Welcome to Breakthroughs with Pfizer UK, the podcast where Pfizer invites experts from across the pharmaceutical industry to discuss the most pressing healthcare topics.

Approximately 5% of the red disease is estimated to be about 7,000 that exist. Only 5% of them have treatments.

Because of the really small patient numbers, you can't have your giant trials that give shoes statistical power.

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This is Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher and Daljata.

When paleoanthropologists eat lunch with biomechanists, well, let's just say the small talk can get pretty technical.

Some of us would have a cooked potatoes, and other people would bring raw salads, and they would just spend longer time chewing their food than ours.

This got us thinking about not just a temporal amount of time that it takes to get for your food, but are they expanding more energy than those who are eating cooked food?

Adam Van Casteren of the University of Manchester says, luckily there's a machine to measure that.

It's a clear chamber. You slip over your head. Looks like an astronaut helmet.

And it measures the oxygen you breathe in versus the carbon dioxide you breathe out.

That's a proxy for how much energy you're burning.

Van Casteren and his colleagues got 21 volunteers to sit in that apparatus for 45 minutes just to get a baseline on their metabolism.

Then they gave them flavorless gum to chew on for 15 minutes at a time.

If you ever have to chew some of the 15 minutes, it's much longer than you think.

Sometimes you have to remind people, keep chewing.

And boring is the key point here.

I mean, it's like if you've ever chewed gum way too long, and it's lost its flavor, and it's just this thing that's what the participants were chewing.

Co-author Amanda Henry of Light and University in the Netherlands explains that rather than cooked potatoes and raw salads, they needed something with no taste or smell.

Because anything appetizing would set off a chain of digestive reactions.

saliva and digestive juices would start flowing, and that activity would swamp the metabolic measurements related to chewing.

And those measurements were significant.

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