Fork U with Dr. Terry Simpson

I’ve been doing a series about foods that built civilizations. In this episode, we are talking about the potato. It is difficult to imagine that thousands of years ago, people constructed large buildings, managed...

Corn, beans, and squash, the three sisters, were the Native Americans’ crop, providing a stable source of calories, protein, and farming from Canada through South America. They allowed civilization to go from a hunting...

Salt: From the Roman Legion to Your Electrolyte Packet You've probably heard that Roman soldiers were paid in salt—and that this is where we get the word salary . It's a great story. It's also almost certainly not true...

How a tiny seed changed the way we work, think, meet, and start the day Bread gave civilization calories. Beans gave it protein. Olive oil gave it light. Coffee gave civilization somewhere to meet—and a reason to stay...

For years, beans have suffered from an image problem. They've been called "the poor man's meat," joked about for causing gas, and often relegated to the side of the plate. Yet for thousands of years, beans, lentils...

Olive Oil: The Original Superfood Before electricity lit our homes, olive oil did. For thousands of years, olive oil was far more than something people poured over bread. It fueled lamps, preserved food, moisturized...

Cheese: Humanity's Greatest Delicious Accident What if one of the world's favorite foods happened by accident? That's probably how cheese began. Nobody knows exactly who made the first cheese. Maybe it was a shepherd...

For years, bread has been the villain of social media. Scroll for a few minutes, and you'll find someone telling you bread causes obesity, diabetes, inflammation, or that humans were never meant to eat it. History tells...

Soup: The Mediterranean Diet in a Bowl Over the past few weeks, many of us have been looking at our refrigerators a little differently. News about Cyclospora, E. coli, and other foodborne outbreaks has made people...

Fire didn't just change dinner. It changed us. If I asked you what made us human, you might say language. Or tools. Maybe agriculture. All of those changed our species, but I think one discovery came even earlier—and it...

The Bank of Muscle: Why Your Real Retirement Account Isn't Your 401(k) I used to think retirement planning was all about money. Put enough away, let compound interest do its thing, and someday you'll enjoy the rewards...

If you read some low-carb sites, or Gary Taub's books, you will find the contention that the food pyramid - the last one being in 2011 - put America into a low fat, high carb diet responsible for today's obesity. That...

How We Eat Most of us think we know what we eat. However, nutrition researchers have learned a frustrating lesson over the years: asking people what they ate yesterday is often less accurate than anyone would like...

Taste Isn't What You Think It Is Most people believe taste happens on the tongue. That idea seems obvious because food enters the mouth, the tongue recognizes flavors, and the brain decides whether something tastes good...

Type 2 Diabetes, Bariatric Surgery, Fasting, and GLP-1s: What We Finally Learned About a Disease We Thought We Understood For years, I watched something happen in bariatric surgery that made very little sense, according...