Julia Belluz, co-author of "Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us," joins Ken to dismantle everything you think you know about nutrition, metabolism and weight loss. Julia is an award-winning health journalist, contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and former senior health correspondent at Vox. She's a Knight Science Journalism Fellow from MIT and currently lives in Paris, France.

Julia explains why our struggles with food aren't personal failures. They are the predictable result of living in toxic food environments designed to make us overeat. Drawing on decades of nutrition science research conducted with co-author Kevin Hall at the National Institutes of Health, she reveals what people get wrong with food despite thinking they’re doing it right.

Julia compares France's deliberate cultivation of healthy food environments to America's chronic disease crisis. She discusses California's groundbreaking legislation defining ultra-processed foods, the promise and failures of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s "Make America Healthy Again" agenda, and why we need systemic change to how we approach food.

For a deeper dive into today’s discussion:

Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

EWG's food policy work

California's ultra-processed food law

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Something unprecedented just happened at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A newly reconstituted advisory committee voted to recommend delaying hepatitis B vaccination for most babies. The vote overturns a 30-year policy that led to a massive decline in infant infections.

In today’s episode, Ken talks with former CDC Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Dr. Demetre Daskalakis. Daskalakis spent decades fighting on the front lines of America's toughest public health battles. He brought HIV testing to the communities that needed it most. He stopped a meningitis outbreak in its tracks and he led the national Mpox response. He left the CDC in August.

Demetre breaks down the recent shake-up at the CDC and why the best sign that federal public health efforts are working are that they’re not in the news – unlike today.

For a deeper dive into today’s discussion:

Dr. Demetre’s Instagram

Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode every other week.

@kencookspodcast

www.ewg.org

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Are you susceptible to cult-like thinking? According to author Jane Borden, everyone might be, especially Americans.

In today’s episode, Jane talks with Ken about how the Pilgrims and Puritans essentially founded America as a "high-control doomsday group" and that those patterns never went away.

In her book, "Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America," Jane identifies the warning signs: worship of a charismatic leader who can't be criticized, apocalyptic crisis narratives, conspiratorial thinking that explains away inconvenient facts, and promises to return to a "pure" past. Sound familiar?

The “Make America Great Again” and “Make America Healthy Again” movements check many of these boxes even while acknowledging that the health threats many Americans face are very real. Are we addressing those threats through evidence and accountability, or through cult-like devotion to leaders who promise easy answers?

For a deeper dive into today’s discussion:

Jane Borden’s Website

Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode every other week.

@kencookspodcast

www.ewg.org

@environmentalworkinggroup