of both houses of congress and there's a democrat president, they're going to go the same route. and that will polarize and poison the political atmosphere even more than it is now, which is bad enough. >> to watch the rest of this program and find err episodes of "after words," visit our web site, booktv.org. click on the "after words" tab near the top of the page. >> good evening, everyone. welcome to this 2020 virtual gaithersburg book festival, or we like to call it the vgbs. i'm your host, and although we're missing you in person, we're so happy you've chosen to spend your time with us virtually for this evening's watch party. we would very much appreciate if you would do three things for us. first -- [inaudible] second, leave a comment below to leapt us know where your watching us from. and third, if you subscribe, you'll get notifications about our latest and upcoming

presentations. we encourage you to support the author. and very importantly, an extremely big thank you to sponsors, to david and michelle blair family foundation and montgomery college. okay, let's get started. tonight we have with us george zeidan, author of "ingredients: the strange chemistry of what we put in us and on us." george, an mit-trained chemist, reveals what will kill you, what won't and why, explained with high octane hilarity, hisser the y'all hijinks and other things that don't begin with the letter h. george created the web series ingredients and co-wrote and directed mit's web series. his work has been featured in "the new york times", "forbes," "the boston globe," national

geographic magazine,npr's the fault and many more. he is currently executive producer at the american chemical society. interviewing george tonight is statistics professor and a award-winning science communicator regina, her writings on probability, statistics data have appeared in the los angeles times, new york times, new scientist and reader's digest amongst others. she has been invited across the world to speak to various audiences about how not to -- [inaudible] yourself or others with statistics. welcome, george and regina. >> thanks. >> thanks for having us. >> okay, george, i think it's you and us. you and me. >> yes, you and i. >> so before we start, i googled you -- [laughter] and i found this random fact,

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

at the end of, like, a three-minute monologue that alton had to do, and i screwed it up like three or four times, and he got really upset. [laughter] it got ugly. but, yeah, that was my first day working on good eats. so i have to say i'm glad that you googled me, because i also googled you. laugh and i, i heard -- [laughter] i heard that you identify as a cyborg. >> yes. >> can you explain that a bit? >> indeed. you wouldn't know it by looking at me. i don't have the joan luke picard. i'm a 5-year-old cyborg, actually, and my half robot internal machine is internal. i have a tiny brain computer embedded in my skull. it's zapping my brain with electricity thousands of times

per second, and that is the only way that i'm here. >> ah. >> which is kind of amazing -- >> yeah. >> right? like, it's total modern medicine. and so i do have this equipment but, yes, a cyborg. [laughter] >> that's very cool. >> okay. so the book -- >> the book. >> we should talk about the book. first of all, huge fan of the book. >> thank you. >> i have it it right here. >> thank you. >> loved it. good, i'm glad you have your own. okay. not only a great book, but such a fun topic. all right? so back at mit -- have you always wanted to write a book about junk food? back at mi or t you're seen in chemistry class, and you're saying someday i will write a book about all the things that are fun but might be bad for us but might not. >> so i was sitting in work rgo

one day, organic chemistry the class, 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 iso apple acetate is? but for some reason deep within the depth of my liz are ard brain -- lizard brain, i thought banana. so i yelled out banana in the muddle of a 300-person lecture x to my shock he goes, that's right. [laughter] so i guess it must have been, like, embedded in my brain at first, that i had to write this book. i've heard it said that, you know, some -- i've heard some advice that says 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. and i think that is true, that 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 e a fantastic motivation to write a book. >> how did you even come up with this idea? so, okay, banana, mit, but this is not about bananas. >> no. so the idea for this really came out of a show that i did for national geographic about five years ago. and the point of the show was can i make consumer products, stuff that we all have around the house -- lipstick, hair conditioner, hand sanitizer -- can i make those things out of all natural ingredients. and my original plan was i am going to go into the forest and puck out a bunch of -- pick out a bunch of plants and take it

into my kitchen and make, you know, hand sanitizer. it turns out it's a lot harder to make things from nature than you would think, and so i ended up ordering a bunch of stuff off amazon and doing it that way. and each 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. but, yeah, rust. yeah, like iron oxide. and, actually, amazon sells little things of rust that they've, you know, cleaned. it's not like you're going to get a tetanus infection for this. but, so, you know, most of the stuff that i tried to make was an utter failure. so i was left with the question of, you know, i'm trying to make this natural stuff, it's hard, but the is it worth it?

is natural stuff better for you? and the opposite question to ask or the same question to ask in a different way is, is processed food bad for you. and we all think we know the answer, yes, very bad. but i really wanted to, like, dig into why it was bad. so that's the book i thought i was going to be writing. i thought i was going to be writing a book about why processed food is bad for you, chem iically what it does inside -- chemically what it does inside your body and why that's bad. >> and, but that's not the book that you wrote. okay. how would you describe it? it's not a diet book. >> no. >> not a cookbook. not -- okay, so what, how would you describe it then? what did you write? >> so i ended up, so once you ask this question of, like, is processed food good or badr for you and why or why not, you first have to actually define processed food which sounds really boring because we all think we know what it is, but it

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, you know, defining what a processed food is. but even before you get there, you know, i, through the research i did, i found that we, humanity as a species, have been processing food for millennia. i mean, before -- so long that we don't actually have accurate dates of how long we've been processing food. >> processing food. processing? processing? >> yes. and i will give you an example. is so there's a, there's a group of people who live and have lived for time immemorial in what is now peru in the andes, and they, their -- 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

there is potatoes. but these are not your grocery store potatoes. these are small, wild and toxic potatoes. toxic in the sense that not they're going to kill you, but they will make you vomit, give you diarrhea, basically make you never want to eat another potato as long as you live. and you can't just boil them and, like, that won't destroy the toxins. they're not -- and they're not environmental contaminants. the toxins are made by the potatoes themselves. now, why would a potato or any other plant make a poison? basically, to protect itself. the potato is the plant's energy storage thing-y, and it doesn't want humans or any other animals digging up its energy stores and eating them, so it makes them toxic. >> the potato plant's batteries.

>> exactly. and you don't want to eat a duracell, right? [laughter] we have to do manager to those toxic batteries before we meet them. so these people came up with this incredibly ungenius way to both free freeze-dry and detoxify the potatoes at the same time. and so what they ended up with was perfectly safe to eat, detoxified potatoes that could sit in storage for upwards of 20 years. and that, and they didn't taste good, but it doesn't really matter what it tastes like as long as you know you've got food for the winter. so the lengths to which, you know, ancient societies would go -- and they're not unique. there's all kinds of other societies who are doing, inventing their own incredibly ingenious processing techniques. and the lengths which we would

go to do that was really cool to me. >> okay. so processing not new and not clearly defined. >> right. >> okay. can i ask a question about that? >> please. >> well, i bought some cheetos in honor of all of this. >> yes. >> so -- >> those the flaming hot cheetos? >> they're flaming hot. >> yes, good. >> okay, first i have a question about cheetos, but first the most important question, flaming hot, crunchy or classic puffs. >> i mean, i think it's a a real toss-up between flaming hot and classic. classic puffs, for me, the puffs for me don't rate. i think, you know, i think if i'm feeling a bit spicy, it's flaming hot all the way, and today i'm feeling a bit spicy, so yeah. >> okay, cool. here we go.

looked at this thing. this does not resemble anything that comes out of the ground or off of a tree, right? okay. but it's delicious. >> yeah. >> so explain this to me. how, how do they change some sort of -- i mean, is it all just created in the laboratory? what do they do? >> so cheetos are a great example of modern-day ingenuity. so what they do is, basically, they start with -- most of the cheeto is corn meal. corn meal if you've ever had it by itself is really bland and doesn't resemble -- it's not crunchy, it doesn't resemble cheetos at all. so what they will do is they will take the corn meal and basically combine it with flavorings which -- and i actually e-mailed cheetos and said, hey, can you please tell me what your flavoring

ingredients are, and they wrote me back with a very polite, no -- [laughter] but they'll mix the flavorings in with the corn meal, and then they will pass it through -- here's the ingenious part -- what's called an extruder. if you picture a wine corkscrew, like a wine corkscrew and then you picture all the negative space around a wine corkscrew, if that were also solid, so you would have, like, you would have like a cylinder with a corkscrew shape bored out into it, and then you'd have an actual corkscrew. they basically have a long tube that's like that, and they feed the corn meal into this thing which spins continuously -- >> okay. >> and the corn meal makes its way through the corkscrew all the way to the very end. and as you can imagine, between the -- and 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 a lot of heat because it's spunking really fast. -- spinning really fast. and so what that does is it boils the residual water in the cheetohs slurry. and so by the time -- and 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 corn meal, and so by the time it comes out the other end of the the extruder, you've got these, like, very puffy, crispy, well, sort of half crispy snacks, and then they deep fry it. >> ah. >> so everything is better deep fried. even extruded corn meal snacks. and the extruder is used in all kinds of other stuff. it's like a classic food processing technique that is a fairly recent. this is not something thatting you know, the imara were doing in peru 2,000 years ago. >> and so this is, this is

highly processed. i mean, you would call this highly processed, right in there's no question about that. just because we're heating it up and we're doing the corkscrew type of thing, okay. but, and you include it in your book. i did not try it, but you included a recipe for homemade diy cheetos. >> yes. and i got this recipe -- i did not invent this recipe. i was chatting with a professor of food history, and he, the day after i chatted with him we were talking through, like, well, what does it mean for food to be processed. and he said i made some cheetos in my kitchen yesterday, and i said what do you mean you made cheetos? and he said, yeah, i basically took some noodles, dehydrated them, sprayed them with oil and put them in the microwave. and that kind of recreated this basically deep frying and puffing up the water in the

noodle at the same time. and then he says, you know,ing i sprinkled them with sriracha powder and, you know, i had homemade cheetos x. it's it was an interesting point because what he was saying was, you know, does, like, does my doing that still count as making these foods processed? >> right. >> like, is the version that that i made at home, does that count as processed food, or does it only if it comes in a bag and was made in a factory. so that was an interesting question. >> so what do you say? processed, yes or no? >> that's a tough one. i mean, i think -- so my training's in chemistry, i have a chemistry background. i would say, you know, the -- and anybody else would probably say no, but to me, you know, the che e eto made in a factory and the one you make at home, as long as you're using roughly the same ingredients and more or less the psalm process, i think they're basically roughly the same in terms of processing. you know, the factory is just a

much more gigantic version of your kitchen. now, if the ingredients are really different, you know, if there's things that are had to the cheetos made in a factually that you would never use -- factory that you would never use at home, we could be talking about different levels of, quote-unquote, processing. >> all right. i'm glad you say that. without some chemicals, you know, if i were to do this at home with corn meal and sriracha sauce, there is -- [inaudible] so -- ghb. >> yeah. >> this is what i think of. they i say, okay -- [inaudible] and this has many ingredients. >> so this is, this is an interesting one. you'll get people on both sides of this debate, right?

especially folks who are trying to sell you natural organic, quote-unquote, healthier foods say things like, exactly like what you just said. like, you know, make sure you can pronounce the ingredients, make sure that, you know, there aren't that many of them on the label. if it's something your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food, you know, don't eat it, that kind of thing. and i have a little bit of a skeptical view of that kind of thing. one of the sort of, 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 is to count the number of ingredients and everything and then count the number of sill basketballs in every -- syllables in every single ingredient and just add those two numbers up. and if you do that for skittles, you get like 109 or something like that, i think. >> okay. >> and then i thought, okay, what if you do that for coffee

or an apple or lettuce or anything, that, you know, you'd consider to be really natural. and i was like, well, coffee, two syllables, so the answer is 2? then i was like, you know, there's lots of tough in coffee, it just doesn't have an ingredients label. you know, there's all kinds of aeromatic acids and different compounds. and so i looked up, okay, well, how many different chemicals are there in a cup of coffee, and it looks like pushing 1,000 different chemicals. >> in coffee? >> yes. and that's only the ones that we've actually been able to recognize and isolate and determine what they are. you know, if you think about it, coffee is a living thing. it's a cell, it has dna, it has proteins, it has a cell wall, it as has all kinds of things in there that is chemically very complex. and then you start roasting it and, you know, pouring boiling water on it, you're going to add

a whole layer of chemical complexity to it. so if i did, you know, my made-up processed food sort of scale on coffee, you know, you might get a number like 5,000 if you add up all the syllables of everything in there. [laughter] so that's when i kind of came down on the side of like, you know, okay, look, like, yes, it can be intimidating to read these ingredients labels and, yes, it does seem overwhelming. but if i think about the true ingredients of what are in all the stuff that's considered natural, you know, that would be off the charts. so that's when i was like, okay, i'm not going to, you know, i'm going to -- i'm not going to view are it as, like, this framework of if i can't pronounce it, then it must be if bad for you. there must be something else that will tell you about the health of these things. >> okay, all right. so if they're not chemicals, you're saying number of chemicals or readability of the ingredients list does not

necessarily correlate being bad for us. okay. and or the source of mechanical or artificial things that we're doing to it, right? because these colombians that are doing the fancy potato thing, right? is that really that much different than shooting a bunch of corn meal through a corkscrew? okay, all right. so how, how to you figure out -- how do you figure out -- what do you do then? what do you do? you're -- you mean i can eat cheetohs all day long? >> yeah. i, i've certainly increased my cheeto and all processed food consumption since doing the book. that's a good question. i mean, i think -- you know, figuring out, like, is something, you know, how them think or unhealthy -- healthy or

unhealthy is something for you is a really hard thing to do. and 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, you would split them up into two groups, you would banish each group to their own desert island, you would field one group the thing that you think is good or bad, and then you would make sure that the other group doesn't is have any of that same thing. >> okay. >> and then you would follow them for, like, 30 years to see, you know, does one group have more heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc. >> no big deal. >> yeah. obviously, that is not doable, right in that's not something we're going to spend taxpayer dollars on, and it's highly unethical -- [laughter]

>> a little bit. >> so you have to resort to other measures that are debatable. [laughter] and these other measures basically are, okay, if you can't banish people to desert islands and force them to eat specific diet, if you're only allowed to just track what people are eating normally and then correlate or associate, you know, long-term consumption of a particular food with a bad health outcome, then, you know, you start getting into what i learned were murkier waters in terms of really being able to pin a bad health effect or a good health effect on a particular food. and there's the last third of the book is really where i delve deeply into that. more deeply than i e ever thought i was going to. but, yeah, it's -- bottom line

is it can be tricky, and it makes me -- so whenever you read a headline on, in the news about, like, you know, eggs linked to 27% increase in heart disease risk, i read those headlines and i go, well, maybe. but also maybe not. >> hmm. okay. i'm going to follow up later on that, but getting back to the book, one thing that really struck me how funny it was. and it was. and i did not expect to be, like, laughing out loud when you're teaching me chemistry. i hated chemistry in college. that was not my thing. and here i was, like, laughing about it. so i'm curious, did you have to work hard to make all of this chemistry and all this, like, scientific blah, blah, blah funny? or did you have to work hard? was it, what?

>> yeah. [laughter] you know, it's funny, there was, someone once told me if you stop trying to be funny, you'll be a lot funnier. [laughter] which was a funny thing to say, ironically. >> okay. >> but, yeah. i mean, some of the stuff, some of the stuff in the book, like, just is objectively funny and doesn't need my help. like, one of the processing techniques that was used in olden days and might still be used today is there's a native american group, a group of native american peoples in northern or what is now northern california who very ingeniously would make candy out of the poop of an insect called an aphid. aphids are, these days, agricultural pests. >> little guys, right? >> yeah. super, super small. you would hardly notice them if

you weren't looking for them. >> you can gather their poop. >> you can gather their poop. not fresh, it has to dry on -- [laughter] it has to dry on the plants first, but the once it does dry -- and, by the way, what they're eating is plant sap, and plant sap is very sweet. so what they're pooping is also very sweet. and so you can gather their poop and make it into candy. and, like, that kind of thing is both ingenious and also funny, and it doesn't need my help to make it any funnier. but there were some parts where, you know, i'd throw in a joke, and then i'd have my partner julia read it, and then if she, like, half chuckled i'd be like, okay, that's good. and if she rolled her eyes, i'd be like, okay, i'm cutting this. >> the julia index. did your editor ever come back and say, george, no? >> yes, actually. the book had, the book had a lot of four-letter words in it my

first draft, and he cut 99% of those. >> okay. all right. so four-letter words are not -- they can be funny. okay, that was in the book as humor, not as -- >> sometimes humor and then also sometimes just to be like, oh, few god, this is f-ing incredible. sometimes in that, in the service of that. >> for effect. okay. you also illustrated your own book. [laughter] and i have to say that was, that was kind of brave. i don't think that you're going to quit your day job and become an illustrator, okay. did you consider farming it out? what was the thought process there? >> yes, i did consider farming it out, and i -- so actually the show on the national geographic show, that was illustrated by someone who is super talented, and my first thought was i'm

just going to have brett do the illustrations for the book. and then every time you do an illustration, you have to vet it for accuracy, and you have to make sure that it's right and it fits well with the narrative. i think there were something like 50 or sod odd illustrations in the book, and that was going to be a lot. and i would sketch out versions of them just so i could see them in the flow of the manuscript. and i am a terrible artist -- [laughter] >> [inaudible] [laughter] >> but it ended up, it ended up just working because the, you know, the style of the book is very infarmal, and the style -- informal, expect style of the illustrations are also very informal. and, you know, i'm not getting paid any money from apple for doing this, but i actually did most of the illustrations in key note which is their powerpoint alternative. >> very nice. okay. but you did have a bit of a home

grown look to it. >> that's a kind way of saying they were terrible, but thanks, regina. >> mabel was my favorite. mabel was, i think, the little insect that we were talking about? yeah, okay. >> right. >> i love that you gave her a name. >> thank you. >> that was just charming. okay, what was the book writing process then? highly regimented? sit down, work for eight hours a day? words come pouring forth? >> yes. i sat down on a monday and then wrote continuously until that friday, and not a single -- few ed editor didn't change a single word, everything was pure gold start to finish. [laughter] oh, man. no, i think there's not one single thing in the book that survived from my first draft. in terms of the process, it really -- that was quite regimented. and i think stephen king has good advice on this.

he basically says 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. and your goal can start low and progress as you become practiced. and it doesn't matter how good or bad the words are, you're going of the days when everything you write is terrible, and your going of the days when you way overshoot your goal, and it's pretty good. but i think the key consistency. so i would get up at 5:30 or 6 and write for a up couple hours in the morning before i'd go to my day job, and i would write for a couple hours in the evening, and then weekends, you know, i would write eight hours a day both days on the weekends. and that got to be, as you can imagine, kind of crazy. so -- >> that is a lot, actually. that explains a lot about, i think, the style of the book. >> yeah. >> feverish. >> feverish, exactly. yeah, yeah. because i was working on

deadline and desperately trying to get it out on time. and then my employer finally was like, you know, you can actually take some time off and focus on this if you want, 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. and during that period it really was, it was like 10-hour days but only monday through friday. it is important to give yourself that time off and stop, recharge, do other things, relax, you know. so, yeah, that was helpful. >> soundtrack? you listen to music? >> actually, porter robinson has some great writing out. i mean, i don't -- it's very, like, electronic dance type style. and also rat-a-tat has some great writing music. it's not something d like now i listen to it and i associate it with work, so i don't ever listen to it when i'm not

writing or working. but, yeah, basically things without lyrics or without -- with subtle lyrics that -- >> do you have a spotify playlist? >> i could make it public. yeah, if you have -- you know what? i'll a make it public. that's a good idea, yeah. >> this sounds kind of fascinating. so when you read it now, do you get excited about it? you're not going to read it now. >> i have -- yeah, i have two reactions. one is like i cannot believe that i actually wrote a book. that's my main reaction. it's -- and, by the way, i should really shout out, there were, so i interviewed a lot of people for this book, you being one of them. and the, there are probably some areas in here, you know, we've all tried to make things as factually accurate as possible, but there would be a hundred times as many errors without the 80 or so people who i have

interviewed and sent excerpts of the book to read and make sure that, yes, the science is actually represented well. so that was a huge, huge, huge help. so officially, regina, thank you. >> my pleasure. >> but now i completely forgot your question. what did you ask? the. >> like when you read it, do you laugh now? yes. >> yeah, so i, i'm one of those people who reads it and i'm like, oh, i should have written this differently, or i should have changed this sentence, or i should have -- you know? and it was mid to have who said, he -- mid to, he was basically e you're ready to give birth to your book now, it's time, i think it's ready, stop tweaking it. just with, it's time.

and i think that's a really important thing, you know, because you could be writing the same one book your entire life and tweaking it until it was perfect, every single word was exactly right, but at some point you have to put it out into the world and see what happens. >> 80 -- how many scientists, 80? you said? 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. so there was a lot of attention to detail. it must be a little terrifying to put a book about science out there. what if there are errors? >> yeah. and this is something i had thought a lot about. i mean, i i i think there's two types of error. there's a 1 plus 1 equals 3 error and there's a 1 plus 1 equals tomato error. the first is your garden variety typo. you say that something is 6 millimeters when you mean it's 6 nanometers. and, you know, is that wrong?

yes. is it a huge deal in, like, the history of science? no. then there are other errors where if you make them, you could risk giving someone the wrong impression about something in a way that would make them change their behavior. there i i think, you know, that's a much more serious error. so, for example, if you, if you only focus on one perspective and don't take a moment to think, like, wait a second, 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, you risk your book being very, very one-sided and, like, painting too rosy on of a picture or two negative of a picture. and there you could, i mean, there i think it's much, it's much more dangerous. even though those aren't really, like, they're not so much errors in a clear unequivocal, you know, this is wrong type way. but, yeah, so i was really

careful to try and, to try and not just go with the first thing i heard, but always investigated the other side. >> so you and i talked about statistics, a little uncontroversial, but i got the feeling from the book that there were a couple of different camps? >> yes. >> of, people with strong opinions. and, okay, tell me about that. what was that like? >> yeah. so this gets back to how you figure out if something is good or bad for you question, right? there is a group of people which i'll call the traditionalists who have been practicing something called nutritional epidemiology for roughly five decades or so. and basically what they do is

they mail surveys out to a group of people, and i think ask them what dud to you eat this year -- what did you eat this year, and they take those answers and correlate consumption of specific foods with negative, or usually negative health outcomes. and that generates headlines like the, you know, eggs are linked to 27% increase in heart disease risk. that's one camp. the other camp are i guess what i'll call the skeptics or the methodologists, and that group of people have fundamental issues with the, like, underlying science of the traditionalist camp. and if you -- and when i was going woo this, i had no -- into this, i had no idea that there were two camps, you know? i just, like, started down the road, and then i think i discovered this actually by roadway reading a rebuttal in a scientific journal that someone else had written, and i was like, oh, my god, this is --

there's actually a debate here. so it was, you know, it was interesting. and, you know, like the different camps may not talk to to you in the same, the traditional u.s.es don't really have a vested interest in, like, talking to journalists. the people who want, the methtologists have a much more -- they want to say, hey, listen to me. i new all of that stuff over there is wrong. so you had to really like, i really had to work hard at getting an interview with some folk in the tradition aalist camp. but -- traditionalist camp. but it was, you know, these were fundamental disagreements that i think were also emotional and not just, like, oh, we disagree on the science, but, you know, when the day's done, we're going to go both have a -- beer at a bar. some people got really ve e health, and some people called each other names which i can't

repeat here. i mean, i can repeat some of them, but, like, steaming dog turd was used, outrageous baffoon was used. i mean, like, take off my white glove and smack you in the face level of insults were hurled back and forth. if. >> so people are getting this emotional -- >> yeah. >> -- and about, basically, junk food. how bad is it for you or, you know, apples or potatoes or coffee or all of that. okay, that makes the whole thing a lot more interesting. >> yeah. >> that there's this big war behind what's going on. >> yes. the nutritional epidemiology war. at least i called it that that. [laughter] no one's dying. no one's dying, but -- >> so how did this change your view about finance? about science? i think about science a lot

lately because we're all in, what, week seven of the lockdown? from the pandemic. >> yeah. >> so you finished the book before the pandemic. >> right. >> but i was struck on reading it how many kind of ear ily parallels -- eerie parallels there were. and i think you said something about uncertainty, finding uncertainty actually comforting. so i could use a little comfort with uncertainty right now, and do you feel like what you learned from researching and writing this book and going through all of this changed how you approached the pandemic? >> totally, yeah. so i, as you mention,, i did -- so i measured, i wrapped up the book, i mean, months before new of this. and i'm actually adding an appendix for the u.k. edition about hand sanitizer, but other

than that nothing in the book is directly related to coronavirus or infectious diseases or anything like that. but, you know, in order to answer the question of how, you know, is processed food bad for you, i had to answer the question of, well, how do we know anything is true in science? and if you're only reading the news, you might think that science doesn't know what the hell it's doing because you're reading headlines that change every six months. it's like first coffee's good for you, then it's bad for you. then it's good for you, then it's bad for you. and we've been through this with trans fats and coffee and eggs -- >> alcohol. >> alcohol, yes. so you might get the impression that, you know, can't these scientists figure out whether something is good or bad? why is this so complicated? and what i learned, basically, was that, you know, this process

is science doing its job. you've got people who run experiments, do them slightly differently, disagree, argue with each other in the literature, and throughout that process which takes -- it's not something that takes a few months here and there, it takes years and sometimes decades -- eventually you reach a consensus view. and that happened, for example, with smoking. you know, we started out in the 1930s and before that basically not knowing that smoking was bad for us, and we ended up in 1964 with the government saying, yeah, definitely, smoking is defendant bad for you. definitely bad. >> three decades. about 30 years. >> yeah. and the research on smoking didn't stop in 1964, it kept going. now we have a much better chemical understanding of what happens when you smoke a cigarette, what it does in your body, all that sort of stuff. so west virginia been building

evidence -- we've been building evidence for some things related to public health for a hundred years. the, you know, so -- and processed foods and, you know, these studies about the health effects of processed foods are relatively new. we certainly have not been doing this for a hundred years. so it's kind of only natural to expect that at least for now results are going to be, quote-unquote, conflicting. we're going to have different way of doing experiments. people are going to disagree more. but eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later, but you can't rush these things too much, we will come to a consensus about eggs or coffee or whatever it is that we, that we're, you know, putting into our bodies on a daily basis. >> so you're trusting the process of science, and you're saying, okay, until then i'm just going to to do the best thi can do? like, how do you make decisions

then about how many cheetos to eat in a day? >> yeah. basically, yeah. i mean, i think, like, the only other thing that i would caution here is or take into account is, like, you know, some of these foods -- i believe, this is a personal belief, and i don't really have any evidence to back this up -- but really are awe dicktive. like -- addictive. yesterday i ate an illegal amount of peanut m&ms and, you know, did i want to eat, i don't know, 75 peanut m&ms? no. could i stop myself in no. [laughter] you know in and part of that is stress. like, we're all in this global pandemic, you know, we're all locked down. food is a, i think for everybody or for a lot of people, modulating your food intake is a natural response to being in such stressful conditions. for me it's eating more, for other people it might be eating less. but part of it is that, you

know, some of these foods really are engineered to be, i think, addictive. so being conscious of that and saying, look, like a wag of cheetohs every now and again not going to kill me, but i shouldn't make it a habit to the point where i'm ordering a pallet -- [laughter] you know what i mean? that level -- >> what's wrong with that? don't knock the habit. >> you're going to turn your camera sideways and show a gigantic pallet of cheetos? >> judgey, judgey. [laughter] one of the things i liked coming quay away from the book, a lot of ran stuff about plants trying to kill you. microbes are trying to eat your -- i typically love that. i don't know, especially like chill, right? chill about this.

and one of the things that i really liked that helped get me there were putting processed food in the whole historical perspective. i felt like that really helped. okay, we just have more mechanics in doing it now, but we've been tinkeringed food for a long time. >> yeah. >> but when you talked about the death tables or life tables, i guess, is a better way of putting it, is so what is, like, give me a factoid. what is -- like my chance of dying right now, you know, if i ate cheetos all the time would be huge. but you say having the life table -- >> yes. so this is another thing. so to answer the central question of this book, i had to dabble in a lot of fields that i am not an expert in, and i relied on you for help with statistics, i relied on demographers for help with these kinds of things. so, again, thank you for that.

but the, one of the interesting things was, you know, a lot of the things you see is such and such food will increase your risk of death by 14%. and, actually, a study calm out relatively recently about processed food that said if you increase your -- sorry. an increase of 10% by weight of processed food is correlated with a 14% increase in risk of death. that a's a complicated sentence to parse. >> yes. >> what i wanted to know was, well, what does that mean exactly? what is a 14% risk of death? does that mean that i take my life span, which i expect to be about 80 years, and i, you know, subtract 14 percent of that? i mean, that would be a huge impact on my life expect tan su e s. >> right. >> and actually, you know, it

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, no, you're wrong, no, this is wrong. and i kept going to, you know, an expert who was more, you know, deeply ingrained in the subject until i finally got an answer. >> you dud your homework. do i did. [laughter] >> >> i did. it was so frustrating. i would literally have scientists e-mailing me telling me the other scientist is wrong. and i'm like, well, who am i supposed to believe? [laughter] so this 14% can be really scary, and, you know, in order to figure out, well -- it turns out you're not just multiplying your life expectancy by a decrease of 14 percent. that is not the right way to do it. but you actually have to look at a table that tells you your risk of dying throughout your life at

every given age you are. and 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. which -- >> 87? >> yeah. i thought, i thought, you know, if i turn 50, my risk of death going to be 10% in any given year. but, you know, we've made such up credible 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. so -- well, early, mid and the early part of the late phase of life, right? so what you have to do -- so the way to talk this 14%, you know, increase in risk of death that's associated with processed food and translate into some number that we can all understand which

is how this impacts your life expectancy. you have to basically sprinkle it on a life table and see what happens. and when you do that, it turns out that you're looking at a roughly are one-year reduction in life expect tan city. which is south intuitive. you think -- counterintuitive. you think 14%, that's a lot, but it turns out one year is less. now, i did talk to a demographer about this, and i ran this by her, and she said, well, listen, you know, a year for you might seem like not that long because you're 34, but a year for my 75-year-old dad, like, that's a long time. especially if you've got grandchildren who, you know, they want to see a lot over the next year. so it also brought, you know, it did bring home that point of life expectancy changes can be different depending on where you are in life. >> i'm going to argue that some

processed food is just so delicious that there's a quality of life issue. maybe it's an extra year, but am i enjoying that extra year? would i i have enjoyed, you know, lots of peanut m and ms for the past 70 years? perhaps -- i'm just going to put that up there. >> yes. no, i totally agree. i mean, there is -- and quality of life is not something that i got into super in depth in the book, but it's totally important. i think the quote i heard on that was we're here for a good time, not a long time. >> oh, nice. well, i came away from it much more, like, big things matter, but the little decisions that i'm making about eating my bag of cheetos, i didn't feel a huge amount of guilt about that now. as long as i'm balancing it out and doing lots of other healthy

things, a tubeny bit is no -- tiny bit is no big deal. how can this not be -- look at it. it's flores cement. [laughter] fluorescent. so 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 reassuring. you're right. i don't have the answers, but t okay. >> exactly. yes. >> is that what you were saying? >> yes. and also that, you know, knowing that temporary uncertainty is an early part of the scientific process as well, like, maybe this stuff will not get figured out in my lifetime. maybe it will, who knows. but at least i know that it's not just that, you know, scientists are a bumbling bunch of bozos who can't get it right. no, this is, like, this is shows

supposed to happen. there's supposed to be debate on these things, it's good to have this intellectual back and forth between two camps or more than two camps. all of that i found reassuring too. >> i feel like in some ways this is a much more grown-up books than books that claim to have all the answers. just do this, you know, live forever, you're going to be healthy, right? we know this for sure. and this is a very grown-up approach to that where you're not claiming to have all the answers. ..

>> was frustrating for me as a researcher to because i didn't know any of this in the beginning. and it was like what is the answer. but i think if well we all nowadays, we all don't have a choice. george: we have to live with that lot of uncertainty. and so if we know that hopefully we know that is okay. and that things are at least in science, as they are supposed to. host: i feel like perspective rather than advice. george: would be my dream. my hope for this book is it's not just something that someone would read, and say all this interesting put it aside. it's that would be well-founded basically told they can use to help evaluate information that comes at them especially now, every single day.

host: given that i felt so much more comfortable with the intake. where our final question, if you're up for something. people who will buy the book. in reading from first time, what would be a good rule sharing. what should you sit down and maybe have an appetizer. white house. george: so i think you want to start salting and work your way to suite. she does what is a great place to start redefining hot. just start strong. then maybe work your way over to chips parted like the cattle coat variety. that is a palate cleanser kinda brain and follow that up with

goldfish. that's really like the main course for me. host: wait a minute. i'm thinking main course. and maybe peanuts. george: you mean the kind they have to undo yourself. host: yes or something. totally unnatural. orange you know. george: [laughter]. host: i'm thinking maybe a hot dog version kind of. george: and speaking of hotdogs, is a great processed food right there. you have two chili dogs. in the maybe polished it off with some starburst. maybe some skittles. and maybe finish it off with a few peanut m&ms. [laughter]. host: about 76 of them. george: everything in moderation. [laughter]. host: maybe you should have a

little bit of spotify. george: and like a menu. host: this is been so much fun. and who everyone is out to get this. an online, maybe they will order some starburst. maybe some m&ms too. george: inc. you. if this is great and thank you for having me. host: thank you. george: i declare the sprouts to be delicious. [laughter]. >> george, i question for you. how much is illegal amount of m&ms. please. george: i bought the largest possible side available at costco which is 3 pounds and 14 ounces. i think i reasonably eight like a good 14 ounces of that. and i did feel sick after doing

that. so i would not recommend trying that at home. it. >> about it was delicious in the moment. george: yes . >> this is been kind of fun and super educational. i cannot think the both of you enough for being with me tonight. george: thank you for having us. >> and think all of you. and i'm sure you'll enjoy picking up ingredients. the strange chemistry. you can get it right now of politics and prose, just click on the link that we have in the description box below to order your copy. we have four fantastic others coming up next and as we close out our 2020 features programming. be sure to join us friday evening at 5:30 p.m. are live discussion with best-selling authors. and author of the last train to london. and on saturday night, were featuring an interview with washington post educated

columnist. author of code red. progressives and moderates can unite to save our country. that is in the morning, kids of all ages can tune in at 11:00 a.m. for a fun presentation. finally, parents at 3:00 p.m. on the next sunday, our program is designed just for you. join us for an important conversation featuring in the book how to raise a reader. it's been healed as a guide to welcoming children to a lifelong love of reading. all presentations will be accessible here on this using channel. okay my friends, the reps the first night. i've in your post, have a great evening. keep reading. >> and i was he spent two, book tv. more television for serious readers.