#62 - Dr. Paul Saladino: Secrets to Peak Performance in Challenging Conventional Diet

Happy Wednesday. It is June 24th, 2020. This is Jorge Cruise and welcome to the Jorge Cruise Show. This is the show for peak performance. And when I say peak performance, I mean where you can work better, you have more energy, uh, you can enjoy your day. And my life's work to help people get this peak performance has been to help them lower their waist circumference, otherwise known as belly fat. And I'll tell you, when you can lower your belly fat, you change everything. You change not just your energy, how good you feel, but you also change your confidence. And on today's show, I am thrilled that we have a special guest. His name is Dr. Paul Saladino. It's a name you're gonna have to get familiar with. I think he is one of the smartest doctors I've ever met. He was recommended to me, his book actually was recommended to me by my nutrition mentor and health for 17 years, Mark Sisson. Mark is a number one New York Times bestselling author, and he's also the creator of Primal Kitchen. And I can tell you, Mark, at 67, is in phenomenal health. And he wrote the foreword to Dr. Paul Saladino's book that just came out recently called The Carnivore Code. Uh, and Mark said, you know, Jorge, get this book. It's something I'm reading, and I'm eating more, uh, grass-fed beef. I'm enjoying more protein, and it's something you need to read if you are interested in doing that kind of a diet, because a lot of my clients do eat protein. I mean, chicken, fish, all that. But they also know plant-based is something that a lot of people are talking about these days. One of my dearest friends is Marko Borrago. He's the author of the 22-Day Nutrition Plan. It's a plan that Beyoncé uses, and he wrote a book more recently called The Green Print, and it's all about plant-based nutrition. So believe me, I know that A lot of people eat plants. Hey, it's something I've written in all my books, you know, but today's conversation may shift that for some of us. You may think of plants in a different way, and you may think of them in a more ancestral way in the sense that what are plants, and can plants be toxic to us, certain plants, and you'll learn which plants are okay to eat, which ones you should avoid, and you also learn about meat, you know, and if that's something that you've been concerned about, whether you have read that it's high in cholesterol or it can cause cancer, or you may How do I not go to the bathroom? You're going to hear all those answers to those questions on today's show. And it may shift your thinking. Something I've done now for 2 months using the principles of this book because of Mark Sisson. And I can tell you, I in the last 8 weeks have gotten in the best shape of my life. And I'm getting closer to 50 than ever. And it's getting easier, which is crazy. So I'm super thrilled for today's show. We'll start in just a minute. We're brought to you by my website, JorgeCruise.com. We're doing our 2020 survey, and I'd love to invite you to to do that because as my thank you, you get an online course to help you cure belly fat using interval training. As you guys know, I am known as the 8 Minute Trainer, uh, to many people, a lot of the busiest celebrities in Hollywood. And this method has been updated with intervals. Intervals are what I use to burn belly fat. It's effective no matter what diet you're on, and you can do it in just minutes. And you get all that for free in July if you fill out the survey All you have to do is head on over to my website, JorgeCruise.com. That's J-O-R-G-E-C-R-U-I-S-E.com. And it's the top of the page.

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Takes a few minutes and then I'll have your information. I'll email this to you in early July, right after the Fourth of July. And you'll love it. And we're also doing a challenge, a 19-day challenge starting July 6th. So make a note of that. We're also brought to you by Primal Kitchen. Primal Kitchen is the company that I use, to get my avocado oil. And you're gonna learn about avocado oil on today's show. It's a neutral oil that is great to use in place of all the vegetable oils that are out there, like corn oil, all these really toxic inflammatory oils. And avocado oil is incredible. It's a little more money, but it is so well worth it. It's anti-inflammatory, and they're giving us a free Chipotle Lemon Mayo made with avocado oil. All you have to do is go to primalkitchen.com/jorgecruise. That's primalkitchen.com/jorgecruise. And finally, we're brought to you by Joovv. Joovv is, I believe, one of the top companies that creates red light therapy. If you want to improve skin texture, improve collagen production, um, they have this red light that I use every morning. I get up early at 4:30. First thing I do is turn it on. It also makes the room feel alive. It's like a sunrise or sunset. It's that magic light, and you owe it to yourself to check it out. Their website is unique, so I'll spell it. It's joovv.com. And if you go to joovv.com/jorge, J-O-R-G-E, you'll get a free gift with that promo code Jorge, J-O-R-G-E, when you get any one of their lights. And I use it— I wish I had it in every room, but I use it at my desk every day when I stand. I have a standing desk and I me, have that shine on me. So really great stuff. So with that said, if you are ready to cure belly fat with a diet plan that's provocative and one that I've been testing for 2 months, I am excited to share with you today's show. It's with Dr. Paul Saladino. So let's get started right now. It's a fact, 91% of us have a dangerous amount of belly fat, and it isn't just unsightly. When you have too much belly fat, you're more likely to suffer from aches and pains, low energy, memory loss, and poor sleep, which prevents you from performing your best at work, spending true quality time with your loved ones, and simply enjoying life. The good news is that you can cure belly fat and immediately start to work better, reduce pain, improve memory, and sleep better using simple shortcuts I've gathered. Hi, my name is Jorge Cruise, and I'm known as the 8-Minute Life Strategist to the world's busiest celebrities. I've been a fitness, nutrition, and high-performance living strategist for over 25 years, and you may have seen my work with Oprah Winfrey, Khloé Kardashian, President Clinton, Tyra Banks, Dr. Oz, Tony Robbins, or even Steve Harvey. My passion to find the best science-backed fitness shortcuts has allowed me to write over 30 books and become a multiple New York Times bestselling author with over 9 million books in print. And I know I can help you too. Welcome to the Jorge Cruise Show.

Hey everyone, welcome to the show. I have a special guest with me today. As you guys know, one of my mentors in health has been for 17 years Mark Sisson. And Mark was just on the show not too long ago. And one of the things he shared with me maybe 2 months ago was a book that he endorsed. This is the book called The Carnivore Code. He wrote the, uh, the foreword. There's Mark's name. And he said, Jorge, get it. And so I read it, it blew my mind. And so on today's show, I am thrilled we have the author of the book, Dr. Paul Saladino. Please say hi to everyone, Dr. Paul.

Thanks so much for having me on, my friend. It's good to be here.

Oh, I'm honored to have you on here. Mark speaks nothing but the best of you. He truly says that you're on to the next, uh, the next generation of nutrition. And I feel like You know, it's— he doesn't say that that often. I know Mark. You know Mark, right?

That's such— I mean, I'm so humbled and honored that he would speak so highly of me, and it was so great that he wrote the foreword to my book. And it's just so— I'm so grateful to get to do this work and to get to share with people this idea that can hopefully bring them a degree of health that they didn't know was possible.

Well, and what I love about you, you're very much like how I'm trying to be. And obviously, you know, I'm the kind of guy who wrote books many years ago that had people like Tony Robbins endorse me, and Tony's all about taking action. And you know, Mark is pretty much a man who lives his words. His body, he's a body of evidence and proof. You know, he's the man who's 67 and running around with his shirt off, showing off how good 67 can look. And when he was on the podcast last, he really said he wants to redefine how 70 looks for men. You know, and women, because his wife is gorgeous too. And you're kind of one of those guys. I want— not to brag— and then I want to ask you how you got into all this, because I feel like there aren't that many true MDs, and you are truly an MD. As much as I respect, uh, people who are chiropractors or people who have other types of, you know, they use the word MD, I mean, you know, and— but you truly are a doctor of, uh, of medicine, a true doctor. And then this is the, uh, the shocking— this is your, your site. Uh, I think this is phenomenal. I mean, tell us how you got to become a true MD, and you are confirmed that, so everyone knows you are an MD.

Yeah, yeah, I'm board certified and as a physician nutrition specialist and in psychiatry. Went to medical school at the University of Arizona. I got my MD there. I did residency at the University of Washington. But the story starts much earlier than that. You know, I grew up with a father who was a physician. And, you know, I was always kind of curious with a father who's a physician and a mother who's a nurse, what causes illness? I think that I'm an engineer at heart or at mind. I'm interested in the root cause of an illness. And so I really liked biology and chemistry in college. And I thought that I was going to go to medical school. I took about 6 years off after college and did a lot of ski bumming and traveling. I traveled through Europe. I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. And then eventually the chemistry and biology side of my brain turned back on and said, okay. And because of what I'd seen my father go through as an internist, I actually went to PA school and I was a physician assistant in cardiology for 4 years.

Oh, wow.

What I saw as a PA in cardiology spurred me to go back to medical school because I was so saddened and disappointed by the mainstream medical paradigm I saw. It wasn't that the doctors I worked with were not super intelligent or very well-meaning. It was that the whole system was broken and the paradigm was wrong because the paradigm was focused on pharmaceutical treatment of symptoms. We say pharmaceutical-based, symptom-focused. We're just not trained as mainstream physicians now to look for the root cause of an illness. But that's always been something I'm fascinated by, and that's what engineers do. But medicine has kind of gotten away from that engineering mindset. So I went back to medical school and throughout the second round of my medical training, medical school 4 years, residency for 4 years, I was just obsessed with thinking about where is the root cause of chronic disease. I am particularly interested in diabetes and obesity and autoimmune disease, and I think they are all connected. And I wanted to think what is causing this?. And I knew from the beginning it starts with food. Of course, there are many things that cause this stress, lack of sleep, toxins. But the biggest lever, in my opinion and in my experience clinically, professionally, personally, is food. And so the last 15 to 16 years, I've just been thinking, what food is optimal for humans? And everyone— I think a lot of people ask this question, and you've asked this question.

Biggest question I've gotten over my career, and I feel like Not to interrupt you, but to pause just for 2 seconds is I feel like if I hear you right, you grew up and obviously in a family of medicine, right? Right. And your family studied traditional medicine, both your mom and dad. You started it, took a break, and then some aha moment hit you. What was it that inspired you to go back to school? And obviously you finished that. And now as an author of The Carnivore Code, obviously you're in a different realm now. You have your own podcast, which I want to— at the end of the show, we'll tell everyone the link and all that. We'll tell them about the second edition of the new book coming out. And then I've got some questions because I've been following this now for probably 2 months. I've been modifying it. So, and I've been asking my clients what their questions are because I used to be scared of eating too much meat, you know, mainly because I wanted to poop and I was like, oh, you know, so Mark said all that straight. He said you're the guy that cleared up that concern in his mind as well. But connect the dots to that, to that moment where you said, I'm going back. And then, and then take us to where you are today and then we'll get into the book. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think I said, I think it was if I had to pick one moment, it was just sitting in a room with a patient as a physician assistant in cardiology who was doing everything right. They were taking all the medicines we prescribed. They were eating a low-fat diet and avoiding red meat. And they still had a heart attack and they still had a heart attack. Right. And you think, the system is wrong. We're not treating the root cause. What we're recommending to people with diet is wrong. And what we're recommending to people with medications doesn't fix the root cause and has a lot of bad side effects. And I thought, you know what, I am not going to be satisfied personally unless I go back to medical school and, and do my own digging into what's going on here. And, and I, on the flip side, as a PA, I worked for 4 years as a physician assistant in cardiology I'd also seen some of the most profound health improvements happen when people made dietary changes and lifestyle changes. It wasn't like I was giving someone a statin or a blood pressure medicine and they come in a month or two later and they're 30 pounds lighter. That never happens. What happens is somehow someone gets a spark, a light, and they change their life. They change the way they eat. They change the way they change the way they work, and then they get better. And I think, why aren't we telling people this? This is clearly the answer. And how do we do it? And then personally, you know, I was kind of going through my own journey. I had eczema, I had my own autoimmune diseases, I had eczema and asthma, which exist on this, this sort of continuum of—

I had that as a kid. Did you have it as a younger kid too? I did.

Yeah, I did.

Drink too much dairy, I think. Casein, the protein.

Absolutely.

What we can talk about all that, because I feel like on today's show you're really going to help us. I mean, Mark has been on your behalf kind of touting your, your method. But I'm so happy you're here because I think the biggest question people want to know from your studies and from your book is what the heck to eat. But before we do that, finish the story, because you went from going to school, uh, working with people obviously, and then how did you, how did you decide to do what you're doing now? Because are you currently seeing people, or right now is it just pretty much your show and books and, and speaking?

I juggle a lot right now. So I'm, I'm writing, I'm writing another book. I'm writing a cookbook. You know, the second edition of The Carnivore Code is coming out in August. I'm writing a cookbook. I have a podcast. I see clients privately. But a lot of what I do now is writing and media and talking on things like this because I realized it's so powerful. So I think that what brought it home for me was just how powerful diet was in my own life and how I was able to really affect my own eczema and asthma. I never had a weight problem, but my autoimmune disease was very clearly affected by the food I ate. And so that was really the story of how I personally arrived at something like an animal-based diet, which we'll get into. And what's so crazy and what's so interesting about this to me and why I think this is so important in June of 2020 is that if you go online to Google or to mainstream media, most of what you see will be go plant-based, And I think that's very wrong, and I think it's more than wrong. I think it's hurting people. And I think that by going plant-based, we are forsaking the foods that are the most healthy for humans. And that's what we'll get into later. And that's what I wrote the book about, sort of a defense of well-raised animal foods. If I say red meat, that's like the R word. That's like a bad word.

It's like, he said, you know, I was on— I told Mark the story of I was on with Travis Sork in LA at the Doctors show, and they don't have a history with them. Documentary about the plant-based nutrition to save the world. Do you know the documentary on Netflix that everyone talks about?

Yeah, yeah.

And so, they had me there to kind of balance the argument out that not all meat is good, and we will qualify that all meat is not the same. Obviously, we don't want antibiotics, we don't want hormones, we want certain types of meat. And, but, you know, your work is in the lines with, you know, one of my dear friends is Kelly Clarkson, and she changed her life recently using Dr. Gundry.

How do you say his name? Dr. Stephen Gundry, yeah.

So, your work is in the vein of this. Obviously, it is a little more, I would say, pivotal. I really do feel that, and you are not the only person saying that there is a paradox with going plant-based and, you know, and in essence that certain plants are to be avoided. I know you have a chart that we are going to talk about that shows from levels of low toxicity to high. And so I feel like, should we jump into the what to eat part, or should we— because I know you also do intermittent fasting, and, you know, half of my clients do this. And do you do that as well?

Yeah, I do do that as well. I think that that's, that's something to kind of wrap it all up in a bow. We can definitely talk about what to eat. I've actually been on Stephen Gundry's podcast as well. We had a little friendly debate if people want to hear that, because, you know, Stephen is a friend of mine. He, he did a great job in showing us that plants have these toxins called lectins, and we can get into sort of plant toxins. Um, and but, but Steven is of the opinion that red meat is not good for humans, and so that's something that he and I disagree on very strongly. So my message is pretty different. But in terms of the messaging in The Carnivore Code, in my book, what I really want people to know and what I really am showing you very strongly in this book— there's over 600 references I tried to write it in a way that everyone could read, but that had so much science that no one could deny it, or at least say that it wasn't well-referenced. But what I'm doing in the book is showing you two things. The first is that red meat has been incorrectly vilified, incorrectly criminalized for the last six decades. 60 years, we've been told that saturated fat and red meat are bad for us. And we can get into more detail there, and I'm sure we will in this, in this podcast. Of course, that is completely wrong, and there is good science to prove it. In fact, check this out, Jorge. Just this week, just this week, in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, there was a paper published, okay, that— and this is the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, and I can show you this paper on a screen share.

Yeah, put it on screen, please.

There's a paper published just this week saying that saturated fat has been incorrectly vilified. And these are a bunch of cardiologists saying, we don't know why everyone says this is so bad, because it's really— the weight of the evidence is that this is not bad for humans.

Wow, there it is.

So yeah, and we'll share the link. If you send me the link, we'll share it. But yeah, read, read the top there. What's it say?

Yeah, so basically this is, um, this is the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. This is no small journal in cardiology. The title is Saturated Fats and Health: A Reassessment and Proposal for Food-Based Recommendations. And if you read the abstract down here, I— you'll have to pardon me, I'll just read it for— so that all the people, um, listening to this will hear it. The recommendation to limit dietary saturated fatty acids persisted despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Most recent meta-analyses, which is a collection of studies, and randomized trials, which is an interventional trial, and observational studies, which is like epidemiology, found no beneficial effects of reducing saturated fat intake on cardiovascular disease and total mortality, and instead found protective effects against stroke. Right, this is your cardiologists, right? Uh, it's crazy.

They don't say this too often. This is a big pivotal study.

And how, and how many news articles have you seen about that, right? So I'll read the last sentence of the abstract here. Whole fat dairy, and we can talk about how dairy might be triggering for some people immunologically. Yeah, whole fat dairy, unprocessed meat, eggs, dark chocolate are saturated fatty acid rich foods with a complex matrix that are not associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. The totality of evidence does not support further limiting intake of these foods. So this is what's crazy, Jorge Cruise.

That's incredible.

This is the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Saying we've been wrong for the last 60 years. And I talk about all this in my book.

This is not in the news. We're not hearing this on the—

we're not hearing this. It's front page news, you know, but this is the first—

we're gonna get it there. Let's get it there. That should be one of our goals because let's do this, if you don't mind. Let's get into what to eat because I love that you do intermittent fast. You know, most of my clients do a 16-hour fast. I do a 20-hour fast. Do you do something in there in between? Probably.

Yeah. So what I have found, so in terms of how I structure my meals, I think intermittent fasting can be so helpful Um, I will eat 2 meals, a window, a specific window, or— yep. So I eat breakfast and a late lunch. I don't eat dinner. It's, it's 4:40 PM here in Texas. I live in Austin, Texas, and I ate dinner 2 hours ago. There you go. So then I ate breakfast at about 10 o'clock this morning. So that was a really small eating window because I was traveling this morning. Usually I'll eat breakfast around 8:30 and I'll eat dinner slash lunch at 2:30 or 3 PM. I won't eat dinner. That'll give me at least a 16 to 17 hour eating window. I think for most people that is plenty big.

Yeah.

You don't need to go over that. But the key, in my opinion, this gets into a little bit of biochemistry. I think that overnight in that overnight fast, you do want to deplete liver glycogen and put yourself into a state of temporary ketosis. I'm a huge fan of the stuff that Mark has talked about with— I think that carbs are not the enemy and we can get into the nuance around carbohydrates. But that every night we probably should get into ketosis and wake up in the morning when the glycogen, which is stored carbohydrates in your liver, are used up. Your body's going to make some ketones. That is when your body does this autophagy or house cleaning. Yeah, so I like to do that.

We talked about that on the show a lot.

Yes, I like to do that on a cyclic housekeeping.

That happens.

Yeah, I think that should— we should probably do that every night or most nights, which means either having an eating window that's in, you know, later in the day or an eating window earlier in the day. But for most people, a 14 to 16 hour fast between dinner and breakfast is going to accomplish that. There are so many studies that show, at least observationally, epidemiologically, and then corresponding animal studies in mice, that having a window with this autophagy permission timeframe is really beneficial to humans. So I think that it's, it's pretty clear that we we know when to eat as humans. It's— that's easier. What to eat is the tricky part. And that goes back to the first question, which is what are humans supposed to eat? We know when to eat. Don't eat all the time, right? Don't eat all the time. But what do we eat? And this is what the book is about, saying, hey, for 60 years you've been told red meat and saturated fat are bad for you. They're not. They're the best foods on the planet for you for so many reasons. And the second part of the equation which kind of borrows a little bit from Dr. Gundry, but I would say advances his notion, is that plants exist on a spectrum of toxicity. Look, plants are rooted in the ground. If they let every animal just walk up to them and eat them like a free salad bar, there would be no plants and no ecosystems on this earth. All plants on this earth, whether it's kale, broccoli, cauliflower, or the bush outside your, your house, have developed thousands of toxins to dissuade insects, fungus, and animals from eating them. So plants exist on a spectrum of toxicity, and humans have a variable ability to detoxify those plants.

100%.

It's a very real possibility that for some people like myself, plant— including plants, including many plants in the diet, could potentially trigger problems, could trigger leaky gut, could trigger GI issues, gas, bloating, constipation. These are not fun. Or it could trigger skin issues and other autoimmune disease. And I go into all of this in much more detail in my book. So those are the—

I think this is great. So let's, let's talk about what, uh, let's talk about diet then. Let's dive into that because I love that we're so aligned with intermittent fasting, right? Uh, and you know, a lot of my clients, celebrities or people online, or people that buy books from, from what I've done, usually work out in the morning on an empty stomach. I don't know if you do that on occasion. You usually work out before you break your fast or after. Do you, or do you mind?

I do both. It depends on the day. I think I'm interested in chronobiology as well. And sometimes I feel like working out a few hours after I wake, work out, I get to wake up, I get a better workout, but I think they're both good.

Yeah. So, so that's great. So let's talk about this. I think we get the message that we're going to talk about meat. And I think for any meat lovers out there, they're going to be so happy to hear why they don't have to be concerned about that. And I'm sure we'll talk about why we don't have to worry too much about too much fiber, because I know Mark talked about that. About this. A lot of people think if they go on an Atkins type of diet from the '80s that they are going to have that heart issue, but you already addressed that today. So that is solid, brand new science, literally, you know, and I don't think Dr. Atkins was way off, although certain distinctions I think you can clarify that have been better refined. But let's start off with the one thing that I think is in your book that you were just talking about, and I will show here on my iPad, but maybe Well, let's talk and then you can pull it up too on your screen, but I want to make sure we see you. But this is a chart in your book on page— what page is it on? Do you know?

I have to open the book up, to tell you the truth.

Let me check, because I have— I love old school books.

I know, the book is right there.

Let me pull it up, but this is on page— I'm going to give you the page number, but while I dig it up on the page, walk us through, because obviously what you just said about plants and carbohydrates and grains and nuts and legumes and all these things that we think are carbohydrates and then they get refined and all that are critical. Most people overeat that and people know if you go low carb, you get better results. You are saying that we can eat certain possible plants that are less toxic and you have two food pyramids. So, I think we should show both if you don't mind. Can you show us? Which one should we do first? Should we— let's just show the plant toxicity chart. Do you have that one?

Right, right. Yeah, yeah. So, in the book—

I am going to pull up the page for you.

Go ahead.

In The Carnivore Code, I realized that it's not about everyone just eating meat all the time. Like I said, I wanted to get across two points.

Page 216, guys.

216.

All right, there it is.

I wanted to get across two points in the book: red meat is not bad for you, it's been incorrectly vilified. Plants exist on a spectrum of toxicity. If you make good quality red meat the center of your diet and you realize which plants might be more toxic That is 98% of the message that I'm sharing in the book. It's not to say that you have to give up all the plants, but if you have autoimmune issues, if you're struggling to lose weight, if you have fatigue or mood problems or GI problems, gas, bloating, constipation, thinking about which plants you are eating and which plants might be causing you problems is really the key. And this gets into what I call a carnivore-ish type diet. In the book, I get 5 tiers of a carnivore diet. And the first tier is the tier that's going to be most broadly applicable, and it's carnivore-ish. And so this is exactly what you're talking about here, and I'll show this.

So, and you're going to show us the chart. Yeah, so pull this chart up. Now let's start with the foods that we can eat. I'm guessing on the left side, less toxic, right?

Less toxic.

So with the less toxic side, so tell us why non-sweet fruits, squash, and berries are something we can enjoy, right?

Right. So if you think about plants We just think about this, you know, plants are rooted in the ground. I'll come back to the chart in a moment. Plants are rooted in the ground. They don't want to get eaten. And like I said, they've developed toxins. And so the stems, the roots, the leaves, the seeds of plants are going to be the most highly defended. A seed is a plant baby. It's like a little Moses that a plant puts on the River Nile, right? And it's very vulnerable.

It's a great metaphor.

Yeah, yeah. So if you think about it, like a plant seed is the last thing a plant wants to get eaten. So seeds have the most toxins. You know, Dr. Gundry talked about this a little bit. Lectins are highest in the seeds. But when we think about seeds, we don't always realize that seeds are grains, beans, nuts, and legumes. These foods are all very high in both lectins and anti-nutrients that are digestive enzyme inhibitors. So if you have gas, right, super embarrassing.

Yeah.

Cut out, just cut out seeds, which means nuts, seeds, grains, and legumes. I'm going to bet you, you know, 50 cents that your gas will improve just by cutting out seeds. That's the worst part. So I'll go back to the chart.

I want to pause for one second. Take us back because I think people in today's world think obviously plant-based is a big deal. I'm friends with Marco Borrago. He's Beyoncé's trainer. He wrote the Green The Green Print and has gotten Beyoncé on a plant-based diet. And, you know, no disrespect to him because I love him and he's gotten her to lose weight. And a lot of people like Beyoncé, you know, Miss Beyoncé with her bootylicious body. But the thing is, take us back way back. Like, take us back, not 10,000 years. Like, take us back. I mean, Mark says we've been eating healthy animal fats for 2 million years. Take us back a million years and then paint this picture. More about the plants. I'm trying to think, because in today's world, I think most people only see plants either in their garden, outside, like as, as, as decoration in someone's yard, or in the grocery store. But there was a time when plants were not in the grocery store and weren't just decoration and had to literally protect themselves from— I mean, I'm not going back as far back as dinosaurs, but from humans and from other predators. Paint that picture of why a plant is designed to protect itself, because I think we think of plants as harmless and they can't protect themselves, but they can, can't they?

They have been protecting themselves. Animals and plants have been co-evolving for 450 million years.

Say that one more time. How many years?

450 million. I mean, if you look at—

Plants have mechanisms to remind us. Well, dumb it down for everyone. So these plants don't want them to be eaten. Why? Because they want to grow, right? I mean, they want to grow.

They want to reproduce. If you go into— if you think about animals, animals can kick you, bite you, gore you, hit you with their antlers, or run away, or sting you, right? And insects too. What can a plant do? There's a cactus or a rose that has thorns, and some plants, you know, are a little bit spinnier than others, but the majority of plants out there have no defenses that you can see, but there are thousands of chemicals lurking beneath the surface.

Wow. And this has been designed over millennia, really, right?

Hundreds of millions of years. Hundreds of millions of years, animals and plants have been in an arms race. So in the book, I suggest this. This is a thought exercise. Imagine that you and I are going to go to the beach and I'm going to bury you up to your head in the sand, right? Remember this as kids?

Sure.

I'm going to bury you really, really tightly so you can't get out. And you're like, oh, this is fun, but I can't move. And then I say, oh, I'm going to joke around, Jorge. I'm going to paint your face like a soccer ball.. And then all of a sudden this busload of irascible 6-year-olds rolls up from soccer practice and they see you buried up to your head in the sand with your face painted like a soccer ball. How do you feel? You feel vulnerable. Yeah, that's exactly how a plant feels. A plant is stuck in the ground. I mean, hopefully many people listening to this have been camping or backpacking or can look out their window and see all of the plants in their yard. You can walk up to any plant you want. And just start eating it right now. It can't do anything. It can't run away from you. It can do nothing except develop— it's developed these toxins that you don't know about. And so this is a great contradistinction to make for people. The plants you see in the grocery store are nothing like the plants we've seen for the last 2 million years as humans. They're usually hybridized. What's that?

No, no, please, this is incredible. Like, I think I'm having a light bulb go on because you're saying The plants we see in the grocery stores are different. Why? How did—

Well, they've been hybridized and made to look a certain way and colorful. And we see fruit year-round when, in fact, it would have been seasonal and variable by location and latitude and geographic location and altitude. And so, you know, we go in the grocery store and you can eat everything in the grocery store. But if you go outside and go camping— don't do this experiment, but imagine what would happen if you just started eating plants that were growing around you. You would get sick. You ever try to eat a fern? Like, you can maybe— you can cook like the ferns, but they're toxic if you eat too many. You know, sorrel is toxic because of oxalates. Almost 99.9% of plants in nature are frankly toxic and will kill you swiftly. About 0.1% will kill you slowly, or maybe will, you know, are just suitable for survival consumption. So this is the point that I make in the book, but there's one exception to this, and this will bring us back to the plant toxicity spectrum. There's one part of the plant that the plant generally wants you to eat, and that's the fruit, right? So the fruit of the plant is what the plant wants you to eat. The plant doesn't want you to eat the seeds. They don't want you to eat the leaves. They don't want you to eat the stems. They don't want you to eat the root. But, and what is the majority of plant food that we eat today? Spinach, kale, uh, chard. It's all leaves or seeds or roots or stems. All the parts of the plant that don't want to get eaten. That's what we eat, and that's what we're told are the most healthful, most healthy. But if you really look at it, I mean, and I talk about this in the book, there are documented cases of kidney failure, which we call nephropathy, from green smoothies. So there's, there's documented cases in the literature of people making green smoothies that are high in oxalate, which is just one toxin from plants containing vegetables, that develop permanent kidney failure from oxalates. So let's go back to this Let's go back to this plant toxicity spectrum. I'll walk you through it.

Yes, so we have the non-sweet fruits, and I'm— I want to guess you're probably on the same page as I am. We want the non-sweet because the sugar is not good for our health, excessive sugar. And there are certain fruits that are low sugar, like I see an avocado there, right?

Right. And a lot of people don't think of avocado as a fruit, and that's the point that I kind of want to make here for people, is that an avocado is a fruit, a squash is a fruit, a berry is a fruit. Most people would think of a berry as a fruit, but people may not know that squash, specifically winter squash, is probably better from a lectins perspective.

Is that a fruit itself?

Yeah, it's a fruit. Yeah, those are fruits because the fruit is carrying the seeds.

I always thought squash was a vegetable, but obviously I'm learning something here.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you ever— yeah, so you think like non-sweet fruits or like avocado, it's a fruit. A fruit is anything that kind of carries the seed within it, and the plant, again, the plant doesn't want you to eat the seed, but it kind of wants you to eat the fruit that surrounds the seed, and then you swallow the seed whole, and then you go poop somewhere and deposit their seed somewhere else in a pile of rich fertilizer poop. That's the way it works, right?

Right.

And you can see, yes, I've, I've put, um, sweet fruit in the middle here. It's not horrible, but what the, the foods that I would prefer people consume are non-sweet fruits like avocado, squash, berries, Some sweet fruit is probably fine depending how you tolerate it. I put tubers here again just because the roots are probably the least toxic part, but it could still trigger some people.

Remind people what those are. Carrots.

Oh, things like carrots or sweet potatoes. Um, not my favorite, they're in the middle. Um, and then if you move on here, you see nightshades, which people may know about as a common immune trigger.

Um, well, let's start with the top nightshades that we should avoid.

Uh, tomato, potato, eggplant. Goji berries are actually a nightshade, interestingly. A lot of people don't know that, but those are the big ones: tomato, potato, eggplant, those kind of things, and capsicum spices. So things like chilies are nightshades, and those can cause a lot of problems for people digestively. Chili peppers are a nightshade. And then here you can see I put brassica, and brassica are things like kale and collard greens, and these are a big problem.

Brussels sprouts.

Brussels sprouts, yeah. So everything that's healthy but These are plant leaves, and in the book there's a whole chapter about the type of toxins that are found in this family of plants. The type of toxins in kale and spinach and collard greens affect the thyroid negatively. And then here, the most toxic, I have all the seeds, nuts, grains, legumes and seeds, and high oxalate foods, specifically things like spinach, rhubarb, beets, almonds are high oxalate. I have a whole chart in the book that talks about oxalate content of foods. Incredible.

And nuts, we're talking like almonds, cashews, all the things that we've been taught are good fats because they do have fats and protein and low sugar. But because of their design, they're the seed.

They're Moses going down the river.

They can be toxic, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think—

Pardon me.

Yeah, they're incredibly toxic. Yeah, I think that, and I think that people, it will cause cognitive dissonance. And I know that people listening to this may be going, I can't even believe this, he's blowing my mind.

This is a big one to take in. But I will tell you, the results have been shown in science. Your book has documented this. And I feel like with this less toxic section of the spectrum, obviously, you can supplement that with certain things like the, like the I was going to ask you about lettuce, but lettuce is on the list. Where's it at? Where's lettuce?

So lettuce is an interesting one.

I think it's a leaf. I see it on the one that says less toxic, right?

Yeah, I actually moved it.

So where did it go to?

It went to sort of a little more toxic side because I thought, oh, it's a plant. This is one of the revisions that I did between the first edition and the second edition. So you've got the first edition graphic there, but the more I thought about it, I was like, you know, I think lettuce is It's probably the least toxic plant leaf, but I'm still not very happy about it because it can— the problem with lettuce is that it's a leaf, so it really accumulates a lot of the toxins in the environment. So we know that kale can accumulate thallium, which is a heavy metal in the environment. Lettuce is going to accumulate anything that's in the water that's sprayed on it. So the leaves of plants, again, they just, they accumulate too many of these toxins in a bad way. And lettuce is a plant leaf, and indeed it does have defense chemicals too. Too.

But let's just say this for the sake of argument for now to keep it simple for everyone watching and listening. If you're— and if you're not watching, it'll be on YouTube, it'll be on IGTV. But if it's the audio version, guys, basically, I would say we draw the line right before we get to the nightshades, if you know what I mean. And so things that are on— I would say on the OK pyramid, and you have a pyramid to show us.

Yeah, I do. Yeah, I got two pyramids.

And you call this the carnivore ish list?

Carnivore-ish. This is Tier 1.

Show us that because I feel like that is what I have been following now for almost 3 months because of Mark Sisson. I will tell you this. I mean, Paul, I don't know if I can compete with you and Mark, but my stomach here, you know, and I am almost 50. I will show everyone. It is pretty flat, you know?

Right.

This has helped tremendously. As much as I love interval training, it has been pretty solid and I have seen some incredible results with my energy. Keeping up with my teenage sons. I mean, I feel incredible. But show us this pyramid, and then we'll go to the next level, and then we'll talk about why we love meat and why meat is good and all that.

But all right, yeah, and we can definitely— and I know what is this one? Before the podcast, I definitely want to show your— I want to talk to your audience more about how to really get that flat stomach, because there's a few nuances we'll get to. But this, this is in the book. This is the nose-to-tail carnivore-ish food pyramid. This is what I would consider to be Tier 1, right?

Okay.

And, um, you know, at the bottom of the pyramid are the animal foods. And, and we'll clarify some of this in a moment. At the bottom of the pyramid are the animal foods that I think should make up the majority of our diet. We have eggs, red meat— red meat, um, this is chicken or turkey, and I want to talk about the sourcing of this. Important. And this is pork. And the sourcing of the pork and the chicken is very critical. We'll come back to this later. For sure. And above that, we build on that with kind of like seafood, um, sardines, right?

Low toxicity fish.

And, and collagen. Um, love collagen. And so these are connective tissues of animals and organs. So this is the part that a lot of people are not familiar with. Very few people eat liver, very few people eat heart. But that's one of the things that I think is important to remember, that our ancestors ate these foods If we can incorporate them in our diet, we will be healthier from a nutrition perspective. There are lots of—

because of the source of vitamins, correct?

Without having vitamins that we get it from these organs, right? It's a source of unique vitamins that we need to have a healthy metabolism. Yes. And then you build on that with the least toxic plant foods like we just talked about. And then at the very top of the pyramid, I think we all need this source of calcium, um, and that can be bone broth. That's probably my favorite source of calcium. And some salt. And then I'll just show you to contrast with that. Yeah, I'll show you the— well, we'll come to the full carnivore pyramid. It's pretty similar. I'll just show that one now so it makes sense.

So that one's about 85-90% pro animal meat and then about 15 or so percent of plant. And now this one's different, right? This one's a little more— it's like 100%.

So some people actually want to go full carnivore, and that's why I had the spectrum. And so So yeah, so carnivore-ish, tier 1, I think that 80% of our diet can be animal foods and 20% can be plant foods, probably by calories, you know, by calories or by weight. It's kind of a— it's a sliding number. But the key is that I think the majority of our food should be the richest food in terms of nutrients, the most bioavailable protein. From animals, the most bioavailable sources of nutrients, which as I talk about in my book, is not plants, it's animals. We've been told all these kind of lies and misled so many times about where we're getting the nutrients from. The most valuable source of nutrients is animal foods. And so the majority of our diet should be those.

And then you have to have that chart for us, Dr. Paul.

Yeah, yeah. And then, and then the plant food can go on top of that.

So this is— ah, this is a nice one in color.

Yeah, so this is the nose-to-tail carnivore food pyramid. This is for people who want to eat all, all animal foods.

And this is, for example, something you follow, correct?

This is like what I follow. Yep.

So walk us through the base. That's pretty much the same.

So these two are pretty much the same. We added bone broth here, uh, organ meats. So people may be a little grossed out by this. And again, we can do a separate podcast about how to get organ meats in your diet.

But yeah, because those are a great source of vitamins, truly the key vitamins. Give people an example of the vitamins we're talking about because I used to worry about vitamin C, vitamin D, all these vitamins that you take in pills that normally come from plant sources, right?

Well, yeah, we can talk about this as well.

So actually, they also come in the organs, right?

It comes in the organs. Yeah. So animal foods are a source of bioavailable vitamin C. People don't know this. And animal foods are actually a much more bioavailable source of vitamin D. The majority of the vitamin D we're going to get is from the sun. So healthy levels of sun exposure are key. You and I both know that living in southern latitudes, but the, like, the other question I always ask people is, where do you get your riboflavin? And a lot of people don't even know what riboflavin is. Riboflavin is vitamin B2. It's involved in methylation. It's a really key B vitamin that is, that is probably deficient in 90% of the population. There's really no good source of riboflavin in plant foods, and this is not conjecture or opinion. This is nutritional science. Um, and so where do you get your riboflavin from? You get your riboflavin from either, uh, heart or liver. Animal organs are the best source of riboflavin. You can get some in muscle meat, but you're not going to get enough in muscle meat. So questions like this, and then people may— I may— then I'll ask people, where do you get your creatine from? Well, you're only going to get creatine in red meat. Okay. Where do you get your carnosine from? Red meat. That's the only place you can get it. And you were asking specifically about the organs. There are many things like, where do you get your copper from? Well, really the only place you're going to get copper is liver. Where do you get manganese? Again, liver. Not— it's like there's unique clustering. So that's another piece of the book, is that animal foods are the key foods. And then of the animal foods, if we can incorporate some organs, even just liver or heart occasionally, we're going to do much better. If you— if muscle meat is the only thing you can do to start That's great. Adding some eggs to that from the right sources, which we'll talk about, will help a lot. Egg yolks and muscle meat is a really good start. But if you really want to thrive, I mean, I hear stories about this all the time when I work with clients who are hesitant to try liver. My mom made that for me. It's gross. And the first time I can get them to try it again, they just say, wow, I haven't felt energy like that in years because you just got this big infusion. You got the perfect multivitamin. You got very bioavailable zinc, manganese, riboflavin, anserine, taurine, all these things that are, you know, it's uniquely found in the organ meats. That's a little bit of a hard thing for people sometimes, so I walk through it slowly. And again, the other—

but I think what you said there, I mean, when you said their moms made it for them, my mom used to have liver. She'd make it sometimes for me, but you know, as a kid you get squeamish. And you know, parents— I mean, I have two sons and I've tried to get them to eat a certain way, and sometimes you just end up letting them be and eat what they want. But I think people will— this will echo in their head things that they knew that their parents did, and something happened because people aren't doing that as much anymore. Although certain celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow— I know there's a really great restaurant in New York City that I've been to, uh, that is owned by this incredible chef that does a lot of organ meats. One of his restaurants is called Brodo. Have you heard of that?

I've heard of Brodo. They do a bunch of bone broth too.

They do all that. So I think this is coming back into— thank goodness, because of celebrities wanting to look their best, feel their best. I feel like people are hearing this, but I think you're right, right on, because I feel like a lot of my clients all know I like to break my fast with some sort of collagen, you know, at every meal. And, and I, and I do that. I think people understand that bone broth is why their skins and connective tissues and joints are going to be healthier., and you can't get this from organ meat or from, from, uh, the non-organ meat, right?

You can't. And you can't get it from— collagen is a source of glycine, you know, and so organ meats are similar. They're analogous. They're a source of unique nutrients. I think it's so cool that, that the chefs in New York are starting to wake up to this because it's unique, it's interesting, it's very, you know, it's different flavors, which is one of the reasons— so I'm writing a cookbook that's going to be out in the winter to help people make organ meats a little more accessible and talk about this kind of carnivore-ish type diet. That'll be the Carnivore Code Cookbook. The first thing is that the second edition of the book is coming out in August, then the cookbook a few months later. But I think it's awesome, and I think that if people— the biggest hurdle for people is usually getting the organ meats in a way that they can make. I know you've been in LA. Have you ever been to Belcampo, that restaurant?

No, no, I haven't.

It's great. It's in Santa Monica. I'm going to have Anya Fernwald the owner, and she has a bunch of farms. She raises cows regeneratively in Northern California. When she makes liver— like, if you guys live in Los Angeles or New York or San Francisco and you want to get organ meats prepared for you at a restaurant, um, try Belcampo. Talk to Anya. She may not— depending what city she's in, you know. Or go to a restaurant where they can prepare organ meat for you in a way that makes it palatable. It'll change your world. It'll just change your world.

We'll look forward to your book. We'll have you on there when that comes out, the cookbook. Yeah, let me dumb this down for everyone and then, and then we're going to go deeper into the meat part. Are you good on time still?

Yeah, I'm great.

Great. So for me, the carnivore, carnivore-ish version of that, I posted this on my Instagram, uh, last week. It's pretty much like a lettuce wrapping of a burger. Now I have cheese on there. I didn't ask you about cheese. I don't think cheese is on the menu because it's dairy, correct?

Well, the thing about dairy that I run into for a lot of people is that they do have an immunologic issue with it. So I want to be clear that, you know, I think that, like I said in the beginning, one of the main things that I'm interested in helping people with is weight loss, but also autoimmune disease. And even within animal foods, I think there are some animal foods that humans probably haven't been eating for a long time. And that's the whole thinking here, right? That humans are not that well adapted to eating plants because we really have— and this is what I talked about in the first few chapters of the book— we really have not been eating a lot of plants for the last 2 million years. We've been mostly hunters using plants as fallback foods, as survival foods. There's—

that's really the best way to look at it. I think ancestral health, which Mark is a fan of, and that's why I think he endorsed your work so highly, that our ancestors kind of created who we are. We became what we did back then. And back then we were hunters. Say that one more time. And we use vegetables or carbs as— what do you call them? Fallbacks, right?

Fallback foods or survival foods. I had people say we were hunter-gatherers. But I think we were mostly hunters. It's like hunter-gatherer, you know, you'd gather when you were starving and you couldn't get an animal. And there's good evidence for this anthropologically, ethnographically, archaeologically. I talk about that in the book. So we don't need to go into all of that right now, but we were mostly hunters. And many indigenous tribes still perform this way. If they can get an animal, they will eat the animal to the exclusion of everything else because One of the more, I think, striking points that I will mention in the book is that eating animals nose to tail will give humans all of the nutrients they need to thrive. This is a pretty radical concept. Uh, we can talk about vitamin C in another episode, but there's plenty of vitamin C in well-raised animal foods, including organ meats. You don't need to eat any plants. This touches on the fiber piece a little bit. We can go down the fiber rabbit hole if you want. The, the high level with fiber is No, you do not need fiber to poop. There's tons of medical evidence to show this. Mark is a living example. I eat a zero fiber diet. Mark has talked about, you know, not eating fiber to poop. Medical literature clearly shows this. It's pretty much just like the saturated fat story. We've been told this kind of repeated mistruth or untruth for 60 years when realistically humans don't need fiber to poop. We can go down there if you want, but You, you will poop.

Well, I think we can save that conversation because as much as you would think people wouldn't want that, uh, Dr. Oz is a dear friend of mine. And if you remember back in the day, he was the guy with the colon and all that with Oprah on TV. And, and my audience, I think everyone listening and watching wants to, to go to the bathroom and not have problems. So I think we'll dedicate a whole show to poop.

Pooping is very good for humans. Everybody needs to poop.

Yes, but not to worry because obviously this diet whether it's with a lettuce leaf or not, because then the other option is to just dump the lettuce leaf, probably not the tomato, probably not the pickle, right? No.

Well, yeah, you want to be careful about the pickle because it has a seed, right?

So the seed in the middle of the cucumber, and then the cheese for a minute, talk about that because I, on occasion, will eat cheese. I like butter in my coffee. At one point in my life, I was doing it a lot. I've started to, after reading your book, to use beef tallow in my coffee.

Tallow is better.

And how long— pronounce it for me. Beef tallow.

Tallow. Yep. Yep.

Tell them what that is because people are going to be like in awe, and I'll go grab it out of my kitchen. Keep talking, please.

Yeah. So tallow is basically rendered animal fat. It's like butter made from the fat of an animal around the muscle meat and specifically around the kidneys. The problem, the concern that I have with dairy is this. Like I said, it's immunologically difficult for a lot of people. There are 2 or 3 proteins, casein, whey, that do trigger a lot of people. I notice personally that milk triggers my eczema, but so does chocolate, right? And so there's a lot of things, plant kingdom and animal kingdom, egg whites. So egg whites and milk are the 2 animal foods that I think cause immunologic reactions in the most number of people. And so every once in a while I'll hear somebody say, I went vegan and I felt much better. And I say, I wonder, my suspicion is that that is because you cut out egg whites or dairy. And I fear that you threw out the baby with the bathwater. And my concern with vegan diets and plant-based diets is that they are nutrient deficient. Again, this is all in the book, too much for one podcast. I think we're going to do a bunch of podcasts. But if you really look at where you're getting your nutrients, whether it's riboflavin or creatine, you are not going to get them from plants. And so Plant-based diets can work as an elimination diet, but you might as well be fasting. And I think this is my concern with Beyoncé is like, yes, you can go on a plant-based diet and lose weight because it is really difficult to get enough calories, but you are not giving your body enough nutrients. And then the other thing I'll just say here is a lot of people will say, well, isn't— aren't people different? Are there some people that you think should do vegan? Some people could do paleo or primal or carnivore.

There's the whole blood code or the blood diets, you know?

I don't agree with any of that. So that's just— none of that is supported by science.

Set that straight for us a little bit, because some people think, oh, come on now.

No, let's just make it very simple. There's really no science to support any of that. Humans have not had that much genetic divergence between each other. Biochemically, immunologically, we are all very similar. There is immunologic variance in terms of which foods we may be allergic to or we may have reactions to.. But I think that 99% of the time, uh, those are going to be, you know, they're going to be plant foods and milk and egg whites. Those are the main problems. And I just don't think that biochemically there's, there's people walking the planet that are going to do better on a vegan diet than an animal-based diet. And so often I think these things get confused. Ultimately, if someone is listening to this and doing a plant-based diet and thriving, do it, you know, like I support it.

It is possible, right, Paul, that certain people have a very strong, um, like, what would you call it, genetics. Somehow they're, they're tough people that were meant to gather, I guess.

God bless them, right? I think it's possible, but here's what I would say. If you are thriving on a plant-based diet, then, then I am happy for you. If you are not thriving, which is sleep, weight, libido, autoimmune, then realize there are other options out there. And the people who are thriving on a plant-based diet I suspect that they would do even better on animal-based diet. So I did a podcast with Rich Roll, uh, on The Minimalist, and we had a little debate. And, you know, Rich claims that he's thriving on a plant-based diet, and I have to take him at his word for that. But Rich has never done an animal-based diet. He was doing a standard American diet, which was a junk food diet, and he was an alcoholic. This is something he's talked about, you know, previously. I'm not, I'm not throwing him under the bus, or, you know, criticizing him. He says he was a sick, fat, overweight lawyer. So he went from a standard American diet to a vegan diet. Okay, great. That's a fantastic improvement. Less processed food. Now, if you really want to thrive, I think you do even better on an animal-based diet. Ideologically, he won't consider it. It's up to him to make that decision. Do what works for you. But I think that the— I really do not believe there are some people who are going to do better on a vegan diet. I just want to talk about that. So I want to go back to— let's go back to the tallow because you asked about this.

Yes, and I have it here. Let me show it to everyone really quick. Take a look, guys. This is from a company called Epic, and I like them. And basically, this is the fat— we remind them that comes from— it's not dairy. This is not from the dairy part of the cow.

No, it's, it's from, it's from the cow, but not the dairy. It's not milk fat. It's actual, it's actual rendered fat from around the kidneys usually. Which is how our ancestors used to do it. It's, it's what we used to make rendered fat out of.

Now, this isn't butter, this isn't any of that. This is fat from the actual inside of the animal around the kidneys. Uh, the meat itself, is it from the meat and then they remove it from the animal meat?

Or usually, usually tallow is from around the kidneys. It's called suet. It's perinephric fat. And again, people may be listening to this or watching this and thinking, that's saturated fat, that's bad. But go back to the beginning of the podcast where we kind of gave you the teaser, and I talk about this all in my book. Saturated fat— and you mentioned this is new science. This isn't new science. This is science that's been around for 60 years. You know, I just released the podcast yesterday on my podcast, Fundamental Health. People can see it in the banner behind me. And one of you, Ina Teicholz, who wrote the book A Big Fat Surprise. And A Big Fat Surprise is all about sort of this crazy story of how saturated fat came to be vilified. So tallow is about 50% saturated fat. I think this is a great segue to something that I think your listeners are really going to be interested in, which is how to get a flat stomach by eating certain types of fat. So, um, I know you're friends with Oprah and I know that she's had struggles with weight despite doing Weight Watchers. And I really have a strong suspicion that I know why. So if you think, and I'll say this at a high level, and if you have people listening who are science-minded or biochemistry-minded and they want more information, they can listen to my podcast with Nina Teicholz or go to my social media at Instagram @carnivoremd and hear my Instagram videos where I go into this biochemistry. But at a very high level, there's a very interesting thing that happens in the fat cells of your belly when you eat vegetable fat, which is called linoleic acid. It's an omega-6 fatty acid. So this is vegetable seed oils versus saturated fat, which is like stearic acid or palmitic acid from an animal, right? So we don't have to talk about the chemical differences between saturated and polyunsaturated fat, but the very clear evidence emerging— and this is the take-home— is that unsaturated fat from vegetables, corn, canola, safflower, peanuts, soybeans, saff— These oils make the fat cells in your belly grow, and it sounds crazy.

Say that one more time.

So these plant seed, the seed oils, the seed of the vegetable seed oils, which are very high in an omega-6 called linoleic acid, make the fat cells in your belly grow. They make them responsive to the hormonal signals from insulin, which is spiked when you eat carbs. To grow. So you and I talked about this offline before the podcast, and I said, if you really want your abs, your belly, Jorge, to look really good, cut out all of this linoleic acid and just eat saturated fat as much as possible from the stearic acid and the palmitic acid, right? And these are the fats that have been vilified while the WHO and the governments are saying eat corn, eat canola oil, because those lower your LDL. Again, this is a whole rabbit hole we can go down why that's completely false and really problematic paradigm to think about. But these vegetable oils, and they are in everything, and this is what's so scary for your listeners. If they go to get a restaurant dressing with salad, it's going to have canola oil. That is making your belly grow. It's going to have safflower oil. If you go to a restaurant, the food is cooked in safflower That's going to make your belly grow. I'm telling you.

What do you think about using alternatives like an olive oil or an avocado oil if they have that, or would you rather just have it naked? I mean, you can be as frank as you want.

I mean, I would— I think that those are an improvement, but here's the key. While the vegetable oils make the fat on your belly grow, the saturated fats in tallow make it shrink.

They make it shrink.

Say that again.

So you're saying, yes, the vegetable oils make it grow and animal fat, beef tallow, makes it shrink. Is one of them. There are different types of tallow as well, right?

Well, no, basically beef tallow is the, is the main thing. Tallow is associated with beef. You could make tallow out of bison, but yeah. So you want, and this is from ruminants, so you really want the tallow from beef. You don't want chicken fat or pork fat. So this is what I want to talk about, Weight Watchers. This is the problem with Weight Watchers. They are not going to distinguish which type of fat you are going to use. They are going to tell you use corn oil or vegetable oil or canola oil. So the devil is in the details. And I think this detail has been overlooked over and over and over. You have said this and I am going to echo it. Calories are not the same. That is the problem with Weight Watchers. It treats all calories as the same. And that is why they do the point system. And that doesn't work because linoleic acid in these vegetable oils is poisoning the fat cells in your belly and causing them to grow. If people don't believe me, do the experiment. Write me, write Jorge Cruise Cruise Cruise. You will be amazed. I am going to do a whole podcast on this, but how incredibly interesting that the foods that have made up the majority of our diet throughout our evolution, the saturated fats that occur naturally in animals that are healthy for us, as the Journal of the American Cardiology is now acknowledging, after 60 years of bad science are also the fats that make us resistant to growing belly fat.

Wow.

This is what Dr. Oz needs to be talking about on his show because the— I'll say it again for emphasis, if you want to—

yeah, no, and basically this is a huge point when it comes to what to eat. Yes, you want to embrace fat, but not all fat. And you're absolutely right, most modern methods of weight loss as modern as they are, don't get into the details. And I hate to say it, but as you said it, the devil's in the details. And so the detail is— drum roll— say one last time, please.

Vegetable oil makes you fat. Saturated fat makes you thin. And when people wake up to this, it will be a revolution. There's a lot of roadblocks ideologically, and I want to get into the nuance here just one more step. But I think if the people listening to this do one thing or 2 things, they can include more red meat and cut out those vegetable oils in their diet, you will lose weight. You will lose weight. If I could give you a money-back guarantee, this podcast is free because Jorge is amazing, right? I'll give you, I'll give you 50 cents. Like, this is a free podcast, so we can't give you money back, but you will lose weight and you will be healthier for it.

I think this is brilliant. And just to put people at ease, to some degree, we're not talking all these plant fats because fruit— I don't want to call them fruit fats, but like coconut oil. Tell me about that. Where does that sit? And avocado oil, because those are kind of the newer ones. And olives— olives are fruit, correct?

Olives are a fruit. Avocado is a fruit. Yes. Let's talk about these. Coconut oil is all saturated, but it's short-chain saturated. It's myristic and lauric acid. It's really the long-chain fatty acids, which are stearic and palmitic, which are 16 and 18 carbons that appear to have this relationship on the gut. So on the, on the fat in your belly, we don't know how coconut oil does, but coconut oil is way better than vegetable oil. I think tallow is the best. Now when we get into olive oil and avocado oil, those are monounsaturated fats. Those might have a neutral effect. We don't really know. They're, they're probably not— they're almost certainly not as bad as vegetable oil, Of course, but they may not be as beneficial as saturated fat. So they might be neutral, but saturated fat— and again, this sounds crazy. I promise you all, I've talked about the very deep high-level biochemistry on other platforms. We can get into it later if you want. This may not be the place. Take my word for it. Read my book, but do the experiment yourself. Like Jorge Cruise is going to do, like Mark Sisson has done, and see how it happens.

But if you really—

You know, there are a lot of people now championing this idea that vegetable fats are bad for you. And so this idea is not very foreign, but I don't think anyone is talking about it with regard to the ability of the abdominal fat, of the belly fat to grow. And so this is a new idea. And the last point that I want to add here, so the reason Weight Watchers doesn't work for Oprah, in my opinion, and I hope you're listening to this, Oprah, because I'm happy to consult with you. Is that she is using vegetable oils and or Weight Watchers is not telling people.

I want to kind of say it, you know, out loud because I don't think it is her fault or a lot of people's fault.

Exactly.

You go to the grocery store, you know, my kids, you know, they are not following a very strict diet and they will get corn chips and potato chips. I know there are certain companies that are definitely moving into away from these vegetable oils and using like avocado oil. And olive oil to make chips and all that. But most products, tell everyone, because it really isn't their fault, are made with canola oil. I mean, even Whole Foods. I know there was a— Mark and I talked about this once. They have their deli, but most of all their vegetable dressings are made with canola oil, and they are Whole Foods. I mean, how much higher up can you get? That is Whole Foods, right?

Exactly. The— yep, and that's full of linoleic acid. And so the last piece here that I'll tell people, at the risk of overwhelming you all, is that you also, when you're selecting meat, one of the reasons I'm such a fan of red meat, and I kind of teased this early when I talked about the pyramids, is that if you're eating pork or chicken, it's very important what that animal eats. So we want— I think most of the listeners will understand that we want to eat animals that are raised as well as possible. We want to eat animals that are grass-fed, grass-finished cows. We want to eat animals that are eating their species-appropriate diet, in air quotes. Now, a chicken eating corn and soy is not eating a species-appropriate diet. A pig eating corn and soy is not eating a species-appropriate diet. What happens to the fat of those animals is that fat becomes enriched in linoleic acid. So if you want to eat chicken or pork Be careful what the animal is eating. This is why it's so easy, so much easier to make the majority of your meat red meat, because they're fed—

well, it's grass-fed, and that is the grass.

That's the grass, right? Exactly. So you could be getting linoleic acid, and this is what I want to— you know, you and I were talking and you said, did you talk to Mark about this? And I haven't. I'm sure he's figured this out on his own, but I want to talk to him more about this. If you are eating pork and most pork is fed soy, you are getting vegetable oil in the fat of that pork. You are getting linoleic acid in the fat of the pork. It's almost like someone put canola oil into the pork because of what the pork is fed.

Because it's crazy. What, what— I mean, not to interrupt, but what did, what did pigs— I get, I want to call them the proper species. What do we call pigs? Pigs?

Pigs or hogs?

Yeah. What were they eating? Take me back to back in the day, like go back, what, 5,000 years, 10,000 years?

They eat bugs. They eat worms. They eat roots. You know, they don't eat soy. You know, yes, and there's no corn growing wild. No, they eat bugs and roots and not grass though. These animals, I don't think they eat grass. And I know I was actually talking to a farmer the other day. They'll even eat mice and small rodents if they can get them. I mean, pigs are omnivores. They're not meant to be eating these foods. And so at a at a biochemical level, monogastric animals— that is, non-ruminant animals, which includes humans, chickens, and pigs— cannot make polyunsaturated fat, meaning we can't make linoleic acid. So all of the linoleic acid in our body is stored from something we've eaten. So if we eat too much linoleic acid, it can affect us negatively for a long time after. And it's the same way with these animals. They're not— unless they are eating linoleic acid, they are not going to put linoleic acid into their fatty tissue. And evolutionarily, linoleic acid is not present at high levels in the environment. It's not what chickens would have been eating. It's not what pigs would have been eating. Chicken fat, chicken eggs would have been much lower in linoleic acid. Pig fat would have been much lower in linoleic acid. And ruminants— this is cows, bison, lamb— these animals would have eaten grass and had much lower levels of linoleic acid.

I mean, it makes so much sense when you just think about history. I mean, it's just, it's a bit of history and you can't deny that this happened. I mean, it was history and I think we get so locked into the modern world and thinking that we all had refrigerators since the dawn of time and, and pantries and, and all this and, and that animals, I mean, we just think that pigs are fed what pigs should be fed, right? But it's about saving money though, and that's, I think, why it's not our fault, because these companies are trying to maximize. And that's why canola oil is out there, and that's why animals are given corn, right, to really lower the prices. And, and that's, and that's the, the, the detail that unfortunately hurts us, right?

Yep. Yep.

So at the risk of being a little too sciency, I want to share an article, and we'll start wrapping up because I know we've been going long here, but I find this so incredible. If you guys are listening or watching to this, I know this sounds provocative. I know, Dr. Paul, you're pushing the limits of what—

I'm pushing the limits.

I love that. I trust what you're saying because it makes so much sense when I've studied ancestral health. I can tell you from the modifications I've made for the last 2 months, I felt phenomenal. I'll be trying this and I encourage everyone to try it. What do you have to show us? And then we'll wrap up in just a few minutes. Go ahead.

I'll show you 2 things because apparently, apparently when Mark Sisson was on the podcast, he showed his abs.

So, oh yes, let's see your abs. There you go. We do the abs. Yeah, look at that. And tell everyone, uh, not that this matters, but your age and all that. You're not some 24-year-old kid.

No, I'm 42, um, and I'm still thriving. I mean, if you see the pictures that Jorge Cruise will post, I mean The proof is in the pudding. I mean, I, I have abs, um, and you've got good guns.

Show me that. That's your gun. Right, I got some guns coming from obviously your diet and your workouts because you do both.

It's mostly diet. I mean, it's definitely genetics and diet, but I, I do work out and I am healthy in that way. So, and the second thing I'll show will be just for your super, uh, your super geeky readers. It's just an article. It's done in, it's done in mice. But they're giving mice dietary stearic acid, which is a saturated fatty acid found in that tallow, and it leads to a reduction in visceral adipose tissue. This is belly fat. So giving mice saturated fat leads to the mice having a flat tummy. That's basically the takeaway from this article.

Will you send me that, please? I'm going to share all this with everyone. Send me the link, would you?

Yeah, yeah, I'll send it to you right now. Yeah, so this is—

I mean, this is what our podcast is about. It's really really about helping people get a flat tummy or a flat stomach in less time. I have dedicated 20 years of my career to this, and I can tell you, this is a pivotal conversation because to know that something like this little jar of beef tallow, literally fat can make you healthy and you can lose belly fat by eating certain fats, but not all fats are the same.

Not all fats are the same.

Yeah, that is, and I think that is, isn't that the take home? Let's try to bring the take home home. To break it down, if there were 3 important messages, I would say fat can make you healthy, can make you, can get you a flat tummy, right? Not all fats. And obviously this whole conversation has been to kind of distinguish what are the harmful fats, the good fats. Number 2, maybe we need protein, and not all proteins are the same either, right?

Yeah, vegetable plant protein is sadly not as bioavailable. So the best source of protein is animal foods. I mean, I think that's the second takeaway point from my perspective is don't fear red meat. It's been incorrectly vilified.

Not all meats are the same. Go for organic, grass-fed, and then when an animal wasn't fed their— I mean, and I hate to ask this, but you would know. I mean, pork and chicken, how many people, how many companies are making pork and chicken fed in their ancestral way? I doubt anyone, right?

Very few. The number is not zero, and there's a great farm in Georgia, White Oak Pastures that I have a great relationship with.

Tell us their name and we can Google them and you'll give us the link later.

Yeah, White Oak Pastures. Yeah, and so they're so cool that I called them on the phone and said, hey, I want you guys to stop feeding your chickens corn and soy. And they said, okay, we'll do it next week. Yeah, yeah.

What do you do now? Do you know?

Well, they feed the chickens corn and soy, but they don't feed the pigs soy. And so what we're trying to do with White Oak Pastures is develop low polyunsaturated poultry and pigs for people. So it's going to be in the works. White Oak is an amazing farm. Yeah, yeah, White Oak is an amazing farm. They're the best source of like grass-fed, grass-finished meat that I found because they're doing it in a regenerative fashion. You and I can talk about regenerative agriculture on another podcast, but they have amazing grass-finished beef. It's delicious. But their corn— their, excuse me, their chicken and pigs needed help. And so I called them and said, we got to change what you're feeding them. And they're so cool. They were like, all right, let's talk to the board.

That's a call from the doctor. Not too many doctors make house calls. They're starting— they're starting to again, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm making a call to a farm and saying, I want you guys— I want you guys to feed your chickens and pigs something else. Wow.

Now luckily, beef across the country— and I even think, I mean, I don't know if this is a stretch— you can go to like Costco and you can get grass-fed beef burgers and all that. That, that's a good thing. We've That wasn't there maybe 10 years ago. I think that is in the last 10 years, right?

It is a great thing and it is driven by consumer demand. Which is fantastic.

So, definitely let's eat those kinds of meats. Then when it comes to carbs, make that the 3rd and final point. We talked about the fat, the protein, and then drum roll on the carbs. Recap it for us because obviously we want to eat the low toxic carbs.

Yeah. So, I think that carbs are not the enemy. If you had an enemy, it is vegetable oils. Um, so you want it, but you want to eat the least toxic plant foods. We shared that plant toxicity spectrum in the beginning, and I think that the least toxicity plant foods are the fruit and non-sweet fruit. But you want to cut out the grains. Those are going to be the worst type of carbs, very similar to what Mark has been saying forever. So hat tip to him for all that kind of stuff. But yeah, cut out those. And if you want carbohydrates, think avocado, berries, squash. Um, you know, fruit is fine. Don't overdo it on the fruit. I think most people will know that if they overeat sweet fruit, their belly doesn't feel very good. But things like avocado, olives, berries, squash— these are fine, uh, for humans.

If we're lettuce-wrapping burgers, as I've done that on occasion, that's okay? Is there a lettuce—

probably fine on occasion—

preferred? Do you have a lettuce that is the more preferred lettuce?

Or maybe romaine? Romaine or green leaf?

Yeah, organic and no pesticides.

Avoid all that.

Yeah, you got to be careful. Yeah. Yeah. And the problem is you can get organic lettuce, but then it's sitting at the grocery store getting sprayed with water from, you know, from the municipal system.

Hopefully bagged, right?

Or who knows, just wash it when you get it home. You can't be perfect, but I think you make, you make the most impactful changes.

And then obviously, you know, this is just— we, I think we got to dedicate another— I mean, we have a few podcasts to do obviously, but you know, people in today's day and age will drink alcohol, will drink beverages. We can maybe get into that another time. Mark taught me to drink water and I like this brand. I am sure you have heard of Mountain Dew. I love those.

Yep.

So, I drink water. You probably would recommend plenty. I mean, if there is a beverage, maybe let's end with that. What is the beverage of choice? I hate to ask, is it water?

It is water. It is not very exciting, you know, I mean, think about what your ancestors ate. I think, you know, I am so grateful for all of Mark's support and in a way, I think maybe I can carry the torch, you know, He's still carrying the torch, but maybe I can continue to carry the torch with him on this sort of primal movement. And I think that the next iteration is around this plant toxicity spectrum and realizing, hey, your ancestors just drank water. So if you're looking for entertainment in your drinks, fine, but it's not going to make you more healthy, and it's certainly not going to give you a flat stomach.

Right. And I know Mark likes the carbonated version, so that's a little bit of, uh, of fun enjoyment, but without going beyond water, you know.

Exactly.

And on occasion, do you have a wine? I hate to ask. I know that's fruit.

I don't drink wine. Um, you know, the problem that I have with wine— I know a lot of people will like wine. If you want to drink a wine, uh, maybe Dry Farms Wines has like an organic low sulfite wine, lower in the toxins, right? Yeah, you want to be careful that the wine doesn't have mold toxins and, and that it, that it's pesticide-free. I personally just don't feel like it's worth it to me. But I understand that some people like it and they want to— they want it, they want that in their life. And I think that's fine. Just make it a high-quality thing. But realize that alcohol is empty calories and you have to burn that ethanol, and that ethanol is going onto your stomach. And for some people, that's fine. It's just you have to make that decision in terms of your quality of life.

And one last question, I promise, and then we're wrapping up because everyone's like, this is the longest podcast ever. But I feel like this has been invaluable, Paul. And we've been trying to connect for many months now, and I feel like The stars have aligned, but for clients out there, because I have a lot of celebrities that will use either CBD or medical marijuana, and now it's not even— you don't even need a prescription, and it is a plant. So I hate to go in that direction, but we're not eating it. I don't think people are usually ingesting it in other ways, or smoking possibly. But what are your thoughts? I know in your book you talk about marijuana, and I read that, and I at one point was overusing it, and I have stopped as much as I can, but help us understand what that does to the body. A lot of people say it can help you relax. I know, I think you talk about it as an option if you are starting, if you are trying to sleep better for a little short period of time, but you don't like it extended or get an end with that note because I know that is the modern option that people are considering over alcohol and, you know, and I wonder about that and maybe you can end on that note and then we will pick it up obviously soon.

So I think there's a difference between using plants and plant compounds as medicine versus food. And when we use plant compounds as medicine, we have to think about it in the same framework when we use any other medicine. Can we address the root cause first? I have so many people that I've come in contact with through my training and my practice who use medical marijuana for anxiety without addressing the root cause. And I've definitely seen people improve psychiatric illness with dietary change, with carnivore diets, with removal of plants and plant toxins. Remember that I'm also board certified in psychiatry and, you know, and have trained in that. And so you can improve psychiatry.

I mean, say that again. So you have two—

is that correct? Two board certifications, yeah. Physician nutrition specialist in psychiatry. And so, you know, you can— psychiatric illness is autoimmune in my opinion. It's neuroinflammatory. We can talk about that in a whole other podcast. And so yes, I believe that plant compounds and synthetic compounds can be useful as medications, but not as food. And so if you're using CBD or marijuana to treat a symptom, I would ask you to really, you know, do some introspection and think, what's the root cause of this? Are we using a plant molecule to treat a symptom and not correcting the root cause? That's my concern. You know, many people will be familiar with psilocybin. Or these psychedelic molecules that are being used to great effect in cancer patients at NYU and Hopkins, cancer patients who have anxiety related to death, fantastically valuable molecules derived from mushrooms as a medicine, not as a food. So that's where I'll draw the line. I don't think that CBD is giving us anything back that we don't have. I fear that a lot of you will end up using it chronically to negative effect because they're not able to address the root cause. If you're using it for sleep, what is the root cause of the insomnia? And a lot of times, not all the time, but this is where the carnivore diet kind of comes into the perspective. What if there's a plant food that you're having a food allergy to? What if there's a food? What if it's milk? What if it's egg yolks? What if it's kale? What if it's spinach? There are many things you can do to find the root cause. And what I'm trying to advance with this book is, hey, plants can harm you. Red meat has been criminalized and plants can harm you. If you haven't been able to find the root cause, think about this plant toxicity spectrum and kind of go from there. But realize what we're ultimately going for is the root cause because that's what's going to improve quality of life long term.

I think that's what you've said there. And I feel like you have, you have the passion. I can tell this without question to, to go beyond what most, I think, people, let alone physicians, do when they're trying to find solutions for people. Because I think All people, doctors, all doctors included, I think their intentions are noble and they take an oath and they are here really to help people. Unfortunately, the information that they are given and you were exposed to what is traditionally taught, they traditionally don't get a lot of details on nutrition. That is where the details are in the sense of so many things from what you said about the psyche to the belly fat, to everything, energy, libido, immune function, inflammation, aging. I mean, let alone working just better and enjoying life, just the basics, right? And I feel like this conversation is going to be, I hope, a series that we'll do with you that will really give people, um, I, I'll say it, you know, a very extreme point of view. But I feel like my audience, they, they will do things that most people may not do because I feel like they've been following me for 10 or 20 years. And I feel like a lot of people know that my passion is sincere. You know, I was an overweight, fat kid. I have shown all my, you probably don't have a fat picture, right, Dr. Paul? I do. Google it. They are there and I know what it is like to be stuck and to hate life at 20. I was in college and overweight, let alone, I went through a whole life reset about 10 years ago in my late 30s and gained all this weight and felt horrible and was going through midlife as a man and, you know, hormones change in both men and women. I feel like your diet, just in the last 2 months to some degree, I have been following the more lighter version, you know, the carnivore-ish version, has dramatically changed my energy, you know, and I am going to be 50 in March and I know Mark claims that he at age 67, his birthday is coming up really soon, July 14th, I think. So, we got it coming up. We will have to send him a happy birthday wish, but he feels better than ever following a lot of what you talk about and you guys know, like Mark wrote the introduction to the book. I feel like he doesn't do this too often. He has never written an introduction to my book, but I believe like what you are on here with this book and this mindset of really going to the root cause and what is the root diet and what was the root lifestyle. I mean, it just makes sense. I mean, I hate to say it, but the species, as Mark said last week when he was on the show, in 2 million years, We have a blueprint, right? And that was his original book, this primal blueprint of sorts. I think you're on it and you're taking what he has done, going deeper. And I'm so excited to have you on here and I can't thank you enough, Dr. Paul, for that. If people want to find you, would you give them your website?

Yeah.

And obviously get this book tonight, guys. Download it. This is the current edition.

You want to show them the new cover?

August 4th, is that right?

Yeah. Show them the new cover.

Yeah, I'll show them the new cover.

So the— that's the website as I show them that the COVID Yeah, so my website where you can find all this stuff is carnivoremd.com. The book is pre-orderable. Thank you so much for your support.

Here it is, guys.

Take a look. The second edition, steak on the COVID I know. The second edition will be out August 4th. The first edition was a bestseller. We hope the second edition will be a bestseller as well. We really want to spread this message to as many people as possible. Because it's a message that hasn't been heard, and I think it's going to positively affect millions of people. So the website is carnivoremd.com. You can find all that stuff there. You can pre-order the book now for the second—

I can't wait to have you back on the show. And you know, we're gonna have a list of questions, so I'm gonna save some questions for you. Let's do it. And I feel like, you know, summer is here, and I think people are motivated to, uh, to have their guns. If they're ladies, they want the nice muscle. They want a nice flat stomach. They want energy. They want to feel young again and I feel like you have given us a blueprint with your book to do that and I hate to say it, but it is darn easy. It is not a complicated diet.

It is not a complicated diet. There is a little bit of nuance. I think the hardest part is just being willing to think open-minded, in an open-minded fashion and unlearn things that we have learned that may be wrong. I think that I'm not asking anyone to believe me, you know, at face value. That's why I wrote the book with the references, and I have lots of content out there. But I would ask people to approach it with an open mind because I think it is really life-changing.

No, and I would agree with that. And I trust Mark for so many years. He's led me to a path of— from intermittent fasting to you. So thank you to our, to our man Mark Sisson, you know. And I feel like what you shared today is invaluable. So thank you, Dr. Paul. And I love the last name, you know, Mark and I always chuckle because your last name Saladino.

I know.

It sounds like you like salads, but that's not your, I mean, obviously that's your dad's name and I love it. I think it's just life, right? It's ironic that your last name, I mean, no relation to the salad family, I don't think, right? No, no.

But you know, Mark actually came up with, I think is the most clever, rendition of my name. And it's, it's Salad, comma, I, question mark, no, period.

I love that. He's so on it. So I mean, yes. So get the book, guys, by Dr. Paul Saladino, officially Dr. Saladino. And thank you for sharing all this. Give them the website one more time where people can follow you and get all your links. The website is carnivoremd.com., and then we'll provide all the links to everything you showed. If you don't mind, shoot those to me and I'll add them up. We're putting this up today, so thank you so much, and I look forward to our next conversation. I feel like if people have questions, they know where to find you. We'll link to your social, but thank you so much, Paul, for your time and for dedicating what I feel is your career to this, correct?

This is my life's work, man, and I'm very happy and grateful to be able to do it. It's a blessing for me and it's challenging sometimes. But yeah, thanks for actually having me on. I can't wait to hear what people think and come back on and answer more of the questions.

You bet. And hopefully we'll eventually be able to have some water together in person when you come back.

I hope so. I hope so.

Yep. All right. Well, cheers. Thank you so much.

Hey, it's Jorge. If you have one more minute, I wanted to address something that I think is super important, and that is if you need help anything from the show, if you need help about losing belly fat, if you want help about intermittent fasting, if you want help about exercise, interval training, anything at all, I want you to join my Fit Family on text. It's a brand new service I've just launched, and if you really do need help, I want you to text me right now. It really is that simple. You'll be part of my texting family. Family. I have a group of people that I work with via text, and it's all for free. So I'd love you to join. All you have to do is text my, uh, Malibu number. It's a 424 area code number, so I'm going to give it to you right now. Jot this down, or while you're listening, text me right now. I mean it. 424-228-9548, and you'll join my Fit Family. Lemme give it to you one more time. It's area code 424-228-9548. Now it's gonna work only in the US, so I have to say that if you're listening to our show outside of the US, sorry, no international texting yet at least. And, but 80% of you in the US should be able to text me. I know if you have T-Mobile, you have to put on premium service or something like that. But this is free and I'm gonna be giving away a lot of my time on this texting service. A lot of free things like our Belly Fat Cure course will be announced on here. So if you've done my survey, this is how you'll get access to it. I'll be doing special livestream events only for people in my texting community. And I'll be announcing my next 19-day challenge on there as well. So really utilize this and you'll get first glance clients from our show as well. So it'll be a great chance for us to connect, and I may even call you and FaceTime you. So kind of a fun thing. Again, the number— text me, literally do it right now— area code 424-228-9548. And I look forward to having you join my Fit Family. Take good care and God bless. Peace and purpose.