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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
I remember we had lunch in Washington when I was doing lots of obesity reporting and you said, why am I a person who if the chocolate cake is there, like 50% of my brain is focused on the chocolate cake.
And I didn't have a good answer for you then.
Do you have one now?
I do, yeah.
I think it's that, you know, so when we think about something like common obesity, so there's many different types of obesity, but what most people have is called common obesity, and it arises from these tiny, like over a thousand genetic variants that almost all act in the brain.
And so you have a neurobiology, probably, that's different from someone who doesn't have to fight the chocolate cake.
And I actually did genetic testing for the book, and I'm also someone who struggles with my weight,
Turns out I have a higher genetic risk than like 90% of the population.
But this risk in a particular environment won't be expressed.
But as you said, when you put people like us in environments where there's lots of M&Ms and lots of chocolate cake, it becomes much harder.
And I think most people don't have this privilege, let's say, of being able to finally curate their environment to control their weight and maybe the way we might have had.
I know, absolutely.
I have this conversation all the time with my husband.
For some people, the cards are just stacked against them.
One person that really helped my thinking on this was Robert Sapolsky, who you've probably talked to.
Yeah, he talks about how we have these potentials or vulnerabilities that are created by our genetics.
And then in different environments, they're either expressed or activated or not expressed, right?
Like it's extremely hard to, you know, do the right thing, to buy the foods that you know you should be eating or to exercise every day when you're working the night shift and you're raising kids and you're the single mom or dad or whatever it is.
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