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 tonights 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. Lets 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 abcnbc hit show make me a millionaire inventor reveals what will kill you, what wont, and why, exploring high octane hilarity historical hijinks and other things that dont begin with the h. George created National Geographic web serious ingredients and cowrote and directed mit web serious for a ahis words have been featured in the New York Times for the boston globe National Geographic magazine and npr the salt and many more. Its currently executive producer of the american chemical society. Interviewing george tonight is the statistics professor and awardwinning science communicator regina reginas 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. Shes 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 its 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 ab 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, im 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 wouldnt know it by looking at me, i dont have the equipment. Im a fiveyearold cyborg actually. My internal machine is internal. I have a tiny brain computer embedded in my skull thats zapping my brain with electricity, thousands of times per second. Thats the only way that i hear. Which is kind of amazing. Its total modern medicine. So i have a little bit of equipment. Yes, a cyborg. Thats 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, thats right. [laughter] it mustve been embedded in my brain at birth that i had to write this book. I heard it said that abive heard advice that says like, dont 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] thats 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, im 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, its 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 thats 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 theyve cleaned. Its not like youre 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, its 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. Thats 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 thats bad. But thats not the book that he wrote. How would you describe it . Its not a diet book. No. Its 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, theres 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 abi mean, so long that we dont even have accurate dates of how long we been processing food. Processing food . Yes. I will give you an example. Theres a group of people called the abwho live and have lived for time and memorial in whats now peru. In the andes. Its a tough life where they live and part of the reason its 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 theyre 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 cant 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 doesnt want humans or any other animals digging up its Energy Storage and eating them so it makes them toxic. The potato plants ab stealing the potato plants batteries. Exactly. You dont 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 didnt taste good but it doesnt 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 abtheyre not unique, theres 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 its a tossup between flaming hot and classic. Classic puffs for me, the puffs for me dont rate. If im feeling spicy its flaming hot all the way. Today im 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 youve ever had it by itself, its really bland. It doesnt resemble, its not crunchy doesnt 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, whats 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 youd have like cylinder with a corkscrew shape in it and then an actual corkscrew they basically have a long tube thats 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 ab its winding its way between the corkscrew and the other part of the negative part of the corkscrew and during that process its 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 doesnt have a ton of places to go because youre 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 youve got these like very puffy chris become a sort of half crispy snacks, then they deep fry it. So everything is better deepfried. Even extruded cornmeal snacks. The extruder is used in all kinds of stuff, its like a classic Food Processing technique thats fairly recent. This is not something that the awere doing in peru 2000 years ago. This is highly processed. You would call this highly processed right . Theres 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 abi 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 recreated this basically deepfried and puffing up the water in the noodle at the same time and he said, i sprinkled them with sharadabwith sriracha powder and then abas 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 its processed food . It was an interesting question. So what do you say . Processed, yes or no . Thats 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 theyre 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 theres 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. Im 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 abthis 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 arent that many of them on the label. If its something your grandmother would recognize as food, dont 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 im 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. Theres lots of stuff in coffee, it doesnt have an ingredients label. Theres 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 . Thats only the ones weve actually been able to recognize and isolate and determine what they are. If you think about it, coffee is a living thing. Its a cell it has dna, it has proteins, a cell wall, all kinds of stuff in their thats 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. Thats 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 thats considered natural, that would be off the charts. Thats when i was like, im not can i view it as this framework of if i cant 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 youre 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 ab what do you do then . You not can eat cheetos all day long . Ive certainly increased my chito and all processed Food Consumption sense during the book. Thats a good question. Figuring out like is something how healthy or healthy is something for you . Its 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 doesnt 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 thats not doable. Thats 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 cant banish people to the Desert Island and force them to eat specific diets, if youre only allowed to just track what people are eating normally and then correlate or associate longterm 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. Im 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 didnt expect to be laughing out loud when youre teaching me chemistry. I hated chemistry in college that was not my thing and here i was laughing about it. Im 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 doesnt need my help. One of the Processing Techniques that