Why Your "Healthy" Foods Are Making You Sick | Michael Pollan
4/17/20261 hr 43 min
Michael Pollan cuts through nutrition confusion and exposes the uncomfortable truth: ultra processed foods now make up more than 60% of the American diet, and they're engineered to manipulate your body and brain.
Most foods you think are healthy, like plant-based burgers with 21 synthetic ingredients and diet sodas that trick your metabolism, are actually sabotaging your health and creating cravings that trap you in a cycle of poor eating. Your gut microbiome holds the key to everything from your weight to your mental health, and it's starving without the 30 different plants per week it needs to thrive.
By understanding how food companies exploit your evolutionary instincts for sweetness and fat, you can reclaim control and use Pollan's seven-word mantra to make choices that honor both pleasure and nutrition. The transformation begins when you stop lying to your body about what you're eating and start thinking of food as medicine rather than entertainment.
Michael’s books:
- This Is Your Mind on Plants
- How to Change Your Mind
- Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
- Food Rules: An Eater's Manual
- In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto
- The Omnivore's Dilemma
- The Botany of Desire
In this episode you will:
- Identify the hidden ingredients in "healthy" foods that are actually toxic to your body
- Learn why diet sodas sabotage weight loss faster than regular soda
- Discover the 10 trillion organisms in your gut that control your mood and metabolism
- Master Michael Pollan's seven-word mantra for eating real food
- Understand how to retrain your appetite signals to stop overeating at every meal
For more information go to https://lewishowes.com/1916
For more Greatness text PODCAST to +1 (614) 350-3960
Follow The Daily Motivation for essential highlights from The School of Greatness
More SOG episodes we think you’ll love:
Get more from Lewis!
Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy!
Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on Spotify
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsLewis Howes· Host0:00
[upbeat music] I think nutrition and this idea of wanting to extend our life, our lifespan, living a healthier life, living longer, is something that people are taking note of, specifically in recent times after just all the different physical ailments, stresses, diseases that people are accumulating in life. And I wanna start with a, a question that I think anyone could resonate with, which is the worst foods that you think so many people are consuming that they think are healthy, which are actually really, really unhealthy for us physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. If you had a list of three to five foods that you think people think are healthy, but actually the research- Yeah ... the studies are showing it's actually hurting you.
Michael Pollan· Guest0:49
Well, yeah.
Lewis Howes· Host0:51
What would those be?
Michael Pollan· Guest0:51
I mean, I think the, the, the least healthy category of foods are what are called ultra-processed foods.
Lewis Howes· Host0:57
Yes.
Michael Pollan· Guest0:58
Uh, sometimes UPFs. Um, these are foods that are heavily processed. Um, the reason they use the word ultra is because lots of healthy foods are processed. Cheese is processed.
Lewis Howes· Host1:09
Mm.
Michael Pollan· Guest1:09
Yogurt is processed.
Lewis Howes· Host1:10
Mm.
Michael Pollan· Guest1:10
Uh, white flour has been processed. Um, so there's a degree of processing that's just kind of fine, but when you get into ultra-processed foods, uh, whether they ... Which often carry health claims. I mean, I'll give you an example, the, the Impossible Burger or the Beyond Burger, right? These- That's super processed though, right? Su- yeah, like 21 ingredients,