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: You have four recommendations in the book and maybe you could just share what those are, having gone down this rabbit hole.
GEORGE ZAIDAN: Totally, so the first and the most important one we’ve touched on is, don’t smoke. It is the number one thing that you can do to improve your personal health. So, obviously if you don’t smoke, don’t start. If you do smoke, try your best to quit. That’s the number one thing. The other one that’s sort of in the same vein is, be physically active in some way. You don’t have to do three P90X classes every single day but find some way to keep your body moving and use your muscles, do things, walk around. Especially now that we’re, if you’re lucky, you’re self isolating at home and we’re shut inside but do take that walk around the block, it is important.
ERIC: And it doesn’t matter so much what you do. It’s just doing some activity.
GEORGE: I think if you, again, we could, I’m sure if you dive into the research on this, there are people who will say like, yeah, it really matters or no, it doesn’t matter so much. My feeling is like, it’s hard enough to motivate yourself to do exercise in the first place that if you like, don’t be too hard on yourself about what that exercise is, just get moving in some way. Don’t beat yourself up for not doing more. Congratulate yourself for doing what you were able to do and be physically active.
ERIC: Right, makes sense.
GEORGE ZAIDAN: The other two bits of advice are sort of, well one of them is how to process information and the other one is about food ’cause the whole book is about food. The processing information one is basically like, unless you’re seeing a headline about contaminated lettuce or something from the CDC, about COVID-19, if I were you, I would pretty much ignore most news about health, especially if the headline reads something like, “X food linked to X percent increase in Y disease,” stuff like that. I bet if you do five minutes of googling, you’ll probably find the opposite headline a month ago and you will end up losing trust in science and it’s not, the science proceeds slowly and step-wise. It’s not like one study is gonna come out and it’s gonna answer all the questions and lay the debate to rest. No, it’s like each piece is built on top of the last piece and it takes years and years and years for us to get to an actual answer. So don’t torture yourself by reading every single piece as it comes out. Wait for the official guidelines. And speaking of which this is now, we tie back into food, I think we have, there’s sort of an obsession in the US at least with optimizing things. Like what is the best possible thing that I can do on X? And especially with food, how can I be the most healthy imaginable when it comes to food? And I think that that’s one that’s really hard because we actually don’t know the pinnacle of health. Second of all, you’re gonna spend so much energy, in my opinion, waste so much energy trying to reach that peak when really it’s not like this, it’s probably more like this. Whereas if you’re just a little bit off the peak and you’re not so bad and you’re gonna spend hours and hours trying to get yourself to the peak, forget it. It’s not worth it. Just follow some doctor recommended diet, any doctor recommended diet. Don’t be deficient in the essential nutrients and stuff that you need and you’ll be fine.
ERIC: Yeah, from an evolutionary perspective, our success as a species is being very adaptable. So there probably is not like an optimum diet. I think that’s probably the case that there are sort of general guidelines and you can really vary within that quite a bit.
GEORGE: Yeah, and maybe the optimum diet is different for different people. If you have a certain gene, the optimum diet for you is different than the optimum diet for Jenny Craig. You could spend your entire life doing that and never get the right answer.
ERIC: And I think you’re right too about, the thing with health news, it’s almost reminds me of on the internet where you see that headline that was going around a lot, that one weird trick to do something, it’s like, you think, there’s not that one weird trick you’re gonna change your diet and it’s gonna, you’re radically lose weight or you’re not… There’s a whole diet industry based on that. Oh, if I just cut out this one thing, if I stop eating this one micronutrient, if I add this one thing to my diet that that’s gonna make this big change and it’s just nonsense.
GEORGE: Yeah, no magic bullets.
ERIC: Yeah, so what was number, you said there were four, so what was–
GEORGE: It was, basically ignore most health news unless it’s coming from the CDC or the FDA or something like that. Don’t smoke. Be physically active and then pick some doctor approved diet and generally follow that and don’t worry so much.
ERIC: All right and then we can live long, healthy lives.
GEORGE: Healthy and happy lives.
ERIC: Happy.
GEORGE: That’s a battle, right?