Know Thyself - E54 - Simon Hill: Nutrition EXPERT Reveals The SECRETS To Health & Longevity

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

Longevity and nutrition expert Simon Hill joins the podcast today to clear the confusion around the food we eat, and give solid evidence proving the power of a plant focused diet. Simon addresses the the polarizing views of nutrition that exist on social media, and gives an insight into why the optimal diet isn't an 'absolute'. He answers some common nutrition questions like plant protein vs animal protein, the danger of cholesterol, debunking the soy/estrogen debate, health concerns around 'fake' meat, and so much more.  Simon also shares his personal awakening to a healthier lifestyle, and opens up about his recent journey to discovering a deeper motivation for longevity.  This is a great episode for anyone looking to have a richer understanding into what their optimal diet could look like. ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro 3:22 Why Is There So Much Nutrition Confusion Online? 8:33 What to look for in Food Studies 13:14 The Optimal Diet For Most People 19:11 Simon’s Awakening to Studying Nutrition  27:16 Fundamentals for a Healthy Diet 30:57 The Protein & Amino Acid Myth 43:11 Comparing Plant & Animal Protein  45:24 Cholesterol in Animal Protein  49:37 Are Seed Oils Bad For You? 58:19 The Importance of Fiber  1:06:47 Increasing BioDiversity in Microbiome 1:09:21 Which Animal Proteins are Okay to Eat? 1:14:50 Are Fake Meats MORE Unhealthy than Real Meat? 1:18:56 Dietary Fat & Our Metabolic Health 1:23:29 Supplementing the RIGHT Way 1:29:48 Plants are Trying to ‘Kill’ You? 1:37:36 Debunking Estrogen & Soy  1:40:53 Vegan: Where Most People Go Wrong  1:54:07 The Danger of Carnivore Diets 1:58:20 Environmental Impacts of Meat Consumption 2:06:54 When to Eat (Fasting) 2:12:08 What’s the Point of Good Health? 2:20:19 Get Connected with Simon ___________ Simon Hill is on a mission to help people fuel their bodies to achieve their health and wellness goals, reduce their risk of developing chronic disease, and add more years to their life. In 2021 he published his book The Proof is in the Plants, with Penguin Random House. It is now a recognized bestseller, having shot up the charts to become the #1 non-fiction book Australia-wide in its debut week.  Simon is also the host of The Proof Podcast, which is a space for science-based conversation, exploring the health and longevity benefits that come with mastering physical exercise, nutrition, mindfulness, recovery, sleep, and alignment.  Simon’s book: https://theproof.com/book/  Simon’s podcast: https://theproof.com/podcast/  Simon's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonhill/   Learn more about lipids with this 3 part lipid series and zero-cost cheat sheet: https://theproof.com/lipid-series/  All Resources & Studies Discussed in the Episode:  https://www.knowthyself.one/simon-hill-show-notes ___________ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/

The cardiologist came out and said, your dad's had a massive heart attack, but we saved his life. And your dad was only 41. And cardiovascular disease runs in families. A lot of the diseases that we've normalized in our society, these diseases are running in families because we're adopting the same lifestyles. I love the fact that the longevity conversation is front and center, but I do feel at times it's reduced to what's the next compound. None of that is going to make up for not eating a healthy diet, for having low.

low cardio respiratory fitness. These are the foundations, the building blocks that will bring you longevity that are proven. Your health is going to be affected by the way you eat over decades, not over weeks. I was outwardly very successful, got very caught up in how the world was perceiving me. You can become revered for what you do and not who you are. I love the idea of optimizing all these health markers, but what am I doing it for? For the longevity discussion to be meaningful. It has to be about giving us more time to live a happy life.

Hello, beautiful beings. Welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast for every single week. We get the honor and privilege to go on this journey of knowing ourselves at deeper and deeper levels. Now, if you listen to the show, you realize that this is a place to come to get introduced to people and ideas that can help you become the full expression of who you are in life. And on the journey of self-realization, you realize it's totally a mind, body, spirit, journey. journey and that if one of the needs of those three are not met, it will hold back the fullness of the potential of the other three. And so today we're going to be diving into the body and nutrition, which I know can be a very divisive topic online. It is a area and field where it can

feel very dogmatic and religious and divisive and both sides proselytizing their beliefs onto the other. And I believe that fundamentally when it comes to what we put in our body, because of the implications it has on our health and the world around us at large that we need to be as objective as possible when it comes to these topics. It seems like every single day there's a new diet, a new fad, carnivore, vegan, keto, high carb, slow carve. And so the conversation today is going to be positioned to best give you the objective understanding how a Whole Foods plant-centric to exclusive diet could be something that might be worthwhile for you to explore. And my guest today is somebody who is very apt at being able to guide us on that journey. He's the host of the proof podcast and author

of The Proof is in the Plants. And he has his master's in nutrition science and he uses that to delineate through the science and the research to give, like I spoke to, best objective readings through the science to what we should eat and why we should eat it. So Simon Hill, thank you for coming on the show, bro. Andre, here we are. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, man. It's been an honor. and being able to see, and I really, like I spoke to, really love the way in which you engage with this topic, which, like I spoke to, can be very confusing at minimum. And so I'm really looking forward to hopefully providing some clear comprehension in such a noisy field. To just start off, why do you feel like there is so much confusion and variance and advice when it comes to the nutritional field? I think there's a bunch of different reasons, but one of the major reasons that I see online

is putting too much stock into our own personal anecdote. And our personal experience with something is important. And I don't want to invalidate that. But there are a number of biases that are at play and we may be unaware of when we're considering our anecdote and wanting to communicate that as the solution. for everyone. And often some of the things that kind of come to mind when I think about anecdotes is, we might make a bunch of changes to our diet,

but then we attribute it to one thing so we can kind of oversimplify that. It's not controlled. So we have no idea of sort of comparing it to something else, which is what clinical studies allow us to do. So for example, for example, you know, for, if I do something to my diet and I feel better, for every Simon that does that, how many Andres or riches or other people are there that would have done the same thing and had a different outcome. So we can get blindsided by our anecdote and we can become very passionate about

our personal experience. We all eat, right, which is why we all have something to say about it, which is a little different to other areas of science where there's a little bit less confusion and divisiveness. So that's one kind of central area. The other is that you can almost go out and find a study to support any claim you want. And the reason for that is that there are certain principles within nutrition science that you need to understand to make sense of the findings. When we're looking at a food or a nutrient, you know, whether that,

that is healthy or neutral or unhealthy depends on a number of things. What are you comparing it against? What dose are we talking about here? For who? Whose genes? And if you're looking at studies and you're not considering these principles, then you can come to some, you know, potentially inaccurate sort of conclusions. And those are some of the things that we might dive into. But, much of that comes back to being trained in nutrition science and understanding these principles so that when you're delving into the research you can actually make sense of things. And then understanding that there are different types of science and they're not all equal. Not all science is created equal.

Different sort of study designs, whether we're talking about looking at cells in a petri dish, like a sort of in vitro, or we're looking at animal studies. or observational studies of humans or clinical trials, these are all important, but they're not equally as valid or reliable as each other. And so some of those more what we would call as bench science, which is looking under the microscope or even animal studies, these are hypothesis generating type of experiments. And what that means is that they're interesting from a mechanistic point of view, but they're very reductionist. And so we can use those to come up with new questions and new hypotheses that we then want to go and test in humans. And when you're testing

in humans, then you have to think about what are the different types of sort of ways of investigating a nutrition-related question. And that could be a very long-term observational type study that allows you to look over decades and allow sufficient time for people to have health issues, like a heart attack or develop cancer and develop some associations. Or it might be shorter term clinical trials where perhaps you don't have long enough because of financial resources, usually, to track people over decades and see hard health outcomes. But what you can look at is intermediate short-term changes to things that we know predict disease, like, changes to your blood pressure or changes to your cholesterol or changes to muscle size or strength,

things like of that nature. So I think not fully appreciating that not all science is equal and understanding where these different pieces of the puzzle fit in. And ultimately, when I'm looking at the evidence, I'm considering that what we would call evidence hierarchy. And then I'm looking for converging lines of evidence. So the mechanistic stuff that we see that's highly reductionist is pointing into the same direction as what you see in long-term observational studies, and that's corroborated by what you see in clinical trials. It's perfect. I'm just going to go there. Next, I'm just kind of curious how you prioritize or on that hierarchy of the variance of efficacy for these different types of studies. What are the most important that you feel like

actually translate to the most truth in reality? when it comes to nutrition it's going to be long-term observational studies and these are not all equal either you can have a sort of poorer quality observational study versus a high quality and you know we could go into the weeds for hours on on what differentiates those but some you know one really important high level thing is if you're going out and looking at a food related nutrition question in a population and you track them for things. 30 years, I want to see that they didn't just look at their diet at the start. I want to know that every three or four years, they kept tracking their diet throughout because, let's face it,

people don't eat exactly the same over time. You know, diets change. So you need to have those multiple sort of time points where you're surveying people. And then even that food frequency questionnaire, you know, a lot of people will say food frequency questionnaires are rubbish. You know, how can we rely on them? But they're unaware. that these are actually validated instruments or they should be. And what that means is I can create a food frequency questionnaire and I can get Andre to complete it for me. And at the same time, I'll get him to do a weighed food record where you're actually weighing all of your food. And I want to see that that food frequency questionnaire correlated really well to the weighed food records.

And then we know that if we go out and use that food frequency questionnaire because we can't get 60,000, 100,000 people to weigh all their food, we know that it's giving us a good idea as to their dietary pattern. So observational studies, they allow us, as I said earlier, to look sort of long term at these hard health outcomes, which is really important. Clinical trial, most of the time, don't allow us to do that. But sitting above observational studies in terms of reliability and validity is these controlled trials because there's less variables at play. Hopefully, the only difference between the two groups, if randomized well, is the dietary exposure. So, for example, if you were looking at saturated fat versus polyunsaturated fats, then you would have one group who is exposed to a higher amount of saturated fats.

The other group has a higher exposure to polyunsaturated fats, lower exposure to saturated fats, but everything else is the same. And you can look at these intermediate sort of changes in biomarkers that we know, are associated with disease risk. And then sitting above those two is meta-analyses and particularly meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials. So what we want to really see is repeatable, replicated results from different research groups around the world. And one of the kind of nice tools that we have is if there are a number of

experiments that have essentially looked at the same thing or very similar thing, we can pull those results together. And so we might have eight different studies that have looked at that example I just showed you. And I'm thinking of a meta-analysis here that compares saturated fat to polyunsaturated fats. Let's put them together and then see what is the sort of overall net result outcome here. And that gives us a little bit more confidence in the results that this isn't just a sort of one-off. We're seeing this sort of more broadly when we pool data and have more subjects involved. Wonderful. Articulated so well.

And like I spoke to in the beginning, I think that there is for sure, there's a lot of divisiveness when it comes to eating, deciding whether you want to eat animals or meat or what you eat on it, what you put on your plate. Because it also represents what you pay for is like you're voting with your dollar. you know and so I think that there are for sure you know ethical moral spiritual environmental implications that are really important when considering what you eat as well but I want to almost pin that for a little bit in the in the duration of this conversation because ultimately it's not compassionate if you want to eat one way but it's not fully what your body needs and so it should be all encompassing what should be good for us should also be good for the planet and so I want to objectively be able to delineate how plant-centric diet is actually most beneficial for most people.

And so I would love for you, in your own words, to articulate after looking at the variants in all these different studies, how do you explain what is going to be most beneficial for most people? Yeah, I'm glad that you raised that. And that's exactly how I wrote my book. I think, and I cop a bit of criticism potentially for that from the vegan community. But my background and entire upbringing was around the objective nature of science. And I learned that from my dad who's been a professor now in physiology for 35 plus years and has published hundreds and hundreds of papers in leading journals. So I think it's really important that we can have separate conversations here. Let's talk about the science and then there's room for a broader conversation, you know, if,

if someone wants to kind of go there. When I think about the food that we eat and how that impacts our long-term health, so when I say long-term health, I really think about health span or longevity, those two words almost sort of speaking to the same thing, a little bit different to lifespan. Health span and longevity to me is a about the number of years that you live in good health. The goal that I certainly have and a lot of the people that I communicate with is to compress the number of years where you're affected by chronic disease such that it's really affecting your quality of life. Yes, not just like I've heard you say years to your life, but life to your years. Yes. And I can't, I can't, that cannot be

attributed to me because I'm sure I've heard that for someone else. That's great. That's right. So we want to add life to your years. And when we really objectively look at the evidence, there's not an absolute answer here. And that maybe will make some of the listeners a little bit uncomfortable. And I understand it. We want an absolute answer. You know, the very reason that when you walk into the bookshop, there's all of these contradictory books. And you can tell that contradictory just by reading the title and maybe the subtitle is because we know to sell and market something the absolute sells better than the more nuanced sort of answer. So bear with me if I sound a little bit nuanced. But science is about reducing uncertainty. We go through the

scientific method to reduce uncertainty. So we get closer to a truth, but it's never absolute. But it allows us through that process to hopefully navigate our lives better. And in this case, choose our foods more wisely and have better health for longer. When you look at all of those different types of studies that I just, we went through before, rather than there being one single diet where I can sit here and say, Andre, eat exactly this. Right. Rather than that. Which there's no way you can honestly say that. Because There's just so much variety in what it means to be human and in our microbiomes and all of it, right? Yeah.

And maybe at some point we can talk about genetics because I think, you know, a lot of what everyone is speaking about on podcasts and in books is the average. Let's face it. When we look at these studies, what do we see with the outcomes? We see the average or typical. You're not average. I'm not average. The listeners aren't average. We all fall somewhere else on the bell curve.

you might fall in the middle point but it would you know it's not going to be everyone so what we see rather than a single diet being the one sort of prescription that we can give everyone is a theme and that theme is a diet that's low in saturated fats it's rich in unsaturated fats particularly polyunsaturated fats which i know is controversial online but it's not controversial in the scientific literature. It's rich in fiber. It has a bias for plant protein, but it can contain animal protein certainly. And it's low in ultra-processed foods. That theme can be achieved a number of different ways. There are a lot of different variations of that theme, which I personally think is an amazing thing because it gives you choice. Right. And people struggle with diets

mostly from an adherence point of view. They're hard to follow. So like if I'm going to give someone any sort of advice, it's to find that variation that you enjoy the most, leaves you feeling great and you can sustain because ultimately your health, your risk of getting metabolic conditions like type 2 diabetes or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, Alzheimer's dementia or cardiovascular disease is having a heart attack or stroke is going to be affected by the way you eat over decades, not over weeks. So that's the way that I think about diet and sort of my thesis is more built around a broad theme and then educating people and showing them that you can actually do that a number of different ways. Makes sense. So I'm excited to start

diving into some of these different nuances here to hopefully give clarity and at the end when we kind of zoom out and look at the whole conversation from a whole it can give people real clarity as to as to some directions that might be more helpful for them too and before we do that I would just love for you to share a little bit about what kind of spurred of this desire for you to go in this direction anyways because I know that your connection with your father is amazing and seeing him in certain health situations earlier on really pulled down your heart to go down this route. Yeah, my dad certainly had a huge influence on me and where everything that I'm doing today, both from his professional life but then also his personal life and his health journey. When I was

15 years old, I had this experience. that I'll never ever forget. I had been spending this amazing, like, Sunday afternoon with my dad. We would often just drive. He had an MGB, you know, those cars? It's like a British kind of old sports car. And they're a convertible. We had a white one called it dot.

And that was the number plate. And we would just take this out on Sundays and explore the hills. I grew up in Melbourne. and we would explore a wine region called the Yarra Valley. It's a stunning area. And we would just cruise through and choose different vineyards and go and speak to the winemakers. And, you know, it wasn't so much about the alcohol.

I was only 15, but I'm sure I was trying a bit. And on this one Sunday, we were heading back home and my dad started to develop some chest pain in the car. And enough for me to notice. And so I kind of checked in on him and he said he had some tightness in his chest and his shoulder and that he thought it would be okay. We went home and started cooking dinner and it was just he and I on this night. My mom and brother were elsewhere. And we had dinner and I thought nothing more of it. He seemed okay. So I went to bed. And a few hours later I woke up to some noise and in the back of my mind I thought I should go and check on

dad knowing how he was feeling in the car and I went out and immediately I knew like this he could no longer deny what was happening. He had he had been sort of making his way to the phone. He actually had already called triple zero which is like the 911 in in Australia and he was on his knees and he was out of breath and they asked him if someone else was there to communicate what was happening and that was me so I quickly kind of communicated what was happening and the fact that he had had this chest pain and shoulder pain and it was now arm pain and he was really out of breath and they said based on where you are because we were my dad had a place that was quite remote it was like an hour from the nearest hospital they said we have to send a health

helicopter and you know everything's happening in a million miles an hour helicopter turns up so grateful for that level of of health care in australia very lucky and they put him in the helicopter there wasn't space for me to to fit in that and off he went and so i followed in the ambulance and called my mother and she met me and and brought my brother to the hospital and we waited and the cardiologist came out and said, you know, your dad's had a massive heart attack, but we saved his life. So we were obviously like really grateful for that. That was all we were concerned with in the moment. And then the day or so afterwards, there was like a family kind of meeting to just talk about what my dad had been through and what his prognosis was going to be from there, how much damage was done to his heart. And in that meeting, the cardiologist

spoke to my brother and I and said, you know, you're 15, your brother's 18, you'll be, you know, adults soon. And your dad was only 41. And cardiovascular disease runs in families. So this is going to be something that you need to really keep an eye on. And that's not bad advice in and of itself. But I kind of, I really wish that conversation went further, right? Because my, you know, 15-year-old takeaway from that was, this was genetic. So for a number of years, I lived life to the fullest thinking that, you know, I might just end up in my dad's position at 41 and what if I'm not as lucky as him? So, let's make the most of this. And when I was, you know, some years down the track, I had done an undergraduate science degree and then I went and did a master's in nutrition science.

And one of the things that became, you know, stunningly clear to me was that a lot of the diseases that we've normalized in our society, in this case, cardiovascular disease. And many of the listeners, you know, probably they've either had an experience with one of these chronic diseases themselves or their parents have. they probably have friends whose parents have been affected. And we have, to a degree, accepted this. We've normalized it. And it's easy for us to say that this is caused by our genes. But in truth, while genes certainly do play a role, and in very rare circumstances, they can completely control the outcome. In most circumstances, genes account for about 20% of your health fate. And the

the way that you navigate your life, the decisions that you make, the lifestyle that you build, you know, the exercise you do or don't do, the relationships and community you build or don't build, the foods you eat or don't eat, all of this amounts to 80%. That's four times as much control as our genes have. So the, what sort of, uh, kind of dawned on me was that these diseases are running in families because we're, adopting the same lifestyles. And so that was a sort of pivotal moment for me where I was, you know, remembering how limited I felt at periods of my life in terms of what I could do. And all of a sudden I became really empowered. And so then I, you know, went down this,

this rabbit hole of just learning more and more and more and then wanting to communicate it to people so that I can hopefully empower them to make change. before it's too late. I think we've all had those experiences either with others or with self, right? We're in good health and our health is the last thing that's on our mind and then either

we or somebody we know falls of ill health and that's like the only thing in the world that matters. And, you know, it's like a healthy man has a million wishes, right? That's saying and the sick man has one. And it's to be in good health. And so I think that what you're doing is

and it's just such a public service, I really mean that because when we look at deciding to play the long game of not just feeling good right now, which is obviously really important, but then also ensuring to the best of our ability that when we're 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, that we have the best chance at still feeling vibrant within ourselves. And so I'm excited to dive into a lot of the components that would make up that possible reality come true. So thank you. and let's dive in.

Yeah, let's do it. So, could you briefly mention those five pillars that you mentioned again earlier? The theme. Yeah. Yeah, so low in saturated fats and instead being rich in unsaturated fats,

particularly polyunsaturated fats, high in fiber, a bias for plant protein over animal protein, and that's important because 75% to 80% of the average person in Western countries protein intake right now is animal protein. We should probably flip that. And then low in ultra-processed foods and 60% of the average person's calories in this country comes from ultra-processed foods. Speaking about divisiveness early on, I think one thing that we actually can all come together and agree on is that that's a huge portion of calories that we know and not

really serving that person. Yeah, and I would actually like to start there. Just at the outset, like, there are many things that just collectively were in agreeance with, for example, these ultra-processed foods that find their way in many people's diet is just causing havoc within the system. And the quality of our food, no matter what you eat, is going to be an important pillar, right? And so, like, there are certain things that I think we can kind of lay the foundation of that are really important. What would you say a few of those would be before we dive into protein, which is where I would want to start after that? Certainly trying to reduce ultra-processed foods in the diet is kind of the lowest hanging fruit. And if you think about a lot of people blame the dietary guidelines and say the dietary guidelines in 1980

are responsible for poor health today. One of the important principles I mentioned earlier when looking at different nutrition studies is, you know, if you're reducing your exposure to something, what are you eating instead of? And so a lot of the guidelines through the 1980s, 80s and 90s have sort of promoted a lower saturated fat diet. They want people to eat less saturated fat, which is a good recommendation. The problem is what you replace it with. If you replace saturated fat with refined carbohydrates, you don't see a reduction in disease risk and you may actually see an increase in disease risk. And this is why you might see some people out on social media saying, hey, look at this study. See saturated fat is not a problem, but not.

appreciating in that study, what were people eating instead of? And so when we're reducing saturated fat from animal foods in our diet and instead eating all of this ultra-processed food that it does contain fats, but it also contains a lot of refined carbohydrates, we're not shifting these important biomarkers in a favorable direction. We're not reducing our risk of diseases. So certainly lowering our exposure to ultra-process foods and sort of by virtue of that increasing minimally or unprocessed plant foods, which increases our fiber, is one of the

sort of biggest levers that someone can pull for sure. Right. And maybe later we can dive into the various, I mean, there's just a myriad of different easy and delicious supplementation, you know, things you can just swap out that, you know, for what you're eating right now. Maybe that's more processed that still tastes great, but it's just going to be so much better for you because you are emitting what you used to eat, but then also you're introducing something that is actually more beneficial for your system. So, you know, there's, there's many different macro, micronutrients that I want to kind of explore into the makeup of what it makes, what it takes to create a holistic plant-focused diet. A big one for people that, you know, are interested in

exploring, introducing more plants into their diet is protein. There is, I think culturally, especially in the West, there's been this big tie between meat and masculinity. that if you want to build muscle, you have to have animal protein. There's just so much conditioning around how much protein we need when it's really kind of different from what the data actually says. And there's also the whole talk of just, you know, phytostrogens. There's the talk of, you know, soy protein and a lot of things that people maybe don't have as much clarity on.

So I'd love for you to kind of clear the field here a little bit. There's a lot in there. I just opened up a lot. Yeah, I think I might have had about 10 or 15 hours conversation on some of this stuff. And we can do our best. Obviously, for those that are listening, to check out the approved podcast assignments, to dive into any of these that you want to in deeper and deeper levels. But let's hit the low-hanging fruit, I think, first and foremost.

Yeah, I think, firstly, usually this sort of conversation around protein is centers around the quality of the protein and the quantity of the protein. Differences between quality, between animal and plant sources, generally focusing on the amino acid sort of makeup. So we can talk about that. And we can talk about how much protein someone needs and what studies show us in terms of outcomes for things like strength and performance. There's a pervasive idea out there that plants are missing amino acids.

You may have heard that. I know I heard that when I was 17, 18 and reading fitness magazines and just talking about nutrition in like football locker rooms and whatnot, which is where you pick up a lot of information. And now also social media. But firstly, I just want to make it really clear to everyone that all plants contain all nine essential amino acids. All plants contain all nine essential amino acids.

And essential amino acid, what is that? that is a building block of protein that our body cannot make. So we have non-essential amino acids and essential amino acids. The non-essential amino acids our body can make, the nine essentials, you have to get through your diet. And your body uses these amino acids to create proteins in the body, things like collagen, for example. So all plants contain all nine essential amino acids.

What is true is that in certain plants, there is a certain plants, there is a what's called a limiting amino acid. So if we take grains, for example, rice, if Andre was to get all of his calories, let's say you eat two and a half thousand calories in a day, all of your calories just from rice, then you would fall short on your lysine requirements, which is one of those essential amino acids. But if you were to add in just modest amount of dietary diversity in there, some fruits and vegetables and legumes into that, no problems at all. You will now get all of the lysine that you need and anyone can simply see this for themselves by using an app like chronometer, chronometer, which is a free app. You can plug in your food over the course of

the day and it gives you a breakdown of the nine essential amino acids. So the only time that this would become a problem for someone is if they're in living in a, a sort of developing country and they have poor food security, poor food access and they're living off one or two sort of foods. So that's important for people to understand and appreciate. The next sort of piece or question that people have is, well, what about the bioavailability? Can we absorb that protein? Can we utilize it? And for this, we really need to look at outcome studies. So if we take a group of people and we randomize them into an omnivorous diet that has plant and animal protein and then a group that has just plant protein. And we measure

things like muscle protein synthesis or hypertrophy, the increase in size of muscle or strength, outcomes that we care about. And here we see that, that despite there being some differences in bioavailability, they're not huge. They're probably only a few percent once you account for preparing food properly. They'd be much bigger if you ate a raw bean or rice that wasn't cooked, which I wouldn't recommend. We might get into anti-nutrients at some point.

And that's where that often comes up. But when you are preparing these plant foods as you would to consume them and you're consuming enough total protein, that's the key here. hitting an optimal amount of protein. When you are doing that, there's no significant difference in multiple trials that have now looked at this. Which would be what for most people in terms of quantity?

If we're talking about athletes, then a threshold and targeting sort of north of 1.5 grams per kilogram. I'm not sure what that conversion is exactly to pounds. I'll leave that to you. 2.2. I'll leave that to you. We can put that in the show notes. The average person's protein intake in this country is about 1.1 to 1.2. Now, they're not all athletes, and they're not people that are trying to squeeze out, you know, all of the last few sort of drips of water out of that

towel. So it kind of does come back to what is your goal. But if your goal is, I'm training, I'm physically active, I'm an athlete, I want to optimize for muscle protein synthesis, this hypertrophy strength, then at least 1.5, 1.6 grams per kilogram. And when you're hitting that, it doesn't matter if it's coming from plant or animal sources. And that's not debated or controversial anymore in the academic sort of world. People like Stuart Phillips, for example, Professor Stuart Phillips, who for years has done research that's paid by the dairy industry and has been a big proponent of animal protein. He's changed his view. And that's what a good scientist should do. And that's that's because there has been in more recent years over the last sort of five or six years,

a bunch of these trials coming out showing that actually when the protein amount is at an optimal level, there's no significant difference. To kind of extend that conversation a little bit further, we also just need to remember, often we sort of hyper-focus on protein, but we need to really appreciate that if you're going to build muscle and strength, the number one most important thing is resistance training. It's the actual stimulus. Right. And there's a beautiful paper that looked at

what happens to muscle strength as you increase protein in two different contexts. One, where you're increasing protein, but these people are not doing any resistance training. So if we just take sedentary people and jack their protein up. Right.

And then the other, where you increase protein, but they're doing resistance training. So in that first group, if they're just sedentary, pretty much nothing happens to their strength. You can eat as much protein as you want, and the stimulus isn't there. You have to remember that the body is adaptive and structure reflects function. If the stimulus isn't there, that protein's not going to be put to use. It doesn't just end up magically as muscle. And in the second context where they're looking at increasing protein with resistance training, you see huge increases in

strength, even at 1.2 to 1.3 grams per kilo, which is around where the average person is. You see a little bit more if you get up to 1.5, 1.6. So that context is really important, particularly when you look at how much resistance training the average person in America does. 70% of people are not getting anywhere close to the recommendations. So the biggest lever that anyone listening or the average person across the United States in Western countries can pull is actually not so much hyper-focusing on their protein or if it's animal or a plant, it's doing the resistance training.

Yeah, makes sense. Everyone wants to get in shape. No one wants to live, no heavy-ass weights. Okay, so yeah, that's important. I love that you spoke to the bioavailability because I think it's really key. And is there anything else that you want to touch on for people that still have this idea

that plant protein is just, is inferior to animal protein. Well, I think inferior can mean a number of things. If we're talking about a developing country where there's not enough food variety, then sure, I think animal protein within that context could be superior because it's giving you a more complete sort of amino acid profile.

You're less likely to have some of those shortcomings when you're under-consuming protein if it's coming from animal protein hands down absolutely but when I think about superiors let's flip that think about what's superior I think about for me personally I want to build muscles maintain strength because it's a really important predictor of longevity it also allows you to do many of the sort of functional things that you you aspire to do in life and as I just stated there you can you can absolutely achieve that with plant protein. I extend my definition of superior to my long-term health. What's the condition of my heart? What's my risk of cancer? What's my risk of type 2 diabetes?

What's my risk of premature death? And we have huge meta-analyses looking at that. And they do what's called a substitution analysis. And when you look at that, you see very clearly swapping calories from animal protein for calories in plant protein reduces your risk of cardiovascular disease, these metabolic conditions, and even premature death. And then to go a step further, we can say, well, what's better for the health of the planet? Right. And, you know, I think it's something like 83% of the land that we use to grow food is for growing animal protein. But it only gives us 18% of our calories. It's extremely inefficient. It uses up so much land. And, you know, that the cost of that is deforestation, less carbon that we can sequester, more water being used, loss of biodiversity.

You know, these are all externalities, external costs of that industry. So for me, my definition of superior sort of encompasses all of that. And that's, you know, when I think of a quality protein, those are the things that I'm thinking about. Now, if you were to compare, for example, a typical source of protein on a plant-based diet like beans or tempe versus an animal protein like red meat, it's also important to consider what else is in the package that is going to deliver you that protein, right? So it's like, yes, you can get protein both ways. They both be beneficial in like building muscle or just meeting your overall needs. But what are the things that, you know, and I also want to kind of separate it here. what are the things within meat that you might not want in that package, right? Because you can, I mean, most people are familiar with the industrialized factory farming meat, which is just not going to be good for anybody that's filled with all these antibiotics, GMOs. And, you know, there's just, there's a lot of things that you don't want in that. But if you were to take regeneratively raised like beef, something that doesn't have as many of those deleterious things, what would you, when you compare the two, what are some things that are some things that are.

still going to be a detrimental to your system over the long term as well right i primarily think about the differences in the the effect of animal protein and plant protein sources on your blood lipids and what does that do to your risk of cardiovascular disease and you raise an interesting sort of point there about regenerative versus conventional and this almost takes us into this territory of like ancestral eating. And this is super interesting because we know that saturated fat, which is, you know, mostly rich in animal foods. There are some plant foods like tropical oils, like coconut or palm oil that are very high and saturated fat. But one of the benefits of a very plant forward diet is unless you're kind of dumping a lot of coconut and palm oil and your food,

it is naturally a low saturated fat sort of style of diet. Some of the benefits, some of the very plant forward. that's very, that I find really interesting is there's quite a good amount of data looking at cholesterol levels, blood lipid levels in hunter-gatherer tribes. And Lauren Cordane, who's like the father of the paleo diet, he published a paper, we can perhaps put in the show notes, that looked at the cholesterol levels, the typical cholesterol levels in hunter-gatherer tribes. And it's actually remarkably low. These are not people that are eating lots of saturated fat. So what does that tell you about the meat quality that they tend to eat? It's very lean. It's probably more akin to venison or antelope, wild game. It's different to many of the fatty

cuts of meat that people are eating and sort of promoting on social media today. And in fact, Lauren Cordane's position is that we shouldn't eat foods that are increasing our food. cholesterol levels. And I think this is one of, you talk about the protein package. This is one of the downsides of animal protein, particularly if it's not lean sources of animal protein, is that it's going to increase LDL cholesterol, or more specifically what now we would say is a better predictor, which is APOB. And there's a bit of a rabbit hole, so I'm not sure if we want to go into that. But that's something that people can request when they do a blood test. And it's a very good predictor of atherosclerosis, the buildup of fatty plaque in the artery, which is responsible for

most heart attacks and strokes. And we have clinical studies that compare red meat to white meat to plant protein, and they look at what happens to that blood biomarker. These are very controlled studies, and they're crossover studies. So each participant acts as their own control. You get an opportunity to do the plant protein. Part of the study, you switch to the white meat, red meat, and people do it in different orders, and we look at what happens to your blood chemistry. And you see red and white meat both significantly raise APOB. Plant protein reduces it. So that's kind of one of the big benefits when you're swapping calories from animal protein for plant protein is you should start to shift APOB in a favorable direction. You know, hopefully,

if you get that down below 80 milligrams per deciliter and you're someone broadly that lives a healthy lifestyle and you haven't had a heart event before, your risk of cardiovascular disease is super low. And we see people who are blessed genetically, who are born with really low A-PoB, that don't develop cardiovascular disease. It is the necessary component for atherosclerosis. Sure, there are other things like inflammation and high blood glucose that can kind of add fuel to the flame. But the necessary component, what initiates it, is elevation of A per B. And when you shift calories from animal protein to plant protein, that's going to move into a favorable direction. The other part of this protein package sort of conversation is the exposure to fiber. When you're

eating more legumes and beans and lentils and tempe, you increase fiber in the diet, which has a number of different benefits. But if we're talking here about blood lipids, it helps to clear bile from the body. And the reason that that's important. So bile is produced by the liver. It goes into the stomach. And in short, it helps us absorb fats in our food. food. That's what it's there for. And bile, the primary sort of constituent or ingredient of bile is cholesterol. When fiber helps pull that out of the body, the body, the natural response of the body is, hey, we need more bile. And so the liver has to make that bile. And to make that bile, it has to pull cholesterol out of the blood, lowering APOB in the process.

into the liver where it manufactures the bile. So that's the kind of mechanism by which fiber helps improve blood lipids through that sort of APOB lowering route. So those are kind of two primary things. Animal foods also contain dietary cholesterol. Dietary cholesterol is a super controversial topic and the evidence is actually really clear. I'm not sure why it's that controversial. it does not have anywhere near as much effect on APOB as saturated fats do. It still does, but it's a much smaller effect. So if someone's wanting to really move APOB into a favorable direction, they're much better off focusing on lowering saturated fat.

And importantly, replacing it with polyunsaturated fats is super important. There's so much conflicting advice as there is with all of this, but especially when it comes to fats, seed oils, saturated fat, butter versus different oils that you can use in your diet. And so how do you kind of, how do you bring clarity to your perspective on seed oils? And then if you were to adopt a plant-based diet, which would probably be the most safe and best oils for you to consume olive oil, you know, there's a lot of things we can open up here. Let's start with the highest level evidence that we have. A meta-analysis of randomized clinical controlled trials. Looking at saturated fat versus polyunsaturated fats and the risk of having a cardiovascular event. So remember I said a meta-analysis allows you to pull these trials together.

So there's a Cochrane Review 2020 by Hooper that conducted this meta-analysis. and they showed that when you're swapping calories from saturated fat for polyunsaturated fats, you reduce your risk of having a cardiovascular event by 21%. So that's really important evidence. We cannot deny that. That's actual health outcomes, which is what people are most concerned with. And then that finding is corroborated by long-term, large-scale observational studies, particularly studies out of Harvard, like the health professionals follow-ups,

the nurse's health one and two studies they've looked specifically at this question and also shown there that substituting calories from saturated fat for polyunsaturated fats significantly lowers cardiovascular disease risk. To your point, people often make all sorts of claims about seed oils and polyunsaturated fats in general. And a lot of this seems to go back to a kind naturalistic fallacy you know they'll show how seed oils are made and say therefore it's bad I think that that's interesting but I always come back to the data what are the actual studies showing us and you know sometimes people will will use that to say you know these oils are inflammatory they're

obeseogenic they cause insulin resistance these are the kind of claims that people would make but the evidence is the opposite. It's contrary to that. If anything, people that are eating or have more linoleic acid in their diet, so linoleic acid is the primary omega-6 found in seed oils. And it's the primary polyunsaturated fat that we would consume in our diet. And in those clinical trials that I mentioned that meta-analysis by Hooper, most of those trials, where they're comparing saturated fat to polyunsaturated fat, most of those polyunsaturated fat diets are rich in linoleic acid. We now have really interesting long-term observational studies that not only look at what's Andre

eating over time and calculating how much linoleic acids in that diet and then looking at health outcomes, but also taking samples of your blood and fat cells. And so we can look at how much linoleic acid is in circulation and is in your adipose tissue. it gives us a bit more a high degree of confidence that what you're reporting on your food frequency questionnaire is accurate you know it's hard it's hard for someone to affect their blood chemistry it gives us a pretty good window into what they're actually doing and in these studies you see that people who have more linoleic acid in circulation and in their fat cells they actually have lower risk of cardiovascular disease and they have lower risk of total mortality. They're living

longer. So I think that's hard evidence for us to kind of deny. So I'm certainly not in the camp of creating fear around seed oils. I don't think that we need to do that. I've seen some people go as far as saying, you know, they're the reason for the obesity kind of epidemic, which I just, I find staggering. Yes, they're found in ultra-processed foods. Right. But ultra-processed food, foods have a number of different characteristics or components that could lend themselves to being over-consumed. They're low in protein, they're low in fiber, they're low in water. They contain artificial sweeteners and colorings and flavorings. They're very colorically dense. They're hyper-palatable. There's so many different explanations there for why people would not be satiated and be over-consuming

those foods. It's hard to kind of just pin it on linoleic acid. So I think the best evidence we have suggests that little like acid is actually healthy it's an essential fat our body can't make it and needs it which is important to remind people but then you know i'm not paid by big seed oil i'm also not here to tell people to go and drink seed oils because they are very colorically dense and most people are trying to lose or maintain their weight and oils in general are not really great for that. In terms of what I would recommend people cook with, personally, I use olive oil. I like the fact that it's rich in polyphenols. So, you know, I think you can use some of that. I would use it sparingly and, you know, just be conscious that it's chlorically very dense. Yeah, I've tried my best to

resist anything that has canola oil, like the plague almost. Maybe a little, maybe I'm on that naturalistic side of viewing things as well. But like for you, you feel like avocado, coconut and olive oil are going to be safer oils. And then also just like, what do you feel like the best sources for somebody who's on a plant-centric diet, the best sources for fat would be as well? Coconut oil, my preference would be avocado or olive oil out of those two, out of those three, sorry, that you mentioned. Coconut oil, this one's really interesting.

So coconut oil seems to elevate APOB, LDL cholesterol relative to, say, an olive oil. But it has less of an effect than, say, a butter. So remember, compared to what's really important here. I don't think it's poison. I don't think many foods are poison. Maybe the only one food or a compound that I'd say we don't want to get any exposure to is trans fats.

outside of that, I think the dose makes the poison. I would throw this back on you or the listener and say that the primary mechanism by which saturated fats is negatively affecting our risk of cardiovascular disease is elevation of APOB. There are some genetic differences between all of us that will dictate how much saturated fat we can have in our diet. So if you have coconut oil in your diet or any other saturated fat-rich foods, then you want to know are they having a negative effect? Are they placing you at risk? Go measure your A-po-B. And if it's north of 80 milligrams per deciliter, maybe you want to titrate and play around with it to see how your

physiology responds. So, you know, coconut oil is very, it's 90% of it, it's saturated fat. For most people, it will raise A-Po-B, but go and measure. You don't know if you need to change something unless you go and measure it. And then go from there. And that's probably the best bit of advice I can give. I feel like it's also, I mean, this is a rabbit hole. We don't have to go down, but I'm also just curious to see how much of our belief about what things are and aren't good for us actually impact their ability, what they do to our system, you know? Yeah. So if you demonize something and then you eat it or find out it's in something you ate and then you start feeling sick, it's like, totally. Cibo, what's not? There's so much conflicting

variables. Okay, cool. I know we briefly touched on fiber a little bit, but I just feel like I want to complete that because it's such an important part of when somebody is going from more carnivorous to omnivorous diet to more of a plant-centric diet, the variant, how important fiber it really is and how you're not getting that in the protein package we spoke to earlier, but that you will be getting as you start to include more plants in your diet and why that's really important. already spoke to a little bit of it, but is there anything else you want to touch on there? Generally speaking, we see a dose-dependent relationship with fiber and all of these chronic diseases I've been mentioning and lifespan. The more fiber people are consuming, the lower the risk

of those diseases, the longer they're living. And it doesn't seem to kind of tap out at 30, 35 grams a day, which is what the recommendations are. The average person is getting 15. So there's already, we're leaving a lot on the table already. It seems like, like the benefits continue above 30 to 35 grams a day. There's just not enough people in these studies that are consuming that amount to really get a good feel for what that is. There's a myriad of mechanisms by which fiber can lower risk. It can decrease transit time in the large intestine of food. So food passes through quicker in the large intestine, which means potentially carcinogenic compounds are less able to inflict damage on the large intestine, which is thought to be one of

the primary mechanisms by which fiber lowers the risk of colon cancer. Fiber also slows down the absorption of nutrients into the blood, which helps us manage our blood glucose levels. I mentioned earlier that elevations in blood glucose can sort of exacerbate that process of atherosclerosis. The slowing down, of absorption of nutrients is also coupled with the release of certain hormones like GLP1. I'm not sure if you've been sort of watching this big conversation right now about OZempic, which is a GLP1 agonist. It's a new drug that helps suppress appetite. GLP1 is a hormone that our body can actually make that sort of reduces our hunger and fiber is a really good

stimulus for that. Fiber also is incredibly important for feeding, nourishing the microbiome. And microbiome is, of course, a very hot topic right now. Largely when we speak about the microbiome, we're talking about the 38 trillion bacteria that live in your colon. And essentially, when we're eating, we are eating for two. We're eating for ourselves and we're eating for all of those guys. Yeah. And if we are eating a fiber deplete diet, we're starving them. And that's, that's really important because prebiotics, which includes certain types of fiber, we would call those prebiotic fiber, but also includes resistant starch and polyphenols. All these compounds are found in plants. We can think of prebiotics as an umbrella term underneath that,

prebiotic fiber, resistant starch polyphenols. almost all of those pass through undigested in the small intestine passed through to the colon and they act serve as food for those 38 trillion microbes and the reason that's important is that when they consume those compounds they produce what are called secondary metabolites some of the most important ones being short-chain fatty acids and these compounds help keep or maintain the integrity of the gut lining. They keep the tight junctions nice and close or preventing this increase in intestinal permeability. Some people may have heard that described online as leaky gut. And what that does is it helps prevent certain compounds that shouldn't be

getting from the gut into the bloodstream from getting through. And it's when those compounds do pass through that you can provoke an inflammatory response. response. So fiber through feeding the microbiome can help lower inflammation in the body, which is a hallmark feature of many of these different disease states where we're talking about. Interestingly, there was a study out of Stanford 2021 clinical trial by Professor Christopher Gardner and Justin Sondberg, and they were wanting to look at how does fiber affect inflammatory markers compared to fermented foods? and I think this is really interesting because it kind of speaks to why some people may be listening

to this, maybe thinking, well, I tried to increase plant foods and I didn't feel great. And so they ran a 10-week study. You were randomized to a high-fiber diet or a fermented foods diet. And in the fiber group, they went from about 20 grams of fiber a day to 40, which is a It's a big jump. And in the fermented foods group, they had about six serves of fermented foods a day, which is a fair bit, but sort of half a cup of yogurt was one serve. And they were looking at the diversity of the microbiome, which we know is an indicator

of a healthy gut and also inflammatory markers in the blood. What they saw was across the board fermented foods lowered inflammation. That's a really big tick for fermented foods. and hopefully a takeaway for people listening is to try and incorporate kraut, kimchi, yogurt if you consume dairy foods or kefir, kombucha, these types of foods into your diet will help increase the diversity within the microbiome and lower inflammation. What they saw on the fibreside was really interesting.

They didn't see this across the board reduction in inflammation. They saw a personalized response. some people who added more plant foods fiber to their diet actually had an increase in inflammation others had a decrease in inflammation and they went back and were curious met what would perhaps predict that why did some people do well with adding fiber and some didn't and they were able to look at the baseline diversity within the microbiome if someone had poor low baseline diversity they were more likely to respond negatively to fiber. And so if, if, you know, someone has a history of, say, antibiotic overuse, perhaps they have a history of being born through C-section, maybe they weren't breastfed,

maybe they've been eating for decades, an ultra-process diet that's low in fiber that's been starving the microbiome, what that tells me is that there are going to be certain individuals where if you just ramp up their protein from, their fiber from 20 grams a day to 40, they might not feel so good. We're just to be farting all the time. And you might cause bloating and increase inflammation. So we don't have a specific answer from that trial. That makes a lot of sense though.

Right. And what it tells me is that they were ramped up too quickly, that the gut didn't have enough time to adapt. And so the take-home point that I would leave people with there is if that's you, it doesn't mean that fiber is bad for you. It just means where your gut is at the moment is not strong enough to handle a lot more.

And rather than completely avoiding fiber, we want to kind of slowly build it up. Like if you were going into the gym and you tried to lift something crazy heavy and you couldn't or you got injured from doing it, the answer is not to not go to the gym. The answer is to find the appropriate weight and then to progressively overload over time

and you grow stronger. and the same thing rings true for the gut. And they're actually doing some interesting trials now where because they had this uniform response on the fermented food side, they're now sort of thinking, what about if we take someone with low baseline diversity, give them fermented foods first,

and then increase their fiber? So more science to come there. That's really interesting. Is there anything else you want to add on to how potentially in the diversity of what we eat with the variance in different plans, can actually increase the biodiversity in our microbiome, which then has its myriad of downstream health positive infects.

The gut microbiome project, which was led by Rob Knight, really helped us answer this question. They took 10,000 stool samples from people all over the world. It's a lot of shit. A lot of shit. And they also had everyone's, completely, a food frequency style questionnaire. So they had their poop and then they also had this information about how they ate. And what they wanted to look at was because the poop,

the bacteria in the poop gives you a good idea as to the bacteria that's in that person's gut. So they wanted to look at how does diet affect the diversity of bacteria? And what they found was that compared to people who had, who ate 10 or fewer, unique plants a week, people that had 30 or more had significantly greater microbiome diversity. Interestingly, that was the best predictor. It wasn't whether someone was vegan or someone was vegetarian or omnivorous. It didn't matter. What mattered was the number of unique plants in their diet. Again, that comes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, that it seems, rather than there being one dietary label that is sort of something we can point at as the

holy grail, there's a number of different ways of doing it. And here in this example of your microbiome, it's about the diversity of plants. And so a fun challenge is, you know, perhaps this week, go and do an audit. Across the week, every time you eat a plant for the first time in that week, write it down. And at the end of the week, see how many unique plants you ate. If that is around 10, 15, there's a good goal. That's a great starting point almost for anyone. If someone was to say, what's one thing that I should focus on? Eat for your microbes. Automatically, that's going to mean eating more plant foods, eating more fiber, eating more plant protein, eating less saturated fat. So it kind of straightens up someone's diet, you know, quite nicely. And keep in mind,

because that can sound rather difficult, A, it doesn't need to be an overnight thing. And B, that includes fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains, legumes, herbs and spices. So when you kind of think about all of those different foods, it becomes much more achievable. In terms of, for individuals that are super, you know, they're sold on getting some sort of animal protein. What do you feel like is the least deleterious for the system? In particular, do you feel like eggs? What is your thought on eggs and how are they potentially, if you're getting kind of, you know, backyard raised chicken eggs in that protein package and what comes in that? Could you see some people integrating those into their diet in a healthy way? Yeah, if we're talking about,

the types of animal protein, if someone was going to consume animal protein, that would be most associated with good health long term, within this theme that we're talking about, then I'm thinking of a Mediterranean-style diet. Fatty fish, some low-fat, fermented dairy-style foods, could be like Greek yogurt or certain types of cheese. The research on those tends to suggest that they're neutral or in many cases positive. Doesn't mean you have to consume those. You can consume a dairy-free diet, but what you replace it with is really important.

And then, you know, eggs is one of the interesting one where it's been all over the shop, the research. I personally tend to think, and this, you know, I probably sound a little bit like a broken record here. You need to measure important biomarkers and I mentioned one, Apo B, but it goes beyond that. There are your fasting glucose, triglycerides, APOB, things like your waist circumference.

All of these are really important indicators of your long-term risk. And if you have all of those things in order in your healthy body way and you're consuming eggs within a plant-rich high-fiber diet, I tend to think that that's not going to be an issue. Now, there's going to be some people out here listening that maybe disqualify. agree with that, but I would love to see what research they would kind of point to to support that argument. So that's where I would lean if I was consuming animal protein and less of, you know, red meats and white meats and fatty cuts of meats and butter. What is your best, I guess, argument for why somebody might want to go plant exclusive in their diet versus kind of plant-centric or like

being 85%, you know, plant-based? There's a few different reasons. For me initially, it was, I'm the kind of person that needs a line in the sand. And through my 20s, I ate a very meat-heavy style diet. You know, we could probably describe it as a paleo-style diet. And that was the result of being in football club environment, reading those fitness magazines, etc. And, you know, I knew that if I created space for some of those foods in my diet, that it would just creep back in

and I would end up back eating how I was. So a line in the sand kind of worked quite nicely. But I think, you know, really, like, how can you argue a plant's exclusive diet is superior to a plant predominant diet? You cannot make a scientific argument for that. Really, the strongest argument lies in planetary health and animal welfare.

Yeah, which is important. And it might aggravate some people that you say you can't do that in the science, but it's important, like we spoke to in the beginning, to be just truthfully honest and objective about what the science says in terms of what the impact is on your body and then you can include those other factors if you want after. Yeah, so you, each person can reflect on planetary health,

can reflect on animal welfare. And then my kind of message is if those things are important to you and you're in a privileged position where you can make changes to your diet based upon those, because not everyone can. You know, back to our earlier point, if someone's in a developing country, it's a different, this is a different conversation

to someone who's sitting in a Western country who has the ability to make different choices. But if though you are in that position and those things are important to you, then I think a good goal is to eat a diet that is as plant exclusive as possible for you, right? So based on your circumstances, based on what leaves you,

feeling good, how plant's exclusive can you get? And only the individual will know that. And so it can be easy for us to go out and just judge everyone else. But I actually like just leaving that with the individual to go away and sort of think about. Another thing that a lot of people when, especially, you know, from those hardcore vegans, I try to proselytize people into switching their diet overnight and say, you know, look at all these fake meats that are around. I want to touch on this because it's one of those things where if you switch, you know, animal protein in your diet and for, you know, an alternative like a beyond or beyond meat or impossible burger, I'm just curious to hear your perspective because a lot of people won't experience a boost in their energy levels by switching to something

that, you know, in many ways is also not great for the planet in the way that it's, that they're made. And I'm making a blanket statement here. You know, there's some obviously good ones. But is there anything that you want to speak to fake meats and some of the more popular ones? Yeah, I'm not sure anyone would argue and suggest that those plant-based meat alternatives are better than tempe or tofu or beans. So, again, compared to what's important here, I think if someone's interested in planetary health and in animal welfare, I still think they're a step in the right direction. And even from a human health perspective, there was a study called the Swap Meat Trial. And the primary investigator of this was quite critical of plant-based meats, you know, previously.

And conducted this study. And it was a really interesting study because often in clinical trials, if you want to show something is superior, then you compare it to a controlled diet that's crappy. Right. and if you're trying to sell something, and that happens. But what they did in this study was they looked at beyond. It was beyond meat and beyond sausages and all this sort of stuff, which I'm not arguing is a health food. Let me just say that.

And they compared it to organic meat products. So they didn't just go and choose conventional. They wanted to get high-quality beef burgers and sausages. all that sort of stuff. And they had a few different hypotheses. They thought that the plant burger would improve lipids, but might be worse for blood pressure. Blood pressure is super important, by the way.

We haven't spoken about that. That's one of those key predictors of longevity. You can order a cuff online for $50, $60. You can measure this at home all the time. You want to be at about $120 over 80, maybe $1.15 over 75 is probably better. but for every 20 millimeters of mercury increase in your systolic blood pressure, you're doubling your risk of cardiovascular disease mortality.

So in this study, I digress, in this study, they wanted to look at blood pressure because plant-based alternatives are often loaded in sodium. And I do think that that's a bit of a problem. You really have to read the labels. There's a lot of variability. And oils and gluten. Yeah. So there's a number of different ingredients that,

depending on the person, you know, if someone's celiac or whatever, like gluten, you're going to have to look at that. That tends to be in the Satan-style products. Poor name, Satan. Yeah. I know. And they ran this study, I think it was four weeks on each diet, and they provided all of the food to the subjects.

They saw an improvement in blood lipids on the plant-based burger. That's probably because there was a slight reduction in saturated fat, and an increase in fiber. Not a huge reduction in saturated fat because some of these plant burgers are actually quite high in saturated fat. They're trying to mimic it, right? They didn't see a negative effect on blood pressure.

And the reason that they think they didn't see that is that most people when they're eating burgers or hot dogs or whatever are putting salt on their food. And they didn't instruct people. They just said eat them how you would. And so it may be that if they weren't, and actually adding salt to those products that there was, you know, higher or more of an effect

on blood pressure in the plant-based alternative group. But I tell people, like, if you're going to eat those foods, then, you know, I don't necessarily think they should be a staple item. And I would like people to look for ones that are low, low in saturated fat, sort of five grams or less saturated fat, have five grams or more fiber. That's usually a pretty good indicated that it's a little less processed and have sort of 300 milligrams of sodium or less per serve. And if you take those three things and go to the aisle, you kind of rule out 90% of the products. Yeah. Okay, great. So I think we covered a lot of ground here. I want to go into some like kind of common rebuttals or kind of arguments people come back with. But is there anything else

like blood pressure, for example, maybe that we miss that I think are important to touch on before we do so? Touch on a lot. You know. with the fiber to the microbiome to the fats and protein. One thing we didn't speak about with the fat component is, so dietary fat is really important, the type of dietary fat when it comes to our metabolic health. So we've spent a lot of time talking about blood lipids, but not so much about blood glucose levels, insulin resistance, triglycerides,

for example, and metabolic health is a big sort of buzzword. at the moment. And Roy Taylor has done some excellent work, researcher out of the UK, looking at what drives type 2 diabetes, which is a metabolic condition. And firstly, it's abundantly clear that type 2 diabetes is completely preventable. It's often reversible in most circumstances. depending on how long someone's had it, but it's driven by energy toxicity. So consuming too much calories, first and foremost. That's the main reason why people are developing insulin resistance and end up with type 2 diabetes. And I find it really interesting to consider that you can have two people in front of you

who have the same amount of body fat, same BMI. One of them develops type 2 diabetes, but the other doesn't. and he seems to have solved this. A lot of that comes down to distribution of fat. Where do you store your fat? And there's a strong genetic component that dictates that. People who can store more fat subcutaneously, so like under the skin,

if they have greater capability of doing that, they're at much lower risk of developing type 2. diabetes. They can just expand that subcutaneous adipose tissue and they're not getting the fat centrally in and around the organs, which is really damaging. The flip side of that is someone who has less capability of storing fat subcutaneously. So they have what Roy Taylor would describe as a lower personal fat threshold. At a given body fat, they're spilling fat over into their organs, whereas the other person is not. They can keep storing it subcutaneous. and that fat that gets stored in the liver and in the pancreas, we would call that ectopic

fat, it's very toxic. We really do not want to build up fat in the liver and in the pancreas. That's what drives insulin resistance. And the downstream effect of that is these elevations in blood sugar. So energy toxicity is the primary driver of that. And you see in clinical trials, if you get people to lose 10 or 15% of their body weight, who have type 2 diabetes and have only had it for five years or less, so the direct trial or the counterpoint trial, you see remission. You get the fat out of those organs. Their blood sugar levels normalize, they come off medications, they no longer have type 2 diabetes. Now, if they regain the body weight, it'll come back. But you can get them into sort of remission. Underneath total energy, the type of fat that we eat actually directly

affects the fat in our liver. And I think this is lost on people. And this sort of ties back to the saturated fat versus polyunsaturated fat discussion. We have quite a few clinical trials now showing that saturated fat, even when you're not consuming it in a hyperchloric diet excess calories, will, relative to polyunsaturated fats, will increase the fat in your liver. So when you make these swaps and you're eating less butter and you eat more olive oil,

you eat less fatty cuts of red meat, you eat more fatty fish or tofu or tempe, you are reducing the fat that within these organs and you actually become more insulin sensitive. You become better at managing your blood glucose. So I think that's, you know, we didn't talk,

about that earlier, but that's one piece that I would kind of add to that. It's important. I'm glad you brought that up. I found that very fascinating. I'm learning a lot in this whole conversation as well. Is there anything within supplementation that you want to? Obviously, the fundamentals are going to be the most important for overall health, right? But there's, I mean, it's such a booming industry and there is a lot of snake oil salesmen within it. But what is your take on supplementation, even if we are eating what most people would see as a holistic whole foods plant-based diet that are getting a variance in their polyphenols, they're getting the proper fiber, they're getting a lot of these different things.

Yet also a lot of the food that were growing in the soils is just nutritionally deficient compared to what it used to be. Is there anything else in terms of supplementation that you want people to look at? And of course, this is under the umbrella like you need to test. to be able to know, right? And we can touch on that towards the end as well. Maybe we want to bring it up now too. Yeah, you beat me to it.

I think you start with testing. I mean, besides the obvious ones that you know you clearly have a gap in your diet. Like if you're not eating any animal foods, then you need supplement B12. But I think outside of that, it's testing, understanding what your nutrient status is, then devising a plan, whether that's through consuming more. foods like for example if it was iodine a urine iodine test and you were low on that then you know you have you have different options you can opt for iodized salt you can opt for dulse flakes or nori flakes the types of seaweed or you could supplement iodine so an individual approach is going to be

largely required there to fill gaps and that's where supplementation i think is most important is if you are filling a nutrient gap, right? That's where I would start. And I think if someone is not consuming fatty fish, for example, I believe that they should, based on the evidence that we have and a kind of precautionary principle, because I don't see a downside of this other than cost, I think that people should supplement with a DHA, EPA algae oil

or fish oil, whatever they want to choose. you know, sort of 800 milligrams or a gram a day at least of that. And they can go out and measure their omega-3 index if they want and hopefully that's at 6% or north of that. Outside of that, creatine, a lot of evidence for creatine, not just for bodybuilders. I think people see it as a bodybuilding kind of compound. It's very helpful in increasing strength.

and that's for everyone across the board no matter what diet you're consuming even if you're consuming a carnivore diet you're probably still not getting an optimal amount of creatine so there's probably still some benefit from supplementing with sort of three or five grams of creatine monohydrate a day that's there's lots of different types of creatine out there I think creatine monohydrate has the most evidence for it

I know I saw out there in your kitchen you supplement with creatine. So you're on that program. Protein powder you could maybe consider as a supplement that probably falls under this. And again, that's just going to come back to someone's overall dietary pattern. And do they need a sort of convenient bolus of protein to get to that optimal amount? And then outside of that, you know, I'm not someone that kind of polices supplements in the that perhaps others do and say, you know, you shouldn't really, there's no evidence for any of this. I think experimentation within sort of limits is as long as those compounds, we have

some safety data to show that they're not toxic and harmful. I don't see any reason that people can't kind of play around and see how they feel. I think that's up to the individual's discretion. But that's kind of like the main ones that I would focus on. I love this analogy you gave on the phone of most people when they're so myopically focused on what they need to supplement but they're not focused on the fundamentals of what they're doing that is going to make up the 99% of actually towards their health.

Yeah, that's really big right now in the longevity kind of scene. Yeah. And I love the fact that the longevity sort of conversation is front and center and people are hyped up and excited. But I do feel at times it's reduced to what's the next compound. What compound can I take? And none of that is going to make up for not doing resistance training, having low grip strength, for not eating a healthy diet, for having poor blood lipids, for having elevated blood sugar, for having a large waist circumference in this ectopic fat centrally,

for having low cardio respiratory fitness. These are the foundations, the building blocks that will bring you longevity that are proven. So while we kind of sit around and wait for, you know the magic compounds i think we should come back to the clear evidence base that we have and sort of just come to terms with you know this does mean you know building new habits right which is hard which is i think where a lot of the attraction to the the the longevity conversation focused around compounds is that we see that as easier um but i would just encourage people to lean into it if it's you know if it's difficult it's probably a sign that it's going to be beneficial for you long term. I love that analogy you gave of stepping

over dollar bills to pick up pennies. Right. That's what people are doing. We've got all of these dollar bills, things I just listed, and we're just stepping over them to pick up pennies. Penises are shiny. Yeah. All right, cool. So we dove into a lot of ground here. I mean, we can keep going for hours and hours. I still want to dive into a substantial amount of things with summer buttles that people have or things that people will bring up typically. A big one that we briefly mentioned earlier was these anti-nutrients that come up.

I feel like there's been a lot of talk over the last few years in particular with, you know, the plants are trying to kill you. You know, and there's these lectins and oxalates and things within beans and plants that are causes of leaky gut. What do you make of all of that noise? Yeah.

This is something I've discussed with people like Dr. Anthony Chafee and Paul Saladena. Yeah. And I have an open invite to both of them. I would love to have. I would love to see that debate. I would love to have a conversation with both of them on any platform, really. But I think there's generally a lot of fear mongering. And I see a lot of what people like Paul and Anthony put out there.

I see a lot of people just regurgitating that who maybe aren't. really looking at the evidence. I mean, broadly, let's just start very high level. If these plants are trying to kill us, they're not doing a great job. Because in the studies that we look at, when people are eating more of them, they do better. The other thing is, it's hard to blame the average person's poor health, let's say, you know, in the United States. It's hard to blame the incidence of obesity in type 2 diabetes, these chronic conditions, certain plant compounds when 95% of the population are not eating the recommended fruits and vegetables

in these foods, right? So I think it's difficult to kind of blame something that's not in our diet for causing, for wreaking havoc. It's important for us to look up. One of the papers that get cited, and Anthony Chafy cites this a lot, is a paper by Bruce Ames, and it's an old paper,

the paper was essentially it was looking at what compounds sort of defense chemicals are found naturally in plants and how toxic are they really and you know they identify there are a lot of compounds in plants that plants use as defense chemicals to ward off pathogens and insects and bugs and these sorts of things right that causes those bugs not to come back it's different to humans. They're not doing that to us. They're not killing us so we don't go back. We can still go back. And the whole purpose of this paper, and they make it explicit in the paper, but this is always overlooked and not shared when cited, is all they were doing was comparing the relative toxicity of these natural compounds with synthetic pesticides. And the purpose of the paper was not to

suggest that we should avoid fruits and vegetables. It was literally, he was putting it out there to say, maybe the synthetic pesticides are not that bad because even the natural pesticides that are in the fruits and vegetables are not toxic to humans. That was the position of that paper, and people can look that up. It's only two or three pages long, and you can read all of that in the summary. I actually want to interview him at some stage. And then, More recently, Stephen Gundry has really brought a lot of attention to lectins, and particularly phytohemia glutenin, which is one type of lectin. And there's actually 500 lectins.

I'm not sure people appreciate that. Lectins are proteins. The evidence that Gundry will cite is not human data looking at feeding lectin-containing foods to people that have been properly prepared and looking at inflammation or gut function, those are non-existent. The evidence that Hillside is animal studies or even cell culture studies where you isolate lectins out of a food and you expose that cell or those animals to an incredibly high load of lectins and look at what happens. But all of those studies, even if you were to say those are meaningful, which I don't think they are, because the way lectins behave in a food

matrix is going to be different to how they behave isolated. But even if you did, we would never, ever, ever get anywhere close to that level of exposure through food on a milligram per kilogram of body weight basis. The only human evidence that he cites, which I would agree with, there are takeaways from this evidence, is looking at the consumption of raw or improperly improperly prepared beans and rice grains. And there are a few different studies out there showing that if you consume legumes that haven't been properly prepared, that they can be toxic. They contain a high amount of these lectins.

Well, who's eating raw beans and rice? I know there's many ways to prepare them. I know if you cook them in a pressure cooker, right, then it has less of what he would say is lectins. That would be deleterious. Yeah, I think he even promotes that, but I don't think that you need to even do that. Just standard soaking and boiling,

which would already be done if you buy canned beans. You're boiling at 100 degrees or higher, and it's going to be for well over 15, 20 minutes. That gets rid of pretty much all lectins, like 93 to 95% of lectins. And you know because if you chew on a legume, it should be very soft and it kind of melts in the back part of your mouth, right?

If you're biting into a legume that hasn't been cooked, you know. Same with the grain. So these studies that he points to, these are where I think a couple of them are like cafeterias and they undercooked the legumes and served them to people when there was case studies where they had symptoms of abdominal, gastrointestinal upset. So that's kind of the,

the lectin story and we actually have really good data looking at inflammation, people that are consuming a low amount of lectin-containing foods and a high amount, and people that contain more lectin-containing foods, more legumes, tend to have lower inflammation. So I think it's hard for us to kind of demonize lectins. I would just say if you're properly preparing your food, then I don't think it's something for people to worry about. There may be some exceptions of people with severe gastrointestinal problems, but for the majority of people, I think it's a kind of fearmongering that we don't need to pay attention to. Maybe you would have them on at some point to dive deeper into it. I'm just curious, he seems very convinced that it's very bad

for the system. Yeah. Well, come back to that, the idea that absolutely salute cell. He came out and said, we've missed it. We've missed everything. We've been looking at the wrong thing. It's lectants. And that creates a lot of attention and a lot of hype. Sold a lot of books. But the data doesn't support his position on that. Why do we see the longest living populations in the world consume diets that are rich in legumes? We'll leave it there. because there are a few other ones that I really want to dive into. So when people speak to phytoestrogens and, you know, switching from animal protein to, you know, soy is a big one, you know,

the soy boy, people feel like, you know, by eating these compounds that you're going to actually increase estrogen in your system, what are people hanging their hat on when they talk to that? And is it valid at all? It's gained a lot of traction over the years. What are people hanging their hat on? I think if you pressed most people, it's just a view that they hold. I don't think they've challenged it.

And that happens a lot in nutrition. But it may stem from there's one or two very well-known case studies. One in particular where a male, a young adult male, presented to his physician with gynecomastia. So he had enlarged breast tissue. And as part of taking that patient's history, he discovered that this guy was drinking 12 serves of soy milk a day. And upon ceasing that, the gynecomastia went away or reduced significantly.

And that got sort of written up. Again, that's not a controlled trial. But thinking about the dose anyway, red flag, consuming 12 cups of soy milk a day. I think if you consume 12 cups of cows milk a day, you may have some problems too. Anything in, overdose can be

a problem. But we have really strong clinical evidence looking at actual controlled studies where you feed people soy foods or isoflavones which are the concentrated

phytoestrogens that you mention. And measure estrogen, measure testosterone-free. in total. You know, look at just how do these foods or these compounds affect hormones? And there's a 2020 meta-analysis of 41 clinical control trials. They lasted anywhere from two weeks up to a year long, which is enough time to see if these

foods are affecting hormones. And there was no significant effect. And of these either isolated compounds or foods on estrogen levels or testosterone, this was in males. this study. And what was the exposure amount? It was equivalent across the board to about three serves of soy a day. That's in line with traditional soy consumption. So my takeaway from this is, you know, you don't need to overdo it. I wouldn't recommend you overdo it with any sort of single food or food group, but up to three serves seems completely safe. And it's a high quality

protein contains unsaturated fats in edamame, soy beans and tofu. So I think, you know, the evidence strongly suggests it's safe. And if someone, you know, was going to make the claim that it increases estrogen levels, I would, I would like to read the study that supports that. For another thing that some people, there's one cap of people that just say, I can't give up meat. It's just part of their ideology. There's some people that, are actually more willing to experiment and go vegan and don't experience the boost in health that maybe a lot of people will. So what do you say for people?

Are there exceptions where because of their bio makeup that they're going to lean more towards positive responses to animal products? And yeah, what do you say to those individuals that have tried plant-based diet and it just, they feel like it just didn't work for them. And of course, there's so much anecdotal, you know, perspectives there and you have to know what they're actually eating, but for people that actually give it a good try and eat holistic plant foods, and they feel like it just doesn't work for them. What do you say? I think there might be some subtle genetic differences that, you know, results in certain people doing better on different diets. I don't think that genetic differences

are large enough such that one person thrives on the carnival diet and that's the best diet for their long-term health and the next person vegan, I think it comes back more to that theme and then variation within that theme based on the individual. And we know that there are some genetic differences. For example, some people have a poorer ability to convert beta carotene, which is a plant compound into vitamin A. And maybe those people, it's a very small subset of the population, but maybe those people need a direct source of vitamin A, for example. So I do think that there definitely is genetic differences that exist. I'm not sure people like talking about that, but it certainly exists. So it's not all in everyone's head. But I do also think that there are

some reasons why someone may fail on a plant's exclusive diet with regards to how they adopt it. and one of the biggest ones is not consuming enough energy, particularly for males. Not enough energy. Yeah. And this, yeah, not enough calories.

It's less calorie dense. The volume of the foods, you know, much higher. So when you're sitting down and looking at your plate, it should look like there's a lot more food on the plate. And I had some difficulty early on with that myself. I found that I was losing some weight and I didn't feel like my energy was amazing.

And that was able to be easily corrected by just understanding I wasn't eating enough calories. So, you know, bringing in some more calorie-dense foods into my diet, like nuts and seeds and avocados and, you know, throwing in dates and whatnot into smoothies was able to really help me with that. And I felt much better. My energy levels went up a lot. So that's a common sort of pitfall that I find.

We've already spoken about fiber. I think that, speaking, with many people and working with many people that try and make these transitions I totally recommend going slow slow and build it out over time put less pressure on yourself

also allow the microbiome and the body to adapt and I think you'll get a better result long term so I'm not sure if that completely answered your question but they're kind of the main things I would focus on. Yeah I think that makes sense you know you got to your plate will be bigger you'll be eating more

um And I suppose, you know, if people aren't training and they switch to a vegan diet and they feel like they're losing muscle, it's probably just because they're eating less protein overall, depending on what they're eating on the new diet. But if you're working out, like when I went plant-based like seven years ago, I didn't see any dip in my, what I was, because I kept working out. I didn't see any dip in how much muscle I was holding. And I felt like I actually built muscle over time as I continued to train. And there's a lot of incredible athletes that are doing amazing things in the world and different sports that are plant-based and have been for a while. Yeah, you don't have to really sacrifice anything when it comes to your performance or how you feel. You know, a lot of what we've spoken about is about long-term health today.

But I do want to make it clear that it's not about sacrificing today. You can feel amazing. You can still pursue your athletic endeavors. it requires some new learnings. You know, how much calories do I need? What food groups do I want to make sure I'm including in my diet? You know, how much fat and carbohydrates leave me feeling best? That's going to be something for people to play around with.

I'm not a big subscriber to there is one macronutrient ratio that is best for everyone. It's similar. Like some people seem to feel better on a higher carb diet, some on a lower carb. I think the most important thing there is the quality of the macronutrients. So the fat that you're consuming, try and have more of it as unsaturated fat. Carbohydrates, it's more of the unrefined, less processed carbohydrates. That's what really matters at the day, at the end of the day, not a strict kind of macronutrient ratio being best for everyone.

What supplements do you need to fill any potential gaps? and at the beginning that's a bit of information to take in but you've been doing this for seven years now once you get moving and everything becomes second nature it's not really something that you give a lot of thought to which in many ways is why I still work with people who are going through the transition because if I wasn't I would forget what that process was like

because I'm not thinking about this stuff every day to the nth degree in my own lifestyle. It's kind of on autopilot now. Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's just going to, of course, feel a little clunky right off the bat when you're switching, when you're making any change in your life, especially if there's a lot of people reinforcing your old lifestyle to you that are around you if you live with a lot of family members who eat a lot of meat. And, you know, it's, it can be a big switch up. But once you get going and build that momentum, it just becomes a part of who you are. And it's like, you don't question or there's not this inner struggle to like, oh, I really want

that meat or something. It's just like, it's off the table. You know, it's not an option. So I think that's an important perspective as well. And what are some other potential blind spots that people might face when they start to go exploring this? Is there anything else that we haven't touched on that you might want to bring up? I often talk about nutrients of focus. We've spoken about a few of those. We spoke about B-12. We spoke about DHA, EPA, Omega-3s.

I touched on iodine. vitamin D is something that I would suggest everyone sort of considers. 80% of your vitamin D status is dictated by exposure to the sun, not diet. Diet can contribute a little bit. But depending on where someone lives, you know, are we talking about a northern sort of latitude? What's their skin pigmentation? Because that will affect how much vitamin D that they'll make for a given amount of sun exposure. I would do a vitamin D sort of lab test, and it might be something a lot of people are low in

vitamin D. So you can supplement with vitamin D. If you want to get a vegan option, you can look for a vitamin D3 from plant lichen, which is now quite available. Otherwise, D3 usually comes from wool. And or a vitamin D2, which is sourced from. mushroom. So both of those are kind of options there. Calcium is something that people often ask about. And I do think this is important for us to discuss a little bit here. All diets have pros and cons limitations. And I'm one for, you know, I want to put recommendations out there, but I want to shine lights on the limitations. I don't want to cover them up. Like, let's make them clear so people can see the limitation, then they can plan accordingly and get best results. And,

one of the potential kind of blind spots or limitations of a plant exclusive diet that doesn't have dairy foods in it. And this is particularly relevant for postmenopausal women is insufficient calcium intake and an increase in risk of osteoporosis and bone fractures. And there are some studies showing that. So I like to make sure that everyone is aware of where they're getting their calcium from. You're going to get, you know, a bunch of that from cruciferous vegetables and certain types of legumes like white, white beans, for example, Pinto beans. You'll get some from sesame seeds and, you know, a bunch of whole foods contain calcium. But I think if you're taking dairy foods out of your diet, I like people with their plant-based milks to opt for something

that's firstly is unsweetened, ideally, doesn't have all the added sugars in it, but is fortified with calcium. I think you should look for something that has about two to 300 milligrams of calcium per serve in a plant-based milk or a plant-based yogurt as well. And that will help people get to north of 7, 800 milligrams of calcium a day, which is the lower end of where you want to land. You don't want to be consuming a plant-exclusive diet with 500 milligrams. of calcium a day, particularly if you're a postmenopause a woman. So calcium, and just to round that out, very important for bone mineral density is resistance training. So we come back to that and other nutrients like vitamin D and vitamin B12 and protein. So those are the big ones. Iron and zinc,

you know, often people ask me about phytates, which is another kind of quote unquote anti-nutrient. is the kind of primary storage form of phosphorus in plants, and it can bind up minerals like iron and zinc and reduce their availability. Now, I think this is overblown. I think people like Paul Saladino, who I've spoken to about this site studies like a single meal, a single food, looking at that high-fatate food or meal, and what happens to the absorption of minerals. And that's problematic for a few reasons.

One is that the effect of phytates is greatly modulated by all of the foods in a whole meal. So when you add foods, for example, that contain vitamin C in them, like lemon juice over a meal or bell peppers, a lot of different fruits and vegetables are rich in vitamin C. That greatly increases the absorption of these minerals and reduces the attenuates the effect of phyteates. as do fermented foods. Femented foods will increase, unlock, mineral availability in your meals. So that's one reason why these single food studies, I think are a little bit problematic or misleading. The second is your body is incredibly adaptive. So what do I mean by that? Well, if I feed you for the first time a high-fitate meal, maybe it will have quite a significant effect on your absorption of iron and zinc.

but if I feed you that for two weeks straight, what happens? Your body adapts and it increases your iron and zinc absorption over time. So it's really important when we're looking at the studies to create a case for whether phytates, phytic acid are deleterious or not. We're considering that temporal, adaptive sort of component. And when you do consider that, you see that the effect is very, very small. Again, phytates, when you're soaking and cooking food, most of them are broken down. And what's also lost on people is that actually the binding of minerals through phytates could be, some of it at least, could be very beneficial. Having excessive minerals in the body, particularly iron, iron causes oxidative stress.

and now there's a whole field of cancer research actually looking at using phytate supplements as a way, as a powerful antioxidant to sort of attenuate or reduce the effect that these pro-oxidant minerals that are floating around in excess can have. So there's a lot more, I guess, to the story, to the phytaic story,

than simply saying, this food contains phytates, therefore it's robbing you of minerals, therefore you shouldn't eat it. And then, you know, when you zoom out even further and you look at the foods that contain phytates, we see very clearly they're associated with good long-term health. One last thing that I wanted to kind of bring up was, you know, I mentioned like the saladinos of the world that kind of promote these elimination type diets

and some people feel really good, just going straight on meat. Is there anything that you want to say in regards to how, of course, we can feel very good when we eliminate a lot of things that might make us feel bad. But then also we're not propagating a diverse microbiome like we spoke to earlier. And there's a lot of issues with actually the sustainability of that, both for ourselves long term and also the planet. I think much of this does come back to the microbiome. And there are a lot of people with very damaged, modernized microbiomes

that are very different to what the traditional microbiome may have looked at look like. And a carnival diet is essentially, it's a strict elimination diet. And we already know that elimination diets can work, at least in the short term, very well if someone has certain food intolerances. And I'm certainly not denying that there are going to be certain people who are not tolerating certain plant foods, at least at the moment, that well. And so I can empathize with them. You remove all of the plant foods from your diet. you feel better, right? We want people to feel better. So I think, you know, that's a, that's an interesting starting point and interesting observation. But was it, was it all of the

30 foods that you removed or was it one of them? You don't really know that until you go through systematic reintroduction and re-challenging. Monash University in Australia and Melbourne actually sort of created, devised a diet called the Lofodemap diet. which is another form of an elimination style diet. And people have run with that, and there are people out there that are consuming a low-phobab diet and think that it was created as a diet you consume for life, but it's certainly not.

It starves the microbiome. So in the long run, it may well lead to more damage to the gut. But what it's good at is actually isolating, what are some of these food intolerances? And also, when we say intolerance, it's not necessarily that someone cannot eat that plant, it's at a certain amount, right, a certain dose their symptoms are provoked.

So the reintroduction has to be very carefully done with a dietitian usually on board to help find what are those thresholds. But that diet, you know, they use it as an intervention. It's a short-term intervention, like eight weeks or 12 weeks or so, and then it's followed by slowly bringing the diversity back into the diet so that you get the diverse microbiome and you reap the rewards of that. That microbiome is like your personal pharmacy. It's in there, if you're treating it well, dispensing

these drug-like compounds, these natural drug-like compounds that go into circulation and have all of these incredible effects on your physiology. And you'd hate to be missing out on that for life. So I think you make a great point. And this does come back to the anecdote thing we spoke about earlier is that we should not always conflate how we feel today with necessarily being reflective of how we're going to feel long term. And I think this is a prime example of that. We know that these diets are going to be starving the microbiome. We know that it's shifting potent risk factors like A-B-B in the wrong direction. So I think having sort of very objective, rational, non-confrontational discussions about this allows people, you know, to consider whether they want to think about that as a

lifestyle or is that a moment in time, is that an intervention? But they want to come back towards something that's a bit more evidence-based. So in 30, 40 years time or whatever it is, you know, they're not experiencing a cardiovascular event and have regrets for, you know, not changing their diet or wish they had have come across this information. It's great. And I mean, I know we spoke to the vast majority of this conversation has been around the science of how plant-focused diet is physiological going to be beneficial for the vast majority of people. And we can't admit that the planet's health is a part of our health. We are a part of the planet.

And so I wanted to speak to a little bit about the environmental impacts of eating meat, of our diet, of the land usage that it has. Because it is part of our health, you know, to say that it's not. would be to exclude yourself from nature, which is not a healthy perspective to begin with. So I just want to open it up for you as well and you share in your book as well. So a lot of numbers that are really eye-opening. That's really inspiring as well, that we should be able to find alignment. It makes sense that the natural way, it doesn't have to be overcomplicated in how we approach our food and that it can be in alignment with bringing true health vitality to ourselves and the planet,

at the same time. Yeah, there are no healthy humans without a healthy planet. Those two are inextricably tied together. And we have turned Earth into a farm. And with that has come great deforestation, destruction, loss of biodiversity. We're using incredible amounts of water, and we're emitting a lot of greenhouse gases that are contributing. They're not the only contributor, but they are contributing significantly to the warming of the planet and the changing of the climate, which

first and foremost is going to affect people who are in developing countries and are contributing less to this problem, which is just unfair. The problems with the current food system, largely center around the way we're producing food and the type of food that people are eating. We mentioned before that animal foods are very inefficient to produce. Factory farms in some ways intensive agriculture, if you think about it, that's more efficient than grazing

because you can kind of intensify it and you can grow these animals really quickly, but you at the same time, where's the food coming from? You have to tear down a lot of forests and grow a lot of crops that are fed into that system. And those animals are emitting a lot of greenhouse gases along the way. And the more extensive kind of regenerative model, which I think has some pros, but it kind of needs to come. with the message of we need to eat less meat. The problem with that model is how much land it uses.

We would be using even more land if we got rid of factory farming. Where's that land going to come from? We would need more deforestation. And in fact, that's been modeled in this country, here by Matthew Hayek from Harvard. He looked at if you were to get rid of conventional beef and just have it as all grazing. what does that mean? And it means 270 times more land. And that's even when you consider the current

crop land going into intensive agriculture. So this is coming at a great cost, destruction of the planet. And the huge opportunity here, and I don't want this to be lost on anyone, is if we just consider the flip side of this statistic. So 83% of the land we use is for animal protein, but that is only producing 18% of our calories. The flip side of that means very small amount of land is being used for plant food agriculture, directly for human consumption, but it's providing a huge amount of calories. What that means is if we shift globally to more plant-rich diets, like what the Eat Lancet Planetary Health Diet that came out in 2021, somewhere in COVID. COVID has made things a bit blurry.

If we shift towards that dietary pattern, then we free up an enormous amount of land that can be rewilded, reforested, restored, which we know is absolutely the best way to bring back biodiversity to sequester carbon. And people may think, well, that's a little bit fantasy. How are we going to get farmers on board that? And I agree. I don't think this is about hanging farmers out to dry. Farmers are part of the solution.

People that own land, they're just doing the best that they can. So how do we fix this problem? Well, largely, we have to shift the incentives. Right now, farmers are incentivized to take their land, however big it is, and extract, dominate, and get as, extract as many calories out of that system as possible. But what if they were incentivized to rewild, to reforest? What if them increasing biodiversity and sequestering carbon they were being paid for? Well, now all of a sudden, many of these farmers who do care about the environment

are going to start making different decisions. So I'm hopeful that that's, and that conversation is starting, to happen now. You know, I think that's the future that we're looking at. It is a regenerative model. Regenerative doesn't automatically mean regenerative beef. I think people have conflated those two. Regenerative just means, you know, thinking more about like biodynamic and polycropping

and less monocropping. I think that's hopefully the future that we move to is using less land to create more. more calories and in doing so rewilding the planet and, you know, turning things around, right? Because as you said, that, you know, future humans, they're relying upon this. What kind of intelligent species destroys their own host? It's not a very intelligent thing to do. Pretty stupid. Yeah, we have our knee on the neck of a planet that wants to breathe.

And it's suffocating. And I believe in the possibility and the beauty and the innovation of humans to be able to create new incentives like you spoke to that can actually solve a lot of these problems. But we, it's like we can feel that the planet is on this huge dystopic trajectory when we see how we as a species are operating of almost, you know, 8 billion whatever people. but it's made up of individuals. And so for whoever's listening to this podcast right now, I think we shared a beautiful invitation of how we can all be a part of the change. And a reminder that sometimes this leads to division,

farmers versus people with new ideas, but we have a shared goal. And when you come back to that and you come back to connection, I think this conversation becomes a lot easier to have and is likely to be much more for, beautiful beautiful that's a it's a fruitful and positive note to kind of steer the ship towards wrapping up we've been going for a little over a couple hours i mean i can keep going on and on and on there was one more thing that i did want to mention that we didn't which i think is super important

as we talked a lot about what to eat but almost equally important is when we eat right and how much we eat so i just want to touch on that a little bit here because you could be eating all the great things but if you're not giving your digestive system time to rest if you're not eating at the best hours for you and you're maybe eating too much then it doesn't necessarily even matter. Yeah, you know, what we ate, how much we eat,

and when we eat. They're like the three things people are interested in and I'd say I put what we eat at number one and that affects how much we eat. But then I think when we eat is also worthy of consideration, particularly once we have the foundations of what we eat in play. I've interviewed Sachin Panda a number of different sort of chrononutrition scientists. So these are scientists that are interested in circadian biology.

So we have these circadian rhythms that are greatly affected by things like light exposure, but they're also affected by meal timing. And these circadian rhythms are kind of. of in a very simplified way, they prepare us for what we need to do. So you'll have certain hormonal changes in the morning that are preparing you for being awake and digestion. And then towards the end of the day, particularly if the lights are coming down, hopefully they are, you're getting changes in hormones that are preparing you for rest and sleep and rejuvenation, not so much for digestion.

So the hypothesis was that perhaps if you align your meals with circadian rhythms will see better health outcomes and improved blood glucose control, for example. And there is some signal there. If I was to simplify it, the evidence that sort of suggests

that eating within a 10 or 12 hour eating window is going to be better than eating in a 15 to 16 hour eating window, which is what the average American eats over 15 hours, which is kind of like rolling out of bed, having a bite of a donut, and then finishing that donut right when you're about to go to bed. It's crazy. Don't recommend that.

So 10 to 12 hours, which is very achievable from a social point of view. When you start to restrict down further, and some people certainly can do that, and they manage it fine, but it tends to get in the way of having three meals a day, which for families, when their parents are,

if they want to enjoy breakfast with their kids or dinner with their family, the 10 or 12 hour window makes it achievable. And then in terms of calorie distribution, it seems that there is some benefit and depends on your metabolic health. So the less metabolically healthy you are,

the more this matters. The more metabolically healthy you are, the more you can get away with. So there is some signal to suggest that having more calories sort of earlier in the day, not as soon as you wake up, allowing 90 minutes or so before you're eating seems to be optimal. But more of your calories towards that first and second meal of the day when you're most active seems to be superior to the opposite, which would be having more of your calories sort of closer to bedtime. So I think 10 or 12 hour eating window, waking up and not eating for at least an hour, hour and a half or so, that sort of starts your eating window, have more calories earlier in the day.

And hopefully when you sort of calculate that and look at your bedtime, you haven't eaten for again 90 minutes before you've gone to bed at least, something like that. Within my own experience, I'm curious to see what you do as well just because I was experimenting with like intermittent fasting probably seven years ago. And what I found what I feel best doing is actually having one meal a day. And like just around, I usually never eat before a podcast. So if I'm filming then, it's maybe like a 2 p.m. kind of bigger meal. Or maybe I'll separate it and do like a four hour eating window. But certainly finishing like five to six plus hours before I go to bed. I feel like optimizing for that deep sleep is like super important for the cascade that it has in the rest of your health.

I'm curious, what do you feel like is better? I struggle to get enough calories in if I do it in one meal. And I've tried some of that before. I agree with you. I don't eat food if I'm doing something in the morning like this. I just feel sharper if I'm fasted through that. But I tend, I do like to eat something particularly after I've trained. And if I'm just doing one meal a day, I'd get nowhere near enough calories and I lose weight.

which is not my goal. It might be someone's goal and that's great. And certainly I don't like eating close to bed. However, if I allowed four or five hours, I'm starving. I wake up starving. So I've kind of played around with that. I think find what leaves you feeling best. Sharp as mentally gives you the best sleep.

Those are the things that are going to be important there. Well, I know we dove into a lot of nuance here through this conversation, hopefully much of which is going to be useful for the audience today. And thank you those that have been listening and coming on this journey and definitely let us know what has been most impactful for you. Before we kind of share where you can find more of Simon, I just kind of love to wrap this whole conversation in a bow and kind of talk about what the point is of really taking back your health.

Obviously, there's a lot of obvious things there. But like what we're speaking to and a lot of these things, it can feel complicating at times when there's so many different variables that contribute to being a healthy human being, but good health actually can be quite simple. Right. I mean, why does any of this matter? You know, why focus on all of these different predictors of longevity?

I think ultimately the reason is because you enjoy your life and you want to enjoy it for longer. So deriving happiness from your life is kind of center stage. You know, that's what creates meaning for anything else that we're talking about here. I recently was looking at the Harvard adult development study. And Robert Waldinger is like the director of that study. It's an interesting study that started with adults in their 20s, 80 years ago or so and tracked them for eight decades.

And they were interested in looking at what leads to a happy and long life. And they're looking at all of these different predictors and, you know, more than fame or how much money someone had, someone's IQ, their genes. The number one predictor of that person being happy and living a long life was the quality of their relationships. So, you know, if we're going to make any of this meaningful, we have to think about the people in our life that are important, the community, how we're building in nourish, and cultivating that.

And, you know, I've personally been going on a deep dive through this myself over the last few years because, you know, in my 20s, this is a long story, so I'll save you the long story. I'll give you the short form. But I was outwardly very successful. And, you know, I created financial freedom and was able to follow all the things that I pursued.

and that can be a blessing and a curse for someone who's in their early 20s. Often a curse, I see a lot of people really struggle. Right. And for me, the curse was that you can become revered for what you do and not who you are. That's scary because that means that you're not really forced to look inwards. And so, you know, I realized like I got first. very caught up in how the world was perceiving me. And when you are doing that, you are, you're wearing masks. And the problem with wearing these different masks and worrying so much

about how people are perceiving you is that you're actually not you. You're not showing up authentically as yourself. And how can you expect to build these really strong relationships with the people in your life if you're kind of holding back and you're, you're presenting yourself you have a persona. So there was a realization for me a few years ago that if I wanted these relationships in my life to be stronger and better, I had to be more vulnerable.

I had to kind of, and this is still a process. I'm getting uncomfortable talking about it. It's always the process. You know, I had to come to grips with many things that when I grew up, I didn't have modeling in the household built around sharing your emotions.

So suppression of emotions is very easy for me. It's natural. I can work all day and have no problems with work ethic. But when it comes to thinking about how I'm feeling or just feeling in the first place and then communicating that with people, that's what creates rich relationships. But for so long, that was a blind spot. I was overlooking that aspect of my life. And I'm sitting here in my mid-therly. and I kind of feel a bit embarrassed that that's a lesson that I'm learning now, but it's never too late to learn. And I know in speaking with more and more people, particularly men, even in their 40s and 50s and 60s, there are so many people who have a similar kind of story to myself. Everyone will have their own sort of things that they need to grapple with that you can only identify through some self-examination,

through kind of getting rid of distractions, whether it's journaling or mindfulness or meditation, and these things that you are confronted with that you shine a light on, that you grapple with are ultimately going to be what lead you to better relationships and showing up more authentically. There was another study, Tom Gillivich, I hope I pronounce his name right. I think so, yeah. Yeah.

And he was looking at regret. Yeah. You've seen this? bad. Yeah, it's how we had Benham tonight. He talked about it. Yeah. The way that I interpret it is, you know, he was kind of wanting to know, like, what do people regret at the end of their life? Yeah. And I was drawn to this because, you know, I've been working on all this stuff and I'm like, I want, I love the idea of optimizing all these health markers, but what am I doing it for? You know, and interestingly, what he found was, you know, one of the biggest regretting

that people had was not living life on their own terms. So he kind of talks about three different selves, but in short, if there's a discrepancy between your actual self, so who you think you are and how you're showing up, but your ideal self, you know, who you really are and how you want to be seen in the world, that discrepancy is what people regretted later in life, not living life on their own terms. They were living life, you know, according to the expectations of others or the obligations of society. And he sort of talks about that most of that discrepancy between, you know, how you're kind of navigating your life and showing up and what your true self is, is a result of inaction. It's not action. It's a result of not taking

action. And, you know, it's a reminder of, and rich roll always says mood follows action. Right. So we can procrastinate all day. I think, you know, getting clear. So having some ability to live and examine lifestyle, creating some goals, but then realizing, you know, it's going to feel tough, it's going to feel uncomfortable. Let's just get the ball rolling and the outcomes will follow that intentional action. So, You know, all of this is to say is that for this discussion, the longevity discussion, to be meaningful, it has to be about giving us more time to live a happy life. So good. Such a good note to end on, man. You absolutely crush it today. I think that when it comes to a lot of things we're speaking to, you know, with nutrition, how we've been diving in this conversation, with meditation. A lot of these things support. us to be able to actually live our life with true vitality, take our power back, and be able to

live the life we want to live. And you can't do that if you feel like shit. So I think that what you're doing is truly a service to humanity and being able to provide accessible and digestible understandings to the data of how people can really eat what is going to help them thrive and live a life that they truly want to live and take that power back like we spoke to. So thank you for the way that you've been showing up, bro. I've been such an honor to have you here and excited to celebrate your birthday tomorrow. Oh, dude. Thank you.

It was a pleasure to be here. And you've helped me both personally and professionally with my show. So I really appreciate that. And just the space that you've created here, it's pretty special. Thanks, man. Thanks. Looking forward to the many years to come. with a friendship and I can't wait to see what you continue to share. Where do you want to

point people to most where they can find you and what you got going on? The proof is the name of my podcast that's on YouTube and Apple and Spotify, all those places. Instagram at Simon Hill. And if you're on Twitter, if you're game enough to get involved in Twitter, be a crazy space at The Proof. But would love to connect with you on any of those platforms. Amazing. Thank you so much, dude. awesome well for those that have been tuning in to this episode of the know-thyself podcast and you made it this far congratulations i want to know why what really stuck out to you that felt most intriguing most inspirational most impactful that is going to actually translate to real changes in your life let us know also

come back and drop in what that you implemented made the difference move the needle in your own experience of life and we'll have to probably run it back and do a round two at some point But feel free to hit the subscribe button if you haven't already to join the family. And until next time,