The Current - Why unhealthy eating isn't always a matter of choice

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

We all make a lot of assumptions about food, and healthy eating — including the idea that if you just make different choices, you can avoid obesity, or take the weight off.  Turns out it's not so simple. We talk to health journalist Julia Belluz, and research scientist Kevin Hall, co-authors of a new book called Food Intelligence, to dig into the science of what we eat, why we eat it, and how changing our food environment may be the key to a healthier future.

The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in Canada, and Google is helping Canadians innovate in ways both big and small, from mapping accessible spaces so the disabled community can explore with confidence, to unlocking billions in domestic tourism revenue. Thousands of Canadian companies are innovating with Google AI. Innovation is Canada's story. Let's tell it together. Find out more at g.co slash Canadian Innovation. This is a CBC podcast.

Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Ask the average person what it takes to eat healthy. You'll get all kinds of opinions. Never mind, if you listen to influencers on social media, you might hear all about high protein, low carb. Guys, these are three ingredients, zero carb, 40 calorie chicken nuggets. And they're so good, and you literally need three ingredients. They have seven grams of protein each, and oh my God.

Or you might get advice on how to boost your metabolism. All you 40 plus guys out there who are complaining about weight gain over 40, and you're saying that your metabolism slows down as you get older. I'm talking to you. Yes, it is true that your metabolism starts to slow down. And if you don't change anything, you're probably going to gain weight. What about fiber maxing? If you're ready to feel great again without another diet or medication, start here.

Drop a green heart emoji in the comments and I will send you my fiber maxing blueprint, the same one that I use to help people reverse insulin resistance naturally. There is a dizzying amount of information and a lot of misinformation out there. Most of it focuses on what you and I should do, how we can control what we eat and how that will result in better health. However, a new book argues it's not as simple of that. Simple as that. So much of what we eat and how that food shapes our bodies is determined by

forces that go way beyond our conscious choices. It's the premise of a book called Food Intelligence, the science of how food both nourishes and harms us. It's written by Julia Balloos and Kevin Hall. Julia is a longtime health journalist and Kevin is a research scientist who studies food and nutrition and how they interact with our bodies and our brains. Good morning to you both. Good morning. Julia, you said you wrote a book that was trying to fill space where you felt there was something sorely missing. What is missing from the conversation we're having around food and diet? So as someone who had struggled with Wade, I felt like there were a couple of types of books out there. So you had the books by single scientist authors

who are kind of outlining their one true way to eat based on their own anecdotes from the clinic and their research. And then you had the books by journalists or even other patients who were kind of saying they also had had the single answer solutions and in both cases a lot of the context was missing in both cases sometimes you know the the particular researchers work or the experience of the journalist just completely didn't give you give you the picture of what maybe the where the body of science had had accumulated and and I think we were trying to do that with this book. We were also trying to get at, you know, a lot of people talk, as you said, about fiber maxing or about, you know, eating an optimal amount of protein or cutting their carbohydrates

or speeding up their metabolism, but they can't tell you what metabolism is, and they can't tell you why protein is so essential in the body. So we also wanted to get at these fundamental ideas in nutrition science and explain what they actually are, what's behind them, and how we know what we know. Kevin, one of the interesting things about reading the book is it certainly made me think about how many sort of baked in beliefs and thoughts I have about food that I don't even question over the course of the day. One part of the book that's particularly interesting is about protein, which is obviously, I mean, it's having a moment now, although as you point out, it's been having a moment for some time. Can you walk us through this as an example of these ideas

that we hold on to that may not really be based in science? Yeah, sure. I mean, protein is an essential nutrient. It's what we call in the book and has been called for centuries, the one true nutrient in some sense. You know, we're built a protein. What makes us uniquely you is the exact suite of proteins that your DNA encodes for. So it really is this fundamental component of life.

And we kind of sketch some of the history of that in the book, but one of the folks who really popularized the idea of the importance of protein was a scientist in the 19th century named Liebig, who really went beyond his kind of scientific expertise and experiments and made some very broad claims about protein, that protein was, in fact, the thing that was powering our muscles and that we needed to eat a lot of protein if we wanted to do a lot of muscular work. And those sorts of ideas have kind of reverberated for centuries, even though even in Leibig's time it became quite clear that, in fact, it was the carbs and the fat that we're powering our muscles and that protein is still important for building muscles, but it's actually the carbs and fat that are powering them. So, yeah, this idea that protein is the main nutrient that we should all be considering has a very long history. So the next time I'm looking to buy a cup of coffee and somebody offers to put a shot of protein powder into it. What do you want people to think? Well, I think that there's so much concern now that people think that they're not getting enough protein, right? When in fact, most people are getting plenty of protein, it's not something that most people need to be concerned about.

There are populations of folks that should be concerned, particularly elderly population, especially those that are in institutions. institutions that tend to maybe not be getting enough protein. But there's this obsession about protein and muscle building, which dates back to kind of the lebig times when, in fact, the biggest stimulus for muscle building is resistance exercise. Protein can help, but resistance exercise is the primary driver of keeping muscle and building muscle. And people thought more about resistance exercise than they did about the protein. they would go a long way and actually achieving the thing that they're trying to achieve. Julia, you mentioned earlier that you've struggled with some of these questions around food.

I think so many of us have. How did that inform what you wanted to do with this book, with correcting ideas like the ones that Kevin was just talking about around protein? I think if anyone who has struggled with weight has felt this, probably this tremendous sense of failure when you're not getting the numbers to where you want them to be, you're putting on weight, probably some shame, and certainly underlying all that is this feeling that it's your fault, that you are the person, you know, you ate too many donuts or whatever the thing is, and you just, you couldn't get it under control. And one of the things I really

hoped to get across with this book and that Kevin Science has demonstrated so beautifully and the work of others is this idea that actually a lot of our body weight it is and a lot of the decisions we make around food, they are not the product of conscious control. We are hugely influenced by these interactions between our individual biology and our environments and these guide our eating behaviors in degrees that are much larger than many people are aware of. The entire premise of this diet industrial complex is that you can, you know, you can make the difference. You can wake up tomorrow and, you know, put the protein powder in your morning coffee and you'll be more satiated and just do the reps of exercise that you need to be

doing. But the science shows something very different. And I think that other picture is one we were hoping to just shed light on. So there's the environment. There's the choices we make. there's also this sense of, you know, our bodies themselves, be it our genes or our metabolism, you actually wound up getting your metabolism and your genes tested, Julia. Yeah, that's right. So I had this question, one of the animating questions of my research was, why do some people, why are we seeing these population level increases in obesity and other diet-related diseases? But why do some people struggle more than others? And why was I one who struggled? and I had my metabolic rate checked. I had my genes analyzed, and I found my metabolic rate

was completely normal, so that didn't explain it. My genetic testing showed I had a much higher genetic susceptibility to both obesity and diabetes than average. But even genes aren't deterministic. So outside of single gene disorders, for most people, people, this isn't going to determine whether you're someone with a larger body or not. And this is when I started to take a really hard look at my food environment, the one that I was surrounded by in particular earlier in life when I was struggling with overweight and obesity. And I realized very quickly, you know, with this, someone with my particular susceptibility in the food environment, I was growing up. And of course, I had a real struggle

with weight. We do, as humans, many of us have these susceptibilities or propensities to weight gain, but what's changed in the time we've seen diet-related diseases like obesity and diabetes explode is our food environments. So, and what do you mean when you talk about the food environment? Yeah, it's both the foods themselves and how widely available they are to us, as well as how they're being marketed to us, the social conditions that we find food in. It's a very broad set of terms that it's basically how we interact with our food in social situations as well as how the food is being presented to us in different ways and how the food themselves has actually changed over time. And you did research on this. What did you find

when you tried to test how the food environment was affecting people's eating? Yeah, so we did these very strange experiments in some sense. What we did was we had these folks live with us for a month in a clinical center. So they stayed with us 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And we basically took complete control over their food environments and removed a lot of the factors that are part of their food environment. So we didn't have any marketing going on. We didn't have people having to purchase the foods or prepare the foods or anything like that. We were interested in what is about the foods themselves that might be, for example, driving people to over-consume calories and gain weight. And so we designed these two food environments in one case composed primarily of

ultra-processed foods. This is a category of foods that is, you know, produced by large manufacturers of foods. They tend to have lots of ingredients that are not used in home kitchens or even in restaurants. And then we matched a simultaneous environment for the calories, the nutrients, the carbs of fat and the protein, the sugar, the sodium, and the sodium, and fiber, but in this case, coming from minimally processed foods and no alter processed foods. So fresh fruits and vegetables and meat and eggs and legumes and things like that. And we basically just ask people, don't be trying to change your weight. You can eat as much or as little as you'd like. And we're just going to measure a lot of stuff. And what they didn't know is that we were

measuring all their leftovers and calculating exactly how many calories that they chose, they chose to eat on these two different food environments. And what we saw were massive differences. 500 calories per day on average. In the ultra-processed food environment, they were eating more than when the same people were in the minimally processed food environment, despite saying that they were eating to the same degree of appetite, same amount of hunger and fullness and satisfaction and eating capacity.

They were reporting that the meals were equally pleasant and familiar. But for whatever reason, they were consuming many more calories in gaining weight, and gaining body fat, although they weren't aware of that either. They had their backs to the scales and wearing loose-fitting scrubs so that they couldn't tell if their clothes were getting tighter or looser. And then when they were in the minimally processed food environment, they spontaneously lost weight and lost body fat. And so there was something about the foods themselves

that was driving this excess calorie consumption. The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in Canada, and Google is helping Canadians innovate in ways both big and small, From mapping accessible spaces so the disabled community can explore with confidence to unlocking billions in domestic tourism revenue, thousands of Canadian companies are innovating with Google AI. Innovation is Canada's story. Let's tell it together. Find out more at g.co slash Canadian Innovation.

As an insurance broker, your customers count on you. From the simple, turnkey business quote to the highly complicated unique risks that require tenured experience and knowledge to hash out. You need a partner whose appetite and capacity for commercial insurance is bigger than you think. Our in-house experts work with you to curate the perfect policy. Simple or complex, at intact insurance, we have the comprehensive commercial solution you need. From manufacturing to contractors, liability to commercial fleet. We have the trusted expertise in solutions you and your customers deserve.

Contact your dedicated underwriter today. for simple to complex and everything in between. Intact insurance. And so, Julia, what did you take away from the results of that? I think the most profound thing is that, yeah, these are the same people in two different food environments. They're spontaneously overeating in one food environment, as Kevin just described,

and then spontaneously losing weight in another food environment. And when we were trying to really understand this argument about it's the food environment, And it's not this genetic susceptibility. It's not that our genes changed, although the food environment is changing our biology now, it's not that it's not something inside of us. It's something external that changed. We're trying to understand these different types, these different threads of research that have accumulated over time.

And what you see is research on migrants who leave countries where ultra-processed foods don't dominate, where traditional diets still dominate, for countries like the U.S., Canada and the UK. And when they move to these places, they spontaneously put on weight and develop diet-related chronic diseases in a way that the family members, they leave back home, don't over time. We have research from rodent studies going back to the 1970s. When you expose rats to environments that are rich in these supermarket kind of ultra-processed foods we've been talking about, they spontaneously gain weight to the extent that researchers couldn't induce unless they lesion their brains previously. So, you know, it's something, it's, again,

it's, this is happening below the level of conscious awareness. This is, this is the types of foods that food systems are drowning us in now. And, and they're causing a lot of the problems that people are struggling with and that are costing economies billions of dollars now, you know. I feel like people may nod along to what you're saying and say, yes, I understand the environment is more complicated. A lot of the food available to me might be problematic. But because there is such a drive to want to change the way our bodies, be it weight loss or gaining muscle, the takeaway may still be, oh man, I just have to try harder to eat no ultra-processed food. What would you say to those folks, Julia? I think for people who have the wherewithal

resources and, yeah, the time to be able to cook lots of their food at home. Certainly, that's better for health if you can find ways to do that. And on a precautionary basis, minimizing the ultra-processed foods, although as we discuss in the book, not all ultra-processed foods are equally harmful. Some might be neutral and even helpful. So it's a little bit more nuanced than just, yeah, they're kind of being painted as the bogeyman now, but it's a little bit more nuanced than that. But for the

people who have the wherewithal and resources to inoculate themselves from these terrible effects of the food environment, go for it, and certainly exercise every day and do all the things we all know we should be doing, but I think most people don't have those resources

and for most of us, it's just not that easy. You know, we don't live in supportive environments or we don't have the money and the time or even the knowledge anymore to cook. So that's why we think that this is really about pulling every policy and regulatory lever to protect individuals and populations from these exposures and these diseases. So, Kevin, what are some of the most important levers you'd like to see governments pull on?

Yeah. So, I mean, there's the usual factors which are kind of trying to identify the problematic foods and put in the same sorts of policies that many countries have used to minimize tobacco use, so labels and taxes and all those sorts of things. But the difference with food that's quite different than tobacco is that we all have to eat. And so just making the foods that are deleterious to health more expensive without also increasing availability and affordability of tasty, healthy alternatives isn't going to go a long way. And so what we were trying to point to in the book is how can we institute policies that will actually motivate companies to make more of the healthy, convenient alternatives, and how do we

subsidize those in ways with tax incentives, for example, both at the supermarket level that might filter upstream to food manufacturers to demand, so that the supermarkets might demand more healthy products to put on their shelves? How can you incentivize manufacturers to produce more of the healthy kinds of products that are convenient and can displace the unhealthy products in the marketplace, while at the same time making those unhealthy products that we know about less available and more expensive and treated more like recreational substances. Julia, the book comes out during a polarized time in the U.S. when it comes to politics.

And food and nutrition, we all know, is very much a part of that. Robert F. Kennedy, in charge of health policy. Certainly a lot of health and medical experts have been critical of him. him. And yet, there is some overlap in what you and Kevin are saying about a greater emphasis on healthy foods. And I don't want to exaggerate it here, but some overlap in that and some of what RFK is promoting. How do you feel about him leading the charge to make America healthy again? Yeah, it's a little, that's a tricky one, because when he was coming into power, it was actually refreshing to see someone who is speaking about the food environment in a way

we've never seen someone at his level speak about the food environment in that way. And he was talking about, yeah, lots of these concerns that certainly Kevin and I share. But what we've seen since is not a lot of real action on these issues and kind of distracting so-called Maha, make America great wins that aren't real wins at all. all. So the kinds of things that Kevin is talking about where the healthiest foods for us are the most available, affordable, accessible, and easy to eat instead of the opposite, which is how many of us live now. You need to pull, this is like a deep food systems, cultural, economic problem, and you need to pull many, many policy and regulatory levers to change that. And instead we're

seeing things like just replacing, you know, high-fructose corn syrup with with cane sugar in Coca-Cola in a single product, like adding a new product to this, what's already a junk food and will remain a junk food. We're seeing that being touted as a win when, you know, nothing is really changing in the food environment for most people. And if anything, they've done things like eliminate support for SNAP and access to fresh ingredients in schools and things like this that actually are doing the opposite of helping push us toward healthy food environments. Kevin, much of your research was done when you were working at the National Institutes of Health, which fall under RFK's department.

In the spring, you left. Why? Yeah, just to kind of pick up a little bit where Julia left off. I was actually really encouraged in the lead up to the last election because this topic of ultra-processed foods and how they might be harming us was right in our wheelhouse. It was what our research had been focused on. And we'd actually been working with colleagues at the NIH to figure out how could we expand on this research and get answers to these questions more quickly because those answers to why and how ultra-processed foods are causing these problems could be used for actually effective policies. And what I experienced was, you know, despite my initial enthusiasm about the political hot topic that this had become, what I sort of realized was that the science that we were generating was not really all that well appreciated by this administration. In fact, we were told we couldn't talk about it at scientific conferences. a reporter who had asked us questions about one of our research topics initially was denied an interview

request, and then when she submitted written questions, and I responded to those, those questions were edited because there seemed to be a little bit of distance between the views of one of our scientific publications and what the rhetoric of the RFK Jr. and many in the political leadership in the Make America Healthy Again movement were discussing. And so you're saying, Kevin, sorry, I want to jump in here because I think this is an important point. You're saying the science, the facts such as they are or the consensus at the moment in terms of the research clashed with what the politicians were saying.

And so you were told basically to keep your mouth shut. Well, I wasn't told to keep my mouth shut. They actually changed what I was saying because they actually edited my written responses to the questions, which I found completely. Completely shocking. Never happened anything like that in my 21-year career at the NIH where my responses were edited and then submitted on my behalf. And is that why you quit that moment? That was not the moment that I quit. In fact, that was that raised the alarm. And I actually wrote to RFK Jr. and his senior staff, as well as the NIH director, to actually express my concerns and say that, you know, we were experiencing disruptions in our research. You know, we had plans to kind of expand on the research. And I was concerned that I wasn't, you know, wasn't able to communicate the results of my research in a free way. I was concerned that there might be meddling in the future communications even in the scientific literature as a result of this. And I wanted some clarity about whether or not that's what I should expect in the future. And so, so yeah, so the reason I left was. Did anyone ever, did anyone ever reply to that message? No one replied. No one replied. No one. replied, although I knew that my email was read because it was circulated within the NIH, and

colleagues said, hey, I saw your email. Are you really going to retire? And I said, yeah, I can't get some clarity on this. And the fear was that our research was such a political hot topic that, you know, they were potentially going to meddle in the reporting of our research and potentially the conduct of our research. And I wanted to get some clarity because I didn't want to sacrifice my scientific integrity in a way that I feared it would be the case, and I was unable to get any assurance that it wouldn't be. Must be pretty painful as a scientist. Yeah.

I mean, to be frank, it really sucks. I built a career that I loved. I used to joke with my wife that I never planned to retire because I loved my job so much and had the freedom to conduct the kinds of studies that I thought were making a difference. And so, yeah, so it's extremely disappointing, not just personally, but professionally what it means that I don't believe this administration is currently listening to scientists, is currently interested in what scientists have to say on these topics and broader topics, and is instead going with the rhetoric and the common sense solutions that they think that they have. So, Julia, where do we find some hope in all of this? because we have food environments that are in many ways working against us and then systems, certainly in the United States that Kevin just described

that are fraught at best. What is our best hope for getting on a better track to a better relationship with food? So separate from this Maha leadership that we've been discussing in the U.S., there is this bipartisan grassroots movement of Americans who are really concerned about what's going on with their food, and they want healthier options. They're concerned about many of the things that we talk about in the book and that many of the leading researchers are concerned with.

And I think it's movements like that that I hope to see just continue to grow and gain support. And people, I hope more and more people feel compelled to push their leadership and in every aspect of their environment, from their schools to their workplaces, to their cities, to federal regulators or governments. to really push for the kinds of improvements that we all deserve for a healthier future. Thank you both very much for this conversation today. Thank you. Thank you.

Julia Bellews, and Kevin Hall's new book is called Food Intelligence, The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.