Carnivore vs. Vegan: Which Diet Really Saves the Planet? | Dr. Paul Saladino

Everyone Dr Josh ax here welcome the show where each and every week I cover the science and principles behind how to grow in Body Mind and Spirit and take your health and your life to the next level today I'm going to be joined by Dr Paul saladino Dr Paul is someone that I've talked to before and have been really impressed with all that he's done he's a double board certified medical doctor he's the host of the fundamental Health podcast and he's the founder of heart and soil and a new company which I'm excited to try

uh some of his new product lineage Provisions lineage uh has created meat sticks that have grass-fed meat plus organs in them so really an amazing superfood product on today's episode we're going to be diving into uh really some controversial topics around modern medicine the root cause of finding chronic illness we'll talk about uh veganism versus carnivorism and which Is actually better for the environment all on today's episode Dr welcome to show thanks for having me on it's good to see you again yeah great to see you you know I know every time we've talked I've

I've I've learned a lot and I love talking about all things carnivore diet and just food is medicine and I know for you I'd love for you to kind of share your story a little bit about how you got into the space in Industry because I know you as a kid were overmedicated you Suffered with autoimmune issues so talk to us about sort of your background and how you healed yourself and also I'm kind of interested if you had Auto immune disease and started to reverse it how that sort of correlated with you becoming a

medical doctor yeah I mean I think one of the reasons that I went into medicine originally was because I grew up in a family of doctors my dad was a doctor my mom was a nurse practitioner and I was just curious and Really wanted to understand how human bodies work I I think I had this this really bad experience when I was like a young adult taking my car to the mechanic and I hated the feeling I had the my first car was a Honda Accord was a twoo 1985 Honda a cord um my dad

drove it and then he he gave it to me when it was you know kind of on its last legs but I got a car as a teenager and I remember I started to break down and I I I hated the feeling of bringing a car to The mechanic and not understanding how to fix it myself you're kind of just you're just you're at somebody else's Mercy you know the mechanic knows how to fix it maybe maybe they'll do it right maybe they're honest you hope maybe they get the right problem maybe they don't maybe

the car drive is better maybe it's back in the shop in a month or a week and that feeling to me was powerless and I didn't like that and I thought the same way about my body and I realized Like I never wanted to feel that way about my health or the health of my friends or my family I I thought I don't want to have to go to a doctor when I have asthma or eczema which were problems that I suffered with as a child or know people in my life whether it's a future

girlfriend or a wife or children or my parents or my sister my niece and nephew when they're having problems and and and not really understand what's going on as much as I possibly could Because what if the doctor doesn't know or what if the doctor doesn't think about things the way that I think about things maybe the doctor is a very intelligent well-intentioned physician but is just from a medical model that's based on Pharmaceuticals or thinks about you know the diet differently than I would or has different goals than I do or doesn't have enough

time to spend with me or my family so that was really the the Genesis of my interest in Medicine was I wanted to take I wanted to be Sovereign over my health and then understanding what I could thinking about things from a root cause perspective hopefully translate that or share information that was helpful for other people so first I went to PA School in cardiology because my dad was a medical doctor and he worked way too much and I thought I never want to work that much I never want to overwork and then once I

started working as a PA a Physician assistant in cardiology I quickly realized that I was kind of just in a system that I didn't have a lot of ability to to really change because I was below the physician and kind of had to do what they said so they they would even mime to me you know just think here just think within the heart box don't think outside the heart box when here I was a curious you know person learning about medicine and practicing medicine at the beginning of my career a number Of years ago

thinking well I'm really interested how our metabolic Health connects to the heart or what about the connections between the thyroid and the heart or the gut and the heart but it was hard to go outside of the heart box when I worked in a cardiology practice even though the guys I worked with were great so then I went back to medical school and then back to residency at the University of Washington and then the University of Arizona was medical school And through all out all of that time I had my own autoimmune issues which I've

been trying to fix my whole life which were eczema and Asthma and it wasn't really getting fixed I tried a lot of different things before I was a PA I tried veganism I lost a lot of weight I was very skinny I should say I lost a lot of muscle mass I lost a lot of lean muscle weight I was too skinny right now I weigh about 167 lbs I'm 5'9 and I'm pretty lean I'm about 10 11% body fat But when I was a vegan I got down to 145 lbs so probably 20 lbs

of lean muscle M lighter because I just couldn't sustain the muscle on a vegan diet I was also running a lot at the time so I had a vegan phase then I was kind of paleo for a while but my Eczema continued which was interesting to me I even tried Autoimmune Paleo but my Eczema still kind of came and went I couldn't quite figure it out it became a problem for me in medical school specifically because I Did a lot of Jiu-Jitsu in medical school and I would get eczema on my elbows and my knees

from kind of wrestling on the mats and that that sometimes would get super infected like a staff or a strep and so I really wanted to figure this out that eventually led me in my residency at the University of Washington to doing one of the more extreme experiments I've done with a strictly carnivorous diet which is all animal products so I basically ate meat Eggs organs and animal fat and salt for a year and a half and that really improved the eczema but I ran into some issues long term with uh electrolyte balance probably due

to keto's dis ketosis long term was hard for my body so then I kind of trended back toward maybe the center a little bit and now I include some plant foods but I still don't eat a lot of vegetables in fact I don't eat any vegetables and we can talk about why if you want so right now I eat Something that is I've kind of termed an animal-based diet in contradistinction to a plant-based diet which is mostly plants with some animal Foods I have this an idea of an animal-based diet and I think of this

is just thinking well we get a lot of our nutrients from meat and organs that's kind of the center of the diet or the animal foods for me it's meat organs and raw dairy raw milk raw cafir and then I have in my diet a moderate amount of fruit and fruit juice Honey those kind of things as well now so and that that's can be more broad than people think when you imagine that things like cucumber or avocado and zucchini and squash these are all fruits in contradistinction to vegetables which are like the leaves and

stems and roots and seeds but I've also you know I think over time it's been interesting for me and then I'll let you chime in here I I'm much more you know relaxed about all this now and feel like look if people Eat vegetables and they enjoy them those are much better than so many of the other Ultra processed foods that we eat I think that what's interesting for me is to see that especially with people who have autoimmune disease a lot of people do seem to benefit at least anecdotally from cutting out some of

the foods that we think of as healthy whether it's grains like oatmeal or wheat or some vegetables do trigger people so that's really where I've Landed at this point like just just kind of raising this gentle little flag to people to say hey if you're if you're struggling with an autoimmune disease and and you're not doing great you might try and cut out the salad and see how you do but if you can eat the salad and you feel great then more power to you well Paul we we have a couple things in common one

is we both had our first cars as Honda cords so I drove drove a 1988 stick shift that my dad insisted I Learned on a stick shift and so I uh anyway so so so enjoyed that and and I and then my my family we were Honda family so I me I drove an accord for a long long time and then um and then you know I I think over time and this is one thing I can appreciate about you is that you know what like our minds can change over time and I think through

experience working with patients and and and you know we we we tend to learn and I know that I used to be a lot more strict and Militant about the way I AE and really soften and one of the things I think that really helped me is realizing that everybody's different and it's really important you know I I I think I realized too one of the most important things that you and I can do as practitioners but also helping our patients do this is have a higher level of awareness it's like if you want to

grow spiritually you want to be spiritually aware if you want to have Great relationships you need to have emotional intelligence and self aware Wess and other awareness but the same goes for our health is really keeping track of what works for our own bodies and this is one of the things I've really loved about Chinese medicine it's that so so many of us are different some people can eat vegetables and there's a few people who maybe shouldn't eat vegetables at all and so that's the reality I think that I'm living in at Least right now

is is that I think that there is a lot of flexibility based on somebody's uh you know current health status and genetics in terms of what foods they tolerate or don't tolerate and so I'd love to hear more about sort of your your you know why you don't eat vegetables I do want to mention I interviewed if you know Dr James D nickol anonio recently and so you know he had mentioned his some of his research on you know carnivore but and It thinking it's good for a period of time but also worrying about what

you had mentioned that sort of alkaline and acidity and that electrolyte balance and some of what happens you're obviously getting fruits in your diet especially certain fruits like watermelon or whatever it might be could you know help remedy that pretty quickly but I would love to hear more about that in terms of why you are you know why you're vegetable free which by the way I have a Nephew who would really you know be interested in this diet so you know share I think it's interesting because you know I have a niece and a nephew

I don't have any kids right now but I have a niece and a nephew and um you know I think that if you look at kids it's pretty easy to feed kids meat and it's pretty easy to feed kids fruit I think as humans we're drawn to those things yeah and even even within the category of fruits there are some things that I Don't tolerate well in fact on my wrist it's hard to see now but on both wrists I have healing eczema because I recently tried to reincorporate tomatoes into my diet and tomatoes are

technically a fruit if people are curious you know a fruit is anything that has seeds within it that's probably a fruit and then the vegetables canonically we think of as the leaves the stems the roots and probably the seeds of plants that's the difference there the fruit are the the Sort of the reproductive parts of plants where they kind of encase the seeds often and try and push the seeds out into the environment they'll put the fruit around it sometimes the fruit is colorful and sweet sometimes it's not but the vegetables are the other parts

of the plant the plants roots that support it in the ground that bring nutrients from the ground that water from the ground through the stem into the leaves where the plants do Photosynthesis but I think that as humans we've always been drawn to the fruit and we've pretty much always liked meat and it's interesting that I think that for some people they have more sensitivities to the defense chemicals in the plant parts that are not the fruit and we see fruit plant defense chemicals are something that I think is becoming more and more controversial but

I think that they do affect humans and the problem here is that there probably Will never be an NIH funded randomized controlled trial that could ever be done looking at how plant defense chemicals affect humans because it's very bioindividual as you said and I don't think anyone would ever fund it but one of the unique things about the world that we live in today is that social media provides both you and I with this opportunity to gather hundreds if not thousands or tens of thousands of stories from people and what I've seen From that and

in my clinical practice previously is that there are a some there are some people there's a subgroup of people bio individuals um who just do better without some of these plant parts like vegetables whether it's because of oxalate sensitivity oxalates being this dicarboxylic Acid found in things like spinach leaves um it's found in rhubarb um which is actually toxic if you don't eat it like the rhubarb leaves are quite high in oxalates oxalates are Moderately found in things like almonds and other Foods so some people are sensitive to oxalates they just accumulate in our bodies

whether it's because of the absence of certain gut Flora or other genetics I for whatever reason seem to be sensitive to whether it's a lectin in tomatoes even though it's a fruit We There are these individual sensitivities and so like you said I think being aware of how Foods affect us is such a gift and it really Takes a lot of intentionality and planning and awareness of our Foods because for me some people might think this is boring but I basically eat the same foods every day now I get into a routine the first thing

I do in the morning when I get up I I live in Costa Rica we were talking about this before the podcast I get up around 5 or 5:30 because I want to go surf and the first thing I do in the morning is I have a glass of raw cafir with some honey Before I surf maybe have some watermelon juice I go surf for Two Plus hours I come back and I have breakfast which is some kind of meat maybe some organs I Have A Little Cucumber cut up in it it's with salt maybe

butter I'll eat you know a little more fruit juice maybe more cafir with honey um and that's kind of how I do it throughout the day I'll eat some meat some organs maybe some cheese some raw dairy some honey and some fruit or fruit juice throughout the day and I Kind of repeat that throughout the day and so when I vary something if I add one thing to my diet and this past experiment was tomato paste I went to the farmers market here in Costa Rica and I got 12 or 13 organic tomatoes because I

wanted to do an actual experiment I take the skin off and then I take the seeds and I try and boil them down and it tastes great I mean I really appreciate Tomatoes like like a homemade tomato paste in my burger but within a Few days my eczema's back and I think okay something about that doesn't affect me positively but if you look at the nutrition space there are many people who will respond negatively to me talking about that and perhaps I haven't done an elegant enough or a clear enough job talking about it but

they'll say there are no randomized controlled trials that tomatoes are bad for humans and I can say like well they clearly don't seem to work for my immune system Yeah that's the idea that that if people are struggling with generally autoimmune diseases I think where we see most manifest whether it's a joint pain issue like an osteoarthritis a rheumatoid arthritis an inflammatory bowel disease or an irritable bowel syndrome a thyroid issue like autoimmune thyroiditis skin issues like ecos psoriasis multiple sclerosis I mean I think a lot of illnesses that we suffer from as humans today

are are autoimmune in some nature I think that there is this this sort of curiosity that I've talked about throughout the time that I've been on social media around do some people benefit from cutting out some of these foods and that's really why I do it that I think some people are more sensitive to those now I'll just say this and then I'll pause cutting out vegetables I think is probably the the last thing most people should do if they're trying to improve their diet with the first Things being cutting out soda cutting out seed

oils cutting out Ultra processed and refined Foods probably cutting out grains um especially moldy grains and then and then at the very bottom you know is is like well maybe then you take a look at the vegetables but I think that for the majority of people there are much more high priority things to do before looking at the spinach and the kale and the almonds but if people get through all the other Stuff and then they get to the bottom of the list and they're still kind of suffering like I was with eczema then cutting

those things out for some amount of time to do an experiment I think is worth it and it's the kind of thing that's pretty safe as long as you're eating other nutrient rich foods like meat and organs and fruit you'll be fine and then hey if it works great and your symptoms get better you don't have to reincorporate and if it doesn't work Then you can go back to including those foods and I think you've done a valuable experiment yeah yeah I love it well again I think you've done a great job in educating people

in fact if anyone's not following you on Instagram they should be you do uh I love when you go around and you uh you know hold up certain foods and you educate on them or the side effects of certain things people should be staying away from and so I think again you've done a great job as a As a medical doctor and educator helping people get healthy and again I again in in this conversation compared to I interview a lot of people you know sometimes people get very ideological right on no this is the way

it's only keto or it's only this I was interviewing someone recently we both know aspirin he's like raspberries are bad and it's I really think he meant for everybody and I thought well I love raspberries and actually thrive on them But you know I but I do think again things can be very bio bioindividual as you're saying so know I I appreciate your softness because I think you know if I were to go and interview some of the most well-known people in our space you know could be again yourself Dr Mark Heyman you know will

Cole Vonnie har I there's all kinds of people right aspry there's a lie it's you know I think all of us have a little bit of a different perspective today than we did 10 years Ago right I think we're continually learning and um and so I uh anyway so I appreciate what you're sharing you know one of the things that I've been thinking about recently and i' love to get your take on this is that you know in Chinese medicine they really you one of the things that we'll talk about is sort of you know

Yin versus Yang Foods right so these Yang foods will be very uh it's going to be organ Meats meat things that create their they're Anabolic in nature okay so they're going to help us grow and develop things versus uh foods that are very Yin are going to be the watermelon the cucumber a lot of things you those are very Yin Keers actually as well these are very Yin foods and so they really help balance each other out and Yin are better for um being catabolic and breaking down certain things for instance eliminating things like um

like ccent cells right those zombie cells and So it's very good for that and helping balance each other out but you know I see all these studies now on longevity and and people talking a lot about your longevity about things like mtor so you've got David Sinclair and some other people saying well you shouldn't eat meat at all or do low protein but I think this all goes back to the individual well well does this person need to be more anabolic or catabolic and ideally people are really operating At a high level of both if

your body is healthy but I I know I'm just I'm sharing a lot of thoughts here but any thoughts on that because I've seen a lot of the PE these longevity people people and again a lot of them are in this vegan Camp which it's low protein low meat that's longevity but I also don't think they realize what they're talking about in certain regards when it comes to um you know the side effects of low protein so Any any thoughts on that yeah that's something I've been thinking about a lot recently in fact I just

started writing another book about this basically this exact topic um when you look and this was fascinating to me and it was really one of the things that spurred me to write this book or begin writing it when you look across species humans dogs and mice the individuals within a species the individuals that live the longest have the highest metabolic rates so That's something to consider and then also we know that that all that kind of flies in the face of using caloric restriction or overusing fasting because there are people in the longevity space who

will boast about their body temperature of 96.6 De well the human body is supposed to be about 98.6 obviously there's some bio-individuality there but when you have a body temperature that's 2° lower Fahrenheit than quote a normal body temperature you Know that your body is not having a high basil metabolic rate and that to me is just not considering all of the research or considering all of this incorrectly so I don't think that caloric restriction actually leads to um a a net longevity benefit we can talk about why it may be beneficial in some regards

which actually Loops back into seed oil but I think that too much fasting it it it turns down your Bas metabolic rate we know that we want the thyroid to work Well and curiously these many of these same influencers that boast about low body temperatures also have to take supplemental testosterone and thyroid hormone to normalize their hormones let me jump in because I this is such a good point because I was goingon to say it's you know it's hyp you know hypothyroidism and low testosterone and low testosterone is is is linked to Shorter lifespan I

mean it just and so yeah keep going there I I love what You're saying so I think that that is kind of the same illustration what we have with meat it's just saying okay well there's some research that if we overactivate mtor that could be negative for humans but what happens in most humans is that when we exercise or when we consume certain amino acids like Lucine or when we consume carbohydrates because insulin also activates mtor uh we turn on this this set of uh Cascades the signaling Cascade in the human body That leads to

rebuilding or making things stronger in the human body and I don't think that's a bad thing overactivation of mtor is different than simply activating mtor this is I think the problem with the longevity spaces they conflate a lot of these ideas and you mention this we know pretty clearly that Frailty is a huge risk factor for shortening your life and so lower protein diets limiting Lucine limiting methionine limiting amino acids that are Prevalent in animal Foods in favor of plant proteins will it it very often leads to Frailty and people in the plant-based Community will

argue no no you can get those amino acids in Plants but the whole point here is to limit those amino acids so you limit mtor and this doesn't make sense it's just we humans cycle M Tor on and off obviously this is an oversimplification but we are going to cycle we're going to cycle this Cascade On and off when we're eating and not eating we all have a fasting window built into our day when we sleep there are some of us that will get up in the middle of the night and eat but that's probably

not a great health behavior for many people um I think the majority of people listening to this podcast have a significant window every night when they sleep and at that point your mtor is turned off and all of these sort of mechanisms that are quote unquote Fasting can be activated and so I worry about both caloric restriction protein restriction animal food fearing and they're all kind of looped into the same way of thinking which I think has flaws when you examine it carefully over fasting any that really is pushing against your metabolism or lowering your

Bas of metabolic rate should be carefully considered when it comes to a goal of Health span or lifespan and Longevity Because like I said we know that well it's it's pretty clear that higher metabolic rate having a thyroid that works well having testosterone that's healthy these are real indicators of longevity and if you look at people in longevity space many of them are they're they're completely they're just missing the plot because like we said they're they're taking thyroid they're taking testosterone and they have lower body temperatures they're they're sort of Like thinking they're doing something

right but they're just misinterpreting the research and that to me is a little dangerous yeah yeah exactly yeah I absolutely agree I think that you know one one of the things I think I'm I'm very aware of now as well you know they'll talk about um you know methionine being this big issue of course it's methionine is important for so many functions in the body but also I think a lot of it comes down to balance You know one of the things I really admire and I think I think your spot on when it comes

to when you're sharing about what your diet is that that we that most people do not incorporate at all today is you're consuming sort of this nose to tail diet right you're getting muscle building proteins from muscle meat you're getting organ meats and you're getting broth and when you think about what our body is made up of right it's it's going to be Predominantly the the the proteins are going to be muscle building 60 to 70% but that other 30 to 40% those are going to be collagen those are going to be you know these

these unique peptides that some of them are only found in organ meats you know one of the things that's so popular they write is peptide therapy when you look at whether bpc157 or tb500 or a lot of these peptides people are paying sometimes thousands of dollars for for their hormonal balance well when You're eating dadum or the stomach you know like you eat in terms of getting some of these organ Meats you're getting bpc157 in that form in your diet my point is is that I think that there's a balance that should happen in the

body just like there should be an omega-3 to omega-6 balance you mentioned these seed oils earlier which is causing so many people to be inflamed somewhere that one to 25 ratio and it should be closer to a 1:1 or 1:4 I think the same thing should Be happening in the body with a balance of amino acids like methionine and glycine there should be sort of this balance there in those and and that's going to allow our bodies to function at a better level and maybe even dampen some of those uh you know if there are

side effects at all that some of those those people are about talk to us a little bit about I think a lot of people Paul have uh are turned off by organ Meats right if anybody's taste liver for The first time most of us have not developed our pallets enough they're not sophisticated enough to like organ Meats they're very bitter uh in most cases and that's not a that's not a flavor that most people are attuned to H how have you gone about getting organ Meats into your diet flavors any recipes ideas why and also

why you think organ meats and broth and some of these other things even outside of animal uh muscle meat is important to incorporate in our diet Well you you said it I mean there are unique nutrients in the organs it's kind of like I mean this is probably a misused metaphor it's like the peanut butter and the jelly right it's just better together nutritionally speaking if you add if you look at muscle meat now muscle is an organ but it's just one Oregon I think we go to the grocery store and we look at the

meat counter and we're looking at one Oregon we're looking at Ground muscle meat we're Looking at a New York strip steak we're looking at a ribeye we're looking at a Fame Minon and we're looking at a skirt steak and it's all the same orgon right it's all muscle meat now that's very nutritious for humans it has iron it has B12 it has some K2 it has choline and it has you know a small amount of things like well like riboflavin but if you look at the liver for instance liver has bioavailable vitamin A and the

retino form there's really not much of that in Muscle meat it has much more riboflavin it has much more bioavailable folate there's almost no folate in in the muscle meat it has more biotin it has more vitamin K2 more choline and then it has other uh minerals that are not so much found in muscle meat so muscle meat is high in zinc liver is high in Copper again there's this balance here that happens over and over if we look at these and then you look at an organ like the heart well the heart Has higher

amounts of torine this amino acid that's kind of getting a lot of press recently because it's been studied across species and associated with longevity that's interesting uh only found in animal foods and a lot of the vegan uh long vity folks will supplement with toine and other animal-based nutrients which is kind of ironic as well circling back to the previous part of the conversation so heart is higher in torine heart is very high in coenzyme Q10 or ubiquinone which is a key part of the mitochondrial electron transport chain and so there's and and the heart

and the liver and also like you said the pancreas you could pick any organ unique peptides we're really just scratching the surface of what we know about nutrition in these organs there's so much nutritional dark matter you look at the universe so we switch to like you know sort of a telescope opic view of the outside of our lives at night Looking at the stars there's so much dark matter there's so many things we don't even understand in the universe stars and things that we can't see and then we applied the same term to our

gut because 60% of the species in our gut are dark matter we don't even know what's in our gut we could apply the same term to the nutrients found in a piece of liver and also a piece of muscle meat there's this great database I found out about recently it's called It's called food be.ca I think it's a Canadian database and if you look in food b.ca you look at a piece of garlic garlic has over 4,000 components and that's incredible it's such a complicated food you know we want to try and take a multivitamin

like uh you know you go I used to go to CVS or when I was in college I would get a multivitamin maybe there's 40 things in the multivitamin a piece of garlic has 4,000 Different yeah it's crazy a piece of meat 42,000 components you know liver is probably on the order of 30 to 40,000 components you really can't recreate that in a synthetic multivitamin you say oh well I can make a multivitamin with creatine well you probably couldn't make with creatine because you couldn't make it that big enough but you I can make a

multivitamin vitamin A and all those things you mentioned Paul vitamin K2 I Can put that on a multivitamin yeah but can you put a hepy growth factor can you put can you put toine can you put this can you put this you know certain peptide in heart can you put uh tus in and splen in and splin pentin from the spleen can you put the bpc 157 and other peptides we don't know about so there's just there's just level of complexity of our food that we're not even aware of and I think that the the

take-home for people is just high level whole plant And animal foods are are just Rich sources of information for the human body that can't be recreated at this point in time our technology is is inadequate to recreate these in a multivitamin and so this is the benefit of eating organs just like there's a benefit to eating you know A diversity of foods from both the plant and the animal kingdoms again something that I've kind of changed my mind on over time and evolved with but if you're Eating just also meet you're missing out on unique

nutrients in a lot of those organs that aren't in your diet and you asked how do you do it I mean with liver specifically which I think is probably the first organ for people to include maybe not the easiest but the first you can just do a half an ounce of liver per day and there's lots of ways to do it you can do it in a desicated capsule that's heart and soil the company that I built or you can do it a piece of Raw Liver if you trust your source and it's previously frozen

all raw food has some risk but if you're if you trust your Source it's pretty safe nothing is perfectly safe but you could do raw like half an ounce you could just Grill it very lightly you know not completely charring it or you know you can grind it into muscle meat and make a burger with an organ in it I've been eating a lot of heart recently and I'll just I'll actually grind the heart and mix it with Muscle meat so you can make a a hamburger and there are great companies doing this now like

force of nature that's exactly what we did with lineage is we made these air dried meat sticks with liver and heart in the meat stick and so you can mix them in with the muscle meat and then they don't taste as much that's one of the things we're proud of I mean I'm proud proud of the fact that we got some liver and some heart into lineage meat sticks but I'm Also proud of the fact that you can't taste it yes yeah yeah yeah exactly you know we've used force of nature they're a great company

and yeah and you really don't taste it I mean and if you do it's by a just a pinch and the health benefits are worth but I don't notice it at all and of course there's loads of benefits there yeah and you mentioned it is astounding and amazing that that you've got as you mentioned 4,000 or 42,000 compounds in these Foods whether It be meat or plants that you're not getting in these other foods and this is why remember supplements are for supplementing a healthy diet and if you do use supplements I know Paul and

I have both founded supplement companies and both of us have a big focus on just putting food in our supplements it's like we're just our supplements they're food that we get in a capsule so so like for instance Paul here so you don't have to taste you know the the liver in the Capsule so anyways yeah these are the these These are these are great uh you these are these are great points and I think there's a time and a place for other supplements um I've been experimenting recently with more creatine in my diet um

you know because creatine is so valuable for humans and I don't always eat two pounds of meat in a day anymore and 2 pounds of meat a kilogram of meat is between three and five grams of creatine and gosh there's A lot of benefits to humans for three to five grams of creatine per day so yeah let's just experiment and this is Technical and we don't have to go down this rabbit hole but I've been thinking about methylation a lot recently I've known that I have polymorphisms in my MTHFR which is the methylene tetrahydrofolate Gene

for a long time and um I just I think that for me as a human I feel better when I take a methylated B vitamin if I'm not getting Quite enough liver or I'm just you know if I'm traveling or something so getting a methylated B vitamin and having that in my in my sort of you know my Wheelhouse in my toolbox or when I'm traveling or I can't get enough of the organs really helps me supplement with those extra B vitamins so there's a time and a place for supplements but the idea that you

can recreate what is present in Animal whole animal and plant foods with a a Multivitamin that you get at at a grocery store that's quote unquote synthetic um is is is fra with problems yeah I do want to mention something about methylation here and I think you'd agree with me on this is that I I do think a lot of people out there are going and buying who knows on anywhere buying a methylated B vitamin and I do think that can be great you know vitam essentially a methylation B vitamin complex but I do also

want to say I Think there's even greater benefits if you're taking an organ like a multi-organ supplement because there are so many nutrients as you know in organs that help with methylation I mean methylation is more than B vitamin so I do see a lot of these methylated supplements out there that have a few of those things in there of course they have methylated folle and b12 and some others but I do think taking that multi-organ supplement plus that would Benefit a lot of people who are who are concerned with methylation I totally agree I

think start with the food um and I kind of use it sparingly when I don't have access to the organs as much as I normally do the other thing to point out there people may not be aware of is that there are forms of the vitamins one of the things that's nice about methylated quote unquote B vitamin supplements is those are usually the bioavailable forms the forms that our body make these B Vitamins and the same can be applied to other forms of these vitamins that can end up or vitamins and minerals that end up

in multivitamins quote unquote they're not always the form the body uses uh folic acid is a big problem and I don't think enough people are talking about this that there there is an enzyme in the human body called dihydrofolate reductase and there's some good evidence that uh dihydrofolate reductase is pretty much tapped out if you're taking More than 226 micrograms of folic acid I think is the study what the results of the study and most prenatals on the market 98% have folic acid most wheat and grains are are fortified with folic acid folic acid is

a form of folate that doesn't occur in nature it's all um you know either dihydrofolate or tetrahydrofolate in nature and so you have to your body has to do work to turn folic acid into the first forms of folate that your body is expecting and Then if the enzyme is saturated and it can't metabolize the folic acid you end up with unmetabolized folic acid in the human body and I think this area still needs more research but the concern is that unmetabolized folic acid could potentially block folate receptors and other things in the human body

so the take for me is we should not be eating food that is fortified with folic acid and we should not be taking supplements that contain folic acid they same could Be true of of B12 in the cyanocobalamin form again I think the they're very small amounts for cyanocobalamin but again you're you're putting literally Cobalt uh cobalamin with cyanide in your body now I don't think it's going to kill someone like a toxic dose of cyanide wood but cyanide is a mitochondrial Toxin and so we shouldn't be taking uh supplements that have these would say

non natural that term is fra but non-natural forms of the vitamins in Them I me there there's no doubt the ones you mentioned and there's many more right that are just cheap uh cheap minerals right A lot of these calcium you know I remember one of the first times I realized this this is when I was in uh studying is that uh before I open up my practice was I read a study on calcium and how calcium supplementation may actually cause calcification of your arteries and actually lead to heart disease and so it's it's wild

to think About like you get what you pay for if you're buying supplements buy food based supplements not a lot of those cheap cheapap cheap supplements we talked about ones that are absorbable I agree Paul I'd like to switch gears I wanted to mention one of the things I I heard you communicate on once and I thought you did a fantastic job of is why I'm trying to think out how to word this but basically is like the Difference between if we lived in an all vegan Society or an omnivore Society what is better for

the climate and the environment and I own Jordan ruin and I own 4,000 Acres of certified organic land where we raise a lot of animals we raise zeboo we raise water buffalo we have Yaks we have a lot of different animals and we really believe and know that we are actually helping the planet build back top soil but a lot of people today I I'll even tell you like I when I Was taking courses this wasn't that long ago I went and got a masters at John's Hopkins University in leadership because I wanted to continue

to learn more about leadership and in Psychology and when I was there this one Prof I mean actually this was a multiple professors like they gave the example of eating meat destroys the environment and and you know I start getting an argument online I'm like you know what I can't you know anyways this probably isn't helpful for my my grades But all that being said please share your thoughts on on on that topic yeah so um one of the other projects I'm working on now is a documentary and the documentary is not specifically about environmental

concerns but we were we were talking about the environment in the documentary the documentary is about how humans can transform their health with choosing better food um and and it's not just you know limiting calories it's the quality of your food is is the Key Arbiter of our health long term but as part of the documentary I went to a farm here in Costa Rica just at the bottom of the mountain where I live and and I'm walking on the farm there's maybe 25 Brahman cattle and it's not a big farm but the grass is

green there's cow poop which is going to become fertilizer are for the ground there's little ducks over in a stream to the side there's birds flying around there's bugs you know if I dug up the soil There's worms you can see this all around Costa Rica with some of these small farms these cows are not destroying the environment it's not they're just they're not just trampling the grass and just it's not just a dead field of poop and cows it's it's actually an ecosystem and you can see that if you go to any operation that's

small scale or a large scale operation in the states or in Europe or especially in Australia where the AG is very Incredible where people are actually trying to mimic the way that ruminants cows specifically these are animals with a rumin whether it's a buffalo an elk a deer an analou or a cow uh these animals are meant to live on grasslands that's what they've always done I mean there's an incredible study looking at the methane emissions I think it's the methane emissions and the carbon dioxide equivalents the greenhouse gas equivalent in the United States in

I Think it's like 1885 and it's fascinating because there were millions and millions of buffalo in the American West and in 1885 or even 1865 perhaps I have to get the year I continue to study the the amount of methane and greenhouse gases was about 85% of what it is now I think people don't understand that there were millions and millions of the close cousin of cows buffalo in the American West before they were killed out by Settlers and Native Americans over hunting but what those animals did was not destroy the American West they made

some of the most fertile top soil on the plan Planet which was then turned into monocarp agriculture right that's now the Bread Basket of the United States and now we have a problem and then you enter into the dust bow so what happens is you have animals millions and millions of animals producing almost the exact same amount of greenhouse gases That we have in the United States today over a hundred years ago making incredibly fertile top soil because they poop on the land they pee on the land their hopes push all that into the ground

in the ground is an ecosystem a microbiome of bacteria that is eating this stuff and and multi supplying the grass gets more nutrients from the roots the grass becomes more nutrient-rich and the cows eat the grass and the cycle continues and what you have is just a Very rich ecosystem and like you said a top soil that looks like coffee grounds it's dark it's full of nutrients it's the kind of thing that like just it's just striking When You See It side by side with a monocrop soil and then we can come in as humans

and For Better or For Worse we can then plant agriculture we can plant crops there and we can monocrop and we'll get a few harvests out of it that'll be very fertile but if we don't put animals back on the land to Regenerate all the nutrients those plants are taking into One Direction into themselves and we're pulling off the land slowly the soil becomes less and less healthy it becomes less and less nutrient-dense because there's no longer a cycle you're growing something and that something is not dying and going back into the soil you're harvesting

it and taking it to eat and you're Harvest it and taking it to eat and this is what monocrop agriculture Looks like I mean there's a great photo that my friend Robbie from force of nature shared with me and it was a photo of an organic farm that was monocrop on one side of the photo and an organic regenerative Farm uh with cows on the other side and the one side was like kind of a Barren Wasteland obviously it had just been harvested and the side with the cows was Green Grass and so it's it's

not the most fair comparison because the even the organic monocraft Agriculture will look green when it's before it's harvested but what's happening is that after you harvest it it's down to dirt and cows raised on grass will never have that grass it'll never look like that organic monocrop farm it'll never be Barren yes you can plant things on it again but what you've done is take the nutrients from the soil put them into the plants and out it goes and so I don't understand how plant-based Advocates can want a world With no animals I mean

that is the mission of some of these plant-based meat CEOs they've stated it in no uncertain terms that is that is a that is a certain recipe for an apocalypse because the food system will completely collapse without the animals to put it back and that's the whole reason that an NP k a nitrogen phosphorous phosphorous fertilizer was developed I think around with the hab process over 100 about 100 years ago because we were just stripping The soil so bare and you couldn't grow as much on the soil because the animals were not on the soil

putting the nutrients back so the idea here is number one monocrop agriculture with plants not great either it's even if it's organic it's not awesome because you have to put the nutrients back in factory farming of cows not awesome uh because then you're basically just feeding cows of grains which be can be contaminated with glyphosate pesticides Mold toxins Plastics microplastics pfas the list is long but there are better ways to do both of those things and especially perhaps the most important Point here is that there's a very good way to do animal agriculture which can

make the soil and if you talk to these Farmers I mean Will Harris at White Oak pastors actually showed me two jars of soil one was from his farm dark coffee grounds the other was from his neighbor's Farm a few hundred yards away A Peanut Farm it looks like light chocolate milk you know it wasn't that dark at all and and what he says is that he's a dirt farmer and he just has cows and so that's really what you're doing is you're creating dirt and dirt isn't super sexy but dirt is what makes the

world go around if we don't have healthy dirt and fertile dirt plants won't grow and the Animals won't have anything to eat and we all die and how do you get healthy fertile dirt you need the Animals as part of the system and again just the last piece of that is the greenhouse gas piece I want to reiterate the fact that like the amount of greenhouse gas is being proded produced by the ruminants in the United States was slightly is slightly more now only slightly more now than it was over 150 years ago with the

remnants that were on the you know that were on our our patch of land so to suggest that the methane coming from ruminant animals is the Problem in terms of a greenhouse gas total effect is just really turning a massive Blind Eye to Transportation industry uh electricity generation which are the huge generators of greenhouse gases and when you have a cow it's producing just it's producing methane but the methane is a burp it goes into the atmosphere it becomes CO2 and then that CO2 is is inhaled by plants that's plants quote oxygen that's what plants

breathe in so it's this incredible cycle Like none of that carbon whether it's carbon in a methane which is CH4 uh it's carbon in methane or carbon in CO2 none of that carbon is new carbon it's carbon that's been circulating in the environment for millions and millions and of years and that's not new but when we go into the ground and we uh take coal and we burn the coal that that carbon was kind of sequestered in in the Bedrock of the earth and we're burning it that's new carbon being released into The atmosphere and

those are very different things in terms of how we should be looking at them if we are concerned about greenhouse gases one of them is carbon cycling as part of a healthy ecosystem that feeds us all and allows us to become healthy humans the other is new carbon being burned but it's kind of the same Playbook right it's like look over here at the cows don't look at the don't look at airplanes and cars and Electricity and and those are not easy problems to solve but don't look at these things let's just blame the cows

and we can get people feeling like they're doing something when in fact they're just kind of pushing more and more people toward worse nutrition at the cost of I I don't with the result of I don't think any real net environmental benefit yeah don't look at Bill Gates on his you know private jet flying around so who's I mean I mean I saw him and the It was I think the founder of Beyond Burger I did an episode on this recently terms of saying our goal is to go 100% meat free like for the I

mean it's the the agendas of some of these people are crazy in terms of and and it also puts people you know the average people like you and I at at a in just all you know really all Americans all over the world in a position of we have less control they have more control I mean you know when we can when someone else controls Your food supply I mean that's a pretty big that's a pretty big deal scary thing I mean people have talked about the fact that Bill Gates has bought up so much

Farmland what's he's not he's not he's not raising cattle on that yes yes exactly scary stuff it's scary stuff but yeah I agree I think that um I think humans I have faith in in humanity and I think humans would Rebel If people really tried to take away meat I think most of us know at the in the deepest Regions of our brains and our bodies that this is critical food for us as humans and we that would be you know the beginning of a of a civil war or Rebellion if people tried to take

it away but um I hope it doesn't get to that point even yeah of course yeah same here you know I want to go back to some of these nutritional components here some some that we kind of touched on uh just a few minutes ago one of them being you had mentioned you know you're you're More vegetable free right now for the most part um you're doing fruit explain again why did you add fruit back in cuz for a while you were full carnivore why did you add back in fruit and some in any other

foods that you added in that aren't fruits and and why why did you do that yeah thanks for circling back to this you you mentioned James nickol anonio and he did raise a good point with you about the the the pH of the body now this is a little misleading Because you know this but it's a little complicated that the pH of the human body is tightly regulated the blood pH doesn't change much but you can see the pH of the urine change significantly based on what you were eating when I was eating only meat

the pH of my urine was often less than five and a lower pH means more acidic a higher pH uh especially above seven means you're trending toward alkaline and now that I have fruit my the pH of my urine is Eight or something so it's it's a totally different environment in the human body and when we can measure the blood pH that doesn't change whether you're eating only meat or plants and meat or only plants but the cellular pH and the interstitial the space between the cells that pH may change so I think James has

a legitimate concern here that if you're only eating meat and this was something that it took me a while to figure out to realize also and you're Not getting enough of those alkaline minerals that are coming in the plant Foods or or some other I mean basically you pretty much need to get plant foods for the alkaline minerals it could change the pH of the interstitial fluid or the cells and create stress on the body specifically for me probably in connection with that but more in connection with the electrolytes things like sodium potassium chloride calcium

magnesium was that long-term keto for me And this may be a an individual thing but I think this is pretty foundational to human physiology led to pretty severe electrolyte deficiencies I had heart palpitations at night I had racing heartbeat I had um at one point a little bit of swelling in my feet which would come and go I had uh muscle cramps when I would go climbing and like try intense my calf muscles I would actually get muscle cramps in the morning when I would wake up uh just and you try and to Stretch and

your whole calf cramps I had my testosterone went down so right now my total testosterone is around 800 I don't do any uh hormones no drugs no trt but when I was on strict carnivore it was it was the lowest went I think was 495 uh nanograms per deciliter and the sex hormone binding globulin went went way up so my free testosterone went down my thyroid hormone panel starts to change where the TSH doesn't change much but you see the fre T3 and the freet T4 Go down significantly so you started to see a lot

of changes in the hormones with long-term keto for me I always felt a little cold and again I didn't understand this at the time but I I my body temperature was lower than normal I would measure and my body temperature was never 98.6 on long-term keto again I did this for about a year and a half and like I said it's significantly improved my ECM and autoimmune disease yeah I know there's a lot of people who do Strict carnivore who find benefits but I've also met a lot of people since I've been speaking about this

who ran into problems and felt better when they added some sorts of carbohydrates back and the issue is that though insulin as a hormone gets demonized I think it's a very valuable essential part of human physiology of course and one of the roles of insulin is to signal to the kidneys to hold on to these electrolytes it holds on to sodium and once you hold On to sodium everything else kind of Falls in line whether it's potassium chloride magnesium Etc calcium but if you don't get enough insulin signaling to the kidneys we just waste these

minerals we waste these quot electrolytes and this is a problem I think for all sorts of people who have insulins too low it's one of the reasons that a type 1 diabetic needs to use insulin but some of the people doing these ketogenic diets they really really Get very little insulin protein is insulinogenic but not as much carbohydrates are and so I think that a lot of people doing this don't get enough insulin and they just you see people in the ketogenic Community who I think are well-intentioned but they have to do 15 20 grams

of salt per day and even that doesn't fully replenish what they're missing and losing and so you just see these like crazy electrolyte int you know you have to do so much Effort with your electrolytes uh at times I tried to supplement potassium which is a very bad idea it can be problematic for you can get too much pottassium oral potassium would be harder but I think you probably could make yourself sick with even oral potassium and so it just I couldn't figure it out and then eventually I realized oh this is just long-term keto

isn't working for me again it's one of these moments in my life that was Humbling and also enlightening for me at the same time adding carbohydrates back I thought what what will I do for carbohydrates and you know the options for carbohydrates for humans are basically grains so you have wheat oats barley Rye um you have tubers sweet potato white potato these kind of things uh maybe you have squash which is basically a fruit it's kind of a mix of glucose and fructose kind of it's not a starch it definitely has more fructose Than a

than a tuber and then you have fruit and fruit juice and honey or maple syrup and when I looked at those I thought I just was kind of thinking in this plant toxin perspective and I thought well let me start with fruit it makes the most sense to me personally evolutionarily and I think it's going to have the fewest amount of toxins and I felt the best when I was doing it so that I added fruit and honey back to my diet and felt a lot better it took a Little time actually probably a few

months for the electrolyte issues to kind of resolve but over time it definitely resolved now I will say that for me going from strict keto to adding fruit I started with maybe a 100 or 150 grams of carbohydrates a day there was some adjustment there because when I was when when humans are strict ketogenic there is a physiologic insulin resistance that develops and so I think a lot of people who try to add fruit or Honey or any carbohydrate back to their diet after they've been low carb get this there's definitely a a coming back

online effect there's a there's a definite adjustment time that it takes for your body to make the enzymes necessary to use carbohydrates whether it's glucose or fructose so there is a there is probably a lot of wisdom in doing that that transition gently and gradually but it most people can adjust and and do better long term in terms of Hormones in terms of electrolytes in terms of energy libido sleep I see it so often now and I think that I don't want to invalidate anybody's positive experience with keto or carnivore I just kind of like

with vegetables I think that if if somebody's struggling with autoimmune disease and and you want to try cutting out vegetables great it might help if somebody is on a ketogenic diet and has found benefits but it's also having sleep issues hormone issues Or electrolyte issues consider adding back a source of carbohydrates gradually to see if those get better um and don't fear that and and with that conversation we can have all this conversation if you want people fear fructose which I don't think is necessary I think if you really look at the literature fruit and

honey are not bad for humans although that's it's been hard to change people's mind on that yeah and I just think anecdotally and probably clinically my Judgment is that grains don't are not the best source of carbohydrates for humans some people can do just fine with sourdough bread if it's a good wheat or like an iron corn or something or maybe people go to Italy and they eat the pasta and they feel fine but most people that I know and myself when I do grains I don't feel great and I don't feel as good on

tubers as I do on fruit but I think that there's there's room in there for people to navigate what sorts of Carbohydrates they choose to reincorporate in their diet just know that I think some things are easier and one of the things that I've started talking about more in the last few years is don't fear fruit um if you do fear fructose I think that there's it's worth people investigating why they fear it and I think it's actually very very good for a lot of people and there's great research on fruit juice and the benefits

yeah yeah I was talking to Joe marola Here recently he was on the podcast and he was telling me I mean he was like I eat pounds of watermelon a day so it was interesting cuz you know he had said cuz again everybody changed you know in the past he had mentioned I mean he had written whole books on how fructose is evil you know and so and now it's I we all come back around you know the reality is I think we all all are continuing to learn and grow and so you know I

can appreciate that and so I uh Yeah you know it's interesting I I started wearing one of those continuous blood glucose monitors and um and I do say I I do think for a lot of people if you're introducing new food sometimes give your body a little time if you know that it's a good real food but you know like I I did really well with potatoes and some of that is I'm wondering if like my Heritage is very um you know it's it's a lot of Germans and Irish you know and so maybe I

tolerate it better It's interesting when you look at studies on Japanese they digest rice and um seaweed better than we do uh in certain cases so it's just it's you know so much of it as you mentioned early can be bio-individual you know one of the you go ahead I I wanted to just mention about fructose real quickly if people fear fructose just realize that that most of the reasons that both Joe and I used to fear fructose is because we didn't really understand all of the Literature almost all of the negative studies on fructose

are done with isolated fructose and when you feed humans or lab animals isolated fructose it it gets malabsorbed it's not absorbed properly in the gut isolated fructose doesn't exist in nature it's always paired with glucose in almost a 50-50 ratio most of the time and that is part of the fructose transport into the gut but unabsorbed fructose leads to overgrowth of bacteria and then you end Up with probably gram negative overgrowth and lipopolysaccharide increased amounts of endotoxin which is just a synonym for lipopolysaccharide so I think most fructose fearing is based on flawed design of

the research and then also the fact that mice and rats don't metabolize fructose in the same way that humans do we know this very clearly that they do much higher rates of doobo lipogenesis which is the turning the the the transformation of Fructose into fat than humans humans do that a very very small degree most fructose we eat is transformed lactate it's trans glycogen and glucose it's it's such a small amount less than 1% or around 1% of the fructose gets turned into doov lipogenesis and so you think I mean that's that's just a vanishingly

small amount if you're eating even if you're eating 40 grams of fructose a day you know point4 you know it's like it's a vanishingly small amount and mice and Rats do much more than that so if you really look at the the literature on fructose I think that the people who have been sounding the alarm about it are well intentioned but it doesn't check out when you really read the research and I mean I I share my blood work all the time on my podcast and you know my hemoglobin A1c is is lower than it

was when I was a carnivore My fasting insulin is still around three it's just there's there's no evidence that Fructose is harmful and I mean this is another point that often gets overlooked uh in keto communities there's a very interesting randomized controlled study looking at Atkins diets either low carb or zero carb and one of the fears with fructose is Advanced glycation end products but we know that a ketogenic diet and a low carb diet actually increases Advanced glycation end products more the one they were studying was methylglyoxal MGO and it increased I Think 2.4

times on a zerocarb Atkins diet so anyone in the ketogenic Community who is concerned about Advanced cation end products I've never heard anyone really explain like a ketogenic diet increases Advanced cation end products because of the way that the physiology works so this is just not something to fear uh in humans and and not everyone needs to get all of their carbohy rates from from fruit but I think that uh again it gets a little Granular for people but I'll just point out a few things rice just be aware that a lot of rice has

arsenic so be careful with the rice right and then oats okay oats also accumulate cadmium one of the things that's fascinating to me and we get back to this kind of vegetables piece is that plants will accumulate heavy metals in their seeds sometimes so just be careful with that and if people are eating those Foods I think you can eat those foods but just if you have Symptoms just make sure you check the heavy metals because rice is traditionally a problem with arsenic some rice has more than others even even chocolate if it's grown in

a soil with high amounts of cadmium can have significant amounts of heavy metals even lead so the seeds of plants just tend to accumulate Metals so I don't think people should stop eating chocolate it's just kind of like be aware that you should check your Metals if you're Eating a lot of those Foods if you're eating rice with chocolate and oats just check your heavy metals yeah yeah I I I think there's always a conversation around in the way that I I'm going to be doing a podcast episode on this in the future on um

well it's related to how untrue most studies are you know there there was a study came out on studies and basically it found like 51.3% of studies just can't be trusted Because if you would go and redo the exact same study it would be sometimes on the totally polar opposite you know they've done this anyways and so so you're really aware of this but one of the things that you know is incredible unfair is is any of these documentaries that they do on meat of course they're doing it on conventional grain fed meat and then

they're just saying oh meat is bad and you're like well why didn't you take the you know at your friend's Farm Or our Farms the you know the grass-fed animals that were slaughtered properly and and it had a perfect diet and a perfect life like you'll use that one my point there though is I I just want to point this out I do think the same can be said for certain grains right I think when you're if you are going to buy grains and you are going to eat the way that people ate grains as

I've studied this thousands of years ago the grains were Sprouted by some people they're doing it properly and then they were fermented and then they were in organic soil so it is a very very different type of grain and even some today they've also been hybridized and so it it is a completely different food that you're getting today often times and so when you're reading studies just for everybody listening if they're telling you meat is bad or fruit is bad or this is bad which fruit the ones that were growing in you know Paul Living

in Costa Rica or I'm in Puerto Rico right now like in our backyard or the ones that are like basically bags of water that they you know anyway so just yeah did you see I mean you mentioned David Sinclair earlier in the podcast did you see what came out recently about the Resveratrol stuff there was something on Twitter that was pretty interesting just people know I mean there was kind of this I mean yeah there was just this crazy Comedy of Errors Where you know he was touting res atrol in super physiologic amounts amounts you

would never get from a grape or a peanut or a blueberry and and touting it as a longevity substance but when they repeated the experiments nobody could nobody could repeat his experiments and find that it actually did what he said it did so um yeah there's yeah there was one study showing positive and then like 10 you know multiple studies showing no it's really not doing your body any good And I actually read somewhere I need to find the study basically going through that the main one of the main research of that first study was

compromised in terms of had Financial connections to the and of course this happens constantly and that's why so many studies tend to be or a lot not all but a lot tend to be inaccurate it's dangerous yeah so if you're taking a Ros veratrol supplement my advice would be throw it out it's here's another idea Eat grapes yeah you blueberries as well yeah yeah yeah so but yeah you make a great point that like it's it I think that it's not again I I want people to understand I'm not saying don't eat chocolate don't eat

rice don't eat oats just know that if you're if you're struggling there are all sorts of different Avenues to pursue and that that's what's been most interesting for me over the years and to try and refine the message as I'm Thinking about it because you know I mean hand up I've been guilty of saying you know oats are har are harmful for humans and I think you know in retrospect I think that's too that's too braz in a statement but I do think that that behind that there was good intention in science saying not everyone

digests oats some oats are high in cadmium there are digestive enzyme Inhibitors and oats and not everyone is great with oats I mean personally and I Think that I had stress fractures from oats because of the high amounts of phytic acid in oats when I was a runner in the past yeah but I think that it's just I just want people to understand and this is perhaps something we've been coming back to a lot in the podcast that the first step is getting rid of the garbage that everyone knows is garbage the seed oils the

the the highly processed sugars the high fructose corn syrup which is not the same as the Natural sugar you find in Fruit the the highly processed food which has all this historically um you know imbibed or you know imbued with nutrition and information into the food get when you get rid of that you run into problems if people are doing all those things and there are some foods that we think of as healthy that could be triggering people you know and that's where I think the Nuance of what I'm trying to communicate to people as

gently as possible comes Out I don't think everybody needs to do those things but know that some of those are possibly harmful for people reminds me of something I'll just mention as I'm as I'm rambling here so if caloric restriction is Ben beneficial we're circling way back Josh yeah yeah it's great caloric restriction is beneficial there are studies in animals that show that when they calorically restrict the animals the membranes change composition and this to me is fascinating because it Loops into the seed oil conversation so the membranes become less unsaturated the membranes become more

saturated when animals have caloric restriction so caloric restriction we talked about earlier probably problematic for humans and animals in general because of hormonal problems long term but but if there's a benefit it's possibly because it allows the body to remove some of the polyunsaturated fats that have accumulated in the membranes so most of These studies are done in lab animals which are fed seed oils I mean the lab animal diet is not uh the natural Mouse wild diet right it's it's a mouse Chow which is full of soybean oil and so if they're calorically restricting

a mouse and you see the membranes becoming more saturated then you have essentially you're undoing some of the damage that the seed oils in the mouse diet has done and potentially in humans that could be the same beneficial effect but I think There's better ways to uh to saturate your membranes which is to eat less polyunsaturated fats from seed oils so I just wanted to mention that because I think it in some ways um corroborates the notion that seed oils are harmful for humans seed oils are of course the corn the canola the sunflower the

safflower the soybean oils which are high in a omega-6 polyunsaturated fat called linolic acid one of the unique things from a bad perspective about Linolic acid is that it's gets stored in our membranes and so if your membranes become more highly full of linolic acid it probably leads to problems for humans and so it's interesting that we see if caloric restriction has any benefit it's because it's undoing the effect it's potentially undoing the effect that we've been doing with these seed oils and I would say don't calorically restrict because you'll just hurt your thyroid and

your sex hormones which you Need to be vital just get the seed oils out of your diet and eat more saturated animal fats butter ghee Tallow the fats that we're told are so bad for us but are probably incredibly healthy or almost certainly incredibly healthy and certainly the fats we've been eating for so long so that's just an interesting little aside story that's amazing you know it's amazing and when it comes to fasting as well I want to say my experience and I've worked with thousands of patients on this in fasting and it to me

it is incredibly bioindividual you know and and I think that and I think women tend to be even more sensitive uh than men you know I think a lot of time due to hormone fluctuations and and and that sort of thing but I um you know one of things I was thinking about with fasting is is that like like for me by the way I don't I don't do like an 816 fast I did for a year or two and uh you know when I Was in my 20s and um and it was you know

I I did okay on it but I found that um for myself I mean you know and I typically eat around 8:00 a.m. so maybe I get up move do a little bit and then I'll eat around noon I eat an early dinner around 5: typically so I probably do have a smaller window than than most people but I look back even throughout history you know a lot of fasting was done for religious purposes more than anything when you look historically and I know that uh a lot a lot of you know Jews would uh

often times do fasting around religious Festival so it wasn't every day it was certain times of year and the early Christian Church what they would do is typically fast oftentimes one day a week and so and they would still eat dinner but fast for a day or sometimes two but it was just this sort of seasonal or once or twice a week and I think we're going to start seeing research like I want to compare it to This cold plunging you know I see a lot of people doing these cold plunges every day and I

think there could be benefits for some people of cold plunging but I don't think it's this every single person said cold plunge because I think of if you got a in Chinese medicine if you have a cold internal body temperature where especially something like a thyroid issue hypothyroid and you're doing that constantly or a compromised immune system you'd actually Be better off with heat most of the time my point is is that when we're looking at hormesis in good stress I think for some people's bodies maybe cold plunging or a cold shower is okay but

it might be better once a week and not seven days a week you know and your body being able to adapt so any any thoughts on you know yeah yeah so okay so fasting you mentioned I think there are benefits to fasting from the perspective of LPS which I mentioned earlier so LPS is Lipid polysaccharide yeah and gosh you would you would be hardpressed to find anything there are not many things in the medical literature that look as problematic as LPS in the human body it's basically just bacterial cell wall fragments that end up in

our body and man they cause Havoc they cause a huge immune system activation they cause inflammation they cause all sorts of problems I mean you do not want high levels of lipopolysaccharide in your gut Or in your body and so one of the clear benefits of fasting is you're removing everything you know I think about all the foods that we eat as humans and I think a lot of people don't know which foods are really damaging their gut or irritating their gut again this could be bioindividual and it comes down to potentially some of the

things that are in our food supply especially in Ultra processed foods that often get overlooked like is it kagene in what About xantham gum do we really have enough research what about these gums are these damaging our guts like what about these additives or these dyes or I mean who knows what's happening but we don't really understand how what's going on at the at the microscopic level in our guts and what is really opening the Gap Junctions or potentially causing pathogenic subsets of bacteria to overgrow and it's incred complex hopefully we'll understand that in the

Next few years with machine learning or the next few decades perhaps but what's very clear is that and we've known this this is something that that you've been talking about for many many years like having an irritated gut is a very bad idea you know we don't really understand all of it but your microbiome has to be happy we don't really know how the microbiome gets happy totally and that's a separate podcast you know but we you don't want to piss off your microbiome You don't want a lot of LPS and so fasting is like

okay there's nothing going in your gut that's definitely going to benefit you and lower levels of LPS in your body the problem is that humans have to eat so you have to eat something and we know that if you fast too long all the same things happen sex and can I point out in regards to the diet that you're currently on I think that if you can't eat nothing Which you don't want to do because the problem then you want to eat the foods that are the easiest to digest and assimilate what is that it's

meat and fruit I think so yeah I think so um and I think I'm particularly sensitive I think there are a lot of people who could eat more than just meat and fruit but one of the things I think is cool about an animal-based diet is it gives people and a carnivore diet gives people a good starting point from which to Build on and so yeah so I think fasting is great but too much fasting we know is a problem a little bit of fasting can really help people understand what it's like to not have

so much LPS in their system yeah since we're talking about lipop polysac I'll just add this one Nuance that I I recently learned about a lot of time saturated fat gets blamed when you're talking about endotoxin and LPS there's there's a really interesting part of this the literature if you look At it carefully that saturated fat though it's increasing levels of LPS it's forming these lipid rafts and it's actually detoxifying LPS it's pulling it out of the gut and through the liver so it's detoxifying it so people in the plant-based communities will often point to

saturated fat and say saturated fat is bad look at it's increasing levels of endotoxin but it's doing it in a different way than other things that increase endotoxins like alcohol would Increase lipop polysaccharide things that are clear gut toxins glyphosate Etc but saturated fat very much looks to be detoxifying LPS so I would argue that saturated fat is protective against LPS and things like polyunsaturated fats are damaging and probably um are going to stoke the Flames when it comes to lipopolysaccharides so if people end up in that kind of rabbit hole just know that there's

if you look carefully at the research saturated fat especially From animals the longer chain saturated fats are probably protective when it comes to LPS and so you mentioned Cal plunging I think it's great people are starting to push back on this a little bit the science on cold plunging is actually pretty shaky um you know there's there's not a lot of great research on cold plunging does it feel good yeah because your body thinks it's dying I mean it's a lot of epinephrine it's a lot of epinephrine and it's a lot Of camines you know

it's epinephrine norepinephrine and dopamine but I think that we have to be able to ask the question is it good to have that much of a catac Coline release in humans I don't know does cold plunging have benefits in terms of mental resilience sure I you know I think there's a lot of benefit to cold water for resetting our psychology for me I know that if I'm frustrated or I'm angry about something if I go in the ocean which is actually pretty warm here In Costa Rica but even if I just get in a cold

shower like it just it's kind of a state change you know so I think that I think cold water is very valuable for us as a state change if we're in a bad mood mood if we're just if especially for me just personally I can just relate it just if I'm angry or I'm frustrated State changing in water of really any temperature but especially a colder water helps kind of snap me out of my my ruminative my ruminating thoughts right That's beneficial but I think we also need to admit that putting yourself in very cold

water too much is probably has a breaking point at which point it's very harmful for humans and there's lots of anecdotes out there now of people I mean I was just talking to a friend and he said gosh if I cold plung too too much I get sick and I thought yeah it's probably I don't know if anybody's ever done the research like it's probably immunosuppressive which yes I mean there Are things in our environment which are immunosuppressive which can be beneficial in the short term if you have immune overactivation but a lot of those

immunosuppressive things you wouldn't want to do long term whether we're talking about a biological in in Western medicine that they would give someone for rheumatoid arthritis I mean the immunosuppressive drug is going to help them symptomatically short-term but long term it's going to increase their rate Of uh bloodborne cancer and pneumonias and all kinds of things so just because something is immunosuppressive doesn't mean you always want to do it and certainly if you have immune overactivation immunosuppression can help in the short term but I think you have to get to the root cause of what's

activating your immune system in the first place so I'm actually not a huge fan of of coal plunging I sold my coal plunge Josh wow yeah man you're like the First wow yeah and I think that there's levels right so I am also fortunate to have a river below my house and the river is probably 70 degrees and that's perfect like yeah I think a 65 70 degree River feels great um and that that's great and it's it's enough to kind of state change and and chill my mind out and change my environment um but

I don't I don't need a 35 degree cold plunge anymore I just didn't find a use for it yeah yeah and this goes back To I think part of a theme of what we've talked about is too is there's a level of awareness if just because one study says it or one expert on social media says it doesn't mean it's for everybody I think really so much of this stuff again as we've talked about is B individual learning what really does well with you and in Chinese medicine it would be if you've got a lot

of too much internal body heat which some people do it would be good but a lot of people Don't 50% of people probably don't and so in that case you want to be really cautious and wise about it so anyways yeah I think I think these are great points one of the last questions I have want to have for you Dr Paul is you've interviewed a lot of people uh I know you you you you come converse with some of the top you know medical doctors and and health experts in the country what is maybe

one of the best pieces of advice or something new you've heard Recently that just sort of opened your eyes to something again it could also be a piece of Life advice if that's something that's striking you yeah you know um I was actually talking to one of my friends yesterday um and I was asking him like how he deals with like negative feedback on social media and stuff and he was just he said like I'm going to paraphrase him and I hope I don't butcher it he said like you know if you If you expand

your purpose basically his his advice was nobody's nobody's criticism of you really matters if you expand your purpose and I thought that makes a lot of sense to me like because I think that for me as a human one of the hard things and this probably just has to do with the way that I was raised or my experience as a child like I'm just sensitive to criticism it's just hard to think that I was wrong about something and you know this like there Are people in the health space who are um who can respectfully

discuss ideas but there's a lot of people in the health space now and I'm not sure if this is increasing I hope it's not who are kind of making their brand about cutting other people down like it's kind of a zero sum game and that their brand is about becoming Arbiters of Truth like they're the only person who knows what's right and everybody else is wrong and I'm going to show you why this guy is Wrong and this guy is wrong and this guy is wrong and a lot of times they do this with like

a lot of shouting and a lot of bloviating and you know hyic action they get really triggered and and I just that that stuff I just think as a human it's just it affects me negatively and I think like wow like that's just such a bummer I don't understand it borders on ad homonym type of attacks and I think that there's just I don't understand why it's out there and I Think the hardest thing for me is to see those people gaining traction and my friend said you know just like expand your purpose and it

all those people become less relevant I thought does that make sense like ultimately for me the less I pay attention to comments on social media the happier I am and the more I meet people in person I'll tell you this I've never met there's probably a selection bi here but no one has ever come up to me in person and said you Know what you said hurt me it's like invariably it's people coming up and saying thank you for the work you doing but yeah I mean it's just as it's just as valid for somebody

to come up and say hey man I cut out all plants for my diet and I did horribly you know you should really think about not saying that to people or or I tried to anal based diet and I felt horrible no one's ever said that to me in person and I'm sure that there are people in The world everybody's individual it doesn't work for everyone but I guess this the point here is that I think for me and for all of us in the space like it's just been interesting to remember like the majority

of people are gaining a lot from what we're doing and are really being helped by it and so just not focusing on the negative because it's all that's the other thing I kind of realize it's always going to be there somebody is all and this is you know Maybe people listening to this are thinking okay I'm not in the hell space But realize that I heard Tim Ferris say this like 10 or 15% of people are just going to not like anything you do okay great like I get it if you're within that margin like

okay whether you're doing a presentation at school or in like the the church group or I I don't know people are always going to disagree with I thought yeah that was just interesting advice like just focusing on My purpose which is just to to share ideas that I think will help some people um and if those ideas are unique then even better um just you know sharing ideas in a way that I think is unique and and maybe people aren't hearing these ideas from other sources that that feels meaningful to me and just not focusing

on the negative has been a struggle but it's I think it's been a good a good effort for me yeah it's good I mean that's that that's good advice And good wisdom you know I think about you know the the people that change the world they're going to get more push back I mean if not you're not saying things that probably matter and so you know obviously I mean Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated John F Kennedy Jesus I mean there's a lot of people because when they were speaking truth and so it's it's uh

yeah I mean that's a it is hard though you know I think that and I do think because we've become more Politically divisive I think that's you know maybe that's part of it too I think there's more taking sides now and you're just on one side or the other there's less people maybe in the middle than there's been and um and so anyways and of course it's much easier to say something mean to somebody when you're invisible uh in versus to their face you know it's um yes I wish I I actually wish I could

meet a lot of these detractors in person I think we'd Probably have really productive conversations but I mean the social media the internet allows for so many people to consume our content in free ways it's great but it also I think brings out bad parts of us as humans where we say things about people in ways that we wouldn't if they were in the room yeah yeah never I mean yeah or maybe maybe 10% of the 10% would it' be incred it'd be so much lower yeah so um you know one of the things that

you have Done that some some other people have done but not a lot you're you're a medical doctor who has reversed autoimmune disease and there are a lot of people listening I think and a lot a lot of people will see this video and or listen to this podcast who are struggling with autoimmune disease what is your best advice just like you were able to reverse autoimmune disease what are a few steps and you've covered some of them probably but what are some of The steps people should take in terms of if they've got Auto

autoimmune disease want to reverse it what are some of the things they should start doing uh today I think start with your diet and make it as simple as you can which is really like we talked about you summed it up really well I think that an animal-based diet is a great place to start that's just my perspective if it's valuable people can can espouse it or try it but yeah I think simplify your diet as much As you can for some amount of time uh and then if the autoimmune condition gets better and then

the goal is always to add things back and have the most diverse interesting fun you know life-giving diet in all of the ways that you can but at the same time uh I think that quality of life is multifaceted and for me personally I think for a lot of listeners quality of life is personally for me is not having eczema and so I'm willing to not eat tomatoes because I Don't like having itchy patches on my arm and I know that that's that's kind of my immune system get a little pissed off underneath the surface

it's not just my skin it's systemic and so that to me is the compromise that I'm willing to not eat chocolate also triggers my Eczema you know bread I'm willing to not eat these Foods even though they're all delicious because I that's my sort of highest quality of life in net and so I think if people are struggling with Autoimmune disease and we talked about some of the the ideas of which autoimmune diseases are out there there's so many just simplify your diet as much as possible make your diet as high quality as you can

which is just obviously unprocessed plant and animal Foods uh make as as much of the food as you can at home understand the details of of everything you're putting in your body and putting on your body that's really I think the devil is in the Details and the more you are intentional about everything that you're eating drinking and putting on your body the better you'll do and I think that's I think I really strongly believe that so much I mean probably north of 95% of autoimmune disease is fixable if people can put that much intention

into it and that's not a small feed I mean it's hard to change where you're getting your water from you got to get a water filter it's hard to change the foods you eat It's hard to cook your own food especially if you have a family but I think that's where the the biggest the biggest movers are and and the I'm really encouraged by all the people that I've seen because I think that the flip side of that is desperation and loss of Hope and the only answer or not the only answer but one of

the main answers that Western medicine will provide is medications which inevitably have side effects and don't correct the root cause So if people want to use medications to correct an autoimmune disease that's totally valid that's your decision but I I think that when people are able to avoid that it's such a such a cool story for me to hear because I think wow you've saved your life you've saved yourself a lifetime of of side effects and you've given yourself a higher quality of life than you would have had on that medication without a doubt yeah

so good well we encourage everybody to Uh check out Dr Paul saladino here check out he's got a podcast he's got a great book called the carnivore code book and he's also got a cookbook also check out his new beef stick uh they've got organs in them right we all need more organs so want encourage you guys it's called lineage Provisions you can go online and search lineage l i n e a g Provisions to get your organ and grassed meat sticks that you can't taste the organs which some of you are going To love

we're super proud of yeah I want to say uh thanks everybody for tuning in today remember each and every week we uncover the science and the principles behind how to take your body Mind and Spirit to the next level and hey if you're not subscribed make sure to subscribe like and share this podcast and just again so grateful Paul for you coming on and sharing your wisdom with us today uh thanks again thanks Josh great to see you man I really enjoyed The conversation me as well