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On today's episode of the Real Foodology.
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Podcast, when we're eating some of these foods, we're eating them wrong today and we're just not thinking about where we've come from historically.
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Welcome back to the Real Foodology Podcast. This is part two of my conversation with Paul Saladino. If you missed part one, go back and listen to that first. Thanks for listening. I think one of the most asked questions that I get in my DMs is what cookware do I use? And the answer is always the same. Our Place. I've been using Our Place for years. They are PFAS free, otherwise known as forever Chemicals. They are incredibly concerning. They're endocrine disrupting and I'm on. I'm on a fertility journey right now. As y'all know, I'm becoming increasingly concerned about these endocrine disruptors. So I really want to make sure that I am reducing my exposure as much as possible. Which is why I love the Our Place cookware. They're also beautifully designed. I feel like they are art objects that I just want to display on my kitchen and on my stove top and I cannot recommend them enough. So go to fromourplace.com and enter code Real Foodology at checkout to receive 10% off sitewide. That's from our place.com code Real Foodology. Our place offers a 100 day trial with free shipping and returns. I have something for you that I personally have been taking for over a year now and that is Mitopure from Timeline. It is a supplement on the market that's clinically proven to target the effects of age related cellular decline. It is quite literally food for the mitochondria which can equate to better fertility health. It also helps with muscle building, it helps with recovery if you're working out. And Mitopure is a precise dose of the rare postbiotic Urolithin A. It works by promoting an essential cellular cleanup process that clears out dysfunctional mitochondria AKA your cell's battery packs. Plus it's shown to deliver double digit increases in muscle strength and endurance without a change in exercise. That is crazy. So if you would like to try MURE today and join me in taking this every day, timeline is offering 33% off your order of Mito Pure while supplies last. Go to timeline.com real foodology33 so I wanted to share this with my audience because you and I texted about this personally, but I have not. I haven't even shared this on my on my Instagram yet. So my audience is very invested in Hector's psoriasis journey right now because I've been sharing with them for the last year. So when Hector and I first met, he has had psoriasis for almost a decade and he in his mind had tried everything to get rid of it, but it was in his mind, it was the creams and steroids and all that. So when we met I was like, oh my gosh, we got to get rid of. He was doing the Tide pods, we were getting rid of his toxic body wash. So I started at the low hanging fruit, got rid of all that, there was nothing budged. We tried a gluten free diet, saw like a little bit of improvement, but not really much. And just so people know kind of how it manifests on him, it's on his scalp and then he has these really big scabs on his arm. So one of them we can see, we can really see the progress on it. And we've done, I mean we went so far as doing BPC157, we have done stool tests, we have done blood work. Just want to outline for everyone. We have gone really far to try to figure this out. Nothing really made it budge.
B
Wow.
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So he wakes up on January 1st, he's really active on X and X is going crazy for Carnivore right now I think. Cause it's like New year and I don't know what it is but. So he wakes up January 1st and he's like, I'm gonna try the Carnivore diet. And I was like, great, I love this. He's like, I think that it might work also. We had dinner with Mikayla Peterson maybe a month ago and she was like, you've gotta do Carnivore diet. She was proponent for lion diet, but he was like, I don't think I can do that.
B
Right.
A
So fast forward to maybe like day three and he's like, I don't feel well. So I text you cause I'm like, I have Paul's number, I'm gonna check in with him and see kind of what we're doing. And he was only doing meat and like electrolytes basically. And you told him to add in a little bit of orange juice and some fruit and maybe some more carbohydrates. So do you like honey? So he feels so much better now. As of today since recording, I've never seen. I'm like so blown away. I know it happens, but to see it with my own eyes is really crazy. His psoriasis is going away.
B
This is cool.
A
It is going away.
B
So just so your audience knows, I wrote a book about the carnivore diet in 2020, and I did a carnivore diet of meat and organs and animal fat for a year and a half, and my eczema went away after a year and a half. I ran into some pretty serious consequences from long term keto. And I went to something that I've just termed animal based to give it a framework that people can talk about. Animal based, in my mind is meat and organs. So it's like a carnivore diet, but you add in things like fruit and honey and raw dairy. So I think of it in terms of like, what are the least toxic plant foods? And we can talk about why I think fruit is less toxic than vegetables and vegetables are. And so I see animal based because I saw you post something, you were like, he's eating carnivore ish or carnivore adjacent. I was like, courtney, it's animal based. Call it whatever. Understand the terminology.
A
Yeah, yeah. Well, because everybody was writing me being like, what's carnivore adjacent? And I was like, I don't even know. Like, I can't even.
B
Right. But some people use the. The term carnivore now and they mean animal based.
A
Okay.
B
A lot of people are saying, I'm carnivore, I eat meat plus strawberries. And I'm like, okay, that's cool, you're carnivore. But like, just call it animal based so people understand.
A
Makes it easier.
B
Just so people understand what it is. It's just Joe Rogan actually came up with a term when I was on his podcast, and I was like, great. I love it. I love that it's like plant based, but better, you know, because the idea is that, like, you base the majority of your calories in your diet around animal foods. You know, I get up in the morning, I eat raw milk with honey and organs in the morning, and then I have meat and then I have fruit. But most of what I eat in the day, where I'm getting most of my calories, calories and nutrition is from animal foods, whether it's meat, whether it's organs, whether it's raw milk, butter, and then I'm using the plant foods for carbohydrates on the side. So that's why I think of it as animal based with some plants. But when people eat carbohydrates in the form of fruit and honey, it makes it so much more sustainable. You Know, because you think a cucumber is a fruit, an avocado is a fruit, squash is a fruit. I just cooked some squash today, right?
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Yeah.
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And the reason I don't recommend people do vegetables is because a lot of the vegetables do contain defense chemicals, which can trigger autoimmune conditions. So you have like a. You have like a hierarchy, Right. If you're just eating a standard American diet, and I know Hector wasn't doing this.
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Yeah.
B
But you got to get rid of the processed foods, right. You got to get rid of the seed oils and the dyes. And so then you get to a pretty healthy diet, which is a mix of vegetables, a mix of fruit. Maybe you're eating nuts and seeds. You're eating all single ingredient foods, Right. But a lot of people who still eat, quote, healthy and are eating all single ingredient foods or foods their great grandmother would recognize still have autoimmune conditions. And this is where I think carnivore and animal based, which is meat and fruit, gets really interesting because for me, with my eczema, I had eczema eating strict organic Paleo. I was eating really good in my residency. So after medical school, I went to residency at the University of Washington in Seattle. I was eating salads with avocados and almonds, and I was eating mushrooms because they're healthy. I'm eating grass fed beef. I was eating really, quote, healthy foods that a lot of people could do fine on, but my immune system was reacting to it, and I couldn't see it until I pulled everything out and just ate meat. I went too far, and I've tried to come back to something that works for me. I don't think everyone needs to eat animal based, but I think that it's a good framework for people who have autoimmune disease or who are looking to see if their underlying gut issues or autoimmune conditions could be related to some of these foods that we think of as healthy that do contain defense chemicals. Because then I look at like, okay, within the foods that are even single ingredient, are there problematic foods for some humans? Yes. I do think that the nightshade. The nightshade fruits and vegetables cause immunologic reactions. As an example, these are things like tomatoes, eggplant, goji berries. I love tomatoes. I'm Italian. Right. My last name is Saladino, which I get endless comments about. Right. His salad and his last name. Right. But I'm Italian. My family is Sicilian, and I love tomatoes. And I've tried to make tomato paste. I get organic tomatoes from the farmer's market. I stew them, I take the skin off, take the seeds out, make tomato paste in three days. I always get eczema. Right. It's just my body doesn't like tomatoes. They're a great food for humans. But some people get immunologic reactions from the nightshades. I think some people get immunologic reactions from leafy greens. Kale has chemicals in it of the isothiocyanate family which prevent the absorption of iodine at the level of the thyroid. If you have thyroid issues, I think it's worth avoiding all brassicas. This is broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collard greens. The whole mustard family should be taken out of your diet to see if your thyroid problems get better, right?
A
Yes.
B
A lot of people eat spinach every day thinking it's healthy. It's full of oxalates. It's full of oxalates.
A
Explain what those are for people that don't know.
B
So oxalates, they're dicarboxylic acids. It's oxalic acid. It's a waste product of a couple of different amino acids in the human body. Proline and hydroxyproline. And we make oxalates in the human body, but we excrete. We only make a small amount per day, but they occur in plant foods in 10-100x times what we're used to getting. And so there are documented medical cases of people dying from eating foods that are high in oxalates. It's this medical literature fact. There's rhubarb. You never see rhubarb leaves. Remember rhubarb pie?
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
B
So rhubarb stems are okay, but the rhubarb leaves have so many oxalates that they. They can't even be sold. There are documented cases of people dying from rhubarb leaves, and there are documented cases of kidney failure from spinach green smoothies. Some of the interesting cases are a woman who had a roux en y gastric bypass as she was absorbing more of the oxalates than regular. But at a subclinical level, it's hard to say. In you or I, are oxalates benign? Could they be causing joint pain? So I think if people have joint issues. Any history of kidney stones, really? Any thyroid issues, Any autoimmune issues in general, it's probably worth thinking about what kind of oxalates you're getting. There's another whole series of literature on oxalates around vulvodynia. It's women who have like, pain in their vagina and like cystitis. And it gets a lot better when they eliminate oxalates. Are the oxalates. Are the oxalates accumulating in the vagina in, like the women's reproductive tract in the bladder, causing pain? This is nothing. Never even talked about in medical school. Right.
A
Well, I just, my brain immediately went to. I had a friend when we were in our 20s. Like, it was a really big problem for her. And I wish I'd known this then.
B
Oxalate, it's just. And again, it's like, doesn't cost anything. You just have to know, like, okay, try cutting this out. Yeah, Like Hector did, like, okay, try cutting these foods out. And so this is why I think an animal based diet is valuable. It's just a framework of starting point. Right. And it's more sustainable than strict carnivore, which is just meat or meat and eggs. All animal foods. Because you need carbohydrates. Most humans do better with carbohydrates. I've talked about this on my podcast and different. Like, the ketogenic diet works for some applications, but I think for most people it doesn't work long term. And Hector experienced this, right? Yeah, because after three days, he's going into ketosis. He doesn't feel good. It's just, you don't need to go there. You know, it's not really great for humans to do that. Like, you can get there. And I mean, I was in long term ketosis for like a year and a half and I ended up with declining testosterone. My testosterone went from like 800 to 500. I had heart palpitations at night because of electrolyte deficiencies and imbalances. I had, you know, sleep disturbance. I had something called hypnagogic jerks, which is so traumatic. So hypnagogic means you're falling asleep every once in a while. Most people get this. You fall asleep and you jerk a little bit.
A
Yeah.
B
I would get it so bad that it would wake me up. And it's a magnesium deficiency in other electrolytes related to long term ketosis. So I would like startle myself awake, and then my sympathetic nervous system is on high alert and I can't go back to sleep. And then I start to fall asleep again 20 minutes later and I startle myself awake. And this is all related to keto and me. And it was traumatic.
A
Yeah.
B
And I didn't realize it at the time, but it can have a lot of issues. I'll just say as like a nugget. People can look at my material if they're interested in this. A ketogenic diet works for people who have broken mitochondria that can't be fixed because it delivers electrons to the electron transport chain at a different place than glycolysis and aerobic respiration. So you do, you know, if you have pyruvate entering the krebs or pyruvate entering the mitochondria, you're going to get electrons delivered to the electron transport chain differently than you do when you do ketosis because you're getting beta oxidation. So you have basically beta oxidation. It's a little bit different. And it can circumvent issues in the electron transport chain for some people. But I think so, like in people with recalcitrant epilepsy or who have dementia, ketogenic diets seem to work. And maybe in some people who have mental illness, schizophrenia perhaps. But I think that for most of us, ketogenic diets create unnecessary stress, and they do kind of put the body in this, this evolutionary scarcity mindset that we don't need. I don't think carbohydrates are harmful for humans at all.
A
Okay, from the right sources, which goes to my next question, because I'm really curious to know what your thoughts are on sugar. So I. This is one that I really have had a hard time letting go of because in my own personal experience, I was always very, very addicted to sugar growing up. And now, granted, it was like candy, cookies, all this stuff. And the way that I was able to ultimately get over that was completely cutting out all sugar consumption. Like, I cut out honey, I cut out maple syrup. And then, because there was a time period there when I was on my journey, I feel like most of us probably have this story where it's like, as I'm learning, I'm trying different things, and as I'm getting healthier, then I just replaced everything with maple syrup and honey. And then I was still struggling with the sugar cravings and all that. And then we hear too, there's kind of this back and forth between, like, okay, well, sugar is. Sugar is sugar, no matter if it's coming from fruit or if it's coming from cane sugar. And so you want to be aware. Now, I've always said, I've always told people that we don't want to vilify fruit, but I've always had the notion of, like, you don't want to go out and have, like, five bananas, like, do you remember that? Do you remember that woman that was online called? Her name was Freelee, the banana girl.
B
Oh yeah, she's still out there.
A
So there was a very, there was a very small, I mean like maybe a couple months where I was, I never went and did what she did, but I was kind of, I was making banana and ice cream and I was like kind of like dabbling in it. I feel like shit. I felt like my blood sugar was always spiking. I was starving all the time, like. And so for me, I just never felt like eating a lot of sugar. Was that great. So where, what are your thoughts on that? And where do you kind of lie with all that?
B
I think sugar is bad for humans, but not for the reasons we think it's bad for humans. Okay, so sugar is bad for humans because it causes dysbiosis in the gut. And I don't hear people talk about this a lot. And by sugar, I mean processed sugar. So this is the difference between high fructose corn syrup or sucrose and fruit. Because we know, like in the kitchen over here, I have blueberries and strawberries and I have squash. All of those contain sucrose. Sucrose is a disaccharide of glucose and fructose. And fructose is a sugar that gets a lot of, I think incorrect vilification. Like it gets a bad rap.
A
Tell me more. Because I vilify fructose a lot.
B
No, you shouldn't.
A
Well, because it bypasses the whole cycle to create ATP and go straight to the liver.
B
We'll talk about it. We'll talk about it.
A
Okay.
B
Yeah, we'll talk about it.
A
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B
So in a strawberry, right, you have sucrose, which is fructose and glucose. And that strawberry also contains hundreds, if not thousands of other chemicals. Right. It is a chemically diverse entity. And what's so interesting about strawberries or honey, which also has hundreds of compounds, Those compounds, many of which are polyphenolic. Not all of them are. They actually act to mitigate the damage that sucrose has in the human body. Or that. And what's the difference here? The difference is that if you eat pure sucrose or high fructose corn syrup, it causes dysbiosis in your gut. It causes overgrowth of the wrong bacteria. And this is the problem, is that we would never have eaten pure sucrose. Historically.
A
Yeah.
B
Even if you make sugar cane juice, which is delicious, by the way, have you ever had it? Sugar cane juice is freaking delicious. It is green. It's full of polyphenols and other chemicals. Sugarcane juice is really healthy for humans. And I know your audience is going to like, lose their mind, but even.
A
I'm a little bit like, no, I promise you. But I'm available. I'm available for it.
B
There are controlled studies in humans with sugar cane juice showing benefits. There are controlled studies in humans with Watermelon juice, orange juice, blood orange juice, pomegranate juice, grape juice, coconut water, I don't know about coconut water. All of the juices that I just listed. There are controlled studies in humans showing improved endothelial function, decreased lipid peroxidation, decreased oxidative stress, decreased DNA damage. There's actually a study in humans where they gave watermelon juice while they were doing an oral glucose tolerance test. So they're feeding someone a glucola, which is basically a coca cola with pure glucose, which is meant to spike your blood sugar. And they give watermelon juice with it and it mitigated, it improved insulin sensitivity when they gave it with a glucola. So they gave extra sugar in watermelon juice and because of the components in the watermelon juice, it improved insulin sensitivity relative to control of pure glucola. So there's a very big difference between pure sugar, which is sucrose, or high fructose corn syrup, which has its own problems, and fruit and fruit juice and honey, that's raw and real. And the difference is in all of these other chemicals which mitigate overgrowth of bacteria in the gut. And the reason dysbiosis is so harmful is because it causes metabolic endotoxemia. So endotoxin is lipopolysaccharide. This is a gram negative bacterial cell wall component, lps. And we know that LPS is toxic to our mitochondria. LPS causes metabolic dysfunction. So the problem here is if you get dysbiosis, if you get metabolic endotoxemia, if you get increased endotoxin, you're going to get metabolic dysfunction, you're going to break your mitochondria. You don't want that. But humans never just stumbled across a pile of cane sugar on the ground. We never did that. We would get, we would get, you know, you'd eat a beet, you know, which are full of oxalates, incidentally. So maybe you don't eat too many beets even though they're delicious. That's the previous conversation.
A
Yeah.
B
You eat a sugar cane, you're getting all these other chemicals. You have honey, which is a prized food for humans throughout our existence. And there's tons of evidence from the Hadza or other hunter gatherers in Africa. Some examples of hunter gatherers in Africa, they, at times of the year they make 60 plus percent of their calories from honey and they're not insulin resistant.
A
That's interesting.
B
Yeah, so it's, it's, they don't get fat and they don't get insulin resistant.
A
Yeah.
B
Now what freely the banana girl is doing is raw veganism, fruitarianism, which, which is the problem there is that you're deficient in all the nutrients that come in animal foods. But, like, I, I just got into a debate with Brian Johnson, the don't die guy, on, On Twitter yesterday about this. But, you know, I was calling him out because he, he did a tweet a few months ago or a week a couple months ago, right when we were in Phoenix, I think, for amfest, talking about he thought seed oils were healthy. And then he did another post on X about how red meat was so harmful to humans, citing all of this observational research. And so I was like, look, dude, I'm done with this. Like, put up or shut up. I've invited him on podcast multiple times to have respectful conversation and debate. And he came back and said, show your blood work, Paul. Show your blood markers. And I responded and said, I've done it. I do it every six months. I have no less than five podcasts on my YouTube channel where I spend an hour and a half discussing all of my comprehensive blood work. And so that's just to say that, like, I've got. I get my blood work every six months at a minimum. And my fasting insulin is 3.2. You know, my hemoglobin A1C is 5.2. My fasting glucose is 76 or 82 milligrams per deciliter, depending on the time you do it. And so my HSCRP is 0.2 milligrams per liter. So it's like the blood work kind of tells this detail, like, I'm not insulin resistant, there's no issue, and I'll eat a lot of carbohydrates. And so to wrap it around full, full circle here, I think in some people who are metabolically broken, which happens at the level of the mitochondria. And we can talk about what I think actually happens if you want. You're not going to handle carbohydrates that well. So if you give a tablespoon of honey to a diabetic, their blood sugar might go up. And I don't actually think that's the worst thing in the world because there is a study where they gave diabetics honey and it improved insulin sensitivity. Their blood sugar goes up a little bit, but the insulin sensitivity improves, probably related to improved gut flora from the compounds in the honey. So when we think about diabetes, we're so glucose centric that I Think we're missing the plot. Glucose is a symptom of diabetes. It's not the cause. You don't get diabetes by eating so many carbohydrates that you just exhaust your pancreas. That's not what happens. You get diabetes by breaking your mitochondria. Because the prevailing narrative now is kind of that, like, oh, you're just eating too many carbs. Bullshit. I can show you people who have 95% of their diet as carbohydrates. There's tribes in Africa, tribes in the Polynesian atolls, 90 plus percent of their diet is carbohydrates. They don't have diabetes.
A
So my question is, do you think that maybe, depending on where your ancestors come from and what your genealogy is, that maybe there's some people that would affect them more than others potentially? Because, for example, with me, we've done a lot of genetic testing on me and I've been a guinea pig for all these diets for the last 15, 20 years. I've tried keto, I've tried everything. And I got to a place and my genetic tests show this, that I actually thrive on a higher protein, higher fat, lower carbohydrate diet. Now, it doesn't mean I don't eat any carbs at all, because I was really not doing well on keto, but I actually thrive when it's a little bit lower because if I have too much carbohydrates, I'm sluggish, I'm fatigued, like. So there's got to be. There's probably bio individuality there.
B
I think there's individual bio. There's bio individuality. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, my ancestors are Mediterranean.
A
Yeah.
B
I'm a little more equatorial. If yours are more Norwegian.
A
Exactly, yeah. Norwegian, French, German.
B
Right. If you're more northern. Yeah, potentially, yeah. And I think that's an interesting nuance that like, you can kind of. So let's just talk about macros for a minute because I think this is a helpful conversation for people. When you think about macros, which is protein, fat, carbohydrates, it seems kind of pedestrian, but I think it's so valuable, I think, about protein first. And my recommendation would be 1 gram of protein per pound of goal body weight for men and women from highly bioavailable protein sources, which is essentially synonymous with animal meat, eggs, fish, red meat, essentially milk. These type of sources, not plant sources, which you have to count double because they're about half as bioavailable and they have a lot of anti Nutrients that come along with that. So plant sources of protein.
A
And you have to eat way more of them too.
B
Way more. And then you're going to have other potential confounding issues like phytic acid, which is a big molecule that chelates minerals and steals it from your body. So I recommend people get the majority of their protein from animal sources, depending what you tolerate and what you prefer. At 1 gram of protein per pound of goal body weight, I'm 165 pounds. I probably get around 165 pounds a day. And most people don't even need one gram. But I think if you aim for one gram, you're going to get 0.8 and that's enough for everyone, even if you're basically, even if you're bodybuilding. And so after protein, once you meet your protein goal, and this doesn't mean you have to eat your protein first, just make sure you're hitting your protein goal in the day. You can dial back. You can dial in the lever of fat versus carbohydrates based on what your body wants. My body actually does better with more carbohydrates.
A
That's interesting.
B
So I'll probably do, you know, I'll probably do 35% of my calories as fat and then I would say 15, 20% as protein and the rest is carbohydrates. So depending on my activity level, I'm not as active when I'm in the States because in the Costa Rica, I'm surfing every day and I'll have more carbohydrates for me, which is just me. People always lose their mind when I say this. I'm probably upwards of 300 grams a day in Costa Rica. Yeah. But I'm also surfing two hours a day.
A
And your blood sugar also shows that you're fine. Yeah.
B
And you can look at my CGM and there's a clear, you know, the blood sugar goes up, which I don't worry about, like. And then it comes right back down.
A
Yeah.
B
Because I'm very insulin sensitive and I can do that. I can do that multiple times a day and I do not become insulin resistant. But I think you're right. There's probably some bio individuality. It's going to shift for me based on seasons. Right now I'm in Virginia, it's winter.
A
Yeah.
B
You know, I'm eating less carbohydrates probably, and I'm trying to get a workout every day, but I'm not surfing for two hours.
A
Yeah.
B
So, yeah. And then you can Just decide what kind of fats do you feel best on? I would say make sure you're getting saturated fat.
A
Yeah, I'm not scared of saturated fat.
B
And don't do the polyunsaturated fats from seed oils and then the carbohydrate sources. You can eat the carbohydrates based on what works for you in terms of the macros. But I think a lot of people do better with carbohydrate sources that are not grains. So this is the other issue where you get into, like, the single ingredient foods that may work for some people, but don't really work for everyone. I've seen a lot of people just lose weight effortlessly when they get rid of grains. I just don't think. I mean, a lot of people know that wheat doesn't work for them, whether it's subclinical gluten intolerance. But even rice, some people can do rice, but a lot of people don't do great with rice. I've seen it just cause weight gain for people.
A
Oats or acid. My body loves rice, okay. But that doesn't mean I'm like, chowing down on rice. But I don't see any. I don't see any issues with it.
B
And I think there might be a genetic thing there. It might be because, you know, people always like to cite, like, Asian countries have a lot of rice and don't seem to have an issue.
A
Exactly. But then oats, like, I do not do well on oats. I get a headache. I don't feel good. It hurts.
B
Oats are very hard for humans. Oats are full of phytic acid. Yeah, very full of phytic acid. And it's very hard to get rid of the phytic acid in odes. So phytic acid, again, is this large molecule that chelates and bites onto minerals like calcium, zinc, magnesium, and it prevents their absorption in the gut. So if you are eating oats with milk, for instance, you're not absorbing the calcium in the milk because the phytic acid in the oats is pulling it out. And there's magnesium in milk, and you're not getting that because the phytic acid is. And there's zinc, and you're not absorbing the zinc. And so if you're eating oats with steak, you're not getting as much zinc, you're not getting as much selenium, because the phytic acid is pulling it out of your body from your gut. The phytic acid won't go into your body and rob it from your cellular Stores, but it will from the gut. And so to get rid of the phytic acid in oats, you have to do more than cook them. If you just cook the oats, maybe 30% of the phytic acid is degraded, maybe 35. To really get rid of 90 plus percent of the phytic acid in oats, you have to ferment them for four to five days at a pH of four at a temperature of 78 degrees Fahrenheit.
A
So just soaking and sprouting them is not going to. Not enough doing wow.
B
Overnight oats, maybe 45% of the phytic acid is gone. You're still, still have. It's better. Right. But to really remove phytic acid from oats, you have to do this arduous process that no one is doing. No one is fermenting their oats for five days at 70 degrees Fahrenheit and a Ph of 4 to 4, 7.
A
There's got to be a homesteader out there somewhere doing it. But like no one.
B
But this is the way that humans used to eat grains.
A
Right.
B
And this is the way that humans used to eat beans. Like, this is kind of the work of Weston Price that like when you see humans eating seeds, and seeds are seeds, nuts, grains and beans, we were always fermenting them. We were fermenting a lot of vegetables, which are the leaves, stems, roots and seeds of plants. Because the fermentation process actually gets rid of a lot of the defense chemicals.
A
So fascinating.
B
Not all of them, but many of them.
A
Yeah.
B
So I think that we're eating, when we're eating some of these foods, we're eating them wrong today.
A
Yeah.
B
And we're just not thinking about where we've come from historically.
A
Well, I was just talking about this recently. Who was I talking about that with? It doesn't matter. But we've lost this ancient wisdom that we've passed down for generations. Right. Like for probably once, for the first time ever, probably, I would argue in human history, we are so confused about what to eat. And before that, our ancestors were never confused. They didn't need double blind placebo studies to know what to eat. Eat. It was passed down through generations. There was also this ancient innate wisdom that we had and nobody seems to have that anymore. We've lost it.
B
And when you talk about it, we are derided or denigrated as like anachronistic, right?
A
Oh, yeah. People call us wax.
B
You know, the, the, you know, the historical fantasy, you know, like this is your ancestral fallacy fantasy. Like there's a lot of Wisdom there. The things. I mean, I've been learning a lot about light recently, and it's the same thing with light, you know, and this podcast isn't mostly about light, but like, look, humans are meant to see the sun in the morning. We're meant to have bright days and dark nights. We're not meant to look at flickering screens which have way too much blue light in them. These things are bad for us, you know, that's messing up our sleep. Yeah, we're just, we're meant to be outdoors. We're meant to see acute angles and not all these, you know, we're meant to see not just 90 degree angles indoors and screens squares. We're meant to see fractalized patterns outside. That calms us. We're meant to actually be in nature. How simple is it? And yet people think, oh, it's a fantasy. No, there is this idea of landscapes of despair. This is a concept I heard Michael Easter, who wrote the Comfort Crisis, discuss. There are landscapes of despair. I mean, right now we're looking out at trees and granted, there's the GW park right there in the Potomac river, but there's nature out of these windows. And the reason that the architect built a panoramic glass window here is because that's beautiful to a human.
A
Yeah.
B
And to say that that isn't something that we need is just ludicrous.
A
Okay, so you've mentioned seed oils a couple times, and this is obviously a huge conversation being had right now publicly. A lot of people are fighting over, what is it? Are they healthy for you? Are they not? What is the truth about seed oils?
B
So the historical truth about seed oils is that they were never in the human food supply until 1911, en masse, when Procter and Gamble came out with Crisco. Same Procter and Gamble that then later donated, you know, the equivalent of $25 million today to the. Aha. It was like one point something million dollars in 1942 or 45, but it was the equivalent of 25 million today. So, like, you know, again, back to this adage that we keep, that I keep repeating. 1900, 1890, no seed oils in the human diet. And this is just an association, but it's a compelling association. So anytime a food, whether it's a food dye or a preservative or glyphosate or a pesticide or ultra processed refined bleach and deodorized seed oils comes into the human food supply, we probably should be like a little careful, right? Maybe we should be skeptical. Maybe we should be skeptical of it. And so that's the reality. They've become a huge part of our diet. Now you can see the polyunsaturated fats in seed oils accumulating in human fat. And so the problem here, the way I see it, is that these oils are something that humans would never have been exposed to at the levels that we're exposed to. Like, did humans eat a sunflower seed? Historically, yeah. Did we eat two and a half pounds of sunflower seeds a day? No. You would have to eat 70 ears of corn to get 5 tablespoons of corn oil. Right. So the average American consumes 5 tablespoons of seed oils per day. Between the chipotle and the salad dressings and whatever your food is cooked in.
A
At the restaurant, maybe the oat milk or all the things, five tablespoons a day.
B
This is a completely evolutionarily inconsistent amount of linoleic acid, which is an 18 carbon omega 6 polyunsaturated fat. And those seed oils are made in a way that's very highly refined in processed. Right. So those seed oils are made by refining, bleaching, and deodorization. And if you look at the actual process, it is astounding, right? It is heating to over 450 degrees Fahrenheit. It's extraction with benzene, contaminated with. Extraction with hexane, often contaminated with benzene, sodium hydroxide, washing. There's, you know, just the amount of de gumming industrial agents. There are traces of organic chemicals in seed oils. We know they are highly oxidized because they must be heated to such high levels, which breaks the fat, which causes rancidity and oxidation. So there are high levels of lipid peroxides in seed oils. Seed oils are then stored in transparent plastic containers on supermarket shelves, which are known to leach heavy metals like antimony directly into the seed oil. So the More.
A
Why is that? I've never heard that.
B
Yeah, there's antimony in the plastic. It's from the plastic.
A
Oh, in the plastic.
B
It's in the plastic that they're packaged in. So first of all, you would never store anything in plastic, hopefully, but definitely not something that's lipophilic like a fat. You have two compounds that are sort of like. They're similar. And so compounds from the plastic can migrate into the seed oils.
A
They're also probably being transported in the back of really hot trucks, especially during the summer. And then it's heating up the plastic.
B
And how old is the seed oil on the shelf? Those last forever. Like, I mean, so I have a nonprofit foundation called the Animal Based Nutrition Research Foundation. It's ABNRF.org and this year, at the beginning of the year, we're going to do some research into seed oils and just pull seed oils off the shelves and test lipid peroxides, test antimony levels. I want to go to some fast food places and pull oil out of their fryers and test levels of these chemicals that are found in cigarettes and these breakdown products of lipids, acrolein and others which are known to be harmful for humans. So this is the other issue with these polyunsaturated fats. When you heat them either in your pan right when you're frying with them, or in the fryer when they're making your French fries and fast food, it's even worse. You generate compounds that are known carcinogens that are exactly some of the same compounds that occur in cigarettes. So there's a crazy study that I've talked about that if you had a large French fry at McDonald's, which I've done in my life, I'm not innocent. It is the amount of acrolein and other breakdown products of these seed oils that are found in a pack of cigarettes. So one large fry. And whenever I say this, people always say, like, he's saying seed oils are as bad as cigarettes. No, I just said that the amount of this chemical is equivalent between the two. And there's multiple research papers to corroborate that assertion. So that's what I'm saying. That doesn't sound good. Yeah, at a biochemical level. The problem here is that all of the randomized controlled trials with seed oils were done between 1950 and 1980, give or take, and we didn't know what trans fat was until the 1990s.
A
Yeah. Interesting.
B
And so the control groups in these seed oil randomized controlled trials in humans were almost invariably fed trans fats. So the way these trials were designed was you had a control group which ate more saturated fats and an experimental group which ate more seed oils. And so if the control group is eating more saturated fat with more trans fats, that might confound the results of some of these studies. It might make it a little hard to interpret. Yeah, but those are the same randomized controlled trials that get put into a meta analysis written by Darius Mozaffarian or others. Darius Mozaffarian of the same Tufts Food Compass fame that said that lucky charms were.
A
This is the same author better than ground beef.
B
Yeah. The same author that says that lucky Charms are better than ground beef. Yeah. Published a meta analysis where he's using. And a meta analysis is a collection of trials. They're taking multiple randomized controlled trials. And some section, some selection of authors says we are the preeminent authorities. We're going to decide which studies we're going to read. We're going to tell you what all these studies say. We're going to put eight or nine trials. We're going to make a forest plot which shows favors seed oils, favors saturated fat. It's just a graphical statistical description to try to summarize it. But when the people summarizing the articles can't understand that the articles themselves are flawed, like garbage in, garbage out. You don't build a house on a landfill, you don't build a house on a garbage dump. There's no foundation there. So the problem with the seed oil literature is that most of the studies that are randomized controlled trials are very poorly done. I think that the best trials done with seed oils actually show that they're harmful for humans and have increased cardiovascular risk. But those trials are outweighed in numbers by trials that are confounded by trans fats in the control groups that are very difficult to interpret. So we end up with a health landscape where we're all arguing with each other and we're kind of talking like this and like, now we're back to the government, what is the FDA going to say? And then I get fact checked on meta when I talk about seed oils and they refer to an AFP blog post which refers back to Darius Mozaffarian's meta analysis, which is looking at flawed studies. So you just follow this little ping pong ball down and you end up at the exact same place, which is flawed studies result in meta fact checking.
A
Me on Instagram, those finally just lifted this year for me. But I had, I texted you about this. I had like four or five flags just talking about seed oils. And they were pushing my content down lower so that people couldn't see. So I'm curious too about that study, because we know there remember that study that came out, I think it was last year, where they supposedly found that eating diets higher in red meat is linked to cancer. And then you go and you look at the study and the foods that they were classifying as red meat were lasagna, a hamburger with a bun on it, things like that. So I'm wondering what were they classifying as saturated fat in those?
B
Well, they were classifying saturated fat full of trans fats in Those studies. And so the devil's in the details. Yes, with nutrition study, the devil's in the details. And so much of this ends up on the news as a flashy headline which says, eggs shorten your life as much as cigarettes. And you go, come on, guys.
A
Oh, my God, they did that. In what? The health or whatever. They did this whole thing.
B
Come on, like, use your common sense. Humans have been eating eggs for hundreds of thousands of years. It doesn't make any sense. And so I don't know if we will ever get better randomized controlled trials on seed oils. But I hope that at some point we could have an honest, authentic conversation. But then I'll tell you this, Courtney, this is what's hard. It gets so convoluted and so technical so fast. Because if I'm on a podcast, and believe me, I'm trying to organize this to do a debate, I guarantee you that 90% of people are just going to tune out in the first 20 minutes because it's going to be so technical and convoluted and it's going to be so boring. We're going to be talking about the control group of the LA veterans trial, and we're going to be talking about the control group of the diet, the DART trial, or the St. Thomas Aquinas Atherosclerosis regression trial. It's so technical and boring that nobody cares and nobody's going to listen except.
A
For the people that are studying this and hopefully publishing the data. And maybe they're the ones that need to hear it, I guess.
B
I mean, that would be really interesting.
A
Not even. Maybe they are, but I think that.
B
Like, if I could debate Darius, you know, like, and get him on a pocket, but he won't do it, you know, so, like, let's talk about this analysis. Let's talk about this meta analysis you did and why it's flawed. And then. Or maybe it just needs, like a conversation like that, if it could happen on Rogan or a big platform. But again, it's so unwatchable. This is so not entertaining for people to see.
A
To be honest, what I think needs to happen is we need to sit down with heads of the FDA and the USDA and get people in a room, room at the Senate and have people, both sides of the aisle, present all of their studies and research, and so have people like you and then have people on the other sides of the aisle and just spend like 10 hours in there, get to the bottom of it, because I don't know how else we're going to figure this out.
B
I think it's a big issue because if we could come to a consensus in US Food policy about seed oils, it would have reverberating effects in our health outcomes, in our health landscape. And the reason this is so important is because think about how many processed foods have seed oils. So like.
A
And how many restaurants cook with it? I mean, if you eat out, you are pretty much guaranteed to eat seed oils. Unless.
B
And they're in. Yeah, unless you're.
A
You're going to a restaurant that's not using them.
B
It's so hard. And because it's. This is a. This is a multi billion dollar question, potentially a trillion dollar question, Courtney. Or more because of the food industry. Like, if the US Government were to come out and say suit oils are unhealthy, it would have potentially trillion dollars of economic impact. And so whether it's Procter and Gamble or conagra or Bungee, who happens to fund Darius Mozaffarian and make seed oils, by the way.
A
Of course they do.
B
Yeah. Yeah. You can find. Bungie funds him. They're a seed oil producer and they won't let you into their factories. Because I've tried to go to like a seed oil factory. They won't let us in. I don't necessarily want to go into a factory using hexane and all these chemicals, but I want to go and get some. You want to see how. Let me show you how butter's made. You take raw cream and you churn it. You know, people do. There's viral videos on Instagram.
A
You can do it at home.
B
I've done it at home. Right?
A
Yeah.
B
How is seed oil made? Like, I don't know, like, it's in a factory with huge boilers and double, you know, like xane extraction. And people are wearing hazmat suits in seed oil factories. I guarantee you, like, they're wearing goggles and gloves and skin protection. This is the food that you're feeding to your kids in the dino nuggets, moms.
A
Which, by the way, I just found out speaking of dino nuggets. So apparently if you fry your chicken nuggets or whatever in seed oils for less than. I don't want anybody to quote me. I don't know what the time frame is, but it's something like less than, like three to five seconds or whatever. So if you just kind of go like this and then pull it out, you don't have to disclose that on the ingredient label. So there's some companies that are saying that they're using olive oil. I think there was even a company that was saying that they're like organic and they're a healthy one. And somebody did some digging and found out that they do the flash fry thing in like soybean or canola oil, but they're not required to disclose that on the label.
B
Again, reform at the level of the fda. Reform at the level of the usda. This is blatant corruption and collusion.
A
Yeah.
B
You know, and it's the story that's as old as time. So would your great grandmother recognize the ingredients? Or in this case, they're not even being transparent.
A
No. But I mean, and that's another. That's a whole other issue. That's a whole other rabbit hole.
B
Yeah.
A
That we can't even go down. You'd mentioned seed oils and baby formula.
B
So when we eat polyunsaturated fats, they accumulate in our body, which is the reason linoleic acid, I believe, is harmful for humans. I think we are eating, we are consuming an evolutionarily inappropriate, inconsistent amount of linoleic acid. We know it accumulates in cell membranes. We know it accumulates in mitochondrial membranes. There's evidence from animal studies and cell culture that when you accumulate linoleic acid and other polyunsaturated fats in the mitochondrial membrane, you get proton leak. And proton leak means less ATP produced. And that is the actual sort of most magnified, zoomed in definition of metabolic dysfunction is impaired energy production. So if you are not making ATP efficiently at the level of your mitochondrial electron transport chain, you are going to become insulin resistant. And seed oils, by packing our cell membranes with linoleic acid, are causing proton leak across the membranes. And they cause utilization of ATP in the cell membrane because there's inappropriate activation of the sodium potassium ATPase, because there's leak across that membrane because they're too polyunsaturated. And that uses up the ATP that we're making. So Callie and Casey have talked about this so eloquently. Metabolic dysfunction is impaired inefficient energy production. And that's in the mitochondria. And the way you break your mitochondria is by messing up their cell membranes. And the way you mess up their cell membranes is by eating seed oil. It's not the carbohydrates, it's the seed oils. You can also mess up your mitochondria by getting metabolic endotoxemia. I think those are the two predominant pathways by which humans become insulin resistant gut dysbiosis, leading to metabolic endotoxemia and seed oils leading to broken membranes in mitochondria and cells. This is relevant to breast milk because when human mothers eat more seed oils, they put more linoleic acid into their breast milk. So you can. You can look at the linoleic acid content again. Omega 618 carbon polyunsaturated fatty acid content of a hunter gatherer woman and a westernized American woman. And the westernized American woman puts way more linoleic acid into her breast milk because she's eating more linoleic acid. Hunter gatherers eat far less linoleic acid than us because it's not in their diet. They might eat a nut, but there's almost none, right?
A
Yeah.
B
There's no linoleic acid in their diet. They're not eating two and a half pounds of sunflower seeds. They're not eating 70 years of corn. They're not eating two pounds of soybeans a day. None of them are doing this, which is the equivalent of these seed oil consumption that we have. So when the FDA goes and tests pregnant women's breast milk, they come up with a certain amount of linoleic acid, but they're testing mothers who are eating garbage food, and they say formula needs to contain this amount of linoleic acid.
A
Wow.
B
Well, you're testing a sick population.
A
Yeah.
B
That's like testing a diabetic and saying everyone's blood sugar needs to be 160.
A
Okay. I have never thought about it like that. And that's so interesting. I also had. I was just telling you about this before we started recording. I had Sally Fallon on my podcast yesterday, who works. I believe she's the president. She works for Weston A. Price Foundation. And she was also telling me that when you put a baby on formula, they're not getting enough cholesterol, and the cholesterol helps your body make your hormones. And for baby males, for example, she said that when they're infants, they. I could be wrong on this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but baby male infants are making the same amount of testosterone for a period of time as, like, an adult male. And then it goes back down.
B
Huh. It's possible. I don't know the specific.
A
Okay. And so she was saying that that's another really big concern with baby formula is that they're not making enough testosterone because they're not getting enough cholesterol, because we've also vilified cholesterol.
B
We have. And so when the FDA sets standards for how you make formula, they're saying it has to have this amount of linoleic acid in the breast milk. And the only way to get that much linoleic acid in the breast milk is to put seed oils in the. In the formula. The only way to get that much linoleic acid in the formula is to put seed oils in the formula. So if you look at any formula on the shelf, without fail, even an organic formula that's labeled an infant formula, it must have seed oils. It will have soybean oil, without fail, even the best quality infant formula. Now, there's a loophole where you can call it a toddler formula, I think, and the toddler formulas don't have to have that. But if it's an infant formula, you must have seed oils in the infant formula.
A
So people message me about this all the time, and they say, well, if I needed to do formula or I'm having a hard time producing enough milk, which is a whole other podcast that we could totally do, because I think it's dependent a lot on the health of the mother. They ask me what do I recommend, And I always tell them, serenity kids. And then there's also one called Sammy's milk, which is raw goat's milk. And I can't remember what oil they use. It might be coconut or palm oil. And then everybody comes back and they say, oh, well, that's toddler. And I'm like, but you can give that to your infants. The only reason they are labeling that is because it doesn't have seed oils.
B
You can't say on YouTube that you can give toddler formula to infants. And you can't make a recommendation for any infant formula other than. Any than, like. Other than like, a mainstream infant formula on YouTube, because I've been censored for this. So it's amazing because if you guys are listening to this on a streaming platform, you're getting the full thing. And you can post this on Instagram, this section of the podcast, but if you post this section on YouTube, you'll get censored because you can't. So you can post the whole discussion around seed oils and infant formula, but whenever I start making recommendations for breast milk or infant formulas, the whole video gets taken down on YouTube.
A
That's so annoying. Censorship at its finest.
B
Yeah, yeah, but I mean, meta probably won't do it. So just. I mean, I would use this little section as, like, something else. And, like. Yeah, but just be careful with that. But people know. You guys know the truth now.
A
Yeah, exactly. You know the truth. Okay, that's amazing. Well, let's wrap up. It's funny because we probably should have started out with this, but I just wanted to get right into it. For people that don't know your story, I think it's really interesting because you went to just allopathic medical school, right?
B
I'm an md.
A
Yeah. So you just have conventional training. At what point did you start waking up? And how did you wake up to all of this?
B
You know, it's a good question. I've been asked this on a lot of podcasts, and I think about it more and more. I don't know why. I grew up in kind of a traditional family. My dad is a traditionally trained doctor. My mom is a traditionally trained nurse practitioner. I've just always been fascinated by, like, the roots of things and why things work the way they do. And so I always wanted to know. In all of my medical training, I went to PA school before medical school, so I worked as a physician assistant in cardiology for four years before I went back to medical school for four years at the University of Arizona. Then I did four more years at the University of Washington. So I kind of have had this like one and a half medical school career. And in. In PA school, I didn't have any awareness of any of this. And then as I started working as a pa, I had this like, sort of time when I was a physician assistant in cardiology and I found functional medicine and the work of people like Mark Hyman and people are asking, like, what's the root cause? And it just got my brain thinking a little bit. And I think the snowball just continued to grow over time and I started to think about my eczema and my issues. And I mean, I definitely started experimenting with diet, but really before I found functional medicine too deeply, I was a raw vegan myself and had all sorts of health issues associated with my seven months as a raw vegan. I was never fruitarian, but I was making these huge kale shakes and having massive gas and really bad GI side effects, and it didn't help my eczema, and I lost a lot of lean body mass. I was so skinny that like a girl, literally that. That a girl I went on a first date with and she said she would not go on a second date with me because I was too skinny.
A
She said that?
B
Yeah.
A
Wow.
B
But I was 25 pounds of muscle mass, lighter than I am today. I'm 160. I was around 140, so you can imagine like 140 pounds, 5 10. That's pretty skinny. That's like marathon or skinny. And I was running like distances at the time, so I didn't see it. I probably had some body dysmorphia as a man at the time, but I think it just gradually happened. When I went back to medical school, I knew that I wanted to do something that was root cause based, integrative, whatever word you want to use. And it just kind of got deeper and deeper over the course of medical school. But again, I wasn't really thinking about things the way I do now. And I had a lot to learn. And so I think once I started falling down the rabbit hole, it just went deeper and deeper and I started thinking about it being in medical school, seeing what they were teaching us, just I always saw it through the lens of ah, this isn't the whole story. This isn't the whole story. I know this isn't the whole story. And then really most of it came in my residency at the University of Washington when I started thinking about this for myself. Doing a strict carnivore diet and then seeing my eczema get better, but then having issues with keto, doing a lot of self education and learning and trying to piece it all together and think, wow, the lipid hypothesis, I think it's wrong. Wow. I think that saturated fat and the diet heart hypothesis is wrong. Wow. I think that humans don't need to get this much cancer. Wow. I think pharmaceuticals have their place, but I think that we're being hoodwinked here. Wow. I think, holy shit, the FDA is completely corrupt. Oh my God, the usa. You know, it's just like it all kind of happens gradually. But I will say this one thing which I've never said on a podcast before. I think that a lot of it actually came from being in the wilderness. So this is kind of woo woo. But I think that being in nature is good for humans. And I was talking to my friend about this on this trip. I think that part of the way that I think was shaped by spending a lot of time mostly by myself in very wild places. So I thru hiked the Pacific Crest Trail when I was 22 years old. So I walked from Mexico to Canada one summer, 2,700 miles on a wilderness trail. And I did it with a buddy. But it was a lot of time semi alone in the wilderness. Before that I spent three and a half months backpacking, I mean like wilderness backpacking around New Zealand by myself. So I think that time alone in nature, I don't know, it did something to me.
A
I agree with you on that. I don't know if there's an innate wisdom that we download and people are probably going to come for me for that, but I believe that. That there's something else happening outside of what we consciously know.
B
Yeah, I feel like it just. I got plugged in, you know, in some way and I don't think about things. I'm not really woo. But I. When I think about my history, I think that something happened when I was like swimming rivers and getting lost or getting, you know, getting swept away in flooded rivers in New Zealand and sliding down mudslides and you know, getting near hypothermia or getting caught in avalanches in Jackson Hole when I was backcountry skiing or just being in the wilderness and seeing sunrises and sunsets and just all of those experiences just. I think it just changed me as a person and probably changed the way that I think about things. And I think you said it well, like is it some sort of innate wisdom? And I realize that I sound super, whatever, kooky right now, but I do think there's some sort of innate wisdom in nature and maybe that affected the way I think and I carried that forward. And when I went into medicine, I just had this fundamentally semi permanently changed perspective on the world. Yeah, Yeah.
A
I mean, it's interesting. I had a very. When I went to school for my master's program, I told you I was initially on the dietetic program and then I pulled myself out because I was seeing all of the corruption and the colluding and the funding that was coming from Coca Cola and Pepsi and I just didn't. That's not where I wanted to get my education. And I went to a master's program that had a more integrative approach, but it was very, very science based, heavy. Like I did biochem, I did organic chem, I had to do all of that stuff too. And I was very focused on like, I want the science, I want the science. Like anything else you can miss me with what I consider to be like woo, woo. And whatever. And I was very much in that mindset. And we took a class that they made us take for our master's program that literally shows, showed us studies and we have proof of the way that our cells change with just our thoughts and there's scientific proof. So if anyone out there is like this sounds so woo, woo. And there's no science to back it up. We actually have a lot of science to back up a lot of what we maybe don't necessarily have the words for, but we know that there's something else happening around us that we also maybe have not fully been able to grasp or discover yet.
B
Totally agree. Yeah.
A
And it blew my mind. That class really made me have a different perspective because I was so focused on, like, I want the science, I want the studies, I want, you know, the, the chemistry and all that. And then I. I took that class and was like, oh, there is science to back this up.
B
There is science. When we look at it carefully, like, you can see it. Humans are affected by nature 100%. Any other part of our environment. And the light, too. Yeah, it's all part of it.
A
Yeah. It's really interesting.
B
Yeah.
A
Well, I feel like we covered everything.
B
It was amazing. Thank you. Yeah.
A
This was so amazing. Did it tell everybody where they can find you?
B
I'm Paul Saladino, MD, medical doctor, MD, on all the platforms.
A
Amazing. This was awesome. Thank you so much.
B
I'm glad we made it happen.
A
Me too. Thank you.
B
Yay.
A
Thank you so much for listening to the Real Foodology podcast. This is a Wellness Loud production produced by Drake Peterson and mixed by Mike Fry. Theme song is by Georgie. You can watch the full video version of this podcast inside the Spotify app app or on YouTube. As always, you can leave us a voicemail by clicking the link in our bio. And if you like this episode, please rate and review on your podcast app. For more shows by my team, go to wellnessloud.com See you next time. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and doesn't constitute a provider patient relationship. I am a nutritionist, but I am not your nutritionist. As always, talk to your doctor or your health team first.
Realfoodology Podcast Summary
Episode: The Carnivore Diet, Sugar, & Seed Oils - What’s Actually Healthy? | Paul Saladino
Host: Courtney Swan
Guest: Dr. Paul Saladino
Release Date: March 4, 2025
Produced By: Wellness Loud
In this insightful episode of the Realfoodology podcast, host Courtney Swan engages in a compelling conversation with Dr. Paul Saladino, a renowned advocate of the carnivore diet and author committed to challenging conventional nutrition paradigms. Together, they delve deep into the intricacies of diet, health, and the pervasive influence of modern food processing.
Courtney begins by sharing her friend Hector's battle with psoriasis, which persisted despite various dietary and medical interventions.
Courtney [03:27]: "His psoriasis is going away."
Dr. Saladino recounts Hector's switch to the carnivore diet as a last-ditch effort to alleviate his autoimmune condition. Initially skeptical, Hector experienced significant improvements after incorporating Dr. Saladino's suggestions to include minor carbohydrates from sources like orange juice and honey.
A key point of discussion revolves around the terminology and structure of the carnivore diet.
Dr. Saladino [05:14]: "Animal based is meat and organs. So it's like a carnivore diet, but you add in things like fruit and honey and raw dairy."
Dr. Saladino emphasizes the flexibility of an animal-based diet, which includes not just meat but also nutritious animal products and select plant-based carbohydrates, making it more sustainable than a strict carnivore regimen.
Both speakers explore the challenges posed by anti-nutrients found in various plant foods, which can trigger autoimmune responses and other health issues.
Dr. Saladino [08:57]: "Kale has chemicals in it of the isothiocyanate family which prevent the absorption of iodine at the level of the thyroid."
They discuss specific anti-nutrients like oxalates and phytic acid, explaining their detrimental effects on mineral absorption and overall health, particularly for individuals with autoimmune conditions or thyroid issues.
Dr. Saladino shares his personal experiences with the ketogenic diet, highlighting both its benefits and significant drawbacks.
Dr. Saladino [11:56]: "I was in long term ketosis for like a year and a half and I ended up with declining testosterone... it was traumatic."
While acknowledging that keto may benefit certain medical conditions like epilepsy or dementia, he cautions against its long-term use due to potential hormonal imbalances and metabolic stress.
The conversation shifts to the role of sugar in the diet, distinguishing between processed sugars and those naturally occurring in fruits.
Dr. Saladino [15:17]: "We know that sugar cane juice is really healthy for humans."
Dr. Saladino argues that natural sources of sugar, like honey and fruit juices, contain beneficial compounds that mitigate the negative effects of sucrose, unlike processed sugars which lead to gut dysbiosis and metabolic endotoxemia.
A substantial portion of the episode is dedicated to dissecting the seed oils epidemic, their historical introduction, and their harmful health impacts.
Dr. Saladino [32:11]: "They were never in the human food supply until 1911... Anytime a food... comes into the human food supply, we probably should be like a little careful."
He details the industrial processing of seed oils, their high levels of polyunsaturated fats, and the resulting oxidative stress they impose on the body. Comparisons are made to trans fats, highlighting flawed studies that have historically downplayed seed oils' dangers.
Dr. Saladino offers practical advice on macronutrient distribution, emphasizing the importance of protein intake from animal sources and tailoring fat and carbohydrate consumption to individual needs.
Dr. Saladino [25:17]: "1 gram of protein per pound of goal body weight for men and women from highly bioavailable protein sources."
He advocates for high-quality protein consumption while allowing flexibility in fat and carbohydrate ratios based on personal activity levels and metabolic responses.
The discussion acknowledges the role of genetics and ancestral dietary patterns in determining individual nutritional needs, suggesting that ancestral heritage may influence one's optimal macronutrient balance.
Courtney [24:21]: "My genetic tests show that I actually thrive on a higher protein, higher fat, lower carbohydrate diet."
A critical examination is made of infant formula standards, particularly the mandatory inclusion of seed oils to match linoleic acid levels found in breast milk.
Dr. Saladino [46:24]: "Hunter gatherers eat far less linoleic acid than us because it's not in their diet... So the FDA says formula needs to contain this amount of linoleic acid."
He highlights the potential repercussions of excessive seed oil consumption on infants' health and hormonal development, urging a reevaluation of current formula compositions.
Both guests express frustration with the lack of open dialogue surrounding controversial nutritional topics, citing instances of content censorship and the dominance of flawed studies in public discourse.
Dr. Saladino [49:44]: "Meta probably won't do it. So just... you can post the whole discussion around seed oils and infant formula..."
They call for transparent, evidence-based discussions free from industry influence to better inform public health policies.
Concluding the episode, Dr. Saladino shares his transformative journey from conventional medical training to embracing a carnivore and animal-based diet, influenced by personal health struggles and profound experiences in nature.
Dr. Saladino [50:17]: "I thru hiked the Pacific Crest Trail... It changed me as a person and probably changed the way that I think about things."
Courtney echoes the sentiment, emphasizing the importance of scientific evidence combined with innate human wisdom derived from nature and ancestral practices.
Key Takeaways:
For more information and to explore further topics on nutrition, sustainability, and wellness, visit www.realfoodology.com and follow Courtney Swan on Instagram @realfoodology.