Speaker 1: Welcome to you stuff you should know from house Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Speaker 1: Josh Clark, There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, and Jerry is
Speaker 1: in a certain kind of mood today. She's making jokes
Speaker 1: and stuff talking. Yeah, she made a joke that would
Speaker 1: have been great for the show, and I was like, well,
Speaker 1: look at you. And then she was like, oh, I
Speaker 1: didn't say you could use that joke. It's her man,
Speaker 1: she's got her spinning bow tie on the day. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna say the joke. Jerry said that her blood type
Speaker 1: was a positive, which she thought was the most optimistic
Speaker 1: of blood types. It doesn't even make sense, Sure it does,
Speaker 1: that doesn't She's a positive person. Oh, I see. I
Speaker 1: think of a positive is like a plus. So like
Speaker 1: you were the star stum. Yeah, the star student of
Speaker 1: the blood type. That makes sense. Though. That's not a
Speaker 1: bad joke, Jerry know that. I understand. It's the first
Speaker 1: joke she's given us in seven years. Way to go, Jeers,
Speaker 1: that's gonna be a trivia question. You're down the roads
Speaker 1: just knocking up with Jerry's one joke. How are you, sir?
Speaker 1: I'm doing good. I'm feeling a positive myself. I'm feeling
Speaker 1: oh negative. Wow, this joke just keep I don't even
Speaker 1: know my blood type. I don't know mine neither. Is
Speaker 1: that crazy? Yeah, that's great. And I've never had to
Speaker 1: I mean, I've given blood IVY, but I don't. I don't.
Speaker 1: I've never received blood. Get the records. Don't they test
Speaker 1: your blood type? I guess, but I don't. Ever, I
Speaker 1: don't know. It should be on your donor card. I
Speaker 1: think you know what I do have, and this is
Speaker 1: so silly. I have some dog tags that I made
Speaker 1: when I was in high school because I just thought
Speaker 1: it was cool to wear in shop. I didn't make
Speaker 1: it myself. I had them made. Oh I see, oh
Speaker 1: hey Richie. Richis like, I'm gonna get dog tag. That's
Speaker 1: neat and um, I don't know. I went through a
Speaker 1: little phase. I guess the dog tag and it's your
Speaker 1: blood type on that it is and I actually know
Speaker 1: where they are are so I could go find that.
Speaker 1: I can wait, all right, I'll be back. Just give
Speaker 1: me a couple of hours. Well, I legitimately have no
Speaker 1: idea what my blood type is, um, because I didn't
Speaker 1: go through a dog tag face and it's not on
Speaker 1: my birth certificate. I went and looked, not there was
Speaker 1: your real name, your real name, I think, so, I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure I wasn't an abductive baby. I've always had
Speaker 1: this fear that, like I look at my birth certificate
Speaker 1: and find out I'm like three years older or something
Speaker 1: that I thought I was. This is a strange fear,
Speaker 1: which would explain a lot. Really, yeah, it's fine, okay
Speaker 1: if you were what now, If you're forty, yeah you are,
Speaker 1: happy birthday, thank you. If I was forty seven, you
Speaker 1: and Julius Caesar just celebrated a birthday that would be bad.
Speaker 1: Or was it his birthday or he just died that
Speaker 1: was the death day. Yeah, that was the opposite of
Speaker 1: his birthday. Yeah, although some people have died on their birthday,
Speaker 1: some famous people. Oh really yeah. I don't remember who though,
Speaker 1: but at LEAs one famous person was at Ason or
Speaker 1: Alexander Graham, Bell somebody like that that did they die
Speaker 1: because of their birthday? Thomas Jefferson. Maybe No, it wasn't. Okay,
Speaker 1: it wasn't anything like that as far as I know,
Speaker 1: Like they didn't like a party, their last breath, blowing
Speaker 1: out their candles, that'd be pretty neat. So blood types.
Speaker 1: Did you know much about this? Did not? I didn't either.
Speaker 1: I just suspected it was fascinating. They had a vague
Speaker 1: awareness of it because, um remember the ten scientists who
Speaker 1: were their own guinea pigs episode. Karl Landsteiner makes an
Speaker 1: appearance in that, yeah, which I think means uh, well,
Speaker 1: stein is Stone, So like land Stoner, he's a landstowner. Nice,
Speaker 1: good for him. He was quite a doctor though for
Speaker 1: a landstowner. He uh he was fearless. Yeah, well, not
Speaker 1: really fearless. He was fearless about um needles, He didn't
Speaker 1: mind with drawing blood from himself. Um. But the reason
Speaker 1: we bring up carl An Stannard because he's the guy
Speaker 1: who finally discovered blood types way back in the d R.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. He got the Nobel for it in n Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's pretty recent stuff here, you know. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I thought the history, uh you did the research on this,
Speaker 1: which thanks man, hats off to you. I appreciate it. Um.
Speaker 1: I thought the history of it was super interesting. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, carl Anstarner was the first guy, and we'll
Speaker 1: talk about him a little more in depth than what
Speaker 1: he did. Um, but he was the first guy to
Speaker 1: identify the A, B O blood types. Um. But prior
Speaker 1: to him, people were aware that there was some weirdness
Speaker 1: with blood and that you couldn't just mix the stuff
Speaker 1: willie nilly and expect good results. Because for a very
Speaker 1: long time, humans, thanks to horrible things like vivisection, knew
Speaker 1: that we are blood was very, very vital. It was
Speaker 1: a vital life force. Yeah. And um, you know back
Speaker 1: in the day, I think we've talked about bleeding in
Speaker 1: barbers before, but they were real big on taking blood
Speaker 1: out of people. Um. And at some point, I guess
Speaker 1: some doctors must have, you know, taken some drugs and thought,
Speaker 1: I wonder what would happen if we put blood into
Speaker 1: a person? Right, Well, I mean, if you think about it,
Speaker 1: if you're like, this is a vital life force. If
Speaker 1: you have somebody who's dying from bleeding out like a hemorrhage,
Speaker 1: which happened a lot like during childbirth, for example, then
Speaker 1: you would think maybe if I took some healthy blood
Speaker 1: and put it into a dying person who's bleeding to death,
Speaker 1: they'll come back. Yeah. And of course, uh, they had
Speaker 1: all sorts of like crazy notions back then, so they
Speaker 1: thought it could like bleeding someone out. They thought putting
Speaker 1: blood back in someone could cure weird things like insanity,
Speaker 1: which we, of course we know now has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with that kind of thing, right, So they said, well,
Speaker 1: let's try this, let's see what we can do. Um.
Speaker 1: They didn't start with human blood, oddly enough, he went
Speaker 1: right to the animal blood. Uh. And it was not
Speaker 1: good when they started taking blood from animals like cows,
Speaker 1: calves and injecting it into human patients. Yeah. There was
Speaker 1: a French doctor that put cast blood into a madman. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Jean Baptiste. Denise the doctor, okay, and he Um. The
Speaker 1: madman started to sweat and vomit and urinate the color
Speaker 1: of chimney soot, and I guess the doctor said, yep,
Speaker 1: he's a madman, and then he gave him another transfusion
Speaker 1: after that after Yeah, and then the guy died and
Speaker 1: actually Denise was charged with murder for that and he
Speaker 1: was forced to quit medicine. Man, it was very very scandalous, um,
Speaker 1: even though he was experimenting on a madman, which you
Speaker 1: know at the time was pretty much fair game for anything.
Speaker 1: I think the horrific accounts of the whole thing really
Speaker 1: kind of captured the national imagination and as a result, um,
Speaker 1: the Decree of Chalet was shoot by the French monarchy
Speaker 1: that basically said oh no, no, no no, no more transfusions
Speaker 1: and uh for a while, like basically a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty years this it was banned in France and the
Speaker 1: effect that it had kind of extended over the continent.
Speaker 1: It was basically de facto banned throughout Europe because these
Speaker 1: horrible experiments by Denny's and others that had these terrible results.
Speaker 1: It was like, you guys, this is mad science, and
Speaker 1: you can't do that anymore because it's a really bad news.
Speaker 1: France also banned ketchup when like three years ago the
Speaker 1: band catch up, but chats up around still now. They
Speaker 1: didn't ban the spelling of ketchup, they banned the condiment
Speaker 1: in school cafeterias, and um, I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people were put it on like uh, French cuisine, like
Speaker 1: they don't want to catch up on their cuisine. But
Speaker 1: it had to do with the sugar, yeah, the sugar intake.
Speaker 1: But they said it's okay for French fries, which they
Speaker 1: just called fries over there, exactly Fritz. I think so
Speaker 1: they band catch up and then a long time ago
Speaker 1: they banned blood transfusions. That's right, thank you, Franz. That's right.
Speaker 1: And it stayed that way for a long time. I
Speaker 1: mean there were doctors here and there in the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century that that experimented around a little bit, of course. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well the Decree of shell it was sixty eight and
Speaker 1: it really was prohibitive until the mid nineteenth century, the
Speaker 1: early nineteenth century. Well, and that's when the guy named,
Speaker 1: a physician in Britain named James Blendell was tired of
Speaker 1: seeing his patients died during childbirth bleeding out like you
Speaker 1: were talking about. Yeah, he's one of the heroes of
Speaker 1: the story, he is. And he said, you know what,
Speaker 1: there's got to be a better way, and let me
Speaker 1: try and and you know, let me try and put
Speaker 1: blood that's not an animal into someone. Yeah. The thing
Speaker 1: that Blendell figured out was that the great error that
Speaker 1: the early French doctors were doing was using the blow
Speaker 1: out of a brute. As he put it, that don't
Speaker 1: mean a jerk, right right, means an animal. He guys, like,
Speaker 1: just let me watch my rugby. Um, the mixing like
Speaker 1: the blood of one species with another. Blendell decided was
Speaker 1: just a really bad move and that that's what it
Speaker 1: caused these horrible reactions. Really good start, right, So human
Speaker 1: human blood, he decided would should work, it would possibly work,
Speaker 1: And he faced an immediate problem, which was, you have
Speaker 1: no means of getting blood out of somebody and into
Speaker 1: somebody else at this point, blood hell, what are you
Speaker 1: gonna do? So he invented a contraption for it, like
Speaker 1: the first blood transfusing contraption was invented by James Blendell
Speaker 1: for this very recent Yeah, And he got some dogs
Speaker 1: and he practiced on them, and uh, I have a
Speaker 1: bad feeling that some of those dogs probably died. I
Speaker 1: would guess along the way. But um he he eventually
Speaker 1: got to a guy that was bleeding to death, and
Speaker 1: I guess. The guy was like, um, doctor, I'm bleeding
Speaker 1: a lot, and could you take some of that blood
Speaker 1: and put it back into me? But because that might
Speaker 1: be a good idea, because I'm told it's important, like
Speaker 1: chimneys in the Yeah, let's just go for this, and
Speaker 1: he did. Then the guy died. Well yeah, but it
Speaker 1: was two days, which wasn't too bad. So I guess
Speaker 1: he was like, he didn't see vomit or charcoal sut urine, right,
Speaker 1: And the guy did say he was feeling less fainty.
Speaker 1: So it did revive him for two days. That's a
Speaker 1: great prognosis, I think. But because he didn't see all
Speaker 1: those awful reactions immediately, he was sort of onto something.
Speaker 1: Even though the guy died, he was encouraged by the results, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he went on to perform I believe ten more
Speaker 1: blood transfusions and um the result, says the the author
Speaker 1: of one of the articles we used for research, Carl Zimmer,
Speaker 1: who wrote a great article in Mosaic about blood types UM.
Speaker 1: As he put it, the results were dismal. Four out
Speaker 1: of the ten survived. It's not too bad. I'm kind
Speaker 1: of like, if this guy is just shooting in the dark,
Speaker 1: mixing human blood together, and yeah, he's doing okay. But
Speaker 1: what he what he proved was that you can take
Speaker 1: human blood and transfer it from one human to another.
Speaker 1: But there's still something we don't know, like what it
Speaker 1: should be a hundred percent success rate? What's the problem here?
Speaker 1: And he never lived to see the answer to it.
Speaker 1: But it was Carl land Steiner who who figured it
Speaker 1: out before them, because because blood Dell's success rate was
Speaker 1: still pretty low and he was working in the twenties
Speaker 1: something like that. In the mid nineteenth century, there was
Speaker 1: a weird little um sidetrack that took place the milk Yeah,
Speaker 1: in in North America and Canada. In the United States,
Speaker 1: doctors decided that milk would be a better substitute for
Speaker 1: transfusions than blow. Yeah. Were they mixing milk into the
Speaker 1: blood or were they just injecting milk directly into the
Speaker 1: blood stream. Here is some sheep's milk, um goat. It
Speaker 1: looks or smells or taste nothing like human blood, but
Speaker 1: let's give it a shot. They're thinking was that the
Speaker 1: fats in the milk would be converted into white blood
Speaker 1: cells and then into red blood cells in the blood stream.
Speaker 1: So um, not even close. They tried with They tried
Speaker 1: with cow, they try with goat, and then eventually they
Speaker 1: try with human milk. And they were doing like massive
Speaker 1: doses and stuff like twelve ounces a beer bottles worth
Speaker 1: of goat milk injected directly into the human blood stream,
Speaker 1: and the results were really really bad. Um. One patient
Speaker 1: suddenly experienced unstagamous, which is uncontrollable like eye movements and
Speaker 1: vertigo and spasms like immediately upon injected. And they're still
Speaker 1: they're they're giving more injections. Some of them were like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is gonna work too much, right, So people were
Speaker 1: slipping into comas and dying, and finally everyone was like,
Speaker 1: this is wrong, this is not good. Let's stop doing this,
Speaker 1: and they started using sailing. Yeah. You know who also
Speaker 1: used injected milk, oh, Michael Jackson. That was a totally
Speaker 1: different kind of milk based right, what's the name of
Speaker 1: that stuff? We never get it right, but I think
Speaker 1: it is prop think you just got it right, man,
Speaker 1: So sad one. And it is a little side note.
Speaker 1: One of the patients was given milk and then does
Speaker 1: support that injection. They were injected with morphine and then whiskey.
Speaker 1: So they're just basically putting anything they wanted to into
Speaker 1: the blood streams of people back then. That's crazy. So
Speaker 1: the point is this, Chuck, There was a little sidetrack.
Speaker 1: And the reason there was a sidetrack is because still
Speaker 1: even after Blundell's experiments were successful in some cases, blood
Speaker 1: transmissions still had a really bad name. Yeah. Um, they
Speaker 1: started to kind of figure it out a little bit though,
Speaker 1: uh in at least what the problem him was when
Speaker 1: they started to mix blood from different people together in
Speaker 1: test tubes and they saw clumping, they saw red blood
Speaker 1: cell sticking together, and said, you know what, um, the
Speaker 1: reason why this is happening is because these are all
Speaker 1: from sick people. That was their explanation at first, Like,
Speaker 1: we got a bunch of sick blood, we're mixing it
Speaker 1: with sick blood, so that's why it's doing all these
Speaker 1: funky things. And it wasn't until the Landstoner came around
Speaker 1: and said, you know what, maybe I should try to
Speaker 1: mix the blood of healthy people together and see what happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: see if that landmark idea? Yeah, because I mean they
Speaker 1: knew that blood clumped, that's one of the reasons they
Speaker 1: went to milk, but they just thought it was because well,
Speaker 1: you're stick already, there's nothing that could be done about that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, when Landsteiner came along and thought that it
Speaker 1: was groundbreaking, and he did it with his own blood
Speaker 1: and with the blood of some of his lab assistants,
Speaker 1: and he just started taking blood samples and then just
Speaker 1: randomly mixing together people's blood to see if it clumped,
Speaker 1: and when it didn't clump, he started mapping his patterns
Speaker 1: and ultimately came up with what's now known as the
Speaker 1: A B O blood typing group. Although initially he came
Speaker 1: up with type A, type B, and type C. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then later on we found out about A B, right,
Speaker 1: and C was changed to Oh yeah, but it was.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's pretty crazy that he could even I mean,
Speaker 1: he separated his plasma from his red blood cells. It's
Speaker 1: it's nuts that he was even able to do that.
Speaker 1: Back then, I didn't know things with that advance. Oh,
Speaker 1: you just inject some morphine and whiskey into your blood
Speaker 1: and man, it just kind of falls to the side. Uh.
Speaker 1: Plasma by the way, you hear that word a lot.
Speaker 1: You may not know what it is. It's just mostly water.
Speaker 1: It's the liquid portion of your blood. That's what it's
Speaker 1: the taxicab. Basically, it carries everything around. It carries the
Speaker 1: red blood cells, among other things, hormones, waste, nutrients, all
Speaker 1: sorts of stuff. So this is like a really really
Speaker 1: really big advancement in medical science. Yeah, but what did
Speaker 1: he say? Oh, he had a great quote. Is my favorite,
Speaker 1: Like this landmark discovery and He's kind of like, well,
Speaker 1: you might just want to look at this, he goes
Speaker 1: it might be mentioned that the reported observations may assist
Speaker 1: in the explanation of various consequences of therapeutic blood transfusions.
Speaker 1: Like it's possible that this is what's been killing people
Speaker 1: all the time. There's blood types. I don't know his
Speaker 1: personality though, so I don't know how to read that.
Speaker 1: It sounds a little smarmy. I I took it as
Speaker 1: he was being very humble. Oh that's how I took it.
Speaker 1: That's because you're a positive that's right. But what this
Speaker 1: did was um millions of millions and millions, I mean,
Speaker 1: I opened the door for everything to come when it
Speaker 1: comes to blood typing. And after this break, we're going
Speaker 1: to get a little bit into what these blood types aren't,
Speaker 1: what they mean. All right, we're back and we are
Speaker 1: talking about blood types and what this means. And it's
Speaker 1: really pretty simple. It is. It's elegant on your red
Speaker 1: blood cells. Um you have you can have lots of things,
Speaker 1: but you can have sugars and proteins, and those sugars
Speaker 1: and proteins can be expressed as antigens and antigens are
Speaker 1: something that your immune system says, Hey, you got a
Speaker 1: foreign invader coming, you might want to do something about it. Right,
Speaker 1: It's something that you're a body can take as a
Speaker 1: foreign invader, even if it's not a foreign invader, or
Speaker 1: even if it's not harmful, But it's something that's found
Speaker 1: on the surface of your red blood cells. Like pollen
Speaker 1: is an anergen. We talked about that in the Allergy podcast.
Speaker 1: So a blood type at its core is just a
Speaker 1: description of what kind of anergen is found on the
Speaker 1: surface of your red blood cells, right, which is just
Speaker 1: a sugar or a protein, right, Penny. So if you're
Speaker 1: if you have A type blood, you have the A
Speaker 1: antigen present on your cells. If you have B type blood,
Speaker 1: you have the B antigen. If you have O type blood,
Speaker 1: you have neither A nor B. And then if you
Speaker 1: have a B you have both A and B antigens
Speaker 1: present on on the surface of your blood. Sounds pretty simple.
Speaker 1: There's no real issues here except that blood types are
Speaker 1: also associated with the type of antibody your blood produces
Speaker 1: your body produces, right, that's right, And that's a protein
Speaker 1: that your immune system uses to attack antign invader or
Speaker 1: what it thinks is a foreign invader. So, if you
Speaker 1: have type A blood, your body produces B antibodies, which
Speaker 1: means that when your body comes in contact with type
Speaker 1: BED antigens, which would be found on type B blood cells, right,
Speaker 1: your body goes crazy and launches an immune response and
Speaker 1: attacks those antigens, which is in the other way around
Speaker 1: in that case with A and B. Yeah, they don't
Speaker 1: like each other, No, they don't. So not only do
Speaker 1: they have opposing and egens, they have opposing antibody. So
Speaker 1: if you make say and B blood together, bad bad
Speaker 1: things are going to happen. Yeah. And you know what,
Speaker 1: you can also be allergic to your own blood, which
Speaker 1: is not good. When we talked about mistaken identity, Uh,
Speaker 1: that is something called hemolytic anemia and um immune hemolytic anemia,
Speaker 1: and that's it sounds immediately like I thought, well, you're
Speaker 1: dead if you've got that because your blood is allergic
Speaker 1: to itself. Yeah, apparently people live with it are able
Speaker 1: to almost everyone does. It's really rare to lead to
Speaker 1: death these days. UM. I did look it up though,
Speaker 1: and the first symptom it listed was feeling grumpy, which
Speaker 1: I thought was like, well, perhaps we all have it
Speaker 1: or he or has immune anemia. Um. So, like we said,
Speaker 1: A and B do not like each other at all.
Speaker 1: I think you said they're like the hat Fields and
Speaker 1: the McCoys of blood types. Yeah, I mean they're in
Speaker 1: a complete opposition to one another. That's right. Type OH
Speaker 1: though is different so TYPO everybody it does. It doesn't
Speaker 1: have any anigens on it on the blood cell surface.
Speaker 1: So as far as blood transfusions go, you could take
Speaker 1: TYPO and give it to type B people, Type A
Speaker 1: people and TYPO people and even type A B people,
Speaker 1: which makes type O the universal donor, right, oh negative specifically,
Speaker 1: But that sounds all great and it is. But because
Speaker 1: it doesn't have anigen's, it uh produces anybody's against A
Speaker 1: and B antigens I'm sorry, antibodies against and B anogens, okay,
Speaker 1: which means it can only accept oh transfusions, Yeah, which
Speaker 1: is said because it's they're the universal donor, they can give,
Speaker 1: but they can't. They can only get from other oaths
Speaker 1: because they have antibodies against everything. But ohs right, A
Speaker 1: B is the opposite of Oh. They're actually the universal recipient, right.
Speaker 1: They have the A and B antigen on the surface
Speaker 1: of the red blood cells. But like you said, they
Speaker 1: are the universal recipient, so that's great. They don't have
Speaker 1: any anybody's at all. So they can they can take
Speaker 1: A they can be they can take oh, but they
Speaker 1: have the antigens A and B, so A B or
Speaker 1: OH can't take a B blood, so they just take
Speaker 1: take take to recap. I'm sure I have a B blood.
Speaker 1: I'm positive of it, you think, yeah, to recap. There's
Speaker 1: a handy little chart here which we do not have.
Speaker 1: Um no, but it's from the American Red Cross. Webon
Speaker 1: like I think everyone that works at the Red Cross
Speaker 1: probably has is printed out, like in their wallet. I'm
Speaker 1: so everyone who's listening to this in the Red Cross
Speaker 1: share it with somebody. Group OH, though can donate red
Speaker 1: blood cells to anybody. Group A can donate red blood
Speaker 1: cells to ais and a B S. Group B can
Speaker 1: donate red blood cells to bees and a bees in
Speaker 1: Group A B can donate to other A B is
Speaker 1: but can receive it from all others. Take take take
Speaker 1: pretty neat um, So there you go. That's the type
Speaker 1: A BO blood type and it's pretty. It was a
Speaker 1: sweeping discovery and that's it, right. No, more about blood types. No,
Speaker 1: this is the end, beautiful friend, it is not the end.
Speaker 1: Uh No, because it turns out the A, B O
Speaker 1: blood typing or blood groups are really one of many
Speaker 1: twenty two we're up to by now. Yeah. Remember earlier
Speaker 1: I was talking about UM positive or negative. Well that too,
Speaker 1: but I was talking about the dog tags. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was talking about that, sugars, booms, sugars. Yes, Sugars and
Speaker 1: proteins are the two different antigens that you can have
Speaker 1: on your red blood cells. We said that the A, B,
Speaker 1: O U grouping are the sugars, so that leaves the proteins,
Speaker 1: and that's where you get into the r h uh
Speaker 1: If you've ever heard your blood as negative or positive.
Speaker 1: That was named after the Reesus monkey spelled r H
Speaker 1: E s U s, which they were obviously the test subjects.
Speaker 1: It basically just says, if you're positive for that protein
Speaker 1: or negative for that protein. Yeah, it's just it's another
Speaker 1: anogen and either you have it or you don't, so
Speaker 1: you can be oh negative, oh positive. So that would
Speaker 1: mean that you are in the O type blood group,
Speaker 1: so you have sugar anogens on or you know, you
Speaker 1: don't have A or B on your blood cell surface.
Speaker 1: But if you're positive, you would have neither A or
Speaker 1: B on your surface, but you would have the recess
Speaker 1: anogen on there. Right, And just like the A, B
Speaker 1: O types, the r H types don't mix either. Know.
Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, there's a really terrible condition
Speaker 1: called mother fetus incompatibility, which the means the mother is
Speaker 1: RH negative and the baby is RH positive. So as
Speaker 1: the baby is developing, it's blood cells that carry the
Speaker 1: r H anogen are taken as foreign invaders by the
Speaker 1: mother's blood, so the baby, the fetus is attacked by
Speaker 1: the mother's immune system. Not a good position for a
Speaker 1: fetus to begin. But this is also very treatable these days. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got the impression. Yeah, I looked into what it
Speaker 1: used to be a really scary thing, obviously, but now
Speaker 1: they know how to treat it. And I think on
Speaker 1: the first your firstborn, it's not really a big deal
Speaker 1: at all. Oh yeah, and the reason why because the
Speaker 1: blood is not mixing right right. Well, No, that first exposure,
Speaker 1: your body is like, what the heck is this? It
Speaker 1: gets caught off guard. Second one, it's kind of like,
Speaker 1: fool me once, Shame on you, fool me twice, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna get you, and it goes after the fetus and
Speaker 1: then it just gets this immune response gets more and
Speaker 1: more heightened with each pregnancy. I'm almost positive that's the case.
Speaker 1: I ran across it during UM during research for this,
Speaker 1: and if I'm not mistaken, that's what happens. Okay. Well,
Speaker 1: I know roughly of the population is r H positive,
Speaker 1: so you have much more likelihood to be RH positive
Speaker 1: than negative. Okay in life, huh, I know that I
Speaker 1: would have guessed negative I would be more common. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I just guess that you need to improve
Speaker 1: your outlook my friends. UM. So, the r H blood groups,
Speaker 1: the A, B O blood groups. There two of UM
Speaker 1: I think twenty two at least total blood groups that
Speaker 1: have been identified. There's other ones like Diego, kid, kill,
Speaker 1: Duffy blood groups, and all of them are descriptors of
Speaker 1: anergens that can be found on the surface of a
Speaker 1: person's red blood cells. So your blood type can go
Speaker 1: far beyond a positive or OH negative. It can be
Speaker 1: like a negative Duffy positive kill UM to the third power.
Speaker 1: Who knows why not, But it's just basically the presence
Speaker 1: or the absence of these different anigens and these combinations
Speaker 1: can form the thing is we now know and Landsteiner
Speaker 1: figured it out early on, but didn't didn't discover that
Speaker 1: actual mechanism. But we know that each one is is
Speaker 1: controlled by a different gene or a mutation on a
Speaker 1: specific gene. And like I said, Landsteiner kind of figured
Speaker 1: it out early on that it was heritable, that blood
Speaker 1: types are heritable, and as a result blood typing where
Speaker 1: it was used in early paternity tests, like almost from
Speaker 1: the outset of Landsteiner's research. Um. The other thing that
Speaker 1: they found out was that you can also be a
Speaker 1: that sounds a little gross, a secretor or a non secretor,
Speaker 1: which means that if you're a secretor, your antigens can
Speaker 1: be secreted into other fluids like saliba or mucus in
Speaker 1: your body toward off other infections, usually at the surface
Speaker 1: of the skin. Yeah, so you're I think are secretors
Speaker 1: in the United States And that's just another subclassification even
Speaker 1: to rule people out. Um quickly, you're a secretor non secretor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: ah lois a secretor got us a great idea. He's
Speaker 1: secreting all over the place. Um. So like you said,
Speaker 1: land Uh, the Landstoner determined that you could test maternity
Speaker 1: and because of that in the ninet nineties, that led
Speaker 1: to the discovery of that A B O gene. And basically,
Speaker 1: if you can have that A antigen be expressed, or
Speaker 1: if something is a little tweaked, you can have that
Speaker 1: B antrogen expressed, right, or if they're both tweaked, you
Speaker 1: can have both A B I think in that case
Speaker 1: you inherit the A mutation from one parent and the
Speaker 1: G mutation from another parent. Yeah, did you say G
Speaker 1: B the gene there's another blood type, the A G.
Speaker 1: I just came up with it. Uh. And then if
Speaker 1: it's completely shut off, then that is where you get
Speaker 1: your OH blood type. Right. But we have to point out, um,
Speaker 1: that the A B O blood type isn't like the
Speaker 1: A is the presence of a egine. B is the
Speaker 1: presence of an engine, and OH is the presence of nothing.
Speaker 1: It's not the case. Um Again. Carl Zimmer in that
Speaker 1: mosaic article put it like, if the A antigen is
Speaker 1: like a two story home in one former fashion, and
Speaker 1: the B antigen is like a different type of two
Speaker 1: story home, the OH is like the single story ranch
Speaker 1: that the second stories are built on top mid century modern. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to love. It's my preference in houses. I like those two. Um,
Speaker 1: I wonder what I wonder what blood type the double
Speaker 1: wide trailer is. I don't know. It's a single story,
Speaker 1: so technically would be oh as well, there's secretors for sure.
Speaker 1: So Chuck, um we talked. You said that RH positive
Speaker 1: was the most common for the r H blood type. Right,
Speaker 1: that's right. What's the most common for A B O types? Uh? Well,
Speaker 1: you've got OH is the most OH positive is the
Speaker 1: most common H. Then you've got A, then you've got B.
Speaker 1: Then you've got a B as the least common, and um.
Speaker 1: Across ethnic groups, it's uh, it's pretty interesting. Hispanic folks
Speaker 1: have higher number of os. Asian folks have a higher
Speaker 1: higher number of bees. And there's reasons for this, which
Speaker 1: we'll get into later. They're pretty interesting, I think. So, um,
Speaker 1: all the teaser we should say with when you do
Speaker 1: we've kind of touched on what happens when you mix blood,
Speaker 1: remember the chimney sit urine um. But the real on
Speaker 1: the molecular level, on the cellular level, what's going on
Speaker 1: when you mix blood types is that the antigens present
Speaker 1: in one blood type that doesn't mix with another one
Speaker 1: attracts the antibodies. Yeah, because it thinks it's some foreign invader. Yep.
Speaker 1: So it's like the troops. You're coming into a house
Speaker 1: that has anybodies that are primed against the engines on
Speaker 1: your blood right right, and um, those anergens or those
Speaker 1: antibodies surround the anergens and just kind of collect and
Speaker 1: clump around the red blood cells. That's a glutination. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That Uh, that just sounded gross to me. It does.
Speaker 1: It's a gross word. I think medical. I think I
Speaker 1: figured out medical terms that have gs and them and glug. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just sounds kind of gross because what happens after
Speaker 1: a glutination is it coagulates. Yeah, and that thickened blood
Speaker 1: is tough to pump through your body. It's pretty simple, really.
Speaker 1: You give blood clots everywhere and you have trouble breathing,
Speaker 1: your lungs filled with blood and you drown in it.
Speaker 1: And again you're if if you're injected with cow milk,
Speaker 1: your eyes go crazy and you spas them in some
Speaker 1: new coma and die. But if not, you're just gonna
Speaker 1: drown in your own turnal bleeding in your lungs. But
Speaker 1: what's going on is the result of a massive immune
Speaker 1: response launched by your body because of the presence of
Speaker 1: what it takes as a foreign invader. If you take
Speaker 1: the blood of somebody with the same blood type as yours,
Speaker 1: even though it comes from another person, entirely your blood
Speaker 1: is used to the antigen present on that blood type
Speaker 1: because that's the one that produces itself, and it just
Speaker 1: thinks it's more of the same blood that it produced
Speaker 1: in your body. That's right, So this is all super interesting.
Speaker 1: Uh I guess after this break we're going to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about why we have blood types and
Speaker 1: where they came from to begin with. Al Right, before
Speaker 1: the break, my friend, we were talking about what are
Speaker 1: blood types come from? It's true, that was the title
Speaker 1: of the segment. Well, I had no I don't even
Speaker 1: know what that accident was or who that was supposed
Speaker 1: to be. It was the one group that you can
Speaker 1: make fun of now, which is this non existent when
Speaker 1: you just made the indefinable group thinking about that the
Speaker 1: other day, is there anybody Germans you can make fun
Speaker 1: of Germans? Still, right? And you can make fun of
Speaker 1: white men? Oh yeah, because like the n asking for
Speaker 1: it for millennia totally. Yeah, there's nothing you can say
Speaker 1: to a white man that is, you know, truly offensive.
Speaker 1: It's true. Yeah, I guess it is, sad man. This
Speaker 1: just took a really surprising n I remember my sociology
Speaker 1: teacher in college that taught as that. Yeah, because they
Speaker 1: he was putting up bad words about different races and
Speaker 1: ethnic groups and sexes. And he's like, you might notice something.
Speaker 1: He's a there's no word that you can call a
Speaker 1: white man that is truly truly offensive. And really there
Speaker 1: really isn't. I mean, a d bag, I guess, but
Speaker 1: that's not offensive. You're just either that or you're not.
Speaker 1: It's the truth or it's not. All right, So let's
Speaker 1: get back to blood types. Where did it come from?
Speaker 1: I know who it is. It's Balky bar taka mos.
Speaker 1: I can't make no. He was from an unknown country, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there you go. All right. So primate species, my friend,
Speaker 1: we found out that primate species had blood that you
Speaker 1: could make with human blood. It wasn't a cow, it
Speaker 1: wasn't a sheep, but primates because they're closer relatives than
Speaker 1: cows and sheeps does well, that's what that was the assumption,
Speaker 1: but it's still scientists were kind of scratching their heads.
Speaker 1: They're like, oh, wait a minute, and what are we
Speaker 1: to make of this? Because it suggests two things. It
Speaker 1: suggests that either blood types are so old that they
Speaker 1: predate human and uh like chimps and girls, so we
Speaker 1: we share some sort of common ancestor that have blood
Speaker 1: types itself, or that blood types evolved independently in different species.
Speaker 1: Because it's like such a great idea, right right, Either way,
Speaker 1: they still said, well, what are these things for? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And some people for a long time said that, oh,
Speaker 1: was the original the O G blood type, Yeah, which
Speaker 1: makes sense because it's the simplest one. Yeah. And they
Speaker 1: thought that, you know, our original ancestors in Africa had type.
Speaker 1: Other people thought A B might have been the original
Speaker 1: because um it evolved into a B and O, which
Speaker 1: that sort of makes sense to and one lens right
Speaker 1: and then is broken down into its constituent. But neither
Speaker 1: one of them, it turns out, are probably true. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: we we honestly don't know. We just there's first of all,
Speaker 1: not all of the primates genes have been surveyed, so
Speaker 1: we can't really say, but they've looked into a lot
Speaker 1: of them. They have UM and the results are still
Speaker 1: just kind of baffling. Like guerrillas just have type by UM.
Speaker 1: I think chimps have type A and O. But that's it. Uh.
Speaker 1: We we don't quite know what to make of it.
Speaker 1: We do know that it's not just primates that have
Speaker 1: blood types. Cats and dogs both too. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: never thought about it that you can have your cat
Speaker 1: or dog if you want to feel really good about yourself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but really piss off your animals. You can take them
Speaker 1: in and have them give blood. Yeah, there's animal dog
Speaker 1: like dog and cat blood banks. Yeah, there's one right here. Indicator.
Speaker 1: Consult your vet. Huh yeah, consult your vet, piss off
Speaker 1: your cat, take them in to give blood, and explain
Speaker 1: to them what a great thing they're doing, right right,
Speaker 1: Just wear like leather falconry gloves while you're doing it.
Speaker 1: It is a great thing to do. But yeah, it
Speaker 1: just never occurred to me. Of course, that's what you
Speaker 1: need to do as a responsible pet owner, right, I
Speaker 1: guess maybe start with donating your human blood first, and
Speaker 1: then once you got that down, pat bring your dog
Speaker 1: into the mix. Well, you have to go to a
Speaker 1: special dog and cat blood bank. Yeah, can tell your vet.
Speaker 1: And I think if I looked at a my all
Speaker 1: mine are too old, which is sad. I think you
Speaker 1: can't be over seven. Well at least did the one indicator.
Speaker 1: Maybe there's different looking for spry blood, I guess. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's very sad for me. My guys. Um, so here's
Speaker 1: a neat thing, though, Josh. Blood types aren't even said
Speaker 1: in stone necessarily they can change, and it's mind blowing
Speaker 1: it is. And I found this really neat. Uh, well,
Speaker 1: a couple of neat things. One is not only can
Speaker 1: it change, We'll go and explain how it can change naturally. Well,
Speaker 1: our old friend epigenetics, Um, what was that episode we did,
Speaker 1: can your can my Grandfather's diet short in my Life?
Speaker 1: One of our best? Yes, it was, And no one
Speaker 1: has any ideas about epigenetics because of the title. But
Speaker 1: if you are looking for an epigenetics episode, go listen
Speaker 1: to that one. But basically, because of changes in the
Speaker 1: way genes are expressed, if your say, a mutation on
Speaker 1: your gene is shut down epigenetically, then all of a
Speaker 1: sudden over time, because red blood cells have about a
Speaker 1: four month life span and bloods is constantly regenerating itself. Um,
Speaker 1: you will turn into an OH blood type person within
Speaker 1: your lifetime. You may not even notice, and until you
Speaker 1: get a blood transfer, then you're gonna notice. But I
Speaker 1: imagine that are good friends at the Red Cross test
Speaker 1: blood type that kind of thing with each donation and
Speaker 1: just leave it to to presumption. I don't think we
Speaker 1: even pointed out they to test this. They still is
Speaker 1: a similar method of mixing blood and scene if it clumps,
Speaker 1: the same thing that the Landstoner did way back in
Speaker 1: the day. So I found another couple of cool things. Though, Um,
Speaker 1: this is from two years ago and I couldn't get
Speaker 1: anything more recent. I think it is still under review.
Speaker 1: But they think now that they can actually not synthetically,
Speaker 1: but just not naturally change your blood type two oh
Speaker 1: to make you. And this would be great because if
Speaker 1: you could change blood type and this is in the body,
Speaker 1: this is in the blood bag, change it from a
Speaker 1: B two oh, then that means, all of a sudden
Speaker 1: you have a more valuable blood because it's more universally accepted. Uh.
Speaker 1: And what they've done is um, of course it was
Speaker 1: the University of Copenhagen Professor Einrich Calaussen. They're always doing
Speaker 1: the best work, it seems like. Um. So they found
Speaker 1: they studied different types of fungi and bacteria and found, uh,
Speaker 1: they're looking for proteins that could help, and they found
Speaker 1: two that could help. One was called Elizabeth Kenya men
Speaker 1: in go specate them septicum. Nice. My guess is that
Speaker 1: Professor Erorich either has a daughter or a wife named Elizabeth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: who's like, I got a bacteria or he's in big trouble. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then the other one is Bacteriosis fragilus and basically
Speaker 1: those two yielded enzymes that remove those A and B antigens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they just sheered those sugars off. They go in and
Speaker 1: made it the O type. So I don't know where
Speaker 1: that's at now, but that was just from two years ago. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then this this case of this girl that doctor
Speaker 1: say is a one in six billion event. At nine
Speaker 1: years old, she got a liver transplant. And everyone knows
Speaker 1: when you get an organ transplant, getting it to take
Speaker 1: is a big deal. Uh, not having it rejected. And
Speaker 1: what they do is they give you medication, usually for life,
Speaker 1: to make sure it stays not rejected. What they found
Speaker 1: with her was that when she got her new liver,
Speaker 1: the drugs actually made her sick, the ones to keep
Speaker 1: her from rejecting it. And what they found when they
Speaker 1: tested her blood was that her body was changing its
Speaker 1: blood type and completely changed its blood type to where
Speaker 1: she didn't need those drugs anymore. It changed from OH
Speaker 1: negative to oh positive, right, and she completely went off
Speaker 1: those drugs. And I think she's like twenty years old now,
Speaker 1: and the doctors I don't think they have any explanation
Speaker 1: for it other than I guess this can happen. Her
Speaker 1: body was like like the kind of local tough that
Speaker 1: fights with pool queues or something like that. You know.
Speaker 1: I was like, all right, just what I gotta do.
Speaker 1: I gotta do what I gotta do keep this liver. Uh.
Speaker 1: So that's pretty awesome. Yeah, that was super awesome. One
Speaker 1: in six billion. It's pretty nice to have that quantified
Speaker 1: for you. You know. I bet she feels like a
Speaker 1: lucky lady. So, Chuck, we've kind of laid out by
Speaker 1: now that blood types are confounding science still um but
Speaker 1: there are some guests, some assumptions about why we have them,
Speaker 1: Although that is the that is still the question that
Speaker 1: plagues blood researchers. Why do we have blood types. Well,
Speaker 1: you'd think it was because, you know, because they're fighting
Speaker 1: off uh, blood born invaders. Like, that's why we have them.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't explain why we have different ones, right exactly.
Speaker 1: And then what confounds that even further is the fact
Speaker 1: that apparently some blood types actually increase your susceptibility to
Speaker 1: some blood born invaders. Yes, so some blood types help
Speaker 1: certain fight certain diseases and not others. And like you said,
Speaker 1: then there are others that make you more susceptible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and not only in the case of like where oh,
Speaker 1: not having this a antigen makes me more susceptible because
Speaker 1: the a antigen fights off say I think malaria more.
Speaker 1: It's not even the case of that. In some cases,
Speaker 1: having an antigen proves to be food for certain kind
Speaker 1: of um germs and bacteria that cause illness actually binds easier. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it binds or they eat like the sugar of the
Speaker 1: protein and they just go attack your body. Like it's
Speaker 1: like food, Like your blood type is food to certain
Speaker 1: kinds of diseases that make you terribly sick. Right, So
Speaker 1: from an evolutionary standpoint, those things should not exist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the only thing to me that makes sense is when
Speaker 1: you included this word in here, which is variation, And
Speaker 1: that to me makes sense because variation is generally pretty
Speaker 1: good for a population, right, because it covers more bases. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in this case that maybe why I mean they
Speaker 1: have found Kevin Kane, this guy. University of Toronto did
Speaker 1: a lot of investigating on this and found that, like
Speaker 1: you said, it was, Type OH protects against malaria better.
Speaker 1: Type A makes you more susceptible to pulp smallpox. Type
Speaker 1: B you're more likely to be infected by E. Coli.
Speaker 1: So it's just you should know what your blood type
Speaker 1: is and what you're more likely to get and not get. Yeah,
Speaker 1: would think. And again remember we said that UM that
Speaker 1: some some anergin service binding sites for certain kinds of bacteria.
Speaker 1: Same thing with the neuro virus UM, which has nothing
Speaker 1: to do with your bloods seem to make any sense
Speaker 1: at first at first, until you find out that not
Speaker 1: only does UM do the does your body express your
Speaker 1: blood type anogens on the surface of your red blood cells,
Speaker 1: it also expresses them on the surface of the cells
Speaker 1: that line your gut. And neuro virus has had a
Speaker 1: lot to do with your gut. So specifically, I think
Speaker 1: if you're Type OH, you UM have basically what accounts
Speaker 1: what amounts to a landing pad for UM neuro virus
Speaker 1: to bind too, and you are really going to be
Speaker 1: hating it compared to everybody else on the cruise ship
Speaker 1: that has Type A B or A B or if
Speaker 1: your type OH, you might get a ruptured Achilles tendon
Speaker 1: or an ulcer a little more easily, and that weird. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they've linked a lot of a lot of susceptibilityy to
Speaker 1: illness is two different blood types, So infections, cancers, memory loss,
Speaker 1: heart disease get this. Type A blood types are most
Speaker 1: most susceptible to stress, which makes a lot of sense
Speaker 1: because the type of personality is like, I don't think
Speaker 1: those are l go go go, let's get things done
Speaker 1: kind of thing type. But that's not what you know.
Speaker 1: We don't know. Uh. All this ignorance though lead to
Speaker 1: a discovery, while it didn't lead to but it's exemplified
Speaker 1: by the discovery in ninety two and Bombay UM patients
Speaker 1: that didn't have a B O blood type at all confounding.
Speaker 1: It's called the Bombay phenotype and it was discovered in
Speaker 1: the fifties, and basically it's um. It's really rare. It's
Speaker 1: again Carl Zimmer comes in to say, if owes that
Speaker 1: single story ranch and A is two story and b's
Speaker 1: a two story house, then this Bombay phenotype is an
Speaker 1: empty vacant lot. Yeah, like these are the guys that
Speaker 1: have nothing there. Yeah, as far as goes and uh,
Speaker 1: in India, you're about one in ten thousand. You have
Speaker 1: one inten thousand chants of having this UM blood type,
Speaker 1: and one in four million in the world. But the
Speaker 1: thing that's confounding about is these people don't appear to
Speaker 1: be any more or less fit or healthy than people
Speaker 1: in the A B O blood group. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: if you need that blood, you're in bad shape. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you have to get Bombay because I think uh, I
Speaker 1: think blood has a shelf life of about forty two days.
Speaker 1: So I mean imagine places like India and Bombay especially,
Speaker 1: they probably have a lot more of this on hand.
Speaker 1: But if you're traveling in the United States, maybe you
Speaker 1: might have a bit of a time if you're bleeding out.
Speaker 1: It was also a general hospital subplot, wasn't really I
Speaker 1: was just poking around and it was like a leave
Speaker 1: it to the soap opera to make that like the
Speaker 1: rarest blood type a sub paternity subplot. That was how
Speaker 1: they proved out fraternity for one of the somebody had
Speaker 1: the Bombay phenixs. Yeah, they're like, it is you and
Speaker 1: you're a secretory fuzz uh. So we've talked about how
Speaker 1: the blood types are they make you more or less
Speaker 1: susceptible of the disease, right. They think that that's one
Speaker 1: of the reasons why UM. Different blood types appear in
Speaker 1: different UM ethnic groups differently. They think that it's evidence
Speaker 1: that in the not too distant evolutionary past, certain UM,
Speaker 1: certain parasites or bacteria or germs or viruses that have
Speaker 1: some sort of preference for a certain blood type passed
Speaker 1: through an area and largely wiped out the people with
Speaker 1: that blood type, left the other blood type standing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we were talking earlier about in China UM, and actually
Speaker 1: in Russian and India two they have a lot more
Speaker 1: blood type b UM, and that is because the bubona
Speaker 1: plague and malaria outbreaks that swept through those countries not
Speaker 1: too long ago and basically wiped out a lot of
Speaker 1: the o's and a's. So you've got a lot more bees. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this isn't This hasn't been proven in science. Things aren't
Speaker 1: proven that there's more and more and more evidence that
Speaker 1: backs it up. It seems to be a correlation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there is. And it's not just China, Russia, and India.
Speaker 1: Africa has a lot of type uh oh people, which
Speaker 1: is less susceptible than malaria UM, and Africa has a
Speaker 1: lot of malaria. So it does make a lot of
Speaker 1: sense that that's that's what happened. So even if the
Speaker 1: reason we have blood types isn't because UM, it provides
Speaker 1: a defense against defend blood borne um illnesses or whatever.
Speaker 1: It's a function for sure of blood types. If you
Speaker 1: want to not get teleological here, well who does teleologists?
Speaker 1: Oh we'll finish up here with two uh examples of
Speaker 1: well one example of HOKEM. One example that may or
Speaker 1: may not be HOKEM, but it's probably HOKEM at the
Speaker 1: very least. It's fun the blood type diet. There was
Speaker 1: a natural path named Peter damont at Adamo Adamo I
Speaker 1: actually funny enough. I was like, how do you pronounce that?
Speaker 1: I found an old Regis and Kathy Lee. I don't
Speaker 1: know if I would trust that. Well, he was standing
Speaker 1: next to him, and he seemed to agree with it.
Speaker 1: So usually though, when it's a di apostrophe, is just
Speaker 1: dottamo and not diadamo. He didn't correct Regius. Well, who
Speaker 1: does Kathy Lee? Oh, this is pre Kelly Rippa. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was Regis and Kathy Lee. Well, so she was drunk,
Speaker 1: and just as Regis, all right, this is he is
Speaker 1: a natural path with my wife calls a hokey pokey doctor.
Speaker 1: And he published a very famous and popular book called
Speaker 1: Eat Right for Number four Your Type, Eat Right for
Speaker 1: Your Type UM seven million copies to date, sixty languages
Speaker 1: has been translated into and he postulated that um our
Speaker 1: blood types came along over the years, um as we evolved,
Speaker 1: and that we should eat according to win our blood type.
Speaker 1: What was going on when our blood type first came about? Right?
Speaker 1: Like evolutionarily speaking exactly so like um the I think
Speaker 1: he's he decided that the type oh blood type came
Speaker 1: about during hunter gatherer era. Yeah, you're saying he decided
Speaker 1: it's very key here, Yeah, I mean I don't know
Speaker 1: what it was based on other than his guesses. Um,
Speaker 1: but he and then he said type A was the
Speaker 1: dawn of agriculture. Type B was from the Himalayan highlands
Speaker 1: ten thousand and fifteen thousand years ago. And then he
Speaker 1: said Type A B is a modern blending of Type
Speaker 1: A and Type B. Pretty convenient. So if you, for example,
Speaker 1: or type A, your blood type came about during the
Speaker 1: hunter gather um days, and your your diet should consist
Speaker 1: mostly of like raw vegetarian foods. Now, that's during the
Speaker 1: dawn of agriculture. Hunter gatherer would be meat eaters. Oh sorry, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so that would be type Oh, it would be the
Speaker 1: meat eaters, right. So Type A would be dawn of agriculture.
Speaker 1: So you would eat um, Yeah, vegetables should he said,
Speaker 1: like you yeah, type oh meat rich, no grains and
Speaker 1: dairy type be lots of dairy um. Also called the
Speaker 1: death diet right, and to avoid foods that aren't suited
Speaker 1: to your blood type. And he did this. Um he said,
Speaker 1: it will reduce infections and you'll lose weight and you
Speaker 1: can fight cancer and I can sell books a lot
Speaker 1: of books pretty much was the reason. And they've done
Speaker 1: testing over the years, the Red Cross of Belgium did
Speaker 1: a lot of people have and they've all said this
Speaker 1: is not true. No, the Red Cross of Belgium did
Speaker 1: a survey of a thousand studies and found no directive
Speaker 1: and it's supporting the health effects of the A B
Speaker 1: O blood type diet. End quote. But that's not to
Speaker 1: say that these diets aren't good for you. For example,
Speaker 1: that type A diet, it's basically vegetarianism. So of course
Speaker 1: you're gonna lose weight, you're gonna lower your body mass index. Uh,
Speaker 1: you you may, whatever you're going to. You're going on
Speaker 1: a vegetarian diet. There, but none of these have to
Speaker 1: do a blood type. No, Like, if you're a type oh,
Speaker 1: go on the type A diet and you will see
Speaker 1: those same benefits, same effects, So don't go on the
Speaker 1: type B diet. So basically it seems like this guy
Speaker 1: um just took some some pretty good diets except for yeah,
Speaker 1: the type the type B diet is. Yeah, you'd a
Speaker 1: bunch of fats and dairy. Although fats have gotten a
Speaker 1: bad rap. Yeah, I mean not all fats are bad,
Speaker 1: of course we know that. But but supposed diet is
Speaker 1: not the one to go with. So that was hokum. Allegedly,
Speaker 1: this I'm at the risk of respecting our friends in Asia.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna call this complete hokum. Well, they they
Speaker 1: believe it pretty like like we believe it is. Actually
Speaker 1: it's gonna say, like we believe astrology. A lot of
Speaker 1: people here just have astrology is like a fun thing
Speaker 1: to read. They really take it seriously in Japan apparently. Yeah, so, um,
Speaker 1: I don't know what you would compare it to over here.
Speaker 1: I don't even know that it has an analog astrology.
Speaker 1: I guess, um, I guess the but the but yeah,
Speaker 1: there's the distinction is is that like over there, more
Speaker 1: people definitely take it as as fact. Yes, I'm saying
Speaker 1: they take it way more seriously. But it's being born
Speaker 1: with something that determines your personality type. So back in
Speaker 1: the seven two kg, fur Fura Kawa, who is a
Speaker 1: professor at Tokyo Women's Teachers School, he decided that blood types,
Speaker 1: and this is based on his observations, blood types and
Speaker 1: personality types were related somehow, and he started to do
Speaker 1: some studies and he decided, I've got this figured out.
Speaker 1: I I've got them mapped. I have type A, type
Speaker 1: B type baby and type OH personality types map And
Speaker 1: it actually caught on, uh, in the East big time
Speaker 1: and still is today. And the Japanese actually have a
Speaker 1: word for a type of harassment, say basically getting passed
Speaker 1: over for a job or not getting into a certain
Speaker 1: school based on your blood type. Yeah, buddhah, Yeah, is
Speaker 1: that right? Is a good pronouncement. I think of pronunciation,
Speaker 1: I couldn't even frown that up, but blood type harassment. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And we'll go over these because it's, um, they're cute.
Speaker 1: It's interesting. Um, if you're blood type A, you were
Speaker 1: going to be kind and compassionate and put others before yourself.
Speaker 1: You're calm on the outside, but you have a lot
Speaker 1: of inner turmoil. Um, but you're a good listener, and
Speaker 1: you're gonna have a lot of friends, and you get
Speaker 1: along with others well. But it's typically at the expense
Speaker 1: of your own sense of balance and happiness. You're just
Speaker 1: giving a little too much. Yeah, you're not speaking up
Speaker 1: for yourself necessarily in order to keep the peace. That's right.
Speaker 1: That's type A. Yeah. Type B is the George Clooney
Speaker 1: of blood types. Smug. No, he's not smug. What I
Speaker 1: don't think he's smug. What it's like, it's defining characteristic.
Speaker 1: I don't think he smug at all. Oh my god, really, yes,
Speaker 1: I'm about a faint. No, I don't find him smug
Speaker 1: at all. I think if you agree with someone, then
Speaker 1: you probably don't find them smug. I agree with him
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways. I think it's a really
Speaker 1: cool thing to do to spend your money the higher
Speaker 1: satellites to track war lords in Africa. That's about as
Speaker 1: cool a thing as you can do with your riches
Speaker 1: as anybody. Right, I still think he's smug. I don't
Speaker 1: think he smugging. I can't like. I don't think he
Speaker 1: can help it. I think we have different definitions of smug.
Speaker 1: If you mean handsome and winning and charming, then yes,
Speaker 1: he's smug. And being a hundred and ten percent aware
Speaker 1: that you're handsome and charming and winning at any given moment,
Speaker 1: down to the molecular levels. That's my definition of smug.
Speaker 1: Awareness of your good looks. That yeah, over confident self
Speaker 1: awareness is smugness. I'm on team Cleaney. I'm not opposed
Speaker 1: George Claney. I just think I just can't imagine not
Speaker 1: thinking you smug. Well, imagine it, baby, like I don't
Speaker 1: even know you right now. Well, that's because I'm a
Speaker 1: personality Type BE blood Type BE, like my buddy George,
Speaker 1: that means I'm outgoing, in friendly. I'm a people person,
Speaker 1: and I don't do that at the expense of my
Speaker 1: own feelings. It just comes naturally, too, yeah, George. Whereas
Speaker 1: like a Type A would like you're a people person,
Speaker 1: but you really expend a lot of energy being a
Speaker 1: people person. Type B. It's just like you said, it
Speaker 1: just comes naturally. You're very adjustable. Uh, you're good at
Speaker 1: a job if you have to deal with people. I
Speaker 1: don't think we said that. Type A blood people don't
Speaker 1: like to have jobs where they deal with other people. Right.
Speaker 1: It gives examples of programmers, accountants, writers, librarians are good
Speaker 1: jobs for Type A. Uh, and Type BE like Mr Cliney,
Speaker 1: is not suitable for marriage because they're flirty and playful
Speaker 1: and sm YEA, so say Korean women, that's right. Um,
Speaker 1: you added the smug thing by the way at the end, Yes,
Speaker 1: of course I did. That was pretty smug. Type A
Speaker 1: B though they are freedom loving. Yeah, they're strong and rational.
Speaker 1: They don't worry about the little things. Uh. They can
Speaker 1: look at life's challenges with emotion removed and say this
Speaker 1: is what I need to do to get past this.
Speaker 1: So their psychopaths, uh, not necessarily. They seem to not
Speaker 1: have issues with the relationships, and they're quite popular. They
Speaker 1: seem to be the winningest personality group. I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: a psychopath for that. I mean, I see what you're saying,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I don't think so. Uh. And then finally
Speaker 1: we have personality. Oh blood type. Oh, you're responsible and
Speaker 1: practical and rule conscious. You're a great leader and very
Speaker 1: determined to achieve your goals. You're physically strong, so you
Speaker 1: might be a good athlete. Yeah, and they're most happy
Speaker 1: with other typeos or type abes, and that are the
Speaker 1: personality blood types. I've never heard of that. That's all
Speaker 1: we know about blood time. I thought that was pretty neat.
Speaker 1: I never heard that that was a big thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've me told me about that. I was like, we're
Speaker 1: doing blood type. She's like, oh, you know about like
Speaker 1: Japanese blood types, right, blood type personality type. Yeah, She's like,
Speaker 1: you know, like George Clooney, smuck. You're like, we're meant
Speaker 1: to be together. It's funny. We just hold hands and
Speaker 1: watch monuments manners, just like, oh god, alright, Chuck. If
Speaker 1: people want to know more about blood types, I would
Speaker 1: steer clear how stuff works because it has one of
Speaker 1: the densest, most incomprehensible articles I've ever read in my
Speaker 1: life on this site about blood It really needs rewriting. UM.
Speaker 1: This this thing you put together was great, Thank you.
Speaker 1: I appreciate that. UM, and a lot of it was
Speaker 1: based on a mosaic article by Carl Zimmer about blood types,
Speaker 1: which I strongly recommend you go read. Uh. And since
Speaker 1: I said Carl Zimmer, it's time for listener mail, UH
Speaker 1: gonna call this truck drive and chemist, Guys. I was
Speaker 1: a truck driver from O five to O eight and
Speaker 1: listen to your show back then I left trucking to
Speaker 1: go to college and I was taking chemistry. We had
Speaker 1: to do a research paper on a compound, and so
Speaker 1: I always want to know about diesel, so I looked
Speaker 1: into diesel. We should do one on diesel. He says,
Speaker 1: it sounds pretty interesting. UM, I learned it's some really
Speaker 1: interesting thing about Rudolph Diesel's invention and about the man himself.
Speaker 1: The original diesel compound was actually made from peanuts, and
Speaker 1: he invented the engine for small plants. Uh was it
Speaker 1: George Washington Carver, No, it was Rudolph Diesel. Um. He
Speaker 1: uh invented it the engine UM for small plants that
Speaker 1: could power um, not you know, biological plants like a
Speaker 1: power plant. Yeah. Uh yeah, you could power a warehouse
Speaker 1: to compete with the big industrial warehouses during the Industrial Revolution.
Speaker 1: So he was a man of the people. But here's
Speaker 1: the conspiracy theory part. Rudolph Diesel found out his diesel
Speaker 1: engine was going to be powering Germany's newest warships called
Speaker 1: Unta sea boots means under sea boats. Where are you
Speaker 1: gonna say? Not that? Uh? And he was really angry
Speaker 1: that they would use his invention for war. So he
Speaker 1: told the German naval representative that if they were going
Speaker 1: to use his diesel for war, he would take his
Speaker 1: designs to England so they would have it too and
Speaker 1: could counter Germany, and that Germany might as well not
Speaker 1: use it. And they shot him on the spot. Basically,
Speaker 1: he's not a smart thing to announce, No, he he
Speaker 1: pushed all his chips in and lost. He told off.
Speaker 1: The government boarded a ferry to England in the evening
Speaker 1: to arrive in the morning. Uh. He left word to
Speaker 1: wake him since he had an appointment with the Naval
Speaker 1: Office in Britain, and when the ferry ducked the next morning,
Speaker 1: he was gone. Eight days later, his body was found
Speaker 1: floating in the English Channel. And this all happened a
Speaker 1: few short years before World War One. Wow, I can't
Speaker 1: believe that, like government agents would fascinate somebody when they
Speaker 1: threatened to take a very important thing to another country. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: so that sounds like a good podcast. He says. You
Speaker 1: have a man fighting for the common man, man that
Speaker 1: didn't like his Anvintioninis for war and engine we still
Speaker 1: used today and could be using more in the future.
Speaker 1: And that is from Russ Fortney. Russ, my friend, I
Speaker 1: think you just did a little mini podcast. Thanks a
Speaker 1: lot for that, man. I love I love history, me too,
Speaker 1: love history. Never knew about Rudolph Diesel, no no idea.
Speaker 1: I didn't even know somebody's last name. I just didn't.
Speaker 1: It was a thing, you know, like Jimmy gasoline right,
Speaker 1: or that Elizabeth bacteria Elizabeth bacteria. Jimmy, guess if you
Speaker 1: want to tell us something that we don't know about
Speaker 1: that will blow our tops because it's so cool, Like Russ,
Speaker 1: you can tweet to us at s y s K Podcast.
Speaker 1: You can join us on Facebook dot com slash stuff
Speaker 1: You Should Know. You can send us an email to
Speaker 1: Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com, and, as always,
Speaker 1: joined us on the web at our lugg sarious home
Speaker 1: Stuff You snow dot com. For more on this and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.