Postpartum University® Podcast · Maranda Bower, Postpartum Nutrition Specialist

The War on Women's Language with Milli Hill EP 243

November 25, 2025·34 min·2 clips

Hill describes being “annihilated” in November 2020 after questioning “women and birthing people.”

1. Postpartum University® Podcast episode 243 centers on Milli Hill’s work on ultra-processed food, birth, and women’s language. 2. Host Miranda Bauer introduces Hill as a bestselling author, freelance journalist, and founder of the Positive Birth Movement, which ran from 2012 to 2021. 3. The episode asks what Hill means when she says changing how we eat can be “a radical act of resistance to an ultra processed world.” 4. Hill says her book Ultra Processed Women began as a study of ultra-processed food and female health, then expanded into broader questions about women. 5. She describes “light bulb moments” while writing and says the book became about “women” rather than only diet. 6. Hill argues that food choices connect to “the bigger picture” of values, nature, and the human body. 7. She points to a chapter on “the environmental impact of ultra processed as food” and links it to “mother earth.” 8. Hill says people have become disconnected from nature, their bodies, “the reality of our mortality,” birth, and each other. 9. She adds that eye contact is declining because people are looking at phones so much. 10. Hill compares weekly shopping to missing “gratitude and mindfulness,” saying people have forgotten to thank nature for food. 11. She references Braiding Sweetgrass and says the book resonated with her because it emphasizes thanking plants and not taking all of a harvest. 12. Hill says the same logic applies to buying food, throwing it away, and deciding what belongs in a trolley or fridge. 13. Bauer connects Hill’s food work to women reclaiming autonomy over their bodies, and Hill says the link involves disconnection, money, profit, industrialization, and capitalism. 14. Hill says she was “cancelled” in November 2020 after questioning where terms like “women and birthing people” came from. 15. She says the backlash felt like being in an auditorium with 10,000 seats while people shouted “bigot,” “evil,” “transphobic,” “nasty,” and “hateful.” 16. Hill says hearing stories from women like Jenny Lindsay, Jester Walls, and Rosie Kay helped her see the backlash as a pattern rather than a personal failure. 17. She says she is not an extremist and describes her own politics as moderate and open to listening. 18. Hill distinguishes between respecting an individual person’s pronouns in care and removing the word “woman” from policy, advertising, and publications. 19. Listeners interested in feminism, birth, and women’s health will get the most from this conversation. 20. Listeners looking for a neutral food interview without language politics may skip it.

As heard by us

A sharp reminder that language and care shape postpartum wellbeing.

Millie Hill's conversation focuses on how birth, care, and language shape women's experience, and it lands most clearly when it pushes back on the old line that a healthy baby is all that matters.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want postpartum care that actually takes mothers seriously.

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