Host: Here's a number that actually shocked me when I learned it. This from a Kaiser Family Foundation poll. One out of eight Americans is now taking a GLP-1. One out of eight. Maybe I shouldn't have been so shocked because the number is higher in my social circles. I have tried these uh for reasons I'll explain, but they're a strange medication, right? They don't make you lose weight. They make you not want to eat food. that like that's what they do, right? But then they do all these other things. They seem to protect people's heart health independent of losing weight. They're protective of kidneys, of livers. There is ongoing research about dementia, Alzheimer's. They have all these strange effects on addiction and desire. But should everyone be on these? Like, what does it mean for society to have access to drugs that regulate desire in this way? What do they mean for the sick? What do they mean for the well? I've wanted to do an episode on this for for a while, but haven't known quite how to approach it. And then Julia Beloo, who's a contributing writer at New York Times Opinion and co-author of the book Food Intelligence and also was a health and science reporter with me back at Vox, she started doing a lot of reporting on JLP1s and she's written a lot of great pieces on them. She is one of the best health and science reporters I have ever known. incredibly deep on the science, but really compassionate and detailed and relentless about talking to actual people about their experiences inside the health system. And I wanted to have her on to hear what she's been learning. As always, my email is forclient.showy.times.com. Julia Beloo, welcome to the show.

Julia Beloo: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Host: So, I was shocked by this number. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation's poll, one in eight Americans are currently taking a GLP1. Why?

Julia Beloo: Yes, it was surprising to me, too. So, I think um one of the ways we can understand this is there's this very long history of people seeking out basically the magical elixir for weight loss, right? So, I think that's one piece of it. And now we finally have something that rivals the only other effective medical intervention we've had to help people lose weight, which is beriatric surgery. On the other hand, there's a lot of people who are living with diabetes. And I think that's another reason that that we see so many people who are on these drugs. In addition, I think these drugs have really met a particular moment, which is this algorithmic social media age. They're everywhere. Um, in the US, we already had this relatively unrestricted approach to marketing pharmaceuticals. Um, we see them advertised everywhere. we've seen this tele medicine kind of industry flourish since co but also around these drugs and um I think that's why we're seeing these kind of shocking numbers.

Host: So I want to start on the part of this that people actually don't talk about that much which is diabetes which is what these drugs are originally approved for as you say a huge number of Americans have diabetes and and have terrible health consequences often from it including limb amputation and and and blindness. What do these drugs do for diabetics?

Julia Beloo: So, our bodies produce GLP-1 naturally. So, we have this hormone that's produced in our gut, in our brains, and to a lesser extent in the pancreas. So, basically, they're this synthetic version of a hormone we produce naturally. And the big breakthrough for diabetes was that they're stimulating the pancreas to release insulin only in the context of high blood sugar. So, it's not like when when you take insulin and you need to be careful about what you're eating and you're at risk of really low blood sugar levels and the dangers that come with that. These are only stimulating insulin secretion when your blood sugar is running high. So, as the re as researchers who are working on this are trying higher and higher doses to help people with diabetes get more and more benefit, they start to discover these weight loss um results in the trial. So people start to spontaneously lose weight and then later we're finding all these slew of other benefits that no one would have predicted. No pharma company would have bet on this. We're only at the beginning of what what's been called this Ozempic era. I think we're we're really just at the beginning of discovering the benefits and the harms of these drugs.

Host: Okay. So you have the recognition which is just something people begin observing that diabetics on these drugs begin to lose weight and they don't feel hungry and as researchers begin testing you know the first generation of this Ozempic what we now in that context call Wegovy how big is the effect size what do we actually know about what Wegovy does for weight loss there's another one which is slightly more advanced it has more mechanisms of action to his Tirzepatide which is also goes by Zepbound. How much weight do people lose on these?

Julia Beloo: So it depends on the drug but we're talking like 15%. It's the first time we have a drug that really rivals the more effective types of beriatric surgery. The key point there is that it's turning down appetite. So it's not ramping up metabolism or energy burn. GLP-1 is a hormone. And the idea was that this is a gut hormone. um or that that's the the thing that a lot of people focused on and we're just and it it's released after eating and it helps people signal satiety. It helps them feel full and know that they've eaten and we're just giving a really souped up version of this um this gut hormone. And it turns out that actually you need to stimulate the brain GLP-1 system to get the weight loss effects. So you only interfere with appetite once you reach this brain GLP-1 system. Well, you've written or co-written a whole book about the metabolism. And one of the arguments of that book, one of the arguments of of books in this space that I think people don't appreciate is that hunger is a function of the brain. And it's a function of the brain's reaction and predictions about the world around it. And we we always have this idea that, you know, people just feel hungry. And then, you know, you should use your brain to decide if you want to eat, but your brain is deciding if you feel hungry. and and and you're sort of fighting its own instincts. So, I'd like you to spend a minute on this like idea that hunger is a function of the stomach versus hunger as a function of the brain and sort of how researchers moved from one to the other.

Julia Beloo: Yeah. The way we describe it in the book, we use this analogy of breathing. So if I tell you like take control of your breath right now, like breathe more slowly or breathe more quickly or hold your breath, you can take control for short periods of time, but eventually physiology takes over. Um, and the same thing is true of what we eat. So we have this illusion of control over our individual meals and snacks, but there's this symphony of internal signals that's going on inside of us all the time. And the brain is sort of leading this symphony. And um the decisions we make are much less a product of conscious control that I think many people appreciate. So when you're taking a GLP1, you're getting a much higher longerlasting version of what your body produces and it has to reach the brain. And the the theory is that it's reaching into the part of the brain that usually signals that there's a toxin in circulation. And so that shuts down your appetite and increases your nausea.

Host: Like what you would get during food poisoning or something.

Julia Beloo: Exactly. or what you would have on a these are the most common side effects of these drugs, right? Um so so it reaches into that.

Host: So the wonder drug we've invented is we've made your brain slightly think it's being poisoned all the time.

Julia Beloo: Um I I think that's one way to put it. Absolutely. And so this so

Host: modernity baby.

Julia Beloo: I know. And in the context of our completely toxic food environment, right? It's just turning down your appetite by reaching into this GLP-1 brain system. So it acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain and from there reaches other parts of the brain. Um yeah this is something this is a very active area of research but that's the sort of bottom line and and this dialing down of appetite is the key key feature of these drugs. One of the things that I find interesting about the GLP-1s is we basically created this food environment that does not exist in nature of hypers sugary, hyper fatty, hyper salty, hyperc calorie dense foods. Our brains are evolved over very very long periods of time to treat those as getting you know three cherries on the slot machine and to really really want them. So, we've put people into this hyper stimulating environment, but we didn't change everybody's brain to turn down the level of hunger when you come into something that is very calorie dense or very sugar dense. And so we've been asking people with these like caveman all of us myself um with these caveman brains now surrounded by the fruits of modern industrialized food production where the Mars company is spending god knows how much on R&D to make my kids want M&M's and it doesn't work for people and then we blame them and tell them they've not done a good job exercising their willpower and self-control.

Host: I think you were also someone who struggled with weight earlier in your life. Uh, I was very very heavy until I was almost an adult. Um, like I lost like 60-ish pounds, 50-ish pounds when I was uh, 16. And then ever since like I fight my food desires. Like if we had a bowl of Oreos on this table, 30% of my mental energy the whole time we were talking did not eat the Oreos.

Julia Beloo: Right. Yeah. Ex. Absolutely. I remember we had lunch in Washington when I was doing lots of obesity reporting and you said why am I a person who if the chocolate cake is there like 50% of my brain is focused on the chocolate cake and I didn't have a good answer for you then. Um

Host: do you have one now?

Julia Beloo: I do. Yeah. I think it's that you know so when when we think about something like common obesity so there's many different types of obesity. Um, but what most people have is called common obesity and it arises from these tiny like over a thousand genetic variants that all act almost all act in the brain. And so you have a neurobiology probably that's different from someone who doesn't have to fight the chocolate cake. Um, and I actually did genetic testing for the book and I'm also someone who struggled with my weight and I I turns out I have a higher genetic risk than like 90% of the population. But this risk in a particular environment won't be expressed. But as you said, when you put people like us in environments where there's lots of M&M's and lots of chocolate cake, it becomes much harder. Um, and I think most people don't have this um privilege, let's say, of being able to finally curate their environment to control their weight in maybe the way we might have had. I have a family member who uh I'm not related to by blood and one thing that always amazes me is she will order dessert and she loves dessert and she loves chocolate cake and she'll like eat half the cake and then take the rest home. And I always look at that and I think whatever is happening in you is not happening or me or or possibly vice versa whatever is happening in me is not happening in you. And then I feel in other ways elsewhere in my life. Uh I can have a cigarette or a puff on a vape. I have no interest in another. It does not exite any desire in me. I can have a whiskey and leave half of it or a glass of wine and I don't particularly want to keep going. And I've had people in my life who struggle with alcoholism and I don't have willpower. They don't.

Host: Yes. something is happening in their bodies or in their minds absolutely that is not happening in mine.

Julia Beloo: And I've always thought the way we blame people for this is so cruel because it is so often people who don't have the propulsive desire, blaming people who do for not exercising willpower. But those people aren't exercising willpower. I'm not exercising willpower to not have more cigarettes. I don't want them.

Host: No, absolutely. I have this conversation all the time with my husband. For some people, the cards are just stacked against them. Um, one person that really helped my thinking on this was Robert Seapolski. He talks about how we have these um potentials or vulnerabilities that are created by our genetics and then in different environments, they're either expressed or activated or not not expressed, right? Like it's extremely hard to, you know, do the right thing to buy the foods that you know you should be eating or to exercise every day when you're working the night shift and you're raising kids and you're um maybe the single mom or dad or whatever it is like um how how are you going to do all like all the things that you know you need to be doing to protect your health and to fight against um this neurobiology that you might have. So you have this you have this interplay of biology neurobiology as you're as you're saying it this thing we call willpower which is a very a very poorly specified concept and then environment to me this question of environment is really important I'll I'll use myself as the example you know when I lost a lot of weight I mean when I was younger a lot younger

Julia Beloo: a high school student with nothing to do

Host: and I was able to really really hold that when I was a young adult. Um, and I have not been able to diet successfully since I had kids because I can't control the food environment.

Host: And there's a lot of other things I can control. I have money. I can, you know, go to the gym. I have a certain amount of autonomy over my schedule. So, as you say, when you add in things like the night shift, when you add in not having the money to to to get healthy foods or or go to the gym, when you add in having more kids or less time, that we will power works very very differently when you're able to have the autonomy or the money to create a certain kind of environment around you that is conducive to living in a certain way, right? you're a Hollywood celebrity with a personal chef versus you're a single mother of four, you know, who works two jobs. And this idea that like willpower is some unchanging like muscle inside the mind as opposed to some reserved discipline that gets depleted like if I don't sleep enough, I eat more.

Julia Beloo: Right. Absolutely. And you're designed to eat more when you don't sleep enough. And you're absolutely right that this symphony of internal signals that I was referring to earlier, it's interplaying with our environments. So, one thing I've really appreciated about your work on the GLP-1s as a reporter and as somebody who's very deep in the science is you've done a tremendous amount of interviewing people on them and you've interviewed many of the kinds of people and again to me this has always been the cruelty of this conversation who were exercising a tremendous amount of constant willpower going on and off like very restrictive diets you know losing 30 lbs gaining it back. What is it like for them? Um, for the people who've seen huge amounts of of of weight loss, how do they describe the experience of being on a GLP1 versus what it's like off of one?

Julia Beloo: I think the big common thread for people in whom the drugs are effective for weight loss is this idea that suddenly this willpower that they were always searching for that they feel they didn't have enough of, suddenly they have it. Um, suddenly it's not that hard to say no to the extra piece of cake or the cake altogether. um they're eating smaller portions, their cravings change. Like they have this complete there's a lot of discussion about food noise. When the cake is there, 30 to 50% of your brain is on the cake or you have cravings that distract you. A lot of people say that this just disappears.

Host: You said a second ago, for whom the drugs are effective. For whom are they effective and for whom aren't they effective and why?

Julia Beloo: So this is another area we don't fully understand but it seems like there are some people who are quite sensitive to the drugs and others who are insensitive to the drugs and there might be a genetic component to this too. um that that's sort of a frontier um area of science. And so I think the the quest that a lot of the companies are on is to understand like how how do we differentiate the people who might need higher doses initially or much lower doses because they're having um so much sensitivity to the drugs and side effects um and whatnot. They're having such a strong response or losing weight too fast. Um so there there absolutely is this variation in how people are responding. Tell me about the side effects of these GLP-1 drugs. In studies, people often don't stay on them that long. People do cycle off of them sometimes for cost, but sometimes for for other reasons. Like what what is unpleasant on them? What what can go wrong?

Julia Beloo: So, the most common are that we know of right now are the gastrointestinal side effects. So, the nausea, the vomiting, the diarrhea. Um those those are the most common, but it seems like there's other emerging potential problems. So there are lawsuits around um severe stomach problems um damage to the ocular nerve um so so eye damage um and those I don't think we have clear answers on how common that is um and but but the basis of of those lawsuits is that people weren't properly warned that this could happen. One thing that a lot of people don't seem to be warned about is the fact that you have to stay on them to keep reaping the weight loss benefits. Um, so I think there's an idea that a lot of people have. I'll lose the weight, I'll learn how to eat properly, and then I'll go off the drugs. I'm I'm always surprised that even people who got the drugs from their doctors don't seem to

Host: What happens when people go off the drugs?

Julia Beloo: You tend to regain the weight and

Host: you just feel hungrier again. The the sort of resets exactly this this appetite that was suppressed through the brain um through through acting on on the brain GLP1 brain system, that effect is gone and you're back to the food noise. you're back to um yeah the hunger that you had before.

Host: Isn't that pretty? I I've heard this and it's definitely true in the the data. But I guess like people in my life have chronic conditions and the drugs are on like they just have to stay on them. You know, you stop taking Statins and the effect goes away. Um if you're diabetic, you have to keep taking your insulin. That like I feel like that's like a like people who are used to drugs to treat acute conditions not being used to drugs to treat chronic conditions. But I think that this is the thing like that goes back to the beginning of the conversation that a lot of people still have this idea that they should just be able to will their way out of it, right? I think these drugs helped reveal how much we are products of our physiology and um that with this, you know, you take take this drug and suddenly again you have the willpower you you didn't have for your whole life. Um but there's still this expectation. It's like any other diet. And um that feels like a place where people haven't been warned. But as you as we've been saying, there are now so many people on the drugs. And I think these more rare side effects we're going to start to learn more about.

Host: I want to talk about a possible social side effect, which is the our cultures expectations for what people's bodies should look like have been punishing for a long time. Um particularly punishing for women and girls. I think we we've interestingly been entering an era where they're increasingly punishing on boys and men and there's this whole thing of like male looks maxing and uh you know the guys in the Marvel movies are completely jacked now and on all kinds of things you probably shouldn't be taking. And you know, if you're obese or overweight and you're taking a GLP-1 to lose weight, you know, great. Um, or to, you know, protect your cardiovascular system. But I think a lot of the cultural effect of them has come from celebrities and influencers who all of a sudden show up and are much thinner at times skeletal now in ways that you know when you have the body's natural hunger signals coming back at you is is harder to do. You know there was like this big body positivity movement and that was always going to be a very uphill climb in this country. But how do you think about GLP-1s as possibly a like a like a pharmaceutical accelerator of, you know, fairly dangerous body expectations because now it's like, well, if you want to look thinner, why not just go on to GLP1?

Julia Beloo: I think that's that's absolutely a strange um in this conversation and in this in this moment that we're living in. Um the place that it freaks me out the most is um I talked to pediatricians who are prescribing the drugs in children. There's no screening yet for for these drugs and eating disorders in young people and and they've they anecdotally have seen people use these as aids for essentially eating disorders and and kind of exacerbating eating disordered behavior. One of the underlying assumptions of the health at every size or fat activism or body positivity movements um was that you can't control your body size. Therefore, you must accept it. We had surgery before. It wasn't as accessible or scalable. But now we do have this medication where people do have the option, right?

Host: Or at least the ones who are sensitive to it

Julia Beloo: and the ones who can afford it and access it and all all of that, right? We've seen influential people in these the body positivity fat activism movement come forward and really grapple with starting on these drugs and um and losing weight on them. And one thing that those movements did that was really important was highlight how much shame and stigma people who are living with obesity face every day, especially women. So, like there was this great economist article a few years ago where they parsed the data on the pay penalty and they they did such a great job of highlighting the discrimination and stigma that people with obesity face. But I think there was really a dangerous glossing over of the health effects of carrying extra weight that even if there is this variation in individuals at the population level, it's very clear that the higher you go up the BMI ladder, the more um health risks you're you're carrying. I I've spoken to people who were part of these movements. They had issues with movement. Um they had problems with their blood sugar. They had um they were concerned about fertility and they were so grateful to be able to now have a medication that could help with those issues. That debate became very polarized. It was either you're fat accepting or fat phobic. And I think we're kind of moving to something maybe in between.

Host: But but you but I take your point on that. But put put that side of the debate over here, right? That was always a like an like an effort that was running up against the mainstream of American culture, which believes very strongly in thinness as a synonym for virtue. And you know, one thing that the people I know are worried about and frankly that I'm worried about, I mean, I feel like I would not have had this concern for like young boys, which is what I have a while ago. And now I look at the rise of male looks maxers and it looks a lot like toxic diet culture you know that girls were exposed to before and you know and obviously you know Clevicular who's the uh avatar of that has talked a lot about being on you know GLP-1s or some some form of these drugs and I wonder what it's going to do when it is just that much easier for people at the top of society to exert like hair24 unknown levels of control over their bodies and when they're doing it with these like wild stacks of GLP-1s and peptides and you know uh pills to prevent hair loss and everything else you know constant Botox like that filters down.

Julia Beloo: Oh, absolutely.

Host: And it makes the the the ideal both like ever more unreachable and ever more punishing to try to reach.

Julia Beloo: No, I think about this a lot with kids, right? there's this basically this market that hasn't been tapped to the extent that the adults have which is children with obesity and diet-caused diseases and I think it's something like 1% of um children who are eligible are taking these drugs now but I think that number is expected to rise stratospherically um pretty quickly especially with the expanded access and going to pill form and there's so much there's if we if there's like a lot we don't know in adults there's so much we don't know about what it means to suppress appetite during these critical phases of growth and development. At at the same time, um diet caused diseases like obesity and diabetes, they hit young people particularly hard. Um and there's some question with diabetes for example about interactions with growth hormone and insulin signaling because the disease comes on so ferociously and it's so hard to treat in young people. So now we have this treatment or or thing that can actually help young people in a way we couldn't accept with beriatric surgery before. But what is it going to mean for them when we're yes blunting appetite um not only with the pressures on body image at that age but also on yeah your muscles, bones, um puberty, all these things, right? We're we're about to put all these young people on these drugs. Like I think about my kids and the pressures that they're going to face. Um, I think about I don't know if you've done this thought experiment, but imagine being like chubby 16-year-old Ezra now. Would you have gone on one of these drugs at 16? Like I I I've thought I would I have, you know, I I also I think my weight fluctuated a lot, but I think around 17 or 18 I would have had obesity. And would I would I have pushed like my parents to say, you know, I really wanted GLP-1. And where would I be now? Would I have had a happier childhood and like or teens and early 20s? Um, if I had one of these drugs, would I have learned to eat in the way that I've learned to eat by changing my food environment? I I don't know. Like I I've But the pressures I think young people are going to face now growing up in the culture that we have, it's it's scary. It's punishing. I'm terrified for my kids when I hope that there's some sort of correction, but I don't know if the correction is coming or how, you know.

Host: So, the conversation we've been having here sort of tracks what I would call like the first cycle of Ozempic coverage excitement. And then a new thing begins happening. And it's sort of when I began paying closer attention. There was a study that came out that particularly caught my eye as a former healthcare reporter, which was that we were seeing huge drops in mortality from any form of cardiac event, but the drops didn't seem to be connected or didn't need to be connected to losing weight.

Julia Beloo: That's right. Yeah.

Host: So, can you explain what we saw then and then how that begins to shift the story here?

Julia Beloo: Sure. Yes. So we have this drug that comes on the market for diabetes in the diabetes trials as as we start ramping up the doses people start to lose weight and then for any diabetes drug now that comes onto the market there's a requirement that companies must look into what these drugs do to cardiovascular events to look for harms. So so they were so the companies were looking for harms. Does this increase the risk of a cardiovascular event?

Host: Past past weight loss drugs like Fen-Phen, you know, which were not diabetes drugs like did increase the risk of cardiovascular events. Right. We've had wonder weight loss drugs before and they gave people

Julia Beloo: heart issues.

Julia Beloo: Exactly. So, so, so they're looking for harms and instead they find this 20% risk reduction. And

Host: put that in context for me. How big is that?

Julia Beloo: It's big. Um, Statins are a drug that are targeting these conditions and the risk reduction is something like 29%. What's really significant about it is it seems that more and more of the benefits that researchers are discovering from these drugs seem to be weight independent. So in other words, what everyone expected is you make people lose weight, inflammation in the body goes down, um your metabolism of fat and sugar um improves. So maybe um you see improvements in fatty liver disease or your diabetes or whatever it is. But what no one predicted was that you would start to see these weight independent benefits and that that goes for the heart, it goes for the liver, I think the kidney, there's a slew of benefits that seem to be weight independent.

Host: There's possible benefits on dementia. Um I mean my understanding of this is that observationally people on these seem to have much lower risk of dementia. They did a study seeing if it uh a randomized control trial seeing if it improves people who have Alzheimer's and it didn't. But we're not sure about whether or not it can prevent Alzheimer's and some people seem to believe Alzheimer's or dementia are metabolically activated. And so now there's this whole question of does it is it cognitively protective. So the Alzheimer's trials, so these were really much anticipated um randomized control trials to see what would happen with um these drugs in Alzheimer's and they had negative results. And so it was a big disappointment um to the community and to the companies, but there is this question of in a different population or with a different dose or a different drug, will we see the benefits? And that's an active um question, right?

Julia Beloo: Yeah. If you're intervening earlier, it's an active um question and area of study. So I don't think that case is closed. And sleep apnea is a big one. Sleep apnea is weight dependent. So you need to lose the weight to see the benefit. That's another indication that these drugs are approved for now.

Host: So these weight independent results, they break our theory of the mechanism of health improvement here a little bit. So as doctors and scientists try to grapple with this, how does our sense of what the drug is doing and why it is helping the body change? So there's a researcher in Toronto, Dan Ducker, who helped discover this whole class of drugs and he described to me like let let basically there's these three buckets. So one is the weight loss bucket that's clear it's going to help you lose weight and you'll get the benefits from the weight loss. Um the second bucket is reducing inflammation. So inflammation is when you're exposed to a pathogen um an infection and injury, your body mounts this immune response and it can signal healing. But when it goes into kind of overdrive at low levels, you have this chronic inflammation and that's a hallmark of many of these diseases we've been talking about. Obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease. And these drugs seem to lower work on inflammation. They seem to lower inflammation. And this to me is the most exciting area because we've had drugs in the past that kind of shut down inflammation like steroids um let's say but but you put people at risk because you're essentially shutting down the immune system. You're putting people at higher risk for cancer or other infections. But the way this is described to me is that GLP-1 seem to act as these finetuners of inflammation. So they have this more subtle approach and um it's not something we've really had in medicine before. So we're using these drugs. So GLP-1 and there's other drugs that are coming on the market with like the dual and triple agonist um that use more than GLP-1. And the question is like are we going to discover these other hormones that we can subtly manipulate the immune system and inflammation with? And so we might just be at the beginning of this. And I think the other exciting facet of it is we might really get amazing insights into the immune system through these drugs that we haven't had before because we haven't been able to do these more subtle manipulations. But the third bucket that the the third way these drugs seem to help people is by directly targeting the organs that are involved in particular diseases. So, um sending signals to the liver to heal scarring involved in fatty liver disease or to clear the fat from the liver um or whatever it is to promote healing in the liver or the kidneys. That that's a third way these drugs seem to be helping people.

Host: Why would it do any of that?

Julia Beloo: Your guess is as good as but um there's models in mice of what's going on. Um but how this is working inside of us, we don't know. My family has a lot of cardiovascular disease in it that um has hit members of my family young. And as everybody sort of around me began going on GLP-1s, I began reading these things about cardiac events. Um I was like, well, am I an idiot for not being on one? Are we all going to be on one of these in a few years? And so I've tried them. I want to talk about that experience in a minute, but I want to ask that underlying question of you given these three buckets you just described and how many things they seem to be helping to treat. It increasingly seemed to me like shouldn't everybody be on lowd dose Ozempic or Tirzepatide if you're seeing reduction possible reductions in dementia that we don't really know but reductions in weight reductions in cardiovascular events reductions in liver and kidney disease reductions in sleep apnea improved blood sugar we'll talk about the addiction um and compulsivity findings later but it began to seem like a thing we should be putting in the water

Host: you know I had the same question is you and the the deeper I've gotten into the the deeper I dive into the science, the more I've wondered the same. We did this poll with the Times um for a piece on of GLP-1 users and asked them like what's your experience been like? And I went into that poll thinking we would get these kind of negative results. I I had a feeling that a lot of the headlines in the media had been quite triumphalist about these wonder drugs, but we weren't reporting what the lived experiences of people on these drugs was really like with the side effects and cycling in and out of insurance. And what we got back was people kind of generally feeling great and having benefits that they didn't expect and that they wanted to stay on the drug for benefits for for reasons other than which the drugs were prescribed. This was amazing to me that 63% of people in your survey said even if the drug didn't work for weight loss, they would want to stay on it.

Julia Beloo: No, this was it shocked me. I did not expect this. Um, one of the most amazing stories to me is the woman who had um postconussion syndrome for almost a decade whose life was essentially I don't want to say shut down but it was she was suffering suffering deeply um with symptoms and she started to find mice and cell research suggesting these drugs could benefit postconussion syndrome. So, she talked to her doctor, she got the prescription, and she tries it. And within days, she starts to experience benefit, and now she's back to her normal life. Um, but the big key is we haven't done a randomized control trial on this. We don't have the high quality evidence to say, is this going to be everyone with postconussion syndrome, 80% of people or like 2%, we don't know. In addition, we don't understand the how these drugs interact. For example, if you were on, god forbid, but some other type of like a cancer therapeutic or something like this, we don't know how how does this fine-tuning of the immune system I talked about work when you're taking an imunotherapy, for example. There are so many unknowns and and researchers are always going to be cautious. But I ask almost all the researchers I talk to this question and they all say we're not at that stage where we should just all be on this. I understand why the researchers have to say well look we don't know but we don't know actually isn't an answer to that question right you have to make a decision like as a person with one life and a life where you have a chance of getting heart disease a chance of developing dementia a chance of developing kidney disease a chance of developing all these different things and you have to look at these studies or the coverage of these studies is more to the point and say or say with your doctor, do I think I should be on this thing that seems to modulate inflammation which appears to be a source cause of all kinds of major chronic and acute illnesses people develop or not. And you know, one reason I think you're seeing like really really aggressive experimentation particularly around this class of drugs is because something that has all these effects for the well or for the you know for chronic conditions saying well I don't know in 12 years maybe we'll know more. You actually kind of have to make a yes or no decision as a person because if you miss out on protecting your body from the chronic effects of ongoing inflammation for five years, you've missed out on 5 years of protection and you have accumulated 5 years of damage. I don't know. It sure seems like maybe, but I know different doctors feel differently about this. And I feel like we're in this place. It's actually like really tender and tricky.

Host: Absolutely. But I think the question I was answering earlier was this. Should it be in the drinking water? Yes. I didn't mean to actually make it mandatory.

Julia Beloo: No, no, no. But yeah, no, but this question of should you, Ezra, as an individual with your particular family history and your underlying disease risk profile or whatever you've struggled with um already. Should you be on the drug? That's a conversation people and you should certainly have with your doctor and um get the prescription and have someone monitor you. What scares me about this GLP-1 era is how many people are circumventing the medical system. They're getting these very low barrier um prescriptions through tele medicine. Um they're going to like elicit research chemicals through people like influencers on TikTok. Um there's so much enthusiasm and I've seen this happen with other drugs. It's like it seems to do everything and then we dial it back. We're not quite there yet that we can just say put it in the drinking water. So I went on the lowest dose of Tirzepatide and like two and a half um milligrams and I did not have the experience that people in your survey had. Uh so on the one hand it's like the most interesting drug or one of them that I've ever tried uh you know legal or non-legal because I seem to be sensitive to it and all of a sudden I just didn't want to eat which is never an experience I've had before. It was like living in somebody else's brain. The way I've described it to people, I used a slot machine analogy earlier. It's like being a gambler who loves slots and going up to a slot machine and pulling the thing and getting the three cherries and then nothing lights up.

Host: It made me feel like that there was this level of experience that I hadn't even recognized I had, which was around desire. Like I would taste something and it would be good or I'd smell something and I hadn't noticed that the thing it would then trigger another feeling which was desire because like the feelings were so connected for me. But all of a sudden I would have that same I would have that same experience and then the desire wouldn't trigger and I would walk by the candy bowl and not stop or I would leave half the burrito on my plate and it was in a it was in a way revelatory. Um, the problem is it made me quite depressed.

Julia Beloo: Interesting.

Host: And andhonic. And whether that was because I wasn't eating enough or or what what was going on. But the thing where people report more energy and and and more focus and feeling cheerier for me, it really doled experience.

Julia Beloo: Almost sounds like an anti-depressant experience. Well, and that's why I think it's like interesting to bring in my own experience because there is this whole thing where it's working on some kind of reward mechanism too on maybe dopamine, but people are reporting not just a desire to eat less, but a desire to do all kinds of things less. Drink alcohol, take drugs, online shop, and then this anhidonia thing is also being reported by people. And so, what have you seen about the whole reward system dynamic of it in your reporting?

Julia Beloo: Yeah. So, this has been a very exciting area and one that we've paid a lot of attention to, I think, in particular in the media because the anecdotes are so startling and I think they're real. I've talked to people who have reported like reversals of um alcoholism, um the desire to smoke, um sex addiction, like any kind of addictive behavior you can imagine seem to be dialed down with these drugs. The trials to date have been mixed and the researchers who study reward are quite cynical that these results are going to endure. And the way it's been described to me is so for a long time we know that if you make rodents hungry, they're more likely to have addictive behaviors like they're more likely to get hooked on cocaine or push the lever. So hunger has this overlapping pathway with these other motivated behaviors and it can increase the risk of addictive behavior. Um it seems and so it's it it so one explanation is that once you've been on these drugs for a while and your appetite starts to normalize, you've lost the weight and your hunger starts to normalize again whether the results for addiction are going to actually endure after that. I think a lot of people think about these as like clear treatments for these addictive behaviors and that's where I think we don't have the the high quality research we want to have.

Host: Well, that my assumption of why some people were getting uh anhidonia, some people were seeing, you know, lower desire for drinking that that was actually not necessarily that it would end up proving to be a clear treatment, but that it is messing with a system we don't really understand. And I mean I I sort of think what's interesting about this whole conversation is we're basically saying we don't understand any of the systems very well. We don't understand the appetite system. It's working a different way than we hypothesized. The cardiac system is not doing what we thought it would be doing. We don't know why the inflammation system is responding. The reward system is changing. I mean the human body is a very very very complex set of systems and this seems to be a complex change to them that like at the population level is positive probably but not in a way where we can precisely define the mechanisms by which it is positive or tell you for whom it will be positive for whom it will be negative and who will actually lose weight and who won't and how It it's a very weird space actually.

Julia Beloo: Absolutely. And and that's where Yeah. I feel I really feel this like there were just at the beginning of this um after we ran this piece where we did the poll and and talked about all these other surprising benefits people have experienced. I got lots of emails about weird like people who were on SSRI. So they were on anti-depressants and they start on a GLP-1 and they completely spiral. Um, and that's not something that I've seen show up in the randomized control trials or or in in um the research, but it's an experience that people have. So, I think we're going to have lots more of this at the scale that people are taking um these drugs. Um, we're seeing these these new drugs are coming down the pipeline. Um, we're seeing that there's now oral forms of these drugs available. The drugs are going generic. We're going to see more and more people on these drugs and learn much more about them. There's so much we don't know. What about all the drugs that are coming now? So I know people who are getting Retatrutide from some compounding pharmacy in China or something and Retatrutide maybe you can explain it but it's another Eli Lily drug eli also makes the makes Zepbound the Tirzepatide um variant and this is in trials now and it's expected that it will be approved in the next some amount of time and it'll probably be a big deal but it works even better than the other two but I don't really understand why all these people I know are getting a compounded thing fromies they can't like oversee when there are perfectly good GLP ones on the market now that you could get and have full confidence in the way they're being manufactured. Like what's going on with Reddit Tutread? Why is it like both like around my community and all over my social media feeds?

Host: Oh, interesting. Um, this says something about are you in bodybuilding algorithms or

Julia Beloo: No, this is just straight up X for me.

Host: Oh, interesting. Okay, that's interesting. Um so so it's still it's a research compound that's still under study. It's targeting three hormone receptors. So Semaglutide um Ozempic is targeting one. Um and this is where at the beginning of the conversation we talked about how we had this a lot of research on these diabetes drugs over many years and we could be fairly confident in their safety profile. these drugs um that have come on since um like Mounjaro, like so Tirzepatide and like Retatrutide, they're they're targeting more than just the GLP-1. So they're they're targeting other hormone receptors and we don't have long-term data on these drugs

Julia Beloo: and I think that's a really important um thing that a lot of people overlook, right? Um, so, so this one is still under study, but in the research we have so far, it looks like it's causing faster and more dramatic weight loss and it's taken off in I think longevity and bodybuilding, social media.

Host: The the argument I keep seeing about it is it it increases energy use that it seems to have some independent effect on how much how on the calories you're burning. Yeah, I'm not sure what the mechanism um but that could make sense that it's not just reducing appetite, it's also increasing metabolism and maybe that's why people lose even more weight more quickly. Um but but the point is we have this emerging evidence that it might be even more effective than what's already available. And I think it just speaks to the frenzy around these drugs that people don't want to wait for the FDA to get the randomized control trials to approve the drug. they're going directly to illicit sources um and trying to buy the drug which is still a research compound.

Julia Beloo: People I knew who used to order drugs on the internet, they they were ordering fun drugs. Now it's like these weird

Host: eat less and focus more. One thing I think is interesting about the GLP-1s, I mean for everything we've talked about here is for instance, you know, the categories of who might want to lose a little bit of weight or even more so who might want to protect themselves from inflammation. They speak to this reality that the difference between well and sick is not this like clear binary thing. We now have these categories like pre-diabetic and prehypertensive and premenopausal and we didn't used to have them. I mean we keep expanding the space in which you should worry and I think that there is an interesting dimension as people start looking for like chemical answers to wellness because the truth is for a lot of people get enough sleep and go to the gym regularly and eat whole foods is hard. If you could just like give yourself a shot or take a pill, people want it. How do you think about the broader shift, which is not new, but it's happening with more force right now towards medicine as not a way of treating illness, but as a way of optimizing wellness? Do you see it as something new? Is that something old?

Julia Beloo: I think it's more pervasive maybe, but I think we have to be careful. So like in if you think about the American public like most people aren't eating the minimum daily requirements of fruits and vegetables let alone like personalizing or optimizing their diet beyond that. Most people aren't getting enough sleep. Most people aren't getting enough physical activity. And I think that's the majority. Right.

Host: Right. That's I'm agreeing with that.

Julia Beloo: Yeah. But but then there is I think there is this minority that we pay a lot of attention to in the media um that that is interested in the longevity and the optimization. I don't think there's anything that new about wanting to use medicine to be more well as opposed to heal from illness. And we've been doing that forever and we've had health and wellness influencers forever. But I think if you look around the mediacape at this exact moment and you think about how big like Rogan and Huberman and Attia and then you have like Brian Johnson is one of the breakout media figures of the era. This sort of former entrepreneur who's trying to never die and is like the you know has like ended up in this incredibly incredibly intense regimen of optimization. Like I'm very skeptical this is ultimately going to be good for him but you know it's his life I guess. Clevicular this like look maxer streamer who like hits his head with a hammer and is on these like crazy stacks and you know oded the other day uh on a live stream but you know has become like is getting billions of views on his clips and I think there's something about the way like how dominant this has become in the media sphere and it doesn't have checks it used to have on it. I mean, you were talking I remember the coverage you would do at Vox of of Dr. Oz, but one of the things happening on Dr. Oz was like there was a network behind that. I mean, there were gatekeepers. There were people who didn't want to see their stock price go down if something went wrong. And now it's a complete wild west boosted by algorithmic interest. And I think it's going to push us into a real period of like a longevity and optimization focused system because like there's going to be money for it. there's going to be attention for it and so yeah I mean a lot of people in this country are very very sick and what they need is treatment for chronic illness but I think there's going to be a real push in the system towards treating these people who what they are is not very sick what they are is they are well and they want to be weller

Host: right we we so we always had the worried well and like we've always people have always done really wild things to optimize their health as you're saying but the megaphone is so much bigger and more fragmented and it's so much more effective at creating this confirmation bias. Like I think about my mom who was diagnosed with osteoporosis and she was trying to decide whether to go on one of these um medicines it's available for the condition and she ended up in a complete YouTube rabbit hole of doctors who were really skeptical of osteoporosis drugs and she became quite frightened and and it took her like a couple of years to go on the medication. Um and this is happening at a scale that we've never seen before, right? But this desire to optimize like like in our book we found this wild example of after the first world war there was an ingredient in explosives manufacturing that sped up the metabolism and caused people to lose weight and doctors at Stanford pivoted and turned it into a drug that was taken by like hundreds of thousands of people and became one of the first targets of the FDA. Um and it had terrible side effects and c like killed people and caused eye problems and and um so so I think we've we've always done these wild things in search of yeah looking for the magic cure um the quick fix or bettering our health but the the in-your-facess of the messages and the the way they're targeted um with the algorithms this we've never seen. So, I think you're touching on something really important, which is how this media landscape has changed, not only around the blockbuster FDA approved drugs like the GLP-1s, but around this broader ecosystem of um yeah, wellness hacks and optimizers.

Julia Beloo: I mean, this goes to something that you wrote about in your in in a piece you did for the Times, which is that these are the first blockbuster drugs to collide with our wellness obsessed algorithmic age. And yeah, I mean I must have clicked and at some point on Reddit who tried content on X and now every time I turn on the system, the platform, I get these videos from people like telling me how great Reddit tried and there's a huge boom in people just getting random peptides from China. I shouldn't say random, but ordering peptides from places where they can't really tell what's in them. Um, The New Yorker tested some of these and found uh a lot of them have lead or impurities or things you don't want or they're not at the right dose. Like there there's something wrong. We got these blockbuster drugs and you might expect everybody to be really excited and be on them, but it seems to have exploded into this biohacking moment in which it's like if something like Mounjaro could exist, well then who knows what is out there and you should order it from China and inject it into yourself and find out, right?

Host: Like what do you make of it?

Julia Beloo: I think it it was it's sort of the perfect drug for this social media algorith al algorithmic age that we're in. Um because it's visual, right? It's not like like you have the before and after photos. You have I spend way more time than I'd like to admit on different social like TikTok and um Reddit accounts where you see the videos and the before and after photos and how people's bodies are transforming. Um, and we we're kind of living in this very appearance obsessed culture. And now for the first time again, we have this drug that does something that humans have quested after for like a century or more. Um, and and so it's meeting that moment. Um, I think like I was doing a thought experiment when I was working on that piece you mentioned about, you know, what would it have been like? Okay. So when Prozac came on the market um what what that was another blockbuster drug that was another drug where we had a cultural moment around it but we didn't have tele medicine so you still had to go to your doctor to get a prescription the internet wasn't in widespread use so you couldn't order a research compound from China there was no social media to compare you know do do your um person like compare your personal experiences and share them with the world so yeah we have all those things now when we have this this elixir that we've wanted for so long, right? The weight loss elixir. So many people have wanted this. We have it at the same time as we have all these other things that have just helped create, I think, the moment that we're in.

Host: I guess this does reflect what I've told my algorithm to to tell me, although not intentionally. I see so many people just posting about like random studies that are not full randomized control trials are often not even in human beings and being like see look at this amazing mechanism and look at these early results and at least according to them they're getting them compounded and and and ordering them and I'm fascinated by this because there is some weird overlap between the community of people who are incredibly skeptical of vaccines of the FDA. And at one point that was understood as a preference for naturalism that there was a primitivist impulse here. And yet some of these same people who were so skeptical about was what was a very wellstudied class of drugs are now ordering completely unknown forms of peptides. some which are about weight loss, but some of which are just to increase energy use or to cure your tennis elbow or to, you know, try to improve like, you know, cell regeneration. And they're stacking them in different formulations. Like it's like a mistrust of the authorities, but a belief in unproven technologies in a way that like that I find culturally very interesting. And I'm curious as somebody who's been around the space for a long time, what you've made of it. Well, I think it kind it kind of goes together. So maybe even it was brewing before the pandemic, but we've had this uptick in an appreciation, an interest in um health and health optimization.

Julia Beloo: Um and then we have these technologies now to spread information about um health optimization, podcasts in particular, that are often sponsored by supplement makers. They're mistrustful of authority and a lot of people I think were left quite cynical after the pandemic of um public health and the medical establishment and now we have this vehicle actually that was helped also in the pandemic with tele medicine um where people can take their health in their own hands in a way that they haven't been able to before and then this this idea that you can just do it yourself but it it feels like that's almost the currency today of social media like you know you say there's this new study and this

Host: I found this new use for something and now I'm going to promote it on my feeds. Um,

Julia Beloo: well, I think it reflects this way in which you have to trust something. The world is simply too complex for anybody to have firstirhand knowledge of very much of it at all. So you can trust established authorities like the FDA and the CDC, but if you lose trust in them, you have to still find some way of deciding what to believe and what not to believe. And a lot of people choose individual voices, you know, Andrew Huberman or Joe Rogan or Peter Attia, uh, or people further into the the Maha world. And I'm not even saying they're necessarily corrupt, but if you're in media, for instance, and you run a podcast on health and wellness week after week, you have to find new things to say. Just getting on the mic every week and saying, "Here's another week when you should eat whole foods and try to reduce your stress and sleep well, it doesn't last." Even putting aside the fact that some of them are getting a cut of either supplement companies or advertising for it, they have this huge bias towards the next new thing

Host: and it was always there, right? I spent a lot of time earlier in my reporting career with you at Vox like looking at Dr. Oz and I remember once interviewing him years ago and he said, you know, that I I think I said like why do you have the magic and miracles on your show? Like you're you're a cardiothoracic surgeon. You know, this isn't um research base. It was a question like that and he said you know if I didn't have the magic in miracles I wouldn't have a show. Um I think there's also something that like the you know that the very sound advice the very sound scientific foundation we have for how to optimize your health. It's so boring. Right. It's what you said. It's like sleep more have social relationships. Eat more vegetables. The stuff your mom has been saying to you since you were in your high chair. And yeah, but to to have the podcast or to have the social media feed, you need to have this new advice. I totally agree with you.

Julia Beloo: I I will say before I make this next point that I think injecting yourself or taking poorly studied peptides, it's a stupid idea and people shouldn't do it. So, I really want to say this very clearly, but in preparing this episode and reading what some of the peptide booster types are saying, their argument is, look, people have a right to do this. It is their body. They are doing it and it would be better if we let them buy them from domestic compounders whose processes we could regulate and oversee rather than these fly by night Chinese companies

Host: that we can't trust. But how do you think about balancing this this argument like look people are doing this it's their right. um we should allow them to get things that are safely made against this like the government doesn't want you doing this and we're going to try to make it hard to get them and increase the you know the risk so more people you know don't try.

Julia Beloo: So that argument is how we got the supplement market. We have you know do you know that the history of how supplements became kind of this thing that FDA

Host: um it's that there there was a big campaign push in particular helped by supplement makers. It was like a massive letterw writing campaign on the part of the public um TV ads with famous actors and the thing was like don't touch my supplements. I have the right to use these supplements. representatives who were from states with um large supplement manufacturers really pushed to to have this kind of lacks regulatory environment. Um but it was this this argument that Americans have the right to use the supplements they want to use. That's why we have this regulatory regime around supplements that we have today.

Julia Beloo: Which way does a supplement argument actually point? You know, you walk into Whole Foods or you walk into CVS and there's a lot of supplements and I don't think we see it as like a national tragedy and a lot of those supplements have names I don't even know. So, is that a bad thing or a good thing? Right. Am I upset people can create these supplement stacks? I mean, not really. If you want to take aine or whatever, go for it.

Julia Beloo: I think I think when people are being misled and using like scarce resources on things that aren't going to help them, I think actually it is a problem. Um I I personally think like you know the government has a role in protecting public health and protecting consumers. Um, but it's a very sensitive topic and a lot of people, especially in the American context, it's this idea that, you know, you have the right to do what you want with your body and to access the the um products that you want to access. And like I I guess I have a more conservative view on that, but a lot of people definitely disagree with me.

Host: I mean, my gut is that this is going to become a disaster. My my personal view is actually fairly conservative. I'm trying to be the devil's advocate here, but it seems like people are taking a lot of things right now to increase cell growth, which maybe is good in the short term, but has really frightening cancerous properties in some of these cases. In the long term, I mean, I think we might end up realizing that a couple of the things that people are starting to get excited about, you know, are really not good for folks, which has happened before. I mean, we were talking about Fen-Phen and things like that earlier. We have had periods where people got really into something and it wasn't good for you. We used to put cocaine in Coca-Cola.

Julia Beloo: Absolutely. Yeah. If you know anything about the history of medicine, it's littered with examples like this. And that's also why I always come at this um much more conservatively. Um but I I think yeah, we're we're we're definitely in this big experiment now where yeah, these these different things are colliding, right? this interest in wellness and longevity and health optimization, the availability of these drugs that seem to do everything and then these um these over-the-counter variants that people are accessing and buying online or in the pharmacy. It's a it's a potential disaster waiting to happen. One thing that I think is just a deep appeal of these drugs of of broader peptides and other things that are you know becoming culturally uh influential is you know what on some level we all want is control. Control over our bodies, control over our health, control over never getting the diseases that scare all of us. And on the one hand, if you are able to be given a real possibility for control, if it's true that the GLP-1s at low doses protect you against heart disease, amazing. Uh, Statins have been amazing. If it's true, I have a friend, somebody who I I I care about tremendously, whose parent died young of dementia, and I've been following all this Alzheimer's research on them, you know, very closely because if they're prophylactic against dementia, like I want my friend to take them. So, I'm not saying that wanting to protect yourself is a bad impulse. It isn't. On the other hand, a desire for endless control over your own body and future can be mentally poisonous too because you can't control it. Right? The the great insight of Buddhism is that you know desire and craving are the root of suffering and you know the more we trick ourselves into believing we can control what will happen to us then when things do happen to us we feel like we failed.

Julia Beloo: Absolutely. We live I think we live in this in particular around controlling food and the body. We live in food environments that are so gamed against making the right choices for most people. Right? So even if you are on the GLP-1 and I've talked to many of these people, they're not losing the amount of weight they want to lose um because they have other barriers to eating the way or exercising the way they'd like to. We've created these systems and um food environments that make it literally impossible for most regular people to do the things that they know they need to be doing for their health. And that's something that I would love more attention paid to um by whoever's in power, like pulling more levers to help prevent these diseases from the first place so that we don't have to do things like um inject young people with drugs that we don't understand the long-term effects of. And I'm not anti-GLP1 at all. Like I think they've been absolute like game changers for so many people I've talked about for friends and family. But we're doing this big experiment on the population because of diseases that really are preventable. If we do the things that we've long known we need to do like restricting junk food marketing to kids, um figuring out ways to make healthy food more accessible. It actually it enrages me as a person who struggled with my weight before like this realization that this was preventable. I didn't have to suffer like that. And kids like the kids who are now going through this now, they don't have to suffer like this.

Host: I feel like I've heard this argument as long as I've been touching this issue which like as you know the beginning of my career as a healthcare reporter and I, you know, we debate food deserts and what would happen if we put you know good grocery stores in food deserts and we did this in a bunch of places and it didn't really work. I I've become very cynical about this. I mean, yes, it would be much better if everybody had was like wrapped around with, you know, more walkable places to live and and better and healthy foods. And I don't think you should be able to advertise junk food at all to children. I think it should be illegal to have Paw Patrol on kids cereals. I think this whole thing where we allow endless advertising children is completely insane. And it makes every parent's life in the grocery store a nightmare, myself included. And for the society at large, I think the problem is people want things that aren't good for them.

Julia Beloo: But we've never done enough.

Host: But people don't want you to do enough.

Julia Beloo: But which people? I feel like

Host: the people who vote like this happened in in New York. Bloomberg wanted to tax sodas.

Julia Beloo: They almost ran them out of town on a rail.

Julia Beloo: Okay. Okay. No, but I think things are the politics of this are changing. I think like more and more people are raising kids with diseases like diabetes and fatty liver and they're aware that this is caused by the food environment and I feel like that that the politics there is shifting but we've never done the inversion of our food environment that we need to do. It's going to take many many levers to really see an impact and that really hasn't been done.

Host: I've just become I I think you would need a level of paternalism for that that I guess what I would say about it is that there is not a single jurisdiction in this entire country where the politics of that have worked. Like we cannot point at one thing, one place, one state, one city where we've been able to do that much. If it were there to do, I would be the first one to say we should do it.

Julia Beloo: But I don't think it's there to do. like the public health community like we tried to get people to take vaccines in the like aftermath or the the the math during a deadly pandemic

Host: and it led to like the largest public health backlash um in my lifetime such an RFK Junior is now the secretary of health and human services people's sensitivity to paternalism is very very very high it's a very potent political force

Julia Beloo: but I think one thing that I'm talking about and that that we write about in the book it's not about taking people's fried chicken or their M&M's away. It's about making a food environment where the healthy options are as accessible as the unhealthy stuff. And and so so I'm living now in France and obviously the politics are completely different. There's no shortage of chocoliers of places where I can buy croissant bos like all these things that I know I shouldn't be eating every day. But as accessible are the healthy options. So they they've done things like fresh um food markets in every district. Um they minimize the size of grocery stores um through land use planning since the late 1800s like using school lunches as a lever to feed children healthfully. And over time they've become more and more avancgard about what that actually means. They pull all these different levers. But what we're what we're talking about I think is creating this regulatory environment around chronic disease. like how do you protect the public from developing these diseases like obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease? And it seems like impossible now because it does involve these radical changes to the food environment. But America did this over 100 years ago, right? When we started to protect people against acute food poisoning, it was just it was wild west. They were putting calf brains in milk at this time and putting like brick dust to dye food in a certain way and lead. That's where the FDA came from. And that's where the meat inspection program of the USDA came from after um like the the publication of Upton Sinclair's book. And but I hear you. It's going to be very difficult. I do think the politics are changing. So we're in a moment where like places like California and West Virginia are both looking at, you know, doing things like reducing ultrarocessed foods in school lunches and um banning certain additives. Um, so, so really politically distinct places and people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Trump and the former FDA commissioner David Kesler. Um, what they're saying about diet caused diseases, you can't tell who's saying it anymore.

Host: That's true. But I've been extremely disappointed by the abil by Kennedy. I've been extremely disappointed to see that even the parts of Maha that I thought made sense like have made it nowhere. right? You will watch Kennedy now at like like eating his call fried French fries and you know go into um like these fast food restaurants that you know if they really wanted to make America the um American food environment better like they could. Meanwhile, the president of the United States is like forcing RFK Jr. to eat McDonald's and photo ops,

Julia Beloo: right? Like their actual willingness when it came down to it to take on industry was extremely low.

Host: No, absolutely.

Julia Beloo: Like Yeah. Like if you listen to what they're saying, it's fine. Have they done anything that will in a sustained way change the food environment for people? I would love to have seen Maha ban, you know, advertising to kids. They didn't.

Host: No. The way I think about it is we, you know, you had the the new nutrition guidelines come out which had this great message, eat real food, right? But no one is doing anything to make it easier for the people who actually really struggle to afford and access real food to to to eat that food. Right. It's like there's something like 3 million fewer people on SNAP and that's something that the administr the administration has made it more and more difficult for people

Julia Beloo: huge cuts are are continuing to go into effect there.

Host: And um and there there were programs to make um local and fresh produce available for school lunches and those have been cut. And then there's a lot of like um tweaking at the edges of you know swap out high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar or focusing on certain food additives and there's such marginal problems in in the greater system if you really want to help more Americans eat real food. You're going to have to do a lot more than that and you're going to have to focus on the segments of society that were on food stamps for example. Um so so I completely agree. I think a lot of the rhetoric has been in the right place. Like this is the first time I've seen at that political level people talking about the food environment and saying, you know, these diseases are preventable and they are caused by these environmental factors um taking the taking the pressure off individuals. But then a lot of the solutions that have been proposed have also been focused on individuals like give Americans more wearable devices and and continuous glucose monitors. It's not the intensity of the intervention that I think we we actually need.

Host: Then always was our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

Julia Beloo: Three books that really shaped my thinking as I was writing um my book. Um one was Behave by Robert Seapolski. Um he wrote another book Determined about um basically it's an argument against free will. Um but he comes at this I think from a really interesting um and important angle. Another one is Deb Blum's Poison Squad. And this is like an excellent look through a biography of one of the of a former chemist at the USDA who did research that helped lead to the establishment of the FDA and a lot of the food regulations and other types of consumer protection laws that we have. Um, I love that book. The third book that I really enjoyed was Ultra-Processed People by Chris Vanelikin. And this is really a palemic um and much more than um where where I ended up coming down in my book, but I I thought that was a really illuminating um and fascinating book on ultrarocessed foods.

Host: Julie Blues, thank you very much.

Julia Beloo: Thank you so much.