Derek Thompson

So since the days of Wiley, we regulate acute food poisoning, but we don't devote similar resources to regulating the origins of chronic food sickness.

We regulate therapies.

We don't regulate supplements or vitamins.

We devote lots of resources to investigating meat facilities, but very few resources to

Am I wrong to pick this up as a theme of your work that America's food policy is simultaneously both maybe over-regulating in some spaces and under-regulating in others?

Last question.

How do you feel about the claim that obesity and ultra-processed foods are fundamentally a technological problem and they require a technological solution?

We can futz at the corner with marketing bans for children and black labels for saturated fats and foods that are too energy dense, but at the end of the day, 20, 30 years from now, if we see the obesity curve finally bending,

Nutritionists and sociologists will say this is because not of food regulation, but GLP-1 drugs.

that this ultimately has to be a policy of allowing people to effectively redesign their bodies to be in line with their food environment, right?

To the extent that GLP-1s work for many people, they seem to work by increasing satiety, slowing gastric emptying in a way that allows them to live in the modern food environment in chronic caloric deficit, which leads to weight loss.

Why isn't the problem here just tech, tech, tech?

Julia, do you want to have the last word?

Julia Balouz, Kevin Hall, thank you very much.

Hi everybody, Derek here.

In December, my wife and I welcomed our second baby girl into the world.

I'm gonna be taking some time off, but we wanted to keep the pod going through the holidays.

So we're gonna be re-airing some of our favorite episodes from the last 12 months, a kind of best of compendium.

And this list includes interviews that really stuck with me and others that really stuck with you and you had lots of feedback and thoughts on, including this one.

I'll be back in the new year with fresh content, but until then, happy holidays and happy new year.