George Zaidan is the executive producer for the American Chemical Society and a former co-host of CNBC’s “Make Me a Millionaire Inventor.” Most recently, he authored the book, “Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put in Us and On Us”.
As the title suggests, “Ingredients” is about the chemistry of the food we eat and the products we use, but it’s more than that. It’s actually a crash course in epidemiology and epistemology. Epidemiology tells us if something is good or bad for us and epistemology looks at how we know what we think we know. Those topics may sound a little dry, but George has packed this book with his own brand of humor that will have you laughing from cover-to-cover.
George and I spoke about understanding risk in both long-term and short-term scenarios, whether eating more processed foods really shortens our lifespans, and how a self-professed chemistry nerd ended up in the quagmire of nutritional epidemiology.
DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE
Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put In Us and On Us