257: Plot Twist: How a Health Scare Inspired Simon Hill to Rethink What We Eat for a Longer Life

In this Plot Twist episode of The Light Watkins Show, Light Watkins sits down with Simon Hill to uncover the pivotal moments that led him to become a leading voice in nutrition and wellness. For Simon, the journey began with a family crisis—a heart attack his father suffered at the age of 41. This health scare became a wake-up call, as a cardiologist warned Simon that, due to genetics and lifestyle, he might face the same fate. Although the warning lingered, Simon initially pursued a career in sports physiotherapy, enjoying the fulfillment of helping athletes heal and perform. But a persistent curiosity about nutrition and its connection to heart health gradually shifted his focus.

After an eye-opening experience with his brother’s dietary changes, Simon found himself compelled to dig deeper into nutrition science. What began as a personal journey to prove his diet was “right” turned into a full commitment to research, including earning a master’s degree in nutrition science.

In the episode, Simon breaks down why understanding nutrition is far from simple, explaining the science behind food studies and why it’s challenging to determine what’s truly healthy. He talks about the importance of rigorous research, the evidence hierarchy, and what it means to “do your own research” in a world of conflicting dietary advice.

Listeners will walk away with new perspectives on nutrition and gain insights into the discipline it takes to uncover the truth in a sea of information. This episode is ideal for anyone curious about the role food plays in their long-term health and eager to make more informed choices.

Transcript

SM: “The cardiologist did say to my brother and I that your dad's had a heart attack at 41, which is very young. Your grandfather had a heart attack in his early sixties. So, you and your brother, my brother three is older than I, you're pretty much young men. You need to keep an eye on this because cardiovascular disease runs in families. And so a combination of good fortune of incredible healthcare access and privilege have resulted in my dad getting a second chance.  And I think part of that is what inspires me today with what I do so that I can hopefully get some of this information to people before they experience something like my father did and not have to kind of run the gauntlet and hope for a second chance.”

[INTRODUCTION] 

I'm Light Watkins, and today I've got another bite-sized, Plot Twist podcast episode for you, which is a shorter clip from a past episode where the guest shares the story of that pivotal moment in their life that directed them toward what ultimately became their path and their purpose. 

And sometimes that plot twist looks like getting fired from a job or losing a bunch of money. Or in the case of today's guest, Simon Hill, it was Simon's father suffering a heart attack at the young age of 41 and a cardiologist warned Simon that due to his genetics and lifestyle. He could be next. 

Let's listen in.

SH: That period for me, although I didn't realize it at the time, it did plant that seed, which would then later fuel me to progress my studies and write the book. One thing at that time that really did stick in my mind was we had a family consultation with the cardiologist, a bit of a debrief. “This is what's gone down. Here's your dad's prognosis. Here’s what his health could look like from here,” and all of that. We were very relieved. As I said, we were just happy that he was alive. 

For a long while, my brother and I, our takeaway from that was that we had been dealt a bad genetic card and that we need to keep an eye on this and that who knows, we may end up in the same position as dad in our early 40s.

LW: You wanted to go to medical school, but you changed your mind at the last minute. Walk us through the next few years after high school, knowing that you were on a collision course with some heart problem genetically and not feeling you had many options.

SH: Yeah. Well, I think I want to clarify that. Although I had that mindset, I was living life to the fullest. Perhaps, because I thought that, hey, anything can happen. It wasn't like, it was getting me down and I wasn't enjoying life. In fact, it was probably the opposite. You're right, you've done your research. I've wanted to go to med school. I didn't quite get the marks to go to the medical school in Melbourne, and at University of Melbourne. I had the decision to go down and do medical school in Tasmania, which I've since gone and traveled and is a beautiful place. At the time, I wanted to keep playing football. Had a lot of friends in Melbourne. I wasn't really wanting to give up that social side of things. It wasn't that appealing for me.

I switched direction, undertook a Bachelor of Science degree in physiotherapy and progressed through that and started working as a sports physiotherapist in private practice and with elite footballers in Melbourne. Then eventually, some years later, I realized that I had a pretty good understanding of physiology and anatomy and a lot of understanding about managing sports injuries and rehabilitation. I did have this real curiosity for nutrition, particularly having come across some information that suggested how nutrition, the way we ate can really affect our risk of cardiovascular disease. That inspired me to go back to university and I did a master's in nutrition science at Deakin University.

LW: That was after you had your experience with your brother, right?

SH: That's right, yeah. He was basically, that little bit of information that opened my eyes to, “Hey, I'm feeling really healthy right now. But given my family history, maybe there's something here that I should look at a little more deeply.” This is what opened my eyes to how confusing nutrition is and is what inspired me to then go and say, “Hey, I actually want to go and study this in detail, so I can actually decode it. Because it seems like another language, and it's so confusing with people online, with seemingly the same qualifications, but coming at this from very different angles.”

The story is, I was living in Sydney at this time. My brother was coming to visit with his fiancé to stay for a week or two weeks, I think it was. He called me up. I think the first time was about three months beforehand and he said, “Look, I just want to give you the heads up that Lauren and I have changed the way that we're eating.” I said, “Okay.” He said, “Yeah, we're no longer eating red meat, or chicken. We're still eating fish. We're eating a pescatarian style diet.” I thought, “Okay. Well, that's fine.” I think, he was giving me the heads up, just so that shopping and the restaurants we would go to would accommodate for that. Not that that's very difficult to accommodate for.

Then, I didn't hear from him for a little while. Then about a week before he came, he called me back up and said, “Look, I just want to give you a bit more of an update. We've actually changed the way we're eating again. We're no longer eating fish.” At that stage, I was saying, “Well, what's left?” Animal protein, for me, Light, was a very, very big part of my diet, a huge part. That was a result of the fitness industry and a full environment I was always in at the time. He explained to me that they'd stopped eating seafood. I said, “Okay. Well, I'm not sure where we're going to eat if we're going to go out to any restaurant, so I'll leave that to you. When you get up, we can go to the grocery store and you can help me.”

To be honest, they came up and it wasn't really a big deal. They love to cook. They cooked a lot of great food. We had a really good time. I think, we went out to a couple of restaurants that they chose. Other than my brother just saying that he was making these decisions for his cardiovascular health primarily and sending me a couple of links to a few podcasts. Other than that, I just really enjoyed the food. I think, it took some weeks after that for me to muster up the energy and get some space and think to myself, “Well, hey, maybe there is something to this.” Also, I remember back to what I was saying about my dad, I'm not sure if I added this when you asked about some of his influences on us.

Being skeptical is something that my dad has reiterated to us for as long as I can recall. I was very skeptical of what my brother, what he was sending to me. I was wearing this hat of, “Hey, I've done a Bachelor of Science. I'm going to take a deep dove and I'll let you know what I think of it.” In some ways, I wanted to prove my brother wrong, because my diet at that time, which was very rich in animal protein, particularly red meat and chicken, it felt like it was serving me quite well. I felt fit and healthy. I had no real reason to change that.

LW: Who got him into it? Did Lauren watched Forks overnight and said, “Honey, you have to watch this.” Then they watch it together type of a thing?

SH: He had actually come across a couple of podcasts where folks like Rich Roll were getting interviewed. Then they listened to Rich's audiobook. My brother, he comes from a marketing sales background. He wasn't doing a deep dive into the science. He had been sent a bit of information about people that had made the transition to change their diet. Also, some information around various populations that were living long, healthy lives without some of the diseases that we have and what their dietary habits looked like. At that level, at that stage, this was, I guess, a very surface level information.

 LW: You guys grew up in the same house, so you both were exposed to this whole skepticism influence. Did he know how to approach you with this information? Simon is not into the hard sell, or Simon needs to hear scientific evidence, or Simon, let me appeal to his physique. Or, how did he lure you into the club?

SH: During that week, certainly, it wasn’t like –

 LW: I'm just asking, because I have three brothers and I was vegan for a long time. None of them – I couldn’t get anybody to eat like that. I’m just curious what the secret formula is.

SH: It’s an interesting thing to think back on. I haven't really asked him too much about that. If I was to just think back to that period, he certainly was not sending me scientific studies. He just shared a couple of things that he'd listened to. They cooked good food and we went to restaurants that served good food. I think, you have to remember, my brother going through high school and into university, his interest was never really in science, and mine was. In our relationship, he has his skill sets in another area to mine. I think, when it came to this area of health and wellness, I don't think he would come to it from a position of trying to show me the science, so to speak.

It was more, “Hey, this is what I'm doing. Look, if you're interested, this is why.” It was just teeing me up for my own journey to deep dive it. As I said, I was very skeptical. I do remember saying to him many times that I'm not sure if what he was doing was a good idea.

 LW: Okay. Then, a lot of people would decide, “Okay, I'm going to read a few books about this. I’m going to watch a documentary, or listen to some podcasts.” You decide to go to masters, you get your masters in nutrition, which is going above and beyond to understand this. What was it that propelled you to go that far with it? Did you not like physical therapy and physiology and all of that? Are you thinking about career shift?

SH: It wasn't that I immediately enrolled in a master's in nutrition science. What I did do to begin with was go into the peer-reviewed literature. In my undergraduate degree, I did honors, and that involved actually conducting my own study and writing it up and learning about study design and methodology results and a little bit of data analyzing, and then coming to your own discussion and conclusion. I had some skills to read peer-reviewed science. Very quickly going in and looking at nutrition science without any formal training in that, I realize that it's a whole different beast.

I didn't have the necessary skills to actually make sense of it. I mentioned before that if you look in the media, or you just look online, you can see people that have both maybe have MD after their name, but come to very, very different conclusions. I was at that stage. I was in a position where I feel a lot of people are, where they're just very confused. You just throw your hands up in the air and think, “Well, nobody's got this worked out.”

I think that, and frustration. There was frustration at that point. I think that is what inspired me. I had to get the skills at my end, so that I could actually start to make sense of nutrition science and understand what a healthy diet looked like. To answer your question as to whether I was bored of physiotherapy or not, I love physiotherapy. I think it's a fantastic profession. I had so many great memories there and really great learnings that set me up for what I'm doing today. I did feel like there was this huge gap in my understanding of health. Even in those football club environments, when it came to nutrition, it just seemed like there was a very cookie-cutter approach. All players were doing the same thing. There wasn't any talk of evidence. I had this brewing curiosity to go away and learn this at a deeper level and then hopefully, become a more rounded health professional.

LW: Can we talk a little bit about those differences? You said that nutrition studies, that was a different beast. How is that different based on study design and methodology?

SH: Yeah. There are so many moving parts when it comes to our diet that I think people can appreciate. If I say to you, “Hey, Light, is red meat good or bad?” Well, in what dietary pattern? For who? How old are they? What exposure level? When I say what exposure level, I mean, are we talking about 50 grams a week, 50 grams a day? 200 grams a week, 200 grams a day? How long for? Compared to what? Are we talking about red meat compared to a Mars bar? Are we talking about red meat compared to whole grains? Are we talking about red meat compared to legumes? Are we talking about red meat compared to fish? I think, you can start to appreciate right now that there are so many studies out there.

Unless you get into those and really understand the parameters of those studies, you can quickly come to the wrong conclusions. An example of this would be, I'm going to use a vegan diet here, because I think this illustrates an important point. Let's say, I find a study that shows a vegan diet improves health markers. Let's say, we're talking about things like blood pressure and cholesterol. Now, quite often that study might make headlines. Now, a really important question to ask there was, compared to what? Did they just compare a vegan diet to a standard American diet? What we would call a dummy diet, that basically, anything can beat? A lot of times, that's the case.

Now, you might think, well, you don't need to go to university to learn that, but I'm giving you a very simple example of essentially, just needing to understand the art of nutrition science, how these studies are being conducted, so that when you're reading them, you can be aware of these things. Another example would be, if you take a population of people and let's say, you’re trying to work out, how does red meat affect someone's health outcomes? We take a population of people and we track them for 20 years.

Now, if we find an association, people that eat more red meat have more heart attacks. An important question to think about there is, well, what else do people that eat more red meat do? Do they drink more alcohol? Do they exercise less? Do they smoke more? Are they of lower socioeconomic status, or higher? Do they have different education levels? All of these other things that we know also correlate with health outcomes. What I would be looking for in a study now that is say, looking at that particular question is, did they use what's called a multivariate statistical analysis to adjust for these, what we call confounding variables? What a confounding variable means, people will hear this, is essentially in a particular study, we're looking at an exposure. In that example, red meat and an outcome. Let's say, the outcome is heart attacks.

A confounding variable is any other variable that could be affecting that outcome, like smoking, or alcohol, or these other factors. When we are in a good cohort, which is that study I've explained there of a population, often that's called epidemiology, or observational science. In a good study, the researchers will consider what are the possible confounding variables? You can imagine, Light, in order to actually adjust for those, that means that when you're actually collecting data, you have to ask the questions. You have to find out. Then again, how good that adjustment is depends on how good your questions are.

Did you just ask people, do you drink or not? Or did you try and find out, do people who drink on average, one drink a day, two drinks a day, three drinks a day? Did you just ask if people smoke or not? Or did you find out if they have 20 cigarettes a week, or 10 or five? How well-defined your population is in terms of all of these parameters will affect how well you can adjust for these confounding variables.

All of that can sound confusing. The point of that is the better the data and the better that statistical adjustment, the more certain, or the more confident, I should say, we can be that our finding is an accurate reflection of that exposure and how that exposure affects that outcome.

LW: When you're reading a study, as a layperson is reading a study, do they clearly state that this study involved multivariance statistical analysis? Is that a standardized classification, where if they're the same 200 metrics to make sure that they accounted for all of these different confounding variables?

SH: Yes. You'll see in the method section. In the method section, there'll be a particular section for statistical analysis, which will describe exactly what I just went through. Then usually, when they show the results which go through. Again, in order to read the results, I mean, you could self-train. A lot of that, I've went through doing my master's. You're looking at data and effect sizes and confidence intervals and it's another language.

Underneath that table of those results will show these different, what we call adjustment models, and that is the multivariate analysis. I went into quite a surface level example there. It does go a lot deeper depending on the study and depending on what exposure and outcome they are looking at.

 LW: You obviously put a lot of studies in your book later. I'm not sure if you knew you were ever going to write a book and these earlier days. When I first started getting into meditation and I knew that I was going to become a teacher one day, I had a binder. Every time I came across an inspirational story, or just something that I thought that really resonated with me, I would store it away in my little binder. At some point, my binder would have hundreds of pages of different stories and anecdotes and different teachings. Did you have an equivalent of that when you were studying all of this? What did that look like?

SH: It was online, and that was probably just to – I was printing quite a few papers at the beginning, but then they start to stack up like my dad and I thought, “I can't do this. I'm not inheriting this habit.” I mean, I'm so thankful, Light, from the beginning. I set up a online database of studies as I'd go through them and I would categorize them. I would categorize them broadly by the area of health, or health outcome with cardiovascular disease, or dementia, or cancer, and then within their start subcategories. I do have this catalog of studies, or archives that I can go back to it at any moment. Yeah, you're right. I didn't think I was going to write a book. I was doing that just so that I could personally, I could retrieve this information quite quickly if I needed to.

LW: One of the big phrases from the whole pandemic era was, there'd be some online argument, or conflict, and then someone will say, “You need to go do your research.” You talk about that in your book, this whole idea of doing your research. It's not as simple, if you properly doing research based on what we just talked about. Sounds like, you were actually doing proper research. Talk about that. Talk about why it's not so easy to do your research.

SH: Well, for many of the things we've been through so far with regards to understanding the details of a study. I guess, zooming back out, first, appreciating that there is an evidence hierarchy. We have this pyramid that helps us categorize different types of science by less reliable and less valid to more reliable, more valid. At the very bottom of that is expert opinion. If someone just said something that's not very valid, or reliable. Unless, they're pointing to a study. In that case, we're thinking about the study. Then a rung above that, you have a laboratory type studies. They could be on animals, or in a petri dish on cells.

Again, not very reliable or valid for extrapolating to humans. We know that. We actually know that the translation of that research, it's a very low percentage of what we see at that level that translates to humans. Then a step above that is your population studies, where you're looking at people out in the wild and you're trying your best to adjust for these confounding variables. That's how we worked out that smoking is not a great idea. It's through those studies.

Often, people say, “Well, these population studies, there's so many confounding variables.” We just have to appreciate that it's not feasible to run a clinical intervention for everything. Can you imagine if right now I said, “Well, Light, for smoking, I want to randomize people into a smoking group and a non-smoking group, and I want to track them for 60-plus years.” In order to get to that position to want to do that study, first, I've seen say, 7,000 observational studies that tell me there's a strong correlation between smoking and cancer. It's not going to pass an ethics board to randomize people to smoking when we have that much observational evidence that it's not a good idea, first and foremost. Then you can imagine that there's all sorts of adherence issues. It's so expensive to run a randomized controlled trial for that long.

The observational studies are a really important piece of the puzzle. They help us explore questions that we can’t explore with clinical interventions. Now, certainly clinical interventions are more robust in that they allow us to control for these confounding variables better. The idea with the clinical intervention, or randomized controlled trial, is that the only difference between the two groups, because you've done a random allocation, is the exposure that you're looking at. If we were to have two groups that, let's say adopted different diets and we do a randomized controlled trial, we would expect that the background incidence of, say, alcohol and smoking and exercise and everything else is the same.

In fact, after they do a randomization, the researchers will check that and make sure that that randomization was actually random and there was no differences in those baseline characteristics. Understanding that evidence hierarchy would be an important first step, if someone's going to “do their own research.” Then getting into each of the individual studies and looking at the methodology, some of those things that I mentioned before about compared to what, what exposure or amount, what population, thinking about all of these things, looking at the data analysis, is there an appropriate adjustment for confounding factors?

You can really, I think, begin to appreciate that this is a specialty and it can be very hard for someone to do if this is not the area that you are trained in, which is goes for many different careers in life. 

[END]

If you'd like to hear how the rest of Simon's story unfolds, head over to episode 100 and start at around the 44-minute-mark. And if you enjoyed this conversation, I highly recommend checking out my other interviews with Max Lugavere, which is episode 98. Max is the author of Genius Foods, and he breaks down the science behind eating for brain health and longevity.

Also, you may want to try episode number 94 with Liana Werner Gray, who healed herself of cancer through her diet. 

And if you know of someone else who's had an incredible plot twist in their life, and they're making the world a better place, please send me your guest suggestions at light@lightwatkins.com, is my email as always. 

Please take a few seconds to rate and review the show and I will see you on Wednesday with the next long form conversation about an ordinary person who's out there in the world doing extraordinary things to leave the world a better place.  And I'll see you on Wednesday with the next long form conversation about an ordinary person doing extraordinary things to leave the world a better place.

And until then, keep trusting your intuition. Keep following your heart. Keep taking those leaps of faith. And if no one's told you recently that they believe in you, I believe in you. Thank you and have a fantastic day.