Do you know what’s in the food you’re eating? Food Chemist Dr. Christopher McNeil does and the answers might surprise you. We talk chemistry, nutrition, GMO crops and what you really need for a healthy diet. Then, we countdown a special food inspired Top 5.
Dr. Christopher McNeil: 01:18ish
Pointless: 33:05ish
Top 5: 44:50ish
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Interview with Food Chemist Dr. Christopher McNeil
Nick VinZant 0:11
Welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, we take a look at the chemistry behind your food.
Dr. Christopher McNeil 0:20
So none of the food that we're eating is remotely similar to what it was 10,000 years ago. And when it comes to nutrition work, there's a lot of noise. And there's a lot of interesting studies going on. But at the end of the day, we know what works and it's so it's actually not food that I'm not worried about. It's more you know, the supplement aisle.
Nick VinZant 0:44
I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, leave a review, we really appreciate it really helps us out. So I don't really know what's in the food that I'm eating. I look at the label, right. But beyond the calorie number, I don't really have any idea what all of that stuff means. Our first guest, though, does. This is food chemist, Dr. Christopher McNeil. You know, the biggest question that I have, in my mind, right talking to a food chemist is I get an apple, is that still an apple or have we done stuff with it and messed with it so much, that it's not really what it was 50 years or 100 years ago, or whatever.
Dr. Christopher McNeil 1:33
So none of the food that we're eating is remotely similar to what it was 10,000 years ago. And that comes with a lot of benefits. And it also does come with some drawbacks. And we're starting to see that with the way that our food system impacts the environment. But I think the one thing I really want to emphasize is the food that we eat is sick. That doesn't mean it's healthy, it doesn't mean that it's always the right thing that we should be eating. But food is always going to be generally safe. The risk of eating the food that we eat is low, as long as we're eating a diversified diet, not relying too much on heavily processed foods. But at the end of the day, humanity wouldn't be where we're at if it wasn't for the advancements in agriculture and technology that makes sure that we have food on the table every day.
Nick VinZant 2:28
What's the difference between healthy versus Safe, safe,
Dr. Christopher McNeil 2:34
has a lot more to do with like the actual risks of disease or toxicity or poison, or all those different types of things that you could think of, in terms of healthy healthy is a lot more about the relationship that we have with food. More about lifestyle choices that are associated with eating and dietary habits. 99.99% of food in the grocery store is not gonna harm you when you eat it. But if you eat an entire diet that consists entirely of hot pockets, that's not a healthy relationship to food, or specifically, like processed foods,
Nick VinZant 3:14
you know, so when you look at food chemistry, are you checking? Are you looking at the chemistry of the food itself? Are you studying more how it reacts with us?
Dr. Christopher McNeil 3:22
Most of my work has been the chemistry of the food itself. There are people who study, you know how food is interacting with either animals or after you eat it or I know people who are actually studying how, you know, pesticides and things on farms are affecting farm workers like there. There's different approaches to food chemistry. And it's kind of a large umbrella. The umbrella of food chemistry is is it associated with food? And is it chemistry?
Nick VinZant 3:56
Is there Okay, so we kind of talked about the idea of like, look, food isn't necessarily good or bad. But are there certain things from like a chemistry perspective that like okay, this is better than this thing? Right? Like these nutrients? This chemical makeup is better for bodies than this one is?
Dr. Christopher McNeil 4:16
That's a that's a hard question to answer just because there are so many chemical components of all the food that we eat. I mean, every everything that gives food flavor or texture, or, I mean, the entire world is just made up of chemicals interacting like that is the human body is just a bunch of it's just a lot of chemical reactions happening all at once that give us life. So due to the complexity of food, it's hard to say you know, these things are better than other things. When you look at the dietary recommendations that come out every five years, you know, the reason why they say try to eat whole grains try to eat a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables is because Those are the things that we know are good. And we can try to dive into the chemistry and have a really reductionist approach to try to narrow down on, like, why it's good for us. But at the end of the day, it's just such a complex system that getting it down to that very, like granule level is almost impossible. Because the chemistry of life itself is so complex,
Nick VinZant 5:28
to help me kind of understand is that kind of, I'm just gonna make something up, right? I have no idea if this is correct or not, right? Like, we know, Apples are good, but we don't know. They're good, because of like the riboflavin, or magnesium and Apple is that kind of how it works. We just know that they're good. So you should eat those.
Dr. Christopher McNeil 5:46
We have a general sense of, you know, the essential vitamins and nutrients. The like, we know, we need a certain amount of certain vitamins, we know we need a certain amount of certain minerals. We know that the fiber from apples is really good. Why it's good. That's a much more complex question to answer. And like research has shown, okay, it's good for the microbiome. So your gut bacteria really likes the fiber because they can ferment it. And you know, they create things that are beneficial for us. But those interactions are all really complex. We know that vitamin C is necessary to prevent scurvy. But we don't necessarily know what a trace amount of some flavonoid, which is going to give it a flavor. Like we don't necessarily know what that trace amount of a single flavonoid is going to do.
Nick VinZant 6:44
So this is kind of like the, you know, the armchair quarterback kind of thing is like, what do you mean, we don't know why, like, why don't we know why I feel I feel as a person who knows nothing about this, that you guys should have figured this out already.
Dr. Christopher McNeil 6:59
So we have 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of chemical reactions going on all at the same time, we've been able to identify like, a lot of very interesting and important and essential chemical reactions that make life happen. But the way that science works, and in order to really, definitively say this is causing this, you have to really reduce down all the variables. And sometimes you just can't reduce every variable out of an experiment. Because that's just not the way that food really exists. Food doesn't exist in this really, like super narrow, focused world. Food is all about complexity and chemical reactions and things like that. Is Does that make sense? It
Nick VinZant 7:55
to me, it kind of sounds like the idea of like, alright, I can't keep using Apples, but we're going to feed these people oranges. And we found that after we fed them oranges, they were happier. But it might also have been because they got good news at work. So we can't like directly attributed to the oranges. Yeah.
Dr. Christopher McNeil 8:14
Imagine trying to set up a study where you control every single thing that an entire population eats for, like 15 years. So when it comes down to studying the long term effects of things, we just have really crappy models that we can use.
Nick VinZant 8:32
Does it change the way that you look at food, though? Like really knowing what's in it?
Dr. Christopher McNeil 8:37
Yes, and no. Um, I'd say the main thing that has changed is, I appreciate food a lot more. Because a lot of people are very removed from the food that they eat, they don't see how it's produced. They don't know where it's coming from. They don't know. They just don't know how the food system works. So having like a really intimate view on like, this is how food gets to your table, makes it care a lot more about it. But at the same time I talk to any dietician dieticians will always say like, if you're really restricting what you're eating, you're not really having a fulfilling healthy relationship with food. So I still eat junk food. A lot of the time I will say working in my field has made me more vegetarian than I was before. Like I eat meat, maybe once a month now and I really focus on on vegetarian foods that's also just being in the Bay Area, like the Bay Area, you're just inevitably going to become a vegetarian. But when I don't feel like cooking or eating an entire bag of soy chicken nuggets because it's fun. Food should be fun.
Nick VinZant 9:58
It is true, right? Like, how do we find the balance between eating stuff that maybe is not the best? versus kind of just living this super strict lifestyle?
Dr. Christopher McNeil 10:09
I feel like Michael Pollan put it really well in a lot of his writing on food where it's no eat food, mostly plants. And not too much.
Nick VinZant 10:20
That I mean, what is it about like the plants, though? And that more vegetarian diet that seems to kind of go with us a little bit better? Is there something in the chemistry of it?
Dr. Christopher McNeil 10:30
That's a very complicated question. It's never been easier for us to over eat, especially when it comes to meat. Because meat used to be really hard to get. And you only, you know, ate meat on special occasions. When it comes to eating mostly plants, we know that there's a lot of benefits from eating, you know, high fiber, very nutrient dense vegetables. And that is partially just because we're not eating as much fat. We're not especially saturated fat, and we're getting a lot more fiber in our diet, which is going to make us feel full, is going to keep calories down just generally, because we're not going to over eat as much. And it's just going to add more variety to our diet. Because eating, you know, meat and potatoes every day. We know that that's not healthy. So it's all about the variety, in the end, making sure that it's a very diverse diet, and that you're just not eating the same thing constantly.
Nick VinZant 11:42
Are you ready for some harder slash listener submitted questions? Absolutely. Our food companies trying to kill us.
Dr. Christopher McNeil 11:53
No, they're not trying to kill you at all. Honestly, this is sort of a narrative that people have latched on to, because it takes the responsibility off of having own personal habits that are positive or negative. Food companies are trying to make food that tastes good at a price that people will buy it at. It's the habit of actually buying and preparing and eating healthy food, that is going to determine if your diet is healthy or not. People care a lot more about price than about health. And by keeping prices low, you know, that does mean that a lot of people are eating unhealthy food. But food companies really only care about making food that people will buy and eat.
Nick VinZant 12:53
This person writes, I always hear that processed foods are bad, but what about what about them makes them bad? Like what is it about the processing that isn't good or isn't as desirable?
Dr. Christopher McNeil 13:07
It depends on the food, how it's being processed. Not all processed food is bad. Frozen vegetables are often really great forms of processed food. Because they're really high nutrients, they're high in fiber. Really, the the processes that make processed food unhealthy is when you're removing things like bran from whole grains, because that's where a lot of the fiber and nutrients are. It's the things that end up being lost throughout the process. So it's losing fiber through aggressive processing of grain, or there's vitamin and mineral loss during you know, some types of canning processes or things like that, where, at the end of the day, there's still vitamins and nutrients in there. But it's just not the same as if you had the fresh option.
Nick VinZant 14:06
So it's not what they're putting into it. It's what they're taking out of it.
Dr. Christopher McNeil 14:11
In my opinion, yes, it's more about what's lost along the way than anything that's added to it. Preservatives are not necessarily a bad thing. It just depends on how often you're eating them, what products they're in and things like that.
Nick VinZant 14:28
Even if you look at like the worst foods have today. Are they still better than when we ate like, week old raw meat 100 years ago, 100,000 years ago, right? Like is, are we still ultimately eating better than we were a long time ago?
Dr. Christopher McNeil 14:46
I love this question. But it's really hard to answer without defining what you mean by better. Are they more nutrient dense? Are we getting more calories from it, then we would have you know 100,000 years ago, yes. 100%. Like, would would the food of today sustain you longer than, you know, prehistoric, like, foods 100% There's a reason my lifespans are two or three times longer today than they were even 100 or 200 years ago. If you're talking about variety, like, there used to be a lot more varieties of all the different foods that we eat, and that has been reduced a lot over the last 150 years.
Nick VinZant 15:37
I did see something once that like, basically all bananas are the same banana
Dr. Christopher McNeil 15:43
in North America and Europe. Yes. If you go to the tropics, or go to South America, Africa, lots of Asia, they actually have more varieties of banana and the varieties of bananas that we eat in North America and Europe. Totally monoculture? Like, there's pretty much just one kind that you're gonna see. But my favorite type of banana is called an apple banana, you can find it in Hawaii. And all throughout the tropics, it just tastes better it it's a little bit more sour, a little bit more tart.
Nick VinZant 16:18
Yeah, I'm just picturing my grocery store, like they got all the different things and then bananas. Um, how often does like when in your studies, like how often does the nutritional label actually match up to what's inside of the food,
Dr. Christopher McNeil 16:32
it's not far off most of the time. But the way that most nutrition facts are, the way that nutrition labels are generally made today, is actually often using computer software, using validated databases, so the computer software is actually doing the calculations for you. It's not like, every single time Campbell's Soup wants to release a new soup line, they're not performing all the calculations, and like actually putting, like the food in a bomb calorimeter, which is going to measure the number of calories, like that's not what's happening anymore. But those databases are very comprehensive. And the calculations are pretty well established for how they're produced. But there are there is regulation on how close they have to be.
Nick VinZant 17:20
I guess the these are kind of all the same question in the sense that they're all like, along the same lines of is this bad for me? GMOs?
Dr. Christopher McNeil 17:30
No, I wouldn't they GMOs don't pose health risks to humans. And it's, at the end of the day, it comes more down to how they're being used, why they were developed, how they're being used, this is going to open up a huge can of worms. But long story short, GMOs are safe, they are safe. You can talk about disagreeing with the business model, you can talk about disagreeing with Pat having a patent for a seed, you can talk about that. But in terms of actual safety, for human consumption, they are safe.
Nick VinZant 18:12
So when we talk about genetically modified like, what is that? What are they doing to it, I know they're modifying the genes. But that doesn't mean anything to me necessarily
Dr. Christopher McNeil 18:24
modifying the genetic code of the plant itself, you can either add genes from other plants, or, you know, intentionally remove specific genes to like, turn on or turn off different attributes. The thing is, we've been selectively breeding plants for 10s of 1000s of years to get the desired qualities that we want. This is actually a much more targeted and specific way to do it. So it actually gives us more control, as opposed to just like hoping for random things to happen over the course of many, many generations, we can actually just choose what we want to have happen now. And I think that's actually a great approach to dealing with a lot of issues. I will say the applications of genetic modification, you know, you could talk a lot about the ethics or morality of it, but at the end of the day, I the technology itself is not evil. How people choose to use it you may disagree with and you can argue the ethics of that, but the the ability to introduce genes into a crop is not inherently good or bad.
Nick VinZant 19:47
Is it kind of like the idea that we used to do this with crops and the farmer would basically just pick the best crop? And now we just do it with a guy in a lab coat?
Dr. Christopher McNeil 19:56
Yeah, just to add, you know, when I see the knowledge GMO Project labels on things I get really frustrated. Because if you look at the actual list of approved GMOs in the United States, it's not a long list. It is not a long list, and they are slapping that Non GMO Project label on absolutely fucking everything. Sorry for language. But you know, that's they're not being used nearly as much as people think they are, you know, yes, you'll see it, you'll see GMO corn, but most of that corn is not going to human consumption, most of its being fed to cattle, and you'll see a lot of GMO soybeans. Once again, most of that is going to either making vegetable oil or feeding cattle, most of those aren't ending up in the human food supply at all. So I get I get frustrated with the conversation, just because most of the time, it's not ending up in our food supply anyway, or if it is ending up in very small amounts, in terms of like soybean oil that's coming from genetically modified plants, all of the genetic material and all of the protein that would have been like coded for five genetic material, all that's gone at that point, it's just the fat from the soybean. So any actual trace of anything that was genetically modified is entirely gone. So I it comes down to people just generally not understanding what it means or what being genetically modified. So anyway,
Nick VinZant 21:43
speaking of rants, how do you feel about fake sugar? And I'm Nikki never pronounce this word as as parted. You know what I'm talking about right? As? How do you say it and ascertain?
Dr. Christopher McNeil 21:58
Too much sugar is bad for you, we know that we know that. We can replace sugar in our food with other compounds that either have fewer or no calories. It's definitely a Pick Your Battles situation, aspartame. From a chemical breakdown perspective, when it's being digested, it isn't tirely broken down through processes that our bodies designed to handle to get rid of things like our bodies are really complex and are really good at handling things that we eat. Aspartame, when it's used in like a diet soda is used in such a small concentration. And it's actually in terms of aspartame in particular, is actually the most studied food additive, ever. Like there are more studies about aspartame than anything else that's ever been added to food. And time and time again, the United States, Europe, China, every major food agency in the world has said that the way that it's being used is safe. The thing that's probably worse for you is the caffeine from drinking the you know 50 diet sodas that would be required to hit any sort of like dangerous level of aspartame in your diet. We know that having too much like simple sugar in our diet in the form of sucrose or glucose or fructose, we know that those simple carbohydrates are not healthy for us in large quantities, we have options to replace it with other things. And if you're worried about the amount of sugar in your diet, try different artificial sweeteners. When I talked about aspartame on Tik Tok not too long ago, a lot of people said, hey, when I drink it, I get headaches. And you know, that is something that has been reported. There's not any real scientific evidence for why that happens. And when people have tried to explore it, they can't really identify really the mechanism that might be
Nick VinZant 24:06
causing that. Is it difficult for you to go grocery shopping? And I think what this person means is like, Are you always looking at the labels and being like, oh, red dye 40 Hmm.
Dr. Christopher McNeil 24:19
I don't fixate too much on any individual component of what I'm buying. I just don't buy a lot of starbursts, or I do eat too many cheeses. I will say like, the one thing that I shouldn't eat as much as I do is like, I'll go through like two boxes of cheese. It's a week, but that's a personal choice. And I'm, like, totally cool with that.
Nick VinZant 24:42
But there isn't something is there anything that you would look at and be like from a chemistry perspective in the sense that like, oh, that that's kinda Oh, that's a little bit. A little bit nasty.
Dr. Christopher McNeil 24:54
Really the only food that I'm like that with is energy drinks. supplements, there's a lot of supplements that you find in the store, like food actually go through a lot more strict regulatory processes, then supplements do. So it's actually not food that I'm not worried about. It's more, you know, the supplement aisle that, like raises concerns in my eyes
Nick VinZant 25:19
is that because of this, the basic ingredients are because we don't actually know what's in it.
Dr. Christopher McNeil 25:25
The regulatory processes are a lot different. A lot of it is, it's easier to get a supplement approved than a food. So any sort of new food additive has to go through a pretty extensive approval process. A lot of people will point to the fact that the United States has a generally recognized, generally recognized as safe classification, say, Oh, it's so easy to get any new food item prove it, it's a lot more rigorous than people think it is. It's a lot more difficult to get new foods on the market than people think it is. And supplements just don't go through the same regulation process. And it's a lot easier to get something on the market.
Nick VinZant 26:06
I keep feeling like this should have all been more complicated, right? Like there should be some kind of nasty boogeyman in our food. But it really kind of just sounds like from a chemistry perspective, like, just don't eat like an idiot, and you'll probably be fine.
Dr. Christopher McNeil 26:20
100% Don't be an idiot is something that a lot of people still need to learn. Uh, no, it's just
Nick VinZant 26:26
why do you why do you think that then we there's such a big deal about like, You got to eat blueberries? Like, why do you think that there's all this stuff, we're constantly being told, like, you got to eat this, don't eat this, your heart will blow up.
Dr. Christopher McNeil 26:40
As opposed to medication where like, you'll only be exposed to it if you're like prescribed specific medication, we have to eat every day, like we have, like food is something that everyone has to have a relationship on some degree. Because if not, you will starve to death and die. So because it's such an intimate part of our day to day life, because if you think about it, everything that you eat, is going like inside of you and is in theory becoming a part of you. So like eating itself is a pretty intimate act, even if people don't necessarily think of it that way. And we live in a world where people aren't necessarily, you know, dying of preventable disease all the time, always I know, we're in the middle of a pandemic. And this is kind of the exception. But most of the time, like, the things that were killing people 150 years ago, like a lot of diseases, were just we were not really facing those anymore. Now we're dealing with things like chronic disease, and we're trying to find out like, how can we prevent things like heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and we know that there are beneficial qualities to certain things. But kind of, as I said earlier, with the approach to narrowing down really specifically on, you know, a specific component of food like focusing on you said, riboflavin, we know that that's not a really great model for what people are actually doing on a day to day basis. So you're seeing results from the person studies that haven't really been observed in the real world, you'll see data from you know, some rodent model showed that something gives you cancer. But we haven't seen that same result in all the other studies or an actual day to day life. So there is sort of a sensationalism that goes on in the way that nutrition is being reported. And also, there's a lot of people who are profiting off of selling people supplements or blueberries, or there are financial incentives to to be sensational about your conversations about about food. And that's why every other year, we hear that a glass of wine is good for your heart versus terrible for your heart and back and forth.
Nick VinZant 29:14
That's so true, right? And I get that in the sense that like, we can repeat this thing in a lab with a mouse. And we found that this is bad for you. But then when you go into the real world, we can't really repeat that ever, because there's just too many variables is kind of all that stuff then besides eat healthy and you'll probably be okay. Is it a lie a
Dr. Christopher McNeil 29:36
lot is a strong word. I mean,
Nick VinZant 29:39
a misunderstanding.
Dr. Christopher McNeil 29:42
A misunderstanding I think is a better way to put it, um, where science is always evolving. We're constantly learning new things and we're constantly integrating new ideas into you know, the general body of knowledge. And when it comes to nutrition work, there's a lot of noise And there's a lot of interesting studies going on. But at the end of the day, we know what works. And it's a high fiber diet, like a high like, low, lower sodium, lower saturated fat, high fiber, you know, lots of routes and vegetables, lots of whole grains, like, those are the things that we know work, because those are the things that have been observed. Anybody telling you, you can or can't eat any, like specific thing is generally, either they have misunderstood the science, or they're trying to get you to misunderstand the science.
Nick VinZant 30:38
That kind of answers this other question I? And maybe if it doesn't, and if you feel like we've answered it, then skip it. If we feel like we haven't, then don't? Are we making too big of a deal? Or not a big enough deal of our food?
Dr. Christopher McNeil 30:52
Cut? It depends on what you mean. Um, I would, I would love if people made a bigger deal out of knowing where their food came from. Like I would love people made a much bigger deal of like, knowing who grew that strawberry, to connect more with food and make that a big deal. When it comes to, are we making too big of a deal? Over like the nitty gritty, like, don't eat that because it has Blanc in it. 100% I think we're making way too big of a deal of that.
Nick VinZant 31:29
That's all the questions that I have, is there anything that you think we missed, or kind of like what's coming up next for you?
Dr. Christopher McNeil 31:35
You know, being here in the Bay Area. There's just a lot of really interesting ideas. And people are doing really cool things with food. The center that I work at, at the University that I'm at now actually studies, trends in food innovation and entrepreneurial ventures within the food space. I live in Silicon Valley. I come from a family that Tech has been very good to my family. So now my space is more focused on what are sort of the radical interesting ideas within food and agriculture. That we need to develop new technologies for how can we apply technologies in a new and interesting way to either produce new food or produce food in a better way. So I'm no longer locked away in a chemistry lab. I talked to a lot more business people than I ever had before in my entire life. But it's really interesting seeing what innovative and creative things people are doing within food and agriculture, and how we can incorporate technology better in the entire system.