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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

So we also, I think, need to meet that reality with options for people and different solutions.

I was going to say, they also offer solutions for many of the things that medicine isn't great at.

Like you're fatigued, you have brain fog, you're dealing with symptoms of menopause.

Whatever the thing is, you know, that these wellness influencers have these kind of very elegant, quick fixes that seem...

They might work, but ultimately there's no evidence for them.

So I think they prey on these, not insecurities, but these areas of vulnerability that people have and offer solutions where maybe traditional medicine has failed or mainstream medicine has failed.

Yeah, I think you touched on something that's really interesting.

I think regulating to prevent chronic illness is something that's just really difficult relative to what Wiley was doing, singling out, you don't want formaldehyde in your food or lead or whatever the thing is, to tease out which components of food are sickening us over these timescales of decades when chronic diseases develop is a lot more

I think it's a bigger challenge, but it's not impossible.

And one thing I think you had wanted to touch on that we didn't get to was this, that where grass evolved from, it was a concern about food additives causing cancer in the 1950s.

And cancer is obviously a chronic illness.

So there was this effort to start to regulate for that.

But then they added this amendment with the grass additives that allowed what became this flood of additives onto the food supply that ultimately...

are basically unregulated.

I don't know if you want to get into that in more detail at this stage, but I think there have been efforts made to recognize these chronic health issues and to prevent them, but I think it's a little bit more difficult.

And we've also allowed these like gaping loopholes to emerge that don't solve the problems we were setting out to solve.

Kevin put it so nicely, but I think what we're trying to get at in the book is that you have to pull, like this problem is complex and you have to pull many, many levers to address it.

So the reformulation and the drugs, the reformulation of ultra-processed foods and GLP-1 drugs are certainly part of the solution, but there are many other levers that we have to pull, including this idea of how do you make healthy meals accessible and available to more people and

So I think that the tech is certainly part of the solution, but not the entire solution.

Thank you so much for such smart questions.

Showing 521–540 of 540 · page 27 of 27