Julia Belluz

speaker

540 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 8 May

Julia Belluz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Plain English with Derek Thompson · Plain English BEST OF: What’s the Matter With America’s Food? · 3 Feb 2026 podcast

In the 1950s, there's this increasing concern about rising cancer rates and how they might be linked to preservatives and additives in foods.

And so this food additives amendment gets passed and it's saying that companies that are using additives need to make sure that they're not causing cancer and they need to seek out FDA pre-market approval.

when they want to use a new additive in food, but they also include this loophole for substances that are generally recognized as safe or grass.

And by the late 1990s, the FDA also says that companies can self-determine whether additives that they're using are grass or not.

And if you flash forward to today, something like 99% of the new additives that entered the food supply since 2000 entered through this self-determined grass loophole.

So that means much of them were just vetted by companies, not by regulators or other independent experts.

Yeah, I think what Kevin was just trying to get at that's a really important distinction is that the science that what we're advocating for is based on, this is decades of research, there's quite strong evidence that overconsumption is linked to these two factors that Kevin mentioned, the energy density and hyperpalatability.

And right now as a consumer, there's basically no way to differentiate products that are more or less hyperpalatable and more or less energy dense unless you're maybe a little bit more knowledgeable about nutrition.

And even then it can be difficult.

So it's these types of things.

And I'm talking to you here from Paris where there is a system of warning labels on food and it's not perfect, but you can at least as a consumer navigate

with a little bit more ease than you can in America right now.

So we're thinking of things like that, but I think that the ultimate goal is how do you invert this extremely toxic food environment where the deck is stacked against everyone to make the best choices for themselves and their families.

The solutions also need to be real about how people eat now.

One big thing that I think a lot of people don't talk about is that the reason we have this proliferation of ultra-processed foods is because we have two people working in most households.

So women went to work and stopped cooking as much and the food industry heavily targeted working moms with these convenience products.

And so we've talked a lot about taking things away and labeling bad things, but we need to also offer these healthy, convenient alternatives to people.

We commissioned this morning consult survey for the book and we asked people, what's the biggest barrier standing between you and a better diet?

And the top answers were affordability, time, like I don't have the...

the resources and the time to be cooking the way I want to.

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