Episode 218: Nick Norwitz (Part 2) Navigating Metabolism, Carnivore Diet, and Food Myths

Welcome to the Food Junkies Podcast. Here we aim to bring you the experience, strength, and hope of professionals working on the front lines in the field of food addiction. Our mission is to educate you, the listener, and increase overall awareness about food addiction as a recognized disorder. Here we discuss all things recovery, exploring the many pathways people take towards abstinence in order to achieve a health-forward lifestyle. We hope to inspire you to thrive rather than just survive. So stay positive, make a change for yourself, and share your journey with others. And hopefully the message will spread. Hey, Food Junkies listeners, Clarissa here. Today we're diving into part 2 of our conversation with the brilliant and always insightful Dr. Nick Norwitz. And trust us, you don't want to miss this episode. We're cutting through the noise of nutrition science and breaking down hot topics that you hear about everywhere. Social media, your doctor's office, and even at family gatherings. Are eggs bad for you? Is fruit just nature's candy? Can you actually fix a broken metabolism? And what's the deal with olive oil, dairy, and carnivore? Some key takeaways from today's episode. Metabolism myths busted. What does it really mean to have a broken metabolism? And is it something you can fix? Fruit: Is it a friend or is it a foe? The truth about fructose, glycemic load, and whether fruit fits into a low-carb or food addiction recovery plan. Dairy and heart health: New research is flipping old nutrition advice on its head. Olive oil and aging: A fascinating look at how a compound in olive oil might actually help with muscle health. And the carnivore diet: Extreme or effective? Why some people thrive on it and others don't. As always, our goal is to help you make informed decisions based on science without the sensationalism. So go grab your coffee, settle in, and let's get into it.

Hey, everybody. We're back for part 2 with Nick Norwitz. So thank you so much for sticking with us today. We are going to cover so many topics. We're going to talk about eggs. We're going to talk about oil. We're going to talk about carnivore. We're going to talk about—

who knows?

Who knows? We're going to see where this conversation goes because we're having a good time. And that's really what we're here for. We wanna make sure that we talk about these things because we know you're listening to these things, you're reading about these things, you're hearing about these things, you're being told about these things when you go into your doctor's office, you're hearing about these things on social media, wherever it is you're getting your information, you are being inundated with it. And you guys know that I'm a big fan of talking about noise and how everything out there is noise, including this podcast, including the 3 of us here today, and using, you know, critical thinking skills and your own judgment, what works for you. So, Listen to the nuance that's coming up in this conversation. Listen to how we go about deciding for ourselves what kinds of things are important to us when we're looking for information that works for us, and then see if that works for you. So let's jump right into it and kick off. Let's talk about broken metabolisms because this is one of your specialty areas, Nick Norwitz. And I think that we know that in the world of food addiction, Many of our clients come to us saying, "Well, I'm metabolically broken. I'm metabolically dysfunctional. Eating too much of this, too many carbohydrates in the form of processed foods," or whatever it might be, "has really wrecked how I process food. I can't drop weight. I can't, I don't know, process cholesterol correctly," whatever it might be. So how do you define a broken metabolism and how important is it to distinguish between the perception of that and biological facts?

Right. I think the idea of broken metabolism is a nice hook, but it should be clarified up front. It's not a matter of like you are a car and you have an engine and it's broken and you can't do anything about it. It's not something you're born with. I mean, there are genetic predispositions to obesity, let me be very clear, but you're not born with just some metabolism that can't be remedied and you have your lot. The way I think about a broken metabolism Or let's say, let's define it by its flip side, which is what is a healthy metabolism? And I think a healthy metabolism in the broadest sense is when your body is running functionally in a healthy state that keeps you free of disease and also operates to some degree on autopilot. So you're driven to eat and live in a healthy way that doesn't require uncomfortable restriction. So I think what people might be looking for, I think a lot of people are looking for is like, wouldn't it be amazing if I could just like, I don't have to think about restricting calories, my body would just hit a nice healthy balance and I would like live with this going on in the background like any animal in the wild appears to be able to do, but for some reason now in my modern food environment I can't do and I'm screwed and it's always on my mind and it's manifesting in, you know, unhealthy, not even— I was going to say weight, but body adiposity. Actually, as an aside, there were just some new paper out in Nature and also The Lancet kind of trying to do away with BMI. We can get to that in a minute. That was like a day ago as we record this or something. But that aside, that's how I define a healthy metabolism and the converse of broken metabolism. So the solution I think is a mindset shift to be like, Why biologically might I be dealing with the issues I'm dealing with? I'll pause to breathe. I never really do that. So I think there's a lot of things we could talk about. I'll narrow in on calories because I feel like it's front of mind. When people say broken metabolism, the most common thing they're thinking of is it seems like I can't eat many calories and I gain a lot of weight. I have a really low calorie threshold as compared to the caricature would be like Scooby and Shaggy where they just inhale food and don't gain any weight. And you'll see those people and be like, ah, I wish I was that person. Well, the way I would think about it for someone with a predisposition to gain body fat is, you know, and I really want to say this in a way that will resonate with people, calories can matter. I want you to come back to this statement after I explain. Calories can matter without causing obesity. So calories in, calories out equals weight change can hold as a physical principle and at the same time, not be a cause of obesity, not be a biological explanation. In fact, it is not calories, energy balance. It is not even a model of obesity. It is just a description of what happened. In fact, it's a post-hoc description. It's almost like saying, if I were to give you that as advice to lose weight, it's like saying, you know, Molly says to me, "Nick, you know, we're having dinner at your house. How do you get to your house?" I'm like, "Oh, here are the directions to my house, Molly. Arrive at my house." It's useless. It's an accurate description, like that is how you get to my house, but it's not useful biologically. So, in the same vein, you know, calories, I think of as like they're in the car, but they're in the passenger seat. And the thing that's driving the car, the actual driver of obesity, is hormones. There's a lot of hormones. Let's focus on one, insulin, which tells your fat cells to grow. And so, you can actually take this script and flip it. And say, "What if hormonal signals to the fat cells was causing us to get hungrier and also expend less energy?" And if you take that framework, then what you have is you have maintenance of thermodynamics. I'm not breaking calories in, calories out. I'm just saying, "Look, this isn't the— in science, we say the independent variable, the thing you actually try to tweak. It's just going to be the outcome. Let me worry about other independent variables, in this case, the quality of food." And for those really struggling to lose weight, I think really focusing on your glycemic load, The simplest way to think about it is that is your sugar and carbs. The literature does tend to support this idea that eating a higher glycemic load diet, more carbs and sugar, causes your fat cells to want to grow. And then after that, there— or downstream of that biologically, you can get hungrier, end up eating more, and also expend less energy. And let me be clear, there are human randomized control trial data, there are Mendelian randomization data for people who know who that is. All supporting this concept. Doesn't mean it's the be-all end-all, doesn't mean you can eat 10,000 calories per day, but in terms of the slow insidious development of obesity, the thing that people struggle with daily, this model I think is a different way of looking at it. And in implementing its logic, which in this case is cutting the sugar and lowering the glycemic load, which for some people can mean things that appear healthy, so dried fruit for example, Giant sugar bolus. Even in choosing fruits, like you might do better with eating some blueberries, which have very low sugar content and glycemic load versus something like a mango. I'm not saying mango is unhealthy per se, but for you and your predisposition, if your goal is to say drop body fat, this actually might not be the best choice for you and you can find something better. So, long story short, broken metabolism. By leveraging our understanding of metabolism and primarily reducing your glycemic load of your diet. There's other things you can do as well. You can tweak your body in a manner that increases your energy output and decreases your hunger in such a way that you can start to run more and more on this autopilot and drop body fat. At least that's the way it works for a lot of people.

So I wonder if you could speak to potentially when this might not work for somebody. We certainly have, you know, in our Facebook group, I certainly have clients I've worked with. I'm wondering, as I'm hearing you speak, you know, if I am somebody that maybe has been eating tons of sugar and carbs and processed foods for years and years and years, and now I've been off these foods for a year, but I'm finding it really challenging to release weight, and I'm telling myself the story of a broken metabolism, may it just be that it might take more time because of this process. You kind of just spoke about that my journey might just be longer.

Yeah, I'm going to say something pessimistic, but it really is optimistic for a minute, which is sometimes— well, first of all, this is a good thing— is like the health changes aren't necessarily reflected on the scale immediately. Sometimes people drop a lot of visceral fat first. It's not necessarily typical, but that's the unhealthy fat. So you might not lose the love handles and the muffin top at first. Sorry, but it doesn't mean your health isn't improving. You might plateau and have other things you need to tweak, which can be done through maybe doing a little bit of a deep dive, track and figure out what's like— I'm not saying track calories, but what you're actually consuming. I actually did a reel today because I was talking with someone. It was about how food labels lie, who was trying to go keto for a medical condition that has to do with brain health and that I can't get into ketosis. Now, this is a very highly educated person, and to their credit, they were reading the nutrition labels on the food, but they were eating this low-carb bread. Which said it had 2 grams of net carbs. If you look at the label, it said 22 grams of total carbs and 20 grams of fiber. So, he did the math right, but I looked at the ingredients and the first 3 ingredients were whole wheat stone ground flour, soy flour, and like bran flour. I know what like the breakdowns are of those. There is no way this was a keto bread. It was just bread. I'm not saying it's a bad bread, but he was misled by bad information. I am sorry nutrition labels and sometimes ingredients labels can be like that crappy, but doing an autopsy of what you're eating and trying to find places and seeking advice maybe on this, maybe have a great counselor or somebody who can be like, "Oh, you should double-check on this one." It can be very helpful. And there are tools that can help you check for that. So, like if you're trying to reduce your carb load, a glucose monitor, continuous glucose monitor, that does not lie. Unless it doesn't malfunction, but provided it doesn't have a malfunction, it shouldn't lie. So if you eat something and there's a big glycemic spike, a sugar spike means you eat some sugar. I had a friend who his dad was trying to go low carb and they went to IHOP and he was having these sugar spikes in response to just scrambled eggs. Turns out they put pancake batter in their eggs. He wouldn't have known. He was trying to do the right thing, but there are things that could sneak in. So I would say do an autopsy on your diet. Now here's where I get to the crappy part. Your fat cells have a memory. They do. They have their own memory. It's called an epigenetic memory. So they remember having been bigger, and that actually predisposes them to having worse metabolic function and more inflammatory function. There was a paper out on this, you can see it on my channel, it's called Fat Cells Remember. I think it was Nature Metabolism out in 2024, where they took fat cells from people before and after bariatric surgery. They lost over a quarter of their body weight, and they compared them to fat cells from people who were always lean. And they found even after 2 years after surgery and losing a quarter of their body weight, the fat cells, despite being smaller, had a fingerprint, a signature where they had slower or downregulated metabolic function and upregulated inflammatory functions. So, the implication— this is me extrapolating a bit, to be clear— but the implication is having had an elevated weight before can leave a metabolic scar. But here is the positive, and that is in this study, for example, it was only 2 years after bariatric surgery. And it's not like you get bariatric surgery and you lose the weight immediately. So, they were very, very early on in their weight loss journey, so to speak. You know, let's just like cut the difference and say 1 year. It's not how you actually do the math, but for the point of argument. And fat cells take years to turn over. So, what I would say is Okay, life isn't fair. You might be behind the 8-ball as compared to someone who was always lean. But I would guess strongly that over time that epigenetic scar will fade. If that's the case, that means the longer you stick to a healthy whole foods diet in general— I would say low sugar, low carb if you're trying to lose weight, but let's set that aside for now— the longer you stick to a healthy lifestyle, it might be that it gets easier. Not harder as your body turns over and has that, let's say, that metabolic scar tends to fade. To be clear, we don't have 10-year data. This paper I'm talking about came out months ago to prove that. That is my informed speculation. And I'm generally an optimist, but I'm also generally a realist. So, I think metabolically speaking, it is very reasonable to believe, look, you might hit plateaus, be mindful about it. Don't be just like hand-wavy, oh, this is what it is, this is my new baseline. Try to do an autopsy, find the chinks in the armor, but also realize that sticking on the horse for a while, you might just break through the plateau by virtue of time. And you're probably, almost certainly, you're getting metabolic benefits even if it's not reflected aesthetically in losing your muffin top and love handles, if that's the goal. Because I realize that's important. We all have some vanity. That's fine.

Yeah, I really appreciate you sharing that because I think Like, you know, we experience that with folks. Either they are happy in recovery, they're not eating those things that were, you know, lighting up their brain, they're not bingeing, they're not doing any of those things, but they're also not releasing weight, which for not everybody that we work with, but there are folks that that is their goal and then they're not experiencing that. So just taking the, like, being patient, looking at those things, are sneaky things getting in there? Is there maybe overeating of something, whatever it might be? Take that deep dive in there, take a look at that, but also have that patience with that whole process. But it also makes me think about talking about sensationalism and all of these kind of like sexy things that are out there. And I was literally just with a lot of my family recently, and my brother's girlfriend was like, think about They keep showing these pictures from the 1970s of the beach and there's not a fat person in the picture. And then, you know, there's— but like, look at us today. And in the keto world, keto influencers specifically, even carnivore influencers, they like to use this image and sell, you know— sell is probably a strong word, but yes, sell people on these specific diets. And I think the missing piece, though, is like we can go on these restrictive diets, for lack of a better term, and maybe drop weight immediately, much like a bariatric surgery, GLP-1s, whatever it might be. But because of this cell memory, we have people who eat the same way and after 2 or 3 years then start to gain weight. You know? And so I'm wondering, like, we don't have to get into the carnivore, keto, whatever.

Oh, I would love to.

We will, we will. But I mean, not right necessarily with this part of it.

Yeah, I see your point.

Like, is there an explanation with that? Is that, I mean, is that because of that memory? So do the cells then almost become tolerant of this new way of eating and then they start to pack the pounds, like they start to hang on to that fat again?

I think it's unlikely that it works like that. I would say it probably has to do with the fact that over-restriction— because even when people go on very restrictive diets, sometimes they're over-restricting calories just because of what we've internalized is important. So maybe they do go keto, But they're actually not eating more fat, they're just eating boiled chicken breast and steamed broccoli. I think I don't need to give you a study to tell you it's not sustainable for most people. At some point, there will be chinks in the armor. You're going to have that cheat day. You're going to binge once or twice. And so, I think on an individual level, I would listen to someone's story and try to believe them or have a conversation. But in general, I think it's going to be more a function of an over-restricted lifestyle that is not sustainable leading to lifestyle creep.

But I'm even thinking about food plans that come out of 12-step programs like Gracie Eaters or OA or CEAHA, where they include fruits, grains, vegetables, animal protein, fats, all of those things where they can initially drop weight and then, over time, it starts to come back on. And I don't know, I mean, like, I get that I'm putting you on the spot with probably not enough information, but just based on what you know and understand about metabolism and what you were just saying about fat cells and how they have their own fingerprint, is there kind of any sort of inkling?

I don't think your fat cells are going to be the, let's say, the nucleus of the cause of the weight gain. It could be a matter of, you know, maybe you eat in a way that does not favor good fuel partitioning. So like, It doesn't really matter how many calories you eat, it's about what your body does with the calories. So, if you're putting in lean tissue to build up lean tissue, you're going to get more muscle mass that's going to burn more energy. If you're losing lean tissue, your basal metabolic rate is going to go down. There are other things that can just change the degree that you're doing non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or NEAT is the short of it. There were actually studies in the '90s where they did overfeeding studies and there was like tenfold variations in fat gain based on this non-exercise activity thermogenesis. So, To simplify that, that's like the jittery movements that aren't exercise, but they're activity, non-exercise activity. Some people, we all know those people, they overeat. What happens? They just get bouncy. I'm that person. I've done overfeeding experiments and my sleep goes to crap, my heart rate goes up, and I'm just bouncing like a pogo stick all the time. Last time I did an overfeeding experiment, I just checked my phone like on day 2 and it's like, oh, I got 27,000 steps. I wasn't trying to, it just happened. Sorry if I made people jealous there for a moment. But the point is your body's very good at autoregulating. So, if you're eating a particular way that may be like, say you're eating 1,100 calories a day, it might just be you lose a little muscle mass and oh, your diet's just creeping up a little bit because just this smidgen because you're really hungry and also you're moving just a little bit less, not even like your step counter time at the gym. It's not even conscious. It's just your body is fighting against you because you're not eating in harmony with what your body wants. I realize that's really fluffy, but if you're trying to restrict in a way that— I'm actually more or less focusing on calories right now. If your diet is focused on calorie reduction, and this is a little bit of a hot take, but I do think that sets you up for long-term failure. I do. And if people want to look at the paper itself, it was in Nature. Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss by inte at all. It was the paper. It was November 2024, so pretty recent.

We'll link it in the show notes. I'm wondering if we can kind of dive into some of the— whether it's controversy, at least in the food addiction world, a lot of people are like, fruit is nature's candy, fructose is bad, fruit has fructose, so fruit equals bad and you're going to gain weight.

Sticking with the waiter.

I mean, first and foremost, I'm not going to be a fanboy of fruit. My position is not that fruit is like the health food you need in your diet. I don't think fruit is even necessary, but I also don't think fruit is unhealthy. And so, let's start with the whole fructose thing because the point I want to try to make is like, is fructose a metabolically harmful molecule even beyond just like, quote, empty calories? I hate that term. By the way, because I think all these biomolecules have unique metabolic effects and it's not just empty calories, but the answer is yes. There are unique things fructose does inside cells and with respect to our biology that are harmful beyond just being "empty calories." One thing it does is it depletes energy within cells and that can actually harm mitochondria by increasing intracellular uric acid and activating NADP oxidase and NOx4, et cetera, et cetera. We can get into the nitty-gritty. Point being, yes, fructose is metabolically harmful. So, how do we square that with the fact that, yeah, well, fruit contains fructose? Well, in a lot of ways, but it really boils down to the poison is in the dose. And something people don't realize, most people don't realize, including most clinicians, is that most fructose you eat, if you eat it at a moderate dose, doesn't even get to your liver. So, people think about liver as the place fructose is doing its damage. It's stimulating, you might have heard of de novo lipogenesis, lipogenesis, the generation of new fat. That's true if fructose gets to your liver. So, how does the fructose— if you eat an apple and it contains X grams of fructose, maybe 1/10 of that gets to your liver. Why? And the reason is your small intestine actually does a bioconversion of fructose. You could think of it as almost a protective mechanism to other organic acids and actually glucose. I could find the study. Let me try to remember what it was called. It was The Small Intestine Converts Dietary Fructose into Glucose and Organic Acids by Zhang at all in cell metabolism. And it's a really beautiful study. I did a newsletter on it, but there's some beautiful graphs if you look at the newsletter of how much fructose is in the small intestine and how much actually gets delivered. And it's actually a small amount. So the thing is, this process can get saturated. It can become overwhelmed. So that's the difference between having 2 Mountain Dews or actually just even a giant bowl of cereal with orange juice and having a fresh piece of fruit is that in The former case, this junk food with a lot of fructose and high processed fructose, table sugar, sucrose, is half fructose. You can overwhelm the system to the point that, yeah, a lot of fructose is getting to your liver. But if you just have some blueberries, then actually the fructose probably never even gets to your liver in the first place, at least not in any appreciable amount, which is a pretty interesting thing. So that's one thing to know. Check out the newsletter for more nuance on that. The other thing to know, and this is the KISS, keep it simple, stupid version, is like, foods are complex ecosystems. They're not one molecule. So, you know, there are other things in foods that are having relevant biological effects, and that's just the truth. So there's a lot of ways we can like rank order fruit. Let's talk about the glycemic index. Like, you know, having grapefruit or blueberries are going to spike your sugar way less than having a mango, a banana, or a papaya. Mango is the highest fructose fruit. You know, if I eat A mango, even a full mango or 2 mangoes, that might overwhelm my fructose processing ability. I'm not a big person. It's also influenced by how much fructose you normally eat. So, being keto, if I ate 2 mangoes, yeah, I would overwhelm my fructose processing capacity most likely. But that's different than having some blueberries. You can also rank it on like maybe your goal is to have fiber. Is a banana the same as an avocado? Evidently not. Or a pomegranate, it's like 10 grams of fiber. So, Fruit, like most food groups, it's a very heterogeneous group of foods. And you also have to consider what are you comparing it to? Do I personally think a bowl of fruit is a good breakfast for someone with diabetes as compared to some scrambled eggs? No, I think the scrambled eggs are a better option. They're higher in protein. I think they have more nutrients, healthy fats. But if you're comparing a mango to a donut or a mango to a Coke, then yeah, have the mango. So, All these things need to be taken in context. My high-level opinion on fruit is: do you need it? No. Can it be a healthy food? Yes. Do different fruits rank differently depending on what matters to you? Absolutely. If you want to keep your sugar load low but still have some fruit, go for berries and low glycemic index fruit. Try to avoid the very sweet fruits like mango, papaya, banana. Again, doesn't mean they're bad, it just means if that's your goal, You know, make informed choices. Again, like, context matters. If you're sedentary and you have diabetes and insulin resistance, a banana might actually do some harm relative to eggs. If you're a 20-year-old track runner, having a banana before your practice, not going to hurt you, probably makes sense. So all these things need to be taken in context. So my position on fruit is kind of like that, that context matters. While fructose can still be Metabolic handful.

Yeah, I was going to ask about that. Would it make a difference if somebody, again, was feeling like they were or had actual evidence that they are somehow metabolically unhealthy? Does that change then the opinion on fruit?

Oh, 100%. So if somebody has insulin resistance, I would avoid sweet fruit. I would. I know that sounds— comes off as like— I don't know if fearmonger is the right word, but put a continuous glucose monitor on someone with diabetes and tell them to have 2 bananas. Don't tell them, but if they had 2 bananas, You will see it. I've seen this happen. Their blood sugar can go to like 200, 300. That is not a healthy response. Their body is not equipped to deal with that. That's fine. Again, using myself as an analogy, I'm a pretty healthy person, but context matters. I have a history of inflammatory bowel disease that is treated therapeutically with a ketogenic diet. Is a sweet potato unhealthy? No. If I eat a sweet potato, do I feel sick? Yes. My context. I also just want to say, now that I'm just kind of skimming in the background through my newsletter, there is so much bad information on fruit. There was this tweet from WebMD, and they have 3 million Twitter followers. It says, "Bananas are a good source of potassium, magnesium, and calcium." That's 3 out of 4 nutrients you need to ease muscle cramps. A banana has 7 milligrams of calcium. To get your daily dose of calcium, you need to eat 150 bananas. You'd have a cardiac arrhythmia before you could eat enough bananas to have like an appropriate amount of calcium for the day. And you see these other things like reels. I saw this like reel where it's like, Guava are the highest protein fruit. First of all, it's misinformation. Second of all, there's no relevant protein in guava. You don't actually eat this to get protein. This is silly. Or like mangoes are a high source of vitamin A. They're like, yeah, for a fruit. But again, compare that to liver. There's no comparison. So in the social media ecosystem, you'll hear a lot of extreme positions about fruit based on what I just said. I mean, I hope people can agree Fruit's not bad, but there's nuance here and fruit might not be your best choice depending on your goals. Exactly. And different fruits are different.

Exactly. Like, it's that n 1, do it for science, put on the continuous glucose monitor. Or if maybe that's not available to you, like in the US, I think it's just now getting easier in the US. But in Canada, for sure, you can get it over the counter without a prescription. I think in the US it's just now changing, or some states have that available to them, maybe not all. You know, but also thinking about your own personal situation as far as like, what are my health goals? Does this move me closer to those health goals? Does this move me further away from these health goals? Also, like you said, you know, if I'm looking for sources of protein, maybe I should be looking to different sources for that versus my fruit. But if I'm going to be picking a fruit based on its, you know, I guess like nutritional, like nutrient-dense nutritional— what am I thinking? You know, like markers, whatever we want to look at.

Yeah, overall properties.

Yeah, exactly. Like, what is it that I'm actually looking for here? Because I'm thinking about, like, I haven't eaten an orange in years. I don't even remember the last time I ate an orange. And we picked up some fruit the other day for my kids to go, you know, to add to their breakfast because they do eat eggs and sausage every morning for breakfast. Good, bad, or indifferent, I don't know. But at least I know they're not, like, having sugar crashes. School, but, you know, we add some fruit. And there was an orange, a peeled orange, in one of the containers and I had it. And I was just like, "Is this moving me closer to my health goals? Probably not. But is it delicious? Yes. Is it something I'm going to go back and binge on?

No.

Is it something I'm going to go back to the store for? No." You know, so like just being willing to ask yourself these questions that way and not worry about what the sensational reels are saying or headlines. Yeah.

And use it as a tool. Like, let me give you an example of what I think is an amazing dessert. Like, if you feel like you want something sweet, some full-fat Greek yogurt. I like 5— to be clear, I have no affiliations with some of the brands I might mention, but I like 5% Fage and like, you know, some crushed macadamia, cocoa nibs, and then some frozen wild blueberries. They have like Wegmans ones that actually, if you put them in a dairy source, like say a full-fat like, um, Good, good, good. And they like freeze a little shell around them. Like the sugar bolus you're getting is negligible. That's pretty amazing tasty dessert. Maybe with a little cinnamon and pink salt versus like if you feel like you need a dessert, if you're going to have that instead of having like some junk food later or a candy bar, then like, dude, that's a great tool. So know what you're replacing it with, know how you're using it as a tool, and just be mindful about your consumption depending on your goals. Are you that 20-year-old track star or are you 40, sedentary, and trying to lose some weight.

Definitely. You know, so my oldest sister-in-law always— she has very young children and she says there's such a thing as fast fuel and slow fuel, like when she's talking about food to her little ones. And that's exactly how she— like, are we going to go do this thing? You need some fast fuel. Are we doing this other thing? Maybe we're not as active today. Maybe we need slower fuel, but we need a combination of all of those things. So thinking about, yeah, how that makes sense for you in that context.

And when it comes to kids, let's just be clear, like, the rules do tend to change. Like, you want kids to get an insulin spike and grow. Insulin, like, is appropriate in a growth context. So, like, anything I say for, like, assuming someone's listening who is the average American, that rule changes if you're a growing 13-year-old. Just be clear about that.

Yes, thank you so much for that too, because there is a lot of fearmongering around fruit and other things, and the last thing we want to do is create an issue that doesn't currently exist. Absolutely.

Yeah.

So thank you for that. So let's talk about olive oil because that also can be pretty controversial. So how does olive oil maybe contribute to muscle health and/or aging?

Yeah, I will be completely transparent that I teed this one up because there was a paper that came out in Cell Metabolism just a week or so ago. It was entitled— embrace yourself for jargon in the title, but I'll break it down, but it's super cool. It was Mitochondrial Calcium Uptake Declines During Aging and Is Directly Activated by oliverpine. I always mispronounce that. Olivarpine to boost energy metabolism and skeletal muscle performance. So, there's a lot of cool things about olive oil. I'm not going to do a masterclass on it right now, but this paper was looking at how it might help with muscle aging. And so, I'll just give the mechanistic breakdown because I love mechanism and this was so freaking cool, which was, okay, how a muscle works. And if you go to my Substack, I have pictures of all these things. Because if you haven't seen like these in textbooks, it might not make sense, but your muscles have these long fibers and in the fibers there are these two filamentous proteins, one called, one's called myosin and one's called actin, and they kind of like link together. And the way a muscle contraction works when you flex a muscle is the, like the myosin has these little heads that kind of walks along the actin. And in so doing, for those that are watching, I'm like increasing the overlap between my forearms. The overlap between these myosin and actin increases, they pull together, and then that makes the muscle fiber shorten. Now, this whole process actually depends on calcium. When your brain sends a signal to your muscle, at the neuromuscular junction, there's like a pulse of neurotransmitters. What ends up happening is calcium fluxes into the muscle, and that allows the myosin to interact with the actin. So, calcium is fundamental to how muscles work. Now, Here's the thing that's cool and where even the physiologists or the well-versed biologists might not fully appreciate the elegance here is it not only enables myosin to interact with actin and allows the muscle contraction to happen, but muscle contractions, they require energy, right? So, if biology was smart and evolution seems to be, they would couple the contraction with a signal to the engine of the muscle to generate energy. And that's exactly what happens. So, not only does calcium enable myosin and actin to interact, but calcium flux into mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell, enables an increase in energy production. I can tell you how. I might lose people.

Can you tell us how so that our listeners can understand? Because I am appreciating. I'm getting the live demonstration.

I don't want to go over—

You can already go Oh, like, whoa.

So, I'm going to give the sciencey version and then I'm going to make it a little bit simpler. Calcium binds to an enzyme that activates another enzyme called pyruvate dehydrogenase. And in mitochondria, you can think of this as the gatekeeper to the energy generation cycle. It's called the tricarboxylic acid cycle, the Krebs cycle. So, in order for something called pyruvate to be converted into acetyl-CoA to go into the Krebs cycle, You need PDH activity and calcium helps turn this on. If you go to my Substack, if you want to link it, if people want to, I have like charts for all of this visually, it makes a lot more sense. But the simple version is calcium allows muscles to contract and signals to the engines of muscles, mitochondria, to open the gateway to the energy generation cycle. Now, where does olive oil place into this? Well, I need to introduce some more players. Which are proteins called MCU and MCUR1, mitochondrial trans— mitochondrial— what is it? MCU was mitochondrial calcium uniporter. So anyway, it's a transporter for calcium. That's the point. And it allows calcium in. MCU and MCUR1, they work together. So, they're a couple. They're like Batman and Robin was my analogy, SpongeBob and Patrick, something like that. You need them together. And, they allow calcium into the mitochondria. So, you need these to allow the energy doorway to open to the Krebs cycle and energy generation. But here's the thing, these proteins, in particular the mCUR1, decline with age and they decline with sarcopenia, so muscle wasting that happens with age. So, if you take humans and look at the levels of this mCUR1, again, which is critical in getting calcium into mitochondria so the energy doorway can open, it declines with age and it declines in age-related muscle loss in humans. Now, what they were able to show in a mechanistic study is that this oleuropein, which is actually found in the olive leaf primarily and to some degree in the olive fruit, can increase the MCUR1 that declines with age, which the theory then will be, okay, you can reverse what's happening with this transporter so that you can get more calcium into muscles so that the muscles can have a better metabolism. At least that's the idea based on what we see in humans. And just to be clear about how they went about doing this, they actually did an agnostic screen of 5,571 natural compounds to see what might interact with these calcium transporters. And then oleuropein was what stood out. So, then they did further tests on oleuropein. And to make it causal and mechanistic, they did it in mice where they can genetically turn things on and off. And do experiments. And what they found was remarkable that you could rescue the metabolic profile, that you could increase mitochondrial function by supplementing with olive leaf extract, oleuropein-rich olive leaf extract. In young mice, it not only improved markers of mitochondrial metabolism, it improved endurance performance on a treadmill running test. And in old mice that have like the mouse equivalent of age-related muscle loss or sarcopenia, it actually increased muscle mass. Which is like pretty incredible. So yes, this oleuropein polyphenol that is found in the olive leaf potentially can help with age-related muscle decline. Now, this is a mechanistic study. I don't have a 20-year RCT, probably never will, but it's really cool physiology. And the thing I want to highlight about it also with respect to our conversation about fruit is that you don't see this on a nutrition label. There's so much more to the foods we eat and how they impact our biology, then you're going to find on the nutrition label, which is why if you take one thing around from this jargon tsunami I just threw at you, it's whole foods are complex. They have complex impacts on your biology that cannot be reduced to a nutrition label. So, if you do one thing, be it high carb, low carb, carnivore, vegan, whatever, I think eating a whole foods diet is going to get you a lot of bang for your buck because of cool mechanisms like this that you're not going to be able to easily discover. On a nutrition label.

Can I ask something about that too? Sorry, just clarifying question. So just clarifying. So there's the compounds, whatever, in the olive oil that helps calcium get into the cells, which helps to calcium get into the mitochondria specifically. Okay. Which then protects against or even helps improve muscle mass in a person.

There's not muscle mass findings in people. So there's findings that the mcuR1 levels decline in people and that you can recover the markers of function. But in terms of causal outcomes, they did those experiments in mice. That is an appropriate caveat. What I will say though, again, it comes down to the practicalities of what you like. This is brand new literature. And to then get like, you need to do this before then you do the human trial. Also, a human trial of this sort will be so incredibly expensive that just because the data aren't there in the literature yet, doesn't mean it wouldn't work. In fact, we could speculate that it would work. I can't promise you that because we don't have the data to say it. But that is the limitation of looking at the cutting-edge science, is that just somebody hasn't run the study.

Yeah, but why I ask, I guess, is because I'm really curious about this. So the enzymes or whatever it is in the olive oil leaf that's helping the calcium get into the mitochondria, like you were saying, it's not even necessarily everything that we are eating. It's like, what are we actually absorbing? Like, how are we processing these things? All of that. Right? So there's that piece of it. So if that compound or those compounds help calcium get into the mitochondria, and I think there was recent literature— this might be going off on a tangent— there was recent literature that I think literally just came out of Oxford itself, talked about increasing calcium intake actually lowers colorectal cancer. Yeah, I don't know how that's related, but yeah, I mean, well, I guess as far as, like, do we actually have to eat more calcium or would it be beneficial to have a way to get calcium into our cells, or is it completely unrelated?

I don't think with, like, say you're doing, like, olive leaf extract supplementation, you need to hyperdose calcium. Your body is very good at having, like, you know, good calcium, like appropriate calcium levels outside of cells. I mean, get enough. Generally, 1,000 milligrams is recommended. If you're eating 300 milligrams of calcium, check that, but you don't need to, like, have 2 grams per day. I will also caveat Going back to our prior episode where I'm not going to be sensationalist, I kind of lied in a sense that this isn't— we said olive oil. The oil doesn't tend to have that much oleuropein. It tends to be in the leaf. That said, if you go searching for high oleuropein olive oils, there are a few depending on the processing. But I just want to clarify that your average olive oil, and we can talk about how to select a good olive oil because that's another kettle of fish, won't be actually that high oleuropein. So, this more was a lesson in how cool biology is. Maybe eat some olives. Want to have some olive leaves, great. Olive leaf extract if you want, your call. But your average olive oil, like the olive oils I eat on a daily basis aren't super high in oleuropein. If I were 50, would I probably be taking olive leaf extract now based on these data? I probably would. I'm not saying do it, I'm just saying that's what I do because I find that I read this paper, I'm like, this is legit enough that yeah, I do this. So I'm young, I don't have sarcopenia, And to be very clear, oleuropein is not going to replace push-ups or resistance training. You still need to do work, but it's cool. It's cool to think that a compound found in the leaf or, you know, or a high oleuropein oil, which is like just fat, could benefit muscle health. And just to think about how complex this is, it's not like, you know, you hear influencers be like, you know, get your 30 grams of protein every meal. It's not that simple. It's never that simple. And I like highlighting the complexities. If for no other reason, that I love to share awe with respect to metabolism and biology because it's such hard, interesting science. And I think people have this idea about nutrition is like, eat your 5 a day, have your balanced diet, have your MyPlate. And I'm like, it's so much more than that. In fact, it's kind of funny. Whenever my parents introduce, say what I'm interested in, they're like, "Nick's into nutrition." I get this cringe down my spine because I know what everybody thinks, that it's a fluff science. I thought that. Before I was forced via a personal journey to really dig into literature like this. And I'm like, wow, this is the hardest science there is. It's just that the space is kind of diluted with junk.

Sorry. No, I love that because I think you really speak to how nutrition science can be legitimized now and that there is sources out there which can feel so much more accessible rather than just, yeah, Even when people are like, "Oh, you know, I'm a nutritionist," or, "You know, I study nutrition," it's like, "Yeah, I totally can appreciate that, your feelings on that." Yeah.

I haven't had the best luck with nutritionists. My mom says, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." I'm not very good at that rule, by the way. If somebody watched my YouTube video, for example, from this morning, I had a little bit of an online beef, which I do very purposefully. But needless to say, if somebody is listening and they rolled their eyes and they're like, "I've dealt with a nutritionist and I didn't get any help," I feel you. I've been there.

Yeah, that's fair. That's fair.

It's really hard.

Some are amazing.

Some dietitians are, like, incredible.

Right.

Dietitians and dietitians are different. But, like, point being, but, like, there's skepticism. There's a loss of trust. We talked about that in the last episode. I appreciate that. I have been in the patient's chair.

Yeah. And trust your instincts. If it's not for you, then there might be somebody else that is. So we want to talk about still two things— dairy, carnivore. Which one do you want to hit first?

Let's leave on carnivore because that's the more messy one. The thing I wanted to say on dairy, just because there was a big new study out that was looking at a UK Biobank cohort and a Chinese cohort, and then also did a meta-analysis of existing literature on dairy and cardiovascular health. This was nutrition epidemiology. I don't apply double standards, or I try not to. So that comes with major caveats. In terms of, you're not going to say anything causal. These are associations, although it was 9 million person follow-up years, something like that. So it was, you know, incidence and basically high level. They found total dairy intake associated with lower cardiovascular disease risk. In the UK cohort, it was lower cardiovascular disease and lower stroke. In the Chinese cohort, it was actually complex because The coronary heart disease seemed to have a little bit of a positive association, which is not good, but also lower stroke. That's actually quite interesting because maybe there's genetic differences between those populations, or maybe it was a dose effect. People in the UK eat about 4 times more cheese or more on average, so maybe you need a lot of— I'm gonna actually say dairy because then what they did, and this is the reason I wanted to bring it up, is what I loved about the study is they did breakdowns by different types of dairy: milk, yogurt, ice cream, cheeses. And one of the big findings is across the board, cheeses had association with lower cardiovascular risk. You know, in one, I think was in the meta-analysis, maybe including the two additional cohorts, it was something like a 12% reduced risk of cardiovascular disease in people who ate cheese at least a serving per day versus people who ate less than two servings per week, which they even presented in the paper. There's a line to the effect of despite the high saturated fat and salt content of like even high fat fat and hard and soft cheeses, there was still a protective association, air quotes. Take that with a grain of salt because it is an association. But the reason I think it's worth bringing up is it does counter current simplistic narratives about the impact of even things like saturated fat and salt on heart health because these are complex foods. And, you know, there's a lot of things that dairy can do that's super healthy. It's high in protein. High in calcium, we talked about. High in vitamin K2. It can be probiotic if you're having fermented dairy, blue cheese, kefir. So, I think dairy is one of those foods like eggs that people steer away from in part because they say, "Oh, it's high calorie." We already talked about calories, especially at the beginning of this episode and last episode, and then high saturated fat. Guess what? Even the large-scale epi is not throwing cheese under the bus now. It's saying, "No, it actually might be cardioprotective." So I thought that was just a fun nibble out there. I'm also making a video on it. I looked at the V1 this morning. By the time this episode comes out, it might be out. I will warn people, it is incredibly heavy on the puns. So don't watch it if you don't like puns. But I really, I am a pun monster. So you brie, you should brie ready because I'm going to churn out the puns. It's just like, I go over the top. I have fun with it. So anyway.

No, this is so good. And I'm so glad that we're talking about these things. You know, especially the topics that we are talking about because, from a food addiction perspective, we do have clients who experience addiction-like responses or symptoms to things like fruit because of the sweetness, to fats like oils, and to dairy. Now, whether that's everybody's experience or not is not what we're trying to say, but that we do have individuals who do have those symptoms and experiences. So, like, for those who are listening who that's your truth, we are not trying to sell you on these things. But what we are trying to do is have a conversation around how these things are nuanced from more of, like, that health perspective or the noise that's out there about them when it comes to should we be ingesting them at all.

Yes, exactly. I don't care. I mean, if you have a cheese addiction or self-described cheese addiction and don't want to eat cheese, don't eat cheese. I didn't say you need it for heart health. I mean, like, I think olive oil— I think the literature on balance is going to say olive oil, like fatty fish, those are great. Eat those if you can. You don't need to eat cheese. I'm just saying don't fear cheese and avoid it for this reason. It can be a health food, just like blueberries can be a health food, but it's contextual. All these things are contextual. There is no— let me be clear, I don't believe there is a single necessary food. There's no food that cannot be supplanted by something else. Period.

Thank you so much. And certainly I didn't think that that was at all where you were going with it. I just wanted to make sure that our listeners are aware that we're not trying to push, "You absolutely have to eat these things in order to be like a complete, whole, well human being," but that there are, again, those nuances.

Not at all.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's dive into this carnivore conversation with the last 20 minutes that we have here or so. So you tell us, what is it that was so important or is interesting about the carnivore way of eating that you feel we need to have a conversation about it?

Let me wrap this around. Well, let's say I'm kind of bizarre because I'm not a pro-carnivore person per se, but I'm also, to my awareness, the most published person on this topic in terms of peer-reviewed literature, actually. And I often come off— like, I had a video this morning about basically— it comes off as defending the carnivore diet because an influencer said something very negative and I stood up. Now, the reason I do this is not because I think carnivore diet is optimal, not because I think you need to eat meat, not because I think plants are poison or broccoli is a conspiracy theory or any of the things you might hear from certain camps. I'm not saying that, but I have met a lot of people who have benefited uniquely from it, including people in a population that I'm really sensitive to, those with inflammatory bowel disease. So, if you look up my last name Norwitz on PubMed and carnivore diet inflammatory bowel disease, you'll get a paper. A case series. This is just one example where I interview patients with inflammatory bowel disease who benefited tremendously from a carnivore diet. Some had suffered for decades with inflammatory bowel disease, been on really harsh medications, immunomodulators, even had bowel resection surgeries and were still suffering, and they got their life back by cutting out all plants and just eating meat, just eating meat and eggs. And their stories matter. And I believe them. In fact, there are many, many stories like this. When you hear a person be like, this is how my life truly changed, like my life was literally saved, like I was suicidal and this is what recovered my quality of life, those patients deserve a voice and they also deserve to have intervention study that could benefit them. So a carnivore diet, we can break down why it actually might make sense for, say, inflammatory bowel disease as a use case. There's actually good data on fiber elimination being helpful, especially in pediatric Crohn's, ketones being protective, and ketones can be generated in the gut, especially when you're low-carb, say carnivore, and plant material being potentially irritating for some people, including fibers being inflammatory in a subset. So, we have strong biological plausibility. When you couple that with a waterfall of clinical stories, human stories, then you're forced to contend with this idea that this might be a really meaningful intervention that could save lives, even if there's not a randomized controlled trial on it. In fact, especially if there's not a randomized controlled trial on it, because that's what we need to get done to make it standard of care so that patients don't go and continue to suffer and suffer and suffer like they do with a lot of these autoimmune inflammatory conditions, be it psoriasis, IBD. So we're actually working on like a series, carnivore diet for multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, IBD. I'm trying to get other people, including other med students and residents, write it up just for distributing the love and the workload, but I've heard a lot of stories, stories from humans that I believe, and they are hurt by diet stigma. There's stigma about keto and there's stigma about carnivore. Now, one could accuse me fairly enough of having a selection bias insofar as like I have lived keto stigma and I see the carnivore stigma by virtue of who my followers are. I will claim that entirely. I'm not saying there's not also stigma against vegan diets or whatever. What I will say though is I am sensitive to those people who have, say, in some cases say cured depression or schizophrenia with carnivore diet. Cured might be a strong word, put into remission, whatever terminology you want to use. And yeah, the carnivore diet community becomes evangelical because it's worked so well for so many people and it deserves to be studied. Again, we can separate that from saying anything about carnivore and environmental sustainability. Or anything about longevity or what the value of broccoli is in the diet. I think on balance, for your average person, fiber is probably beneficial. I do not think carnivore is ideal for longevity. I do think more diverse diets would probably be better from a microbiome perspective. I can break down why that is. I can maintain all of that and say, but this could still be an incredible intervention for certain people. So I raise that because you know, even if your audience isn't carnivore, they're probably going to meet someone who is shortly. And it is a highly stigmatized topic. I think what I would just say is this is scientifically legitimate. It's not hooey. It's not just a fad diet. It is scientifically legitimate. Doesn't mean it's the right thing for you. Doesn't mean it's the right thing for most people. Doesn't mean it's sustainable. Doesn't mean that animal welfare isn't an important topic. That's something I'm very, very actually sensitive to myself. We can get into that. But it is scientifically legitimate. Now, it was on my mind this morning because I dropped a video in response to someone some people may know. His name's His name is Layne Norton, who just went on a diatribe against carnivore diet. We don't have to get into it. You can watch my video if you want. I've responded to him in the past. But the reason I was provoked to respond is because his actions were, first, he was misrepresenting it and giving poor citations. Now, irrespective of what you think of a carnivore diet, like manipulative citations and then not owning up to it, and then also bullying and harassing people, which he's done, that's not appropriate. And I stand up against— I have a very low threshold for bullies, so I tend to stand up against these issues when they arise. But it's an awkward position because it's just like the incentive structure. We talked before about incentive structure. I forget if it was this episode or the one that would have been released last week, but there are easy points to get by bashing on the opponent. So a cico bro, calories in, calories out bro, bashing on carnivore. It's saying it's all about the calories for weight loss, or a carnivore person bashing on vegan, also not nice. You know, whatever it is, understand that in social media there are so many easy points to be scored by attacking the other. And I see this a lot with carnivore, just as a case study. So yeah, you got my flavor on carnivore. I think it's interesting. I don't think it's for everyone. I think it'll be very powerful, and I think it needs to be studied more. I do not think people are going to drop dead of a heart attack because of a carnivore diet. I do not think meat causes cancer. You know, I do not think meat is unhealthy. I think meat can be an incredibly healthy food, but you don't need to eat it if you don't want to.

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I've definitely heard of that. I've tried that because my gut's so screwed up, basically doing like, all right, if you think, oh, I have microbiome dysbiosis, I don't know exactly what's wrong with it, but it's all kind of messy. It seems kind of logical. I'm going to reset the clock by doing carnivore for 4 months, then titrate in slowly, maybe starting with fermented food and a strong probiotic. Maybe a little bit of kimchi, a little bit of kefir, and then maybe I'll titrate in a little bit of fiber. Could that reset and generate a healthier microbiome after the fact? Possibly. No one's ever tested this protocol in a study. It'd be hard to. I would love a protocol like that, but it's feasible and it makes sense, right? If you're struggling, so many people struggle with gut issues. It's the number one reason I hear people go carnivore and they're like, my IBS or my IBD just went away. And when you struggle with that daily, that's a big win.—

which is so interesting because we know people who have gone carnivore and then developed symptoms of IBS.

So that is a legitimate thing to contend with and caution. So I mentioned before, I think a diverse diet can have benefits. The way I boil that down is think about any ecosystem, coral reef, a rainforest. What makes it resilient? Diversity. Diversity in an ecosystem makes an ecosystem resilient. It's the same with microbiome. And if you define metabolic health, or let's say microbiome health, as resilience to some outside insult or flexibility, then it kind of makes sense. You want a diverse microbiome ecosystem. So, if you have a healthier gut at baseline and then you starve it and you develop something that has less diversity, you might have less resilience. When you then introduce a challenge, say some broccoli, that it could deal with before, it might not be able to handle it now. And so you might get IBS symptoms in response to foods that previously didn't cause you issue. The good thing is you probably are able to adapt in the other direction as well. Human microbiome is complex, but if at baseline you have pretty good gut function, you probably can recover it. It's complicated. There might be some people that are just like, I'm sorry, screwed. I say this pessimistically because I think I'm one of those people. There are things that we don't understand why, but they can have really long-lasting impacts. So, by example, I got IV antibiotics as a neonate for a fever. That's known to increase your risk of developing ulcerative colitis even decades later by 500%. I developed ulcerative colitis because when I was, you know, 0 years old, I got some— maybe there was a contribution of getting those IV antibiotics. How it manifested 2 decades later, I don't know. Am I screwed up for life because at a critical period of my life I had an insult to my microbiome? It's possible. And it's the lot I have to live with. I don't actually think it's that big a deal in the grand scheme of things because one thing we kind of mentioned before is like, look, biology doesn't play fair. We all have our sensitivities. I'm blessed with not struggling with a weight problem, but yeah, my gut's kind of screwed up. I don't know what degree getting antibiotics at age 0 contributed to that. That's my predisposition. We all have predispositions. Some of them just manifest visually and others are more secretive. But bear in mind, like, it's very easy to have a negative selection bias and be like, oh, why do I struggle with this thing? I mean, everybody feels that way, but everybody's thing is different. Sometimes taking a step back and being like, everyone's struggling with something. This just happens to be my thing. It's a lot I got in life. I'm going to accept it and just take it on as a challenge is the healthiest attitude you can take.

Thank you for sharing about that for sure, because we were— I always wonder, I'm like, why does one person have this response and another person have that response? And how can that even be? But that helps to break that down.

We don't always know. It's just something we have to deal with.

Yeah, exactly. Those nuances. And like you said, it's, it's like the, the cards that we've been dealt and then how do we play them? How do we leverage them against whatever it is that's out there in a way that works for us? Yeah. So we are just about out of time and we appreciate you so very much for this amazing conversation. I have a question and Clarissa has a question. So my question is, Nick, for our listeners who are super interested in you and what you have to say and what you do, where can they find you?

Yeah, I'm on all social medias at Nick Norwitz, N-I-C-K-N-O-R-W-I-T-Z. There are no other Nick Norwitzes that I'm aware of. I'm easy to find. I'm most active on YouTube. At least twice a week I post a video, usually breakdowns. I have a great animator, so they're usually pretty easy to follow. I get a lot of nice comments on like, you know, that it was very technical but also easy to follow. I'm active pretty on Twitter and Instagram. Nick Norwitz across all those platforms. If you want the earliest breakdowns to like Breaking Science, my newsletter, usually I'll read a paper and like write the newsletter up on the spot. So you might get like the day something comes out in Science. If it's a big story, like I might drop a newsletter breakdown, um, or like 24 hours later. So I, I'm pretty on top of that. And I'm most responsive in YouTube comments day one. Usually I'm just combing the, the comments of a video and, and responding. I like engaging there. I'm also on Threads, Facebook, LinkedIn. I'm trying to get everywhere. As a full-time PhD scientist and medical student and trying to be a loving boyfriend and taking care of myself and managing all that social media and not having a team, it gets to be a lot. So I apologize if I don't get to your comments. My inboxes and my comment section are just like insane. But I love engaging with people. As you can tell, I'm a talker. I'm passionate about this. And what I'll say to your audience is my intent. I really started putting effort into social media New Year's 2024. This has been one year for me. I intend to be here for the next 50, 60, 70 years. So I appreciate the early engagement. The people who find me now, say, are my early adopters. I have high aspirations, big dreams, and not to pat myself on the back too much, my dreams usually do come true. I work hard at it, and I love sharing data and Their feedback, your listeners' feedback at this early stage in my career are my data to develop as a communicator. I'm not trying to be a guru. I'm trying to tell you I'm a 29-year-old, very excited PhD, soon to be MD, will be going off into the world to have this mission to make metabolic health mainstream. And I'm new at this and communication is a skill I want to develop for the rest of my life. So I'm not trying to be all wise here. I'm trying to be like, I'm on this journey with you. Give me your feedback. I'll try to listen as openly as I can, and we'll evolve and learn together. I have a lot of fun with it.

Well, I will say you were pretty responsive. Like, I emailed you and you go zippity zip right back. So I feel like your communication skills are on point, Nick, and it's perfect. I love it. I was just thinking the other day, oh, red light therapy, is that worth knowing something about? Boom, in my email inbox was your newsletter on red light therapy. So I love that I can go to your YouTube channel. Or your Substack, all of that, because I feel like it's a really, I will say, unbiased opinion on the information that's out there is how I read it anyways.

Thanks. I always love playing devil's advocate. You can tell. You might get one thing is like, is he promoting carnivore? And the next thing is like, why fruit is not bad. And I do that very intentionally. And I also try to— one thing I said earlier that I want to reinforce I do not feel the data or other people's narratives have any impact on my personal journey. So I will, if there's good fiber or there's good data on fiber that I legitimately think like this is good, I will say these are good data. Even if I don't eat a high fiber diet, I don't care. Or if there's something concerning, like legitimately concerning, honestly it hasn't happened, that comes out about like unprocessed red meat, I'll be like, this is legitimate. You should look at this. I try not to hold double standards. I try to evaluate the data as the data. And yes, I'm more sensitive to like the keto side of the thing because that's just the life I've lived. It's the community I've built. But I try to be generally diet agnostic with respect to data coverage and also things non-data. So I have stuff on like cold exposure coming out and specific pro-resolving mediators, red light therapy, sleep, breathing, everything metabolic health is of interest to me.

Yes. And that leans into our signature question, which is, if you could tell a younger version of yourself something critical about metabolic health, what would it be?

You don't get a free pass for being skinny.

I'm dead serious.

I mean, I say that— the only reason I'm joking about that comment—

I love that because the thin ideal— yes, go ahead.

Sorry.

Well, I wouldn't have believed me. I wouldn't have internalized because I know what I was like in college. And if you said, Nick, you shouldn't have cookies, they're hurting you, I'll be like, screw you. I just worked out for 3 hours. Me and my bros are going to get the spaghetti and the cookies. Actually, fun fact, in my valedictory speech, I promote cookie consumption because we used to have cookie eating competitions and my friends set the record eating 6,000 calories in soft baked chocolate chip cookies. I almost went to Dartmouth because their cookies were so amazing. And it ended up as a statistic in our graduation book next to students with military accommodations, like number of cookies eaten by valedictorian's friend in the dining hall. So I've come a long way, but I seriously bring that up because it's like we're of this mindset of your body tells a story. The thin person is healthy. The person who has more weight and are elevated BMI in the obesity range, although that might be overturned soon, is unhealthy. It's so much more complicated than that. And the foods we eat, I said I don't like the idea of like saying fruit because it's empty calories. Is the biomolecules we eat are not just energy substrates. They are information for the body. And you need to understand that because everybody can benefit from a healthy diet and no one can escape that long eating a poorly formulated diet. Not athletes. It's spinning a roulette wheel and it will come back to bite you. So yeah, that would be my piece of advice to younger me. You don't get a pass because you're skinny.

I love that. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's been such a fascinating conversation. So many takeaways. And yeah, I think we're going to have to have you back again.

That'd be fantastic. Absolutely. Thank you.

Thanks for joining us this week on Food Junkies: Recovery from Food Addiction. Make sure to join our Facebook group, Sugar Free for Life Support Group. I'm Sweet Enough. Molly and Clarissa are food addiction professionals who offer one-to-one counseling and group coaching through Sweet Sobriety. Please subscribe to our show so you never miss an episode. While you're at it, if you found value in today's episode, we'd appreciate you leaving us a review on your favorite platform. Your feedback helps grow our show and allows us to reach others who need to hear this message of recovery. Don't forget to pick up a copy of Dr. Tarman's book, Food Junkies. And as Vera always says, the power is ours.