Dr. Paul Saladino

Summary

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Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Guest: Dr. Paul Saladino
Date: March 14, 2025
Episode Summary & Detailed Breakdown

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Overview

In this profound and thought-provoking episode, Rick Rubin sits down with Dr. Paul Saladino, a physician known for his exploration of functional medicine, elimination diets, carnivore/animal-based nutrition, and the critique of many mainstream medical practices. The conversation traverses Dr. Saladino's personal journey through various health paradigms (from raw vegan to carnivore and beyond), his critical view of Western medicine's symptom-focused approach, the root causes of chronic disease, individual food sensitivities, the role of plant toxins, and the science and controversy surrounding diet culture. Throughout, both Rubin and Saladino explore food not only as fuel, but as powerful information for the body, with huge implications for health, disease, and modern dietary misconceptions.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Medicine, Burnout, and Work-Life Balance

[00:24 – 03:39]

• Saladino's career began as a physician assistant (PA), inspired by medicine but wary of the unhealthy work-life balance he witnessed in his physician father:

  • “I saw him get really out of balance in his life... I never wanted to be that.” (Saladino, 01:06)
  • Personal sabbatical: Mountain biking, hiking PCT from Mexico to Canada, before returning to medicine with a clearer purpose.

• Early experience in cardiology as a PA highlighted the limitations of the "box-thinking" in Western medical specialties.

• Profound realization: Treating symptoms rather than digging for root causes is insufficient for true health.

• Quote:

  “It really felt like we were just treating a symptom and we weren't getting to the root cause.”
  (Saladino, 02:31)

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2. Western Medicine vs. Functional/Root-Cause Medicine

[03:39 – 05:57]

• Western medicine compartmentalizes (silos) organ systems, leading to missed connections between different parts of the body.
• Example: Takotsubo (‘broken heart’) cardiomyopathy as a clear mind-body connection.
• Saladino discovers pioneers like Jeff Bland and the functional medicine movement:
  • “Not simply making the symptom go away, but why did the symptom come.” (Rubin, 05:49)
  • Rebelling against the mainstream notion that patients are "broken at their core" and only pharmaceutical intervention is possible.

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3. Diet as Information, Not Just Calories

[07:02 – 07:47]

• Saladino emphasizes that food is information, not simply calories:
  • “We give people... microgram or milligram quantities of drugs to affect the system profoundly. We are eating kilogram quantities of food, and that is a lot of information coming into our body every day.” (Saladino, 07:19)

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4. Personal Diet Evolution: From Raw Vegan to Paleo to Carnivore

[07:53 – 12:25]

• First experiment: Raw vegan diet. Lost significant muscle mass, suffered severe GI issues (embarrassing gas in clinical settings).
  • “I lost about 20 pounds of lean muscle mass... bordering on gaunt.” (Saladino, 09:12)
• Transition to Paleo: Inspired by functional medicine and personal feedback (including being rejected on a date for being too skinny).
  • “I started adding meat back to my diet at that point... meat along with vegetables and fruits and nuts and seeds.” (10:59)
• Persistent issue: Eczema and asthma never fully resolved.

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5. Food Sensitivities and Autoimmunity

[12:25 – 15:32]

• Allergic responses range from classic IgE (anaphylactic) to chronic, subclinical immune activation.
• Many autoimmune conditions (eczema, psoriasis, MS, depression, type 1 diabetes) may be triggered from immune reactions in the gut, possibly from food.

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6. Individuality in Food Reactions; The Role of Elimination Diets

[17:01 – 22:16]

• Immune system programming is "infinitely complex."

  • "That's just a personal process of discovery.” (Saladino, 17:15)

• Most common triggers: Plant foods, but some react to animal foods (egg, dairy, even beef or lamb).

• Signal vs. noise: The power of radical elimination (e.g., carnivore) to clarify what foods work.

• Quote:

  “When you can lower the noise, you can see the signal.”
  (Saladino, 22:13)

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7. Carnivore & Animal-Based Diets: History, Practice, and Evolution

[19:46 – 28:19, 61:28 – 65:00]

• Saladino references earlier experimenters and pop culture references (Jordan Peterson, Owsley from the Grateful Dead).

• Original strict version: Meat, salt, organs. Eczema disappeared, felt energetic and well at first.

• Long-term challenges: Muscle cramps, heart palpitations, "hypnagogic jerks" (sleep disruption), declining thyroid/testosterone—likely due to electrolyte deficiency from chronic ketosis.

• Led to reintroduction of carbohydrates (honey, fruit) and later raw dairy, forming his animal-based diet:

  • “Meat and organs, plus fruit and honey and raw dairy.” (Saladino, 102:04)

• Notable quote:

  “I do not subscribe to the idea that sugar in fruit is harmful for humans.”
  (Saladino, 64:19)

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8. Local, Seasonal, and Ancestral Food Context

[25:18 – 27:58]

• The importance of eating locally and seasonally—effects on the microbiome, tolerance, and potential health benefits.
• The nuance of local honey and food sovereignty in Costa Rica.

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9. Raw vs. Pasteurized Dairy

[38:16 – 47:34]

• Pasteurization: One-century-old adaptation to poor sanitation, but eliminates beneficial commensal bacteria in milk.

• Raw milk linked in studies to lower incidence of asthma, eczema, and allergies; tolerability may be increased due to microbiota and unique proteins.

• Fermentation further reduces lactose and plant defense chemicals, making foods (milk, vegetables) safer and more digestible.

• Quote:

  “I definitely wish I'd had raw milk growing up.”
  (Saladino, 45:44)

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10. Plant Defense Chemicals: Oxalates, Phytic Acid, Lectins, and More

[49:23 – 55:06, 103:33 – 106:23]

• Seeds (grains, beans, nuts): Highly defended, may cause digestive or immune issues; grains contain gluten and phytic acid, beans and nuts have enzyme inhibitors.
• Fermentation (e.g., sourdough bread) makes some grains more tolerable but doesn't eliminate all antinutrients.
• Certain vegetables, especially leaves (spinach, kale), roots, seeds, and spices (turmeric), contain high oxalate levels and may cause health issues in some.
• Turmeric/curcumin: Potential anti-androgenic effects; benefit or harm is context-dependent.

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11. Modern Food Quality vs. Ultra-Processed Foods

[55:06 – 61:17, 125:15 – 130:49]

• Industrial meat: Grain-finishing introduces pesticides, plastics, less healthy fats.
  • Emphasis on grass-fed, grass-finished; seek trustworthy local producers when possible, but perfection shouldn’t preclude improvement.
• Processed meat (deli, sausage, hot dogs): Higher risk (additives, microplastics).
• Dairy: Best when raw, from healthy animals; next best is grass-fed, less processed.
• Ultra-processed foods (crackers, cookies, chips): Considered "poisonous," cannot be redeemed by calorie restriction.

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12. Controversies in Mainstream Nutrition: Seed Oils, Carbs, and Saturated Fat

[75:10 – 88:31]

• Seed oils (PUFAs): Viewed as a significant driver of mitochondrial and metabolic dysfunction, based on mechanistic biochemistry and evolutionary mismatch.
• Mainstream dietary advice often conflates observational studies (correlation, not causation) with experimental evidence.
• Red meat, eggs, and animal fats remain wrongly vilified.
• Counterpoint: Saturated animal fats, butter, and dairy appear neutral or beneficial, offering protective odd-chain fatty acids (e.g., C15, C17).

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13. Eggs, Coffee, and Fiber

[88:33 – 99:48]

• Eggs: Highly nutritious, issues mostly for a minority with egg protein allergies.
• Coffee: Caveats regarding pesticides, mold, acrylamide, and especially caffeine’s potential impact on sleep quality.
• Fiber: Not a panacea; for some (especially with gut/immune issues), high-fiber grains may be problematic. Fruit/vegetable fiber typically better tolerated.

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14. Supplements, Protein, and Protein Powders

[106:23 – 116:09]

• Supplements: Best used for genetic/personal context (e.g., methylated B vitamins for MTHFR).
• Protein: Favor animal protein for bioavailability; plant protein roughly half as usable.
• Collagen/bone broth: Complements muscle meat for glycine, balances methionine.
• Whey: Benefits immune system uniquely due to immunoglobulins.

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15. Perspectives on Fasting, Weight Loss, and Ozempic

[133:23 – 140:28]

• Intermittent Fasting: Mixed data, risk of increased stress hormones, lower sex/thyroid hormones if overdone.
• Weight Loss: Emphasis on food quality rather than calorie restriction or pharma solutions (e.g., Ozempic).
  • “Ozempic is essentially a pharmaceutical antidote for a highly processed diet..." (Saladino, 120:54)
• Satiety and nutritional sufficiency, not calorie deficit, cited as keys to sustainable fat loss and high health span.

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16. Ancestral, Weston A. Price, and Animal-Based Diets Compared

[130:49 – 133:23]

• Weston A. Price: Traditional diets prioritized meat, organs, some fermented grains/vegetables—reflected in superior oral/facial health.
• All healthy pre-modern diets included nutrient-dense animal foods, not plant-based exclusivity.
• Carnivore & Animal-Based: Modern distillation focusing on most bioavailable, least problematic foods for modern health context.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• “It really felt like we were just treating a symptom and we weren't getting to the root cause.” — Dr. Paul Saladino, [02:31]

• “It's all connected. It all works together... Western medicine still thinks this way.” — Dr. Paul Saladino, [03:45]

• “You are broken at your core. You were dealt a bad genetic poker hand... take this medication, which is actually a gift.” — Dr. Paul Saladino, [05:57]

• “We are eating kilogram quantities of food, and that is a lot of information coming into our body every day.” — Dr. Paul Saladino, [07:19]

• “I lost about 20 pounds of lean muscle mass. Horrible gas... they had complained to the business about how bad my gas was.” — Dr. Paul Saladino, [09:12]

• “There's pretty good evidence now... There's lower sort of chronic subclinical allergy... We see immune reaction, right? ...almost everything, even like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, certainly depression.” — Dr. Paul Saladino, [13:16]

• “That's just a personal process of discovery. But I think there are some, like, metrics that we can use to kind of look at the most common things that people react to.” — Dr. Paul Saladino, [17:15]

• "When you can lower the noise, you can see the signal." — Dr. Paul Saladino, [22:13]

• “What’s interesting about the carnivore diet… is when you're eating only animal foods, you can do that longer without running into problems like nutritional deficiencies.” — Dr. Paul Saladino, [22:41]

• “I do not subscribe to the idea that sugar in fruit is harmful for humans.” — Dr. Paul Saladino, [64:19]

• “Ozempic is essentially a pharmaceutical antidote for a highly processed diet.” — Dr. Paul Saladino, [120:54]

• “A lot of what we hear in mainstream dietary recognitions has some science. It's just that it may not be a comprehensive scientific analysis.” — Dr. Paul Saladino, [85:52]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Western medicine’s pitfalls & work-life balance: [00:24 – 03:39]
• Functional medicine, root cause thinking: [03:39 – 05:57]
• Diet as information, not calories: [07:02 – 07:47]
• Raw vegan / paleo journey: [07:53 – 12:25]
• Food sensitivities, autoimmunity, gut-immune axis: [12:25 – 15:32]
• Bioindividuality in food reactions: [17:01 – 22:16]
• Carnivore diet: history, benefits, and limitations: [19:46 – 28:19]
• Animal-based diet evolution & justification: [61:28 – 65:00]
• Raw/local foods, honey as ancestral food: [25:18 – 27:58], [70:51 – 75:10]
• Seed oils & metabolic health controversy: [75:10 – 88:31]
• Eggs, fiber, protein, supplements: [88:33 – 116:20]
• Perfect vs. good in food quality hierarchy: [55:06 – 61:17], [125:15 – 130:49]
• Difference between carnivore and Weston Price diets: [130:49 – 133:23]
• Fasting & longevity myths: [133:23 – 140:28]

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Memorable and Practical Takeaways

• Holism over reductionism: Health is more than treating symptoms; interconnectedness of organs, diets, and disease is real.
• Animal foods at the center: For Saladino, nutrient density, bioavailability, and evolutionary precedent put meat, organs, raw dairy, fruit, and honey at the core of optimal eating.
• Ultra-processed foods as toxins: The combination of seed oils, additives, refined sugars, and grains is central to the modern health crisis—not carbs or fat per se.
• Individualization above dogma: Elimination diets may uncover surprises; what's “healthy” is often context-dependent, not absolute.
• Plant foods and defense chemicals: Not all vegetables are benign; antinutrients and defense chemicals in seeds/leaves/roots can be problematic.
• Raw and well-produced foods matter: Pasteurization, industrial farming, and processing disrupt the biological harmony of ancestral diets.
• Caution with fasting and pharmaceutical shortcuts: Focus on satiety, food quality, and metabolic health over restriction and symptom suppression.

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This summary encapsulates the depth of Dr. Saladino's arguments and the natural, inquisitive tone of Rick Rubin's interview style. Their wide-ranging discussion provides a powerful resource for critical thinkers, nutrition enthusiasts, and anyone interested in the connections between food, health, and self-experimentation.

Transcript

[Narrator/Advertiser]

Tetragrammaton.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

I went to position assistant school before I went to medical school. As a physician assistant you have prescriptive rights. But a nurse practitioner has full autonomy. But physician assistants kind of work with a physician. They don't really do autonomous work. So when I worked as a pa, I was in cardiology and I would see patients after their procedures or after the hospital. I would see patients in the hospital with the doctors or like round on patients to help the doctors, but I wouldn't do the independent care with the patient. Right. So you sort of like help the doctors. And when I went to PA school, all I knew was that I liked medicine and I liked physiology and I liked pharmacology.

[Interviewer]

How did you pick PA school?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

My dad was a doctor.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

And I saw him get really out of balance in his life. So he's an internist. When I was growing up, he never really had good work life balance at all. And I never wanted to be that.

[Interviewer]

Did he have a beeper?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

He did.

[Interviewer]

So he was like always on call.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

He was always on call, Yeah. I remember him coming home in the middle of the night. So I would go to sleep growing up and almost never would he be at the dinner table. More commonly he would come home after I was already asleep and I would get up in the middle of the night to pee and he would be down in the living room at 1 or 2 in the morning on his belly with a stack of charts, you know, 2ft high, charting by hand in the middle of the night. And. And that really affected his health negatively. And I remember I took 6 years off after college, so I went to high school. College, College, William Mary, studied chemistry, worked really hard, thought I was going to go to medical school and got kind of burned out. I had a six year, quote unquote sabbatical where I mountain biked and skied and climbed mountains. I hiked from Mexico to Canada.

[Interviewer]

Did you think you would ever come back or no?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

At that point I never thought I would come back. I thought I was just going to be. I thought I was going to work for Outward Bound. One summer I just spent three and a half months on the Pacific Crest Trail in the wilderness. And I thought, this is great, what a resume powder for Outward Bound. And eventually after about four or five years, I remember working in a bike shop in Bend, Oregon and thinking, oh, I'm not going to sell bikes for the rest of my life. I actually want to do something with science. And that was when I applied to PA school thinking, I, I don't want to go to medical school. I want to find something in the middle because I want that work, life, balance. But I knew nothing about medicine. I just knew it sounds fun. I like science. I like biology. I like chemistry. It wasn't until I worked as a PA that things started to click for me and something felt off. I really began to realize once I was in it that what I was doing wasn't resonating with me. It really felt like when were just treating a symptom and we weren't getting to the root cause. And I thought, there's so much more here. I really want to understand this problem at a deeper level than I am understanding the problem with this sort of a practice. And I remember the cardiologists I worked with who were really great people miming to me around the heart, saying, think here. You know, this is your box. You think in this box. And I thought, wait, that's the. That's the worst thing I want to do. What if the heart is connected with the gut or the thyroid or the pancreas or the brain or. Right. There's so many more connections. But that's what western medicine did, I realized, is that it taught us to silo specialties and silo organ systems.

[Interviewer]

And when you silo an organ system, you're not taking into account how it impacts the others or how the others might be impacting it.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

It's all connected. Yeah. Yeah, it's all connected.

[Interviewer]

It's a holistic system.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

And it obviously does work together. It all works together. And I mean, it's crazy to me that western medicine still thinks this way, because even as a physician assistant in cardiology, there's a diagnosis in cardiology called takotsubo cardiomyopathy. It's T, A K O, T, S U, B O cardiomyopathy. On an echocardiogram, it looks like a spade because it's apical ballooning of the heart. But it's called broken heart syndrome because people. It was originally, I think, described in Japan potentially by Dr. Takasubo. It happens when people experience extreme stress, the loss of a loved one, broken hearts. You get this ballooning of the apex of the heart, and it heals on its own. But this is a clear connection that breaks the mold. This is a physiologic manifestation of an emotional experience through the mind with the outside world. That's wild. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Right.

[Interviewer]

So that tells you there are likely many of those.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

So many. Right. And you and I know that what we put into our gut, what we put in our mouth, affects our heart. Right. And when someone has a thyroid issue, that can affect your heart. And all of these things are connected. So it was working as a PA that I started to kind of question the mainstream and think, this isn't going to work. I don't just want to give out beta blockers and calcium channel blockers and thiazide DIuretics As a PA, I want to just try and get my hands a little deeper into this and understand what's the root cause. And that was when I started to go down the rabbit hole and found things like functional medicine ideas and people thinking about these sort of root cause ideas.

[Interviewer]

Remember what the first functional medicine people you came across?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Probably Jeff Bland. Jeff Bland is a PhD and he was one of the people that really started the idea of functional medicine. And I think he's doing some different stuff now with, like, lifestyle medicine. But, yeah, those folks were really at the beginning of that movement and just sort of asking the question, what is causing these things? And that was. That was like. That's been the most fascinating rabbit hole that I've fallen down in my life.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Not simply making the symptom go away, but why did the symptom come. Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Root cause. That's so satisfying.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Because. Yeah. As we know, many people continue to suffer. Millions and millions of people suffer. Because the mainstream story that we're told in medical school, in Western medicine, by our doctors, really, even by our society now at large, is that you are broken at your core. You were dealt a bad genetic poker hand. There's nothing you can do about this. You might as well take this medication, which is actually a gift. Right. Here's a pharmaceutical. It's a gift. And that, to me, has always felt so discordant, and it was so interesting to realize, oh, wait, that's not the reality. And I've really made that. One of my central purposes now is to try and educate people and to rebel against that idea, because I've seen it so many times now over and over and over, that people have issues, whether it's eczema, psoriasis, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, thyroid issues, depression, infertility. They go to their doctor and the doctor says, here's a medication. What you're eating has nothing to do with this.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. For you, is diet the main thing?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Diet is one of the central things. And I think my bias is to think about diet as the main thing. It's certainly not the Only thing.

[Interviewer]

But because you do eat every day, several times a day. So diet is consistent and it's a lot of information.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

And I think that we don't understand that like we should today. So in medical school, we learn about pharmaceutical drugs, whether it's a beta blocker, a statin, whatever. We give people microgram or milligram quantities of drugs to affect the system profoundly. We are eating kilogram quantities of food, and that is a lot of information coming into our body every day. And that's. I think, that affects us in profound ways, huge ways, far beyond calories.

[Interviewer]

So starting from the beginning of your diet experience, what was the first experiment?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Probably veganism.

[Interviewer]

How long did you do vegan?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Six months. Raw vegan.

[Interviewer]

And how'd you get turned onto it?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

I don't remember exactly.

[Interviewer]

Remember where you were living at the time?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

I was living in Flagstaff, Arizona. So this is right when I was working as a page. So in PA school, I never really thought about diet. I remember being in PA school making cardinal sins. You know, bringing chicken with pasta sauce that I made at my house in a plastic container and putting it in the microwave. Right. Things that just caused me to cringe right now in terms of endocrine disruptors or pfas forever. Chemicals, all of these things were seeping into my. I wasn't thinking about that at all in PA school. And at some point when I had just started working as a pa, not very long into my work, maybe a year or two into working as a pa, I found, like, day David Wolf. And there was another person that I found that I don't remember the person's name. There's a series of books that he wrote with some really interesting illustrations. But that really turned me onto this idea at the time that simple food is good, cooked food is harming us, and humans are not meant to eat cooked food. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. And then I even went down for the rabbit hole. Like, humans are not meant to eat animal foods at all. So I started a raw vegan diet at that point. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And how did that impact you?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

I lost about 20 pounds of lean muscle mass. So I'm not a large human. I'm like 5, 9, 165 pounds. But I'm fairly muscular. And at that point, I weighed 140 to 145 pounds. And when I see pictures of myself, I'm much skinnier and much less muscle, bordering on gauntlet. So I lost a lot of muscle mass. And from a GI perspective, I had horrible gas, horrible. And There are funny stories of that time, of me not being able to be in indoor settings with humans without being really embarrassed. I mean, I worked in an office as a PA with two women, so it was me, another woman who's a PA and a woman who's a nurse practitioner. And we shared a small office that was probably 15 by 15. And I didn't know this at the time, but after I left, I heard from the CEO of the business that they had complained to the business about how bad my gas was, right? So here I am working, thinking, like, oh, I can just kind of fart into this chair and it's going to be okay. And they were really suffering because of my bad gas, and it never got better.

[Interviewer]

And then what was the first change after raw vegan.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah, Paleo, essentially something like Paleo.

[Interviewer]

What turned you on Paleo?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

You know, I came back to Jeff Bland from Functional Medicine, and I heard him talking about our book of life as humans, which is kind of our DNA, and how there are certain foods that are really written into our book of life, written into our DNA as humans and how humans had evolved, eating meat and animal foods for our entire existence. These are written into who we are. And I thought that makes a lot of sense. And I think it was galvanized by an experience that I had with a woman who would not go on a second date with me because she thought I was too skinny. And I thought, wow, this is a real evolutionary signal that, like, I'm not a fit mate for her, like, she's not attracted to me. And so that really hit home for me at that point. I was in my early 30s, and I thought, I, you know, I'm. I'm not attractive. Like, I'm too skinny for a woman. And then, oh, it all kind of clicked, and I started adding meat back to my diet at that point. But I was eating then meat along with vegetables and fruit and nuts and seeds.

[Interviewer]

How long did that go on Paleo?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

That went on for probably six years or so.

[Interviewer]

And how did that feel?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

It felt pretty good overall, and an issue that I'd had since my childhood of eczema and asthma. This atopic condition never went away, and that was something that started to bother me more and more. I think at first I was just happy that I had more muscle mass, that I felt better, that I felt more energy, and that I didn't have horrible gas anymore. And I can be in a car or I can be in a movie theater or be. Be in someone's house on a couch. And not feel embarrassed because I had to go outside all the time. And that was an improvement. And I had intermittent episodes of eczema, which is this kind of like red itchy rash that I would get on my wrists, my elbo toes. My hips sometimes worsened in medical school, which came shortly after that time.

[Interviewer]

You think because of stress?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

I think it was mostly caused by food. Yeah, food triggers. And. And eventually I started to hone in on certain food triggers.

[Interviewer]

Would you say that you have allergies or it's something else?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

There's different definitions of allergy, right? So we have different immunoglobulins in our immune system. And technical allergy, or at least anaphylactic allergy, is related to this immunoglobulin IgE. And when IgE immunoglobulins bind to certain cells, like mast cells, and they cross link, you get this degranulation. That's where people get anaphylaxis or swollen tongue or swollen lips. That's the main thing we think of as allergy. But I think that there's pretty good evidence now. There's lower sort of chronic subclinical allergy, which is just a word that means your immune system responds to something. It's an allergic reaction, but not at the level of a hypersensitivity.

[Interviewer]

You don't have an event based on it, but it'll be a low level thing that continues to build in your body over a long period of time and then may turn out to be cancer or heart disease.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Who knows, Right? Some sort of chronic low level activation of the immune system. And that's what we see when we look at a biopsy of someone's skin who has eczema or a sister syndrome, psoriasis. They're not the same, at least histologically. We see immune reaction, right? And there are so many conditions that have an autoimmune component that we don't necessarily think about like there's autoimmune components, meaning the immune system is involved in a potentially broken way in almost everything, Even like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease, certainly depression. You have immunologic cells in the brain. These are called microglial cells that are triggered for some reason. There's a phenotype of the cell that changes the way the cell looks. So immune cells get triggered. And there are now ways to track where immune cells originate. And people with multiple sclerosis, they can track now that the immune cells reacting against the glia, which is this sort of fatty coating around neurons, this demyelination that's happening, or these glial cells that make the myelin around the neurons, this demyelination, they originate in the gut. So many of these immune conditions, we think about the same with type 1 diabetes. These cells in the pancreas that are attacked by the immune system, it looks like the immune system is again originating in the gut. That's interesting that like so many of these autoimmune conditions are triggered potentially in our guts from food possibly, and that these cells are moving out. So in the skin you'll find immune cells reacting against the skin or psoriasis or thyroid gland or joints. For rheumatoid arthritis, it's so common. Eye conditions or skin conditions, scleroderma, Sjogren's, and it's even in blood vessels potentially now as well. I mean there is involvement of the immune system potentially triggered by something else. But I think autoimmune conditions are much more common than we imagine as humans. Even like I said, depression is one that I think is in some ways could be considered autoimmune because there's definitely neuroinflammation.

[Narrator/Advertiser]

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[Interviewer]

If you were to do an experiment on yourself and you find out something that triggers you in a negative way, how do we know that that's not you and that would go for everybody? How do we know what works for who?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Oh, I think that there's definitely differences between you and I in terms of what foods are going to bother us or work well. And I don't know why this is. I think the programming of our immune systems is very Complex. It happens very early on in our development, potentially even in utero. Different mothers, different breast milk, different environments from when we were young. Who knows what sort of signals affect this? I was a child that was probably overmedicated as a kid. I had two medical parents. I was getting antibiotics as a kid, right. I had exposure to certain foods and pesticides. And so there's this almost infinitely complex milieu that affects the way our thymus and other organs in our body program the bone marrow, the spleen, program the immune cells. And so some people react to nightshades, which are things like tomato and eggplant and goji berries. And some people can enjoy pasta sauce, which is delicious, you know, and some people react to chocolate, which I seem to. And some people can eat it with no problem. So I think that it comes down to this idea that, okay, if we are thriving, why change anything? But if we're not just realizing that certain things in our environment start with food can be triggering us. Even foods that we think of as, quote, healthy or unprocessed may be irritating our immune system in a unique way. That's just a personal process of discovery. But I think there are some, like, metrics that we can use to kind of look at the most common things that people react to.

[Interviewer]

What would be the metrics? Like, how could we see what are the most common things that people react to?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

It's really just experience, right? There's no randomized, double blind, controlled trials here. But there are people in the functional medicine space and even in the immunologic space that are starting to think about this. And I think that for most people, the main foods, and I'll put an asterisk on this, the main foods that people react to are plant foods generally. But some people do react to animal foods also, like egg whites and egg yolks can be triggering for people because of.

[Interviewer]

And some people have trouble with dairy.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Some people have trouble with dairy. And I wonder for most people whether that's pasteurized dairy versus unpasteurized, which is kind of a separate conversation. But yeah. And I've even met people who sometimes have trouble and react to beef versus lamb or things like that. But my path kind of led me to this point of first thinking about the plant foods, which is this interesting framework to think about what parts of plants are potentially more triggering for us versus less triggering for us. Differentiating a plant fruit from the leaves, stems, roots and seeds, that was the beginning of like, kind of the next step of the journey around the carnivore diet. Because this eczema bothered me in medical school.

[Interviewer]

Was there a carnivore diet before you started?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Oh, yeah. Yeah, there definitely was.

[Interviewer]

What's the history of the carnivore diet?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

You know, I think wasn't there. Was he a drummer for the Grateful Dead? Who did?

[Interviewer]

Oh, Owsley. Yeah, yeah, he wasn't the drummer, but he was the guy who made the acid, okay, for the grateful thing. But he only ate meat.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

And he wrote a book or something about it many years ago. I think Sean Baker was one of the people that really kind of popularized the carnivore diet. A few years before I got into it, Michaela Peterson's experience, along with her dad, Jordan Peterson, definitely started to think about it. But the Carnivore diet, I think, has really only been in the zeitgeist for probably the last eight years or so. I was in the sort of functional medicine mindset when I heard about the carnivore diet. I was driving to the Washington coast to go surfing, and it was probably a rainy, dreary day, and I was listening to Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan's podcast, and Jordan was talking about sort of biblical things and, you know, how we might use those ideas to think about how we live our life. And at the end of the podcast, he talked about his autoimmune conditions. And my ears kind of perked up because I thought, oh, this is interesting. You know, I'm in my residency at this point in Seattle, and. And I'm getting more and more interested in what a common thread might be among autoimmune conditions for humans, because I see it so much, and I'm starting to think like, oh, yeah, depression, anxiety. These conditions that I'm thinking about a lot now in my psychiatry residency are probably autoimmune in some nature, with the immune system getting activated by something. And Jordan was talking about his sleep apnea, weight loss, his joint pain. I think he had some psychiatric symptoms also that got better with a carnivore diet. And my first reaction, again, was, that's crazy. We know that there are things in plants that we need that are valuable for us, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm fascinated because that's a really interesting experiment. It's just, how can you distill it down? I think one of the hardest things for people, to your earlier point, is understanding signal from noise. And so many of us have such complex diets and complex environments that we surround ourselves with, whether it's skincare products or fragrances or deodorants. Or laundry detergents or the foods we put in our body, that it's very hard for us to tell what we might have been exposed to that makes us feel a certain way, whether it's good or bad. Often it's bad. But that's a very powerful differentiation. When you can lower the noise.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

And you know this. When you can lower the noise, you can see the signal.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

And so this is, this is a really powerful experiment to simplify the human diet in a way. Like an only animal foods diet.

[Interviewer]

Well, it's an elimination diet.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Right.

[Interviewer]

And elimination diets, whether it's meat or not, when you reduce what you eat down to one thing and you tolerate it, then you get a sense of eventually, maybe two weeks later, three weeks later, if you start adding one thing at a time back, you find out very quickly.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah, yeah. What's interesting about the carnivore diet or a diet now? I mean, you know, fast forward, foreshadowing. Eventually I added more foods back to my diet. But what's interesting about a diet like the carnivore diet, especially if it includes organs, is when you're eating only animal foods, you can do that I think, for longer without running into problems like nutritional deficiencies. This is the issue that I have looking back on my vegan phase and some of these other things. But yes, in principle, you could just eat apples or you could just eat oranges.

[Interviewer]

There's a potato diet. The potato hack.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yes, yes. You could just eat potatoes and you will separate signal from noise and you'll see things. The issue that I have with juice cleanses or some of these things that go on long term is there's a lot of nutritional deficiencies with the potato diet. Now, I eventually understood, and we can talk about that in a moment, that there are even some nutritional deficiencies that I ran into with a fully animal meat and organs diet. But that idea of signal to noise for humans is so powerful and so profound. Interestingly, I think that one of the catalysts for me originally starting a carnivore diet was a bad flare of eczema that I got, I think, from a mushroom extract.

[Interviewer]

Interesting.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

So I was in Seattle at the time, working out at Seattle Bouldering project, and one of my friends was telling me about Chaga and Reishi and cordyceps, and I thought, oh, great. And I got large quantities of these mushroom extracts. Again, there's so much interesting research on the superfoods, glycoproteins, you know, in here, and the beta glucans and in the mushrooms? Yeah, Quote superfoods. And I believe that that was a major trigger. And I had eczema all over my arms and all over my chest to the point that it's actually called an auto examinous reaction or an ID reaction. Like that's, that's something where your, your immune system gets so triggered that it kind of reacts everywhere. Usually when I get eczema, previously it would be elbows, knees, hips, wrist. And this one was everywhere. It was on my chest. There's an old picture of me that I found where I was surfing at La Push in Washington. And I have a wetsuit that's like, pulled down and I can see my chest and it's all red. There's eczema all over my chest. And it was probably from the mushrooms you mentioned earlier.

[Interviewer]

In vitro or mother's milk. But since we're talking about ancestral ideas, is it possible that where we genetically come from may also have some impact, that if we're from a colder latitude or if we're from a more tropical latitude, we might do better with certain foods than others?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Absolutely. And it might also be connected with where we are in the present moment.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about that.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Well, that's kind of an interesting theory. I think Jack Cruz has talked about.

[Interviewer]

That, you know, local food that you're genetically predisposed to be able to digest foods that are grown in the place.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

That you're at, or your gut microbiome might change in the place that you're at based on your environment. We know that even walking. So I live mostly in Costa Rica, and I've been in California for about a week. And just being among different trees and the ocean here is different than the ocean in Costa Rica. So my microbiome is changing and the sun is at a different place in the sky. And I'm getting less sunlight here because I'm not exposed because the sun isn't as high. So I'm getting information from the sun in my eyes and how long it's out and the height of the sun over the horizon. So all of those things might influence my tolerance of carbohydrates. Interesting things in my body, and they're. There is some preliminary research that I've seen that suggests that if you're eating food from a place that's far from where you are, it may not react the same way in your body. Now, that's a level, I think, of granularity that most people don't need to worry about.

[Interviewer]

But it's interesting. And I know that for Honey, in particular, local honey seems to have magical properties that even the healthiest honey from somewhere far away doesn't have.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yes. Yeah. The bees thing is fascinating. I have bees in Costa Rica that are stingless bees. And I was just talking to a friend. I want to get APIs melliflora, which is the regular stinging bee in Costa Rica as well, and tend the bees. And I want to have my own honey that's local. But yes, I mean, I love honey and I put honey in my goat milk. I actually brought some raw goat milk for us with honey. But, you know, I got some honey from Vermont and you're reminding me, like, when I'm thinking about honey, what I'm thinking about is where are the hives? And are there any other crops that can be sprayed with pesticides within 3 miles of the hives? Because bees generally go about 3 mile radius from the hive. So. But yeah, local things are pro. Making more sense. So what's cool about being in Costa Rica is that I get all of my produce 100% from a farmer's market. So there's really no ability to have something imported, or if it is, it's very obvious that it's imported because it's in some package and you can tell that it's not local. Like grapes, you know, there's no grapes in Costa Rica that I've ever seen. And when rambutan, which is mamoncinos, are in season, you eat mamoncinos. And then when they're out of season, or this mango's in season and it's not in season. So, yeah, that stuff's very interesting. And I always appreciate, when I come to the States, that I get different food than I did in Costa Rica. Although I'm also now realizing, as I'm saying that not all the food I'm getting in the grocery store is from the area that I'm in. Like blueberries. I don't think there's a lot of blueberries being grown in California right now.

[Interviewer]

Let's talk more about honey. In the original version of Carnivore, it was meat and salt. Is that correct?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Meat and salt, plus liver and heart.

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah. And animal fat. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. And how long did you do that version?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

A year and a half.

[Interviewer]

And how did that work?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

It worked really well. In the beginning, I felt good. The eczema went away probably over the course of three to four weeks and didn't recur. And I felt like, especially for the first six months to a year, I had good energy, good performance. In the gym, sleep was okay. And then some things started to creep in that were puzzling to me and now make more sense in retrospect.

[Interviewer]

So what were those things?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Mostly things like muscle cramps. When I was climbing, heart palpitations at night. I had a series of, they're called hypnagogic jerks. So as you are going to sleep, you feel like you're falling and it wakes you up and it's quite disturbing psychologically and probably related to magnesium or electrolyte deficiency. I had a time where I would just, I would try to fall asleep and just felt like I was jerking myself awake. And that really disturbed my sleep in a pretty big way. Looking at my labs, I had decline in my thyroid hormone, especially T3, free T3 and free T4, but my TSH stayed about the same. But the actual active thyroid hormones started to decline. My testosterone declined. I didn't notice a whole lot in terms of like libido, but my testosterone went from around 800 to around 500. And my sex hormone binding globulin, which sort of binds up the free testosterone, went way up. It almost doubled on a ketogenic diet. So in retrospect, most if not all of this was probably related to profound electrolyte deficiency, which is common in many people, but apparently not all people who do long term ketogenic diets. So a lot has been made of ketogenic diets recently and it's a really interesting, let's call it alternate physiology for humans. Most of the time in our lives growing up, we are burning some mix of carbohydrates and fat. And on a ketogenic diet, we take in primarily fat and don't eat any carbohydrates of any significant amount. And we start to really shift our cellular physiology to be doing beta oxidation of fat. And that can work in humans. And because of that, insulin levels fall very, very low. And I think that the physiology here is that we need some insulin spikes throughout the day. Insulin gets vilified, I think incorrectly. It's a much more nuanced conversation.

[Interviewer]

Doesn't the ketogenic diet also really help people with different kinds of problems?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Mostly neurologic problems, yeah. Yes. Because at the level of the mitochondria, some people who have genetic epilepsy or Parkinson's or some of these highly advanced conditions, especially in the brain, probably have broken mitochondria in the brain that are hard to salvage. And the main pathway of glycolysis and utilization of carbohydrates to make the intermediates that run the electron transport chain in the mitochondria is. It doesn't work real well. And it's hard to salvage that for some people who are very far advanced in their conditions. And so a ketogenic diet can be a great alternative therapy. It always has side effects, which we know now. I mean, but it was originally developed for kids with recalcitrant epilepsy because of the way that it can kind of bypass some of these mitochondrial issues. And like I said, it has. It has side effects which include electrolyte issues for a lot of people. Because for those of us that don't have severely advanced or irreversible mitochondrial dysfunction at the level of the nervous system, the increase in insulin when we eat carbohydrates is a signal to the kidneys to hold on to electrolytes. Sodium, potassium, calcium.

[Interviewer]

Even if you were to drink electrolytes, it wouldn't fix it because you just.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Sort of like have a hole in the bathtub, right? And it just goes out. You can pump a lot of water in, and it's. It's very difficult. I remember when I was doing a strict carnivore diet. I would sometimes have 20 plus grams of salt per day. And I experimented with large doses of magnesium. I even experimented with oral potassium chloride, which is not something anyone should ever do, because generally, if you're taking potassium orally, your body will regulate it. But it's a dangerous. That's a dangerous electrolyte to take orally because it can cause profoundly, let's say, cardiac shifts to the level of cardiac myocytes. That can be very dangerous. So, and none of that helped. Like, I couldn't take in enough electrolytes. They just come in, they go out, they come in, they go out. And when I added carbohydrates back, and that was a moment of real cognitive dissonance, Right? Thinking this way of eating had some kernel of truth in it. And I believe that cutting out all plants in my diet really helped me from an immunologic perspective, from an autoimmune perspective. And now I'm realizing, okay, I'm still on the journey. I thought I was.

[Interviewer]

You thought you found the key?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah, yeah. But I was still. I was still walking. And, you know, at that point I had essentially, like, written a book about the carnivore diet and thought, oh, man. Like, I guess I was wrong about some things in there, which is something to this day that I still get. I get pushback about. But it's a good learning and it's humble.

[Interviewer]

I know that when you started adding things back in, many people were really unhappy, of course, because also in the paleo and keto community, carbs tend to be a no no.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah, well, definitely in the keto community, carbs are a big no no. And I've had some friendly debates with my colleagues in the keto community. In the keto community, there is a lot of messaging that carbohydrates are the root cause of diabetes. And I, I don't think that's supported by the medical literature at all. I don't think that carbohydrates cause insulin resistance. This idea of insulin induced insulin resistance is not something I think plays out. And we should just pause for a moment because the word carbohydrate is fraught. I think colloquially people say carbs and that apparently means like spaghetti and pizza. But we're talking about carbohydrates, which is a macronutrient which is found in spaghetti and pizza, but also squash and fruit and honey. So I'm not talking about pizza and pasta. I'm talking mostly about just carbohydrates broadly. And I don't think that fruit, for instance, causes diabetes in humans. And that's another rabbit hole we can go down if you'd like. Fructose gets a lot of a bad rap, which I think is not deserv.

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[Interviewer]

Tell me about keto versus carnivore.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Well, keto is a philosophy where you don't necessarily eat only meat or animal products. You just eat very high fat and very low carbohydrates. So there is a threshold, probably around 50 grams of carbohydrates a day. Below that at which people will become. Most humans will become ketogenic. And that means your body has to make its own glucose through a process called gluconeogenesis at the level of the liver. Glucose turns out to be so critical for human physiology that we make our own if we don't intake glucose or precursors, and we can do that in a starvation situation, or we can do that as a alternative pathway. And in a ketogenic diet, you are eating, perhaps you can eat salad, but you're eating it with lots of, lots of oils and lots of fats and you're not eating any carbohydrates or very small amounts. And that will put you into ketosis. Your body makes ketones and you will see levels of ketones 0.5 millimolar, 1 millimolar if you use a ketone blood meter. Sometimes people use breath meters, which are a little less accurate. But you can see that you are in ketosis, which is sort of the byproduct of this fat based metabolism. You're doing beta oxidation of fats to make the intermediates necessary to run your mitochondria, sort of this alternative pathway instead of breaking down glucose to make the precursors for the mitochondrial respiratory chain. So ultimately we have to run our mitochondria and we can do it essentially two different ways. And yeah, they both have details that are associated with both of those pathways.

[Interviewer]

When you do it, have you experimented with keto?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

A little bit, but never, never a whole lot. Only keto in the context of carnivore. I did a little bit before carnivore. I did try keto a little bit. I don't think I did it anywhere near the extent that I did with carnivore. Like I was in ketosis for a year and a half, essentially.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Tell me about raw dairy versus pasteurized dairy.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

So historically, I think that humans have been tending animals for 10 to 15,000 years, and we've been milking them and making cheeses and perhaps turning it into butters for the last few thousand years. And most of our time with animals, we've been just milking the animal and drinking their milk. And there's lots of examples of this, like the Maasai tribe in Africa that even mixes milk with blood from the cows. But milking of animals is something that's been around for a good amount of time. It's only really within the last, say 100 years that we've been pasteurizing milk. And that means we've been heating it to pretty high Temperatures ostensibly to kill bacteria that occur in milk. Milk is a very interesting substance. It naturally contains hundreds of species of bacteria, whether it's human breast milk, which is not sterile. Right. The mother's dermal flora go into the breast milk and affect the baby's immune system and the baby's gut flora. Whether it's milk from a cow, a goat, sheep, a horse, a buffalo, whatever. There are hundreds, I think, on the order of 500, give or take, species of bacteria in the milk. Now, most of those bacteria, if not all of them, are commensal. They're not going to make the infant sick. That would be sort of, doesn't make sense evolutionarily. You know, a cow is not trying to kill their baby, know we're not trying to kill our babies. Every once in a while in milk, you can get an organism that is pathogenic. And when you have an unpasteurized milk, generally the other species of bacteria out compete that bacteria. This is kind of the terrain hypothesis. It goes back to this long standing debate between Louis Pastour and, I forget the name of the gentleman who was the advocate of the terrain hypothesis. We can look it up. But that idea was that the question was, are people getting sick because of a microbe or are people getting sick because the terrain of the body is imbalanced? And this is interesting to me because when we look at people who are diabetic, people who are diabetic get profound infections with the same bacteria that those of us that are not diabetic handle just fine. And when I was in medical school, everyone was very worried about MRSA methicillin resistant Staph aureus or vre, vancomycin resistant enterococcus. They were super bugs, right? And so we've also been fed this ide idea of superbugs, these bacteria that are just so virulent that even those of us with profoundly healthy immune systems will not be able to combat them, which I think is a little bit misleading because most of us can handle, you know, exposure to something like a little bit of mrsa, even though it's such a, it's such a vilified organism and it's very virulent. But most of us don't really have problems with that or can outcompete it in our systems. Now that's a fraught conversation. But this idea of terrain versus microbe is interesting because when you think about raw milk, you have all of these commensal bacteria in the raw milk. So even if a little bit of listeria or enterococcus gets in there. Listeria being a pathogenic organism that really shouldn't be in high numbers in a milk culture, the other guys kind of out compete it. This is also relevant to what happens in our guts. And how you achieve a healthy gut microbiome is not by completely carpet bombing all the bad ones out there. It's probably by supporting the good ones to out compete the bad ones. We are so teeming with microorganisms at every orifice of our body, every skin, every toenail, and, you know, we can't sterilize ourselves. There's a real fallacy around hand washing and sterilization. But it's interesting that when you pasteurize milk, you eliminate all of those commensal bacteria. And the reason it became popular is because in the 1920s, when milk was becoming something that people wanted in cities rather than just farms, cows were being milked in subsanitary conditions, right? They were being milked in very dirty places. They were being fed swill, which is the spent grains of alcohol from an. So cows are fed garbage food. Cows are being milked in very subsanitary, dirty places. And there were the beginning of significant outbreaks of endemic sort of contagious bacterial diseases in the milk. So someone came up with the idea of all this. Pasteurize the milk and we can heat it, and then it will be safer for humans to consume. So most of the milk that we've had for the last 100 years has been pasteurized. That's what I drank growing up. In fact, I drank skim milk because my parents were also fat phobic, you know, being traditionally trained doctors. But what was interesting for me in the last couple of years to explore and I did not drink raw milk when I was a carnivore. I was just drinking, doing meat and organs. So is that there's a large body of literature around the unique benefits of an unpasteurized milk versus a pasteurized milk. There's many, many studies showing that there are probably differences in the whey protein in the milk and potentially in the obviously in the flora that's in the milk that affects our immune system in certain ways. There's one study called the Gabriella study. Other studies looked at the same thing, and they found consistent, statistically significant differences. Lower rates of asthma, eczema, and allergies. So the same things that I suffer from as a kid in children on or off farms who drank raw versus pasteurized milk in their childhood. So that's interesting, right? There's something about A cross species mammalian milk that is unpasteurized potentially having a positive effect on the immune system. And whether or not a pasteurized milk is having a negative effect or it's the absence of the positive effect of the unpasteurized milk that was interesting to me. So I kind of went further down this raw milk rabbit hole and found that there's all sorts of benefits to raw milk that either infant immune system, resistance to respiratory diseases in kids who are exposed to raw milk. And when you talk about that you get a lot of pushback because people say raw milk is dangerous and you think yes, any raw food is dangerous. There are thousands of outbreaks.

[Interviewer]

What about raw fish? Like wouldn't sushi be dangerous if hugely dangerous?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Look at the number of people. Or spinach, you know, like thousands of people are sickened every year from sushi, from raw fish, from spinach. There was actually a recent outbreak of wisteria in plant milks in Canada. I think three people died in this outbreak. There were thousands and thousands of articles were recalled in Canada. I think it was the silk producer, but we can fact check that. But the almond milks plant based milks were also contaminated with listeria. And in 1986 there was a huge outbreak, I believe of salmonella in pasteurized milk that sickened tens of thousands of people and I think hundreds of people died. That was the biggest outbreak ever of salmonella and pasteurized milk. Now to be fair and to complete the story, there have been illnesses and potentially deaths associated with raw milk even in the last 20 years. It's just those are hard to record and there is a quality standard that's not consistent across raw milk producers. So I'm not saying, and I don't think anyone is really trying to say that all raw milk is completely safe and you can never get sick. Just like nobody is saying you'll never get sick from eating oysters raw or sushi. But, but there is, I think an over vilification or an incomplete story around raw milk now with an under emphasis on the potential unique immunologic benefits of a raw versus a pasteurized dairy. And I think there's more and more education now happening at a good level to help milk producers who want to do raw milk understand how to standardize and make it clean. Because like I said, raw milk contains bacteria that will keep it sort of protected as long as you do it right. So I think raw milk can be a very unique and interesting thing for people. And just anecdotally I've spoken to a Lot of people who tolerate raw milk better, whether at like a skin level, an acne level, a gut level, or just in general, like they just like it better or that feels better in terms of overall energy for them versus pasteurized milk. So I definitely wish I'd had raw milk growing up.

[Interviewer]

So there's some people who are lactose intolerant, but maybe it's not the lactose, it's that it's pasteurized.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah. There was a study that looked at lactose intolerance in raw milk and it didn't actually find that raw milk, at least in this randomized controlled study, that raw milk had any difference in lactose intolerance. And there are lots of anecdotes which make me curious that kind of counteract that because I had lactose intolerance growing up, and when I started drinking raw milk, slowly, I was able to apparently drink more and more of it without having problems. So I think that there is a potential, again, this hasn't been fully studied and who would fund it, but that raw milk for some people, when taken in small amounts over time, could be more digestible and intolerable than a pasteurized milk, potentially because the flora and the raw milk can affect the flora in our guts and potentially affect how we're digesting it. It's interesting to note that goat milk has about 11 12% less lactose than cow's milk. And once you ferment a milk, whether it's cows or goats, you significantly reduce the lactose. So kefir, which is a 24 hour, 76 degree, 78 degree fermentation of milk, has almost no lactose in it, a much lower lactose. Yogurts have moderate amounts of lactose. Any aged cheese has almost no lactose in it. And so people that are lactose intolerant can still do dairy, even if they're concerned about a raw versus a pasteurized, if it's fermented.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about fermented foods.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Fermented foods are interesting. So historically, I think fermented foods have a long lineage, probably because fermentation is a very interesting way of detoxifying things. So when you ferment cabbage, for instance, there are compounds in it that you degrade. And these compounds are called isothiocyanates. And these isothiocyanates tend to impair the absorption of iodine at the level of the thyroid. So there are many examples in indigenous cultures of iodine tribes getting goiters, hugely enlarged necks from hypothyroidism related to inadequate iodine. Absorption, because there are many foods that some of these tribes have taken to eating when they can't get enough animal foods, cassava being a major one, that have goitrogenic potential, meaning they contain compounds in this isothiocinate family that are known to inhibit the absorption of iodine at the level of thyroid. Fermentation of these foods, whether it's cabbage or kale or the cassava in some cases, can degrade these compounds partially or entirely to make them safer for human consumption. So I think fermentation is a fascinating thing because it can allow us as humans, and we're very resourceful. And there are examples documented by people like Weston Price and many others, of humans apparently thriving all over the globe eating quite a wide variety of foods. But what's interesting to me is that when humans eat, whether it's beans or leaves, a lot of times we are fermenting them. In these cultures, we are doing something to detoxify them in some way. And this kind of speaks to the echoes of this idea that there are these plant defense chemicals in certain parts of the plant that can be harmful for us. And sometimes fermentation can get rid of those.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about grains.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

So grains are kind of a colloquial term that we use to describe some plant seeds. Technically, nuts, seeds, grains and beans are all seeds. If you plant a lime of bean in the ground, it will grow into a lime. So it's a seed. But we have these sort of arbitrary definitions. So grains are. We think of things like oats and wheat, barley, kamut, maybe rice, and they're a seed. And all seeds of plants are highly defended. The whole point of a plant's existence is to channel energy from the sun through photosynthesis and move that energy into the production of a seed. And some plants package the seed in a colorful sweet container called a fruit. And some plants package a seed in a helicopter, you know, a metaphorical helicopter that'll move into the air and distribute from the plant. But plants are like us. They're trying to move their DNA to the next generation. That's what life does in this fascinating sort of anti entropic way. And seeds are plant babies, and they're very vulnerable. And so evolutionarily, plants and animals have probably coexisted for 400 million years, plus maybe 450. And plants have figured out that putting defense chemicals in their seeds allows more of those seeds to actually germinate. There's been this interesting dance, this sort of chemical warfare between plants and animals for that whole time, or plants and insects or plants and primordial animals. And so plants put a lot of defense chemicals into their seeds. And this is just botany. This is just science. It's not opinion. How much we react to those is what we're questioning. And how much any individual is sensitive to those defense chemicals is what's in question here. But digestive enzyme inhibitors are unequivocally found in plant seeds. Many seeds are high in compounds called oxalates, other defense chemicals. Some plant seeds contain cyanide derivatives, things like apple seeds. Right. We know that they're problematic for humans and eaten in too high amounts. So grains specifically are things like wheat, oats, et cetera. And it's a collection of plant seeds, some of which are high in a protein called gluten, that seems to irritate the immune system for people. But in general, I think that the. The story here extends to all the seeds, and it's that if you're thinking about one or two foods that are some of the most immunogenic foods for people, I think seeds are high on the list. And there are so many books written now about cutting out certain seeds, cutting out gluten, and things like this. And in general, a lot of people find major benefits by cutting out seeds from their diet broadly. And I think that was a big thing for me, too. I used to eat a lot of almonds when I was a raw vegan, and they would just wreak havoc on my gut. They were so hard for me to digest. And I think that when we are able to differentiate the signal from the noise, many of us will realize that seeds in general, especially nuts and maybe some grains, are very hard for us to digest. So if you're talking about oats, you're thinking a lot of phytic acid in oats. So this is a big compound that chelates minerals and kind of robs us of those minerals. Wheat is gluten.

[Interviewer]

There are problems with buckwheat the same as other grains.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

It's going to have its own sort of issues. I think buckwheat is perhaps a little more tolerable. There's no gluten in buckwheat, but it is going to have defense chemicals, phytic acid, some level of other things that can be an issue.

[Interviewer]

How does sourdough impact grains?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

So here we're fermentation, right? So sourdough is probably one of the original fermentations. And we think, okay, if we ferment the wheat, some of the gluten goes away. It's a little more digestible. Some people can eat sourdough bread without having issues and it's probably the only way we should be making bread. There should be no bread that's not sourdough. But yeah, sourdough is a fermented bread. It makes it less glutenous, but not entirely gluten free. So some people would probably still have issues with sourdough. I can't eat sourdough without getting some brain fog and not feeling great. It triggers my eczema a little bit.

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[Interviewer]

Tell me about the difference between pasture meat and industrial meat.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

So historically, meat, all meat ate what it was supposed to eat, right? Whether it was a deer or a cow or a cow's relative or bison. Ruminants, hooved animals eat grass. These are grassland animals. Carnivores eat other things. You know, lions eat smaller animals. And in the last few hundred years we've started, or maybe just in the last 100 years, we've started farming animals in a special way, where we feed them grains.

[Interviewer]

Might even be less than 100 years.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah, right. Might be 50 to 75. Yeah. And out of economics and profit margins, farmers have generally taken with cows especially, but also with pigs and chickens in a similar way. Those are not ruminant animals, pigs and chickens. They've taken to feeding them grains in the last 15% of their life. Most cows are raised on pasture for the majority of their life and then they are sent to a feedlot at the end. The problem with this is that the grains the cows are fed at the end of their life are usually sprayed with pesticides, moldy. They're also fed other contaminants with the grains. The law allows cows to be fed pieces of trash and plastic and food refuse from humans with all kinds of things in it that are.

[Interviewer]

And cows don't naturally eat grains.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

They do in small amounts because grass goes to seed.

[Interviewer]

I see, right.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

So in small amounts, depending on the grass that cows are eating, they will eat some grains, but not as much as. Not exclusively grains. And we see that when cows are fed grains at that amount, they get inflammation, they get digestive problems. There are all sorts of issues in their guts that happen with that amount of grain. And we see them get fat. I mean, cows become less healthy. You can measure this in a cow.

[Interviewer]

And for the producer, if the cow gets more fat, that's beneficial because that's more meat to sell.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

They sell them by weight. Right. So when cows are sold at auction, or when cows are sold to abattoirs where they're butchered and made into meat, they're sold by weight. And so they definitely increase the muscle, but they also increase the fat. You can look at meat in a grocery store and see a. The visual difference between meat that is grass fed and grass finished. Eating grass for its whole life, that's really what a ruminant animal is supposed to do.

[Interviewer]

Or at least that's the natural way.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

That's the natural way it's done. Yep. And a cow that's grain finished. And I want people to know that, like, even at places like Whole Foods, they sometimes make this confusing because there are meats at Whole Foods that are labeled pasture race. But if you ask them, they're grain finished. Right. They're pasture raised, but then they're grain finished. Which is why this is kind of a big, like, section of greenwashing and confusion for consumers. So right now, I think most of the time, but not all of the time, it's best or safe, quote, unquote, to buy meat. If you're looking for this, that is grass fed and grass finished. But sometimes meat that is grass fed and grass finished can also be fed grass pellets. Right. Or things that they get around the guidelines. So the.

[Interviewer]

So the best way is to find a farmer.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Or to find, like, US wellness meats, Like a provider who you trust, who you trust.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

And interestingly, US Wellness meats, I know them well. I've been to their farms in Australia, and I've seen the cows in Australia source from. It's some of the best meat that I've ever seen in my life. At least the most healthy cows on really green pastures. So with a little bit of work you can find producers you trust, smaller farms. I don't want that to be an obstacle for people, but it's a reality. And so when cows are fed grains, you see them, their meat is more marbled in the grocery store. And if you look at that meat under a microscope and you could break it down into its component parts, you would probably see more pesticides, more glyphosate, pharmaceutical residues, residues of plastic, more microplastics, potentially forever chemicals. I'm not saying that pasture raised or grain fed meat is to be avoided completely. I, I've started thinking in my work recently that I don't want perfect to be the enemy of good for people. I just think that if you have the time, freedom and the financial freedom to choose the grass fed meat, you're really supporting a more regenerative cycle.

[Interviewer]

And I think there's a website that can tell you where to find local grass fed and finished meat.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

There's a couple of websites. There's one website, which is realmilk.com where you can find raw milk near you. Raw milk is not legal to be sold in grocery stores in many states. In California it is, but in many states it's not. And even in states where raw milk is not legally able to be sold in grocery stores, it's often able to be obtained through a co op at a farmer, which is cool because then you get to meet a local farmer. And there's a similar website that I can't think of the name off the top of my head that tells you about farmers markets and local farmers where you can go to get meat. The milk conversation is interesting to me. I think the overarching question there is why drink milk in the first place? And the reason to drink milk is there is an important balance between calcium and phosphorus in mammalian physiology. And that was something that I did not understand when I was doing a carnivore diet of only meat and organs. But when you are consuming meat and organs, those are high phosphorus foods. Humans need phosphorus, but humans tend to do better, as do all mammals when we have a balanced of calcium and phosphorus in our diets. And so having a source of calcium is critical. So if people don't want to do milk, you can do some bone broths, have calcium, some people are actually eating bones, you can do like bone meal. There are historical precedents of traditional cultures actually chewing bones and eating bones. When I was with the Hadza In Tanzania, they would chew on the bones of small animals. And so there are ways that humans can get calcium to balance the phosphorus of animal foods, but dairy happens to be one of them. So I noticed just personally an anecdote that when I added calcium containing foods, whether it was cheese or milk or kefir or yogurt back to my diet later on that I felt better. It was an interesting sort of noticeable signal amongst, you know, my hopefully low noise in my life. So I think that there is an argument to including calcium containing foods in your diet.

[Interviewer]

So in the new version of the carnivore diet, would you consider raw milk to be thumbs up?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

I definitely think so, yeah. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Tell me today's carnivore diet.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

So there's a, there's a version of the carnivore diet that I do today that I've probably been doing for about four years. It's something I've termed animal based, just to make it simpler for people, which, and it, it was part of my natural progression. I was experiencing electrolyte issues, eventually realizing this is related to an inadequacy of carbohydrates in my own life. And that led me to first include honey and then fruit in my diet, thinking in the same framework of a carnivore diet about what plant foods am I going to include in my diet? Can I be aware of defense chemicals and also include some plant foods, especially carbohydrate containing plant foods in my diet? And that was where I came to the idea of fruit, thinking, oh, this is the part of the plant that the plant wants me to eat. It's colorful, it's sweet. There's a clear signal here from a plant when you look at fruit. It's a fascinating thing because we know that unripe fruit actually does contain some of these same defense chemicals. And as a fruit ripens, they go down. So there's a lot of dance here, a delicate communication between plants and animals or plants and humans that plants are saying to us like, oh, this is a ripe fruit, please eat this. There are seeds in here which I hope you don't chew all of and some of them end up in your poop and germinate. But I'm going to give you this fruit. I put extra energy from the sun into this and it can actually nourish you. But part of the deal is that you're going to move my seeds somewhere else. And that's interesting because plants aren't trying to poison us with their fruit. Generally speaking, there are some Cross species things that happen there. Because some fruits are only really able to be used by certain species that can detoxify things in them. But generally speaking, most fruit works for us, not all, but most fruit is not toxic. And in contrast, plants are trying to give us a real signal with the leaves and the stems and the roots and the seeds that, hey, I don't want you to eat these. Or if you're going to eat these, you probably should ferment them because I'm going to put defense chemicals in there. Because if you can just go outside and eat any of these leaves right here, this plant is not going to do well. And there would be a real imbalance, I think, of this in terms of. Do you remember the scene in Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory where they walk into the room and it's just the chocolate river and everything is made of candy, Right. They can just pull a lollipop. Like leaves of trees are just lollipops, right. And they can eat everything. They, they can eat the bark on the tree and it's made from like chocolate bark, right? It's. It's cinnamon or something. If it were like that for us, plants would have gone extinct a long time ago and animals would have all eaten each other because it would do nothing for us. There has to be this kind of delicate space between us, and that's. That space is held by plants defending themselves with these chemicals because plants can't move.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, let's go through fruit. Is the idea of fruits high in sugar worse than ones that are low in sugar? Like blueberries supposedly are low in sugar, whereas pineapple's high in sugar and bananas high in sugar. Tell me about fruit.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

I do not subscribe to the idea that sugar in fruit is harmful for humans. And I think it's a different information for us. And I'm still trying to understand how to communicate this most effectively and elegantly in what I do. But at a basic level, I think the concept that people struggle with here is how can sugar outside of fruit be harmful for you and sugar inside fruit not be bad for you? And my answer to that is that when you eat fruit, you're getting so much more information along with the sugar. And it really appears that the sugar. Any negative effects from sugar that occurs in fruit, which is a combination of both glucose and fructose and sometimes other carbohydrates. But generally those two is mitigated by informational components in the fruit. There's an interesting experiment that I saw done that I think illustrates this well. Doesn't use fruit, but the. It illustrates the concept. So you can take glucose and you can infuse it directly into someone's vein, and you can raise their blood sugar. And you look at the inside of someone's veins, the blood vessels, and you look for what's called endothelial dysfunction. And at a certain level, you can put someone's blood sugar high enough with pure glucose intravenously that you will achieve endothelial dysfunction. The levels are generally like 180mg per deciliter, or 215 or 220mg per deciliter, at least in the study. Now, when they do that, they're obviously not mimicking something that generally occurs in nature or in our daily lives, but you can. You can abrogate so you can stop that endothelial dysfunction by administering the glucose with vitamin C. So you think about how many fruits, for instance, have information along with them, like vitamin C. And if you go down the rabbit hole and you look at fruit juice, for instance, something that actually gets vilified quite a bit because it's stripped of its fiber. And there's evidence, multiple studies show, that when you give someone fruit juice, like watermelon juice, and you give them a glucose tolerance test, at the same time, it actually improves their glucose tolerance test to give them watermelon juice with the glucose. And a glucose tolerance test is basically pure glucose. In soda, they call it glucola. It's gross. So you're having someone drink pure glucose soda, and their tolerance of that at an insulin sensitivity level improves when you give them watermelon juice with pure glucose. And then there are other studies with fruit juice showing that when you're eating things like cherry juice or orange juice, the list is on pomegranate juice, grape juice. These consistently seem to improve endothelial function, decrease oxidation at the level of LDL particles, which is cholesterol in the blood, and decrease DNA damage. But they all contain sugar. And so there's just so much more information, I think, in fruit and even in fruit juice, that that makes it a complete package in our body. And I don't see any evidence in the medical literature, in fact, that fruit or fruit juice are harmful for humans, and yet they contain sugar. Now, juxtapose that with literature looking at pure sugar. So sucrose table sugar, for instance, or its cousin, high fructose corn syrup, which is a further refined, processed thing made from corn, where they have to take glucose from the corn and isomerize it into fructose and Combine it. Both of these don't look as benign in the literature to me at all. And so I think, okay, I think what we're dealing with here is just we've stripped out enough information from this sugar that your body doesn't process it in the same way. And it's a problem for humans because I don't think there's many who would argue, perhaps a few, that high fructose corn syrup is benign for humans. I think even isocalorically you have problems with high fructose corn syrup in humans, even at the level of just satiety and things like that. So, so processed sugar probably very different for humans than fruit. Now, within that whole conversation is just a little bit of an aside on fructose. Fructose is a carbohydrate, it's a monosaccharide, it looks like glucose, but it's not quite the same. Anyone who took organic chemistry knows that a few of them, the atoms have been moved around just a little bit. And humans make glucose in ketosis, but we don't make fructose. And there are research studies in animal models primarily, but some in humans that make fructose look bad when it's given in isolation. But again, when we look at the.

[Interviewer]

Literature, what would in isolation be just pure fructose? I see, yeah. Does it exist?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

It doesn't exist in nature. Right, right. It doesn't exist. So it's not a fair, it's not a fair thing. And this is the problem with many studies is that we become reductionist. Right. A lot of nutrition is reductionist. And we think, well, if I give someone pure fructose, either intravenously or by mouth, that's the same as eating a piece of fruit, right, Rick? Well, probably not. It's not the same. And what we know is that if you feed someone pure fructose orally, they will not absorb it. Well, because we need glucose to absorb the fructose fully in our gut. And if you malabsorb fructose in your gut, there's more fructose hanging out in your gut and it causes bacterial overgrowth. And when you get bacterial overgrowth, you get more of something called endotoxin or lipopolysaccharide. Those are synonyms. And we know that things that increase endotoxin, lps, those are inflammatory for humans. So there are follow up studies where they feed people or animals, in this case pure fructose and they give them something that blocks the effects of LPS and they don't have Any negative effects from the pure fructose. So you can see that, like, it's an argument that it's the downstream effects of this bacterial overgrowth. Again, not something that happens in humans, because so many of the compounds in the fruit balance it out and prevent the overgrowth. Either increase the absorption of the fructose at the level of the gut, like the glucose, because it's the proper CO transporter, or they prevent overgrowth of bacteria in the gut. There's so much information in a piece of fruit, thousands and thousands of components that affect microbes and absorption of certain compounds. It's so much more complex, which makes it elegant and beautiful and really chaotic at the same time.

[Interviewer]

I wonder if that's the same issue with pharmaceuticals, that they're so specific that maybe the reason people have such terrible side effects is because it doesn't have the balance.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

It's a strong argument theoretically, for herbs right, in place of this, because in.

[Interviewer]

The herb, it's the holistic version, and it has the balancing elements.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

It has much more information associated with it. It's a very different signal to the body. We're very complex in this regard. And so I think one of the other versions of fructose that people get concerned about is honey, which to me is just very sad because I think honey is one of the most beautiful foods. We talked a little bit about it earlier, and human interaction with bees is probably tens of thousands of years old that humans have been tending bees or gathering honey from bees again. When I was in Tanzania spending time with the Hadza, they had multiple interactions with bees, both stingless bees and stinging bees. And I remember we were out on a hunt with them, and they had killed a baboon, which is what they're hunting primarily because their hunting lands are being encroached upon by other tribes, because there's a lot of sort of land scarcity there. And after they killed the baboon, they found a hive and a tree of bees, and they made fire in two minutes and smoked out the bees and cut the hive down. And then within five minutes, we were just eating huge pieces of honeycomb with the brood, with the larvae in there, and they were loving it. And so the Hadza clearly know, and this is our history with honey. There was a PhD researcher who spent a lot of time with the Hadza, and he asked them, these are some of the last remaining hunter gatherers on the planet. They're not purely uncontacted by humans, but they're probably some of the best representation that we have. So this researcher asked them, what are your favorite foods? And both men and women unequivocally said honey because it's sweet and it's calorie dense. And in Hadza people, you don't see diabetes, you don't see chronic illness in these people generally at all. They do have a lower overall life expectancy because their infant mortality is higher. It turns out that being a young, small human in the wild is quite dangerous. Snake bites, falls. But in terms of chronic disease, once the Hadza and hunter gatherers in general reach adulthood or even young teenage years, they live as long as we do, with a much broader, much more impressive health span. So they don't get the same decline in health as they age. But honey also has lots of evidence in the medical literature for being helpful for humans again, also even improving metabolic parameters, potentially improving insulin sensitivity with honey. So that, to me is just very interesting and clarifying. There's a randomized controlled trial where they gave diabetics honey in increasing amounts over eight weeks. At the end of the eight weeks, diabetics were eating, I think on average 125 grams of honey per day. You're looking at seven to eight tablespoons of honey per day in a diabetic. Their blood sugar goes up some, but their insulin sensitivity parameters get better. That's, I think the discordance here that people sometimes confuse is that just because your blood sugar is going up doesn't mean that you're becoming insulin resistance. And I, I just want to say this, that I think there is a lot of well intentioned discussion right now about blood sugar, and I think it's misleading for people. And I think that what we should be focusing on is insulin sensitivity, which is a synonym for metabolic health rather than your blood sugar. In some people who are diabetic, high blood sugar, whether before meals or between meals or after meals, is an indication of insulin resistance or metabolic dysfunction, but that blood sugar is not what causes the problem. The blood sugar is a symptom, it is not the cause. And so in people who are frankly diabetic, they may not always tolerate fruit and honey well, because they may not tolerate the carbohydrates well. And that is an argument to limit them and understand, again, what is the root cause of your insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction. But I want people to understand that those things did not cause the diabetes and that gets overlooked or there's a lot of confusion around that with Western medicine. So the argument is, I guess, twofold then coming from that. And the first Is that if you are metabolically healthy, there's no reason to fear fruit and honey. And if you are not metabolically healthy, limiting them is probably not the worst idea, and eventually you can probably eat them again. But it's important, like so many things, that we understand what the real culprit is here. Fruit and honey didn't cause diabetes. And then we come to the really $64,000 question, which is, what does? And that's really interesting.

[Interviewer]

What causes insulin resistance and metabolic?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

So, like, then we arrive at what I think is a very interesting question. And I will say that in western medicine, there is no consensus here. When I look at the literature, my strong suspicion is that it is driven partially, in a significant amount, by inappropriate consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids, primarily from seed oils. And that's a controversial thing at this point, I think.

[Interviewer]

Why is it controversial?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Because the majority of the randomized controlled trials done with seed oils were done in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and at that point, we were even worse at doing nutritional studies than we are today, and we didn't fully understand the cardiovascular adverse effects of trans fat. And so There are probably 10 or 11 randomized controlled trials done with seed oils, Things like corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, Soybean. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, they were primarily using soybean canola in some studies, and maybe corn oil. There definitely were a couple trials with corn oil. But the problem with many of those studies is that trans fat snuck into the diets on both sides, and that kind of confounds the results. If you get trans fat in your control group and you're feeding people saturated fat with trans fat, it makes the saturated fat look bad. And in some of the studies, the experimental group that got the seed oils may have also gotten some amount of trans fat. And then we think, okay, that that makes it confusing too. So if we take an honest look at the randomized controlled trials done with seed oils, we don't have a clear conclusion. I think that there's a signal that seed oils are harmful. And this is why there's so much debate about it, because there are meta analyses that have been written, and a meta analysis is a study of studies. And so there are meta analyses that have been written by people who say in the conclusion, oh, seed oils look like they're benign or potentially even beneficial for humans. And that is just the conclusion of the author of the meta analysis. So that's someone who looked at eight studies and excluded two for some unknown reason, right? Or three, and said, this is the.

[Interviewer]

Conclusion I draw and who hires the people to do this?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Exactly. And I disagree with your conclusions because if you look at the individual studies, they're not accounting or being aware of the fact perhaps that many of the experimental diets, sometimes in both the control and the experimental group, included trans fats and had other issues. A lot of the studies were also multivariable interventions. And so it's very messy data at the randomized, controlled study level, at the mechanistic level, it's very clear. Polyunsaturated fats have more double bonds, which creates sort of a tendency for the carbon between the double bonds to have electrons stolen from it, which creates oxidation or in this case, peroxidation of a lipid. So polyunsaturated fats are an oxidative liability in humans, in all species, and in whole foods. There are often mechanisms to counteract that, to mitigate that. But when you take an oil from a seed and a canola seed is actually a rapeseed or a cotton seed or a soybean, to get oil out of it, I mean, there's not a lot of oil in corn, right? To make corn oil, you have to do multiple steps of bleaching, refining, deodorization, multiple heating steps, at times over 500 degrees Fahrenheit of a very fragile oil, addition of solvents contaminated with hexane or benzene, bleaching, deodorization. So you have a lot of processes with this oil that leave it pretty highly damaged because it's just a fragile thing to begin with. It's a very. It's very prone to having electrons stolen from it in this oxidative process and peroxidation. And so what you end up eating as a human is just like dry wood. You know, you think about California is a good example of this. If there's a lot of dry wood, all you're doing is waiting for a spark and then everything goes up. Especially here in Malibu or Topanga. Right. And so a metaphor that we might consider for this is eating seed oils is like just packing your home with dry wood. And as soon as there's a spark, wow, you're going to have a wildfire. That's very hard to control. Our body does have mechanisms to control this. Vitamin E is one of those vitamin C depending whether you're in the lipid soluble portion or a water soluble portion of a cell. And there are other mechanisms, but I think that easily, with overconsumption of seed oils and polyunsaturated fats in general, we can overwhelm our body's ability to control this fragility, this oxidation of these oils, and we end up with little mini fires at the level of our mitochondria, at the level of other cells in our body. And I think that there's interesting evidence that the seed oils are probably creating mitochondrial dysfunction in the cell membrane and the mitochondrial membrane, and that's leading to some degree of cellular dysfunction, mitochondrial dysfunction. And again, it's a little hard. And so what we need are probably 5 to 10 year randomized controlled trials to be done in 2024. The problem is that study would probably cost $50 million, right? And we wouldn't have answers for 12 to 14 years. Who knows if it'll be done? Historically, it probably would never have been done. Maybe now that we have a different administration and RFK junior Is in office, there will be some reform at the level of the nih and there might be funding for something like that. Because I think it's one of the greatest questions that we have, you know, and I know that RFK Jr is also worried about seed oils at this point. But I think that at an intuitive level, we can also say that seed oils are extremely evolutionarily inappropriate. We would never have consumed this amount of our calories from refined polyunsaturated fats. Historically, hunter gatherer tribes get maybe 1 2% of their calories from polyunsaturated fats that naturally occur in animal meat. Maybe a few seeds and would be.

[Interviewer]

Balanced with whatever else was necessary.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Well, that's in the nuts, right? If you're eating nuts, they have vitamin E that comes with it. And I've done content on this to get. The average American eats five to seven tablespoons of seed oil equivalents per day across all the seed oils, sometimes around 500 to 700 calories of seed oils per day. And there's a real problem there because there's just not enough vitamin E to go with it. And you would need to eat 60 ears of corn to get that amount. So you would never do that. Two and a half pounds of sunflower seeds or soybeans. We're never doing that as humans. And so we have this evolutionary inconsistency. There's a rich history around seed oils and sort of potentially how they were sold to us. You know, there's the story of the American Heart association receiving a very large grant, the equivalent of $25 million from Procter & Gamble in, I think, the 1940s. And that was part of a contest, I believe. And then shortly after that, the American Heart association starts to endorse polyunsaturated fats, oversaturated fats. This is kind of the beginning of our era in our history as Americans, where saturated fats became vilified with Eisenhower's heart attack and the work of Ancel Keys, who incidentally, was one of the primary investigators in one of the largest seed oil trials that was never published because they didn't like the results at the. Again, none of those randomized controlled trials with seed oils were perfect. But, I mean, you remember this, and I remember this having grown up in the 80s and 90s, and my father certainly saw this as a physician trained in the 70s, there's a lot of saturated fat phobia that's still hard to unprogram from us.

[Interviewer]

Absolutely.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

That is not really based in science. Saturated fats from animals, Butter, milk, these things. Animal fats tallow. They appear to be neutral or very healthy for humans. And there are certain types of saturated fats that are gaining interest now. These odd chain fatty acids. So most of the fats in our diet are even chain. 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 24 carbons, 22 carbons. But there are two fats that I'll just mention for a minute. There's C15, which is pentadecanoic acid, and C17, which is heptidecanoic acid, that are odd chain.

[Interviewer]

What are they in?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

They're in mostly in dairy fat. The levels of C15 in the human body are a very reliable marker for consumption of dairy fats. Right. So again, we're looking at milk, butter, some of the most vilified foods in terms of animal fats. There's a little bit in animal meat and there's a little bit in leafy greens, but nothing like the levels you'll find in dairy. And I just read this study. Lower levels of C15 pentodecanoic acid are associated with increased rates of ferroptosis, and ferroptosis is programmed cell death. So have you heard the term apoptosis? Some people say apoptosis. Apoptosis is programmed cell death. Ferroptosis is programmed cell death due to excessive lipid peroxidation. So ferroptosis is what happens when polyunsaturated fats in our membranes become so oxidized that the cell has to commit suicide. So lower levels of C15 are associated with increased levels of cell death due to lipid peroxidation in humans. That's fascinating. That potentially a odd chain Fatty acid, saturated fatty acid found almost exclusively in dairy in the human diet, could protect us from lipid induced cell death. Ferroptosis. That's interesting. And again, the whole existence of the idea of ferroptosis is probably connected with seed oil. So you are predisposing your cells to inappropriate but programmed cell death by making them full of dry wood. You're just waiting for sparks to happen and then the whole thing goes up and your body can't control. Because we are this, this elegant, incredible machine, for lack of a better term, that manages the movement of electrons so well. We are the movement of electrons. This idea of oxidation, which is the loss of electrons, reduction, which is the gain of electrons, that is fundamental at sort of a subatomic or an atomic particle level. Really. I think that, you know, maybe Jack would agree that's like Jack Cruz would say that's quantum at some level, like we are quantum. Movement of electrons is everything for us. And polyunsaturated fats complicate the movement of electrons. It makes it very difficult for our bodies to manage that.

[Interviewer]

How much of what we hear today in mainstream diet recommendation is rooted in science?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

I think that it's rooted in science in someone's opinion, right? And it's rooted in some piece of science. I would say that a lot of what we hear in mainstream dietary recognitions has some science. It's just that it may not be a comprehensive scientific analysis. And this is the challenge, right? It's not hard to find an observational study that says that red meat is associated with increased rates of diabetes. But that's an observational study. There's no experiment there. That's a survey that people did. And when you think about that, we know that we've been told red meat is harmful for humans as a narrative. It's really been part of the zeitgeist for the last 80 years. So who eats more red meat? The people that are probably going to do other more rebellious things. Less likely to get prostate exams or colonoscopies or, you know, mammograms or maybe smoke, maybe smoke, maybe drink more alcohol, maybe do other less healthy behaviors, less likely to play tennis on Sunday or, you know, walk or run. These are people who are, you know, eating burgers because burgers taste good. And nobody's going to tell me what to do, but nobody's also going to tell me not to ride my Harley while I'm smoking a cigarette and drinking alcohol. Right? And I believe in sovereignty. I believe humans should be able to do what they do. But we know that eating meat doesn't associate with healthy behaviors in any group of humans. And that's interesting, right? That's not to say eating meat isn't healthy. It just doesn't associate with healthy behaviors. There are some of us who do eat meat and do healthy behaviors, and I think there's an increasing number of humans that do that. But broadly, in these observational studies, eating meat is not. Now eating vegetables is. Right? And this is what makes the studies even more confusing. And I don't think vegetables are bad for everyone. We talked a little bit about how there might be some defense chemicals in some parts of plants that are problematic for some people. But eating vegetables consistently associates with healthy behaviors. And that's again because of the zeitgeist, because of the narrative. People that eat more vegetables are more likely to be of higher socioeconomic status, more likely to see their doctors more often, more likely to play tennis on Sunday or go for a walk or go for a run, less likely to smoke, less likely to drink. And so this makes observational studies comparing meat and plants confounded and makes them fraught with a lot of problems. So that's technically science, right? There is an observational study somewhere that says eggs are equivalent to smoking cigarettes in terms of risk. And there's a lot of other science. You know, when we think about it, perhaps we attempt to be more comprehensive that would argue against that and say eggs are probably not harmful for humans. They have many, many unique nutrients that help us thrive, as does meat.

[Interviewer]

Let's talk about eggs.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

So eggs are interesting. I think that eggs contain a lot of cholesterol. And colloquially there is this confusion between cholesterol and ldl. So LDL is low density lipoprotein. It's essentially a lipoprotein balloon that carries cholesterol and triglycerides. But cholesterol is a steroid molecule. So it's a whole different molecule than what we colloquially think of as cholesterol in the blood. But cholesterol is encapsulated. It's packaged in a carrier molecule called ldl. But eggs contain cholesterol. Cholesterol is a building block for so many critical things in the human body, most prominently hormones, sex hormones, hormones that regulate salt balance in the human body. All of these things are cholesterol based hormones. We need cholesterol. And so in some people, a small percentage of people eating dietary cholesterol increases your blood cholesterol. That doesn't seem to be associated with any increase in cardiovascular risk. From what I read in the literature, and we can talk about APOB and ldl, but I think eggs are generally a very healthy food for humans. They are sort of an interesting way to eat nose to tail. There's like a whole animal in the egg, right? They contain a lot of unique nutrients. You asked me earlier if I only ate meat when I was doing a carnivore diet and I ate organs with the meat, because there are unique nutrients in liver, for instance, that aren't found in muscle meat. Muscle meat is very rich in things like zinc or vitamin B12, iron. And liver is rich in things like folate and biotin and vitamin A and copper that complement the nutrients in the meat. It's kind of like it's completing the picture. And a lot of those complementary nutrients are also found in eggs. Eggs are also very bioavailable protein. So I think that eggs are a great source of nutrition for humans. And you could theoretically construct a vegetarian diet of milk and eggs that's actually pretty good for humans. I think including, you know, meat really improves it. But there are ways to construct a vegetarian diet that are pretty darn nutrient rich in both vitamins and minerals. The way that eggs are raised mirrors the way that cows are raised. Just like there's grain finished cows, there are caged chickens that make caged eggs. And then there are better ways to treat the chicken that makes the eggs. There's pasture raising of chickens, which legally requires the chickens to have 106 square feet of room to roam per chicken. A cage free chicken just means they get to go outside and they get a very small amount of space. A chicken that doesn't say cage free or pasture raised is raised in a cage. And that's inhumane and probably creates much less quality eggs. And then you have organic. So the feed that's given to the chicken is going to be either free of pesticides or going to contain pesticides. So an organic egg is fed organic grains. In general, chickens are supposed to be eating bugs and worms and they're supposed to peck and root. They're not really supposed to be eating tons of grains. But it's very hard to obtain chickens that aren't fed grains unless you're raising your own chickens. So I think in general eggs are healthy for humans. I will say that one of the foods that does tend to trigger some people's immune system are eggs, the whites more than the yolks. But some people do get triggered by egg yolks as well because of there's an albumin protein in the chicken. Egg that can interact with our immune system. So some people who have immune issues don't do well with eggs.

[Interviewer]

What percentage of people do you think that is? If you were guessing?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

I just have to guess. I would say that 5%.

[Interviewer]

Okay. A small percentage.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

I think it's pretty small.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

But if you have that issue, you would know it if you ate eggs or.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

No, I think you would know it if you ate eggs if you could differentiate signal from noise.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Right.

[Interviewer]

So if you were off eggs for a period of time, if you were eating a strict carnivore diet and then you added eggs in, you'd find out, has anything changed or did it get worse?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yep. If anything was problematic. Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Historically, we've been told that bitter food, typically vegetables, have health benefits. I'm imagining the reason something would taste bitter is because the plant is trying to protect itself.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah. I think that bitter foods are probably a communication from the plant that it doesn't want you to eat it. And there are ways to partially or significantly detoxify that. Cooking helps, fermentation helps. But, yeah, I think bitter is a signal from the plant not to eat meat, as is hot, you know, and some people really like hot foods. And we also know that in some people, spicy foods can irritate the gut. So many spicy foods are nightshades as well, which is a whole class of plant foods that tend to be more immunogenic, at least anecdotally, for humans. So, yeah, I think spicy foods can be a problem for some people. It's a signal like, hey, don't eat meat. And conversely, there is some evidence that capsaicin may benefit some things in humans. I think it's just always a calculus in every individual human about net benefit or harm. When I eat peppers, anything in the nightshade family, all of these spicy peppers are in the nightshade family. My eczema gets worse. And my personal experience is that I burp. So I've experimented in the past with jalapenos or other things because I like the way it tastes on a burger. It's interesting. And then I start burping, and I think, okay, signal versus noise. I don't usually burp, and now I'm getting reflux. What's going on? I don't like this. And, you know, I think we can tell. I mean, a lot of times when we poop after eating spicy food, your poop feels a little hot. You know, your butt is a little irritated, and you think, okay, I don't know. Is that irritating? My gut Lining and some people, it.

[Interviewer]

Probably does tell me about fiber.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Fiber is quite interesting. Fiber is one of the things that I've. I've sort of evolved my perspective on. I've kind of changed my perspective on fiber. Carbohydrates being the first one in this conversation, especially sugar that we talked about with fruit and honey. I've definitely changed my perspective on that since writing the carnivore code about the carnivore diet.

[Interviewer]

What year did you write that book?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

2019. 2020. Yeah. And fiber is interesting. So I am not convinced that fiber is a panacea. There are some in the health space who think that chronic health issues are related to lack of fiber in the human diet and that we should be forcing ourselves to eat lots of fiber. We'll do things like psyllium husks or I mean, I remember growing up grape nuts, right? All bran. We're eating food for the sake of trying to eat fiber. And I don't think that's a good idea. I think that if fiber comes with the foods you're eating, there's probably not a problem. Problem with it as long as your gut handles it well. I think there are some people who have dysbiotic microbiota in their gut who do well to limit fiber for some amount of time while the gut changes its perspective. But that in general, most of us can handle fiber. When we look at fiber, a lot of the discussion of it is around short chain fatty acids like butyrate, which feed the colonic enterocytes, they feed the cells of the gut. That's beneficial. And a lot of the conversation around fiber often goes to microbial diversity. It's something we measure in the gut with a metric called alpha diversity. But when you look at the literature, fiber doesn't change alpha diversity. You can feed someone more fiber and it doesn't change the amount of diversity of our gut microbiome. What does change the diversity of our gut microbiome are fermented foods. Kefirs, even kombucha has been studied. Sauerkraut potentially changes alpha diversity. Increased microbiome in the gut has been associated with better health outcomes in humans. So there's some associations along the path. But I think that generally having a more diverse microbiome in your gut is a good thing. Whether or not creating a more diverse microbiome with the fermented food is going to lead to resolution of your health issues is probably dependent on the person. So I think fiber is not a horrible thing. When I wrote the carnivore Code. There was some set of literature that was interesting to me around potential negative effects of fiber in humans. There's a series of colonoscopies that have been done in people with diverticulosis. Diverticulosis is a really interesting process whereby one of the inner layers of the colonic mucosa extrudes out through the muscular layer, and you get sort of this appendix, you get a blind loop, and there's these blind sacs in the colon, and then these can get infected, which is called diverticulitis. Western medicine doesn't really know what causes diverticulosis, but I would argue from my perspective, that it's an autoimmune disease circling back to what we talked about earlier in the conversation about how many things we experience that are actually autoimmune, because there is evidence that there is lymphocytic infiltration. So there's infiltration of certain types of immune cells at the sites of the diverticuli. So the diverticulum is this sort of blind pouch, and there are immune cells there. There has to be something that weakens the wall for this inner layer to extrude through the muscular layer of the gut. And in this colonoscopy series, I think it was two to three thousand people. The gastroenterologists who were doing the colonoscopies observed when they gave people a survey that the more fiber people ate, the more likely they were to have diverticulosis. Again, it's just an association. We can't draw causal inference. But that's interesting and statistically significant and begs the question of, are certain types of fiber good or better than other types of fiber? Is it possible that some types of fiber. These are just hypotheses. Is it possible that some types of fiber are problematic for humans and could be triggering immune reactions in the gut that cause diverticulosis? Or is it possible that some foods, for instance, grains, are triggering immunologic issues in the gut, leading to diverticulosis in some people. So there's a lot of possibilities, there's a lot of hypotheses. And, you know, my general perspective, which is just my opinion at this point, my suspicion is that, yeah, there's probably, like, fiber in grains, may not be great for us. Fiber in squash, that's a fruit, maybe that's different for humans. Because my suspicion, again, this is just my personal hypothesis, as Paul Saladino, is that there are some foods that are more benign for our gut than others, even foods that we think of as healthy or unprocessed. Oats, grain based fibers, things like that. So no one's ever done the research that I'm aware of looking at source of fiber, grain based fiber versus fruit based fiber. And are those different in humans? So in your answer to your question, I think that fiber's probably mostly benign for humans. If you eat things with fiber and you have negative gut reactions, it may be an indication that you should limit or eliminate fiber for some amount of time and think about how you can shift the gut flora. And there's a question that remains in my mind. If fiber from all sources is equally benign beneficial in humans, with the potential for grain based fibers to maybe be irritating the gut or causing immunologic reactions. And one signal for that may be diverticulosis. But again, more research is needed.

[Interviewer]

Any thoughts on coffee?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

A lot of thoughts on coffee. So coffee is beloved and anything I say next, I hope people will pardon if this doesn't agree with their coffee religion. I think that coffee is one of the most dogmatic things that people get up in arms. When I talk about coffee and chocolate, we can talk about both. So coffee is a seed that's roasted and there are a lot of problems with that process. Potentially some high quality coffee manufacturers may be able to avoid that, these being pesticides and mold primarily. If you're going to drink a coffee, I would drink an organic coffee that has been tested for mold. That's a big problem, I think in a lot of coffees. We know that coffee contains acrylamide. We know that coffee contains polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Probably not in amounts that are harmful for humans in a major way. But the other issue with coffee for me is the caffeine. The half life of caffeine is around five hours. So if you drink coffee in the morning, you probably have about 25% of that caffeine in your system when you go to sleep. And I worry that many of us are having disrupted sleep architecture at night due to the persistence of coffee, the caffeine from the coffee in the morning. Now that's assuming you drink coffee first thing and you don't drink any throughout the day. A lot of us drink coffee at noon or two. And in that case you're looking at 30 to 40 to 50% of the caffeine that you had in the day still persistent in your system at night, potentially disrupting sleep architecture. That I think is the biggest problem I have with coffee is sleep quality. And so again, I think this is an argument for most people or some people to Try and differentiate signal from noise. Have you ever cut coffee out of your diet? Do you feel better or the same without it? If you can reintroduce it without having any problems? The same subjective sleep quality, maybe the same objective sleep quality based on metrics, then maybe it's benign. But I don't drink it. I think again, it's individual. Some people are going to metabolize caffeine differently, metabolize other compounds in coffee differently. But yeah, it's an interesting thing for humans.

[Interviewer]

Have we gone through all the food groups?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

We talked about vegetables somewhat talk about them more. Yeah, I just try to communicate to people with the framework that if you're thriving, there's probably no need to change anything in your diet and that that level of thriving is subjective. And I do believe that in many individuals who have persistent gut issues, autoimmune issues, fertility issues, sleep issues, weight loss issues, attention to elimination diets and simplification of the diet is powerful. And one of the ways to do that is by eliminating vegetables, either with a strictly carnivorous diet or an animal based diet. And I don't know if I defined animal based earlier. I have just defined that for the sake of conversation as meat and organs, plus fruit and honey and raw dairy. That's kind of the way that I eat now. That's basically what I keep coming back to. I don't believe that everyone needs to eat exactly like that. I just find that to be a helpful foundation, maybe a starting point for people as an offered blueprint as a dietary prescription. But I do think that elimination or attention to the presence of plant defense chemicals in vegetables, vegetables again being leaves, stems, roots and seeds of plants, is valuable for people. I don't think everyone needs to eliminate all of those, but some of them eliminated does lead to improvements in health for some people. So that's interesting. So that's kind of the vegetable conversation in general.

[Interviewer]

Are there certain vegetables that are more dangerous than others?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah, I think. And again, this is just observation. There's never been a controlled trial to look at this. But I think that many of the leaves are problematic for humans, with spinach being high on the list because of the amount of oxalates. Oxalates are a compound, it's oxalic acid. It's produced in small amounts in the human body from the breakdown of certain amino acids present in large amounts in certain plant foods.

[Interviewer]

Which ones?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Spinach, rhubarb, almonds are pretty high. Kale is moderate. Beans often have high amounts of oxalates, depending how far you go. Down the list. Sweet potatoes have a moderate amount of oxalates. White potatoes are high in oxalates. The other one that's really high in oxalates is turmeric. It's a turmeric powder really concentrates oxalates quite a bit. You don't eat as much turmeric as you might spinach. Right? Right. But a tablespoon of turmeric powder has a lot of oxalates. And the oxalate thing I think is easily imagined. You just can think of a smoothie that someone can make and you say, oh, I'm going to put some spinach in my smoothie. I'm going to throw some almond milk, I'm going to throw in some turmeric powder. Maybe I'll throw in some blackberries, which actually have a moderate amount of oxalates. And you have a very large amount of oxalates in your smoothie. Just with those are probably the highest of all of, you know, plant.

[Interviewer]

Maybe there's some benefit in curry that even though it has turmeric, there's something that balances the turmeric in curry.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

I wonder. And I've had an interesting conversation with Andrew Huberman about turmeric because just as an aside for a minute, the active ingredient in turmeric is curcumin. And there is some evidence in humans that curcumin decreases androgens. So male sex hormones, but also important for women too, that's concerning, you know, that some of these things we think of as superfoods. Again, it kind of harkens back to this idea of plant events, chemicals and like doing an honest calculus around whether a certain food is net and positive for any particular human. But I'm not convinced that turmeric is what it's cracked up to be. If you look at the turmeric studies, there are a couple maybe, and I mean like maybe one or two that show reduction in osteoarthritis, pain from turmeric. But as an overarching concept, if most people take it because it's quote anti inflammatory. And this is interesting philosophically because then we start to ask the question, like why are you not correcting the root cause of your inflammation? You don't take ibuprofen every day as a vitamin. Is the turmeric potentially anti inflammatory? Yes. And what are you covering up with the turmeric? It's not that you have a turmeric deficiency if there's a source of inflammation in your body. Correct that. And inflammation is again kind of this colloquial word around activation of the immune system in the human body So I think that too often we are taking turmeric feeling like it's a tonic and we are taking things that are sold to us as anti inflammatory when we should probably be thinking about the source of the inflammation is.

[Interviewer]

What are your thoughts on supplements in general?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

I think that in an intentional fashion they can be incredibly beneficial and if used without care can swing over into net negative pretty quickly. So I'll give you an example. In my own life I have a genetic polymorphism called mthfr. Have you heard of this? So it's a. It's genetic polymorphism common I'm half Italian, it's common in I believe Latin America, Italy, maybe the Mediterranean and I am homozygous for a polymorphism at 677 position in MTHFR which stands for methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase which means that if I eat folate in food whether it's from eggs or liver, theoretically I could eat leafy greens to get folate I don't do that. I'm very bad at converting that food folate which is often tetrahydrofolate down the pathway through this one step that makes L5 methylfolate in the end. So MTHFR converts 510 methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase into L5 methylfolate. The problem with not making enough L5 methylfolate is that that is essential for many reactions in the human body that are methylation reactions 300 plus reactions are essential with that. And so having enough methylfolate in my body helps me detoxify things, it helps me manage hormones in the body, helps me methylate DNA, turn it on and off. It's crucial for human physiology test that.

[Interviewer]

You found that out through.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

You can find it out through any genetic test that will show you the raw data. So I believe 23andMe doesn't show you the raw data anymore. There are others online where you can look for this MTHFR genetics. You can also see it in your lab work not specifically but reflected in high levels of a compound called homocysteine because that reaction that converts those two forms of folate also converts homocysteine to methionine. At the same time if you have extra homocysteine you may not be making enough methylfolate. So in this case I take a methylfolate supplement as part of a methylated B complex with riboflavin, a small amount of B6 adenosyl cobalamin, which is a bioactive form of vitamin B12, and a little bit of TMG, which is trimethylglycine, along with L5 methylfolate. And that supplement has been helpful for me in terms of mental clarity, sleep. And you can see my homocysteine go down in my labs. My homocysteine, if I'm just eating half an ounce of liver per day, which is usually what I do, is around 11 or 12. When I take methylfolate as part of a B complex, it's around seven, seven and a half. So I would think that's clear signals that that's moving in the right direction, that's specific to my genetics. But that's a use of a supplement. And the other supplement that I take is creatine. Now, the amount of research on creatine right now is enormous. Creatine is enjoying, I think, a well deserved resurgence in the health community. It's pennies a day and super safe and has benefits in terms of mental clarity, mental performance, athletic performance, recovery, explosiveness, muscle strength overall. Creatine is a cellular energy currency. It's a storage form of phosphate in the human body. So we can probably get an optimum amount of creatine every day by eating 2 to 2.2 pounds of meat. There's some debate over, you know, perhaps you could eat a little less red meat if you don't cook it too much. But most people would suggest 4 to 5 grams of creatine per day per humans. Again, you can get that from a kilogram of meat. Maybe red meat you could eat a little less, but I don't eat a kilogram of red meat anymore. When I was a carnivore I did, but now I'm eating fruit and squash and sometimes avocado, and I'm probably eating a pound or a pound and a quarter of meat per day. So I think that I find benefit by supplementing with a little bit of creatine in my diet every day. Three to five grams.

[Interviewer]

Would you ever supplement protein?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

I don't supplement protein because I just cook my meat. I see the utility of protein powders for people who are on the go. And I think that protein is interesting. When we are constructing a diet for a human. This is one place where I think there's pretty clear data to suggest that. 0.8grams per pound of protein. So 0.8 grams protein per pound of body weight, or goal body weight more specifically, is ideal for most people. It's convenient to round that up to 1 because 0.8 is a hard number to do calculations within your head. So for the sake of discussion, we'll say 1 gram of protein per pound of, of goal body weight. Just more than most people need.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, most people don't have that much protein. No, not even close.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Not even close. Especially if you're eating a lot of plant foods, which kind of fill your day in terms of your stomach space and, you know, your hunger, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's just, I think for most people, building your diet around protein, which is kind of the ethos of an animal based diet. That's why I thought that term made sense. Like, base your diet around animal foods, which I would argue are the most nutrient rich, most bioavailable, least toxic food for humans. Base your diet around that and you'll do well and then fill in the edges or the, you know, fill in the next level of the bullseye with plant foods that work for you to kind of complete the picture. Color, variety, texture, flavor, nutrients like carbohydrates, things like this. But getting enough protein a day from high quality animal sources is critical. There's more and more research coming out now that plant protein is about half as bioavailable as animal protein. So if you want to eat all of your protein from plant sources, you might need to double that number. You know, it might need be. It might be 1.6 grams per pound of plant protein. And then you run into other issues with plant protein. Lectins, oxalates, digestive enzyme inhibitors. I think there's a real argument evolutionarily, historically in the medical literature that basing your diet around animal proteins is superior to plant proteins.

[Interviewer]

Any thoughts on the different kinds of protein powders?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah, there's benefits to, unique benefits to many of them.

[Interviewer]

There's whey, there's egg, there's bone broth, now collagen, collagen.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

There's hydrolyzed beef protein. So the two that I think of mostly are whey and hydrolyzed beef protein. And if you're getting a beef protein, I think you want it to be like whole carcass protein, which kind of has the collagen built into it. So collagen. I can talk about that for a minute. So collagen is connective tissue and it's much higher in glycine than muscle meat, the way that organs complement muscle meat. Collagen also kind of complements muscle meat. We're meant to be eating muscles, but also the tendons and the fascia and the connective tissue that surrounds them. So often when we go to a steakhouse, we are only eating the muscle. And for the sake of taste and texture and visual appeal, all of the tendons which are chewy, have been cut off. Unless you're eating in New York and most people don't eat the tendon anyway. But when I'm making a skirt steak in my house in Costa Rica, from the butcher, you can see the fascia on the meat and it's chewy and I've grown to like that. Right? But most of us like tender meat. And believe me, I went to a steakhouse last night here in Los Angeles and I had some of the most tender grass fed New Zealand wagyu ever had. It was amazing. And there probably wasn't a ton of collagen in there. A little bit. I could see that it was marbled. So it definitely had some fat and probably some collagen. But many people like filet mignon, right? It's tender, it melts in your mouth. There's less collagen there, right? There's not zero, but there's less collagen. So if that's the kind of meat that you're eating, you want to complement that with a bone broth or a collagen powder to get the glycine. So many things in optimal human health are about balance. Copper balances zinc, copper in liver, zinc in muscle meat. Right. Glycine balances methionine and there's glycine that occurs in muscle meat. But we need to get some of the connective tissue in an animal to balance the methionine properly in the muscle meat. And so when you're getting a carcass, hydrolyzed beef protein, you're getting the collagen with the beef protein. If you're just using a collagen powder and thinking that's your protein powder, it doesn't really give you enough methionine. Right. And it can cause problems. There are experiments that have been done in animal models where they give animals just collagen and they develop amino acid deficiencies. And that's not something you want either. So you don't just want collagen. So not as big a fan of a bone broth protein powder because it's a more collagenous protein. If you want a beef protein, I would go for a hydrolyzed sort of beef carcass protein that has both the muscle and the collagenous portions. Whey protein is from dairy. I think whey protein is very beneficial for humans for different reasons whey protein is probably beneficial for the immune system. Whey protein contains because it's dairy derived immunoglobulins that beef protein doesn't contain. So there are, there are immunoactive things in whey protein. Lactoferrin, lactoglobulin. There's immunoglobulins in whey protein that are uniquely beneficial. So I think that there's benefit to both whey and beef protein. People can use whichever of those they prefer. Also, I think that if you're doing raw dairy and eating steak and maybe a little liver, you may not need a protein powder. But if, if you can find a good source of a protein powder from a company that you appreciate that tests their stuff and that helps you have a life in terms of convenience, it's fine to use.

[Interviewer]

Is there any benefit to egg protein powder?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Not that I know off the top of my head.

[Interviewer]

Okay.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

You know, I haven't researched it deeply. Some people will say that egg protein is bioavailable, but I think that whey and beef protein are probably the best options. From what I see out there right now.

[Interviewer]

You can really tell the difference between the quality of the eggs when you break them open.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Oh, yeah.

[Interviewer]

When the yolk is bright orange. Psychedelic orange. You know it's a good egg. Egg.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

You know it's a good egg. There are ways that egg manufacturers can stack the deck in their favor.

[Interviewer]

Really.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

There are things they can feed the chickens that make the eggs that color, which may be a good thing. It's not that they're feeding them something unnatural. They're feeding them. There's something common that they feed it that may make it look more orange. But in general, yes, it is reflective of something. And I think that one experiment that I would like to do in the future is have my own chickens. I want to have my own bees and my own chickens. And I want to do the experiments with the egg yolk color. I think you can also tell with.

[Interviewer]

The taste stuff like tofu.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah. So tofu is soybeans. Right.

[Interviewer]

And I don't even know if soybeans or beans.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah, soybeans or beans. And we can talk about soy for a minute because it's kind of an interesting conversation. Soybeans can be a source of protein for people. I've certainly eaten tofu in my life. I don't love it and I don't eat it now. But again, we're back to the idea that plant protein is about half as bioavailable as animal protein. Soy is a Unique one, because in the sort of bro sphere, there's this idea that soy will give you man boobs, right? Or the soy is estrogenic. And there is no evidence that consuming soy lowers testosterone. But there is a trial that I've seen in humans where soy consumption decreased androgen receptors. And that was interesting to me because soy contains compounds that may mimic estrogen in humans. These are sort of xeno or, you know, like plant estrogens, phytoestrogens are present in soy, this genistein and other compounds in soy. And so there's been this question like, is there a problem with soy for men or women? It could potentially be problematic for both because hormones can imbalance in both sexes. And while they don't lower testosterone, it does, at least from the trial that I've seen, seem to lower androgen receptors. So the way that a sex hormone like testosterone or estrogen works is it has to bind to a receptor. It's usually a nuclear receptor for the sex hormone. And so you don't want to lower androgen receptors because then you have less androgen signaling in men. So I would not be a fan of soy in humans. I think that, you know, if you're in a starvation situation, okay, but probably not the best food for humans. And that, that kind of just harkens back to an idea that I think is interesting to point out, which is that if you look at hunter gatherers, we talked about the hadza earlier, there is a consistent pattern of food hierarchy, the foods that they prefer. And humans have eaten all sorts of foods throughout our evolution. We know this based on fossil records and, you know, analyses of certain isotopes in human bones. But, but I think that it's not that we've never eaten vegetables as humans throughout our history. I just think that consistently, based on what we see in current anthropology and ethnography, the vegetable parts of plants are consistently the least favored parts of plants. Earlier we talked about the study that this researcher had done, asking the hadza what their favorite foods are. Honey is number one for both men and women. Men say meat. Second for women. It's a three way tie for second, third and fourth between meat, berries and baobab.

[Interviewer]

What's the last one?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Baobab, which is a fruit from the baobab tree in Africa. It's kind of a hard outer shell with this dry, almost like cotton candy inside, but it's very citrusy. It's a good fruit. And both men and women, the fifth, the least desirable thing is tubers. There's no salad on the list, they don't even eat leaves. You know, when I was with the Hadza, they never ate leaves unless they were using it as a medicine. So there's also this perspective as plants or vegetables as medicine, not necessarily as food. Cultures do eat roots as food, but they will detoxify or cook them. And again, they're usually low on the list. So that's interesting for me, and I think it's mirrored in the medical literature, or at least the botanical literature about these defense chemicals that yes, we can eat vegetables. Are they a survival food? Are they a fallback food for humans that has been elevated to the center of the pan, you know, to like, the most, you know, celebrated role in the pantheon? Vegetables are the best when they're probably the worst. Like you can eat them, but they're probably a starvation type of food for most humans. And meat, conversely, ironically, has been vilified when that one really. Meat and organs should occupy the center of our house of worship when it comes to the foods that nourish us.

[Interviewer]

Any difference between the healthy diet and the fat loss diet?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

If you wanted to lose fat, would you do something different than just eating healthy?

[Interviewer]

Yes.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

No. I think that maybe there's an Ozempic conversation here, but I think that.

[Interviewer]

What are your thoughts on Ozempic?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah, ozempic is a GLP1 agonist. It's mimicking a naturally occurring peptide in the human body that signals satiety. What we also know is that eating unprocessed meat and animal foods, and many plant foods does that for humans as well. So there are natural sources of Ozempic in our diets that we are just ignoring. And I see Ozempic as, like many pharmaceuticals, it's a band aid, right? It's a crush. If you don't want to correct the root cause of the reason that you're not feeling the satiety signals properly in your body, then you can take Ozempic, which has side effects. Right. It can cause GI issues, it can cause muscle wasting because you eat so few calories that you lose lean muscle mass with the fat. And I think there are better ways to get to the root cause. Ozempic is essentially a pharmaceutical antidote for a highly processed diet. But you could also just make your diet less processed and you would have satiety and you wouldn't need Ozempic. The idea that we need Ozempic, there's this sort of semi viral clip of a Harvard trained physician who I believe is actually paid by Ozempic to potentially be A spokesperson saying that obesity is 60 to 75% genetic. And then she goes on to say it was on 60 Minutes to Barbara Walters. I believe that that means, Barbara, that even if you have a good diet and you're active, you're still going to be obese. And that to me was just so gross. It was so distasteful. I thought, well, if that's not a mouthpiece for the pharmaceutical industry, I don't know what is. Because that's, that's the narrative of western medicine. You're broken, you have bad genetics, you're meant to be obese or you know, your genetics are predisposing to obesity. There's nothing you can do. Thankfully we've developed this injectable for you.

[Interviewer]

And it's just wrong.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

It's Frank, it's absolutely 100 wrong. There are very, very rare cases of genetic obesity and overeating, Prater Willie syndrome, things like this. 99, 99.5, 99.8% of obesity is lifestyle based and can be massively affected with the quality of the foods we eat. And this I think is where I should comment a little bit on calories and how there's a misunderstanding here. So one thing I've been thinking about a lot. I'm working on a documentary about food. It's pro meat. And the theme that kept coming up for me when I'm working on this documentary with my team is food quality. And that's a hard thing, it's not necessarily a sexy thing for people to hear about. But I think it's really important to, for people to understand that if you do nothing else but you improve the quality of the foods you're eating, you will become healthier, you will lose weight without any attention to calories, without any attention to food portioning, without any attention to food, you know, to like intermittent fasting or any of those things which are all interesting conversations. Simply improving food quality leads to more satiety. Hunger is one of the strongest urges that we have as humans. Good luck fighting your hunger for anything more than a few weeks to months. Food prison is a horrible place to be. We will break out of it. 80% plus maybe 90% of people who have been on the Biggest Loser gained all the weight back plus more. It doesn't work. Calorie restriction doesn't work for weight loss long term in humans. It just tanks your thyroid in a process called adaptive thermogenesis. And your body will not tolerate long term. So if you don't improve food quality, you must decrease calories to lose weight generally in some way. And that to me is a losing battle long term. So the idea of calories as the central metric around which you should base the health of your diet or that you should use as the fuel or the, the sort of stepping stones in your weight loss or health journey, that's the wrong place to start. Unless you improve food quality, you will not be successful because you can lose weight eating only potatoes, only Twinkies, only donuts, but that will not lead to better satiety. You can, you know, grit your teeth and flex your muscles and be super disciplined and lose weight eating donuts for the next three weeks. And you'll become massively undernourished, nutrient deficient, and you will be so hungry and irritable all the time that you'll be so just miserable that when you start eating anything else, you'll overeat.

[Interviewer]

In each case, what would be the healthy version of the foods that we, that we eat as opposed to the unhealthy versions? Let's go through all the food groups.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Oh, okay.

[Interviewer]

So in meat, it's grass fed, grass finished, Right?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

As opposed to grain finished. But I think there's also a third level there. There's another level at which meat can become less good for humans, which is highly processed meat. So deli meats, things like this can be problematic, unfortunately.

[Interviewer]

Are there healthy versions of those?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Probably healthier versions, yeah, with less additives. But anytime you're like extruding and doing these things to the meats, it becomes problematic. There's more microplastics and things in there, obviously more additives, probably more pesticides. Sausages can be that way too, depending how processed the sausages are. Hot dogs, you know, hot dogs contain microplastics. So there's. We're going down the hierarchy now, right? I think that if you're thinking about meat, if someone is eating unprocessed ground beef or chicken or steak or lamb or fish, and we can talk about fish, we probably should. Great. Even if it's not perfect, you know, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. If you can access grass fed, grass finished meat, that's probably the way to vote with your dollars. But again, if you can't afford that or you don't have access to it, meat is still healthy for humans. But once you start getting into the other levels like deli meats and overly processed salamis and sausages, you run into problems. Dairy, you know, you have raw from a good producer from a variety of animals, cow, goat, Some people do Camel. I've had bison milk. It's really good. Then you get into pasteurization and then you get into whole versus skim, and you've had a real drop off in quality there. The same with butters. You know, it's hard to find a raw butter. I think most people can do fine with this, an organic grass fed butter in that sense. And then cheeses are the same way. Even in states where raw milk is not legal to be sold in grocery stores, you can find raw cheeses, which is probably a good option for a lot of people. Cheese is very rich. Some cheeses are very rich in vitamin K2, an isoform of vitamin K that's been consistently associated across multiple studies with decreased morbidity, decreased mortality, decreased cardiovascular outcomes, heart attacks, and calcific aortic sclerosis. Which is interesting because in the Rotterdam study specifically, again, meat does not associate with healthy behaviors. And the only place people are really getting vitamin K2 from in Rotterdam is meat, eggs and butter and cheese. And those are not associated with healthy behavior. So for those to consistently significantly show a signal for decreased cardiovascular disease, ask some really profound questions that are consistent with what we've been talking about, but fly in the face of mainstream narratives. Right. How can saturated fats from butter or dairy or eggs or meat be good for you when they contain vitamin K2? Well, maybe they're not bad for you in the first place. And maybe the whole cholesterol thing is sort of of a little bit misshapen in that paradigm. In terms of plant foods, I think, yeah, we have fruits and vegetables. Unprocessed fruit.

[Interviewer]

Anything in the vegetable, like is cucumber as bad as spinach?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Cucumbers are fruit.

[Interviewer]

Oh, that. I didn't know that.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

What are the other fruits that I might not know are fruits?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Anything that has seeds in it is a fruit. So squash, winter or summer squash is a fruit. Avocado is a fruit. Those are the big ones.

[Interviewer]

And then avoid grains, beans, nuts, maybe with the exception of once you have a baseline, you could experiment with real serious sourdough bread and see how it.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Fermented versions. Yeah, fermented versions of vegetables, sauerkrauts, things like that. I will say that I believe humans can be pretty darn healthy eating unprocessed plant foods. I know there are lots of people who eat oatmeal and they're pretty healthy. And there are people who eat oatmeal and probably have issues related to the oatmeal. I believe that a lot of My stress fractures related to when I was running a lot were related to oats. Oats are very high in phytic acid. Very hard to get rid of the phytic acid, which is that molecule that holds onto minerals. Eating oats will actually rob you of calcium and other minerals. And it only really is mitigated by fermenting the oats. You can't boil the phytic acid out in any significant amount somewhat, but even cooked oats have 60% of the original amount of phytic acid. So you can't get rid of it by cooking entirely. So I think grains are problematic for a lot of humans. If you can tolerate them, great, knock yourself out. But if you have issues like I did, recurrent stress fractures of running, getting rid of them often creates major improvements. And then, you know, I think most people understand that in the plant food kingdom or in the plant food genre, there are very poor versions of plant foods which are basically the ultra processed things. We see cakes, cookies, crackers, chips. These are not good for any human. And circling back to the calorie conversation, I think that they are in some ways poisonous. And that's a strong word, but I don't think there's hyperbole there. And I think RFK Jr. Has done a great job of using that word recently to really tell us that we are being poisoned. And I think that these ultra processed foods are poisonous in as many words for humans. And there's no version of eating ultra processed foods. Even if you're restricting calories, that is going to result in better health for you. And that I think that it's misleading to imagine that you can out exercise a donut, that you can out exercise bad food. It's not just about the calories and the bad food. It's about the oxidized oils, it's about the pesticides, it's about the food additives, the food dyes, the dough conditioners, it's about the gluten. It's things you can't out exercise. You can out exercise calories, sure. And that will create stress on your body, but you can't really out exercise all of the other things which are problematic, I think, in more ways than we imagine.

[Interviewer]

How is the carnivore diet different than the Western A. Price diet?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

So carnivore is just animal foods. Weston A. Price is a very fascinating way of eating that I respect a lot, which is really informed by Weston A. Price's travels. I actually went to the Price Pottinger foundation in San Diego to see his original slides and all of the photographs as part of filming this documentary. And it was really cool talking to the, the people that curate that there and seeing the original stuff. I mean, the history there around his travels are amazing. And if people aren't familiar, there's a book called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration which is very difficult to read. But the photos tell the story. And the photos juxtapose from 1920, 1940, 1940, I think it was published in the mid-1940s and he was far ahead of his time. And the photos juxtapose contemporary members of the same tribe, one member of the tribe or one group of members of the tribe who are eating traditional foods, meat, organs, fermented grains, a variety of foods, depending what part of the world you're in. Fruits, some fermented vegetables, generally broths. And juxtapose that with again, contemporary members of the same tribe, same genetics, who have joined towns and are eating foods of modernity. So processed sugars.

[Interviewer]

And this is in the 1940s where it's less processed than it is now?

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

Yes, far less, yes, far less process. Then you see changes in dental structure and just massive difference in facial structure. The smiles again. He was a dentist, so he saw things through the oral health lens. But that reverberates in the rest of the body. The smiles that these people have when they are eating these traditional foods again, not brushing their teeth with fluoride toothpaste, not going to see a dentist are they're enviable, they're perfect. And these people all look like models. They have the most beautiful facial structure, wide jaws. It's the type of thing we don't see today. And Weston A. Price argues in the book that facial structure changes when we don't get these fat soluble vitamins. Our faces become skinnier, our palate becomes skinnier, our teeth become crowded. We don't have room for the wisdom teeth. We have different bridges of our nose and we have less room to breathe. And so it's quite a striking perspective. And the diet that comes out of Weston A. Price is similar. Its attention to organs in addition to meat, not just meat. That was consistent across all of his travels. There were no vegetarian or vegan tribes or people that he encountered. And when plant foods were eaten, when vegetables were eaten, they were often fermented or detoxified in some way.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about fasting and intermittent fasting.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

I am not, not a huge fan in general. I know that some people use this to good effect and I think that we just need to be careful with fasting and intermittent fasting that we don't tip over into overstressing the human body. What's clear from studies of intermittent fasting are that if you don't eat breakfast, you extend the cortisol awakening response. So when we wake up in the morning, one of the things that wakes us up is a cortisol spike. It's normal physiology. Certainly the circadian rhythm and seeing the morning sunlight helps set the table for the rest of the day or set the clock for the rest of the day. And in the studies that I've seen, if you skip breakfast, you have more cortisol later in the morning, which isn't a good thing. Cortisol, it wakes us up, but it also is sort of this stress hormone in the human body. If you skip dinner, it also changes sort of the diurnal rhythm of cortisol in the day. So there are studies with intermittent fasting where again, androgens are decreased. I think that the reason people intermittent fast is for the promise of autophagy or to lose weight. If we're trying to lose weight with intermittent fasting, I would suggest that people focus more on food quality rather than limiting food at a certain time in the day. Because if you want to lose weight, you want to really mitigate excess cortisol in your body. This is kind of getting into like a Ray Pete type of ideology, which has been, I think, interesting for me to learn about. Like, I think we want to limit these stress hormones in our body. We don't want to over exercise some exercises, right? Find the Goldilocks amount. Eating throughout the day is probably good for us. We probably don't want to have lots of cortisol either in the evening when we're going to sleep, or in the morning persisting throughout the morning if we're doing intermittent fasting for autophagy. I think the research is pretty shaky and I don't think it's actually what's happening. I think that autophagy is this cellular house cleaning. And I think that we've. We're again conceptualizing this incorrectly because when we have cellular house cleaning, and I think even that term is misleading. So you can have cellular house cleaning, which is good, but we know that there are foods that we eat that actually trigger autophagy. So glucose in some studies actually triggers autophagy. So it's not that we need to not eat. I think there's this, this prevailing idea that the only way that you can do cellular house cleaning is by not eating. It's like, oh, you have A party at your house. You can't clean the house while the party's still going on. But that's exactly how your body works. Like, you need nutrients to do autophagy. The human body doesn't need to have no nutrients coming in to do house cleaning. The other really interesting potential problem with this theory is that it's possible that fasting creates more cellular damage and that's why autophagy goes up, up. So just because autophagy is going up doesn't mean that you're net benefiting the human body.

[Interviewer]

Interesting.

[Dr. Paul Saladino]

It's possible that not feeding yourself is causing proteins to be misfolded or causing cellular apparatus to be misconducting their role in the human cell. Or it's possible that not eating is just creating damage in the cell and that's leading to more autophagy. So autophagy is a tricky thing to assay in humans. And I don't think that we need to be doing intermittent fasting or long fast to really get that at an optimal level. There's some evidence that longer fasting can be quite harmful for humans connected with cardiomyopathies and things like this. So. So I think that when it comes to fasting, the jury is still out. Certainly it's something that's been used in religious practices for centuries, and I'm not discounting it. I think that if you are eating junk food, eating less of that junk food is probably good for you. And if you look at the literature in animal studies, it's pretty interesting regarding caloric restriction across species. It's not always clear that the restriction of calories is what's extending lifespan. And there's two juxtaposed studies in, I think it's rhesus macabre monkeys, one at NIH and one, I believe, in Wisconsin. And they found that only when the monkeys were eating monkey chow did caloric restriction have health benefits when the monkeys were eating what they eat in the wild, which is, why would we not feed all monkeys that in studies, there really wasn't the same benefit to caloric restriction. So I, I fear that caloric restriction has been adopted by some in the longevity space prematurely. And there are other studies, I believe, in fruit flies and some other animal models that suggest that if caloric restriction is beneficial, the mechanism may be decreased polyunsaturation of cell membranes. Because it does appear that in some animal models, when we do caloric restriction, membranes become more saturated. So now we're back to the idea of seed oils, polyunsaturated fats, the Mix of oils or the mix of fatty acids, polyunsaturated versus saturated in your cell membranes. And maybe there's a better way to achieve that. If you want to make your membranes more saturated, you can just eat less polyunsaturated fats, predominantly decreasing seed oils in your diet. So I think the jury's still out on intermittent fasting and fasting in general and caloric restriction. They're all kind of tied together, I think. It's hard for me to believe at this point, looking at the literature, that any of them are clearly net positive for humans. They may have benefits, but then what's the side effect? And like, can we say net positive? Does it need to be happening in all humans if someone wants to do those things? Just make sure that you're watching other metrics, because I think that quickly when you do too much intermittent fasting, fasting or caloric restriction, your sex hormones will go down, your fertility will go down, your thyroid hormones will decrease, specifically T3 and T4. And I'll just point out that one of the most, I think, well known examples of this today is Brian Johnson here in Venice, California. I haven't met him in person, but I've heard he's a lovely human. And two of the medications that he's on are testosterone and thyroid hormone. He says that the thyroid hormone is from hypothyroidism that he's had since he was a child. And his testosterone went down so much that he started supplementing with testosterone. So I fear when, and I'm saying this with just respect and love and just pointing out this potential issue, I fear that when he says that his biomarkers look healthy, they're being covered by two hormonal sort of crutches here on the thyroid and the testosterone, which are two of the biggest places where I think people who are overusing fasting, intermittent fasting, or caloric restriction will see their vitality decline. Tetragrammaton is a podcast. Tetragrammaton is a website.

[Interviewer]

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