Aug 5, 2026 · 13 min · 10 segments
Imagine you wanted to get a general idea of what people are eating in a given community. You could look at grocery store sales, or do surveys, but neither can capture a complete picture. Microbiome…
Lawrence DavidGuest
Flora LichtmanHost
Imagine you wanted to get an idea of what people are eating in a given community.
You could look at grocery store sales, but that doesn't capture everyone and everything they ate.
You could do surveys, but not everyone will respond, and if they do, maybe they don't remember exactly what they ate or they'll selectively block out that sleeve of Entenmann's chocolate frosted donuts.
So my next guest is working on another way of tracking community nutrition from a backend data source, sewer water.
Dr. Lawrence David uses genetic data to study nutrition, and his research group came up with this innovative, if maybe a little bit gross, technique to analyze the DNA in sewage to identify what plants and animals people are eating.
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Imagine you wanted to get an idea of what people are eating in a given community.
You could look at grocery store sales, but that doesn't capture everyone and everything they ate.
You could do surveys, but not everyone will respond, and if they do, maybe they don't remember exactly what they ate or they'll selectively block out that sleeve of Entenmann's chocolate frosted donuts.
So my next guest is working on another way of tracking community nutrition from a backend data source, sewer water.
Dr. Lawrence David uses genetic data to study nutrition, and his research group came up with this innovative, if maybe a little bit gross, technique to analyze the DNA in sewage to identify what plants and animals people are eating.
