Food Intelligence Quotes

“If the momentum builds and public health triumphs, maybe we’re almost finished with dessert for breakfast for our children, with super-sized, salt- and fat-filled lunches and dinners, with sugar-laden everything else. Maybe the era of sending billions of animals to slaughter for our protein while destroying natural habitats to grow them will soon be behind us. Maybe the distraction from the root causes of our nutrition crises is over. Maybe it’s the end of a calorie glut so unevenly spread around the planet that people starve while others develop obesity and diabetes. We’re on the cusp of Food 2.0—and healthier, more equitable, environmentally sustainable eating. The technologists, agriculturists, and food scientists whose genius gave us the ultra-processed calorie glut and the Green Revolution can deliver the cleaner food future we all require and deserve. We’ll look back at the food system of today the way we do the Poison Squad era when borax and formaldehyde were common food additives: That was crazy.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“The global production of the big four commodity crops—corn, soy, wheat, and rice—now amounts to about 3,500 daily calories for every person on the planet. That’s plenty, but remember that humans don’t eat those crops directly. They’re processed, either through animal agriculture or factories that make ultra-processed food. So while current industrial agricultural practices with their high yields provide enough calories for the global population, lower yields from idealized farms wouldn’t meet our needs now, much less the needs of more than ten billion people expected to arrive by the end of this century. Fortunately, that’s about when the world’s population is projected to plateau. With enough investment and planning, Food 2.0 can help humanity once again avoid the Malthusian trap, this time permanently.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“The problem is that we do not do the growing sustainably, healthfully, or equitably. Adapting Michael Pollan’s eternal eating advice to food systems, we need to: Grow enough healthy food we can all eat. Mostly sustainably produced plants or other organisms. Not so much that we have to trash it or turn it into biofuel and animal feed.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“Rich countries are making similar moves, looking beyond their borders to secure food and water provisions because hungry citizens easily become unruly. As Vladimir Lenin is credited with saying, “Every society is only three meals from chaos.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“Because metabolic rates increase with the size of the animal, larger animals like cattle are even less efficient at turning commodity crops into human food. Beef production emits eight to ten times more greenhouse gas than chicken.[*4] (One encouraging trend is that beef consumption has been decreasing at the expense of people eating more chicken in the United States.) The CO2 expired by agricultural animals does not contribute in net to carbon in the atmosphere because the CO2 was originally captured from the air by photosynthesis in the plants that were eaten. But ruminant animals like cows also produce substantial quantities of methane, with even greater global warming potential than CO2. This makes growing cows for beef and dairy particularly bad for the climate.[*5] When raising these animals destroys carbon-rich rainforest, they’re even more environmentally hazardous. That’s why Brazil’s cattle farming production became a focal point in the conversation about the destruction that comes with red meat.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“We use almost half of the earth’s habitable land to grow food, and nearly 80 percent of that is devoted to producing livestock (both for grazing and producing feed). Along with all of that land, agriculture consumes mind-boggling amounts of water. Worldwide, it uses around 70 percent of our fresh water. This has already drained the groundwater in many regions, including across America. Conventional industrial agriculture not only saps water resources but depletes soil of nutrients and biomass, while the vast quantities of fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides have poisoned environments, with nitrogen leaching into waterways, promoting algae growth and creating dead zones where no other form of life can survive. Ninety percent of land-related biodiversity loss and water stress stems from the extraction and processing of biomass—that is, agriculture and forestry. The food system as a whole is now responsible for a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. The Haber-Bosch process alone is one of the world’s largest energy hogs and producers of greenhouse gases, contributing 1 to 2 percent of global carbon emissions. Animal agriculture is a spectacularly inefficient and energy-consuming way of producing calories. As we saw at the start of the book, the energy in our food is ultimately derived from the sun, converting solar energy into chemical energy and the material flow of air and water through the metabolism of plants and animals that we eat. The further removed our food is from its solar energy source, the less energetically efficient. Most of the calories eaten by animals go toward their metabolism, keeping them alive, while only a small proportion goes toward the growth of meat. This is true even for modern chickens, selectively bred and housed in factory farms for meat production—and considered the most energetically efficient agricultural animals eaten in the United States. Yet every calorie in chicken meat requires more than four times that amount in feed.[*3]”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“On balance, though, more people now have obesity than endure hunger. More die from the diseases of overnutrition than from too little food. To put it another way, in the exact period when starvation was predicted to become more widespread, even in America, we bore witness to the global reduction of hunger and staggering increases in food waste and body weight.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“When you walk around a supermarket and look at the vast range of products on display, you have the illusion of diversity but you’re mostly looking at shelves filled with commodity crops in various guises. The rows of soda and sweet drinks, the aisles stocked full of chips and candy, the freezers brimming with ready-to-heat meals: All are derived from corn, rice, wheat, soy, mixed up with artificial flavors and colors. As we’ve seen, many UPFs reduced the time spent cooking, while the cost of eating also dropped off, leaving money in the pocket for saving or investing in other things—or buying more food to eat (or throw in the trash). In the beginning of the twentieth century, people in America used to spend about 60 percent of their disposable income on food. They now spend less than 10 percent. Some people think government subsidies of the commodity crops are the reason ultra-processed foods are so cheap compared with the healthier foods like fruits and vegetables. The real reason UPFs cost less than fruits and vegetables is that commodity crops—the main inputs to UPFs—are so cheap and efficient to grow.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“The result was more than enough protein and calories to feed growing populations with far less labor. Modern industrial agriculture requires only about two hours of human labor to produce 100 bushels of wheat, enough to make forty-two loaves of commercial white bread, compared to about three hundred hours of backbreaking farmwork at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Similar efficiencies were realized for the production of corn and soy. Providing the daily energy requirements of a single person is now accomplished with only a few seconds of human work. Collectively referred to as the Green Revolution, these changes have been credited with averting the dark future Malthus portended. More food from these technologies not only meant more grains and less hunger. It meant more feed available for animal agriculture. It meant less poverty, reduced infant mortality, and raised incomes. It meant fewer people needed to work in agriculture even as they fed billions of additional people now on the planet. This freed us up to do things like produce art, advance science, and start businesses. But the Green Revolution did more than just nourish us. It’s how we got the glut of calories, calories that we had to find other uses for, fundamentally altering what we eat, our bodies, and how we use food and energy. In Europe and North America, a lot of the corn and soy was diverted to the production of biofuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, used to power transportation, heating, and electricity. A larger portion—the majority—of the calories went to making animal products by feeding cows, chickens, and pigs that are then eaten by humans. The U.S. Department of Agriculture helped fuel the demand for animal protein, subsidizing livestock, and funding marketing and advertising programs to promote the consumption of meat, eggs, and milk. The per-person availability of poultry and eggs soared by more than 400 percent and 240 percent, respectively, between 1800 and 2000. By 2020, people around the world were consuming 574 million metric tons of animal protein in the form of meat, seafood, dairy, and eggs. That’s nearly 75 kilograms per person, and the number is increasing in developing countries.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“Finally, you invest heavily in developing agricultural equipment to efficiently sow and harvest all those crops. You build up your physical infrastructure, especially for irrigation and transportation, to water your harvest and move it to market. You sprinkle in an industrial chemical revolution, which produces new pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides, further boosting your agricultural productivity. You fund research to find ways to continue increasing crop yields and enact policies that direct farmers toward specialization, and larger farms growing commodity crops “fencerow to fencerow.” Some of these policies include government subsidies encouraging the production of more wheat, soy, rice, and corn. Humanity achieved all of these incredible technological and policy advances. Wheat was transformed from wild grass into a staple crop that now makes up a fifth of the diet around the world. Corn went from being a cultivated crop only in sunny Mexico to the most farmed cereal grain globally. “Miracle rice” matured faster than traditional varieties and produced up to ten times the yield. We shipped the harvests from these crops far and wide. We turned deserts where hardly anything grew into productive farms. We pumped fresh water out of the ground at a rate never seen in history. We made more food, more quickly, than ever before.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“Designing hybrid seeds for crops that can flourish with your artificially fixed nitrogen would be step two. You focus on crops that can already produce the most calories per hectare of land—corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice, as opposed to, say, spinach and oranges—and then selectively breed those crops to make them disease resistant, faster maturing, and more calorie and protein dense. With wheat, you do this by increasing the size of the edible kernels at the top of a wheat shaft, while shrinking the length of the inedible shafts. With rice, you design a sturdy stem packed with more grains of rice on top. With corn, you breed varieties that can grow closer together and produce larger kernels filled with starch. In addition, you make sure to breed crops so that they’re adapted to resist disease and grow in cooler climates where they wouldn’t normally thrive.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“If you want to design a food system that can overfeed populations to the point of epidemic levels of obesity—one that’s rich in ultra-processed products, and one that produces tons of food waste—step one is finding ways to make plants grow faster. Going back to the Liebig-era protein insights, the nitrogen content in soil sets a limit on how quickly plants can synthesize protein and grow. More nitrogen means more plant growth. In the early twentieth century, the German chemists Fritz Haber[*2] and Carl Bosch invented a method for artificially synthesizing ammonia—the form of nitrogen that can be easily absorbed by plants—on an industrial scale. What became known as the Haber-Bosch process removed the nitrogen cap for agriculture. This led to synthetic fertilizers, as well as far quicker plant growth, paving the way for industrial agriculture.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“The global food system now supplies nearly 2,800 daily calories for every single person alive.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“But even after accounting for all the exports, the commodity crops amounted to about 12,000 calories per day per person—more than four times the energy needs of the population. Most of that food isn’t directly eaten by humans. Instead, it goes to biofuel production and feeding animals, most of which are subsequently eaten by humans. The rest of the crops become the cheap inputs to the industrialized food system that produces ultra-processed foods, which gave us our food environment—and an epidemic of obesity.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“In industrialized countries, agriculture and technology policy have been structured to maximize calories and protein—with the costs to biodiversity, soil health, climate change, environmental pollution, animal welfare, and human health all pushed to the margins. In short, we didn’t create a food system that overperforms for health. We didn’t create a food system that overperforms for the environment. We didn’t create a food system that overperforms for equity, sustainability, or animal welfare. We created a food system that could feed billions of people calories, to excess. The epidemic of obesity and its downstream metabolic diseases are a direct result of designing food systems to produce an oversupply of energy. In this chapter, we’re going to describe the calorie glut, how we got it, its real costs, and how we can change course.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“It’s not that these companies set out to sicken people, or that the people who work at them are evil. It’s that resisting anything that’ll decrease profits is a fiduciary duty of food manufacturers to their shareholders. As the eminent public health and nutrition researcher Marion Nestle puts it, “Food companies are not social service agencies, and they’re not public health agencies. They’re businesses. The shareholder-value movement is predominant, and that means that corporations’ primary goal is to sell products and make profits for shareholders.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“Not all chemicals are bad for you, and of the ones that are, it’s often the dose that makes the poison. Small amounts of arsenic are not dangerous, while excessive water consumption can be deadly.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“The Chronic Food Poisoning Era Thanks to Wiley’s era, we have regulatory guardrails in place to prevent acute food poisonings. This thing that seems so obvious that we now take it for granted—we probably won’t leave lunch with a stomachache, or be killed by our dinner—was not at all obvious a century ago. Now, instead of mere processing, we use ultra-processing to make shelf-stable foods that comprise most of the calories feeding populations in places like the United States and the UK, and growing proportions elsewhere in the world. We have more energy and protein at our disposal than at any other time in history—but our food environment is fattening and sickening us on time scales of years and decades. The public is once again losing faith in the healthfulness and safety of the food supply, and those who have the privilege and wherewithal are cutting UPFs from their diets. We need to raise regulatory guardrails and institute policies to prevent our food from chronically sickening us. As Kelly Brownell, the Duke “toxic food environment” researcher, told us, “If six people go to a dinner and get sick from the tainted meat, the health authorities are all over it. But if thousands of people get obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer, the government stands back.” Almost all of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) food safety budget goes toward acute poisoning, not chronic disease, even though more Americans die every day from chronic food illnesses than from acute food poisonings every year. To build those guardrails, we need aggressive policies and regulations that achieve the kind of inversion we mentioned at the top of this chapter—making the healthiest foods more convenient, affordable, attractive, and accessible, while the least healthy undergo the opposite transition, into relative obscurity.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“Even if Kevin and his colleagues unravel all the factors in our ultra-processed food environment that most encourage overeating, there will probably be other important negative effects of UPFs beyond weight gain, obesity, and its downstream consequences: how these foods might cause gut dysbiosis and inflammation, for example, altering our immune systems to possibly increase the risk of autoimmune diseases and other health conditions. Overeating isn’t the only thing we need to be concerned about when it comes to UPFs, nor is it the only thing we’ve yet to understand about how these foods impact our health.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“Now here’s the twist (because there’s always a twist): Only the minimally processed diet caused body fat loss. The differences in body fat have to do with how many calories people are absorbing, Kevin suspects. Those eating a minimally processed diet consumed more insoluble fiber, the kind that comes from intact plants. Insoluble fiber has been shown to reduce the digestibility of food, leading to fewer calories absorbed. In Kevin’s first UPF study, he’d noticed that the difference in body fat between the two diets was greater than could be explained by the calorie differences calculated using nutrition software. He theorized that this was probably because the software calculations didn’t account for the fact that high insoluble fiber intake decreases calorie absorption, which some speculate happens by altering the gut microbiome. That aphorism “a calorie is a calorie” from Chapter 4 best refers to absorbed calories. Maybe eating a minimally processed diet caused more body fat loss because people digested and absorbed fewer calories compared to the UPF diet with low energy density and few hyperpalatable foods? Why the latter diet leads to weight loss without body fat loss is still a mystery.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“Another intriguing finding: When the same people were exposed to the food environment rich in UPFs but low in both energy density and hyperpalatable foods, they consumed only slightly more calories as on the minimally processed diet. They also lost about the same amount of weight during both diet periods. So a diet high in UPFs may not lead to overeating if it’s low in energy density and hyperpalatability.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“When exposed to a UPF diet high in energy density and hyperpalatable foods, people eat the most calories and gain the most weight. This time, they consumed about 1,000 calories more compared to the minimally processed environment and gained about 1 kilogram in a week. So once again, the kind of environment many of us live in unequivocally causes overeating and weight gain, replicating the findings in the first study. When people were offered the high UPF diet that’s low in hyperpalatable foods but high in energy density, calorie intake seemed to be trending downward, but the study participants still gained weight. Does that mean hyperpalatable foods aren’t important? Not necessarily. The experiment may not have reduced hyperpalatable foods enough—or maybe the participants who completed the study so far were not particularly susceptible to them.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“Biomedical research funding overwhelmingly goes to developing treatments for individuals rather than understanding how environments sicken us in the first place or how we can change them to prevent disease. James Tabery, a professor of philosophy at University of Utah, documents this tension extensively in his book Tyranny of the Gene. He contrasts the relatively paltry investment in research to explore the environmental determinants of health compared to the many false promises offered by the biomedical paradigms of human genomics and precision medicine. Diet-related chronic diseases are most responsible for driving up healthcare costs, yet less than 5 percent of the NIH’s budget is invested in nutrition research.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“If we deny free will when it comes to the worst of our behaviors, the same must also apply to the best,” the neurobiologist and free will skeptic Robert Sapolsky writes in his persuasive book Behave. For more great free-will-skeptical reading, see Sapolsky’s Determined or Free Will by Sam Harris.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“Knowing that our hunger will soon be sated seems like a good moment to ask: What is hunger anyway? There’s no specific mechanism for hunger, Goldstone explains. “We don’t feel hunger in our blood hormones. It’s an internal feeling, which arises from our brain.” The brain signal most associated with initiating hunger comes from a set of brain cells, the AgRP neurons, located in the hypothalamus. AgRP neurons become more active when the body senses that it hasn’t eaten for a while or its energy stores are low. Stimulate AgRP neurons in well-fed mice, and they start eating as if they were starving, continuing to gorge as long as the neurons are stimulated. When AgRP neurons turn on, food seeking goes into overdrive. As eating begins, they shut off in response to nutrients and hormones circulating in the blood.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“The research seemed to shed light on the cliché that “hunger is the best sauce”—or why the initial bites of a meal taste better than the last, as we saw in our imaginary Paris bistro.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“Drugs of abuse hijack a reward system that’s been set up for food, water, sex, and salt,” Goldstone explains, as he and Julia sit down at a flower-filled Indian restaurant near his West London office. All these substances have been extracted from nature—cocaine from coca plants, heroin from poppies, nicotine from tobacco plants—and modified by humans to be addictive. They seem to send the reward system into overdrive, similar to the way some researchers now suspect ultra-processed foods hook us (more on this soon).”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“Physical activity and fitness—even without weight loss—can cut the risk of some of the metabolic complications of too much body fat and reduce inflammation, with profound health benefits no matter a person’s size.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“Glycogen attracts a lot more water than fat, making it relatively heavy and therefore an inefficient way to carry around fuel.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us

“Our muscles make up 30 to 40 percent of our body weight but only burn about 3 percent of our total calories at rest—muscles are super efficient when they aren’t moving. Despite being only about 2 percent of body weight, the brain uses about 20 percent of our resting energy expenditure, and it’s relatively constant regardless of whether you are thinking hard or bingeing on Netflix.”
― Julia Belluz, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us