Podcast appearances and mentions of Kevin Hall

More with Kevin Hall! Until recently, Hall was the U.S. National Institutes of Health's key researcher on the connection between ultra-processed foods and obesity. He took an early retirement due to increasing censorship of his work. He talks about his groundbreaking study with former “The Biggest Loser” contestants, the link between Big Tobacco and Big Food, and why Canadian scientist expats like him may soon be looking to return home.

Obesity has more than tripled in Canada since 1981. In their new book “Food Intelligence,” Canadian co-authors Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall - an award-winning health and science journalist, and a prominent researcher on metabolism in the U.S. - argue that it's not because of a collective loss of willpower. Instead, they say the foods we buy and eat have become more calorie-dense, delicious and addictive over the last 40 years.

An avalanche of information besets us on what to eat. It comes from the news, from influencers of every ilk, from scientists, from government, and of course from the food companies. Super foods? Ultra-processed foods? How does one find a source of trust and make intelligent choices for both us as individuals and for the society as a whole. A new book helps in this quest, a book entitled Food Intelligence: the Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us. It is written by two highly credible and thoughtful people who join us today.Julia Belluz is a journalist and a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She reports on medicine, nutrition, and public health. She's been a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and holds a master's in science degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Dr. Kevin Hall trained as a physicist as best known for pioneering work on nutrition, including research he did as senior investigator and section chief at the National Institutes of Health. His work is highly regarded. He's won awards from the NIH, from the American Society of Nutrition, the Obesity Society and the American Physiological Society. Interview Transcript Thank you both very much for being with us. And not only for being with us, but writing such an interesting book. I was really eager to read it and there's a lot in there that people don't usually come across in their normal journeys through the nutrition world. So, Julia, start off if you wouldn't mind telling us what the impetus was for you and Kevin to do this book with everything else that's out there. Yes, so there's just, I think, an absolute avalanche of information as you say about nutrition and people making claims about how to optimize diet and how best to lose or manage weight. And I think what we both felt was missing from that conversation was a real examination of how do we know what we know and kind of foundational ideas in this space. You hear a lot about how to boost or speed up your metabolism, but people don't know what metabolism is anyway. You hear a lot about how you need to maximize your protein, but what is protein doing in the body and where did that idea come from? And so, we were trying to really pair back. And I think this is where Kevin's physics training was so wonderful. We were trying to look at like what are these fundamental laws and truths. Things that we know about food and nutrition and how it works in us, and what can we tell people about them. And as we kind of went through that journey it very quickly ended up in an argument about the food environment, which I know we're going to get to. We will. It's really interesting. This idea of how do we know what we know is really fascinating because when you go out there, people kind of tell us what we know. Or at least what they think what we know. But very few people go through that journey of how did we get there. And so people can decide on their own is this a credible form of knowledge that I'm being told to pursue. So Kevin, what do you mean by food intelligence? Coming from a completely different background in physics where even as we learn about the fundamental laws of physics, it's always in this historical context about how we know what we know and what were the kind of key experiments along the way. And even with that sort of background, I had almost no idea about what happened to food once we ate it inside our bodies. I only got into this field by a happenstance series of events, which is probably too long to talk about this podcast. But to get people to have an appreciation from the basic science about what is going on inside our bodies when we eat. What is food made out of? As best as we can understand at this current time, how does our body deal with. Our food and with that sort of basic knowledge about how we know what we know. How to not be fooled by these various sound bites that we'll hear from social media influencers telling you that everything that you knew about nutrition is wrong. And they've been hiding this one secret from you that's been keeping you sick for so long to basically be able to see through those kinds of claims and have a bedrock of knowledge upon which to kind of evaluate those things. That's what we mean by food intelligence. It makes sense. Now, I'm assuming that food intelligence is sort of psychological and biological at the same time, isn't it? Because that there's what you're being told and how do you process that information and make wise choices. But there's also an intelligence the body has and how to deal with the food that it's receiving. And that can get fooled too by different things that are coming at it from different types of foods and stuff. We'll get to that in a minute, but it's a very interesting concept you have, and wouldn't it be great if we could all make intelligent choices? Julia, you mentioned the food environment. How would you describe the modern food environment and how does it shape the choices we make? It's almost embarrassing to have this question coming from you because so much of our understanding and thinking about this idea came from you. So, thank you for your work. I feel like you should be answering this question. But I think one of the big aha moments I had in the book research was talking to a neuroscientist, who said the problem in and of itself isn't like the brownies and the pizza and the chips. It's the ubiquity of them. It's that they're most of what's available, along with other less nutritious ultra-processed foods. They're the most accessible. They're the cheapest. They're kind of heavily marketed. They're in our face and the stuff that we really ought to be eating more of, we all know we ought to be eating more of, the fruits and vegetables, fresh or frozen. The legumes, whole grains. They're the least available. They're the hardest to come by. They're the least accessible. They're the most expensive. And so that I think kind of sums up what it means to live in the modern food environment. The deck is stacked against most of us. The least healthy options are the ones that we're inundated by. And to kind of navigate that, you need a lot of resources, wherewithal, a lot of thought, a lot of time. And I think that's kind of where we came out thinking about it. But if anyone is interested in knowing more, they need to read your book Food Fight, because I think that's a great encapsulation of where we still are basically. Well, Julie, it's nice of you to say that. You know what you reminded me one time I was on a panel and a speaker asks the audience, how many minutes do you live from a Dunkin Donuts? And people sort of thought about it and nobody was more than about five minutes from a Dunkin Donuts. And if I think about where I live in North Carolina, a typical place to live, I'm assuming in America. And boy, within about five minutes, 10 minutes from my house, there's so many fast-food places. And then if you add to that the gas stations that have foods and the drug store that has foods. Not to mention the supermarkets. It's just a remarkable environment out there. And boy, you have to have kind of iron willpower to not stop and want that food. And then once it hits your body, then all heck breaks loose. It's a crazy, crazy environment, isn't it? Kevin, talk to us, if you will, about when this food environment collides with human biology. And what happens to normal biological processes that tell us how much we should eat, when we should stop, what we should eat, and things like that. I think that that is one of the newer pieces that we're really just getting a handle on some of the science. It's been observed for long periods of time that if you change a rat's food environment like Tony Sclafani did many, many years ago. That rats aren't trying to maintain their weight. They're not trying to do anything other than eat whatever they feel like. And, he was having a hard time getting rats to fatten up on a high fat diet. And he gave them this so-called supermarket diet or cafeteria diet composed of mainly human foods. And they gained a ton of weight. And I think that pointed to the fact that it's not that these rats lacked willpower or something like that. That they weren't making these conscious choices in the same way that we often think humans are entirely under their conscious control about what we're doing when we make our food choices. And therefore, we criticize people as having weak willpower when they're not able to choose a healthier diet in the face of the food environment. I think the newer piece that we're sort of only beginning to understand is how is it that that food environment and the foods that we eat might be changing this internal symphony of signals that's coming from our guts, from the hormones in our blood, to our brains and the understanding that of food intake. While you might have control over an individual meal and how much you eat in that individual meal is under biological control. And what are the neural systems and how do they work inside our brains in communicating with our bodies and our environment as a whole to shift the sort of balance point where body weight is being regulated. To try to better understand this really intricate interconnection or interaction between our genes, which are very different between people. And thousands of different genes contributing to determining heritability of body size in a given environment and how those genes are making us more or less susceptible to these differences in the food environment. And what's the underlying biology? I'd be lying to say if that we have that worked out. I think we're really beginning to understand that, but I hope what the book can give people is an appreciation for the complexity of those internal signals and that they exist. And that food intake isn't entirely under our control. And that we're beginning to unpack the science of how those interactions work. It's incredibly interesting. I agree with you on that. I have a slide that I bet I've shown a thousand times in talks that I think Tony Sclafani gave me decades ago that shows laboratory rats standing in front of a pile of these supermarket foods. And people would say, well, of course you're going to get overweight if that's all you eat. But animals would eat a healthy diet if access to it. But what they did was they had the pellets of the healthy rat chow sitting right in that pile. Exactly. And the animals ignore that and overeat the unhealthy food. And then you have this metabolic havoc occur. So, it seems like the biology we've all inherited works pretty well if you have foods that we've inherited from the natural environment. But when things become pretty unnatural and we have all these concoctions and chemicals that comprise the modern food environment the system really breaks down, doesn't it? Yeah. And I think that a lot of people are often swayed by the idea as well. Those foods just taste better and that might be part of it. But I think that what we've come to realize, even in our human experiments where we change people's food environments... not to the same extent that Tony Sclafani did with his rats, but for a month at a time where we ask people to not be trying to gain or lose weight. And we match certain food environments for various nutrients of concern. You know, they overeat diets that are higher in these so-called ultra-processed foods and they'd spontaneously lose weight when we remove those from the diet. And they're not saying that the foods are any more or less pleasant to eat. There's this underlying sort of the liking of foods is somewhat separate from the wanting of foods as neuroscientists are beginning to understand the different neural pathways that are involved in motivation and reward as opposed to the sort of just the hedonic liking of foods. Even the simple explanation of 'oh yeah, the rats just like the food more' that doesn't seem to be fully explaining why we have these behaviors. Why it's more complicated than a lot of people make out. Let's talk about ultra-processed foods and boy, I've got two wonderful people to talk to about that topic. Julia, let's start with your opinion on this. So tell us about ultra-processed foods and how much of the modern diet do they occupy? So ultra-processed foods. Obviously there's an academic definition and there's a lot of debate about defining this category of foods, including in the US by the Health and Human Services. But the way I think about it is like, these are foods that contain ingredients that you don't use in your home kitchen. They're typically cooked. Concocted in factories. And they now make up, I think it's like 60% of the calories that are consumed in America and in other similar high-income countries. And a lot of these foods are what researchers would also call hyper palatable. They're crossing these pairs of nutrient thresholds like carbohydrate, salt, sugar, fat. These pairs that don't typically exist in nature. So, for the reasons you were just discussing they seem to be particularly alluring to people. They're again just like absolutely ubiquitous and in these more developed contexts, like in the US and in the UK in particular. They've displaced a lot of what we would think of as more traditional food ways or ways that people were eating. So that's sort of how I think about them. You know, if you go to a supermarket these days, it's pretty hard to find a part of the supermarket that doesn't have these foods. You know, whole entire aisles of processed cereals and candies and chips and soft drinks and yogurts, frozen foods, yogurts. I mean, it's just, it's all over the place. And you know, given that if the average is 60% of calories, and there are plenty of people out there who aren't eating any of that stuff at all. For the other people who are, the number is way higher. And that, of course, is of great concern. So there have been hundreds of studies now on ultra-processed foods. It was a concept born not that long ago. And there's been an explosion of science and that's all for the good, I think, on these ultra-processed foods. And perhaps of all those studies, the one discussed most is one that you did, Kevin. And because it was exquisitely controlled and it also produced pretty striking findings. Would you describe that original study you did and what you found? Sure. So, the basic idea was one of the challenges that we have in nutrition science is accurately measuring how many calories people eat. And the best way to do that is to basically bring people into a laboratory and measure. Give them a test meal and measure how many calories they eat. Most studies of that sort last for maybe a day or two. But I always suspected that people could game the system if for a day or two, it's probably not that hard to behave the way that the researcher wants, or the subject wants to deceive the researcher. We decided that what we wanted to do was bring people into the NIH Clinical Center. Live with us for a month. And in two two-week blocks, we decided that we would present them with two different food environments essentially that both provided double the number of calories that they would require to maintain their body weight. Give them very simple instructions. Eat as much or as little as you'd like. Don't be trying to change your weight. We're not going to tell you necessarily what the study's about. We're going to measure lots of different things. And they're blinded to their weight measurements and they're wearing loose fitting scrubs and things like that, so they can't tell if their clothes are getting tighter or looser. And so, what we did is in for one two-week block, we presented people with the same number of calories, the same amount of sugar and fat and carbs and fiber. And we gave them a diet that was composed of 80% of calories coming from these ultra-processed foods. And the other case, we gave them a diet that was composed of 0% of calories from ultra-processed food and 80% of the so-called minimally processed food group. And what we then did was just measured people's leftovers essentially. And I say we, it was really the chefs and the dieticians at the clinical center who are doing all the legwork on this. But what we found was pretty striking, which was that when people were exposed to this highly ultra-processed food environment, despite being matched for these various nutrients of concern, they overate calories. Eating about 500 calories per day on average, more than the same people in the minimally processed diet condition. And they gained weight and gained body fat. And, when they were in the minimally processed diet condition, they spontaneously lost weight and lost body fat without trying in either case, right? They're just eating to the same level of hunger and fullness and overall appetite. And not reporting liking the meals any more or less in one diet versus the other. Something kind of more fundamental seemed to have been going on that we didn't fully understand at the time. What was it about these ultra-processed foods? And we were clearly getting rid of many of the things that promote their intake in the real world, which is that they're convenient, they're cheap, they're easy to obtain, they're heavily marketed. None of that was at work here. It was something really about the meals themselves that we were providing to people. And our subsequent research has been trying to figure out, okay, well what were the properties of those meals that we were giving to these folks that were composed primarily of ultra-processed foods that were driving people to consume excess calories? You know, I've presented your study a lot when I give talks. It's nice hearing it coming from you rather than me. But a couple of things that interest me here. You use people as their own controls. Each person had two weeks of one diet and two weeks of another. That's a pretty powerful way of providing experimental control. Could you say just a little bit more about that? Yeah, sure. So, when you design a study, you're trying to maximize the efficiency of the study to get the answers that you want with the least number of participants while still having good control and being able to design the study that's robust enough to detect a meaningful effect if it exists. One of the things that you do when you analyze studies like that or design studies like that, you could just randomize people to two different groups. But given how noisy and how different between people the measurement of food intake is we would've required hundreds of people in each group to detect an effect like the one that we discovered using the same person acting as their own control. We would still be doing the study 10 years later as opposed to what we were able to do in this particular case, which is completed in a year or so for that first study. And so, yeah, when you kind of design a study that way it's not always the case that you get that kind of improvement in statistical power. But for a measurement like food intake, it really is necessary to kind of do these sorts of crossover type studies where each person acts as their own control. So put the 500 calorie increment in context. Using the old fashioned numbers, 3,500 calories equals a pound. That'd be about a pound a week or a lot of pounds over a year. But of course, you don't know what would happen if people were followed chronically and all that. But still 500 calories is a whopping increase, it seems to me. It sure is. And there's no way that we would expect it to stay at that constant level for many, many weeks on end. And I think that's one of the key questions going forward is how persistent is that change. And how does something that we've known about and we discuss in our books the basic physiology of how both energy expenditure changes as people gain and lose weight, as well as how does appetite change in a given environment when they gain and lose weight? And how do those two processes eventually equate at a new sort of stable body weight in this case. Either higher or lower than when people started the program of this diet manipulation. And so, it's really hard to make those kinds of extrapolations. And that's of course, the need for further research where you have longer periods of time and you, probably have an even better control over their food environment as a result. I was surprised when I first read your study that you were able to detect a difference in percent body fat in such a short study. Did that surprise you as well? Certainly the study was not powered to detect body fat changes. In other words, we didn't know even if there were real body fat changes whether or not we would have the statistical capabilities to do that. We did use a method, DXA, which is probably one of the most precise and therefore, if we had a chance to measure it, we had the ability to detect it as opposed to other methods. There are other methods that are even more precise, but much more expensive. So, we thought that we had a chance to detect differences there. Other things that we use that we also didn't think that we necessarily would have a chance to detect were things like liver fat or something like that. Those have a much less of an ability. It's something that we're exploring now with our current study. But, again, it's all exploratory at that point. So what can you tell us about your current study? We just wrapped it up, thankfully. What we were doing was basically re-engineering two new ultra-processed diets along parameters that we think are most likely the mechanisms by which ultra-processed meals drove increased energy intake in that study. One was the non-beverage energy density. In other words, how many calories per gram of food on the plate, not counting the beverages. Something that we noticed in the first study was that ultra-processed foods, because they're essentially dried out in the processing for reasons of food safety to prevent bacterial growth and increased shelf life, they end up concentrating the foods. They're disrupting the natural food matrix. They last a lot longer, but as a result, they're a more concentrated form of calories. Despite being, by design, we chose the overall macronutrients to be the same. They weren't necessarily higher fat as we often think of as higher energy density. What we did was we designed an ultra-processed diet that was low in energy density to kind of match the minimally processed diet. And then we also varied the number of individual foods that were deemed hyper palatable according to kind of what Julia said that crossed these pairs of thresholds for fat and sugar or fat and salt or carbs and salt. What we noticed in the first study was that we presented people with more individual foods on the plate that had these hyper palatable combinations. And I wrestle with the term terminology a little bit because I don't necessarily think that they're working through the normal palatability that they necessarily like these foods anymore because again, we asked people to rate the meals and they didn't report differences. But something about those combinations, regardless of what you call them, seemed to be driving that in our exploratory analysis of the first study. We designed a diet that was high in energy density, but low in hyper palatable foods, similar to the minimally processed. And then their fourth diet is with basically low in energy density and hyper palatable foods. And so, we presented some preliminary results last year and what we were able to show is that when we reduced both energy density and the number of hyper palatable foods, but still had 80% of calories from ultra-processed foods, that people more or less ate the same number of calories now as they did when they were the same people were exposed to the minimally processed diet. In fact they lost weight, to a similar extent as the minimally processed diet. And that suggests to me that we can really understand mechanisms at least when it comes to calorie intake in these foods. And that might give regulators, policy makers, the sort of information that they need in order to target which ultra-processed foods and what context are they really problematic. It might give manufacturers if they have the desire to kind of reformulate these foods to understand which ones are more or less likely to cause over consumption. So, who knows? We'll see how people respond to that and we'll see what the final results are with the entire study group that, like I said, just finished, weeks ago. I respond very positively to the idea of the study. The fact that if people assume ultra-processed foods are bad actors, then trying to find out what it is about them that's making the bad actors becomes really important. And you're exactly right, there's a lot of pressure on the food companies now. Some coming from public opinion, some coming from parts of the political world. Some from the scientific world. And my guess is that litigation is going to become a real actor here too. And the question is, what do you want the food industry to do differently? And your study can really help inform that question. So incredibly valuable research. I can't wait to see the final study, and I'm really delighted that you did that. Let's turn our attention for a minute to food marketing. Julia, where does food marketing fit in all this? Julia - What I was very surprised to find while we were researching the book was this deep, long history of calls against marketing junk food in particular to kids. I think from like the 1950s, you have pediatrician groups and other public health professionals saying, stop this. And anyone who has spent any time around small children knows that it works. We covered just like a little, it was from an advocacy group in the UK that exposed aid adolescents to something called Triple Dip Chicken. And then asked them later, pick off of this menu, I think it was like 50 items, which food you want to order. And they all chose Triple Dip chicken, which is, as the name suggests, wasn't the healthiest thing to choose on the menu. I think we know obviously that it works. Companies invest a huge amount of money in marketing. It works even in ways like these subliminal ways that you can't fully appreciate to guide our food choices. Kevin raised something really interesting was that in his studies it was the foods. So, it's a tricky one because it's the food environment, but it's also the properties of the foods themselves beyond just the marketing. Kevin, how do you think about that piece? I'm curious like. Kevin - I think that even if our first study and our second study had turned out there's no real difference between these artificial environments that we've put together where highly ultra-processed diets lead to excess calorie intake. If that doesn't happen, if it was just the same, it wouldn't rule out the fact that because these foods are so heavily marketed, because they're so ubiquitous. They're cheap and convenient. And you know, they're engineered for many people to incorporate into their day-to-day life that could still promote over consumption of calories. We just remove those aspects in our very artificial food environment. But of course, the real food environment, we're bombarded by these advertisements and the ubiquity of the food in every place that you sort of turn. And how they've displaced healthy alternatives, which is another mechanism by which they could cause harm, right? It doesn't even have to be the foods themselves that are harmful. What do they displace? Right? We only have a certain amount the marketers called stomach share, right? And so, your harm might not be necessarily the foods that you're eating, but the foods that they displaced. So even if our experimental studies about the ultra-processed meals themselves didn't show excess calorie intake, which they clearly did, there's still all these other mechanisms to explore about how they might play a part in the real world. You know, the food industry will say that they're agnostic about what foods they sell. They just respond to demand. That seems utter nonsense to me because people don't overconsume healthy foods, but they do overconsume the unhealthy ones. And you've shown that to be the case. So, it seems to me that idea that they can just switch from this portfolio of highly processed foods to more healthy foods just doesn't work out for them financially. Do you think that's right? I honestly don't have that same sort of knee jerk reaction. Or at least I perceive it as a knee jerk reaction, kind of attributing malice in some sense to the food industry. I think that they'd be equally happy if they could get you to buy a lot and have the same sort of profit margins, a lot of a group of foods that was just as just as cheap to produce and they could market. I think that you could kind of turn the levers in a way that that would be beneficial. I mean, setting aside for example, that diet soda beverages are probably from every randomized control trial that we've seen, they don't lead to the same amount of weight gain as the sugar sweetened alternatives. They're just as profitable to the beverage manufacturers. They sell just as many of them. Now they might have other deleterious consequences, but I don't think that it's necessarily the case that food manufacturers have to have these deleterious or unhealthy foods as their sole means of attaining profit. Thanks for that. So, Julia, back to you. You and Kevin point out in your book some of the biggest myths about nutrition. What would you say some of them are? I think one big, fundamental, overarching myth is this idea that the problem is in us. That this rise of diet related diseases, this explosion that we've seen is either because of a lack of willpower. Which you have some very elegant research on this that we cite in the book showing willpower did not collapse in the last 30, 40 years of this epidemic of diet related disease. But it's even broader than that. It's a slow metabolism. It's our genes. Like we put the problem on ourselves, and we don't look at the way that the environment has changed enough. And I think as individuals we don't do that. And so much of the messaging is about what you Kevin, or you Kelly, or you Julia, could be doing better. you know, do resistance training. Like that's the big thing, like if you open any social media feed, it's like, do more resistance training, eat more protein, cut out the ultra-processed foods. What about the food environment? What about the leaders that should be held accountable for helping to perpetuate these toxic food environments? I think that that's this kind of overarching, this pegging it and also the rise of personalized nutrition. This like pegging it to individual biology instead of for whatever the claim is, instead of thinking about how did environments and don't want to have as part of our lives. So that's kind of a big overarching thing that I think about. It makes sense. So, let's end on a positive note. There's a lot of reason to be concerned about the modern food environment. Do you see a helpful way forward and what might be done about this? Julia, let's stay with you. What do you think? I think so. We spent a lot of time researching history for this book. And a lot of things that seem impossible are suddenly possible when you have enough public demand and enough political will and pressure. There are so many instances and even in the history of food. We spend time with this character Harvey Wiley, who around the turn of the century, his research was one of the reasons we have something like the FDA protecting the food supply. That gives me a lot of hope. And we are in this moment where a lot of awareness is being raised about the toxic food environment and all these negative attributes of food that people are surrounded by. I think with enough organization and enough pressure, we can see change. And we can see this kind of flip in the food environment that I think we all want to see where healthier foods become more accessible, available, affordable, and the rest of it. Sounds good. Kevin, what are your thoughts? Yes, I just extend that to saying that for the first time in history, we sort of know what the population of the planet is going to be that we have to feed in the future. We're not under this sort of Malthusian threat of not being able to know where the population growth is going to go. We know it's going to be roughly 10 billion people within the next century. And we know we've got to change the way that we produce and grow food for the planet as well as for the health of people. We know we've got to make changes anyway. And we're starting from a position where per capita, we're producing more protein and calories than any other time in human history, and we're wasting more food. We actually know we're in a position of strength. We don't have to worry so acutely that we won't be able to provide enough food for everybody. It's what kind of food are we going to produce? How are we going to produce it in the way that's sustainable for both people and the planet? We have to tackle that anyway. And for the folks who had experienced the obesity epidemic or finally have drugs to help them and other kinds of interventions to help them. That absolve them from this idea that it's just a matter of weak willpower if we finally have some pharmaceutical interventions that are useful. So, I do see a path forward. Whether or not we take that is another question. Bios Dr. Kevin Hall is the section chief of Integrative Physiology Section in the Laboratory of Biological Modeling at the NIH National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Kevin's laboratory investigates the integrative physiology of macronutrient metabolism, body composition, energy expenditure, and control of food intake. His main goal is to better understand how the food environment affects what we eat and how what we eat affects our physiology. He performs clinical research studies as well as developing mathematical models and computer simulations to better understand physiology, integrate data, and make predictions. In recent years, he has conducted randomized clinical trials to study how diets high in ultra-processed food may cause obesity and other chronic diseases. He holds a Ph.D. from McGill University. Julia Belluz is a Paris-based journalist and a contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, she has reported extensively on medicine, nutrition, and global public health from Canada, the US, and Europe. Previously, Julia was Vox's senior health correspondent in Washington, DC, a Knight Science Journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and she worked as a reporter in Toronto and London. Her writing has appeared in a range of international publications, including the BMJ, the Chicago Tribune, the Economist, the Globe and Mail, Maclean's, the New York Times, ProPublica, and the Times of London. Her work has also had an impact, helping improve policies on maternal health and mental healthcare for first responders at the hospital- and state-level, as well as inspiring everything from scientific studies to an opera. Julia has been honored with numerous journalism awards, including the 2016 Balles Prize in Critical Thinking, the 2017 American Society of Nutrition Journalism Award, and three Canadian National Magazine Awards (in 2007 and 2013). In 2019, she was a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Communications Award finalist. She contributed chapters on public health journalism in the Tactical Guide to Science Journalism, To Save Humanity: What Matters Most for a Healthy Future, and was a commissioner for the Global Commission on Evidence to Address Societal Challenges.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Remember “The Biggest Loser”—the show where people tried to lose as much weight as quickly as possible for a big cash prize? The premise of the show was that weight loss was about willpower: With enough discipline, anyone can have the body they want.The show's approach was problematic, but how does its attitude toward weight loss match our current understanding of health and metabolism? The authors of the book Food Intelligence, nutrition scientist Kevin Hall, who studied “Biggest Loser” contestants at the NIH; and science writer Julia Belluz, join Host Flora Lichtman and answer listener questions about nutrition, diet fads, and metabolism.Read an excerpt of Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us.Guests:Julia Belluz is a science journalist based in Paris.Dr. Kevin Hall is a nutrition scientist and former NIH researcher based in Kensington, Maryland.Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Journalist Julia Belluz and scientist Kevin Hall talk to Mark about their new book, Food Intelligence: why there's such a big gap between food science and diet fads, how the effects of our 'food environments' determine how much we eat and how much it changes our biology, and how our public outcry over the unjustness of our food system is apolitical—but is made political.Subscribe to Food with Mark Bittman on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen, and please help us grow by leaving us a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts.Follow Mark on Twitter at @bittman, and on Facebook and Instagram at @markbittman. Want more food content? Subscribe to The Bittman Project at www.bittmanproject.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you've heard of metabolism, you've probably heard endless tips and tricks to boost it, from working out to drinking green tea. The idea is that a slow metabolism leads to weight gain, and speeding it up makes it easier to shed pounds. But what if we told you that metabolic rate doesn't really have anything to do with why so many of us in the developed world are heavy? This episode, nutrition scientist Kevin Hall and science journalist Julia Belluz join us to debunk metabolic myths, starting with what actually happened behind the scenes on the reality TV show The Biggest Loser. Can you really mess up your metabolism by gaining and losing weight, or reset it with morning tonics and exercise? Are those of us who weigh more than we want cursed with a slow metabolism, while those of us who seem to be able to eat whatever we want without gaining weight are just lucky to have a speedy one? And what do World War I explosives and Froot Loops have to do with figuring this all out? Listen in this episode, as we debunk some metabolism myths! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kevin Hall spent 21 years at the US National Institutes of Health and became known globally for his pioneering work on ultra-processed foods. In April he unexpectedly took early retirement, citing censorship under the Trump administration. Now he has co-authored a book with the journalist Julia Belluz that aims to bust myths and challenge wellness orthodoxy on everything from weight loss and metabolism to supplements and wearables. Hall tells Ian Sample what he wants us all to understand about diet, exercise and weight loss, and what led to his departure from the job he loved. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

Broadcast from KSQD, Santa Cruz on 10-02-2025: Dr. Dawn opens by explaining how blood pressure treatment guidelines have been corrected back to 140/90 after the problematic 2015 SPRINT study temporarily changed recommendations to 120/80. That study used ideal measurement conditions - five minutes of quiet sitting, perfect cuff sizes, compliant patients - creating unrealistic targets that caused elderly patients to faint and break hips. The Veterans Administration and major cardiology organizations now recommend treating to 140/90, with statins only for LDL above 190 or 12% ten-year cardiovascular risk. An emailer asks about claims linking Tylenol to autism. Dr. Dawn thoroughly debunks this, explaining that Swedish studies of 2.5 million children found no association when controlling for sibling comparisons. She notes autism rates remained flat from 1960-1990 despite widespread Tylenol use, then spiked after DSM-4 in 1994 and DSM-5 in 2013 broadened diagnostic criteria. Recall bias skews studies since mothers of autistic children are asked leading questions about past Tylenol use during pregnancy when fever treatment was medically necessary. She discusses RFK Jr.'s mixed positions, comparing him to Isaac Newton who excelled at physics but believed in astrology. While criticizing vaccine misinformation, Dr. Dawn strongly supports RFK's stance on ultra-processed foods. She describes NIH researcher Kevin Hall's studies showing people consume 500 extra calories daily on ultra-processed diets versus whole foods, even when nutrients are matched. The US produces 15,000 calories per person daily, with the food industry engineered to promote overconsumption through hyper-palatable fat-sugar-salt combinations. A caller asks about Healthcare 4.0 plans for biometric tracking bracelets and digital twins. Dr. Dawn discusses privacy concerns around constant health monitoring and data collection, noting that while early disease detection could be valuable, mandatory participation raises serious civil liberties issues. She acknowledges voluntary research projects like the Million Man Study but emphasizes the importance of consent and protection against unauthorized data access by advertisers or government agencies. An emailer shares research on ultrasound brain stimulation helmets as alternatives to surgical electrode implants. Dr. Dawn explains how 256-element phased ultrasonic arrays can target brain regions like the visual cortex with high precision mechanical perturbation, potentially treating Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and depression without surgery. The technology remains experimental, requiring MRI guidance, but could become portable and dramatically improve quality of life for neurological conditions currently requiring invasive deep brain stimulation. A caller with adrenal cancer asks about fasting-mimicking diets. Dr. Dawn explains that 14-hour fasting before chemotherapy improves outcomes because healthy cells can downshift metabolism while cancer cells cannot. Cancer cells rely only on glycolysis without mitochondrial function, making them vulnerable during fasting states. She recommends chronotherapy - scheduling treatments during fasting periods - and expresses optimism about new cancer therapies like CAR-T cells and CRISPR technologies. An emailer asks about inulin fiber for fatty liver disease. Dr. Dawn explains how this fiber found in chicory, Jerusalem artichokes, and root vegetables stimulates gut bacteria to break down fructose before it reaches the liver, preventing fructose-induced hepatic lipogenesis. Inulin supplementation protects against fatty liver disease, increases antioxidant production, and helps with obesity by reshaping the gut microbiome to better process dietary sugars.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talk with Kevin Hall about all the things he had learned in marketing his books. He has put all of his ideas, what works and what doesn't, into a book just for indie authors. You can find out more about Kevin at http://www.kevin-hall.comInes Johnson has a Kickstarted up for her Page Turner Planning. She describes it as a guidebook, a planning system, and a course all rolled into one powerful tool to help writers balance craft and career with intention. Find out more here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/romancewriteclub/page-turner-planningBe sure to check out my audiobooks created with Spoken.press here: https://katcaldwell.com/curiosYou can create your audiobooks, too! Just go to Spoken.press to get started! (you can even use your own voice!!)Sign up for my writers' newsletter to learn more about the craft of writing, know when my workshops are and be the first to get exclusive information on my writing retreats. https://katcaldwell.com/writers-newsletterWant more information on my books, author swaps, short stories and what I'm reading? Sign up for my readers' newsletter. https://storylectory.katcaldwell.com/signup You can always ask me writing questions on instagram @author_katcaldwell

In the past few weeks, we've done several episodes on obesity, GLP-1 drugs, and nutrition science. What we haven't talked about as much is the politics of food. And today's guests say: If you really want to understand why Americans are so unhealthy, you have to see that the problem is not just our willpower, and it's not just our food itself. It's our food policies. Kevin Hall was a former top nutrition researcher at the NIH who retired after accusing RFK Jr. and the Department of Health and Human Services of censoring a report that questioned their description of ultra-processed foods. Julia Belluz is a longtime nutrition and health journalist. Together, they've written a new book, 'Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us.' If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guests: Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In its heyday, “The Biggest Loser” was one of the biggest shows on TV. But now, nine years after it went off the air, a  Netflix docuseries and new book by leading obesity researcher Kevin Hall, are prompting a re-examination of the show's tactics, and some of the surprising discoveries it led to surrounding metabolism and weight loss.

ไลฟ์ #102: Ultraprocessed foods ก่อให้เกิดผลกระทบทางลบต่อสุขภาพผ่านกลไกใดระหว่างมีสารอาหารต่ำหรือเป็นเพราะกระบวนการแปรรูป ปัจจุบันนี้ Ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) กลายมาเป็นอาหารประจำวันของมนุษย์ทั่วโลก โดยมีสัดส่วนแคลอรี่ของอาหารกลุ่มนี้สูงมากกว่า 50% ในสหราชอาณาจักร และสหรัฐอเมริกาการบริโภค UPFs เพิ่มขึ้นดังกล่าวคู่ขนานไปกับการเพิ่มขึ้นของโรคอ้วน เบาหวาน ไขมันในเลือดสูง นำไปสู่การตั้งคำถามของนักวิทยาศาสตร์ชั้นนำว่า UPFs ส่งผลกระทบทางลบต่อสุขภาพผ่านส่วนประกอบของสารอาหารอย่างเดียว หรือว่ามีปัจจัยอื่นที่มากไปกว่านั้นงานวิจัย UPFs ส่วนใหญ่เป็นงานวิจัยทางด้านระบาดวิทยา ซึ่งก็ให้ผลลัพธ์ที่สม่ำเสมอไปในทางเดียวกันว่า การบริโภค UPFs เพิ่มมากขึ้นเท่าไหร่เกี่ยวพันกับความเสี่ยงโรคอ้วน โรคหัวใจ เบาหวานเพิ่มขึ้นเท่านั้น มีร่องรอยว่ากระบวนการแปรรูป UPFs อาจมีบทบาทในผลลัพธ์สุขภาพที่แย่ลงด้วยงานวิจัยสำคัญชิ้นแรกที่เป็น randomized controlled trial ฉบับแรกที่ทำใน metabolic ward ซึ่งพิสูจน์กลไกสำคัญของ UPFs ในการส่งผลกระทบทางลบต่อสุขภาพคืองานวิจัยของ Kevin Hall และคณะในปี 2562 ชื่อ Ultraprocessed, Diet Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake ซึ่งให้ผลลัพธ์ว่า UPFs ทำให้บริโภคเกินวันละ 500 แคลอรี่เมื่อเทียบกับกลุ่มที่ได้อาหารผ่านการแปรรูปต่ำ Minimally Processed Foods (MPFs)อย่างไรก็ดี UPFs มักจะมีสารอาหารต่ำ มีปริมาณเกลือ น้ำตาล ไขมันสูง ใยอาหารต่ำ นักวิจัยยังไม่แน่ใจว่าถ้าเราออกแบบให้ UPFs มีลักษณะตามคำแนะนำมาตรฐานการกินอาหารที่ดีต่อสุขภาพ (UK Eatwell Guide) มันจะยังมีผลลัพธ์เชิงลบต่อสุขภาพอยู่อีกหรือไม่ ยังไม่เคยมี RCT ที่ทดสอบ UPFs vs MPFs ใน condition ดังกล่าวเลยเป็นที่มาของการที่พี่ปุ๋มจะสรุปงานวิจัย UPFs ล่าสุด ซึ่งเปรียบเทียบกับ MPFs บนเงื่อนไขที่ว่า ทั้ง UPFs และ MPFs ที่นำมาเปรียบเทียบกัน ต่างมีสารอาหารตามคำแนะนำของ UK Eatwell ผลลัพธ์ต่อสุขภาพจะเป็นอย่างไรรอติดตามในไลฟ์นะคะพบกันวันอังคาร 23 ก.ย. 2568เวลา 20.00 น.ค่ะ#หาคำตอบสุขภาพจากงานวิจัยไม่ใช่จากเรื่องเล่า#FatOutHealthspans

In this podcast, Lisa meets with Internal Family Systems (IFS) practitioner and Certified Health Education Specialist (CHES), Manya Ronay. Together they discuss a comprehensive approach to nutrition that integrates balanced dietary practices with emotional well-being. They address emotional eating, stress management, and the use of Internal Family Systems to balance dietary choices.Topics Include:Intuitive EatingFood Industry   IFS FrameworkEmotional EatingIntentional Weight Loss Strategies[:35] Lisa encourages listeners to sign up for the final group coaching cohort starting in September and the Reclaiming Peace With Food Retreat at the Omega Institute from September 7-12, 2025.[10:22] Manya introduces herself as a certified health educator, nutrition specialist, and practitioner trained in internal family systems, underscoring a commitment to nuanced health and eating narratives. Lisa encourages listeners to listen to the previous podcast episode with Manya. Lisa and Manya discuss nutritional science and its diverse expert opinions, political influences, and constant evolution. [15:14] Lisa discusses how her approach to food intake is like managing a financial budget, where understanding caloric surplus and deficit plays a key role. She explains how this method allows her to be aware of the calories in food without succumbing to judgment or rigidity, allowing for informed choices to maintain weight balance. [22:00] Manya expresses caution about the potential pitfalls of anti-diet and intuitive eating messages, how they gaslight by promoting absolute freedom from food monitoring. Lisa and Manya discuss the value of mindful eating, how balance is necessary to avoid counterproductive outcomes. [28:25] Manya discusses Kevin Hall's experiment that showed that ultra-processed meals led to higher calorie consumption, while real foods increased satiety and reduced caloric intake, resulting in weight loss. Lisa discusses how her approach to maintaining her weight loss is eating for volume and choosing high-nutrient, low-calorie foods over calorie-dense, low-volume options.[49:30] Lisa and Manya discuss how her living in an environment of high stress has led to her using food to gain a sense of comfort and safety. They discuss how Manya should shift to managing stress and embracing embodied safety will help her with her intentional weight loss without a diet mentality. Manya talks about how the IFS framework is used to balance contrasting inner parts: firefighters, representing the urge to eat for comfort, and managers, which impose boundaries. Lisa and Manya explain how this integration supports healthy eating decisions while honoring the positive intention of every inner part.[1:18:56] Lisa and Manya wrap up the episode by discussing how listeners can learn more about Manya and connect at: Website | Instagram | Facebook | LinkedIn.  *The views of podcast guests do not necessarily reflect the views and beliefs of Lisa Schlosberg or Out of the Cave, LLC.⁠Purchase the OOTC book of 50 Journal Prompts⁠⁠Leave Questions and Feedback for Lisa via OOTC Pod Feedback Form ⁠Email Lisa: ⁠lisa@lisaschlosberg.com⁠⁠Out of the Cave Merch⁠ - For 10% off use code SCHLOS10Lisa's Socials⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠Facebook⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠Reclaiming Peace With Food Retreat at the Omega Institute - September 7-12, 2025 

In this engaging conversation, Steve, Jerry and Brett discuss spirituality and the connections we have with the spiritual realm with author Kevin Hall. They explore the themes of signs, communication from beyond, and the thin veil that separates our world from the spiritual one. Kevin shares insights from his new book, discusses the self-publishing journey, and reflects on the impact of AI on authorship. Personal stories of signs and messages highlight the profound connections we can experience in our lives.

Could a Top Trump Official Who Lied About Being Born in the Soviet Union be a Russian Plant? | Trump Slashes Soft Power While Adding a $Trilion to Fighting a Nuclear War That Can Only Be Prevented by Diplomacy | Trump Slaps a 50% Tariff on Brazil Along With 35% on Canada and 30% on the EU and Mexico backgroundbriefing.org/donate twitter.com/ianmastersmedia bsky.app/profile/ianmastersmedia.bsky.social facebook.com/ianmastersmedia

Kevin Hall, All Indiana Sports joins 365 Sports to discuss his thoughts on the Indiana Pacers dominating the OKC Thunder in Game 6 of the Finals, his thoughts on what a game 7 looks like, Tyrese Halliburton and his ability to fight through injury, his thoughts on the depth of the Pacers, his thoughts on how the Pacers plan to stop the Thunder and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

(0:35:00) Don Williams, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal (1:05:00) Jason Bachtel, Houston Christian FB Coach (1:30:00) Alan Blondin, The Horry Independent (1:45:00) Unbreakable Records (2:07:00) Kramer Robertson, Former LSU All-American (2:35:00) Kevin Hall, All Indiana Sports (2:52:00) Paul Catalina's “Top 5” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin Hall from the Iowa Pork Producers stopped by to talk about BBQ & Brew at the Ballpark!

Simon Conway's interview with Kevin Hall during Monday's third hour.

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3015: Nancy Clark breaks down the hidden impact of ultra-processed foods on weight and health, revealing how even calorie-matched meals can lead to different outcomes based on food quality. Learn why whole, minimally processed foods may not only help you feel fuller but could also support long-term weight management more effectively than their convenient, ultra-processed counterparts. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://nancyclarkrd.com/2019/11/13/quality-calories-for-weight-management/ Quotes to ponder: "Ultra-processed foods commonly have added flavors, sugars, fats, preservatives and ingredients that you are unlikely to have stocked in your pantry." "When the subjects ate from the ultra-processed buffet, they consumed about 500 calories above their baseline intake and they gained about 2 pounds in two weeks." "Processing changes the food structure (matrix), and this impacts satiety, the feeling of fullness that persists after eating." Episode references: Kevin Hall's NIH Study on Ultra-Processed Diets: https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)30248-7 Calorie absorption from almonds study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3650507/ The Thermic Effect of Food and Meal Composition: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6019055/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3015: Nancy Clark breaks down the hidden impact of ultra-processed foods on weight and health, revealing how even calorie-matched meals can lead to different outcomes based on food quality. Learn why whole, minimally processed foods may not only help you feel fuller but could also support long-term weight management more effectively than their convenient, ultra-processed counterparts. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://nancyclarkrd.com/2019/11/13/quality-calories-for-weight-management/ Quotes to ponder: "Ultra-processed foods commonly have added flavors, sugars, fats, preservatives and ingredients that you are unlikely to have stocked in your pantry." "When the subjects ate from the ultra-processed buffet, they consumed about 500 calories above their baseline intake and they gained about 2 pounds in two weeks." "Processing changes the food structure (matrix), and this impacts satiety, the feeling of fullness that persists after eating." Episode references: Kevin Hall's NIH Study on Ultra-Processed Diets: https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)30248-7 Calorie absorption from almonds study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3650507/ The Thermic Effect of Food and Meal Composition: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6019055/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin Hall, All Indiana Sports joins 365 Sports to discuss his thoughts on the Indiana Pacers run to the NBA Finals, his thoughts on the play of the Tyrese Haliburton down the stretch, his thoughts on the Thunder being a heavy favorite at the beginning of the Finals and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sean Roberts and Alec Busse! NBA Playoffs! US Open! Golfing for charity! Kevin Hall from Iowa Pork!

****This is a repeat due to technical issues****In this engaging conversation, Kevin Hall returns to discuss his book 'Signs: The Veil is Thinner Than We Imagine,' exploring themes of spiritual communication, personal beliefs, and the experiences that connect us to the beyond. The discussion delves into the concept of the veil separating our world from the spiritual realm, the importance of being open to signs, and how modern distractions may hinder our ability to perceive these messages. Kevin shares personal anecdotes and insights from his research, emphasizing the significance of faith and the quest for understanding in a complex world. The episode concludes with reflections on future projects and the impact of Kevin's work on readers.

In this episode, we take a deep dive into the commonly held belief that protein is the most satiating macronutrient. It's an idea that shows up frequently in both clinical guidance and popular nutrition discourse: if you want to feel fuller, eat more protein. But how robust is that claim when you drill into the details of the evidence? To explore this, Alan and Danny examine the complex interplay between protein intake, satiety, and energy intake. We look at both historical and recent literature, including work from Kevin Hall's group, that raises important questions about how much of protein's supposed appetite-suppressing effect is due to the protein itself versus other influential variables—such as eating rate, food texture, and energy density. This is an important topic, not just for academic curiosity, but for its practical implications. If our assumptions about protein and satiety are oversimplified or overstated, that has knock-on effects for how we design diets aimed at appetite regulation, weight management, or obesity prevention. So whether you're a researcher, a clinician, or simply someone interested in understanding the mechanisms behind how we eat, this episode aims to provide clarity on where the science currently stands—and where it might be leading. Timestamps [03:18] The impact of protein on satiety [04:49] Historical context of protein and satiety [07:30] Mechanisms of protein-induced satiety [16:31] Research methods and measurements [21:39] Studies on protein and satiety [27:51] Analyzing specific studies [35:51] Understanding high protein meals and their effects [37:31] Acute vs. chronic effects of high protein intake [45:59] Other meal characteristics [53:21] Real-world implications of protein intake [01:01:19] Summarizing the impact of protein on satiety Related Resources Subscribe to Sigma Nutrition Premium Join the Sigma email newsletter for free Enroll in the next cohort of our Applied Nutrition Literacy course Go to episode page Related studies: Fazzino et al., Nature Food, volume 4, pages144–147 (2023) Weigle et al., Am J Clin Nutr. 2005 Jul;82(1):41-8 Smeets et al., J Nutr. 2008 Apr;138(4):698-702 Blatt et al., J Am Diet Assoc. 2011 Feb;111(2):290-4.

Today we jump back 15 years to two back-to-back episodes of the PWTorch Livecast from May 14 and 17, 2010.On the May 14, 2010 episode, PWTorch's James Caldwell and Brian Hoops features calls and discussion on last night's TNA Impact, TNA booking, a caller debate on the Samoa Joe-Matt Morgan set-up, Kevin Hall & Scott Nash winning the TNA Tag Titles, WWE's line to a wrestler "creative doesn't have anything for you," history of mid-card titles, TNA needing to clean up mid-card title picture, drop Global Title and add TV Title?, and more. In the previously VIP-exclusive Aftershow, they discuss the Dixie Carter shoot interview, the Sacrifice PPV line-up, Nostalgia News, and more.Then on the May 17, 2010 episode, PWTorch's James Caldwell and Pat McNeill includes discussion from calls, emails, and chat room on tonight's WWE Raw, how the Bret Hart vs. The Miz match could play out, giving away PPV matches on free TV before the PPV, what does commercial-free actually mean?, ROH as a potential challenger to WWE, what ROH needs to become a bigger player, future ROH champion, TNA budget issues, real issue with who TNA will be cutting, TNA Sacrifice review, and more. In the previously VIP-exclusive Aftershow, they discuss finishes and angles from the PPV, where Kurt Angle fits into storylines, King of the Mountain predictions, TNA booking four weeks of TV this week, Jack Swagger vs. Big Show, and more.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/wade-keller-pro-wrestling-podcast--3076978/support.

Kalorien rein, Kalorien raus – so einfach ist es dann doch nicht. Warum nehmen wir zu, obwohl wir uns bemühen? Und warum funktioniert das mit dem Abnehmen oft nur kurzfristig? In dieser Folge geht es um Kevin Hall, einen Forscher, der mit seinen Studien gezeigt hat, dass unser Körper viel komplizierter mit Essen umgeht, als wir dachten. Es geht um die amerikanische Politik, The Biggest Loser, und die Frage warum chips süchtig machen. 00:58 Zensierte Forschung 05:41 Diät-Mythen 08:44 Zwei Apfelstücke zu viel 19:23 Die Wissenschaft der Unwiderstehlichkeit

After 21 years at the NIH (National Institutes of Health), Dr. Kevin Hall walked away,exposing how corporate giants have INFILTRATED our health agencies. His final act? Ascorching Twitter thread revealing the deadly truth about ultra processed foods—and howthe NIH SILENCED him to protect BIG FOOD industry profits. Now, the science they tried tosuppress is going viral. This isn't just about food; it's about FRAUD and your health undersiege.Dr. Bob and Dr. Brockman take calls and emails from listeners

The Food Relationship Fix is a transformative one-day virtual webinar designed to help outsmart your drive to eat and break free from food addiction patterns and take back control of your eating habits. Join leading experts in medicine, nutrition, psychology, and behavior change for a day of learning, self-discovery, and actionable strategies. Among the line-up of lecturers for this course are Dr. Jen Unwin, Dr. Rob Cywes, Dr. Tro Kalayjian and many other highly experienced coaches and medical practitioners. For details about the course and how to register, see the links below. In this episode, Dr. Tro and the Toward Health team talk about… (00:00) Intro (00:01) The upcoming Food Relationship Fix webinar (01:47) New developments and breaking news in the food addiction research world (02:59) Kevin Hall's research and why his recent findings on food addiction are not accurate (08:15) Lack of good, up to date nutrition information in medical education and how this issues perpetuates food addiction in the general population (13:10) The brain and food addiction (15:09) Recovery strategies for those struggling with food addiction (16:32) How to balance harm reduction strategies and abstinence during the recovery process (23:18) Shame, negative self-talk, and addiction (30:04) The confluence of circumstances and influences that make people primed and ready for addiction (35:21) The absolute NECESSITY of having a supportive community if you are in addiction recovery (42:47) How addiction keeps you trapped and how to counter its tricks (52:39) WHY community is essential for beating addiction (59:07) How to join Toward Health's Food Relationship Fix webinar (see links below) For more information, please see the links below. Thank you for listening!   Links:   Please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.lowcarbmd.com/   Resources Mentioned in this Episode:   The Food Relationship Fix (Food Addiction Course): https://toward.health/food-addiction-webinar/   Dr. Brian Lenzkes:  Website: https://arizonametabolichealth.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianLenzkes?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author   Dr. Tro Kalayjian:  Website: https://www.doctortro.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DoctorTro Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doctortro/   Toward Health App Join a growing community of individuals who are improving their metabolic health; together.  Get started at your own pace with a self-guided curriculum developed by Dr. Tro and his care team, community chat, weekly meetings, courses, challenges, message boards and more.    Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/doctor-tro/id1588693888  Google: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.disciplemedia.doctortro&hl=en_US&gl=US Learn more: https://doctortro.com/community/ 

Guests: Dr. Kevin Hall, Asha Rangappa, Rob Bonta, Patrick Gaspard, Waleed ShahidNew concern over the man who says he's “Making America Healthy Again.” Tonight: a top NIH official—who had cheered the MAHA movement—is suddenly leaving, citing censorship under RFK Jr. Then, Trump's latest attempt to keep a Maryland father in a foreign prison: smacked down again in court. And as Trump's tariffs continue to roil markets, new alarm over the president's targeting of the Federal Reserve.  Want more of Chris? Download and subscribe to his podcast, “Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes podcast” wherever you get your podcasts.

To everyone who responded to our blurb writer last time, they've been sacked. I mean ... does this look like message-in-a-bottle time? Using our show notes to get attention and complain about your job.... Seriously, we've no time for whingers 'round here- HA! April fool. Still me. It was lovely seeing some of you on the socials. I'd print out your comments, only I don't have a printer and the walls are too damp to post things on. Anyway, just wanted to let you know it's "spring" on the Oz 9, which means the bioswamp is in full flower and the mating calls of the egrets is deafening. The flowers and general greenness are pretty, but the giant spiders have taken to spinning themselves ear muffs to reduce the noise. All right for some, I guess. Anyway, hope it's pretty where you are. You've been listening to: Kevin Hall as Greg Tim Sherburn as Colin Bonnie Brantley as Donna and Jessie Eric Perry as Dr. von Haber Zetzer and Joe Pete Barry as (yuck) Bob Chrisi Talyn Saje as Julie David S Dear as Dr. Theo Bromae and Tiberius Shannon Perry as Madeline and (mumble) Sarah Golding as Mrs Sheffield Sarah Rhea Warner as Pipistrelle Kyle Jones as your Narrator 2, and Chris Nadolny Gourley is your Narrator Sarah Golding is our incredible dialogue editor, and Mark Restuccia WENT ABOVE AND BEYOND in this hella episode as our sound designer. Our music is the brainchild of John Faley, and poor artist Lucas Elliott just can't quite get free of us. Until next time, Space Monkeys, stay well, and send earplugs and a towel? I have no idea where my towel is.... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As Ireland today marks the five-year anniversary of the first Covid-19 lockdown and the widespread shift to remote working, research from Datapac, trusted IT partner for leading Irish organisations, highlights ongoing challenges associated with hybrid work. The research indicates that Irish organisations, having rapidly adopted remote solutions in response to the pandemic, are now increasingly focused on implementing more robust, permanent technologies to support hybrid work long-term. The independent survey, commissioned by Datapac and conducted by Censuswide among 200 IT decision-makers in Ireland, reveals that 96% of organisations are now operating hybrid working models - a permanent legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic. Five years on from the initial shift, organisations continue to face significant challenges, with work-life balance (39%), training and development (36%),cybersecurity (34%), and communication and collaboration (31%) identified as key ongoing issues. 89% of IT decision-makers say they invested in software-as-a-service (SaaS) communication and collaboration tools in response to theCovid-19 pandemic. However, this trend has endured, with 57% of businesses reporting increased investment in these tools since the pandemic, and 31% maintaining their investment levels. Meanwhile, two-thirds (67%) of Irish businesses say they are using Microsoft365 to support collaboration and productivity. The survey also emphasises the importance of having the right digital tools and technologies in place to ensure success in the modern workplace. Some 46% of IT decision-makers would rate their IT infrastructure's ability to support hybrid work as only "somewhat" or "not too" capable. Kevin Hall, Senior Systems Engineer, Datapac, said: "Five years on from Ireland's widespread move to remote working, our research shows that many organisations are still facing substantial challenges in fully embedding hybrid working into their long-term strategies. Initially, organisations rapidly invested in digital tools like Microsoft 365 to maintain operations - but now is a critical time to reassess these investments to ensure they deliver lasting value. "Organisations must evaluate if their current technology genuinely supports their goals, particularly when issues around work-life balance and cybersecurity remain widespread. Rather than simply renewing licenses, businesses need to ensure they're fully leveraging existing investments for maximum efficiency, security, and employee satisfaction. Given how crucial technology now is in the post-pandemic era, partnering with the right IT provider, who can optimise these investments strategically, is essential to remain competitive." See more stories here.

Message by Kevin HallText: Romans 10March 9, 2025 - 10AM

Episode 54 - Murdock and Marvel: 2001 Part 2 The year 2001 has a dark shadow over it, and there are elements of this year that are pretty rough, because as the year closed comic books were trying to make sense of and deal with 9/11 just like the rest of America.  But the start of the year brought a lot of great entertainment and for the first time in years sales held steady (mostly)   This is part 2 of the podcast. that will feature the year in Daredevil, the Spotlight story and the Takeaway for 2001.   The Year in Daredevil  Appearances:  Daredevil #14-26, Daredevil / Spider-Man #1-4, Daredevil: Yellow #1-5, Daredevil: Ninja #2-3, Marvel Knights #7-9 and #11-15, Black Widow #2-3, Spider-Man and Mysterio #1-3, X-Men #109, Big Town #4, Deadpool #52, Black Panther #31, Elektra #1, Ultimate Marvel Team-Up #7-8, 100 Greatest Marvels of All Time #1 and 4, Marvel Masterworks: Daredevil #2 and Marvel Masterworks: The Mighty Thor #3.  Writing: David Mack (#14-15), Brian Michael Bendis (#16-19 and #26) Bob Gale (#20-25)  Pencils: Joe Quesada and David Ross (#14), Ross (#15 and #23-25), David Mack (#16-19), Phil Winslade (#20-22), Alex Maleev (#26)  Inks: Mark Morales (#14-15) David Mack and Morales (#15) Mack and Pond Scum (#17) Mack (#18-19), James Hodgkins (#20-22), Hodgkins and Mark Pennington (#23), Pennington (#24-25), Alex Maleev (#26)  After the wrap-up of the Parts of a hole storyline that included a trail of Kingpin before he's eventually blinded by Maya Lopez aka Echo, we get our first story from Brian Michael Bendis with David Mack moving over to art. The 4-book story, Titled Wake Up, is a fantastically told and beautifully brought to page by the creative team. It doesn't really have any action and is really only loosely about Daredevil. Interesting, right? This is, without a doubt, worth spotlighting this week – so we'll talk more about it then.  The other main story we get this year is called Playing to the Camera in which Daredevil is sued by rich philanthropist Samuel Griggs and wants to retain Nelson and Murdock (specifically Matt Murdock) as his lawyer. Matt reluctantly agrees as he knows he wasn't involved with destroying the man's greenhouse and plants and wants to figure out who's behind it. As Daredevil, he hires a lawyer and they have their days in court surrounded by a media circus.   The trial ends with 3 daredevils in the courtroom - Murdock as himself holding a video tape of himself as Daredevil earlier that morning, Peter Parker in a Daredevil costume with the defense attorney and a third Daredevil who crashes a window, admits to the property damage, offers the $50k needed to fix it and then reveals his true identity as Terrance Hillman. Confused? So is Murdock and Nelson. Apparently, Hillman decided on his own to dress up as Daredevil and crash the courtroom. He then used the reveal and announced retirement to swing fame and fortune (and help out the real Daredevil). We also learn that Hillman didn't destroy the property either and that the Ringmaster was behind everything. He was testing his ability to implant false memories in people.   One interesting side note about the first issue of the Playing with Camera storyline. A second story appears in the issue “My Brother's Keeper” written by Stan Lee and Kevin Hall with art by Gene Colan. In the short story, we see Daredevil and Spider-Man during a night out.  We did get one more book in December from Brian Michael Bendis but we'll save that for next year's discussion.  Finally In Daredevil: Yellow we get a 6-book story in which Matt is writing letters to the late Karen Page about the early days of Daredevil and the Nelson and Murdock law firm as a way to find forgiveness for everything that happened between them. The story, by Jeph Loeb, artist Tim Sale and colors by Matt Hollingsworth, is another retailing of the first handful of issues from Daredevil volume 1 that ends with the Purple Man story and Matt finding the forgiveness he needs.    This Week's Spotlight: Daredevil volume 2 #16 May 2001 - #19 August 2001 “Wake Up” Recap Why We Picked This Story Daredevil Rapid Fire Questions The Takeaway Writers are the key. Questions or comments We'd love to hear from you!  Email us at questions@comicsovertime.com or find us on Twitter @comicsoftime. ------------------ THANKS TO THE FOLLOWING CREATORS AND RESOURCES  Music: Our theme music is by the very talented Lesfm.  You can find more about them and their music at https://pixabay.com/users/lesfm-22579021/.  The Grand Comics Database: Dan uses custom queries against a downloadable copy of the GCD to construct his publisher, title and creator charts.  Comichron: Our source for comic book sales data.  Marvel Year By Year: A Visual History  DC Comics Year By Year: A Visual Chronicle  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_English-language_comics  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Marvel_Comics_superhero_debuts  https://comicbookreadingorders.com/marvel/event-timeline/  https://www.comic-con.org/awards/eisner-awards/past-recipients/past-recipients-1990s/ 

In this episode, we welcome our first podcast guest and talk with photographer Kevin Hall about his recent experiences photographing Arctic Foxes in the Hornstrandir Nature Reserve during our back-to-back workshops in Northern Iceland. Kevin shares his insights on his experience and his thoughts on the new Canon EOS R1 in an all-things-photography discussion.www.kevinhallphotography.co.ukBird Photographer of the Year Finalist 2025Support the showWild Nature Photo TravelPhotography Workshops and Expeditions around the Worldwww.wildnaturephototravel.comSupport the Show and fellow Nature Photographer: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/JoshuaHolko/membershipFind us on Social MediaFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/Joshuaholko/Twitter: https://twitter.com/HolkoJoshuaInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshuaholko/Need to Contact us? info@jholko.com

In this engaging conversation, Kevin Hall returns to discuss his book 'Signs: The Veil is Thinner Than We Imagine,' exploring themes of spiritual communication, personal experiences, and the nature of belief. The discussion delves into how individuals can receive messages from beyond the veil, the importance of being open to these experiences, and the intersection of faith and reason. Kevin shares personal anecdotes and insights from his research, emphasizing the significance of understanding our spiritual existence.

The Getting2U (G2U) crew get to chat with Dr. Kevin Hall, Dentist at The Health Collective, based in Hartford, CT. In this jaw-dropping episode, Dr. Kevin Hall delves into the critical intersection of HIV and oral health. The conversation explores the unique oral health challenges faced by individuals living with HIV and highlights the importance … Read More Read More

In this captivating episode of Newsworthy, host Jerry and Kevin Hall delve into the themes of spirituality, signs from beyond, and personal experiences that challenge perceptions of reality. Kevin shares his journey as an author, discussing his latest book, 'Signs: The Veil is Thinner Than We Imagine,' and recounts various personal stories and experiences that illustrate the thin line between our world and the spiritual realm. The conversation explores how signs manifest in our lives, the impact of these experiences on personal decisions, and the importance of being open to spiritual connections. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/news-worthy0/support

Podcast Overview: The Truth About Ultra-Processed Foods In this episode, we explore the eye-opening insights from Chris van Tulleken's book, Ultra-Processed People, revealing the hidden dangers of ultra-processed foods (UPFs). UPFs, often found in sugary snacks, ready meals, and sodas, are loaded with artificial additives, preservatives, and unrecognizable ingredients. These foods are designed to be addictive, altering brain chemistry and driving overconsumption, as evidenced by studies like Kevin Hall's 2019 trial, which showed participants eating 500 extra calories daily on a UPF diet. The result? Weight gain, mood shifts, and chronic health issues like obesity and diabetes. UPFs' dominance stems from systemic factors, including marketing, affordability, and convenience, but their health impacts are far-reaching. From ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup to artificial flavors and emulsifiers, these foods are engineered for taste and shelf life at the expense of nutrition. Tune in to learn how to identify UPFs, understand their effects, and take simple steps toward healthier, whole-food alternatives. For extra support, follow us on Instagram @HormoneGenius and post your favorite clean products to claim a free grocery guide with the ingredients to be aware of! Thanks to our sponsor Fiat Institute! If the content you're hearing on this podcast has stirred something in your heart, and you feel called to be part of the change—to launch a mission in hormone health, wellness, and true women's health care—then this program is for you! The Fiat Institute certifies women as hormone coaches in a six-month program. You'll learn about gut health, inflammation, liver detox, cycle charting, cycle-syncing, root cause restoration, and the FiatWay Coaching Methodology. Plus, you'll find community in weekly calls, small-group breakouts, and the Fiat Sisterhood. Seats for January's cohort are limited! Schedule a discovery call with Jamie today! Be part of the movement to restore women's health. Fill out an inquiry form: www.honeybook.com/widget/fiat_inst…0194ff00292a19e2 OR Schedule a 15min 1:1 chat with her! See link: calendly.com/hormoneconsult/fir…chat?month=2024-12 To learn more you can visit www.fiatinstitute.com. Medical disclaimer: The information presented in this podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for actual medical advice from a doctor, or any medical professional.

A leader for conducting rigorous randomized trials of humans along with animal models for understanding nutrition and metabolism, Dr. Kevin Hall is a Senior Investigator at the National Institutes of Health, and Section Chief of the Integrative Physiology Section, NIDDK. In this podcast, we reviewed his prolific body of research a recent publications. The timing of optimizing our diet and nutrition seems apropos, now that we're in in the midst of the holiday season!Below is a video snippet of our conversation on his ultra-processed food randomized trial.Full videos of all Ground Truths podcasts can be seen on YouTube here. The current one is here. If you like the YouTube format, please subscribe! The audios are also available on Apple and Spotify.Note: I'll be doing a Ground Truths Live Chat on December 11th at 12 N EST, 9 AM PST, so please mark your calendar and join!Transcript with links to publications and audioEric Topol (00:05):Well, hello. This is Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I'm really delighted to have with me today, Dr. Kevin Hall from the NIH. I think everybody knows that nutrition is so important and Kevin is a leader in doing rigorous randomized trials, which is not like what we usually see with large epidemiologic studies of nutrition that rely on food diaries and the memory of participants. So Kevin, it's really terrific to have you here.Kevin Hall (00:34):Thanks so much for the invitation.Ultra-Processed FoodsEric Topol (00:36):Yeah. Well, you've been prolific and certainly one of the leaders in nutrition science who I look to. And what I thought we could do is go through some of your seminal papers. There are many, but I picked a few and I thought we'd first go back to the one that you published in Cell Metabolism. This is ultra-processed diets cause excessive caloric intake and weight gain. (Main results in graph below.) So maybe you can take us through the principle findings from that trial.Kevin Hall (01:10):Yeah, sure. So that was a really interesting study because it's the first randomized control trial that's investigated the role of ultra-processed foods in potentially causing obesity. So we've got, as you mentioned, lots and lots of epidemiological data that have made these associations between people who consume diets that are very high in ultra-processed foods as having greater risk for obesity. But those trials are not demonstrating causation. I mean, they suggest a strong link. And in fact, the idea of ultra-processed foods is kind of a new idea. It's really sort of appeared on the nutrition science stage probably most prominently in the past 10 years or so. And I first learned about this idea of ultra-processed foods, which is really kind of antithetical to the way most nutrition scientists think about foods. We often think about foods as nutrient delivery vehicles, and we kind of view foods as being the fraction of carbohydrates versus fats in them or how much sodium or fiber is in the foods.Kevin Hall (02:17):And along came this group in Brazil who introduced this new way of classifying foods that completely ignores the nutrient composition and says what we should be doing is classifying foods based on the extent and purpose of processing of foods. And so, they categorize these four different categories. And in the fourth category of this so-called NOVA classification scheme (see graphic below) , they identified something called ultra-processed foods. There's a long formal definition and it's evolved a little bit over the years and continues to evolve. But the basic ideas that these are foods that are manufactured by industries that contain a lot of purified ingredients made from relatively cheap agricultural commodity products that basically undergo a variety of processes and include additives and ingredients that are not typically found in home kitchens, but are typically exclusively in manufactured products to create the wide variety of mostly packaged goods that we see in our supermarkets.Kevin Hall (03:22):And so, I was really skeptical that there was much more about the effects of these foods. Other than that they typically have high amounts of sugar and saturated fat and salt, and they're pretty low in fiber. And so, the purpose of this study was to say, okay, well if there's something more about the foods themselves that is causing people to overconsume calories and gain weight and eventually get obesity, then we should do a study that's trying to test for two diets that are matched for these various nutrients of concern. So they should be matched for the macronutrients, they should be matched for the sugar content, the fat, the sodium, the fiber, and people should just be allowed to eat whatever they want and they shouldn't be trying to change their weight in any way. And so, the way that we did this was, as you mentioned, we can't just ask people to report what they're eating.Kevin Hall (04:19):So what we did was we admitted these folks to the NIH Clinical Center and to our metabolic ward, and it's a very artificial environment, but it's an environment that we can control very carefully. And so, what we basically did is take control over their food environment and we gave them three meals a day and snacks, and basically for a two-week period, they had access to meals that were more than 80% of calories coming from ultra-processed foods. And then in random order, they either received that diet first and give them simple instructions, eat as much as little as you want. We're going to measure lots of stuff. You shouldn't be trying to change your weight or weight that gave them a diet that had no calories from ultra-processed foods. In fact, 80% from minimally processed foods. But again, both of these two sort of food environments were matched for these nutrients that we typically think of as playing a major role in how many calories people choose to eat.Kevin Hall (05:13):And so, the basic idea was, okay, well let's measure what these folks eat. We gave them more than double the calories that they would require to maintain their weight, and what they didn't know was that in the basement of the clinical center where the metabolic kitchen is, we had all of our really talented nutrition staff measuring the leftovers to see what it was that they didn't eat. So we knew exactly what we provided to them and all the foods had to be in our nutrition database and when we compute what they actually ate by difference, so we have a very precise estimate about not only what foods they chose to ate, but also how many calories they chose to eat, as well as the nutrient composition.And the main upshot of all that was that when these folks were exposed to this highly ultra-processed food environment, they spontaneously chose to eat about 500 calories per day more over the two-week period they were in that environment then when the same folks were in the environment that had no ultra-processed foods, but just minimally processed foods. They not surprisingly gained weight during the ultra-processed food environment and lost weight and lost body fat during the minimally processed food environment. And because those diets were overall matched for these different nutrients, it didn't seem to be that those were the things that were driving this big effect. So I think there's a couple of big take homes here. One is that the food environment really does have a profound effect on just the biology of how our food intake is controlled at least over relatively short periods of time, like the two-week periods that we were looking at. And secondly, that there's something about ultra-processed foods that seem to be driving this excess calorie intake that we now know has been linked with increased risk of obesity, and now we're starting to put some of the causal pieces together that really there might be something in this ultra-processed food environment that's driving the increased rates of obesity that we've seen over the past many decades.Eric Topol (07:18):Yeah, I mean I think the epidemiologic studies that make the link between ultra-processed foods and higher risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, neurodegenerative disease. They're pretty darn strong and they're backed up by this very rigorous study. Now you mentioned it short term, do you have any reason to think that adding 500 calories a day by eating these bad foods, which by the way in the American diet is about 60% or more of the average American diet, do you have any inkling that it would change after a few weeks?Kevin Hall (07:54):Well, I don't know about after a few weeks, but I think that one of the things that we do know about body weight regulation and how it changes in body weight impact both metabolism, how many calories were burning as well as our appetite. We would expect some degree of moderation of that effect eventually settling in at a new steady state, that's probably going to take months and years to achieve. And so the question is, I certainly don't believe that it would be a 500 calorie a day difference indefinitely. The question is when would that difference converge and how much weight would've been gained or lost when people eventually reached that new plateau? And so, that's I think a really interesting question. Some folks have suggested that maybe if you extrapolated the lines a little bit, you could predict when those two curves might eventually converge. That's an interesting thought experiment, but I think we do need some longer studies to investigate how persistent are these effects. Can that fully explain the rise in average body weight and obesity rates that have occurred over the past several decades? Those are open questions.Eric Topol (09:03):Yeah. Well, I mean, I had the chance to interview Chris van Tulleken who wrote the book, Ultra-Processed People and I think you might remember in the book he talked about how he went on an ultra-processed diet and gained some 20, 30 pounds in a short time in a month. And his brother, his identical twin brother gained 50, 60 pounds, and so it doesn't look good. Do you look at all the labels and avoid all this junk and ultra-processed food now or are you still thinking that maybe it's not as bad as it looks?Kevin Hall (09:38):Well, I mean I think that I certainly learned a lot from our studies, and we are continuing to follow this up to try to figure out what are the mechanisms by which this happen. But at the same time, I don't think we can throw out everything else we know about nutrition science. So just because we match these various nutrients in this particular study, I think one of the dangers here is that as you mentioned, there's 60% of the food environment in the US and Great Britain and other places consist of these foods, and so they're unavoidable to some extent, right? Unless you're one of these privileged folks who have your backyard garden and your personal chef who can make all of your foods, I'm certainly not one of those people, but for the vast majority of us, we're going to have to incorporate some degree of ultra-processed foods in our day-to-day diet.Kevin Hall (10:24):The way I sort of view it is, we really need to understand the mechanisms and before we understand the mechanisms, we have to make good choices based on what we already know about nutrition science, that we should avoid the foods that have a lot of sugar in them. We should avoid foods that have a lot of saturated fat and sodium. We should try to choose products that contain lots of whole grains and legumes and fruits and vegetables and things like that. And there's some of those, even in the ultra-processed food category. I pretty regularly consume a microwavable ready meal for lunch. It tends to be pretty high in whole grains and legumes and low in saturated fat and sugar and things like that. But to engineer a food that can heat up properly in a microwave in four minutes has some ultra-processing technology involved there. I would be pretty skeptical that that's going to cause me to have really poor health consequences as compared to if I had the means to eat homemade French fries every day in tallow. But that's the kind of comparison that we have to think about.Eric Topol (11:36):But I think what you're touching on and maybe inadvertently is in that NOVA class four, the bad ultra-processed foods, there's a long, long list of course, and some of those may be worse than others, and we haven't seen an individual ranking of these constituents. So as you're alluding to what's in that microwave lunch probably could be much less concerning than what's in these packaged snacks that are eaten widely. But I would certainly agree that we don't know everything about this, but your study is one of the most quoted studies ever in the ultra-processed food world. Now, let me move on to another trial that was really important. This was published in Nature Medicine and it's about a plant-based diet, which is of course a very interesting diet, low-fat versus an animal-based ketogenic diet. Also looking at energy intake. Can you take us through that trial?Plant-Based, Low Fat Diet vs Animal-Based, Low Carbohydrate Ketogenic DietKevin Hall (12:33):Sure. So it's actually interesting to consider that trial in the context of the trial we just talked about because both of these diets that we tested in this trial were relatively low in ultra-processed foods, and so both of them contained more than a kilogram of non-starchy vegetables as a base for designing these, again, two different food environments. Very similar overall study design where people again were exposed to either diets that were vegan plant-based diet that was really high in starches and was designed to kind of cause big insulin increases in the blood after eating the meals. And the other diet had very, very few carbohydrates of less than 10% in total, and we built on that kind of non-starchy vegetable base, a lot of animal-based products to kind of get a pretty high amount of fat and having very low carbohydrates. Both diets in this case, like I mentioned, were pretty low in ultra-processed foods, but what we were really interested in here was testing this idea that has come to prominence recently, that high carbohydrate diets that lead to really large glucose excursions after meals that cause very high insulin levels after meals are particularly obesogenic and should cause you to be hungrier than compared to a diet that doesn't lead to those large swings in glucose and insulin and the prototypical case being one that's very low in carbohydrate and might increase the level of ketones that are floating around in your blood, which are hypothesized to be an appetite suppressant. Same sort of design, these minimally processed diets that one was very high in carbs and causes large swings in insulin and the other that's very low in carbs and causes increases in ketones.Kevin Hall (14:22):We ask people, again, while you're in one food environment or the other, don't be trying to gain weight or lose weight, eat as much or as little as you'd like, and we're going to basically measure a lot of things. They again, don't know what the primary outcome of the study is. We're measuring their leftovers afterwards. And so, the surprise in this particular case was that the diet that caused the big swings in glucose and insulin did not lead to more calorie consumption. In fact, it led to about 700 calories per day less than when the same people were exposed to the ketogenic diet. Interestingly, both food environments caused people to lose weight, so it wasn't that we didn't see the effect of people over consuming calories on either diet, so they were reading fewer calories in general than they were when they came in, right. They're probably eating a pretty ultra-processed food diet when they came in. We put them on these two diets that varied very much in terms of the macronutrients that they were eating, but both were pretty minimally processed. They lost weight. They ended up losing more body fat on the very low-fat high carb diet than the ketogenic diet, but actually more weight on the ketogenic diet than the low-fat diet. So there's a little bit of a dissociation between body fat loss and weight loss in this study, which was kind of interesting.Eric Topol (15:49):Interesting. Yeah, I thought that was a fascinating trial because plant-based diet, they both have their kind of camps, you know.Kevin Hall (15:57):Right. No, exactly.Immune System Signatures for Vegan vs Ketogenic DietsEric Topol (15:58):There are people who aren't giving up on ketogenic diet. Of course, there's some risks and some benefits and there's a lot of interest of course with the plant-based diet. So it was really interesting and potentially the additive effects of plant-based with avoidance or lowering of ultra-processed food. Now, the more recent trial that you did also was very interesting, and of course I'm only selecting ones that I think are particularly, there are a lot of trials you've done, but this one is more recent in this year where you looked at vegan versus ketogenic diets for the immune signature, immune response, which is really important. It's underplayed as its effect, and so maybe you can take us through that one.[Link to a recent Nature feature on this topic, citing Dr. Hall's work]Kevin Hall (16:43):Yeah, so just to be clear, it's actually the same study, the one that we just talked about. This is a secondary sort of analysis from a collaboration we had with some folks at NIAID here at the NIH to try to evaluate immune systems signatures in these same folks who wonder what these two changes in their food environment. One is vegan, high carbohydrate low-fat diet and the other, the animal-based ketogenic diet. And again, it was pretty interesting to me that we were able to see really substantial changes in how the immune system was responding. First of all, both diets again seem to have improved immune function, both adaptive and innate immune function as compared to their baseline measurements when they came into the study. So when they're reading their habitual diet, whatever that is typically high in ultra-processed foods, they switched to both of these diets.Kevin Hall (17:39):We saw market changes in their immune system even compared to baseline. But when we then went and compared the two diets, they were actually divergent also, in other words, the vegan diet seemed to stimulate the innate immune system and the ketogenic diet seemed to stimulate the adaptive immune system. So these are the innate immune system can be thought of. Again, I'm not an immunologist. My understanding is that this is the first line defense against pathogens. It happens very quickly and then obviously the adaptive immune system then adapts to a specific pathogen over time. And so, this ability of our diet to change the immune system is intriguing and how much of that has to do with influencing the gut microbiota, which obviously the gut plays a huge role in steering our immune system in one direction versus another. I think those are some really intriguing mechanistic questions that are really good fodder for future research.Eric Topol (18:42):Yeah, I think it may have implications for treatment of autoimmune diseases. You may want to comment about that.Kevin Hall (18:51):Yeah, it's fascinating to think about that the idea that you could change your diet and manipulate your microbiota and manipulate your gut function in a way to influence your immune system to steer you away from a response that may actually be causing your body damage in your typical diet. It's a fascinating area of science and we're really interested to follow that up. I mean, it kind of supports these more anecdotal reports of people with lupus, for example, who've reported that when they try to clean up their diet for a period of time and eliminate certain foods and eliminate perhaps even ultra-processed food products, that they feel so much better that their symptoms alleviate at least for some period of time. Obviously, it doesn't take the place of the therapeutics that they need to take, but yeah, we're really interested in following this up to see what this interaction might be.Eric Topol (19:46):Yeah, it's fascinating. It also gets to the fact that certain people have interesting responses. For example, those with epilepsy can respond very well to a ketogenic diet. There's also been diet proposed for cancer. In fact, I think there's some even ongoing trials for cancer of specific diets. Any comments about that?Kevin Hall (20:10):Yeah, again, it's a really fascinating area. I mean, I think we kind of underappreciate and view diet in this lens of weight loss, which is not surprising because that's kind of where it's been popularized. But I think the role of nutrition and how you can manipulate your diet and still you can have a very healthy version of a ketogenic diet. You can have a very healthy version of a low-fat, high carb diet and how they can be used in individual cases to kind of manipulate factors that might be of concern. So for example, if you're concerned about blood glucose levels, clearly a ketogenic diet is moderating those glucose levels over time, reducing insulin levels, and that might have some positive downstream consequences and there's some potential downsides. Your apoB levels might go up. So, you have to kind of tune these things to the problems and the situations that individuals may face. And similarly, if you have issues with blood glucose control, maybe a high carbohydrate diet might not be for you, but if that's not an issue and you want to reduce apoB levels, it seems like that is a relatively effective way to do that, although it does tend to increase fasting triglyceride levels.Kevin Hall (21:27):So again, there's all of these things to consider, and then when you open the door beyond traditional metabolic health markers to things like inflammation and autoimmune disease as well as some of these other things like moderating how cancer therapeutics might work inside the body. I think it's a really fascinating and interesting area to pursue.Eric Topol (21:55):No question about it. And that also brings in the dimension of the gut microbiome, which obviously your diet has a big influence, and it has an influence on your brain, brain-gut axis, and the immune system. It's all very intricate, a lot of feedback loops and interactions that are not so easy to dissect, right?Kevin Hall (22:16):Absolutely. Yeah, especially in humans. That's why we rely on our basic science colleagues to kind of figure out these individual steps in these chains. And of course, we do need human experiments and carefully controlled experiments to see how much of that really translates to humans, so we need this close sort of translational partnership.On the Pathogenesis of Obesity, Calories In and Calories OutEric Topol (22:35):Yeah. Now, you've also written with colleagues, other experts in the field about understanding the mechanisms of pathogenesis of obesity and papers that we'll link to. We're going to link to everything for what we've been discussing about calories in, calories out, and that's been the longstanding adage about this. Can you enlighten us, what is really driving obesity and calories story?Kevin Hall (23:05):Well, I co-organized a meeting for the Royal Society, I guess about a year and a half ago, and we got together all these experts from around the world, and the basic message is that we have lots of competing theories about what is driving obesity. There's a few things that we all agree on. One is that there is a genetic component. That adiposity in a given environment is somewhere between 40% to 70% heritable, so our genes play a huge role. It seems like there's certain genes that can play a major role. Like if you have a mutation in leptin, for example, or the leptin receptor, then this can have a monogenic cause of obesity, but that's very, very rare. What seems to be the case is that it's a highly polygenic disease with individual gene variants contributing a very, very small amount to increased adiposity. But our genes have not changed that much as obesity prevalence has increased over the past 50 years. And so, something in the environment has been driving that, and that's where the real debates sort of starts, right?Kevin Hall (24:14):I happen to be in the camp that thinks that the food environment is probably one of the major drivers and our food have changed substantially, and we're trying to better understand, for example, how ultra-processed foods which have risen kind of in parallel with the increased prevalence of obesity. What is it about ultra-processed foods that tend to drive us to overconsume calories? Other folks focus maybe more on what signals from the body have been altered by the foods that we're eating. They might say that the adipose tissue because of excess insulin secretion for example, is basically driven into a storage mode and that sends downstream signals that are eventually sensed by the brain to change our appetite and things like that. There's a lot of debate about that, but again, I think that these are complementary hypotheses that are important to sort out for sure and important to design experiments to try to figure out what is more likely. But there is a lot of agreement on the idea that there's something in our environment has changed.Kevin Hall (25:17):I think there's even maybe a little bit less agreement of exactly what that is. I think that there's probably a little bit more emphasis on the food environment as opposed to there are other folks who think increased pollution might be driving some of this, especially endocrine disrupting chemicals that have increased in prevalence. I think that's a viable hypothesis. I think we have to try to rank order what we think are the most likely and largest contributors. They could all be contributing to some extent and maybe more so in some people rather than others, but our goal is to try to, maybe that's a little simple minded, but let's take the what I think is the most important thing and let's figure out the mechanisms of that most important thing and we'll, number one, determine if it is the most important thing. In my case, I think something about ultra-processed foods that are driving much of what we're seeing. If we could better understand that, then we could both advise consumers to avoid certain kinds of foods because of certain mechanisms and still be able to consume some degree of ultra-processed foods. They are convenient and tasty and relatively inexpensive and don't require a lot of skill and equipment to prepare. But then if we focus on the true bad guys in that category because we really understand the mechanisms, then I think that would be a major step forward. But that's just my hypothesis.Eric Topol (26:43):Well, I'm with you actually. Everything I've read, everything I've reviewed on ultra-processed food is highly incriminating, and I also get frustrated that nothing is getting done about it, at least in this country. But on the other hand, it doesn't have to be either or, right? It could be both these, the glycemic index story also playing a role. Now, when you think about this and you're trying to sort out calories in and calories out, and let's say it's one of your classic experiments where you have isocaloric proteins and fat and carbohydrate exactly nailed in the different diets you're examining. Is it really about calories or is it really about what is comprising the calorie?Kevin Hall (27:29):Yeah, so I think this is the amazing thing, even in our ultra-processed food study, if we asked the question across those people, did the people who ate more calories even in the ultra-processed diet, did they gain more weight? The answer is yes.Kevin Hall (27:44):There's a very strong linear correlation between calorie intake and weight change. I tend to think that I started my career in this space focusing more on the metabolism side of the equation, how the body's using the calories and how much does energy expenditure change when you vary the proportion of carbs versus fat, for example. The effect size is there, they might be there, but they're really tiny of the order of a hundred calories per day. What really struck me is that when we just kind of changed people's food environments, the magnitude of the effects are like we mentioned, 500 to 700 calories per day differences. So I think that the real trick is to figure out how is it that the brain is regulating our body weight in some way that we are beginning to understand from a molecular perspective? What I think is less well understood is, how is that food intake control system altered by the food environment that we find ourselves in?The Brain and GLP-1 DrugsKevin Hall (28:42):There are a few studies now in mice that are beginning to look at how pathways in the brain that have been believed to be related to reward and not necessarily homeostatic control of food intake. They talk to the regions of the brain that are related to homeostatic control of food intake, and it's a reciprocal sort of feedback loop there, and we're beginning to understand that. And I think if we get more details about what it is in our foods that are modulating that system, then we'll have a better understanding of what's really driving obesity and is it different in different people? Are there subcategories of obesity where certain aspects of the food environment are more important than others, and that might be completely flipped in another person. I don't know the answer to that question yet, but it seems like there are certain common factors that might be driving overall changes in obesity prevalence and how they impact this reward versus homeostatic control systems in the brain, I think are really fascinating questions.Eric Topol (29:43):And I think we're getting much more insight about this circuit of the reward in the brain with the food intake, things like optogenetics, many ways that we're getting at this. And so, it's fascinating. Now, that gets me to the miracle drug class GLP-1, which obviously has a big interaction with obesity, but of course much more than that. And you've written about this as well regarding this topic of sarcopenic obesity whereby you lose a lot of weight, but do you lose muscle mass or as you referred to earlier, you lose body fat and maybe not so much muscle mass. Can you comment about your views about the GLP-1 family of drugs and also about this concern of muscle mass loss?Kevin Hall (30:34):Yeah, so I think it's a really fascinating question, and we've been trying to develop mathematical models about how our body composition changes with weight gain and weight loss for decades now. And this has been a long topic, one of the things that many people may not realize is that people with obesity don't just have elevated adiposity, they also have elevated muscle mass and lean tissue mass overall. So when folks with obesity lose weight, and this was initially a pretty big concern with bariatric surgery, which has been the grandfather of ways that people have lost a lot of weight. The question has been is there a real concern about people losing too much weight and thereby becoming what you call sarcopenic? They have too little muscle mass and then they have difficulties moving around. And of course, there are probably some people like that, but I think what people need to realize is that folks with obesity tend to start with much higher amounts of lean tissue mass as well as adiposity, and they start off with about 50% of your fat-free mass, and the non-fat component of your body is skeletal muscle.Kevin Hall (31:45):So you're already starting off with quite a lot. And so, the question then is when you lose a lot of weight with the GLP-1 receptor agonist or with bariatric surgery, how much of that weight loss is coming from fat-free mass and skeletal muscle versus fat mass? And so, we've been trying to simulate that using what we've known about bariatric surgery and what we've known about just intentional weight loss or weight gain over the years. And one of the things that we found was that our sort of expectations for what's expected for the loss of fat-free mass with these different drugs as well as bariatric surgery, for the most part, they match our expectations. In other words, the expected amount of fat loss and fat free mass loss. The one outlier interestingly, was the semaglutide study, and in that case, they lost more fat-free mass than would be expected.Kevin Hall (32:44):Now, again, that's just raising a little bit of a flag that for whatever reason, from a body composition perspective, it's about a hundred people underwent these repeated DEXA scans in that study sponsored by Novo Nordisk. So it's not a huge number of people, but it's enough to really get a good estimate about the proportion of weight loss. Whether or not that has functional consequences, I think is the open question. There's not a lot of reports of people losing weight with semaglutide saying, you know what? I'm really having trouble actually physically moving around. I feel like I've lost a lot of strength. In fact, it seems to be the opposite, right, that the quality of the muscle there seems to be improved. They seem to have more physical mobility because they've lost so much more weight, that weight had been inhibiting their physical movement in the past.Kevin Hall (33:38):So it's something to keep an eye on. It's an open question whether or not we need additional therapies in certain categories of patients, whether that be pharmacological, there are drugs that are interesting that tend to increase muscle mass. There's also other things that we know increase muscle mass, right? Resistance exercise training, increase this muscle mass. And so, if you're really concerned about this, I certainly, I'm not a physician, but I think it's something to consider that if you go on one of these drugs, you might want to think about increasing your resistance exercise training, maybe increasing the protein content of your diet, which then can support that muscle building. But I think it's a really interesting open question about what the consequences of this might be in certain patient populations, especially over longer periods of time.Dietary Protein, Resistance Exercise, DEXA ScansEric Topol (34:30):Yeah, you've just emphasized some really key points here. Firstly, that resistance exercise is good for you anyway. And get on one of these drugs, why don't you amp it up or get it going? The second is about the protein diet, which it'd be interesting to get your thoughts on that, but we generally have too low of a protein diet, but then there are some who are advocating very high protein diets like one gram per pound, not just one gram per kilogram. And there have been studies to suggest that that very high protein diet could be harmful, but amping up the protein diet, that would be a countering thing. But the other thing you mentioned is a DEXA scan, which can be obtained very inexpensively, and because there's a variability in this muscle mass loss if it's occurring, I wonder if that's a prudent thing or if you just empirically would just do the things that you mentioned. Do you have any thoughts about that?Kevin Hall (35:32):Yeah, that's really a clinical question that I don't deal with on a day-to-day basis. And yeah, I think there's probably better people suited to that. DEXA scans, they're relatively inexpensive, but they're not readily accessible to everyone. I certainly wouldn't want to scare people away from using drugs that are now known to be very effective for weight loss and pretty darn safe as far as we can tell, just because they don't have access to a DEXA scanner or something like that.Eric Topol (36:00):Sure. No, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, the only reason I thought it might be useful is if you're concerned about this and you want to track, for example, how much is that resistant training doing?Kevin Hall (36:13):But I think for people who have the means to do that, sure. I can't see any harm in it for sure.Continuous Glucose Sensors?Eric Topol (36:19):Yeah. That gets me to another metric that you've written about, which is continuous glucose tracking. As you know, this is getting used, I think much more routinely in type one insulin diabetics and people with type 2 that are taking insulin or difficult to manage. And now in recent months there have been consumer approved that is no prescription needed, just go to the drugstore and pick up your continuous glucose sensor. And you've written about that as well. Can you summarize your thoughts on it?Kevin Hall (36:57):Yeah, sure. I mean, yeah, first of all, these tools have been amazing for people with diabetes and who obviously are diagnosed as having a relative inability to regulate their glucose levels. And so, these are critical tools for people in that population. I think the question is are they useful for people who don't have diabetes and is having this one metric and where you target all this energy into this one thing that you can now measure, is that really a viable way to kind of modulate your lifestyle and your diet? And how reliable are these CGM measurements anyway? In other words, do they give the same response to the same meal on repeated occasions? Does one monitor give the same response as another monitor? And those are the kinds of experiments that we've done. Again, secondary analysis, these trials that we talked about before, we have people wearing continuous glucose monitors all the time and we know exactly what they ate.Kevin Hall (37:59):And so, in a previous publication several years ago, we basically had two different monitors. One basically is on the arm, which is the manufacturer's recommendation, the other is on the abdomen, which is the manufacturer's recommendation. They're wearing them simultaneously. And we decided just to compare what were the responses to the same meals in simultaneous measurements. And they were correlated with each other thankfully, but they weren't as well predictive as you might expect. In other words, one device might give a very high glucose reading to consuming one meal and the other might barely budge, whereas the reverse might happen for a different meal. And so, we asked the question, if we were to rank the glucose spikes by one meal, so we have all these meals, let's rank them according to the glucose spikes of one device. Let's do the simultaneous measurements with the other device.Kevin Hall (38:53):Do we get a different set of rankings? And again, they're related to each other, but they're not overlapping. They're somewhat discordant. And so, then the question becomes, okay, well if I was basically using this one metric to kind of make my food decisions by one device, I actually start making different decisions compared to if I happen to have been wearing a different device. So what does this really mean? And I think this sort of foundational research on how much of a difference you would need to make a meaningful assessment about, yeah, this is actionable from a lifestyle perspective, even if that is the one metric that you're interested in. That sort of foundational research I don't think has really been done yet. More recently, we asked the question, okay, let's ignore the two different devices. Let's stick to the one where we put it on our arm, and let's ask the question.Kevin Hall (39:43):We've got repeated meals and we've got them in this very highly regimented and controlled environment, so we know exactly what people ate previously. We know the timing of the meals, we know when they did their exercise, we know how much they were moving around, how well they slept the night before. All of these factors we could kind of control. And the question that we asked in that study was, do people respond similarly to the same meal on repeated occasions? Is that better than when you actually give them very different meals? But they match overall for macronutrient content, for example. And the answer to that was surprisingly no. We had as much variability in the glucose response to the same person consuming the same meal on two occasions as a whole bunch of different meals. Which suggests again, that there's enough variability that it makes it difficult to then recommend on for just two repeats of a meal that this is going to be a meal that's going to cause your blood glucose to be moderate or blood glucose to be very high. You're going to have to potentially do this on many, many different occasions to kind of figure out what's the reliable response of these measurements. And again, that foundational research is typically not done. And I think if we're really going to use this metric as something that is going to change our lifestyles and make us choose some meals other than others, then I think we need that foundational research. And all we know now is that two repeats of the same meal is not going to do it.Eric Topol (41:21):Well, were you using the current biosensors of 2024 or were you using ones from years ago on that?Kevin Hall (41:27):No, we were using ones from several years ago when these studies were completed. But interestingly, the variability in the venous measurements to meal tests is also very, very different. So it's probably not the devices per se that are highly variable. It's that we don't really know on average how to predict these glucose responses unless there's huge differences in the glycemic load. So glycemic load is a very old concept that when you have very big differences in glycemic load, yeah, you can on average predict that one kind of meal is going to give rise to a much larger glucose excursion than another. But typically these kind of comparisons are now being made within a particular person. And we're comparing meals that might have quite similar glycemic loads with the claim that there's something specific about that person that causes them to have a much bigger glucose spike than another person. And that we can assess that with a couple different meals.Eric Topol (42:31):But also, we know that the spikes or the glucose regulation, it's very much affected by so many things like stress, like sleep, like exercise. And so, it wouldn't be at all surprising that if you had the exact same food, but all these other factors were modulated that it might not have the same response. But the other thing, just to get your comment on. Multiple groups, particularly starting in Israel, the Weizmann Institute, Eran Segal and his colleagues, and many subsequent have shown that if you give the exact same amount of that food, the exact same time to a person, they eat the exact same amount. Their glucose response is highly heterogeneous and variable between people. Do you think that that's true? That in fact that our metabolism varies considerably and that the glucose in some will spike with certain food and some won't.Kevin Hall (43:29):Well, of course that's been known for a long time that there's varying degrees of glucose tolerance. Just oral glucose tolerance tests that we've been doing for decades and decades we know is actually diagnostic, that we use variability in that response as diagnostic of type 2 diabetes.Eric Topol (43:49):I'm talking about within healthy people.Kevin Hall (43:53):But again, it's not too surprising that varying people. I mean, first of all, we have a huge increase in pre-diabetes, right? So there's various degrees of glucose tolerance that are being observed. But yeah, that is important physiology. I think the question then is within a given person, what kind of advice do we give to somebody about their lifestyle that is going to modulate those glucose responses? And if that's the only thing that you look at, then it seems like what ends up happening, even in the trials that use continuous glucose monitors, well big surprise, they end up recommending low carbohydrate diets, right? So that's the precision sort of nutrition advice because if that's the main metric that's being used, then of course we've all known for a very long time that lower carbohydrate diets lead to a moderated glucose response compared to higher carbohydrate diets. I think the real question is when you kind of ask the issue of if you normalize for glycemic load of these different diets, and there are some people that respond very differently to the same glycemic load meal compared to another person, is that consistent number one within that person?Kevin Hall (45:05):And our data suggests that you're going to have to repeat that same test multiple times to kind of get a consistent response and be able to make a sensible recommendation about that person should eat that meal in the future or not eat that meal in the future. And then second, what are you missing when that becomes your only metric, right? If you're very narrowly focused on that, then you're going to drive everybody to consume a very low carbohydrate diet. And as we know, that might be great for a huge number of people, but there are those that actually have some deleterious effects of that kind of diet. And if you're not measuring those other things or not considering those other things and put so much emphasis on the glucose side of the equation, I worry that there could be people that are being negatively impacted. Not to mention what if that one occasion, they ate their favorite food and they happen to get this huge glucose spike and they never eat it again, their life is worse. It might've been a complete aberration.Eric Topol (46:05):I think your practical impact point, it's excellent. And I think one of the, I don't know if you agree, Kevin, but one of the missing links here is we see these glucose spikes in healthy people, not just pre-diabetic, but people with no evidence of glucose dysregulation. And we don't know, they could be up to 180, 200, they could be prolonged. We don't know if the health significance of that, and I guess someday we'll learn about it. Right?Kevin Hall (46:36):Well, I mean that's the one nice thing is that now that we have these devices to measure these things, we can start to make these correlations. We can start to do real science to say, what a lot of people now presume is the case that these spikes can't be good for you. They must lead to increased risk of diabetes. It's certainly a plausible hypothesis, but that's what it is. We actually need good data to actually analyze that. And at least that's now on the table.Eric Topol (47:04):I think you're absolutely right on that. Well, Kevin, this has been a fun discussion. You've been just a great leader in nutrition science. I hope you'll keep up your momentum because it's pretty profound and I think we touched on a lot of the uncertainties. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wish I did?Kevin Hall (47:23):I mean, we could go on for hours, I'm sure, Eric, but this has been a fascinating conversation. I really appreciate your interest. Thank you.Eric Topol (47:30):Alright, well keep up the great stuff. We'll be following all your work in the years ahead, and thanks for joining us on Ground Truths today.**************************************Footnote, Stay Tuned: Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall have a book coming out next September titled “WHY WE EAT? Thank you for reading, listening and subscribing to Ground Truths.If you found this fun and informative please share it!All content on Ground Truths—its newsletters, analyses, and podcasts, are free, open-access.Paid subscriptions are voluntary. All proceeds from them go to support Scripps Research. Many thanks to those who have contributed—they have greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for the past two years. I welcome all comments from paid subscribers and will do my best to respond to them and any questions.Thanks to my producer Jessica Nguyen and to Sinjun Balabanoff for audio and video support at Scripps Research.Note on Mass Exodus from X/twitter:Many of you have abandoned the X platform for reasons that I fully understand. While I intend to continue to post there because of its reach to the biomedical community, I will post anything material here in the Notes section of Ground Truths on a daily basis and cover important topics in the newsletter/analyses. You can also find my posts at Bluesky: @erictopol.bsky.social, which is emerging as an outstanding platform for sharing life science. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

Some old nemesisisisisisises have reappeared, and that's ... unfortunate. But at least Bob has some colourful brochures to distract our team from their impending doom. So.... how many oceans is "too many," do you reckon? You've been listening to... Kevin Hall as Greg and Felonius Sarah Rhea Warner as Pipistrelle Bonnie Brantley as Jessie and Donna Eric Perry as Dr. von Haber Zetzer, Mr. Southers, and Joe Pete Barry as Bob Lee Shackleford as Pluto Sarah Golding as Mrs Sheffield Chrisi Talyn Saje as Julie Shannon Perry as Madeline and Olivia David S. Dear as Dr. Theo Bromae and Tiberius Kyle Jones is your Narrator 2. And Chris Nadolny Gourley is your Narrator John Faley is our music director, and our artwork is by Lucas Elliott. Sarah Golding is our dialogue editor, and Mark Restuccia is our sound designer. Oz 9 is written by Shannon Perry. Oz 9 is a proud member of the Fable and Folly Network. Please check out our sibling shows at fableandfolly.com and support our sponsors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join me, Leila Lutz, for a solo episode on weight and body composition as I challenge the fitness industry's misconceptions around what it means to be fit and healthy. In this episode, I share where I am up to on my personal journey and why I have chosen not to lose body fat right now, even though I do want to. Get ready to rethink everything you thought you knew about weight, body fat, and what it truly means to be fit.In this Episode:Introduction to the Health Journey The Role of Muscle Mass and Organ Health Body Fat Percentages and Industry MisconceptionsThe Impact of Dieting and Caloric Deficits The Importance of Strength Training and Muscle Mass Assessing Fitness and RecoveryThe Role of Nutrition and Caloric Intake The Psychological and Emotional Impact of Body Image Conclusion and Next StepsLinks to studies:"Long-term persistence of adaptive thermogenesis in subjects who have maintained a reduced body weight" by Kevin Hall et al. in Obesity, 2016. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4989512/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5568065/https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.21538Connect with Leila:WebsiteInstagram @leilalutz

Episode Highlights:Making sense of the recent Kellogg's food dye petition and what it means for ultra-processed foodsResearch showing how ultra-processed foods affect weight gain regardless of macronutrients How chewing food impacts GLP-1 production Why replacing artificial ingredients with natural ones may not solve core issuesThe complex relationship between food manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare systemsThe importance of the "food matrix" and processing methods beyond ingredientsAbout Chef Dr. Mike: Chef Dr. Mike is a cardiologist turned culinary medicine expert who combines his medical expertise with a deep understanding of food science and cooking. He teaches healthcare providers and the public about the connections between food, health, and medicine through his work with culinary medicine programs and his weekly column at the Center for Food is Medicine.Links & Resources:Gluten-free artisan bread recipe

Kevin Hall is an author who has written about what life was like growing up in idyllic Ilion, NY and Rosemount. Hall recently released his third book, SIGNS: The Veil is Thinner Than We Imagine.Connect with Kevin at Kevin-Hall.com and Facebook at Kevin.HallWant more The On Purpose Podcast?Find full episodes and more!Check in on Instagram , FacebookConnect with Jerrod!Linkedin, InstagramGet My Book!

On the latest edition of Kentucky Newsmakers, WKYT's Bill Bryant talks with Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear and Lexington Fayette County Health Department Communications Officer Kevin Hall.

We've all heard of processed foods, but what about ultraprocessed foods, which make up more than half of the typical American diet? In this special Chasing Life: Spotlight, CNN Medical Correspondent Meg Tirrell explores how these foods became so widespread and the potential risks they pose to our health. She speaks with Professor Marion Nestle, a leading authority on nutrition and food policy and NIH senior investigator Kevin Hall, who conducted the first and only controlled clinical trial on ultraprocessed foods. Hear about the study's remarkable findings; it may change some of the choices you make in the grocery store.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode I am reading from Kevin Hall's book 'SIGNS: The Veil is Thinner Than We Imagine'.Have you experienced hearing a whispered voice when no one else is around, or perhaps a gentle nudge appearing to direct you? Have you had a dream of a departed loved one so real that it left you with undeniable feelings? Have you had inanimate objects suddenly turn on by themselves?Have you thought that it was all a coincidence or maybe your imagination? Are you looking for answers as to why these unusual occurrences have happened in your life? SIGNS provides some needed direction in order to help you find the answers you seek.This book contains a collection of true stories, each linked to a theme of how the Veil is thinner than we imagine. It will challenge you to explore your own SIGN experiences, while providing compelling research to assist with your personal journey of understanding.What is in this book for YOU:Discover the importance of SIGNS in your lifeExplore real life stories of notable people and their SIGNSLearn from experts and historical referencesGain comfort in knowing that you are not alone.BioKevin Hall joyfully adopts the titles of dad, grandpa, and papa. Residing with his wife in Rush, NY—a suburb of Rochester—he is a family man with two married children, six grandchildren, and a beloved dog named Pal.His career spanned over 40 years in the private sector, during which he secured a US Patent, was featured in Forbes magazine, authored several white papers, and received numerous accolades for his contributions.Now retired and contemplating his next chapter, he turned to writing. In 2022, he published his first two memoir/history books. When queried about his motivation to write, he replies, "It was the persistent curiosity of my grandchildren, always asking, 'What was it like when you were young, grandpa?'"For his third book, he interviewed a range of fascinating individuals, sharing their extraordinary and inspiring tales—some bordering on the miraculous. One Certified Buyer comments: Have you ever been in a situation where you get a tingling sensation telling you something extraordinary is happening? This book took me through an interesting journey of some astounding stories and other smaller tales of wonder in day-to-day life.Amazon link https://tinyurl.com/4bk5h73bhttp://kevin-hall.com/https://www.pastliveshypnosis.co.uk/https://www.patreon.com/ourparanormalafterlifeBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/our-paranormal-afterlife-finding-proof-of-life-after-death--5220623/support.