Michael Pollan

One of the problems with ultra-processed food is it's so caloric, it's so dense in calories.

that for every bite, since there's so little water, so little fiber, you're getting many more calories.

And before your satiety signals can tell you you're full.

Eating plants kind of slows down this whole process and adds bulk to it.

Plants also are full of nutrients that you're not getting from ultra-processed food.

All plants have antioxidants, a variety of them, because antioxidants help them deal with the stress of photosynthesis.

Antioxidants are very important to our health, too.

And vitamins, I mean, plants are just, you know, a storehouse of necessary nutrients.

You know, what's going on in the microbiome is it's like this chemical factory, pharmaceutical factory.

Hundreds of thousands of metabolites are produced.

But these, it turns out, are very important to our well-being.

And they're influencing the brain in ways we're just beginning to understand today.

I think we have to remember that when we're eating, we're not just feeding our body.

You know, we have these, you know, 100 trillion or whatever the number is microbes that also need to be fed.

And, you know, we're eating not even just for two, we're eating for millions.

Well, caffeine is probably my favorite drug and we don't think of it as a drug.

We think of coffee and tea as drinks, but it is a drug and it affects the mind in powerful ways.

I was taking this addictive drug every day

And I was interviewing an expert on drug abuse, Roland Griffith.

He died a couple of years ago, but he was a very influential psychopharmacologist and did a lot of the early work on psychedelics there.