Eat Or Die: Stories From The Human Table

Most people avoid beans because of the gas. The science says that is exactly backwards. The oligosaccharides that produce the discomfort are the same compounds that feed your gut microbiome, generate short-chain fatty acids that reduce inflammation, and drive the prebiotic benefit that makes beans one of the most consequential foods for long-term health. The discomfort fades after two to four week...

Nine thousand years ago, the people of the Balsas Valley began transforming a wild grass with five inedible kernels into the most productive crop in the Western Hemisphere. What they built over five millennia of careful, intentional agricultural work is the most dramatic plant domestication in recorded history. What they discovered afterward — a preparation technique that unlocked the nutrition lo...

Seven thousand years, six hundred flavor compounds, and the full affirmative health case for the most complex food humans have ever made. The dairy series finale — and the Season One closer. Cheese earned this episode.

Part Three of the dairy series — milk was the origin, butter was the vindication, yogurt is the fermentation. The science here is less contested than most of what this show covers, which is its own kind of relief. The evidence for yogurt is consistent, the mechanisms are understood, and the food has ten thousand years of safe human use behind it. What the American food industry did to it in the se...

Butter is not a guilty pleasure. It is not something to consume in secret or apologize for. It is a five-thousand-year-old human food that is, when sourced from grass-fed animals and consumed in the context of an otherwise sound diet, genuinely good for you. The bog-burying Irish knew it. The French knew it. The Indian tradition of ghee as a sacred nourishing substance knew it. Now you know it too...

Milk changed us. Genetically. Literally. A food altered the human species to be able to consume it more efficiently — because the populations that could consume it had a survival advantage significant enough to propagate the trait across generations. That is not a minor thing. That is one of the most dramatic examples of gene-culture co-development in human history. Today we begin a four-part seri...

Right now, inside your gut, there are approximately 100 trillion microorganisms — bacteria, fungi, viruses, archaea — representing somewhere between 500 and 1,000 distinct species. They outnumber your own cells. They collectively contain 150 times more genes than your own genome. They have been with you, in one form or another, since the moment you were born — and they are running processes that y...

Fish is the food that fed coastlines and built trade routes and launched fishing fleets and eventually gave us the most studied dietary pattern in cardiovascular history. It is also, in the modern food environment, one of the most confusing things to shop for — a seafood counter where the gap between the best and worst choices is nutritionally enormous, and where terms like 'fresh,' 'natural,' and...

Somewhere around 1750 BCE, an Olmec priest prepared cacao for a ritual occasion — roasting the beans, grinding them on stone, mixing the paste with water, pouring it from vessel to vessel in the firelight to create the sacred froth. Three thousand years later, a team of researchers at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston published a randomized controlled trial showing that cocoa flavanol sup...

Vitamin D. Technically a hormone more than a vitamin — we'll get to that — deficient or insufficient in an estimated one billion people worldwide. In the United States alone, roughly 42 percent of adults are deficient. The number climbs higher in northern latitudes, higher still in winter months, higher still in people with darker skin, people who spend most of their time indoors, and people o...

The potato is one of the most nutritionally complete foods on the planet. It fed empires. It saved populations from starvation. It is the only food a human being has been documented to survive on, almost exclusively, for extended periods — with full health maintained. Today, we are giving the potato its day in court. Evidence will be presented. Witnesses will be called. And by the end of this epis...

We've done protein. Grains. Magnesium. Beer. All of them fascinating, all of them important, none of them quite like this. Sugar is the episode where everything we've discussed so far converges. The blood sugar spikes we talked about in the grains episode. The insulin resistance. The metabolic dysfunction. The way the food industry operates. The gap between what official guidelines say and...

This is Eat or Die: Stories from the Human Table, from Renegade Health Group. Today we're talking about beer. Which your doctor will probably tell you to drink less of. And by the end of this episode, you'll understand exactly why — and also why ten thousand years of human beings disagreed, and why they weren't entirely wrong. This is a long one. Get comfortable. Maybe grab something to drink.

This is Eat or Die: Stories from the Human Table, fromRenegade Health Group. Each episode, we take one ingredient — a nutrient, a food, a molecule — and we follow it. Through history. Through biology. Through your daily life. Three episodes in, and we've covered the molecule that built your body and the seed that built civilization. Today we're going smaller — down to a single mineral, inv...

This is Eat or Die: Stories from the Human Table — a show from Renegade Health Group about the things we eat, the history behind them, and what the science actually says when the marketing gets out of the way. Each episode, we take one ingredient — a nutrient, a food, a molecule — and we follow it. Through history. Through biology. Through your daily life.   Today we're talking about grains — the...

Welcome to Eat or Die: Stories from the Human Table — a show from Renegade Health Group about the things we eat, the history behind them, and what the science actually says when the marketing gets out of the way. Each episode, we take one ingredient — a nutrient, a food, a molecule — and we follow it. Through history. Through biology. Through your daily life. Today: Protein. The most talked-about...