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Ingredients
- The Strange Chemistry of What We Put in Us and on Us
- Narrated by: George Zaidan
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
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Ingredients
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Publisher's Summary
Cheese puffs. Coffee. Sunscreen. Vapes. George Zaidan reveals what will kill you, what won’t, and why - explained with high-octane hilarity, hysterical hijinks, and other things that don’t begin with the letter H.
Ingredients offers the perspective of a chemist on the stuff we eat, drink, inhale, and smear on ourselves. Apart from the burning question of whether you should eat that Cheeto, Zaidan explores a range of topics. Here’s a helpful guide:
Stuff in this book:
- How bad is processed food? How sure are we?
- Is sunscreen safe? Should you use it?
- Is coffee good or bad for you?
- What’s your disease horoscope?
- What is that public pool smell made of?
- What happens when you overdose on fentanyl in the sun
- What do cassava plants and Soviet spies have in common?
- When will you die?
Stuff in other books:
- Your carbon footprint
- Food sustainability
- GMOs
- CEO pay
- Science funding
- Politics
- Football
- Baseball
- Any kind of ball really
Zaidan, an MIT-trained chemist who cohosted CNBC’s hit Make Me a Millionaire Inventor and wrote and voiced several TED-Ed viral videos, makes chemistry more fun than Hogwarts as he reveals exactly what science can (and can’t) tell us about the packaged ingredients sold to us every day. Sugar, spinach, formaldehyde, cyanide, the ingredients of life and death, and how we know if something is good or bad for us - as well as the genius of aphids and their butts - are all discussed in exquisite detail at breakneck speed.
Includes a PDF of the author’s illustrations as well as the appendix about prayer and death.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
What the critics say
"If you crossed Bill Nye with Stephen Colbert, you’d get George Zaidan. Ingredients is a masterful piece of science writing." (Daniel H. Pink, New York Times best-selling author of When and Drive)
“I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that food is very important, and yet we are terrible at talking about it. Nutrition is a mess of marketing, classism, science, truth, guilt, confusion, and outright hucksterism. Ingredients lifts the film from our eyes with humor and reassurance.” (Hank Green, author of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing)
"At last, a book on nutrition that tries to make you understand how little we know instead of offering blanket prognostications. If instead of a simple solution, you want a guide to how to think about health, this is it." (Zach and Kelly Weinersmith, New York Times best-selling authors of Soonish)