WHOOP Podcast - The Power of a Plant-Based Diet with Simon Hill

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

On this week’s episode, WHOOP VP of Performance Science, Principal Scientist, Kristen Holmes is joined by Simon Hill. Simon is a physiotherapist, nutritionist, and author on a mission to help people make informed lifestyle choices. In 2021, he published his first book, The Proof is in the Plants, which makes a case for a plant-based, whole-food diet, drawing on all the latest nutrition research. Kristen and Simon will discuss Simon’s book and his main philosophies (3:55), tailoring diets to the individual (11:30), scientific research that helped shape Simon’s findings (13:13), the barrier for entry for various diets (19:38), the negative stigma around legumes and soy (24:23), getting enough protein (31:38), biomarkers that people might see change while dieting (41:43), dietary data from WHOOP members (46:33), how nutrition impacts sustainability and the environment (50:38).Resources:Simon’s WebsiteSimon’s Podcast with Thomas DayspringOur World In DataSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down with the best of the best. I'm your host, Will Amid, founder and CEO of Woop, and we are on a mission to what? Unlock human performance. That's right. On this week's episode, Woop VP of Performance Science, Principal Scientist, the Fearless, the Epic, Kristen Holmes, is joined by Simon Hill. Simon is a physiotherapist, nutritionist, and author on a mission to help people make informed

lifestyle choices. In 2021, he published his first book, The Proof is in the Plants, which makes a case for a plant-based whole-food diet, drawing on all the latest nutrition research. As of 2023, his podcast, The Proof with Simon Hill has been listened to over 30 million times. The proof extends beyond nutrition to other crucial lifestyle factors that impact our well-being. Kristen and Simon discuss Simon's book and the research behind his philosophy, creating a diet that is suitable for the individual, essentially understanding how your body reacts to certain food groups, an in-depth look at the plant-based and whole-green diets, the power of legumes and some of the myths around them, how to get enough protein on a plant-based

diet. This is something I was certainly interested in. They touch on plenty of non-meat alternatives that are loaded with protein, how WOOP members are tracking various diets, and how nutrition can be linked to sustainability and the environment. If you're looking to join Woop, you can visit our website and sign up for free. That's right. Free 30-day trial. If you like it, become a member. If you don't, send it back. It's that simple. You can also use the code Will at checkout, W-I-L, get a $60 credit on apparel and accessories. If you have a question you want to see answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at whoop.com. Call us 508-443-4952, and it might just be answered on a future episode.

This is obviously a very diet-focused and nutrition-focused podcast, and it's also very oriented towards plant-based. I want to be clear that WOOP does not have a strong opinion on what diet you should be on, but we do believe it's a highly personal decision in that whatever. diet you're on is going to affect your body and probably your body differently. So you should manage it by measuring it. And as part of that, we've also had other people come on the podcast. Most recently, Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, who talked about the importance of a meat-based, heavily protein-oriented diet. We got a lot of feedback on that podcast. So now we're showing the other

side of the spectrum, which is plant-based. We'll continue to have more folks on. Without further ado, here are Kristen Holmes and Simon Hill. Simon received a Master of Science in Human Nutrition from Deakin University. During this time, he established this podcast, The Proof with Simon Hill, where he hosts world-renowned doctors and public figures who share their significant experience in translating the latest research into actionable lifestyle recommendations. As of today, Simon's podcast has been listened to over 30 million times. Simon, welcome.

Kristen, thank you for having me in this beautiful space. I know. I'm so excited for this conversation. Admittedly, this is an area that I actually, I don't know a whole lot about, so I know I'm going to learn a ton today, so I'm really excited for that. I wanted to start in, so in 2021, you published the book, The Proof is in the Plants. Congratulations on that. In the middle of a pandemic.

Totally. Maybe not the best timing, but. No, no. Well, I'd love for you to describe just the thesis. of that book and really what motivated you to kind of take on what is not an easy project. The motivation was, I felt like people are extremely confused about what they eat, the good phone to them how I think talking to friends and family members and people that I was working with, it almost seemed like people felt as if we didn't have enough information

to even inform our food choices and that all the science was conflicting. And you could find any science to support any view, which that part is true. But it's not as though science is completely conflicting or confused. I understand why people may feel that way. But when you have the actual skills to get into the research and understand and appreciate the context and that way, so when you're digging into certain studies, you're thinking about things like dose, of a nutrient or food, how much is someone eating? Or if you're considering a particular nutrient or food,

what are you comparing it against in a study that's comparing high and low? What is high and low? These are relative terms. So how contrast is there between that exposure of interest? What subject group are we looking at? Are we looking at children? Are we looking at pregnant women?

Are we looking at postmenopausal women? Are we looking at elderly? What is the control? like control what outcomes are we interested in are we looking at surrogate things like changes to blood biomarkers like cholesterol or acobie what what glucose markers are we looking at triglytherids or are we looking at hard health outcomes like increase in strength or cardiovascular uh events like a heart attack stroke or the development of a certain type of cancer and then you know beyond that for who if we're looking at a particular compound of food we then all have to

appreciate that there are some genetic differences as well between people and it's not until you're actually aware of that context and then appreciating it and looking across a body of literature and not at a single piece of evidence yeah each single piece of evidence is important but it it has to be considered within the wider body of literature looking at that and appreciating that not all study designs are equal in terms of validity and reliability. Right. So when you consider all that, and I think when I explain that, people go, wow, there's a lot to this. But when you are appreciating that, it becomes very clear that while there's not like one diet that I can say, Chris, here's a prescription for just eat exactly this.

You know, it's not that clear. There's a bit of brain. But there's a theme that I like to describe people. And that was the central part of my thesis in my book was to help people understand that thing. It's diets that are low and saturated fats. They tend to be rich in unsaturated fats, particularly polyunsaturated fats. We can get into what this looks like from a food perspective. It's diets that are high in fibril.

They provide a good amount of protein based on that person's needs, their activity levels and goals, and has a bias for plant. protein it can contain animal protein but certainly compared to the average person's diet today 85% of proteins from animal foods it's more emphasized and there's more emphasis on plant protein and it's low and ultra processed foods and so that thing you might seem a little bit safe to people and and we want absolutes and that's why books that are selling you an absolute that's why they sell so well and they're on the bestsellers list and will gravitate the dogma because it simplifies things and I understand that

like there is some beauty to simplifying something so that people can grab hold of it sure so I don't want to make it too gray the way that I kind of tie that together could say that that thing that I just described is generally achieved in plant predominant to exclusive diet but that would be a Mediterranean diet which in the literature is described as a form of plant-based diet It could be a pesticide diet, the DASH diet, which is used in the literature a lot for blood pressure management, another form of plant-based eating, vegetarian for a plant-exclusive diet and the commonality of all of those dietary patterns and why they reduce your risk of cardiometabolic disease in particular, which covers most of the diseases that are reducing health span, increasing the number of years where people have lower quality of life. All of those diets are low and saturated fat, a good amount of unsaturated fats, they're rich in fiber. They have much more plant protein than the average diet today and they're low and ultra-processions. The nice thing about that is there is a lot of variations of this theme.

So you have choice. And in working with many people, it's become super clear to me that the biggest problem or hurdle that we have obstacle, it's not that we actually need to know more information about what to eat. We actually just need to be able to do what we know. And the hardest thing is adherence. Finding something that you enjoy, it's healthy for you. So it's looking after your health today. You're great today.

It's going to reduce your risk of non-outreveloor, fatty liver disease, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, having an heart attack, etc. And you can stick to it over decades. Because that's what, when we're talking about food, it's all about lifetime exposure it's very much like cigarettes where people are about pack years so we have to about our diet i would rather people try and find one of those variations and do it imperfectly over decades then do something perfectly for two weeks and so that's the kind of i guess the central thesis to that i wrote in 2021 when it comes to nutrition and then

in the book I also expanded upon the conversation and spoke about some benefits of leaning more towards plant exclusive diets in terms of the effect on the environment which I think that research is super clear and of animal welfare and my my position was not to tell people to go vegan it was that if we're going to have a conversation that is about food and go on to just our health. I think, firstly, you have to separate it. You need to be able to talk about how food affects your health separately, because often that's blurred. You can see it online, it becomes very emotional. Then you can talk about the environment and animal welfare, and I think there is a strong case to adopt a diet as a plant exclusive for you. So again, that comes back to the individual

can be the only person that can actually assess that on their circumstances, how they're feeling And they love what they goals with those things. Talk a little bit how you kind of, I imagine in your book you talk, you elustate the difference between kind of diet and lifestyle. Just maybe, I heard that as one of the core themes, just maybe expand a little bit on people were to just engage in a diet, you know, for two, four, six, eight weeks, you know, versus like a lifestyle. What does that behavior change actually look like?

And how do you frame that up for an individual? I think when we approach diet, yes, the mindset is more temporary. This is an on-off type thing. But it comes back to understanding that if our goal is long-term health. So that's got to be a starting point. Firstly, people need to understand what is their goal. And also that comes back to what are your values. So often we just skip over all that and then we're making changes to our diet,

but we're really not sure why we're making those changes. Or it's something superficial, and for me, the superficial thing, it can be a good motivator initially, but often you need something a little deeper to stick long term. Or you get the result, you're looking for the superficial result. We've all done it, and then you just drop off. Yeah. And six months later, you do it again,

and that's kind of yo-yo dieting. The difference is that you're in it for the long game. you understand that in terms of how these foods affect your physiology, so how insulin-resistant you are, the way your heart's working, your liver function, the way your brain's operating, it's about chronic exposure. What you're doing over decades that really matters. So I think we have to get out of this mindset of diet now, something that we're just kind of hopping on and off,

and instead try and find some variation in that theme, you can stick to over the course of your life and it would vary as well yeah what were some of the key scientific findings that you highlighted in your book that kind of led you to believe that plant-based kind of whole food diet is really the path yeah each of those different dietrines that I mentioned that fit in that theme you see a lot of the very consistent results in terms of how they're affecting people's health so first and foremost As you're shifting from more of a standard diet to any of those variations,

you're seeing improvements in blood pressure in the realm of 10 millimeters of mercury drop or systolic point pressure. To give people context, how important is that? Every 20 millimeter increase in systolic blood pressure, double your risk of heart attack, stroke, or other masculine events.

So we're talking about a quarter, so 25% reduction in your risk of any of those events by adopting one of these dietary patterns if your systolic blood pressure comes down from, say, 130 to 120, where we want it. So dietary patterns, so you're talking pescatarian, vegan, vegetarian, Mediterranean, those four, right? Yeah, so, and maybe we define those if you want. Yeah, that might be helpful, yeah.

I think the basic premise of all of those is that whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, lots of fruits and vegetables, these are filling the plate. And the Mediterranean diet, there's room in there for meat. It's usually more like white meat and fatty fish. There's some dairy in there. And it's very similar to the dash diet in many ways. What's that acronym stand for? A dietary approach to stopping hypertension, I think. Okay.

So that's similar, and there's a low sodium kind of dash diet as well. And then, you know, vegetarian is mostly plant-based. There's some dairy and some eggs, depending on the type of vegetarian diet that someone adopts. Pescatarian is that plus fish. And then a vegan diet is completely plant exclusive. but I guess we should be very clear here. You can do a vegan diet very poorly. We're talking about one that's not full of ultra-processed vegan foods.

It's, again, it's those whole foods that make up the majority of calories. The reason why these diets reduce blood pressure is when you're eating that way, relative diet, you get a huge reduction in sodium intake. You get a big increase in potassium intake. That lowers blood volume, which lowers blood pressure. And hypotension or high blood pressure is a huge risk factor for cardiovascular diseases. We've made massive inroads in terms of reducing cardiovascular mortality. And a lot of that is through pharmacology and also reducing cigarette smoking.

But if we want to squeeze cardiovascular disease out of society, we have to address hypertension. These diets help with that. We also have to address LDL cholesterol or more specifically APOB. that's a that's a long discussion to explore what apobie is but let me just say high level this is now believed to be a much stronger predictor of cardiovascular risk than LDL cholesterol and you can ask your physician to listen to peter yeah right talk to hold out about people yeah so you can listen to peter ritea i did a seven or eight hour long series with thomas dayspring Peter Ritchie has also had on

and that came out like four or five months ago and it's like if you really want to deep dive apo B then do that but all of these diets will help lower someone's APO B and they do that because they have the emphasis on unsaturated fats and deemphasized saturated fat and just very quickly the mechanism there is

saturated fats essentially they downregulate a receptor in your liver and make it much harder to clear cholesterol to clear APOB, whereas the unsaturated, particularly polyunsaturated fats in fatty fish, nuts and seeds, they open up those receptors and allow you to clear more. So these diets will shift that potent risk factor in the right direction. All of these diets as well will help improve insulin sensitivity. That's through a couple of different mechanisms.

One is as you lower your body weight, you become more insulin sensitive. And naturally when you eat the way that I'm describing, this is a lot of. lower calorie density diet. And we know that calorie density affects how many calories you're consuming over the day. So the more volume there is in your food, less calories per bite, the less calories you're likely to eat over that day. So these diets can be very good at helping someone if they want to lose weight as well, which helps improve insulin sensitivity.

But insulin sensitivity is also improved independent of weight by the type of fat you're eating. And this is lost on people. The literature is very clear on this. Even if you're not losing weight, when you reduce saturated fat and increase polyunsaturated fats, you see improvements in blood glucose control. Insulin sensitivity improves. So you get that benefit.

You'll see there are fairly robust associations with each of these diets with the lowering in inflammation. So less of, I'm talking about chronic inflammation here, not so much the acute inflammation that we want. If we get injured or have an infection that we need to clear, talking about that more low-grade inflammation that causes a lot of collateral damage. Yeah. Just sleep. Right. So that underpins a lot of these chronic disease processes, including dementia. So that's, I guess, a bunch, certainly not limited to those, but those are some of the big reasons why shifting to these diets really protect you against chronic diseases that we've kind of normalized in our society, but it doesn't have to be that

way. Yeah. In terms of like ease of entry, so low barrier to entry, what would be the taxonomy of those four diets in terms of like, you know, is Mediterranean kind of the easiest of the four? This is a great question. It's one of the best questions I've ever been asked. I love it because it's so practical and it's often, it's often missed. you know we can go down all of these rabbit holes and as I said we have enough information

we just kind of need to make it simple for people and easy to grab a hold of I would say that the Mediterranean diet is the sort of most comprehensive diet from the point of view of if you just want to adopt something and you don't really want to go to the next level of researching about certain nutrients of focus and filling some of the gaps which you do need to do as you go to any extreme. If you were to go to the carnivore extreme or to the full vegan extreme, and some people may want to explore that territory, but you probably have to think a little bit less,

and there's probably a little less that can go wrong with the Mediterranean-style diet. Now, most people when they think of Mediterranean diet are probably not thinking about it how it is in the literature. So we probably should sort of define that a little bit more. it's not necessarily just eating a lot of pizza and pasta and red wine. I think there's room for a glass of red wine here and there to enjoy ourselves. But the diet is, again, it's based on lots of fruits and vegetables, whole grains,

legumes. So there is certainly much more emphasis on plant protein than there is in the standard diet. And when it comes to meat, it's leaner cut to meat, which is important because that will reduce that saturated fat. intake the dairy that's included tends to be fermented dairy and i think that's quite consistent with the literature looking at at dairy foods it's so mixed and because there's all different types of dairy and again what are you comparing to it seems like we should really be reducing our exposure to butter that's going to really jack up your apobie but quite significantly and that doesn't it's a trend around you know quote-unquote ancestral eating natural eating and

That's a whole other discussion. But I don't think our ancestors were interested in longevity. And I don't think evolution is particularly concerned with how healthy you are at 70 or 80. I think evolution is mostly concerned with, are you going to procreate? So I'm not sure adopting our ancestors' strategies as wise, unless we have the same goals as then. Yeah. Being valid. Right.

I think most people listening want to procreate and be around for as long as possible to enjoy that time with their kids. and their grandkids so the Mediterranean diet is where we were talking about what the Mediterranean diet is and what it's not it has that bias for for plant protein and then it's those leaner cuts of meats there's fatty fish in that that dietary pattern yeah yeah yeah I think that that's a good sort of starting point and to even go a step even more simpler here, I would say the biggest swap that someone could make if they're eating currently a diet that's not consistent with what we're describing is two swaps here, I would say. One is instead of cooking with butter, cooked with olive oil, and the second is, instead of eating

red meat, four or five, six times a week, try to half that and replace that with legions. and naturally what's going to happen here is you're going to lower your consumption of saturated fat you can increase your plant protein and you're going to increase your fibre and these are all things that will shift those risk factors that we discussed before into the right direction and that doesn't have to be an all or nothing play to begin with

I'll work with people that often I say when people are like I just don't know where to start keep your recipes as they are but go on Instagram and think you have to create these three, four hour long recipes every night of the week, that's not sustainable. You know your lasagna recipe or whatever you make.

Okay, let's just say that there's a pound of minced beef in it. I'm translating that, because converting, because I work in grants. But let's just say it's a pound of minced beef. Well, can you half that and have half minced beef, half lentils? You won't even know. It's going to taste the same. You just... I do put it down of what actually the licholum is a lot simple time.

I'm not even know that. Yeah, so a legume is anything from lentils, chickpeas, beans. There's lots of different varieties of beans. It also includes tempe, which is a fermented legume product. Often it's made with soy, but now it's made with chickpeas and other types of legumes as well. And tofu, that's another one. Why do folks rail against legumes? Where do we start?

Soy and hormones comes up. If people think that soy contains estrogen, it doesn't. I mean, you'd have to have bags and bags of it, right? And it doesn't contain estrogen. It contains polyphenols, which have been labeled as phytoestrogens. It's not estrogen. The reason that they call phytoestrogens is that they can bind to the estrogen receptor. But there's a number of actual benefits that are up for grabs for that.

And so you see in the literature, women in Asian populations who consume soy early in life have way lower risk of breast cancer because by binding to the receptor that the thing that people are overlooking is they're thinking that when it binds to the receptor it's mimicking estrogen but it's relative to estrogen it's about a thousand times weaker and what it's doing is it's blocking estrogen so a lot of these types of cancer whether it is breast cancer or prostate cancer they're hormone dependent cancers so there might be some some benefits up for grabs I'm not saying that that's definitive, but if anything, it's leaning towards being positive for cancer risk reduction, for certain types that are hormone-driven. So people think that it contains estrogen,

it doesn't. People think that it's going to mess with your hormones. And this has been tested in women and in men. Usually this comes from men who are worried about it. They think it's going to really take their tests off their own. There's a meta-analysis two years ago, looked at 41 clinical studies in humans. This is important because if you see someone making this claim, they're going to cite an animal study that was fed so much soy that you would never be exposed to in your diet. This was 41 clinical trials from two weeks up to a year long, feeding varying amounts of soy and those phytoestrogens, two men, and looking at estrogen levels, looking at free testosterone, total testosterone, all the things. And there was no significant changes. There was

nothing to be worried about. That was the conclusion of that paper. And am I saying that people should just eat unlimited amounts? I wouldn't recommend that for any food. Probably run into problems if you had unlimited dairy or unlimited nuts and seeds. We want to balance a diverse diet, but two or three serves of that a day is not going to be an issue or something for people to worry about. The other thing that comes up is lectins. I'm sure you've heard that. Yeah. so this is this is another one and this i think explaining this also covers the whole plants are trying to kill us type message about defense chemicals in general yeah the dose really matters here so you know as i kind of just pointed to you can find a study an animal study where you

isolate something out of a food which firstly is not always reflective of how that compound acts within a food matrix so you isolate it out and you expose an animal to it at an amount on a milligram per kilogram basis that we would never be exposed to and for example with lectins you could show some increased inflammation or in animals what would be described sort of colloquially leaky gut increased intestinal permeability but we have to remember that that's highly reductionist it's not the right dose so what we've seen at that level while interesting and it might be hypothesis generating you have to test it and maybe if there's no other studies you might just take the proportionary principle and say hey we've seen that until we know more let's not eat legumes but this

has been absolutely tested yeah you you can look find studies where they fed humans lots of legumes measure inflammation if anything they have reduced inflammation studies looking at hard health outcomes and in populations where people eat varying levels of legumes, people that eat more legumes are living longer, they have less risk of cardiovascular disease. The one thing that I would say is that it is quite clear that lectins can be a problem if you're not cooking your food or properly preparing your food. So there are some studies where people were fed raw, dried beans, basically. they were well undercooked and they had some digestive symptoms right and so i mean when no one's

recommending anyone has rice that hasn't been soaked and cooked or legumes that it would be really um not enjoyable to eat uh of any type of legume that hadn't been soaked and cooked and when you buy them in a canned form they've already been soaked and cooked right right that's taken care of for you but if if you know when when you bite into a legion it should sort of sit in the back of your mouth and it's soft if it's hard and crunchy it's undercooked and i wouldn't recommend you're you're consuming that but people that are consuming them in the properly prepared way are experiencing better health so i just think that that's another example where it's it is easy to kind of cherry pick a certain study and get people scared about lectins yeah but i could do that with

oxygen. I could honestly, and I say this to people all the time, I could hook someone up to 100% oxygen, pure oxygen, and they'll pass out and I'll kill them, right? Does that mean that oxygen is toxic and not healthy? Should we stop breathing? Oxygen in the air that we're breathing is 21%. And at that dose, it's life sustaining. It's important. So the dose is, you know, really important here as well. And this is just something for people to be aware. of with so much information coming out I think it helps to be discerning what are we looking for if you're looking for someone if you if you're seeing that someone is generating a lot of fear because fear drugs clicks and the algorithm loves it yeah just just be aware of you know where are

they getting that information yeah from and often some of the clues are these are people that are very overly dogmatic confident they're they're not speaking with any type of new or context, which I think some people, you can fall into the trap thinking that that person knows more than the person who's putting in some caveats and saying maybe, perhaps, that can come off as a bit of weakness. But if I'm looking sort of outside of nutrition for someone to provide advice in another area of science, those are the type of things that I'm looking for. Yeah, I think it's important and a really good call out.

So I think legumes, it's important to get into because that's a future of all these different diets, I think, that, you know, people are looking to do Mediterranean and vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, like, legumes are going to need to be a future of that diet, right, in order to kind of be as healthy as possible inside that diet. Yeah, and to get enough protein. And I think that within the plant-based community, there are certainly quite a few people who kind of downplay the importance of protein. Yeah.

I don't think that's a good idea. Right. I think that protein is really important, and I think the discussion around protein and long-term health for me is more about the source, not the amount. I think we have to have more of an emphasis on plant protein, but I also think we need to get enough, and it is important for a number of different functions in the body, but particularly important for maintaining muscle mass and strength as we age, both of which are predictors of longevity. What are the best plant proteins? What do you kind of recommend? Tofu, tempe, all those other legumes that I just mentioned. There's also satan if people are not celiac or gluten sensitive. TVP is another product that's not ultra-processed and is very high in protein for calorie. So all of those are options. I think if you're an athlete,

then adding in some type of protein powder can be convenient. I think athletes... Is that the only way to get that full chain of amino acids like how do you actually yeah that's a great question just to finish that i think athletes all athletes not all but most athletes use some type of protein powder from a convenience point of view if they're trying to get to an optimal level and that could be a weight protein or a plant protein shake the protein quality question is a good one protein is made up of amino acids some of which are non-essential some are essential so nine of them are essential which means that our body's not making them we require them through nutrition and often I think people have been led to believe that plants are missing some of these essential amino acids

that's not quite correct so maybe we can define that a little bit more all plants contain all of the nine essential amino acids and I know when I was at university, they actually didn't teach us that. It taught us that, you know, Kinwaar and soy were complete proteins that contain all nine essential amino acids and other foods were missing them. That's not, that's not correct. What is correct is that the definition of complete and incomplete proteins needs to be understood here.

It's not saying that if it's complete, it contains all nine and if it's incomplete, it's missing those nine. What it's saying is an incomplete protein is a protein that is, If you ate that food for all of your calories, at the end of the day, you would fall short on your requirements for one or more of those amino acids. That's interesting,

but it's really only interesting to people in developing countries that have no access to food. That's where that becomes really important if someone's getting all their nutrition from one grain. But when you're eating with some, you know, just a modest amount of diversity, providing you're eating enough calories in total protein, that takes care of itself.

And you can see that in an app like Chronomator, which is a free app, plug your food in, whichever one of these variations of diets that you choose over a day, I think this is good for people to do anyway for a little bit. I'm not saying that everyone needs to track their food in calories long term, but it can be helpful to see what are you eating? How much saturated fats in there, unsaturated fat? Are you getting all of these essential amino acids? Are you falling short on any micronutrients?

that app will display that in a nice, very visual way. So I get people not to focus so much on combining foods. I don't think people don't need to do that. What I do like them to focus on is just knowing they're eating enough protein. Because when you're eating enough protein and enough calories, all those amino acids take care of themselves. So if you're not an athlete and you're someone who's just, you know, recreationally working out, then 1.2 to 1.3 grams per kilogram, I'd say,

is the lower amount where I'd want someone to land. There are people that argue that you only need 0.8 grams per kilo, which is the RDA. I'm not on that team. I think that you're more likely to run into problems there in terms of recovery, ability to build muscle, stay strong. And there was a recent study just out that makes me believe that even more. And then if you're an athlete and you're really optimizing and you work training hard, you've got a lot of volume resistance training, then you want to be able to at least 1.5, 1.6 grams per kilogram. And that's going to help you recover. That's going to help you get the adaptations that you want.

The exercise is the stimulus that provides the stress and then for the body to adapt it needs that the nutrition to come with it. but even at that 1.2 to 1.3 grams per kilo when you look at studies that have looked at varying protein intakes and strength with resistance training you get most of the benefit in strength by 1.2 1.3 grams you squeeze out a little bit more if you get up to 1.5, 1.6 but it's not a huge amount. I wonder like for folks who are not eating animal proteins which in some ways is just easier to get protein, right?

For the most part, maybe that's not true. Well, I think it's easier for the average person who hasn't spent any time thinking about plant protein and where protein is found. Right. Right. And so people are just kind of doing what they know. But with a very small amount of time invested,

I mean, I reeled off those foods. Honestly, if you just put them side by side into a chart, you'll see how protein rich they can. be yeah and if you were to go and do two or three days of eating and including those foods in your meals you'll see it adds up um so i can kind of understand on face value why it makes seem easier but you can definitely get enough protein from eating only plants i mean i only personally only eat plants and i had my dexas scan today and my fat-free mass is in the top five 10 cent. So it's certainly possible. And I'm not sitting around, I can't remember the last

time I have ever counted protein. I'm not sitting around asking about that. I just know what foods contain protein. And I make a concerted effort to feature them and emphasize them in my meal. So step one is just actually knowing where you find protein in plant foods. Are plant foods, are they more colorically dense than like an animal protein? Not necessarily. Often they're actually less caloric dense, which surprises people. You know, some foods like salmon are quite calorie-dense foods, even though, you know, we'd see them as healthy. And I would argue they are healthy. I think that fatty fish like that is the research shows positive health outcomes.

But tofu is not more calorie-dense than salmon. And, you know, TVP or satan, like satan, which I mentioned before, which people can control. if they're not celiac or gluten-sensitive is like 80, 90% protein. So it's absolutely possible to get enough protein without consuming extra calories. And I think that's, that is something that people think, and there is the idea out there that, oh, you'd have to eat more calories. That's not the case. I can make someone a meal plan with 2,000 calories that has 160, 170 grams of protein.

And part of the art in that is manipulating some of the other. kind of food groups, you know, changing things around in terms of nuts and seeds. Yeah. Whole grains. So Mediterranean, what would be the next kind of diet that you would, Pescatarian, be kind of the next in terms of ease of entry? Yeah, I think, you know, as you sort of step away from Mediterranean and you're reducing animal foods, usually from just the point of view of being familiar with something or less

familiar. So we're eliminating meat right now. We're just fish. So it's like the social element and also just what you're familiar with. It sort of gets a little bit trickier to navigate. And then also some of the nutrients that you need to be more aware of. So you step to pescatarian. That's, you know, for most people that sort of land there,

they find that quite sustainable. And there's really not a whole lot to think there around micronutrients because you're still getting some beef, you're getting DHA and EPA omega-3s, you're getting iodine. These are three of the nutrients that I would say are of focus as you step away from a pescatarian diet. So as you get into a more vegetarian or a vegan diet, then there are some micronutrients that you want to be aware of.

Now, at the same time, the vegan diet also has a lot of extra pluses. It usually comes with much more plant protein, much more fiber, more polyphenols and antioxidants. So it's not just a trade, you're not just sort of stepping towards an inferior dietary pattern. There's pros and cons. All diets have pros, cons, some limitations, and it's just worth being aware of them. But certainly probably have to be a little bit more aware as you're removing animal foods and shifting to plants exclusive. Just make sure you're not becoming deficient in a key. micro nutrient. Have you noticed certain biomarkers for folks who maybe are wondering if you have

any data, folks who go from standard American diet, let's say, and then they shift to a plant-based diet. What would someone expect in terms of biomarker changes? I know this is pretty unique to an individual, but in any, you know, changes in sleep and variability, you know, is there anything that you know from the data that show? Yeah. So from a biomarker point, point of view, the further you shift along that spectrum, the more that APOB comes down. So we see from clinical intervention studies looking at essentially completely plant-exclusive dietary patterns, maybe a little bit of animal food, but not a lot. You can get about a 30% reduction in your LDL cholesterol, which is akin to the 30% reduction

in APAB. We would assume they didn't necessarily measure APA in those studies, which is important. So if you're considered low risk of cardiovascular disease, so you don't have hypertension, type 2 diabetes, you haven't had a cardiovascular event, you're not smoker, you want your APOB at 80 milligrams per deciliter or lower. The average person in this country walking around is at about 120, 10050. What does that mean? Well, that means that every day and every night they're laying down plaque in their artery.

We know that. The study's showing that where you look at. that people that do not have other cardiovascular risk factors, but have varying levels of LDL cholesterol. And what you see is at this 120 to 130 level, which a lot of physicians would say is, quote-unquote, normal. Is that a relatively sedentary individual? No, well, you wouldn't assume so.

I mean, these are people that have normal blood glucose. They don't have high blood pressure. They don't have type 2 diabetes. So we would assume that they're relatively healthy. They're going to probably moving their body in some capacity. And at 120 to 130, at least half of them have subclinical atherosclerosis. So they're laying down plaque, and it's not causing a heart attack or stroke at that point in time because it takes decades. So those people, if they don't get on top of that through diet or through pharmacology, will be,

one of the statistics when they're 50, 60, 70 where they have a stroke or a heart attack. So you can expect about a 30% reduction in that figure through diet if you take it more towards the extreme. And that's how I would say for people to navigate this. I think as you're making changes and you're sort of trading down on some of these animal foods, whether it's Mediterranean or Presbyterian, retest, where is APOB at? is it if you're a low risk person is it below 80 no okay do you want to make some more changes if not if you say i don't want to make any more changes well maybe you can think about pharmacology to help you get there so or if you're high risk and so you've had a cardiovascular event

or you have type 2 diabetes or your smoke or a combination of these hypertension then apobie should be at 50 milligrams per decilator or lower so you might be motivated to make more changes to your diet particularly if you're someone who's thinking I don't want to be relying on a medication. Well, then that person might say, you know what, I'm going to make all the dietary changes that I can make and they have a lot of motivation to do it and they can adhere to it.

Or, again, it might be a combination of the two. Blood pressure-wise, you can probably bring that down by 10 millimeters of mercury, which I mentioned before, which is about a 25% risk reduction in stroke, heart attacks or other vascular events. you will certainly see improvements in your blood glucose. So HBONC, fasting glucose, but also triglycerides if you're not eating refined carbohydrates, that's important.

So again, your carbohydrates are mostly coming from fruit, whole grains and legumes, not from packaged foods. Cookies and cakes and pizzas and white flour stuff. How much those numbers will improve will be a little bit subject to whether or not you lose weight. If you do lose weight and you're able to reduce, particularly the fact that is in and around your organs, visceral fat, and ectopic fat,

that's the really metabolically damaging fat. And again, I said before that one of the sort of nice things about these dietary patterns is they're low calorie density. So they can help people lose some weight and clear out some of that visceral fat, the ectopic fat, that is leading to the insulin. resistance and elevated blood sugar. Right.

So they can really improve their metabolic health and lower inflammation. I mentioned before. There are a number of things that people will see on their blood test. You mentioned sleep. Again, if you lose weight, you're going to sleep a lot better. Yeah. If you exercise more, you'll sleep a lot better. Yeah.

So all these things are kind of tied together. Yeah. Our members have the ability to track various diets. So we have as options, you know, paleo and vegan and vegetarian and intermittent fasting regime, which I really want to ask you about. and ketogenic and dairy-pre-diet. Yeah. What do you see?

I'd love to know. Oh, yeah. I have those data. Can you guess? I think probably any number of those is probably better than a standard American diet, but I'm betting that a lot of people using whoop aren't eating a standard American diet. Yeah, I mean, we definitely trend toward the healthier folks without a doubt. But yeah, so we basically took all the members' data who are tracking these things consistently.

We took all their data from the month of June. Yeah, and we found that the average resting heart rate among members across all six diets was actually lower than the average of the age and gender-matched group. So we had kind of an age-and-gender-match control group, and then we had all these people who are tracking diets. And the vegans saw the lowest resting heart rate, and this was 55 beats per minute compared to the gender-matched group, which was 60 beats per minute.

Did that, did you look at recovery? Did that translate to better recovery? Yep, so I'll get there. Yeah, so and yeah, I guess just wondering, you know, I think you kind of alluded to this, but I think the lower, the less inflammation, the lower your resting heart rate, generally, the better at your sleep. But we'd love to hear just your thoughts on why you think the lower resting heart rate for the vegan group was, you know, even maybe even above vegetarian.

I'd be hypothesizing here because I haven't seen, I mean, This is interesting for me because I've kind of wanted more data to speak to this kind of data. Because anecdotally, and I don't love anecdotes, but anecdotes can be more interesting when there isn't any data out there. And anecdotally, one of the kind of areas where you hear a lot of people adopting a plant-based to the vegan diet is towards the end of their career. So it's like the older athlete who's having difficulties with recovery.

Right. It's not adapting as well as maybe they were previously. And they'll say that their sleep improved in their recovery. recovery time improved, and to date, you know, the hypothesis has just been that, well, they're probably less inclined. And my lab tests sort of corroborate that in terms of my inflammation is extremely low. So it was my visceral fat. Yeah.

So my dextus gain, my visceral fat was 0.01 pounds, which is basically nothing. And I think that that comes back to this too. So that comes back to the type of fat that we're consuming. but also whether we're in a calorie surplus or not. So I'm very active and probably not in calorie surplus often. And my fats are mostly unsaturated. And when you keep that visceral fat down, you will reduce inflammation a lot. That visceral fat is very inflammatory.

So, I mean, that's interesting data. But I think it probably ties back to inflammation. Yep. And hearty variability, the vegetarian diet saw the highest heart rate variability. That group was 59.47. Yeah. So anything different in the vegetarian diet that might yield a kind of higher HRV, which is, you know, could correlate recovery and, you know, inflammation.

I mean, what vegetarians relative to vegans are often getting a little bit more calcium, potentially a little bit more protein. So, you know, those are usually the two big differences in the diet. I'm not sure how those are interacting with HIV, but again, interesting. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. And also sleep quality and duration and consistency, so the degree to which you say, well, I's when you go to bed and you wake up,

which is more behavior, routine type thing. It was definitely, it was best in the vegan and vegetarian group. Interesting. And I know we're kind of winding out, but I would love for you to talk a little bit about just sustainability and environment and just, you know, what is your, what's your philosophy there? you know I know that this is an area that you think a lot about yeah I think if we're privileged enough and to be able to consider how our food choices affect the world around us

I think we have to so I kind of I really appreciate that not everyone is that privileged there are people in developing countries or people in low socioeconomic status that are just trying to make it through to the next day so this is a very privileged conversation but it's extremely clear that food is impacting the environment in a number of ways and more so than fossil fuels in that fossil fuels is mostly greenhouse gas emissions and food certainly is affecting greenhouse gas emissions and there are greenhouse gas emissions attached to the food that we eat but it's so much more than that it's we've turned earth into a farm and so if someone values the environment like they enjoy getting out into nature and they feel better from that

then I think they're the type of person that does want to do the right thing by the environment like we're taking from it let's give back and when you look at so greenhouse gas emissions are certainly much higher on a per gram of protein or per kilogram or pound of food for animal foods relative to plant foods and there's a deep discussion there because it's not all the same like beef and lamb are right at the top and the biggest contributors and then it drops off a lot with pork and chicken and eggs much smaller but relative to any of those to produce those protein sources that i said before like cocoa or tempe or legumes we're talking in the realm of 20 to 40 times less green that's a lot it adds up and probably the

most important thing though is the land use so i said we've turned earth into a farm more than 50% of habitable land is used for agriculture and 83% of that land is used for animal agriculture both through having animals on land and grazing or also growing crops directly to feed into those animal food systems but that 83% of land is only giving us 18% of our protein it's extremely inefficient So what is up for grabs here is if we can get the world to shift to more plant protein, it means we can use less land. We free up land. And this is where a sustainable food system actually ends up is in conservation.

It's taking land that's currently used for agriculture and rewilding it, restoring it into natural habitats that sustain the earth systems. And people will often say, well, how are we going to do that? Because farmers own this land, they've bought it, they've invested, they have mortgages. And this is not about wiping out farmers making them bankrupt. The entire sustainability or the ability for us to address this problem rests on shifting incentives. So right now, what is a farmer incentivized to do? They've got this land, they've paid this mortgage, they need to generate some type of

of income, the only thing that they are incentivized to do is to extract calories out of that land. They have to dominate the land, right? And so domination is what has got us into this place and got us here in the first place. So if we want to work with the land, we have to get away from a domination mindset. And the only way to do that is to shift the incentives. So if you own some land, instead of me saying the only way you're going to get paid is by producing beef calories or whatever you're used to doing, I'm going to pay you to restore. I'm going to pay you to restore it rewild, I'm going to pay you based on biodiversity. Now we start creating an ecosystem that is actually considering the environment and we reduce our overall agriculture footprint so we can

produce more calories from less land and in the process we bring back biodiversity, we bring back in water stores, there's less eutrophication which is pollution in waterways where you get alga blooms and it starts to starve animals of oxygen and get all these dead zones in water And when these ecosystems come back, it creates a more resilient environment. That's what environmental resilience is biodiversity. And so if we are appreciating nature and want to give back to it, we have to think about the way that we're consuming, and each time we're voting for a world where there's more deforestation

and less nature, or more nature, greater biodiversity, and something that we can enjoy and our kids can enjoy and you know future humans where would you say where's the best place for people to learn more about that specifically chapter nine of my book uh that's a plug great no they can read they can read that there that chapter it's just not talked about yeah i mean that chapter was one of the most eye-opening chapters that i wrote and it was really inspired by i had a number of conversations on my show with people like Hannah Ritchie from our world and data. She's a geoscientist.

And it's interesting to think about how all these people eat. So she's pescatarian. And then Jonathan Foley, who is at Project Drawdown, which is a big sort of climate change organization. And he eats a little bit of meat, but it's very, very rarely based on all of this research. And Nicholas Carter, who's an environmental scientist, who's been on the show a number of times,

and we talk about regenerative grazing and the claims that come out of that. So yeah, read Chapter 9 and there's a bunch of those episodes that people can go and listen to if they want. And then our world in data is this website that is absolutely fantastic. You can go on there and look at,

you can get super granular and look at all of the different foods that we might eat, greenhouse gas emissions, land use, eutrification, water use, all of that. and it compares everything so you get a sort of good relativity to it. Beautiful. Well, this has been really fascinating.

I appreciate your time. Where, I know your Instagram is amazing and you have loads of followers, is that the best place for folks to kind of follow you, would you say? Yeah, that or the podcast. So I probably connect with people most on the podcast, which is the proof. Yep. And from a social media point of view, I'm across all the platforms. But Instagram is at Simon Hill.

And then if you want to get a little bit more nerdy, Twitter and your game for everything that takes place on Twitter, it's an interesting place. And you can find me at The Proof. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. This has been awesome. Appreciate it. Thank you to Simon Hill for coming on the Whoop podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating or review.

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