Nick Norwitz
speaker
450 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Nick Norwitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The Oreo cookies lowered my LDL by 71% in just 16 days. I think the top 10 drugs only help like 1 to 4 to 1 in 10 people who take them.
An Oxford PhD who reversed his own chronic illness.
First of all, thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be here and have this conversation. As for my backstory, I grew up in a household of both my parents are MD, PhDs, and I always wanted to do medicine and science. I was always fascinated by biological sciences. I always had high esteem for the medical profession. So that's always what I wanted to do, as long as I can remember.
That said, I had a very fluffy idea of what nutrition science really was. I think my understanding- Fluffy idea? A fluffy diminutive. It was kind of not real medicine. Yeah, it was one of those things where I think a lot of people still think, oh, I kind of know what healthy is. My plate, before that, the food pyramid, eat a balanced diet, eat your five a day. I would say a lot of platitudes.
but platitudes that people take as gospel. I generally felt that way as well. I kind of knew, or I thought I knew, what healthy was. You know, I eat my fruits and vegetables, not too much saturated fat, not too much salt, and then get enough energy to fuel my activities. And blessed or cursed, I don't know what you want to call it, I was a young person who never struggled with my weight.
I was a pretty athletic young person, so throughout college, high school and most of college, I really didn't think much about my diet. And then things took a little bit of a left turn for me at the end of college when I started to develop inflammatory bowel disease. Before that, I was known as like- Like colitis. Colitis, ulcerative colitis.
So what that looks like for people who don't know, sorry if this is a bit graphic, but bloody diarrhea 12 to 20 times a day. Yeah, no fun. No fun whatsoever. And it was a really big shift for me because before that I had no dietary restrictions. I was known as the trash compactor of the family and my friend group. And I loved adventurous eating. It was one of my favorite parts of traveling.
You can catch me eating basically anything.
um but i went from that to being able to eat basically nothing that didn't upset my stomach just to kind of give insight to the psychology of or the psychological impact of something like ulcerative colitis you become well i'll say the physical impact is only a tiny fraction the tip of the iceberg of the whole impact because it really causes you to withdraw from life socially psychologically
At this point, I'm finishing up college, starting grad school. And as a young man, you'd imagine I would, you know, be going out with my friends, dating, just to kind of give like a quick example. Dating's not really on the table when, you know, if you're going to have a girl over, you might have bloody diarrhea in an instance, not really a...
a romantic mood setter so you just let those things drift away and for me it continued to get worse and worse after graduation i went to oxford to do my phd and that's when the hit the fan pardon the pun almost probably literally did i i started having these terrible flares and ending up in and out of the hospital yeah i see you down to like 90 pounds right i'll care at some points i was under 100 pounds i was
So malnourished, my heart rate was hitting like, you know, getting to the 20s. I had gone in the period of a couple years from, apologies for patting myself on the back, but this was the reality. I was a top performing academic, valedictorian at my college, sub three marathoner, breaking like state pushup records to being so successful.
braille that getting up and going to the bathroom costs more energy than running sub three marathons used to. And on top of that, you know, my sub three hour marathon. So that's a pretty good feat. Yeah. I mean, I'm a pretty intense person. Really?
is one of the funny things I did. Yeah, when I get my mind on something, I never stopped 2014 Boston Marathon. This was the year after the terrorist bombings, and I'd always wanted to do the Boston Marathon. So I qualified doing a sub three when I was 17, which actually made me the youngest time qualifier for the 2014 marathon.
But if you look at my time for the 2014 marathon, it was just under seven hours. And that's because I ended up breaking my tibia right before the race. So I did the whole marathon on crutches. Wow. Which I had to get special permission to do anyway. Back to Oxford. Yeah, no, I was my quality of life had been completely destroyed.
I was barely staying afloat with my studies, doing a lot of my work from the hospital. No social life, no romantic social life, really just had nothing beyond what was on paper for me.
Well, that's the great irony is you think I'm in a ketone lab and then I start a ketogenic diet. Somebody might intuit like, oh, he was informed by his studies. That's not at all what happened.
So I had read a beautiful paper by Cox et al and Sell in 2017 about exercise metabolism as an undergrad from this lab in Oxford using exogenous ketones, this ketone ester that had been developed using a grant from DARPA, US military, some like super soldier project to enhance athletic performance. and cognitive performance.
So I was just drawn to actually the possible physical performance boosting effects and just metabolism and physiology. So I went to this lab because I found the work just really fascinating, using the tool as a supplement, completely separate from the diet. At that time, starting at Oxford using ketone esters, I still had a very negative view of the diet. My PI actually did as well.
Her name was Kieran Clark. Keto diet was still in my shit list, I guess you could say. or I had a very negative perception of it. Like I think a lot of people do based on what you see in the media around ketogenic diets and what I had internalized through growing up as a kid in the late 90s and early 2000s, really about what healthy is.
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