A Seat at the Table with Anthony Bourdain (Part 1)

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Radio. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I'm an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. We also serve as the director of the Hayden Planetarium. And I have with me my co-host for this program, the one and the only Eugene Mermin. Eugene, welcome back. Welcome back to me. We so tap your talents for this, thank you. And this will not be the last. No. For sure. This would be a fun way to fire me. And you're still on one of the voices in Bob's? I'm still one of the voices of Bob's Burgers, also not replaced. Bob's Burgers. We'll get back to Burgers in a minute. Today's show, by the way, is about food and nutrition. So I combed the land. Then I found someone who actually has the title, Professor of Nutrition at New York University, Marion Nestle. Marion, welcome to StarTalk. Glad to be here, I think. She thinks, so you'll be the judge of that later, we'll find out. First, I'm intrigued and impressed that there's such a thing as a professor of nutrition. So I'm glad that somebody has that. He thought of it like alchemy. Nutrition departments all over the country. No, I just never ran into one and I'm glad you were here and ready for us. Because in this episode of StarTalk, we have my interview with Anthony Bourdain. He's the famous TV- Travel chef. Travel chef. In fact, first he had a New York Times bestselling book in their year 2000 titled Kitchen Confidential Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, bestselling book. Which I understand is a very accurate account. Excellent. So he's been around a while and he had a longstanding travel channel show called, of course, No Reservations, and he's moving from the travel channel to CNN. And he's going to do a show, Cuisines of the World. So I just chatted with him about what made him tick, what got him interested in food. In particular, what intrigues me, and we'll get back to you on this in a minute, is just how cuisine can be so different around the world. What some people think is nasty, other people think is extraordinary. And how people just eat differently around the world. So let's go to this first clip right away, and we'll have a lot of time to talk about it and carry it into the other segments. My opening clip with Anthony Bourdain, Chef Extraordinaire. People always say, oh, I've been to this country and this food is a delicacy there. That's a cue to me that the food tastes nasty or some bug that they pulled out of the ground and sauteed. So what's with people saying something is a delicacy? Well, it's rare or expensive. You know, it's valued more than, you know, the way we look at the shrimp or lobster or truffles as the good stuff. A lot of people in this world look at ingredients that many of us would probably have difficulty with. That's an attitude that changes really quickly the more you travel. Something I got over very quickly, particularly, you know, you talk about, wow, their food in Thailand is really repulsive to me. I mean, they eat bugs. But the Thais, who are largely a non-dairy culture, try to put yourself in their shoes. They're looking at us. You eat cottage cheese or Roquefort would be truly horrifying. And if you think about it for a second, what that must look like. You get some milk and then like turn it into cheese and then let mold grow on it. Right. Yeah, just hideous. I got over sort of using words like bizarre a long time ago when looking at how other people eat around the world. But what I do find interesting, though, is you go from one country to the next. And one of the simplest measures of this is what is the assortment of flavors that they infuse in their potato chips? Yeah, right. I mean, you know, so in Japan, they have like fish flavored potato chips. I mean, we eat fish here, but I don't know that that would sell. There are whole spectrums of flavors that other countries, other cultures take for granted and require in their diet. The Philippines, there's a whole bitter component that we are almost instinctively not happy with. I mean, they will introduce bile into dishes to give it that welcome bitter note. Cultures like Scandinavian cultures, where there's a very limited spectrum of flavors, not a lot of spices traditionally, a lot of fresh fish, fresh fish, frozen fish, more fresh fish, maybe some preserved fish, as well as South Pacific cultures where it's all sort of sweet, fresh fish, not a lot of salty, savory. There's a tradition of rotting things like fermenting fish, getting it really offensively funky by our standards just because I think out of boredom. It introduces another flavor. And it's worth noting also that we, Western societies, and we used to do that. Roman times, the condiment of choice was essentially something called garum. It was essentially rotten fish guts and rotten fish sauce. This was the salt, the principal seasoning ingredient all across Europe. So even our own tastes have changed. For a lot of people, the last frontier is the textural thing. Particularly in Asia, they like squishy or even rubbery, chewy, or a lot of traditional European cultures have a cartilage texture. That's something that we really have a problem with. We tend to like crispy. Once you cross that border, you're someplace special. To get back to your question about delicacies, a lot of I think, you got to ask always, is there an assumed medical component to what we're talking about also? I think a lot of what we consider the really freakiest foods, the eye-popping, why would you eat that? A lot of that has either folk medicine or traditional Chinese medicine applications, or a regular feature in my life in China is if something arrives, still wriggling, or there's a sex organ involved, it's usually accompanied by winking and banging on the bottom of the table. This will make you strong. Many, many sons, you know, it's like, oh God. So Marion, I got to go straight to you on this. When we think of nutrition, I think of things that are tasty that might be good for me. And for so many of the cultures of the world, I don't know that they have an active science of nutrition, but they just simply know what has worked over the centuries, right? So is a person more likely to think that something tasty is actually nutritious? Probably. But the point is that... The physiology of that. Yeah, but people eat what's available. You know, before there were supermarkets and before there was internet food and before there was food on every corner, people had to eat what was available to them. So they learned to put together a diet that supported life, supported reproduction. So the empirics of that is, if you died, you didn't keep doing it. Yeah, they wouldn't be here if it hadn't worked. So, wait, you were saying that people would eat healthy... You would think ribs were delicious because they're healthy because they're delicious? If you had them. If you had them. Because these people survive. These cultures survive. These populations survive. Yeah. So it's self-selecting. And we know that healthy diets can be made out of almost anything as long as the foods are varied. In India, they drink a bear-ass friend soup. Yeah, and you don't eat too much of them. On that note, we'll come back to StarTalk Radio after this break. We're back on StarTalk Radio, and I've got Eugene Lerman. Hello. And this show is about nutrition. So, professor of nutrition here, Marion Nestle. Marion, thanks for being on StarTalk. Coming up from New York University. And in fact, you have a book, just was published, Why Calories Count, From Science to Politics. How about that? That's awesome. Because calories do count. They do. So, here we are talking about nutrition all around the world. And so, here are people eating local foods. They're not thinking, does it have vitamin C? Does it have vitamin A? But if someone gets sick or the tribe doesn't continue, presumably, they figured out that that diet wasn't good. And so, over the generations, an emergent diet comes that happens to work out. If it didn't, they wouldn't be here. They wouldn't be here. Everyone who tried to just only eat dirt is dead. That's right. All the religions and the people who just only just- All the cults and all the things. Yeah, they'd like suck on a weird rock and be like, I still feel hungry. They're all dead. They're all dead. All we have now is French food. A lot of Asian food. So here in America, I guess since the 1950s, but certainly in recent decades, fast food is a major part of the American diet. It's everywhere. And then with the American cultural influence around the world, our fast food restaurants are showing up in other countries. Is that good? Is it bad? I mean, do you have an opinion on this? It's business. There's only a certain amount that people can eat. Americans, they're maxed out on what they can eat. If these companies want to make money, they have to move it overseas. So, they can't make us fatter than we are. Yeah, yeah. We've hit a fat max. And we now need to make everyone in Vietnam fat. We're working on it. And then when Earth is done with the next planet, right? All right, but fast food shouldn't necessarily make a person fat. Not if they don't eat too much of it. If they don't eat too much of it. So, the issue is not the existence of fast food, it's the regulation of the consumption of food. Yes, and that turns out to be evolutionarily complicated because we have about a hundred physiological factors that encourage us to eat more, and one or two. Because historically, on the Serengeti, that's survival. If you found a McDonald's on the Serengeti, you would be like, I'm gonna eat all I can, because the next McDonald's is centuries away possibly. I had a brother-in-law who grew up in Alaska and every time we fed him, we said, you want seconds? And he said, you never know when you're gonna eat next. But in fact, he does know when he's gonna eat next, and it's in three hours when it's the next meal. Right, so we're not very well-tuned to the environment that we're in, and our physiology is much better at saying, eat, eat, eat, eat, you're hungry, better get the glucose to the brain quick, and much, much less effective at telling us when to stop. When to not eat. Alas. We're like geese trying to turn ourselves into foie gras. Band in California. So you're saying the ready availability of fast food is what's contributing to our inability to stop eating. Yeah, the things that encourage people to eat more are having it right there. If we had candy here, we'd be eating it. The fact that you could eat it anytime, night or day, 24-7. Because you got the refrigerator that's got the food through the night, and there's a corner person selling you food, particularly in the cities. So that makes people eat more. You make it sound like gluttonous monsters surrounded by piles of food. We're just encouraged to exercise our physiology. We're not biologically prepared for the world we've created around ourselves. That's right. You know, I spoke with Anthony Bourdain about this, just to get his reaction to it. Let's find out what he said. So what about the idea of what Americans have done to some foods? We put cheese in a can. Now, maybe the cheese tastes okay, but that's got to be an abomination to the cheese cultures of the world. Increasingly, the French are doing it too. You know, the great cheese making cultures, by joining the EU, have agreed to bastardize a lot of their traditional artisanal products, like cured meats, traditional forms of cheese making. They've been killing their own products for years. Is that not our influence, our cultural influence on them? It's a combination of convenience food culture. Well, who invented convenience food? Well, America, I think it's a by-product of post-war affluence, less time to kick back. Second World War. More specified for the current generation. People forget, they lose touch with their roots. They learn to demand newer, saltier flavors. So it's not just us, unfortunately. So there's not only a concept of fast food, to which there's been this resistance, I guess they're calling it slow food, right? I mean, has that movement caught on? People certainly talk about or think about where their food's coming from a lot more, and not just at the elite foodie levels. People, even if they're not particularly knowledgeable about organics or sustainable or local or artisan, all of those very fuzzy words, at least they're thinking about it now. You only need to look at, but McDonald's has publicly foresworn any use of pink slime. Pink slime, it is not an ingredient, according to the rules. It is a process that allowed ground beef manufacturers to essentially buy the outer cuts of beef that would otherwise previously have had to be discarded or used for pet food because they were more likely to come in contact with hides, excrement, other animals and contain E coli. They found by introducing, as I understand it, an ammonia vapor, basically steaming this stuff, whipping it into a mulch-like paste with bits of extruded fat, mixing it into this slime and processing it with ammonia that they were able to bring the likelihood of E coli down. Now, it doesn't sound like good stuff for sure, and there was clearly a backlash, though not a huge one. The fact that McDonald's and other major retail outlets are saying, we're not using it anymore, it's not like they're nice guys. They're looking pretty far into the future and seeing that this is gonna come back and bite us. We're saving money now, we're making money now, but this could really come back and hurt our brand. So clearly that's one of many indications of this sort of thinking affecting the marketplace. Yeah, so it wasn't like you said, it was not a separate ingredient because it was still beef. Well, that's up to you to decide whether the introduction of an ammonia vapor or whatever is an ingredient or a process. Personally, I would like to know if there's ammonia in my cleaning product, in my meat. All right, so this is kind of America's hallmark. Agribusiness, growing production and storage technologies, I think America has led the world in this. We have. I looked this up recently. We're spending a third today of our annual budget on food compared with what we were doing in the 1950s. Our single largest privately held company is a food producer. I think Cargill is the biggest American privately held company. And so we're making more food on less land with fewer farmers than ever before. No doubt about it. Frozen food, surely a good thing, most of these things. But with the good comes the bad. And the bad might be that it is in the financial interest of some very large, powerful companies that you continue to eat badly and too much. And they're gonna spend a lot of money, as any company will do, to make you continue to buy their products. And a lot of these products are not ideal staples of any diet. We need only look at the way Americans look in the state of our health to see that that's the truth. So is processed food bad? I like french fries. I like burgers. That burger last night. It's not like cigarettes. It's a matter of proportion. It's not you can't eat it, it's that you can't eat too much of it. That's hard. So it is so good and so cheap, it makes it that much harder to regulate. And the politics come into how come it's so cheap. Okay, so what's an example of that? We subsidize corn and soybeans, we don't subsidize broccoli. And soybeans, what do we do with that that's so bad for people? Soy oil, it goes into processed foods. So what's your solution to this? Is it to make food more expensive? Is it to change the availability of it? What's the solution? Yeah, you wanna change the environment in order to make it easier for people to eat more healthfully. That's what Mayor Bloomberg is trying to do with his 16 ounce soda cap. He's trying to outlaw 20 ounce sodas in the city. Yeah, he's trying to make fat people illegal, which I think is a good thing. So are you over that line? Are you ready to go? I don't drink a lot of soda. I'm just a regular fat person. But I think that band sounds pretty good. But what if we subsidize parsley? It's not a band, it's a cap. Yeah, yeah, it's a cap. It's a cap. So if there is a public good that laws can serve, because somebody out there is more concerned about your health than you are. Yes, because they have to pay for it. Right. If something goes wrong. Right, the insurance base, the tax base. I mean, there have been estimates, I don't know how good they are, that overweight costs America $190 billion a year. You can go to Mars twice for that. I would hope so. And imagine if the trip was full of people who were overweight. The savings combined with shipping away the problem, plus the exploration, it's just like, I'm full of solutions. So lately, fast food has been fortified in ways so you are getting vitamins and minerals and things. Isn't that right? Oh, it has vitamins and minerals and protein and other kinds of nutrients. It's not sodas. Sodas are the only thing that have calories and no nutrients. And no nutrients, yeah. Okay, so- And alcohol, sorry. Okay, so- You think there's no nutrients? There's no. Not even whiskey? It makes pregnant people run faster? Isn't that true? That's true. When we come back to StarTalk Radio, more with my interview with Anthony Bourdain, we're talking about nutrition around the world, food around the world. More on StarTalk Radio when we come back. We're back on StarTalk Radio, and I'm with Eugene Mermin. Hello. And I've got Professor Marion Nestle, spelled like Nestle, I guess, but without the accent. Without the accent. Too bad, right? She's Professor of Nutrition at New York University, has thought a lot about this, and not only nutrition in general, but the role of food and its impact on culture and politics. In fact, you've got a book out called Why Calories Count, From Science to Politics. Excellent title, check it out. So, what's interesting is different regions of the world have different diets, and you can look at how long those people live, and say, hey, maybe something's going on in their culture that's not going on in my culture. They've talked about the Mediterranean diet that is high in, I guess, olive oils and things. There's the Japanese, broadly the Asian diet, which is very low fat, high carbs. Let's hear what Anthony Bourdain had to say about it, and then we come back and get some of the science of why that may or may not be true. Let's check it out. Tell me about these diets, we call them diets, whether it's just the mainstay, culinary offerings, and in various parts of the world. There's a lot spoken of the Mediterranean diet or the Japanese diet, and they live a long time. Heart disease is low. From your life experience, is all that true? No doubt about it. I mean, you go to Crete, for instance. I guess we know it's true, but... Look, if you're... You're gonna credit the food, or because there's no stress, or because how big a factor is the food? I'm guessing there's... You're a Vietnamese rice farmer. There's... You're workin hard. You're workin. You are workin hard, and there is stress in your life. Especially if you've been through three or four wars in the last 30 years. I don't think that's it. I think clearly the ratio, in much of the world, the ratio of... I'm a confirmed carnivore, but clearly there's something to be said for cultures where the ratio of meat, of protein, to fresh vegetables is completely different. Ours is distorted. Much of the cultures we're talking about, they use meat or bone or protein almost as a flavoring ingredient, very careful. It's much more valued. A condiment, yeah. You have delicious, for the most part, vegetables, generally a filler like starch, like whether it's rice or cassava or potato, wherever it is. Clearly, it has an impact on what your body looks like and how long you're gonna live. No doubt about it. All right, now, you're over six feet tall. In Japan, people hardly get that height. So is it a trade-off between that kind of diet and whether you grow tall? Well, I don't think it's a trade-off we make anymore because they're getting taller and bigger. There's no doubt about it as they become fonder of Western food and processed food. I mean, the same thing's happening there as here, the bulking of the world. But I think, yeah, there clearly is. I mean, one of my favorite, I'm not particularly well-inclined. As much as it might be good to eat more vegetables and less animal protein, I'm not particularly well-inclined towards really hardcore unwavering of vegans. So one of my favorite statistics is that apparently, vegans in non-industrialized cultures seem to do much better than vegans in industrialized cultures. And people were trying to figure out why that was, why they're living longer and seem healthier. Apparently, the insect parts and carcasses in rice are much higher in non-industrial cultures. It's left in the product. Yeah, so basically, they're getting a lot more animal protein. Insect protein. We're flicking away the insects out of our vegetables. Very high in protein bugs, by the way. People eat those for a reason. So, you know, I happen to know separately that little people live longer than big people. So if you have a culture where everyone's little, then maybe it doesn't matter what they eat. Leave them alone. That's why babies live forever. So in certain cultures, people are just smaller. Maybe that's the biggest driver for their longevity. Or is there much truth in these diets that... What can you say? The statistics all show that there are plenty of countries in the world that have much better longevity than we do. And they tend to have in common that they eat more plant foods, fruits and vegetables and grains, and they don't eat as much meat and they don't eat as much junk food. And as the American fast food and soda company... It's not just fewer calories. It's the actual mixture of... It has a lot to do with calories. It's just harder to eat so much parsley that it's as many calories as a burger. Really hard to get fat on parsley. You have to eat roomfuls of it. It's really tough. Now, Buddha, last I checked, was a vegetarian and he's generally shown as quite chubby. Yes, but everybody was bringing him rice offerings all day long. He had a very high carb diet. That's the reason. All day long. Okay, so you're prepared to say that if in America, if we want to live longer, cut the meat. Cut the calories. Oh, cut the calories. Cut the calories and change the balance of the meat. And change the balance. Eat more fruits and vegetables. Don't eat so much junk food. Balance calories and love what you're eating. What does that do for you? That's my advice. Love what, meaning eat, find ways to make foods that aren't burgers delicious. Yeah, or just make sure that you enjoy what you eat. Burgers, the reference frame for all other foods. I don't even, I mean, burgers are totally fine. But food is one of life's greatest pleasures. Yeah. You should enjoy it and not make it your enemy. It should be your friend. Right? Food is your friend. Be friend food. You're like Yoda. You're like be friend food. Eat it. When we come back, more of my clips with Anthony Bourdain and my in-studio guest, Marion Nestle and of course, Eugene Berman. We'll be right back. We're back, StarTalk Radio. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host. Find us on the web at startalkradio.net. You can download our archives of shows, great stuff there. And not only that, we're on Facebook, like us there. Just StarTalk Radio, you'll find us. And we tweet, StarTalk Radio, of course. Eugene, you tweet. Yes. At Eugene Mermin. M-I-R-M-I-N. M-A-N. And my special guest today, right up. I tweet. You tweet? Nice. I do. A tweeting nutritionist. Marion Nestle. Marion Nestle. Oh, we came out of that previous segment, I called you Nestle, I'm sorry. I can't be the first one. No relation, you're not the first. And I'm not the first. And you won't be the last. And I surely won't be the last. By the way, we're also on the Nerdist channel of YouTube. Check us out in video form. So we're featuring my interview with Anthony Bourdain. Yeah. He gets around, he makes great food, he eats food that is prepared all around the world. And an intriguing subject, as you know, because not everyone eats the same way. My great disappointment traveling America is the same restaurants are in the same places. And I asked him about food that's sort of good or bad. You know, I mean, you can make that judgment. You mean like morally? Because he travels the world. I mean, when you travel, you eat different foods. So I asked him, what kind of good food did he have? What kind of bad food? No, just what did he taste good? Tasted good, didn't taste good, that's all. But might be a delicacy in its land. So let's find out what he said. The fermented fish in Iceland is something I will never ever be able to really, even many people in Iceland, probably even the majority, it's a celebrated national dish that they eat on their holidays and it's basically rotten, sharp. I'm not gonna be visiting that again. I could choke down anything to be a good guest. The really, the only real problems, when it's a matter of freshness, when it's a really poor culture with very limited access to ingredients. You have a hearty digestive system? Yeah, but I mean, the two times that I've been brought down and lost a day's work were both tribal situations, the whole tribe looking at me, it's bush meat, it's whatever protein they could scrounge. It's not in good shape. There are cleanliness issues. You took one for the team. I absolutely did. The surprises are everywhere. Eating street food in Asia changed my life. It ruined my life in wonderful ways. When you've had a really well-made bowl of spicy noodles in Vietnam, even out of a chipped bowl on a low plastic stool in the street, your old breakfasts just won't cut it anymore. You cannot go back to be the person you were before when you've experienced some of the degree of spice, complexity, and even a little bit of pain. There's an element of sadomasochism in some of that food that kind of disturbing and yet enticing. Good and bad food around the world. I mean, this was parodied in or captured in the Indiana Jones second of those. Where he has to eat the little boy's heart. I can't remember what that was. That's when they pull the heart out. They give him the Icelandic shark that's... He killed monkey brain and eyeball soup. And so are these real foods out there? They must be. As whatever they're, if they're being served, they're obviously real foods. Unless they're trying to get you. Do they do that? When you go somewhere, they're like, we eat brains all the time. So is there study on the nutritional analysis of all these exotic foods? Absolutely. And what do you guys find? I mean, I guess they have nutrients. All foods have nutrients. At the end of the day, they're just eating something that was once alive. That's right. How good are sweet breads for you, would you say? I think in small quantities, I wouldn't worry about them at all. It's neither sweet nor is it bread. No, but. It's neither sweet nor bread. Sure. It's organ meat of mammals. But if you have a tiny bit of it, will make you strong and fast and outrun people drinking red wine. Wouldn't you love that? I'm just trying to have you go like, most people don't know this, but eating butter in the morning is very good for you. Why won't you tell me this? Cause they've got their safe of secrets down in the. Cause I'm one of these people who thinks it's okay to eat whatever you like as long as you vary it and don't eat too much of it. Right. All right, so foods that are really horrendous. Is you think there's something, it must be cultural. I mean, a learned taste buds. Yeah, I mean, if everybody, if you grew up on eating sweet breads all the time, you would think it was a great delicacy. If you grew up on eating crickets all the time, you would think it was a great delicacy. You'd be right about sweet breads, but wrong about crickets. There you are. That's cultural relativism. Just to give a world blanket statement. Whether or not Americans are the right answer to this question, hold it aside. What country in the world has the worst health? The worst health? Yes. Excluding America? Yes. Oh, I would say the countries that are poorest. So poorest. The poorest countries. So poorest and then the fattest. Yeah, that. So go poorest, poorest, fattest. That too. And then just like vegetarian Asians. And what's happening, and what's happening in the developing countries now is that as everybody gets a little money, they start eating more. They just, but then they just eat, start eating like Kit Kats and stuff. And they start eating like we do and they put on weight and develop type two diabetes and there it goes. It even has a name, it's called the nutrition transition. Nutrition transition. Where it goes from hungry to type two diabetes. To type two diabetes. In one fell swoop. When we come back, StarTalk Radio, we're talking about nutrition, my clips with Anthony Bourdain. We'll see you in a moment. We're back on StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. I got Eugene Mervin and Professor of Nutrition, Marian Nestle. The verb, not the chocolate. Oh, okay, Nestle, that would be. Is that what it says on your card? The verb, not the chocolate. The verb, though. We've been featuring my interview with Anthony Bourdain, the TV chef and world traveler, tasting exotic foods. And just interesting to hear how he got to where he is. He's got a story, he's got a story, and the story surprised me entirely. I had no idea this was in his... I guess I could have done my homework, but I wanted it all to be fresh. It surprised you because you didn't Google it. No, but it was all very fresh, and it was a delightful success story. Let's check out what he tells us. Well, was there angry, embittered, spoiled? I was a bad kid. Where did you grow up? Grew up in New Jersey in the suburbs, right across the river. What exit? I was just very disappointed with the way that the 60s turned out, and I was a bitter, self-destructive drug-seeking kid who really had a hard time finding anything to believe in. And I found a home, the way that a lot of people find a home in the military, I found a home in the restaurant business. I mean, this was a world of absolutes that I responded to. I liked the science of, to me, it was a revelation working as a dishwasher. Why? Because plates went in dirty and they came out clean every time. And if I did my job of washing dishes, I got the respect of hardworking people in the kitchen. And that made me feel proud of myself in a way I never had before. I'll tell you really- So that was a transitional period. Transitional. I went from a very unhappy, self-destructive college kid, a college dropout to a guy with a- You liked to transform washing dishes. Yes, absolutely. And I lived by those, the lessons I learned as a dishwasher were the most important of my life. Show up on time. Have the respect. Have the- Lessons I learned washing dishes. I've written that book. And then at age 44, I found myself standing broke but reasonably happy next to a deep fryer at a restaurant in New York. And I'd written an obnoxious, over-testosterone account of my life that I didn't think anyone would buy. And suddenly I found myself on the bestseller list and my life literally changed in the space of a week from a guy who never thought he'd see Saigon, much less Rome, to somebody who's now been traveling for the last 10 years anywhere I wanna go in the world doing pretty much whatever I please. So, not to over-interpret what you just shared with me, but the fact that your life transformed at age 44, that's extraordinary. Look at how many people give up long before then saying, look, I'll never make anything in my life. I'd never had health insurance. I'd never owned a car. I'd never owned a home. I'd never paid my rent on time. I owed the IRS 10 years in back taxes. I went to sleep every night hyperventilating from fear for who's gonna call first, the landlord credit card company or the IRS. I had no hope of ever changing that situation and that was good by previous year's standards. So it came as a big, big, big surprise to me to suddenly have the freedom to see this world and do the things that I'm able to do with the people I do it with. I think it makes me grateful in a way that I might not be had it happened earlier. So who would have thought food can change somebody's life that way? It was an extraordinary story. Yeah, I was a dishwasher for like a year, but I didn't realize I could do this. I had six years before I'm his age and have to have accomplished the same stuff. Gotta keep at it, keep working on it. You have to work on the dish washing a little more carefully. I learned a lot, but not quite as much. So Marion, I think most people who care about their health have either only a pseudoscientific understanding of nutrition or no understanding at all. So you've gotta be disappointed. Present company excluded. You've gotta be disappointed with the state of knowledge out there. No, I'm disappointed with the state of science and knowledge in general. In general, yeah, yeah. It's just one aspect of it all. Well, it's an aspect that hits people personally. We put food in our bodies, and that makes it extremely personal. And it's some combination of protein, carbohydrates, fat. Yeah, I mean, nutrition's complicated. There are probably 50 different components in food that we need in order to survive, and it's hard to keep track of them, and you don't know what's in food. Can I live off of any one of them, if I want to just go all protein? No, no, no, no, variety, variety. You couldn't live off of just diet coke? It would be very difficult. For how long do you think if you just drank diet coke would you live, like two months, a year? Actually, it's probably very close to 70 days. 70 days of just diet coke. Yeah, if you- Well, it has no calorie sources. It has no calories and no nutrients, so it's just like- Oh, yeah, so you'd also have to eat bugs. So it's the equivalent of water, and there've been studies, the Irish Hunger Strikers, for example, they were very carefully studied, and on average, they lived about 70 days once they decided not to eat anymore. Okay, so the diet coke experiment, proxied with water, would do that. Yeah, and if they ate something, then they would have lived longer. Right, right, right. We gotta wrap up this hour. It's been an awesome conversation about food and diet. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio, and I've had Eugene Mermin, you've seen him and heard him before, and of course, Professor Marion Nestle. Thanks for being on StarTalk Radio. A pleasure. My pleasure, and contributing to the information surrounding my interview with Anthony Bourdain. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio, a show brought to you in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. And as always, I bid you to keep looking up.