The Rich Roll Podcast - Simon Hill On Proving Plant-Based Diet Positives

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

Beyond politics and religion, few topics are more hotly debated than nutrition. But when we consider the totality of health—not just human health, but planetary, ecosystem, soil, and animal well-being—the science is irrefutable: a diet that is as plant-exclusive as possible is best. Nonetheless, misinformation fueled by emotions and ideological tribalism persists. Confusion propagates. Thus the average well-intentioned person remains stuck in unhealthy lifestyle habits that tragically lead to avoidable ailments and disease. Meanwhile, the planet suffers. To help us parse facts from fiction and guide us towards an evidence-based, rational model for nutritional health and well-being, today we convene with my friend Simon Hill. The host of the fantastic Plant Proof Podcast and blog of the same name, Simon plies his master’s degree in nutrition to objectively decipher scientific literature to deliver clear and actionable tools to help people make diet and lifestyle choices that actually promote optimal health and longevity. The culmination of Simon’s obsession with nutritional science is The Proof Is In The Plants,the ultimate evidence-based primer on the positive impact of a plant-based diet on human and planetary health—and an essential must-read for any and all interested in grounded nutrition science. Today we hit all the hot topics: tribal diet wars, what the science says and what it doesn’t, the environmental implications of our food choices, the truth about saturated fat, cholesterol, and oil. Not to mention the key things you can and should be doing to perform at your peak, sidestep disease, promote longevity, and live both optimally and consciously. To read more click here. You can also watch listen to our exchange on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. For so many reasons, Simon is the health and nutrition resource we need right now—and this one is packed with crucial, perhaps life-saving information. Break out pen and paper—you’re going to want to take notes. Final Note: Simon was kind enough to provide comprehensive evidentiary support for his many statement throughout the podcast. For those that desire to to dig deeper into the science, click the ‘References’ tab on this episode's web page here. Peace + Plants, Rich

The sort of general school of thought is that you get your protein from animal foods and that plants are missing protein. And that's not true. All plants contain all nine essential amino acids. I'm big on diet quality being more important than focusing too much on the macronutrients. The macronutrients can be important if you have a very specific goal. macronutrients. The macronutrients can be important if you have a very specific goal, but I think what's more important first is the quality of those macronutrients, the quality of the fat, the quality of the carbohydrates. It's less jelly beans, more black beans. In terms of strength and building muscle, this is a really interesting area.

And there's a lot of emerging science here. And I'm starting to see nutrition scientists in this space who have been very adamant that animal protein is king, starting to change their tune a bit. And I don't think it's all sort of said and done, but there is some early clues that you can still get the same benefits in terms of strength and hypertrophy from consuming plant protein. The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Very few topics are more hotly debated than nutrition. It truly is right up there with politics and religion.

But the irony is that the hard science, which we're going to get into today in depth is actually pretty clear. Nonetheless, misinformation persists, fueled by emotions, by ideological tribalism, in a manner that propagates not only confusion, but paralysis, keeping the average well-intentioned person stuck in unhealthy lifestyle habits that often, and quite tragically, lead to avoidable ailments and disease. To help us parse fact from fiction and guide us towards a reasoned, rational model for nutritional health and well-being, today we convene with my friend Simon Hill. Simon is the host of the fantastic Plant Proof podcast and blog of the same name, both incredible resources. And he plies his master's degree in nutrition

to objectively decipher the scientific literature to help people make better diet and lifestyle choices to promote optimal health and longevity. Simon is also the plant-based food contributor to Chris Hemsworth's Fitness App Center. He owns the best plant-based restaurant in sydney australia eden which is a must if you find yourself in bondi beach and he is the author of a fantastic new book the proof is in the plants which no hyperbole is the ultimate essential evidence-based primer on the positive impact of a plant-based diet on human and planetary health.

A few more important items to mention before we get into it, but first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care,

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Okay, Simon, Simon Hill. So Simon's basic thesis is that when we consider all facets of health, human health, of course, but also planetary health, soil health, ecosystem health, animal welfare, that the argument for a diet that is as plant exclusive as possible becomes irrefutable. Today, we hit all the hot topics, tribal diet wars, Today, we hit all the hot topics, tribal diet wars, what the science says, what it doesn't, the environmental implications of our food choices, the truth about saturated fat,

cholesterol, and seed oils. And of course, the key things you can and should be doing now to perform at your peak, sidestep disease, promote longevity, and live both optimally and consciously. For so many reasons, Simon is the health and nutrition resource we need right now. And this one is packed with crucial, perhaps even life-saving information, including links provided by Simon to all studies that he references throughout the conversation, which you can find in the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. So, breakout pen and paper and enjoy my conversation with Simon Hill. Mate, how long have we talked about doing this?

It's been a long time. It has been a long time. Years, in fact. I know. I was in Australia. I was tempted to do it with you then. I've been on your show a bunch of times. We've been friends for a couple of years at this point. I think I reached out to you to do this earlier,

but you kind of wanted to sit on it until your book was coming out. So we waited, here we are, you're in Los Angeles. Good to see you, my friend. Thank you, likewise. It's bloody awesome to be here, you're in Los Angeles. Good to see you, my friend. Thank you, likewise. It's bloody awesome to be here, let me tell you that. It's been a long time coming, you're right. But I think it's nice timing with the book coming out.

Yeah, absolutely, man. And I'm excited to get into the book and everything like that, but just sort of a prefatory way of contextualizing this. The thing that I, besides our this, the thing that I, you know, besides our friendship, the thing that I really appreciate about you the most is your very kind of grounded, rational, non-absolutist approach to nutrition.

Everything that you talk about and advocate is objective. It's evidence-based. You're not driven by ideology. You're calm in your delivery. You have experience in education and nutrition. You're not hyperbolic. And your analysis of nutrition science is always deeply rooted in the studies.

And your advocacy is oriented around actionable, doable changes that people can make. And you deliver all of this in a nonjudgmental and very even keeled approach, which I think is something that we not only need right now, but I think we're thirsting for in a kind of social media landscape at least that tilts towards extremism and hyperbolic narratives.

Yeah, well, that means a lot to me because, you know, I think I pride myself on trying to communicate the science as objectively as possible. And I'm a big believer in science and how science can help us better understand the world and better navigate it and improve our lives. But you're right, I think a lot of the nuanced conversation has been lost. And some of that is a result of social media and the algorithms that are at play.

And the absolute message is often, you know, favored from an engagement point of view. It will reinforce one's identity and at the same time, perhaps challenge and trigger the other side's identity and at the same time perhaps challenge and trigger the other sides identity which is the ultimate results if you're looking to create engagement and excitement so you know I've ever since I was a little kid I have had a deep appreciation for science and being able to use it as a tool to help reduce the amount of uncertainty.

And that's what science is. It's using a method to test our intuition, our hypotheses and to reduce that uncertainty so we can make decisions with more confidence. And so my approach with nutrition science has always been to let the science do the talking and be led by the data, be open to changing your mind. And a lot of that I've really learned from my dad.

Yeah, your dad was a scientist, a medical doctor. Yeah, and you have this kind of evolution story of how you got into nutrition science that really begins with a health crisis that was faced by your dad. Yeah, when I was maybe three or four years old, that's sort of as far back as my memory goes, maybe five, as early as I can recall,

I would be surrounded by scientific papers. My dad would print these things out and they would fill up the coffee table. And if he picked me up from school, I'd have to lift them up off the car seat just to get into the car and they'd always be highlighted. And I couldn't make much sense of them, but I could see how important science was to my dad

and the work that he was doing. He got his PhD in Texas. So we moved as a family to Texas where he did his PhD in physiology and has gone on since then to have 30 or 40 years of academic research as a professor and publishing in circulation and metabolism, leading journals and a very well-respected professor in his field of physiology, which is looking right under a microscope

at the micro level mechanisms, deep science, much deeper than what I do. I tend to zoom out and think about what's the big picture? What does this mean to you and I? How can we make better decisions and be healthier? And how can we consider the world around us? But his research, equally as important, understanding the mechanisms that are at play

has been dedicated to looking at how our arteries function and dysfunction and what happens when you develop type two diabetes and cardiovascular disease. And this is somewhat ironic because you're right, I did experience for the first time what loss of health looks like. And on weekends, my dad and my brother,

you've met my brother a couple of years ago here in LA, James. And he's actually the one that introduced me to your show originally. On weekends, when we had moved back to Australia, so when I was about 10 years old and my dad had finished his PhD and was working as an assistant professor in America, we moved back to Australia.

And on weekends, we would go and explore an area called the Yarra Valley. And it's a beautiful wine district in Victoria, rolling hills, incredible scenery. And we would go and visit little wineries. My dad always liked to choose the small ones. And if you went to these more boutique wineries, and this wasn't about the alcohol,

it was about the experience. And you could speak to the winemaker usually. And you could see their passion they had for what they were doing. And so we would have a lot of fun together exploring these areas. And on this one particular day, and it was just my dad and I,

we had a fantastic day out together. And my dad had an MGB convertible. I can remember these days vividly. My dad had an MG Midget. Yeah. So I know the vibe. Great cars and the roof would come down and we would play classics like U2 and Rolling Stones and Cat Stevens and all that sort of stuff.

And I think a lot of people listening perhaps can relate to that perhaps with experiences with their parents or uncle or someone in their life. Those days you look back on 20, 30 years ago and with very sort of fond memories. These were those days for me. And on this one day in particular, as we're driving home, it's dusk, I could see that my dad was uncomfortable and he was slightly grimacing and he was also rubbing his chest.

And I asked him if everything was okay and he said he was feeling some chest pain but downplayed it and we continued to go home and cook dinner and I remember checking in again and he said that everything was fine. So we had dinner and thinking nothing of it, I went off to bed. And a short while afterwards, I woke to some noise in the kitchen. And I thought, well, thinking about what had happened, I better go and check if he's okay. And when I went out, I could see he was making his way to the phone.

He had the phone in his hand by that stage and he was on his knees. At this stage, this was, Rich, the first time that I've ever seen my dad with so much fear in his eyes. It was a point now that he could no longer deny what was happening and he was pale, he was out of breath. And it was very obvious that he was struggling.

And so I actually spoke with the lady on the other end of the line. He'd called triple zero, which is like calling 911 here. And I was explaining what was happening. And all of this was happening super quickly. And I was 15 at the time, my dad was 41. This was out of nowhere. And at the time my dad was 41. This was out of nowhere.

He was not reliant on the healthcare system. He had no medical diagnosis. He was not taking any medications. He was living the standard Australian lifestyle. And if you looked at my dad at that stage, you would not look at him and say he is particularly unhealthy. He was in decent shape and would exercise

and for all intents and purposes was just representative of a young Australian dad. Right, and studying vascular physiology at the time. Right, so many years later and now a better understanding what happened and the disease at play, which I'll go into. You know, it's become clear to me that my dad knew exactly what was happening at the time. And I think this denial is quite common, particularly in males that are experiencing poor health. And perhaps if you deny what you're feeling, it will go away. Right. particularly in males that are experiencing poor health.

And perhaps if you deny what you're feeling, it will go away. Right. I'm not sure it works like that. Yeah, I have some familiarity with that. Yeah, so the lady on the other end of the line after me explaining what was happening said, we need to send a helicopter.

And so where we were at that point in time, my dad had a place in King Lake. So my parents were separated when we moved back, they got divorced. When we moved back to Australia and my mom and my brother and I, we were actually living in Melbourne and then we would spend weekends with dad. So they said, we need to send a helicopter.

King Lake is quite remote. It was like this mud brick house in the middle of nowhere. My dad's always loved being out in the middle of nowhere. And then anyway, it was a long way from the nearest hospital. So they did, they sent a helicopter and it came so quickly and they rushed in and scooped him up, put him onto a stretcher and put him on oxygen and were checking his vital signs.

And before I knew it, he was in the helicopter and it was flying off and I couldn't fit in the helicopter. So they said to me, I could follow in a car, in an ambulance to the hospital. And by that time, I called my mother and my brother and said, you probably should come to the hospital. This is what's happening. I don't know what the outcome is here.

We really don't know the specifics, but dad's not in a good way. And that car ride to the hospital, it felt like it took forever. And we got to the hospital and we waited and waited. And then the doctor came out and said to us, we've saved your father's life. He's had a severe heart attack,

which of course that was, the fact they saved his life was what we were most concerned about then and there. But we were very shocked that at 41, this had come out of nowhere. And the next day there was a family meeting, as there often is, it's a bit of a debrief. What's happened?

What's the prognosis, et cetera. And so we met with the cardiologist and he had taken my dad's history and it was quite clear that cardiovascular disease did, does run in my family. And my grandfather had had a heart attack at about age 61, I believe. My grandmother, so my dad's, that was my dad's dad, my dad's mom, my grandmother, she had vascular dementia.

And so the cardiologist said to my brother and I, my brother was 18, I was 15. He said that cardiovascular disease runs in families. Clearly it's running in yours. And this will be something that you need to be screened for as you get older. And looking back on that today, that is great advice.

But the conversation ended there. And- Yeah, it lacks any sense of agency. This is a predestined thing. This is genetically motivated and you're gonna have to contend with it at some point. But, and that's very much of that time as well, right? Like we know a lot more now about how we can intervene

and make these lifestyle choices. But, you know, I was told the same thing. My grandfather died early. Like I know that whole drill and what it leaves you with, and you tell me how you felt was this, you know, sense that there really isn't much you can do about it. Yeah, you've been dealt a bad card. So, I mean, that is how I felt

and my brother felt for many years was that, what's to say we're not going to follow in my dad's footsteps. He was living a typical Australian lifestyle. He wasn't from the outside unhealthy and this has happened to him. So why will it be any different for us? Right.

If you do the same thing as everyone around you, how can you expect different results? Right. So it's disempowering when you get that news and you put your health down to purely to genetics. Yeah. And it was many years later that I would come to learn that while genetics do create predispositions

and can increase your likelihood of developing a certain disease, your lifestyle and the way that you're navigating your life has a lot more say. And there are a bunch of studies looking at identical twins, for example, exact same genes, different environments growing up, nature versus nurture, what happens? And these studies have been able to tease out

what is the impact of genetics versus lifestyle and broadly speaking, and of course, this is different depending on the type of genes that someone has, but broadly speaking, if we're thinking about these big chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease, type two diabetes, fatty liver disease, even Alzheimer's, dementia, broadly speaking,

your genes are controlling about 20% of your health fate. And that means that your environment and your lifestyle is controlling 80%, it's four times more powerful. And so, of course, when you come across that information, then the game changes, the narrative flips from being disempowered to being incredibly empowered. Yeah, so it was your brother, correct me if I'm wrong, who was the first instigator

in terms of getting you interested in nutrition. You've done your research. A little bit. I know you too, so it's not like. I didn't expect any less. Yeah, so, you know, finishing, when I finished high school, I actually wanted to become a doctor and I got really, really strong grades at school,

but not quite strong enough to get into medicine in Melbourne. And so I was accepted to do medicine, but in Tasmania. And I wasn't quite prepared to make the move down to Tasmania and give up my friendships and give up playing football. And so I made the decision to stick around and I did physiotherapy instead in Melbourne. And the reason I tell you this is because I was very much indoctrinated

and I was surrounded by this fitness culture. I was working in football club environments and these are environments where animal protein is king. And so there was a Christmas where my brother was coming up to stay with me and with his fiance at the time, Lauren, who's now his wife. And he called me up and he said, we've been reading and listening to a few things,

probably your podcast and probably some of Dan Buettner's work, I believe. And he had come across some information to suggest that there were populations that were not experiencing the same levels, the same degree of cardiovascular disease that our societies experience. And of course, thinking back to our dad's history

and grandfather's history, that was meaningful information for my brother to come across and enough for him to want to explore. And he's from a business background. So it was not something that was inspiring him to get deep into the science or the weeds with. He felt that the information was of high enough quality to act on. And he called me to say, Lauren and I have changed the way we're eating a bit. And it was a bit of a heads up.

They were coming to stay with me and I was going to do some grocery shopping of course and take them out for dinner. And he said, we're no longer eating red meat and chicken. We've adopted a pescatarian diet. I think this might've been like my introduction to dietary labels. Before then, I hadn't given a whole lot of thought

to all the different dietary labels that exist or the dietary wars. I was just doing what I knew. And I said to him, well, that's cool. I eat fish and we can make that work and I'm sure we can find restaurants that will cater for that. And that was a few months before him coming up

and then about a week before he came up, he called me up again and he said, yeah, we've changed our diet a little more. The volume's getting turned up. Yeah, and I thought, okay. I thought maybe he'd reverted. And he said, well, we've decided to remove the fish. And I was thinking, what the fuck is left?

How long ago was this? This is is 2014 15 yeah not that long ago yeah 2014 15 uh and so i said to him i said look well i'm definitely going to need some help with regards to knowing what to buy and and certainly with restaurants. I had no business in choosing the restaurants that would be catering for vegan meals. To be honest, I had never really considered a diet without animal products. And he came up and both he and Lauren are great cooks

and particularly Lauren. And so they did a lot of cooking and we went out to some restaurants and the feeling that I was left with at the end of those two weeks was not any pressure from them. They weren't asking me to consider how I was eating. We just had a great two weeks together

and the food was delicious. And so the feeling that I was left with was, well, if my brother's right and there is some information out there that suggests you can change the way you're eating and reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease. And I know that I don't have to sacrifice on flavor and joy and the experience,

then this is something that I should be looking into. Right, but for those that aren't watching on YouTube and are just listening, what you might not know is that, Simon is a physical specimen. Like you're a buffed, big, strong guy. And you're working with Australian rules football guys at the time, like your focus is on performance

and strength and agility and all of these things, right? So how does that information mesh with everything that you knew up to that point and were interested in? Because yes, oh, I feel good and this tastes good, but how is this going to fuel me and keep me in the physical condition to which I'm accustomed? So I had that fear completely. I think for the first step for me was first looking at the information and science

around chronic disease. And then when I had unearthed information there and it became clear to me that there was a way to eat to reduce your risk of chronic disease, the next step was, am I going to have to sacrifice the physical performance, athletic pursuits? Am I going to be able to maintain, improve strength, et cetera? So the first step, Rich, for me from after that was, I was trained in physiotherapy initially.

You gotta remember at this time, I actually hadn't done my master's in nutrition science. That's been done in the last seven years. So when my brother came and stayed with me and inspired me to think about this, I had no formal training in nutrition. I had done an undergraduate degree in physiotherapy, which is a four year sort of bachelor in science.

So you cover a lot of physiology and anatomy. And I did an honors year where I wrote my own thesis, performed a review, conducted my own study and wrote it up. So I understood how to look at research and analyze it, albeit from a different lens, a different area of science. So the first step for me was to try and get into the literature and see if what my brother was telling me was true or not. And I quite often say, I wanted to prove him wrong. I was healthy, I wasn't having any health issues i was strong i was fit everything about my diet seemed to be working for me not against me and as i was getting into the research initially

what i realized was how many polarizing views there are and how confusing it is and tribal. And one moment I thought I understood something, then I'd see the exact opposite. Right. And that's what inspired me to go and do the master's in nutrition science because I realized even though I had training at an undergraduate level in science,

I was not equipped with the skills to make full sense of it and to really decode it. And so it was back to university and to really focus in on the research-based side of things and then get right down into the weeds of the nutrition science to try and understand exactly what an optimal diet looks like. Right, so you get your master's in nutrition science. There's a whole like sort of backstory or backdrop here,

this entrepreneurial journey that you've been on. That's almost its own podcast. We can maybe revisit that in a little bit, but you emerge from that experience. You become steeped in the science. You have this kind of urgent call to advocacy that leads you to create plantproof.com and the Plant Proof Podcast and the latest iteration

now being this new book, the proof is in the plants. But walk me through how you arrived at a certain kind of global thesis around nutrition and perhaps state that case. So I guess the thesis to start here with the thesis and then I can go into how I came to that and how I look at science in general. The thesis is that there is a set of characteristics or a theme that define an optimal diet. And rather than one particular dietary brand being absolutely proven by science as the most optimal. And this theme is that,

diets that are low in saturated fat that provide good amounts of unsaturated fat that are rich in fiber, that have a good amount of plant protein and a low in ultra processed foods, time and time again, lead to good health outcomes. These are the people that are experiencing less cardiovascular disease,

less likelihood of having a heart attack or a stroke, less risk of developing type two diabetes, less risk of fatty liver disease, less risk of various cancers and less risk of neurodegenerative diseases. And the cool thing, I guess about that theme is that there are many variations of that. That could be a really thoughtfully constructed

Mediterranean diet, Mediterranean diet as described by Ancel Keys who was a very prominent scientist in the mid-1900s. He described that as a largely vegetarian diet. It does include some animal products, but they're not as emphasized as a standard Western diet today. It could be a really well-done pescatarian diet. It could be a really well well done vegetarian diet. It could be a completely plant exclusive, whole food plant-based diet. And so it means that there are lots of ways to sort of eat your way to good health.

And that's a sort of less absolute message and perhaps not as sexy. Yeah, that makes it difficult. You can't come up with a label for this or some kind of contrite specific drilled down term that allows it to trend on Twitter and create a simplified idea that can get lodged in someone's brain.

But that's science. That's science. And the way I like to kind of describe this to people is that any of those diets, if you compare them to a standard diet, and there are a bunch of studies that have done those, you'll see significant risk reductions for various diseases. But if you were to run,

let's say a randomized controlled trial from birth and just include those dietary patterns that I just mentioned, which are all sort of very thoughtfully constructed diets, and you were to follow those people across their lifespan, you're unlikely to see any difference in outcomes because all of those diets are so vastly, so significantly different to the standard Western diet, which is the diet that is provoking disease the most. And so how do I look at science

and sort of come to that conclusion? A few different principles kind of guide the work, I guess that I do. And when you understand these principles, it also makes social media and the headlines a little frustrating. But I guess firstly, not all science is equal. Right, so we could talk about the hierarchy of science.

We hear terms like randomized controlled trials, population studies, epidemiological studies, all of that. And perhaps we have some familiarity with what those mean, but walk us through that hierarchy and how we parse fact from fiction when it comes to evaluating the multitude of studies that are out there, among which you can always find, you can find a study or cherry pick this or that

that's going to affirm your thesis. So yeah, the evidence hierarchy allows us to kind of add weight to certain evidence based on how reliable and valid it is. And at the very bottom, which is the sort of least reliable and least valid evidence, is expert opinion. That's if I just say something without a citation, someone, a professor or a doctor just says something,

that's considered very weak evidence. Just above that is laboratory studies. These are in vitro studies, looking at cells under a microscope or animal studies. And it's not to say that this science is not important. It can be an important part of piecing together the puzzle, but it's hypothesis generating. Right, the idea that a certain metabolic pathway

in a mouse that you could extrapolate to how that applies to human health is tenuous at best. Yeah, and we see time and time again, lectins or soy and a lot of people generating fear about these and they are arriving at that conclusion based on this sort of in vitro animal-based study and overlooking the human health outcome data, which really is a more valid source of information for public health recommendations. It's interesting to see what happens in a cell or in an animal, but we also then have to zoom out and see what happens in a human.

And also you can fall into some traps with research in an animal or in vitro where the exposure level is very important. You can, for example, you could, if you're looking at phytoestrogens in soy, for example, you could look in an animal model and show estrogenic effects. And then perhaps that could get you worried about the development of hormone-dependent cancers like prostate and breast cancer.

But what a lot of those studies have looked at, if you were to look at the exposure level on a grams of those phytoestrogens per kilogram of body mass or pound of body mass, what you would see is that the exposure level in that rat is magnitudes higher than the exposure level that any human would ever be exposed to through eating soy or tempeh, et cetera.

So not only is physiology different at the animal level between an animal and a human, but also sometimes exposure can be significantly different. So that's, I guess, the sort of level above expert opinion. And I think something else that is probably useful here is, Fleming discovered penicillin. And I think that was back in 1936 or something. Yeah, mid thirties.

Yeah, and he discovered that through, started in a Petri dish that he'd left out. And he saw that this mold was destroying the bacterial cells and then by studying the mold, he was able to isolate penicillin. And then he was able to use penicillin effectively in rats as an antibiotic and then was able to do it again in humans. And that kind of progression,

that progression is actually very rare. You might have 150,000 discoveries in a rat that don't play out in a human for every one that does. So, we hear of these success stories like Fleming and penicillin and we think, well, the animal model is a great model, it's sound, but what we don't hear of is how often it fails. So, I think it's just an important reminder

that it is a hypothesis generating level of science. And really we shouldn't be making public health recommendations from that level of science alone, unless there is zero human outcome data and you want to take a sort of precautionary stance, right? So then the rung above that is observational science epidemiology and there are a bunch of different types of observational study designs but the the key point here is you're looking at humans that live in a population and you're observing the way they live in the case of nutrition you're looking at what they eat or don't eat and you're observing the way they live. In the case of nutrition, you're looking at what they eat or don't eat and you're looking at specific health outcomes. And you're trying to

see if you can find any sort of tight associations. These people that are eating more of this end up having a higher risk of this. For example, people that are eating more ultra processed meats have around 18% higher risk of colorectal cancer per 50 grams consumed per day. And it's not a perfect science, but no science is. And I think often observational science gets slammed by certain folks out there. And one of the common sort of criticisms is that there is a healthy user effect.

And that is that if you're looking at populations of people who are eating more fruits and vegetables. And you're looking at health outcomes, be it cancer or cardiovascular disease. Perhaps it's not the fact that they're eating fruits and vegetables, but that that's a sign that they live a healthy life. Sure, there's all these co-founding variables and the Achilles heel being that when you're in this observational modality, you can't control for any

of those variables. People are just living their lives. So there's also the risk of rife misreporting as well. Cause it's based on people reporting what they're eating and how they're living on some level, right? So, you know, are people actually writing down what they're really doing or are they writing down what they think you wanna hear? There's room for all kinds of error,

but at the same time, if you're taking massive populations of people, you can extrapolate from that some general trends and there is some level of reliability with what you're observing. It's just limited in terms of what you can extrapolate from that. Yeah, you can't create a sort of cause and effect

conclusion. You can't say that variable A is causing this outcome. So you can only speak to associations. But even I think something that's really important here is that the researchers are aware of the limitations of this study design. And so the confounding variables, for example, although you might not be able to remove their complete effect, they do through statistics control for them.

So the idea is if you have a really well-defined population that you are as best as possible working out how often people drink alcohol, how often they smoke, how often they exercise. And in your analysis, let's say for example, you wanna look at the fiber's effect on a certain health outcome. The idea with controlling for confounding variables

is that we're not going to compare people that have significantly different consumption of alcohol. What we're going to do is compare high and low fiber between people who are exposed to the same amount of alcohol, what we're going to do is compare high and low fiber between people who are exposed to the same amount of alcohol. So that's the idea through adjustment is to remove some of the effect of these confounding variables. And so there is a statistical protocol called multivariate analysis. And the researchers use this to the best of their ability. When it comes to the food frequency questionnaires,

they do have their limitations, but they also validate them in that population to, if it's a good study, that's what they should be doing. They have tools to validate that food frequency questionnaire, which means going out and performing a study to make sure that that as you say, what people are reporting is reliable and there are methods of doing that.

So it's sort of, they're not just going out and completely shooting in the dark. There are steps and processes within epidemiology to produce good epidemiology. And of course they can be bad epidemiology as well. And then above that, what's the next tier up? So above that is your randomized controlled trials. These are clinical interventions.

And the idea here is that by having a clinical intervention, you can remove the effect of other variables other than what you're looking at. So it's very controlled. Perhaps you have two different groups and the only difference between those two groups is the exposure that you're looking at.

Maybe it is, for example, the addition of fiber to a diet or the addition of a certain vegetable oil. And therefore, you can have a greater degree of confidence that the outcome that you're measuring is a result of the difference between those two variables. The cause and effect. Yeah. And then above that, we have these meta-analyses, right?

Like where you take all of these studies that are of a certain ilk and lump them into one pile and kind of compare and contrast all of them to draw even deeper conclusions. Yeah, so the idea is if you pull together 30 randomized controlled trials from around the world that are all looking at the same thing from different researchers in different labs

and you pull them together and perform an analysis, you're likely to reduce the chance of any bias that could be affecting any individual study. That said, a meta-analysis is also, you know, there are times where a meta-analysis can be performed you know, there are times where a meta-analysis can be performed poorly. It has to define what its inclusion criteria is and therefore what studies it includes. And if you put garbage in, you're going to get garbage out.

So a meta-analysis again is not bulletproof. You still have to be able to look at it, understand what the inclusion and exclusion criteria was, and then look at the results in the context of everything else. And that's the key here is that when you're reviewing the science and you're looking at any individual study, you then have to step back out and look at the totality of the evidence. Ideally, what we're looking for is converging lines. The mechanistic studies under the microscope and in the animals are pointing in the same direction as what the epidemiology is pointing in,

is pointing in the same direction as what the clinical intervention studies are. and intervention studies are. Yeah, I think this is all really important. I mean, the reason I wanted to dive into this hierarchy of evidence is simply because I think it's important that people develop some level of evidentiary literacy around this, particularly when people are going online and they're reading stuff on Facebook or Twitter, and somebody's promoting a certain diet or lifestyle,

and they're using study X, Y, or Z as evidentiary proof of this, it's important to understand, well, what kind of study was that? What are the circumstances under which it was conducted, et cetera? And what you see with respect to the tribalism that abounds is a certain group,

and this cuts across every dietary tribe. Like they will throw an epidemiological study under the bus because that's trash, but then they'll cite one that supports their perspective. And there's this kind of war of ideas that goes on where shots are fired across the bow at each other. And for the average consumer, it's like, I don't know, I'm not reading these studies.

I'm not going on NBCI and like trying to figure all this stuff out. And it's really hard to find somebody who's coming from an objective point of view to help people parse all this stuff out. And it's really hard to find somebody who's coming from an objective point of view to help people parse all of this out. And I feel like you're a good actor in this space, somebody who's willing to admit when they're wrong, who's teachable, who's learning as we go,

sharing what you're finding along the way, calling out BS when you see it. And that's a real public service. Yeah, there's a lot of false equivalence is how I like to describe it, where you on social media, everyone now if you read the blog or the post on social, first two words, study show.

And yeah, it's how you know, how can studies show such contradictory positions and how can such contradictory positions exist? So it's frustrating and I can see from someone who's just trying to make sense of things that it's incredibly difficult. And I think many people are left with this idea that science isn't settled. Science doesn't understand what a healthy diet is.

Look at all these different opinions that are out there. And then when you're in that position, it's very easy to kind of just throw your hands up in the air and stick with what you know and what you're comfortable with. Right, it creates a paralysis. Yeah. the air and stick with what you know and what you're comfortable with. Paralysis.

Yeah, so I do think it's important for people to understand this evidence hierarchy, but equally speaking, I think something that I've also sort of grown to learn over time in trying to communicate this message is not to expect too much from the average person trying to make sense of this. And what I mean by that is people are busy.

They have their own careers and their own jobs and they're not like me sitting down and reading nutrition science papers seven, eight hours a day and geeking out on them. And that's cool. They've got their own passions and interests. And this is, you know, we hear this kind of throwaway line of do your own research or I did my research.

Yeah. And, you know, I kind of laugh sometimes when I hear that. I mean, really doing your own research, if you think about that phrase literally would mean going and getting trained in a bachelor's and then becoming a professor and having a research question and then raising grant money

and performing the research and hiring the statisticians. I always fumble that word. And the research assistants and performing the research. Or it could be someone who's maybe not performing the research themselves, but is trained to read it and to get into the study and understand exactly what they're looking at and to look at the exposure that I spoke about before compared to what,

if we're looking at a certain food or nutrient and we're looking at an outcome, what are we comparing it to? Such an important question that's often overlooked. Understanding the evidence hierarchy, being able to zoom out and think about the tot, understanding the evidence hierarchy, being able to zoom out and think about the totality of the evidence, all of this stuff,

I think it's a big ask to ask the average person to be doing that on the regular, to make sense of things. And this is where I think the consensus guideline papers from the American College of Cardiology or the American College of Endocrinology or the American Cancer Society. These guideline papers, they are those people

who are conducting the research themselves, who are trained to read the research to understand the totality of the evidence and then provide recommendations. And so when I see someone say, do your own research to someone, I think that it's a little unfair. And I think in many ways,

what's more constructive is just to point them to a good resource where there are very credible experienced people that have been engaged to do exactly that. Right, do your own research often means I found the guy who I like and I resonate with him. So, and I find him to be credible and believable. So on some level, there's a leap of faith

and a level of trust that that person is telling me the straight truth. And the, you know, the, the less aware you are, I guess, of the way that science works, I think the more affected you can be by confirmation bias. And, and so it can be easy to just go and find the information that reinforces your current views, established views, your identity, and at the same time,

turn a blind eye to anything that perhaps challenges that. And so I think that right now, I empathize with the average person trying to make sense of what on earth to eat. Right. And people are terribly confused and caught in the middle of all this. So as somebody who has, quote unquote, done the research,

like you're a guy who's done the research, you've looked at the totality of evidence, you've extrapolated from that to develop this thesis that you spoke about earlier, which on some level I feel could be set in more simple terms to be a plant predominant diet, perhaps not a plant exclusive diet, although that's great, but a diet that leans in towards mostly plants.

Is that fair? That's fair. So a plant predominant to a plant exclusive diet and why does this work? Well, there's a twofold kind of effect going on here. You're reducing your exposure to certain foods and nutrients that we know when consumed in excess will promote disease. Things like saturated fat, for example,

that are the most common source of saturated fats is in animal foods. You're reducing your exposure to certain carcinogenic compounds. You're at the same time reducing your exposure to ultra processed foods. Let's not forget that in this country, 60% of the average person's calories come from ultra processed foods. And in Australia it's nearly 50% and similar in the UK and in Canada. And we know from clinical intervention studies and we could go into that if you want to explore it that these ultra processed foods are hyper palatable. They make it super easy to over consume calories.

They promote hedonic hunger, where we're consuming calories in the absence of a physiological requirement. And they're designed by food scientists to do that, to hit the bliss point. And they've done a good job. If you look at the consumption levels. So we're reducing our exposure to certain parts of a diet

that are promoting poor health. And then at the same time, we're increasing our exposure to fiber, right? And fiber is probably the most overlooked nutrient. If there was one thing that I was going to say to people to focus on that would just straighten up their diet and would reduce their risk of so many of these diseases, help them live healthier for longer, it would be to get more fiber into their diet.

And I know you've had our mutual friend, Dr. B. Yeah, at your insistence earlier, you were the guy who was like, you gotta check this dude out. And then I had him on, of course, he's a rockstar. He's been on your show many times. Yeah, so there- He wrote the forward to your book.

He wrote the forward and the microbiome is wild. And in many ways what's going on in our microbiome and the loss of biodiversity reflects the macro world. And it's no coincidence that farming and food production is affecting both. So the introduction of more fiber to the diet is crucial for nourishing the microbiome, for creating a healthy balance of the 38 trillion microbes that call your large intestine their home. And when you are nourishing them and feeding them,

they reward you. And so that's obviously an extremely important benefit of increasing these plant foods in the diet. You're also increasing the amount of plant protein in your diet. And we see very, very consistently in large observational studies that look at substitution analyses. What happens when you reduce animal protein in someone's diet and increase plant protein?

And we see dramatic reductions in the risk of all of these chronic diseases. We see reductions in total mortality, the risk of premature death. So that's a huge benefit. And perhaps one of the most important benefits is the exposure to all of these phytochemicals. And there are 5, 10, 20,000 plus phytochemicals.

We haven't even yet identified all of them. And you've probably heard a lot about polyphenols. And people probably immediately think of resveratrol in red wine or chlorogenic acids in coffee or curcumin in turmeric or catechins in green tea. These polyphenol compounds, while not essential nutrients, and when I say not essential nutrients, they're not essential for your survival, but they are essential for promoting optimal health. And we know just through work in the last 10 years that most of the polyphenols you eat

actually pass through your small intestine, they land in your large intestine, and it's the microbiome, it's the bacteria that metabolize them and produce thousands of metabolites that have downstream effects through the body that are driving down inflammation, both systemically, also in the central nervous system. And so as we're making these changes to our diet

and eating in this more plant predominant pattern, this way of eating that the blue zones eat, Okinawans in Japan, the Sardinians, the folks in Loma Linda, who on average are living around 10 years longer than the standard American. We are producing the risk of these diseases through a range of risk factors that we're modifying. That's the key part here. By driving down cholesterol, by driving down blood pressure, by improving our insulin resistance. All of this stuff,

along with an anti-inflammatory diet that is helping promote a more robust immune system is creating a healthier body. So it's multifactored in the sense that moving towards a more plant predominant diet, you're crowding out space for some of those foods that are contributing to the ailments and the chronic lifestyle diseases.

But on top of that, by increasing the diversity of what that plant predominant diet looks like, you are enhancing health in no small part due to the fact that you're feeding your microbiome in a manner in which has all of these extra downstream impacts on health enhancement. Yeah, let's perhaps zoom in on the microbiome for a moment here.

And not to repeat what you've done with Dr. B, but perhaps we can build on that. You know, the human body is made up of around 23,000 human genes. There are around a hundred times that many genes in our microbes. So we are genetically more microbe than we are human. And I think there's been some revision on the, on the maths around how many human cells are there to microbe cells.

Right, yeah, there's been, there has been some changes. There's been some changes and used to be 10 to one. It was thought that it was 10 microbial cells to one human cell. And that's been revised to around 1.3 microbial cells to one human cell. It's a big change.

It's a big change, but it still speaks to the fact that we are, from a cell point of view, we still have more microbial cells than we do have human cells. I mentioned before, there are around 38 trillion microbes in our gastrointestinal system.

That is more stars than there are, that is more than the number of stars are in the Milky Way. It's wild. It's hard to wrap your head around that number. Right, there is a whole lot going in there that we have underappreciated for a long time. These microbes, they rely on us and we rely on them. It's a symbiotic relationship.

And you mentioned diversity. And the reason why diversity of plants in the diet is important is that these, we have about 500 to a thousand different species within our gut of bacteria. And a more diverse microbiome is associated with better health. We see healthy people have a more diverse microbiome.

Increasing the number of species of those microbes. Yes. So most people will have a sort of predefined number of species between 500 to 1,000. And that is usually defined in the first three years of life, right? So increasing diversity is really working with what you already have, but it's increasing the prevalence of the healthy bacteria, the numbers of them, and suppressing, reducing the numbers of the pathogenic bacteria. I think perhaps a good analogy of this is thinking about society. When there's equal representation of people from different cultures, we have a better functioning society. When there's equal representation of people from different cultures, we have a better

functioning society. You know, it's where each of these people from diverse backgrounds are bringing different skills to the table. And same thing in society, you know, there are, of course, a minority of people who get up to no good. The pathogenics. The pathogenics. And we wanna keep them at bay, right? And that's the same thing with the microbiome. And so when you have better representation, essentially, if you think about a football team as well, you could think about on any given day,

if a couple of players aren't performing their best, some of the other players can pick up the slack and you can still win the game. That's what it means. When you have a more diverse microbiome, more robust, you're more likely to be winning in producing these compounds that are protecting your gut lining.

And I'll go into that. These different species, essentially like you and I, have different food preferences, slightly different taste buds. And so the prebiotics and the prebiotic fiber and the polyphenols and the resistant starch in certain foods will help promote the growth of certain species, starch in certain foods will help promote the growth of certain species, but then other foods will help promote the growth of different species. And so when you have a diverse range of plants in your diet, you're keeping more of these guys happier.

And as you feed them, they're producing metabolites. So they ferment these food products that pass through undigested into the large intestine. And as they're fermenting them, they are producing these metabolites. There are thousands of these, but probably the most studied and spoken about are short chain fatty acids.

And of the short chain fatty acids, butyrate probably gets most of the attention and kind of rightly so. Butyrate helps to keep the mucosal layer of the gut intact, healthy, along with the endothelial cells, which sit right between, just a very thin layer of cells sit between

all the microbes, the 38 trillion microbes, and then 70% of your immune system. Which is important because we're seeing this rise in the incidents of conditions like ulcerative colitis, et cetera, all of these gut digestion issues, which really relate to gut lining permeability. Yeah, if you look at the surge in autoimmune conditions and allergies, they've increased far too rapidly

for that to be down to human genetics. Human genetics take a lot longer than that to change. We're talking hundreds of thousands, millions of years usually. So something else has changed. And when we look at the microbiome, it's clear that people who are experiencing these types of autoimmune conditions, they tend to have dysbiosis.

Now, I think it would be far-fetched to say that a causal relationship has been established for some of these. A lot of this is epidemiology and it's an association, but there are mechanisms that do make sense. And so the idea is that if you have dysbiosis and you have less of these short chain fatty acids being produced. And just to be clear, dysbiosis being a dysregulation

of your gut health in general. Yeah, so you've lost that diversity and you get a relative reduction in the healthful microbes and you get an increase in the pathogenic inflammatory microbes. And when this happens, you get breakdown of that mucosal layer, you get separation of the endothelial cells.

So the endothelial cells are held together by tight junctions and butyrate, that short chain fatty acid that I mentioned, one of the functions that it has in the gut is to help keep those tight junctions in good health. And so as you get this more inflammatory state in the gut and dysbiosis, you get breakdown of that layer. This is important because it allows the flow of molecules from the gut into the bloodstream that otherwise, that shouldn't be getting through the gut lining. And these are often referred to as bacterial endotoxins.

And these are often referred to as bacterial endotoxins. And they essentially travel into the bloodstream where they rev up the immune system. And when you're driving up inflammation, you're increasing oxidative stress through the body and oxidative stress leads to DNA damage. And then you're starting to accelerate the aging process of tissues. So what are the foods that are most butyrate promoting?

Great question. Have you heard of professor Christopher Gardner? I don't think so. So this brings us to a very interesting study that just came out. He's a professor at Stanford and he was working with the Sonnenbergs. The Sonnenbergs are arguably

some of the leading microbiome scientists in the world. And- Yeah, is that a husband and wife pair? Yeah, yeah, I've heard of them. And they just conducted a really eloquently designed study that took 38 adults, if my memory serves me correct, and randomized them into two groups. And the idea was really to see how fiber affects

the microbiome and how fermented foods do. And of course, fermented foods contain probiotics. So the hypothesis was that maybe they improve diversity. And the idea is to test and see if there's a difference between fiber and fermented foods. And this was a 10-week study. The subjects that were told to increase fiber, they increased their fiber from 20 grams to 40. The subjects in the fermented food group,

they were told to eat six serves of fermented foods a day. To give you an example, one kombucha was two serves. There was sauerkraut, there was kefir, I'll give you an example. One kombucha was two serves. There was sauerkraut, there was kefir, there was some yogurt, there was about five or six different probiotic rich fermented foods. And the results of this study were really interesting because there was some findings that I guess challenged

the idea that fiber leads to increased diversity, right? In the fermented food group, we'll start there, they saw across the board, you know, aggregate increases in microbial diversity and really impressive increases. in microbial diversity and really impressive increases. So a real strong finding and a good reason

to add more fermented foods to your diet. They also measured markers of inflammation and they measured around 200 odds. So a very comprehensive look at inflammatory markers. And they saw that the fermented foods drove down inflammatory proteins, 19 of them specifically. So the introduction of fermented foods was leading to a better immune response

and decreasing inflammation in the body. Now, the fiber group, very interesting. There was an individualized response. So if you look at the aggregate, just the average, the fiber group did not see an increase in microbiome diversity. And that's an interesting finding. And you kind of have to dig into the study

to make sense of that. Right, why would that be? I mean, that upends prior conclusions around that. It does. And when you dig into the study and I've spoken with Dr. Gardner about this, there were some individuals and I've spoken with Dr. Gardner about this, there were some individuals who handled the increase in fiber really well,

and they saw an increase in diversity. And then there were some who didn't and actually saw an increase in inflammation. And they thought this was really interesting because this finding is kind of in spite of previous understanding. And what they found was when they went back and looked at baseline diversity, the people who didn't respond so great to increasing fiber,

they essentially had very poor diversity to begin with. And so there are a couple of hypotheses from this study. It's not to write off fiber at all. It's just to say that maybe in certain circumstances, jacking your fiber up from 20 grams to 40 grams overnight is not ideal for some people. And perhaps they need tools and strategies to increase their diversity first before they're increasing. And so one of the hypotheses is that if your microbiome is really struggling

and you don't have diversity, perhaps you have a long history of using antibiotics, for example, and you've been eating a lot of ultra processed foods and living a very high stress life, we know that stress affects the microbiome as well, then perhaps it could be a better strategy to introduce fermented foods first, increase some diversity

and then start to add more plant diversity and more fiber into the diet when your gut is in a better position to be able to handle it. How long was the study conducted for? So this was a 10 week study. Yeah, it would be interesting to see how that would play out over six months. Perhaps if you just continue to eat fiber at some point,

your microbiome locks in on that. But that idea of fermented foods, kind of turbo charging things and getting you prepared to be in a position to take advantage of additional fiber in your diet, I think is super interesting. Yeah, so I think they're gonna go and test that. And they may even look at probiotic supplement,

I believe as well. But the other thing to consider here, and your point's a great one, because duration of this study is important. And that was one thing they commented on. Perhaps over longer exposure, the microbiome would have adapted and been better able to handle that increase in fiber,

and then you would see proliferation of the bacteria. But the other thing I think that's important here is that it was an overnight jump from 20 to 40 grams. Would it have been different if it was a very slow progression? Steeped, yeah, stepped. So look, some of that remains to be seen, but that's the beautiful thing about science. It's constantly evolving.

We know that from the gut microbiome project, which is led by a microbiome researcher, Rob Knight, he has this huge project and has been creating this database where people send in their stool samples and also send in information about what they eat. And he's been able to create a really cool library. And we know from that,

that compared to people who are eating 10 or fewer plants per week, those that are eating 30 or more have much more diversity in their microbiome. So that's Dr. B's whole thing. Like if you're gonna do one thing, increase the diversity of plants on your plate. Yeah, so I think that recommendation still stands.

I guess the only thing that I would add there is that the process to increasing that diversity, it might look a little different depending on what someone's baseline diversity looks like. Sure, and the clickbait title version of that would be forget about fiber, it's all about fermented foods, right? A simplified.

And that happened. Yeah, it did, I'm sure. So that happened and the Hannah, I can't remember Hannah's surname, but this study was part of her PhD. And I've heard her speak and she kind of had a bit of laugh about that because that's not what the study shows. Sure.

It is a lot more nuanced than that. As the world tends to be, Simon, right? That's fascinating. Is there a way, I wanna switch gears in a minute, but to kind of put a pin in this, what's the best way for somebody to figure out what the diversity of their microbiome looks like? Are there tests?

Can you like get a stool sample or something like that? How does that work? Yeah, there are a couple of different companies that are doing this. I'm not sure how reliable they are yet. I'm told that they're getting more and more reliable. So actually, this is a great question because I think this could be a key part

in helping people work out what steps they should take. Right, but in the meantime, in helping people work out what steps they should take. Right, but in the meantime, a good rule of thumb is increase both your fiber and your fermented foods. Yeah, and you may need to experiment a little bit with that to work with your body and listen to your body. But I think certainly the key finding from that study

is that fermented foods are beneficial and all of us should be eating more kimchi and sauerkraut. And if you eat animal products and you eat dairy, then I would argue that fermented dairy is probably the best of the dairy options. And I do think that some of that technology that you just spoke to, it will become better over time.

I think Zoe is one that's out there. I'm not sure whether they report so much on diversity in terms of a diversity score for the person, but they do take a stool sample and they do recommend foods. And that's being led by Tim Spector, but they do take a stool sample and they do recommend foods. And that's being led by Tim Spector, who is certainly a sort of prominent expert in this space.

Zoe. Zoe. That's what it's called, Zoe. Yeah. Final question on this point. What is your sense of the efficacy of store-bought kombucha products? You know, you see them, you know,

advertised with, you know, a certain number, you know, attached to what that culture looks like. But then I think, well, these things are, you know, pasteurized on some level. Like, am I really, like I could make kombucha at home and we've done that. I'm sure the ones we make at home are gonna be more efficacious

than what I'm buying at the store. But I've often just thought like, this is probably not doing anything. It's more of a placebo type situation, but I don't know. Have you looked at that or other studies on this? I'm with you. I don't think there are studies on that, but I choose the raw non-pasteurized kombucha.

You can find a few of those. There are some here that I found in California for that reason. I think if you're pasteurizing them and heating them, then you are- It defeats the whole entire purpose of the whole thing. Yeah, those microbes are likely being killed. Now in saying that, to add a layer of complexity to this,

there is a lot of research now looking at dead microbes and these are often called postbiotics. And there are some studies showing benefit even through the consumption of dead probiotics. So that's interesting. I don't think we fully understand, is pasteurized kombucha and perhaps the dead cultures that are in there, is that exerting benefit

within our garden downstream? So I think my advice would be to either try and make your own or to look for one that is a raw non-pasteurized kombucha. Yeah, get your scoby going at home. Yeah. Switching gears, I wanna talk about saturated fat. When you articulated your thesis

at the beginning of the show, a big piece in that was the reduction of saturated fat. And when we talk about saturated fat, this is a hot button, hotly debated thing, particularly on social media, depending upon your particular dietary tribe of choice. The overwhelming evidence from my perspective of a valid objective science is pretty clear

that saturated fat no bueno, contributing to heart disease and other not so good health outcomes. So walk us through your sense of the science with respect to dietary saturated fat intake, the impact that it has and why we should be reducing it. How far back should we go? I don't know.

We got as long as you want. There's a great study from 1908. That still holds up? Yeah, well, it's interesting because pre-1908, atherosclerosis, a lot of what we're talking about when we're talking about saturated fat is its effect on LDL cholesterol, and then the effect that that has

on the accumulation of fat in your artery, the development of plaque in science called atherosclerosis, which then puts you at higher risk of having a heart attack or a stroke. And prior to 1908, however, the prevailing sort of idea around cardiovascular disease was that it was just a process of aging and it wasn't necessarily driven through a dietary exposure. And there was

this early research goes back to Russia. These Russian scientists were in the lab, scientists were in the lab. The first ones really doing work in this space. And there was a researcher last name Ignatowski and he fed meat and dairy products to a rabbit and was able to see that rabbit developed fatty streaks in its arteries. And that was really the very first study that was like, hang on, maybe the development of fatty streaks atherosclerosis that we're seeing in humans is not just aging.

However, from that study, the hypothesis was that it was animal protein. And about four or five years later, 1913, Nikolai Anichkov, quite a famous name in the sort of science world for cardiovascular disease, another Russian. He was looking at the fatty streaks in arteries and could see that there was a lot of cholesterol in there. And so he had a hypothesis that maybe in that 1908 study, maybe it was cholesterol that was in those foods

and it wasn't protein that was causing this arterial plaque to form. So he ran a study again with a rabbit and he used one group were fed a sunflower seed oil and one were fed sunflower seed oil with cholesterol in it. And he was able to see that quite clearly the rabbits that were fed the sunflower oil with cholesterol dissolved into it developed the fatty streaks and the sort of pathogenesis

that goes on to become, the pathology that goes on to become atherosclerosis. Now, that research then was really groundbreaking. But what happened was immediately after that, some other researchers and he decided to look at replicating that study in rats and in dogs. So again, feeding dietary cholesterol to these animals and looking to see if there was any buildup of this fat in the arteries.

And what they found was there wasn't. And so they thought this was a bit of an anomaly. Maybe it's just something that happens in a rabbit, which is a herbivore. And there was no further science done for quite some time. Now, the key thing that was overlooked there was that in the rabbit model, the rabbit was fed something, it increased the LDL cholesterol in that rabbit, which then had led to the buildup of the fatty streak. The rat and the dog models, the reason there was no fatty buildup in the artery

was because they metabolize cholesterol differently. And so the consumption of dietary cholesterol didn't increase their cholesterol levels in their blood. And so having sort of overlooked that, and also the fact that all of this was published in Russian, it was kind of parked by the Russians there and wasn't seen by the rest of the world. Kinsel and Keys, they were looking at metabolic ward studies where they're bringing people in and they wanted to see if they could identify what components of the diet

would increase cholesterol levels in the blood. Because the idea at that point in time was that high cholesterol, serum cholesterol was driving heart disease. And you gotta remember cardiovascular disease peaked in the 1950s. There was essentially a national inquiry following the president of America, President Roosevelt.

He died of heart disease in 1944. And so these guys were running these metabolic ward studies and they were able to very clearly show in humans, when you feed someone saturated fat, you increase the levels of LDL cholesterol in their blood. On the other hand, when you feed someone polyunsaturated fats, you will drive down their cholesterol. In fact, in their calculation, what they were able to deduce was that saturated fat will increase cholesterol at a rate of around twice as much

as polyunsaturated fat will lower it. They were also able to tease out that dietary cholesterol in humans, while it doesn't have as significant effect as saturated fat, it still does affect cholesterol levels. And they came up with a calculation that still stands to this day. It still stands to this day. The more saturated fats in the diet and the less polyunsaturated fats, the higher someone's LDL cholesterol levels are. And thus incidents of atherosclerosis.

Yes, so what we know is that the higher your LDL cholesterol and the longer you're exposed to that over a lifetime, the higher your risk is to develop atherosclerosis. And there's an interesting study out of Spain called the PISA study. And this study essentially took 4,000 healthy adults and they used ultrasound

to look at the plaque in their arteries. And these were healthy adults without cardiovascular disease. And the recommendations in this country and around the world are LDL cholesterol should be around 100 milligrams per deciliter. And so they ultrasounded all of these different participants who had varying LDL cholesterol levels.

And what they found was that even at that 100 milligrams per deciliter level, which we consider to be normal, but we consider it to be normal in quite an unhealthy population. What they found was that at that level, 40% of people had atherosclerosis. And it wasn't until you got down to around 50, 60, 70 milligrams per deciliter, did you see people without atherosclerosis.

So a couple observations. First, wasn't there a study done on young soldiers who had died in World War I, where they autopsied them and they realized perhaps for the first time that young people had these fatty streaks in their cardiovascular system? Yeah, it was the Korean war, I believe. Oh, Korean war, okay.

And around 70% of the American soldiers who were, they were killed from gunfire. Right, these are like 18 to 24. Yeah, young guys. Or whatever. They, around 70% of them had atherosclerosis. And then the second thing that I wanted to bring up, you mentioned Ancel Keys.

I mean, this is a guy who is legendary for his breakthrough science, but also somebody who has a scarlet letter attached to him. There's a whole narrative around this guy being a quack and why we shouldn't pay any attention to anything that he discovered. And this narrative is being propagated by a different dietary tribe,

like the sort of carnivore and low carb community of people. So walk us through, you know, truth and fiction when it comes to Ancel Keys, where he sits in the canon of legitimate verifiable science that's trustworthy versus this idea that he should be dismissed for reasons X, Y, and Z. If you take a position that carbohydrates are to blame

for all of disease and you blame the 1980 guidelines, which are quite notorious. Everyone refers to them as the guidelines that came out told people to eat low fat and look what happened. Population got sicker and sicker. If you take the position that- Nevermind that people didn't follow those guidelines, but anyway, go ahead.

We should get into that. That's really important. If you take that position, then you need a scapegoat. You need someone to blame who's responsible for this. And unfortunately Ancel Keys is that fall guy for a lot of people. And they blame him for the development of the low fatfat guidelines that came

out in 1980. Now, if you go back and look at Key's work, I would say arguably he has made the greatest contribution to nutrition science in the last 100 years. This relationship between saturated fat and cholesterol and atherosclerosis is the most solid relationship that exists today. If that's wrong, then we need to throw out all of nutrition science. And people think that he just performed this seven country study.

But as I just mentioned then, he started before that in the metabolic wards. He started in metabolic ward trials, very controlled settings, bringing people in, feeding them different fats, exposing them to animal fats, to vegetable oils

and looking what happens to their cholesterol. From there, he was able to create a hypothesis he could see that the saturated fats animal fats were driving up cholesterol now he wanted to go out in the real world and look at populations that exist and compare those populations eating lots of animal fats with high cholesterol, what's their cardiovascular disease incidence like compared to other populations eating less animal fats with lower cholesterol. And prior to the seven country study is what he's most known for.

And prior to that, he conducted a, he did a speech at a conference and he put up on a chart, he put up the saturated fat intake and level of cardiovascular disease from six countries. And people today say, look at that and say, well, he cherry picked those six countries. There was actually 22. Now in Key's defense, he chose those six countries

because that's where the best data was. He wasn't happy with the data from the other countries. You remember this is back in the late 1950s. So some of the population data wasn't that great. Now, the main point here is that some folks at that time who were arguing with Ansel Keys said that in actual fact, there's 22 countries.

And they produced a graph, which is very famous now. You'll see the six versus the 22. And the 22 didn't actually refute what Ancel Keys was saying. It just made the association a little weaker, right? Now- And the reason that he did not focus on those other countries was that

the data was error-ridden or incomplete because of reporting inconsistencies or just issues related to creating verifiable data sets. Yeah, how verifiable it is. There were problems with diagnoses, for example, in countries and how they were categorizing the deaths for certain people. But I think what's really important is that when he went to conduct,

set up the seven country study, he invited many, many countries. And this is overlooked. He's written about this. He wanted to work with established nutrition scientists in these countries. And essentially he even invited France, which often gets brought up and they declined.

So he was working with those that accepted the invitation and had established nutrition science centers who could conduct the research with him. It was a collaboration. And so there were seven countries chosen. And within that, there was 16 cohorts. These countries were the USA, there was Finland, there was Greece, there was Yugoslavia,

which today has been separated. There was Yugoslavia, which today has been separated. There was Japan and there was the Netherlands. That's the seven countries. And then within those, some of those countries had multiple cohorts. There ended up being 16 different cohorts. And the really nice thing about this study was that there was differences

in the amount of saturated fat between these cohorts. You need that contrast. If you're just looking at lots of populations and their saturated fat consumption is very similar, then you're not providing enough contrast to see whether high versus low saturated fat consumption is affecting heart disease. So he conducted this research and was able to establish relatively quickly that countries like Greece and Japan who had low saturated fat intake around six to 8% of calories had significantly lower incidence of heart disease compared to countries like the Netherlands and the USA and Finland who had saturated fat intakes around 16 to 20% of calories. Wow, so what we glean from that is a pretty clear picture

of the relationship between saturated fat intake and heart disease incidents that holds up to this day. And the research around this relationship has only continued to kind of build on that premise. Yeah, like that was just the start. Right. You know, there's been extensive research since then. And I should add that, you know,

another criticism that Keyes often gets is that he was not paying attention to refined carbohydrates. And, you know, that's not true. His own studies show that there is a relationship between refined carbohydrates and cardiovascular disease, but that association is weaker. It is weaker than saturated fat cardiovascular disease. And in fact, in 1968,

when Keyes was providing recommendations for Scandinavian dietary guidelines, limiting refined sugars was one of his recommendations. And he wasn't just this guy that was obsessed just with saturated fat. That was very much the start of his work. And over the course of his work, he's most well known for being an advocate of the Mediterranean dietary pattern. And he's the one that went on to describe that dietary pattern, as I referred to earlier, as a sort of largely vegetarian diet

with modest amounts of fish and dairy. So when we see the carnivore diet proponents out there, the Paul Saladinos and the Sean Bakers, advocating for this notion that everything you ever thought you knew about saturated fat is wrong. Saturated fat is your friend. What are they hanging their hat on

in terms of establishing that this is not harmful? Compared to what, Rich? I don't know, you tell me. That's the million dollar question here. There are a bunch of meta-analyses that seem to make saturated fat look okay. And you can do that depending on what you compare it to. And I said before, there's been mountains of evidence

that have come out since the seven country study. And part of that has been teasing out exactly this. If you swap calories from saturated fat for calories in refined carbohydrates, then that's a lateral move. It could even increase risk of cardiovascular disease. Yeah, and you're kind of alluding to, there was a study that garnered a lot of press

that said saturated fat isn't related to heart disease. It was really, yeah, exactly. But what it really said was, maybe it's not quite as bad as we originally thought, but it's still bad. How do you interpret that? The way I interpret the PURE study in particular is that this was a multi-country study

and there are always some limitations when you're comparing different socioeconomic classes. And in that study, the people that were eating less saturated fat were tending to eat diets below the poverty line. And they were diets that contained a lot of refined carbohydrates, very little diversity. And sure, in a diet like that, the addition of some animal fats may improve their health. I wouldn't argue against that.

But consistently, if you look at what happens if you swap calories from saturated fat for polyunsaturated fats, like vegetable oils or nuts and seeds, or even fatty fish, or for monounsaturated fats, or for whole grains, you see that you drive down heart disease risk. So I think the key takeaway point here is you can make saturated fat look good. It depends what you're comparing it with

and whether removing saturated fat from your diet is healthy or not depends what you're replacing it with. If you are replacing it with nuts, seeds, fatty fish, if you eat seafood or whole grains, then you are going to be lowering your risk of heart disease. Another talking point that gets thrown around from those communities. I feel like they've pivoted a little bit away

from the saturated fat thing. And now it's all about vilifying seed oils. Like that's become like the evil culprit in this whole thing in a very reductionist way. So walk me through that argument and kind of where things stand in terms of not just seed oils, but also the whole conversation around the health implications of oil in the diet.

Whether we're talking about the Esselstyn, super no to low oil plant-based diet to people who are very kind of pro olive oil and all of that. I mean, that's a large, big question. Maybe we start with the sort of omega-6 rich vegetable oil, seed oils, and then we'll go into olive oil and the vegan diet, the low fat vegan diet.

And then we'll go into olive oil and the vegan diet, the low-fat vegan diet. That rhetoric around omega-6 oils being to blame, seed oils being to blame for disease, it's something I've studied super closely because it really intrigues me because I find it incredibly hard to see how someone can take that position from an evidence-based point of view. But I think this is a prime example where

emotions and facts don't mix very well. And when you're really affected by emotions, it can affect objectivity. And so I said before the 1980 guidelines came out and a lot of people will say that those guidelines pushed people off of animal fats and push them towards seed oils and vegetable oils. Right, being a primary ingredient in ultra processed food. Sure, and I would be the first person to put my hand up and say that seed oils within ultra processed foods,

I don't think anyone should be eating more ultra processed foods, but we need to remember there is much more than just seed oils in those ultra processed foods. There's added sugar and there's added salt and a whole lot of other additives. Refined grains too. That's right.

So where does this idea that of other additives. Refined grains too. That's right. So where does this idea that omega-6s, seed oils are inflammatory, are causing disease come from? Let's go back to the evidence hierarchy. So I think firstly, from an anecdotal point of view, a lot of people who believe that seed oils are bad, they've removed ultra processed foods from their diet

and they feel better. So I understand that. That's again, that's their lived experience, but I think they're wrongly attributing that benefit to the reduction of seed oils when in fact it's just the reduction of seed oils when in fact it's just the removal of ultra processed foods from their diet.

If you look at the strongest kind of arguments for omega-6 as being inflammatory, all of this is in vitro animal study science. And as we mentioned earlier, not everything that happens at that level plays out in humans. And we know from significant amounts of randomized controlled trials, randomized controlled trials,

if people substitute saturated fat for vegetable oils or seed oils, they reduce their risk of heart disease. That's the first thing. The second is that omega-6s when you consume them the the body desaturates and elongates them into a biological biologically active form a bit like what happens to omega-3s people have probably heard that plant-based omega-3s go through a similar pathway where they're converted to DHA and EPA. Same thing happens with omega-6s. And along this pathway, when you consume

omega-6s, which is linoleic acid, this is a fat that is quite concentrated in seed oils. in seed oils. Along that pathway, a fat called arachidonic acid is produced. And the idea from a mechanism point of view is that this is a precursor to inflammatory compounds. But when we look at human intervention studies, if you feed people seed oils, you don't get an increase in arachidonic acid. You don't see it. Secondly, if you feed people omega-6 linoleic acid, you do not get an increase in inflammatory biomarkers. That's probably the most important thing for us to think about here. It just doesn't happen.

Despite the putative mechanism and what you see in in vitro or animal studies, it doesn't play out in human studies. And then if you zoom right out and you look at large population studies and you look at people consuming more linoleic acid or who have higher amounts of linoleic acid in their tissues,

they have lower risk of cardiovascular diseaseleic acid in their tissues. They have lower risk of cardiovascular disease and lower risk of total mortality. But would that not be to play devil's advocate another example of compared to what? Is not the conventional wisdom still like you, you know, what I've heard for years is most people are consuming way too much omega-6 and it's all about the ratio or proportion

of omega-6 intake to omega-3. And we're being told to increase our omega-3s and reduce our omega-6 to bring that into kind of proper relationship. Is that still the scientific sort of perspective or is this new studies that have changed that? I don't think that is the position today. I think that overwhelmingly,

there is overwhelming evidence to show that, that ratio where I do think it is important is that the omega-6 pathway and the omega-3 pathway share enzymes. And so there is a possibility if you have a lot of omega-6s in your diet, then you're using up all those enzymes and you may struggle to convert the omega-3s from ALA to DHA and EPA. So I don't think that's been fully borne out in the science

other than to say I think there is some evidence, particularly people with chronic inflammation, like rheumatoid arthritis, that does seem to be a benefit for them to lower omega-6s in their diet. But overall, if you look at human health outcome data, when you're feeding healthy adults, omega-6s in quite large volumes,

you're not dialing up inflammation. And when we look at a population level, people that are consuming a lot of these omega-6s, as I said, they do have lower risk of cardiovascular disease, lower risk of premature death. Is that provided those omega-6es are not pre-packaged in an ultra processed food where there's all these other factors to consider?

Yeah, I think so. And that's kind of where I land on this. I mean, firstly, I'm not sort of pro seed oils or pro vegetable oils. You don't have to eat them. Let's make that clear. I mean, firstly, I'm not sort of pro-seed oils or pro-vegetable oils. You don't have to eat them. Let's make that clear, because it does sound like,

hey, like no problem with Omega-6s, knock yourself out with seed oils. What I'm saying is, I just don't think they're the poison that they're made out to be. I certainly don't think that we should be increasing our exposure to ultra-processed foods, but I don't think that we should be increasing our exposure to ultra processed foods but I don't think we need to generate the fear over vegetable oils

and certainly don't need to blame the increased burden of chronic disease since 1980 that's not from people swapping butter with a vegetable oil in their cooking you know it's a lot more complex than that. Since 1980, you know, the consumption of these ultra processed foods has increased. Sure. You know, hugely. And, you know, as I said,

I'm not a huge sort of pro seed oil person. And, you know, particularly, you And particularly if someone's watching their weight, I think all oils are very calorie dense and we need to be mindful of that. They're bringing about 120 calories per tablespoon. So they're quite easy to over consume. You mentioned olive oil and the vegan diet. Yeah, I mean, within the plant-based vegan world,

there are sub communities within that, that are at odds with each other over the health implications of including something like olive oil in the diet. On the one hand you have Caldwell Esselstyn and his camp that is very anti-oil. That's a contingent of people who are primarily focused on preventing and reversing heart disease.

And Caldwell is somebody who's treating people for the most part who are very ill. Then you have, and he's very adamant in that perspective and has done his studies and written books about this. And then on the other end, you have a different contingent of people that include like Danielle Bilardo and some other folks who are saying,

the science doesn't bear out the negative health implications of olive oil on a plant-based diet. We vilified this. There is space and room within a healthy plant-based diet, we vilified this. There is space and room within a healthy plant-based diet to include this where, you know, what say you, sir? So I guess, firstly, the likes of Dean Ornish and Dr. Esselstyn, you know, these guys are giants. Yeah, just legends.

And they have done so much good for health across the globe, reached millions and millions of people and their diets work. I am of the view that there is no definitive evidence that the addition of olive oil, for example, to a plant-based diet makes it inferior. And perhaps it could make it superior in some ways. And I think if you look at say Dean Ornish's study, for example, I think people look at that and see or even Esselstyn's study

that there was no oil in those studies and therefore that must be why they got the results that they did. But in the case of Dean Ornish, you have to realize that compared to the control group, there was many changes. It wasn't just- Well, there were a lot of lifestyle changes that they made that were part of that.

And he's never tried to say otherwise. Exactly. And I mean, just from a dietary point of view, there were many changes. There were, you know, people increasing their fruit and vegetable consumption and decreasing their animal product consumption. And the removal of oil was just one change of many. So you would really need a third arm in that study to try and independently tease out the effects of oil. And in fact, you would need to change the study design a little bit to remove the exercise and the stress component and all these other variables that could be affecting the outcome.

So I think that there's a little bit of kind of over extrapolation from that study. And also Esselstyn's study as well, but that's an oil-free diet. There are some nuances with that study that are still debated, but I don't think we need to sort of go into that. If you then zoom out and look at other studies like PREDIMED, and PREDIMED was a study of around 7,000 people, primary prevention, so they didn't have heart disease. And they had a control group, standard care, standard diet. They had two intervention groups. These were Mediterranean diets, one with oil and one with nuts,

olive oil, I should say. And they saw over a five year period, those in the Mediterranean groups had around a 30% reduction in cardiovascular disease events. And there was no difference between the Mediterranean group that had nuts added or the Mediterranean group that had olive oil added. So that kind of speaks to the fact

that olive oil can be included in a heart healthy diet. It's not to say that there's not going to be a future study that does look at the independent effects of olive oil in a completely plant-based diet and shows a difference. But at this stage, I think it's kind of the least of most people's concerns. The most important things are driving saturated fat down. We know that the inclusion of polyunsaturated fats,

as I spoke to earlier from those metabolic ward studies, is actually very important. These polyunsaturated fats are inherently beneficial. They will help to lower cholesterol. So their inclusion through nuts and seeds or olive oil, if that's right for you, I think is a good idea. Right. So when someone hits you up and says, Simon, I hear everything you're saying, you make a lot of sense, but I've been on a low carb diet

or I've been on a keto diet and I'm having great results. I feel great, I've lost a bunch of weight. What is your response to that? Like, how do you think about low carb diets, the keto diet, et cetera, in contrast to a higher carb plant-based diet? I might just add one thing to the oil. Hold that thought.

Cause I just remembered something that I think is important. There are some studies showing that oil impairs endothelial cell function. And you may have heard that before. And these are acute studies looking at when you feed someone oil, what happens in the postprandial period after they consume that oil

to their endothelial cell function. And you see that it is impaired. And that is often science that people point to to say, hey, look. Impaired in what way? What does that mean? Well, you get a change in blood flow, a negative change in blood flow.

And so the idea here is that the consumption of oil is negatively affecting the endothelial cell function. Endothelial cells line the arteries. And if this is happening acutely, maybe it explains what's happening chronically. Right. But there is some, I guess, some issues with this train of thought.

Exercise also acutely impairs endothelial cell function and so does sleep. So it's interesting, but I guess we have to consider that not everything that happens acutely is representative of what happens chronically. And sometimes an acute stress can actually lead to an adaptation and a benefit in the long term.

So I think that's worthwhile adding. All right, so onto the next thing that I asked you about. Low carb versus high carb. Basically. From a weight loss point of view, there is a plethora of studies that have essentially shown there is no significant benefit to either. And some of the probably the best design studies

come from Professor Christopher Gardner out of Stanford. He initially ran a study in the early 2000s called the A to Z study. And this featured Atkins, it featured the Zone Diet, the Learn Diet and the Ornish Diet. All of these have a different ratio of macronutrients. So some of them are low carb, some are high carb. And 12-month trial, by the end of that 12 months, there was no significant difference between Atkins and Ornish. And Atkins is the lowest carb and Ornish is the highest carb.

Strictly through the rubric of weight loss. This is strictly through the rubric of weight loss. And the idea with this was they had dieticians who would use the most prominent books. So the Atkins book and the Ornish book at the time to educate people on how to adopt these diets. the most prominent books. So the Atkins book and the Ornish book at the time to educate people on how to adopt these diets. So this was done a while ago then?

This is done. Because those books like the zone diet was like in the early 90s, right? Yeah, so this was done I think in 2003. And there was a very interesting finding though, Rich, from this study. And that was that within the groups, so within the low carb and within the high carb, some people did really well and some people did really poorly. So there was this sort of

wide variation. And Christopher Gardner was left thinking, well, I wonder what explains that? And Christopher Gardner was left thinking, well, I wonder what explains that. Why would some people do really well on low carb, some do really poorly, and the same for high carb? And he thought maybe it's genetics or perhaps it's insulin resistance, how well your body can utilize glucose, carbohydrates. And so he went away and got funding and ran another study, a larger study, 600 people, again, 12 months called Diet Fits. And this study only had two arms. The two arms were a low carb diet and a high carb diet. And he was looking at, he wanted to, he knew that what he would see in each group was some people do really well and some really poorly.

And he wanted to see if perhaps these genetic markers, he was looking at three different genetic variations. He wanted to see if they would affect the outcome or if insulin resistance would affect the outcome. And very interestingly, none of that predicted who was successful and who was unsuccessful in weight loss. So we're left in this position today where that is largely unanswered.

For some reason, some people do better on high carb and there's certain people that are doing better on low carb. And perhaps future research will tease out why that is. But at this stage, I've kind of changed my view a little bit, I'd have to say, on low carb. And I think I've softened my approach a bit. If that works for someone, then, you know, I think that meeting them where they are

is the better approach. And that's not to say you can't do a low carb diet in a healthy way. Right, I mean, it's what kind of low carb, if you're doing a low carb diet, that's rife with saturated fat and all these other things that we've been talking about, not so good, but there are ways of doing it

in a healthy manner. Yeah, so you can, going back to that theme, the plant predominant theme, you can do a low carb diet within that theme. And instead of loading up on the red meats and the dairy, you're going to be more emphasizing the nuts and the seeds and the plant protein. And I've since writing this book

and I'm not sure exactly what communities have been speaking about the book, but I've had a number of people from the low carb community get in contact with me. And what I've realized, Rich, is there are a lot of people in the low-carb community who, despite what Paul Saladino and Sean Baker might be saying about cholesterol,

there are a lot of people who do believe the science. Low-carb's working for them, they're losing weight, but they do believe the science when it comes to heart disease and they are fearful. These are young parents, people 40s and 50s, who they found a way of eating that does help them lose weight, but at the same time they go to their doctor

and their doctor's like, They got these blood markers. Their doctor's like, what are you doing? We need to put you on a statin. And that's scary. So what I found is that there are a large number of people who are really receptive to this idea of, hang on, you don't have to abandon this approach

that's working for you. You can actually do it in a way that is evidence-based. We can keep you on this path of weight loss if that's right for you. And at the same time, we can modify the foods that are in that diet in a way that will drive your cholesterol levels down, drive your insulin resistance down

and overall, not just deliver on weight loss, but also put you at lower risk of these diseases. And what would some of those cornerstone foods be? So it's all about driving the saturated fat down and increasing polyunsaturated fats. You're trying to cut back on meats and dairy in particular, and you're wanting to increase nuts and seeds and seafood. If you eat seafood, it's a much better source of polyunsaturated fats,

much lower in saturated fats compared to meat. So those are the main little tweaks, but also finding ways within their diet to increase fiber as well is important. And you can do that through in a low carb manner where instead of it being, leaning heavily on the sort of starchy foods, you're really trying to increase the volume

of sort of low calorie, very nutrient dense vegetables. Right, like super low glycemic vegetables. Yeah, so lots of cruciferous vegetables and dark leafy greens. And so you can easily shift this sort of animal heavy, low carb diet to a more Mediterranean style, low carb diet. And you see very quick, huge improvements in their blood lipids, improvements in blood pressure,

and they feel better. But you personally eat around 50, 30, 20, right? 50% carb, 30% protein, 20% fat. Yeah, if I was to count it out, I think actually somewhere around there, maybe a perhaps a little more fat and a little less protein than that. But that would be kind of around the mark.

And that's what leaves me feeling the best. I'm big on diet quality being more important than focusing too much on the macronutrients. The macronutrients can be important if you have a very specific goal. And for example, athletes or bodybuilders, et cetera. But I think what's more important first is the quality of those macronutrients,

the quality of the fat, the quality of the carbohydrates. You know, it's less jelly beans, more black beans. The quality of the protein. That's my favorite quote of yours, by the way. Yeah. So, you know, there are a lot of people that are very anti-carbohydrates,

but carbohydrates, it's an umbrella term. And what matters is where you're getting those carbohydrates from. If they're coming from jelly beans, then you're getting those carbohydrates from. If they're coming from jelly beans, then you're going to run into problems. Right, this idea, you know, in terms of kind of falsified narratives out there,

vilifying all carbohydrates, lumping in the black beans with the jelly beans is preposterous or analogizing fruit to diet soda or soda, sugar soda. Yeah. We've talked extensively on this podcast about protein, meeting your protein needs on a plant-based diet. So I don't wanna belabor the point,

but I haven't had you here to do it. And you being a very strong physical specimen, I think it's worthy if somebody's tuning into this and isn't familiar with either of us, and perhaps this is their first introduction to some of the ideas we're talking about, to at least spend a couple minutes talking about the big protein question.

Because it still propagates in terms of people who are interested in moving towards a more plant-centric diet, but are fearful of what that implies in terms of meeting their protein needs, especially for the active people amongst that cohort. Yeah, so this was a very large fear of mine when I was initially making the changes to my diet. And I always remind myself of that

because it's easy to kind of dismiss it and forget that the sort of general school of thought is that you get your protein from animal foods and that plants are missing protein. And to this day, when you go to a restaurant or you go to Chipotle, they say, what protein do you want on this? And yeah, very rarely does that include plant protein.

Although that's, it's starting to change. I think the food environment's starting to modify. Definitely. And we're seeing increases in plant protein options. And I was chatting with Paul Shapiro a couple of weeks ago now, and he's doing exciting things with mycobrotein. What his company is doing right now with mushrooms. Yeah, it's crazy.

Feeding these fungi microbes, potato and sorghum, and then producing this super protein rich food. I tried some as well and it's incredible. So I haven't tried it yet. You know, that's certainly future food. But overall, I think there are a few aspects of protein that are somewhat misunderstood and we can perhaps clear up some of that confusion. The first would be that plant protein is missing certain essential amino

acids. And protein is made up of amino acids. They're the little building blocks and our body can make 11 of them. And the other nine are considered essential amino acids. We have to get them through our food. And the idea for many decades has been that plants are missing some of those amino acids. And you hear this idea of complete protein, right? And often, you know, people speak to quinoa and soy. And I think definition here is really important. It's critical to this because I think there's a misunderstanding

of what complete protein means. I think most people think, okay, well, if quinoa and soy are complete proteins, that means that these other plants are missing amino acids. They're inferior. Yeah, or that they're just totally missing something. And that's not true. So all plants contain all nine essential amino acids.

They're not missing. There just are some of those plants where certain amino acids are in lower amounts. And so the definition of incomplete, actually by definition within the science, although it's not used this way in general conversation, is not that an amino acid is missing. It's just that it is in a smaller percentage. And if you were to eat only that food for all of your calories, then you might run into some trouble. You might not consume enough of a certain amino acid to meet your body's daily requirement. So you can imagine that that's kind of a useful definition for developing countries,

places where there is food security problems. And if someone's living on one or two foods, then that's important. But if you're eating a diet where you have a range of an abundance of food options, then really it's not that helpful. And so if you are eating with diversity, you might be consuming, for example,

grains that are low in lysine. And look, it's true. If you were to eat certain grains and that was providing your 3,000, 2,500 calories, then you might fall short on lysine. And the same could be said about certain beans. If you eat a certain bean for all of your calories, you might fall short on methionine.

But beans are very rich in lysine. And when you start adding all these foods into your diet, some might be low in a certain amino acid, but the other food is really high. Right, it's really an academic exercise because almost no one is only eating one food. Correct. Unless you're like the Spud Fit guy who's eating just potatoes for a year,

or you are in a developing country and there's a legitimate food scarcity issue, but almost everybody is eating at least two, three, five, six, seven, 10 different foods throughout the course of a day or two. And if you're doing that, you're eating with that diversity and you're eating enough calories, you will not run into problems.

You will get all of the essential amino acids that your body needs. And anyone can run a simple exercise. Don't believe me, download the Corona meter app. It's a free app, plug't believe me, download the Corona meter app, it's a free app, plug in a day of eating and you will quickly see that you will exceed the 100% recommended amount for all nine essential amino acids.

And you'll see it's very hard not to exceed. It would be more challenging to fall short on them than it would be to consume enough of them. Is there any validity to the argument of high quality versus low quality proteins? If we're meeting all of our essential amino acid needs, is there a difference in plant protein X versus animal protein Y beyond just the narrow lens

of amino acid intake. I mean, we're like IGF-1 and all these other things that come into play in terms of the impact on our ability to build and repair our muscles. So let's step back one step here. I think it's important to acknowledge that if you look at populations who are vegetarian or are vegan, across the board,

whether you're looking at populations in North America or in Europe, people are consuming more than enough total protein. And that's really important. So there's a paper just out from Slovenia, Health Conscious Vegans. And these people were consuming about 1.5 grams of protein per kilo, right? And the recommendation is to consume 0.83 grams per kilogram.

That's just for everyday functioning, not if you're an athlete. If you're an athlete, it's going to be higher in the realm of 1.2 grams per kilo up to sort of 1.6 grams per kilo. But first and foremost, these populations of people eating only plants or almost only plants are getting more than enough total protein. And then the question is around protein quality. And often people wonder, well, is there a difference in bioavailability as well?

And you hear about animal protein being much more superior in terms of absorption and your body's ability to utilize it. And of course, the RDADA and when they did the guidelines, they had to consider this because if there was a really, really big difference, they would need separate guidelines. 0.83 grams per kilo would not be for everyone. It would be for omnivores.

And then for vegetarians and vegans, there would need to be a separate guideline. If there was a 20% reduction in bioavailability of plant protein, then you would have to increase that up from 0.83. Yeah, which there's not. And that's based on nitrogen balance studies, which essentially can look at the, how well your body is absorbing protein.

And these studies have been able to compare animal protein versus plant protein and see that there is not a big enough difference to justify different recommendations for protein requirements for different populations, omnivores, vegetarians, vegans. for protein requirements for different populations, omnivores, vegetarians, vegans. Now, I will say that there have been some studies where animal protein has been made

to look quite superior to plant protein. And there are a few problems with this research or limitations, I should say. There's not a problem with the studies themselves, but limitations in terms of how we can interpret them. A lot of this knowledge early on was built on animal studies, feeding them different proteins and measuring absorption. And so the physiology is different to us, but they can act as a useful model, particularly pigs, which have a closer digestive system to us

compared to rats. But one of the biggest problems with this research is that by and large across the board, when it came to plant protein, they fed them raw plant protein. And we know that cooking beans and grains, for example, it helps make the nutrients more bioavailable. And you and I wouldn't eat a raw bean for that reason.

And so what's happened is in those studies, the results sort of overstate the differences between the animal protein and the plant protein. Now, in more recent years, there are now human studies that have looked at properly prepared plant proteins. And in the plant proteins that they've looked at, there seems to be only a few percent difference

in bioavailability. And there's a paper by Mariotti from 2019 that summarizes all of that. And so the current position is that, there might be a slightly lower bioavailability of plant protein, but it's much less than what had been thought in the past. And I'll add the caveat there that there's probably only

around six or seven plant proteins that have been tested. So I'd love to see more research and look at, hundreds of different sources of plant protein, but it does seem like there's not a significant difference or at this stage reason to be worried about bioavailability differences. But perhaps more important than any of this,

because let's be honest, people listening and you and I, bioavailability and percentages around absorption, that's not what matters. What matters is what happens to various health outcomes or short-term outcomes in terms of strength and building muscle. And I spoke before to the clear benefits of swapping animal protein for plant protein when it comes to our long-term health.

There's no doubt about that. It's absolutely consistent in the literature. In terms of strength and building muscle, this is a really interesting area and there's a lot of emerging science here. And I'm starting to see nutrition scientists in this space who have been very adamant that animal protein is king, starting to change their tune a bit. And I don't think it's all sort of said and done,

but there is some early clues that you can still get the same benefits in terms of strength and hypertrophy from consuming plant protein. And we need more research looking at different populations, but there's one study that came out early this year actually. And this was a randomized controlled trial and really the first of its kind a lot of

studies in the past rich that have looked at at plant protein and and looking at resistance training and uh measuring strength and hypertrophy have looked at the addition of say a soy protein shake to an omnivorous diet and and versus uh another group who are eating an omnivorous diet. And versus another group who are eating an omnivorous diet with a whey protein shake. So it's very hard to, from that study sort of extrapolate to a completely plant exclusive diet because their baseline diet was including. They were already meeting their protein needs.

Yeah, and they were not a person consuming a vegan diet. So it's just a different question, right? Those studies are essentially just comparing whey versus soy protein in the context of the two different people eating the same diet. Right, I got it. Whereas with this latest study, it was, okay, let's actually look at healthy adult males who are consuming a completely plant-based diet,

same sort of diet you and I would consume with a soy protein shake supplement against a group consuming an omnivorous diet with a wh protein shake supplement against a group consuming an omnivorous diet with a whey protein supplement. So now we have completely plant against an omnivorous diet, how most people in the sort of resistance training industry would eat. And we get to see, is there a difference in strength

and in terms of hypertrophy, lean muscle? And I should note, these were healthy adults that were active, but they weren't people that had been doing resistance training for years. And there was a very important reason for that selection. Once you've been training for a very long time, it's hard to build muscle. You plateau. So you're likely in for a very long time, it's hard to do. You plateau.

You plateau. So you're likely in a 12 week trial, you're not likely to see enough differences to be able to measure whether one diet is superior to the other. So what they wanted is almost these healthy fit people who are going to get those early newbie gains and see like in this period of rapid growth,

is there a difference between these different diets? So they brought these folks in, they did, I think it was 10 or 12 weeks of resistance training. This is a study out of Brazil, Hamilton Rochelle is the lead researcher. And what they found was there was no significant difference at all in strength or hypertrophy.

And both groups had great improvements in both. So look, what can we say from that study? Well, we can say in healthy adult males that did not have a history of resistance training, there seems to be no difference in terms of whether it's plant protein or animal protein. Yeah, no difference in terms of your ability to make gains in a certain period of time.

That's right. And is that the same for an elderly population who as you get older, you develop anabolic resistance and so your ability to generate muscle to promote lean muscle growth is harder. There are certain ideas out there, for example, that animal proteins might be better in that population because of differences in amino acids,

particularly being more concentrated in leucine. But these were the same ideas that were held not too long ago about healthy adult males. And what we're starting to see here, and I didn't mention this about that study, they set both groups at 1.6 grams per kilogram of protein intake. That seems to be the sort of threshold.

If you want to absolutely maximize muscle protein synthesis, that's the level you need to hit. Once you go above that, you don't really see any extra improvement. So, that's kind of where science is up to today. Yeah, the current state of affairs. I mean, that's encouraging. And I would like to see that study

with elderly people as well, because I have heard that, like once you reach a certain age where your body becomes less able to hold onto that muscle mass and make those gains, that protein then becomes a much more important component of your diet. And that's coming, those researchers are going to do it. But having spoken to the researchers,

and I think they were a bit surprised by the results of that study, I'm not so sure they're as confident going in to studying the elderly now in terms of animal protein being vastly superior because in this study of healthy young adult males, even though the protein was matched at 1.6 grams per kilo and they had no differences in strength or in lean muscle,

the plant-based protein group did consume significantly less leucine, right? So they were still able to achieve the same health outcomes despite the lower concentration of leucine in their diet. And I think that's an important thing. Right, so what does that tell you? What do you extrapolate from that? Well, I extrapolate that there might've been,

there may be an overemphasis on the importance of focusing in, dialing into leucine. I think it's no doubt is important, but most important is total protein. And if you're hitting that 1.6 grams per kilogram mark, I don't think there is added benefit of just continuing to dial up leucine further and further. And in fact, if you speak to longevity scientists, likes of Volta Longo, that these guys are gonna say, one of the inherent benefits of plant protein

is that it's exposing you to lower amounts of leucine and methionine, these amino acids that are thought to activate, not just muscle growth pathways, but also aging pathways. It's so interesting. It's also fascinating to see traditional kind of gym rat, bodybuilder type guys pivoting towards plant-based, protein powders instead of the traditional way.

Like they're not, these are not plant-based people. They're not vegan people. They're probably eating their chicken and their broccoli and doing the standard routine. Yet they're still going to the pea and the brown rice and the various new products that are coming on board as opposed to just doing the whey thing like traditionally they always have.

Yeah, and some of that is probably down to the way that whey makes certain people feel. And there's a lot of lactose intolerance out there. makes certain people feel. Yeah. And there's a lot of lactose intolerance out there. So, you know, it's nice to see that change in the community. And I think this study in particular is giving people more and more confidence, right?

Because people need the data. You know, there are a lot of great anecdotes out there and you can see a lot of people like yourself who have had very, very successful careers in various forms of performance, the performance world, be it endurance or be it resistance training. But now to have some actual data

is giving people more confidence to lean into this and explore it a bit further. So Simon, I wanna switch gears data is giving people more confidence to lean into this and explore a bit further. So Simon, I wanna switch gears and cover some other terrain, but before we move off of human health, perhaps some final thoughts on LDL and the carnivore diet, because there's a lot of people out there

who are being influenced by certain quote unquote influencers with respect to this meat heals perspective There's a lot of people out there who are being influenced by certain quote unquote influencers with respect to this meat heals perspective of diet and nutrition. So let's just kind of put this to bed. Yeah, so I am extremely concerned. I think would be a nice way of summarizing, what we're seeing with people adopting the all meat diets.

Certainly, and I mentioned before that a number of people in low carb community have reached out to me. And some of these have been people that have been eating a completely carnivorous diet and it cannot be denied that you can get good short-term results. Especially if you're moving off of a standard American diet,

you are gonna experience some pretty immediate changes in how you feel. Right, and speaking back to that Stanford study and the microbiome, it's not sort of far-fetched to understand that perhaps there is a certain amount of microbiome disruption where the addition of plant foods is uncomfortable for people. And a carnivore diet is essentially,

it's a strict elimination diet. And so if these people, even if they're trying to eat healthfully are introducing certain plant foods and it's revving up their inflammation and making- Especially, yeah, sorry to interrupt, but if you've been eating strictly carnivorously, you're seeding your microbiome

with a certain type of microbiota, right? That feed on that type of food and you're lacking the diversity to be able to create a healthy environment for the plant microbiomes to propagate. And that you'll have digestive issues, you'll have inflammation and all the like. Yeah, so you, you know, I see it as a bit of a bandaid.

If someone is in a state of chronic inflammation and their gut is very inflamed, removing a lot of foods does work. We see it, the low FODMAP diet, for example, which is a specific diet for people with IBS. You're removing the triggers. Now, the problem is the food that you're removing is not unhealthy. It's just that your microbiome is not set up

in a way that allows you to derive the benefits of that food. So completely removing those foods from your diet and doing something like adopting a carnivorous diet, it could in the short term make someone feel a bit better. The problem is because you're removing all of this prebiotic substrate, you're starving those bacteria. So you're going to, as you say, over time,

lose more and more diversity and you're not getting all of those benefits that we spoke about before with regards to the production of these short-chain fatty acids, these postbiotics that then, you know, keep the gut lining intact and provide huge benefits both locally in the gut and also downstream. You know, these metabolites are lowering the risk of colorectal cancer. They're driving down inflammation throughout the body

and, you know, protecting us against things like neurodegenerative diseases. So there's a band-aid solution here where you get this short-term benefit. What I think is being overlooked is that chronic diseases have a long latency period. They bubble away under the surface for a while. And you might experience chronic disease in your 40s or 50s or 60s, but by and large,

the lifestyle that you were leading 10, 20, 30 years ago has had a lot to do with the development of that chronic disease. You spoke to the soldiers from the Korean War. They were young. They were laying down the pathology of atherosclerosis. So my fear is it is this sort of short-term Band-Aid solution. And my biggest fear with it is that it sends LDL cholesterol through the roof.

I'm talking, I said before, 100 milligrams per deciliter is like, it's considered the kind of recommendation here in America and in Australia. But as I said, really, you got to get down to 60 or 70 milligrams per deciliter where you don't see atherosclerosis. And here's the really, really interesting thing, Rich. Lauren Cordain, he wrote the Paleo Diet Book. He also published a paper that goes into what is a healthy LDL cholesterol level. This is coming from the father of the Paleo Diet.

And he went through and he looked at LDL cholesterols of primates and of hunter-gatherer tribes where there is low incidence of atherosclerosis. And his conclusion in this paper that he wrote, the father of the paleo diet, was that human LDL cholesterol needs to be at 50 to 70 milligrams per deciliter in order to avoid atherosclerosis.

So this is coming from him. And you might think, well, hang on, he's advocating for the paleo diet, then how can he be also saying that LDL cholesterol should be low? And a lot of this comes back down to what the paleo diet is versus how people are doing it. Yeah, that's a very good point.

Yeah, because it's not exactly the way that it's been massively adopted. That's right. And the paleo diet, if you look at how Lauren Cordain, what he recommends, it's talking about meats that are very low in saturated fat. If you went back and looked in the Paleolithic era and you look at woolly mammoth

or these types of meats that would have been eaten then, they're more equivalent to venison and antelope, which are very low in saturated fat and higher in polyunsaturated fats. That's actually ironic in itself because those people that are blaming polyunsaturated fats in seed oils are overlooking the fact that meat from the Paleolithic era was very rich in polyunsaturated fats. But overall, Lauren Cordain, his recommendations is for a diet that's low in saturated fat, even though he speaks about the inclusion of animal foods.

He talks about that being more consistent with the type, the quality of meat that people were eating back then. And he talks about the importance of a very high fiber diet. In fact, he mentions that many of these people were eating over 100 grams of fiber a day. In fact, he mentions that many of these people were eating over a hundred grams of fiber a day. So I think that's very important for people to understand that the paleo diet was not developed as this high saturated fat animal rich diet. Yeah, but the carnivore diet

is something altogether different. It has its roots in this kind of ancestral ideology, I suppose, but part and parcel of the philosophy of the carnivore diet, is it not, is that saturated fat is your friend. We talked about that, but also these high LDL markers are something that you should not concern yourself with.

Like, cause you see a lot of that cause people are having these elevated numbers including Sean Baker who shared it on Rogan, et cetera. And in response, they just say, well, that high number isn't relevant in the traditional way that we've considered it in the past because I'm doing my diet in this way, it's somehow buffered or ameliorated

by dint of the fact that I'm only eating meat. So help me understand at least like if you were them, like how you would articulate that and then let's kind of deconstruct it. So I mentioned before that saturated fat, increasing LDL cholesterol, increasing risk of atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease is the most substantiated relationship in science, in nutrition science today, without a doubt. And so much so that in 2017, a cardiologist by the name of Brian Ferentz, he co-authored a paper which very clearly states that LDL is causal in the progression, the development and progression of atherosclerosis. There are some very interesting things in that paper that he walks through and let's quickly go through those.

There is some genetic mutations that see people with genetically high LDL cholesterol, heterozygous familial hypercholesterolemia and homozygous. And hetero if you inherit one of those genes from one parent and homo if you inherit both. The latter unfortunately leading to much more rapid development of disease. But if you have FH as it's called in short, then particularly if it's the homozygous form,

you know, if you're dealt that genetic card and you have high LDL cholesterol from birth, these are people that have LDL cholesterol between 500 and a thousand, right? Which is where we're seeing people in the carnivore community. If you are- Literally, five to 10 to 15 times higher.

I think Paul Saladino's is 700. 700 where Cordain saying 50 to 70. And these people that inherit this, if they're not treated with statins, it's very, very common for them to develop cardiovascular disease in their teenage years and die in their 20s or 30s, right? And that's obviously very, very sad today with the progression of statins,

these people are living much longer. So that's the first thing that I think is interesting. The second is that there is a type of science we didn't discuss it before called Mendelian randomization. And this is science that really has become, I guess, popular or more commonly used in the last five to 10 years. And thanks to improvements in our understanding of genetics.

And Mendelian in the Gregor Mendel sense. I'm not sure of the origin. Like the original guy doing plant hybrids and working in genetics. Well, it could well be, I'm not sure of the origin but what it speaks to is these studies are like nature's randomized controlled trial. There are over 50 genetic mutations,

which lower LDL cholesterol, right? And if you're dealt that card and you have lower LDL cholesterol, you have significantly lower risk of developing coronary heart disease through your life. And because this is occurring as you're being made by your mother, it is nature's randomized controlled trial. And so we can see very clearly, what's really interesting about this is that these

single nucleotide polymorphisms is what they're called, right? There's 50 of these or more, is that they all lower LDL cholesterol by different amounts, right? But if you are to standardize how much they lower LDL by, right? They all have the same order of effect

on coronary heart disease, which means that it's highly likely that this is a causal link, right? We're talking about true cause and effect. Between elevated LDL and atherosclerosis. Yes, and it's a linear relationship. The lower you get LDL cholesterol down based on whichever genetic variant someone has, the lower their risk of coronary heart disease. Now, to add more evidence onto that, then we have lots and lots of statin trials. And there's some anti-statin rhetoric out there,

but it's so clear in these studies that when you get, when you lower LDL cholesterol through the use of either a statin, ezetimibe or PCSK9 inhibitors. These are different drugs acting on different pathways that all lower LDL cholesterol. No matter which one you look at, they all significantly lower

coronary heart disease. And once you get someone's LDL cholesterol down to about 70 milligrams per deciliter, which is 1.8 millimoles per liter with statins or with PCSK9 inhibitors, that's where you stop. You see the progression of atherosclerosis stops and you can start to see some regression.

So we have evidence from people who have genetically high LDL cholesterol. These people, if they're untreated, will develop atherosclerosis in their teens. We have evidence from people who have genetically low LDL. They're significantly protected against heart disease. We have these statin trials, which you see as a lower LDL cholesterol, you drive coronary heart disease risk down. And then on top of that, we have all of the observational research. There's a meta-analysis, the prospective studies collaboration that included 50 plus studies, 12 million plus person years follow up in that study. And it clearly shows in these cohort populations,

lower LDL cholesterol, lower risk of coronary heart disease. So when Paul Saladino with his insanely high LDL says, don't sweat it, don't worry about it. You don't need to concern yourself with this. How is he scientifically substantiating that? I don't think he is. I think that it's inconvenient for him that LDL

has been shown to be causal in the development of heart disease. And I've never seen him be able to substantiate that. Other than the fact he will say that his coronary artery calcium score is zero, right? But we know that people with a coronary artery calcium score of zero can still have atherosclerosis

and can still suffer from a heart attack. So for me, the evidence is overwhelming. The lower your LDL cholesterol and the more years you're exposed to that low level of LDL cholesterol, the better. Enough said on that. I wanna switch gears and explore a couple other things we've been going on for a while here.

Obviously there are different motivations and on-ramps for people who are interested in the plant-based diet or becoming more plant predominant in their lifestyle. We've explored the human health piece quite extensively today, but of course there are other motivators, the ethics of our food choices and how that implicates planetary health more largely,

which of course also brings up the issue of the environment and the health implications planetarily for the choices that we're making about the foods that we eat and the food products that we choose to purchase with our buying power. So let's talk a little bit about that. Maybe start more broadly with the idea

of how these dietary choices are affecting. Like we're in a climate crisis right now. We all, it's incumbent upon all of us to take greater responsibility for the choices that we make daily. How does the plant-based diet figure into this equation of being more ecologically responsible? Well, we've turned this place into a giant farm.

That's my second favorite quote of yours, by the way. And that's had huge effects on greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, agriculture is responsible for 25% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. It's had huge effects on biodiversity loss and deforestation. Agriculture is the number one cause of deforestation throughout the world. And with that, we're losing these precious parts of the natural world that really are our ally in fighting acidification. It's resulting in the eutrophication and hypoxic conditions in certain bodies of water that result in the algal blooms. Overall, if you are to look at agriculture,

I think one of the most powerful statistics is 50% of the habitable land on earth is used today for agriculture. And of that, 83% of that is used for animal agriculture, yet it only returns us with 18% of our calories and is responsible for two thirds of agriculture related emissions. Yeah, so purely from an academic perspective,

this is a highly inefficient farm that we're running if the planet is indeed a farm. So we have kind of, I guess, two parts to this. The factory farming of animals is very inefficient because it requires large amounts of land to grow crops. And the feed conversion ratio is not great. Like to produce animal products, you have to grow these animals. And the larger the animal, the higher have to grow these animals.

And the larger the animal, the higher the basal metabolic rate. It's the energy that that animal's burning just to be alive. And so with that, what happens is we lose a lot of the calories that we feed in to the system. So if you use like a combustion engine as an analogy, you put gasoline in and not all of that energy

gets converted into forward motion of the car. Some of it is cast off by heat, et cetera. Similarly, when we're taking all of these crops, we're feeding them to animals, not all of that is converted into potential energy that's consumed by humans. A lot of it is lost. Like it's just highly high.

If you were an alien who came to earth and said, show me how you make your food. And we showed them, they would say, this is total insanity. And food waste is important, right? And 17% of the world's calories are wasted. And we absolutely have to focus on that because that's calories that could be ending up in bellies

and it's also a big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. But what's overlooked is that the biggest area of food waste is within animal agriculture. It's the waste of the calories that we're feeding into this inefficient system. And to give you an idea of the efficiency or lack of efficiency, if you feed a hundred calories into a cow,

you'll get 40 calories of milk out the other side. So you'll lose 60%. If you feed a hundred calories into a chicken, you'll get 20 calories of eggs out the other side. So you're losing 80%. If you feed 100 calories into a pig or a chicken, you'll get about 10 calories of meat out the other side. So in that example, you can think, you know, if you had for one chicken burger, right? You could essentially make 10 black bean burgers. You know, that's the difference we're talking about here in terms of, you know, efficiency and what we're wasting.

And then beef, red meat is the least efficient of all. You feed a hundred calories into a cow and you get three calories of meat out the other side. Now, often when I speak to this, people say, well, I only eat the grass-fed beef. And they're not feeding them feed crops, they're out grazing. And that's true. But the biggest problem with grazing is the amount of land that that it's using and you know in order to to make space for that industry which provides very few calories

we have to clear a lot of land and there's a really interesting paper from 2018, Tim Searchinger, that has gone back and looked at today's grasslands. And at least 41% of them were forests or woody savanna not too long ago. And globally right now, still to this day, the number one cause of deforestation is animal agriculture. Right, so, you know, I could do a four hour podcast

on the environmental implications of animal agriculture and the impact of a pivot to a plant centric diet in terms of the ecological impact. We don't have four hours. So I wanna focus our remaining time on the conversation around regenerative agriculture, because I think there's a lot of confusion here. I've hosted people from this arena on the podcast.

We're both friends with Rylan Englehart, who's behind the Kiss the Ground movement and the Cafe Gratitude restaurants. I've had John and Molly Chester from Biggest Little Farm on here. I have a lot of respect for people who have devoted their time and energy towards the regeneration of our soils,

because I think this is crucial. It's a crucial piece in redressing climate change and pivoting from a consumptive society into a regenerative one. But I also think there's a lot of misunderstanding, as I said, and also greenwashing when it comes to how we're understanding what exactly it is that we're talking about with respect to regenerative agriculture.

I think there's a lot of well-intentioned, but perhaps misconceived narratives about this. So I wanna parse truth from fiction when it comes to what we're talking about with regen ag, what exactly can be accomplished, what is getting overlooked and what these, what the kind of inherent flaws are when it comes to the claims being made by the holistic land management cohort of advocates?

Gosh, big question. So, I am a huge proponent of regenerative agriculture overall. I think it makes a lot of sense. I think that we certainly need to consider soil health. I think that we certainly need to consider soil health. I think definitions are important here and also looking at what the science says because it is an area like the diet wars

where emotion can affect the interpretation of science. And so I think there's a little bit of science to go through here as well. Regarding definitions, regenerative agriculture is really nothing new. A lot of the practices, be it polycropping or intercropping or covercropping,

or cover cropping, these are- Those are ancestral practices. What's new is industrialized farming. That's right. And so a lot of regenerative agriculture, I guess, in some ways it's become a bit of a buzzword, but I do think it's important for people to understand the roots of many of these practices are from First Nations land management

and regenerative agriculture overall is not the same as regenerative beef. Regenerative beef is one practice, this holistic grazing within a whole plethora of regenerative agricultural practices. And so there have been many, many First Nations people around the world that have improved soil without animal integration using polycropping, cover cropping, green manure, etc. So I think that's an important point because I think sometimes when people think of a regenerative agriculture,

they immediately think of regenerative grazing. I don't think that there's much debate at all about polycropping and intercropping and cover cropping. I think that's generally accepted across the board, and intercropping and cover cropping, I think that's generally accepted across the board that those practices are much better for promoting biodiversity and improving soil health. I think where- And sequestration.

And sequestration, right? I think where there is dispute is around regenerative grazing. And I believe, and I've had a number of people in my show to talk about this as well from both sides. Right, I should point out, so I don't forget, you've done a number of podcasts with Nicholas Carter

and those are, I don't know, three or four with him. I mean, those are fantastic. So we're not gonna be able to get into, the super nitty gritty of all this, but everybody should go listen to Simon's conversations with Nicholas on his Plant Proof Podcast because it's very- You should have him on.

Yeah, I would love to have him on. He's an incredible environmental researcher, scientist, but I guess big claims require big evidence. And there have been some wild claims made about regenerative grazing over the years. Alan Savory, most notably, he's well known for a YouTube TED Talk. And he said this was the key.

That really kicked off this whole thing. He said this was the key to reversing climate change. You know, and his idea is that he believes through his practices that you can sequester an enormous amount of carbon, right? And that would be amazing. Imagine we could draw down all of this carbon that has been emitted since the industrial revolution, get it into our soils and cool the planet.

That is a great story. Now, where does the science lie? That's ultimately what we should be most concerned with. And the science doesn't stack up with these practices being a net carbon sequestering practice. So it's true that you can sequester some carbon, absolutely. The problem is that when you are accounting for methane emissions and nitrous oxide from the animals,

the net position is one of greenhouse gas emissions. And there was a big report done from out of Oxford University called Grazed and Confused by Dr. Tara Garnett. And she walks through this, the fact that, you know, you can probably offset about 40 40 to 60% of emissions. But even then over time, what happens is the soil becomes saturated with carbon. And so over the years,

you're sequestering less and less carbon, but you still have the same amount of methane and nitrous oxide emissions. So the practice is becoming less net sequestering over time. Right, the livestock themselves being the emitters. But also part of that report, was it not this idea that the sequestration is not indefinite, but time sensitive in that it's not permanently sequestered

in the soil. That's right, so it can be reversible. And still to this day, and it is somewhat frustrating. I actually, I think that some regenerative grazing, like let's say we were moving to a world where everyone was adopting very plant predominant diets and the only beef production was regenerative grazing. I think that's a great result for the world.

But what I've noticed is from this industry, there doesn't seem to be a message about reduction. It seems to be a message about, it's not the cow, it's the how, and that's a nice message to the mainstream who perhaps don't wanna change their meat consumption. They don't have to, they can just change where it's come from. There's an intellectual dishonesty with advocating

for a solution premised on more grazing without the counterpoint or not the counterpart being, this is all contingent upon everybody moving to a more plant predominant diet, because by dint of sheer land availability, this model cannot scale to meet global meat demand as it currently stands. You're correct in that if everybody pivoted

to only eating beef that was grass-fed and grazed on regenerative land such as this, we would be in a much better state, but it's a mathematical impossibility to meet global meat demand using this model. So something has to change. And as much as I admire the people behind Kiss the Ground and what they're trying to communicate, I think there's a lot of good in that movie. I feel like it overlooked or gave short shrift to a very important point, which is that no matter what,

no matter how efficacious this model is, it will still all demand that we reduce our meat consumption. And the key point being here, why do we need to reduce our meat consumption? Because we need to free up land. We need to produce more calories from less land and restore vast amounts of land back to wild ecosystems. Right, and those wild ecosystems, forests, et cetera,

are actually better at sequestering carbon than a grazed regenerative farm would be. Yeah, so this is a really interesting point too, because there is this sort of prevailing idea, I guess, from people within holistic grazing that you need the animals to regenerate the land. And that's not true. There is a meta-analysis 2020,

which specifically looked at what happens to biodiversity when you include livestock versus excluding them. And they specifically showed that when you exclude livestock from land, you get greater returns in biodiversity, increased numbers of herbivores, you restore the predator-prey relationship, you increase the number of intervertebrate pollinators. So the why I believe that the solution to this Rich is that until there's an incentive for the landowner to practice conservation, like let's think about regeneration and just drop agriculture off the end of it for a

moment. I understand that, you know, farmers and landowners need to make an income. And I think the grazing aspect is a result of economics. And- Well, it's a result of incentives or a misalignment of incentives. And in New Zealand, they have an incentive to afforestation, so converting grasslands into forests. And it's now got to a point, so 2020 paper that just, or 2021, it's now got to a point where land owners,

the more economical choice is to practice tree planting and afforestation than livestock grazing. How did they create that incentive structure? Well, they are valuing carbon drawdown and biodiversity. And so I think that this is sort of critical to solving this is our mindset. If you go back to the First Nations people, something that we can learn from their culture

is living in harmony with the environment, being stewards of the environment, being stewards of the environment, being guardians of the environment. And it's a different approach to looking at land and thinking about what value can I extract from that in the form of calories. And the New Zealand government, what they have done is they have placed value

on carbon storage. And so, you create a situation where the owner of that land stands to make more money by practicing carbon farming as opposed to livestock grazing. Yeah, we need some fundamental changes from the top down here, as well as from the livestock grazing. Yeah, we need some fundamental changes from the top down here, as well as from the bottom up. The farm bill being one of them. I know Ryland's very active in doing some advocacy

around the next vote that's taking place, I think next year. And we do need a better incentive structure because these farmers are well-intentioned and they just wanna make a living and they're just trying to get by. So how can we create a system that drives them towards making that regenerative choice

in a way that's restoring our land, protecting our soils and promoting the increase in biodiversity? It always goes back to that analogy with the microbiome. Like these are all microsystems and macro systems that mimic each other in terms of how health outcomes are produced. And it starts at the very micro level and scales up from there.

There's a wonderful documentary called rewilding a Mountain. You heard of Heart Mountain in Oregon? Is this in China? They did something similar in China too. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I believe they did. But this is different?

This is in Oregon, I believe, Heart Mountain. And it's a documentary that looked at 20 year rewilding project. The land manager at the time consulted scientists and they said to him, you have to remove livestock. And all the riparian areas were completely damaged. The birds had left. The land was very degraded. A lot of degraded land around the world today

is through overgrazing. And this documentary steps through what happened. And you see the pronghorn antelope come back and that predator prey relationship comes back and you see the grasslands grow. And it's not just this kind of monograss land, but it's native grasslands that, you know, and that's an important point. Native grasslands are actually different to a lot of these grazing grasslands. They support a very diverse range of herbivores.

And so that's a nice, I think, documentary for people to watch if they wanna see what happens when you exclude livestock from the land. And this is just critical to us solving the climate change problem in terms of agriculture is rewilding a lot of land and producing more calories from less land.

And sometimes I hear of this idea of marginal land. I'm not sure if you've heard of that. And the idea with marginal land is that, this land you can't do anything with it except for graze cattle on it. But that's not true. That's if you're looking at it from an extraction of calories lens.

There's nothing marginal about that land to the animals and the ecosystem should you regenerate it. And- Yeah, marginal, that's a subjective assessment, only by virtue of how valuable it is to us. So I think if we can change that mindset and from a less kind of dominating mindset and more to practicing conservation

and get the incentives in like New Zealand, this is happening now around the world, then farmers can be a key part, play a key role in helping to heal the planet. Mm-hmm. And I would imagine that if you can create that sort of structure for these farmers, just how much more fulfilled and purpose-driven

they would feel as stewards of the land rather than as extractors. just how much more fulfilled and purpose-driven they would feel as stewards of the land rather than as extractors. Well, I think we've gone over three hours today, dude. We could go another three. My outline, I think we did two things on my entire outline, but I'm not letting you go without congratulating you on the new book.

This really is like the ultimate primer, just chock-a-block with accessible tools that walk you through everything that we talked about today and so much more with respect to how to be more plant predominant and understanding all the hows and whys behind it. I know years of your life went into this. When I was in Australia that January,

you were writing it then, and that seems like a past life. You gave me some great tips actually. It's finally reached North American shores. It's coming out September 30, what's the date? November 1st. November 1st, got it. We've calendared. What's the date? November 1st. November 1st, got it. We've calendared this to go out right around the same time. So kudos on that.

Everybody should check out Simon's podcast, Plant Proof. And beyond that plantproof.com is an incredible resource with tons of articles that are freely available where you can kind of learn the nuts and bolts of how to do this properly. And everything I might add is, or nothing I should add about Plant Proof or this book is being monetized by you basically.

This is stuff that you make freely available and the proceeds of the book are being directed to charity. Am I correct? Yeah, maybe we should finish this on a nice optimistic. I got some good news last night. What's that? The Daintree rainforest in Australia, which has been threatened through deforestation

over a number of years. It's the world's oldest tropical rainforest, one of the most biodiverse places on earth. And it's a World Heritage Site now. And overnight, there was an agreement made between the government and the First Nations people that are from that area. And they have been granted the land

to be the custodians of the land. So it's going to be handed back to them to be under their care, the Kuku Yalanji people, Eastern Kuku Yalanji people. So this is a, you know, it's a small win. It's 160,000 hectares though that will now be protected under their care and along with Uluru and Kakadu in Australia.

So I work to that and that's incredible because that means, you know, this wonderful rainforest will be protected and their culture can live on. And we're at risk of losing a lot of the culture from First Nations people. So I see this kind of agreement as some reparation, making amends for things of the past

and important going back to what we were talking about earlier in just creating a societal perspective shift of the past and important going back to what we were talking about earlier in just creating a societal perspective shift to one of guardianship and stewardship. And the more we can integrate these First Nation cultures back into society, the better. So the reason I bring that up

is that the, you're right, the profits of the book will be going. There are still parts of the Daintree that are privately owned and are under threat of deforestation. So Half Cut, the organization led by a friend of mine, actually, is Half a Beard, which- Oh yeah, that guy.

I know that guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's his name? Jimmy Halfcutt. Jimmy Halfcutt. Half a beard to represent half the world's forest. He sounds like he's in Goodfellas or something. Yeah.

So half the world's forests have been cleared and that's what his half beard represents. Got it. Yeah, I never understood what the symbolic nature of that was. So it's a conversation starter. Whenever I'm out with him, everyone of course comes up and says,

hey dude, what's going on? How long has he had half a beard? Five years, I think. Yeah, a long time. He says he's going to regenerate it though. So he's regenerating it as we regenerate. I see. So I hope that we see a day where he has a full beard, but he runs the organization Half Cut

that is buying back some of the land around the Daintree, you see a day where he has a full beard, but he runs the organization Half Cut that is buying back some of the land around the Daintree, still part of the Daintree that isn't under World Heritage, but buying it back and then having it listed under World Heritage and under the care of the indigenous people that are from that area. You're a beautiful man, Simon Hill. Thank you. Come back anytime, man.

We got plenty more we could talk about. Yeah, I hope I haven't confused people. No, I think it's good. I think you cut through a lot of confusion and created clarity from my perspective. More clarity again can be found in Simon's book, The Proof is in the Plants, plantproof.com. On Instagram, Simon is constantly sharing super helpful information at plant underscore proof, right?

And you're on Twitter a little bit, you mix it up. Yeah, I'm an avid Twitter user. I don't have many followers on there. It's good, it's a good time. I always check in like, wait, you know, like you're not afraid to scrap it up a little bit. I thought I wondered actually, does Rich watch this? Oh yeah, dude, I watch from the sidelines.

I don't participate. I have a standard copy and paste line, which is, can you provide a study that supports this claim? And I'll tell you what, my strike rate is not great. I get barely any replies to that. Right, that's the conversation ender. Yeah. There you go. There are some people who of course can engage in,

you know, a civil conversation, but. Yeah, but three or four tweets in, it generally devolves into less civil. But we kept it civil here today. We did. Be civil in the world and enjoy the rest of your time in LA. And we'll do this again soon.

Rich, love you brother. Thank you so much for having me. And if you find yourself in Bondi, Bondi Beach, where Simon hails from, you gotta visit Eden, Simon's restaurant. And I can't take the credit. I can't take all the credit for that. I need to.

Well, Tanya. Tanya, my lovely partner, she's made that the place that it is. So of course, if you're in town, come on down. Yeah, for sure. Best plant-based eats in all of Sydney, right there in Bondi Beach. When I was spending time there, that was my second home.

And you know, next time you're gonna have to let me pay for a meal, because Simon didn't let me pay for a single meal when I was there. We loved having you, it was our treat. It was great. So thanks man, much love. Talk to you soon. Peace.

Plants. Proof. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com

where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated.

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was created by blake curtis with assistance by our creative director dan drake portraits by davy greenberg graphic and social media assets courtesy of daniel salis dan drake and aj akpodiate thank you georgia whaley for copywriting and website management and of course course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.

Namaste. Thank you.