If You Wear Perfume & Lululemon We’re Done | Paul Saladino, MD

Summary

Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark: "If You Wear Perfume & Lululemon We’re Done" featuring Paul Saladino, MD

Release Date: October 22, 2024

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark, host Alex Clark engages in an in-depth conversation with Dr. Paul Saladino, a leading authority on the carnivore diet. Dr. Saladino, a double board-certified physician from Maryland, shares his expertise on how modern lifestyle choices and dietary habits contribute to various health issues. The discussion delves into topics ranging from the hidden dangers of everyday products to the profound impacts of diet on autoimmune conditions.

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1. The Hidden Dangers in Everyday Products

Timestamp: 00:00 - 07:41

Alex Clark opens the discussion by highlighting common issues such as infertility in women and links it to modern clothing choices, particularly leggings. Dr. Saladino explains the role of PFAs (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) found in activewear:

Paul Saladino (00:08): "You potentially have PFAs containing clothing directly touching highly absorbent mucous membranes of the human body."

The conversation transitions to the skepticism within Western medicine regarding seed oils. Dr. Saladino critiques the prevailing medical stance, attributing it to a lack of comprehensive research:

Paul Saladino (00:20): "Because they haven't read the research carefully. We live in 2024 in a toxic soup. The only way out of the toxic soup is through intentional lifestyle choices."

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2. The Impact of Seed Oils and Western Dietary Guidelines

Timestamp: 17:12 - 23:05

Dr. Saladino provides a thorough analysis of seed oils, emphasizing their industrial processing and the resultant presence of heavy metals:

Paul Saladino (21:21): "They're fragile oils. So seed oils are refined, bleached, and deodorized, oils that are harshly industrially extracted from a sunflower seed and a kernel of corn, a soybean..."

He further discusses the inaccuracies in meta-analyses that the medical community relies upon, pointing out methodological flaws and selective data interpretation that downplay the risks associated with seed oils.

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3. Chemicals in Clothing and Personal Care Products

Timestamp: 05:57 - 12:04

The dialogue shifts to the prevalence of harmful chemicals in activewear and personal care products. Dr. Saladino warns against the presence of PFAs and BPA in leggings and sports bras, elucidating their potential to disrupt endocrine functions:

Paul Saladino (05:57): "So this gets to these forever chemicals. So these are PFAs, parafluoro alcohol substances.... These forever chemicals...appear to be able to transit through our skin."

He recommends choosing natural materials and being mindful of the brands used to minimize exposure to these hazardous substances.

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4. Electromagnetic Fields (EMFs) and Modern Technology

Timestamp: 09:00 - 18:03

Addressing the ubiquitous presence of EMFs in daily life, Dr. Saladino expresses concerns over long-term exposure from devices like AirPods and electric vehicles:

Paul Saladino (10:12): "We don't really know what's going on. We don't know what the long term effects of this on humans are. We've never really studied it—we are living an experiment in so many ways."

He advocates for minimizing unnecessary exposure to EMFs and suggests practical measures such as using EMF detectors to assess environmental levels.

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5. Dietary Choices: Carnivore Diet vs. Animal-Based Diet

Timestamp: 38:00 - 47:58

A significant portion of the episode focuses on Dr. Saladino's personal journey from a strict carnivore diet to a more inclusive animal-based diet. He discusses the benefits of eliminating plant-based foods to manage autoimmune conditions, particularly eczema. Dr. Saladino shares success stories and recommends a transitional approach:

Paul Saladino (43:07): "So, like, that's one of these things that you have to be aware of. Yeah."

He emphasizes the importance of quality in animal products and the role of fermented foods like kefir in maintaining gut health without relying on probiotics.

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6. The Role of Organ Meats and Supplements

Timestamp: 67:16 - 69:39

Dr. Saladino introduces the concept of consuming organ meats to address specific health issues, attributing therapeutic benefits to their nutrient profiles and microrna content:

Paul Saladino (67:27): "And this is pretty a fascinating concept. It makes sense intuitively. And the research on this was done in the 1950s and 1960s in Germany..."

He advises caution when consuming hormone-rich organs like the thyroid and highlights the potential of organ supplements in optimizing health.

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7. Practical Advice for Listeners

Timestamp: 65:33 - 71:10

Towards the end of the episode, Dr. Saladino provides actionable steps for listeners seeking to improve their health through diet and lifestyle changes:

• Eliminate Processed Foods: "Number one, cut out as many processed foods as possible."

• Adopt an Animal-Based Diet: "Just eat meat and fruit for a little while and see how you feel."

• Understand Evolutionary Diets: Aligning modern eating habits with those of our ancestors to enhance biological compatibility.

He also touches upon the importance of supporting local and sustainable food sources, advocating for grass-fed and regenerative farming practices.

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Conclusion

In wrapping up, Alex Clark and Dr. Paul Saladino underscore the critical role of diet in healing a "sick culture." Dr. Saladino reinforces that intentional lifestyle choices, especially dietary adjustments, are paramount in mitigating the pervasive "toxic soup" of modern environmental and dietary hazards. The episode serves as a call to action for listeners to critically evaluate their everyday choices and embrace a more conscious approach to health and wellness.

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Notable Quotes

• Paul Saladino (00:20): "We live in 2024 in a toxic soup. The only way out of the toxic soup is through intentional lifestyle choices."

• Paul Saladino (21:21): "They're refined, bleached, and deodorized, oils that are harshly industrially extracted..."

• Paul Saladino (10:12): "We don't really know what's going on. We don't know what the long term effects of this on humans are."

• Paul Saladino (43:07): "No one thinks that kale is entirely good for humans, I would argue with that."

• Paul Saladino (67:27): "The research on this was done in the 1950s and 1960s in Germany."

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Final Thoughts

This episode of Culture Apothecary offers a thought-provoking examination of how modern lifestyle choices intersect with health outcomes. Dr. Paul Saladino's insights challenge conventional wisdom, urging listeners to reconsider the safety of everyday products and the fundamental components of their diets. Whether you're grappling with autoimmune issues or simply seeking to optimize your health, this episode provides valuable perspectives that encourage proactive and informed decision-making.

Transcript

[Alex Clark]

If you are a woman who is consistently experiencing problems with infertility, but you also live in leggings, like that could be contributing.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah, you potentially have PFA containing clothing directly touching highly absorbent mucous membranes of the human body.

[Alex Clark]

Why do so many western medicine doctors say seed oils are harmless?

[Paul Saladino]

Because they haven't read the research carefully. We live in 2024 in a toxic soup. The only way out of the toxic soup is through intentional lifestyle choices.

[Alex Clark]

He's the leading doctor and authority on all things carnivore diet. Of course I'm talking about none other than than double board certified Maryland Paul Saladino. He's host of the Paul Saladino, Maryland Podcast and author of the Carnivore Code and the Carnivore Code Cookbook. We'll dive into why he switched to animal based rather than strictly carnivore, why hospitals serve the worst food to patients, whether he would or wouldn't own an electric vehicle, why some doctors say seed oils are harmless, his opinion on raw milk and why women should avoid Lululemon like the plague. You're going to love this one and so will the men in your life. If you are listening to Culture Apothecary for the first time, My name is Alex Clark and my mission is to bring two different guests on a week sharing their own unique remedy to heal a sick culture physically, mentally or spiritually. We are completely donor funded and if you believe in our mission and would love to be a financial supporter of the show, you can give a tax deductible donation with the link in the show notes. You can also leave a five star review for free which really helps a lot. Watch this episode on the real Alex Clark YouTube channel and shop [e-mail] you can use code Alex Clark for 10% on off. Please welcome Paul Saladino to Culture Apothecary. My favorite video of you ever is this you going through TSA with these coconuts and when I tell you I was in tears reading the comments, I have never laughed so hard and I whenever I'm having a bad day that's the video I look for on the Internet. I love it to read those comments. Are you really bringing coconuts through tsa?

[Paul Saladino]

I brought them on the flight here.

[Alex Clark]

But this is the thing. How are you opening them on the flight?

[Paul Saladino]

There are metal straws. So you can buy a metal straw.

[Alex Clark]

And you poke it and you poke.

[Paul Saladino]

It in the coconut. So if you look at a coconut it has two ends. It has like a, I don't know One end that's like a belly button, like an Audi, and one end that's like three little eyes. And one of the eyes on a coconut is soft. If you have like a. If the whole husk is stripped off the coconut, what you find in the grocery store are coconuts that have the whole husk on them. So you can't see this internal coconut anatomy, if you will. But in Costa Rica, these young coconuts called pipas have this, all of the husk stripped and you have this basically naked coconut on one side. You have three eyes and one of them is soft. And you can just stick a metal straw like right through it.

[Alex Clark]

And so what are your seatmates saying to you? Is anybody like, hey, man, what the hell?

[Paul Saladino]

Every time I go on a plane, people look and the stewardess, you know, like the, the flight attendants are always, they, they come around all the time and they say, well, do you want some peanuts? No. Do you want a drink? No, I'm just. No, no, no. And then they see me with a glass container of hamburgers. It looks like cookies, right? It's. But it's hamburger patties that I'm eating on the plane or a coconut that I'm drinking out of or another glass container with chopped up fruit in it or something in there.

[Alex Clark]

That's what I'm doing too. I'm doing the hamburger patties. I've got the Redmond salt that I keep a mini version in my purse.

[Paul Saladino]

We got to talk about the salt.

[Alex Clark]

Okay, now wait a minute. I thought this was like, just bs, these people being like lead in the Redmonds. Do you really have a problem with Redmonds?

[Paul Saladino]

There needs to be another test because this independent analysis, this, this website did heavy metal testing on Redmond's Celtic sea salt, Jacobson Baja Gold, a bunch of salts, Vera salt, and there's a lot of heavy metals in these salts. I mean, if you look at the actual numbers. So Redmond salt, off the top of my head, I want to say around 270 parts per billion of lead in the salt. And if you do the numbers, you average about 9 grams of salt per day. 8 grams of salt. Now that's not sodium, that's salt. That'll get you far over the tolerable upper limit of lead for a day.

[Alex Clark]

Okay. Okay. Paul, are you just not having salt at all or is there at least a reputable brand you can recommend?

[Paul Saladino]

Well, according to this analysis, there were some brands that had a lot lower amounts of heavy metals. So the best one in the test, which probably Needs to be repeated. Was a diamond kosher salt?

[Alex Clark]

What?

[Paul Saladino]

Yes.

[Alex Clark]

Okay. I'm shocked by that. Were you shocked?

[Paul Saladino]

A little bit. Diamond is made by Cargill.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah. So again, it needs to be repeated.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Paul Saladino]

Jacobson's was pretty good.

[Alex Clark]

And.

[Paul Saladino]

Which is a. A sea salt from Oregon. And then I'm pretty sure the malon salt was good. Was like, better than these other ones.

[Alex Clark]

I mean, Redmond's had like an explanation that they had posted about the, the, the test.

[Paul Saladino]

What was their explanation?

[Alex Clark]

I don't remember. It was just like, safe levels.

[Paul Saladino]

I don't know. It's sketchy. I thought it was really interesting because when you look at what we're eating, salt is a pretty big contributor to heavy metal levels. At those levels of lead. I mean, Celtic sea salt was the worst, which is crazy because, like, that blue container, you always think, this Celtic sea salt, it's like an institution. That one had even more lead in it. And lead is associated with developmental delay in kids, hormonal disruption in adults, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease. Extra lead in the human body is horrible. So if there's truly. The test is repeated. And some of these salts have high levels of lead, along with aluminum, arsenic, and cadmium. So pretty significant heavy metals across some salts. It's a good thing to change. It's like a powerful thing you can do to just decrease the levels of heavy metals. Could affect fertility, too.

[Alex Clark]

Something else that everybody's doing while flying, typically, especially women, is wearing activewear. We're wearing our Lululemon to travel. Why do you tell women to stop wearing Lululemon?

[Paul Saladino]

So this gets to these forever chemicals. So these are pfas, parafluoro alcohol substances. They have a fluorine atom in them, and that's how they test. So this same website, which is actually an interesting website called mama, have no association with them. They did fluorine testing on a number of these active wears and their leggings or this kind of activewear that women wear. And people have also tested this stuff for bpa, which is one of these endocrine disrupting bisphenol A compounds. The thing about both BPA and these pfas forever chemicals is they appear to be able to transit through our skin. So if they're fat loving, if they're lipophilic, they can just move through the skin. Like, you know, don't touch a receipt. Right. So you don't want to touch the thermal paper receipts. And look, one thermal paper receipt isn't going to kill you. But if you're taking the thermal paper rece putting into the bag of groceries and it's touching your food or you're handling the thermal paper receipts and then eating food and not washing your hands. I mean, you're getting more exposure to these endocrine disrupting chemicals. So the problem with leggings is that women don't always wear underwear. Right. Because it looks tight. It's tight and it looks, it does. You don't want the panty lines or whatever. And so you potentially have PFA containing clothing directly touching highly absorbent mucous membranes of the human body. And that could be problematic. So it's just a question we have to ask, like are these the best things to have? And then with the sports bras and the bpa, the question is you have highly active hormonal tissue in the breast. Men and women. But men usually don't wear sports bras. Right. And is the BPA in the sports bra moving through the skin potentially affecting the breast tissue? So these are questions that we just need to answer. And I think that they're not fully fleshed out yet, but women should be aware that like potentially the clothing can be hazardous. The simple answer would be know the brand of leggings. See if they use pfas or wear some sort of barrier like underwear between the leggings and your body.

[Alex Clark]

Are you somebody that's only wearing natural materials in all of your clothes?

[Paul Saladino]

Pretty much. I'm a guy, so it's easier for me. And I was talking with my team about this yesterday. Guys don't really have to wear as form fitting in their clothes. Right. Like I get it. Like I go to the gym and I'm like that those leggings look good on that woman. You understand that? That looks good. And if you're going to wear like baggy sweatpants or cotton shorts, it doesn't look quite the same. So. But I do think clothing is something to be aware of and like as a guy, it's easier to wear wool or cotton in basically everything we do. Now the one exception that I have is board shorts. When I'm surfing. I can't, I haven't been able to figure this out.

[Alex Clark]

Right. Yeah, they're. Yeah. Because they probably have plastic, don't they?

[Paul Saladino]

Well, they're polyester board shorts. Now it's, it's two hours a day, but it's two hours a day I'm in the ocean. So there's water. You know, it's not like directly, but this is crazy, Alex. So they've done studies in dogs, like Male and female dogs, and they actually took a male dog that still has its testicles and they put the male dog in polyester underwear. So they basically sling the dog's testicles and polyester underwear and dog's sperm count changes, it goes down and the hormones in the dog change. And the same happened in the female dogs. They put like little polyester underwear on female dogs.

[Alex Clark]

So some of these, I mean, is it crazy to say, like, if you are a woman who is consistently experiencing problems with infertility, but you also live in leggings, like that could be contributing?

[Paul Saladino]

Who knows what the contribution is? It's just one of these things that you have to be aware of. Yeah.

[Alex Clark]

Okay. Are you wearing AirPods on a flight?

[Paul Saladino]

Never. I don't use AirPods at all. So now into the realm of EMF, which is electromagnetic fields. And this gets complicated, but I'll try and keep it simple. What we're talking about now is radio frequency emf. So RF emf. There's also elf, which is extra low frequency emf. That's like what's coming out of the outlets in your house. That's a different type of EMF. When we're talking about WiFi or cell phones or AirPods, we're talking about radio frequency EMF. Now, interestingly, this is the same thing that's coming out of your microwave oven. It's basically the exact same frequency your cell phone, these AirPods, it's just like a microwave. So you can get these EMF detectors and look at this frequency, this RF band of emf, and you turn on the microwave and you can see a number, it'll tell you how many microw are coming out of the microwave. When you move away from the microwave, when it's on a few feet and you'll get like a million microwatts per meter squared. And when you turn on your AirPods, right when they are pinging, trying to connect with a device, or throughout the time you're wearing them, you'll get similar numbers with AirPods in your ears. 700,000. A million microwatts per meter squared. The difference is that you might wear AirPods six hours a day.

[Alex Clark]

They are. And especially you know who's doing this is the teenagers.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah.

[Alex Clark]

Every moment of life, they just, it's like a, it's almost like a comfort thing. They just leave the airpods in their.

[Paul Saladino]

Ears and we don't really know what's going on. We don't know what the long term effects of this on humans are. We've never really studied it we are living an experiment in so many ways. The pushback that you get on this is people will say, this is not ionizing radiation, right? This is not like X rays or radiation that actually ionizes or causes direct DNA damage. And nobody is saying that RF EMF is ionizing. But just because it's not ionizing doesn't mean that it's not harmful or able to affect biological systems. And there are many research papers. The research here is a little bit unclear and probably isn't well funded for a reason we don't really understand. There are certainly studies that suggest that it could affect biological systems at the level of cell membranes, at the level of potassium channels, at the level of calcium channels. So we're talking about microscopic channels being affected. So we don't really understand this. And I think it's just the better part of safety to think, like, should I really be doing that? Like, do I get headaches? Look, if you're not having an issue with any of this stuff, keep living your life. Keep using the AirPods and rocking your life. But if somebody has headaches or mood swings, you know, like, why not just change and see is this affecting me? This may be completely in my imagination, but maybe you've experienced this too. I think about EMF a lot. So most of the time my phone is on airplane. And when I do have my phone off of airplane and I'm using it in my hand, I can feel it in my hand.

[Alex Clark]

Really?

[Paul Saladino]

Yes.

[Alex Clark]

Oh, my gosh.

[Paul Saladino]

And I think, like, what is going on there? Right? I don't want to be carrying that around, like, in my pocket, my jeans. And there's actually studies in men that associate cell phone wearing on your pants with lower sperm counts, too. So there's a lot of things pointing in the direction that some of this stuff could be harmful for men at the level of testicles or women with ovaries or women with their breast tissue. And we don't really know. I. Putting an EMF signal through your brain for hours a day. What's. Who knows?

[Alex Clark]

Recently I had said that something online, like, I was like, oh, I don't believe in microwaves. I don't use them. And my audience is like, wait, what? Microwaves are bad? So they don't know. So. So what would you say about microwaves?

[Paul Saladino]

So again, we're back to the cell phones and the. The RF EMF with the AirPods at one level, if you turn the microwave on, you don't want to stand in front of the microwave. And that's what Our parents were telling us as kids. I remember having a microwave in my house as a child and staring at the food in the microwave and my mom would say, move away from the microwave. Well, that like you're getting this RF EMF at pretty high levels. It'd basically be like standing in front of a wifi router all day. And who. We just don't fully understand how that's affecting biological systems. Then secondarily there's this question of whether using microwaves to heat the food, which is moving the water molecules in the food, changes the molecular structure.

[Alex Clark]

Is it making healthy food less healthy?

[Paul Saladino]

I don't know. I mean, intuitively I feel like it's probably not a great thing, but I haven't seen any real solid evidence to say that it's like toxic if you put it in the microwave. I think there are, there's just easier ways around it.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah. I also think food tastes better cooked on the stove, but maybe that's just a personal.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Alex Clark]

I have met with so many huge players in health and wellness this past month. All of them have mentioned masa chips to me and how good they are. I keep asking, but have you tried the churro? Once. I was skeptical about a dessert chip with beef tallow, but if these are not the best freaking chips that I've had in so long. Scoop of vanilla ice cream with these cinnamon sugar chips in the bowl. Heaven. Masa chips are the number one best tasting and best textured seed oil free tortilla chips on the market. Not just my opinion, it's everyone's opinion who's tried them. There is a reason celebrities are going to air one. It is for their masa chip fix and of course Haley Bieber smoothie. Duh. Only three ingredients in these chips. Beef tallow, organic corn, real salt, no synthetic pesticides, gluten free, no preservatives, no artificial flavors, no GMOs, no seed oils. Masa chips are a real food snack. And to get 20% off go to masa chips.com use code real Alex Clark on your first [e-mail] that's code real Alex Clark for 20% off@masa chips.com they've got original carbonara lime churro and more. The best tasting seed oil free beef tallow chips are masa chips. Your dad was a doctor, your mom was a nurse. What do they think about what you've become in your career and all the things that you talk about?

[Paul Saladino]

They're both in their 70s, so I don't think they fully understand what I do. They think like, wait, what? You don't practice medicine and seeing patients anymore? I think at this point they have met people in their lives that have sort of independently found my content or benefited from what I do. And so they're starting to connect the dots and think like, wow, Paul is on this Instagram thing putting content out there and it's. And our friends are seeing it and it's benefiting their lives. Now, sadly, I'll just say this. My dad, 74, he's a traditional doctor, he's retired now, but I just think he never really was able to think outside the box and got so far in his medical career before I started thinking about this stuff and really hit my stride in my medical career that he hasn't been able to change his perspective terribly. He helped me edit my first book, but I haven't seen him make as many changes in his own life as I had hoped that he would. So I think that he understands it somewhat, but he's just kind of in this state where he's just 74, he's just living his life and they're happy that I'm enjoying what I'm doing and it seems to be helping people in the world, but I don't think they fully get it.

[Alex Clark]

Do you think they think you're like some kind of woo woo witch doctor?

[Paul Saladino]

I don't think they think that at all. It's just, they. I don't know. That's just the thing that we ask ourselves, right? Like, why won't they change more? I think they're just a little bit ossified in their ways. My mom tries. My mom has been into health for a long time, and both my father and my mother experienced a lot of health issues that I think could have been massively changed if they changed their diet or had better lifestyles. My dad always struggled with work, life, balance and never was really able to manage that. That was something that I never wanted to get out of balance with in my own life. My mom has had autoimmune issues which have really become something that I'm fascinated by. And that was the beginning of my journey trying to understand where these autoimmune issues are coming from in our population. She has autoimmune thyroid disease and an autoimmune joint condition which is somewhere between osteoart arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. A lot of diagnoses in medicine don't necessarily fit into the box that we hope they fit into. So my mom has Autoimmune issues and in her own life, really understands now that when she does gluten or bread or pasteurized dairy or certain foods, these get worse, and if she eliminates them, they get better. But not one rheumatologist or endocrinologist ever told her that in her younger life.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah, they never do. I just got diagnosed with Hashimoto's this year, so.

[Paul Saladino]

Okay.

[Alex Clark]

Yep. So I'm learning all of that and working through all of it and desperately missing the sourdough.

[Paul Saladino]

Well, yeah, yeah. You know, gluten's a little addictive like so many foods because of these, you know, gluten morphin proteins in there. So I think that some people, when they get rid of bread, it's a visceral. Yeah, yeah. It's a hard thing to miss.

[Alex Clark]

Why do so many Western medicine doctors say seed oils are harmless?

[Paul Saladino]

So this is tricky. So. Because they haven't read the research carefully. Okay, so doctors are busy. Right. We generally work in busy practices or hospitals. We see patients for seven minutes at a time average, and we get compensated per visit from insurance. Doctors are not incentivized to improve outcomes for patients. They're incentivized to see more patients. So doctors don't have time to read 12 articles in a meta analysis. They have time to read the abstract of a meta analysis. And a meta analysis is a summary of studies. So if you look at a few of the meta analyses looking at seed oil trials, randomized controlled trials, in the abstract of the meta analysis, Darius Mazaffarian or other authors who have written these meta analyses will say, seed oils appear to be neutral or trend toward benefit for cardiovascular health.

[Alex Clark]

Yes.

[Paul Saladino]

But when you actually look at the studies in the meta analysis. So a meta analysis is basically saying, I'm going to summarize all these trials for you. You don't actually really need to read the trials. I'm going to summarize them for you and tell you what they say. But if you go and you actually read the basically 10 randomized controlled trials on seed oils, you find that the majority of them have really serious methodological flaws that have been consistently overlooked. So this is the problem with a meta analysis. Whoever writes the meta analysis gets to say, I'm going to ignore that trial. I'm not going to include that trial in my meta analysis.

[Alex Clark]

So they're cherry picking.

[Paul Saladino]

They're cherry picking. And they can do something with statistics called a forest plot, where they'll say, well, this study looks like seed oils are beneficial. This study looks like they're harmful. We're going to average them together and in the end you end up with this sort of average of all of them saying seed oils are probably neutral or maybe beneficial. But if you look at the studies that are pulling them toward the seed oils beneficial, they're really poorly done studies. And what I mean by that is that most of these randomized controlled trials with seed oils were done in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and they haven't retested. There's not been a randomized controlled trial done with seed oils in probably 50 plus years. And in the 1950s and 1960s, even in the 1970s, we didn't really understand trans fat. That was the beginning of what we think of as nutrition in this country. In the 1950s was when Eisenhower had his heart attack for the first time. That was when Ancel Keys was talking about the seven countries study. The idea that saturated fat is consistently associated with higher cholesterol and that means more heart disease. Except when you go back and look at that study, that's completely cherry picking. Right. So there are many studies, there are many examples of studies where countries have been examined and though they might consume more saturated fat and have more cholesterol levels that are higher, they don't have higher levels of heart disease. Right. So the association between saturated fat, cholesterol and heart disease at a population level doesn't hold true when you look at more than just the studies that Anel Keys wanted to cherry pick. But on the back of that saturated fat fearing were these seed oil trials where they're comparing saturated fat rich oils, quote unquote, to these polyunsaturated fat rich seed oils, things like corn, canola. Canola actually wasn't around then. Mostly corn and soybean oil in the 1950s and 1960s. And the problem is in the control groups, which are the groups that were supposed to eat the saturated fat, they didn't either tell the people not to eat a trans fat laden margarine or they were actively giving them margarines that had lots of trans fat in them. And that's the problem is this confounds the results. If you're giving trans fats to your control group, which is the group that's supposed to be eating more saturated fat, do you think that might skew the results?

[Alex Clark]

Yeah, just a little bit.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah, that's very confusing. A lot of these randomized controlled trials on seed oils also had multiple interventions. So they don't just say you're going to eat butter and you're going to eat soybean oil for the next two years. They say you're going to eat butter might or may or may not have trans fats in it, because we're going to give you some butter with some margarine. It's a saturated fat margarine, but the margarine has trans fats. And this experimental group, we're going to give soybean oil, but we're also going to tell you, why don't you stop smoking and why don't you exercise a little more?

[Alex Clark]

Well, that's not very fair.

[Paul Saladino]

Why don't you eat some more vegetables and some fruit? And so you think, like, which of those interventions improved the seed oil trial? And that's the level of detail that you have to go to when you're looking at these seed oil trials. But that's what gets lost when you just read the abstract of the meta analysis.

[Alex Clark]

So if you were going to explain to a 5th grader why seed oils are bad, how would you do it?

[Paul Saladino]

They're fragile oils. So seed oils are refined, bleached and deodorized, oils that are harshly industrially extracted from a sunflower seed and a kernel of corn, a soybean. Have you ever tried to get oil out of a peanut?

[Alex Clark]

Yes. Not really natural.

[Paul Saladino]

Pretty hard to do. So you look at the way canola oil is made, for instance, canola is a rape seed, and it's not even a food that humans traditionally have ever eaten. But you have to grind it in a screw press, and then you get this kind of waxy substance and an oil which then has to be heated to over 450 degrees Fahrenheit and then bleached and extracted with hexane, which is a neurotoxin, and then deodorized, because people can clearly tell this is a rancid, oxidized oil at that point. Well, these seeds have these polyunsaturated fats, these fragile fats in them, and when you pull them out of the actual matrix of the seed, they basically become rusted, they become oxidized, they become rancid. And that's the problem, is that you have these fragile oils that are never meant to be separated from a kernel of corn, a sunflower seed, or a soybean, and you're putting them into a refined oil, which is then flammable in some ways, quote unquote, and then you easily oxidize the oil in storage or in your body. The other thing to consider is that humans would never have eaten this amount of these polyunsaturated fats. Historically, evolutionarily, to get 5 tablespoons of corn oil, which is the average of what an American eats in seed oils, we eat five to seven tablespoons of seed oils per day. Broadly, that's a major source of calories in our diet. To get five tablespoons of corn oil, you have to eat 60 to 70 ears of corn.

[Alex Clark]

60 to 70? Yeah. Nobody would be doing that.

[Paul Saladino]

You'd never get that much.

[Alex Clark]

And this is all coming primarily through the ultra processed food.

[Paul Saladino]

Exactly.

[Alex Clark]

Is how we're getting this.

[Paul Saladino]

Yes, because it's cheap and it acts as a preservative in the food.

[Alex Clark]

Is olive oil healthy?

[Paul Saladino]

So olive oil is different. Right. Olive oil is not refined, bleached and deodorized. It's generally pressed. So if you've ever seen how olive oil is made, they take the olives and they just take a press and they basically squeeze the olive oil out. This is what called cold pressing. That's much healthier. The problem with olive oil and avocado oil is you have to know the quality. So this is a piece of content that I'm going to release soon. But there was another analysis. They looked at the phthalates. So this is another type of endocrine disruptor in fragrances. So you walk into a room, you see the plugin in the corner, the glade plugins. It makes me freak out. I like throw the thing outside the Airbnb. That's Fates. You know, you, you go into a car and you see the little thing hanging in the rearview mirror, the little, the, the, the fragrant trees that you. That's like my worst nightmare in an Uber when there's like five of the trees and, and you just, you get out of the car smelling like the car because those phates carry the fragrance and they stick to your skin and they stick to your clothes. Well, those phase are endocrine disruptors. But if you look at olive and avocado oils, many of them had very high levels of the phthalates in them too. So you have to be really careful with the quality of the oil.

[Alex Clark]

Are you also supposed to look for single origin on these? Because sometimes they're cut with other oils.

[Paul Saladino]

And stuff and seed oil, so it gets to be kind of cumbersome. But I think olive oil can be a much healthier choice for an oil than a corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, the obvious seed oils. But you want organic, you want in glass.

[Alex Clark]

Yes. You have to buy the olive oil and glass. So many of Them are in the. These, like, plastic containers.

[Paul Saladino]

Containers. And all of these endocrine recepting chemicals from the plastic leech into the oil because they're both sort of lipophilic. And then you want it to be single source, because a single source olive oil is much less likely to be cut with a seed oil. Many olive oils are cut with seed oils. And now we know, as if it weren't hard enough already, that the oils also contain these phthalates. So some of them, I think it's a Consumer Reports issue that I can link to or I can study the link to. You can see the levels of these phalates. So basically we'll just zoom out for one second because I know people are probably just wringing their hands.

[Alex Clark]

No, I just want to point out that, like, I'm asking these questions, you don't even hesitate. You just immediately know the answer. I'm floored. This is so fun.

[Paul Saladino]

Just like humans are meant to thrive, like our biology, our, our steady state, our, like, homeostasis is thriving. But we live in 2024 in a toxic soup. And I think what's so cool about what you're doing with your podcast is you're educ and men that look, this is the way out of the toxic soup. And the only way out of the toxic soup is through intentional lifestyle choices. What you eat, what you put on your body, how you surround yourself in your home. But you can do it. You know, you can live in la, you can live in any city in the United States and live differently than the norm and escape the toxic soup. But if we just do what everyone else is doing, we're likely going to experience harmful effects of these things. And whether it's going to be cumulative hormone disruptors, phalates, BPA forever chemicals, heavy metals, stuff we haven't even talked about. This is, I think, a big reason that so many of us are struggling with autoimmune issues, with infertility, with obesity. And this is really why I stopped doing Western medicine and in the clinic and seeing patients, because I thought western medicine isn't telling us that these things are reversible and preventable with lifestyle changes. And so there's a way out. It's just that, look, all of the easy things in your life may be harmful for you unless you take intentional choices to navigate your life. Convenience will kill you. So that's just what the framework I wanted to give people. So olive oils can be good, but you have to know, are they high in phthalates? And there are Some that are much lower and some that are very high.

[Alex Clark]

So is it kind of one of those things of, like, with olive oil, you get what you pay for. Like, you might necessarily. Oh, really? Okay. So it doesn't. You don't have to, like, spend a ton.

[Paul Saladino]

You don't necessarily have to spend a ton. It's probably essentially the same cost for a good versus a poor olive oil. So we were in Sprouts yesterday, actually planning this YouTube and this reel out, and we were looking at avocado oils also. And there's one avocado oil, it's the Madhava Madhava, that had a huge amount of phthalates in it. And it had like 50,000 parts per billion of phthalates, which is. Which is a large number relative to what other avocado oils had. So, yes, an avocado oil is kind of like an olive oil. It's better than a seed oil. But when you're doing all those things, it's important to know like, okay, even the olive oils and avocado oils can be contaminated with endocrine disrupting chemicals. So just go the one little step for yourself and your family and educate yourself and say, okay, this test was done and this one is lower in these phthalates if I'm going to use it. The other thing that I'll add is just an asterisk on the conversation with olive and avocado is I don't think they should be heated. These are essentially salad dressing oils or just topping oils. If you want to put it on whatever, like a snack or something, people put it on, like bruschetta or something, you know, that's a topping oil. These oils are less stable at heat than an animal fat, which is more highly saturated.

[Alex Clark]

So what should we be cooking in instead?

[Paul Saladino]

So I think that tallow is probably the best thing to cook in. Butter is okay, but it will burn because of the milk solids. That's where you get into ghee. If the milk solids have been removed, it's going to burn at a lower temperature, at a higher temperature. So the idea here is the more saturated the oil is, the more stable it is for cooking. Okay, that's what you want. Now, we've been told, going back to Ancel Keys and this sort of what I believe is the incorrect diet heart hypothesis that saturated fat is bad for us because it raises our cholesterol. Hogwash. It's just. It's really not true.

[Alex Clark]

Wait, high cholesterol isn't bad.

[Paul Saladino]

High cholesterol needs to be interpreted in the context of your metabolic health. Okay, so this gets a little technical, but suffice it to say that of the saturated fats, only one of them, palmitic acid, actually raises your apob or LDL cholesterol. LDL plus a few other lipoproteins are what are technically considered to be apob B. And broadly, the mainstream paradigm is that apob containing lipoproteins are atherogenic. And I would. I would rebel against that. It's not true, in my opinion. What we see, what I believe is happening, is that people who are metabolically unwell, this is diabetes, pre diabetes, this metabolic dysfunction spectrum that our friends Casey and Cali means have been talking about so much recently. When you have metabolic dysfunction, your LDL may go up. That doesn't mean that LDL is causing atherosclerosis. It's an association which gets confusing for people. So that's, that's. It's really important in medicine. When you see two things associated that you understand, is there actually a causal connection? And if so, what direction does the IRO of causality go? You don't know which is causing which. Does that make sense? Yes. So if you, if you have slightly elevated or elevated apob containing lipoproteins, we can just say LDL cholesterol, colloquially known as, like, bad cholesterol. And you see that's associated with higher rates of cardiovascular disease. The question is, is the cardiovascular disease causing the apob to go up or is the apob causing the cardiovascular disease?

[Alex Clark]

It's like a chicken versus egg situation.

[Paul Saladino]

Exactly. You don't know which is causing it. And I would argue it's the cardiovascular disease which is driven by metabolic dysfunction, that leads to LDL going up. It's not the LDL directly causing cardiovascular disease. So in order for high cholesterol, high ldl, to cause cardiovascular disease, it really needs to be directly injurious to the endothelium. So these are veins on the outside of my arm here, but we have arteries.

[Alex Clark]

Careful, we're in la. Don't flash that around.

[Paul Saladino]

I know. I remember one time I was in the hospital in my residency, and there was a heroin addict, and he goes, man, you got some pipes.

[Alex Clark]

Oh, my gosh.

[Paul Saladino]

You got ropes. And I was like, oh, my God. But you can see this is a blood vessel, right? And inside of a vein or inside of an artery, which are usually deeper in our body, there is a thin layer on the very inside called the endothelium. Now, in order to start atherosclerosis you really have to injure the endothelium. That's the beginning of that. It's like, kind of like skinning your knee. You have to, like, get a. You have to get, like, a skin knee on the inside of your endothelium. In a metabolically healthy person, if you skin your knee, your body repairs it, right? In a metabolically unwell person, which is actually the majority of the population, most of us are metabolically unhealthy now because of this toxic stew that we're swimming in. Your body has trouble healing the skinned knee on the inside of your artery, and that is where atherosclerosis begins. Ldl, I believe, gets roped into that process, but didn't cause it. It's like the fireman arriving to the fire. Did the fireman cause the fire, or is the fireman going there as a response to the injury at the level of the endothelium? We're getting a little technical now. I'll just zoom back out, you know, and say that I don't believe that there is evidence to suggest that high cholesterol causes atherosclerosis. The underlying, most critical proximate event is metabolic health. If you are metabolically healthy, everything works better. If you are metabolically unwell, everything falls apart.

[Alex Clark]

What was it about your particular medical school experience that was so transformative for you?

[Paul Saladino]

I think it was even before medical school, honestly, I went to medical school knowing that I wanted to do something different. So before medical school, I was a pa. I worked in cardiology as a physician assistant for four years, and then I went back to medical school because I wasn't really happy doing my PA work as a. As a cardiology pa. I ended up doing a lot of assisting and a lot of, you know, I didn't get to have a lot of autonomy. And what is interesting, because until I was a PA in cardiology, I'd never seen Western medicine from the inside. I saw it from the outside. I saw what my dad was doing. And I've always been fascinated by, like, how does this incredible biological form that I'm inhabiting work? I want to know how to. How to, like, craft this and how to optimize it and how to avoid becoming decrepit later in my life. I want to be able to surf and ski and do fun things for the rest of my life. I don't want to get a loss of function. Like, I see so many people getting. My father. I saw my father, you know, aging and getting, like, limitations in his joints, and he can Just, he has so much less ability to have fun in his life now. I wanted to avoid all of that. So I thought, how do I keep myself healthy? So I went to. I went to PA school, first worked in cardiology, and then once I was in it, I thought, oh, man, this system looks is broken. We're not doing anything for people with any of these nutritional ideas or any of the root cause. We're just. We're literally just handing out meds, right? And the cardiologist I worked with would mime a box around the heart and say, this is where you think. Think here. They don't think. They're not thinking. Like, connect the brain or the gut. Like, how does your gut influence your heart? How does your metabolic health influence your heart? And what are the foods you eat have in terms of an effect on the metabolic health? We weren't thinking about any of that. We had basically rubrics, we had decision trees. If the patient has these things, you give them this statin. If they have an allergy, you give them this statin. If they have this high blood pressure, you give them this calcium channel blocker, thiazide diuretic. And it's just, look, that's one way to practice medicine, but it doesn't really serve the patient. So at that point, I kind of threw my hands up and said, okay, I gotta go back to medical school. I went to medical school late. I started medically school when I was 34.

[Alex Clark]

Oh, my gosh. Did you feel like you stood out?

[Paul Saladino]

Like, I was about 10 years older than everyone in my medical school class. I wasn't the oldest person, but I was, you know, one of the top five oldest people in my whole medical school class.

[Alex Clark]

Wow.

[Paul Saladino]

And then you do residency, so you do four years of medical school. Then I did four years of residency. So I finished medical school and residency when I was 42. And it was just. I had a lot of experience in my life with medicine. And then even before that, when I got out of college, I took six years off and I basically was in the wilderness, which is a strange thing to say, but I think it shaped the way that I think about the wild.

[Alex Clark]

Or did you have friends there, or did you make friends with the bears? Or what happened?

[Paul Saladino]

I mean, so I did a lot of things right. I moved around. I spent three or four months in New Zealand a few times by myself in the backcountry, hiking between huts, like swimming flooded rivers and trying not to drown. And then skiing. And then I hiked. At one point, I hiked from Mexico to Canada. I had one guy, it's called the Pacific Crest Trail. So I walked one summer all the way from Mexico to Canada.

[Alex Clark]

Who was the most interesting person you met on that trip?

[Paul Saladino]

Oh, you meet some characters?

[Alex Clark]

Yeah, there has to be somebody like real interesting.

[Paul Saladino]

I mean, I don't. It was so long ago. There were just interesting people like being on the trail. So this was in the year 2000, you know.

[Alex Clark]

Cool.

[Paul Saladino]

A lot of your audience might have just been born or not even born at that point, but. So in the year 2000, I was walking from Mexico to Canada and cell phones weren't really a thing then, but being disconnected from television, from news, from everything for three and a half months in nature. And this is going to sound woo woo, but it's actually really true. Like it just does something different to human. To humans just sleeping on the ground, seeing the stars, seeing the moon, just like seeing natural landscapes. It just changed me as a human in a way that's hard to describe. And I don't think everybody needs to like go live in caves.

[Alex Clark]

So then you did this and then you come back and then like, and then the next year we have 9, 11. Like that's crazy.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah, it was pretty crazy. I was in New Zealand when it happened.

[Alex Clark]

Wow.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah.

[Alex Clark]

Okay. So sorry I sidetracked you. So then. So you're doing all this before getting like into all the med school stuff.

[Paul Saladino]

So I think that just. I honestly think that taking six years off and just kind of spending time in the wilderness and spending time just really seeking out activities that brought me joy in the wilderness just changed the way that I thought about things. I think it just gave my brain maybe a little more time to develop without being indoctrinated or something. Because since then I've always kind of seen the world a little differently than other people. And that must have been a contributing factor. And so when I went to PA school, I was thinking a little differently. And then after seeing the way medicine worked from the inside as a physician assistant and going back to medical school, the minute I arrived at medical school on day one, I knew that I was just going to be a troublemaker in some sense and I wasn't going to think about things the way other people were. I. I wanted to build some sort of an integrative holistic practice from day one. And then it just ended up that I actually sort of just left medicine completely in the practicing sense and have just been doing this free educational content because I think that's the best way to actually reach the most people.

[Alex Clark]

Really?

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah, I think so. Not that practicing medicine every day is not a valiant thing to do. It's just when I started making content, I thought, oh, this is really great. Like a lot of people can identify with this content and I can reach a lot of people and maybe this is my calling rather than being in an office every day.

[Alex Clark]

My freezer stopped working recently when I went out of town and I definitely cried because I got home and all the food that I had in there went bad, including my Good Ranchers meat and seafood. So I walked in and I actually said to Moji, I go, it smells weird in here. When you choose to buy your meat from Good Ranchers, you're supporting local ranchers who embody the values that make our nation strong and enjoying meals that are as wholesome as they are delicious. And this is why I was so sad. Good Ranchers recently created a groundbreaking innovation in the world of chicken nuggets. Seed oil free nuggets. No other nugget on the market here or abroad guarantee a pure seed oil free recipe that prioritizes your family's health without sacrificing flavor or crunch. Right now, Good Ranchers is doing a presidential promo for a limited time. If you subscribe to any Good Ranchers box, you can choose a free meat add on for four years. Choose from chicken breast, ground beef, bacon or salmon to add to your box free. Whichever protein you pick, Good Ranchers guarantees it's all American, all around delicious. Try Good Ranchers seed oil free chicken nuggets, the only ones on the market here or abroad. Go to goodrangers.com use code clark to get 25 off your first box. Free shipping and a free meat ad on for the next four years. That's good ranchers.com code clark good ranchers American meat delivered. So why did a strict carnivore diet at first appeal to you and then why did you switch to animal based which includes fruit, honey. Yeah. And dairy. Right?

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah. So I have struggled with autoimmune issues my whole life. When I was a kid, I was overmedicated by my parents for my asthma. So asthma and eczema are part of this allergic triad. Hay fever is the third part of this triad. So like allergies, it's called atop or atopic dermatitis is eczema. And I remember getting Theodore, which is theophilin in my applesauce as a kid and it tastes bitter and it makes you kind of hyper. That's the way we used to, we used to treat asthma was with an oral medication called Theophilin, my parents would force me to take my albuterol inhaler at dinner. I didn't want to do the medications, but I was. They were trying to do the best for me, but they really overmedicated me because I had these issues as a child. Now, granted, a. I was a child eating a standard American diet. I know my parents wanted to do good, but I was sitting at, you know, in the living room with my father, watching tv, eating a hungry man TV dinner.

[Alex Clark]

Really?

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah, full. I mean, it was in the 1980s, so it probably wasn't as bad as junk food is now, but it was still pretty horrible. And surely full of seed oils. I was eating pasteurized milk, you know, factory farmed meat, factory farmed chicken seed oils and all of the grains. No limitations, no real attention to. To nutrition. When I was a kid. And it wasn't any surprise to me in retrospect, that I had autoimmune issues. So I struggled with them throughout my life. And they sort of, they were, they fluctuated. Sometimes they were worse, sometimes they were better. But I had a number of eczema flares in my life that were pretty bad. And eczema is like a itchy, bumpy rash. And sometimes it's just cosmetic or a nuisance, but other times it can be a really, a really problematic thing. When I was in medical school, I started doing jiu jitsu, like wrestling on mats. And when I would get eczema on my knees, it would get infected from the mats. And you get sort of a super infection called impio. So you get a skin infection where the skin is cracked and open from this eczema. And I mean, there. I've had times in my life where eczema was so bad that it, it affected my. Just my sense of self. I mean, I remember being on a date with a woman when I was in residency, and I had eczema on my arm so bad that I told her it was poison oak. I don't know why I was so embarrassed to tell her it was eczema.

[Alex Clark]

Wow.

[Paul Saladino]

But that was really the, the, the breaking point for me when I was in my residency. So I'm probably like late 30s. I'm just sick of this recurrent eczema my whole life. And I'm thinking, why do I still have eczema at that point in my life? In my late 30s, I'm still eating. I'm eating a much better diet. I'm eating basically entirely organic. I'm eating meat. I'm eating fruit, but I'm eating nuts. I'm eating seeds, I'm eating vegetables, and I might have eaten milk sometimes, but, you know, I was eating basically like a paleo type diet. So not really restricting any food group, but not eating junk food anymore. And still I'm having major flares of eczema. So kind of through my hands up. And I heard about this thing called the carnivore diet. I actually heard Jordan Peterson talking about it on Joe Rogan's podcast.

[Alex Clark]

No way.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah. And I'm in residency, right. So I've been to medical school. And I just thought, this is so interesting. Autoimmune illness is rampant, and I think that autoimmunity affects so many of us. You're having your issues with it too, right? In ways that we're not even understanding as humans what is causing us to have these autoimmune issues. And I heard him talk about Carnivore and I thought, what if it's some of these plant foods that we think are healthy that are actually triggering our immune system? And I can talk about why they might do that in a moment. But I did a strict carnivore diet at that point for a year and a half. Eczema gets way better, completely resolves. But I'm only eating meat and organs like liver and heart and animal fat and salt for a year. A year and a half.

[Alex Clark]

A year and a half. You did only those things.

[Paul Saladino]

Only those things.

[Alex Clark]

And then when and why did you decide to be like, okay, let me add some other stuff.

[Paul Saladino]

So eventually I started to have issues with electrolyte balance, probably related to long term ketosis. So there's a lot, lot of talk about ketosis or keto diets or low carbohydrate diets now. But I really think that in a lot of people, those are very stressful. And what we know is that insulin is this peptide hormone in the human body that gets released when you eat carbohydrates. It also gets released when you eat protein, not so much with fat. But insulin is valuable. Insulin gets a bad rap. Some people in the health space are saying you should never see insulin. You should minimize it as much as possible. I don't believe that. I think that insulin is clearly valuable for humans. And insulin gets out of whack when you get underlying metabolic dysfunction. But insulin doesn't cause the metabolic dysfunction. It's something else, which we can talk about. But what happens is when you don't get enough of an insulin signal, and on a ketogenic diet, you get a very low insulin signal. You don't hold on to electrolytes at the level of your kidneys. I was never taught this in medical school. You need insulin to reabsorb sodium, potassium, calcium and chloride at the level of your kidneys and the descending tubules and all of these loops within your kidneys that sort of help you manage your fluid and your electrolytes and your human body. So it's very interesting to me that in my case and in a lot of people's cases who do long term keto, you end up with just massive electrolyte insufficiency and you just.

[Alex Clark]

So what's the max amount of time you should do? Strict hardcore carnivore diet.

[Paul Saladino]

You know, I think it's going to be very dependent on the individual. And I actually don't think most people need to start there at all. What I learned from it was valuable though, and I don't want to gloss over this. What I learned was that many of the foods that I thought were healthy, whether it was salad or nuts or seeds or in my case, probably mushroom extract, were probably triggering my eczema. So there's value there for people to understand that. A lot of autoimmune issues, I believe, are triggered. Not entirely. This isn't the panacea, but I think for a lot of people, autoimmune issues can be triggered by foods we think are healthy. Oats or quinoa or spinach or kale or broccoli or almonds.

[Alex Clark]

Well, it's just like an individual food allergy.

[Paul Saladino]

It's very individual. Yeah. A food sensitivity, probably. Yeah. And a carnivore diet is so precise that it can really help understand that. But my transition to animal based was this sort of thought process of saying, can I eat more foods, more variety, more flavor, more color, but also not trigger my immune system. And what I found is that for me and for a lot of other people, just through experimentation and sort of crowdsourcing this information, you think, oh, when you think about plants, the fruit is the colorful part of the plant that the plant wants you to eat. And this is the problem with vegetables, I think for a lot of people is that vegetables are the leaves, the stems, the roots and the seeds of plants. And these are the parts that plants don't want you to eat. So there's a clear communication going on here, or an attempt at communication between plants and animals or plants and humans. These are the parts of the plant that the plant needs to photosynthesize to gather Energy from the sun to make sugar, to have their energy. But plants can't run away from us. So between, you know, over the last 400 to 500 million years of divergent animal and plant evolution, plants have developed thousands and thousands of defense chemicals. We're never really told about this. And humans and other animals, in turn, have developed mechanisms, enzymatic systems, to detoxify those plant defense chemicals. But not all of us are great at that. And some of us have problems with those defense chemicals, and they can be harmful for humans. So the idea that kale is entirely good for humans, I would argue with that.

[Alex Clark]

So you think kale is bull?

[Paul Saladino]

I do think kale is bull. Generally. That's a black and white statement that has kind of been made historically. And it's kind of fun because it gets people thinking about it.

[Alex Clark]

What other vegetables? But, like, you were really anti kale, but is there any other top vegetables? You're like, do not eat this.

[Paul Saladino]

Spinach is a big one.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Paul Saladino]

Spinach is a big one because of oxalates. So oxalates are essentially oxalic acid. It's a dicarboxylic acid. It's a breakdown product of amino acids in the human body that we can get large amounts of in food much, much higher than we would.

[Alex Clark]

So then what's this, like, whole campaign? Like, why was it drilled into us as kids that, like, spinach is so healthy? Like, that's the ultimate vegetable?

[Paul Saladino]

I think Popeye just led us all astray. Like, I. I don't know. I mean, there's. There's. There's urban myth that potentially the whole deal with Popeye was related to a misplaced decimal point having to do with iron.

[Alex Clark]

What?

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah. Okay, so if you think about. So let's just think about spinach, because it's a good model system. So when you think about spinach, like, what's beneficial about spinach? Well, it probably has some B vitamins, it has some folate, and it has iron in it. And a lot of people are deficient in iron. It's hard to get meat for all of us, you know, whether we don't can't afford it or we don't have access to it. Like, people all over the world often don't eat enough meat. So plant foods with iron can be valuable. Iron deficiency anemia appears to be very common in humans, especially women who menstruate every month and lose iron when they're bleeding. But the iron in spinach is just not nearly as bioavailable as the iron in meat. Which is heme iron.

[Alex Clark]

What kind of meat would have the most red meat. Okay.

[Paul Saladino]

Or dark meat? Chicken. In fact, there's. If you think about organs, the spleen has the most iron. Some people eat. I've eaten spleen in the past. That's a whole separate story.

[Alex Clark]

I'm not surprised.

[Paul Saladino]

I know, right? But in terms of things that we commonly eat, it would be red meat that has the most iron in it.

[Alex Clark]

So if somebody goes full carnivore, what are like the, the immediate benefits they're going to start seeing?

[Paul Saladino]

I think that their gut is probably going to get quieter. They're probably going to have less gas and bloating. Although some people, when they cut out all fiber, go the other direction and get a little diarrhea. Because sometimes we need the fiber to hold on to or at least, least manage the recycling of bile acids. But some people who go strict carnivore do have like, less problems with their gut. Less gas, less bloating. A lot of people go strict carnivore do have improvements in autoimmune issues, whether it's autoimmune thyroid disease or skin issues like psoriasis and eczema, or autoimmune gut issues like Crohn's colitis or ulcerative colitis. Basically, you know, being in the carnivore space for years now and then sort of being carnivore adjacent. Now, I've heard probably thousands of stories, almost every diagnosed autoimmune condition getting better with intentional dietary changes. But what's interesting to me is that I haven't really heard that many people say that these things come back or get worse when they add a few foods in their diet, like fruit.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Paul Saladino]

That make it much more manageable long term.

[Alex Clark]

So there's a lot of moms in my audience listening that have toddlers struggling with eczema. What would be like your first steps of like, what to eliminate or what to change to help with that?

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah. I have a good friend, actually, Mike Michael Chandler, the UFC fighter, recently messaged me and said, oh, one of my boys has bad eczema. And I said, just simplify his diet. So if your child has eczema, I would think about meat and think about fruit.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Paul Saladino]

And that's as simple as that in the beginning. And just do it for a few weeks, two to three weeks, I think you're going to see changes. So I'm working on another book now, and my literary agent's mother in law recently did carnivore for eight days. She did it for a month, but within eight days, her eczema was completely gone.

[Alex Clark]

Completely gone.

[Paul Saladino]

Completely gone. So you just hear these things. So I think that I just mentioned that to show the timeframe that we're working with here.

[Alex Clark]

Yes.

[Paul Saladino]

If there's a mother listening to this and their toddler has eczema, you have to think like, okay, are they drinking pasteurized milk?

[Alex Clark]

Why would pasteurized versus raw milk flare up? Eczema.

[Paul Saladino]

So this is interesting. The. There are a number of milk proteins like the whey protein that are changed. The conformation of the protein changes when we pasteurize the milk, and the unpasteurized whey proteins appear to help modulate our immune system. So you really lose. You lose these immunomodulatory benefits of the whey protein in milk when you pasteurize it. Now there's a whole conversation about raw milk that we can hopefully get to. But if you can get raw milk from a reputable source and you believe it's safe, Every raw food has a risk of food contamination, including raw milk. But there's a huge listeria outbreak right now. There was one in Canada with almond milk, and there's one going on right now with deli meat. So any processed food has a risk of listeria. And every year, many, many more people get sick from eating raw vegetables than get sick from eating raw milk. There are probably less absolute number of people drinking raw milk, but there are many sources of contamination that can get us sick. Raw milk could certainly be one of them. But if you can get it from a good source, it can be a very safe food, because raw milk actually has many, I would say, healthy organisms or many good organisms in it that limit the growth of the pathogenic organisms.

[Alex Clark]

Aren't we seeing like close to a hundred percent when it comes to vitamins, minerals, enzymes in raw milk, and then it's like less than 50 and pasteurized. Am I right or wrong?

[Paul Saladino]

I haven't seen that study. So you definitely get changes in the flora. So you're. When you pasteurize the milk, there's nothing in it, and you've basically made a petri dish. So anything that gets in that milk now is going to grow. So it's like your gut, right? You don't want to have no bacteria in your gut. You want to have the right type of bacteria in your gut. Because the, the issue, the answer for most people when they have gut issues, is not to just take massive antibiotics like vancomycin and completely sterilize your gut, because we know that as humans, we can never be sterile. This is the fallacy of washing your hands. You can never get all of the bacteria off your hands.

[Alex Clark]

Wait, so do you not wash your hands?

[Paul Saladino]

Not with soap.

[Alex Clark]

Interesting.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah. Okay, well, the other thing to consider here, and there are so many little interesting offshoots, is that so many of the soaps contain endocrine disrupting chemicals like triclosan or phalanx states.

[Alex Clark]

I. I bring my own soap. I bring my own body wash and soap everywhere I go.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah, you can.

[Alex Clark]

So you just think we only need water?

[Paul Saladino]

I think you really only need water. You know, in terms of personal care products, these are challenging. And many of the personal care products, whether it's soaps, whether it's body washes, shampoos, conditioners, a lot of them have fragrances. I mean, look at the label. It's probably 45 ingredients. Half of them I can't pronounce. There are endocrine receptive chemicals in there. Like crazy. Potentially pfas forever chemicals. So we're talking about swimming in a toxic soup. We are literally swimming in a toxic soup when we go in the shower and, you know, use the loofah and just use a body wash that's full of these chemicals. And a lot of it can be absorbed through the skin. So I just shower with water. Now, granted, I live in Costa Rica and I'm a dude, so I don't really get super into this stuff, but I think that most women could probably scale down all of their soaps and body washes significantly and improve. And you got to think about lotions and things you're probably putting on your face. There was recently a study that looked at this and they looked at these endocrine disrupting chemicals in women. And women who switched to low or no endocrine disrupting products for, I think it was 30 days, had a massive reduction in their urinary phates and the urinary hormone disrupting chemicals. So we know, we know these are affecting us. And at baseline, most women are probably significantly higher than they should be in these endocrine disrupting chemicals.

[Alex Clark]

So if you're on a first date and the girl is wearing perfume, do, you know, not ask her on a second.

[Paul Saladino]

Oh, it's pretty tough for me. It's pretty tough for me. I mean, look like the first date, maybe the woman doesn't know, like, what. Yeah.

[Alex Clark]

How much grace is Paul Saladino giving women on all these different lifestyle things? That's what I want to know.

[Paul Saladino]

Challenging, you know, so I'm old fashioned when it comes to dating. And I try to have at least a phone conversation with a woman before I go out with her in person.

[Alex Clark]

That's good.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah. And maybe even a video chat. Who knows? And so, you know, maybe a woman knows what I'm about. And I mean, I've even asked women like, hey, just please don't wear any lotions.

[Alex Clark]

Or my gosh, you say that before the first date.

[Paul Saladino]

Sometimes that's controversial. I'm completely like, like, because, you know.

[Alex Clark]

Modern women today, they're going to be like, he's already telling me what to do.

[Paul Saladino]

But look, I'm. I'm all about the no in David. Like, the no is so powerful. Like, if I say to women, like, hey, I'm really sensitive to fragrance and I don't like these things. Like, do you mind not wearing lotions? And she says I have to wear lotion, we're probably not a fit already, right? I just believe that when you're dating someone, like, why not get all of the things that are important out right up front? Like, like values. And what are all the sticking points for me in dating? Like, whatever future vision, I want to be aligned with all that stuff as early as possible. I'm not trying to pretend. So, yeah, if I can. If I can go on a date with a woman and say, like, hey, please don't wear any lotions. She says, oh, I don't use any stuff anyway. I'm like, okay, great, Cool.

[Alex Clark]

Like, green flag. Yeah.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah. So I just think I don't see the point in hand soap. Right? Like, you, you're trying to sterilize bad bacteria on your hands. Look, unless you're in a hospital working with patients with methicillin resistant staph aureus, you don't need to sterilize your hands. There are literally billions, if not trillions of bacteria at any one point, at any one time on the skin all over your body. You wash your hands with an antibacterial soap, you'll kill some bacteria. And immediately, the bacteria from your elbow are just going to walk right onto it.

[Alex Clark]

Oh, they do they just crawl down?

[Paul Saladino]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Alex Clark]

Like, hey, boys.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah, you can see that we can see this all the time, right? Like, you are. We are covered from head to toe. Every orifice, our vagina, our anus, like, it's just covered our mouths, our eyes, we're covered in bacteria. And this is not a bad thing. It just means that we want the right type of flora throughout our body. We know.

[Alex Clark]

Which is exactly what we were talking about. With raw milk?

[Paul Saladino]

Yes. It's the same type of thing with raw milk. This is kind of the terrain idea. Like, it's not bad to have a milk that has commensal or healthy or friendly, quote, bacteria and organisms in it. You think about breast milk, like, if a human baby is getting milk from a mother's breast, like that Breast milk is not sterile.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah. You're not boiling your breast milk before you feed it to your child.

[Paul Saladino]

Why would you do that?

[Alex Clark]

But then what people would say, Paul and I get this a lot, is that, okay, there is an argument for a human being to drink another human's milk, but why would we have to drink milk made for a baby cow?

[Paul Saladino]

This is really interesting. Mammalian milk is very compatible across species. It's really interesting. I mean, whether it's cow, whether it's horse, whether it's camel, whether it's bison.

[Alex Clark]

Goat.

[Paul Saladino]

Goat. I love goat milk. Yeah. I mean, we see the benefits of mammalian milk across species. So there is an argument to be made, or at least a question to be asked, like, is a cow's milk good for me as a human? And when it's unpasteurized, it sure looks like it is.

[Alex Clark]

So question on, on goat milk. Does should goat milk also be raw or. Yes, pasteurized.

[Paul Saladino]

Absolutely raw.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Paul Saladino]

And goat milk has about 11 to 15% less lactose. So a lot of people are lactose intolerant. We can just talk about the milk for a second. And technically, there haven't been any solid studies to show that raw milk is better in terms of lactose intolerance. But anecdotally, there are a lot of people who report that they can tolerate raw milk from a lactose perspective better. So the, the jury's still out on this. If someone is lactose intolerant, an adult or a child, and they want to drink a raw milk, the best way is probably to ferment the milk to get a yogurt or a kefir, which is sort of a, a, an Eastern European version of yogurt that's fermented at a lower temperature for more time. So kefir. Some people say kefir, but it's technically kefir.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah, yeah. So you can get a kefir or a yogurt. Those are going to have far less lactose. And a lot of the hard cheeses can have essentially no lactose in it.

[Alex Clark]

Jamie McGuire told me to stop dermaplaning, but I can't. My skin is seriously the softest and best. When I do too, things Dermaplane and use Neemi Skincare. Did you know that Neemi Skincare, which is a conservative owned brand in the usa, has an entire clean line that I consulted on. If you click each individual product on their site you can see if it's regular Neemi or Neemi Clean. In the clean line you're going to find their makeup removing cleansing oil, the Pure Punch Protein cleanser, an AHA HA toner, their age defying antioxidant moisturizer, and the Nature Burst Antioxidant mask. The clean line still uses powerful anti aging ingredients like glycolic acid, green tea extract, hyaluronic acid and more. The skincare difference you see in me is Nene feel amazing about choosing to support an all American brand with all American values. Go to Nini skincare.com use code Alex Clark for 10% off. That's Nene skincare.com with code Alex Clark for 10% off Little Bean, are you drowning in student loan debt? Do you feel like there's no way out? Are you discovering that your whole family is affected by this? If you have private student loan debt and are behind or even in default, you got to call my friends at why Refi? Why Refi refinances private student loans that others won't touch and provides you with a custom loan payment based on your ability to pay. They can reduce your monthly payment and your total cost plus they don't care what your credit score is. Why Refi is not a debt settlement company. You'll receive a low fixed interest rate that you couldn't get anywhere else and a pathway to making all the stress and worry come to an end. Just give them a call at 888-502-2612. That's 888-502-2612 or go to wirefi.com that's y r e f y.com if private student loan debt is wrecking your life, it doesn't have to take it from me. Call why refi at 888-502-2612 or go to wirefi.com is there such a thing as a non toxic non stick pan?

[Paul Saladino]

In my opinion, no. So you want to use stainless steel probably is the best thing. And there are ways to use a stainless steel pan to make it non stick. Basically the mercury effect. You can put the water on the pan and see it move into these like little granules. If the pan is over 400 degrees Fahrenheit, you can make it so that a stainless steel pan can be Essentially non stick as well. You don't need non stick.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah. I always tell people, well, I'm doing cast iron or stainless steel only.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah.

[Alex Clark]

And then glass dishes in the oven.

[Paul Saladino]

Exactly.

[Alex Clark]

What are some of the biggest examples of things the FDA says are healthy but aren't?

[Paul Saladino]

I don't know if the FDA necessarily says things are healthy, but the biggest issue here is this. It's called the GR S system, the grass system, the generally recognized as safe system. Something I've been thinking about a lot recently. There are 5 to 10,000 chemicals that are allowed in our food supply in the United States. And only a fraction, Perhaps less than 5% of those have actually been tested for safety. There is this sort of grandfathering process that's happened in the last last 20 years at the FDA, I believe, where the companies that make these chemicals can actually just say, oh, this is safe. They can like grandfather it in. So in Europe, there are 400 to 500 of these chemicals in the food supply. And in the United States we have almost 10,000 chemicals. So again, we're living in a toxic soup. And if you are looking at a label and there are chemicals that you don't understand, do not eat that food.

[Alex Clark]

Okay. When it comes to your anti vegetable stance.

[Paul Saladino]

Yes.

[Alex Clark]

How do you debate people living in Asian countries who are eating all this rice, rice, vegetables, grains, and they're living longer?

[Paul Saladino]

Well, they're not necessarily living longer. So the longevity thing is a very tricky thing to assay. People appear to have a long lifespan. In Hong Kong, for instance, it's one of the top three or four places in the world. But they also eat about a pound and a half of meat per day. So Hong Kong is a huge meat eating place. They live a long time. The thing about vegetables, I'll say this, and probably should have said this earlier. If you're thriving, don't change anything about your diet.

[Alex Clark]

Okay, that's great. Tip.

[Paul Saladino]

The advice here is for people who are struggling. They have kids with eczema, they have eczema, eczema, they have infertility, they have psoriasis.

[Alex Clark]

Let's eliminate some stuff.

[Paul Saladino]

Let's eliminate some stuff. If you're thriving, don't change anything. Right.

[Alex Clark]

I like that.

[Paul Saladino]

And the idea is, if you're not thriving, understand that it's time to question your nutritional dogmas and understand that some of the things that you think are healthy might be causing you issues. And that's why I just wanted to offer this alternative perspective. Like, okay, just go to like meat and fruit, like an animal based Perspective and see how it helps. If things get better, you can add them back one at a time. If somebody's eating spinach salad a few times a week and they don't have issues, no big deal. I think that could lead to issues long term. But generally I just say if you're thriving, don't change anything. But if you're not, here's an option for you that you might not get from western medicine.

[Alex Clark]

If your family is on a budget and you can't afford the organic grass fed meat, but you could afford commodified feedlot beef, or your other option is ultra processed food, is it still healthier to eat the commodified beef versus ultra processed food food?

[Paul Saladino]

Absolutely.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Paul Saladino]

And I don't want people to let perfect be the enemy of good. Yes, commodified beef is still incredibly healthy for humans. There are so many nutrients in meat. Right. Whether it's beef or chicken or pork or fish or eggs, other animal foods that are not replaced by plant foods. This is the fallacy of a vegan diet. You cannot get the nutrients that a human needs to thrive unless you eat animal foods. And being vegetarian is a step in the right direction. But even vegetarian diets lack, lack many nutrients that are critical. So whether you're eating chicken or beef or pork or fish, you're getting unique nutrients that are valuable. There are caveats to all of those, especially with fish because of the heavy metals. But people can kind of research that. But I do not think that women or men should fear red meat. That's a huge thing that I stand for, is that red meat is such a health food for humans. And don't let perfect be the enemy of good. If you can only afford the commodity, be fine. But I will say that increasingly there are pretty darn affordable, better options.

[Alex Clark]

You can go Aldi, Costco, both. They are two options that there has been. Organic grass fed beef, five, six dollars a pound.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah, pretty good.

[Alex Clark]

Are you taking probiotics?

[Paul Saladino]

No.

[Alex Clark]

Why?

[Paul Saladino]

I don't think everyone needs probiotics.

[Alex Clark]

Are they a little bit like overdone?

[Paul Saladino]

I think so. I drink raw milk every day.

[Alex Clark]

Right, right.

[Paul Saladino]

And I drink kefir, which is a type of probiotic. I don't always drink caffe. I tend to favor the milk over those other things. But yeah, probiotics are an interesting thing. Some people get worse with them them and some people get better. It's a very complex. It's a complex thing. I don't think everyone need probiotics.

[Alex Clark]

Would you drive a Tesla or other Electric car.

[Paul Saladino]

This is an interesting question. So I thought for a while that I wouldn't and I actually tested it. So Teslas appear to have about the same amount of RF emf. So that we talked about with cell phones as regular cars.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Paul Saladino]

The difference with a Tesla is the magnetic field, which is something you have to test with a different type of meter. You can get a Trifield meter and test both RF EMF and magnetic field. But I was recently in Austin and I went on a drive with a friend in his Tesla and the magnetic field was not as bad as I thought. Okay, so maybe the newer ones are shielded in a certain way. Now the, the question is very important and it's a very astute question because when you have an electric motor, you are going to have a bigger magnetic field. And I don't think it's the worst idea for parents to actually get a, a meter that can tell you what the magnetic field is around your house. Because if you live near high voltage power lines, this is a big deal. You're looking at a screen that's telling you how many milligauss there are at this time. And I'm driving the Tesla, it might be 1 milligauss or 0.9. And at 1 point we stopped and it went up to 8 milligauss. And I thought, aha, look, the Tesla's horrible. And I looked up and there's a power line across the sort of driveway we were in. So it's the power line that was causing it to be so high. So a lot of us don't understand. And I was. So I was at Heart and Soil Headquarters, which is this desiccated Oregon company that I founded, and it's in Texas. And I was walking around getting the baseline reading before I got in the Tesla the of the magnetic field. And at one point it went to like 16 or 17 milligau. And I thought, what is going on with this? And I look up and there's a power line going right above me.

[Alex Clark]

Whoa.

[Paul Saladino]

So what I'll say is that there are potential environmental exposures, especially power lines that are a much bigger deal than Tesla's. Based on my limited testing.

[Alex Clark]

What is your opinion on vasectomies?

[Paul Saladino]

I'd have to do some research on this. I don't have one. I'm not an expert here, but I think, isn't there some research that they potentially are, are connected with increased rates of testicular cancer?

[Alex Clark]

Yes, I've heard that. Also chronic pain that develops at any point, like could be years later, all of a Sudden he develops chronic pain and sometimes it's mild and then other times it's completely debilitating. We're seeing.

[Paul Saladino]

It's probably not a good idea.

[Alex Clark]

Yeah. Okay.

[Paul Saladino]

The human body is really well designed. We shouldn't muck it up too much. I get, people want to manage their fertility and they want to manage family planning. But I would think really hard before I, I cut the epididymis, you know.

[Alex Clark]

Whether it's birth control or with vasectomy, you can only get pregnant a handful of days a month. I, I just, I'm like, track your cycle. Don't have sex on those days.

[Paul Saladino]

I'm a man, so I only have one side of the relationship in this. But. So you asked me if I won't go on a date with woman who's wearing lotions. I won't go on a date with a woman who's on birth control because there's no point.

[Alex Clark]

Anytime I speak to high school or college age boys, I tell them to break up with their girlfriends who are birth control. If they won't get off.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah. Why am I going to go on a date with a woman who. I mean, there's solid studies to show that women on birth control and I'm sure your audience knows this because you've educated about this. They make different choices in terms of mate selection. Right. Women tend to choose men with different genetics when they're on birth control. So why would I go on a date with a woman who's on birth control?

[Alex Clark]

Yeah, because it's almost like she's like got like a shield over her eyes to like truly see you.

[Paul Saladino]

I'm going to be confused in terms of attraction to her pheromones. She's going to have a confusion and attraction to my pheromones. And again, going back to the lotions, like we need to smell each other's pheromones. Stop masking it.

[Alex Clark]

So I first got introduced to you because of seeing the nourished documentary on. That's how I discovered you. And through that documentary fell in love with Lindsay Mila. She's been on the show. She's been like a very, very popular guest with my audience. What is the first food women should eat after birth?

[Paul Saladino]

I mean, it's meat.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Paul Saladino]

It's red meat. If you can throw a little liver in there, that's amazing. But yeah, I hope, I hope your audience will watch that documentary on YouTube. It's incredible.

[Alex Clark]

What is your action plan for anybody who wants to try Carnivore or clean up their diet? And lifestyle. Like, what are we doing today?

[Paul Saladino]

We've talked about a lot of things on this podcast that make it all seem very complex. And I was at Sprouts the other day, and there was a woman there checking me out. And, you know, she didn't know who I was, but she said, that woman in line just told me that you're an Instagram influencer. So I looked at your page, and it looks really interesting, but I'm confused. What do I do with diet? And I said, it sounds confusing, but it's really simple. Like, you just need to, obviously, number one, cut out as many processed foods as possible possible. Obvious. We all know what these are. Number two, it's like, just eat meat and fruit for a little while and see how you feel. Like, it doesn't have to be complex. And you think about this evolutionarily, which is kind of a fun thought experiment for most of us. Like, take yourself back 200,000 years in a time machine. It's hard for us, most of us, to conceive of this unless we like to hunt or camp. But, like, you're in a tribe, you're in a forest, you're in the jungle. What do you guys want to eat today? Like, you can't eat McDonald's. You can't eat Chick Fil A. You can't eat Shake Shack. You're going to go hunt an animal and gather some fruit if it's in season and get some honey. Maybe the women are going to dig. Going to go dig up some tubers. So, like, fine, if you want to eat some white potato or some sweet potato, no big deal. But, like, that's the extent of it. Like, it's unlikely that you're going to go harvest some grains 2,200 thousand years ago. It's probably. It's extremely unlikely, right? You're not going to go eat some seed oils. You're not going to go eat 60 ears of corn. You're not going to have tortilla chips cooked in canola oil. So just think about where humans have come from and try and align what you're doing with where we are as humans. Because. Because we have amnesia as humans, we don't. We don't really realize that our biology is much older than we are. It's 20, 24. And we just think, like, this is normal. For my whole Life, I've seen McDonald's on the corner, and I've seen macaroni and cheese in the grocery store, but these are just recent additions to the human diet. For 350,000 years. The majority of that, 99% of that we've mostly eaten meat and fruit as humans.

[Alex Clark]

If you could give one remedy to heal a sick culture, and that could be physically, spiritually or mentally, what would it be?

[Paul Saladino]

I think it starts with diet. I really think it starts with diet because people don't know where to start. Right? Do I need to exercise more? Do I need to cut off the WI FI router? Just improve the quality of the foods you eat and everything gets better.

[Alex Clark]

Okay, you have some really exciting things. You have heart and soil. I have a question for you about heart and soil. So you guys have like there, it's all organ meat supplements and some of them say things like heart and brain. And say things like, okay, if I'm experiencing a problem in my body with a certain organ, should I try to eat the organ meat of that?

[Paul Saladino]

Yes.

[Alex Clark]

So like, if I'm having problems with like thinking clearly brain fog, I should take the brain.

[Paul Saladino]

Yes.

[Alex Clark]

Okay.

[Paul Saladino]

And this is a pretty fascinating concept. It makes sense intuitively. And the research on this was done in the 1950s and 1960s in Germany. And we don't think about this in the American culture because it wasn't done at the NIH, but there was a lot of research published 90, 80, 90 years ago in Germany looking at the effect of organs on the corresponding organ in animal studies and in humans. And it's pretty incredible research. It probably has to do with things at the level of the micrornas. So these little molecules. There was just a Nobel Prize awarded for the discovery of micrornas this year. So we didn't even know what micrornas were until last five years or 10 years. And there are micrornas that appear to survive the freeze drying process in these organs. So the hypothesis here is that when you eat liver, it changes the way genes are turned on and off in your liver because of the micrornas. It's a chemical, it's a, it's an information communication between the food you eat in your body. This happens with every food you eat. But organs are unique. Unique.

[Alex Clark]

Okay, so if I have like thyroid issues, right, what should I be taking?

[Paul Saladino]

The thing about thyroid is that actually contains thyroid hormones. So you have to be careful because you can get too much thyroid containing active thyroid hormones. It probably would be good to try and take a little bit of thyroid. Just know that when you have that one organ, it contains active hormones, the two organs that are hormonally active that you might be able to eat in terms of an organ supplement. Are the adrenal, which is going to have cortisol, and the thyroid. So those you have to be particularly careful with the dose. I think with your thyroid stuff, specifically the autoimmune condition, broadly, what I would suggest for someone with that is just to think about the quality of their diet. Something in your life is triggering your immune system, is confusing your immune system and your immune system is reacting against self. So what is it in your diet that is triggering your immune system? For me, it was probably salad and mushrooms and other vegetables. What is it for you?

[Alex Clark]

Tell us about Lineage, your new meat sticks.

[Paul Saladino]

Yeah, so there's Lineage is the second company I founded and it's really cool to be at this point in my life, in my career where I can build companies that make really curated, intensely unique products. So we started Lineage with grass fed grass finished regeneratively raised beef sticks with liver. And we have a protein powder, we make creatine, we have a glyphosate free honey and we have tallow. And tallow is fun to put on your face. It's like this kind of, I don't know, alternative beauty thing. So do you put tallow on your face? Face?

[Alex Clark]

I'm anti tallow on the face. This is so controversial to my audience. For women specifically, I. I think you probably completely fine. For some of us, I think it can really clog pores.

[Paul Saladino]

Really?

[Alex Clark]

I know, I know. This is like very controversial. You love tallow on the face.

[Paul Saladino]

I haven't seen it, but okay, fair, Totally fair. So yeah, there's tallow. Tallow is a good cooking oil too. If you don't put on your face.

[Alex Clark]

Tell us about your podcast.

[Paul Saladino]

So my podcast is long form. It's fairly technical. Most of what I do in the world world is kind of short form and you see that on Instagram or other things. And I'm trying to give people like little snippets of valuable information. But my podcast is just called the Paul Saladino MD Podcast. If you really want to go deep and you want to learn about lipids or you want to learn about metabolic health, that's the place to go. It's definitely like pretty nerdy.

[Alex Clark]

You're going to interview me for your show?

[Paul Saladino]

Yes, we're going to talk about some things that I don't usually talk about in the podcast. We're going to talk about dating and yeah, all kinds of things.

[Alex Clark]

Oh, juicy. Okay, so going to get into that. So make sure you subscribe to Paul's show and then real quick, remind us where you are on Instagram.

[Paul Saladino]

Paul Saladino, M.D. everywhere.

[Alex Clark]

Thank you Paul for coming on Culture Apothecary.

[Paul Saladino]

It flew by.

[Alex Clark]

We had to wrap that way earlier than I was wanting to, but I really enjoyed that conversation. He was different than what I expected him to be like in person. He was super friendly. He shared his food with me. Me. He had some hamburger meat and grapes and raw milk and honey and that was super kind. I was like super busy filming and I mentioned like, I have to go do another interview right now and I have like 20 minutes, there's no way I'm going to be able to eat today. And he's like, oh, don't worry about it. Like we have all this stuff in our car and in a cooler. Like I'll bring it in and we'll share. And I was like, oh, that's so nice. So anyway, he has all that footage and you'll have to check out my interview on his show. I did want to mention one of the top ways that you can make a true difference in this fight against big food and Big Pharma, because this is a question I get asked a lot is to call your local congressman or woman. Literally. It is this easy. Grassroots action has a massive impact in swaying the way they will vote. Call your member of Congress, tell them to prevent pharma from funding the fda. Tell them we need to remove conflicts from the nih, the National Institute of Health, and make the goal of the department to be research about why we are getting sick. This is how we really heal a sick culture. So call your congressman, tell all your other friends to do the same. Don't forget to check out Paul's interview with me on his show, the Paul Saladino MD Podcast. New episodes of Culture Apothecary come out every Monday and Thursday evening at 6pm Pacific, 9pm Eastern, anywhere you get your podcasts or the real Alex Clark YouTube channel. Please leave a five star review right now for us at. You didn't earlier. I'm Alex Clark and this is Culture Apothecary.