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EconTalk · 2025-09-29 · 66 min · 11,750 words

Eating with Intelligence (with Julia Belluz)

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Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.

We'd love to hear from you. Today is September 4th, 2025, and my guest is journalist and author Julia Beluz. This is her second appearance on Econ Talk. She was last here in November of 2018 talking about epidemiology, nutrition, and metabolism. She is the author, along with Kevin Hall, of Food Intelligence, The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us, which is our topic for today.

Julia, welcome back to Econ Talk. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. I want to start with uh the way you start the book, which is uh the biggest loser, the TV show. And uh your co-author, Kevin Hall, uh had unusual access to the participants and found some surprising things, and I I was surprised as well.

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