The Dr Louise Newson Podcast - 45 - Inflammation, hormones and the hidden cause of chronic disease

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

In this episode, Dr Louise Newson is joined by Professor Robert Lufkin, physician, medical school professor and author, to explore how inflammation and metabolic dysfunction lie at the heart of many of today’s chronic diseases.They discuss why conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia and mental illness are often treated as separate problems, when in reality they share the same inflammatory and metabolic origins. The conversation also looks at the central role of hormones in regulating inflammation, mitochondrial function and long-term health, and why progesterone, estradiol and testosterone may be among the most powerful disease-modifying treatments we already have.Want more from the podcast? Sign up to my premium offer: https://www.drlouisenewson.co.uk/premium-podcasts LET'S CONNECT  Subscribe here 👉 https://www.youtube.com/@menopause_doctor Website 👉 https://www.drlouisenewson.co.uk/Instagram 👉   / @drlouisenewsonpodcast  Download balance app 👉 / https://www.balance-menopause.com/balance-app/ LinkedIn 👉     / https://www.linkedin.com/in/drlouisenewson/ TikTok 👉   / https://www.tiktok.com/@drlouisenewson Spotify 👉 https://open.spotify.com/show/7dCctfyI9bODGDaFnjfKhg LEARN MORE Download my balance app 👉 https://www.balance-menopause.com/balance-app/Get tickets for my new theatre tour, Breaking the Cycle 👉 https://www.nlp-ltd.com/dr-louise-newson-breaking-the-cycle/ 

This is a great conversation with Dr. Robert Lufkin, who is a US doctor, and he's written a book about lies he learned at medical school. He talks about things he learned at medical school aren't quite what he knows now. And we know this because evidence is changing all the time, but he talks a lot about chronic diseases and the underlying cause being related to inflammation, something I'm very fond of. So thinking about how we as individuals, can reduce inflammation through our lifestyle and hormones, of course, really important.

So it's a very riveting conversation for you to enjoy and to learn from. So Rob, I've been stalking you for a little while, and I read your book quite soon after it came out. And to be honest, so many pages I've turned down and I've gone back and read and reread it. And it resonated so much with the way that my mind, my brain has changed. over the last 30 years of being a doctor. And when I came out of medical school, I thought I knew everything and I thought everything I learned at medical school would just put me in good stead until the time I retired.

And it's changed every day I learn new things from my patients and every day I learn new things from reading different articles and scientific evidence literature and reading books like this as well. So your book is called Lies. I taught in medical school how conventional medicine is making you sicker and what you can do to save your life. So it's pretty powerful cover here. So can you just explain a bit about your background and then why you wrote this book, which is a New York Times bestseller I like to add. So congratulations for that. I'm a practicing physician. I'm also a

medical school professor. So in addition to seeing patients, I also get to do research and and write papers and and also help educate healthcare professionals and learning about the world of medicine. And I've done that essentially my entire career and how I got how I got to this particular point is I was I was mining my own business as a medical school professor when I suddenly came down with four chronic diseases and I went to my doctors and, you know, they said, don't worry, here's a pill. You know, we're going to give you a pill for each one of those. So I was given four prescriptions for medications.

And I said, you know, hey, what about lifestyle? You know, I hear about that. Does that work? And they go, nah, that really doesn't work. You're going to be on these pills for the rest of your life. So get used to it. And at that point, my daughters were in elementary school, and I knew enough about chronic disease that I was, that I knew it wasn't going to end well.

And so it forced me to be. to begin to question my own beliefs, what I've been teaching, and what many of my colleagues are still teaching. And I realized there's been a revolution in our understanding about these diseases and the mechanisms for them and that lifestyle actually does matter. And I was able to make a few changes in my own lifestyle. And long story short, I went back to the doctors. They couldn't believe it. They thought the labs were broken. But they eventually took me off all mediation. medications, the diseases are reversed. And now I've made it my mission to help others take back their health and hopefully not make the same mistakes that I did. And that's why I've written

the book. It's so interesting, isn't it? Because I trained, as you know, as a general physician and I did lots of different jobs rotating through hospital specialties. So, you know, renal medicine, cardiology, respiratory, rheumatology. And it was really exciting as a junior a doctor to make a diagnosis. We'd run loads of tests with people. Scans were just sort of coming in. They were harder to get, but we were doing scans. Once we had a diagnosis, the first thing we did was think about which treatment. And it was always prescribing treatment. And in hospital, as you know, there's layers and layers of treatment. And this was, you know, in the 90s, we often didn't really involve our patients. We're just right on the drug chart. And then they would just have a, you know,

to have the drugs, they'd then go home with the drugs, the GP would carry on the prescription. And it was almost like I felt I was doing the best thing for their patient at that time. And I didn't even think about how could we even prevent that disease happening in the first place? What's making it happen? And, you know, like you over the last few decades, the incidence of chronic diseases, we've just watched getting higher. people are becoming sicker despite all these medicines, despite it being, you know, in the 21st century, I feel like we haven't really made the advances that we should have done to keep people well.

Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, you know, some of your audience may be thinking, wait a minute, you're being critical of Western medicine or, you know, allopathic medicine, but you're part of the problem, right? You were in medical school. You're teaching that. you're the problem. And my book is very critical of Western medicine. What we're talking about it is going to be critical of Western medicine. But I think it, you know, in the 20th, in the 20th century, where you and I grew up, essentially Western medicine was magical. It transformed the lives

of humanity. Truly around the world, the pills and surgeries that were developed made the world a better place. I mean, largely through public health measures, certainly. But indeed, it really transformed and elevated the life of everyone around the world. And even today, you know, if I get hit by a car, I'm going to want to have, you know, that blood transfusion. I'm going to want my, my ruptured spleen removed. I'm going to want my bone set. So Western medicine still has a role to play. But I think the problem is in the 21st century, we're now facing this literal tsunami of what you and I are talking about are chronic diseases that while they were present in the 20th century, they're now in biblical numbers, never before seen in history by some estimates occupying up to 80% of

health care resources. And, you know, this list, it's really wide range. It goes all the way from from obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and mental illness, just to name a few. And these seem like very separate diseases, but they, you know, they share a common cause. But the problem is when Western medicine takes the same pills of surgeries, hey, they work in the 20th century and applies them to these chronic diseases now. they do help in the acute case and they may be life-saving but the problem is in most cases they don't get to the root cause and these diseases continue to progress they're sort of a band-aid over the symptoms and that's and that's really the problem and that's what the book is set out to address and I think that's what you're talking about as well it's almost got worse because medicine's very siloed you know I I really trained with some amazing people to be a general physician and I had a lot of interest in all the organs whereas now it becomes everyone becomes specialised a lot younger it's a lot narrower

people think of one organ but as you know I've got a pathology degree as well and it's really interesting I love doing pathology because the study of disease makes you think in a molecular way a lot differently to the way you're trained as a medical doctor and one of the essays that I wrote for my final degree was about atheroma, so the furring of the arteries, being a pre-malignant disease, as in something associated with cancer, which people listening might think, how has arteries, you know, diseases of the lining of the blood vessels associated with cancer? And I wrote a three-hour essay on this,

and I was trying to find if I had my exam paper anywhere, because I'd love to reread it now. This was in 1992, I wrote this essay. And I loved it because I wrote a lot about inflammation, so the cause of atheroma, this furring of the arteries. And I wrote about inflammation and the cause of cancer and why cancer develops. But it's going back to the basics. And this is what your book does because it sets out all these chronic diseases like heart disease and osteoporosis and, like you say, even mental health, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. And to specialist people, they would think that.

they're all very separate conditions. But once you get down to the root cause, thinking about in a cellular level, what's going wrong in the body, it makes sense to fix that rather than wait for all the diseases to happen and then, like you say, medicalize them all. Yeah, that's such a great point.

And it was really a wake-up call for me, to realize that the same lifestyle changes that work for obesity and hypertension also work for cancer risk in Alzheimer's disease and mental illness. And it's correcting the same at the root metabolic dysfunction that drives all of these. So it's almost like one size fits all. And the other big wake recall for me was that the diseases didn't start when the doctor diagnoses them. You know, as a doctor, that's why I used to think, you know. And And our health care system is certainly set up that way.

You know, you don't have diabetes until your glucose or your human bobbin. Once she crosses a certain threshold. And then you have diabetes. And then the insurance or the payers will start to cover that disease. And, you know, before that, a week before, you didn't have it. And I now realize, at least for these chronic diseases that we're talking about, they don't begin when the doctor diagnoses, they begin actually days to weeks to decades. before the doctor diagnoses them.

And if we wait until the doctor says, oops, you know, you've got diabetes or, you know, oh, you forgot your keys, you have Alzheimer's. If we wait for the doctor to diagnose them, we'd miss a tremendous opportunity for what you mentioned was prevention. And that's why, you know, even, you know, even, yeah, I have friends who go, hey, I'm perfectly healthy. I don't have a single disease.

Well, we're all on the path to getting the diseases because the list, those chronic diseases that we're talking about, statistically, those are the diseases that you and I and most of our listeners will die of. And, you know, we all die of something, right? You know, as Jim Morrison said, nobody gets out alive. So, you know, they are in our future. But, you know, why have the heart attack at 50? Why not have it at 105? You know, why get the Alzheimer's at 60?

Why not get it at 95? you know, let's push them back as far as we can. And that's why I believe even, you know, quote unquote, healthy people should think about their lifestyle because you can do things now that will keep you healthy longer and just by doing you simple things. I totally agree. And it's so important because, you know, our healthcare system, sadly, is failing. Like a lot of healthcare systems and it's very reactive.

You know, my husband said to me, he works in the NHS and he said, we have. haven't got time to think about preventing disease. You know, we are just there to fight and help. Treat diseases. It's different for him. He's a surgeon. So obviously he can make a huge difference to people. But actually, I feel very strongly as a patient, we should be advocates for ourselves. We should be working as hard as possible to help our physicians. And the problem is, I think, the way the healthcare systems are set up, it's almost waiting for the inevitable to be happening. And then it's like, oh, it's not my fault now because I've got diabetes or hypertension or whatever. But we need to be thinking really holistically and we need to be helping as physicians, our patients to understand this because lifestyle to a lot of people seems really scary.

But actually thinking about inflammatory diets, thinking about inflammatory lifestyles, there's quite a lot we can do to change our habits quite early on, isn't it? which makes a big difference because if we can think about keeping well in our 20s and 30s, it's a lot easier to have good habits then than waiting until we're in our 50s and then suddenly realizing we have to change what we eat or stop drinking or smoking or whatever. Yeah, totally. I mean, even though I'm a doctor, one of the wake-up calls I realized was that even though I'm a doctor, I now realize that doctors really don't make us healthy, right? It's not a health care system.

It's a sick care system because for the most part, doctors are too busy dealing with disease and illnesses, you know, like your husband, the surgeon. He's busy operating on things and taking care of diseases. But if I want to be healthy, the doctor's not going to do it for me. Doctors can't make me healthy. Doctors just make me less sick. And if I want to be healthy, me, I as a patient, that's on me. And that's, that's, no doctor can, can do lifestyle for me. That's a choice, you know, I make every day when I get up, when I eat, you know, when I'm going to exercise, when I go to the gym, all those things.

And, but it's really empowering for the patient too as well, I think. Absolutely. And I can see that with younger generations, actually. My oldest daughters are 22 and 21 and they go and exercise far more than I did as a medical student. They don't smoke. They, one of them doesn't drink at all. The other one doesn't drink that much. And, you know, they're constantly looking things.

But my oldest daughter has really bad chronic migraine. And she's been under so many different neurologists. And we've seen so many different consultants. And she's a trombone player. So she was getting reflux as well. So she saw a gastroenterologist who gave a medication. Her neurologist wanted to give us some medication with lots of side effects for her migraines. And then she saw a respiratory person who wanted to give her other medication for her lungs.

and, you know, now she's not on any medication because she's changed a lot with her lifestyle and various other supplements and various other things that she does. But it would have been very easy for her, like you say, to be medicalised on a PPI, you know, a proton pump inhibitor to stop reflux. The gastroenterologist said when she was 20, that's fine, she can be on it for life. And I sat there like thinking, oh my goodness, I wouldn't want really my children to be on something for life unless they really needed it. It just felt like a bit of a crutch almost. And, you know, looking at her gut microbiome, looking at, you know, what she eats, all sorts of

things, her posture, her exercise, her mental health. All of those things are so important. But it's a lot quicker, isn't it? You can get through loads of patients if you're just giving them all medication. Yeah. I mean, and it's not all the fault of the system or, you know, the fault of doctors. I mean, the system is built into doing it the way it is. But I think part of it is patients have some responsibility for it because I know as a patient, you know, I'm basically lazy. You know, I would much rather if I have a symptom, all things being equal, assuming that they're equal, I would much rather get a pill that I only have to take, you know, once a day or even a surgery that, you know, I take a week off from work and then I'm back to normal. I'd rather do that than get

about how I have to change my lifestyle and actually change who I am at the root cause. And, you know, no question. Everyone would rather have the pill or the surgery. But the problem is it's a false equivalency. In other words, in most cases, the pills and surgery are not as good as the lifestyle changes. And, you know, like with type 2 diabetes, you can you can go on, you know, insulin and metformin and these things and you you won't die of hyperglycemia, but your diabetes becomes a chronic progressive disease going on to, you know, amputation, blindness, renal failure. But when you

reverse it with lifestyle, the disease stops. Essentially, it goes intermission and it's no longer a chronic progressive disease. So it's not really a fair equivalency. And I don't think that's being presented to patients nearly enough. Starting in April this year, I'm going back on tour across the UK with a brand new show, Breaking the Cycle, The Power of Hormones. I'll be visiting 45 venues and my aim is to challenge what we've been told about hormones, to unpick the science that's often overlooked and to explore why there's still so much confusion and misinformation, particularly around hormone health.

Our hormones influence everything, our mood, our sleep, our metabolism and our future health. Every single cell in our bodies is impacted by hormones. Yet so many people are still left without clear answers. So in this show, I'll be sharing research, some history, the real stories and some very uncomfortable truths. There will be moments that surprise and maybe shock you and plenty of opportunities to reflect and ask me questions.

So if you want to learn, feel empowered and be part of a moment. movement that's changing how we think about hormones, I'd love to see you there. You can buy tickets through the link in the show notes. Every medication has a side effect, it has a risk. And I didn't really think so much about those when I was younger. You know, I've prescribed a lot of antidepressants, for example, but we know they're associated with osteoporosis, increased incidence of dementia, you know, and side effects. People often have side effects with them. And I'm not saying they're wrong. For some people, they are really important, but to be just handed them out as readily as possible and looking at some of the figures for the amount of medical or medical treatments that

are prescribed for chronic diseases in your country, in the US, but also in the UK, we're catching up. So by the time we're in our 60s and 70s, many people are on six, seven different medications and like you say, they'll be on them forever, won't they? Yeah, yeah. That's definitely a thing. I mean, the numbers are just staggering. I mean, in the United States, most people are overweight or obese. Most people have hypertension or are being treated for hypertension. Most adults, when I say people, I mean adults. But children are affected too. One third of adolescents in our country now have diabetes or prediabetes. And, you know, it goes on and on. These chronic diseases are affecting everyone up to where 90% of adults in America, America have at least one symptom of metabolic dysfunction. And as you say, you know, most people take many, many pills for many of these conditions. One of the things that I obviously spend a lot of my time thinking about is natural hormones. And, you know, we know that Easter dial, progesterone,

testosterone, for men and women work on the inflammatory cells. They help reduce inflammation. they help mitochondria to work and function properly. They are really important actually in improving metabolism. We know that people that have replacement hormones have a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, dementia, depression, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. The list goes on and on. And it's, you know, if it was a new drug that was a public health medicine that I had just said, look Rob I've got all I've got this one treatment that we can give to people or three because there's three hormones but even if you look at estradiol and then testosterone for men to make it even simpler it has all these disease modifying effects but most people can't access it because it's cheap it's not pharma it's not patented you know so there's a big resistance globally for people to have hormones back although we've got

good evidence how important they are to reduce incidence of inflammatory disease. Yeah, that's such an important area. I couldn't agree with you more, Louise, on that. Yeah, absolutely. But I think this is where my work, your work, to educate people as in patients, but also healthcare professionals is really important. And I think as a healthcare professional, you want to keep that professional curiosity. And somehow that seems to have gone in some people. I feel like often people are on a bit of a treadmill and they do something because they've always done it because they've been told that it's the right thing to do. And I'm very challenging because I like to challenge myself, but I think it's a good thing to challenge guidelines, challenge scientific literature, challenge what others have done.

Because we're learning and changing all the time. And I feel sad that some doctors, clinicians have sort of stuck in a rut. They don't want to be challenged or think differently somehow. Yeah, and I would suggest those challenges are becoming even greater now. As we, you know, as we accelerate into the age of artificial intelligence, we're now having science being developed by artificial intelligence so that the pace of discovery is increasing. I'm certainly feeling it. And each week there's new information.

And some optimists are even saying that we're accelerating so fast that within the next 10 years, we'll have as many scientific discoveries in the next 10 years as in the last 100 years. And it's really a unique time in human history where with artificial intelligence and quantum computing, we're approaching a singularity in many ways, as many authors talk about. It's interesting, isn't it? Because on one hand, we're really advancing and it's wonderful. But the other hand, I look back to when I was growing up in the 1970s, and people weren't overweight, people weren't obese, people were healthy.

You know, they weren't all going to the gyms like people do now, but they were doing a lot more physical exercise just day-to-day with gardening and being outside and walking. and whatever. And I look back and think, what a shame, because they had, they got it right, really. They didn't have these inflammatory diets. They didn't have all the drugs because they weren't all available then. So something has really changed over the last 30, 40 years.

And it was quite a simplistic life back then. Yeah, yeah. And it's fascinating to speculate. I mean, nobody really knows the answer. But you can, as you say, you can plot the graph of obesity. you can plot the graph of diabetes and these other chronic diseases. And going back to the 80s and 90s, there's a hockey stick kind of, you know, sharp uptake in these diseases.

Fatty liver disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease didn't exist before the 1980s. Now in the United States, it's a number one cause of liver failure, liver transplants and all. And, you know, it has nothing to do with alcohol. It's fructose, you know. But overall, there, you know, there's so many. so many possibilities of what this this could be. You know, certainly the lifestyle factors that you and I talk about are, you know, first and

foremost there, but, you know, many people are, you know, suggesting all kinds of different things. But hopefully, hopefully the challenge, you know, as we get this unprecedented intellectual power with AI and other things, we'll begin to see these trends reverse. And it's really, it's remarkable. of the trends has actually begun to reverse in the United States. The obesity trend that took off in the, you know, in the 80s and 90s going straight up essentially like that for the first time in 30 years is now showing evidence of leveling out. There's a report in the Journal

America Medical Association and a couple other metrics that show, at least in America, the number of people that are overweight and obese is beginning to actually not slow down, but actually decrease. And, you know, a lot of people are attributing that to the GLP1 agonist, which is probably true, you know, but it's interesting to see these effects, whatever they are, we're at least beginning to see some change. Which is wonderful. So there's a lot more we need to do.

Before I end the podcast, I always ask for three take-home tips. I want to ask you three things that you think will make the biggest difference to the future generation of doctors. Because as doctors, we do have a responsibility for our patients, their families, and so forth. So what three things do you think are so important for the new generation of doctors to learn? First of all, to embrace an understanding of metabolic health and these group causes might. mitochondrial health. You know, we're talking about doing mitochondrial transplants now, you know, who knew, you know, for longevity and stuff, embracing metabolic health and understanding that embracing lifestyle and, you know, what patients can do as far as prevention and, and really

becoming aware of that and, you know, and accepting that knowledge is changing rapidly and whatever we know today, whatever we believe to be true today, you know, a large, percentage of that is going to be proven wrong just because our models of the world are getting, you know, are continually improving. One last chip, not only for medical students, but for everybody, especially people as they get older and older, is to lift weights. It's something I never, I never even thought of. I never considered. It wasn't a part of medical school unless you were an orthopedic surgeon nobody lived at weights but I think now you know everybody should do it it's the it's the secret longevity trick if our nursing homes had weight rooms

there'd be a lot fewer people in nursing homes you know yeah it's a great tip I do a lot of yoga but I have been starting to do weights as well just to join in so it's so important but thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and wisdom it's been great thanks Rob thanks so much Lee's, I appreciate it. It's been a wonderful conversation.