Fork U with Dr. Terry Simpson

Ultra-Processed Food: Making Sense of the Madness Ultra-processed food has become the villain of modern nutrition. Scroll through social media, and you’ll hear that it’s poisoning us, wrecking our gut, and driving the obesity epidemic all by itself. At the same time, other voices dismiss the entire idea as fear-mongering. According to them, processing doesn’t matter at all. Neither extreme tells t...

Willpower Is B.S.: Food Noise, Healthspan, and What Actually Changed My Life For decades, I started every New Year the same way. In January, I promised myself this would be the year. By February, I tried harder. Every spring, I adjusted the plan. And by summer or fall, the weight crept back. That cycle repeated not because I lacked knowledge, discipline, or effort. Instead, it repeated because I m...

Is Your Watch Predicting Your Death? What Biologic Age Really Means — and What It Doesn’t My Whoop tells me I’m eight years older than I actually am. Naturally, that raises a question. Does that mean I’m going to die eight years sooner? Is my watch quietly chiseling a new date onto my tombstone? Fortunately, the answer is no. Still, confusion around biologic age has exploded. Wearables promise ins...

GLP-1 Drugs, the Mediterranean Diet, and the Science of Living Longer For years, anti -aging has been hijacked by supplements, hacks, and promises that never hold up. Meanwhile, real science has quietly moved forward. Today, the most compelling anti-aging story does not come from a powder, a cold plunge, or a fasting app. Instead, it comes from metabolism . A class of medications called GLP-1 rece...

The Holiday Party That Turned Deadly It started at a holiday party. Laughter, champagne, a toast — then a collapse. A fifty-two-year-old, active and healthy, suddenly lost consciousness. Paramedics did CPR and shocked her heart twice. She survived — barely. Doctors called it Holiday Heart Syndrome: an alcohol-triggered arrhythmia that can kill.​ What Is Holiday Heart? Holiday Heart arises after bi...

Muscle is Medicine: Why Lifting Weights is Your Best Longevity Investment Clearly, your body changes as you age. I learned this lesson years ago when my son was three years old. We started him skiing, and he loved every minute of it. When he fell, he tumbled onto his behind, jumped right back up, and skied down the hill like nothing had happened. He was pure rubber and resilience. However, I was...

🧬 Telomeres and Time: Can We Really Rewind Aging? The Lowest Hemoglobin I’ve Ever Seen The lowest hemoglobin I’ve ever seen belonged to a young woman who was still standing. Her blood count was one-fourth of normal. She was pale, short of breath, and strong enough to walk into the clinic. Doctors soon learned her bone marrow had stopped making new blood cells. The diagnosis was aplastic anemia —...

The Mitochondria Problem: Why These Tiny Powerhouses Shape How We Age Many people suddenly talk about mitochondria. You hear them in political speeches, on podcasts, and across social media. RFK Jr said he can “see” kids with weak mitochondria just by watching them walk through an airport. Others claim special diets or powders can “fix” aging by supercharging these organelles. However, most of tha...

Urolithin A: What It Is, How It Works, and Why Your Gut Decides Everything By Dr. Terry Simpson Most people hear the name Urolithin A and think it belongs in a commercial about prostate health. It sounds like something a man named “Gary, 62,” would talk about while fishing. But Urolithin A has nothing to do with plumbing. Instead, it sits at the center of a new wave of longevity science focused on...

🧬 NAD: The Molecule of Life — and the Hype How a lab coenzyme became the latest anti-aging obsession What We Mean by Longevity and Healthspan When people talk about longevity , they usually mean how long we live. But healthspan — the years we live well — matters far more. That’s the time before disease steals our energy, mobility, and independence. Modern medicine has already doubled our lifespan...

🎙 Celebrating 100 Episodes of Science, Sanity, and a Little Sarcasm This is it — our 100th episode of FORK U . Over the last hundred episodes, we’ve gone from goat-gland hucksters to the microbiome, from Kellogg’s enemas to cholesterol chemistry, and from Blue Zones to bird flu. Today, we look back — not just to celebrate the great scientists who shaped modern medicine, but to expose the modern in...

Thanksgiving is more than a meal — it’s a worldwide celebration of gratitude built around foods that started here in the Americas. Corn, beans, potatoes, and turkey didn’t just feed a nation; they changed global cuisine. Today, we blend culinary history with medical sense to show how to enjoy the feast without the nap. 🍁 A Holiday for the World Our Canadian friends already finished their celebrat...

When Vitamin D Isn’t Sunshine in a Bottle Vitamin D is sold as bottled sunshine . Social media says it boosts immunity, prevents cancer, and makes you live longer. But science says something very different — and megadoses pushed by influencers like Dr. Eric Berg can do more harm than good. Here’s what you need to know. ☀️ The Sunshine Vitamin — and the Myth That Follows Vitamin D has been called t...

Animal Protein and Cancer Risk: What the Science Really Says Recently, Mark Hyman posted on X (formerly Twitter) that a new study suggests eating more animal protein might actually lower your risk of cancer. The study he pointed to came from the NHANES dataset—a U.S. survey of diet and health. It sounded reassuring, but it doesn’t line up with the bulk of the evidence. Here is the story about Anim...

When Green Tea Isn’t Chemotherapy Introduction Food is powerful. Eating well lowers your risk of many diseases, including cancer. Yet food is not chemotherapy. Still, the idea that broccoli or green tea could replace cancer treatment is tempting. It feels safe, natural, and hopeful. However, cancer is not treated with vegetables or tea. Cancer is treated with medicine. Let’s break down what food c...

Food Is Powerful, But It’s Not Enough Food shapes our health. Eating beans, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains can lower the risk of diabetes and other chronic conditions. Yet food does not replace medicine. Clearly, diets high in ultra-processed foods make diabetes worse. And yes, eating better is the most empowering thing anyone can do. Still, some claim that modern food is the only reason we...

When Salmon Isn’t a Stent Heart disease was four times more deadly than it is today. In those days, we had no statins, no stents, and no bypass surgery. Food was the only weapon doctors had. Pharmacies in Rome and Greece even stocked extra virgin olive oil for patients with “hardening of the arteries.” Doctors sent people to pick up bottles, almost like prescriptions. Olive oil wasn’t curing clogg...

When Bananas Aren’t a Beta Blocker People love to believe that food can replace medicine. We talked about this in Episode One, where I explained that Hippocrates never said “let food be thy medicine.” Still, the myth endures. Food does matter. The right eating pattern can lower blood pressure. One of the best-studied is the DASH Diet —short for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension. It is often...

When Tofu Isn’t a Statin People love to say “ food is medicine .” Some even claim Hippocrates himself said it. But here’s the thing: he didn’t. The phrase does not appear in any of his surviving writings. In fact, historians believe the line was created centuries later and then falsely attached to Hippocrates to give it weight. Still, the idea persists. Even the current head of HHS, Robert F. Kenn...

Milk: Life, Death, and the Paradox Milk has always been central to survival. When mothers died in childbirth—and this happened often before modern medicine—infants survived only if they had access to another nursing mother or wet nurse. When that wasn’t possible, families sometimes turned to the milk of other mammals. That discovery helped keep our species alive. However, milk’s role in human surv...

Protein Powders: What’s Real, What’s Hype, and Why It Matters Protein powders are everywhere. Walk into a gym, scroll through social media, or visit a health food store, and you’ll see tubs of whey, egg, pea, and soy protein. Add buzzwords like “isolate,” “hydrolysate,” and “grass-fed,” and suddenly these powders sound like liquid gold. But how much of this is science—and how much is hype? From Su...

Make America Healthy Again? Hyman’s Half-Truths Exposed Mark Hyman loves a soundbite. One of his favorites is: “If doctors were trained in nutrition, we could prevent 90% of heart disease and type 2 diabetes.” It sounds inspiring. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. Nutrition Is Powerful — But It’s Not Magic I’m certified in culinary medicine, and I live the Mediterranean diet. Good nutrition matters. I...

Carter’s Little Liver Pills: The Original Detox Scam and Its Modern Cousins For more than a century, people have searched for quick fixes to “cleanse” the liver. From old‑time laxatives to today’s wellness shots and hangover probiotics, the promise is the same: remove toxins, feel better, live longer. However, as science catches up with marketing claims, we learn a hard truth — most of these clean...

Goat Glands, Chloroform, and the City That Saved Surgery (How Edinburgh dragged American medicine out of the Wild West)  When we think about modern surgery, it’s easy to imagine it has always been clean, safe, and scientific. However, that could not be further from the truth. Surgery was more like a horror show just over 150 years ago. Patients faced unbearable pain, filthy instruments, and s...

A Hole Lot of Nonsense: Surgery Before Science People once drilled holes in skulls to cure madness And in some cases… it actually helped. Well, if you consider madness what happens if you get a stroke from too much pressure in your brain from trauma That’s the wild part. While visiting the Surgeons’ Hall Museum in Edinburgh, I saw ancient skulls with round holes cut into them—evidence of trepanati...