The Truth About Seed Oils, Protein & What’s Actually Making Us Sick

Mark Hyman, MD

Full Transcript

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Dr. Mark Hyman
This whole debate about seed oils. Why is it such a boogeyman word?

Simon Hill
Where a lot of the confusion comes from is that

Dr. Mark Hyman
Simon Hill is a nutrition scientist And physiotherapist. Best known for cutting through wellness hype with science. And his mission? To help you make evidence based choices to live better and longer. Our consumption of soybean oil has increased a thousand fold since 1900.

Simon Hill
When I look at the increase in chronic disease, to me, the most obvious explanation for that is not an increase in the consumption of seed oils, it's an increase in the consumption of hyper palatable ultra processed foods. The goal should be to create an environment where the convenient and affordable option just happens to be a healthy option as well. The food industry doesn't wanna hear that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so protein is the latest darling of the nutrition world. And what do we know about protein?

Simon Hill
You do not see a difference in muscle size or strength.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Regardless if it's animal or plant.

Simon Hill
Regardless of two diets.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I asked you about protein, and we end up talking about string training. Well I think that's really important.

Simon Hill
It's intentional.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Summarize the bottom line for people, like, what should they do?

Simon Hill
What should they be eating? But what's really the problem is the

Dr. Mark Hyman
Simon, welcome to the podcast. It's so good to have you here.

Simon Hill
Mark, thank you very much. It's been a little while coming in. It's a it's a big honor to be with you.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We've been talking about it. Yeah. You know, Simon, for those who don't know him, is a very measured, deeply thoughtful, non ideological nutrition scientist. And there aren't very many of those around, which is why I love him. And he also started his career as a physical therapist studying muscle mass and has a lot to say about nutrition, longevity, how we age.

And, you know, one of the things that you know, we're we're going to talk about a lot of stuff today, but one of the things that's sort of this hot topic, and you've recently done a couple of podcasts on it, but I want to talk about on the show, is this whole debate about seed oils. And, you know, personally, I've been very focused on this for a long time because I was confused. And I wrote a when I usually am confused about something, write a book.

Simon Hill
I'm saying that. I've observed that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So I wanted to know more about fat because I was just there was so much noise in the field. And so I wrote a book 20, I think 16 called Eat Fat, Get Thin. And the idea was, you know, all our thinking about fat was wrong and then we villainized saturated fat and we've not not really well understood the role of fats in our diet. We're supposed to be low fat, is that really what we should be doing? So it was the whole low fat craze that ended up causing a huge catastrophe.

And so I sort of mapped out the whole historical context and the science behind it. I and I really wanted to understand this whole controversy about omega six oils, otherwise known as plant oils, otherwise known as seed oils. And with the whole Ma movement, it's become a lightning rod. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. You guys are talking about the wrong thing here.

I mean, sugar. It's the sugar and the starch in our diet and the ultra processed food. And and that's a vehicle for carrying a lot of these refined plant oils or vegetable oils or I don't even know what you mean by vegetable oil because that's Is it broccoli oil? No. It's like chili seeds or beans.

Soybean. Soybean oil, corn, canola, safflower, sunflower oil, and all these oils that are used in industrial food. But also been used throughout history, sesame oil and cooking and different cultures. And so I really dove into literature and I read every study and I tried to figure it out and I looked at the methodologies. You know, and I think I'd like to sort of dive in at a high level with you.

Like why do you think this becomes such a lightning rod topic? Why has everybody glommed onto it? And and why is it is seed oil such a boogeyman word?

Simon Hill
Yeah. It's become a bit of the whipping boy. Yeah. And yeah, it's I think you're trying to throw me under the bus here. No.

No.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We're we're going have a good conversation. I don't I have all the answers, but I I very wanna wanna dive into

Simon Hill
this. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
As I start out,

Simon Hill
you're a thoughtful scientist. Yeah. Why has this become, you know, a bit of the the whipping boy and I guess a target from MAHA movement? You know, I think we're all looking for an explanation to why our population's so unhealthy. And deep down, we're experiencing people around us suffering unnecessarily.

And so we are passionate about finding a reason for that, right? You and I and everyone else in this space is really about it's more than just trying to get people to be healthy, but why do we want to be healthy? We want to be healthy to increase our life fulfillment. And so we're about increasing fulfillment for people. And at the end of the day, we're all trying our best to look through the science and find out what is it that is increasing our risk of these chronic diseases causing us to increase our body fatness levels over time and driving metabolic disease.

So I think the intention piece is generally pretty good. I think that where a lot of the confusion comes from is the context and missing some of the nuance in research. So when I look at the increase in chronic disease over the last fifty or seventy years, to me the most obvious explanation for that is not an increase in the consumption of vegetable oils or seed oils. It's an increase in the consumption of hyperpalatable ultra processed foods.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Which we used to call fast food and junk food.

Simon Hill
Fast food

Dr. Mark Hyman
junk food. Now it's called ultra processed food.

Simon Hill
Right. That drives increased energy consumption and calorie surplus and weight gain. And from there, you get a whole lot of metabolic consequences. And if you pair that with being sedentary and you lose muscle mass and muscle quality, well, now you're just spelling sort of metabolic disaster. Double whammy.

The double whammy, and we're seeing that. And put very simply, that that can be distilled into consuming too many calories and not moving enough.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's not that simple.

Simon Hill
It's not that simple. And I find what's interesting is double clicking on that, looking at all of those details. But when it comes to to, say, vegetable oils or just fat in general, the context piece that that I'm pointing to that I think is often missed is when we're evaluating a food or nutrient in nutrition science to determine is it increasing risk of some disease or is it neutral or reducing risk, we have to consider dose. We have to consider compared to what? Because very infrequently when you make food choices, does it happen in isolation.

You usually remove something when you add something. We have to also consider, particularly in this conversation of fats, because you mentioned saturated fat. Saturated fat is an umbrella term. But as you know, there are many different types of saturated fat.

Dr. Mark Hyman
There may be different types of plant oils or similar

Simon Hill
types So of when we're talking about say reducing saturated fats for wholly unsaturated fats, what saturated fats are we talking about? Are we talking about butter? Are we talking about cheese, yoghurt? Are we talking about the saturated fats in red meat? Are we talking about some stearic acid, the most predominant saturated fat in chocolate or cacao that really doesn't seem to affect blood lipids?

And so I think, hopefully, I'm painting a picture to the listeners that this context matters. And if you oversimplify it, what can happen is you can point to one study where it's like, oh, that reduction saturated fat didn't lead to a favorable outcome, but then this one did. And it starts to get very confusing and it looks like the science all over the place.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It is, yeah.

Simon Hill
And the outcome of that, and I was in this position before I did a master's in nutrition science, what compelled me to go to back to university was that I was confused by all of this stuff and the changing headlines.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Imagine how the average person Right.

Simon Hill
What I will say is that in academia, there is far less confusion. Although although there is some disagreement among academics and and scientists, they generally agree on 90% of these big, big topics. Mhmm. That's because they understand the context. And when you understand the context, these conflicting or or seemingly conflicting results become explainable.

And if I was to kinda just double click a little bit more because I I feel like you you want to kind of hear my position on vegetable oils and seed oils, what what do I find? I'll explain my thought process here.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I I would. I just wanna set the context for the audience just first because, you know, when I began to look into this, was like, okay. Well, what's what's our evolutionary diet? And I I have a a bias, which is that if we haven't been eating it for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe it's something we should take a look at. If some one component of our diet has increased dramatically, is it what is the effect from an evolutionary point of view and what our needs are?

And you know, when I began to look at this in 1900, heart attacks were super rare. Like if you had a heart attack, everybody would rush in. By that time we were eating 40% of our fats as butter, cream, whole milk, eggs, and heart attacks were almost unknown. And then at the same time, we started to refine these vegetable oils. We call them seed oils, whatever you want to call them, plant oils.

And we developed Frisco, which was basically hydrogenated

Simon Hill
Trans fats.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Plant oils, trans fats, which really was a problem. And then our consumption of soybean oil has increased a thousand fold since 1900. And so I don't think there's something that's increased that much. What it doing to the population? And how do you fit in the context of all the acknowledgement now?

So it's like I had an initial bias around it. And there were some studies that were early done in the 70s that tried to answer these questions. The Minnesota Coroner Experiment, the Sydney Heart Trial, which were randomized controlled trials, which were really hard to do in nutrition where you, you know, randomize people different diets and you follow them and you control them. And they seem to find that people who had the omega-six diets actually did worse. Like in the Minnesota corn experiment, the ones who had corn oil versus butter, even though their cholesterol dropped, LDL dropped by 30 points.

For every 30 drop in cholesterol, of LDL cholesterol, the risk of heart attack went up by twenty two percent. Yeah. But it's kind of murky because when you kind of look below the surface, at that time they thought margarine was fine. I grew up on Fleishman's corn margarine when I was a kid.

Simon Hill
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so the corn oil they used was margarine, which we know is deadly.

Simon Hill
Yeah. So they like in those interventions Yeah. Because I agree with you. I think I agree with you intuitively what you stated Yeah. Also makes sense to me.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But the

Simon Hill
data doesn't really make sense to me that as is this increase in this this food group that we didn't consume

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Simon Hill
We see an increase in in cardiovascular mortality. Yeah. So that's worth that's that's definitely worth questioning and researching. I agree with you. It makes sense.

It's like, hang on. Let's let's that's a red flag. Let's look into that. Those two studies, I think, at a high level, you know, in nineteen sixties were really elegant studies for their time. There are some issues, at least, from what I found that I'm happy to walk through.

Dr. Mark Hyman
There's a lot

Simon Hill
of issues for this study. Through, like, what how I see them and and why why I don't look at those as evidence that reducing saturated fats for polyunsaturated fats doesn't improve cardiovascular risk at a high level. So Minnesota Coronary Experiment, and that was an Ansel Keyes study who a lot of people will be And they buried it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
They buried that study. And I I met Joe Hiblin who uncovered the data and actually reanalyzed the study because he found the son of one of the original researchers with Ansel Keyes. And he said, this never was published. It was funded by the NIH, but it was never published. You know what happened to your dad's data?

He's like, yeah, it's in the basement in his house. Sorry to get it. And so he then reanalyze it. But it it was problematic.

Simon Hill
Yeah. It was there was there was problems with it. And, I mean, there's some different opposing views on on that, whether it was buried or whether it was incomplete. So seventy five percent of the subjects appear to drop out in the first year. Yeah.

So it may well have been that the research team were like, this is completely underpowered for us to even publish and understand, like, do we have a significant finding here, or do we have enough power to detect the difference?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Empower in a study means are there enough people in the study to be able to prove a hypothesis one way or the other? And if you don't have enough people, it's not powered enough.

Simon Hill
And this this was in the setting of a psychiatric ward. And so the way they had it set up was that, which is really a neat part of this study, was that they were it was randomized. People didn't know what fat they were getting. So when they make the food in the in the cafeteria setting, they can just give it to them without them knowing, and it's either coming from saturated fats or from margarine. And not only was there a huge dropout, but the participants were allowed to go out home, stay at home for multiple days and then come back.

And so there's all these kind of little issues that we look at now and we're like, oh, that probably wasn't controlled enough. And then Sydney Diet Heart Study, without going into too much details, pretty good study, but also, as you said, the intervention group was contained in margarine that we believe probably contained trans fats at the time, being in the nineteen sixties. It was before trans fats were really reduced in the food supply. And but what I would say is, overall, there are other studies. When you when you put them into a meta analysis, which is not perfect, right, because meta analysis really depends on the quality of studies going in.

But when you do that and when you look at the trials that are longest in duration with the least dropout with a good intervention that's probably doesn't have this confounding variable of trans fats, you do see a a reduction in risk of cardiovascular events Yeah. In these short term kind of RCTs. And we're probably never gonna have those kind of trials again.

Dr. Mark Hyman
In So population studies, you also see the same.

Simon Hill
And then in population studies, you see a similar thing. My and then further to that, if you go and look at population studies of and you look at linoleic acid, which is the primary omega six fat in vegetable oils or seed oils. Yep. And about 40% of linoleic acid in America comes from soybean oil alone. And when you look at just dietary surveys, which are a starting point, they're not perfect, they have issues, when you look at that and you sort of you quantify how much linoleic acid are in people's diets, they have lower risk of coronary heart disease compared to people with higher amounts of linolenic acid compared to those with lower.

You can go a step further. Some of these kind of more modern, more thorough observational studies also have biomarker blood biomarker assays where they look at red blood cell content Yeah. Like the function health test that looks at how much linoleic acid do you have in your red blood cells. And also some of them have looked at how much linoleic acid you have in adipose tissue. Mhmm.

And so that's like a step further.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Instead of asking people what they ate, you can actually biopsy them or do a blood test and see what they ate.

Simon Hill
Yeah. It's because that fat we don't make. Yeah. The only way it ends up in your red blood cells or in your fat tissue is from consuming Yeah. And you can then look and see, is there an association between higher fat stores, higher red blood cell linoleic acid, and a risk of of coronary heart disease, for example, or total mortality, dying of anything during whatever the follow-up period was.

And you see again here, you see lower risk of coronary heart disease, lower risk of total mortality with higher levels in both red blood cell or adipose tissue. And so when you when you look at all of that evidence and then you look at the mechanisms, so what is probably the mechanism that would explain this? And I don't think it's all of it, but it is probably the LDL cholesterol reduction that you get with that that swab. And then that's supported in and of itself through genetic Mendelian randomization studies, population studies where you consistently see lower LDL cholesterol, reduced risk of coronary heart disease. And so that's how I think about all of that.

That said, do I think it's healthy to consume vegetable oils and seed oils within these ultra processed foods? No. I think they're driving an excess of calorie consumption.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay to eat if you have a bottle in your kitchen, but not when you stick it in ultra processed foods.

Simon Hill
And even in your kitchen, right, do I think it's good to be having tablespoons and tablespoons of this stuff? No. It's super calorie dense. I what I do think though is the consumption of vegetable oil at home, like a tablespoon on vegetables, cooking them, is very different to having them in ultra processed foods or deep frying them and reheating them.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, yeah. That's the worst. Oh my god.

Simon Hill
Yeah. So I think we can all agree that we need to completely try and avoid those types of foods as much as possible. But it is different to, again, cooking with some vegetable oil in your pan at home where you're not deep frying and reheating.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And I think the other issue is, you know, it's like it's you know, I often talk about like know, calfo meat versus regeneratively raised meat and the differences. And it's not the cow, it's the house. The same thing is true with the oils. It's like where they come from, what are you eating them with, what else are you not eating, what are you eating more of, what are eating less of? And you know the the that sort of reminds me of this this bigger context is that the science, when you look at the science of essential fatty acids and fatty acid metabolism, omega-3s flow down a pathway that creates all these anti inflammatory compounds in the body.

Whereas LA or linolenic acid, which we're talking about the omega-6s, go down a pathway that creates inflammatory molecules. So theoretically, these omega-six's should be inflammatory. But it all depends on context. And everybody needs an anti inflammatory system and inflammatory system. Not that they're good or bad, it's just they have to be in balance.

And the other big thing that's changed aside from our dramatic drop in saturated fat content and our increase in these refined oils is the difference in our omega-three content. And omega-3s and the six ratios seem to be pretty important. When you look at the data at a high level and analyze it all, it seems as though a lot of people who don't have the omega-3s, if they have a lot of these omega-6s, they get into trouble potentially. Whereas if you have a ratio that's two to one, one to one, four to one, five to one, that's okay. But most Americans are like 20 to one of the omega six to omega threes.

And that I think that's another big issue. We're all we're all not eating wild food, we're not eating wild fish, we're not getting omega three fatty acids. Ninety percent of us are deficient in it. So you've got a really complex matrix of a problem that makes people think sea dogs are bad, but I don't think they necessarily are.

Simon Hill
Because all of that data that you presented there is that the facts says what you'll come across. It's how you explain those. Yeah. That so for me, I think the omega three to six ratio is generally a proxy of like overall diet quality. Usually, the higher that ratio, the more ultra processed foods, and like you said, not getting enough omega threes.

I don't actually think it's inherently the omega six that's causing the issue there. And I say that because there are clinical trials where you overfeed people omega sixes and linoleic acid and you measure the amount of arachidonic acid, which is the next omega six that produces.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Which is inflammatory.

Simon Hill
Yeah. And it doesn't go up. So the body seems to buffer it and hold it at a pretty steady state. So where I think though that this is an issue is that if you're not consuming enough direct DHA and EPA, because these two pathways you mentioned, they share the enzymes. So if you have a whole lot of omega six running through that pathway and using a lot of these enzymes

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like trying to get it through a highway. It's a very narrow highway. And if you have a lot of one type of vehicles going through, can't get another

Simon Hill
type So if you're only consuming like plant based omega threes, ALA

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. From flax, chia

Simon Hill
You rely on the conversion to DHA and EPA. But if you have a lot of omega sixes in the diet, that conversion's even lower. And so this is where I think then people see increased inflammation. So I think I completely agree with you in terms of what you're putting forward there, and I I sounds like we agree that a big part of that problem is under consumption of omega threes, particularly the direct DHA and EPA. Yeah.

Whether you go out and eat fatty fish two or three times a week, which a

Dr. Mark Hyman
lot of people don't. Eating sardines three times a week. I I probably do.

Simon Hill
And or having a good DHA EPA supplement Yeah. To make sure that that you're you're getting enough of those long chain omega threes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So at the end of the day, we've got this whole controversy. Seed oils are the boogeyman of of 2025. You know, secretary Kennedy's called them out, I think not correctly. At the highest level, how would you kind of guide people on how to understand this complexity between saturated fat, these plant oils, and omega three

Simon Hill
Okay.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oils. Because those are the three buckets. And and as you said earlier, they're not homogeneous. There's many types of saturated fat. There's many types of omega six fats.

There's many types of omega three fats, right? So they're not like monolithic. But it's important to understand that overall diet matrix and complex that you're eating of these things determines the impact on your health, which is what we're talking about here.

Simon Hill
Yeah, it's the key. And then also your personal genetics.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, that. Oh, that. Yeah. That's very true. And that's humbling as a doctor because when you hear people say these categorical things and you go, well, wait a minute.

I've seen thousands of people and the same thing will cause one person's cholesterol to spike and another person's to drop like a stone. And like, how do you explain that? It's genetics.

Simon Hill
Yeah. It's genetics and it's also again that a lot of the time the change doesn't occur in a vacuum. So I've mentioned off air to you that when I increase coconut oil in my diet that I see my LDL cholesterol and APOB go up a lot, 30% in fact, on my latest function test.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's because you're metabolically fit.

Simon Hill
And and the swap that I made was olive oil is the oil that I cook with, the extra virgin olive oil. I was swapping that out and adding in coconut oil and then also some coconut yogurt. And so that swap saw a reduction in monounsaturated fats and an increase in in saturated fats, particularly lauric acid in coconut foods. And so for me personally with my genetics and that swap, LDL cholesterol went up quite a bit. What I always say to people to keep this really simple is that, like you mentioned earlier, in 1980s, there was a low fat recommendation.

My review of the literature is that there was evidence that saturated fats were increasing risk of coronary heart disease. But I think the messaging was not clear enough on what that meant at the grocery store and at dinner time when you prepare a meal. And so what ended up happening was this low fat craze where people thought anything that was low fat was healthy. And what was the swap that that we really saw? We saw saturated fat foods, which whether it's meat or butter, they eat cream, we saw those being reduced.

And instead of people eating fatty fish, which are rich in polyunsaturated fats or nuts and seeds, even tofu or tempeh, these types of foods, whole foods, the increase came from ultra processed foods, which yes, have unsaturated fats in them, a lot of them, but they're added refined sugars, lots of sodium. They're super seductive, hard to put down, and drives the

Dr. Mark Hyman
They're also very inflammatory.

Simon Hill
So the the swap matters. If you're gonna reduce saturated fats in your diet, if you go then and eat those foods, I mean, there's a fair bit of compelling data to say that you're just increasing your risk of disease in doing that. And I think we've seen that. So what you eat instead is really important. And rather than making making this too complicated, let's just come back to a dietary pattern.

Why does a Mediterranean kind of diet across the literature or a Nordic style dietary pattern

Dr. Mark Hyman
Fish olive oil and nuts and seeds.

Simon Hill
If you look at the research consistently, what what disease do you want to look at? Type two diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, people that eat that way are protected. And so what I would say is look at those those dietary guidelines and and then understand that you can modify that way of eating to be low carb. It can be moderate carb. It can be high carb.

What's working best for you leaving you feeling best with the best blood work, which is then where your your personal genetics come into play. And then you can toggle around with it because one person might be able to consume a Mediterranean diet with a bit more saturated fat than the next. But that's really the starting point. And then for me, it's it's you you test so you know where you're at. Yeah.

Go and intervene. That's the dietary pattern. There is very good evidence to support that way of eating. Retest, and then tweak it as as needed based on the feedback you're

Dr. Mark Hyman
getting. This is the most valuable kind of data. We call it n of one data because when you when we're talking about all these studies that we've been chatting about, randomized controlled trials, observational data, You know, kind of an aggression to them. In other words, it's like a race to the bottom and don't actually know what's going on for you. So you're putting a group of people and say you're going to behave like these people, but you may not be anything like them.

And the best way to learn is test against yourself. That's why when you did your own self test removing the olive oil and adding coconut and then retesting your blood work with function, you could see that your numbers change. And that's what I encourage you to do is test, don't guess, and use your body as as its own control group.

Simon Hill
I would kind of emphasize though that that doesn't mean that the guidelines and all of the science is not helpful because it gives us it's like a compass. It points us into a direction where we see what the typical result is and then having the humility to understand, well, as an individual, we're not always representative of the typical person. Like, where do we fall in that distribution? And that's where it gets fun and interesting. You can play around with it and then you can factor in other things like what are your goals?

Is it just chronic disease prevention or are you an athlete? You're trying to build as much muscle as possible. Right. And to me, that's what makes all this fun. But online, it seems to cause a lot of arguments.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It does. And and and beginning back to the omega sixes, you know, whole foods that have them are good for you. Like nuts and seeds and, you know, beans, they're good for you. Right? So it's when you kind of extract them through sort of science projects and concentrate them and and mix them in with all kinds of other junk, which is essentially how we eat them.

I mean, most people are not pouring soybean all over their food, but it's 10% of our calories. It's because it's in all the ultra processed food, that's 60% of our calories. Yeah. So that's the issue, right?

Simon Hill
Can I ask you a question? I'm interested in your opinion on this. So I think with the Kennedy administration, there's certainly a focus on seed oils. Do you think if you were to go out to the current food environment, maintain all the fast food, all the ultra processed foods, but you could click your finger and all the seed oils in all those foods was changed to butter or tallow, but they were still hyper palatable, high sodium, high sugar foods. Disaster.

Would it make a difference to health? A tangible difference?

Dr. Mark Hyman
It would probably potentially make it worse. And here's why. I think, you know, when you look at the impact of fats, any kind of fat, you know, when you have saturated fat or even all in saturated fats and you consume them in the context of a high starch and sugar diet, which is what we'd have in America, we, you know, out of almost a pound a day per person of sugar and starch, flour basically, that's what causes the problem. You end up, whether it's saturated fat. So saturated fat, like butter on your broccoli, okay.

Butter on your bread, not okay. Right? Because the carbohydrate content, and not all carbohydrates are bad because broccoli is carbohydrate, but starchy and sugary carbohydrates actually exacerbate the cardiovascular harm of these foods. And so because you raise insulin and because you're not just letting sugar in your cells, you're letting any kind of energy, free fatty acids, those just pour into your cells, particularly around your belly fat. And it's like the insulin just opens the gate and everything goes in.

So when you're eating sugar and starch, get this high insulin and then whatever fats you're eating, it just becomes doubly bad for weight gain and for inflammation and for everything else. So I think the guidelines should say that we shouldn't have a limit on saturated fat as long as one, we consume a balance of polyunsaturated fats with them, right? So it should be probably like a two to one ratio of polyunsaturated fats and saturated fats. And it should be really limited when it comes to refined starch and sugars. So you can't eat saturated fat if you're eating a diet high in starch and sugar because it creates a disaster.

Simon Hill
I've been interested by some of these relatively short clinical trials, like twelve week studies looking at feeding people a lot of saturated fat or polyunsaturated fats. And these are in background diets of Western diets. So like you said, they're not amazing. What's interesting to me is that when you dial up saturated fats, you seem to increase liver fat more than when you dial up polyunsaturated fats, which as we know often precedes this fatty liver disease type two diabetes. But, yeah, I was just interested in your view of because it seems like the Kennedy administration seems to think that if you eliminate seed oils, the problem goes away.

But I would argue that if 60% of calories are still coming from ultra processed foods

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's the problem.

Simon Hill
We still have a problem.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's like the ultra processed food is the issue, whatever you're eating.

Simon Hill
The food industry doesn't want to hear that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. But they're going they're going to. They're having to. I think you know, I think they're it's like what is that? Teddy Roosevelt, know, this big stick, you know, thing.

I think we're I just read an article by Marty Makary and Mehmet Oz in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. And they were like, look we convened, which the government can do. We brought these companies to table and we said change. Get the crap out of your food. Get the dyes out, etcetera, etcetera.

And they're promising to do it. But if they don't, we've got a big stick which is you know regulation and legislation. So you do it or else. And I think that's actually probably a good move because you know there's a lot of things that are going to interfere with regulation legislation because there's so many billions of dollars spent on food lobbying, agro lobbying and controlling the narrative. And so I think we're in an interesting moment.

I think we're going to have some progress. And I think I've seen some of the early renditions of the dietary guidelines and I think it's moving in the right direction. Less dogmatic, more around dietary patterns, around whole foods, around getting rid of the ultra processed foods, which no dietary guidelines has ever said before, which is quite amazing. It's like you can only say eat more of, you can't say eat less of, unless it's an ingredient because then that's easily manipulated. And if it's salt or sugar or fat, then you can dial up and down in the ultra processed food and just make different styles of Frankenfood that aren't really food.

Simon Hill
Yeah. Because it it seems to me that, like, right now to be healthy in this country, it takes a lot of intentionality Yeah. And a lot of discipline. Yeah. Right?

But the goal should be to create an environment where the convenient and affordable option just happens to be a healthy option as well. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's going take that's going take a lot of effort because we subsidize the crap and that's the problem. We make it artificially cheap. And the Rockefeller Foundation came up with a report a few years ago called The True Cost of Food. And they basically say for every dollar we spend on food at the checkout counter, costs $3 to society in terms of chronic disease and environmental degradation. You know, all the we call externalities.

They're not really externalities. If you eat crap, you're going to get sick. It's not it's not it's just we call it side effects if you don't like it in a drug, but it's not a side effect, it's just the effect we don't like. Yeah. And and so I think I think they're the cat's out of the bag.

People are awake now. People are talking about it. Politicians are talking about it. Congressmen, senators, you know, the White House, all the agencies. It's it's kind of stunning to see.

I've been working at this for decades and I've been screaming about this forever. I mean, I wrote fifteen years ago mostly in my book, The Blood Sugar Solution, about the toxic triad of big food, big ag, and big pharma. And how they're you know, co opting our health and undermining you know, the environment and everything you could possibly think of. And I wrote a book called Food Fix about this. And I'm coming out with a new version It's updated called Food Fix Uncensored.

Simon Hill
Okay.

Dr. Mark Hyman
About an updated kind of take on what's happening. But it's this whole omega six thing is sort of I think an aceto thing got kind of steam somehow. And and it's I think a little bit misguided. Think you know, for people listening that all the science y stuff that Simon and I've been talking about, the bottom line is try to eat your sources from whole foods. Don't get these oils in processed food and have plenty of omega threes and you'll be okay.

Simon Hill
Yeah. And do your lab work.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And do your lab work.

Simon Hill
If you're super sensitive to saturated fat more than the next person and you get your lab work done and the lab work includes ApoB, which a lot of tests don't, but you you now, you can get that, you can order that. In some places, if it's high, then reducing saturated fat from more polyunsaturated fats for you as an individual might be even more meaningful. But only you will know that by doing the testing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. There are now companies that do lipid genetics. I did mine because I have a genetic lipid disorder. I had most of my grandfathers, brothers and sisters, it was like nine of them all had heart attacks or bypasses in their fifties. And he was a laborer, so he actually did a lot of physical activity and walked every night after dinner.

So he didn't start to get it until he was later in his 70s. But they all are in their 50s. And so I have genetic lipid disorder that makes me hyperabsorb cholesterol, that affects my triglycerides, that affects different biological parameters. So it's interesting to look at your genetics too. All right, so that's the bottom line.

Not so much the boogeyman, but you know one last point I want to talk about with this is what a lot of people talk about. Which is the idea that they're processed in a way that's bad. So they're extracted from soybeans, for example, with hexane, which is a toxin. They're sprayed with glyphosate, Roundup, they're deodorized, they're bleached, and they're chemically highly altered. And they can be easily oxidized.

And so this is kind of a theoretical reason they should be bad. But I haven't seen enough data to kind of prove that that's concerning or maybe we haven't actually learned about it yet. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, right?

Simon Hill
True. So I agree with you in that I think all of those things are worth looking into. But what I would say is what should our current hypothesis be? And the way that I think about this is the food that we eat affects a myriad of pathways in our body. We know that.

It could affect blood pressure. It could affect blood lipids. It could affect ox oxidative stress. It could affect blood glucose control, and then thousands of others that we probably haven't even identified. Right?

And so we can speculate on individual mechanisms, like maybe this is oxidized or contains hexane and maybe that increases risk of something. What matters is the net effect of that food on all of the pathways, so all the different ways it's interacting when you consume it. And how do we measure that? Well, it's the end health outcome. And when I look at the linoleic acid seed oil consumption data, again, coming back to red blood cell content and also adipose tissue, they have people with higher linoleic acid in their tissue have lower risk of heart disease, cancer mortality, and total mortality.

While there could be individual constituents in seed oil that are harmful,

Dr. Mark Hyman
The the the the net

Simon Hill
effect seems to be positive.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And that's what it seems like. Even despite my despite my protests, it seems like that's

Simon Hill
true. And can I just say, I I I not only empathize, I I understand the the logic behind, hey? Look at how this is manufactured and what is what is goes into it. I completely understand that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.

Simon Hill
And all I'm saying is that what challenges me on that is looking at the data of of these health outcomes, particularly at tissue levels. And I find that that data really hard to argue with.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. That's true.

Simon Hill
So I can kind of I can see all all opinions and views and empathize with all of them here.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Now I want to sort of zoom out another big topic because, you know, we went through the area of era of low fat. Then recently we've gone through this era of keto and low carb. And there's only one macronutrient left. There's carbs, there's fat, and there's protein.

Simon Hill
And we can argue about all

Dr. Mark Hyman
of them, aren't we, as a community? And so protein is the latest darling of the nutrition world. And now everywhere you go, you're like, protein this, protein that, protein bars, protein shakes, protein sticks, protein you know? And it's like, wow, okay. Somehow everybody's sticking protein to everything.

Is that good? Is that bad? And what do we know about protein? And and what should we be thinking about it? Because I think, you know, there's a whole conversation going on that we should be eating two or even three times sometimes what is the RDA recommendation for protein.

And there's controversy about whether plant protein is as good as animal protein and what that does to muscle as we age. And this is an area of expertise for you. So now we covered the keto thing. Want to kind of get into the protein thing. Yeah.

And then dive right in. That's scary. Yeah. Difficult subjects, which is why I like talking to you.

Simon Hill
Yeah. And and these things are interconnected in some ways, which is what I realized. So I'd I'd begun my career as a physiotherapist, and I was splitting my time up between working was I very lucky to get a job working with professional athletes in Melbourne and Australia, but it was on the provision that I would also work out in a community center, completely different demographic. Less affluent, not on private health insurance, a lot of chronic disease, lot of chronic back pain. And I it didn't take long for me to notice that a lot of folks with chronic back pain who were also overweight were coming in with fatty liver disease, diabetes.

They were under muscled, And these things are very, very related.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Is it over fat or under Right. Both? Both.

Simon Hill
And and what we're seeing is increasingly we're seeing both. We're seeing over nutrition and we see increased body fatness coupled with sarcopenia, loss of muscle size and function and quality.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I would say excess calories, not overnutrition. Because you know Right. If you get nutrition, I think of it as food. And I often said this, but if you actually look up the definition of food in various places, somewhat worded differently. But the essence of it is food is something that supports the health and growth and development of an organism.

And and by definition, ultra processed food technically isn't actually even food.

Simon Hill
So excess calories and still still malnourished just in another way.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And very vitamin deficient.

Simon Hill
Right. So I was I was observing that these things are are interconnected. And and what we see is from the age of about 30 onwards, we see a reduction in muscle mass, about half to to kind of 1% per year. And then by the age of 50, that can ramp up. So you you can be losing one to 2% of your muscle mass per year.

Right? So you could be losing 14% of your muscle mass per decade after the age of of 50. From age 50, you're losing more strength per year than you are muscle mass, which is also really important, strength and power. And we can maybe come back to that. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Because I don't think you'll understand the difference between muscle mass

Simon Hill
Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And strength and power.

Simon Hill
And there is an association, but you're actually losing more strength relative to the amount of muscle that you're losing as you age and and power, which becomes really, really important when we look at risk of falls. Let's come let's come back to that. Primarily, if we're trying to maintain and build muscle mass throughout our adult life and maintain the quality and function of that muscle mass, it comes down to the movement that we're doing or not doing and our nutrition, which is where protein becomes really important among other things. And from a a if we were to look at this this like, our society right now, like, what what is driving a lot of the sarcopenia, I think protein is important to a degree. The average protein intake is at about 1.2 grams per kilogram at the moment in in America, which could be a little bit further optimized.

But what's really the problem is the sedentary lifestyle and the lack of the the stimulus. Right? If you don't use it, you lose it. And unfortunately, what happens is that when you're not stimulating the muscle, the kind of motor units, the nerves that go into the muscle that innovate them, that allow us to contract to control, they die off. And so something that I think is often not appreciated is that as we're aging, we're not just losing muscle mass, but the quality.

We're losing quality muscle. And we get a shift from type two kind of fast twitch fibers. And the fast twitch, fast twitch means faster fatigue, but we can we can produce power really quickly, produce force really quickly. A hundred year dash. And react really quickly.

Whereas the slow twitch are more slower to fatigue, more endurance kind of muscle fibers. And as we age, we get this reduction in the fast twitch and relative increase in slow twitch. And that is what leads to us having less power and being more at risk of falls because when when you when you fall and you have to catch yourself, you have to produce force really quickly Yeah. Through the knee, through the hip. Yep.

And this is this is critical.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It comes back And just falling over like a building and the tree in the forest.

Simon Hill
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Boom. You know?

Simon Hill
Like Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's what kills people.

Simon Hill
In order for us to combat this, and we see this, Mark, if you look at masters athletes, there's some studies Means

Dr. Mark Hyman
older athletes.

Simon Hill
Older older athletes. Right? So athletes that are in their fifties, sixties, seventies, you know, sometimes their early eighties that have been physically active throughout their life, they can attenuate a lot of that muscle loss. So this is not just a normal part of aging. Yeah.

Right? It is it is from living a sedentary lifestyle and not having that stimulus there.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, I was I don't know you know this, but I was sick this year and I had back surgery. And long story short, I had an infection in my back. I was in bed for six weeks. I lost 20 pounds of muscle because I didn't have much fat on me to start with. That was about 12% body fat.

And I was scared because I was 65. And I didn't know if I could actually gain the weight back. But being very disciplined about my protein intake, the quality of the protein, and being in the gym every day with a physical therapist and trainer, I gained back 25 pounds of muscle. And I was like, wow, at 65, like I'm sort of shocked because I was like, I'm just going to be a frail old man after this thing. And I was like, if you actually give the right inputs to the body, even when you're older

Simon Hill
It wants to adapt. So what we understand is that the age related muscle loss that we've kind of normalized in society because it's so pervasive and we see it, it's actually not normal. Yeah. And we can we can intervene and we have a lot more say. And the earlier we intervene, the better.

But it's also never too late like you just said. But you

Dr. Mark Hyman
know what's so crazy, Simon, is that I'm a doctor and I never learned how to evaluate sarcopenia. Then I went to work at Canyon Ranch in 1996 and they had a DEXA machine. And it was the first time I'd seen actually a body composition scan or knew really what it was about or learned about it or understood the difference between visceral fat or belly fat and your butt fat or your android or gynaecoid fat levels. And I was like seeing these things and I was just sort of like, wow, this is like a black hole in medicine. And there's some interesting now biological tests like blood work that you can get that helps indicate sarcopenia that are derivative calculations from other biomarkers.

And so those things are going be added to function. We just added Ezra, which is a scanning company, and you can do an MRI body composition, which is extremely accurate. And you can find out what's going on. But you've got to measure your muscle mass and your body fat. Because if you don't have a good sense of what that is, you're kind of flanked blind.

Simon Hill
And I think it's really motivating to measure and then to intervene and see these science based interventions really work, to see the improvement and know that you are moving in the right direction. Or if they're not working, to know that you get to iterate and change what you're doing. But the two most important things there to combat this loss of muscle function and quality is, a, the training we're doing, so having resistance training in place, and also ideally having some type of power training like plyometric, like box jumps or squat jumps or skater kind of lateral bounds, that type of movement. What else can we throw in there? We can throw in kind of broad jumps, burpees if you can do them.

And even if you can run, like, earlier in life, sprinting is a is a great power movement which will help you maintain, preserve, look after all of those fast switch motor units, which is really important. And then when it comes to to to our diet, protein is super important. And as you said, this has been heavily debated. So how much do we need? What source is best?

Yeah. And then I'd say kind of below those two is, like, does the timing matter? Yeah. And over the last ten years, we've had an abundance of research that's helped us, I think, piece this together with much more confidence. Although, you know, in science, we always have to have a degree of humility and understand we don't know everything yet.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Simon Hill
Yeah. So there still are some things to learn. But overall, when it comes to and I've changed my view on this over the years. But when it comes to the outcomes of muscle mass and strength, it looks like you wanna be consuming at least 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And currently, the the the RDA, which is point 8.8. Is low. And and can you explain how they come up with that? What is point eight?

Simon Hill
They do these nitrogen balance studies and they were done a long, long time ago. But I'd say just at a very high level to explain that those studies are more looking at a requirement of protein.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like preventing protein deficiency.

Simon Hill
Not an optimization of protein. Yeah. And these are two different things.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So how much you need to be a healthy 75 year old versus how much you need so you don't get protein malnutrition, Right? Which is not

Simon Hill
Yeah. So I I mentioned before that after the age of 50, you could be losing one or 2% of your muscle mass per year. Yeah. Those studies done back in the day, they were not looking at how do you attenuate that? How do you slow that down.

So I just want to make that abundantly clear. The research suggests that you need a little bit more protein than the RDA at point eight if you want to do that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. It's how much protein is out there. It's like yesterday, I went to work out at Equinox and I did a pretty hard workout. And then I went down and they had a little smoothie bar and they had a whey protein smoothie with all this healthy stuff.

And it was like 54 grams of protein. And I was like, wow. And then when I do my calculation based on the point eight, it's I need 67 for the whole day. So the question is how much should I be really getting at a 65 year old guy to not just not lose muscle, but actually develop muscle? And you're saying it's more like 1.2 to 1.6 or Yeah.

Simon Hill
When you look at there's a beautiful study that looked at strength and protein intake at two different contexts. So one was looking at as you dial up protein in the context of someone who's doing resistance training. And then the other is if you dial up protein and they're sedentary, what happens to strength? What you see is increasing protein without resistance training.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Doesn't do anything.

Simon Hill
Basically does nothing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's like it's like putting the ingredients for soup in a pot and not putting on

Simon Hill
the heat. Right. So and and if you like, eighty eighty or 90% I think of The US population not meeting the resistance training guidelines. So that's like the number one thing generous. Yeah.

That could be generous, but that's like the number one thing to address. Let's make that clear.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And you mean resistance, meaning strength training

Simon Hill
Yes. And and ideally, think it's in the in the you know, there's a lot of debate around what's the best rep range. Personally, I think that that eight to 12 rep range is a good rep range because it's not the load's not too heavy where you increase risk of of injury for people where the load's super heavy in that kind of four rep range where you need to be a much more experienced lifter to avoid injury. Also at the eight to 12, you get the added benefit of loading the skeleton. So you get the bone mineral density benefits that you you don't get as much if you're doing a lightweight and doing 30 reps.

Yeah. So I do like the eight to 12 as a general kind of heuristic, particularly for healthy aging.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That means eight to 12 to fatigue where like the twelfth one is like you can't do one more.

Simon Hill
Yeah. And that's a great point. So it's, you should be within an effective set.

Dr. Mark Hyman
If you're doing 12 reps of a five pound weight, that's not a set.

Simon Hill
So so an effective set of eight to 12 would be that those last two reps are within failure. You're you're you're getting two a couple reps within failure. Mhmm. Right? So if you were to continue the set, you would only be able to maybe lift it one or two more times and you'd be losing form Yeah.

Right. Is a good way of kind of looking at that. And in terms of an intensity, you might describe that as like an eight out of 10 in terms of intensity of 10 is all out. But in this study, if you look at the context of resistance training and strength as you dial up protein, Most of the benefit is is driven once you get to 1.2. There is a little bit further getting going from 1.2 to 1.6 grams.

It's kinda like squeezing the last few drops out of the towel. Mhmm. Right? So in terms of our priorities, number one is have regular resistance training in place. Ideally, each muscle group in your body, the main muscle groups, you're getting at least 10 effective sets in a week in the way that we just described as a as a minimum kind of stimulus to promote strength and

Dr. Mark Hyman
Is that what, like, three times a week? Yeah.

Simon Hill
You could split that easily across three workouts. And when I say muscle groups, a simple way would be thinking of of movement patterns. So ten ten kind of pushing Mhmm. Which could be overhead or horizontal pushing, 10 sets of pulling Mhmm. In the two different planes.

Yeah. And then, obviously, lower body, you can have, you know, ten ten sets of, like, some type of squatting pattern, 10 sets of some type of hinging pattern

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Simon Hill
Like a deadlift, but over a week. And if you split that across three workouts with a personal trainer

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Simon Hill
You can split that up, and that's a that's a that's enough volume to promote muscle hypertrophy growth and also strength. And then depending on how much time you want to invest in this, you can build that up to 20 sets per muscle group if you have enough time, and you'll get some extra benefits.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I find interesting that I asked you about protein, we end up talking about string training. I think that's really important.

Simon Hill
And and and it's it's intentional. Yeah. Because we spend so much time talking about protein. Yeah. And honestly, the studies show that existing protein intake is already at a level where people would be building and maintaining a lot of muscle if they just added the stimulus.

Now we get into the actual protein source, and there's so much debate around the source of that, particularly animal versus plant protein, which is more anabolic. And this is where my views have changed a little bit over the years and even in the last twelve months. There's been a couple of clinical trials, Hamilton Rochelle out of Brazil, and then Alastair Montaigne and his group with Benjamin Wall that have actually looked at comparing omnivorous diets to vegan diets where all of the protein comes from plants. And these are novel studies because most of the studies, kinda ten, fifteen years ago, just looked at the addition of a pea protein versus whey but in the background of an omnivorous diet, which is not really helping us fully answer this question. So these diets are interesting because you look at a completely plant based diet where all the protein comes from plants versus an omnivorous diet where about 60% of the protein is from animal.

And in these two studies, they go for ten and twelve weeks long where they're doing resistance training in healthy adults and they put the protein intake at 1.6 grams per kilo. Or in Alastair Montanes it was more about two grams per kilo which is pretty high, you do not see a difference in muscle size or strength gains throughout that ten to twelve week period.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Regardless of it's animal or plant based.

Simon Hill
Regardless of the two diets. And I definitely think that challenged a lot of the protein research world and a lot of the main researchers like Stuart Phillips came out and Alan Aragon changing their views on these things. And really the consensus view from that was that if protein is high enough, so not at the RDA, point a. That's very low. But if protein's high enough and you're up at this 1.6 grams per kilogram, then the subtle differences that exist between the amino acid makeup of plant proteins and animal proteins doesn't seem to affect the health outcomes that we care about.

So yes, we can drill down and look under a microscope at the difference between these proteins and come up with a digestibility score and all these things. But when you actually feed people these foods at a high protein intake and measure these outcomes that we care about, there's no difference. And that's what most people listening to this right now, that's what they really care about is the strength and the hypertrophy. It's not an amino acid score on paper.

Dr. Mark Hyman
When I started researching this, because when I wrote my book Young Forever, started really looking at this. And I looked at this one large review by a group called the Proto Age Study Group, which looked at protein requirements in people 60. Because when you're older, there's something called anabolic resistance, meaning you you you have to work harder to actually build muscle than you would have if you were 20. And that has to do with hormonal changes and other factors. And they said the recommendation was one point five to two grams per kilo.

And they also said that animal works better than plant. And they also said that you should have at least 25 to 40 grams per meal in order to hit that threshold of actually activating, they're switching on muscles, protein synthesis or building muscle. Can you speak to that? Because I think when I read it I was like, this seems like a bunch of experts who know what you're talking about and it seemed like a pretty well done review of the literature.

Simon Hill
The only two clinical trials that I'm aware of, and I look at this data all the time pretty closely, so I don't believe there's any others that have looked at comparing plant protein to animal protein at those levels that you just mentioned, 1.5 to two grams, and looking at muscle size and strength are the two studies that I mentioned where they showed no difference. Where I think those conclusions in that paper are probably coming from are that when you look at feeding studies in the context of low protein diets, where total protein across the day is not where we would say is optimal, animal protein does seem to be superior and seems to be more anabolic and probably because of the amino acid makeup. That's where I think the digestible indispensable amino acid score, the DS kind of scoring profile that's often used, that's where I think that tool was really developed for parts of the world where there is food insecurity and you may be getting all of your protein from one or two sources of food. When you're doing that and you're under consuming protein, it's very hard to create an argument that plant protein is equal or superior to animal protein because animal protein has a better amino acid complex if you're under consuming protein, particularly from one food.

That's kind of undeniable. But even as recent as this year and Luke Van Lune published a study who's a big protein researcher. And this study was funded by Beef Chekhov. So if anything Yeah. Yeah.

If anything they wanted out

Dr. Mark Hyman
of by the industry.

Simon Hill
I don't necessarily think that that immediately means this is a bad study. I think Luke Van Loon does incredible studies in science and is a great scientist. But if anything, at least the hypothesis from this group was that animal protein should come out superior and usually that's why the industry would like to support it. What they found, and this was in elderly who, again as you mentioned, there is an anabolic resistance, we would think that if anyone is really going to benefit from animal protein over plant protein, maybe you don't see it in healthy middle aged adults, but maybe it becomes more important as you get older. And this is where my view has changed a bit.

They had protein intake at 1.1 to 1.2 grams per kilogram and they were using elderly, healthy adults that were active and looking at daily muscle protein synthesis rates and no significant difference between an omnivorous diet and a vegan diet, which kind of challenged their group's hypothesis. Now where I'll say the gap is, and we have to acknowledge this, that's a nine to ten day study. The next step is to take elderly and run like the studies I mentioned before that go for ten, twelve weeks, maybe sixteen weeks, and actually measure muscle size and function. So look at strength and these things that power, these things that we care about that we were talking about earlier and just confirm that, okay, what we're seeing in terms of a mechanism because I would be really contradicting myself to what I said earlier. Muscle protein synthesis is a mechanism, right?

That's one mechanism. And we see in the nine to ten days, no difference. What's the actual effect on health outcome that we care about the net effect? And in order to assess that, you need a longer study. So that's a watch this space for me in terms of stay open minded.

It could be that there's no difference in elderly at 1.1 to 1.2 grams per kilo, it could be that there is.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What was the forms of protein they were using? Because when you think about, you know, whole food protein, right? A little pork chicken breast has got about a 120 calories, 30 grams of protein. But to get 30 grams of protein in beans, looks like black beans or whatever, that's about 500 calories. So you're having almost, you know, five less, times

Simon Hill
but it's

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's like three, three hundred four, five times whatever, it's still Right. It's a lot more calories. So in order to consume enough protein, are you consuming too many calories? And if you're not, does it mean the only way you can get there is using concentrated plant proteins that are processed?

Simon Hill
I think a lot of these studies, and I think if you were to go out and look in like a plant based community of people that are eating moderate to high protein, legumes like black beans and lentils are not a go to source because of that There are supplementary food on the side that offers some protein and some carbohydrates, but the more protein dense foods would be tofu, tempeh, seitan for people that can tolerate gluten. Microproteins like a big one that's now starting to become very popular, is they're actually not plant based, it's derived from fungi and is incredibly rich in protein and fiber and iron. So you'll start to see more of that. That was actually used in the Alastair Montaigne trial. They used a fair bolus of that.

And in the other one, the Hamilton Rochelle trial that I mentioned, the healthy adults, they in the omnivorous group, they use whey protein to supplement their whole food. And in the vegan group, used a soy protein isolate to supplement their food. But the same amount of protein powder.

Dr. Mark Hyman
They didn't add extra amino acids or anything.

Simon Hill
No. They didn't do any fortification of leucine or anything like that, which is interesting because you might hypothesize that you would need to do that. Yeah. But what you're what we're seeing is that, again, once you're up to 1.1 to 1.2, at least in those short term studies, and then 1.6 in those longer term studies, that at that level of protein intake, we're not seeing a difference between the anabolic potential of the animal protein and the plant protein. Alan Aragon actually beautifully walked through this on a Huberman show a few weeks ago.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, really?

Simon Hill
Yeah. It's challenging. I get it. Like, I Mark, I was one of the biggest meat eaters, honestly. That my

Dr. Mark Hyman
French Australia, so it's was I was

Simon Hill
the dude who was organizing all the steakhouse dinners. It's the only place I would ever want to eat. I that because I think the strongest argument for animal protein over the last ten or fifteen years has been that it's better for muscle related outcomes. Because to be honest, the research looking at more chronic disease, it tends to favor plant protein, right, you get the added benefit of increasing fiber and phytochemicals and probably a healthier fat profile. Now we're in this position where I think it is challenging because a lot of our society loves to eat meat and that's fine.

I think meat can be part of a healthy diet. But also as scientists and people that want to be objective, we have to stay open minded to what these studies are showing us. And like I said, I'm prepared to be wrong or to change my view if they do a twelve week study and show that people eating the animal protein, the elderly, had better strength and hypertrophy?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Those are all the studies I've seen. Typically it shows the opposite. And so I would like to see those studies replicated because they're interesting, but then does it comport with all the other data? And think I when you're looking at any kind of scientific question, you've to look at not just one study, but how do they fit in the context of the overall literature from basic science to observational data to randomized trials. And you know, what are the quality of the studies?

Is the methodology? How are they powered? I mean, it's complicated. Even as a doctor or a scientist, like, it's hard to figure these answers out. And we might even have the right studies to answer the question.

That's the other problem.

Simon Hill
And that that is where though that these the longer term health outcome studies become really important because, yes, like, the studies that you're referring to, they they exist, but what's the background diet? Are they are they actually optimized their overall protein intake for the day, or are they at a low protein intake where I think it's pretty established that animal protein's probably gonna be superior in that context. What's really interesting to me that I think also is changing the way I look at that protein is the distribution question. So I think for a long time

Dr. Mark Hyman
When you eat it throughout the day?

Simon Hill
Yeah. For a long time, it was thought that, you know, having, you know, 25, 30 grams and spacing it out into all these different meals throughout the day is definitely the superior strategy. And at least what's being borne out in the data now and one of those studies that I mentioned there, the Nicholas Byrd study, not only compared it vegan to omnivorous looking at muscle protein synthesis, looked at two different distributions, uneven and even. So they looked at one where they had five meals across a day, even distribution, and then the other was uneven. So they only had 10% of protein at breakfast, 30% at lunch, and 60% at dinner.

And the reason they did that is that that tends to reflect protein intake in America. So they were interested in, okay, is there a difference between animal and plant? But also maybe there is a difference but you only see it in an uneven distribution. And they didn't see it. And in fact, across both groups, even comparing to the same group, there was no difference in daily muscle protein synthesis rates even in an uneven distribution.

So I think if you were to get really into the weeds, distribution might matter, but it matters far less than the total amount of protein that you eat in a day.

Dr. Mark Hyman
My understanding was that it mattered more for those who are not adapted to strength training. So if you if your muscles are already sort of kind of on and you're used to strength training and used to building muscle, that it doesn't matter as much when you distribute your protein. But if you're not, it matters more. Is that is that true?

Simon Hill
I haven't seen that, but Yeah. I mean, it's it's interesting. I'd love to to read about it if Yeah. Yeah. Send me a study.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That was some of the protege work, but it was fascinating. Okay. So so we need basically more protein, especially as we age than the RDA, which is how much you need to not become protein deficient, which is not really a big problem. Two, you know, you can get there with plant proteins, but you need to have some type of supplementary protein that's concentrated because that that's that's what worries me. Like, you can get don't have to have whey protein if you're eating animals, right, in order to get enough protein.

But do you have to eat a processed pea protein or a processed soy protein, which may have other consequences to get the adequate amount of protein? Or can you get it by eating beans and grains and nuts and seeds?

Simon Hill
Could get it if you were eating enough tofu and tempeh and seitan and and mycoprotein and these kind of some of these more novel types of of plant based or or fungi based protein. But I would say, I think a lot of people that are eating an omnivorous diet are definitely supplementing with a whey protein. I think it's pretty common. And I don't necessarily think it's a bad choice even if it's a whey protein or a pea protein. Particularly now, if it's like NSF certified, you know that there's third party testing.

It's tested for heavy metal contaminants. It's tested for banned substances and what they say is in it on the label is actually in it. I think if you can go through that kind of process and find a protein that ticks those boxes, it can be a very convenient way for someone to increase their protein intake, particularly as people are aging, often their appetite goes down. So I don't want I don't wanna necessarily scare people from supplementing their diet with protein powder, but I think it needs to be it's it's complementing and supplementing a diet like we spoke about before. Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah.

Simon Hill
Right? If you're eating a an ultra processed style diet Really, that's bad. And you're going out of your way to buy high protein ultra processed foods Yeah. That's that's to me, that's not optimization.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It is mostly protein bars. I look at them and go, oh, that's like the most processed crap. I mean, I would never eat that.

Simon Hill
And to and to be honest, back to the coconut thing that I mentioned earlier. Mhmm. So I'm training for a marathon right now. And and one of the the I don't know if consequences is the right word, but one of the realities of that is I have to increase my calorie consumption by quite a bit in order to fuel my training. So one of the changes that I made was to add this coconut yogurt and the reason, and this shows how all of us can be kind of fall victim to the high protein messaging.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Simon Hill
The the reason was I I chose a a high protein coconut yogurt. Mhmm. And I just didn't that and and then cooking with coconut oil. I didn't realize how much saturated fats were coming along for the ride in that coconut yogurt with the eight grams of protein. And so for me, that was not an optimal way to increase my protein.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's interesting. You know, I remember hearing a lecture when I went to the Institute for Functional Medicine conferences twenty years ago. Really stuck with me. It was a researcher from the NIH who was studying soy. Because you know, soy is bad, it's like estrogen, it's going to give you breasts and blah, blah, blah.

And it maybe cause cancer. And if you talk to most oncologists who take care of people with breast cancer, they tell people not to eat soy foods, which is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. They say eat ice cream but don't eat soy foods. It's not actually like that. It's more like a regulator, like a sort of modulates hormone, not stimulates it.

But what he said was really interesting. When they studied in animal models, giving isolated soy protein, which is what was done in these protein studies versus whole soy foods. They have profoundly different effects, particularly on cancer. And that the basically soybean protein that comes from you know, as a byproduct of making soybean oil is kind of a waste product. And it's turned into these soy protein shakes or soy protein bars or soy protein whatever.

And that that hydrolyzed soy protein is chemically different than soy protein and linked to these cancer outcomes in animal models. So that makes me a little worried about that.

Simon Hill
Yeah. You don't have to consume soy protein isolate. Whey protein is also a bit of a waste product as well from industry. So they're kind of similar in that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Curds and whey. It's like Little Miss Muffet. So yogurt is the curd and the whey is the little liquid stuff on But

Simon Hill
you don't have to consume soy protein isolate. There are other forms of plant based proteins. I think on the soy cancer relationship, the guidelines now certainly are not telling people to avoid soy foods for preventing cancer or whether they have cancer. But they do say, and I think this is important for people to know, not to take soy isoflavones supplements, which have become relatively popular. You'll find them all over the internet.

So having that very isolated high dose of isoflavones, there is no evidence right now to recommend that for people and it could be deleterious for someone who has cancer. So I think that's worth kind of differentiating. But soy whole foods themselves, we see a neutral or a positive relationship for at least for risk of cancer. And if you look at certain Asian cohort studies, they have a lower risk of breast cancer in the parts of world where they consume the most whole soy foods. But I guess the point being there is like, if you don't want to consume a soy protein isolate, there's all these other options now.

And come back to like, is it NSF certified, third party tested, and just find a find a good one that doesn't have a lot of ingredients.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Fascinating. Well, you know, this has been such an incredible conversation. I I think, you know, you can tell from the listening to this that the science is really hard to navigate through even for people who spend their lives like you and I trying to think about it and be honest about it because it's constantly shifting. And there's always a boogeyman in nutrition, and there's always the darling of nutrition.

And right now, sea dogs are the boogeyman and protein is the darling. I mean, I cover I think we cover those pretty well. I mean, hopefully, you understand after listening to this what is the bottom line. So maybe you kinda summarize the bottom line for people, like, what should they do? What should they be eating?

And if you wanna, you know, go home and and after listening to this podcast, you know, do the right thing for you when it comes to fats and protein, what would you tell people?

Simon Hill
I would honestly start looking at the Mediterranean dietary pattern or even the Nordic diet, like the Danish dietary guidelines. These are dietary patterns where the focus is on whole foods.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's a herring.

Simon Hill
Yeah. There there there is a compared to a standard American diet, there's less ultra processed foods. There's more fiber. There's more omega threes, fatty fish. There's more emphasis on dark leafy greens.

And if you're going to consume grains, whole grains

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Simon Hill
Nuts and seeds. And from there, now you have a basis. And like I said earlier, you you can you can tweak that to suit your needs. Are you an athlete and wanna go higher carb? Or do you wanna go more down the low carb direction and go high fat?

But the bias for the fats there is gonna be from fatty fish and avocado and macadamias and nuts and seeds and olive oil. So you're gonna have a lot of these monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats. It's a little bit different to how you might see an animal based diet online sometimes now. Within the context of that, be protein aware. You might want to, for a week, just log your food, which I don't think is a bad exercise because a lot of people are not really sure how much protein is in their food at all, and just see where you land.

Are you at at least 1.2 grams per kilogram within that context of that theme? If you're doing that, you're ticking a lot of boxes. And I think sometimes we can go into all these rabbit holes and people get paralyzed and make no change. So I'd say start there. Get all of that in play and

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's not like Michael Pond, eat food, not too much, mostly plants. And

Simon Hill
but it it works. And here's the thing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Only eating real food.

Simon Hill
Real food. But Mark, it only works if we are consistent with it and imperfect. If we try and get this thing perfect Forget it. And we go and do it for a couple weeks, that that's not gonna make a dent in our chronic disease risk. Yeah.

So have some grace for yourself. Right? Try and get as much of that into play as possible. Find a way that leaves you feeling good today. Mhmm.

And you're achieving whatever goals it is you have. Supplement it, complement it with resistance training. We didn't even get into the other forms, but the plyometric power work, aerobic training, get all the other aspects of health in play like good relationships.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Pretty basic stuff.

Simon Hill
All these things that and anything that I've put forward, I'm of the view that if someone presents me with a good scientific argument, they show me how they're thinking and it is more logical than the position that I've found myself in, I will change. So if there's something that I've stated that someone thinks, hang on, I disagree with that, if you show me your thinking, I'm going take a look at that. And I'm prepared to change my views.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Fascinating. Okay. So doctor Jay Bhattacharya calls you up, the head of the NIH right now, the National Institute of Health. He says says, Simon, I I know nutrition's a big question.

What are the most important unanswered questions in nutrition today that we should spend the government's money figuring out? What would you tell them?

Simon Hill
I think we should spend the government's money figuring out how to change the the food landscape, the environment. I think we actually know enough. Mark. We know enough. We don't know everything, but we know enough to help people get into their fifties, sixties, and seventies without these sky high rates of chronic disease.

So I don't want the government to not act thinking that we need a whole lot more information. Sure, we need some funding to learn things on the periphery and get a little clearer here and there, but I would spend the money on understanding what is it going to take to create new environments. What's it That's going

Dr. Mark Hyman
not an NIH question. That that's more of a well, actually, not really true because I I've been talking to folks at and the government, and and there's a new initiative, which is the FDA and NIH initiative around regulatory science, nutrition science. Meaning what regulations and legislations required to actually fix food in America.

Simon Hill
That's where I'd be pouring

Dr. Mark Hyman
the Yeah. That's happening. That's happening. That's good. Alright.

Good answer. Answer. Well, it's great to chat with you always. I hope everybody listening had a little bit of awakening around some of these very sticky, confusing, and messy topics and who you brought hopefully brought some clarity to them and and helped you navigate just how to eat in a way that's gonna help you thrive instead of make you sick. So Thanks, This was fun.

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