Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. The weekly podcast where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.

Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. Well, as a species we're actually hardwired to obsess over food.

And from the cultural ties to the taste and the nutritional profiles, our knowledge of food is vast and expands in many directions.

But what most people don't know is that foods come with an incredibly rich and fascinating history, including their original purpose, symbolism, and dynamic relationship with humans.

And today, my guest here is going to talk all about it. In a moment, I'll speak with Matt Siegel, former English professor and author of the book, The Secret History of Food.

Strange but true stories about the origins of everything we eat.

Fascinating, you're going to love this, I promise you.

After the break, Matt and I will uncover the hidden truths behind popular foods, including our toxic codependency with corn, a big problem, and the perpetual problem with most commercial olive oil.

We'll also reveal tomatoes were once blamed for witchcraft and werewolves, you knew it didn't you, and potatoes for syphilis and leprosy.

You can't miss this one. Stay tuned, it's going to be a fun episode. We'll be right back.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you, I'm excited to be here.

So your book isn't just about the history of food, it encompasses many other themes, including the cultural, scientific, and even psychological aspects of our relationship with food.

Alright, what's the motivation for an English professor to write this book?

And how do you collect all that research?

Yeah, you know, so there's a lot of motivation, but sadly my father passed away when I was 14 from a heart attack, he was 50, and his father had his first heart attack when he was in his 30s, I think, and passed away before I was born.

So I started questioning what I knew about food when I was a teenager, and I continued to do that, and what amazes me is how many times the narrative of what's healthy has changed in just a few decades.

And, you know, our top experts still can agree on whether or not eggs are bad for us, and it's just not health, not just health.

In a lot of cases, we've forgotten more about food than we know.

In other cases, we're still just learning, just starting to understand things, but, you know, I think the sum result is that there's so much about food that we don't talk about.

This despite the fact that we seem to talk about food constantly.

Yeah, that's a great point. Actually, I started researching food and its impact in human evolution as my thesis at Yale University, and so I ever since a young man, and now, you know, I'm a nutritionist, food and the history of food, and how the things we ate impacted, you know,

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