Writer and producer George Zaidan spoke to over 80 health experts for his new book “Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put In Us and On Us”. In this video, he shares the four key things he learned.
TRANSCRIPT
ERIC R. OLSON: This whole thing with coronavirus is really epidemiology and about dealing with risk and probability of exposure and all this stuff. And there seems to be some kind of debate about is this really deadly, is this really a big risk, is it worse than flu, is this lockdown necessary? I mean, do you have any thoughts on that, having sort of dug into epidemiology? I mean, I know you didn’t look at infectious disease in particular, but did you have any thoughts about it?
GEORGE ZAIDAN: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting. So I wrote the book months before any of the COVID-19 stuff started happening and really hit the US. But writing the book was actually the best training that I could have had for trying to deal with the current situation, for a couple different reasons. The first is that like, I mean, right now, the headlines are changing every five minutes. Sometimes they’re contradictory, sometimes like, as we’ve seen with the CDC, right, a month ago they were saying, “Don’t wear a mask unless “you’re sick or a healthcare worker, or anything like that”, and now they’re saying, “If you go outside, it’s a good idea “to put on a mask, even if it’s a bandana”, right? That is a dramatic change. And so trying to understand things like well, why did they change their guidelines like that and trying to deal with all the headlines coming at you. Diving into nutritional epidemiology and also health news was really good training for that.
ERIC: Yeah, I think, you said the news cycle in that area is something like 22 days, there’ll be a news headline out saying coffee can kill you, and then 22 days later they’ll be like coffee prevents heart attacks, so.
GEORGE: Yes, that was one of the most surprising things. I had always heard, and probably you had, too, that, oh, one day, coffee will kill you and then the next day it’s totally fine for you, and then the day after that, it’s actually good for you. And so, how are we supposed to know what to trust? And I had always thought that was kind of an exaggeration. But when I went to actually went and looked at, I went into LexisNexis and looked at headlines that contained the words coffee, risk, and increase or decrease over a period of I think 20 years or something like that. And sometimes the headlines literally were coming out within 22 days of each other, I mean, opposite headlines in the same month, which, if you’re a consumer trying to read that, what the hell are you supposed to make of that? It’s insane. So, yeah, and today, these days the headlines are, it’s not every 22 days, it’s every day, right?
ERIC: Yes, right.
GEROGE: So it’s even crazier, even more fast paced than the headlines about food.