A book that reads like a novel; it’s humorous, it’s a love story. Dr. Christopher Labos, an imaginative cardiologist and epidemiologist at McGill University, takes us through multiple longstanding misconceptions about different foods and drinks, and along the way provides outstanding educational value.Video snippet from our conversation. Full videos of all Ground Truths podcasts can be seen on YouTube here. The audios are also available on Apple and Spotify.Transcript with external links and links to the audio recordingEric Topol (00:07):Hello, it's Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and with me today is a cardiologist, Chris Labos from Montreal, who has written an extraordinary book. I just read it on my Kindle, “Does Coffee Cause Cancer? And 8 More Myths about the Food We Eat. Chris teaches at McGill University. He is a prolific writer at the Montreal Gazette and Canadian broadcast system, CBC, CJAD radio, CTV News. And he also has a podcast on the Body of Evidence and he probably has other stuff, but welcome Chris.Christopher Labos (00:49):Hello. Hello. Hello. Thank you for having me. It is a great honor to be on your podcast. I am in awe of the work that you've been doing, I mean, for all your career, but especially during Covid. So it's a big thrill for me to be on the podcast.Eric Topol (01:03):Well, for me, I have to say I learned about a person who is not only remarkably imaginative but also humorous. And so, have you ever done standup comedy?Christopher Labos (01:16):I have not. Although I was asked to chair the research awards that we did here at McGill one year because I've been doing local media stuff and they said, can you come and be like the MC? And I said, sure. And I said, do you want me to be funny? And they were like, well, if you can. And I went up there and people were laughing and laughing and laughing and then people, like some of my former attendings had come up to me and they're like, Chris, I don't remember you being this funny as a resident. And I was like, well, I guess you come into your own when you start your own career. But I think people were very, it's tough MCing a research awards because you're essentially, it's kind of like a high school graduation where you don't read the names in alphabetical order, right? It's like one name after the other. And I went up there and I tried to throw in a little bit of humor and people seem to like it. So I think that was the first, that was when I started to realize, oh, if you inject a little bit of levity into what you're doing, it tends to resonate a little bit more with people.Eric Topol (02:13):Well, no question about that. And what I love about this book is that it wasn't anything like I thought it was going to be.Eric Topol (02:21):Amazing. It was a surprise. So basically you took these nine myths, which we'll talk to, hopefully we'll get to several of them, but you didn't just get into that myth. You get into teaching medical statistics, how to read papers, all the myths. I mean, you are the master debunker with entertainment, with funny stuff. It's really great. So this is great, before we get into some of these myths and for you to amplify, but this is a gift of communication, science communication that is you get people to learn about things like p-hacking and you throw in love stories and all kinds of stuff. I mean, I don't know how you can dream this stuff up. I really don't.Christopher Labos (03:10):I sort of look back at the inception of this. This book did have sort of a few iterations. And I think the first time I was thinking about it, I mean I wrote it during Covid and so I was really thinking about this type of stuff. It's like how do we educate the public to become better consumers of scientific information? Because there was a lot of nonsense during Covid. So teaching them about confounding, which I think through a lot of people when we started talking about low vitamin D levels and Covid and outcomes and all that. And so, I started like,