The Science Pawdcast

Episode 22 Season 7: 10,000 steps, Same Sex Clusters, and Dogs Watching T.V.

• Jason and Kris Zackowski • Season 7 • Episode 22

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In this episode we explore scientific findings about optimal daily step counts, genetic predispositions for having children of the same sex, and how dogs perceive and interact with television.

• Research shows 7,000 steps per day is the health "sweet spot," not the commonly cited 10,000
• At 7,000 steps, studies found 25% reduced cardiovascular disease risk, 37% lower cancer risk, and 38% decreased dementia-related deaths
• Even modest increases from baseline (2,000 steps) show significant health benefits
• Genetic study reveals some families may be predisposed to having children of primarily one sex
• Older mothers showed strongest patterns of same-sex children, possibly due to biological mechanisms
• Two gene variants identified that correlate with having all male or all female children
• Modern LED TVs allow dogs to see continuous motion unlike older TVs
• Dogs primarily see blue and yellow colors and 45% react to other dogs on screen
• A dog's personality, not breed or age, determines their interest in television
• Anxious dogs may find TV overstimulating rather than enriching

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Speaker 1:

Hello science enthusiasts. I'm Jason Zukoski. And I'm Chris Zukoski, we're the pet parents of Bunsen, beaker, bernoulli and Ginger.

Speaker 2:

The science animals on social media.

Speaker 1:

If you love science.

Speaker 2:

And you love pets.

Speaker 1:

You've come to the right spot, so put on your safety glasses and hold on to your tail. This is the Science Podcast. Hello everybody and welcome back to the Science Podcast. We hope you're happy and healthy out there. This is episode 22 of season seven and, chris, we took a week off. We're back from the mountains. Are you feeling okay?

Speaker 2:

I'm feeling great. I'm feeling like we had a really good time going to the mountains and hanging out with the dogs and it was really special being able to go back up and hike with Bunsen, because he is had that life-saving surgery last summer and recovering from his slipped disc in his neck, so I'm very proud of him. He worked super hard and he always has a positive attitude and he always wants to go. So, he's a good Bernese Mountain Dog, that is for sure.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, he's a hard worker. I was asking because both you and I we both fell in the mountains. You fell over a root and I fell into a creek.

Speaker 2:

Yes, that happened. I was going to try and be like you where you do these epic shots of the dogs running in behind the camera, and I was doing it. Maybe I should not have done it. I was doing it. Maybe I should not have done it. Maybe I should have looked to see if there were roots hanging out of the ground, or maybe chose not to do it. On rock, that is scree.

Speaker 1:

And I fell into the creek because Bunsen, or sorry, I fell into the creek because Bernoulli went down to be in the creek and Beaker went around my back and the two leashes took my legs out from under me and I went down this little embankment. So both you and I have some cuts and bruises from our falls yours did not look that bad, to be honest with you.

Speaker 2:

You just went. I went hard, but you went, oh, I don't want to go in the creek, oh, I don't want to go in the water, oh, and you like melted into the water and it was funny actually, but I did not laugh, you have to be proud of me that I did not laugh at you.

Speaker 1:

Yes, thank you all right, let's get to the show on the science podcast. This week we're looking at some new findings about. Is taking a certain number steps a a day beneficial? Is there really a hard number? Is there a sweet spot? In our other science news article, we're going to be looking at how they found their single sex clustering meaning that folks are maybe genetically predisposed to having a boy or girl based on their DNA that they pass along. And our pet science item you actually found this one, chris. It's about dogs and their watching of TV habits.

Speaker 2:

I thought it was interesting because Beaker loves to watch the red crabs on the David Attenborough show and I thought, hey, I want to read more about this. And then I shared it with you and you thought it was cool.

Speaker 1:

It's cute. Yeah, all right, let's get on with the show. There's no time like science time. This weekend's science news, let's talk about a little bit of fitness science getting your steps in. How many steps did you think we took? And we didn't do very big hikes, we did like shorter hikes in respect to Bunsen, but I think we took a lot of steps on our trip. How?

Speaker 2:

many steps we took, but it was uneven terrain, which makes it a little bit more challenging.

Speaker 1:

And sometimes we had to quicken our pace because the dogs were going quickly. All right, let's get to the study Now. In the past there has been a recommendation of 10,000 steps per day. Have you heard that before? Chris get 10,000 steps a day, thousand steps per day.

Speaker 2:

Have you heard that before? Chris Get 10,000 steps a day? I have, and, like when I was talking about my Apple Watch, like I never keep track, but I have heard that 10,000 is a nice number to aspire to.

Speaker 1:

But that's not based in evidence, that's just a number that's thrown out there. So the study, which was conducted at the Universidad Europa de Madrid so it sounds like it's a Spanish study they took a look at 57 different studies on steps. They analyzed the relationship between daily step count and various health outcomes, and here's where we get into the fun bits. So there's a baseline of 2000 steps per day. I feel that if you get between zero and 2000, you're not really moving a heck of a lot. But if you just go to your job, and your job has a normal movement around, and then you come home, you might hit around 2000, just steps. That's why it's called the baseline. So what did the meta-analysis turn up? So what's the sweet spot, chris?

Speaker 2:

You know what? It's actually 7,000 steps per day, which if you're aiming at 10,000, you're like woohoo, I have to do 3,000 less. Maybe you're really happy. And if you were doing, say, 4,000 steps a day, you're like woohoo, I don't have to increase it by that much to hit the sweet spot.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, At that point they found that there was a large decreased risk for cardiovascular disease compared to baseline. So they found a 25% decreased risk. Cancer was at 37% and dementia related deaths were at 38%. So these are all compared to the baseline of 2000. But even if you doubled from baseline to 4000, you still decreased your risk of death from a whole bunch of different causes. So just moving a little bit had a huge impact on the risk of death from cardiovascular disease, cancer and, as I said, dementia.

Speaker 2:

But the best seems to be around 7 000 interestingly, your risk reduction does continue, but the curve will flatten and it continues at a slower rate so it's like the whole idea of diminished returns.

Speaker 1:

You have a huge benefit and then you have smaller benefits, but that increase in benefit is very, very slow. Now there are some limitations to the study. It did not account for age, lifestyle factors or any pre-existing conditions. They are hoping to do more long-term studies as that will help them refine guidelines. But there's some really cool takeaway messages from the study.

Speaker 2:

You know what. You don't actually need to reach 10,000 steps to improve your health and walking more than you currently do, even if it's a modest amount more, it can greatly reduce your risk of major diseases and death. And if you aim for 7,000 steps per day, that's a solid, evidence-backed target for better health. That's a solid, evidence-backed target for better health.

Speaker 1:

How long does it take to do 7,000 steps? I was wondering that so I actually googled it. But if you went from zero to 7,000 and you walked at kind of a normal pace, it would take the average person about an hour and 15 minutes to hit 7,000 steps. Now, obviously, if you go faster you might take more steps, but this is an average amount. In that time that's a lot of walking, but then that doesn't account for you're just walking in a day. If you think about how many times you're on your feet moving around and I know we're both teachers and I feel some days I don't do a lot of walking. I do a lot of standing, talking and like moving around my classroom, but it's not like I'm moving around the building or taking long strolls.

Speaker 2:

Now I guess a strategy to increase your walking is to set an alert on your phone to say, hey, it's time to get up and do a walk around the school.

Speaker 1:

What's interesting, as we kind of wrap this up, is these studies that talk about walking. They tie into one of the reasons why folks who have dogs are struggling on average healthier than folks that don't, and that's that you take your dog for a walk. So even if you're taking your dog for a short walk of like 20 minutes or so, you might hit 1,000 steps, 2,000 steps on a very short walk, and that would bump you up to the 4,000 level, right, 4,000 steps in a day, which would increase your chances of avoiding those terrible outcomes.

Speaker 2:

I call it the heel and toe express.

Speaker 1:

Folks that live in walkable cities. They hit these targets very easily. All right, that's this article for this week. Let's move on to article number two, which talks about how folks may be predisposed to having children of just one gender, one sex. I know, because we're teachers. I know families where you hit four or five boys or four or five girls in a row. Have you had those families that you've taught?

Speaker 2:

That's my family, Jason.

Speaker 1:

Two girls right.

Speaker 2:

No, and Craig had girls and, like grandma, had a boy and a girl. Duncan was the first boy since my uncle Craig. It was girl after girl after girl.

Speaker 1:

And in my family it was boy after boy, like on the Sikowsky side, until my sister had little Leah, because that's Duncan, adam, pierce, brynn, xavier, weston, james, that's eight boys in a row and then Leah. So maybe my family's predisposed to having just one type of sex, because it should be 50, 50. Like when you do the Punnett square of sperm and egg, the sperm can either be X or Y and the egg is always XX and it's the same as flipping a coin. However, we're going to get into some of the study. We're going to get into the study that shows folks may be predisposed to skewing those odds.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, when you're talking about like the 50-50, that's over a large population. So as you get more participants in the population, then the statistic averages out to the 50-50.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, anybody can flip a coin and you'll get three heads in a row Like that's possible. But if you flip the coin as I'm sure some people learned in math class you flip the coin a thousand times. It would be a pretty much a 50-50 thing. You'd have 500 heads and 500 tails, unless you got one of those trick coins which people may or may not have had in high school to try to cheat people out of coin tosses. But let's get to the study. It was led by Jorge Chavarro, who is a reproductive epidemiologist at Harvard Harvard Chan School of Public Health. The team used the Nurses' Health Study, which has data on over 58,000 pregnancies and births from 1956 to 2015. Okay, what did they find in all of these pregnancies, with all these bye-byes?

Speaker 2:

they found, about one-third of families in the data had children all of the same sex, and so more families than they expected had three to five children of a single sex, which exceeds what random chance would predict, and so the researchers proposed that the individual families might have a unique probability of producing children of a certain sex.

Speaker 1:

One pattern they found was families with older mothers at first childbirth showed the strongest clustering of same-sex children. So the older the mom is, the greater the chance that mom had of having all boys or all girls. But there are some possible biological mechanisms which maybe we get into some uncomfortable territory here. So if you're listening to the podcast with small children, it's just biology but it's how we roll. It's just biology but it's how we roll. The more acidic vaginal environments with age may favor X-carrying sperm. So that means the older you are, the X-sperm have a greater chance of survival. They're larger and they may survive better in those acidic conditions. A very short menstrual phase with age may change the cervical mucus, potentially favoring Y sperm. So I guess it comes down to where the sperm are going. If they get all acidified up or they get all stickied, they can't make it. But it's a race to the finish, chris.

Speaker 2:

It is a race to the finish.

Speaker 1:

They did.

Speaker 2:

They did find some genetic findings, though. They found two gene variants that were associated with having children of only one sex, and one of the variants was linked with all male children and another variant was linked with all female children, and the genes they're actually not known to be related to reproduction themselves, and the gene's function is actually currently unknown.

Speaker 1:

There's other things too, for example, that may be outside of genetics. Some families might continue having kids until they get a child of the opposite sex. I'm sure you've heard this story before. Right, they have five girls and they just keep having kids until they hit the boy, or the other way around. Or families might just straight up stop. They might be wanting to have three kids, but once they have a boy and the girl they're like done, they may also skew the observed sex ratios. We do have to talk also that some scientists are skeptical. Example, geneticists at the university of queensland said that that they would like bigger replication in other populations, just not the united states, because in a swedish population data since 1931, that swedish data showed no family level sex preference. It was, of course, just the american data in this study.

Speaker 2:

So we're looking at the study providing insight and looking at more than just biological factors to explain those patterns.

Speaker 1:

And I guess, as we wrap up this one, it's an interesting conversation. The bottom line is that well, population level sex ratios are pretty even. I think in North America just over 50% girls at birth and just under 50% males at birth, boys at birth. There's reasons for that. Individual variation and biological predispositions may still exist. A fun kind of thing to think about and talk about and study in bigger, bolder studies in the future.

Speaker 2:

Exactly.

Speaker 1:

So does that mean the next dog we get as a girl? Chris, to even it out.

Speaker 2:

Well, I don't know, jason, because when we went to look at the Bernese mountain dog that in effect turned out to be Bernoulli, big red male, you said to me there are two criteria that have to happen with this dog. One is that we are going to pick out a male and two, he needs a B science name. I don't know because, like when we were looking at the characteristics of the dog breed Bernice Mountain Dogs, you had found that the girls tended to be a little bit more aloof and you wanted a really cuddly, happy dog.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And what do we have?

Speaker 1:

We got a pretty cuddly, happy guy.

Speaker 2:

We do.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, but he could have been a cuddly, happy girl too. Anyways, this is dogs, not people. All right, that's science news for this week. This week in pet science hey, now we can talk about dogs. We're going to talk about dogs and their TV viewing habits. Now, in the intro, chris, you mentioned that Beaker likes to watch certain types of TV.

Speaker 2:

She likes Life Channel, Like not Life Channel but Nature Channel, so things that have bright, vibrant colors and are moving on the screen. She's quite interested in that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I watched a while ago this movie called Oddball. I don't know if you ever watched it. I think you were actually working at your school. It's about the little penguins in Australia and they train dogs to protect them, and Beaker was obsessed with the little penguins on TV, like she watched that whole movie with me from the couch. It was really cute. She watched that whole movie with me from the couch it was really cute.

Speaker 1:

But Bunsen and Bernoulli, I think the TV is not a thing they care about. I rarely have ever seen them even thinking the TV is a thing.

Speaker 2:

No, bunsen sat on the couch with me when I'm trying to watch a show with you and I can't see the show because his body is so large.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, but he's not watching the TV. He's just stopping you from watching the TV.

Speaker 2:

I guess that's right.

Speaker 1:

Anyways, this study looked at how dogs watch and respond to television, and it's from July 17th in Scientific Reports.

Speaker 2:

Now, historically, dogs couldn't see the TV clearly due to the way TVs were created, how they were manufactured. There was a lower ticker Nope, there was a lower flicker fusion rate of older TVs and we may have had one like a cathode ray TV tube. And because dogs have a faster flicker fusion rate than humans, they need TVs that can fast flick. How do you say it? The older TVs appeared to them as having flashing still images, and so the newer LED screens display video at a high enough resolution and refresh rate for dogs to see smooth, continuous, smooth, continuous motion. And dogs also have dichromatic vision. They see in two colors, blue and yellow hues, unlike humans who see in three. So there might be something about that nature tv, where the colors appeal to Beaker for sure.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, one of the most popular cartoons for kids is Bluey, and I know our nephew Rafi. He was all over the moon for Bluey. You're familiar with this right, chris Bluey.

Speaker 2:

I am. I picked up a Bluey thing from Costco early on because he saw it in Costco and wanted it for Christmas and I think it was September. But, Costco, if you don't buy it then you don't get it. So we were holding onto that Bluey thing for a very long time.

Speaker 1:

And it's a fun trivia thing. And, if you don't know, it's a cartoon about a blue healer named Bluey and his family and they have trials and tribulations. It's a very sweet show, but it's primarily colored in blues, yellows and browns, which are colors that dogs can see. So if you're watching it, it's actually quite a muted cartoon without crazy vibrant colors. They did that so if families have dogs, they can watch with their kids, which is sweet. That's pretty cute. Okay, let's look at the study. How did they test this? Researchers sent out surveys via Facebook and email and they received 453 responses from dog owners and that reported on their dog's behaviors in front of the TV. So probably difficult to get. Probably difficult to get hundreds of people to bring in their dogs to see if they watch TV or not. So surveys are the most economic and quickest way to go. The survey questions included like what kind of visuals and sounds the dogs reacted to, whether they barked, wagged, growled or chased. So were they reacting to the TV? And, if they were, how were they reacting?

Speaker 2:

Well, 45% of dogs reacted to image or sounds of other dogs and they also showed interest in animals on the screen moving objects and off screen sounds like doorbells or opening doors.

Speaker 1:

Oh man, like doorbells and knocks, send our dogs running and barking. That's happened before.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, for sure, if it goes ding dong. Our doorbell doesn't even sound like ding dong and our doorbell never goes off.

Speaker 1:

No one ever uses our doorbell, it's not a thing, unless it's the day that everybody uses it, where like 10 people come and use the doorbell.

Speaker 2:

And it's like what? But I don't think like Bernoulli for sure has never heard our doorbell, and if I know. So, how do they do? How do they know? How do they know that's like an alerting sound, because then they go and bark at the door. It's mind-boggling to me how it's like an off screen sound doesn't sound like anything in our house, but it's something to investigate. I think that's fascinating.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it is cool. The study found that breed, age and sex did not significantly alter how dogs responded to TV. It was their personality so excitable dogs, so dogs with lots of energy were more likely to follow the moving objects on the screen, especially those animals like dogs. Some dogs in the survey, like Jack's the Catula Leopard Dog it was owned by the study co-author tried to look behind the TV to find out where the animals went who ran off the screen. Anxious dogs often responded negatively to stimulus like doorbells. So the TV was overstimulating rather than enriching, and I've heard that before. Some dogs are scared of the television.

Speaker 2:

It's not all TV is beneficial for dogs, and sometimes owners just assume that TV is always enriching. So when you go home, or sorry, but when you leave for work, some people leave the TV on, thinking that it'll be entertainment for their dog or enrichment for their dog. That's not always true. Especially anxious dogs find that it could be too much stimulation for them.

Speaker 1:

They also found that dogs may be mimicking their owner's emotions when they're watching television. Television, For example, if you are a sport watching person and you start to go bananas because your team is winning or your team is losing, or somebody did a good play or somebody did a bad play. If you get excited, the dog may also mirror that type of energy. Now, owner behavior was not accounted for in the survey, but this is just as an aside other researchers have pointed out from other studies about dogs and TV.

Speaker 2:

We can go down to takeaways. So some takeaways is that actually not all dogs enjoy TV the same way and the excitability and anxiousness levels play a major role in whether a dog will find TV stimulating, confusing or upsetting. And by knowing your dog and knowing your dog's unique traits and preferences, that's a key factor when you want to decide if TV is something that will enrich or overwhelm them.

Speaker 1:

I have been watching this TV show called Andor. It's like a Star Wars thing. That TV show does make you excited and anxious at the same time. It is a very gripping TV show. None of the dogs are watching this with me.

Speaker 2:

No, just you. And they were singing a song for over 20 minutes. It was a protest song?

Speaker 1:

yeah it was, it was really moving.

Speaker 2:

I don't want to give anything away, but yeah, it was a protest song and there was a reason why they were singing yeah, but that was enough like to draw me in thinking, wow, this is pretty powerful that they're singing for that long and then doing cutting to other scenes, and but still it was like, wow, that's pretty impactful, but our dogs were TKO.

Speaker 1:

They didn't care that people were singing.

Speaker 2:

They did not care.

Speaker 1:

All right, that's pet science for this week. That's it for this week show. Thanks for coming back week after week to listen to the science podcast. And a shout out to all the top dogs that's the top tier of our Patreon community, the pop pack. You can sign up in our show notes. All right, chris, let's hear those names that are part of the top dogs.

Speaker 2:

Amelia Fetting, rhi Oda, carol Hainel, jennifer Challen, linnea Janik, karen Chronister, vicky Otero, christy Walker, sarah Bram, wendy, diane Mason and Luke Helen Chin, elizabeth Bourgeois, marianne McNally, catherine Jordan, shelley Smith, laura Steffensen, tracy Leinbach, anne Uchida, heather Burback, kelly and cuteness.