Fork U with Dr. Terry Simpson Podcast By Terry Simpson cover art

Fork U with Dr. Terry Simpson

Fork U with Dr. Terry Simpson

By: Terry Simpson
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Fork U(niversity) Not everything you put in your mouth is good for you. There’s a lot of medical information thrown around out there. How are you to know what information you can trust, and what’s just plain old quackery? You can’t rely on your own “google fu”. You can’t count on quality medical advice from Facebook. You need a doctor in your corner. On each episode of Your Doctor’s Orders, Dr. Terry Simpson will cut through the clutter and noise that always seems to follow the latest medical news. He has the unique perspective of a surgeon who has spent years doing molecular virology research and as a skeptic with academic credentials. He’ll help you develop the critical thinking skills so you can recognize evidence-based medicine, busting myths along the way. The most common medical myths are often disguised as seemingly harmless “food as medicine”. By offering their own brand of medicine via foods, These hucksters are trying to practice medicine without a license. And though they’ll claim “nutrition is not taught in medical schools”, it turns out that’s a myth too. In fact, there’s an entire medical subspecialty called Culinary Medicine, and Dr. Simpson is certified as a Culinary Medicine Specialist. Where today's nutritional advice is the realm of hucksters, Dr. Simpson is taking it back to the realm of science.Copyright 2026 Terry Simpson Biological Sciences Hygiene & Healthy Living Physical Illness & Disease Science
Episodes
  • The Three Sisters

    The Three Sisters
    Sep 10 2026
    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 people to those who built cities that rivaled Europe and pyramids equal to the marvels seen in Egypt. The rise of civilizations has a pattern: grow a stable crop that allows people to survive, and go from nomads to develop complex societies.In our series of foods that built civilizations, we turn to the Americas before Europeans arrived.Long before Europeans arrived, civilizations in the Americas had developed writing, calendars, monumental architecture, cities, trade networks, irrigation systems, pottery, and sophisticated agriculture. Corn, or maize, fed the Maya, Inca, and Aztec worlds.In what is now the American Southwest, Pueblo peoples built multi-story communities in the desert, while Mississippian societies built towns and enormous earthworks along the great river valleys.It began with Corn, or MazeIt all began with a grass called Teosinte (pronounced “tA-O-‘sin-tE”). Teosinte does not look like corn today, but the DNA shows they are alike, and it was this grass that Native Americans 10,000 years ago began to engineer. In fact it wasn’t until a few years, 2005, ago that modern molecular geneticists discovered that this grass, Teosinte, was the father of corn. For years, people who study plants, botanists, assumed the evolutionary predecessor had long since become extinct. And while Teosinte is widely spread throughout Central America, it was not even considered in the same family as corn.The original ear of Teosinte is 2-3 inches long with 5-12 kernels. The kernels were hard, and most human teeth would break trying to eat them. Teosinte is inedible for many people. Contrast Teosinte with modern corn with a cob. A cob is 12 inches long, with over 500 kernels. The coating on the kernel was selectively bred from the rock-hard protecting seed to, now, where corn has an easily chewable, paper-thin, but still indigestible membrane. This was breeding at its finest.Ten thousand years ago, there was no plant that anyone would recognize as corn. In fact, there was no corn. By 4500 years ago, corn was throughout all the Americas, with carbon dating of kernels in Arizona from over 3000 years ago, in Canada 700 years ago. Corn allowed the Mayan people to go from a people who foraged to a people who could stay and cultivate.You can see from the photos how, as time went on, corn changed: both Teosinte and corn have the same number of chromosomes, and they have the same genes that code for the same proteins. Teosinte and corn can be bred because they are so close genetically. The difference between the grass, Teosinte, and modern corn is about a few genes. Corn didn’t “evolve”; early Native Americans bred corn. Generation of corn after generation, they bred the crop that tasted better, chewed more easily, and survived well.In what is now El Salvador, some have said the Mayans discovered corn in the mountains of Chalatenango. Recently, a dam revealed a village in the area, which was one of the original four Lake Island villages of the Mayans. On this land, one can see the range of corn from the grass to the modern corn. If you hike there, you can see places where the Mayans would grow special crops, where they would harvest the Teosinte with the kernels they could eat, and over time, they would breed it and cross-breed it until they had an agricultural system based on this plant.So sacred was corn that they called it the “grain of the gods.” To this day, the people in Santa Ana, in western El Salvador, still plant little plots of primitive corn that they call something like “ulupiche”. This is not to eat, but simply to please the ancestors. It is from these Mayans that corn was selectively bred, or genetically engineered for better taste, different colors, and the ability to withstand pests.Corn moved quickly, finding its way to Mexico 7000 years ago, South America 6800 years ago, and to North America nearly 4000 years ago. Once Europeans arrived, corn spread even more rapidly through the rest of the world.The First Tupperware PartyEdible Tupperware, that would bring new life into a product that seems to have gone the way of Department Stores and home parties hosted by your neighbor to get you to buy something.The first squash was probably used to carry water, food, and grain. Vessels such as these were radioactive-dated nearly 11,000 years ago in Honduras. These gourds were hard; the inside was bitter, but they were efficient to carry water, perhaps cook food, and store knick-knacks (the first junk drawer was a squash). But get hungry enough, and even bitter food can be tasty (not Brussels sprouts).The squash family (Cucurbitaceae) was domesticated about the same time. Those squashes were related to zucchini, yellow summer squash, acorn squash, delicata, many pumpkins, ...
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    21 mins
  • Fear Not Rice: It Built a Civilization

    Fear Not Rice: It Built a Civilization
    Sep 3 2026
    If you spent time in the low-carb world, rice is about as welcome as a toxic waste dump. It is part of those dreaded whites: white flour, white sugar, and white rice. All a part of the reason we are fat, diabetic, and have every disease one can think of.But then, if you get out and see the world, you will realize that people eat rice daily, are thin as a rail, relatively healthy, and have some of the longest lives on the planet.Today, we will make sense of the madness of rice.While people in the Mediterranean were mostly illiterate, in Asia, they had developed writing, laws, philosophy, governments with elaborate testing for civil servants, and gunpowder. In addition, the evidence shows they circumnavigated the oceans, found a larva that could make silk cloth, and developed fine porcelain. They did this while we were drawing crude paintings in caves. Some of our ancestors looked east and even wrote about this “strange” but highly advanced civilization.This was all possible with grass, we call rice.Yangtze River BasinAlong the basin of the Yangtze River, and elsewhere, was an edible grass that ultimately became rice. You can imagine it was simply gathered until someone learned how to plant it.Wild rice, then, would drop the edible seed as it matured. Replanting those that kept their seed on the plant longer meant the rice was easier to gather. Planting and gathering meant staying in one area, then, with abundance, one had to build storage, and eventually a civilization around rice. Weights, measures, laws, buildings. Once people can exchange for rice, you develop professions, art, philosophy.River basins have great soil, but the unpredictability of floods, so management of the river, canals, and all because of a simple grain.I realize carnivores like to hunt large game as their primal food, but chasing mammals doesn’t lead to a civilization or a brain beyond hunting. Also true today, although the hunting is reserved for determining which type of beef is better, and which store has better prices. Modern carnivore hunters prefer Costco beef, gyms, testosterone, and making fun of people who take statins. One needs a granary to build a civilization.Rice RoadsThe ability to grow rice led to the first trade routes, as rice and the dishes that accompany it. From Bryani, to Pilaf and Risotto, to Paella Rice, made its way through trade routes around the world. And with each region, their dishes were accompanied by rice. Spice roads developed on the trails originally made by rice traders, and one might think the spices were there to make the rice even better.Today, we all have our favorite rice dishes. Mine vary between sushi and paella. Every culture accepted rice and made its own dish.Some regions even claim their rice came not from the east, but locally.Rice and MedicineThe first peer-reviewed diet for a chronic disease was the Rice and Fruit Diet, popularized by Walter Kempner out of Duke University. He developed the diet for malignant hypertension, the disease that President Roosevelt died of. This disease was almost uniformly fatal within six months of diagnosis. Kempner developed this low-sodium diet of white rice and fruit. In trials, it not only lowered blood pressure but also improved survival.In the 1960’s, the diet became popular for weight loss, and throughout the United States, “Rice Houses” became a place for weight loss. Many Hollywood celebrities swore by them.Vitamin B1 was arguably the first vitaminToday, we know that thiamine deficiency leads to Beriberi, which was a common and often fatal disease in the Japanese Navy. Kanehiro Takaki noticed sailors who preferred polished white rice, almost exclusively for food, developed beriberi. While officers eating a more varied diet generally did not. Hanehro Takati is credited with saving the Navy by changing its diet. Polished rice removes the husk and endosperm of the rice, which is the main source of fiber and nutrients.Vitamin A is also unavailable in polished white rice. Vitamin A deficiency remains a preventable cause of childhood blindness. The World Health Organization estimates that 250,000 to 500,000 vitamin-A-deficient children become blind every year, and about half die within twelve months of losing their sight.To overcome this, rice was genetically modified to produce a precursor of vitamin A. The rice takes on a deep yellow color, hence the name “golden rice.” Unfortunately, the objection to a genetically modified organism was brought to court and stopped golden rice from being used. While this sits in litigation, these children are still going blind and dying.Why not use brown rice? White rice is shelf-stable for years. Brown rice will quickly become rancid, so it has a limited shelf life.How to Eat Rice without Losing Your Mind - and Should You Buy the $400 Rice Cooker?When writing about rice, there is a lot of heat and not much light. Influencers warn about blood sugar levels, arsenic, while some claim brown rice is ...
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    13 mins
  • Beer, Bread, Cheese — and Penicillin

    Beer, Bread, Cheese — and Penicillin
    Aug 27 2026
    When we talk about the microbiome, people think about the colon and trillions of microorganisms. Have you ever considered that humans have other interactions with microbiomes that occur with our cooking? On this week’s episode of FORK U, we continue with our series “Food That Made Civilization.” The topic is Fermentation.How Fermentation Built CivilizationWe were selecting a microbiome without knowing it. Bacteria, yeast, and molds. Feed the ones that worked, keep the conditions they liked, and do it again.Your grandmother may have kept the bowl that made better bread. She saved some of yesterday’s dough to start tomorrow’s. Others learned that milk mixed with a bit of salt and kept in a goat’s stomach became yogurt or cheese instead of something that had to be thrown away.In Asia, they salted cabbage, put it into a jar, and buried it, which allowed them to survive the winter. And perhaps in what is modern-day Iran, they learned that when they crushed grapes, stored them in special containers, they made wine. And in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), ancient Sumerians left written recipes of barley brewing dating back over 5,000 years, which was probably beer.There were no microscopes or bacterial cultures. We didn’t know that yeast metabolized sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, or that lactic-acid bacteria changed the chemistry of cabbage and milk.But what they didn’t see was a colony of bacteria, yeast, and mold, creating environments in which organisms thrived, and transformed foods into something more edible and even stable for preservation.Those microorganisms gave us bread, beer, wine, cheese, kimchi, vinegar, and eventually penicillin.What Did Ancient Beer Taste Like?We are fascinated by what people before us ate and drank.From the Midas Tomb in ancient Phrygia, now Turkey, they discovered that people had made a fermented drink from barley, grapes, and honey. It was probably beer, wine, and mead in the same cup.Based on a chemical analysis of these vessels, Dogfish Head Brewery used modern yeast to make a beer called Midas Touch. But I wished we could have cultured the yeast and bacteria from one of those vessels?As much effort as Dogfish used to reproduce the ingredients on the basis of chemical analysis, the beer is not the same. The barley, grapes, and even the water are different. Some of those grape varieties may not even exist anymore. The temperature and storage conditions we are guessing at best. And the microbes undoubtedly changed over the three thousand years while waiting to resume their shift.Dogfish Head analyzed ingredients from pottery in China. That 9000-year-old pottery once held a fermented beverage made from rice, honey, and fruit. This was being drunk years before the Great Wall was built. Which makes me think, the Great Wall was the velvet rope, seeing if your name was on the list for the rice wine party.But consider it like this: even pizza lovers from New York will tell you that without the NY water, or coal-fired oven, you cannot make a true NY pizza.The yeast we use now are descendants of those used by our ancestors. But the microbiome changes, they reproduce, mutate, mix with other organisms from the flour, the grain, the fruit, the hands, and the environment. Yeast today are more different from their ancestors than we are from ours.But we are never drinking the exact same beer. We are drinking what became of that ancient experiment. Just like you never step in the same river twice.Then We Finally Saw ThemThen came Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who developed the first microscope. He was not a physician. He was not a professor of microbiology. There was no microbiology. He was a fabric salesman with an obsession for making good lenses. When he put those lenses together, he saw a world no one knew existed. He pointed it at everything: water, tooth scrapings, and eventually beer. He saw tiny living things moving around in a world humans had never seen. Leeuwenhoek called them animalcules, little animals. He even looked under his microscope at wine and beer.France Has a Wine ProblemBy the middle of the nineteenth century, France had been through revolution, empire, monarchy, another revolution, republic, and empire again. The country had plenty of political problems. But there was one problem that could unite almost any Frenchman. They didn’t know why sometimes their wine would spoil. Yes, there is the occasional bottle that is “corked,” and that is an inconvenience. But losing the entire batch is a disaster.Louis Pasteur, a chemist, was commissioned to help solve this problem. Leeuwenhoek could see them. Pasteur wanted to know what the hell they were doing. They were doing chemistry. The yeast was associated with alcoholic fermentation. Other organisms were associated with lactic fermentation. Different microorganisms produced different outcomes. And suddenly, all those odd instructions from your grandmother made sense. Use this bowl. Save some of that dough. ...
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    41 mins
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I have been following. Dr Simpson for awhile now, he is so knowledgeable and speaks to us ðirectly. Thank you for being a wonderful teacher !@

love learning from Dr Simpnon

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