Marion Nestle
speaker
375 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 5 Jun
Marion Nestle’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 Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And the controlled clinical trials that show that these foods get people to eat more, not only more, but a lot more.
The observational research looks at what people self-report eating. All it can do is demonstrate association, that if you eat a lot of ultra-processed foods, the chances are—and we're talking about probabilities here—you have a higher chance of gaining weight, becoming obese, and having type 2 diabetes, having heart disease later on.
And the problem with self-reports in nutrition is, I'm going to put this politely, people have a hard time remembering what they eat. You know, out and out, they lie. So to get around that, you need really well-controlled clinical trials.
These are breathtakingly expensive to run because they require a locked metabolic ward facility in which people volunteer to be locked up for some period of time, never more than four weeks because people can't stand it. And everything they eat, drink...
or ingest is monitored and everything they excrete is monitored and their behavior and their physical activity and everything else is monitored and they can't lie or cheat.
It's just an enormous – and they gained weight. Of course they gained weight. They gained a pound a week. That's 500 calories a day, 3,500 calories a week. That's a pound.
The people who were in this study didn't know which diet they were eating. So because they all tasted good, they liked the food. The shifts must be unbelievable. Then the big heavy criticism of the study is that it's too short and that there would be regression to the mean later on. And that's possible.
So I tell the critics, great, go ahead and criticize, but why aren't you fighting to get him more money to do longer studies with more people?
Well, we know that works with salt.
We absolutely know that. And with sugar. But those are difficult theories. I like simple explanations. The simple explanation is these things just are so yummy that people can't stop eating them. You know when you're eating a salad. You know when you've had enough salad. You've got a bunch of Oreo cookies in front of you. Well, I'll just have one more. They're small.
They deliberately excluded any consideration of the controlled clinical trials because they said they were too short. So they were completely dismissed as if they never existed. All of the studies that they looked at were either animal studies or observational studies. And on that basis, they said, well, we can't make a decision about it. I thought that was a very weak recommendation.
I was very disappointed. Mm-hmm.
For all of those. For all of those. You know, I think if we're really going to change the food system, the first thing we have to do is get money out of politics. But that's a little off topic.
Yeah, I mean, that's my trajectory. Mm-hmm. The first thing I was interested in was vitamins. I loved them all. They're all so interesting. Each one is different. They do different things in the body. To me, they were intellectually fascinating. I just adored them. And then I realized that people don't eat vitamins, except people who take supplements, and they eat food.
And food is really complicated. Eventually, I thought, well, wait a minute. People don't eat food. They eat diets. They're eating lots of different foods. These foods interact in different ways. The basic principles of nutrition are try to eat as much of a variety of real food as you can. I mean, the big change was the shift from not having enough nutrients to having too many calories.
And then in 1980, the inflection point, when President Reagan was elected and lots and lots of policy changes took place, then rates of obesity, the prevalence of obesity started to rise very, very rapidly. The reasons for that, I think, are pretty well understood. People ate more. And there's tons of evidence that people started eating more in the 1980s.
80s, portion sizes got larger, a sufficient explanation.
I like real food. I mean, I have my favorite junk foods and I eat my favorite junk foods. I just don't eat a lot of them.
Well, just that this is such an interesting time in American politics. And I think it would be wonderful if RFK Jr. could make the food supply healthier. I just think that in order to do that, he's going to have to take on the food industry. And I don't think Trump has a... of taking on corporations of any kind. So we'll see. Maybe he'll get them to volunteer.
Maybe he'll be able to do what Michelle Obama was unable to do because of the opposition.
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