Digital Social Hour
The $10M Gap: Why Metabolic Health Research is Failing Us | Nick Norwitz DSH #908
21 Nov 2024
The $10M Gap in metabolic health research 💰🔬 Tune in as Harvard MD/PhD candidate Nick Norwitz breaks down why our approach to health is failing us! 🧠💪 Nick shares mind-blowing insights on: • Why he lowered his cholesterol with Oreos 🍪 • The shocking truth about carnivore diets and IBD 🥩 • How to reshape medical research incentives 💡 Packed with valuable insights on nutrition, metabolism, and the future of personalized medicine. Nick's unconventional experiments and academic expertise will challenge everything you thought you knew about health! 🤯 Don't miss out on this eye-opening conversation. Watch now and subscribe for more insider secrets on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 🚀 Join the conversation and stay ahead of the curve in health and nutrition. #MetabolicHealth #NutritionScience #DigitalSocialHour #SeanKelly #NickNorwitz #KetogenicDiet #PersonalizedMedicine #metabolicwellness #metabolicsyndrome #lowcarblove #metabolicsyndrometreatment #metabolicdisorders CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 00:27 - Nick's Current Research 04:48 - Oreo vs Statin Study 07:28 - Are Oreos Healthy? 11:25 - Business Model for Metabolic Health Studies 17:18 - Reshaping Medicine 19:54 - N=1 Medicine 23:54 - Carnivore Diet Study 27:50 - Nuanced Conversations on Controversial Diets 34:01 - Calories and Obesity Misconceptions 37:04 - Fuel Partitioning Explained 39:10 - Solutions for Obesity 42:05 - Dave Dama Discussion 45:45 - Oreos in Focus 50:10 - What's Next for Nick 52:34 - Where to Find Nick APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [email protected] GUEST: Nick Norwitz https://www.instagram.com/nicknorwitz/ https://www.nicknorwitz.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@nicknorwitzPhD LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Full Episode
This is interesting, because I think that interest in the general public actually has a lot of value. We'll talk about the citizen scientists later, but to cut to the story, I envisioned this experiment where I could use my understanding of new physiology, new metabolism, to lower my cholesterol, which a lot of people see as bad, with Oreo cookies.
All right, guys, we got Nick Norwitz here today. He's working on some very interesting studies. Could you tell everyone what you're working on right now?
Sure. I mean, I have my my foots in a lot of different puddles, but a lot of my research broadly right now is in metabolism. So cholesterol, lipid metabolism, particularly in low carb diet context. That's my area of interest. Things like carnivore diet, inflammatory bowel disease. We've got a lot going on, so we can start wherever you want.
We'll start with the one that made you break out in space, which was the Oreo one, right?
Yeah. So me and my friends had been studying cholesterol dynamics, particularly in a low-carb context for some time. To give a little bit of framework to this – One of my areas of interest is in therapeutic carbohydrate restriction, so low carb diets, including ketogenic diets, which now are becoming very popular for far beyond things like diabetes and obesity.
People may or may not know they had, or ketogenic diets have been used for about 100 years for epilepsy, but now they're being used for mental health disorders, inflammatory and autoimmune disorders, and the literature is picking up steam really fast. But a major obstacle to clinical implementation of ketogenic diets is cholesterol levels.
Because some people see their cholesterol levels shoot through the roof. Like not just blip up, but go to levels that are so high that if a doctor sees it, they either think it was a lab error or that you have a one in one million genetic condition. Something like homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia. So my history is I adopted a ketogenic diet back in 2019 for inflammatory bowel disease.
It happened to work for me, but I was surprised to find I had this response, and my cholesterol shot through the roof. And so using myself as a case in point, you get caught between a rock and a hard place, right? It's like my levels are so high that some people think I might get a heart attack in a few years and die in my 20s.
of heart disease, at the same time, this dietary intervention is working wonders for something that basically had me in palliative care, in the ICU. So there's a lot of patients, different conditions, that are caught between this rock and a hard place.
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