Eating with Intelligence (with Julia Belluz)

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2025

⏱️ 66 minutes

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Summary

Losing weight should be simple: eat less, exercise more. But according to author and health journalist Julia Belluz, it's complicated. Listen as Belluz talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about her new book, Food Intelligence. Belluz argues that a calorie is pretty much a calorie whether it's carbs or fat. Keeping calories under control is often harder than it sounds. The message isn't blame; it's agency with compassion: understand your body's feedback loops, redesign the choices around you, and choose a sustainable way to enjoy food. At the end of the conversation, Belluz makes the case for government intervention of various kinds to help us make what she sees as better food choices; Roberts pushes back.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.6	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.9	Today is September 4th, 2025. And my guest is journalist and author Julia Blues.
0:42.8	This is her second appearance on Econ Talk.
0:45.8	She was last year in November of 2018 talking about epidemiology, nutrition, and metabolism.
0:52.5	She is the author, along with Kevin Hall, of Food Intelligence, the science of how food
0:59.1	both nourishes and harms us, which is our topic for today.
1:03.4	Julia, welcome back to Econ Talk.
1:06.0	It's a pleasure to be here.
1:07.5	Thank you.
1:08.0	I want to start with the way you start the book, which is the biggest
1:13.0	loser, the TV show. And your co-author, Kevin Hall, had unusual access to the participants
1:20.4	and found some surprising things. And I was surprised as well. So it's actually a beautiful
1:27.3	example of what we think of as feedback loops
1:31.8	or emergent order in economics. So tell us what happened. Yeah, so Kevin, basically the way Kevin
1:39.7	tells it, so he had a postdoc in his lab who was sort of under-employed. This gentleman was never
1:45.9	going to be able to publish a paper. And so Kevin was sort of on the lookout for how can I get him
1:51.1	many participants in a study really quickly? And he had this guilty obsession with reality TV.
	...

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