Show Notes
Processed food has gotten a pretty terrible reputation. We’re warned to avoid foods with long ingredient lists, mysterious additives and chemical names we can’t pronounce. “Ultra-processed” has practically become another way of saying “bad for you.” But is that a useful way to judge what we eat? After all, almost everything we eat has been processed in some way, and everything we eat — including perfectly natural food — is made of chemicals.
So how can you tell which ingredients are worth worrying about and which ones just sound scary? Why do manufacturers put preservatives, emulsifiers, artificial flavors, stabilizers and other additives into food in the first place? And does a complicated-looking ingredient label actually tell you much about whether a food is healthy?
Here to sort through the chemistry is George Zaidan, an MIT-trained chemist who created National Geographic’s web series Ingredients: The Stuff Inside Your Stuff. He is also author of Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put in Us and on Us (https://amzn.to/2Zykgij).
Listen as George explains what some of those strange-sounding ingredients actually are, what they do, what the science says about their safety and why our instincts about “natural” versus “chemical” can sometimes lead us astray. If you have ever stood in a grocery store reading a label and wondered, “What IS all this stuff?” this conversation may change the way you look at what’s in your food.
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