Courtney Swan
speaker
1,290 appearances
7 recordings
4 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 4 Feb
Courtney Swan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Literally. So she was really on it. And very, very early on. I mean, my mom told me in 2006. It's crazy that I remember the date, but I remember the year because she cut out a newspaper article and physically mailed it to me at my college dorm. And it was an article about trans fats. And she said, watch out for hydrogenated oils because trans fats are really bad.
Well, then we know now, obviously, that trans fats are really bad for us. And they ultimately were pulled from our food supply in 2006. when was that? 16, somewhere around there, where food companies were finally, they were legally required to take them out. But this is how far back my mom was in on all this. So I had my mom kind of like in my ear showing me stuff here and there.
But at the time I was kind of, you know, I was like 21, like, oh yeah, whatever mom kind of mentality, you know, but it was interesting. I was still kind of taking it in. I took a nutrition class. My last class in my undergrad was And it really sparked an interest for me that I had never experienced before nutrition. I have a very inquisitive mind and I love to know how things work.
And learning about how food affected our bodies and how important nutrition was and when I really started to make the connections of what I was putting in my body and how food is literally code for our DNA, right? I just was fascinated by all of that. And then fast forward to when I started finding the works of people like Michael Pollan and Dr. Mark Hyman.
I was really upset to learn that what I was discovering about food and how food can be used as medicine wasn't actually being applied for the general public. In fact, it was quite the opposite. And I started learning about things like, I mean, the FDA has admitted that they don't have the full manpower
to man all of the stuff that's coming onto our into our food supply and going onto our shelves they just don't have the manpower the funding they just admitted this to bernie sanders in a hearing like two months ago there's this misconception that if something is on the shelf that it's been safe and vetted for and that it's healthy and that it's considered to be food i don't consider these old processed hyper processed food like products to be food
So there was a large awakening for me there. I felt a moral obligation to tell people because this was largely not being discussed. I mean, when I was starting to wake up to all of this, I started Real Foodology in 2011. And there were circles, little circles of people talking about it and, you know, natural food stores popping up and stuff like that.
But it wasn't being talked about on a stage like it is now. So I just felt this moral obligation to let people know, like, hey, guys, this is how we navigate a broken food system and this is how we can change it.
I mean, I feel like it's the obvious offenders, like the cereal, just anything that's ultra processed. That's when I... So I started vigilantly reading food labels. And I was horrified because before then I had never even looked at them. In fact, when I was in college, I'm so embarrassed to admit this now, but I was so uneducated.
So I had gained a bunch of weight when I was in college because I went from...
eating these amazing meals at home to eating fast food and partying and drinking and so I gained a bunch of weight and I was trying to lose the weight and I was eating lean cuisines and slim fast bars and at the time we were being told in magazines I'm opening and ads on the tv that this is what you eat to be healthy and so when I started reading those ingredient labels I was horrified by what I was seeing because you look at that I mean there's 40 plus ingredients on that and it
It shouldn't be that many ingredients. And more than half of them, you look at it and you're like, I don't even know where I would buy this in the grocery store. Where would I buy BHT in the grocery store? You don't. You get it from a factory.
And then it's being put in your food so that it can be preserved and so that it can sit on that shelf for a lot longer so those companies can make more money. It doesn't have to do with your health whatsoever. It's all about the profits for the food companies. So I would say, yeah, the largest offenders are all these ultra-processed, hyper-processed foods that don't resemble food anymore.
Is it the plastic list?
Yeah.
This is why I don't understand the resistance to all of this, because there, there is a large resistance to it and people have made this largely political. And I don't understand how we can't just all agree that, We have an antiquated system happening right now. We largely didn't understand the implications of plastic on our bodies 10, 15 years ago.
You know, thank God for the work of Dr. Shanna Swan, who I'm sure you're aware of, who wrote The Countdown. And she talks all about how phthalates are affecting our bodies, how it's affecting our fertility, men's testosterone levels, sperm counts, like... We largely didn't know that this was really an issue until more recently. And now we know. That's the thing is we have the science.
We have the data out there. But now we need to understand where we're getting all this exposure from. And there's the obvious low-hanging fruits like stop buying the plastic water bottles, right? But the meat, I mean, I was at the grocery store the other day. I can't even find meat at my local grocery store that's not wrapped in plastic. And that was the first thing I was thinking.
I didn't even think about them physically eating the plastic. Although, horrifyingly enough, I've heard in factory farming settings that they will take expired bread from grocery stores still in the plastic wrap and just feed it to them. Candy bars in the wrappers.
Now, I don't think that that's allowed in the grass-fed organic realm, but in the factory farming realm, I've seen a lot of reports of that happening. So there's largely a lot of stuff happening right now in our food system that needs to be addressed, that for whatever reason we're not talking about, we're not looking into it.
Showing 1161–1180 of 1,290 · page 59 of 65
← Previous
Next →