Ingredients - George Zaidan ***

Is processed food bad for you? That’s the big question that George Zaiden seeks to answer in Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of Plants, Poisons & Processed Foods. Of course, since this is a book, and not a tweet, the answer is a little more complicated than yes or no.

Taking a broader look, the book explores the things that we put into (and onto) ourselves when we eat, smoke, or use sunscreen. Zaidan seeks to explore not just whether these things are good for us or not, but how we know whether certain ingredients are harmful.

I really appreciate Zaidan’s dissection of the scientific method, and how we learn about the effects of various chemicals. He goes through the benefits and shortfalls of various types of scientific studies in even-handed and easily accessible ways.

I also enjoyed his commentary on the way the press presents nutritional findings. You often see things like 'Coffee causes/cures/prevents/worsens cancer' and Zaidan goes through where these often contradictory claims come from in wonderful detail.

The book is also very funny. The tone is conversational, and very easy to read. His analogies verge on the absurd, like giving chemical components names like Phillip, but they always come together in a satisfying way. Zaidan’s illustrations are also simple but effective in getting his point across.

The book is, by Zaidan’s own admission, meandering. The question of processed foods is raised, and then left aside as he discusses cigarettes and sunscreen. Though it comes together in a satisfying way later on, I often found myself wondering where the book was going. If readers weren't invested in the topic, I could see them dropping the book for something else. And I would understand that.

The conversational nature is also not for everyone, although I enjoyed it.One strange point is the mix of American and British references. It felt like someone had gone through the book and changed certain references (Judge Rinder is mentioned, and so is a Vauxhall Corsa) but the references weren’t changed throughout, so the changing terms often felt like cultural whiplash.

Ingredients changed the way I look at the food I eat, and demystified a lot of things that I didn’t realise I was ignorant of. If the meandering nature of it doesn’t put you off, it’s a book I’d definitely recommend.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Adam Murphy

Comments

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily, Introducing Artificial Intelligence is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

Search This Blog