Welcome to

This is the website of Jared Sturgeon, MD, PhD. I am a practicing radiation oncologist with a PhD in Epidemiology that didn’t make the cut in academics because I wasn’t good enough or dedicated enough (or both) to write papers. I still love data and what it can teach us about the world and here share just some random stuff I am working on.

Project 1: Is it Natural?

Much of the conversation around what is healthy centers around a bias against chemical-sounding words. However food nomenclature isn’t science. When someone says they don’t want their ingredients list to sound like a shampoo bottle they are really expressing that the names on the ingredient list sound foreign. But this is completely arbitrary because we call an apple an “apple” and not the thousands of complicated proteins and chemicals that it is made up of. So the quiz is designed to help people realize scary names aren’t evidence of good or bad. We should evaluate additives carefully for what their contribution is to food and possible health, not dismiss them because they have “chemical” sounding names. Food is very complicated and I am not arguing for or against additives, just against a simplistic narrative that mostly reflects naming conventions and bias against the unfamiliar.

Project 2

AI has been amazing in making things possible that would have taken me hundreds of hours. My wife wanted a visual demonstration of where our children had done their full-time church service (a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) so I made one with AI. So I decided to generalize and make it available to anyone who might be interested.