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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Actually, I was so concerned about this that before I started at Harvard, I wrote a piece for Stat News that was, will a ketogenic diet make me a pariah in medical school? And what I found to be the case is behind closed doors, like people are so open to these fascinating innovations in metabolic health.
So I guess the challenge set forth before me, and I present this not as a, I'm not trying to toot my own horn for what's coming up. For me, I'm actually asking for help from everybody listening. which is that we've gone through a lot in this podcast.
I'm sure all of you listening caught moments when Mark pulled me back and was like, let's simplify this because you're going off the deep end a little bit. Clearly, I have a lot of enthusiasm for this. And I... want to find a way to engage people in the discussion in the way that is practical, functional, nuanced, and I want to scale the discussion.
And one of the big challenges there that I think everybody who's a public communicator grapples with, I'm sure you've grappled with it over the years, is how do you compete in this ecosystem of engagement bait in a way that is practical and intellectually honest. I think I've really struggled with this because- You've done a great job, honestly, better than most.
Well, it's difficult because it's like, I know exactly what I'm doing when I eat Oreo cookies to lower my cholesterol. I know the media is going to run with it and say, Harvard doctor, Harvard scientist lowers his cholesterol with Oreo cookies. And I know that's going to create confusion.
I also know that a similar thing's gonna happen when I do 720 eggs, or that it's kinda clickbaity for me to do debunked with my picture next to a giant ribeye steak when I'm debunking egg carnivore myths. That said, I don't really see another way to access people unless you provide them engagement bait that then draws them to the table to have nuanced discussions.
So using Oreo cookie as a case in point,
Yeah, but I'm very transparent about it. In fact, in some of my videos, I say, this is clickbait. Let's see how it does. Here's how I engineered this clickbait. But here's why I'm doing it. And so to use Oreo cookies as a case in point, because I was very nervous about doing that. I didn't just do it on a whim. I'm like, well, this had a net positive or net negative effect.
I genuinely didn't know.
Oh, definitely talking about my health. I wasn't even worried about my career. I was talking about like public impact. I'm like, I really can't see a scenario where someone genuinely believes Oreo cookies are a health food. I don't think like an adult could be persuaded by a thumbnail. And if they can, then, you know, natural selection can thank me. But that's another question.
But what resulted was really exactly what I'd hoped and more, which was it drew forth conversations that were incredibly productive. It drew into the fold researchers who were prior, previously not aware of the work, who then started digging down the rabbit hole and finding there's legitimate research here and then investing funds Potentially in big studies in doing so.
We have one $2 million project I want to get up and running either later this year or next year to like rigorously assess some of our work in multiomics. And it acts as clinicians. To the point that in the months following the Oreo experiment, I was literally getting emails from cardiologists left and right saying, I saw your Oreo study.
It put me on a path to learning about lean mass type responders and lipid energy model. I realized I had a bunch of these in my practice. Some of them were statin intolerant, and I've dropped their LDL by 400 points with sweet potatoes because I understand the physiology. So if anything, it had a, quote, positive clinical impact, if anything.
i bring this up because it's it's hard i'm sure you know it's hard to like put something out there that you know is a is actually i'm going to say a little bit is is clickbaity for the purposes of drawing people into discussion and also knowing that there's going to be collateral damage there's always collateral damage someone's going to be confused somebody's going to be angry and you just accept that and i feel like at a point you just need to there's going to be haters and there's going to be lovers and it doesn't matter who you are what you say
You kind of have to start enjoying it a little bit. Start playing with it a little bit. I don't know. I had a couple pieces recently about Diet Coke, aspartame, and both cardiovascular health and reproductive health. And you'd be surprised at how vitriolic people get about their diet.
I think there is. I will probably never drink a Diet Coke again.
I think it's first important to acknowledge getting rid of artificial sweeteners, in particular, like say like aspartame and sucralose, costs you nothing. Like you like the taste, but it's not like saying cut out red meat or something that might have a health benefit. There is no clear health benefits.
You're not eating less calories, though, unless you have the binary of it's a Coke or a Diet Coke. And I hate that binary. People are like, is it worse than a Coke? I'm like, why are you choosing between these two things? Right. Like, if that's actually your binary.
Then you can choose the lesser of two evils. That is a legitimate choice. Yeah. And my thing is not to say people shouldn't have Diet Coke. It is, here are the data. Make an informed decision like a freaking adult. If you want to slam Oreo cookies and eat milkshakes for the rest of your life- So what is the data?
So what I would say is there are really interesting data showing potential high-impact harms, like transgenerationally inheritable anxiety. So there's a paper in PNAS, ironic because it sounds like penis, but it was an animal model paper, mice, and I'll explain why that is totally legitimate in a moment, but where they fed mice the equivalent of two to four Diet Cokes for humans in aspartame.
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