109 - Remedies: How Carrots Won the War

Greetings, listenerland!

This episode really gets to the heart and soul of the podcast. Almost every episode that we have done is rooted in some sort of remedies or old wives’ tale. When it came time to hash out what we were going to cover it was really exciting to see the podcast, in a sense, come full circle.

That was until we started to research these topics on hand. Apparently people took these rumors, myths, and misconceptions for face value and just ran with it. Thanks a lot science.

We assumed that things like lemon juice dying hair, ginger being used for motion sickness, and tomato juice neutralizing skunk smell would be easy to cover with no problem. We could not have been more wrong.

Finding the origins of these remedies also proved as a daunting task. They have been passed along orally from various sources that we almost needed carbon dating to find any mention of them as we scoured high and low. This was also coupled with the science itself was frustrating so it kind of became a moot point. We found some mentions sporadically but nothing concrete enough to present their evolution.

The one topic I was very glad that we covered was the chicken pox for oatmeal. That was the lone subject that I could vouch for personally. It was a home remedy I used when I was a kid when I caught the chicken pox virus. I can confirm that it did work and the younger me could not be happier.

Even though the research was heavier and more involved than previous episodes, we really enjoyed dismantling these remedies and approaching them as subjectively as possible. It’s hard not to be skeptic approaching these from a science oriented perspective, but we were pleasantly surprised with the end result. We hoped you learned something from this episode because we most certainly did. If nothing else, we hope to be educational and informative. Thanks a lot for listening.

-Jos