Michael Pollan

speaker

2,844 appearances 8 recordings 8 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 28 May

Michael Pollan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 3.

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ZOE Science & Nutrition · Why you can't stop eating: The science of cravings, food addiction and 5 ways to regain control | Michael Pollan & Prof Tim Spector · 28 May 2026 podcast

And high fructose corn syrup, for example, doesn't really enter the food system in a big way until the early 80s.

And that was a big discovery that you could make something as sweet as table sugar from corn.

So it's called corn refineries that do all this work.

So when I was writing Omnivore's Dilemma, where I really looked at this monoculture system,

I was amazed how many of the ingredients, if you took a package of Twinkies or something, or a sweetened breakfast cereal, and you went through it, and I had a list of what the corn refiners were producing from corn and the soy refiners, there it all was.

And you think you're getting many ingredients, but in fact, you're eating corn and soy, and mostly corn.

A scientist I was working with at the time said that if you took a lock of human hair in America right now, you could determine how much of the carbon in that hair and therefore in that person's body came from corn.

And I forget what the figure was, but it was like a majority.

And so we are the carbon life form, right?

We're mostly made of carbon.

So where does that carbon come from?

You can actually trace it back and you can figure out how much of that person comes from corn.

And we are corn walking in the United States.

It's not bad that your carbon came from corn necessarily.

I don't think it matters.

But it's a reminder that we are the product of what we eat in a very literal way.

I think the bigger problem is that these ingredients don't contribute to healthy foods for the most part.

There are ways to sweeten food, bulk it up, and ultra-processed foods, we now know, are detrimental to our health, and we're eating way too many of them.

And it's, you know, there's great ingenuity here.

I mean, figuring out how to get rid of the surplus corn or extra oil.

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