after that is the splendid in the bile, historian eric larson's study of winston churchill's leadership. wrapping up our look at some of the best selling nonfiction books is between the world and me, national book award-winning author look at the state of black america. most of these authors have appeared on book tv and you can watch them online. .. tonight's event we are very much appreciate if you do three things, first please ãbleave

a comment to let us know we are watching from and hit the subscribe belt to get notifications about our latest and upcoming presentations also, we encourage you to support tonight's offer by purchasing his book through independent booksellers partner politics and prose. and very importantly extremely big thank you to dbs sponsors downtown crown are pai and montgomery college. let's get started. tonight we have with us george zaidan, author of "ingredients" the strange chemistry of what we put in us and on us". george, an mit trained ãbcnbc hit show make me a millionaire inventor reveals what will kill you, what won't, and why, exploring high octane hilarity historical hijinks and other things that don't begin with the h. george created national geographic web serious "ingredients" and cowrote and

directed mit web serious for ã ãhis words have been featured in the new york times for the boston globe national geographic magazine and npr the salt and many more. it's currently executive producer of the american chemical society. interviewing george tonight is the statistics professor and award-winning science communicator regina regina's writings on probabilities, statistics, data and other topics have appeared in the los angeles times, new york times, scientific american, espn magazine, new scientists and readers digest amongst others. she's been invited across the world to speak to various audiences about how to not fool yourself or others with statistics. welcome george and regina >> hi. >> thanks for having us. >> okay, george, i think it's you and us. >> you and i. >> before we start, i googled

you. [laughter] i found this random fact that you played thomas jefferson on tv at one time. true or false? >> that is 100% true. [laughter] this is actually, i worked on a food show on the food network called "good eats" hosted by alton brown, my very first and my job was a production assistant. it was nothing glamorous. i was plunging toilets, making coffee, helping with whatever needed be done. my very first day on the job he looks at me and goes, put that guy in a wig we need a thomas jefferson. i had one line and it was ãb "i declare these sprouts to be

delicious". my one line came at the end of like a three minute monologue that elton had to do and i screwed it up like three or four times and he got really upset. justifiably so. that was my first day working on "good eats". i have to say, i'm glad that you googled me because i also googled you. [laughter] i heard that you identify as a cyborg. can you explain that a bit?>> indeed, you wouldn't know it by looking at me, i don't have the equipment. i'm a five-year-old cyborg actually. my internal machine is internal. i have a tiny brain computer embedded in my skull that's

zapping my brain with electricity, thousands of times per second. that's the only way that i hear. which is kind of amazing. it's total modern medicine. so i have a little bit of equipment. yes, a cyborg. >> that's very cool. >> the book. >> the books. >> we should talk about book. first of all, huge fan of the book. i have it right here. i love it. not only a great book but such a fun topic. back at mit, have you always wanted to write a book about junk food? in mit urine chemistry class saying someday i will write a book about all the things that

are fun but might be bad for us but might not. >> i was sitting in or go one day organic chemistry class one day and the professor for what reasons i have no clue what they are asked this is like a 300 person lecture asked the entire class does anyone know what isoamyl acetate is? i did not know what isoamyl acetate was. for some reason, deep within the depths of my lizard brain i thought, banana. i thought banana. i yelled out "banana" in the middle of a 300 person lecture and to my shock he goes, that's right. [laughter] it must've been embedded in my brain at birth that i had to write this book. i heard it said that ãbi've

heard advice that says like, don't write a book unless you have a topic that is bursting to get out of you and you have no other choice but to write it. that is true, there is a great motivation for writing a book, but another great motivation is fear of being in breach of contract with your publisher. [laughter] that's a fantastic motivation to write a book. >> how did you even come up with this idea? okay banana, mit, but this is not about bananas. >> no. the idea for this really came out of a show i did for national geographic about five years ago. the point of the show was, can i make consumer products that we all have around the house, lipstick, hair conditioner, hand sanitizer, can i make those things out of all natural ingredients? my original plan was, i'm going to go into the forest and pick

out a bunch of plants and take it into my kitchen and make hand sanitizer. it turns out, it's a lot harder to make things from nature than you would think. i ended up ordering a bunch of stuff on amazon and doing it that way. even though i did end up ordering things, and that's not going out and getting things from nature, it still turned out to be hard. you can make a decent lipstick out of like five or six ingredients a few different oils and rust for color. like iron oxide. amazon sells little things of rust that they've cleaned. it's not like you're going to get a tetanus infection for this. but most of the stuff i tried to make was an utter failure.

i was left with the question, trying to make this natural stuff, it's hard but is it worth it? it is natural stuff better for you? in the opposite question of that are the same question to ask in a different way is, is processed food bad for you? we all think we know the answer, yes, very bad. but i really wanted to like dig into why it was bad. that's a book i thought it was can be writing i thought i was to write a book about why processed food is bad for you, chemically what it does when he gets inside your body and why that's bad. >> but that's not the book that he wrote. how would you describe it? it's not a diet book. >> no. >> it's not a cookbook. how would you describe it? what did you write? >> i ended up, once you asked this question mike is processed food good or bad for you and why or why not come you first have to actually define

processed food which sounds really boring because we all think we know it is but turned out to be one of the most interesting parts of the book. first of all, there's a huge debate in the scientific community about defining what a processed food is. even before you get there, do the research i did i found that we humanity as a species has been processing food for millennia ãbi mean, so long that we don't even have accurate dates of how long we been processing food. >> processing food? >> yes. i will give you an example. there's a group of people called the ãbwho live and have lived for time and memorial in what's now peru. in the andes.

it's a tough life where they live and part of the reason it's a tough life is that not a lot grows there. one of the things that does grow their is potatoes. but not your grocery store potatoes, these are small wild and toxic potatoes. toxic in the sense that, not that they're gonna kill you, but they will make you vomit, give you diarrhea, basically like make you never want to eat another potato as long as you live. him. and you can't just boil them that will destroy the toxins. and they are not environmental contaminants the toxins are made by the potatoes themselves. why would a potato or any other plant make a poison? basically to protect itself. the potato is the plants energy storage thingy. it doesn't want humans or any other animals digging up its energy storage and eating them

so it makes them toxic. >> the potato plants ãb stealing the potato plants batteries. >> exactly. you don't want to eat at duracell. we have to do something to those toxic batteries before we eat them. so demar came up with this incredibly ingenious way to both freeze dry and detoxify the potatoes at the same time so what they ended up with was perfectly safe to eat to detoxify potatoes that could sit in storage for upwards of 20 years. they didn't taste good but it doesn't really matter what it tastes like as long as you know you got food for the winter. the links to which ancient societies would go ãbthey're

not unique, there's all other kinds of societies doing inventing their own incredibly ingenious processing techniques. the links to which we would go to do that was really cool to me. >> so, processing, not new, not clearly defined. >> correct. >> can i ask a question about that? i bought some cheetos in honors of all this. >> are those the flaming hot? >> yes. >> okay good. >> first to have a question about cheetos. first, the most important question, flaming hot, crunchy, or classic puffs? >> i think it's a tossup between flaming hot and classic. classic puffs for me, the puffs for me don't rate. if i'm feeling spicy it's flaming hot all the way. today i'm feeling a bit spicy.

>> okay. here you go. but this is my question. this does not resemble anything that comes out of the ground or off of a tree. explain this to me. how did it change, is it all just created in the laboratory? what do they do? >> cheetos are a great example of modern day ingenuity. what they do is basically you start with, most of the cheetos is cornmeal, which is made from corn. cornmeal, if you've ever had it by itself, it's really bland. it doesn't resemble, it's not crunchy doesn't resemble a chito at all. what they will do is they will take the cornmeal, basically combine it with flavorings.

i actually emailed cheetos and said, can you please tell me what you are flavoring ingredients are. they wrote me back with a very polite "no". [laughter] they mix the flavorings with the cornmeal and then they will pass it through the years the ingenious part, what's called an extruder. if you picture a wine corkscrew like wine corkscrew and then picture all the negative space around a wine corkscrew, if that were also solid so you'd have like cylinder with a corkscrew shape in it and then an actual corkscrew they basically have a long tube that's like that and they feed the cornmeal into this thing which spins continuously and the cornmeal makes its way through the corkscrew all the way to the very end and as you

can imagine, between the ãb it's winding its way between the corkscrew and the other part of the negative part of the corkscrew and during that process it's creating, a lot of friction and heat because it spinning really fast. so what that does is it boils the residual water in the chito fleury. the water doesn't have a ton of places to go because you're in a constrained environment in this corkscrew so it puffs up the cornmeal by the time it comes out the other end of the extruder you've got these like very puffy chris become a sort of half crispy snacks, then they deep fry it. so everything is better deep-fried. even extruded cornmeal snacks. the extruder is used in all kinds of stuff, it's like a classic food processing technique that's fairly recent.

this is not something that the ãwere doing in peru 2000 years ago. >> this is highly processed. you would call this highly processed right? there's no question about that. because we are heating it up and doing the corkscrew type of thing. but you included in your book, i did not try it, you included a recipe for homemade diy cheetos. >> yes. i got this recipe i did not invent this recipe. i was chatting with ken al bella professor of food history and the day after i chatted with him we were talking to what it means to actually be processed for food to be processed. he said, i made some cheetos in my kitchen yesterday and ãbi said what you mean you made cheetos? i basically took some noodles, dehydrated them, sprayed them with oil and put them in the microwave and that kind of re-created this basically

deep-fried and puffing up the water in the noodle at the same time and he said, i sprinkled them with sharadãbwith sriracha powder and then ãbas in interesting because he said my doing that does it still count as these being processed. or does it only if it comes in a bag and was made in a factory that it's processed food? it was an interesting question. >> so what do you say? processed, yes or no? >> that's a tough one. my training is in chemistry, i have a chemistry background. i would say, anybody else would probably say no but to me, the chito made in the factory and the chito you make it home, as long as you are using roughly the same ingredients and more

or less the same process, i think they're basically roughly the same in terms of processing. the factory is just a much more gigantic version of your kitchen. if the ingredients are really different. if there's things that are added to the cheetos made in the factory you would never use at home. then we could be talking about different levels of "processing". >> i'm glad you say that. there are so many chemicals, if i were to do this at home with cornmeal and sriracha sauce, there is ferrous sulfate, monosodium glutamate ãbthis must all be bad for you? this is what i think of of processed food. they say find something that only has two ingredients. this has many ingredients.

>> this is an interesting one. you get people on both sides of this debate. especially folks who are trying to sell you natural organic "healthier foods" will say things like, exactly like what you just said. make sure you can pronounce the ingredients, make sure there aren't that many of them on the label. if it's something your grandmother would recognize as food, don't eat it. that kind of thing. i have a little bit of a skeptical view of that kind of thing. one of the things i did in the book is i was like, okay, let me just invent a food processing scale and the way i'm going to do this is to count the number of ingredients and everything and then count the number of syllables and single ingredient and add those two numbers up. if you do that for skittles you get like 109 or something like

that. i thought what if you do that for coffee or an apple or anything you consider to be really natural. i was like, well, coffee, two syllables. there's lots of stuff in coffee, it doesn't have an ingredients label. there's all kinds of aromatic acids and different compounds. i looked up like how many different chemicals are there in a cup of coffee and it looks like pushing 1000 different chemicals. >> in coffee? >> that's only the ones we've actually been able to recognize and isolate and determine what they are. if you think about it, coffee is a living thing. it's a cell it has dna, it has proteins, a cell wall, all kinds of stuff in their that's

chemically very complex and then you start roasting it and pouring boiling water on it you can add a whole layer of chemical complexity to it. if i did my made up processed food scale on coffee you might get a number like 5000 if you add up all the syllables of everything in their. that's when i kind of came down the side of light, look, yes it can be intimidating to reduce labels and it seems overwhelming but if i think about the true ingredients of what are in all the stuff that's considered natural, that would be off the charts. that's when i was like, i'm not can i view it as this framework of if i can't pronounce it then it must be bad for you. there must be something else that will tell you about the health of these things. >> okay.

so not chemicals you're saying number of chemicals or readability of the ingredients list does not necessarily correlate with being bad for us. >> yes. >> okay. or the source of mechanical or artificial things that we are doing to it. because the peruvians doing the fancy potato thing, is that really that much different bed shooting a bunch of cornmeal through a corkscrew. so how do you figure out ãb what do you do then? you not can eat cheetos all day long? >> i've certainly increased my chito and all processed food consumption sense during the book. that's a good question. figuring out like is something

how healthy or healthy is something for you? it's a really hard thing to do. i think most people, certainly i when i first started this did not realize how difficult it is to do this. if you really want to get an accurate picture of how good or bad something is for you, ideally in an ideal world, you would take a large group of people, split them up into two groups, banished each group to their own desert island. feed one group the thing that you think is good or bad and make sure that the other group doesn't have any of that same thing. and then he would follow them for like 30 years to see, does one group have more heart disease? cancer? diabetes? obviously that's not doable.

that's not something where to spend taxpayers dollars on and highly unethical. you have to resort to other measures that are debatable. these other measures basically are, if you can't banish people to the desert island and force them to eat specific diets, if you're only allowed to just track what people are eating normally and then correlate or associate long-term consumption of a particular food with a bad health outcome then you start getting into what i learned were murky waters in terms of really being able to pin a bad health affect or good health effect on a particular food. there is the last third of the book is really where i delved deeply into that more deeply

than my other thought i was going to bottom line is, it can be tricky and makes me, whenever you meet a headline on the news about eggs linked to 27 percent increase in heart disease risk. i read those headlines and i go, well, maybe but also maybe not. >> i'm going to follow up later with question about that. getting back to the book, one thing that really struck me is how funny it was. i didn't expect to be laughing out loud when you're teaching me chemistry. i hated chemistry in college that was not my thing and here i was laughing about it. i'm curious. did you have to work hard to make all of this chemistry and all this scientific blah blah

blah, funny? or did you have to work hard? >> someone once told me if you stop trying to be funny, you will be a lot funnier. [laughter] which was a funny thing to say, ironically. some of the stuff in the book just as objectively funny and doesn't need my help. one of the processing techniques that was used in olden days and might still be used today there is a native american group a group of native americans people in what is now northern california who very ingeniously would make candy out of the poop of an insect call in aphid and aphids these days are agricultural

pests, super small you would hardly notice them if you are looking for them. >> you can gather there poop. >> you can gather there poop, not fresh, it has to be dry. it have to dry on the plants first but once it dries, by the way, what they are eating is plant fat and plant fat is very sweet. what they are pooping is also very sweet. so you can gather there poop and bank it into candy. that kind of thing is both ingenious and also funny and doesn't need my help to make it any funnier. but there were some parts where i throw in a joke and then i have my partner julia read it and if she have chuckled i'd be like, that's good. if she rolled her eyes and be like, i'm cutting this joke from the book.>> did your editor ever come back and say, george, no. >> yes. actually the book had a lot of

four letter words and it when i first ãbmy first draft, he cut 99 percent of those. >> okay. four letter words can be funny. and the purpose of humor, ã >> sometimes humor and also just to be like oh my gosh this is fitting and credible. >> for affect. he also illustrated your own book. i have to say that was kinda brave. i don't think you're gonna quit your day job and become an illustrator. did you consider farming it out, what was the thought process there? >> i did consider farming it out and ãbactually, the show

on the national geographic show, that was illustrated by someone who is super talented and my first thought was, i'm just can have brett do the illustrations for the book. then every time you do an illustration you have to vet it for accuracy and you have to make sure it's right and fits well with the narrative and there was something like 50 some or so odd illustrations of the book. it was good be a lot. i would sketch out versions of them just so that i could see them in the flow of the manuscript and i am a terrible artist. [laughter] it ended up just working because the style of the book is very informal and the style of the illustrations are also very informal. i'm not getting paid any money from apple for saying this but i actually did most of the illustrations in keynote, which is there powerpoint alternative. >> very nice.

it did have a bit of a homegrown look to it. >> that's a kind way of saying they were terrible. >> mabel was my favorite. mabel was i think a little insect we were talking about. i love that you gave her a name. >> thank you. >> that was charming. what was your book writing process then? highly regimented, sit down, eight hours a day? words come pouring forth? >> yes. i sat down on a monday and then wrote continuously until about friday and not a single, my editor didn't change a single word. everything is pure gold. [laughter] i think there is not one single thing in the book that survived from my first draft. in terms of the process, that

was quite regimented. i think stephen king has good advice on this, he basically says can i sit down on my computer and i don't stop until i have x number of words whatever my goal is for the day. in your goal can start low and progress as you become more practiced. it doesn't matter how good or bad the words are, you can have days where everything you write is terrible. you can have days where you way overshoot your goal and it's pretty good. i think the key is consistency. so i would get up at 5:36 am and will write for a couple hours before i go to my day job and write for couple hours in the evening and then weekends i would write eight hours a day both days on the weekends and that got to become as you can imagine, kind of crazy. >> that explains a lot actually a lot about the style of the

book. >> i was working on deadline and desperately trying to get out on time. in my employer finally was like, you know can actually take some time off and focus on this if you want in your job will still be here when you get back, which was very generous. so i did take a six-month sabbatical to finish up the book. during that period it really was it was like a 10 hour day but only monday through friday. it's important to give yourself that time off stop, recharge, do other things, relax. that was helpful. >> soundtrack? to listen to music? >> yes. actually, porter robinson has some great writing out, it's very like electronic dance textile and also rat a tat has some great writing music like now and listen to it and i

associate with work so i don't ever listen to it when i'm not writing or working in some way but basically things without lyrics or with subtle lyrics. >> you have spotify playlist? >> i can make it public but i do have i will make it public. that's a good idea. >> we can put that in the comments because this founds fascinating. when you read it now to get excited about it? >> i have two reactions, one is like i cannot believe i actually wrote a book, that's my main reaction and i should really shout out, i interviewed a lot of people for this book, you being one of them. and there are probably some errors in here, we all try to make things as factually accurate as possible but there

would be 100 times as many errors without the 80 or so people i interviewed and sent experts of the book to read and make sure that like yes the science is actually represented well. so that was a huge huge help. officially, regina, thank you. >> my pleasure. i completely forgot your question. >> when you read it you laugh now? >> and one of those people i read that and say oh i should've wrote this differently i should change this sentence or i should have it was my editor who said he actually sat me down, not physically but over email he said, george, i know when writers are tweaking things to the point of like basically like, you are ready to give birth to your book now. it's been the right amount of time. i think it's ready, stop tweaking it, it's time.

i think that's really important thing if you, you could be writing the same book the same one book your entire life and tweaking it until it was perfect every word was exactly right but at some point you have to put it out into the world and see what happens. >> how many scientists, 80? that's a lot of people. i was impressed how well you got the statistics part right which is what you and i talked about. there is a lot of attention to detail it must be terrifying to put the book about science out there i think there's two types of error. there's one plus one equals three error and one plus one equals tomatoes. the one plus one equals three error is your garden-variety

typo. you say something is six millimeters when you mean it's six millimeters. is that wrong? yes. is it a huge deal in like the history of science? no. then there are other areas where if you make them and you could risk giving someone the wrong impression about something in a way that would make them change their behavior. there i think that's a much more serious error. if you only focus on one perspective and don't take a moment to think about, what if this could be wrong? let me talk to some people on the other side of the fence of this and see what they think. if you don't do that, i think you risk your book being very one-sided and painting too rosy of a picture or too negative of a picture and there i think it's much more dangerous. even though those are really like their not so much errors

in a clear unequivocal this is wrong type of way but i was really careful to try and not just go with the first thing i heard always investigate the other side. you and i talked about statistics which is kind of a little controversial but i got the feeling from the book that there's a couple of different camps? some people with strong opinions tell me about that. what was that likely stop. >> this gets back to the how you figure out if something is good or bad for you question. there's a group of people i will call the traditionalists who been practicing something called nutritional epidemiology for roughly 5 decades or so.

basically what they do is mail surveys out to group people and asked them what did you eat this year and they take those answers and correlate consumption of specific foods with usually negative health outcomes. written headlines like the eggs are linked to 27 percent increase in heart disease risk. that's one camp. the other camp are what i will call the skeptics or methodologist that group of people has fundamental issues with the underlying science of the traditionalists camp. when is going into this i had no idea there were two camps. i just like started down the road i think i discovered this by reading in a scientific

journal someone else had written and i was like oh my god there's actually in a debate here. it was interesting. and the different camps may not talk to you in the same the traditionalists don't really have a vested interest in like talking to journalists. the people who want the methodologist have a much more they want to say, listen to me like i think all of that stuff over there is wrong. they have a much more vested interest. you have to really like i really had to work hard at getting an interview with some folks in the traditionalists camp. but these were fundamental disagreements i think were also emotional and not just like we disagree on this science but when the day is done were both gonna go have a beer at a bar. people got really vehement in their disagreements and some

people call each other which i can't repeat here. i could repeat some of them but like, steaming dog deterred was used outrageous buffoon was used. take off my white glove and smack you in the face level of insults were hurled back and forth. >> people are getting this emotional about basically junk food how bad is it for you or apples or potatoes or coffee all of that. okay. that makes the whole thing a lot more interesting knowing that there's this big war kindness going on. >> the nutritional epidemiology war, that's what i call it. . no one's dying. >> how did this change your view about science?

. i think about science a lot lately because were in week seven of the lockdown from the pandemic. you finish the book before the pandemic hit but i think you said something once about finding uncertainty comforting. so i could use a little comfort with uncertainty right now do you feel like what you learned from researching and writing this book i'm going to all of this, change how you approach the pandemic? >> totally. as you mentioned, i finished i wrapped up the book months before any of this and am actually adding an appendix for

the uk edition about hand sanitizer. no other than that nothing in the book is directly related to various or infectious diseases or anything like that. in order to answer the question is process food bad for you, i had to answer the question how do we know anything is true in science. if you're only reading the news you might think science doesn't know what the hell it's doing. first coffee is good for you, then bad for you, then it doesn't matter one way or the other. we've been through this with trans fats and coffee and eggs and. >> alcohol. >> yes.

so you might get this impression can't the scientists figure out what's good and bad, why is it so propagated? what i learned is that basically this process is science doing its job. you got people who run experiments, do them differently, disagree, argue in the literature and throughout that process which takes it's not something that takes a few months here and there, takes years and sometimes decades, eventually you reach a consensus view. that happened, for example with smoking. we started out in the 1930s and before that basically not knowing that smoking was bad for us and we ended up now we have a much better chemical

understanding of what happens when you smoke a cigarette it, what it does in your body. so we been building evidence for some things that are related to public health for 100 years. and processed foods, these studies about the health effects of processed foods are relatively new.we certainly have not been doing this for 100 years. it's kind of only natural to expect that at least for now results are going to be "conflicting. we can have different ways of doing experiments. you plug in a disagree more but eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later, you can't rush these things too much. we will come to a consensus about eggs or coffee or whatever it is that we are putting into our bodies on a daily basis. >> okay so you are trusting the process of science and just saying, until then i'm just

gonna do the best that i can do? how do you make decisions then about how many cheetos to eat in a day? >> basically, yes, the only other thing i would caution here is take into account is like some of these foods i believe this is a personal belief i don't really have evidence to back this up but really are addictive. yesterday i ate an illegal amount of peanut m&ms. did i want to eat i don't know 75 peanut m&ms? no. could i stop myself? no. part of this is stress, were all in a global pandemic, were all in lockdown, for a lot of people food is modulating your food intake is a natural response to being like such stressful conditions.

but part of it is that some of these foods are engineered to be addictive. being conscious of that and saying, look, a bag of cheetos every now and again is not to kill me but i shouldn't make it a habit to the point where i'm ordering a pallet of cheetos off of you line. that level. >> what's wrong with that? [laughter] >> ãbbesides just like a lot of random factoids about plants or trying to kill you, that was one of my favorite chapters. microbes trying to eat your

food. kind of like chill out about this. one of the things that i really liked that help get me there putting processed food in the whole historical perspective of what were doing i felt like that really helped. like we have more mechanics doing it now but we been tinkering with food for a long time. but the way you talked about life tables. give me a factoid. i feel like my chance of dying right now if i eat cheetos all the time would be huge. but you say having a life tables something different. >> this is another thing. to answer the central question the central question of this book had a dabble in a lot of fields are not an expert in and relied on you for statistics and demographers for help with

these kind of things. a lot of the things you see as such and such food will increase your risk of death by 14 percent. a study came out relatively recently about processed food that said if you increase your ãban increase of 10% by weight of processed food is correlated with a 14 percent increase the risk of death. what i wanted to know was, what does that mean exactly? what is 14 percent risk of death? does that mean i take my lifespan, which i expect to be about 80 years and subtract 14 percent of that?

that would be a huge impact on my life expectancy. and this gets back to like how many people i interviewed. i think i interviewed something like 12 people on just this one thing because people kept going saying like, you're wrong, this is wrong, i kept going to an expert who was more deeply ingrained in the subject until i finally got an answer. >> you did your homework. >> i did. it was so frustrating. i would literally have scientists email me telling me that the other scientist was wrong i was like, what i supposed to believe? [laughter] so this 14 percent can be really scary and in order to figure out, it turns out you're not just multiplying your life expectancy by a decrease of 14 percent. that's not the right way to do it. but you actually have to do is

look at a table that tells you your risk of dying throughout your life at any given age you are. it's actually a fascinating table just in and of itself. i learned, for example, that your risk of death in any given year only hits 10% when you turn 87. >> 87? >> yes. i thought if i turned 50 my risk of death is going to be 10% in any given year. we've made such incredible strides with medicine and hygiene and public health over the past 500 years that we really have reduced our risk of death a lot especially in the early phases of life. while early mid in the early part of the late phase of life. so the way to take this 14 percent increase in risk of

death associated with processed food and translate into some number we can all understand which is how does this impact your life expectancy? you have to basically sprinkle it in a life table and see what happens. when you do that, it turns out that you're looking at a roughly one year reduction in life expectancy. which is counterintuitive. think 14 percent, that's a lot, it turns out one year is less. i did talk to a demographer about this and ran this by here and she said, year for you might seem like not that long because you 34 but a year for my 75-year-old dad, that's a long time, especially if you got grandchildren who they want to see a lot over the next

year. so it brought home that point that life expectancy changes can be different to pending on where you are. >> i would argue that some processed food is just so delicious there's a quality of life issue. what i have enjoyed a lot of peanut m&ms for the past 70 years perhaps, and just can put that out there as a conjuncture. >> and totally agree. and quality of life is not something i got into super in depth in the book. but it's totally important. i think the quote i heard on that was were here for a good time not a long time. >> nice. feeling much more like the big things matter but the little decisions when making about eating my bag of cheetos.

i don't feel a huge amount of guilt about that as long as i'm balancing it out and doing lots of other healthy things. every tiny little bit just you like, how can this not be, the candidate? it's fluorescent. i appreciate that. i feel like coming out of the book i was reassured, perhaps this is what you meant when you said uncertainty is reassurance. you're right, i don't have the answers but it's okay. enjoy yourself. is that what you said? >> yes. also that knowing that temporary uncertainty is in early part of the scientific process as well, maybe this stuff will not get figured out in my lifetime, maybe it will, who knows. at least i know that it's not just that scientists are a bumbling bunch of bozos who can't get it right.

this is supposed to happen. they are is supposed to be disagreement there supposed to be debates on these things. it's good to have this sort of intellectual back and forth between two camps or more than two camps. all that i found reassuring. the books that claim to have all the answers. just do this. live forever you can be healthy.we know this. very prescriptive and this is a big grown-up approach to that. you're not claiming to have all the answers. it's funny they say don't read the reviews of your books, which i cannot read the reviews. some people have explicitly said it was disappointing that he doesn't give like clear advice or solid answers.

it was frustrating for me as a researcher because i didn't know any of this at the beginning. i was like what is the answer? nowadays we all don't have a choice we have to live with a lot of uncertainty. if we know hopefully that that's okay and that things are at least in science happening as they are supposed to, then great. >> i feel like tools rather in perspective rather than advice. >> that would be my dream. my hope for this book is that it's not just something that someone would read. say that's interesting and put it aside my hope it was be well-formed and basically a tool they can use to help evaluate information that comes

at them, especially now, every single day. >> i like that. given that i felt so much more comfortable with my junk food intake i thought for our final question if you're up for something, for people that are going to buy the book and read it for the first time, what would be a good meal pairing? like a wine pairing, what should you sit down and eat, cheetos definitely. maybe an appetizer is cheetos. what else? >> i think you want to start salty and work your way to the sweet. i think cheetos is a great place to start. >> appetizer. >> i would start with flaming hot because just start strong. then maybe work your way over to some chips. i like the kettle cooked variety. that's kind of a palate cleanser. i followed that up with

goldfish. goldfish is the main course for me. >> wait a minute i'm thinking main course. i'm gonna put it out there. circus peanuts. >> the kind you have to undo yourself? >> yes or something, the wholly unnatural. not real peanuts, the circus peanuts. i feel like maybe a hot dog version of the circus peanuts. quick speaking of hot dogs, that's a great processed food right there. you could have two chilly dogs and polish it off with some starbursts. maybe some skittles if you're into that. then finish it off with a few peanut m&ms. [laughter] >> not 76 of them. >> everything in moderation. >> i feel like when you put up

your spotify playlist maybe you should have a little bit of a food pairing to go with it. >> like a menu for the book. >> george, this has been so much fun. i love your book. i hope everyone goes out to get it right away and maybe while online they order some starbursts, peanut m&ms along with it.>> us has been great, thank you for having me. >> i declare the sprouts to be delicious. [laughter] george, i have a question for you, how much is an illegal amount of peanut m&ms? >> i bought the largest possible size available at costco which is three pounds and 14 ounces and i think i reasonably ate like a good 14 ounces of that and i did feel

sick after doing that. disclaimer, would not recommend trying that at home. >> i bet it was delicious in the moment. this is a ton of fun and super educational. i cannot thank you both enough for being with us tonight. >> thank you for having us. >> i would like to thank all of you for being with us for this saturday night premiere. ...... >> joins friday evening at 5:30 p.m. with a live discussing with best selling authors. >> on saturday night at 7:00,

we're featuring an interview with the "washington post" columnist author of code red, how progressives and moderates can unite to save our country. then on sunday morning, kids and kid of all ages can tune in at 11:00 a.m. for a fun presentation; finally, parents at 3:00 p.m. next sunday, our closing program is designed just for you. it's an important conversation featuring maria and her book, how to raise a reader, which has been hailed an an inspencable did to we canning children to a life long love of reading. awe presumptions on the gbf youtube channel. i have been your host. have a great evening and as always, keep reading. >> now on c-span2's booktv more television for serious readers.