Why Your ”Healthy” Foods Are Making You Sick | Michael Pollan

2026-04-17

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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...

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

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