Digital Social Hour - The Startling Science Behind Modern Health Crises | Simon Hill DSH #720

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

🚨 Discover the startling science behind modern health crises with Sean Kelly on the Digital Social Hour! 🚀 Join us as we dive into a captivating conversation with Simon Hill, uncovering the secrets of lifestyle, genetics, and environment on your health. From heart attacks to hidden visceral fats, Simon shares personal stories and expert insights that will make you rethink your health habits. 💡   Tune in now to explore how lifestyle changes could be your key to a longer, healthier life. Don't miss out on this episode packed with valuable insights into obesity, metabolic health, and the surprising role of genetics. 💥   Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets. 📺 Hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more eye-opening stories on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 🚀 Join the conversation and let these insights transform your life today!   CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 00:43 - Causes of Heart Attack 03:58 - Understanding Visceral Fat 10:10 - Impact of Carbohydrates 12:30 - Effects of Overeating 17:46 - Link Between Diet and Dementia 20:37 - Living Proof Challenge Overview 22:30 - Importance of Measuring Biomarkers 24:20 - Predictors of Healthspan 29:55 - Autonomy vs. Optimal Health 32:07 - Finding Simon   APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail]   GUEST: Simon Hill https://www.instagram.com/simonhill/ https://www.facebook.com/theproofwithsimonhill https://www.instagram.com/theproof/ www.youtube.com/@TheProofWithSimonHill https://theproof.com/   SPONSORS: Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly   LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

They're literally working until the day they die. Yes, and that's a really critical point. We don't want people to be frail and old, unable to navigate their environment or do the things they enjoy for 20 or 30 years at the end of their life. So it's not just about extending life. It really is about compressing the number of years where you are suffering from chronic disease. Right. All right, guys, we made it happen.

Had some address issues, but he's here, Simon Hill. Thanks for coming, man. Sean, finally. Thank you so much. Health topics are one of my favorite things to discuss, so this will be fun. Yeah, I've seen the list that you've sent through some topics that we're going to cover,

and I'm excited. Yeah. Some controversial stuff. Absolutely. So how did you get started on this journey? Was it a specific moment that triggered it? Yeah, when I was a kid, I was constantly surrounded by science.

My dad's a professor of physiology, so there was always printed studies all over the house and in the car, and I didn't really understand what those studies said, but I understood the role of science and the importance of science to my dad. He taught me that this is a way where we can be curious about the world and help understand the world better.

And growing up, because of that and kind of seeing my dad's love for science, I felt like I would pursue some sort of career in science. When I was 15 i i was spending a day there's an area outside of melbourne called the yarra valley it's on wine region and my dad and i would often drive out there on the weekends together and just spend some time we were driving back home and he started to get chest pain and long story short we went back home it was just he and i he ended up having a severe heart attack was taken by helicopter actually because we're quite remote to the nearest hospital

and i followed in an ambulance by road there wasn't room for me in the helicopter so that was like quite a traumatic experience for a 15 year old absolutely and um you know not knowing like what was the outcome of this going to be and it wasn't like my dad was obese or unwell he was not diagnosed with any type of chronic disease so this was really out of left field and it was a very long way to what felt like a long way and the cardiologist came out and told us that they had fortunately saved his life but he'd had a severe heart attack. He would be on medications likely for the remainder of his life. And my brother and I would need to keep a very close eye on this as cardiovascular disease runs in families. And I, I really didn't think too much of it beyond that conversation. I was 15, right? Sort of went back

just to living life as, as I did. And just in the back of my mind, I was 15, right? Sort of went back just to living life as I did. And just in the back of my mind, I always thought, you know, based on that conversation, perhaps we have a genetic predisposition or vulnerability. And that's going to be something that I have to deal with when I am my dad's age. And he was only 41. That's young. That's young. So, you know, as I graduated, I did an undergraduate in science, became more and more interested in the role of lifestyle and how we can kind of attenuate or reduce our risk of these chronic diseases that are really crippling our communities in Western society. And I was inspired to go back and do a master's in nutrition science. And really so I could get the skills to read the research. Because it really is like another language. And so as a kind of outsider to that field of science, even though I had an undergraduate science degree, when I was trying to make sense of the nutrition literature, I was finding it very difficult.

I was confused because you'd read something in a magazine and then you'd speak to someone in the locker room. I played football and they'd have a very conflicting view, jump online, see people fighting. How do you make sense of that? I wanted to develop those skills so I could attempt to do that myself. Yeah. What a story. Yeah. I mean, obese people having heart attacks, that makes sense to me. The ones that scare me are skinny people like your dad. What do you think is causing that if it's not obesity? Well, obesity is the predominant risk factor that is driving cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, significantly raising risk of neurodegenerative diseases like dementia but it is it is possible to be metabolically unhealthy but from the outside appear to be a normal body weight and a lot of this comes down to genes and where you store fat

so it's also true and possible that you can look at someone who is two people who are both obese to the eye but one of them is of much higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes why is that well there is differences between us in terms of where we store fat so fat distribution matters a lot and long story short there's three main compartments where you can store fat subcutaneous which is like just underneath the skin yeah and then there's visceral and ectopic which is sort of in and around the organs you know like like your liver and your pancreas and some people who are let's say genetically blessed have what's called a higher personal fat threshold they can gain weight and store more fat subcutaneously in that compartment

without it spilling over into the visceral and ectopic fat compartments, which are really the deleterious, dangerous ones. That's where fat is very toxic and inflammatory. So those people can gain a lot of weight and not suffer much consequence. Now, on the flip side, you can have someone who has a very, very low subcutaneous fat storage capability. And they're the person that from the outside doesn't look that overweight. And they're walking around the streets and have no idea that even though they tend to look healthy from the outside, there's a lot of fat being stored in the pancreas and in the liver. And they can go on and develop type 2 diabetes. One in six people with type 2 diabetes

are of normal BMI. Wow. And that's important, right? Because I just got my first MRI last week. Yeah. So you can do things like MRI or DEXA scans and start to sort of get ahead of the curve and look at your fat distribution and use that as a way of kind of understanding, you know, to what extent would you like to, or be motivated to make lifestyle changes? Absolutely. And I thought I was super healthy. I'm, you know, 185 pounds, pretty lean, have a six pack and stuff, eat healthy. But my, uh, scan came back really bad. I had a lot of visceral fat all over my organs and heart. So I think it's more than just diet, you know? Yeah, there's other parts of our lifestyle

can also influence that fat distribution kind of equation. So it can be genes, which I mentioned, can determine where you store fat and which compartment. But we also know things like sleep deprivation, right? there are studies showing when you deprive someone of sleep not only the next day are they more likely to eat hyper palatable foods and excess calories but they're also they have a this preference to store the excess energy in those visceral compartments. Wow. So, you know, you're right. It's not just genetics and the food we eat. There's more going on that can influence where we're storing fat.

That's scary because a lot of students are sleep deprived. Yeah. And alcohol is another big one. And drinking, yeah. So alcohol is a big one that will increase fat, particularly in the liver, especially if you're in a calorie surplus if you're eating more calories than you're expending and then when it does come to nutrition independent of calories so calories are certainly the worst thing when it comes to storing fat in

these you know storing fat where we don't want it let's just say that that's that's what is metabolically damaging calories is the most important thing when it comes to nutrition but behind that is certain dietary constituents parts of our diet independent of calories that can affect fat storage in organs and the biggest one is the type of fat you're actually eating so saturated fats and there are metabolic studies randomized control trials in humans showing this even when you're not eating. So saturated fats, and there are metabolic studies, randomized control trials in humans showing this, even when you're not in a calorie surplus, saturated fats will increase hepatic or liver fat compared to polyunsaturated fats. So when I say saturated

fats, I'm really talking to things like palm oil, coconut oil, butter, ghee, fat that's in red meat if it's a fatty cut of red meat. And when I say polyunsaturated fats, which would be of preference if we're thinking about visceral fat, would be like fatty fish, nuts, and seeds. Oh, wow. That makes sense because I eat a lot of canned fish. No, as in fatty fish are rich in the polyunsaturated fat so if anything they should be a good thing when it comes to okay to liver health so if you have excess fat in your your liver it's probably not from it was mainly in my fish my heart i got it on the abs and some was on the heart too yeah i was really scared honestly need to make some changes man because i'm 27 so

to have that visceral fat people don't really get mris in their 20s like that's not really common no and i'd be interested to know outside of the mri results what's happening with certain blood biomarkers like yeah you usually if someone has excess fat in the liver and especially if it's in the liver and the pancreas, you see changes to important biomarkers like fasting blood glucose, triglycerides, HbA1c. They tend to be elevated. And that's when we know, like when you're looking at not only the results of a scan, but you see those changes in blood biochemistry, that's when we really start to see more of a

full picture that this person has some type of metabolic dysfunction. Got it. And what's your take on carbohydrates? Cause the person that gave my scan told me to pretty much cut them out completely. Yeah. I mean, carbohydrates stems everything from a jelly bean to a black bean. So it's hard to throw all carbohydrate containing foods in the same bucket because you know you and i am sure would agree that a jelly bean will have a different effect on your health outcomes long term and physiology compared to a black bean right right one of those they both contain carbohydrates but one of those also contains a lot of phytonutrients, different types of fiber, polyphenols. So the food matrix is different.

And so sometimes we can get so reductionist and say, hey, there's 30 grams of carbs in black beans and 30 grams of carbs in jelly beans. That's going to have the same effect on your body. But the food matrix is very different. So not all carbohydrates are kind of created equal and carbohydrate containing foods like whole grains and fruits and vegetables and legumes are associated with good long-term health outcomes and lower risk of metabolic disease so for someone like you if your goal is to reduce your risk of metabolic disease. So for someone like you, if your goal is to reduce your risk of

metabolic disease, I certainly wouldn't be saying, hey, you have to go keto or super low carb. You're recommending carnivore. But I probably wouldn't recommend carnivore. I would say to you the type of carbohydrates that you eat matters. And when you're getting carbohydrates from hyperpalatable ultra-processed foods, it's not that the sugar molecule is inherently bad. The sugar molecule in an ultra-processed food is the same as a sugar molecule in fruit. But the food matrix, the overall package is completely different. And when you're eating those ultra-processed foods that are low in water, low in fiber, low in protein low in protein calorie dense hyper palatable what happens you're you don't reach the same level of satiety for the

same number of calories right so you end up over consuming and that's that's the real problem with ultra processed foods for most people is a they end up eating excess calories and b as a result of filling up on those foods think about all the foods that they didn't consume that have a very healthy effect on physiology. Makes sense. So there's kind of a displacement factor as well. Yeah. How common would you say overeating right now is? Well, it's massively common.

I think by 2030, one in two adults in this country will be obese. Less than 7% of adults in this country are what you would define as metabolically healthy. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So, you know, to, we're in a huge health crisis and it's not like we're staring down the barrel of a health crisis. The gun has been shot and people are, you know, we're not, we're not down and out, but people are, you know, critically wounded, I guess is how you'd put it. And so we have to work out,

how do we, how do we resolve this? What are the problems? What's causing the obesity epidemic? And what can you do at a public health level? What can you do at an individual level? And is this a US problem or is this in australia is this in other countries it's a western culture problem and as as western culture starts to uh sort of creep into eastern communities you're seeing those communities change and start to take on the these um same levels of or same incidents of these non-communicable cardiometabolic diseases. We have an environment where we have a mismatch between our genetics and our environment. And the environment that we live in largely sets us up to fail. We have a set of genes that have evolved over

hundreds of thousands, millions of years in an environment where food was scarce. So it makes sense that we're really good at consuming extra calories and storing fat. That benefited our ancestors. Today in an environment where there is really no famine, for most people. Yeah. And, you know, thankfully, levels of hunger and undernutritional or malnutrition are decreasing year on year. But overnutrition is becoming a problem because we have those genes.

We're surrounded by this hyperpalatable food environment and we can't really rely on willpower. If you look to the communities that live to 100 or have a high number of centenarians, I personally don't think those people were born with more willpower than us. They just live in a different environment. And the environment's conducive to better health. So a way that I try and explain this to people is,

if you think about a maze versus a labyrinth. So a maze is something that we would design to sort of get people lost. It makes it hard for you to find your way through it. Right. Whereas a labyrinth is very much a path that is created. There's only one way to walk. It's a mindfulness-type practice. It's designed for you to succeed.

And in these communities, often some of them are described as blue zones. You may have heard of that they live in an environment that's more akin to a labyrinth where the healthy choice is also the easiest and the normal choice whereas we live in a maze and so short of rapid changes to the food environment just the environment in general that we live in, I think the only way out of this is for people to be more intentional with how they're living in this environment. So, okay, despite the environment that you're living in, can you still be healthy? Yes, you can, but it's going to take more intention or intentionality. You have

to be more deliberate than someone that lives in a blue zone. And the impressive thing with these blue zones is not only are they living to 100, but their health span, they're literally working until the day they die. Yes, and that's a really critical point. We don't want people to be frail and old, unable to navigate their environment or do the things they enjoy for 20 or 30 years at the end of their life so it's not just about extending life it really is about compressing the number of years where you are suffering from chronic disease right and so that's you know that's mostly what i kind of focus on yeah i want to i want to help people avoid premature chronic disease yeah i look at my grandparents and

yeah those last 5-10 years were tough and that's something i definitely don't want yeah tell me about it my my grandma uh is still alive now she's 96 wow it's very good at innings uh but the last i'm gonna say 12 to 15, she's had pretty severe dementia. Dang. Which, if I'm being completely honest, I don't know that I would say her quality of life is that great. Wow. She's in a home. It's tough on her family.

Financially. She doesn't remember any of her family. Yeah, so there's financial burden. It's very sad. Yeah, and now there's new studies about dementia and Alzheimer's, how it might be type 3 diabetes, right? Right, so there seems to be, at least for some types of dementia, a vascular component. And we know that people who have insulin resistance or type 2 diabetes are at significantly higher risk of developing dementia. I think it's doubling of the risk if you have type 2 diabetes.

So certainly getting people metabolically healthy, which means we want to get fat from being stored, get it out of these places where it shouldn't be stored. And we also need skeletal muscle because metabolic health is not just about getting fat out of organs it's also about having skeletal muscle working in an efficient healthy manner which comes down to healthy mitochondria in your muscle fibers which is largely achieved through exercise got it so the other thing that we're not doing a lot of is moving yeah i think that's why i had the visceral fat because i was not active my lifestyle was very sedentary i was only walking 3 400 steps a day yeah and now skeletal muscle i think a nice way to think about it is like a sponge

so when you eat a meal inevitably you will have a rise in blood glucose after that and that's normal physiology i know there's been a lot made of blood glucose spikes uh and flattening the curve i don't think we need to flatten it it is normal for your blood glucose to go up what is not normal is if it goes up and stays up two hours post meal right it should be coming back down and people with pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes if they're not medicated, when they have a meal, their blood glucose will go up and it will stay up. Wow. But a really nice kind of hack or thing that people can do

to help manage their blood glucose is actually moving their body. So if you eat a meal and then you just sit down, your blood glucose response will be dramatically different to if you eat a meal and then move your body, even if it's just for 10 minutes. Particularly if you can do some type of whole body exercise interesting so if you can get muscles working from top to bottom then you will help bring that blood glucose rise back down to a normal level in a shorter amount of time wow so taking walks after a meal is probably really beneficial then. Yeah.

And there's quite a few studies now looking at people at work and getting them to, when they have their lunch, a lot of people are eating their lunch sitting down at their computer. Right. If you can,

and particularly if you are in management and this is something that you can encourage your staff to do, get people moving, even if it is just a 10, 15 minute walk straight afterwards. And that's going to really benefit not only their long-term health, but it's going to benefit their energy levels in that afternoon, which hopefully has an effect and influence on

their productivity. Yeah. That's great advice. So talking about the living proof challenge, what exactly is that? So I've written a book that I published in 2021 i've done like 320 podcasts i think at this point and my whole my whole shtick is i want to get the domain specific experts on like i i'm aware of what my limitations are even in the nutrition sphere like i'm relatively young so it's impossible to kind of know everything. So I want to sit down with these

domain specific experts that have often worked in a specific area of science that influences our health for like 30 years. And I just ask the questions that I'm curious about. And then over time, hopefully I'm sort of evolving my own thinking, but bringing the listener along for that journey. The issue is a lot of these conversations like two or three hours long so like you can imagine how many people email me and say simon just tell me what to do yeah absolutely so the living proof challenge is kind of my answer to that i was like how can i synthesize all this information back to the the maze help people be more deliberate more more intentional.

So the challenge is basically a distillation of all of that information and will be really objective. So what are the things we can measure that really predict our health span? I call those the 10 truths. What are the science-based interventions or protocols that can improve those? Let's put those into the challenge and help people build habits around those over a 12-week period. And then at the end, let's retest. So let's go back and retest those 10 truths. And hopefully what people can see, even if they are moderately adherent to it they will see great

improvements in certain biomarkers that maybe were not optimal at the outset that's great yeah i think measuring your biomarkers are is very important because people just kind of take all these supplements without knowing where they're at yeah it's it's hard to optimize something that you don't measure, at least being very specific. So when you measure this, and the 10 truths are really a window into four key systems of the body, so the musculoskeletal system, cardiorespiratory, metabolic health, and psychological well-being. When you measure the 10 truths, can it's like it's a window into these systems you can look underneath the hood and see which areas of your health you need to focus most on right because there's probably a bunch of things that you're already

doing that are amazing and rather than investing more time into those you can say okay here's actually some of my weak points no different to if you or i were like let's let's go to the gym and develop a program yeah we probably at the outset would say like what's our what's our weaknesses here what are our goals and someone might say you know what my upper body strength's really good my but my quads or my glutes are like really weak and so that program will be built around strengthening those weaknesses. So we do the same thing if we measure things at the outset before we start an intervention. And one of the critical things in terms of me distilling that down

to 10 key predictors of health and the 10 truths was that there are so many things that we can measure. There's a huge laundry list, right? So so much but not all of those are validated you know data is good to the extent that you can act on it but we could go out and measure a lot of things and if the data is not validated and it's not interventions that can improve them what are we doing yeah we're just overloading people with information so i wanted to to get these predictors that are not only validated, but are accessible. So most people can just go down and speak to their doctor or get these functional tests done pretty easily and affordably. But also that there is the evidence that you can

actually improve it. Got it. So when you say validated, what does that mean? Validated means that it's reliable so that it reliably predicts, let's say cardiovascular disease. Imagine that we were measuring, one of the markers is APOB, okay? And it is a reliable predictor of your risk of cardiovascular disease. But imagine that that marker, you know, there was a lot of cardiovascular disease. But imagine that that marker,

there was a lot of daily fluctuations, it was influenced heavily by sleep or exercise or stress, then it might not have much predictive power in terms of your long-term risk of cardiovascular disease. And it's a marker that has been replicated in many studies over time in different types of studies. So we have like genetic studies, observational, randomized controlled trials. So when I say it's validated, there's also a wide body of literature that supports its use as a predictor of healthspan.

Is there any direct studies that high testosterone levels increase your healthspan? I don't think there's any evidence that I've seen and someone can correct me if I haven't seen it and send it to me via email. But I wouldn't say high, but I would say that low testosterone can correlate with higher mortality, so premature death. Once you get into sort of 300 to, let's call it 1,100 total testosterone, I don't think there's much difference in terms of association with longevity. And I did an episode on testosterone. Actually, I had my testosterone measured, and I think it was like 500 or six hundred and then i did some interventions and got it up to 800 nice but in even in this conversation and speaking to people a lot of people you won't you won't feel significantly different subjectively you won't experience any differences moving from say four

or five hundred up to 800 hundred some people might but many people won't and so there is no evidence that if if you're in the lower sort of part of normal that you need to do trt or anything like that unless if you're at the lower end and you have subjective symptoms like low libido low energy so it comes down to both the measurement and your subjective experience. Got it, got it. Hopefully that was clear. No, that's good to know because I was similar.

I was at 520 and I thought that was considered low. No, so sub 300 would be cause for concern and let's dig deeper. But if you're at 500 and your libido is good and your energy is good, then there's no indication there that you need to do like testosterone replacement therapy, things like that. And I think a lot of people are jumping the gun, particularly young males on TRT. Not that it is a bad thing.

It can be used responsibly. It's that you need to understand the risks and what it does to the body, particularly from a fertility reproduction point of view for a young male if they're wanting to have kids. Right. Because there are things that you can do kind of as alternatives to it that will increase your testosterone and not affect your fertility so much.

Or there are things that you can do side by side with it to maintain sperm production throughout it. And by doing that, you know, down to say five years down the track, you want to have children. That is hopefully an easier process for you. Did you see the new microplastic thing? It was found in every male's testicles. Yeah, I saw that.

That's scary. It is scary. I haven't read that study. I saw that and it reminded me of a study that came out about three months ago, New England Journal of Medicine, looking at the plaque in the coronary arteries. And they also found significant microplastics. Oh my gosh. That's what's in the air too.

Yeah, microplastics are kind of showing up in multiple organs. That's scary. That could be through circulation going through to the coronary arteries. I had a heart surgeon on. He said he saw it in a heart while performing surgery. I mean, I don't really know how to combat this one. Yeah, it doesn't really surprise me given how dramatically our environment has changed. I'm not sure there's a lot that we can do.

But I'm certainly, I think it's an area of research that we need to continue exploring yeah and another big one that doesn't get a lot of air time is particulate matter so pollution um and we know that these kind of very small particles found in air that is polluted significantly raises risk of cardiovascular disease as well so air quality does seem to be particularly important. That's interesting. So if you live in like Manhattan, that's something to keep an eye on. Yeah. And there's, can you do a lot outside other than maybe wear some masks? I mean, how far, how far do we go? You can probably, you know, you can, most people are probably willing to explore things like controlling the air inside their home.

I'll do that. Yeah. Yeah. And you can do that with certain machines. I'm not affiliated with any of them and, um, having plants inside is probably a good thing too. Yeah. Yeah. I'll do the indoor ones. Brian Johnson has the outdoor ones though in the backyard.

I think that's pretty, pretty interesting. What do you think of Brian Johnson? I've had dinner with Brian Johnson actually. Really? Yeah. I want to hear how that went. It was a fun experience. Nice. dinner with brian johnson actually really let me hear how that went it was a fun experience it was about 10 of us and it was a philosophical kind of exploration of

of longevity and how far you would go and are you are you prepared to give up everything and be controlled by an algorithm if that guarantees optimal spiritual physical mental health right and we deliberated on that as a group interesting and where were you on that spectrum i i kind of ebbed and flowed but the the sticky point for me where i think i actually agree with brian is that immediately there's this visceral response to letting go and allowing an algorithm to control everything where you think, hang on, I fought hard for autonomy. Like I really value freedom. And it feels like it's encroaching on that. But then when you kind of replay the theoretical situation

that he was putting out there, and I don't think he'll mind me speaking about this. Sorry, Brian, if you're listening uh you know he worded it in a way where the algorithm will guarantee your most optimal physical spiritual mental health and and so while the visceral reaction is hey if i give up my autonomy i'm not going to be as happy as you know emotionally right he's guaranteeing that in the hypothetical so i think i i landed on siding with him that i probably would give it up i don't think it's going to happen interesting i don't think that'll happen um but it was kind of it was

interesting to see the responses from people on the table was pretty split yeah well you look at the lifestyle sleep at the same time wake wake up at the same time, you know, you're almost living like a, like a robot. Yeah. So from the outside, that seems very boring and would seem to really affect life satisfaction. But he, in his hypothetical, he's suggesting it doesn't. So, um, I don't, again, I don't think that will happen. I think so much of our, the joy we get from our lives does come down to autonomy.

Absolutely. Simon, it's been fun. Where can people find your books and get some coaching from you? Theproof.com is kind of the hub where you can get links to everything, the podcast, the book, blogs, all the things, socials. Perfect. We'll link below. Thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks, Sean. Appreciate it. Thanks for watching, guys. See you tomorrow. Thank you.