I was delighted to get a chance to talk to Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal about diet and health and in particular about fasting as the key tool for defeating obesity. The result is the Odd Lots podcast "An Economist Explains Why Losing Weight Is Kind Of Like Defeating Inflation." One of the key things I say in this podcast is that using fasting to fight obesity is like a central bank engineering a recession to fight inflation, except that recessions are horrible, while fasting is not that bad an experience at all, if you do it right. 

All around, I think this is a very high-quality podcast, thanks to the Odd Lots team. I hope you will try listening!

Don't miss these other posts on diet and health and on fighting obesity:

• Stop Counting Calories; It's the Clock that Counts
• Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid
• Obesity Is Always and Everywhere an Insulin Phenomenon
• How Fasting Can Starve Cancer Cells, While Leaving Normal Cells Unharmed
• The Case Against Sugar: Stephan Guyenet vs. Gary Taubes
• The Case Against the Case Against Sugar: Seth Yoder vs. Gary Taubes
• How Sugar Makes People Hangry
• The Keto Food Pyramid
• Why a Low-Insulin-Index Diet Isn't Exactly a 'Lowcarb' Diet
• Hints for Healthy Eating from the Nurse's Health Study
• A Conversation with David Brazel on Obesity Research
• Mass In/Mass Out: A Satire of Calories In/Calories Out
• Carola Binder: The Obesity Code and Economists as General Practitioners
• Carola Binder—Why You Should Get More Vitamin D: The Recommended Daily Allowance for Vitamin D Was Underestimated Due to Statistical Illiteracy
• Jason Fung: Dietary Fat is Innocent of the Charges Leveled Against It
• Faye Flam: The Taboo on Dietary Fat is Grounded More in Puritanism than Science
• Diseases of Civilization
• Sugar as a Slow Poison
• Katherine Ellen Foley—Candy Bar Lows: Scientists Just Found Another Worrying Link Between Sugar and Depression
• Ken Rogoff Against Sugar and Processed Food
• Kearns, Schmidt and Glantz—Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents
• Intense Dark Chocolate: A Review
• Salt Is Not the Nutritional Evil It Is Made Out to Be
• Whole Milk Is Healthy; Skim Milk Less So
• Is Milk OK?
• How the Calories In/Calories Out Theory Obscures the Endogeneity of Calories In and Out to Subjective Hunger and Energy
• Putting the Perspective from Jason Fung's "The Obesity Code" into Practice
• Julia Belluz and Javier Zarracina: Why You'll Be Disappointed If You Are Exercising to Lose Weight, Explained with 60+ Studies (my retitling of the article this links to)
• Meat Is Amazingly Nutritious—But Is It Amazingly Nutritious for Cancer Cells, Too?
• Diana Kimball: Listening Creates Possibilities
• On Fighting Obesity
• The Heavy Non-Health Consequences of Heaviness
• Analogies Between Economic Models and the Biology of Obesity
• Debating 'Forget Calorie Counting; It's the Insulin Index, Stupid'

Also see the last section of "Five Books That Have Changed My Life."