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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And it tastes like an ice cream sundae used to. So I think the interesting part about that exercise is for people to reflect on, like, where is your baseline of expectation for what a healthy, reasonable diet is, which you can kind of test by what was your emotional reaction to me describing that unhealthy lifestyle or that unhealthy diet, so to speak.
westernized diets I mean if you look globally at like where inflammatory bowel disease and also irritable bowel syndrome is like on the rise it's everywhere that there's you know a westernized diet so the more processed junky food we eat with the more added chemicals in the more like we are to develop gut dysfunction that shouldn't really be surprising I mean when you just think about the scale of the things that are adding to our food that we were not designed to be exposed to evolutionarily speaking
it's no surprise that things are getting screwed up. And the fact of the matter is the burden of proof is not on the food industry that's introducing these foods to demonstrate no long-term harm. They can show no acute toxicity, but in terms of just this scale of exposure and the inadequacy of long-term safety testing for the things that get introduced into the diet,
It really should be no surprise that eating a more processed westernized diet contributes to an increase in, let's just say, gastrointestinal upset on the spectrum of I get some bloating to I have bloody diarrhea 20 times a day. I need to get my colon removed.
We need to first acknowledge that this is a population that is, I would say, suboptimally served by Western medicine. That is not to say doctors aren't doing their due diligence with their patients. That is not to say some patients don't do remarkably well with surgeries or immunomodulating medications or other medications.
That is to say that there is a population of people, and I was in this group, who, despite trying all, quote, evidence-based medicine has to offer, still find themselves suffering terribly.
And if you have ever been in that sort of situation or known someone in that sort of situation, you know that desperation can lead people to try crazy things, things that aren't necessarily proven with the most rigorous research. So I think that's what's driving people to try things like a carnivore diet, which from the mainstream sounds crazy. But when you're desperate, you'll do anything.
And if you hear stories... of people saying, well, I suffered like you and I tried this thing and it worked remarkably. Then what goes through that person's mind, the person suffering is, well, what do I have to lose?
Sincerely, you could be in the ICU, you could have no social life or engagement because you just have to find a toilet every 30 minutes to crap out your ass and you're in incredible pain, you're losing weight. What do you have to lose by trying a dietary tweak? So people try things like carnivore or ketogenic diet, and then a lot of them actually have incredible responses.
So it's spreading from grassroots experimentation, word of mouth. Now, just to give a little bit more literature context, we have done a case series on people using carnivore diets for inflammatory bowel disease. I interviewed these patients, 10 patients. We did in-depth medical histories, dietary histories. We had lab reports, colonoscopy reports.
And to hear these patients' stories and look at their medical histories, I mean... The things I've seen and heard, I can't unsee and hear. To hear people say, like, I suffered with this for 20 years. Medications didn't help. Surgery didn't help. Now I'm living a life that I never thought I could have again. I feel like a new person. Why didn't somebody tell me about this earlier?
Like, that gets you really interested and curious. And there's physiological reason to think this would work. it's already actually known that fiber elimination, now talking carnivore, can be therapeutic in treatment-resistant cases of Crohn's disease. It's actually sometimes prescribed for kids with Crohn's disease who aren't responding to treatment.
They put them on fiber-free liquid diets, and in about 60% to 85% of cases, they go into remission. This is published on. And we also know that ketones are anti-inflammatory. They help feed the gut lining cells. They reduce inflammation. And there's actually an inverse association between ketone levels and inflammatory bowel disease activity in patients.
So higher ketones, lower inflammatory bowel disease activity. So we have some data to say this makes sense. And then a... building a mountain of clinical cases saying this works. The next step is going to be to do the randomized controlled trials needed to make this mainstream. The fact of the matter is they're hard to get funded and organized.
I mean, you need millions of dollars for these studies. Big Pharma isn't paying for it. The NIH isn't giving me that money. So you need to get a little bit more creative. So the stage we're at now is getting the word out about, look, this appears to be helping people. We need more research so it can help more people.
Yes, it was the John Radcliffe Hospital and the NHS when I was at Oxford. I spent some time in a palliative care ward and ICU. And yeah, no, I was quite poorly off. I was a dangerously low weight. So malnourished that my heart rate was like dropping into the 20s. Very weak.
And I had, you know, over the course of a couple of years, gone from being like, you know, a high performing athlete and academician to being just completely broken. I mean, the psychological...
trauma of being like a social person who's breaking pushup records and running sub three marathons to being like, I'm in a bed, 20 something year old guy, not dating, not engaging my friends, can't even keep up with my studies, you know, wasting away physically, knowing that right now it takes me more energy to get up and go to the bathroom than running a marathon used to take and not having an answer.
Like that's where I was. So when you talk about desperation and trying something, quote, crazy, you have to understand that is the mindset that people are in when they start experimenting with these things that society still stigmatizes. And I think when you start to appreciate that, you can understand the decisions some people make with respect to their health.
So with respect to the osteoporosis, I'll get to that first. I actually do have a very weird genetic mutation, a very, very rare one. And basically the way it probably manifested is when I got to marathon running, generally when you load bones mechanically, they should respond and get stronger. Just like when you load a muscle. When you lift up heavy weights, your muscles should get stronger.
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