You and Betty and the Nancy's and Bill's and Joes and Jane's will find in the study of science a richer, more rewarding life.

Hey, welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas. This is a podcast that explores the space where science and society collide.

We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover,

and why it matters. If you're like me, maybe a few times during this pandemic, maybe the

whole time during this pandemic, you might have

turned to food to get some comfort when all the other things that bring us joy, or at least a lot of

them, have been stripped away from us. At the beginning of the pandemic, at the beginning of

lockdown, people joked about the COVID-1919, the pounds we put on because of this habit.

Well, almost a year later, a lot of us are still experiencing

pretty significant restrictions to the things we can do with our lives. But there also seems to

have been a trend to focus in on our health, to take a look at the habits that might be making

us sick. And so I thought this would be a good time to revisit something that we've talked about

on this show before,

which pertains to diets. We talked to Tracy Mann to learn why almost all diets ultimately fail.

We learned some bizarre facts like the fact that exercise is actually not really an effective way of losing weight, that it comes down to restricting what you eat.

So as I looked around for an expert to talk to,

I wanted to hear from someone who could explain this phenomenon. And also, why it is that counting

calories doesn't always work. I mean, it should, right? It's just logical. If you eat more calories

than you burn, then ultimately you should be putting on weight. And if you eat fewer,

you should be able to lose it. But that doesn't seem to be true for many of us. There's also this

idea that your weight is largely set by your genes. So the person that I wanted to talk to is a professor

of genetic epidemiology. Tim Specter is a professor at King's College London,

...