56 min listen
Our Brains Weren’t Designed for This Kind of Food
Our Brains Weren’t Designed for This Kind of Food
ratings:
Length:
87 minutes
Released:
Feb 28, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Our society’s dominant narrative is that body size is a product of individual willpower. We are skinny or fat because of the choices we make: the kinds of food we buy, the amounts we eat, the exercise regimens we follow.Research has never been kind to this thesis. It’s a folk narrative we use to punish people, not an empirical account of why residents of most rich countries are getting heavier over time. But, then, what account does fit the data?In his 2017 book, “The Hungry Brain,” Stephan Guyenet, a neurobiologist, argues that weight gain is less about willpower than it is the product of an evolutionary mismatch between our brains, our genetics and our environments. Now a new class of weight loss drugs is raising the possibility that we can change our brains to fit this new environment.Paired with diet and exercise, Ozempic and Wegovy caused anywhere from about a 15 percent to 18 percent loss of body weight over the course of just over a year in people classified as obese or overweight. And they do this in a way that aligns exactly with Guyenet’s research: They don’t make our bodies burn more calories, they make our brains crave less food.So I asked Guyenet on the show to talk me through his model of weight gain, the research on these new drugs and the strange implications of living with old brains in a new world.Mentioned:“Relationship between food habituation and reinforcing efficacy of food” by Katelyn A. Carr and Leonard H. Epstein“Dietary obesity in adult rats: Similarities to hypothalamic and human obesity syndromes” by Anthony Sclafani and Deleri Springer“Why Have Americans Become More Obese?” by David M. Cutler, Edward L. Glaeser andJesse M. Shapiro“Persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after “The Biggest Loser” competition” by Erin Fothergill, Juen Guo, Lilian Howard et al.“The future of weight loss” by Stephan GuyenetUnder a White Sky by Elizabeth KolbertBook recommendations:Burn by Herman PontzerSalt Sugar Fat by Michael MossThe Secret of Our Success by Joseph HenrichThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Emefa Agawu, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Pat McCusker and Kristina Samulewski.
Released:
Feb 28, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Should We Dim the Sun? Will We Even Have a Choice?: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand famously wrote in “The Whole Earth Catalogue.” Human beings act upon nature at fantastic scale, altering whole ecosystems, terraforming the world to our purposes, breeding new species into existence and driving countless more into extinction. The power we wield is awesome. But Brand was overly optimistic. We did not get good at it. We are terrible at it, and the consequences surround us. That’s the central theme of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.” And yet, there is no going back. We will not return to a prelapsarian period where humans let nature alone. Indeed, as Kolbert shows, there is no natural nature left — we live in the world (and in particular, a climate) we altered, and are altering. The awful knowledge that our interventions have gone awry again and again must be paire by The Ezra Klein Show