Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Apr 2020
320 pages
Genre: Science, Health and the Environment
Publication Information
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.
"[E]ngaging and witty...While Zaidan lays on the humor, his conclusions are sound. Science lovers will enjoy Zaidan's lighthearted approach." - Publishers Weekly
"[T]he author provides a restrained, thoughtful, and eye-opening analysis...There is good information to be found in this book; just look past Zaidan's heavy-handed efforts to be accessibly amusing." - Kirkus Reviews
"An entertaining romp through the world of scientific studies focusing on topics that will concern most readers. Recommended for all curious about the everyday products they consume or use." - Library Journal
"Ingredients employs a lighthearted tone and approachable language to enlighten even the least science-inclined reader on the strengths and pitfalls of the science that tells us what's best for our bodies." - Booklist
"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
"If you are looking for a guide in understanding the everyday chemistry of our lives, you could not do better than George Zaidan. And his book, Ingredients, is everything that should lead you to expect: funny, edgy, fascinating, dismaying, reassuring, and overall, just incredibly smart." - Deborah Blum, Pulitzer prizewinning author of The Poison Squad
This information about Ingredients was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
George Zaidan is a science communicator, television and web host, and producer. He created National Geographic's webseries Ingredients, and he cowrote and directed MIT's webseries Science Out Loud. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, the Boston Globe, National Geographic magazine, NPR's The Salt, NBC's Cosmic Log, Science, Business Insider, and Gizmodo. He is currently executive producer at the American Chemical Society. Ingredients is his first book.
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