43. Why Paul Saladino, MD Quit A 100% Carnivore Diet, Impacts of Cholesterol, And the Value of Insulin

There's this collective consciousness happening around focusing on meat, a food that's been demonized, vilified, and it looks to be incredibly healthy and nutritious for humans. I believe almost all physicians are intelligent and well intentioned. We're just brainwashed. 10.2 times harder to unbrainwash someone.

High fructose corn syrup sneaking in as natural fruit flavor when there's actually no fruit in some of these yogurts.

Do you really want to be eating this oil? Do you really want to be eating excess amounts of linoleic acid from any seed oil but canola specifically?

And you really got to read the label. It's like partially hydrogenated. They don't have to put it if it's less than a certain percentage. A lot of what you espouse, what I espouse, it's not fear mongering, it's actually clearing the air.

Knowledge is power, but a year and a half into it run into problems with long term ketosis that we can talk about.

Wow. So this is kind of how your diet philosophy has evolved from being pure strict carnivore to now incorporating ultimate human. Our next guest, Dr. Paul Saladino, is renowned for his advocacy of the carnivore diet and his critical perspective on conventional nutritional wisdom. He is double board certified with credentials including an MD from the University of Arizona in Tucson and a residency at the University of Washington in Seattle. Saladino is a certified physician nutritional specialist. His journey into medicine was driven by the realization that western medicine often fails to address the root causes of of chronic illness, focusing instead on the symptomatic treatment through medication. This realization led him to explore the potential of nutrition, particularly an animal based diet, in preventing and reversing chronic disease. Saladino's exploration of a dietary impacts on health is deeply personal, including a significant period where he adhered to a raw vegan diet, which he ultimately found detrimental to his health. This experience, coupled with further research, led him to adopt and then become a prominent and proponent of the carnivore diet, which he credits with curing his autoimmune conditions and improving his overall health. However, it's noteworthy that his views have evolved over time. Initially, Saladino adhered strictly to a meat only diet, but later adjusted this approach to include moderate intake of carbohydrates from fruits, highlighting the impact of flexibility and individualized approaches to diet. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecker. Where we go down the road, everything anti aging, aging, biohacking, longevity and everything in between. And today is going to be a phenomenal day because I have someone that I've wanted to have on the podcast now for almost a year. I've been following this guy for a long time. I incorporate a lot of his ancestral tenants into my daily life. I'm a huge, huge fan. He's a mentor of mine. Doesn't even know it, but he is. And we're in la, of all places. But getting to sit down and get a few minutes of his time so we can hear his wisdom is going to be an episode you definitely do not want to miss. So welcome to the podcast the Carnivore, Maryland. Dr. Paul Saladino.

Thanks for having me on, brother. Previously, Carnivore md.

Yeah, I changed. I actually wanted to start with that. Yeah. And one of the things that I do admire about you is I think, well, first of all, I, I know that this started as a health journey for you because you were a raw food vegan for a while 15 years ago. Yeah, People really know.

A long time ago I was like.

The Carnivore MD was a raw food vegan.

True.

Yeah. That didn't work out. So talk a bit, a little bit about your journey to becoming the Carnivore md. And like I. Because I think some of the, the most influential people in the world and, and, and, and the great thought leaders of our time, you know, really come from some kind of problem that they solved in their own life.

Yeah. I mean, I grew up in a family of doctors. My dad's a doctor, my mom's a nurse, and I had eczema, asthma, and allergies as a kid. I was a little bit obese as a kid. And so.

You got any of those pictures? Man, I want to see a chubby pulse.

Al, I don't have any baby. Can we throw that up on the podcast? I've got some pictures when I was a raw vegan.

Oh, you do?

Yeah. And I was, I was 20 pounds of lean muscle mass, lighter. So I was such a gaunt human. Yeah, I'm £165 59 now and I have a moderate amount of muscle mass. I'm pretty lean, but I was 145 even sometimes less than 145 pounds as a raw vegan. But so I grew up with, you know, average kid problems. Not super sickly, but not super healthy. And I got over medicated. I got theophylline, which is a medication that we used to give to people with asthma. I had pills of theophylline empty into my applesauce. When I was a kid, I over. I had inhalers. I remember one time my dad forced me to take an inhaler at the dinner table, and I puked in my pea soup. Just too much albuterol. Right. At one time. And so there were no real thoughts about food or where the roots of my illness was coming from. We ate a pretty standard American diet growing up, probably slightly better than standard American diet. And it was really not until I started thinking about human health that I took matters into my own hands. I started thinking about diet right when I was a pa. Right. So before I went to medical school, I was a physician assistant, worked in cardiology, and my first foray into diet was a misstep in the vegan world.

Okay.

I was a raw vegan for seven months. Lost a lot of weight, had horrible GI symptoms. I really couldn't be in a closed room like this with people. My gas was so bad.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

You're just letting them rip, huh?

It was so bad. I used to work in a small office, maybe half the size of this, with two other women, a nurse practitioner and a pa. And after I left that practice, they told this. I mean, I heard stories about how they used to complain to the CEO of the business about how bad it was. It was like, oh, so bad. I was just. I thought I was doing the right thing. And, yeah, months and months and months.

I'm decoxing, I'm detoxing my gut flora.

Just wasn't having it. And eventually I kind of realized humans have always eaten meat. In our history, we've never. There's never been a tribe discovered of humans that doesn't eat meat. It's part of our biology. It's written into our DNA. And I reincorporated meat and did something kind of like Paleo for 10 or 12 years, but it didn't fix my eczema and asthma. That vegan diet didn't fix it. So I haven't eaten a lot of.

You felt better. You put some muscle back on you.

Yeah, but, yeah, muscle back on. I was running at the time, faster, gained probably about 5 to 15 pounds of muscle over time, and started to feel better, but didn't. Didn't quite fix the eczema and asthma. And then I was in medical school, had really bad eczema at different times. I was doing a lot of jiu jitsu, and I would get impetigo, which is a superficial fungal infection, Right? Well, it's a bacterial infection on the skin. Yeah. From the Mats. Because you get eczema on my knees and elbows and they get infected. It was a pain in the ass. I was always tweaking my diet, trying to figure it out. But I thought, you know, I'm eating this organic paleo diet. Vegetables, salads, nuts, meat, eggs, fruit, and. And my eczema is still problematic for me. So what's going on here? And it wasn't until my residency at the University of Washington, I had a really, really bad eczema flare. I did a bunch of sort of mushroom extracts, cordyceps, reishi chaga, and it just flared my eczema like crazy. I had head to toe eczema.

Wow.

And I was just sick of it. I was like, this is not right. My immune system is not happy with these foods. And I was right about the same time that I was driving to the beach to surf. It was probably a cold, rainy weekend in Seattle. It was miserable surfing there. And I heard Jordan Peterson on Rogan's podcast talking about how a strictly meat based diet improved his autoimmune.

Wow. I know he talks about that. I thought he got that from you. You actually.

No, I got it from him. Wow. Yeah.

Because he only eats meat.

Salt water, occasionally eats liver.

Okay.

But it's rare.

Okay. But that's what I mean. Meat, meat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's pretty interesting. And so I am fascinated by autoimmune conditions because the further I went in medicine. So I did two years masters as physician assistant, working in cardiology for four years, four years of medical school, four years of residency. And throughout all that, I was really interested in what was causing human illness. And I started to see this commonality along autoimmune conditions. The immune system is disordered in almost every single chronic disease. Atherosclerosis is autoimmune in some ways. Dementia has autoimmune components. Mental health issues, depression, anxiety, have neuroinflammation and changes in the phenotype of the macrophage and the brain. So the immune system is at the center. And I really think that there's a very compelling hypothesis around the gut as this ground zero.

Oh, no question.

Where the immune system is being programmed. Right. Because so much of our immune system lies in the lamina propria, these, these lymphatic tissues right around the gut. And so the foods we eat program us in interesting ways and, and that can extend to the whole body because these immune cells then move from the gut to the whole body and affect us in different ways. So some people get eczema some people get autoimmune, thyroid disease, some people get rheumatoid arthritis. And often the cause is the same. But western medicine doesn't think that way. Western medicine wants to divide illnesses into 10,000 different pigeonholes.

36,000.

Okay, there you go. It's expanding. It' 36,000 of them become even more. And I think that it's probably four or five things, right? 36,000 from five. It's just different manifestations in different people based on our genetics at a baseline.

Wow.

And so I thought, okay, if Jordan Peterson is an n of 1. But I think these stories of humans are so valuable. What little nuggets. That's a gem. That's a diamond piece of information. He fixed his conditions that western medicine had been telling him and his daughter Michaela were incurable for decades by eliminating all plants. That's crazy. What's going on there? Let me experiment with that. So I cut out all plants, ate meat, organs, salt and animal fat for a year and a half. Eczema gets better. Right. Never get a recurrence. But a year and a half into it, run into problems with long term ketosis that we can talk about.

Right. Wow. So this is kind of how your, your diet philosophy has evolved from being pure strict carnivore to now incorporating clean carbohydrates, berries, honey fruit, maple. Yeah, okay.

Things like that. Because what happened after a year and a half was that I had electrolyte problems. I had muscle cramps, I had sleep disturbances, heart palpitations, declining sex hormones. Testosterone goes from a total of like 800 to 500. Sleep disturbance. And I'm thinking, what's going on here? And then I came across this paper that nobody had ever showed me in medical school, talking about how insulin affects the kidney and actually signals to the kidney to hold on to electrolytes. And so if we don't get an insulin signal from our meals, we waste sodium. And along with the sodium, everything else flows out. That's the way the kidneys work. There's all these transporters, antiporters and symporters.

Part of the keto flu.

Well, part of the keto flu is like long term keto flu. Right, Right. Because my body just wasn't holding on to these nutrients, these minerals. And so I have this kind of crisis of faith. I wrote a book about the carnivore diet because I'm so interested in this collection of people healing things that western medicine says are not healable. Right. There's this colle consciousness happening around, focusing on meat, a food that's been demonized, vilified, and it looks to be incredibly healthy and nutritious for humans. Evolutionarily consistent people healing every autoimmune condition under the sun. Right. By cutting plants out. And everyone's a little different. But what's going on here? This is a movement. It's really just a. It's something that's happening even now today. I wrote a book about it, and then I'm thinking, oh, man, I don't know if I can be strict carnivore. That's hard on your brain, right?

Yeah.

It really challenges my mental flexibility to think, okay, maybe there's a piece of the truth here, but maybe I don't have the whole truth. And that's the humility that I've had.

Yeah.

The whole time.

And I love that. I. I love seeing that you're. You're. You're willing to get out of a dogmatic commitment to one, you know, linear line of thinking and say, I'm willing to actually change and involve and mend, you know, my. My protocol and my. My dietary recommendation.

I always want to be evolving and thinking and learning. And I, I. There's. I think it's just. I forget who said this, but, you know, it's like, don't say that you have the truth. Say that you have a piece of the truth. Who has the whole truth. No. Right. But we all share pieces of the truth in hopes that it will help people that can benefit from our experiences. So I added back fruit, looking at kind of the plant kingdom and thinking the leaves of plants and the stems of plants, like celery or the roots of plants or the seeds of plants, which are actually seeds, nuts, grains, and beans. They all have defense chemicals. And this is Botany 101.

Right.

And they all have more defense chemicals than the fruit. And if you look at the fruit, it's colorful, it's sweet. The plant wants you to eat the fruit. There's a clear signal here.

Like, here's a treat. Don't eat me.

Yeah, well, yeah, like, here's a treat. Don't eat the rest of me.

Right.

Right. And. And maybe eat this mango and deposit the seed somewhere else, or eat this raspberry and poop out some of my seeds somewhere in a pile of poop. Fertilizer. It's a clear design. And if you look at the way fruit even ripens, fruit contains defense chemicals, and they decline as the fruit ripens.

Wow.

So an unripe fruit has more defense chemicals than a ripe Fruit. There's a clear, there's a clear collaboration between animals, insects, humans and plants that's been going on. And we sort of, in some ways, for some people, not everyone, we have these genetic susceptibilities that make us more sensitive to defense chemicals in the vegetables. And what I've come to now sort of over time in my evolution is this perspective that if you're thriving, why change anything?

Right.

But if you're not, it's really interesting and insightful to question our assumptions about nutrition. First assumption, meat is horrible for us. Every news outlet is going to tell you that.

Yep. Saturated fats.

Yep. Horrible for you. That's the devil that's the cause of heart disease. Right. Second assumption, vegetables are great for everyone. Plants are the best thing on the earth. Eat more of these to thrive. If you have an illness, it's because you're not eating enough fiber.

Yes.

Because you're.

Oh my God. So true.

It's because you're not eating enough plants, Gary.

Right. Yeah.

You should eat more plants and less meat. And so I turn that on its head and go, okay, what if I look back at, in my mind, this is just my sort of, my sort of summation of what I look at the medical literature and anthropology. I went to visit the Hadza in Tanzania. You look at where other hunter gatherer tribes go in terms of their preference of foods. And at this point we've completely excluded all ultra processed food. We can talk about that. But if you look at unprocessed animal and plant foods, which I think can form an incredibly healthy diet for every human, there is, I believe, a hierarchy of value in those foods. And we see this reflected in the way hunter gatherers behave the foods they prefer. And if you ask western medicine or you ask people who consume general scientific information or nutritional, you know, information, plants are at the top.

Right.

And I'm going to say, actually let's put plants at the bottom, the vegetables and put meat at the top. Right. Because meat and organs are the center of every human diet that we've ever studied and doesn't mean that they eat only meat and organs or that they eat. The majority of their diet is meat in orients. But if you ask the Hadza, what's your favorite food, it's meat, Right. Without a question.

I mean, Singapore has one of the longest average life expectancies and they have one of the highest consumptions of meat in the world.

I think it's like a pound and a half average of meat per day.

Yeah.

And that Never gets mentioned in conversations about blue zones. Conveniently left out of blue zone conversations. I don't think Dan Vuetner ever visited Singapore. This is. This is just recapitulation. This happens over and over in medical science.

We could go on, you know, some of the research that I viewed in centenarians, but that's contrary to. To a lot of conventional thinking. I mean, we. And in 22 years of mortality research, I did not see a single centenarian, not once. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but we did not process a death claim for a centenarian that did not have clinically elevated levels of LDL cholesterol when they died.

Now, clinically elevated. We should talk about this. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

But in any case, I mean, I didn't mean to cut you off, but. But I think there's a lot of conventional wisdom and we form an industry around it. And then, you know, it's like an aircraft carrier moving at full speed to. To actually turn it around. It takes. There's so much inertia that. To. To actually turn it around because there's so many people on the deck of that ship that are relying on that conventional theory of thinking, and it picks up so much momentum and. And, you know, the healthcare system evolves around it. To then actually turn that as. As is. Is difficult.

Super hard takes. But we should. I want to come back to that idea that. Because there are multiple studies. Yeah.

Because I want to talk about LDL cholesterol.

There are multiple studies that show that people who live a long time, Lydon 85 plus the Lothian birth cohort, have elevated levels of cholesterol. So it's quite interesting and challenges this hypothesis that APOB is directly injurious to the endothelium. But if we go back to this hierarchy, it's like you look at hunter gatherers, meat, organs, honey, fruit. These are the foods that they prefer. You ask the Hadza, what are your favorite foods? Meat, berries, baobab, honey. Tubers is the last thing. Vegetables aren't even on the list. Other than tubers. They don't really eat salads. Right. They don't eat seeds unless they're starving. And so that's interesting to me. And again, I want to reiterate the fact that it's not that everyone needs to think about this and limit those foods, but for people who have issues that are unresolved, fatigue, anxiety, mental health issues, sleep disturbance, low libido, weight loss issues, autoimmune conditions of a variety of Forms for a lot of those people, limiting or cutting out the vegetable plant foods for some amount of time as an experiment is incredibly helpful. And so that's why I didn't want to be Carnivore, Maryland anymore. Right. Because I eat plant foods and I have become less dogmatic over time, hopefully. And I didn't want to say to people, hey, you can only eat this one way.

Right.

I meet a lot of people who eat vegetables and are super healthy.

Right.

But I've also met a lot of people and I think the value of anecdote and story and human experience is, is something you can't ignore. Who cut those things out and have these long standing issues resolved. So what's going on there?

Right.

It's not something to ignore. And I think that our detractors who are similar and make similar arguments for both of us would say there's no rct, Paul, that says vegetables are bad.

For randomized clinical trial. Yeah.

And I'm saying I can give you a thousand people who have had improvements in joint pain, long standing inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, insomnia, mental health cond. Eczema, psoriasis. I'm one of them. You're telling me that's not valid because there's no rct. And I'm not saying everyone needs to do it. I'm just saying consider this.

Yeah.

Consider this and understand that meat is being vilified. Organs are not even eaten in the Western consciousness. You know, unique nutrients that are left out of our diets and fruit and honey, I mean a lot, those are increasingly under attack.

Yeah.

You know, people are saying, oh, it's going to spike your glucose. We can talk about that too. But vegetables are elevated and meat is, it's just upside down world, which is, which is similar because a lot of things depending on your way you see the world, the upside down world seems to be a pretty accurate characterization of a lot of things.

You know, it's interesting. I had a Harvard, Maryland on my podcast last week, Dr. Palmer, and he's a Harvard MD, he's a psychiatrist and he's treating some of the most drug resistant mental illnesses. And I'm talking about real crippling mental illnesses like severe forms of schizophrenia with paranoias and you know, where people are literally trapped inside their own bodies. You know, voices, paranoias, you know, all kinds of really tragic consequences that, and they're drug resistant and he's treating them with ketogenic diets. And when you're, when you're to the Level where you're treating drug resistant mental illness with nutrition. I think you're starting now to see the power that the human body has not just to heal itself, but that nutrition can have on a whole consequence, a whole cascade of, of issues.

It's incredible. Yeah, it's really interesting what's happening there. I've, I've spent a lot of time working with people who had severe mental illness. Also. I did my residency in psychiatry.

Right.

I've since left psychiatry and.

Hey guys, if you've been watching the Ultimate Human Podcast for any length of time, you know that one thing I do not do is push products. I do not just let any advertiser into this space because I believe that the products that appear on the Ultimate Human Podcast should be things that I use every day in my life to improve my own physiology. One of them is something called the Echo Go Plus. The Echo GO plus is a hydrogen water generator that you can take on the go. You essentially take the top off of this bottle. You pour water, bottled water in this and repeatedly it will make high part per million hydrogen water. You press this little button, you'll see these bubbles going up in the water. That's hydrogen being created in the water. There are all kinds of peer reviewed, published clinical studies on the benefits of hydrogen water, including reduced inflammation, better absorption of your supplements, better absorption of your foods, better balance of the stomach acid, and it feeds an entire class of bacteria in your gut. Hydrogen water, in my opinion, is the most beneficial water that you can drink. And now you can take it wherever you go. You can go to echo echo h2o.com. That's echo echo h2o.com. Enter the code Ultimate10 for a discount.

Echo h2o.

Enter the code Ultimate10 for a Discount.

I think the mainstream psychiatry is just a man. Just a what, a dumpster fire? Yeah, I mean, in the most respectful way. But you know, and that's not because I have anything against the doctors. It's just, it's mostly every doctor I've met has been intelligent and well intentioned. It's just the medical system is broken in our paradigm.

And I think the biggest break is we treat from the neck up and from the neck down. Right. And we somehow think that this is not connected to this.

And that was really my realization that, you know, I was seeing people in psychiatry and there was never any attention to diet in my residency at the University of Washington. And you're seeing neuroinflammation. That's, that's the root cause of most Psychiatric illness is neuroinflammation. Like I said, we have these macrophages in our brain. They're called microglial cells, and they. They become inflamed. They have a switch and they become, you know, a certain phenotype when they become inflamed and when they become reactive against our bodies. And what's triggering that? What's something coming from here? And so dietary changes in psychiatry, that's such a radical thing to do. And I wish there was absolutely no ability to do that. In my residency at the University of Washington, one of the most preeminent, you know, universities in the country in Seattle, there's no ability to treat anything with diet. It's all medications. Don't worry about the side effects, any of this stuff. And so that was really why I left medicine. I've had this just complete loss of religion. And I'm still a doctor. I'm still a board certified, licensed physicians, but I don't practice. I do this sort of thing educationally. And I realized that there's so many parallels between the way that we divide the brain and the body and with every other autoimmune condition that we see. I mean, I've talked to so many people who go to see gastroenterologists for inflammatory bowel diseases, Crohn's and ulcerative colitis, who are told there's no connection with diet.

Yes.

It's literally your gut.

We see discharge papers from, from oncology treatment centers that say dietary recommendations. None.

Yeah.

And I'm like, none. Somebody just finished, you know, several rounds of chemotherapy for. For breast cancer or colon cancer or metastatic cancer, and they were blessed enough to be on the other side of this. And now there's no dietary recommendations. That's incredible. Even during treatment. Dietary recommendations during treatment. None. That's astounding to me. You know, Ben and Jerry's.

I mean, you got to gain weight.

Yeah, yeah. You got to gain weight. That's it.

You got to gain weight.

Yeah.

I want to talk about the keto thing for a minute because there's a little bit of a discordance here that's interesting to me because I had a bad experience with keto, and Chris Palmer's using keto to treat, you know, profound mental illness. So I think there's clearly value to ketogenic.

It's not prolonged keto dieting either. It's. It's what I guess he would call a keto reset.

Right. There's. I think there's something to that. And we know that when you're intentional about your food choices, things get better. And so what he's doing with patients is sort of an incredibly brilliant idea where I'm going to use a keto diet to improve the quality of their diet. I think some sort of a framework for diet helps people do that. And if you're cutting out carbohydrates, great, because you're cutting out carbohydrates that are ultra processed, right? And we know that when you have an ultra processed flour from ultra processed grains, you're stripping out the information that's been there for all of our evolution as humans. And that's very confusing for humans, right? And I think that the same thing about sugar, and this is a very interesting position that I don't think I've done a good enough job communicating to people. But if you look at processed sugar, if you look at table sugar, that is a molecule of sucrose, it's a disaccharide of glucose and fructose, right? And that is interesting because humans would never have had that evolutionarily. We would have always had that molecule in concert with thousands, literally thousands of other compounds in the fruit. So you look at honey, there's over 600 components in honey, there's probably over a thousand components of honey, but 300 haven't even been identified. So there's polyphenols and prebiotics, and you look at a piece of fruit, it's probably over 5,000 components in that piece of fruit. So there's all this. There's all this contributory information that comes with sugar in our diets, whether it's honey, maple syrup, or a piece of fruit. That is not the same as a table sugar, which has zero information. And it goes in your body and it basically just can feed the bacteria in your gut and cause overgrowth and lead to. Lead to increases in lipopolysaccharide endotoxin, which we are so clearly connecting in Western medicine. If you have endotoxemia, this increase in lipopolysaccharide in your, in your gut and in your body, that's horrible for humans. But what's so cool is that if you eat an orange, you're getting fructose in the sugar and fructose gets demonized, but you're also getting all this information that's actually preventing your bacteria in your gut from overgrowing. So this is a difference. I don't want people to fear fruit or fear unprocessed forms of honey, but understand that we can't Conflate research on processed sugar or high fructose corn syrup.

Yeah, I was just going to say I want delineate the difference between fructose that's found in fruit and high fructose corn syrup, which by the way, now is. Is sneaking into labels. I did, I did a podcast short on this as natural flavors, natural fruit flavors. And you really got to read the label. It's like partially hydrogenated. You know, they don't have to put it if it's less than a certain percentage right in there. And so these partially hydrogenated oils, which is, you know, the slang term for the seed oils, and high fructose corn syrup sneaking in as natural fruit flavor when there's actually no fruit in some. Like some of these yogurts, you know, with fruit on the bottom.

Right.

It's. It's blueberry flavoring and high fructose corn syrup with a dye to look like a blueberry color, but there's actually no fruit in it.

It's crazy. But high fructose corn syrup is made from corn, obviously, but corn is all glucose and it's a different molecule than fructose. So in order to make fructose from glucose, you have to extract it, you have to isomerize it, and then you have to highly process it. So you remove it from corn. It's not even a whole food anymore. It's not even a food anymore. It's just a industrial chemical. And there's studies showing that high fructose corn syrup contains trace amounts of mercury and other toxins. And the high fructose corn syrup industry has gone to great lengths to cover these up. But it's. It's just. I think this is the problem with humans. And it goes back to this, these simple principles that I think humans can live by. And if these guide the way we're living, we can be so much healthier. Which is why would you eat a food that has been stripped of all the information that has always been presented with that in humans?

Yes.

You know, a processed wheat flour.

Never encounter high fructose corn server in nature.

You would never encounter pure fructose. You would never encounter pure sucrose in nature. And yet the studies that vilify sugar are done with those and then conflated. And you see people. I mean, you know, this is just respectful, but I'll call it out. You know, on Huberman's podcast, there was A physician recently, Dr. Robert Lustig, just talking horribly about fructose. But conflict conflating research done with isolated fructose or done with isolated sucrose in animal studies or in human studies, again with isolated molecules, and really not giving a different perspective. I don't want people to make fruit or fruit juice their whole diet, but I don't think we need to fear it. And there's an interesting story here, which is, oh, the problem is not the fruit. The problem is not the fruit juice. It's taking away all the information that's associated with it in nature. And the same is probably true of seed oils.

Yeah.

Right. Because what is a seed oil? It's an industrial byproduct of a sunflower seed.

Right.

Or a rape seed or a soybean. Foods that humans have probably eaten in small amounts historically. But when you take all the information out of it and you distill it and you make concentrations of things that humans would have never experienced, we end up with massive problems as humans.

Especially when you de gum it with hexane, you deodorize it with sodium hydroxide. Imagine that 405 degrees and turn it rancid. I mean, we talked about this on our last podcast, but I. I got censored by the Seed Oil Society of Canada, which I didn't even know, or Canola Oil Society of Canada. And. And. And I was like, look, I didn't say canola plants were bad. I said that industrial processed canola oil is bad. Right. And you know, anytime you're adding hexane and sodium hydroxide and high amounts of heat to turn something rancid.

Well, canola plants are bad. There's no such thing as a canola plant. It's a rape seed.

Yeah, rape seed.

And apparently you can't even say rape seed on YouTube. I don't know.

Rape seed.

It's. It's one word.

Guys, did I just lose my YouTube channel?

But what's interesting is that, by the.

Way, why can't you say rape seed on not to diverse?

Because it has the word rape.

Oh, okay, okay. Can you say consensual sex seed?

I don't.

Okay, okay.

But you know, rape seeds are not. It's illegal to sell rapeseed oil in the United States. It's also an illegal to sell mustard seed oil because they have a monounsaturated fat called erucic acid in them. Right. And so this is the problem, that in order to make canola oil, which is an acronym for Canadian Oil low acid, there's no such thing as a canola plant. Canada said, hey, we've got these rape seeds. Let's figure out A way to do this. They genetically modified a rapeseed plant to be low arousic acid, but it still has significant amounts of arousic acid, a fat that has been associated with heart lesions in the studies. And so this is concerning. You're eating 2 to 3% arucic acid, I believe, is the number in canola oil. Native rapeseed plants have 30 to 40%, but you're still getting some. We talked a lot in the last podcast that we just did about cumulative stress.

Yes.

And so do you really want to be eating this oil? Do you really want to be eating excess amounts of linoleic acid from any seed oil but canola specifically? No. I don't think any human has ever really gone up to a rapeseed plant and said, yum, let me eat this. Like, it's never. It's never even been a food for humans. And now it's probably the single most consumed seed oil around. It's touted as healthy by the American Heart association because it lowers your cholesterol.

Wow.

Don't. You know, they don't tell you that it oxidizes.

Yeah, it's the oxidized cholesterol. So let's go. Let's sort of take a. A little wander down the road of cholesterol, because I certainly don't have the body of knowledge on cholesterol that you do. But anecdotally, as I mentioned, you know, we didn't see a single centenarian that did not have what we would consider clinically elevated levels of LDL cholesterol. So LDL cholesterol, over 99 nanograms per deciliter. And I think a lot of people don't understand that cholesterol is actually not a fuel source. Right. It's a. It's a construction material, one of the main construction materials in our body. We build hormones, we build cell walls, cell membranes, we make vitamin D3, we make cholecalciferol from cholesterol. And so it's. It's a very necessary compound, and yet it is vilified because in my opinion, it's at the scene of the crime, but not the one pulling the trigger. And so talk a little bit about cholesterol and maybe some of the challenges and misconceptions in the medical community surrounding cholesterol.

Yeah, I think cholesterol is. Is really the crux of so many conversations, because when humans eat more saturated fat from animals, whether it's butter, tallow, ghee, a steak, and they eat less seed oils, there is A physiologic thing that happens that the apob, which is just part of just, just a metric that sort of reflects LDL cholesterol in a little more sophisticated way. LDL/APOB containing lipoproteins go up and this triggers all sorts of alarm bells in medical offices across the country. And the knee jerk reaction is here's a statin. So let's just consider this position like when humans eat a diet that is evolutionarily consistent, that essentially mirrors what humans have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. And, and they get rid of seed oils and LDL cholesterol goes up a little bit. That's bad because, you know, the position of Western medicine is called the response to retention hypothesis and is essentially that there is a direct geometric relationship between the amount of apob containing lipoproteins in your blood and the rate at which you accumulate atherosclerosis in your veins. The more apob containing lipoproteins in your blood, the more you get plaque in your arteries. Except when that's not true.

And except when that's not true.

Except for, except for the many instances when that relationship does not exist. And there are so many of these relationships out there that Western medicine ignores wildly. But here's the problem that if you look at our population as a whole, as westernized Americans in general, there are multiple studies suggesting that 88 to 93% of us are metabolically unwell. Some form of insulin resistance. Right. Pre diabetes. And that's a big number. And that's 93 to 88% have at least one metric of metabolic syndrome. And I would say that means you have some cascade beginning in your body of insulin resistance, AKA metabolic dysfunction. Even the American Heart association admits that half of Americans are either pre diabetic, undiagnosed diabetes or diabetes. Over 150 million people, according to the American Heart association, have some form of insulin resistance. Metabolic dysfunction.

Wow.

I would argue it's closer to 90, but even the AHA claims it's over 150 million of 330 million plus Americans. And so when we have a position, when we have a context of metabolic dysfunction, yes, there is a direct geometric relationship between apob and atherosclerosis progression. But what if we don't have metabolic dysfunction? The relationship completely changes it. It essentially goes to almost zero. There's still a very, very small relationship. But we also know that no study is perfect. There are other things in our environment that can damage the endothelium. But I think that if you. If you argue, as Western medicine does, that apob is causal. Right?

Right.

Because if you have more apob and it's not causal, what's the big deal? But it has to be causal. It has to directly injure the endothelium on the inside of blood vessels. If you argue that apob is causal in atherosclerosis, then why in someone that's metabolically healthy, does it really not have much of a relationship between atherosclerosis or even a very small relationship between atherosclerosis? And why in someone that's diabetic, is the relationship very clear and extremely intense? Like the geometric relationship is much more. A much higher slope? So there's a discordance here in the actual philosophy around apob. If APOB is truly damaging the endothelium, why is it that you have centenarians in your mortality data that all have high levels of apob?

Yeah.

And they're not dying of atherosclerosis. What's going on? These examples are myriad of discordances. Places where APOB levels don't seem to correlate to the progression of atherosclerosis.

Right.

And it's generally in people, men and women, who are insulin sensitive. So how can you say that APOB is injuring the endothelium when there's clearly something else going on? And there's all sorts of other arguments in native human biology. We don't get atherosclerosis in veins. We only get it in arteries. So you have the same amount of apob. It's a continuous system in your vein as you do in an artery. But an artery is a higher pressure system with a much higher propensity to have damage to the endothelium, denuding to the endothelium.

Right.

So if you look at the literature in medicine, and, my God, I want to debate Peter ATI about this.

You do?

Yeah, for sure. And everyone else that. That you know is claiming that APOB is. Is the boogeyman and that apob is causal. If you look at the literature, it's just. It's. It's. There are so many discordances here. And it's just so clear that if APO B is causing the problem, why are there so many. Why are there so many instances where it doesn't look like it's happening? And then it's clear the endothelium must be damaged for atheros. Atherosclerosis to start. So what damage is the endothelium? Oxidation, oxidation, poor Repair from an insulin resistance, heavy metals, toxins in our environments. Right. So if you have damage to the endothelium, yes, APOB is involved. But this is necessary but not sufficient. So if you have a component that's involved and you have a system where there is constant damage to the endothelium, like diabetes or metabolic dysfunction, is it possible that APOB looks like more APOB is bad, but it's not actually beginning the process? Right. And then interestingly, or connected with that. What about someone that doesn't have rampant endothelial dysfunction happening? What about someone that doesn't have rampant endothelial damage? We all have a little bit, but I think in those of us that are metabolically healthy, we can repair it. We all have high pressure with bifurcations in our arteries. We're all going to get some denuding of the endothelium of our arterial walls. But I believe that we can repair it it. And so this is the problem. It's. It's just basically saying something else initiates APOB as a causal factor. I completely disagree with that verbiage. I think it's wrong. And I think that is propagating a, a false narrative in medicine. It's incorrect philosophically to say that. And the problem then, like I said, is that people are scared of eating foods that are good for them.

Yeah.

And they're scared of eating foods. And connected with that, the American Heart association, the American College of Cardio, College of Cardiology, will recommend canola oil to you because it lowers your apob. And they will tell you to limit saturated fat because it raises your apob. When we also know that there are so many populations of free living humans with huge amounts of saturated fat in their diet and high cholesterol, quote unquote, that don't have any incidents of atherosclerosis in their diets. It's just they're not eating processed foods. And the piece that always gets left out. I know I've been ranting and it's complicated.

No, I love this.

The piece that always gets left out, and we hinted at this earlier, is that as polyunsaturated fatty acids in seed oils lower your ldl, lower your apob, they're also increasing oxidized LDL and lp, which are much stronger risk factors for cardiovascular disease. But why is that never addressed that there's this huge discordance here.

So now your, your APOB goes down and these other ones rise. There's greater degrees of endothelial damage and oxidation and that and that initiates the process, and then it initiates the process even though you've controlled for your.

And we have randomized controlled trials that show this. I mean, the data regarding seed oils, and this is hopefully a debate with Lane that's going to happen on seed oils at some point. The data on the randomized controlled trials on seed oils are. Are interesting. They're complicated. There's about 10 randomized controlled trials that have been done in the last 60 to 70 years where researchers have replaced saturated fat in the human diet with seed oils. The problem is that in seven of them, the control arm that was high saturated fat was given a lot of trans fat, because it wasn't until the last 20 to 30 years that we realized that trans fat was bad for humans. So when people in the health space who are saying that the research says seed oils are benign are quoting studies or meta analyses, they're basing the meta analyses. The meta analyses include trials or are they're quoting studies that are fundamentally flawed where the control group is eating trans fat fats. But there are three trials where that doesn't seem to have been a major case, and these are Minnesota Coronary study, perhaps the best study that's been done on seed oils versus saturated fat. Sydney diet, heart and rose corn oils.

And these were all seed oils versus saturated fats, essentially.

Yeah. And they all found that seed oils were worse. Minnesota Coronary was. We talked about this in the last podcast we did. Suppressed. Yeah, right. It took years for that trial to be published. Ansel Keys, the guy that initiated the whole saturated fat, fearing, you know.

Right.

Sort of cascade with his seven country study, was one of the authors. He was one of the researchers on Minnesota Coronary, but didn't want to be associated because the results were not what he wanted to see. Results were buried for decades. And what they show us pretty clearly is that when you saturate, substitute saturated fat from animals with seed oils, you have higher rates of cardiovascular disease and increased rates of death. Wow, big surprise. You're putting more fats into your membranes that are fragile. They're breaking down more. And the problem with seed oils is that they contain this fat, linoleic acid. Right. Which accumulates in our bodies. So we talked about cumulative toxicity in our podcast, about fluoride, about cyanocobalamin, even folic acid being unmetabolized. But I think that this is the problem with linoleic acid, that this is a compound that we never would have been exposed to in these amounts historically, evolutionarily, as humans.

But it's in nuts and in small amounts. Yeah, it's very small.

Have you seen how many. So Americans eat an average of 5 to 6 tablespoons of seed oils per day. You would have to get over two and a half pounds of sunflower seeds to get that much linoleic acid. Okay, 65 to 75 years of corn.

Okay, Right.

Like, the numbers are staggering.

Yeah.

Over two pounds of soybeans. You know, like, I think it's two and a half to three pounds of soybeans to get the equivalent of that. It's just we would never have gotten this amount of linoleic acid in our diet. It's in nuts, in small amounts. And you eat a small amount of nuts. Right. How many nuts are in the human diet historically? Small amounts. Like, you have to crack every single nut.

Right.

It's very hard. And you think about, we probably ate some nuts and seeds. I would argue we did that when we were starving as, like, a fallback food. But then you see it concentrated in the seed oil. You can eat massive amounts. And if you look at a bag of lay's potato chips, there's probably, I think, what do we calculate, like, 15 to 17 tablespoons of seed oils in that whole bag. You would never have gotten that historically. And whether it's fried in canola oil, we didn't even eat rape seeds. Right, right, right. So this is an evolutionarily inconsistent amount of a compound linoleic acid that then gets stuck in our bodies. Cumulative toxicity. We know that. Cumulative toxicity. And the trick here, if you look at the research carefully, is that the linoleic acid in your fat cells that is reflective of your consumption, it's not in the plasma because plasma gets turned over. And this is the other confusing part. Part when people are looking at seed oil consumption. But if you look at linoleic acid and fat cells, the more linoleic acid in your fat cells, the higher your rate of cardiovascular disease. And that is never discussed because people always look at blood. And the problem with blood is that linoleic acid is metabolized by two enzymes. Delta 6 desaturates, Delta 5 desaturates into pro inflammatory mediators. And the people that have the lowest amount of linoleic acid in their blood do the best. Or, excuse me, the people have the lowest amount of linoleic acid in their blood do the worst because they're pushing it all to inflammatory pathways. And so they look at the literature and say, hey, look, people that have more linoleic acid do better in their blood. People that have less do worse. Therefore, more linoleic acid is better. But what they're really showing is that you don't want linoleic acid to go down that inflammatory pathway and make arachidonic acid or the other downstream mediators, which are highly inflammatory for humans.

So. So for somebody that's listening to this podcast, you know, how do they go on a journey to avoid high amounts of linoleic acid? Like, where do you find it? How do I avoid it? Obviously, meats and organ meats. But, you know, because what if I'm eating vegetables, nuts, fish, chicken, avocados, small.

Amounts and all that. Right. Tallow 1 to 2% linoleic acid and tallow 1 to 2% in butter. Nuts can have 15 to 25. But you're not eating 6 pounds of nuts.

Right?

Right, right. If you tolerate nuts. Right. I talked earlier. I think a lot of people do better without nuts in terms of their digestion. But if you tolerate nuts, small amounts. Right. You're not eating five pounds of nuts.

Right? Right.

It's concentrated in seed oils. And the seed oils are corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, soybean, grapeseed, peanut. This is why I'm not a fan of peanut butter. Yeah, right.

I'm not a fan of peanut butter. Peanut butter is made from the worst mycotoxin.

It's made from. It's made from moldy, moldy peanuts. And you're basically making acetoil oil. It's not an industrially processed seed oil. But what do you think is on the top of peanut butter? That's natural peanut butter. Non natural peanut butter. The gippy that I used to eat when I was a kid.

Right.

They put things in it to prevent the separation of the oil. If you get the natural peanut butter, which I thought was better, you have the seed oil on top, and that's. That's 30% linoleic acid. This is the problem with almond butter, too. You're making a seed oil and that seed oil is becoming rancid. It's on top. It's highly oxidized, and you're concentrating linoleic acid acid. You're going to have a much harder time. Unless you're spooning that seed oil into your mouth, you're going to mix it back up in the peanut oil, peanut, peanut butter, or the almond butter, you're going to get less. But it's highly rancid and oxidized when you do that. So.

Wow.

This is the problem with nut butters. You're not Meant to do this. You're not meant to grind up nuts and leave them for months on a shelf. They just, they're fragile. This is the problem with. So another one we should talk about is flaxseed oil. Yeah, Highly oxidized. Yeah, highly oxidized. That's a seed oil.

And that's considered like the panacea of healthy oil.

It's healthy, bro.

Yeah. I mean, I literally know, I happen to agree with you, but I literally know people that actually start their day off with half a tablespoon to a full tablespoon flaxseed.

Oh, yeah. And people will. This is another thing important to consider. People will also start their day off with a spoonful of fish oil. If you're going to do fish oil, you better know that brand is really good. And you don't want to do fish oil in a spoon because that is so highly oxidized when it's exposed to the air. So you can't spoon fish oil. Horrible idea. And any of these oils, they just break down over time. So you just gotta be really careful. So avoid the seed oils. That's a, that's the first step. And then if you want to get really granular and decrease the amount of linoleic acid in your diet, you want to do grass fed beef versus grain fed beef. Ruminants convert polyunsaturated fats to monounsaturated fats so ruminants can saturate. We can't do this as humans, but it's really the monogastric animals where the polyunsaturated fats accumulate. Pigs, the eggs of chickens, chicken meat, this kind of stuff. So fatty chicken eggs or fatty pork that's fed corn and soy is going to have more linoleic acid in the fat than it would if it were naturally wild chicken or wild hog.

Yeah.

So again, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. But understand that if you're really trying to get this dialed in, I think that an important metric for humans would be how much linoleic acid is in your diet. And one of the things I would love for you guys to do at 10x, I don't know if you could ever do this is actually sample the amount of linoleic acid and adipose tissue. Tissue. And you can track that.

What if we could do it? Natapose tissue. We could, we could do it in the blood.

Blood isn't good. Because we talked about that. Yeah, you'd have to, you'd have to.

You'D have to just Do a, an adipose little biopsy. Just a little, just pull some adipose tissue out.

You can do it in red blood cell membranes, but it's not great either. The fat is really predictive. Like I said, the more linoleic acid you eat, the more that ends up in your fat tissue. The more that's in your fat tissue, the higher rate of cardiovascular disease.

Yeah.

So what are we arguing about?

Right.

What we're arguing about poorly done studies and confusion over blood levels of linoleic acid because people don't understand how linoleic acid is metabolized.

Right.

And again, let's just back up, you know, 15,000 years, we would never have had this move, you know, back up 100 years. Seed oils are machine lubricant.

Yeah, yeah.

That's other.

Yeah, it was like a submarine lubricant.

And let me just mention this. I know. And then we'll, we'll stop with seed oils. But, but 120 years ago, 130 years ago, all Americans ate were animal fats and the rates of cardiovascular disease were a fraction of what they are today. So anyone who wants to argue that apob going up or animal fats are the cause of cardiovascular disease, you got a really hard argument to make because there's a, there's a natural experiment of many millions of Americans from 1900 or 1875 showing very low rates of cardiovascular disease. All we ate was very, very low animal fat. All we ate. Then Something happened in 1950 with anthropology keys, the Seven Country Study. Eisenhower had his heart attack. His cardiologist was Paul Dudley White. And the American Heart association got a 1.7 million dollar donation, the equivalent to $20 million today from Procter and Gamble, who made Crisco.

Wow.

And this is. And then the American Heart association begins talking about how saturated fats are bad, polyunsaturated fats are good. And there are literally advertisements from the 1960s talking about how you should polyunsaturate your family. Yes. Mazola corn oil.

And, and that's when we got margarine. And, and we got all of these like industrial processed.

I forget, I forget the name of the housewife they had in the ad. It's tonight, Maggie polyunsaturated her whole family with Mazola corn oil. You can find them.

Oh, wow.

And you know, we can look at.

There'S still, there's still a, you know, know some people that are of that conventional wisdom that fat makes you fat. I mean, I, I have female clients that won't Even wouldn't touch a ribeye, wouldn't eat an avocado, would never touch a walnut or coconut oil or olive oil or, or grass fed butter or ghee or tallow. Because they believe that fat makes you fat. And they're, and they're very heavy, right? We know sugar makes you fat, but.

Well, sugar probably short circuits our satiety mechanisms. Sugar probably leads to overgrowth of bacteria in the gut, which leads to lipid polysaccharide.

Insulin resistance too, is all, you know, core component to obesity.

It's a huge component of obesity. And I think if you look at it, insulin resistance is probably coming from long term overconsumption of linoleic acid at a cellular level. And it's, it's chronic toxicity, right? Because in the short term, if you look in the short term, seed oils don't create insulin resistance. They sometimes even make you more insulin sensitive. But I think it's so hard to do a long term study on seed oils and insulin sensitivity. But if you look at the mitochondria of people who have insulin resistance, they're not doing oxidative phosphorylation, they're not doing oxidative glycolysis. Well, they're not moving nutrients through the cellular energy pathways. And this can all be connected with changes to the mitochondrial membrane, disruption of the electron transport chain, leakiness of the proton gradient across the inner and mitochondrial matrix spaces. So there's a lot of really interesting hypotheses. It's impossible to do randomized controlled trials about this, or they've already been done, like Minnesota coronary trial. But the mechanistic ideas here are really interesting. That accumulation of linoleic acid and probably other polyunsaturated fats in your membranes leads to breakdown of our energy systems. And this is where insulin resistance begins. It's one of the pathways.

What do you really see as some of the challenges in the medical community and why would it not be adopted as more mainstream? I mean, clearly you make an amazing argument. I actually agree with your argument. But I mean, how is it that physicians today, conventionally educated physicians today are not ascribing to dietary changes, lifestyle changes, has major impacts on, on chronic disease. I mean, I think if your eyes are open, you're looking at this. We also talked about the this on the podcast too. And you're like, look at the spending, look at the rise in chronic disease. Look at the mortality rates. Mortality, by the way, in the United States for the first time in 110 years is going backwards. And I was mortality expert for decades. So I think between the 2018 variable basic table and the 2022 variable basic table, first time we're actually seeing life expectancy go backwards, which doesn't make sense given the amount of technological advances and in science, things we have to do to keep. Keep people alive. But what is it about the adoption? You know, one of my opinions is if we don't fix the food supply, we will never fix chronic disease. 100 and. And, you know, but what is your opinion on that? I mean, what is, what is keeping the medical community from.

Yeah, there's a maxim that I heard. Well, you look who this is, because I want to get the name out there so people can find this maxim. It's that the amount of effort required to undo is 10 times required. Is 10 times greater than the amount effort required to create it. Right. Do you hear that? The amount of effort required to undo is 10 times greater than the amount of effort required to create it.

Wow.

What we learn first as humans stays in our brain. Right. It's hard to undo what your mom told you about broccoli, right?

Yeah.

Even if. Even if you get a lot of gut pain. Even if you get a lot of gut pain. Right. And I'm not saying your mom's and I use the term all the time and people say I'm. So whatever. It's all fair game, right? Yeah, all is fair and love and war. But it, you know, the problem is that. What's the name of the guy? Brandolini's law. Yeah, Brandolini's Law.

Brandolini's law.

Good old.

Does actually say.

No, I think it does. Does it actually say in there? It does, yes.

Did he do a randomized clinical trial?

Yeah. This is. This is a meta analysis showing that it's 10.2 times harder. Right. But the idea is this. You come into medical school as a bright eyed, intelligent, enthusiastic medical student, and you are taught things. And it is 10 times harder to undo all that teaching that medical students have all now been indoctrinated, propagandized. We're told in medical school on the first day, half of what you learn is wrong. Half of what you learn is wrong. And when a doctor speaks out about it, you get pilloried. Right. You're told half of what you learn is wrong. And then when a doctor says, I'm questioning the medical system, the narco system will absolutely try and destroy you, discredit you. You're a charlatan, you're a quack, whatever.

Right.

It's the same thing. So, so half of what we learned in medical school is wrong. The trick is just which half right. And it's really hard for us to change our mind as humans. And a lot of physicians. Humans are also tribal. We look at other physicians and we say this is what we believe. We believe that statins are good for cardiovascular disease. I believe statins have a place. I don't think they're, I think they're over prescribed and underappreciated in terms of their side effects. But we believe the statins are good. We believe that saturated fat is causing heart disease. We believe that red meat is bad for you. We believe that, you know, your lower, your AP will be the better. This is what we believe. This is our tribe. And we sing and we sing and chant over a fire sponsored by Fizer, you know, about, about, about how good we are as physicians. And like I said earlier, I believe almost all physicians are intelligent and well intentioned. We're just brainwashed and it's really hard to unbrainwash people, man. It's no, it, it 10.2 times harder to unbrainwash someone.

Yeah. So, so then what are the, what are the basics? I mean somebody. Because you know, again, my, I, I really have tried to steer my audience to the masses, right? I mean we talked about this earlier where you know, instead of ultra woke biohackers talking to ultra woke biohackers and I know you don't like that term, but I'm going to use it and you know, bringing a message down to the masses that here's what you, here's what you've learned. That's wrong. It's wrong. You know, I've, I've actually started doing this thing I call lateral shifts where I take, I go into anybody's cabinet and I, I take whatever it is that they like to eat and I say, okay, I'm not going to add a dime to your budget. I'm going to not change the flavor profile. I'm just going to massively shift the nutritional profile and show you how you can go from like this Dan and yogurt with fruit on the bottom and high fructose corn syrup to, you know, a whole fat Greek yogurt with a fistful of berries and some natural honey and still you'll actually be more satiated, have a better nutritional profile and you actually won't miss the taste of that. And so, you know, talk a little bit about this starting point for someone because it seems, it seems extreme for me. To go? Do I have to go just all meet all the time right out of the gate or like what are some of these steps I can take, you know, to get going?

I think I love the idea of lateral shifts. I think it's just the idea of better than.

Yeah.

Wherever you are now, do better than tomorrow.

Yeah. You said something earlier, progression versus perfection.

Don't like perfect be the enemy.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Yeah.

Yeah. So in other words, don't not, don't do nothing because you can't be perfect.

Exactly.

Right. And, and I, and I take the opposite coin and side of the coin that you know, a lot of what you espouse. What I espouse is not fear mongering, it's actually clearing the air.

Knowledge is power.

Yeah. It's not just power, but it's also making things easier. Do you know how easy it is to eat like that? I mean, you know, it's how much easier it is to navigate a restaurant. How much easier it is to navigate a grocery store. How much easier is to navigate, you know, food choices when you're, when you're not in your own home and cooking your own food. If, if you know that whole grass fed meats, organ meats, you know, berries, honey, you know that, that there are really nutritious food choices that you can make pretty much available anywhere and you don't have to be like hyper attentive to exhaustively reading every label.

Yeah. So it's understanding that it's just do better than what you're doing now. And like you said, there's a shift between I think first step, the smallest amount of ultra processed foods you can eat. Right. Less things that have had all the information that we would have always associated with them historically evolutionarily stripped away. Less chips, less seed oils, less of that stuff and just eat whole plant foods and whole animal foods.

What.

And hopefully some organs.

I'm still, you know, I, I haven't gotten there on the argument. You know, I get, I get my grass fed meats from this place called Parker Pastures in, in Colorado and, and I love them because their, their family farm and they don't vaccinate their cattle. It's all grass fed, grass finished. But she does these organ blends where she takes the grass fed the, the, the hamburger meat and, and mixes it with organ meats and it's delicious. Right straight to the organ meats is still like the liver's still, still a little tough for me.

It's probably always going to be that way. I mean, when I first started eating liver, I was in medical school and I would literally gag. Yeah, I would just. I would gag.

I remember such an acquired taste, man.

If you give it to a child when they're eight months or a year old and they haven't had years and years of Cocoa Pebbles and these other flavors, they're going to be fine with it.

Yeah.

But my niece and nephew are 4 and 6. You know, my mom is 73, my dad is 73. And so I realized, I mean, I want people to eat fresh organs, but this, this, this like Gap here was why I built my first company. So hardened soil makes the desiccated organ supplements. I brought you some with testicle, by the way.

Let's fire it up. Yeah, no, actually, I'm not gonna eat a testicle on my podcasticle. Oh, capsule testicle.

Okay, you can take it with you.

Yeah. Because I seen people on Instagram like, I'm like, I'm not quite there yet.

No, I'll give it to you after the podcast. I got, I got a bottle of, like, I don't want to bomb it, testicle capsules. But what's so interesting is that, you know, my.

She has some sticks too, that I want.

I do have some sticks. I'm going to get you this too. Yeah, yeah. But the, you know, my, my. Here, I'll give you. Fire that up. My, My sister. So my niece and nephew are 4 and 6 and they won't eat liver, but you can take the capsule and empty it into their smoothie and they never know.

Right?

Right. How cool is that?

Perfect.

My mom takes the beef organ supplement from Hard and Soil all the time. And this is another thing that I'm super proud of. So you got to try one of these beef sticks. So I just. This is the second company that I've built, and it's really humbling to build these companies because it's just really cool to think about doing things in the world that help make people's lives better.

Yeah.

I really only I want people to eat whole foods and I want people to eat fresh food. And so I want to make the highest quality stuff. And this is what come. This is sort of the, the agency that comes with the work that I've done in the world is I can build this. I could never have built this, you know, a few years ago, but how cool is this to be able to build this? So this is a grass fed, grass finished meat stick. The first of its kind in the world.

Really?

Yeah. With organs in It. So this contains liver and heart in the beef stick.

Okay.

I went to Australia to see the farms that we source from. These are the most beautiful farms I've ever seen in my whole life.

Really? In Australia.

Green pastures right on the ocean. It's like literally million dollar real estate. And it's cows grazing on grass.

Oh, dude, that's freaking awesome.

You guys want to try?

Yeah.

Give it to these guys.

I'm not kidding. Like, I'm not just saying that because I'm like, I'm not gonna sit here with Paul Saldino, be like, that's awful. No, it's freaking good.

It's grass fed beef, grass fed liver, grass fed heart vinegar.

I think, I think this mix is so much better because the liver has, I call it a gamey taste or whatever. Yeah, pretty intense.

What do you think? Isn't that good? And it's important because a lot of, a lot of women fear this stuff too. And like most of us have a.

Very diverse difficult time meeting our protein needs. And certain protein sources like whey protein and others can be as little as 20% absorbable. This is 99 absorbable and it has all of the essential amino acids that the body needs to build lean muscle, to recover, to improve our exercise performance, and most importantly to repair after we have intense exercise. So this is called perfect amino by Body Health. It's, it's like I said, 99 absorbable. It only has two calories. Eventually the caloric intake has virtually no caloric intake. It will not break a fast. It tastes amazing. You mix it in water. I take this literally every single morning. If you're working out in a fasted state, you have to take a full spectrum amino acid prior to your workout to preserve your lean muscle and make sure that you're recovering properly. And again, it will not break your fast. So the caloric impact is virtually zero. You get all of the full spectrum amino acids. It tastes wonderful. I use it every single day. You can go to bodyhealth.com forward/ultimate. That's bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate. And look for the perfect aminos. They actually come in capsules if you're on the go or it becomes in several flavors that they make in a powder, which I love. It's flavored with natural means of flavoring. So there's no artificial sweeteners in here. So this is one of my absolute favorite products. Give it a try. If you're working out at all, you need a full spectrum amino acid. Go to bodyhealth.com forward/ultimate. That's bodyhealth.com forward slash ultimate. I love their lab tested products. You can actually see the absorption rate for all of their products. They've got great electrolyte protein combinations. My favorite is the Perfect Aminos. Body health.com ultimate and now back to the ultimate human podcast.

There's like a voice off camera right now.

This is different than chomps. So this is air dried. I will talk about this just for a second. But chomps, we don't have to name any of their brands. They're cooked, right? They're cooked. And when they cook something, they have to put lactic acid and sodium nitrate or sodium nitrate or celery powder, which is just a stand in for the same things in it. These are five days air dried at 78 degrees Fahrenheit. They never get heated above 78. They're in, they're in a cooler for five days getting air dry.

How do you find these people?

I built this. Oh, I built this.

You found the farm and then you built the process.

Yes.

Wow.

Yes.

Can I invest?

Yeah, maybe. I think you probably.

Oh, no, it's. It's actually awful.

No, but it's so cool to, to build things like this. And we were talking off camera before the podcast. Like doing what we do is a blessing and a curse because it means that I can't make products because my fans will keep me honest. Right, Right. Like hardened soil will never make something in a plastic bottle. You know, we'll never use garbage ingredients. We'll never use garbage ingredients in this. I never wanted to put celery powder or lactic acid in these. And the way that it comes out when it's air dried is so much better than when it's cooked. Now having said that, better than can also be a grass fed beef stick in a grocery store that's cooked. That can be way better than.

Right.

A slim gym. Right, Right. But what's exciting for me is to give people opportunities to, to have something that's like the quality that I really want, that I'm proud giving to my sister and my family and my niece and nephew. And my, my niece and nephew go crazy for beef sticks.

They do.

Yeah. Like young kids, all they do is snack. I didn't know. I don't have kids. But like all these, they eat all the time. So it's cool to create things in the world that make people's lives easier. I agree. And also have this message behind them. And it's been a, it's been an incredible Journey.

Because I've been on a journey to build a chemical free living brand. And you know, eventually it's got to be hard humans. It's very hard for cleaning products, for toothpaste, for dishwasher detergents and, you know, soaps and all kinds of things. Because again, when you go back to just micro poisoning ourselves.

Yeah.

To death. The cumulative dose toxicity. So. So where is Paul Saladino, the. The evolving carnivore. MD where is all of this headache headed to? You know, products like these that are to help feed the masses? I have actually happened to agree that if we don't fix the food supply, we'll never fix chronic disease.

Yeah.

Is that where your passion projects are now?

No.

Aside from surfing.

Yeah. Surfing is a huge passion of mine. These are just side projects, I think that I feel most compelled to like, I mean, this will sound cheesy. Just fight the good fight. You know, there's a. And I don't know that it's necessarily a fight. It's just. There's a lot of discordant voices in the health space and it's confusing for people. And I think that a lot of these people are well intentioned and smart. I just think it's important to try and have respectful discussions on different views.

Respectful is the main thing.

Yeah. Respectful discussions on differing views. And I want to try and create ideas and content for people that helps them navigate because I imagine people are listening to this going, this is different than what I've heard.

Right.

They've heard somebody else on a podcast say, worry, don't worry about. Or like, you should be considered raw food vegan. Yeah. Be a raw food vegan. Or be worried about blood glucose spikes or honey is horrible, or fruit is horrible or vegetables are great for you. And I don't think vegetables are horrible. But like I said, there's a time and a place and maybe some people are different than others. And so I think that mostly what I'm excited about now is just trying to create content in the most. In the most, you know, sovereign and the most consistent way that I feel good about, you know, in my heart. That's like putting ideas in the world that help people navigate this confusing landscape.

Yeah.

You know, in the most truthful way to myself. Like, because I just think that I'm a doctor. You know, I spent decades doing this. I have a doctoral degree and it's still confusing for me. It's.

Right.

It takes time to read 10 different, different randomized controlled trials on seed oils and realize, hey, they're using trans fat, they're using, you know, a hydrogenated fat in the control group. These are not valid studies.

Right.

How is anyone going to make sense of this stuff?

Yeah, no, it's very, very hard. And then you got to look at the, you know, the, just disclaimers and, and you know, the conflicts of intersection. Sometimes you see that actually the company that's actually putting out a certain drug is actually touting the drug's efficacy. And, you know, well, it's hard for me to, to really trust that. And you don't see the whole data. You only see the published data.

You know, the 20. I think it's 19 of the 20 people on the USDA guidelines for nutrition in the United States from 20 to 20 to 202020 to 2025 have conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies, food industry, ultra processed food. 95 of people who are on the committee that makes our food guidelines in the United States have conflicts of interest. 95. And it's going to be the same for the 2025-2030 guidelines. And the guy who's one of the chairs for the 2025-2030 guidelines for food in the United States, which a lot of people listening to this podcast don't care about. But it's what shapes food lunches. It's what shapes school lunches. Yeah, yeah. And it's what shapes policy, and it's what shapes all sorts of things. The guy who's one of the chairs for that is the same guy who authored the Food Compass study that told us frosted mini wheats were healthier than beef and eggs. It's the same guy who wrote a meta analysis on seed oils saying they're benign and included all of the studies that are confounded by this trans fat in the control group. And it's the same guy who also receives funding from Bungee, a seed oil company.

Wow.

And also I believe ilsi, which is one of the major sort of conglomerates of ultra processed food. So this, this guy's name is Darius Mazafari and he's a Tufts. And I can say that because I'm not afraid of getting sued.

Right.

Because it's all true what I just said.

Right.

It's kind of like, you know, it's not slander if it's true.

Right. It's not a conspiracy theory if you're just following the facts.

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's all true. And I mean, I've talked to people who have spoken with him. I've never spoken with him. I'D love for him on my podcast. Come on, let's go, bro.

What's his name?

Darius Mozbarian.

Darius Mozafarian. You're invited to.

You're being paid and. But it's just. Yeah, it's crazy stuff. I've spoken to people who have spoken to him. You know, Cali Means is a friend of mine. He used to work in the sort of processed food industry. He was a. He was a. A sort of a policymaker or a, an advocate at Coca Cola. So he was in the boardrooms of Coca Cola when they were planning how do we get in front of this idea and make people think that Africa's corn syrup is fine. He was part of the enemy, you know, he was like on the, the dark side. And he came over the Rebel Lions.

Right.

But he, you know, when he was talking about these ideas with Darius and suggesting publicly that there's perhaps a conflict of interest here, Kelly told me that this guy calls him on the phone and says, how can you do this? You know, this is how we make. This is how we fun studies. And he was literally like yelling at him on the phone.

Wow.

So it's crazy. And I'm not looking to be disrespectful. I'm just saying truth is truth.

Yep.

And it's, it's not slander if it's true.

No, no, it's not slander. It's true. This is, this is so awesome, man. I love helping, you know, people like yourself get the message out. I'm gonna throw links to some of your, your products into the show notes. Where can people find you? Most of my audience is probably familiar with you, but for those that are not, where can they find you? How do they find out more about you and. And get more guidance from your books and teachings, what have you?

Paul Saladino, M.D. on all the socials. Find me everywhere. Yeah, I've got a podcast. Got. I'm on all the socials.

Great podcast too.

That's where you find me.

So, Paul, I ask every guest the same question at the end of the podcast and there's no right or wrong answer to this. Just a thought provoking question. What does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

I think it's basically living the birthright that we all have to be vital. Right. So I think that our, our resting state, our. The state of lowest entropy, which is thermodynamically whatever, but the state that we should fall back to, the state that we have a birthright to, is a happy Healthy, vital human that can do what they want. They can play with their grandkids or their kids. Like, we have this. I love this. This word birthright. You know, we have a birthright to be way healthier and way more capable than we are told by society. You go to a Western medical doctor with any ailment, they say it's bad family history. You can't fix it. Most of the time they'll say, here's a pill. But I think that being an ultimate human is just going back to what is ours as our birthright. This. This idea that as humans, we can be incredibly vital and just radical humans at our. At our natural state, at our baseline state, at our resting, you know, just at our resting state, we are incredibly, you know, vital humans. And. And that is when. That's what happens when we align the way that we're living with the way that we've lived for hundreds of thousands of years as humans.

I love it. It's not feeling amazing. It's just feeling normal.

Yeah. And normal is amazing by today's standards.

Exactly. Yes. Awesome, man. Well, thanks for coming on today. This was one of the easiest conversations I've had in a very long time, man.

So much fun.

Appreciate you, too. Man's handshake. I know.

I'm, like, reaching around the microphone.

That's just science.