The Calorie Myth: Why 85% Of Diets Fail! Eat THIS To Lose Weight & Stay Young! Paul Saladino

Calorie restriction fails 70 to 85% of the time for people. I wouldn't be surprised if there has been some funding behind this calories idea to confuse people. Every time I had quinoa, I would see it in my poop the next day. There's no nutrition that I got from that. Quinoa is garbage. I ate so much oatmeal in college that I stress fractured my femur. Every single bowl of oatmeal that you are eating is robbing you of minerals.

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You're listen to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is an in person interview, my favorite kind here at the studios in Austin, Texas with none other than Paul Saladino. And Paul, if you don't follow him on social media, is a well known physician talking about what happens when you eat meat. I would say that you're a leader in the carnivore space. You're a guy I really respect because you're willing to evolve.

Thank you.

And so many people get stuck on an idea and then they just do it and do it and do it. And you can actually make the most money that way online if you just build a cult and then you say I'm keto, I'm keto. I'm keto. Even though keto breaks people. Like, the reason I wrote the bulletproof diet was because the keto diet helped me lose £50. The other £50 I had to not do keto and go in and out and all this.

Right.

So you're. Well, I'm carnivore, except I eat fruit. So I just have to ask you this. Why did you choose weakness?

Why did I choose weakness? To change my mind.

You went from all you need is meat and salt.

Yes. And organs. Yeah.

To something else.

To something else. Why? Because I ran into problems. Maybe kind of like you. Yeah.

What? Okay, what problems happen when people only eat meat and salt and organs?

I ran into what I think was a lot of electrolyte insufficiency. So it turns out that for me, eliminating vegetables from my diet was very instructive in terms of some foods in the vegetable kingdom, the plant kingdom, that might be triggering my eczema specifically. We can talk about what I think are triggers for me might be triggers for other people. Often foods that we think of as healthy sometimes don't work for everyone, but a lot of people can eat them. And I benefited a lot from doing strictly meat organs and salt and fat for about a year and a half. I wrote a book about it because my eczema was really bad. It got way better. And then, you know, toward the end of that time, I was experiencing some pretty significant electrolyte insufficiency manifested with like heart palpitations, especially when I was sleeping. My testosterone at the beginning of the carnivore experiment was about 800 total. And after about a year, year and a half, it's down to 500. Sex hormone binding globulin goes up to around 120. Free T3, free T4 go down, but TSH doesn't change. And I start getting kind of cold sometimes. And I notice. I notice muscle cramps when I'm surfing or muscle cramps when I'm climbing. So a lot of things kind of pointed in the direction of overall electrolyte imbalance. And I didn't remember this from medical school. I didn't learn it. But it turns out that insulin has benefits in the human body.

What? Just because high insulin is bad, it doesn't mean low insulin is better. In fact, which is more dangerous.

I mean, probably low incident is pretty dangerous. Yeah, yeah.

Low insulin and low cortisol are both more deadly than high insulin and high cortisol.

Yeah, I mean, high, low cortisol, this is Addison's disease, right? This is John F. Kennedy in a lot of ways. And the thing about eating no carbohydrates is your insulin goes down a lot, but you don't even get the post prandial, the after meal insulin bumps, which are so beneficial for your body. I would argue they signal abundance to your body. And they do give a required signal to the kidneys to hold on to. Sodium chloride, potassium, calcium, probably magnesium. We need that little. We need that input. I think it's okay to have your insulin go up after meals. And that's what I was missing. So then I thought from this carnivore perspective, okay, I've learned that I believe there are some plant toxins that affect us as humans, maybe differentially between different humans. But what are the carbohydrate containing foods that I can reincorporate that will have the least amount of these plant toxins? I've started with honey and then progressed to fruit. And that's kind of where I am now.

I'm just kind of laughing. Chapter one of the Bulletproof Diet. I'm like, guys, there's five things that might be messing with you that come from plants. Lectins, phytic, Acid oxalates, let's see, mold toxins, which are major thing. And histamine. And a sixth one that was in the book was seed oils. And that you're probably getting cravings and health problems because one or more of these are kryptonite for you. That may not be kryptonite for another. And this was before, you know, plant paradox came out.

Right.

I feel like oxalates are trending right now. I've. I mean, when I went on Joe Rogan, like, you're getting too much oxalate in your spinach and kale smoothies.

Yes.

And it turns out you get five times the dose that your body can eliminate in one spinach kale smoothie.

Octane, huge amount.

And it's 20% of the beginning fatal dose. So maybe you might want to cook it and dump the water at least. And I remember Joe's going, no. And seven years later, when Mike Tyson's on and Mike is talking about killer kale, Joe's like, yeah, I had to quit the kale smoothies because of oxalates. Right. So it doesn't mean that no one should ever eat spinach. Although I would argue there's no reason to eat spinach unless you're starving.

Yeah.

But it does mean that being aware that if you're doing something that no one ever did, which was eat like 2 pounds of spinach every day, that just understand Popeye, he wasn't actually eating spinach. He was injecting steroids. That's what his spinach. He was popping the spinach. So this was what they did in the 60s in cartoons. So I just, I. I've been on a very similar path as you and I, I do eat carbs. I recommend cyclical ketosis because one thing that also probably happened to you happened to me when I did the all meat experimented. Meat and eggs in coffee for I did 4, 500 calories a day for almost a year. And I was trying to prove, look, I'm going to get fat less than I should. But I actually lost weight on it, which the whole calorie thing is nonsense.

It is.

But what I did get was inter sleep 12 times a night. You got that as well, right?

I had some pretty serious sleep interruptions. Yeah.

This can happen. And then the gut bacteria, Akkermansia, which are probably really good for you, they control your blood sugar if you have mucus in your gut. If you don't, they eat your gut. So I got leaky gut. I gave myself an egg allergy when I was doing that kind of thing. And that's why I. I'm like, well, you go into ketosis to get the benefits. Go out of ketosis so that you don't get insulin resistant. And to this day, a lot of people go. In fact, someone was at a thing where I was speaking for one of my books. I'm like, oh, yeah, Dave invented the keto diet. I'm like, no, that was Robert Atkins, and I didn't invent it. And I'm not even a keto guy. I'm just. Keto's a tool that you can use. And you can go into ketosis in the morning with MCT oil and be out of ketosis at lunch if you want to.

Yeah.

So what's your take on keto now that you've been down this journey?

So I think that pretty clearly, for me and a lot of other people like yourself, long term ketosis has a lot of potential baggage to go with it. Electrolyte insufficiency, hormonal imbalance, sleep issues. Now, ketones are fuel. Our body clearly has a pathway to make them, which I see as kind of a backup pathway. I think there's a lot of therapeutic benefit to. For ketosis for people that have broken mitochondria and need to circumvent a purely glycolytic pathway in their biochemistry. And, you know, I think that a lot of people are leaning on keto still for fat loss and ending up in sort of a hole. They're ending up in kind of a rut, and they can't get out of it because they've. They. They end up with this carbohydrate fear. And I think this is being perpetuated by some people in the space right now. Sure. Who are saying that things like honey are harmful for humans. I mean, I saw a recent podcast thumbnail on YouTube and that the title was Honey is a lie. Or what they told you about Honey was a lie. And I thought, okay, I disagree with that. But, you know, this idea that, like, all carbohydrates are horrible for you and any spike in your blood sugar is bad. But look, I love continuous glucose monitors. I think they can be a very useful tool for looking at glycemic variability and a visual representation, representation of insulin sensitivity. And I think they create a lot of carbohydrate fearing and people create this arbitrary glucose ceiling that they must not breach for fear of creating insulin resistance or for fear of creating arterial damage or inflammation. That happens when your blood Sugar goes up 140mg per deciliter, which is just nonsense.

What I look at, and I'm a huge fan of cgm. In fact, I was an early seed investor and advisor in levels. And so I, in fact, I just took my, my Dexcom sensor off. I think there's a mark on my arm from it because I don't have my new one yet. And I look at how long does it take my body to return to baseline.

Yeah.

Right. So if, if I get a spike and I had a bunch of rice and some honey and then I come back down to normal within two hours. That's normal.

Pretty insulin sensitive.

Yeah. And if I stay high for three days, then I might have an issue. Right. And so this middle ground is so important. I remember years ago, a guy named Jimmy Moore, he was a devout low carb guy, invited me to speak at a low carb cruise. And this is very, very early in the days of Bulletproof. So I went, and I'm expecting 300 relatively fit people. This was one of the most morbidly obese groups of people I've ever spoken to. And I remember asking one guy, like, well, you're talking about this low carb thing, but you still have a lot of weight. He goes, oh, I'm only £300. I used to be £450. I know. My problem is that some days I go over 15 grams of carbs if I could just get under 10. Meanwhile, he's pouring NutraSweet on his food and they're eating seed oils. Anything that's not a carb is considered food.

Right.

It doesn't work.

It doesn't. I've seen a lot of people lose weight on keto, and some people get to exactly where they want to be in terms of weight on keto, but a lot of people get to a place where they kind of plateau with weight to lose and they end up in this ideologic kind of quicksand and they can't do anything that's going to spike their blood sugar. And as you hinted at earlier, they've also become so physiologically insulin resistant. This is not necessarily the same physiology as pathological insulin resistance and diabetes or this insulin resistance spectrum that is synonymous with metabolic dysfunction. But they've become so physiologically insulin resistant that if they eat a, a handful of blueberries, their blood sugar spikes, quote unquote. And they feel badly because they have, basically they've put all of their metabolic machinery for processing carbohydrates into the attic with the Christmas decorations. And it Takes a little while to unpack it and they just end up in this ideological dead end. And that's. I think that's. That's tragic for people. Cause I want them to understand there are other ways to get to your fully healthy state.

My advice has always been, if you're in ketosis, have pancakes gluten free on Saturday. Just so you go out and you come back in. So your body remembers and people forget. The glial cells in the brain, these are the things that take care of your neurons. And they require glucose, but your neurons love ketones. So it's. Why wouldn't you just have a gentle wave back and forth, almost like you're on the savannah and you find a beehive and you eat the whole thing. And probably including the bees, the larvae are very good.

Have you, have you done that? Have you eaten the larva?

I have not eaten the larvae.

They're delicious.

I've eaten a lot of weird foods, but not that.

When I was in Tanzania, I had a honeycomb with the hadza. They literally. We were hunting a baboon and they find this beehive in the tree and they smoke them out. They make a fire in two minutes, they smoke out the bees, and they're handing me a honeycomb and there's bee larva. And not even a millisecond did I question whether I was going to eat this. When in Tanzania, you eat.

Oh, yeah.

You eat what the hunter gatherers are handing you. Yeah, it's pretty incredible.

I've eaten. Termites live out of the hive in Belize. Just put a stick in there and then you just eat it. Sound like it tastes like pine nuts.

Okay. That's pretty good. Yeah. I could get behind that more than I like pine nuts, right.

So I don't have a problem with any food that's out there, especially if you've been eating it for a long time. I just like to know what are the pros and what are the cons. And we have this weird blindness. I love this at a guy who's trying to lose weight. He goes, well, I'm eating four bananas a day because potassium. And you're going, well, that might be a lot of sugar you're getting in there. What if you just took a potassium pill, right. Or drank water with potassium electrolytes? So it's to the point now where this aggregate nutrient density index. You know about this? So this is something that the vegans propose and they're saying, well, let's ignore bulk, right? They're saying, how many nutrients are there for very low calories? And this is what gives you an excuse to eat like a bag of kale because there's no calories in it. It's mostly just pain and fiber and a few vitamins. Ignoring toxins entirely.

Exactly.

And this is dumb because that way of thinking would say, what has the highest aggregate nutrient density index? Multivitamins. But they would take multivitamins along with a side of arsenic and cyanide, because those are invisible in that way of looking. So I don't look at nutrient density at all. I actually want calories in my food. That's what fuels my energy. Right.

Why are we fearing calories? I think that the calories idea is kind of a psyop. I wouldn't be surprised if there has been some big food quote, funding behind this calories idea to confuse people, because this idea that you can just limit your calories without improving food quality is insidious. This is where Weight Watchers comes from. And I'm eating based on points or something, you know, and it's the idea, which I think this is the. This age old kind of silly debate that we go round and round with people about online, in nutrition circles, about calories in, calories out. And you think, of course, yes. If you eat Twinkies in a calorie deficit, you will lose weight.

Is that the best way to lose weight necessarily? I would like to think that was true, but it's not always true.

Well, there will be adaptive thermogenesis and eventually you'll stop.

Unless your thyroid's at zero. Yeah, unless you have zero. Zero in your food. Do you know about that?

Oh, yes, yes, this. This mold toxin that creates.

Well, they sell the mold toxin to cow breeders so that the cows get fat on 30% less calories.

Yes.

So for me, I actually lived in a house that has zero and all. I didn't know it. 10,000 times more estrogenic. So I'm like, I was starving all the time and I'm working out 90 minutes a day. My thyroid is almost undetectable. My testosterone is lower than my mom's in lab tests.

Right.

And I can't lose weight on a low calorie diet, even though, well, it's because of food quality and my environment.

Yeah. You know, it's funny, I did a podcast this morning with Dale Brisby. He's a cowboy here. I think he has that show on Netflix, like How to be a Cowboy. And we were talking about how to raise cattle, and he was telling me about this he said, you know, when I'm raising cattle, as a cattle rancher, we give them something he didn't know.

It'S a little wax pillow they put in the cow's ear.

He didn't know that it was the zero and all. And I'd heard you talk about it, so I mentioned it to him and he said, yeah, we give this to him and we can feed them less feedback and they get fatter. And I thought, okay, Dale, but you understand what's going on there, right? This is actually kind of a beautiful, insidious black mirror of what's happening to humans today. Because I think that there are similar toxins that act in similar ways in our food environment, in our ultra processed foods that are breaking our metabolism. And so I've thought that this, you know, when you see a calorie label, it's so misleading because say you see Doritos and it says one serving is 200 calories. I think about that as potential energy. That's potential energy. But you have to make that into physical kinetic energy in your body to repair DNA, to make hormones, to do all of these cellular processes. And that transition from potential energy to kinetic energy is not assured, especially if you have a broken metabolism by all of the toxins in our environment, whether it's seed oils accumulating in your membranes causing excess oxidation, or the cardiolipin in your mitochondrial cristae to be misfolded, or, you know, all of these mold toxins that are affecting hormones. If the transition, if the actual, you know, movement of energy from potential energy in food to kinetic energy in your body is impaired, you will simply store more of those calories. So this idea that you can just limit calories and lose weight is completely misguided. It's so false. But it really is convenient for manufacturers of Coca Cola and Doritos and Frito Lay, who can say, just eat less.

It's funny because if you tell people to eat less calories, they get cravings, of course, and then they buy Doritos. It's so smart. There's another thing I like to share. Every now and then you'll see like a 25 year old fitness instructor influencer who's saying, well, I just had a Diet Coke to cancel out my Snickers bar and none of this stuff matters. And if you just eat less calories, you'll lose weight. I go, okay, this is great. Uranium has a million calories per gram. So if you ate that, you get fat, right? And they go, well, you can't Absorb it. I go, oh, so we're asking about absorption now? So you just change the rules. Okay, and what about 0 null? If you can get fat on 30 less calories, it's probably not the calories, right? And then they just look at me angry, and then maybe they have to read a book or something.

Well, and as you hinted at, if you restrict your calories, you also end up in this kind of. This. You're digging yourself in a hole. Right. It's a race to the bottom. We know we get adaptive thermogenesis as humans. Your thyroid hormones are less powerful or they are either downregulated at the level of conversion from T4 to T3 or T4 goes to reverse T3 or downregulated at the level of the receptors and basically your whole body thermostat gets turned down. So when you restrict calories, you can see the research. Calorie restriction fails 70 to 85% of the time for people. They just don't keep the weight off. So why are we even suggesting this to people anymore?

It's voodoo science. I look at telling someone to restrict calories as the same as when a doctor would say, smoke Marlboros, they're the best. It's. It's just not real.

It doesn't work. And there's no conversation or there's less of a conversation that I would hope for around food quality, because I think then we have to have the hard conversations. What is quality food? Are, is meat quality food? You and I believe it is, but then we have to have candid conversations with people who don't believe that, you know, what is quality food? I think most of us understand brunch broadly what quality food is.

I don't.

I would say any food that our grandmother recognized is a step in the right direction.

I would say that. But we live in a bubble of being abundantly healthy. If you go to a stock photo site and you say, show me healthy food, they're going to show you a salad with 40 calories in it and some sort of unhealthy looking person eating it, smiling as if they like the salad or a little piece of lean chicken. When we see healthy food is what the Dieter's plate from 1950 looked like, which was a scoop of full fat cottage cheese, two beef patties, a piece of lettuce and a piece of tomato. I would argue about the tomato. And maybe you're sensitive to dairy or not, but people ate that to lose weight and it worked.

Yeah.

And now the dieter's Plate is kale and quinoa. Tell me why quinoa sucks.

Have you ever been camping, you know, when you're backpacking? So I thru hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. I went from Mexico to Canada.

Sweet. That's amazing.

Yeah, it's 2,700 miles and one of the things we brought on that trail was quinoa.

You poor.

And every time that we had quinoa. So I'm backpacking for three and a half months. Every time I had quinoa with my buddy, I would see it in my poop the next day. Yep. So number one, your body is really not going to have an easy time digesting quinoa. You'll see it in your poop. I mean it's just a science experiment, guys. But when you're camping, you see your poop, you know, you don't flush it where you see it. It's just how it works. You see it in your poop and I think, okay, that's, there's no nutrition that I got from that. The other big problem with quinoa from my perspective is the saponins, which are not really degraded when you cook it. Oats have kind of the same problem. These, and these are soapy substances. That word means soap. They're meant to prevent digestion.

Aren't your cell membranes made of fat? When you put soap on fat, what's going to happen?

It dissolves it and it's like it, you know, it decreases the tension between these things. So the quinoa. So many of these plant foods, and this is again part of the carnivore journey for me personally. Your bulletproof journey mirrored this. So many of these plant foods are clearly communicating to us. Don't eat me, stop eating me. And we're just, we're being told that these foods are so healthy for us. Or like you're saying that they are the top, they are the pinnacle of health. These are the healthy foods. According to AI, quinoa is really hard to digest and it's full of these defense chemicals that are not degraded much with cooking, that are probably irritating your gut. Quinoa's garbage.

If you go to a restaurant and they put quinoa on your salad, there's a hundred percent chance that that was not pressure cooked. The only safe way to eat quinoa is the way that they would in Peru and I've been there. They ferment it for several days to make it digestible at all. It is peasant food. It's better than starving to death.

Yes.

And you could also pressure cook it here, but when you throw a handful of it in water and boil it, you are just trashing your gut. I remember years ago, David Wolf, you.

Know, David Avocado Wolf, he got me into being vegan. He was the reason that I was a raw vegan 14 years ago.

So you and I were both raw vegans years and years ago. Right after I started Bulletproof, he invited me to speak at his conference, which kind of funny because I'm, you know, Mr. Grass Fed Beef and butter. But it was because he wanted to launch some mold free coffee. Unfortunately, it didn't taste very good. But so I, I went there and I said, guys, I'm a lacto ovo beefo porco vegetarian and I hope we can be friends. And I gave a talk about how the values of regenerative agriculture line up with what vegans are are going for. They're going for health it mistake, they're going for animal cruelty as a mistake, and they're going for the environment. It's a mistake. It's well intentioned. So I went through the talk and I said, so here's my ask for you. I want you to add ghee to your vegetables because you'll absorb them better. And I came back the next year and two thirds of the raw vegans in the room are no longer vegan because they were eating ghee. And David started selling ghee because it worked.

Of course it worked.

Need it.

Of course. I mean, we need it. We should talk about oats too.

Okay, before we get into oats, I got to tell you, the punchline for the David Wolf thing, I just thought, well, why did I start talking about that? I talked to the hotel where they hold this event and I said, you guys almost hate this event because no one will order room service because they wouldn't eat any of this. And the guy just started laughing. He goes, no, this is our highest revenue of the entire year for room service. So what was that? Was I went to the VIP dinner and I ate some quinoa on river else. And you spend an hour in the bathroom afterwards. I was like, why do I feel like crap? And of course I ordered my own food. Everyone else at the hotel would come down, eat the peasant food and then go upstairs and order the fried steak.

Get a steak on the slide.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

This is what I wonder about. Like how many closets meat eaters are among the vegans you've interviewed.

Oh, geez, I'm blanking on her name right now.

Elise Parker.

No, the daughter of the Peter.

Michaela Peterson.

Not Michaela, That's Jordan Peterson. Slaughter. I was just on her show. Her name's Monica Hershaft.

I don't know.

And her father was a founder of PETA. And she tells the story. She almost died from a vegan diet. She had to sneak meat. And he had liberated a concentration camp and was deeply traumatized by what he saw. And he came back to the US and he saw a slaughterhouse, and it triggered him. And the whole PETA movement was about trauma.

Fair.

Yeah. It was all about trauma. But she almost died, and now she's a devout carnivore.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of. Yeah, I get it. Like, I understand why people sometimes choose to avoid meat. And I think that for us, as Homo sapiens, that's a bad idea.

Nutritionally, it harms us, and it does. There is a way. From my shamanic training and things like that I fundamentally believe and have experienced. We made a. We'll call it a spiritual contract with our farming and our food animals. We nourish them. They nourish us. And they come here for gratitude. Like, that's the animal experience that they were seeking. So this is why you say thank you before you eat the juicy ribeye. And then it. It's spiritually complete as long as the animal is treated well and as long as the animal poop went back into the soil, like we completed the cycle of life in a really sacred way.

Yeah.

And just recognizing that as a regenerative farmer, when I built my farm and we raised and ate our sheep and our pigs and our cows, and it gets deep, but it's not unclean.

I agree with you. Have you ever read Tom Brown's books? The guy who wrote the Tracker?

Yeah. He's a legendary. I've always wanted to do his course.

I love it. His son is doing it now, too, these survival courses. But I read his first book, the Tracker, and then many of his subsequent books. And the scene that sticks with me from this is the first time he kills a deer. He's 9 or 10 years old. He's apprenticed to this Apache Indian in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, 1960s. He's a young child. And there's this, you know, Apache Indian Grandfather, he calls him. He's learned how to stalk and kill this deer. He's followed this lame deer around, and he's in a tree. He falls down in the tree with. He falls out of the tree with a knife and stabs the deer. He brings the deer back to camp. He's weeping. And this man, grandfather, this Apache Indian, says, why are you crying? And I'm paraphrasing. He says, oh, I'm so sad that I killed this deer. And he says, you know, once you understand that the life in the deer is the same as the life in a blade of grass, and that in order for something to live, something else must die, this is the way of life, this will all be easier for you. And I thought, that's very profound. Like, veganism is a complete fallacy. There is no life on this earth without killing something. All of the buy kills, right? Everything that vegans, like you said earlier, it's not better for life, it's not more humane, it's not better for the planet. The intention is good, do less harm and be compassionate.

But the spoken, logical intention of veganism is good. And veganism is about death. It is a death cult.

I've heard this. Yeah.

And I'm just saying that having been a devout raw vegan, is that it's a death deep hatred of the life and death cycle. You're trying to stop it, but if you just do basic math on the number of deaths that gave you your impossible burger, it is much higher than a cow.