The Proof with Simon Hill

Practising registered dietitian and senior research fellow at the University of Oxford, Dr Nicola Guess, returns to the show to discuss a new study whose findings were interpreted in quite different ways the week it came out. Dr Samuel Klein’s group at Washington University assigned people with prediabetes to one of three diets, carefully controlled their weight loss, and found that the arm labell...

This is Christopher Gardner's eighth appearance on the show. Christopher is a nutrition scientist at Stanford, director of the Stanford Nutrition Studies Research Group, and the author of a new book, Food Sense: What to Eat and Why. He has run more than 20 human diet trials over three decades. Instead of relitigating the diet wars, we spend this conversation on the machinery underneath them:...

A few weeks ago I published my own heart scans, and one number travelled further than the rest: a 48% drop in plaque over 16 and a half months. The question underneath that video was the obvious one. How? This episode is the answer, and it is also the part I could easily have left out. Three companies analysed the same two scans. HeartFlow found a 48% reduction, Cleerly found a 20% increase, and Q...

Howard Luks is an orthopaedic surgeon with almost 30 years of experience, and a good deal of his week is spent telling people they do not need an operation. We work through the joints that bring most people into a clinic, knees, shoulders, Achilles tendons and ankles, and separate what a scan is actually telling you from what it is being used to justify. Almost everyone over 40 has something on an...

This is part two of my conversation with Dr Federica Amati, Head Nutritionist at ZOE and author of the Sunday Times bestseller Every Body Should Know This. In part one we covered preconception, fertility, and pregnancy nutrition. Here we follow the first 1,000 days through to the end: birth, breastfeeding, weaning, and the environmental exposures behind all of it. Much of this territory has become...

Around 30% of the world's population has too much fat in their liver, and almost none of them know it. Liver disease stays silent until it is very advanced, which is exactly why so many people are found too late. In this episode I sit down with Prof Aleksander Krag, professor and department chair of gastroenterology and hepatology at Odense University Hospital and former Secretary General of the E...

Almost all of us have atherosclerosis, and almost none of us are told so, because "normal" cholesterol is a population average rather than a physiological target. Dr Thomas Dayspring and Dr Dan Soffer, both Masters of the National Lipid Association, join me for a conversation devoted entirely to primary prevention. They do not agree on everything, and that is the point. Tom argues ApoB is the caus...

Everyone wants to talk about longevity. Almost no one wants to talk about gerontology, the field that has been studying how to age well for a century. Dr Deborah Kado, Stanford professor of medicine and geriatrician, joins me to bridge that gap. From bone health and balance to deprescribing, gut microbiome research, and the surprising power of your attitude towards ageing, this is a masterclass in...

Professor Roy Taylor returns, three years after his first appearance, with the five-year DiRECT trial results and a clear-eyed assessment of where diet-driven type 2 diabetes remission stands in the GLP-1 era. The evidence is now solid: type 2 diabetes is, for many, a reversible condition of excess fat in the liver and pancreas. But keeping it in remission demands keeping the weight off, and the n...

Can you meaningfully improve type 2 diabetes without losing weight? Dr Nicola Guess, registered dietitian and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, says the evidence is clear: a higher-protein, lower-carbohydrate diet can lower post-meal glucose by more than medication, no weight loss required. We also tackle the noisier end of the blood sugar conversation: glucose spikes, fruit fear...

About one in seven couples are unable to conceive after a year of trying, and roughly half of those cases involve a male contribution. Yet in a quarter to a third of them, the man is never properly evaluated. In this episode I sit down with Dr Michael Eisenberg, a urologist, Director of Male Reproductive Health at Stanford University and Chief Medical Advisor of SwimClub, and Dr Natalie Crawford,...

Dr Terry Simpson is back, and we go deep on the science of protecting your heart and brain for the long run. He is a surgeon and one of the clearest voices online for separating solid evidence from confident hype, and in this conversation we tackle everything from new cholesterol-lowering drugs to gene editing, cognitive ageing, and the lean mass hyperresponder debate. Along the way we get a few t...

Metabolic dysfunction rarely announces itself. We tend to think of metabolic health as a line you cross the day you are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, but the decay usually begins years earlier, at the level of the cell. In this masterclass I bring together Dr Iñigo San Millán, Dr Alan Flanagan, Dr Kevin Hall, Dr Robert Eckel, Professor Roy Taylor, and Dr Christos Mantzoros to explain what metabo...

GLP-1 medications are transforming obesity treatment, but they're only one piece of the puzzle. In this masterclass, I bring together insights from Dr Terry Simpson, Dr Federica Amati, Dr Mauricio Gonzalez, Dr Christos Mantzoros, and Dr Stephan Guyenet to explain how these medications work, why "food noise" matters, and what it really takes to improve long-term metabolic health. What We Cover How...

We tend to treat pregnancy as the starting line for a child's health. In this episode, Dr Federica Amati, Head Nutritionist at ZOE, makes the evidence-based case that the window opens earlier, in the months before conception, and that it shapes fertility and lifelong health in ways most of us were never told. What I valued most is her balance. The science is striking, but she frames it as informat...

In late 2024 a CT scan revealed a small amount of soft plaque in my arteries. Sixteen months later I scanned again, and my plaque volume had dropped by around forty percent. In this episode I ask the cardiologist behind the technology whether a result like that can really be trusted. Dr Campbell Rogers is an interventional cardiologist, a former Harvard faculty member who ran the cath lab at Brigh...

Can a supplement actually reverse the plaque in your arteries, or only slow it down? It is the question I am asked most, and after a 2024 scan revealed early plaque in my own left anterior descending artery, it became a personal one too. This is part two of my three-part series on reversing atherosclerosis. In this solo episode I work through eight of the most popular supplements and rank them by...

For decades we have treated the number on the scale as the goal of metabolic health. Dr Mauricio Gonzalez, a triple board-certified physician and endocrinology fellow practising in New York, makes the case that we have been measuring the wrong thing. In this conversation we explore why liver fat, not body weight, is becoming the real target, what the latest weight-loss medications can and cannot d...

In this episode, exercise physiologist Dr Margie Davenport walks me through what the evidence actually shows about exercise during pregnancy and the postpartum period. Margie chaired the 2019 Canadian Guideline for Physical Activity throughout Pregnancy, the 2025 Canadian postpartum guideline, and the upcoming International Olympic Committee consensus statement on athletes through pregnancy and po...

GLP-1 medications are now part of the mainstream conversation, but the biology of appetite and satiety, the system these drugs operate within, gets far less attention than the drugs themselves. In this episode, I sit down with Dr Federica Amati, Head Nutritionist at ZOE and author of the new book The Appetite Reset, to explore what's actually happening in the gut and brain when appetite signals do...

In this episode, I sit down with bariatric surgeon and science communicator Dr Terry Simpson for a wide-ranging conversation about health misinformation, GLP-1 medications, statins, ApoB, the Mediterranean diet, and the loud contrarians who dominate social media. Terry has familial hypercholesterolemia, a family history of premature cardiovascular disease, and lost 50 pounds on tirzepatide, all of...

In this episode, I’m joined by Sarah Ann Macklin to explore the hidden psychological costs of modern wellness culture and why pursuing health can sometimes leave us feeling more anxious, overwhelmed, and disconnected. Sarah shares insights from her new book, Healthy Shouldn’t Be This Hard, as we unpack self-compassion, perfectionism, body image, mindset, and the pressure to constantly optimise eve...

Six years on from our first conversation, global meat consumption is at a record high, and the harms of industrial animal agriculture have only deepened. Bruce Friedrich, founder of the Good Food Institute, is back on the podcast to argue that the answer is not asking people to eat less, but rebuilding meat itself from the ground up. Bruce is the author of the new book Meat: How the Next Agricultu...

Cardiovascular disease is the world's leading killer, and yet the prevention conversation has become noisier and more confused than ever. In this Masterclass I bring together the evidence-first material I think is most useful for understanding cholesterol, blood pressure, and long-term heart health. You will hear from Dr Walter Willett at Harvard, cardiology dietitian Michelle Routhenstein, and ne...

The peptide and GLP-1 conversation has reached a fever pitch. Growth-hormone-releasing peptides are being marketed as longevity tools, GLP-1s are being treated as a default rather than a last resort, and a wellness aesthetic of higher IGF-1, more muscle, and less fat is being sold as the route to a longer life. In this episode, I sit down with Dr Valter Longo, Professor of Gerontology at USC and D...