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What is that?
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Oh yeah, it's a World cup holder.
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Like the soccer tournament.
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World cup holder for the world. Fits every car, holds every cup.
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It has a Carvana logo.
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Carvana made it. They buy and sell cars, so they made a car cup holder. So. Got any good cups lately?
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Used to. Just couldn't figure out where in the world to put them.
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The World Cup Holder brought to you by Carvana Proud sponsors of the World Cup Holder, sign up today to win yours@cup-holder2026.com not authorized or endorsed by FIFA. Not a real product for parody and fair use purposes only.
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Support comes from Wise the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the globe Fed up with losing out to hidden fees when you send money abroad with your everyday bank? Choose the smart way Wise. You can count on the exchange rate you'd usually find on Google. No unwelcome surprises. Plus, ditch that where's my money feeling. Most transfers arrive in under 20 seconds. Join Millions Saving billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get Wise. Download the Wise app today. T's and C's apply.
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The NIH has been a wonderful place because it allows scientists to take risks, form unique collaborations and and do studies difficult to conduct elsewhere. I'm proud of what we've accomplished and I'm fortunate to have had such wonderful colleagues and scientific collaborators. I hope to someday return to government service and lead a research program that will continue to provide gold standard science to make Americans healthy. That's nutrition scientist Kevin hall sharing his resignation letter to the National Institutes of Health on Twitter on April 16, 2025. Hall is considered one of the top nutrition experts in America and for decades his work informed health conscious policies and movements across the country. In fact, many of the nutrition facts that RFK Jr and his MAHA fans like to share can be traced back to Hall's work. And then his research found something Kennedy didn't like, so he suppressed Hall's work, which led to his resignation. I'm going to tell that story in a minute. I'm also going to discuss a number of things that I learned while reading the book that Kahl co authored with New York Times opinion writer Julia Belous. Food Intelligence the Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us is one of the most insightful books about food that I've ever read. The irony is that many of Maha's main talking points like tobacco companies, engineering food to hook Americans and the problems with ultra processed foods and food environments. Also, the necessity of exercise accompanying a healthy diet can all be found in these pages. The problem isn't what Belews and Hall include, it's what Maha leaves out or outright denies. That's a bit of what I want to get into today. Welcome to Conspirituality Book Club. I'm Derek Barras. For over six years, Julian, Matthew and I have referenced hundreds of books on this feed. We've interviewed dozens of authors about their new works. We regularly share information from the books that we're currently reading, so on occasion we'll focus episodes on one book that we're really digging and unpack what inspired us from its pages. Today we start with Food Intelligence. As always, you can find us on SpiritualityPod, on Instagram and Threads, as well as individually on BlueSky. And as independent media creators, we rely on the support of our listeners in order to keep this project going. If you can afford to do so and enjoy our work, please Support us at patreon.com conspirituality where you'll get access to our ad free episodes plus our Monday bonus episodes. You can also subscribe just to the Monday Bonus episodes via Apple Subscriptions. We really appreciate your support. Now let's dive in. Before we turn the pages, a little background about Kevin Hall's run in with Kennedy. The study at the center of this Dispute was published March 5, 2025 in the journal Cell Metabolism. It's called brain dopamine responses to ultra processed milkshakes are highly variable and not significantly related to adiposity in humans, and hall served as lead author. Their research used brain imaging to see whether consuming ultra processed milkshakes high in fat and sugar caused reactions in dopamine similar to addictive drugs. The premise being tested was the food addiction hypothesis, the idea that ultra processed foods high in fat and sugar are addictive because they induce an exaggerated post ingestive brain dopamine response akin to drugs of abuse. This is something that Kennedy and Maha fans often like to say. You've probably heard them claim ultra processed foods are more addictive than cocaine. If that thesis were true, people with obesity should show blunted dopamine responses and reduced dopamine receptor availability, which which would point to signs of tolerance from repeated over consumption. The team used pet scans on 50 participants, which is the largest study of its kind, and they found the opposite of what the theory predicted. Milkshake consumption didn't produce a significant post ingestive dopamine response and the highly variable individual responses were not significantly related to BMI or body fat. In fact, the measured responses were substantially smaller than those of many addictive drugs. The authors concluded that the narrative of these foods being as addictive as drugs was not supported by the data, which is simply good science. Hall even contextualized this at the time by saying it didn't outright prove that ultra processed foods aren't addictive at all. He said the research quote just suggests that they may not be addictive. By the typical mechanism that many drugs are addictive, he noted there are other possible neurochemical pathways. Plus, hall ran a 2019 trial that showed ultra processed diets cause excess calorie intake and weight gain even when calories and macronutrients are matched, something he discusses in Food Intelligence. So hall set out with a thesis in mind, and he was proven wrong by his own work, or at least his hypothesis was not confirmed. Instead of raging against the findings, hall started thinking about how this changes his research approach moving forward and how he'd have to update his own theory of nutrition. He absorbed the findings. He didn't deny them. But then there's his boss, or former boss. At this point, Hall's work contradicted a central plank of Maha messaging. Kennedy has long blamed ultra processed foods for a wide range of health problems and regularly characterizes them as being addictive. You might be surprised to learn that that was not based on a ton of evidence. It was more Kenny vibing on his hunches. After the study was published, the New York Times wanted to interview hall about his findings. As with a lot that happens in government and some larger businesses, Paul had to go through his employer to make sure he could do the interview. And HHS denied the request. They even contacted the reporter directly to downplay the study results because again, it contradicted Kennedy's preconceived narratives about ultra processed food addiction. Hall said he was blocked from being directly interviewed. He did email a few questions back, but then he noticed that they were heavily edited by hhs and he called it censorship of how his research was reported. This wasn't Hall's first run in with Kennedy. In an earlier incident, he was instructed to remove a reference to equity from a draft paper. And so instead of fighting it, he just withdrew his name from that paper. Before resigning, hall wrote a letter to Kennedy and incoming NIH director J. Bhattacharya about this censorship. He lamented funding freezes that were preventing researchers from getting basic supplies or from buying food for study participants. Which is pretty important if you're studying things like, I don't know, food addiction. Surprise. Neither Kennedy or Bhattacharya replied. And so hall accepted early retirement in order to and I wish I was kidding on this, to preserve health insurance for his family. Resigning in protest later on would have meant that he lost that benefit. If you're a regular listener of this podcast, you know my feelings on America's lack of socialized medicine, so let's just make that clear right away. I will say, though, watching Kennedy and Dr. Oz set the stage for removing millions of Americans from Medicare earlier this week by imposing work requirements, that's one of the cruelest ways to deflect from the fact that this administration just wants to take away social services, especially from poorer people. And it's obvious that this is only going to damage American health, not make it better. All right, let's turn to the book as a general heuristic. I'll just say that food intelligence shows how much more complicated metabolism is than most people realize, and certainly much more complex than wellness influencers and MAHA fans make it out to be. So far I've been citing Kevin Hall's work because it's important to understand politically and scientifically. Julia Belous is an equal contributor to this book as a journalist and also offers up her own body to experimentation to one of my favorite wellness pet peeves, Microbiome Tests. I'll get there toward the end, but they're equal writers and if I reference one or the other, just know all of their work went into this book. The first finding I want to cover is how they open the book metabolism, or basically how our bodies turn food and drink into energy. And they go right after one of nutrition's biggest myths right off the top, the notion that slowing down or speeding up metabolism results in the ability to lose weight or to keep it off in the short or long run. They look at this through the lens of that show the Biggest Loser, which we recently covered, in light of a documentary that showed just how cruel the celebrity trainers Jillian Michaels and Bob Harper really were. The context in the book years after the Biggest Loser, most participants gained most or all of the weight, or even sometimes more weight back, and it was attributed to this concept of slightly slowed metabolism. Hall's research found something quite different. It was the pressures of the real world food environment outside the ranch where the show was filmed that caused it, and this becomes a central thesis throughout the book. And this is why the authors explain boot camps and basically any form of fad diet never works. People eventually return to their old routines, sometimes unknowingly, and they often don't understand the complexity of their food. Food environments. In fact, when hall published his research on the show and this concept of slow metabolism, the show ended up canceling after the next season. Now, there were, if you saw the documentary, there were a lot of reasons for that. So it might not have only been Hall's work, but I'm sure it made some sort of impact. And here's an important factoid I learned while reading the book. The best way of measuring metabolism today is. Is by measuring a person's health. I also love that they wrote today in the book. They always caveat those things. I've long said that about good scientists or good doctors. They'll say things like, the best information we have right now. They won't make overarching or totalizing statements that it must be this way because they want to remain open to the evidence. Now, last year, I talked to Kevin Klatt, who received his PhD in molecular nutrition from Cornell University, about the lack of proper nutrition studies in America. He told me one reason studying nutrition is so hard is how many variables are involved. To properly do a study, you need a clinical kitchen where everything can be measured and not be subjected to contamination. And to really do it right, you need to confine participants to the research facilities for weeks or months. So it's expensive, and you're asking a lot of people, which is why these trials don't include tens of thousands of people like vaccine trials. They include something like 50, because you have to. You really have to look for the people to do it. Now, a big part of the reason for all this, it turns out, is, is because the researchers are measuring their breathing, which is the best current way of understanding the biochemical reactions occurring in their bodies. So we think it's the scale or the blood pressure monitoring, but they actually have special chambers measuring their breath. 24, 7. Respiration isn't something that only happens in our lungs, though. It occurs in almost every cell in our body. Remember, calories are units of heat energy. As Bellews and Hall write, life self organizes by harnessing a continuous flow of matter and energy derived from food and breath. And that flow gives off heat in order to measure the impact of food on that process. You're measuring heat, and that's measured through breathing. There's a lot of reductionism in nutrition science, and the concept of slow. Slow metabolism is one of the myths that it perpetuates. The authors write that most people's metabolic processes, they're not slow. Weight gain and weight loss is a lot more complex than that, which led them to look into another myth. That Maha has readily embraced the notion that we need more protein. Short answer, most of us get plenty of protein. There's a ton of political, cultural and individual baggage around proteins. Specifically the strongman idea that meat equals power. It's a very American ideal, but I know it also infects a lot of cultures. I'm going to leave those aside as we've covered them often on the pod in our concepts of soft eugenics. A lot of the scientific confusion around protein traces back to Justus von Liebig. He was a German scientist and considered one of the founders of the field of organic chemistry. Liebig was not a crank or a grifter. Well, mostly you'll hear that he was actually a highly respected researcher who advanced the field of chemistry greatly. But like some scientists stretching their knowledge beyond their bounds, he had a lot of theories around protein that were never properly tested or verified. But people became cultural brain worms. He's not unique in that sense. There's Edward Jenner, the man who codified vaccination as a legitimate medical intervention. He was a huge self promoter. Linus Pauling, the brilliant two time Nobel prize winner fell hard for the myth of megadosing vitamin C. And Liebig not only advocated for excessive protein, he founded Liebig's extract of meat company because he swore mega dosing meat was the best way to stave off illness. So maybe there was a little grifting going on there. He's kind of the granddaddy of the wellness industry. His meat extract was one of the first processed food products and it was marketed with all sorts of health claims that he never actually researched. Liebig is basically what leads to the liver king and his business partner Carnivore, MD, Paul Saladino creating powdered testicle supplements. There's three major macronutrients we know this carbs, fat and protein. And they're all composed of configurations of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen molecules. Only protein contains nitrogen. However, early research from around 1820 I believe confirmed the necessity of protein. Through a rather cruel experiment, they found that dogs, in eating food that lacked nitrogen, quickly became sick and died. That's how researchers realized protein is an essential building block of life. Following this specific research, Liebig officially launched his extract of meat. That was the name, that was in 1865, which belous and hall wraight the enduring template for rushing to market with untested nutrition ideas. Perfect. I'm going to let them explain. It's a longer quote but it's worth it. Lets be clear. Liebig's errors still distort the way many of us think about nutrition. Even now, eating vast quantities of protein is not necessarily useful or even beneficial to health. We certainly do not need to derive our protein from meat. Consuming extra protein alone will not build muscle, nor is protein what powers muscles. Contrary to Liebig's theory, the other two macronutrients, carbohydrates and fat, provide almost all of the energy necessary for both the physical and chemical work of life. So carbs and fat, not protein, are the main fuels for metabolic reactions we learned about in the last chapter on an Essential Protein Fact. However, Liebig was correct. Protein is the stuff in food that builds and repairs us. Or as he'd apparently put it, the stuff of life itself. I can hear Maha's brain screaming and all the carnivore fucking meat fluencers going nuts about this. But again, I'm more interested in what science tells us. Now, there's a lot more about protein that they cover, and they're clear that certain groups of people lacking in protein do need supplementation. This is categorically different from the influencer culture that I'm referencing. So let's turn to the other two macros, because they've also been implicated in a lot of nutrition myths, namely this idea that carbs are bad and fats are really good. The whole keto trend that I fell into about 15 years ago is part of that nonsense. So thanks Dave Asprey and your fucking coconut oil ketones. The authors dove into the literature and discovered something fascinating. People on low carb and low fat diets both lost similar amounts of weight. How could that be if one macro is superior to the other? Okay, well, they write, carbohydrates and fats are practically interchangeable fuels for the body, and we seem to be incredibly adaptable to using almost any combination. They don't write off ketogenic diets. They write about how they show promise for managing type 2 diabetes, for example. And then there's emerging research on low fat diets and in how they impact the body's innate immune system. And that might unlock new information. These are exciting areas of study, but they have not yet been proven. And if you're trying to lose weight, all the hype might only lead to more confusion. So the idea is don't rush ahead and just start experimenting on yourself because you're bound to create more anxiety. Speaking of weight and anxiety, I've often spoken about my 15 year struggle with the eating disorder known as orthorexia. I've long pushed back against the notion that being overweight is a moral or individual failing, and the authors of Food Intelligence provide plenty of evidence for this. First, they note that the neurobiology of people who have obesity variants is different from that of people without them. They then spend a lot of pages discussing the food environment. In some ways you'd think they were rehashing Maha arguments until you realize the reference material is from years or decades predating Kennedy and crew. I remember reading about how tobacco companies purchased food conglomerates and re engineered food products to be more appealing to consumers, such as some 20 years ago. This information has been out there for some time. Maha is right to call it out, but they're wrong to put the onus of the problems on individuals. Let me unpack that a bit. Maha is wrong to pretend that individuals can hack their biology and simply lose weight. Kennedy's tenure is proving even more dangerous to our health than his predecessors because of these misperceptions or propaganda or activism. Whatever it is, he's gutting agencies actually studying chronic diseases. He fired many people researching these problems, and along with Brooke Rollins at the usda, he's kicking millions of people off SNAP benefits for supposed fraud, which they can't actually show. And they'll soon be kicking thousands of stores off the SNAP benefits list if they don't spend millions of dollars to change their food offerings. Does Kennedy address the root cause in this case? That it's the supply chain and infrastructure that needs to be updated in order for those stores to stock healthier foods? Of course he doesn't. Just like his unwillingness to acknowledge that infectious disease can lead to chronic disease and therefore vaccination is a good thing if you want to fight chronic disease. He's looking way downstream of the actual problems when it comes to nutrition. As the authors write, non nutritional features of the food environment may be the most important drivers of overeating in the real world. They devote chapters looking at how the social determinants of health are affected by our food systems. I'm going to leave those for you to read, because as much as I'm trying to unpack here, I really hope this episode inspires you to actually read this book. So is it that ultra processed foods are the real villains? It's not that simple. And Hall's research, as we know, is why the man is no longer at the nih. He researched a topic that I always had an issue with, the idea that a calorie is a calorie. Turns out both his and my hunch are Wrong. Calories are basically calories regardless of the macronutrient profile. One of the real issues however, is that in order to make ultra processed food shelf stable, manufacturers remove all the water from them, making them much more calorie dense or energy dense. That's why people tend to gain weight when eating mostly ultra processed foods. They're taking in a ton more calories and they're not really feeling sated. And yes, there are also combinations of nutrients that make them more appealing, which hall and Beloza recognize. But as addictive as cocaine, that's hyperbolic and not reflective of the pathways that these chemicals take. That doesn't mean people don't come to crave them or as the authors note, they can only afford them. They write if ultra processed foods are anything, they are highly accessible, heavily marketed and socially acceptable. It's this combination of energy density and hyper palatability that makes them so dangerous. Then we have to talk about calorie absorption, our body's ability to digest and absorb calories. And this is where fiber comes in. Most Americans don't achieve the recommended daily allowance for fiber, and that too is a problem. Regardless. The authors rewrite the maxim that a calorie is a calorie to better reflect what we now know. A calorie is an absorbed calorie. And while our agricultural system produces more than enough calories for everyone, it does not produce enough fruits and vegetables for everyone. Now that is a systemic problem Maha should actually be addressing and incentivizing. Kennedy makes hints at it, but he has not touched the supply chain yet because instead he wants everyone to rock a health wearable like he said a few months ago. And, and I'm not against them. I'm wearing an Apple watch right now. I like it for a number of reasons. I just know it's not a replacement for actual healthcare. And I don't spend my money on expensive subscriptions for biomarkers that will probably only likely cause more health anxiety than fix problems. And that's, that's for me. If you find value in them and they're helpful, great. I'm not saying that, I'm just saying they do not replace healthcare. Belous and hall spend a number of pages unpacking the unreliability of another topic that I've talked about recently, continuous glucose monitors. And they also write about what they're useful for. I tried to get that across in some ways on the episode I recorded with my wife a few weeks ago and her experiments with it for pre diabetes. They also take the over hyped supplements market to task an industry which you might know is a huge red flag to me. They provide receipts like the fact that supplements result in 23,000 emergency room visits and 2,000 hospitalizations every year. And the fact that nutrients derived from whole foods have a lot of great evidence for health behind them. Yet not so much for supplements. I want to wind down with the microbiome testing Beluz took part in that I flagged earlier. She sent off samples of her spit and shit to Zoe and Viome and two subscription companies that purport to give you precision nutrition readings of your inners. I actually laughed out loud when the companies returned opposite readings of her samples. And yeah, she sent the samples from the same batch. Whatever nutrition advice made sense was no different from what any credible doctor has been saying for decades. Reduce glucose levels, Eat whole foods. When it comes to personalized, the conflicting results only created more confusion. And since their products are not FDA approved, they have to caveat everything the same way that supplements companies do. Here's some medical sounding advice, but it's not really medical advice. Wink wink. As the authors write. They purport to be cutting edge, ahead of the mainstream medical curve, but they also defer to doctors in their traditional diagnostics when medical needs arise. There's a lot to pull on in food intelligence. I mark the hell out of this book. They offer prescriptions like subsidizing grocery stores that offer fresh foods, not threatening to shut them down if they don't. They advocate for a lot more research in nutrition health on a governmental level, not as Kennedy is doing, forcing medical schools to do it. And perhaps most importantly, they remind us to follow the science. There are a number of instances where hall went into a study expecting one result and getting the opposite. Instead of throwing out the data, he absorbed it and updated his own thoughts on the topic, letting the work guide the way. If only we could be so lucky and have people in charge of public health in America who would do the same. Sam.