INGREDIENTS: The Strange Chemistry of Plants, Poisons

With humour and reassurance, at last this is a book on nutrition that tries to make you understand how little we know, answering age old questions and a lot more besides for everyone curious about the everyday products we consume or use. Nutrition is a mess of marketing, classism, science, truth, guilt, confusion and outright hucksterism. Cheese puffs, coffee, sunscreen, vapes, hand sanitiser, Zaidan reveals the weird science behind everyday items that may or may not kill you, depending on whom you ask. If you're curious which health studies to trust, what dense scientific jargon really means, and how to make better choices when it comes to food and health, dive right in. Zaidan makes chemistry more fun than a potions class as he demystifies package ingredients we buy in the supermarket and explains how we know whether something is good or bad for you in exquisite, hilarious detail and at breakneck speed 'with brilliant analogies that even an 11 year old can understand.' Chapters include Microbes Are Trying to Eat Your Food, Plants Are Trying to Kill You, Processed Food Is Bad For You, Right?, Sunburnt to a Crisp, and Is Coffee the Elixir of Life or the Blood of the Devil? 'James Lind ran a controlled trial. On a voyage aboard the HMS Salisbury, he took 12 sailors with scurvy and split them up into six groups of two. Each group got a different potential cure: a quart of hard cider, 75 drops of sulphuric acid, two spoonfuls of vinegar, half a pint of sea water, the 'bigness' of a nutmeg, or two oranges and a lemon.' Can you guess the result? See page 168. Some of the language is utterly hilarious, like DNA, if it were the title of a movie, the sub-titles might read: Your Genetic Code, or The Blueprint of Your Life, or There Is No Such Thing As Free Will. With scientific and also hilarious diagrams, 297pp, paperback. Chemistry has never been such fun.