Kick Veggies to the Curb and Go Full Carnivore – Dr Paul Saladino #621

Bulletproof Radio. A state of high performance. You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is yet again about gut bacteria. Because those little bastards are doing all sorts of things in your life that you probably didn't know. In this case, the gut bacteria have just upended hundreds of billions of dollars of, well, drug research to put it in the best possible way. That's because a new study found that gut bacteria can modify huge numbers of drugs. And the genetic makeup of your microbiota predicts your response to medications. And the amazing scientists who were only a little bit cowardly so they could get their next grant said in the quote that they may predict your response to medications, even though they just frickin proved beyond any reasonable doubt that gut bacteria metabolize and change medications before your body can use them. However, they may predict whatever the may is. Let's stop using weasel words, my friends. We just broke a lot of medical research. This is from Yale. They tested the ability of 76 kinds of bacteria, which is a selection of bacteria, to represent the microbe diversity of the human gut. Although, frankly, if you do it right, you can have more diversity. My number is 196. And you could do that. They found that that 76 different type of bacteria mix altered the molecular structure of 271 oral drugs, everything from hormones to antiviral medications. And they did that in only 12 hours in test tubes. About 2/3 of the drugs they tested were modified by at least one strain of bacteria. And each strain of bacteria could modify 11 to 95 different drugs. And then the next step was a series of experiments with different medications. They monitored the entire microbial population in fecal samples to see what it would do to the drugs. And it turns out that it's one thing if bacteria A does something to, say, an antibiotic, that's maybe a bad example, say, to metformin. But if bacteria A turns metformin into something and bacteria B turns that thing into something, and bacteria C turns it into something else, that's toxic to bacteria, bacteria D, that was responsible for making a good compound in your body. What you have is a system effect, a network effect, and everything in your body is actually a system. And that's why systems biology is such an important thing to do. And it requires massive amounts of computational abilities as well as interesting machine learning algorithms, as well as the ability to actually genetically sequence large numbers of bacteria. So it's kind of cool we can do this. Now. We couldn't do it 10 years ago. What this means though is that pretty soon your doctor is going to need to look at your poop to tell you whether any medication works for you or not. And that means all those studies saying this population of, or sorry, this medication does something for this population of people, it's probably BS Just like the studies that say, oh, kale is good for you. Oh, a third of people can't metabolize oxalic acid for you guys, it could cause gout, kidney stones, or my favorite condition you don't want from Kale called vulvodynia. That would be the formation of uric acid in the vulva in a woman, which is an exceptionally painful condition that results in, well, difficulty sitting down and wearing underwear and things like that. So go Kale. All right. And today's guest is interesting because he's a doctor who says you don't have to eat your vegetables. And if you've read some of my posts and all, you know I've gone pretty deep on the I didn't eat my vegetables either path a while back. I'm talking about a guy named Paul Saladino, a certified functional medicine practitioner in Seattle who focuses on in depth study of both behavior in humans and diseases. And he's pretty unusual because he's quite an explorer. Spent six years adventuring hiking the Pacific Crest Trail and became a physician's assistant, practiced in cardiology, then became an md Then became a functional medicine certified MD and is now doing a psychiatric residency, which is a very unusual path. And he's looking what's the root cause of why we do what we do and what can we do beyond pharmacology. And he's probably best known because he talks about nutritional biochemistry and the Carnivore diet, which is our main focus. Welcome to the show, Paul.

It's so good to be here, my friend.

Now I just realized you're in Seattle.

I am in Seattle.

What a waste. I was in Seattle yesterday. Why didn't I just interview you in person?

I would have loved.

To have you. Well, next time we are both in Seattle at the same time, let's go to Carnivore, the restaurant. Have you been there?

I would love to do that. I have not been there. But I'll tell you what, Dave. I am moving to San Diego in one week.

Well, you suck. Too bad. No, I'm just kidding. I love San Diego too. I'm down there pretty frequently. I have a bunch of friends there. Well, Carnivore in Seattle has all grass fed meat and the Founder shut down a couple bars after reading the Bulletproof Diet and benefiting. And you go there and she'll tell you, I hunted this deer myself and things like that before you eat. It's kind of cool. So maybe in your one week of time left you can do it.

Maybe so.

All right, before we get into the cool carnivore diet things, one of the things that attracted me to having you on the show was that when you hiked the 2,700mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, you did something that few people have done. And everyone I know who's done it always talks about this incredible focus on fuel and efficiency and how you feel every day because all you have is just 12 hours of walking every day. And did I walk well? Did it hurt? Did it not hurt? Was I tired? Those sorts of things become top of mind. What did you learn that you didn't expect to learn when you walked the trail?

Pacific Crest Trail was an incredible experience. There were many lessons that I learned on the PCT regarding food. What I learned was that I never got sick of animal foods. And this is probably something that you maybe weren't even anticipating me saying. But as I was going through the trail, I had packed all of my food for the trail and sent it to myself at 27 resupplies along the route. And I got so sick of every single thing I had sent myself. But I never got sick of jerky or other animal foods. I look forward to those the whole time. But believe it or not, I got sick of peanut butter. Oh yeah, I never thought I would get sick of peanut butter. And this was years ago, mind you, this was 20 years ago that I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. So I had no inkling of a nose to tail carnivore diet in my mind at the time. But in retrospect, it kind of. There's a little bit of foreshadowing there. I got sick of every food that I had packed. And granted, I was trying to pack whole foods. I. I wasn't trying to pack processed foods. I was trying to eat as well as I could imagine at that time during the Pacific Crest Trail. But all I wanted to eat were animal foods after the first, I don't know, thousand miles or so.

It's pretty well known my dad was a long distance backpacker more than I was. But I've done some decent hikes, including Annapurna Circuit and stuff like that. And people oftentimes resort to carrying sticks of butter or ghee or little bottles of olive Oil. So I'll just take a couple swigs because the caloric density of straight oil is about as good as it gets. And at a certain point you are turning food into electrons. And the more electrons in your food, the more you can make of them. When you don't want to carry a bunch of, I'm going to call it carbohydrate empty calories there, even if there's some nutrients in them or not, it doesn't really matter. They're empty calories because they have less calories per gram than fat. In fact, maybe. Is that the new definition of empty calorie?

Anything that's less than fat is empty. Pretty much. Calories. Those are weenie calories.

Nice. Although I hate to say it, but if you're eating nose to tail, nevermind. That's why they have hot dogs. You learned that you wanted jerky, but you got tired of peanut butter and you got tired of crackers and dehydrated noodles and all the other crap that they eat. I found the more I got into just controlling how I felt that when I would go backpacking, I looked at what was in the processed garbage that they serve and said, I'm not going to do this. So I would find myself like you, eating jerky. I found a way to for about a week to preserve a hunk of filet mignon. If you dehydrated it with enough stuff on the outside of would essentially be something that you could cook and store for an amazing amount of time. But I just stopped eating the garbage and my performance went up. My knees didn't hurt. I felt so much better to the point that even when I was in Tibet, I had some protein powder, I had some certain types of nuts and things that worked much better than the local ramen. So you discovered that what got you into the carnivore side of things. That's pretty out there. I've been following the space for a long time. I've dabbled. But you're not just dabbling. Like, I've got a medical degree and I'm telling you to throw down your vegetables. And you're famous for saying. Was famous in some circles for saying every vegetable positive has a higher net negative. How did you get there from? I hiked the pct eating peanut butter.

It's an interesting journey. I think it has all been based on the fact that I am fascinated by what makes things work and what makes things not work. I think that perhaps a little bit like you, I'm probably an engineer at Heart, maybe a mechanic. I really see myself as a human mechanic rather than a physician. And so throughout my training, when I was a physician assistant, I began to realize this. And then I went back to medical school at the University of Arizona because I was dissatisfied with the paradigm that I saw as a physician assistant. I don't think anyone will argue with me when I suggest that most of Western medicine just looks to ameliorate symptoms with pharmaceuticals. That wasn't interesting to me or satisfying. It didn't feel good in my gut or my heart. I wanted to understand what was causing patients to be sick at the root and be able to affect that. That's been the driving factor for me throughout my education and that's really led me to some strange and wild jungles of thought. So I was a physician assistant working in cardiology. Quickly realized that giving people statins and ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers was not correcting their root cause of their illness. There had to be something else going on. I thought, I'm going back to medical school. It was about at that point that I discovered functional medicine, which is root cause based medicine, and began to explore the thinking in functional medicine and the tools that functional medicine had to address what might be root causes. Functional medicine talks about elimination diets, it talks about food allergy, it talks about gut flora, inflammatory organisms in the gut, toxic metals. And I thought, okay, that's a good start. And I did everything I could from a functional medicine perspective for many of my patients, and they just still weren't getting better in the way that I hoped they would. And what I saw in medical school, what I saw in residency, which I'm finishing this week, by the way.

Congrats.

Yeah, so I'm down. I've been at the University of Washington for four years, finishing residency this week. And as I mentioned, I moved into San Diego to open a private practice there and surf a lot. And it was this constant disillusionment, this constant disappointment, like I am doing everything that I think is right and people are still not getting better. And what I saw persisting was chronic inflammation and autoimmunity. I would argue that those are essentially synonyms, that autoimmunity is chronic inflammation, and that what we are dealing with in Western medicine is a tidal wave of chronic inflammation, a tidal wave of autoimmunity.

Do you think they're really the same, like, identical?

Essentially? Right.

You can cause chronic inflammation by inhibiting mitochondrial function without triggering any immune behaviors.

Well, I think that a lot of the signals from the Immune system come from the mitochondria. I mean, that's what reactive oxygen species do. Right. They affect everything. It's hard to trigger mitochondrial dysfunction and not get cytokine abnormalities. Immune system is always talking. Right.

But are cytokine abnormalities autoimmunity, or are they just cytokine abnormalities?

Well, if you're having cytokine abnormalities, then the immune cells are talking to each other in a different way. It's a little bit of like.

I see what you're saying. So basically, the presence of extra free radicals is. Well, it may not be classical autoimmunity where you've got antibodies to your thyroid. Isn't going to happen if you inhibited mitochondrial function for a short period using hydrogen sulfide or something.

Right. But if we're thinking about both innate and adaptive immune responses, you know, you can get those adaptive immune responses, or typically what we think of as traditional autoimmunity. But I would argue that innate immune response, dendritic cells, macrophages, that's autoimmunity, too. And that kind of gets to this broader definition of autoimmunity. The immune system is involved and dysregulated.

Okay.

It's just this concept that it's all kind of connected.

Yeah. Dysregulated immune system. I like it. And maybe I just have too strict of a semantic definition. If you're listening, you're going, what are you dork's talking about? Here's the deal. Doesn't matter if your body is attacking a specific part of the body. The immune system is acting. Specific part of the body versus the immune system is jacked up. So you have inflammation everywhere. Bottom line is, I would agree very much with what Paul's saying here, which is that if you have inflammation everywhere, things are broken, and you better fix it. And you can call it whatever you want to call it, including Unicorn flu, but you better solve the inflammation problem. And when you do that, everything else gets into alignment. Am I finding out there? All right?

Absolutely. Yep. Electronic high five. Boom. We just gave it to our knuckles. Through the knuckles through the Internet. Yes. And so what I became more and more focused on was interventions that I could use to modulate inflammation, autoimmune immunity. And what I quickly realized, even early on in my training when I was in medical school, was that food was the lever that I was most fascinated by. Food was the main thing, and you can do it. It's the biggest lever. Food is a huge, huge lever. And so that. That was. That's been the iteration in my mind. Is how am I built to eat? How are humans built to eat? And that was really what led me to hypotheses around a carnivore diet. Thinking, wait a minute, maybe this is the idea, maybe this is what's going on here, that we have been in this arms race with plants as humans for millions of years. We sort of had this evolutionary history coming from primates where we were eating a lot of vegetable and plant matter, moving to humans as Homo sapiens, while previously Homo erectus and Homo habilis 4 million to 2 million years ago. And we saw this huge expansion of the human brain, and that was because we were eating animals. Most likely, this is all hypothetical, but there's so many convincing theories now that it was animal nutrients, density of calories that allowed our brains to just grow in size and humans to generate a neocortex to move out of the trees and become hunters. There was something magical about eating animals. And then I heard these stories.

Didn't mean to interrupt you. There's something magic about cooking them, too.

Well, we can talk about that.

I want to go there with you.

Yeah. Yeah, we should. There are these theories about the cooking of food, and I have some interesting thoughts about that, too. As I was mulling over that, I hear Jordan Peterson and Michaela Peterson talking on Joe Rogan about the improvement in their recalcitrant autoimmune conditions by eliminating plants from their diet. And I thought, maybe that's really cool. Throughout the history of my training, I've always been fascinated by any intervention, whether it was a vegan diet or bulletproof diet or a paleo diet, or any of these things that helped people anecdotally and have won case study, improve autoimmunity, improve chronic inflammation, all that. I don't want to. I want to study that. I want to study that and see what's going on there. All of those are valuable anecdotes. So when I heard about this with a carnivore diet, and we can talk about how I would formulate a carnivore diet, for me, it's much more than just meat. It's like this nose to tail, as you suggested. So that was really fascinating to me. And I went down that rabbit hole and I've just been on this magical unicorn journey. It's been a great experience. It's led me to learn about all sorts of cool things. As I'm exploring this hypothesis that for some people, for all people, plants are kind of out to get us and they don't want us to eat Them. It comes with all these corollary questions which I'm sure we'll dive into, and that perhaps animals really are the source of the optimal food for humans.

Well, I love the mindset that plants don't want us to eat them. And I go back to emergent behaviors from complex systems. And there's a guy named Stephen Wolfram who proved this is the guy who created Mathematica, which is this math simulation software used in almost all advanced engineering and science and biology degrees to model behaviors. And he showed, look, you want to make something that looks like a really amazing complex flower, you take these four rules and just do them over and over, billions or trillions of times. And these amazing, complex patterns emerge from simple rules. And I think that the basic plant emergent behavior is I can't run away because I'm rooted. So number one rule is don't die, which means don't get eaten. And this is why, if you're listening to this, like, Dave, what's up with this? All I'm going to tell you is go outside, find any plant around you, just a tree, a weed, take a handful of it, put it in your mouth and chew it and see what happens, right? The vast majority of plants, you could die. You will shit yourself silly, and you could go to the hospital. No joke. That's how strong of a pattern this is.

Totally true.

There's credibility here. There's a reason, there's an explanation, and then there's a test that we can all do that I don't recommend you do because you'll feel really unwell. And one leaf of certain plants, in fact very common plants, will give you really severe gut cramps. So please listen to what we're talking about here, because this is the world you live in. You just never thought of it that way. All right, so assuming we got our listeners past that first, what the heck is going on here? I was a raw vegan. I'm going to call myself a devout raw vegan. And then I had tried everything. I swallowed an electrical stimulation device, like a TENS device from Russia to see if I could increase peristalsis. My digestion had been ruined by 15 years of antibiotics in the raw vegan diet. I felt good for a little while and it really wrecked my health over time. So I said, all right, I am familiar with this grass fed stuff in the very early days of grass fed and all. So I said, I'm going to go back to being omnivorous, but raw still has to matter. So I ate raw meat. I Ate raw steak. I'd marinate it in vinegar. Sometimes raw eggs. Raw fish, raw lamb, raw pork. Probably not a really good idea unless you know where it's from. And raw chicken. I actually did do it a few times, but it's a stupid thing to do. I think eating raw chicken is just a terrible idea because of the amount of viruses that chicken have. Plus they're dinosaurs. They're not that compatible with you into that of all that stuff. I went to a place where you couldn't get raw meat. And I started eating cooked meat again, that would be Tibet. And just decided it wasn't worth it. But having gone down the path of raw versus cooked meat. And the original all carnivore guy was Angelo Vonder Plomper. I can never say his name right, but you know his name.

Vonder planets. Vonderplanets. Vonderplanets agents. Vonder Planets.

So you must have come across the raw carnivore diet before you settled on the nose to tail carnivore diet where you are now. Why do you cook your meat?

This is a very interesting question and it has many corollary discussions connected with it. I think that in today's day and age, we basically cook our meat for cleanliness to eliminate pathogens on the surface of the meat. I will tell you that I eat raw egg yolks fairly commonly with reckless abandon and much enjoyment. In fact, I eat raw duck egg yolks. Yeah, I mean, yeah, they're amazing.

They make ice cream.

They're fantastic. You can almost cut them with a knife. They're so viscous and rich. I don't eat the white raw because of this avidin and the white binds biotin. And I don't think raw chicken or duck whites are compatible. But I eat the yolks raw because it tastes better that way. Many of the compounds in the yolk are at least partially heat labile, degraded by heat. And I just find it to be simple and easy. I also do eat raw liver from time to time fairly frequently.

It's disgusting.

It's really good. Dave, you like it when we hang out? Yes. Yeah, it's grown on me. There's a whole hashtag on Instagram now, Hashtag frozenlivergang.

Yeah, I used to do that for years. I'd freeze my chunks of liver. But I finally, I just started taking powdered liver, like desiccated liver capsules because it's easier. But the reason I think it's gross is I would take slices when I was a omnivore. And I never liked it. But one time I said I could just take this whole young lamb liver, I put it in a blender with some vinegar and some water and some salt, maybe blended it up, and I went to drink it, and it was even worse than before. And as I'm drinking it, one of those stringy bits of connective tissues caught halfway in my teeth. I still have nightmares about raw liver. And you're telling me, okay, you freeze it and take it as capsules. But do you have some recipe for raw liver to make you happy?

No, you just eat it like the primal caveman that you are. You're more of the apex predator. So what I'll do is, so I'll tell people about raw liver because as a physician, it's very tenuous. And I do not recommend eating raw liver to anyone because you will get sick. But it is something that I have experimented with and I will go to the butcher and I learn about the diseases that cows can get in their livers. And there are liver flukes. But what I learned is that you can see when the fluke is in the liver, there are scars, there are streaks. So it teaches me about what a healthy animal liver looks like. And you can see if the liver is healthy, then you freeze it for a certain amount of time, just like you might do with salmon to eliminate pathogens. People don't need to eat liver raw in order to get the nutrients. But we will talk about nose and tail carnivore, but liver is very nutritious, even cooked. The desiccated capsules are great, I think, but I'm kind of always. I think of myself as the astronaut, right. Like I'm going to the carnivore moon.

Yeah, we got to try it, right?

Yeah. The carnivore moon is made of raw liver. Just in case people want to know. And I'm out there exploring it.

It's not grass fed cheese.

Oh my God, it's not made of cheese. Carnivore moon is made of raw liver. So I want to go back, I want to explore and bring things back. I do eat most of my meat cooked, but I will eat my steaks pretty darn rare, not always blue rare, but mid rare, things like that. Especially if it's a really good quality steak, like a wagyu or something like that. Now, basically what I'm doing there is I'm just searing the outside of the meat to get rid of any bacteria that are on the outside of the meat. But I'm not heating often. I'M not heating the interior of the meat far enough to kill things that are in the inside of the meat. And I think that most meat in the United States is of high enough quality, especially the grass fed organic stuff that I'm seeking out because I am trying to get really good meat that you're not going to find any real pathogens in the meat. They do occur, but in the herds in the U.S. they're very rare. So I'm basically kind of sterilizing the outside of the meat and that's it.

You know what I would do when I was really doing the raw thing heavily is I would make an iodine tincture. So I'd put a few drops of Lugol's iodine in water and I'd drop the steak into the water and slosh it around for a little while. And that is how you sterilize water that might have a little bit of poop in it. And as a backpacker, you know very well how to use iodine to sterilize water. You can use it to sterilize your meat too, as long as you're only worried about the surface.

I think this brings up the interesting discussion of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. We don't have to go down the rabbit hole too deeply, but it's something that I talk about with carnivore diets. I was on another podcast and the person I was on the podcast with said, oh, he doesn't believe in those. And I said, yes, I do. We need to think about the way that these molecules that are formed by cooking on the surface of the meat affect us as humans. And so what I recommend to people is they're aware they shouldn't be charring their meat and we should do strategies to mitigate the amount of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon part of the bulletproof diet.

Cooking matters. Who would have thought that deep frying something or cooking it at 1100 degrees might create a different outcome than gently cooking it at 200 degrees? It's just chemistry, right?

Yeah, chemistry rules. It's wild.

I love it that you're talking about those. That's one of the concerns I have with paleo and even just keto people. Yeah, barbecue time. They go out there and they're eating massive amounts of just meat, just the muscle meat, and they're burning it and they're cooking in ways that really are not going to lead to anything but cancer. How worried about PAHs and PCAs are you?

I'm very worried about them and I take many steps intentionally in my life to mitigate it and to really, really limit my own exposure. I've seen a number of guys in the space talk about these Traeger smokers and a lot of guys I'm good friends with talk about them and I'm thinking, no, that's a horrible idea. Bad idea, bad idea. I don't even grill my meat anymore. And again, people are going to say you're puritanical, you're eliminating all the pleasure from the meat. But my goal in the space is to try and get the most optimal, nutritious food without any of the toxins. And that's the whole reason I don't eat plants. So when I cook the meat, I'm either going to do a sous vide in a non plastic bag, like one of these Stasher bags that doesn't have polyethylene, although those may have issues as well, or I'm going to slow cook it in water, or I'm just going to sear it on the pan for a moment. Or maybe I'm going to try your method and do the Lugols or just sterilize the outside of the meat. I definitely do eat meat raw, fairly commonly. Just completely raw. I was over at Mike Mutzel's house last night having dinner with he and Ben lynch and we just all ate raw steak and it was fantastic. It was so funny because Ben lynch, people may know him from the book Dirty Genes. Yeah, he's been on yeah, mthfr and he had this raw meat, he hadn't had it before and I posted it on my Instagram. He was like, oh man, I feel high. I thought it was so cool.

2 ounces of raw meat from a good grass fed animal. You feel you get energy and you're full. I used to slice it real thin on salads like carpaccio style. And yeah, I haven't done it in a while, just for convenience and all, but now that I have my own sheep, it wouldn't be that hard to just have sheep on the cob. I could just walk out there, take a bite and let it free again.

I think it's great. So I think people should definitely be thinking about this. And I'm going to piss on a lot of campfires right now when I just say that smoking your meat, closing the barbecue, grilling, these are not the way to cook your meat.

All right, I'm going to double down on that. And I don't know that I've confessed this in public. I tossed my grill more than 10 years ago. For that reason, I just did a video on how to minimize toxins from grilling. Like, if you're going to grill, here's how to do it. And newsflash. You take a big piece of metal, like a metal griddle, and you're gonna deal with the iron on the griddle. But at least it's protecting your food from most of the crap that comes off the fire and sticks to the fat. And so when I want a nice smoky flavor, it's shocking what you can do. You take salt, Himalayan salt, or something that has been smoked. Because when you smoke salt, the smoke that goes into that is isn't the stuff that sticks to fat. And I've went really deep on all the academic research on this. So smoked salt that's made properly is okay, but liquid smoke is usually not okay because they put fat in the liquid smoke. It just comes down to chemistry. So I can get a smoky flavor. I can do it in the oven and it's healthier, or I can put it in the sous vide and it works. And the outcome in health is so important that when I see smoked meat, I'm like, I don't want to eat it because I can tell my inflammation the next day. Do you feel it in one dose?

I feel it. So I hadn't talked about this with people, but, I mean, I'll share it with the community now. So I've been doing exclusively raw for the last three weeks as an experiment. Yeah. And I mean, you'll appreciate this. We're both sort of astronauts in the space. I don't know that I'll do exclusively raw long term, but I'm going to remeasure my oxidative stress markers. I'm going to measure F2 isoprostane. I'm going to measure malandialdehyde.

Can't wait.

8, 8 hydroxy 2 deoxyguanosine. I really like eating all of my meat raw right now, Dave. And as a doctor, it's like it's too hot for television. I can't tell people I'm doing that.

You feel really good.

You feel really good.

Yeah.

You feel really good. Yeah.

What's your take? When I did this. Jesus. Going way back, I would eat only raw butter. Are you doing any butter or are you just doing meat?

I don't do dairy. I'm happy to talk about what I eat. I am writing a book which is called the Carnivore Code, and it's going to be super awesome. I Just wrote the chapter on lectins and in that chapter I talked about a one versus A two dairy. And I'm completely convinced or at least very of the opinion that A1 is not a good thing for humans. I've just cut dairy out of my, my diet completely. And when I recommend if people are going to try, they do at least 32 days with no dairy at all. You know, butter actually has a decent amount of age so advanced glycation end products in it as well. So I don't do any of those things.

Doesn't that depend on how it's processed and what it ate? Yeah.

Yes.

And so there's, I mean I've looked really deeply into the whole butter thing and I tell people ghee, milk fat has a lot of stuff that's beneficial for you in it and it's the same. It's essentially animal fat the way it's composed. But there is some age in butter. However, there's much less than you're going to get from most of the cooked food you eat.

Yes. Or bacon. One of the things that I say, don't overeat, that people think carnivore. This is great. I can just eat bacon and eggs and steak for the rest of my life. And I'm thinking that's not the way to do it. If you're trying to leverage health, Bacon, because it's cooked in its fat, has a lot of these ages.

You know, the bacon is relatively easy to fix. Right. Number one, if you can get a pastured pig, that's great. And I know I have 10 of them in my farm, so I'm a little spoiled because I get to cure my own bacon. But then most people, if you can hear your bacon cooking, you're doing it wrong. That's the most important thing. And then adding vanishingly small amounts of lipid antioxidants when you're cooking things like, oh, I don't know, vitamin E, just a very small amount of vitamin E. Or you want to go out there in the anti aging land, you could add butylated hydroxytoluene or bht, which was an anti aging substance, but now it's a demonized synthetic antioxidant food preservative. I think that preventing the damage in your fat's good. And now I'm going to really piss you off. Are you ready?

Me.

Rosemary. Rosemary extracts a great lipid antioxidant. I know it comes from plants. It's like it's a bad thing. I'm just kidding. But Rosemary is documented, so is oregano, in studies to inhibit lipid peroxidation. So if you slow cook your bacon so that the fat is undamaged, there was no smoke, you didn't have to worry about burning yourself. Your outcomes will be very different. But your bacon won't be crispy. Right. Like, you have to know this, not you, but like just everyone who's going to eat has to know this. Otherwise, screw the bacon, it's bad for you. But it's a religious experience when it's.

Done right, and that's amazing. And I think that's what this podcast is about and why it's cool to be spreading the message. People don't have to be. We're not telling people to remove all pleasure from their life, but I think what's cool is to be able to deliver knowledge that creates power for people, leveraging this for better health outcomes and say, if I'm going to do it, I should do it this way, or if I'm going to eat meat, I should eat it this way versus that way. Because these things are important to know. And if people want a goal of optimal health and longevity and performance, then this is the way to do it. To be informed and to be intentional about how you're cooking and eating food.

Yeah, we're not saying you're going to die. If you cook your bacon hot and smoke something for a long period of time, you just might live less, which is a very different animal. Your quality of life may go down or the length of your life may eventually go down, but you might have a lot of pleasure right now, which is you're not the end of the.

World pleasure now, pleasure, long term, it's a balance. It's all about quality of life. People need to make their decision.

One thing that I've noticed, because I'm definitely a connoisseur of grass fed meat and have been for many years, I've sampled it from around the world and now I have to look at the quality of the grass that my animals eat, because I get to eat the animals. But when you get a properly fed animal and you don't burn it and you eat it, there's a food high. And the biggest food high that I know how to get comes from pork belly, from a properly raised pig. Pigs have the same detox organs as humans. They put almost everything through the ineffective kidneys instead of through the liver, which is why pigs accumulate toxins the way humans do. We both suck at detoxing and it's one reason you probably don't want to eat pig kidneys and liver amongst many other reasons, including viruses and stuff. But when you get that pork belly and you cook it just right and you eat just a normal amount of it for, for several hours afterwards, instead of like the sugary buzz or the caffeine buzz, there's this feeling of just like I could do anything I want to do right now. What is your go to? Meat that produces that like superhuman feeling.

It is a combination. And I had this last night with Mike and Ben. It's a combination of a good quality filet that's raw and animal fat. Have you had raw suet? People are thinking I'm a nutcase now, but have you had raw animal fat? Yeah, like the suet or the trimmings from a steak. I was slicing this up and giving it to people last night. I think it's amazing. You can even cook it a little bit on the grill, get it soft or on the, you know, like on a cast iron skillet, not the grill. You can cook it a little bit on a cast iron skillet and just get it a little soft. And that is the go to. And I think it's the fat, it's not the protein necessarily, it's the fat.

Marrow too, right? You crack open the bone, you get the marrow that's not marrow, not overcooked. And there's something that happens. Your whole body is just singing like your cells are like, yeah, I'm sure.

It'S ketones and it's fat soluble nutrients and there are nutrients in the muscle meat. But one of the things that I talk about in the context of a carnivore diet is not having people overeat protein.

It's a massive problem. Right? Tell people why. It's like, in fact, I just wrote a kind of a, a quasi negative piece. I'm not against the carnivore diet. In fact, it just saved a friend's life. But it was like, hey, if you're eating a lot of muscle meat, your amino acid ratios, blah, blah, blah. But I think there's more to it. Tell everyone listening why high protein on a carnivore diet could be a problem and how the heck you avoid that.

So there are two issues and I know that you've mentioned both of these and I really appreciated you highlighting these. The first is the methionine glycine ratio which you've talked about on your posts. Right. The idea here is that muscle meat relative to the amount of glycine in muscle meat, the amount of methionine is fairly high. And if you actually look at the percentage of methionine and the percentage of glycine, what I've seen is that glycine is about 2 and methionine is about 7. But it's the relative ratios of those, because if you look at collagen or collagenous connective tissues of an animal, the amount of methionine is about 0.9 and the amount of glycine is about 23 or 27. So you can see that we don't really know in human biology what the optimal methionine glycine ratio is. But I suspect it's different than 2 to 7. You need less methionine and more glycine than 2 to 7, as occurs in muscle meat. And there's a whole series of experiments that were done in the 1950s and 1960s on rats that everyone cites saying excess methionine is bad for you. And really, when they did the follow up experiments, what they found was that it was the absence of glycine or the imbalance of glycine that that was the really detrimental thing. And when they added glycine back to those rodent experiments, they saw prolongation of life and longevity. So what we know in human biochemistry is that much like a rodent, if we over consume a thionine without balancing it with glycine, we may be setting ourselves up for biochemical stress, biochemical disaster.

It's funny because if you look at sort of the history of collagen as a supplement, bulletproof, put collagen on the market as something worthy of consideration and now it's become a big category in of itself. We have the top selling collagen protein bar. It's all grass fed and all that kind of stuff. Because of what you just said, that science is real. And I'll tell you, if I'm going to eat more than 2 or 4 ounces of meat in a meal, because I do practice moderate methionine restriction. The traditional way of doing it would be to have some soup made of bones. And since bone broth is kind of a pain in the ass to make, I just take a scoop of my collagen and I put it in water and I chug it before I have foods that are higher in methionine to keep my ratio where I want it to be.

I love it. So you're down with that on Instagram and social media. I made a thing out of like putting collagen directly on the steak. And some people were like, oh, we love.

I mean, our collagen is pretty neutral. It's about as neutral as any protein powder you'll get. Not like pea protein or something gross, but.

Oh, gross.

But like, seriously, you ruin a steak by putting collagen on there.

I don't think it's that bad. Dave, you gotta try it.

You know, my kids will. I can pour our unflavored collagen powder. I'll pour it in my hand and they just like lick their fingers and eat it. They love the taste.

It's good.

Wow.

And so. Yeah. But, and the other thing is for people to think about the fact this gets to the idea of a nose to tail carnivore diet, that if you or I, if you and I are in a tribe and we're out hunting and we kill a deer, respectfully and we're thankful for the, the animal, or we kill a bison, we are going to take that animal back to the tribe and we are going to eat every single piece of that animal. We're going to eat the tendon that connects the kneecap to the. You know, I don't even know if a bison has a kneecap. We're going to, we're going to eat all the tendons. We're going to eat all the pieces of the animal that we never know about as a human. And we're going to as, as like westernized humans, we only see the muscle meat. We don't see the fat around the kidneys. We don't see all the tendinous tissue that animals have. And that's where the collagen is in the animal. And that's what we're missing as well as humans who are just focused on tenderloin steaks and rib eyes, which are delicious. But we're not eating the whole animal. If you look at the whole animal, there's all this connective tissue. So I encourage people to either do a collagen supplement, a glycine supplement, or just eat collagenous tissue from the animal, get tendon and make tendon, or get more tendinous tissue from the animal. That's one of the reasons I like the fat from the animal, because it'll often have tendons, tendinous tissue in it, and it offends the delicate sensibilities of some people. We're not used to it as Westerners. It's quite common in other cultures.

Oh yeah.

But I try to eat tendinous tissue as a source of that glycine thinking. Okay, I'M just trying to eat the whole animal. The other thing about eating tons of rib eyes, which is certainly one of the flavors of a carnivore diet, is that, you know, what I've seen in myself and others who I work with as a physician is that it pushes your fasting glucose up. It just does.

And this really worries because of the muscle protein, because.

Yeah, because I think we're exceeding our need for protein. As you know, humans don't run on protein. We either run on fat or carbohydrates.

It's an emergency fuel source and it'll trash your biology to be protein driven. The high protein diets are terrible.

I think I agree with you completely.

Including high plant protein, by the way.

Yeah, yeah. And you don't want to put your body through the stress of that. Now, I think that there is a low end for protein and if we get too little, we're going to get sarcopenia, we're going to get bone density problems, we're going to lose muscle mass. But there's a clear sweet spot for humans for protein. And my impression of that is something like 0.7 to 1.1 grams per pound of lean body weight. That's a little more than a lot of people would recommend. I mean, maybe you could go to 0.6.

Maybe 0.6 to 1.6 is my number.

Yeah, 0.6 per pound of lean body weight, not kilograms per pound. And so I think that that's what you want to find and it's a real easy metric to follow. You can look at your fasting glucose. If people have a CGM or a continuous glucose monitor, you can look at those. The amplitude of the postprandial glucose excursions, which on a carnivore diet will be very low because the fast, the glucose throughout the day is very mellow. But people can look at their fasting glucose, they can look at their A1C and if they're eating too much protein, you'll see those bump up a little bit. They edge into the 90s. The fasting glucose goes into the 90s and the A1C goes above 5.4. And I think, no, I don't like that. If you look at the studies that have been done, it's very clear when we look at fasting glucose and A1C and mortality, large studies in Korea, the sweet spot is right around 75 for fasting glucose. And if we're doing things that elevate our fasting glucose above that, I have real concerns about that.

So now I just finished the manuscript for Superhuman. My how I'm going to live to at least 180 and you'd can too kind of book. And I talk quite a bit about those issues, both with methionine, but also with this idea of how much protein do you need. And one thing that comes out of the data that surprised me is that low insulin is a much, much stronger predictor of all cause mortality than high insulin. And when you go on a high fat keto unending non cyclical diet, or presumably, and this is part of my question, a carnivore diet, are you creating a low chronic insulin state?

The insulin is usually pretty low.

So have you looked at the studies on low insulin and all the bad things it does when it's too low?

Well, I think what's interesting is that when we're looking at insulin, it's just this one time point. Right. We'll get one fasting insulin. One of the things that I wish we could develop, maybe you and I can develop. This is a continuous insulin monitor. Right.

I think that what happens, insulin, glucose, ketones and probably organic acids for all we know. But good stuff will come like it has to.

Yeah.

If your aura ring can do what it can do now in just a ring, not like a chest strap from 10 years ago, I'm pretty sure we're going to get there on the little stick on monitors.

And so what you'll see is that when people eat, even if they're eating fat and meat, you're going to get insulin rise, it has to rise, you're going to get glucagon rise with it, so the ratio won't change a whole lot. But people on carnivore diets are not going to have insulin that's chronically super low. You're going to get rising insulin. We know that because if you didn't have any insulin ever on a carnivore diet, you wouldn't have any anabolic stimulus. You would lose your muscles, you would lose your bone density. I think that humans want to activate MTOR every once in a while. We need some anabolic signals. We need to activate mtor, but we want to balance that with ANT kinase and turning these things off. And so when we are eating meat, when we are eating throughout the day, preferably in a time restricted eating window, but we can talk about that. We're going to get insulin rising. So it's not chronically low insulin, it's just the fasting insulin is very low on a carnivore diet. Now I think that the super low insulin all the time is a very different thing. And that's why I think postprandial insulin might be the marker to look at. And I think I might start measuring that in some of my patients. My friend here in Seattle just got a microplate reader, so I hang out with some pretty amazing people here. So we got a kit of 400 Elisas and we're going to do insulin, we're going to do all these measures on ourself and kind of create a continuous insulin monitor throughout the day.

Wow. All right, that's fascinating. Now let's get back into this anti plant thing, which is kind of like whether you're for or against vaccines or different female reproductive things and all that sort of stuff. It's actually not as black and white as for plants are against plants or for meat is against meat. It's way more nuanced. But I'm just saying that to be inflammatory. So in your anti vegetable stance, Paul, as a clearly bad human being, what are the major classes of plant based compounds you're most concerned about? And I have my bulletproof diet 5. But I'm going to ask you, I'm going to quiz you on yours and we're going to correlate it to those and you're going to teach me about the ones I missed. So give me your deep list.

Yeah, it depends how granular you get with the plant defense chemicals, but I would classify the first large category as phytoalexins. Phytoalexins is quite a broad category that just means plant defense chemicals. These are chemicals that plants make in response to injury that plants make to discourage insects, herbivores, omnivores from eating them. Within the category of phytoalexins there are many different types of plant toxins which we can go into. But as a broad category there are plant sort of phytoalexins. There are also oxalates and lectins. And I'm sort of, you know, it depends how we sort of classify all this. I don't know that oxalates are necessarily a phytoalexin because plants often use oxalates to move ions and minerals around the plant. And lectins are probably part of plants normal germination process, but can really muck up human biology as well. So I think of it in terms of those big three. Perhaps phytic acid would be a fourth one, but you might include phytic acid in one of those categories as well. So those would be my four and in the category of phytoalexins, we could break that down even further. I suspect a lot of yours might fall under the category of phytoalexins if we're thinking about some of the other molecules in there.

Sure. So lectins we largely agree on. Dr. Gundry's been on the show, and I wrote a chapter in the Bulletproof diet on lectins. However, as I think you probably learned in medical school, we make 1000 lectins in our own bodies every day. A thousand?

Absolutely.

It's a broad class of compounds. So to say all lectins are bad would be to say you must die. And also, there are lectins in the meat you eat. They're just not lectins that mess with you.

Right, Exactly. Because they're more compatible with your biology. One of the things that I have developed as a meme, as a teaching point for people is this idea that plants are from a different operating system than humans. And many of the. Many of the molecules that plants use don't play well with our biology. It's like. Exactly. Most of them don't. Oxalates and lectins are a great example. You're absolutely right. We have carbohydrate binding proteins in humans. Meat has carbohydrate binding proteins. But the chances of a carbohydrate binding protein from a plant interfering with your biology are much, much greater than a compatible molecule from a cow or a deer interfering with your biology. It basically is you. It's built just like you. It's biochemistry is 99.99% the same. So you're right. Lectin compatibility is really the issue. And Dr. Gundry's done a great job of highlighting that.

And so lectins are out there. And I just. I don't think all plant lectins are necessarily bad for you. It depends on who you are. And there are people who tolerate nightshades. I think nightshades are generally bad for everyone, but some people handle them better, and some people handle them much more. Poor, poorer, poorlier, whatever, than other people. So lectins are there. The oxalic acid thing, man. When I went on Joe Rogan the first time, I was like, hey, here's bulletproof coffee. And Joe's like, yes. Oh, my God, I can't believe how I feel. And the second time, I'm like, I want to give something back to this community. I'm going to, like, do the deep research on kale. And I prepared this post because at the time that was like, the big thing was kale smoothies. And I tried kale smoothies. I'd been that raw vegan, eating a bucket of kale every day and all that. And it causes inflammation, at least for me. So I went through. I'm like, okay, here's how you cook kale. Here's how you bind the oxalic acid. Here's how you pour the water off. Here's the species of kale with lower oxalic acid. By the way, the lacy kale is bad, and the dino kale is good. Well, good being less bad and all that stuff. And I wrote this big post and went on, and it still pissed people off. I'm like, come on, guys, I'm trying to help you. If you're going to do it, do it this way. Or maybe just skip it already. So that's kind of my oxalic acid story. But the category of toxins from plants that you didn't mention that I think is noteworthy is field toxins and storage toxins.

Mycotoxins, Absolutely.

Hold on. Did you just say mycotoxins are real thing?

Mycotoxins are very real thing, my friend.

Oh, my goodness. Didn't you hear Rhonda Patrick when she went on Joe Rogan right after he decided one of his friends decided to knock off Bulletproof? He decided that I was a bad man, and he had Rhonda Patrick come on and say mycotoxins didn't matter in human biology. Are you disagreeing with the great Rhonda Patrick, who is too busy to come on Bulletproof Radio?

Oh, I think I would disagree with Rhonda Patrick about many things.

No.

Yes.

Oh, my goodness.

Let me send you some literature about mold toxins.

Oh, you mean the thousand studies I have on the Bulletproof website?

You already told? Yeah, you should make a movie on it. Oh, wait, you did.

Oh, my God.

Yeah. No, no. Mold toxins are a big thing. I recently had Anthony J. On my podcast, which is Fundamental Health. Oh, yeah, yeah, we talked about.

How many episodes do you have, by the way, on Fundamental Health?

I have nine or ten now.

Okay, you just got started. I haven't checked it out. I'll check it out. Fundamental Health is the name.

Fundamental Health with Paul Saladino, M.D. yeah. And I had Anthony J. On. He is a PhD. He works at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, and he's written a great book on estrogens. And we were talking about mycoestrogen, Xurinol.

Right?

Yeah.

Tell people about Xurinol. You know what it is?

I think you and Anthony may know more than I about that, but I know that when grains get moldy, they get these. I don't know if it's zeaxanthin or something.

That's a zeaxitin that's good for you. At least if you believe, as I do, that some of those things are good for your eyes, even though they come from plants. You're talking about zearolanone, the mycotoxin.

That's zearalenone. Yes.

So it's a thousand times more estrogenic than your own estrogen, but Xurinol. And this is why I thought you know about Xurinol. Xurinol is purified zearolenone that's sold to ranchers. And you put a little wax pellet of xurinol into a cow's ear and the feed efficiency of the cow goes up by 30%. Now that means the cow gets fat on 30% less calories. And if you're one of Those old school 1970s calories in, calories out guys, you tell me how that's possible.

Muscle.

It's not about calories in, calories out. It's about hormone manipulation in that case. But if you're on a carnivore diet and you're not eating grass fed meat, you're getting a dose of synthetic estrogens purified from mycotoxins. And what they do is they cause fatty streaking in the muscles. You want that nice marbled cut. I don't want marbled tissue in my body, thank you very much. And I don't eat marbled tissue. That's why for the people who are into the carnivore diet or just in the bulletproof diet, grass fed or be vegetarian? Well, in your case, I don't know what you do if you're not grass fed, but okay, so you're down with the mycotoxins having some effect on human biology.

And this is the other thing I was talking about on that podcast with Anthony, about the fact that when cows are fed moldy grains or they're fed corn, that corn is also sprayed with atrazine, which has an estrogenic effect. And I do have a lot of concerns that those estrogenic molecules accumulate in the fat and in the muscle of these non grass fed animals. And I've often thought if you look at a healthy human, if you look at a human athlete, you're not going to have intramuscular fat deposits. I love that you brought this up, Dave. And yet you go to the butcher and you're like, I want that marbled meat. You know, that is a cow with metabolic syndrome.

It's a diabetic cow.

That is a diabetic cow. That is a cow with inflammation. And the way that healthy muscle is supposed to look is not. You're not supposed to have fat in your muscle and it tastes better because of the fat. But you know what, you're supposed to have fat stores around the muscle or fat on the tendonous streaks, or fat in the rib eye in that place. But intramuscular fat, that's suggesting a sick cow. And whether they're giving them the mycoestrogens in the ear like you're suggesting, or whether they are giving atrazine on the corn, this is going to bioaccumulate in your meat. So it's a big problem. These estrogens and these mycotoxins. Yeah, absolutely.

So that's another.

You can eliminate all the mycotoxins if you don't have any plants, Right?

Well, except. No. Well, on the food, that's the problem. A lot of us know the amazing myth of. I don't mean myth in a bad way, but just the mythology of 48 day dry aged beef.

Oh, yes, right. That's not a good idea.

So, and it took me a while to figure this out. I'm dialing in. Why do I feel inflamed? Why is my brain foggy after I ate that amazing $80 steak? And what happens when you hang meat for a while in the right environment is you're fermenting it and you're allowing fungus to grow. And then they cut off all the black stuff from the outside of it. But the hyphae, the fungal roots have gone into the meat and they've tenderized it. Newsflash. You're eating meat contaminated with a fungus that feeds on meat and you are made of meat. That seems like a bad idea to me.

I agree with you. Yeah, I think that I've always thought that about dry, aged meat. It's so funny that as westernized humans, we're just in search of the most unhealthy meat we can get. We're in search of marbled, grain fed, fatty meat that's been dry, aged and then overcooked and burned in a steakhouse. No wonder people think meat isn't good for them. Because you're not eating fresh meat that you just, that you just killed with your tribe. That's not how it's supposed to taste. That's not the meat you want.

And it's funny, too. It doesn't taste right. If I was to go out, and it's been many years since I did this, I was to go out and eat a piece of non grass fed steak. I used to say, all right, just eat this stuff with no fat. If you can't get organic or grass fed, eat the filet because it has almost no fat in it and you'll avoid the fat soluble toxins. But I still feel crappy. And I think the reason, at least in the US Is this isn't a plant based issue. Although plant based diets cause this issue. It's glyphosate.

Yeah.

And glyphosate. Stephanie Sinoff came on the show a while back and talked about this in detail. But the gly in glyphosate is glycine, that amino acid you just.