The Real-Life Diet of Plant-Based Nutrition Expert Simon Hill, Who Says Tofu Is Just a Flavor Vehicle

This is where I think a lot of people get somewhat confused: For a set to be effective, it’s not dictated by the number of reps. You could go to the gym—let’s just make this easy and pretend we’re doing bicep curls—I could pick up a light weight and do 12 reps. And put those weights down versus pick up a weight that’s much heavier to do 12 reps and the last few reps I’m really fighting. Those two sets are a very different stimulus. The stimulus is key because that’s what causes your body to adapt. So an effective set is when you take that set to within two reps of failure. If you’re aiming to do eight or 12 reps, you need to select an appropriate weight such that once you get to a load where you only had two reps left before you were going to be completely at failure and wouldn’t be able to lift that weight. So that’s what I’m thinking about.

I did Bulgarian split squats to begin with, which is a glute and quad exercise. Then I did leg press. Then I did standing Romanian deadlifts, with dumbbells, which is really more of a hamstring exercise. Then I did lying hamstring curls. Two of those exercises are machine-based: the leg press and hamstring curls. The other two exercises are weight-bearing, which I was speaking to before.

What do you listen to, if anything, while you’re training?

Limp Bizkit. [laughs] Eminem, Limp Bizkit. I need some kind of hype music to really get me into the zone where I can do an effective set, which, back to what I was saying earlier, to get within two reps shy of failure, you’re working hard. I can’t do podcasts. I love podcasts. I can do podcasts when I’m doing zone 2 training and just sitting on a bicycle. But when I’m lifting weight and really trying to get the body into a place of fatigue, where we’ll adapt, and I need something that’s hyping me up.

One phrase that you used earlier—and I know you’ve used it before—is asking if something is more marketing than science. In general, when you’re scrolling through fitness Instagram or whatever it is, how much would you say the content you’re seeing is more science than marketing?

Very little.

Why do you think it’s shaken out that way?

Because science, in its essence, is about becoming more certain or reducing uncertainty, but there are no absolutes. And that uncertainty is not what sells, it’s not as sexy as being absolute, or going out and telling everyone, “Everything that you’ve heard or been taught is wrong. I’ve discovered the truths or the answers.” The average person—what happens is we mistakenly think that when a scientist is communicating and has a degree of uncertainty in their language, they’re using words like may or perhaps or I don’t know, they’re untrustworthy.

When I hear those things, I love that. I trust that person. But I think, to the average person out there, as a result of this very clickbait-y environment that we’ve created and how much we’ve shortened our attention spans, people hear that and they’re not captivated. They feel like that person delivering that that message is not confident, they’re not a domain-specific expert. The reason that they feel like that is because they scroll up and then all of a sudden you have this person who is not an expert who is making absolute claims thinks they are captivating, engaging, sexy. It’s very hard for the true science or science communicator to compete with that.

Part of the reason that you got your master’s in human nutrition was because of misleading wellness trends. Can you think back to if there were specific ones that were proliferating at the time? And what are some misleading popular trends today?

[laughs] Where do we start? So this, I mean, the big one, and the obvious one is, there’s been fighting for years about low-carb diets, or low-fat diets—what’s best for weight loss. And clearly, weight loss, rightly so, is a very important topic. There’s a lot of people interested in it, because of increasing prevalence of obesity, and that being a huge if not the major driver of all of these non-communicable diseases like cardiovascular disease, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, Type 2 diabetes. So within the nutrition sphere, there’s been this huge debate between camps: If the government’s going to recommend a certain set of dietary guidelines, one camps thinks that it should be low-carb because that’s better for weight loss. And then the other side is arguing that low-fat is better. And the ironic thing is that we have enough evidence now to at least partly answer this question. We know that when you match diet quality, and you compare a low-fat diet to a to a low-carb diet, and you get people working with dieticians, and you follow them over a 12-month period, you don’t see any difference in average weight loss between these two different ways of eating. What you do see, which is interesting, is that within both groups, some people do well on low fat, some don’t. And low carb? Some do well, and some don’t. And in both cases, when you go out past five months, people tend to regain quite a bit of the weight that they they lost. So where does that leave us in terms of what advice we can give people? We’re not really sure why. It could be social, it could be environmental, it could be the way that their family eats or their friends eat or what’s accepted in their culture. So that hasn’t been fully elucidated.