‘Wellness is bulls***t’: Dr Norman Swan on the 5 things you need to do to be healthy

Should you eat low carbs? Take supplements? How long should you exercise for? Dr Norman Swan cuts through the ‘bulls***t and gives it to you straight.

Should I be on low carbs? Maybe high protein? Should I take supplements, what supplements? Is dairy really bad for you? What sort of exercise should I be doing, low intensity or high intensity? I’m not getting eight hours of sleep a night, am I going to get dementia?

There are plenty of things we get anxious about when it comes to our health but most of them are a waste of time according to health guru Dr Norman Swan.

For more than 30 years Swan has been delivering straight-talking advice and health information as a broadcaster and doctor. He has become synonymous with the ABC’s coronavirus coverage and his podcast Coronacast has been wildly popular with listeners able to get their coronavirus questions answered.

Now the Scottish-born doctor, who trained as a paediatrician, has written a book – So You Think You Know What’s Good For You? – that aims to settle anxious minds about what we do and don’t need to worry about when it comes to our health.

Dr Norman Swan. Picture: Janie Barrett

“There is so much mythology around and so much to make you anxious, the key thing about the book is that there is a lot of stuff you just don’t need to be anxious about,” Swan says.

“It’s the things I think are important in your life, how you eat, how you love, how you feel better about yourself and cutting away the bullshit to what you need to know.

“It’s part memoir as well and I’ve told personal stories about what I’ve lived through. I do write about anxiety because I’ve had it and I do write about PTSD because I’ve had it.”

The best part? You won’t find any “bullshit words like wellness”.

Swan says it’s time we get rid of the idea that we are supposed to feel good all of the time.

“If you go through life and somehow think there are people in this world who jump out of bed in the morning, full of beans, full of energy and feel fantastic, that they wash their teeth in the mirror admiring their thin thighs and a flat abdomen and have these perfect children, well we know that is complete bullshit,” he says.

Wellness is overrated, the keys to good health are quite simple.

“We have unrealistic expectations that we should feel great all the time but the reality is if we felt great all the time we wouldn’t actually know what feeling great means. You’ve got to feel crap to know what feeling great feels like.”

And crap is exactly how Swan feels most mornings.

“I get up and wash my teeth and think I wish I had a flat abdomen like Brad Pitt and my muscles are sore from the gym from the day before and I feel crap, then one morning if I get up and if I do feel really good you notice,” he says.

“It’s about knowing there is light and shade in your life, but if it is unrelenting and there is no light in your life then that is the first thing, a kind of self-diagnosis. Then it’s about working out what is it that’s causing that and reaching out for support is vital to do that.”

Inspired by the questions he’s been asked by health-conscious millennials, but not written exclusively for them, Swan busts countless health myths in his book and spoke to Qweekend about five facts that may surprise you.

Our Greeks get it

It’s widely known that the Japanese are the longest lived people in the world but who comes second may surprise you. Although not often in tip-top shape, suffering widely from the likes of diabetes and heart disease, Greek Australians are actually the second longest-lived people on the planet.

So what is their secret?

“Everyone would say it’s the Mediterranean diet and that’s why they live long, well it is part of the story but it is far from the whole story,” Swan says.

“If you look at older Greek Australians, sure they eat a Mediterranean-style diet, but this is actually about cooking and how you cook and what you cook with.

Growing your own fruit and vegetables is a huge benefit to your health and wellbeing.

“A lot of Greek Australians will have a backyard where they will grow their own herbs, sometimes their own vegetables – so what they eat is fresh and the herbs they cook with is part of the chemistry set of cooking. So when we cook with olive oil, fresh herbs, fresh vegetables and other things like tomatoes and onions, and cooking the way they do, particular slow cooking, they are creating more powerful antioxidants than anything you could buy over the counter in a pharmacy in terms of antioxidants.”

Tending to a garden full of fresh herbs and vegetables also provides the added benefit of incidental exercise.

In addition to cooking slowly, consuming only small amounts of wine and little red meat, plenty of our Greek Australians also have another secret weapon in their arsenals: God.

The Greek Orthodox Church has about 100 fasting days per year – Swan is quick to point out they’re not like the fasting days made famous by Michael Mosley – they’re more like vegan fasts.

The fasting days mean they don’t eat meat, dairy or fish – the only thing on the menu is plants. “So you can’t just say I’m going to eat a Greek diet and I’m going to live a long time, it’s actually how you cook, it’s about having days where you might not eat that much, it’s getting exercise – it’s a package of stuff,” he says.

The sleep myth

For years Australians have been told they are not getting enough sleep. Anything less than eight hours and it’s a big fat fail. But sleep is kind of subjective, Swan says.

“Everybody is anxious about sleep,” he says.

“We must get seven or eight hours’ sleep a day, but that’s kind of an average and I don’t know anybody who gets seven or eight hours sleep a night. But we get anxious because we’ve been told we’re going to get dementia if you don’t get seven or eight hours sleep a night.”

While there is no question that if you’ve got a mental health issue poor sleep is a problem – mental health issues can cause poor sleep and poor sleep can make mental health issues worse.

Not getting eight hours of sleep per night is not the end of the world.

“The whole thing about insomnia is it is self defined. If you are feeling unwell because you can’t get enough sleep, then you’ve got insomnia but if you’re getting five hours a night and you’re feeling fine then you haven’t got insomnia.”

Swan says while the poor sleep and Alzheimer’s link is well documented it may be misinterpreted. “It is true that if you look backwards at people with Alzheimer’s it is true that often they have not slept well but then you have to work out if it’s horse and the cart or chicken and the egg.”

Signs of dementia can be detected decades before it is developed, Swan says.

“Dementia causes abnormal sleep patterns so it’s not at all clear whether abnormal sleep patterns is an early sign of dementia or it causes dementia and it is much more likely to be the former,” he says.

Fat in dairy won’t hurt you

There is no question that some saturated fat is bad for you, but the good news is that the saturated fat found in dairy is not bad for you.

“There are all of these people drinking almond milk and it’s fine to be drinking that if you are vegan and that is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, but if you like full-fat milk, knock yourself out,” Swan says.

The saturated fat found in dairy is not bad for you.

“There is no evidence that the saturated fats in dairy foods is actually bad for you.”

Swan writes that fats come from whole foods and their effects are influenced by cuisine, whether we’re eating too many calories and the state of our microbiome.

“The thing with dairy foods is they have other benefits, including powerful antioxidants, which actually work against the saturated fat,” he says. “The other point worth making is that calcium consumed from dairy is far more effective than calcium found in over-the-counter supplements.”

Best not to stress

Swan says there is no doubt that millennials are far more health conscious than previous generations. After years of talking to them and fielding their questions he says one of the areas that has consistently come up is stress and mental health issues.

“They feel psychologically distressed a lot of the time, so I picked apart where stress comes from,” Swan says.

“There is a whole section of the book on control, which is about having control over your life and how that doesn’t just affect your psychological wellbeing but it affects your physical wellbeing too.”

The feeling of being out of control in a situation – whether something is grinding you at work or you have three kids at home and you’re looking after them by yourself – is something most of us have experienced.

Mindfulness helps with stress.

And the solution is simple … sort of.

“That awfulness going off in your brain is actually affecting almost every system in your body and regaining that control is really, really important,” he says.

If you’re stressed because of a bad boss or bad workplace, while it might seem extreme, sometimes leaving is the best solution.

Those who work longer, live longer so enjoying what you do is vital, Swan says.

“The story I write about control is about my hopeless father, who was a lovely person, but a hopeless father. He takes me to a carnival in Glasgow and he’s got a friend that is a carnie who gets me a free ride on this really scary almost big dipper type ride,” he says.

“I’m screaming as I go by and my father thinks I’m having the time of my life and it was
a complete nightmare. That was my first experience with being out of control and I couldn’t
do anything and I’ve never been on a scary ride since.”

Also, it may sound like a buzz word but mindfulness works, so if you’re stressed and can’t seem to relax, meditation could be the key.

A man is not a camel – is he?

Another surprising fact uncovered in the book is that, despite what we’ve been told, you don’t actually need to drink a million litres of water per day.

“How many people do you see with a bottle of water on their desk at work and they’re guzzling water all day? We’re told to drink three, four, five, six litres a day,” Swan says.

“If you look at Ethiopian marathon runners they run their fastest and most efficient when they are 2 per cent dehydrated.

“If you’re thirsty, drink, but don’t force yourself.”

With so many things worth getting anxious about, there’s five to strike off the list.

So You Think You Know What’s Good For You? by Norman Swan, Hachette, $40.

Originally published as ‘Wellness is bulls***t’: Dr Norman Swan on the 5 things you need to do to be healthy