Pursuit of Wellness - The Shocking Truth Behind Nutrition Trends (Carnivore, Veganism & More) w/ Simon Hill

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

Ep. #70 Join us in this episode as we delve into the fascinating world of nutrition with Simon, exploring his journey from curiosity to expertise. From the debate between veganism and the carnivore diet to dissecting social media extremes versus scientific thinking, we navigate through topics like Bio Individuality, the Mediterranean diet, Danish Dietary Guidelines, and the American food pyramid.  Uncover the truth about saturated fats, cholesterol, and the impacts on heart health. We'll even touch on the Hadza tribe's lifestyle and diet, questioning ancestral norms and finding a sustainable approach. Whether you're into ketogenic diets, fish consumption, or the nuances of veganism, this episode takes a deep dive into the diverse realms of nutrition, emphasizing the importance of domain-specific experts in shaping a healthy lifestyle. Leave Me a Message - click here! For Mari’s Instagram click here! For Pursuit of Wellness Podcast’s Instagram click here! For Mari’s Newsletter click here! For Simon Hill’s Instagram click here! For Simon Hill’s Podcast click here! For The Living Proof Challenge click here! Show Links Bite is offering our listeners 20% off your first order. Go to trybite.com/POW or use code POW at checkout to claim this deal. Right now, Chomps is offering our listeners 20% off your first order and free shipping when you go to Chomps.com/POW Today my listeners receive 20% OFF any AquaTru purifier! Just go to AquaTru.com and enter the code “POW” at checkout. Studies and Links From Simon: 1) Saturated fats versus unsaturated fats 2) High saturated fat rich low carb diet in healthy women markedly raises LDL-C and ApoB in just 4 weeks 3) Plant-based dietary patterns typically lower LDL-C by 0.3 mmol/l which equates to about 20% reduction in risk of atherosclerotic CVD 4) The hadza 5) Red meat does increase LDL-C and ApoB 6)Swapping animal protein for plant protein improved LDL-C levels 7) LDL-C is causal in development of atherosclerotic CVD 8) All cells produce their own cholesterol and the brain does not rely on systemic cholesterol 9) Low cholesterol does not negatively affect sex hormones 10) When optimal protein is achieved (1.6g per Kg), there is no difference in strength/hypertrophy between animal and plant protein 11) Total protein and plant protein are associated with reduced mortality. Swapping animal protein for plant protein is associated with reduced mortality 12) Two clinical studies looking at soy foods, or soy isoflavones, fed to men that measured semen parameters and/or sex hormones: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11352776 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19819436/ 13) Meta-analysis of 38 clinical interventions looking at soy foods/isoflavones and sex hormones: 14) Danish dietary guidelines and 3 other evidence-based nutrition guidelines 

If you're following every man and his dog on social media who has a view about food, then your feed is going to be full of contradictory, confusing views. This is the Pursuit of Wellness podcast, and I'm your host, Mari Llewellyn. Hi, guys. Welcome back to the Pursuit of Wellness podcast. Today we have a very sciencey, factual episode all about nutrition. Today's guest is Simon Hill. Simon is a physiotherapist and nutrition scientist. His goal is to simplify health and nutrition information. And basically what Simon does is takes really complex scientific studies and translates them for us. Now, Simon has a very interesting approach. I would say he's very different to every other guest I've had on the

show so far. He is very anti-extreme opinions when it comes to wellness industry. So what we find now with social media is there's a lot of extremes on one end or the other. So for example, carnivore, veganism, people have really strong, strong opinions on one end or the other. And he's all about finding that middle ground and what actually has science backing it. So he brought a lot of studies, he actually had a stack of papers while we were discussing and I think they're all linked in the show notes for this episode. But it was so interesting because it had a really big impact on me a lot of what he brought to the table was quite different to how I live my personal life and my personal health beliefs which I think it's important to bring on people to the show that I

may not agree with 100% or people who have maybe a different perspective. For example, he is pro-vegetable oil, pro-plant, and really questions red meat intake. And as I always say, I really encourage you guys to listen to this conversation with an open mind. I think it's important that we have a diverse group of people in the wellness industry on the show so we don't get stuck in narrow perspectives. But I do believe everyone is so so different and everyone feels different on different diets which is something we discussed today we're going to talk about veganism versus carnivore social media extreme views and scientific thinking bio-individuality the American food pyramid versus the Danish food pyramid, high cholesterol and heart disease, keto diets for women, insulin

resistance, why ancestral diets aren't actually that optimal in Simon's view, the problems with the carnivore diet, and why we need to listen to domain specific experts in nutrition. This is a very interesting one, guys. And I think you'll find it interesting to hear his take on some of my previous guests like Paul Saladino he does reference him a lot so without further ado let's hop into this episode with Simon just a reminder if you haven't yet please click subscribe or follow and rate the show it helps me so so much I love you guys let's do it, welcome to the show. Mari, thank you very much for having me. It's an honor to be here. Oh, thank you. We initially connected after my episode with Paul Saladino launched. I have had

a fair amount of pro-animal based, pro-carnivore guests on the show and you are here to give us a different perspective. So I'm excited to learn, ask questions and just get curious. So I'd love to start with how you personally became interested in nutrition. This story goes back to my early childhood, actually. My dad's a professor of physiology and, you know, as far back as I can recall, when I would come home or if I would jump into his car, there would be scientific papers printed out, sprawled everywhere. Like we've got here. Yeah, right.

And I'd have to shift them to get into the car or if we were having dinner, I'd have to shift them off the table. And, you know, at that stage as a kid, I didn't really understand what those studies actually were speaking to or what they meant. But I saw that my dad took them very seriously and there was bits highlighted and squiggled and he would, I guess, educate me from an early age around the role of science and how we can use science to kind of better navigate the world, make better choices. And how we use science to reduce uncertainty. That's what we're doing. You know, we have intuition and we have hypotheses and we use a scientific method to test that.

And so from a very early age, I found that fascinating and knew that I wanted to explore some field or realm of science, you know, when I was old enough to go out and start a career. So I started my career as a physiotherapist. I was working in Australia with professional athletes. And I did that for a number of years. And then started getting very interested in nutrition. And at that stage, my understanding of nutrition was influenced by society, culture.

I was working out. So you have locker room talk, all the things, right? And my brother at a certain point in time when I was in my mid-20s came to me and said, he was coming to stay with me in sydney and said just to give you a heads up i've changed my diet a little bit and he'd come across some information that was looking at cardiovascular disease and diet and spoke to the benefits of reducing animal foods in the diet now i was very resistant to that idea believe it or not i was eating a lot of steak i had a kind of very much what i would describe as a gym kind of bro bodybuilding style diet not a lot of diversity a lot of meat, sweet potatoes, broccoli kind of thing. So I was resistant to that.

And with my undergraduate training in science, I thought I'll go into the literature and try and prove my brother wrong. And very quickly getting in and looking at the published literature on nutrition, I realized how confusing it is. You can find a study pretty much to support any position. Right. And so I realized that I actually wasn't able to decipher this and make sense of it.

And that encouraged or inspired me to go back to university and I did a master's in nutrition science. And with this purpose of, you know, I was very curious about this. I wanted to develop the skills and to be able to better help the people that I was working with at that stage, athletes. And I did that and went on this, you know, long journey of discovery and understanding how nutrition science works and all of the ins and outs with regards to study design and quality and the things that we need to think about when we're looking at literature

in order to interpret it accurately. And yeah, that kind of I, led to me starting my podcast and then sitting down and interviewing domain-specific experts so I could kind of delve deeper into different aspects of nutrition. And, you know, today I kind of find myself in this position where I actually just see myself as a synthesizer of information. I'm sitting down and speaking to a lot of different experts and I am reading the peer-reviewed literature and I'm just trying to make that information more accessible to this kind of everyday person that has a very busy life style and doesn't have the time to kind of develop the skills to go into the literature themselves.

Yeah, and I think it can be really confusing for people because they, as you said, there are studies to back any sort of absolute ideal that you would like to have. I've had people on the show who believe that you should only be eating meat and no animals, sorry, only eating meat and no plants or vice versa. So I think people can get overwhelmed by the information. And I love that you come at it from a place of curiosity and that the way that you got into this was trying to figure out the best solution for yourself and communicating that to the community. I feel like the biggest divide that exists in the nutrition space on the internet especially is veganism and carnivore.

Why do you think there is this massive divide in nutrition, especially online? I think we first need to acknowledge that the online space and the views that we see, the whole sleuth of extreme views we see are not representative of the typical views held by academics. It's helpful to build an audience and to drive engagement if you have a contrarian or different position to the consensus, particularly for people that lack trust. And so we see these extreme views online, but we often, I think, see that and presume that the science is not settled, that the science is confused.

Look at all these people with completely contradictory viewpoints. But we need to recognize that, firstly, a lot of these viewpoints that we're seeing on social media that we're exposed to are not coming from domain specific experts. And secondly, if you go and speak to domain specific experts, academics, you'll see that while they don't agree on everything, they do agree on the bulk majority of things when it comes to how food influences our health, both in the short term and the long term. I think the more inconspicuous kind of reason for why these absolute positions exist,

the first kind of reason I just spoke to there about these extreme, you know, absolute positions, absolute sell, they drive engagement. And not everyone's agenda is to improve public health. There are a lot of different agendas out there, you know, selling products, building profile, all the things, right? The more inconspicuous reason is that we all eat food two, three, four times a day. And I think that leads to many people feeling like they, because of that, they can have a very strong opinion on nutrition and food. And this is different to other fields of science. If you or I wanted to learn about the stars or the galaxies or the planets, we're going to want to listen to an astronomer or an astrophysicist, someone that's an actual expert in that field. And so online, we have a lot of noise and I think distraction, confusion,

because there are a lot of voices speaking about food that are not domain-specific experts. And I don't think that necessarily all of these people have bad intention. There's a thing called the Dunning-Kruger effect and it's where you're overestimating your capabilities based on the level of knowledge that you actually have. And so what I see online is deep convictions, absolutes, sensationalized posts, not having context and that's the opposite of scientific thinking.

Scientific thinking is understanding there's uncertainty, is being open-minded, having humility so that you can actually objectively review all data, whether it is in line with your current position or challenges it. And the idea of a scientific thinker or approach is that with that open mind, you allow your views and positions to evolve over time. If we're not approaching science like that, then what can happen is we have a current pre-held view and we just go out and look for evidence to reaffirm that

and double down on it. During my wellness journey, even my skin healing journey, something I've been really conscious of is the products I'm using every single day. And one of those being toothpaste. You guys have heard me talk about this before, but we are swallowing about five to 7% of our toothpaste every single time we brush. That's why I love Bite toothpaste so much. Most commercial toothpastes are filled with harsh chemicals, artificial flavors, and preservatives, but Bite isn't. Bite makes dry toothpaste tablets that are made with clean ingredients that are sulfate-free, palm oil-free, and glycerin-free. They are so convenient. You just pop a bit in your mouth, chew it up, and start brushing,

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slash pow. As you guys know, we just moved into a new house in Austin and one of the first things we did was install an aqua true purifier because water, tap water, is not always safe, guys. You have to keep that in mind. Unfortunately, according to extensive research by the Environmental Working Group, three out of four homes inica have harmful contaminants in its tap water i really want to be able to drink as much water as i want at home without having to worry about that that's why you guys need to check out aqua true aqua true purifiers use a four-stage reverse osmosis purification process and their countertop purifiers work with no installation or plumbing it removes 15 times more contaminants than ordinary pitcher

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Plus I love the fact that it got delivered straight to my home and was a super easy setup and I never have to worry about my drinking water again. AquaTrue comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee and even makes a great gift. Today my listeners receive 20% off any AquaTrue purifier. Just go to AquaTrue.com. That's A-Q-U-A-T-R-U.com and enter my code POW, P-O-W, at checkout. That's 20% off any AquaTrue water purifier when you go to AquaTrue.com and use code POW. How much of the absolutes that we see online do you think are coming from a place of bio-individuality? For example, Paul Saladino feels amazing

when he eats a certain way, but someone else wouldn't feel that way. I feel like people have this sense of ownership over the way they eat and they think it's the best way to eat because they feel good doing it. Do you feel like there's a different diet for everyone or everyone should kind of be eating the same way? Does that make sense? There's a few parts to answering that. One is I think we often assume that short-term changes in health reflect long-term disease risk. And that's not always the case. For example, smoking can help aid weight loss, but smoking increases cancer long-term.

So I think that's one explanation for that. I don't think that we're all genetically so different such that one person does best long-term on a carnivore diet and another person does best on a vegan diet over 50, 60, 70 years. But I do think that there is no single dietary brand or label that is best. There's a theme. And this is a little bit more great. It's less absolute, which is why this is not really that popular. That theme that you see in the literature that's associated with the best long-term health, so lower risk of various types of cancer,

lower risk of metabolic conditions like type 2 diabetes or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, lower risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, etc. is a diet that's high in fiber. It's low in saturated fat. It has a bias for plant protein, but it can include animal protein. So relative to a standard Western diet, it has more plant protein and it limits ultra processed foods that have added sugars, salt, oil, and other kind of artificial or even natural additives that you wouldn't find in your kitchen and you wouldn't use in everyday cooking. Now, that theme I just described, that could be a Mediterranean style diet. It could be a pescatarian diet. It could be a plant-based diet. It could be low carb. It could be high carb. So I think there's flexibility within that

for the individual to adjust and play around and try things and then look at blood work and go back to the drawing board. And maybe that's something that we'll discuss, but my advice to people is very much to within that theme, find a way of eating that leaves you feeling good today. It's something that you can adhere to because you enjoy it because none of this matters if you're only doing it for two or three weeks. What are you going to do for decades? We're talking about lifetime exposure here. That's really what shifts the needle in terms of risk of these diseases. And what leaves your blood work and important predictors of longevity,

risk factors, what leaves them in good shape. And so there is a degree of personalization that I 100% agree with within that theme, but I just don't think it's as extreme as one person does best on all meat and the other person does best on whole plants. Out of curiosity, I don't know if you like to share this, but I know people are going to be wondering what diet did you switch from, from your bodybuilder bro red meat diet after you did the research? And what, how did you begin eating? I shifted to a more pescatarian diet at that stage. Okay. And, you know, I think let's be pragmatic here within that theme that I just described and

also in the literature. If the question was, okay, based on that, what do you think is realistically the best diet to go out and recommend for public health to a population at large, not to an individual, then it's going to be some form of the Mediterranean diet. Which, can you break down exactly what that means? All right, so a Mediterranean diet is a diet that has an abundance of fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes. From a fat perspective, it has more of a bias to monounsaturated fats and unsaturated fats. So fatty fish, olive oil, and obviously the nuts and seeds. And there is room and inclusion for meat in there, but it tends to be leaner cuts of meat.

So the overall saturated fat content of that diet typically falls below 10% of energy, which is different to the diets that we see in a Western country. And that diet is going to probably be the best diet from an adherence point of view for the population at mass. It doesn't require a lot of education. As you start going down more towards pescatarian, vegetarian, vegan, much more education is needed with regards to optimizing that diet to make sure you're getting all the nutrients that you need and

you're doing it in a way that is healthy. Because you can do those diets in a really healthy way or you can do them in a very poor way yeah um and that's you know probably the the best dietary guidelines that i'm aware of are the danish dietary guidelines what are the danish dietary guidelines i did print out we love print outs on the show we can maybe put this into the show notes but the the danish dietary guidelines these came out in 2021 their recommendations they have seven recommendations okay eat plant-rich varied and not too much not too much is is really speaking to the importance of energy balance because we know that excessive adiposity or fat brings a lot of risks for chronic disease. So number one, eat plant-rich, varied and not too much. Two, eat more vegetables and fruit. Three, eat less meat, choose legumes and fish. Four, eat whole grain foods. Five, choose vegetable oils and low-fat

dairy products. Six, eat less sweet, salty and fatty food, seven, thirsty, drink water. Now, there's probably a few things in there that may be in the online space are controversial, but within academia, 90 plus percent of that is absolutely agreed upon. And where I think the general public gets a little bit confused is people think, well, hang on, the guidelines have been out there and look at the health of the typical person in a country like America, where 50% of people have cardiovascular disease, 70% of people are overweight or obese, 40% of people have pre-diabetes, the list goes on and on. What we need to understand is that that is not how people are eating. But is the food pyramid in America completely different to those guidelines? It is slightly different to that, but the big picture items are the same. And if you were to adhere to the dietary guidelines,

we have studies that have shown this, there would be a dramatic reduction in risk of chronic disease and incidence of chronic disease. There's a study out of the UK in the last year looking at data from the UK Biobank study, which is a large population study. And they were interested in looking at what percentage of people within that population were adhering to global sort of

international dietary recommendations. And they were looking at, I think, four components. It was the saturated fat content of the diet being below 10%. They were looking at fiber intake being above a certain level. They were looking at fruit and vegetable consumption and they were looking at added sugars. Can you just give some examples of saturated fats just for anyone who doesn't know?

Right. And there are different types of saturated fats. Okay. So again, this is where context matters and you can come to erroneous conclusions if you're not aware of different types of saturated fats. But in short, saturated fats within typical diets are generally coming from meat, butter, dairy,

and then coconut oil, palm oil. Okay. Those are the very saturated fat rich sources. And what would vegetable oil be considered? But just in saying that though, just so that I'm clear here, you can eat meat that's low in saturated fat. Like leaner cuts of meat. Like venison.

Have much less saturated fat in them. And the saturated fats that are in meat do not have the same effect on physiology as the saturated fats in dairy, for example. Okay. And then what would vegetable oil be considered? So vegetable oil would be considered anything from olive, avocado, canola. But that's not a saturated fat. These are monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fat or a mixture of both. That was the thing that surprised me the most. I think on the Danish food guidelines, they're recommending vegetable oil.

There's been a huge movement away from vegetable oil. Can you explain why that's considered healthier? Yeah, I think people are conflating vegetable oils with ultra-processed foods because a lot of ultra-processed foods contain vegetable oils. But we have to separate that and look at the independent or an inherent effect of vegetable oil itself. And we have clinical trials and meta-analyses of clinical trials where you look at the substitution of saturated fats in an isolated form for these vegetable oils

which contain unsaturated fats in an isolated form. And when you make those substitutions and you track people in clinical trials over years and you pull all of that data from clinical trials across the world together, you see a significant reduction in risk of cardiovascular disease. And there's physiological explanations for that. We know that saturated fat, it basically in simple kind of lay language, it reduces your liver's ability to bring cholesterol back in.

And so saturated fats tend to increase serum cholesterol, whereas these unsaturated fats, particularly polyunsaturated fats, lower serum cholesterol. Okay. And we know that that concentration of cholesterol affects your risk of cardiovascular disease. I want to talk about cholesterol. And we know that that concentration of cholesterol affects your risk of cardiovascular disease. I want to talk about cholesterol. I've had a few people on the

show say that the concept of high cholesterol being bad is a myth. What's your take on cholesterol and also low cholesterol? Because that was something I saw in my lab work and I was told that that's unhealthy as well. This is one that kind of baffles me because if you look at the entire body of literature looking at cholesterol and heart disease, it seems incredibly difficult to take the position that high cholesterol is not a problem. Let me walk through that. So let's start off with, I mentioned earlier there are different types of studies and study design. Some of them are more valid, more reliable than others. So let's start off with observational studies,

which I would say in terms of what I'm going to talk about are the least reliable. We see very clearly in populations highest cholesterol, serum cholesterol, so cholesterol in blood, higher risk of coronary heart disease. Is that the same as LDL? Yes. Okay. So when I say serum cholesterol, I'm speaking to, I'm really speaking to ApoB. I'm just being careful not to go down the rabbit hole here.

We appreciate that. We're speaking to the number of lipoproteins. Low-density lipoprotein is a lipoprotein. The number of lipoproteins in the blood that are potentially atherogenic. What that means is they can go into the artery wall and provoke an inflammatory response and get stuck in there. And LDL, low-density lipoproteins, are the most abundant of the ApoB-containing lipoproteins. You might hear of ApoB and people talking about it. ApoB essentially sums up LDL plus the other atherogenic lipoproteins and gives you a kind of a better window

into how many of these particles are flowing in your blood. In population studies, when you go and look at the concentration of these atherogenic lipoproteins in people's blood the higher the concentration the more risk of coronary heart disease then we have a whole another type of study called a mendelian randomization which looks at genetic genetic levels of LDL cholesterol and risk of coronary heart disease because there are a number of different gene mutations

which affect your level of LDL cholesterol. So you can go out and look in the general public and look at people that have genetically very low LDL cholesterol, very high and everything in between. And you can chart that and you see a linear relationship. So the higher that person's LDL cholesterol, the higher their risk of coronary heart disease. Me and my husband are actually a good example.

I have low LDL and he has high and heart disease runs in his family, I believe. So that's the genetic studies. And when you look at that curve, it's very steep. So for every unit increase in LDL cholesterol, the rise in risk of coronary heart disease is actually much greater than in population studies. And the reason for that is that lifetime exposure matters. When we're talking about genetic studies, we're talking about people that are exposed to that LDL cholesterol from birth. Does that mean the parents are feeding them a lot of saturated fats from a young age? Your parents can affect your

cholesterol levels, but what I'm talking about here is particular genetic mutations that affect cholesterol levels for that newborn. And so they're from that very young age, because typically a newborn's cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, is like 20 to 30 milligrams per deciliter. Okay. Very, very low. But there are these gene mutations that exist that will mean that certain individuals from birth

will be exposed to different LDL cholesterol levels throughout their life. Okay. Okay. The point I'm trying to make there is that lifetime exposure matters when we're talking about how does LDL cholesterol affect our risk, right? If we have low LDL cholesterol for a lot of our life and then we adopt a ketogenic diet for one or two years, our risk of coronary heart disease is not the same

as someone who had elevated LDL cholesterol from birth. It's the same as saying, you know, if we started smoking cigarettes from birth versus starting to smoke cigarettes at age 30, our risk of lung cancer would look different, right? And researchers are actually now in the lung cancer science, people talk about pack years in terms of your exposure. And now in this area of science, we're talking about cholesterol years.

So are you saying that ketogenic diets increase your risk of cardiovascular disease? Ketogenic diets that are very rich in saturated fat, because not all ketogenic diets are the same. I'm asking because I did it for two years. There's a study looking at healthy adult women aged on average in their 20s who adopted high saturated fat ketogenic diet and they looked over a four-week period at how did their LDL cholesterol change. And they saw that their LDL cholesterol increased

by 1.8 millimoles per liter. Now, if those genetic studies that I mentioned before, they allow us to see on a per unit basis of LDL cholesterol. If someone's exposed to that over a long time, what is their reduction in risk of or increase in risk of coronary heart disease? For every one millimoles per liter that LDL cholesterol is increased, when you're exposed to that over decades, there's about a 55% increased risk of coronary heart disease. Okay.

One millimoles per liter, 55% increase in coronary heart disease. We get that from the genetic studies looking at lifetime exposure. In this ketogenic study, their LDL cholesterol went up by 1.8 millimoles per liter, which represents if they were to stick with that diet over decades, possibly a doubling in their risk of coronary heart disease. Now we're extrapolating, that's a four-week study. It's looking at changes in LDL cholesterol. It's not looking at heart outcomes. So we're extrapolating based on the genetic studies to say, what would this kind of risk look like? And I have the conclusion though from that paper. I think I've printed it out here. The current trial shows that feeding healthy

young women a ketogenic low-carbohydrate high-fat diet rich in saturated fatty acids for four weeks resulted in profound alterations in the blood lipid profile. LDL cholesterol increase in every participant with a treatment effect of 1.82 millimoles per liter. These alterations should be a cause for concern in young, normal weight, healthy women following this kind of low carbohydrate, high fat diet. I mean, I should have been in that study because I've done that before. Yeah. I did it for a long time, actually. It's interesting. I want to ask, is it difficult to collect data because how can you have someone stay keto for their whole life to see if it ends up having long-term effects? Well, that's why we need the observational and the genetic studies

because we're not going to have a randomized controlled trial where you randomize someone to a particular diet and expect them to adhere to that for life. This study was a four-week study. The observational studies epidemiology where we go out and look at populations and we can do dietary food frequency questionnaire surveys to see how people eat and validate them against weight food records. They allow us to look at how diet affects certain variables over the long term and they have some limitations

but they're allowing us to fill in the gaps because there are certain questions that randomized controlled trials cannot answer. It's just not feasible to conduct them for that long. Right. So at the beginning I was explaining the different levels of science that show that high cholesterol increases risk of coronary heart disease. So I spoke about the population studies. I spoke about the genetic studies.

Then we do have randomized controlled trials. We have pharmaceutical studies. So looking at people who are high risk of cardiovascular disease and you give them a particular drug that lowers their cholesterol and you see in the four or five year follow-up period, which is how long these trials go for, they don't go forever because of how expensive they are, you see dramatic reductions in coronary heart disease.

Now, that reduction in risk per unit is much smaller than what I spoke about on the Mendelian studies before. And it makes sense. These are often people that are 60 years old, who have had high cholesterol their whole life, and you reduce their cholesterol for five years. You can't expect their risk of coronary heart disease to be the same as someone who had that low level of cholesterol for their whole life okay but we have these what i would call converging lines of evidence population studies genetic mendelian randomization studies randomized controlled trials that all show us pointing in the same direction that when you get your cholesterol down, you reduce your risk of coronary heart disease. Now, just to kind of

underline the importance of this, coronary heart disease is the number one cause of death in this country, in the UK, in Australia. And what we understand is that the concentration of those ApoB-containing lipoproteins determines how likely you are to be laying down this plaque in the artery wall that builds up over time and at some point can predispose you to having a heart attack or a stroke. And through all of this research, we've been able to identify, well, what's that threshold? Where does it become a problem where you're actually accumulating plaque in the artery? And so for me, it would seem sensible. I want to go to bed every night knowing that the concentration of those particles is below that threshold. I'm not getting plaque building up. And at the same time, I don't want

to be insulin resistant. I don't want high blood pressure. These are all other risk factors. And often people point to them and say, well, if you don't have insulin resistance, it doesn't matter. What we need to understand is that the injurious component and what starts this process is the concentration of ApoB containing lipoproteins, of which LDL is the most abundant. And sure, if you want to stack on top of that smoking and drinking alcohol and insulin resistance, that's like adding fuel to the flame. But the flame and the initial process is being instigated or started by those ApoB-containing lipoproteins in the first place. And the other part of your question was about low cholesterol. So this takes us into the territory of observational studies.

There are some observational studies that have shown that low cholesterol late in life is associated with increased mortality. I've got to fix that. And so you can go and if you just look at that evidence at face value, you might be able to support your position online that low cholesterol is a bad thing. But in those studies, when they actually adjust for certain disease states,

that goes away. So this is considered what we call reverse causality. Essentially, there are certain disease states that cause metabolic dysregulation. And part of that metabolic dysregulation is a lowering in cholesterol. It's not that the low cholesterol led to that disease and their premature death. These people were sick. They had a whole lot of derangements. And when you control for that, that association goes away. The other thing that people are often concerned about is that low cholesterol levels in the blood will somehow affect hormone levels or cholesterol

levels in the brain. The first thing is for people to understand is that all of your cells throughout your body produce all the cholesterol they need. These lipoproteins are not taking cholesterol to your cells. So that cholesterol that's in your blood, that's not being distributed out to your cells. Those lipoproteins, their purpose is to take energy, triglycerides out to cells. The cholesterol that's in those lipoproteins is literally just there to enable that lipoprotein to be spherical and flow through the blood. We know that. So when you look at hormone levels

in people with very low LDL cholesterol, be it genetic or induced by drugs, they're completely fine because those cells are manufacturing all of the cholesterol they need. In fact, most of the cells throughout our body, if anything, manufacture excess cholesterol and their lipoproteins are taking that excess cholesterol

from the cells back to the liver. That's what they should be doing. And then with regards to the brain, your serum cholesterol that you measure on a blood test has nothing to do with the cholesterol levels in your brain. There's a blood-brain barrier. Cholesterol synthesis in the brain is completely independent to cholesterol synthesis in the liver and throughout the systemic body.

So there's no reason to be worried about cholesterol levels in the brain if you're doing certain things with your lifestyle to reduce your serum cholesterol. And there's no reason to be worried about your hormone production because as I said, all of those cells throughout the body are perfectly capable of producing all of the cholesterol that they need. And this is something that I discussed. I had a three-part series, lipid series with Dr. Thomas Dayspring. And it was seven hours long.

On your podcast? Yeah, it was seven hours long. And this is one of the frustrating things is that, you know, there's a law called Brandolini's Law. And essentially, I won't be able to quote this verbatim, but the amount of energy required to refute bullshit or claims online is an order of magnitude greater than the amount of energy that was required to make that claim. So we spent seven hours unpacking this and then you'll see a claim online where someone will say, hey, you don't want low blood cholesterol because cholesterol is important in the brain. Well, I feel like it's also difficult to communicate information because everything's so condensed online and people only

want to watch 10 seconds, you know? Back to your point about the studies. This is like a random question, but I'm just curious. You know, some of the ancient tribes that still exist, like the Hamza tribe, are there any studies on them and the effectiveness of their diet? Because they mostly eat meat. That's a great question. I just spent time with the Hadza actually. I just got back from Tanzania. No way. And I've also interviewed Herman Ponser who is an anthropologist

that's lived with the Hadza, published peer-reviewed papers. And I find it funny that someone like Herman Ponser has less airtime talking about the Hadza and their diet than someone like Paul Saladino, right? Herman Ponser is the domain specific expert. That's who we should be listening to. He's an anthropologist. He spent time living with the Hadza, the Maasai, the Chamane in South America, observing their diet, weighing the food that they're eating, looking at their blood biochemistry and their cholesterol levels, all of the things. I'll come to his research in a moment, but just on personal reflection, my time with the Hadza,

I found it fascinating that there was a morning where they were going hunting. So we all went out to observe their hunting. And I can tell you it was slim pickings. The only animals that we saw in that entire time were these tiny little birds of which they missed all of them with their bow and arrows. And, you know, in speaking with them, and this could be because of encroachment of communities and a change in terms of the amount of wildlife that exists there. But in speaking with them, you know, I got the sense that these images you see online of the Hadza with a big kind of a big kill, that a lot of that is set up. You know, people go there, they say we want to eat a a lot of meat and they curate that. So, I'm not sure it's really representative of the Hadza. And I think that's corroborated by Herman

Ponce's data. And certainly the Hadza eat meat. Absolutely. And if you look at his data, he plots over every month of the year the contribution of calories from meat from honey from berries from baobab tubers etc and you know across the year on average 65 percent of calories are coming from carbohydrates okay and that means that more more than 65 percent of calories are coming from plant foods because you're also going to get some protein and some fats from plant food as well. And the contribution of meat changes across the year depending on the month. When they look at their cholesterol levels, they're super low, like 70 milligrams per deciliter.

And that's considered more beneficial than having high cholesterol? Right, so that's at that level where you don't really see atherosclerosis. So then you start to wonder, well, okay, what type of meat are they eating? Clearly, it's not super high in saturated fats because we're not seeing like what we see in that four-week study where people did the low-carb, the women did the low-carb diet, high saturated fat and have extremely elevated LDL cholesterol levels. And that's in line with, you know, even Lauren Cordain who wrote the Paleo Diet book.

He's published with Stanley Boyd Eaton who are really two of the kind of father figures of the paleo movement. And even in their peer-reviewed literature where they write about ancestral diets, they talk about how lean that meat was, how low saturated fat was in the diet and how high fiber was in the diet. And so in Herman Pons's one of the reviews that I'll give you to put into the show notes, he has this beautiful table

and it shows you the contribution of calories from carbs, fats and protein for the Hadza, for the Maasai, for Chimane and their LDL cholesterol levels. I think that gives us a kind of a lot of information as to how these people are eating and it's not the same as it's depicted on social media. How long are they living? We asked that question.

We had this beautiful kind of ceremony and then we're able to do a sort of Q&A and there was a translator there. And their response was they don't track their age. Oh, wow. That must be nice. And there's no public health records. So, it is difficult to know exactly how long they're living. They tend to remember things like the season that they were born, was it wet or was it dry, those kind of things,

not the year and they're not counting the years as they go by. Did you notice a difference between how the men and women were eating by any chance? The women tended to, from what i saw were eating more tubers and berries and and these sorts of foods um but again they didn't they weren't able to actually catch anything when they went hunting so i think rather than what did i see on one day i I think Herman Ponce's research where he spent years with them looking at monthly intake is probably a more accurate reflection. So I'm sort of careful not to extrapolate too much from my experience with that.

But big picture, I guess the other question that we have to ask is, I think there's this assumption out there that whatever our ancestors ate must be best for us. Right. But I find that hard to kind of reconcile or understand that position because our ancestors had certain foods available. They're different foods to us today. And what we can say about

their diet was that whatever they were eating, they were able to get to an age to procreate, to survive. And really that's what evolution cares about. Can you get to an age to procreate so the species can continue to evolve and be sustained. It doesn't speak to whether or not that food selection is best for longevity. That's a completely different question. That's something that I think we need, you know, modern science, we need to then come back to today and say, okay, it's interesting to look at what they consumed that allowed them to procreate. We have a whole wide range of foods available to us today.

And we also have science. So we can make more informed decisions based on the different goals that we have. We're not going through life just trying to survive to the next day. You know, we're in this, I guess, relative position of privilege where we can make choices and forecast and think about our long-term health outcomes. one of my major goals for 2024 and i think for many other people too is getting in more protein and i feel like the one area that has always been a struggle for me is snacking and making sure they are high protein snacks and that's where i found chomps chomps are tasty meat sticks packed with mouthwatering flavor and only the best ingredients. There's up to 12 grams per stick without any unhealthy additives and zero grams of sugar. They are low carb, keto friendly, allergy friendly, and don't contain any fillers.

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link so they know we sent you now we can focus on optimizing and focusing on longevity and feeling the best we can into older age what would you say is the optimal amount of meat that we should be eating on a weekly basis? Specifically, I guess, red meat and how would you recommend getting protein in without having too many saturated fats? Okay. Again, remember I mentioned there's a theme of eating and you'll individualize that. So we can give some broad recommendations here but one of the things that I would be getting people to do is measure A per B. Blood tests.

I saw Gabriel Lyon who's someone that I respect and have had some dialogue with back and forth but I thought it was a little bit of a click-baity style video put up something saying red meat doesn't affect cholesterol levels. Well, this is what I'm talking about when you have these bite-sized bits of nutrition information that I think we need to be really careful about is what dose of red meat are we talking about? What type of red meat?

And if someone's not eating that, what are they eating instead? Because all of these things will determine the effect for example on apob and so how much red meat in someone's diet you know broadly speaking i think the recommendations of you know three four hundred grams of red meat you know in a week are good recommendations and i say that because when you go out and look at the research looking at cardiovascular disease and cancer for things like unprocessed red meat it's very easy to find a study to show that there is no association i can do that but you have to be very careful when you're looking at that data what are are you comparing? Because often they use the

words high and low, but that's relative. So if you're comparing 70 grams a day intake with 30, like a lot of Asian populations where they don't consume a lot of red meat, you don't see any significant difference because the contrast between high and low is actually not that large. So exposure and exposure contrast matters a lot. When you look at the US populations and you compare low, you know, 40, 50 to high, north of 100, 150 grams, now you do start to see risk because you have sufficient contrast in the exposure. So I think that's a, you know, think that's a good general recommendation is that

300, 400 grams a week, which is like what the World Health Organization and the World Cancer Research Fund recommend. But then I would go a step further and say, you need to look at your blood work. Where is ApoB at? Because if I had elevated ApoB and let's say I wanted to try lifestyle first before any type of pharmaceutical drug to lower that down, and I was eating a lot of red meat, well, I can tell you there's a bunch of peer reviewed data that's reproducible. When you swap red meat for either fatty fish or for sources of plant protein that tend to be low in saturated fat and high in fiber you do get significant reductions in apob so i'm not sure if i answered your question no you did but i'm i guess i'm also highlighting

uh how important context is yeah so when you say 300 to 400 grams, is that a steak per week? Would you say? That's a large steak, I guess. A ribeye? Yeah. Okay. I'm currently doing a lot more than that. So when you say fatty fish, are you concerned at all about heavy metals? And do heavy metals have an impact on cholesterol level i don't know the answer to that second part which i know might you know often when people say they don't know something they can come across as like a lack of confidence but i actually i went to do you know inq no he's a poet oh and he said something the other night he, we need to repopularize the idea of being able to say, I don't know. I love that. And I think we just need to know our limitations.

Yeah. Right. And so I don't know if there is an association between mercury and cholesterol levels. I'm interested in mercury exposure in fatty fish and how that could affect health outcomes. I can tell you the research that I've looked at, looking at particularly long-term cognitive health, because that's usually where fatty fish comes up, either cardiovascular health or cognitive health, long-term dementia.

Martha Morris from Rush University, she conducted a really neat study where she looked at the risk of dementia and then looked at mercury levels in the brain. And what she found was that people that consumed fish regularly had higher mercury levels, but lower risk of dementia. So what do we do with that data? Well, for me personally, I care more about the health risk of cardiovascular disease and lower risk of dementia. And then within that, sure, let's make some sensible choices and try and consume smaller fish where there's less bioaccumulation of mercury. Let's not go out of our way to have a lot of mercury in our system.

That's how I would approach that. And how do you feel about farm-raised versus wild-caught? I have mixed feelings. Everyone should read a book called Toxic by Richard Flanagan. Okay. Which is a book that kind of journals the farmed salmon industry in Tasmania, in Australia. I think there's problems with both, to be honest. Getting enough DHA and EPA,

which are these long-chain omega-3s that our body cannot make, we have to either get them directly in through our diet or supplement or consume plant fats that our body then converts. Getting enough DHA and EPA from fish globally for everyone, I don't think it's sustainable. I think that we would have just mass destruction of a very important ecosystem, which is unfortunate. So I think we have to come up with other solutions that a lot of innovative companies are kind of working on

and there are some plants that are now being grown that contain DHA in them that will be commercially available and algae oil which is like a more sustainable source than fish. Fish actually get their DHA and EPA by eating feeding on algae. So yeah back to your question I think if you are if you are consuming fish then it's like mackerel and sardines and salmon, those types of fish. I don't have a good answer as to farmed versus wild. I think both of them have problems that we need to think about. And then if you're not consuming fish regularly, and by regularly I mean two, three times a week,

then you're going to be supplementing with a fish oil or an algae oil I love fish oil I take it every day yeah we've talked a lot about meat but I kind of want to get your answer on what is your problem with the carnivore diet because it's definitely trending right now and I want to hear your thoughts. I understand why people are adopting it and are talking about it online. Elimination diets, we know that they work. We know that when you restrict a lot of foods, particularly if you have digestive issues or even autoimmune conditions that you can see an improvement in symptoms so i think that's a good thing i think that you know we all want people to succeed i'm

more worried about what are the long-term implications of that style of eating i think that if you're going to do a low carbohydratecarbohydrate, kind of high-fat, high-protein diet, you can do it in a more Mediterranean way. And so my message for people that are in that community, and I've worked with a lot of these people because they go and get their blood work and things like ApoB are sky high and they do get alarmed, is that treat it as an elimination diet.

So if you're doing it and you're feeling better, great. But somehow over time, you want to increase diversity and come back more to like those Danish dietary guidelines that I recommended, which again, you can do in a low carbohydrate way. I like that recommendation. I think the carnivore diet can be a really great tool. I personally had a pretty extreme acne journey and when it was at its worst, I decided to go pretty much carnivore

and eliminate a lot of what I was eating and it did help. Now I'm starting to have more vegetables, more potatoes again. Also, as we spoke about before, the sustainability of your diet is really important and eating in a way that you can sustain, I think is crucial. And I don't think carnivore is something that you could do for decades. I would be really curious to see Paul Saladino's like long-term health, you know, like I know he does bloat work regularly,

but I would love to see it over the years. Yeah. I mean, that's interesting. I think I always just come back to the peer-reviewed data. We have so much evidence to suggest that if you're consuming that style diet and it's very high in saturated fat and you're hugely elevating A b ldl cholesterol that you're increasing your risk of the number one cause of death and so it just doesn't seem like a sensible way of eating long term to me but that said i understand that people are suffering and they're in pain and they're getting some relief from that style of eating so i'm'm empathetic, I guess, to that person. I just, my wish for them is to continue working on it

and to try and come back to a dietary pattern that's going to, also at the same time, they're going to have that reduction in their symptoms now, but be reducing their risk of developing cancer in 20, 30 years time or having a heart attack. For someone who follows a vegan diet, what do you think is the right way to be a vegan? And the wrong way.

Yeah, let's think about some of the kind of big picture principles to begin with. So vegan can be everything from a, you know, ultra processed cookie to a bean, or sometimes I say a jelly bean to a black bean. So what the word vegan doesn't tell you anything about the quality of the diet. And we have a ton of research looking at comparing the risk of disease with healthy plant-based dietary indexes versus unhealthy plant-based diets. And you see consistently, if you're adopting a vegan or plant-based diet that is full of ultra-processed foods, you're not getting that reduction in cardiometabolic disease risk that we see with healthy whole food based

plant forward, plant based, whatever you want to call it, dietary patterns. So I think food quality is like the first thing. We're talking about an abundance of fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes, and whole grains that are making up the bulk majority of the calories in that diet. I think people need to be conscious of protein. I think one of the disservices that many people in the vegan community do is pretend that you don't need to focus at all on protein and it just takes care of itself. You need to educate yourself. What are the protein dense plant foods and optimize protein? I think most people should be getting at least 1.2 grams per kilo, but if they're an athlete or someone with performance goals, at least 1.6 grams.

So you agree that protein is important? Yeah, I think protein is really important. I think there's myopic views of protein from all corners of diet tribes. Within the vegan community, there's people that will tell you that you should just adopt a very low protein diet. I don't think that's conducive to good muscle mass and bone strength as we age. And we know that sarcopenia and frailty is a big issue. So I think that we need a higher protein intake than the rda so i disagree with those people and then there's people in the carnival community that you know are you know

promoting the superiority of animal-based protein and i think that's problematic too because yes animal protein is high quality and can help with developing muscle mass and strength but it increases risk of cardiometabolic health and when you look at plant-based protein if you're getting enough once you get to a certain level you don't see differences in strength and muscle mass. At low levels, the differences in protein quality becomes far more important. So if you're not eating enough protein, absolutely animal protein is going to be a superior source for you.

But once you get to what I would say is an optimal amount, then it doesn't matter if you're getting those amino acids, protein from plants or animal, the outcomes that we care about, muscle mass and strength are the same. The benefits that come with getting more of that plant protein is the package. That protein is coming as a package in a food matrix and those are the foods that are associated with lower risk of cardiometabolic health.

So when I think about longevity, I want to optimize for frailty and psychopenia but I want to optimize for cardiometabolic health. So when I think about longevity, I want to optimize for frailty and psychopenia, but I want to optimize for cardiometabolic health. I'm thinking about lots of kind of different factors and outcomes that we care about. And that's where I think plant protein has a kind of edge on animal protein. So I would optimize for protein.

I would be trying to make sure we're not eating a lot of these ultra-processed vegan foods. Getting enough calories if you're an athlete. Sometimes when people are moving to a more plant-based diet, there's more fiber, there's more food volume and they can under-eat and see a reduction in energy. So you need to be aware of calorie density. That's with nuts and

seeds and the more calorie dense foods can be helpful. And then certain nutrients. So if someone is adopting a completely plant exclusive vegan diet, which again, I've never said is the healthiest diet that's out there, I come back to that theme. But there are going to be people for environmental ethical reasons that want to do a vegan diet. And I want to be able to support them. What are the limitations of the diet? Let's make that clear and then people can optimize for it. And one of those limitations is there are certain nutrients that are harder to come by. Vitamin B12, you need to supplement. I think people should be supplementing iodine, 150 micrograms per day. DHA, EPA, and there's a lot of debate in the vegan community about that.

I think the data, you know, if we're going to be cautious, then I think people should be supplementing with DHA and EPA direct source, whether that is fish oil or algae oil. There are other nutrients like calcium and iron and selenium and zinc and I wouldn't give like a broad recommendation as to whether someone needs to supplement with those. It really comes down to their blood blood work and life stage so the big ones are b12 iodine dha epa making sure you're eating you know majority whole foods optimized for protein and you know ensure you're consuming enough energy to meet your body's requirements

what would you say are those optimal sources of plant protein? I actually have no idea. So tofu, tempeh, mycoprotein, seitan if someone is not gluten intolerant. What is seitan? It's made from wheat protein. Oh, okay. Yeah. There's TVP, which is very protein dense. And then lentils, beans, chickpeas, all of those foods can kind of help you get to that protein level of 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilo. And I'm not against protein powders. I think that protein powders can be a very convenient way. I don't want someone to get all of their protein across the day from protein powder. Of course, because those protein-containing foods I just mentioned

have a lot of other nutrients that we want to be exposed to. But having a 30-gram protein shake a day can be a very convenient way to help someone get to that kind of total daily protein intake that I would say is optimal. Yeah, I'm a fan of protein powders as well. I feel like it makes it easier for sure. With all the noise that's out there and all the absolutes online, what do you hope is the one thing that everyone takes away from this conversation?

Download the Danish dietary guidelines. And, you know, I think we need to come back to the importance of domain specificspecific experts in nutrition. And if you're following every man and his dog on social media who has a view about food, then your feed is going to be full of contradictory, confusing views. And some of these can seem really compelling. There was that video that I think you and I sent back and forth that Paul put up about soy. I watched a video from Paul Saladino and even I at the end of it was like,

that's a compelling story. And it literally took me two hours to dig through the literature in order to provide some type of rebuttal to that. And most people are not looking even at the studies that he cited let alone the broader body of literature right and so like one example i don't want to go into too much detail in that video is that video was about is soy feminizing for men and you know the if if soy was feminizing you would expect things like increased estrogen reduced reduced testosterone, right? The very first study that Paul cited, there was many issues with what he cited, was a rat study where he flashes it up

on the screen and I'll give this to you. I might read it out actually. Yeah. And He says these rats were fed a soy extract and it behaved like bisphenol A and reduced their hormone levels. Here's what they actually found. Animals treated with soy extract showed a decrease in circulating estradiol levels. So they had a reduction in estrogen, the opposite of what you would expect if soy had a feminizing effect. Okay. Only the animals treated with soy extract showed elevated levels of circulating testosterone.

These were male rats. So this study showed that the exposure to soy extract resulted in a reduction in estrogen and an increase in testosterone. The very study that he put forward contradicts his position that soy foods are feminizing. And then he goes on and speaks about a cross-sectional observational study, which is the weakest form of epidemiology that exists. And this is a good thing for people to look out for.

If someone's presenting information, they should be logically consistent. Paul talks a lot of the time about how bad epidemiology is and these studies showing plant-based diets reducing risk of cardiometabolic health their observational epidemiology weak science is healthy user bias but then in this instance he's flashing up a study on on soy consumption and fertility rates it was a cross-sectional study which is the weakest form of epidemiology. We're not

tracking people over time. It's one time point. It's very hard to work out the direction of a relationship between a variable and an outcome. And he flashes that up on screen. So for me, that's highlighting a logical inconsistency. When observational epidemiology doesn't support his view it's junk science but then in this case when it does support his view we're going to present it to strengthen this story or this position and above all of that is the inability to just communicate the totality of evidence. We have studies that supersede those studies that he put up, whether it's the rat study or this cross-sectional observational. We actually have a plethora of studies where you take men and feed them soy foods or soy isoflavones, which are the polyphenols that are often called phytoestrogens,

and measure over time sperm concentration, motility, all of these different sperm parameters, and sex hormones. And time and time again, you see no significant changes in any of these outcomes. So you're saying, why are we even looking at the rat studies? Why are we even looking at them in the first place? And the only conclusion that I can come to is that we're cherry picking evidence to be sensational, drive clicks and engagement. I'll read out a couple of these studies just so you know that I'm not just making this up. We can put them into the show notes. But, you know, there's, for example, there is a meta-analysis that looked at 38 clinical intervention studies were exposing men to soy foods

or soy isoflavones from anywhere from two weeks up to a year long. And they were tracking testosterone, free testosterone, sex hormone, binding globulin, estradiol 1 and estradiol 2, all these really important sex hormones and from anywhere from 239 men up to 1752 men for testosterone so a lot of a lot of subjects regardless of the statistical model no significant effects of soy protein or isoflavone intake on any of the outcomes measured were found. Sub-analysis of the data according to isoflavone dose and study duration also showed no effect. So they compared like over 75 milligrams per day exposure to soy isoflavones to under, which is kind of like comparing four or five serves of soy a day to less than that,

found no difference. This updated and expanded meta-analysis indicates that regardless of dose and study duration, neither soy protein nor isoflavone exposure affects total testosterone, free testosterone, estradiol 1 or estradiol 2 levels in men. How do they know that those men are intaking their soy every day? They measure in many of these studies, they look at the isoflavone content in the blood. Okay. So you have a biological test to kind of confirm adherence. And then, you know, on top of that, there's multiple studies that have looked at sperm quality with soy protein consumption. I have one in front of me here. Soy protein isolates a varying isoflavone content,

do not adversely affect semen quality in healthy young men. So again, Paul puts up that cross sectional fertility study that's observational. That's not a clinical intervention this is a clinical intervention where they had a group of men come in and they had them either consume a milk protein isolate a low isoflavone soy protein isolate or a high isoflavone soy protein isolate and they were consuming this for 57 days. And then you had a month off and you would swap to the other arm. So you got to do all three of those different diet interventions. So you are your own control. And they're measuring the amount of isoflavones that are in their urine. So they're able to confirm adherence. Here's their results.

Urinary isoflavones were significantly higher after consumption of the high isoflavone soy protein isolate compared with the low isoflavone soy protein isolate and milk protein isolate. That's what we'd expect, right? Semen parameters, including semen volume, sperm concentration, sperm count, sperm percent motility, total motile sperm count, and sperm morphology, were not significantly affected by consumption of either low or high isoflavone soy protein isolate compared with milk protein isolate. Can you tell when a study is funded is that public information yeah it is it's usually

towards the end of the at the end of the paper there'll be like declaration of competing interests or funding source like funded by almond milk right yeah and that doesn't mean that you immediately discard that study but you might want to look at the methodology a little bit more closely. Okay. And it's also a reason for looking at the wide body of evidence because reproducibility is really important in research. If we just have one study from the almond that's been funded by the almond industry that shows benefits of almonds for some sort of outcome,

but then there's another 15 studies that looked at the same thing and do not show that, then we have reason to pause. How often do you run into that? I mean, you can find certain studies that have been funded by an industry where it's not like it's outright fraud. Usually what happens is within the methodology, the study is designed in a way for that food to succeed. Yeah.

So what are you comparing it to? Let's compare that food to something that we know is not going to perform well. Right. Or the dose exposure, like all of those sorts of things. So it comes down to looking at their methodology. And really, unless you can find a good critique and explain why that study is flawed or biased, then I think we can't just look at a study and say, well, it's funded by industry, therefore it's biased.

Yeah. You need to have the skills. If you're going to make that claim, you need to have the skills to point out what the problem with the study is. You should sell a course on how to read studies. I would take it. Yeah, we would get super, super nerdy. Because that would be such an issue for me, I feel like, if I wanted to check myself to see if Paul or someone else's claim was true, and I pull up this crazy study, I wouldn't even know where to begin. I just have to think we have to come back to why we're listening to Paul in the first place.

You know, I don't think the answer to this is to educate every person to be able to decipher the literature. We're asking everyone to be domain-specific experts. We're not going to ask everyone to be astronomers or astrophysicists, are we? So I used to think that and I think to a degree, let's give people skills so they can be more discerning on social media. But I think at some point, we just have to acknowledge that the only way to reduce confusion is to elevate domain

specific experts, platform domain-specific experts, people that have dedicated 30, 40 years and are academics doing the research that speak with some degree of uncertainty, that don't have these deep convictions. They're open-minded. They're testing their hypotheses. Let's look to who are the scientific thinkers, elevate them. And then I think we start to crowd out those voices that are kind of cluttering, cluttering things. Yeah. Confusing the waters. Well, Simon, I really appreciate your perspective. And I'm, I greatly appreciate you coming on and essentially disagreeing with a lot of the people I've had on. I really like hearing different perspectives.

And I guess my goal is to stay curious and ask questions. And I learned a lot from you today. And I definitely have some things I need to think about and re-explore. Now it's time for the question we ask every guest. I started this podcast because I believe everyone's pursuit of wellness looks different. What does wellness mean to you? Happiness, I think, is a huge component. You know, I don't think we want to lose sight of the forest for the trees and be trying

to optimize for longevity at the expense of how we're feeling about our life and our emotional health. So I think that's where it starts. You know, if we're going to live a long life, then we want to enjoy it, right? So I think the emotional health, mental health aspect, which we haven't spoken about too much today, I think is critical. And I think being able to experience life in its entirety. You know, I have so many things that I want to do in my life, explore throughout the world with friends and family and create memories. And much of that relies upon being healthy and physically able. Yeah. I love that answer. Awesome.

Where can everyone find you online? Where can they listen to the show? So theproof.com is my website. We just launched a challenge actually. Oh. Yeah, called the Living Proof Challenge, which is a 12-week program, zero cost for people to get involved,

where we get people to test what we call the 10 truths, which are these 10 very important sort of biomarkers and lab tests and functional tests at the beginning. They'll get a longevity score. They do the 12-week program, which is pulling on the peer-reviewed literature and all of the wisdom from my guests. And then at the end, they can retest and see how they've been able to shift the needle. So they can find that on the website.

Again, that's zero cost to get involved. And then social media, Instagram is probably where I'm most active, which is at Simon Hill. Awesome. Thank you so much, Simon. Thanks, Mary. Thanks for joining us on the Pursuit of Wellness podcast.

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This show is edited by Mike Fry, and our video is recorded by Luis Vargas. You can also watch the full video of each episode on our YouTube channel at Mari Fitness. Love you, Power Girls and Power Boys. See you next time. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and does not constitute a provider patient relationship. As always, talk to your doctor or health team.