You are not what you eat. You are what survives the preparation.

This is the extended, full-length version of the deep dive — just over an hour taking the kitchen apart as a chemistry lab.

Nutrition is sold to us as arithmetic. Eat spinach, collect iron, tick the box. In molecular culinary biology that ledger burns. Your ingredients are raw machinery and nothing more. Heat, timing, cutting and pairing decide whether a compound reaches your bloodstream or dies on the board.

What we work through:

• Garlic and beetroot — and why antibacterial mouthwash can cancel the blood-pressure benefit of beet juice before you swallow it • Coffee and roast level: the neuroprotective compounds burnt off in dark roasting • Ginger, yoghurt and live cultures — what actually survives, and what pasteurisation removes • Broccoli sprouts and turm ...