as much as a 10 percent increase in monthly rates over what they see from February through April. “We call it the summer surge,” Spong told me.
Her hospital isn’t alone in this trend. For decades, demographers have documented a lift in American births in late summer, and a trough in the spring. I see it myself in my own corner of the world: In the past several weeks, the hospital across the street from me has become a revolving door of new parents and infants. When David Lam, an economist at the University of Michigan who helped pioneer several early U.S. studies on seasonal patterns of fertility, first analyzed his data decades ago, “we were kind of surprised how big it was,” he told me. Compare the peak of some years to their nadir, he said, and it was almost like looking at the Baby Boom squished down into 12 months.
Birth seasonality has been documented since the 1820s, if not earlier. But despite generations of study, we still don’t fully understand the reasons it exists, or why it differs so drastically among even neighboring countries. Teasing apart the contributions of biology and behavior to seasonality is messy because of the many factors involved, says Micaela Martinez, the director of environmental health at the nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice, who has been studying seasonality for years. And even while researchers try to track it, the calendar of human fertility has been changing. As our species has grown more industrialized, claimed more agency over reproduction, and reshaped the climate we are living in, seasonality, in many places, is shifting or weakening.
There is no doubt that a big part of human birth seasonality is behavioral. People have more sex when they have more free time; they have less sex when they’re overworked or overheated or stressed. Certain holidays have long been known to carry this effect: In parts of the Western world with a heavy Christian presence, baby boomlets fall roughly nine months after Christmas; the same patterns have been spotted with Spring Festival and Lunar New Year in certain Chinesecommunities. (Why these holidays strike such a note, and not others, isn’t entirely clear, experts told me.)
In addition to free time, family-focused celebrations probably help set the mood, Luis Rocha, a systems scientist at Binghamton University, told me. Cold weather might help people get snuggly around Christmastime, too, but it’s not necessary; Rocha’s studies and others have shown the so-called Christmas effect in southern-hemisphere countries as well. No matter whether Christmas falls in the winter or summer, around the end of December, Google searches for sex skyrocket and people report more sexual activity on health-tracking apps. In a few countries, including the U.S., condom sales rise too.
But cultural norms have never been able to explain everything about the Homo sapiens birth calendar. “It’s pretty common for mammals to have a specific breeding season” dictated by all sorts of environmental cues, Martinez told me. Deer, for instance, mate in the fall, triggered by the shortening length of daylight, effectively scheduling their fawns to be born in the spring; horses, whose gestations are longer, breed as the days lengthen in the spring and into summer, so they can foal the following year.
Humans, of course, aren’t horses or deer. Our closest relatives among primates “are much more flexible” about when they mate, Élise Huchard, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Montpellier, in France, told me. But those apes are not immune to their surroundings, and neither are we. All sorts of hormones in the human body, including reproductive ones, wax and wane with the seasons. Researchers in the United States and Australia have found that couples hoping to conceive via in vitro fertilization have a higher chance of success if the eggs are retrieved during the summer. At the same time, summer conceptions appear to be less common, or less successfully carried to term, in somecountries, a trend that sharpens at lower latitudes and, Lam told me, during hotter years. The subsequent spring lulls may be explained in part by heat waves dissuading people from sex. But Alan Barreca, an economist at UCLA, suspects that ultrahigh temperatures may also physiologically compromisefertility, potentially by affecting factors such as sperm quantity and quality, ovulation success, or the likelihood of early fetal loss.
No matter its exact drivers, seasonality is clearly weakening in manycountries, Martinez told me; in some parts of the world, it may be entirely gone. The change isn’t uniform or entirely understood, but it’s probably to some extent a product of just how much human lifestyles have changed. In many communities that have historically planted and harvested their own food, people may have been more disinclined to, and less physically able to, conceive a child when labor demands were high or when crops were scarce—trends that are still prominent in certain countries today. People in industrial and high-income areas of the modern world, though, are more shielded from those stressors and others, in ways that may even out the annual birth schedule, Kathryn Grace, a geographer at the University of Minnesota, told me. The heat-driven dip in America’s spring births, for instance, has softened substantially in recent decades, likely due in part to increased access to air-conditioning, Lam said. And as certain populations get more relaxed about religion, the cultural drivers of birth times may be easing up, too, several experts told me. Sweden, for example, appears to have lost the “Christmas effect” of December sex boosting September births.
Advances in contraception and fertility treatments have also put much more of fertility under personal control. People in well-resourced parts of the world can now, to a decent degree, realize their preferences for when they want their babies to be born. In Sweden, parents seem to avoid November and December deliveries because that would make their child among the youngest in their grade (which carries a stereotype of potentially having major impacts on their behavioral health, social skills, academics, and athletic success). In the U.S., people have reported preferring to give birth in the spring; there’s also a tax incentive to deliver early-winter babies before January 1, says Neel Shah, the chief medical officer of Maven Clinic, a women’s health and fertility clinic in New York.
Humans aren’t yet, and never will be, completely divorced from the influences of our surroundings. We are also constantly altering the environment in which we reproduce—which could, in turn, change the implications of being born during a particular season. Births are not only more common at certain times of the year; they can also be riskier, because of the seasonal perils posed to fetuses and newborns, Mary-Alice Doyle, a social-policy researcher at the London School of Economics, told me. Babies born during summer may be at higher risk of asthma, for instance—a trend that’s likely to get only stronger as heat waves, wildfires, and air pollution become more routine during the year’s hottest months.
The way we manage infectious disease matters too. Being born shortly after the peak of flu season—typically winter, in temperate parts of the world—can also be dangerous: Infections during pregnancy have been linked to lower birth weight, preterm delivery, even an increased likelihood of the baby developing certain mental-health issues later on. Comparable concerns exist in the tropics, where mosquitoes, carrying birth-defect-causing viruses such as dengue or Zika, can wax and wane with the rainy season. The more humans allow pathogens to spill over from wildlife and spread, the bigger these effects are likely to be.
Children born in the spring—in many countries, a more sparsely populated group—tend to be healthier on several metrics, Barreca told me. It’s possible that they’re able to “thread the needle,” he said, between the perils of flu in winter and extreme heat in summer. But these infants might also thrive because they are born to families with more socioeconomic privilege, who could afford to beat the heat that might have compromised other conceptions. As heat waves become more intense and frequent, people without access to air-conditioning might have an even harder time getting pregnant in the summer.
The point of all this isn’t that there is a right or wrong time of year to be born, Grace told me. If seasonality will continue to have any sway over when we conceive and give birth, health-care systems and public-health experts might be able to use that knowledge to improve outcomes, shuttling resources to maternity wards and childhood-vaccination clinics, for instance, during the months they might be in highest demand.
Humans may never have had as strict a breeding season as horses and deer. But the fact that so many people can now deliver safely throughout the year is a testament to our ingenuity—and to our sometimes-inadvertent power to reshape the world we live in. We have, without always meaning to, altered a fundamental aspect of human reproduction. And we’re still not done changing it.
The heat—miserable and oppressive—is not abating. Today, a third of Americans are under a heat alert as temperatures keep breaking records: Phoenix has hit 110 degrees Fahrenheit for two weeks straight, while this weekend Death Valley in California could surpass the all-time high of 130 degrees.
Even less extreme heat than that can be dangerous. Recently, in Texas, Louisiana, part of Arizona, and Florida, there have been reports of deaths from heat, and many more hospitalizations. The toll of a heat wave is not always clear in the moment: A new report suggests that last summer’s historic heat wave in Europe killed more than 60,000 people.
Ideally, you’d stay in the air-conditioned indoors as much as possible. That’s not an option for everyone. The other thing to do is stay hydrated. The importance of getting enough fluid is hard to overstate—and often underappreciated: Last month, the Texas state legislature banned local governments from mandating water breaks for construction workers. In the heat, hydration “impacts everything,” Stavros Kavouras, the director of the Hydration Science Lab at Arizona State University, in Phoenix, told me. And with temperatures continuing to rise, it’s essential to get it right.
Serious dehydration is really, really bad for you. Your blood volume decreases, which makes your heart work less effectively. “Your ability to thermoregulate declines,” Kavouras told me, “so your body temperature is getting higher and higher.” You might feel weak or dizzy. Your heart rate rises; it gets harder to focus. The worst-case scenario is heatstroke, when your body stops being able to cool itself—a potentially fatal medical emergency.
In extreme temperatures, heat injuries can happen quicker than you might think. Given that the human body is mostly water, you might assume that there is some to spare, but inconveniently, this is not the case. “If you lose even 10 percent of [the water] your body has, you are entering the zone of serious clinical dehydration,” Kavouras said. “And if you look at optimal health, even losing just 1 percent of your body weight impacts your ability to function.” There are two basic ways your body cools itself when it gets hot. One is to send more blood to the skin, which releases heat from the core of your body, and is the reason you turn red when you’re overheated. The other is to sweat. It evaporates off your body, and in the process, your body loses excess heat. You can’t cool yourself as effectively if you’re not properly hydrated. At the same time, one of your main cooling mechanisms is actively dehydrating, which means the goal is not just to be hydrated, but to stay that way.
What that takes depends on many factors rather than a single universal rule, but in general, the danger zone is “high humidity with anything above 90 degrees,” Kavouras said, at which point, “it’s actually dangerous” just to be outside. The more active you are in the heat, and the hotter and more humid it is, the greater the risk—and the more important proper hydration becomes. The standard water target in the U.S. during non-heat-wave times is 3.7 liters a day for men and 2.7 liters for women. When it’s very, very hot out, you need more. Even if you spend most of the day in the bliss of AC, you are almost certainly leaving the house at some point.
Instead of trying to figure out what that precise amount should be, Kavouras recommends you focus on two things instead. “No. 1, keep water close to you. If you have water close to you, or whatever healthy beverage, you’ll end up drinking more, just because it’s closer,” he said. And second: Keep an eye on how often you pee—pale urine, six to seven times a day, or every two to three hours, is good. You want it to be “basically like a Chablis, a Riesling, Pinot Grigio, or champagne-colored,” John Higgins, a sports cardiologist at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth, in Houston, told me. “If you notice the urine is getting darker, like a Chardonnay- or Sauvignon Blanc–type of thing, that generally means you are dehydrated.”
Certain groups are especially at risk. Older adults are more prone to dehydration, as are young children, people who are pregnant, and people taking certain medications—blood-pressure medications, for example. None of this requires you to take in extra fluids per se, just that you need to be even more careful that you’re getting enough.
As for what to drink, as a go-to beverage, straight water is hard to beat. Water with fruit slices floating in it has the benefit of feeling like something from a luxury hotel. Carbonated water is also good—you might not be able to drink quite as much of it, which is a potential drawback, but “there is no mechanism in your GI system that will make sparkling water less effective at hydrating you,” Kavouras said. You probably want to avoid downing giant buckets of coffee—caffeine is a diuretic in large quantities and Higgins warns against sugary drinks for the same reason. (A daily iced coffee is fine.) If you’re doing hours of heavy sweating, then you might work in some (less sugary) sports drinks. But for the majority of people, water remains the ideal. Food can also be a fluid source: “Make sure you’re eating a diet that’s rich in vegetables and fruits that have water content,” William Adams, the director of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s Hydration, Environment and Thermal (H.E.A.T) Stress Lab, advised. Alcohol, which causes you to lose fluid, is definitively unhelpful.
There are lots of water myths out there. Can you go too hard? Technically, it’s possible to over-hydrate, causing an electrolyte imbalance, but all three experts agreed that for most people, this isn’t really a concern. You can find arguments for drinking hot drinks in the summer—the idea being that they increase the amount you sweat, thereby promoting cooling. But Kavouras is emphatic that you’re better off with cold drinks, which cool your body, he said. In the moments before a race, marathon runners will sometimes take it one step further, slurping ice slurries to lower their body temperature. For good old-fashioned drinking water, about 50 degrees Fahrenheit is best—roughly the temperature of cool water from the tap.
One final key to staying hydrated: Start early. A lot of people, Higgins said, are lightly dehydrated all the time, heat wave or not. “So particularly when you first wake up in the morning, typically you are in a dehydrated state.” Accordingly, he recommends that people drink about a standard water bottle’s worth—roughly 17 ounces—as soon as they wake up. The other thing people forget about, he said, is what happens when they come back inside after enduring the outdoors. “You keep sweating,” he pointed out. In other words: hydrate, and then keep hydrating.
As crucial as hydration is, it is not a miracle. “It doesn’t mean that you can say, ‘I hydrate well, so I’ll go out for a run in the 120-degree weather, and I’ll be fine because I’m drinking a lot,’” Kavouras said. “It doesn’t work this way.” Still, it is a simple but effective tool. As heat waves like this one become even more frequent, many more people will need to learn how to become attuned to their hydration. And perhaps adequate water can be a perverse sort of comfort: You can’t control the unrelenting heat, but you likely can control your water intake. In a heat wave, it helps to have a glass-half-full attitude—and an emptied glass of water.
This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.
Bad things happen to a human body in zero gravity. Just look at what happens to astronauts who spend time in orbit: Bones disintegrate. Muscles weaken. So does immunity. “When you go up into space,” says Saïd Mekari, who studies exercise physiology at the University of Sherbrooke, in Canada, “it’s an accelerated model of aging.” Earthbound experiments mimicking weightlessness have revealed similar effects. In the 1970s, Russian scientists immersed volunteers in bathtubs covered in a large sheet of waterproof fabric, enabling them to float without being wet. In some of these studies, which lasted up to 56 days, subjects developed serious heart problems and struggled to control their posture and leg movements.
Weightlessness hurts us because our bodies are fine-tuned to gravity as we experience it here on Earth. It tugs at us from birth to death, and still our intestines stay firmly coiled in their stack, blood flows upward, and our spine is capable of holding up our head. Unnatural contortions can throw things off: People have died from hanging upside down for too long. But as a general rule, the constant push of g-force on our body is a part of life that we rarely notice.
Or at least, that’s what scientists have always thought. But there is another possibility: that gravity itself is making some people sick. A new, peer-reviewed theory suggests that the body’s relationship with gravity can go haywire, causing a disorder that has long been a troubling mystery: irritable bowel syndrome.
This is a rogue idea that is far from widely accepted, though one that at least some experts say can’t be dismissed outright. IBS is a very common ailment, affecting up to an estimated 15 percent of people in the United States, and the symptoms can be brutal. People who have IBS experience abdominal pain and gas, feel bloated, and often have diarrhea, constipation, or both. But no exact cause of IBS has been pinned down. There’s evidence behind many competing theories, such as early-life stress, diet, and even gut infections, but none have emerged as the sole explanation. That is a problem for patients—it’s difficult to treat a condition when you don’t know what to target.
Brennan Spiegel, a gastroenterologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles, has a different idea: People with IBS are hypersensitive to gravity as a result of any number of factors—stress, weight gain, a change in the gut microbiome, bad sleep patterns, or another behavior or injury. The idea came to him after watching a relative confined to a nursing-home bed develop classic symptoms of IBS. “We’re upright organisms,” he told me. “We’re not really supposed to be lying flat for that long.” The hypothesis, published late last year in The American Journal of Gastroenterology, is just that, a hypothesis. Spiegel hasn’t conducted any experiments or patient surveys that point to a “mismatch” in our body’s reaction to gravity as the cause of IBS, though the mechanics are all based in firm science. But part of what makes the theory so alluring is that it might encompass all of the other conventional explanations for the disease. “It’s meant to be a new way of thinking about old ideas,” he said.
So exactly how would someone’s relationship with gravity get off-kilter? Consider serotonin, a chemical that carries messages from the brain to the body. Spiegel sees serotonin as an “anti-gravity substance” because of the role it plays in so many important bodily functions influenced by g-force, such as blood flow. Serotonin can cause blood vessels to narrow, slowing circulation. It can make certain muscles contract or relax. It’s also crucial to digestion, helping with bowel function, getting rid of irritating foods, and regulating how much we eat. Without serotonin, gravity would turn our intestines into a “flaccid sac,” Spiegel writes. Because 95 percent of the body’s serotonin is produced in the gut, if levels spike or plummet from factors such as stress, then the chemical’s possible handling of gravity would be thrown into chaos, affecting digestion. The result, he theorizes, is IBS.
Other parts of our body that respond to gravity can also be in on the problem. We are hardwired to react negatively to situations in which the pull of gravity might harm us; walk to the edge of a cliff and your body will tell you something. The amygdala in our brain is key to fear responses, and stress of various kinds can cause it to go into overdrive. Spiegel thinks that when stress taxes the amygdala, a person begins overreacting to potential threats, including from gravity. The digestive issues that make up IBS are a manifestation of that overreaction. Sure enough, people with IBS have been shown to have a hyperactive amygdala.
That is hardly anything close to proof. The thought that this painful and prolonged condition could be a gravity disorder is a major stretch, relying on a renegade interpretation of basic biology. “People just think I’m crazy,” Spiegel said. Many of his fellow doctors are not sold on the idea. The gravity hypothesis is another in a long parade of unconvincing theories about IBS, Emeran Mayer, a gastroenterologist at UCLA, told me. He’s heard them all: “It doesn’t exist; it’s a hysterical trait of neurotic housewives; it’s abnormal electrical activity in the colon.” He added, “I don’t think there’s any other disease that has gone through these peaks of attention-grabbing new theories.”
Spiegel’s idea has clear holes. If a faulty reaction to gravity triggers IBS, says David C. Kunkel, a gastroenterologist at UC San Diego, then you would expect to see higher rates of IBS among populations living at sea level versus at high altitudes, where g-force is slightly weaker. But that doesn’t seem to be the case: About a quarter of Peruvians live high in the mountains and most Icelanders live at sea level, yet both countries have high rates of IBS. Likewise, IBS rates appear to decrease with age, “which would not be expected if the disease was caused by a constant gravitational force,” Kunkel told me.
Spiegel is aware that the gravity hypothesis has little support in the field and no proof. But the gravity hypothesis has some logic behind it. The fact that the weightlessness of space travel can drastically change the body lends credence to the idea that other shifts in our relationship to gravity could do the same, says Declan McCole, a biomedical scientist at UC Riverside.
And the gut may be particularly sensitive to gravity changes. McCole has found that weightlessness made epithelial cells—which line the gut and stop invaders from entering the body—easier to evade. So if our internal chemistry can change in a way that makes us hypersensitive to gravity, then, to McCole, it stands to reason that such a shift could hit the gut hard. He’s less sure of whether that hypersensitivity exists. If it does, then why haven’t we identified any chemicals that help handle gravity, as we have for fear or sex drive or hunger? That molecule may indeed turn out to be serotonin, but right now there’s no proof.
The gravity hypothesis really matters only if it is meaningful for people with IBS. And that’s not guaranteed. Tying the very real pain of IBS to such a fantastical idea may seem closer to mythology than medicine, leaving patients feeling dismissed or belittled. Or they may throw up their hands in despair and prepare for a lifetime of pain: If the immovable force of gravity is the enemy, then why bother fighting?
But if there is some truth to it, then the hypothesis could also provide a possible starting place for treatments. Some of Spiegel’s suggestions are already common, such as weight loss and medications that decrease serotonin, but he also advocates for some gravity-specific therapies. “I do talk about it with my patients,” Spiegel said. “I recommend certain yoga poses; I recommend tilt tables.” People who have IBS may balk at his more radical ideas, such as moving to a higher altitude or farther from the equator.
The gravity hypothesis may never be anything more than a hypothesis. We have a long way to go before truly knowing whether the human body can develop a hypersensitivity to gravity that can make us ill, or whether some of us are better equipped to handle gravity than others. But the weight of evidence is enough to make us think twice before ignoring the idea that our body’s relationship to gravity can go awry—including for those of us not coping with IBS. If gravity might contribute to IBS, why not other ailments too? And then, why can’t it also be harnessed for good? Mekari and his colleagues recently found that lying at a six-degree downward angle sped up response times to cognition tests—pointing to a possible link between gravity and executive functioning. Antigravity treadmills, which help astronauts prepare for weightlessness, are being studied for the treatment of cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s disease, and sports injuries.
All of these unknowns about gravity can feel haunting. Life on Earth has changed a lot since its first forms appeared about 4 billion years ago, but through it all, gravity has seemingly remained constant—perhaps the single thing that connects every organism that has ever lived. What if there’s still much we have to learn about what it’s doing to us? After all, right now your body is coping with gravity, just as it has been for every other second of your life. Perhaps it would be weirder if gravity wasn’t doing anything to us over time. “Every fiber in our body is straining to manage this force,” Spiegel said. You don’t need to spend 56 days in a bathtub to figure that out.
Last month, at a dining table in a sunny New York City hotel suite, I found myself thrown completely off guard by a strip of fake bacon. I was there to taste a new kind of plant-based meat, which, like most Americans, I’ve tried before but never truly craved in the way that I’ve craved real meat. But even before I tried the bacon, or even saw it, I could tell it was different. The aroma of salt, smoke, and sizzling fat rising from the nearby kitchen seemed unmistakably real. The crispy bacon strips looked the part too—tiger-striped with golden fat and presented on a miniature BLT. Then crunch gave way to satisfying chew, followed by a burst of hickory and the incomparable juiciness of animal fat.
I knew it wasn’t real bacon, but for a moment, it fooled me. The bacon was indeed made from plants, just like the burger patties you can buy from companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. But it had been mixed with real pork fat. Well, kind of. What marbled the meat had not come from a butchered pig but a living hog whose fat cells had been sampled and grown in a vat.
This lab-grown fat, or “cultivated fat,” was made by Mission Barns, a San Francisco start-up, with one purpose: to win people over to plant-based meat. And a lot of people need to be won over, it seems. The plant-based-meat industry, which a few years ago seemed destined for mainstream success, is now struggling. Once the novelty of seeing plant protein “bleed” wore off, the high price, middling nutrition, and just-okay flavor of plant-based meat has become harder for consumers to overlook, food analysts told me. In 2021 and 2022, many of the fast-food chains that had once given plant-based meat a national platform—Burger King, Dunkin’, McDonald’s—lost interest in selling it. In the past four months, the two most visible plant-based-meat companies, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, have each announced layoffs.
Meanwhile, the future of meat alternatives—lab-grown meat that is molecularly identical to the real deal—is at least several years away, lodged between science fiction and reality. But we can’t wait until then to eat less meat; it’s one of the single best things that regular people can do for the climate, and also helps address concerns about animal suffering and health. Lab-grown fat might be the bridge. It is created using the same approach as lab-grown meat, but it’s far simpler to make and can be mixed into existing plant-based foods, Elysabeth Alfano, the CEO of the investment firm VegTech Invest, told me. As such, it’s likely to become commercially available far sooner—maybe even within the next few years. Maybe all it will take to save fake meat is a little animal fat.
Animal fat is culinary magic. It creates the juiciness of a burger, and leaves a buttery coat on the tongue. Its absence is the reason that chicken breasts taste so bland. Fat, the chef Samin Nosrat wrote in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, is “a source of both rich flavor and of a particular desired texture.” The fake meat on the market now is definitely lacking in the flavor and texture departments. Most products approximate meatiness using a concoction of plant oils, flavorings, binders, and salt, which is certainly meatier than the bean burgers that came before it, but is far from perfect: The food blog Serious Eats, for instance, has pointed out off-putting flavor notes, at least prior to cooking, including coconut and cat food. On a molecular level, plant fat is ill-equipped to mimic its animal counterpart. Coconut oil, common in plant-based meat, is solid at room temperature but melts under relatively low heat, so it spills out into the pan while cooking. As a result, the mouthfeel of plant-based meat tends to be more greasy than sumptuous.
Replacing those plant oils with cultivated animal fat, which keeps its structure when heated, would maintain the flavor and juiciness people expect of real meat, Audrey Gyr, the start-up innovation specialist at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for plant-based substitutes, told me. In a sense, the technique of using animal fat to flavor plants is hardly new. Chicken schmaltz has long lent rich nuttiness to potato latkes; rendered guanciale is what gives a classic amatriciana its succulence. Plant-based bacon enhanced with pork fat follows from the same culinary tradition, but it’s very high-tech. Fat cells sampled from a live animal are grown in huge bioreactors and fed with plant-derived sugars, proteins, and other growth components. In time, they multiply to form a mass of fat cells: a soft, pale solid with robust flavor, the same white substance you might see encircling a pork chop or marbling a steak.
Out of the bioreactor, the fat “looks a little bit like margarine,” Ed Steele, a co-founder of the London-based cultivated-fat company Hoxton Farms, told me. It is a complicated process, but far easier than engineering cultivated meat, which involves many cell types that must be coaxed into rigid muscle fibers. Fat involves one type of cell and is most useful as a formless blob. Just as in the human body, all it takes is time, space, and a steady drip of sugars, oils, and other fats, Eitan Fischer, CEO of Mission Barns, told me. The bacon I’d tried at the tasting had been constructed by layering cultivated fat with plant-based protein, curing and smoking the loaf, then slicing it into bacon-like strips. Mixing just 10 percent cultivated fat with plant-based protein by mass, Steele said, can make a product taste and feel like the real thing.
Already, cultivated-fat products are within sight. Mission Barns plans to incorporate its cultivated fat into its own plant-based products; Hoxton Farms hopes to sell its fat directly to existing plant-based-meat manufacturers. Other companies, such as the Belgian start-up Peace of Meat, the Berlin-based Cultimate Foods, and Singapore’s fish-focused ImpacFat, are also working on their own versions of cultivated fat. In theory, the fat can be mixed into virtually any type of plant-based meat—nuggets, sausages, paté. In the U.S., a path to market is already being cleared. Last November, cultivated chicken from the California start-up Upside Foods received FDA clearance; now it’s waiting on additional clearance from the Department of Agriculture. Pending its own regulatory approvals, Mission Barns says it is ready to launch its products in a few supermarkets and restaurants, which also include a convincingly porky plant-based meatball I also tried at the tasting. (Due to the pending approval, I had to sign a liability waiver before digging in.)
I left the tasting with animal fat on my lips and a new conviction in my mind: At the right price, I’d buy this bacon over the regular stuff. Because cultivated fat can be made without harming animals—the fat cells in the bacon I tasted came from a happily free-ranging pig named Dawn, a PR rep for Mission Barns told me—it may appeal to flexitarians like myself who just want to eat less meat.
Although there’s no guarantee it would taste as good at home as it did when prepared by Mission Barns’s private chef, with its realistic texture and flavor, cultivated fat could solve the main issue plaguing plant-based meat: It just doesn’t taste that good. Cultivated fat is “the next step in making environmentally friendly foods more palatable to the average consumer,” Jennifer Bartashus, a packaged-food analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, told me.
But cultivated fat still faces some of the same problems that have turned America off plant-based meat. The current products for sale are not particularly healthy, and cultivated fat would not change that fact. Building consumer trust and familiarity may also be an issue. Some peopleare leery of plant-based products because they’re confused about what they’re made of. The more complex notion of cultivated fat may be just as unappetizing, if not more so. “We still don’t know exactly how consumers are going to feel about cultivated fat,” Gyr said. Certainly, finding a catchy name for these products would help, but I have struggled to find a term less clunky than “plant-based meat flavored with cultivated animal fat” to describe what I ate. Unless cultivated-fat companies really nail their marketing, they could go the way of “blended meat”—mixtures of plant-based protein and real meat introduced by three meat companies in 2019, which was “a bit of a marketing failure,” Gyr said.
Above all, though, is the price relative to that of traditional meat. Plant-based meat’s higher cost has partly been blamed for the industry’s slump, and products containing cultivated fat, in all likelihood, will not be cheaper in the near future. Neither founder I spoke with shared specific numbers; Fischer, of Mission Barns, said only that the company’s small production scale makes it “fairly expensive” compared with traditional meat products, while Steele said his hope is that companies using Hoxton Farms’ cultivated fat in their plant-based-meat recipes won’t have to spend more than they do now.
Despite these obstacles, cultivated fat is promising for the flagging plant-based-meat industry because of the fact that it is absolutely delicious. Cultivated fat could “lead to a new round of innovation that will pull consumers back in,” Bartashus said. After all, plant-based and real meat could reach cost parity around 2026, at which point even more companies might want to get in on meat alternatives. Cultivated fat might warm us up to the future of fully cultivated meat. With enough time, lab-grown chicken breasts could become as boring as regular chicken breasts.
Enthusiasm about cultivated fat, and fake meat in general, has a distinctly techno-optimist flavor, as if persuading all meat eaters to embrace plants gussied up in bacon grease will be easy. “Eventually our goal is to outcompete current conventional meat prices, whether it’s meatballs or bacon,” Fischer said. But even as the problems with eating meat have only become clearer, meat consumption in the U.S. has continued to rise. Globally, meat consumption in countries such as India and China is expected to skyrocket in the coming years. At the very least, cultivated fat provides consumers with another option at a time when eating a steak for one meal and then opting for plant-based meat the next can count as a win.
Since the tasting, I’ve often thought about why eating the bacon left me feeling so perplexed. When I gnawed on the crispy golden edge of one of the strips, I knew I was eating real bacon fat, but my brain still wrestled with the idea that it had not come directly from a piece of pork. I’ve only ever known a world where animal fat comes from slaughtered animals. That is changing. If cultivated fat can tide the plant-based-meat industry over until lab-grown meat becomes a reality, these new products will have done their part. In the meantime, we may come to find that they’re already good enough.
