Simon Hill // The Proof, the plants, the pathYAY

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you're not putting yourself in the position where you're
a beginner and you feel that challenge and the butterflies,
then you're limiting your growth. But actually, what I love
is being a life learner and realizing how much more
I have to learn and also just how amazing we
all are. We can all learn so much more than
we think.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Welcome to the Sees the Yay Podcast. Busy and happy
are not the same thing. We too rarely question what
makes the heart seeing. We work, then we rest, but
rarely we play and often don't realize there's more than
one way. So this is a platform to hear and
explore the stories of those who found lives They adore
the good, bad and ugly. The best and worst day

(00:42):
will bear all the facets of seizing your ya. I'm
Sarah Davidson or a spoonful of Sarah, a lawyer turned
fu entrepreneur whos walped the suits and heels to co
found matcha Maiden and Matcham Milk Bark CZA is a
series of conversations on finding a life you love and
exploring the self out challenge, joy and fulfillment along the way.

(01:06):
Lovely Neighborhood, I hope you all had a wonderful double
long weekend and getting back into the swing of things.
It does take the brain a little while to kick
back into gear. I had some very much needed downtime
in the countryside over easter with lots of wholesome analog
playta We did crosswords and puzzles and read books, and
my goodness, it does wonders for the soul. So often

(01:28):
you don't realize how fast you've been going, or how
hard you've been pushing yourself until you stop, and then
it all catches up on you. And I talk about
the relentlessness of our modern pace of life so much
on this show, and yet even with all that knowledge
in my brain, I still constantly fall victim to it myself.
It's just crazy how we can get stuck in these cycles.
So I am very grateful not only for our guest today,

(01:52):
but for the timing of his appearance, as he just
happens to be a world renowned expert in optimizing our health,
our wellbeing, and our longevity and is exactly the person
whose brains that I needed to pick this week. Nick
and I are lucky to have been friends with Simon
Hill for many years now connecting through multiple shared chapters

(02:12):
in the wellness industry, including launching product businesses. This was
back in the Matchmaden days for us opening our plant
based restaurants at similar times and sharing in that experience,
writing books, hanging with the hemswords, and then of course
entering the wild world of podcasting. One of us has
a number one best selling book and a podcast with
forty million downloads and counting. And I'll let you, guys

(02:34):
guess which one of us that is. You may already
know Simon as the brain's behind the multi platform plant Proof,
recently rebranded to The Proof, exploring the health and longevity
benefits that come with mastering physical exercise, nutrition, mindfulness, recovery, sleep,
and alignment. Simon is a physiotherapist and nutrition scientist with

(02:55):
such a unique ability to distill and translate often bluted,
nuanced scientific information into snippets that are digestible pun intended
by everyday audiences, so that we are equipped to block
out the noise and misinformation of the social media age
and better our lives. I mean, who doesn't want to
live longer and better and be given tips on how

(03:17):
to do that in a digestible, easy to access way.
You can see why Simon's is a brain that I'm
thrilled to have picked this week and why millions tune
into his content. This one is full of zingers, and
I hope you guys enjoy as much as I did.
Simon Hill, Welcome to Ceza Sarah.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
Great to be here with you. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
Oh my gosh, we were just discussing before we started
recording that it's been many, many years, like maybe even
almost a decade since I saw you in the flesh,
back in the homeland of Australia, which is not where
you are currently. But it's lovely to see you, my course.
I think the big problem with having guests that you've
followed for a really long time and sort of lived

(03:57):
parallel lives that have intersected at very points is wanting
to distill that entire person and all their knowledge into
a single episode to just showcase everything that's incredible about you.
But with like three hundred and sixty episodes of your
own podcast, a book endless knowledge in so many areas,
multiple businesses, I've actually struggled a lot to decide where

(04:18):
to start with this one, because there's so many places
we could, but in most episodes I like to start
back at childhood because I think that as we get
further and further into our lives, we get clouded by
success and the rat races we're just talking about, and
sort of taking it back to the very beginning who
you are, when you're a blank slate, and then chasing

(04:38):
through all the chapters that formed you into who you are.
It always is a nice place to begin someone's journey.
So take us back to young Simon and Melbourne boy,
what were your first part time jobs? What did you
think you'd be?

Speaker 1 (04:51):
My first part time job was actually selling footy records
at the MCG no.

Speaker 3 (04:57):
Record, get your record?

Speaker 2 (05:00):
I probably bought enough for you, how I con.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
It you might have? Yeah, Yeah, I was really big
into skateboarding actually when I was a teenager. So I
worked out that I could work at the football self
footy records, make some money, and then I could go
to the swyards. I'm not sure if you remember the
there was a skate park that it's gone now, used
to be in the middle of Melbourne and it's right
near Melbourne Central. So I would get off the train

(05:25):
with my friends at Melbourne Central and we'd head over
to the sour yards and spend all the money that
we'd made, like buying new skateboards.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
Or new wheels and buy food, and we thought it
was so cool.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
It's a simple time.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
So it was such a simple time.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
But I have so many fond memories, like with the
friends that I was working with and being able to
sneak into the games and sneak into the Grand Final
because I had a footy record uniform and I felt
so cool at the time. But that's where I kind
of cut my teeth with my first job and started
to understand money and the importance of money and the
fact that you could you could trade your time and

(06:03):
labor and in return get some money and then go
out into the world and spend it. But as a kid, yeah,
and that's different to getting money from your parents and
spending their money. So he gave me a taste for
what was to come as an adult. But as a kid,
I was a pretty curious kid. I was like the
kid that would always want to know how things worked,

(06:25):
and probably annoyingly so, so I would ask my dad
and my cousins and my uncle, you know, everything and
anything if there was you know, some new piece of
technology in front of us, or a car or a bike.
I wanted to dismantle it. I wanted to understand how
it worked. And my dad was really encouraging. He kind

(06:46):
of really helped encourage that curiosity. He's a scientist himself,
a professor now and now has been a professor for
forty years of physiology, and so I think I got
that from him. You know, he's obviously very cure, wries
about how the body works and biology and physiology, and
so kind of followed him down that path.

Speaker 2 (07:07):
Yeah, and I think he was very closely linked into
another sort of big pivotal moment in your younger years
that kind of shaped you on the pathway that you're
on now. I just listened to your episode of The
Imperfect that just came out two days ago, so I'd
been sort of doing my research and then was like,
oh wow, this is so handy for me. I get
like a refresher of Simon Hill and you talk about

(07:29):
your I think you called it your on ramp to wellness,
and there's sort of been several in your life and
that aligns really closely with what I love in this
part of each episode, which is tracing through people's earlier
years to sort of look at all the dots that
connect and how we think there's this linear pathway to
get to where we are, but really it's this mish
mash of events and slide indoors moments, and you know,

(07:52):
most people don't figure it out going forwards. It only
makes sense kind of looking backwards. But can you maybe
take us to that event at fifteen where this passion
for wellness kind of really was sparked.

Speaker 1 (08:04):
Yeah, So I think up until the age of fifteen,
I sort of just thought health was a given. I
hadn't been around anyone. My grandparents were still alive, and
I hadn't had a family member or pass away or
had any real serious health issue. And when I was fifteen,
on this particular day, we were living in Melbourne or

(08:25):
outside of Melbourne, and on the weekends, my dad and
myself and my brother would often go out to the
Yarra Valley, a wine region, and on this Sunday it
was just my dad and I and we were having
a great day driving around in his MGB, which is
this convertible British sports car, and visiting wineries and being curious.

(08:49):
I remember we used to ask the wine makers so
many questions. I really got to appreciate how wine was made.
And it was also not the first time. But memories
of the wine makers and this I digress here, but
wine makers like their face lighting up when people were
really inquiring about what it is they do.

Speaker 3 (09:10):
So I think back.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
About that now and I'm like, yeah, gosh, you know,
those people probably felt really seen because we would often
go to these little tiny wineries, not the bee ones,
and spend like my dad would just we'd sit there
for like hours. And on this day, we were driving
back home to Kinglake where my dad lived, and he
started to get some chest pain and I could tell
that he was uncomfortable. Asked him if he was okay,

(09:34):
and he said that he has chest pain, but he
kind of played it down, and we proceeded to go
home and cooked dinner.

Speaker 3 (09:41):
He seemed fine. I went to.

Speaker 1 (09:42):
Bed, and in the early hours of the following morning,
I woke up to noise in the kitchen and thought
I'd better go out and see what was happening. And
by the time I got out to the kitchen, my
dad was there with the phone. He was on his knees,
he was out of breath. I can remember this vividly,
and he had called triple zero, and by that time

(10:08):
he could no longer deny what was happening. He was
having a heart attack. My dad studies cardiovascular risk factors.
They knew exactly what was happening.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
The strength of denial.

Speaker 1 (10:23):
I think it's pretty common among men to kind of
wait until the last minute to go and see a doctor,
and this was like really waiting until the last minute.

Speaker 3 (10:33):
And so he pushed it to write to the limits.

Speaker 1 (10:36):
And I ended up speaking with the paramedic and just
explaining like what his state was. And we were in
King Lake, and this was a while back. So now
I imagine it's quite developed out between Bundur and King Lake,
but there wasn't actually much back then. It was a
lot of paddocks and country farms, and the nearest hospital
was a little while away. So they said, we're going

(10:58):
to send a helicopter, and before I knew it, there
was a helicopter. There was paramedics inside the house, putting
him up on the stretcher and attaching all sorts of
different cords and cables and measuring vitals and all these
sorts of things, and then they whisked him away and
took him in the helicopter. That wasn't room for me,

(11:20):
so I trailed in the ambulance by car, and my
mom and my brother.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
They were in Alpham.

Speaker 1 (11:27):
Because my parents were divorced, so I called them and
explained what was happening, and so they then met started
driving and met me at the hospital.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
Oh my gosh, you were fifteen by yourself.

Speaker 1 (11:38):
Yeah, So it was just that was just me kind
of dealing with all of that, and I don't think
I really realized until like maybe fifteen years down the
track that that was like quite a traumatic experience to
sort of see a loved one, you know, my dad,
my hero, who all of a sudden his health is
crumbling and you don't know if he's going to live.
And we waited at the hospital and the doctor came

(12:01):
out and let us know that my dad had had
a very severe heart attack. He was forty one, and
he wasn't on any prescription medications and had no diagnosed conditions,
so it was kind of out of the blue, very unexpected,
and they had managed to save his life, which was
like obviously the most important thing that we cared about

(12:24):
at that point. In time, and then he walked us
through my dad's prognosis and said that he would likely
be on certain medications for the rest of his life,
and that my brother and I, being young men essentially
I was fifteen, my brother about eighteen, would really need
to keep you an eye on this because cardiovascular disease

(12:44):
runs in families, and that we kind of walked away
from that event for many, many years, sort of holding
this limiting belief that we'd been dealt this dodgy card
essentially your cards, and so we had these genes that
you know, led to our father who seemed healthy. He

(13:05):
wasn't from the outside. He wasn't someone that was going
and eating McDonald's and hungry Jackson. He wasn't OBEs. My
dad was representative of a typical Australian father. He was
someone who was probably a little stressed from work and
trying to earn enough money. But he exercised, you know,
three or four days a week. He tried to eat

(13:25):
whole foods. He wasn't eating a whole lot of junk food.
And he didn't smoke, and he drank you know, I
guess I'd say like the average amount of alcohol for
an Australian, which is probably too much.

Speaker 2 (13:35):
I was going to say relative globally, probably a little
bit side the average.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
Yeah, let's just say it's a little high, but still
unexpected at forty one. Right at forty one, you are
still very much, you know, middle aged young. You're not
expecting to have a heart attack or a stroke or
any type of significant cardiac event.

Speaker 3 (13:59):
And it wasn't until many, many years later.

Speaker 1 (14:02):
When I had gone to university and started understanding science,
that I was able to better understand the role of
genetics and lifestyle our environment. And so while I probably
do have some genes that are kind of stacking the

(14:24):
deck against me from a cardiovascular disease point of view,
the main reason that cardiovascid disease actually runs in families
is not genetic. It's that families typically adopt the same lifestyles.
When you double click and deal a little deeper into
the research, sure, genes probably count for about twenty percent
of your health fate and risk of chronic disease, but

(14:45):
the other eighty percent is influenced by the choices that
you do or don't make. And discovering that kind of
flipped the I guess the narrative. And I haven't really
ever thought about this, but I probably had a bit
of a victim narrative. You know, I was probably not
in a very empowered position, and then when I had

(15:06):
that information, it changed to me saying, Okay, I have
these genes, but I kind of can accept a lot
of responsibility here and understand that I have a lot
of power. And that was, you know, a very empowering
moment for me, and it led to everything I'm pursuing
now and kind of provides a purpose for why I
have the conversations I have, so that the everyday person

(15:29):
out there can also feel that empowerment and understand that
they you know, they may have genes that are predisposing
them to breast cancer or to prostate cancer or if
you're like me, having a heart attack, but there's there's
a lot you can do to stop those genes being
expressed and really reduce your risk of having those diseases

(15:49):
affect your life.

Speaker 2 (15:52):
I loved that. I mean, I've heard you sort of
speak to that statistic quite a lot, that eighty twenty split,
and it fascinates me in quite a unique way because
I think you probably already know that I'm adopted, and
so I've never had the full picture of our genetics.
Nick's mother is also adopted, so we both have like
a bit of a mystery in our genetic makeup. And

(16:13):
often when I'm asked, have you ever gone to find
your birth parents and medical history? You know, have you
wanted that picture? I've actually often. I mean there's lots
of sort of social and emotional parts of that conversation,
but in the health area alone, when I did twenty
three in me the DNA testing, I wanted to know
my ethnic makeup, but I didn't want to know if

(16:35):
I had a predisposition to anything because of that exact reason.
I thought, if it's bad, it's not guaranteed, but it's
going to make me think I've been dealt these cards,
and I'll focus on it rather than knowing that that
eighty percent I'm empowered to change within that sphere of influence,
it's massive, and I didn't want to know that, you know,

(16:57):
have this like, yeah, this opportunity to become a VG
them to the cards I've dealt. And I think that
the message that you have in health is also really
well extrapolated to life, is it? Sometimes you think you've
had this bad luck because of your circumstances, but you
can change so much more of it than you think.
You think. I'm shy, I can't public speak, I'm short,
I can't be a model. You know, there's all these
things that we think silo our choices in life. But

(17:21):
maybe that's twenty percent of the picture. But that eighty
percent you can work with with your lifestyle, with your choices,
with the mindset that you take. And when you said
that in the Imperfect episode, I just was like writing
down furiously. I'm like, oh my god, eighty twenty people
need to know this.

Speaker 1 (17:37):
I agree with you. We can really limit ourselves and
put ourselves in a box. We can become defined by
something like those things that you just mentioned there. I
will say, in speaking to many people about this idea
of doing genetic testing, it's funny because I think personality
I play a role.

Speaker 3 (17:55):
You know.

Speaker 1 (17:56):
There are some people who at least the feedback that
they've given me is that going out and doing a
genetic test and they found out they had like two
copies of APO E four, which it means that you
have significantly higher risk of dementia.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
And I'm not.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
Sure if you watched Limitless with Chris Hemsworth, but that
was one of the key for like a focal point
of that that documentary was his work with doctor Peter Attia.
They did genetic testing discovered he had two of those copies,
And I think it can go both ways. So I
agree with that. I think there's certain people that do
not do well with that information, and so you have
to know yourself. And if you think that that is

(18:36):
going to limit you and perhaps lead to a kind
of more of a victim mindset than genetic testing, is
probably not for you. But then there is the person
out there who just wants to know all of the
information and he wants to prove people wrong, and so
finding out they have two copies of Apoe four provides

(18:56):
all the motivation they need. And that type of person
is also the type of person you know. It's very
hard to get people to adopt a healthy lifestyle.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
But one of the.

Speaker 1 (19:07):
Ways that I've at least seen that helps people is
either they go through a very serious have a very
serious event themselves, or they see someone directly like I did.

Speaker 3 (19:20):
And if you don't, then your why may.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Not be strong enough for you to sustain the changes
that you make. So for someone who hasn't had a
severe health event themselves or hasn't seen a close to
a loved one, it might be the generating testing that
does provide the motivating piece for them. But I totally
agree with you that you know, I know people in
my life that it would just be too much information

(19:46):
for some people.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
So funny that you said that, And my reason for
my reaction just then was because I had scrapped whatever
my next question was and typed just as we're writing
before that idea of I think you and I have
been in the wellness industry for it, and had our
podcast for a similar amount of time. We've kind of
navigated through the big changes that have happened in the space,
and one of the things I've often found that we

(20:07):
all share in common is some big pivotal event, which
is often a crisis. It's very rarely a big positive event.
It's always some kind of physical breakdown of ourselves or
someone else, and then a passion to share enough information
with others so they don't need that kind of crisis
to make a change that they can preempt it and

(20:28):
learn by not by doing, but by seeing, so that
they don't have to have a breakdown like all of us.
I think there was a stage in the wellness industry
where every single person's book was like such a similar
format because we all were speaking to this I had
this aha moment, and I hope that you know, we
don't all need to have that to sort of but
I do take your point that for some people you

(20:50):
don't take it seriously until you know you're at risk,
and so that information can be really empowering. So I absolutely,
in no way, anyone listening I'm encouraging you not to
get a DNA test to get more information if that
is the path it's all about. And the same with
anything in life. It's all about knowing your own incentivization
and motivations and hacking the way you do your life

(21:11):
around yourself, not around other people's, which is I've always
found really fascinating.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
I often think back to, like if my dad hadn't
have had that experience, Let's say I was twenty five
and someone sat me down and said, these are all
of the principles of a healthy lifestyle and ways that
you can reduce your risk of chronic disease A, because
I wouldn't have gone through that first hand experience with
my dad. I'm not sure how engaged I would have

(21:36):
been in that conversation and then be how much discipline
and motivation or intention would I actually have to go
away and make those changes and see them through. And
I say intention because it requires intention. We live in
an environment that makes it very easy to be unhealthy,
and you know, versus some of the longest living populations

(21:58):
in the world, it's not that these people just have,
you know, magically more willpower. They just live in an
environment where the healthy decision is usually the affordable and
also the easy decision. But we live in like a maze,
and so like there's all of these indulgent things trying
to pull us off track away from.

Speaker 2 (22:18):
Health, all the shiny things, right, all.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
The shiny objects, and all this temptation. And so you
need to have some intention. And when there is a
strong why underneath that intention, because you've had this health
experience yourself or a family member has, then I think
you're more likely to kind of have that intention sort
of front of mind as you're navigating your way through
the world.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
And one thing I think you said in the Imperfect
podcast is that you know when you are twenty five
and you hear that someone had a heart attack at
forty one, You're like, well, forty one's ancient, And now
we're all closer to forty one than we are to five,
And suddenly it's all like Jesus, when did we get here?
But you know, one thing that I think is so
powerful about you is the way that you deliver scientific

(23:04):
information that is incredibly powerful. It is sometimes delivered in
a way that removes so much of the power of
it in its message because it's there's so much noise,
it's all conflicting, there's no context, it's not distilled, and
it's also not reframed to suit the short attention span
of the generation it's meant to target. Whereas you have

(23:24):
cut through and been able to like one of your
last episode, the one of the last episodes, the title
is this food swap could cut your risk of early
death by seventeen percent. Who is not going to click
on that. You don't have to be forty one to think, Jeesus,
I could be doing something that risks an early death
and I could reduce that, Like your your capacity for
deliveries is so incredible. But before we get to that,

(23:46):
and some of the messages that I'd love our listeners
to walk away with some kind of spark. What I
think is even more interesting about what you said about
twenty five is that it wasn't until twenty five, twenty
six to twenty seven for you that I mean, you'd
been a physiotherapist. You hadn't actually done your nutrition studies
until your twenties, and at the time that probably felt late.

(24:08):
That probably felt like you were behind. You know, you'd
not been in this industry when other people had started
their first degree in nutrition. What was it like to
start again? You know, we have this fear of going
backwards and self doubt to be a beginner, and I
think people don't think they can begin something like later.

(24:29):
You know, if you didn't do it is your first degree,
it's like, well, I'm too late. I don't think it's
ever too late. But what went through your head when
you did go back to the beginning and start as
a sort of newbie because your wellness had been more
biomechanical until then.

Speaker 3 (24:43):
You're too old, it's too late, being silly. The critic
was pretty loud.

Speaker 1 (24:51):
And then I had the same voice again when I
started the podcast and I said, you know, earlier we
were talking offair, like we started in twenty eighteen, and
at the time I was I thought it's too late.
And in the last year I've picked the guitar back
up and I want to start singing as well with
that and so same voice again, way too old.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
You're nearly forty, Like, what are you doing kind of.

Speaker 2 (25:16):
Thing over the heill mate over the hill.

Speaker 1 (25:20):
If you're not putting yourself in the position where you're
a beginner and you feel that challenge and the butterflies,
then you're limiting your growth. And I've certainly had periods
in my life where I'm uber comfortable, you know, and
everything just feels super comfy and good, and that's okay.
But I think every now and then you need to
do a bit of an audit, and you know, where

(25:41):
are you holding back? And I knew I wanted to
better understand nutrition. I knew that it was a gap
in my knowledge of understanding the human body, and it
just required me to get over those nerves, to get
over the fact that I was going to be a
little older going back to university, and to kind of
swallow my price, so to speak, and throw myself back

(26:02):
into it, and to be honest, looking back now, it's
like what I went and did a master's in nutrition science,
and I was in my mid to late twenties.

Speaker 3 (26:10):
It's not that old.

Speaker 2 (26:11):
Oh it's so young.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
I've even considered maybe going back and doing a PhD.
So I think certainly have had the inn a critic
to answer your question, and a lot of doubt and
whether it was a good idea or not.

Speaker 3 (26:25):
But the more.

Speaker 1 (26:27):
I've thrown myself back into these positions where I'm learning
something from scratch and I'm a beginner, I realized that
it's what actually what I love is being a life
learner and realizing how much more I have to learn,
and also just how amazing we all are. We can
all learn so much more than we think, and I
think that's really really cool. You know, twelve months ago,

(26:49):
I couldn't play the guitar at all. Now I can
play and it's pretty crappy.

Speaker 2 (26:53):
But in a year you'll be headlining Coachella.

Speaker 1 (26:56):
Maybe it's semi decent and I could be at Coachella.
I joke around my friend, you could sell out Madison Square.

Speaker 2 (27:01):
Got it a hundred percent, one hundred percent, so you
could maybe be the intersection of like music and stats
about health, Like maybe there could be some kind of
like I talk about effiicient delivery. Maybe it's through music,
like who even knows?

Speaker 3 (27:16):
Could be Yeah, yeah, whatever gets people listening it. I'm gay.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
So I mean, I went back to our dms before
we started recording, and I think the first one was
like maybe back in twenty eighteen when we did first
start our podcast. Maybe a little bit before that, but
I think through my husband Nick, I think you'd known
him for quite a while before that as well. So
we've kind of crossed paths many many times. And one
of our biggest chapters in parallel was having plant based

(27:45):
venues in a landscape where that wasn't really a thing.
I think we've actually been, you know, thinking about you
thought you started late in twenty eighteen. It was so
early that compared to now, that was so early in
the health and wellness industry. It was such a time.
Looking back, we had Matromaiden and Matrimilk Bar and you
had Eden, and I just looking back at that time

(28:09):
and how far we've come, and I have so many
questions for you. But first I want to go back
to the fact that we both really focused our plant
based messaging, as you mentioned before, about these ancient civilizations
around the blue zones and longevity, and took the animal
rights ethics based the heat of those arguments away to

(28:30):
kind of hitch to people who weren't eating plants, because
it creates more change to serve a plant based meal
to a non vegan than it does to a vegan.
And I loved that we were doing that in parallel
with each other. When you did first sort of start
eating more plants, you were a very heavy meat eater
who had been in a very sporty, protein heavy lifestyle beforehand.

(28:57):
Can you talk to us about some of the heaviest
eye opening statistics or facts that you learned that spark
that change for you, and that now you wish you
know more people knew, because I still think people. I
can't believe how many customers would come in and just
have no idea why they needed to be They just
didn't understand why we needed to be eating more plants.

(29:18):
They did it because we had a cool looking latte.
But like that behavior change, what changed it for you?

Speaker 1 (29:24):
I think when you look at the totality of evidence,
and when I say totality of evidence, I mean essentially
bench top science, so being at the sort of bottom
of the evidence hierarchy, which is scientists working with peagery
dishes and sort of sell cultures, and then animal studies,
and then you go up or wrong and you're with
large scale human observational studies. So it could be populations

(29:46):
in America or in Japan or in parts of Europe
where there's one hundred thousands of people followed over decades.
And then above that you go to randomized controlled trials
where they're often conducted you know, over weeks to months.
It's a bit expensive to conduct them for longer than that.
When you look at all of that evidence related to nutrition,

(30:09):
while there's not one absolute diet that's clearly the best
for everyone, there is a very clear theme or sort
of big over overview picture of what a healthy dietary
pattern looks like. And it's a diet that is low
and saturated fat. It's rich in these unsaturated fats, it's

(30:30):
high in fiber, it has more plant protein than animal
protein compared to the average diet today, and it's lower
ultra processed foods. And what that looks like in terms
of diets that people might be familiar with, is anything
from a Mediterranean diet done well. People might have heard
of the Dash diet, which was this very plant based
diet that has been used in research for lowering blood

(30:52):
pressure and risk of cuttivascular disease. It could be a
pescatarian diet, or it could be a whole food plant
based diet. All of the those diets that I just
listed there, well, some of them are omnivorous and have
animal foods, and certainly there is room for animal foods
and healthy diet. It goes all the way to a
whole food plant based diet that's plants exclusive. The commonality

(31:15):
is the theme that I mentioned at the beginning, which
is low saturated fat, rich and unsaturated fats, high fiber,
a good amount of plant protein, and low and ultra
processed foods. And what all of those diets achieve through
that theme is optimization of blood pressure, blood glucose control, cholesterol, inflammation,

(31:38):
insolent sensitivity, all of these risk factors that we know
are driving the cardiometabolic diseases and cancer, so cancers, fatty
livid disease, type two diabetes, cardiabascar disease, dementia, all of
the big chronic diseases that are robbing people of healthy

(31:58):
years of life are influenced by those risk factors. And
when you eat in this manner, particularly over decades, you're
optimizing those risk factors and dramatically lowering your risk. And
so for me, as a heavy meat eater, it was
kind of impossible to ignore that because meat is pulling
you in the opposite direction, and dose is important. Like

(32:19):
I said, you can have some meat in a plant
rich diet and you're still optimizing all those factors that
I mentioned. But when meat is the star of the plate,
particularly at every meat at every meal, particularly fatty cuts
of meat like I was eating, and you're eating a
lot of butter and high fat dairy, then you're increasing

(32:41):
your cholesterol, you're reducing your impairing blood glucose control, you
can increase inflammation. You see less diversity of the microbiome,
which affects a myriad of risk factors as well. And
so it was just learning that and understanding what a
healthy dietary pattern looks like. That provided a lot of

(33:02):
food for thought for me, and I had to reflect
on it, and I was very resistant. I didn't want
to change at the beginning, and I think that if
I hadn't had that experience with my dad, I don't
think I would have made the changes in my twenties.
But I had a very strong reason to make changes
and to improve these risk factors because I knew that

(33:25):
my genes were probably stacked against me, and so I
needed to do whatever I could to make sure that
they weren't being expressed in a way where I was
going to have a heart attack.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
Well, I mean, coming back to that idea that not
everyone does have that kind of why in built into
their story. That does you know, create behavior change in
a society where it's very difficult, Like if you live
in one of the blue zones, it's not hard to
eat that way because everyone's eating that way, and that's
what's available to you. If you had the ear of
someone for sort of three key things that you could

(33:59):
tell them about the way they're eating, that might shock
some change into people's you know, coming back to that
episode the food swap that could cut your risk of
early death by seventeen percent? Firstly, what is that? And secondly,
you know what a couple of other big changes you
could begin with even that you know could have a
dramatic improvement on your health.

Speaker 1 (34:20):
So in terms of disease and chronic disease, the first
thing I would make clear to people is it's not
like these diseases just occur overnight. They are bubbling away
under the surface for decades. You're in your twenties now,
if you're eating a diet that's very high and saturated
fat like I was, low in fiber, low and unsitrated fats,
you are more than likely laying down plak fatty pluk

(34:43):
in your arteries right, which is not just going to
affect your heart, that's affecting blood flow to all organs
in your body, including your brain. And so the earlier
you make changes, the healthier your arteries are going to be.
So that's how I would just keep it very very simple.
For someone it's not just someone who has genes like

(35:04):
me that has a predisposition to cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease
is the number one cause of death in Australia for
men and women. So everyone is predisposed to it, and
everyone dies with atherosclerosis, which is the build up of
plaque in their arteri, but not everyone.

Speaker 3 (35:22):
Dies because of it.

Speaker 1 (35:23):
So let me say that again, everyone dies with it,
but not everyone dies because of it. There is a
natural progression of authorosclerosis as humans age, but you can
limit the rate of that progression and how much plark
is being laid down. You don't want to be walking
around and going to bed every night and having significant
amount of inflammation in the arteri wall and plaque building up.

(35:43):
That's predisposing you to having a heart attack or perhaps
even worse a stroke from a physical impairment point of view.
And so the biggest food swaps that someone can make,
let's say the Australian diet, like what are the biggest
leavers that people can focus on to look after their
vascular health, but also would say is eat more fiber.
And the average Australian is eating about twelve to fifteen

(36:05):
grams of fiber per day, but that really should be
at thirty grams or higher. Now, fiber is found in
all plant foods, and we are going into too much detail.
It affects many of those risk factors that I reeled
off before. But the really important thing to understand about
about fiber and prebiotics in particular, probiotics is just a

(36:29):
fancy way of saying compounds in your meals that you
eat that are not absorbed in the small intestine, they
pass through to the large intestine and they feed the
microbes the thirty eight trillion bactery in your gut. Those
prebiotics vary from plant food to plant food to plant food,
So the probiotics that are in broccoli are different to
those in artochokes, are different again to those in potato,

(36:51):
are different again to those that are in carrot. And
one of the best predictors of gut health, which directly
affects things like inforammation in cholesterol, is having a diversity
of plants in the diet. And there was a very
big study called the Gut Health Microbiome Project a few
years back that looked at the diversity of the microbiome

(37:14):
in ten thousand plus subjects who sent in poop samples
and also cataloged how they ate. It's a lot of poop, Yeah,
it's a lot of poop, and also cataloged how these
people were eating. The best predictor of a diverse microbiome
was not whether someone was vegan, pescatarian, whatever. The dietary
label didn't matter. The best predictor was whether someone ate

(37:35):
thirty unique plants a week or not. And so my
number one piece of advice for this young person is
increase your plant diversity. Forget about removing things right now,
because by the time you increase your plant diversity and
get up to thirty unique plants a week. And I
encourage people to grab their journal or no pad and

(37:57):
just see where you land next week, probably landing about
ten to twelve, I bet most people. And that's because
we tend to eat the same plants every day.

Speaker 2 (38:07):
I absolutely do that, right.

Speaker 1 (38:10):
So you find and this is an order I have
to do myself. I have to keep coming back to
it because I go back to eating the same plant foods.
But remember these plant foods. Although we like to simplify
fiber as one thing, it's not like. There are many
different types of prebiotics and they're feeding different type species
of bacteria, all of which have different and very important

(38:30):
roles in our gut. So you can do an order,
see how many unique plants you have, and then try
and increase over time. You can do this over weeks
and months, try and get up to eating thirty unique
plants a week, and that's going to do wonders for
your microbiome. Fire has other effects beyond the microbiome that
are going to be beneficial, and at the same time,

(38:52):
I bet by adding all of those in, you end
up eating a little bit less animal foods, and so
saturated fat comes down, and the type of plant foods
I'm talking about are whole or minimally processed, so fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes,
whole grains, and by version of that, you eat a little.

Speaker 3 (39:12):
Less ultra processed foods.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
So just focusing on that one thing can really straighten
up the diet and optimize a number of these really
important risk factors without having to think about too much.

Speaker 2 (39:23):
I love that it kind of has flow and effects
without you actually having to focus on three different goals.
It's like, do this and by nature of try to
introduce that many things, you'll kind of you end up
with all these other benefits. What about some and this
must be particularly as someone with as much sort of
depth of research, with deep qualifications, but also really a

(39:44):
long long history of working with experts and engaging deeply
with the science. What are some of the biggest and
most frustrating misconceptions that you see in the landscape at
the moment.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
I think you mentioned at the outset that there there's
a lot of conflicting information on social media, and you
also use the word context, and those are two really
important words. So what frustrates me is that I believe
many people, thanks to social media and the type of

(40:17):
information that is on social media about nutrition, I kind
of left in this position where they think that there's
a lot of conflicting information in nutrition science and it's
sort of all over the place, and scientists just haven't
worked this out, and so I end up just kind
of throwing their hands up in the air and thinking,
I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing because
everyone's arguing, right, and I actually understand and empathize with them,

(40:43):
and I don't blame you, like if you're in that position,
I get it. That's why I went back and did
my masters, because I was in that position. Even with
an undergraduate degree that involves science learning how to read
peer reviewed literature, I didn't have the specific skills to
make sense of nutrition science. And so the one thing

(41:03):
that I would say to that person is that while
it seems like all the information is conflicting, it only
seems that way because the context is missing, and so
it's very easy for me to go and find a
study and say study show And that's why you see
everyone saying study show, study show, study show, study show
about all these these things that people are saying are

(41:24):
completely contradictory. How can studies show things that are the
exact opposite, right? And the reason is because the context
is missing. Who are we talking about? Are we talking
about a twenty five year old athlete? Are we talking
about a postmenopausal woman? What food are we talking about?
Are we talking about red meat? What type of red

(41:44):
meat are we talking about? What dose are you talking about?
Because like red meat, what does that actually mean? Are
you talking about someone that's eating thirty grams a day
or we're talking about someone that's eating eighty grams a
day or one hundred and fifty grams a day. And
also nutrition is a little different other areas of science,
particularly from a place Ebo perspective. When you are trying

(42:06):
to determine the effect of a food, let's say red meat,
you have to compare it to something so compared to
what are you comparing red meat to ultra processed foods?
Are you comparing red meat to whole grains. Are you
comparing red meat to legumes? And now all of a sudden,
and there's way more than that. I hope the listener understands, like,
there's really important context. And when you understand that context,

(42:31):
these studies that seem contradictory, they're not actually contradictory. It's
actually quite easily explained. So I think that's the most
frustrating thing that I would say is just that social media.
You alluded to it earlier. It's all about the clickbait.
How much emotion can you kind of generate in a
twenty or thirty second clip, And often that doesn't lend

(42:52):
itself well to a more nuanced position that contains the context,
and it leads to the absolute or sensational kind of
position is what gets shared and amplified. And this is
like an extension of what frustrates me is that I
think as a society we're losing track of what science

(43:14):
is and what it means to communicate science objectively and effectively.
And so when I'm looking for someone who is a
science communicator that I'm going to trust, it's not the
person who is using absolute language. I want to hear
the person who understands their limits, what we do know,
what we don't know. I want to hear a little

(43:35):
bit of hesitation. I want to hear them say I
don't know. Words I think need to be repopularized, right
because science fundamentally requires a ton of humility, and so
it's frustrating for me to see sort of deep convictions,
often from people who are not directly in the science field,
and I think the public conflates that conviction with credibility,

(44:01):
whereas for me, credibility is.

Speaker 3 (44:04):
As I mentioned, is a little bit you know.

Speaker 1 (44:06):
I'm looking for that person who says words like perhaps
or maybe or but we need to consider this context
and adding caveats, And that's not as sexy and probably
isn't going to go as viral in the podcast world
or in the reels, but it's actually it's just more responsible.

Speaker 3 (44:26):
That's how science should be.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
And that leads really nicely into my next question, which
is also kind of more relevant in the social media age,
where people want absolutes and they want clickbaiting sentences without
context that are sexy, and part of that is an
immense pressure, I think to never change your mind like
you've been on social media as long as I've been

(44:48):
on social media, and not only have we changed and
the world's changed, the nature of science is that it changes.
Like yes, it operates in absolutes in the moment, but
I mean our unders standing of life over the course
of all of science has gone from whole opposite conclusions
because our technology advances, because the way we understand. You know,

(45:10):
there's so many reasons why things change. Have you felt
pressure in a world where you have a million followers?
That is an enormous amount of people who are listening
very closely to everything you do. Have you ever felt
pressure to not change your mind on something to be
the same person over the history of your lifetime on

(45:30):
social media? And has there been anything that you've changed
your mind on or that science has changed its mind
on that you've had to kind of learn to deliver
that too to your audience.

Speaker 3 (45:40):
I've definitely changed my mind on quite a few things.
We can get into that. But I agree with you again,
I think that changing your mind for some people that
might be seen as this person is foot flopping or
doesn't know their stuff right, and it could be seen
as as like a weakness rather than being a strength

(46:03):
for someone. But I think it's it is a strength.

Speaker 1 (46:06):
Now, you don't want to see someone flip flopping day
to day because the science in the sensus is not
changing day to day and our consensus and sort of
understanding of science. But in this case nutrition science, there
is course corrections, but it's shaped over years and decades.
So it is very rare that all of a sudden

(46:26):
you wake up and everything's slipped on its head, and
you know, we learn tomorrow that the best diet is
just eating salami.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
That's a little bit of a red flag. Now.

Speaker 1 (46:36):
Sure, there are things like over the last ten years
where I've changed my mind, and some of it's been
a slow progression where a study comes out.

Speaker 3 (46:45):
And you're like, huh, that's actually interesting, it's.

Speaker 1 (46:47):
Making me think about this in another way, And then
another study comes in, another study, and I'd say dairy
is one of those, because over the last five years
there's been quite a few publications suggesting that at least
when you remove butter from that, because you've got to remember,
dairy is such a diverse range of foods, Like what
does that actually mean? Because it's everything from butter to

(47:08):
ice ice cream with lots of refined sugars to Greek yogurt,
to fermented types of dairy which have probiotics, live cultures,
you know, very different. Again, and when researchers have got
a little bit more granular and instead of just analyzing
dairy as a kind of big umbrella group, you see
that certainly well, butter, at least compared to oils like

(47:31):
olive oil, increases risk CUTI of ascular disease. So I
think that's another swap that people could make as simple
one is eat a little less butter a little more
Olive oil particularly have high cholesterol. What we've been able
to see is that yogurt and cheese, particularly fermented cheese,
actually associates with improvements in cardiovascular health. So a little

(47:55):
bit of nuance that I guess I've added over the
years is that not all dairy is the same, and
even the saturated fats that exist in dairy do not
behave the same as saturated fats in red meat. And
so I just sort of simplified it earlier saying we
want to eat less saturated fat, and if we wanted
to double click on that, I'm conscious of time, but

(48:17):
saturated fat is actually not one thing, just like fiber.
It's saturated fats. There are different types and they have
different effects on physiology, and the real saturated fats that
you want to reduce are the ones in red meat
or in butter. And you might be thinking, well, how
can the saturated fats in butter be different to yoga
and cheese. It's very simple. When you refine the dairy down,

(48:42):
you bust open what's called a milk fat globule, and
that milk fat globule sort of liberates the saturated fats
in dairy, and so they have this much more amplified
effect on cholesterol, whereas in yogurt and in cheese, where
they're not as refined, the milk fat globule remains intact
and it limits the effect that saturated fat has on cholesterol.

(49:07):
So while you know, ten years ago, a lot of
people just looking at the nutritional profile of yogurt and
cheese would have a hypothesis that this is going to
really jack up cholesterol, doesn't actually seem to play out
like that, And in large population studies, those two types
of dairy seem to be either neutral or positive for
cardiovascular health. That's something where I've changed my view over

(49:31):
the years. And that's not saying that you have to
consume dairy. Someone might be like to its intolerant or
just choose not to consume dairy for ethical or environmental reasons,
which are are valid. But you then would want to
really focus on what are you consuming instead, And so
dairy it's a great source of protein, it's a really
good source of calcium, and probably the effects on cardiovascular

(49:56):
health are because of calcium. So if you're someone who
is a avoiding yogurt, is avoiding cheese, you want to
make sure that the replacement foods you're consuming have a
similar amount of calcium, or else you're getting enough calcium
somewhere else in the diet. You wouldn't want to be
not consuming dairy and then under consuming your daily amount

(50:17):
of calcium, if that makes sense.

Speaker 3 (50:19):
So the replacement, the replacement matters somewhere else.

Speaker 1 (50:22):
I've changed my mind a little bit is ultra processed
foods and the way in which they are affecting disease.
So there's been a lot of research over the last
kind of decade, but particularly in the last five years,
and I've had some of these scientists on my show
trying to really unravel like what is it about ultra

(50:44):
processed foods that is driving obesity? Because we know that
people who eat more ultra processed foods tend to be
overweight or obese, or have a higher risk of being
overweight or obese. And there's been all these different kind
of hypotheses out there looking at this, and you know,

(51:04):
people have speculated maybe it's like the amount of sugar
or fat or sodium in these foods. And there was
some really interesting work done by Kevin Hole about five
years ago now where he compared in metabolic ward bringing
people into a you know, essentially like a prison but

(51:25):
a hospital setting, whether you feed people food and you
know everything they eat and you can do all the
measurements there, whereas you know, when you conduct these studies
at home and they're free living, it's a little bit
hard relying on people doing exactly what you say.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
And reporting it correctly.

Speaker 1 (51:41):
Yeah, this is like a very controlled study. You know
exactly what people are eating. And he had he had
two diets, this ultra processed diet and this unprocessed diet,
but they were matched for all of those things that
I just mentioned, like protein and fiber and salt and sugar, okay,
so only difference that some of these foods were ultra

(52:02):
processed and the others were unprocessed. And for about two
weeks they had every participant eat the unprocessed foods and
then have a little bit of a break and then
eat the ultra processed foods or in the opposite order,
so every participant got to do both diets, and the
instructions were just to eat until you're full. And what

(52:23):
they found was despite matching all of those macronutrients and
sodium and fiber, people ate about five hundred calories.

Speaker 3 (52:30):
More per day on the ultra processed diet.

Speaker 1 (52:33):
So then that kind of leaves you wondering, well, what's
driving this, and so the hypothesis from that was that
it's probably calorie density, so the amount of calories per bite,
which affects your eating rate, how fast you can eat something.
And this was like building on other research done by

(52:54):
Barbara Rolls, who has been in this space for ten
or twenty years, so I need to make because of
her work kind of really paved the way for this,
but there's been subsequence studies now that have again kind
of really confirmed that probably ultra processed foods are driving
excessive calorie consumption. Certainly by hyperpalatability, we know that they

(53:18):
kind of hijack the reward centers of the brain because
they're just overly delicious, but also by calorie density and
eating rate. And there's this interesting sort of thing where
we all tend to eat the same amount of food
by volume per day, right, but a kilogram of food

(53:40):
can be vastly different amount of calories depending on how
energy dense that food is.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
Yeah, okay, so the volume is what's consistent, but the
calorie density is what varies.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
Yes, And this has been borne out in many studies now,
so we can use this again. It doesn't really change
any of the advice set that we're giving here, because
it's why those dietary patterns. One of the reasons why
that I reeled off before Mediterranean dash, pescatarian, whole food,
plant based. It's one of the reasons why time and

(54:17):
time again you see people eating that way are healthy,
body healthier body weight, because when you eat more of
those high fiber, high water plant foods, those are low
calorie density foods, it lowers the total calorie density of
your overall dietary pattern. So when you eat a kilogram
of food, it contains less calories than if you're eating

(54:40):
a kilogram of food that was animal foods and ultra processed.

Speaker 2 (54:44):
Right. So it's also like a satiation kind of measurement,
like what satisfies your hunger? Hunger?

Speaker 3 (54:52):
Right, it's absolutely satiety related.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
Oh, that's the one satiation. Society is a better word.

Speaker 1 (54:58):
Yes, you're right, though, you're absolutely right. So there are
stretch receptors in your gut. So when you eat food
that is less calorie dense, if I give you five
hundred calories of food that's less calorie dense than say
five hundred calories superclori dense, that's going to be a
larger volume of food. It's going to stretch your stomach more,
and it activates these stretch receptors which send a signal

(55:21):
to your brain saying, hey, we're pretty good down here.
You don't need to bring in any more calories.

Speaker 2 (55:28):
Yeah, minor a bit diluted. They're a bit de lulu
mine down there.

Speaker 1 (55:33):
And can I just add one little thing here because
I think it's a neat tip, and it's from Barbaraoll's work.
She was really interested in this idea of energy density,
and she was the researcher responsible for what's called the
preload strategy. So if someone's wanting to lose weight to
lower their risk of chronic disease or for whatever reason,
it is a really helpful strategy is before you eat

(55:58):
your main meal, to eat a water based sort of
broth based soup or a large salad, providing that salad
doesn't have a whole lot of energy dense salad dressing
on it. And in her studies, when they preloaded people
with either the soup or the salad, they ended up

(56:18):
eating fifteen to twenty percent less calories over that entire
meal sitting, so including the preload. And it's likely because
it's activating those stretch receptors earlier in the meal.

Speaker 2 (56:32):
Oh, that's such a good tip. I've actually heard that before.
And also it's partly related to the timing, is that right, Like,
it takes twenty minutes for the messages of those stretch
receptors to get back to your brain. So it's like
if you gobble like I do and eat so quickly,
that's why you overeat because you don't give yourself time
to realize the volume that's actually already in your stomach. Like,

(56:54):
give it a minute.

Speaker 1 (56:55):
Yeah, that's one dredsent true. And I mean that's why
ultra process foods are you super energy dense? You know
we've all done it before. You can quickly take down
you know, five hundred and seven hundred calories without even
knowing it. And also why if you're sitting in front
of the TV, you know, before you know it, you've
scoffed down so much food. And there are a lot

(57:17):
of researchers looking at exactly that and looking at mindful
eating and slowing down and chewing slowly, and it is
likely to lead to better appetite regulation.

Speaker 2 (57:27):
For sure, I knew I would get to this point
in the episode. I even began with knowing that my
biggest challenge today was distilling all of your wisdom and
everything I wanted to ask you. I feel like I've
covered like, not even one percent of all the things
in our brain. So it's lucky that our listeners can
go to your own podcast and get three hundred and
sixty more episodes of wisdom from you and your incredible guests.

(57:49):
But if you did have to distill say three swaps
or practical tips that people could start with, now, what
would you leave us with on top of what you've
already so generously given us, but in like a SoundBite.

Speaker 1 (58:03):
Okay, before I give you the SoundBite, because I know
that sometimes these conversations can be a little anxiety provoking
for people focusing on food so much. I just want
to make it clear. This is about doing it in
perfectly over decades, so the things that I say, it's
not about getting it perfect every single day. And if
you do fall off the bandwagon on a day, no worries,

(58:25):
it doesn't matter. Just do your best in the next
food decision that you have the next day, and you're
going to be fine. So I would say Number one
is focus on the thirty unique plants? Can you get there?
How many unique plants? So are you currently eating? Do
a bit of an order and see if you can
work your way up towards thirty unique plants. And I
didn't mention this before, but herbs and spices count oh nice.

(58:47):
So it can seem a little daunting at the beginning,
but that makes it a little bit easier. Number two,
for a swap, as I mentioned, would be swapping out
cooking oils, cooking fats that are really rich and saturated fats,
particularly butter or ghee, even coconut oil and palm oil,
and instead cooking with olive oil or avocado oil or

(59:09):
god forbid, seed oles, which I know are much maligned.
And maybe that's another episode.

Speaker 2 (59:14):
Yeah, you have an episode on that. Actually I've saved
it for later.

Speaker 1 (59:18):
I have an episode on that, so people can go
and check that out. But if we want to just
avoid arguments, swap those saturated fat rich googn oils for
olive oil, which is almost universally accepted as a healthy
cooking oil, or avocado oil. So that would be the
first two and the third would just be about being

(59:40):
conscious of ultra processed foods. So there is room for
ultra processed foods in the diet. The main mechanism by
which ultra processed foods are causing disease, as I mentioned,
is through driving excess calorie consumption. So really, if someone's
overweight or obese, then these are things that you might

(01:00:01):
want to pay a little more attention to. But if
you're metabolically healthy, you don't have chronic disease, you're active,
and ninety five percent of the time you're eating whole
minimally processed foods.

Speaker 3 (01:00:15):
You know, a little bit of these ultra processed foods,
having some ice cream here and there and whatnot, it's
not going to kill you. And so yeah, overall, sixty
percent of Austrain's calories coming from ultra processed foods, so
across the board we can benefit massively by reducing them.
But they're not toxic at any dose. So I just

(01:00:35):
want people to know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
That when you fall off, and I'm hoping that your
answer is that you do occasionally, what are your guilty
pleasures everything, Well, that's good to know. That's very humanizing.

Speaker 3 (01:00:52):
And yeah, I do.

Speaker 1 (01:00:53):
I certainly do fall off, and I've gone through periods,
to be completely honest with you, where I've probably do
well in a little bit of regret or shame or
guilt and being too focused on having the perfect diet.
And it's not worth the anxiety that comes along with that.
I think, I think chasing perfection is just impossible when

(01:01:15):
it comes to our diet, and so it sort of
sets us up for failure. And the problem with that
is when perfection is a goal and you don't meet it,
that's when people just stop altogether and give up. So
having this approach of just doing it imperfectly. It allows
you to be human. It allows you to be human. Right,

(01:01:35):
So for me, cookies, cakes, you know Brownie's ice cream cakes?

Speaker 3 (01:01:40):
Love those?

Speaker 2 (01:01:41):
Well, you're a sweet too.

Speaker 1 (01:01:43):
Yeah, anything sweet. You know, chocolate and you know a
little bit of chocolate's completely fine. But I can easily
house way too much chocolate.

Speaker 2 (01:01:51):
House you can house so much stretch factor.

Speaker 3 (01:01:56):
Yeah, I just like everyone listening.

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
I have my vices, and you know, I don't get
it perfect every day, but you know, the foundations of
my dieta there, and I'm not bashing myself up so
much these days.

Speaker 2 (01:02:10):
Oh that's good tonight. Oh my god, I couple of
if I've left out so much. I don't even talk.
We haven't talked about Center. We haven't talked. Maybe we
have to do a follow up episode. But just the
last question anytime you're in La, I love that. The
occasional word. I'm like, oh, he's been there a long time.
There's an American Twain coming through. Just a few words.
What's next? Like do you come home? Are you going

(01:02:31):
to come home? Or is home La? What's next for
the proof you're going to be based there? Yeah, what's up?
What's happening.

Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
What's next is probably Madison Square Garden and I'll be
there sewing that out home and this will sound corny.

Speaker 3 (01:02:50):
Is where my partner is.

Speaker 1 (01:02:52):
She's Californian, so it's true, and that's probably why I've
picked up some American twain from spending so much time
with her.

Speaker 2 (01:03:01):
Do you hear it or is it just us?

Speaker 3 (01:03:03):
Yeah? I'm aware. I'm aware.

Speaker 1 (01:03:05):
Like even when I say I'm aware, you aware. The
hours on water are like getting stronger and stronger. And
my dad has lived now in America, so in my
defense and I know over time, But in my defense, I.

Speaker 3 (01:03:19):
Lived in America from two till ten.

Speaker 1 (01:03:21):
Oh wow, so first accent I had. Yeah, so we've
left Melbourne. My dad did his post doc in Texas
and then Virginia. He was an assistant professor in Virginia,
so I learned to speak in Texas. So, believe it
or not. Oh, I had a Southern American accent from
two till ten that I came back to Australia.

Speaker 3 (01:03:42):
I lost it because I wanted to fit in and.

Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
You wanted to sell records. I mean obviously, yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:03:49):
Now things are creeping back in, but I am trying
to maintain my Australian Accent podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:03:55):
I'm at three hundred and sixty episodes.

Speaker 1 (01:03:58):
For me, it's aboutntinuing to find the academics in particular
that don't have a platform, that are kind of hidden
away at these conferences talking about fatty liver disease and diabetes,
and it's really arms length from you and from eye,
and I love sitting down and often for the first time,
and like their family members will send me emails or

(01:04:21):
messages because they didn't really understand what their dad or
mum did for the past thirty or forty years. So
it's a nice way to act as a bit of
a tribute to them and their family, but also take
the incredible amount of information they have and share it
with people and just continue, I guess, to try and

(01:04:43):
be a quality scientific voice in this space, you know, online,
where there's a lot of misinformation and a lot of
confusion that I think needs clearing up, just to help
people feel a little more confident with all of these
decisions they're making.

Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
Absolutely doing that, I mean, forty million downloads and counting
is extraordinary and as I said a couple of times,
you are uniquely able to package up information that is
not accessible to the average young, instagratuitous mind and make
it powerful and impactful. So you're doing wonderful, wonderful things

(01:05:21):
and will continue to follow along keenly. But just to
finish up, do you have a favorite quote?

Speaker 3 (01:05:26):
Oh? Favorite quote?

Speaker 1 (01:05:30):
I love Ritual's quote at the moment, which is very
simple and that is mood follows action.

Speaker 3 (01:05:35):
Ooh, mood follows action.

Speaker 2 (01:05:39):
That's deep.

Speaker 3 (01:05:40):
I love rich I love him too. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:05:44):
I will also include a link to your episode on
his podcast. When was that?

Speaker 1 (01:05:49):
I've been on his show a few times, so twenty
twenty one, I think, and then twenty twenty four.

Speaker 2 (01:05:57):
All right, what an amazing way to finish, Simon, Thank
you so much. I'll include links to everything in the
show notes for our listeners. If you don't already know Simon,
but I think most of you probably will, you can
go there to find out more. Thank you so much
for joining.

Speaker 3 (01:06:10):
Thank you, Sarah, appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
You guys know, I love speaking to people about things
that they love, and I could just feel how excited
Simon gets about the science of living well and wanting
to convey that to us all, and he truly does
so in such an impactful and accessible way, even when
the science behind what he's saying is complicated or voluminous,
or as he said, sometimes it can appear conflicting. He's

(01:06:32):
just got such a talent for making it accessible to
the everyday person. And I'll include links to all his platforms,
his book, his master classes in the show notes in
case you haven't already devoured everything that he's created. I'm
guessing that some of you already have, but hopefully you
learn something new in this episode. If you did enjoy,
took something away, or even have further questions for him,

(01:06:53):
please share and tag Simon It's at Simon Hill to
thank him for his time. It truly means so much
to help growing our show and yighborhood as far and
wide as possible, even seven or eight years in which
is absolutely wild. It was nice to reflect with Simon
on how long we've both been doing this and that
we still get to be here having these wonderful conversations.
So thank you to you guys all as well for

(01:07:13):
following along. In the meantime, I hope you're having a
wonderful week and are seizing your yay

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Crime Junkie

24/7 News: The Latest

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Simon Hill // The Proof, the plants, the pathYAY

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Crime Junkie

24/7 News: The Latest

Stuff You Should Know

All Episodes

Simon Hill // The Proof, the plants, the pathYAY

Crime Junkie