#85 - Dr. Paul Saladino: Debunking the Meat Myth & How Going Carnivore Can Turbocharge Your Health

Hi, my name is Jorge Cruise, and I'm the number one New York Times bestselling author and leading fitness, nutrition, and peak performance trainer to the world's busiest celebrities. You may have seen my work with Oprah Winfrey, Khloe Kardashian, Tyra Banks, Kelly Clarkson, or even Dr. Oz. My career started because in my early 20s, I was out of control and addicted to sweets, carbs, and salty snacks. And experts told me to simply count calories to get control. They were wrong. My passion to get control of my hunger led me to find simple ways backed by science that would turn off physical hunger as well as my emotional eating instantly. And I know I can help you too. Welcome to the Jorge Cruise Show. Well, happy Monday. It's October the 26th. This is Jorge Cruise and welcome to the show. I'm back, super excited, uh, on this Monday to, uh, really talk today with a man who needs no introduction. Uh, you've been listening to my podcast, you know how highly I respect this man, Dr. Paul Saladino. We're going to be talking about the best diet to turn off hunger. As you hopefully know, this podcast is really the number one place in the podcast community world to really turn off your hunger and understand that hunger control is a science. And you gotta understand it, because if you can't control this thing called your appetite, uh, things get out of control. You could be on the best plant-based diet, you could be on the best animal-based diet, you could be doing intermittent fasting, but if you overeat even when you're intermittent fasting, you will destroy your diet and you'll destroy all the success you've had out there. And I can tell you, my career started 20 years ago because I was kid in my 20s that was overeating all the time— sugar, carbs, salty snacks, all that kind of stuff, right? And, uh, and luckily, you know, 20 years ago I started my journey. And so if you're with me here today, welcome, because you're at the number one podcast for controlling hunger. And I'm excited because today's show is really leading with a diet that's high in fat and high in protein, turns off your hunger and allows you to eat less. And, you know, it helps me do what I call OMAD, which, if you know about intermittent fasting, is— it's an acronym that stands for one meal a day. And I've been doing that all of 2020, all of COVID-19. And I have to say, uh, not that you want to go to my Instagram, @jorgecruise, but I've been looking pretty darn good for someone who's 49, you know. And I feel like in my 40s now, late 40s, I've gotten into the best shape of my life because of OMAD. One meal a day. But the only way I can do it— because you can imagine, if you're just eating once a day, and literally I eat every 24 hours, just during an hour window now. It's not even 3 hours. I used to give myself a longer window, but, you know, I do it not— and I don't do it for weight loss. You know, you would think, oh, you're going to lose protein, you're going to lose all this. Not true. I have a great interview that we've got scheduled with Dr. Jason Fung, another incredible MD. He's in Toronto, and he's literally the world's expert on intermittent fasting. And I can tell you, the muscle mass I gained during COVID-19, about 20 pounds of lean muscle, uh, while I was eating one meal a day. So this idea that if you eat once a day and you do fasting, you're going to be hungry and skinny and lose your muscle and just be skinny fat— not true. So I'm super excited to have this conversation with Dr. Paul Saladino on today's show because I think it's going to be super provocative. Now, this is the second interview he and I have done. I would highly encourage you guys to listen to the first one. It's episode 62. We talked about, uh, the new diet that lowers waist circumference. He was the guest. This is back in June during COVID And so now to have him back here, and it's October, I'm so excited because his book is now— The Carnivore Code is the name of the book— is out in paperback, and it's been fully revised. So if you heard this interview back, episode 62, you need to get the new paperback because it is amazing. It has been all revised, new charts, new information, new science. And long story short, He's going to give it to us all in the next 90 minutes. It's a long interview, but it is provocative. It changed my life during COVID And, you know, I always give thanks to Mark Sisson for introducing me to Paul because he wrote the introduction, his book. But Dr. Paul is truly a leader when it comes to human nutrition and optimal performance. And he's in his early 40s, I should say, but is a rock star. I mean, you should see his six-pack, ladies and gentlemen. He's in great shape. Uh, he's a goal for me, you know, to look a little more like him. And even Mark Sisson, who's 67 years young, looks amazing, and I still don't have those abs yet, but I'm working on them. So, uh, so today's show is going to be all that and more. Now, what I love about the show, in case you're new to the show, is not only what we're going to be covering on the show— we have a new format— this physical hunger and ways to calm it down through nutrition, through biohacks, through electrolytes, through healthy creams and fats, all my— all the tricks that I've been using with celebrities for the last 10, 20 years now. We're gonna talk about how to turn off that physical hunger. But hear me on this, guys, because what we're gonna also talk about on the show throughout the next few weeks and months, especially as we wrap up 2020, is how to deal with the emotional hunger a lot of us feel, which can lead to stress, anxiety, boredom, which triggers us to eat when we're not hungry, truly not physically hungry. And that kind of hunger, this emotional eating, shall we call it, will truly sabotage any single diet you will ever try in your life or have ever tried. Because I'll tell you, we're all human, and humans are emotional beings. We just are. And we crave things that give us high feelings of serotonin and dopamine, whether it's drugs or sugar or carbs. You know, these are the drugs that make us feel good. So we're not dumb. I mean, if we're addicted to these things that cause serotonin to go up, it's because they work. The unfortunate thing, they all have side right? And for the sugar and carb lovers out there, which used to be me, you can gain weight so fast. And so this type of emotional control is something we're going to be talking on the show every week as well, because this need to be— how shall we say— under control of our emotions and our hunger, both emotional and physical hunger, is so important. It's like a balance, and we need them both. And a lot of times when we're stressed out, as so many of us are, even celebrities I work with are stressed out. Everyone is. We want to relax, we want to escape at night. So if we're not overdrinking or using some drug of some sort that maybe doctors prescribe, which again make us feel better, we're eating sugar or carbs or salty carbs or salty, uh, snack foods, and they all lead to weight gain. So we gotta have a control system on that. So I'm super excited to be talking about that. We're going to be talking to people like Deepak Chopra, really leaders in the field of mind-body medicine. So I'm excited for the next few weeks. We got some great guests coming on the show to, to balance it out, so to say. But on today's show, it's all about really The Carnivore Code, and I'm going to encourage you to just have an open mind. Believe me, this is the diet I've been using, and it's a diet that turns off hunger, in my opinion, better than any diet out there. You can still have your carbs. He'll talk about that as well because he has a whole chart in his book that talks about which carbs to go after, the healthier ones that are less toxic. So I think after today's show, you're going to have a good feeling for how to create a diet that makes you feel full, and That's my goal, is to help you feel satisfied, if anything at all. So hope that makes good sense, guys.

I can't wait to get started here.

Now, before we do, I give a shout out to our sponsors, which really create the opportunity for us to do the show every single day. And I'm really grateful to the 3 following companies. Number 1, Primal Kitchen. They're our sponsor now for quite some time. And Primal Kitchen is created by Mark Sisson, my nutrition mentor, the man I mentioned. And I can tell you, he started this out of his passion to give people a simple way to make vegetables taste great. Salad dressing, but that was healthy. Because 90% of all salad dressings out there that you buy in the store are made with seed oil, which are inflammatory to your body. Things like canola oil, soybean oil, corn oil, horrible oils that you got to avoid. If you're taking any of those oils, whether it's intentionally or unintentionally, you're going to get inflammation in your joints, your skin, you're going to gain weight. It's really bad. So Primal Kitchen was started as, as a way to give people the most delicious, healthy salad and then it was mayo, and now it's expanded. But these options, these great condiments that are anti-inflammatory, made with avocado oil, which is a fruit— the avocado is a fruit and it's anti-inflammatory. And so if you go to primalkitchen.com/jorgecruz, you get a free chipotle lemon mayo with avocado oil. It's absolutely delicious. I put a dollop or two on my steak when I have it. You're going to love this stuff, so check it out, primalkitchen.com/jorgecruise. /jorgecruz. We're also brought to you by Joovv. Now, Joovv is how I start my day. You guys have heard of this red light therapy by now, hopefully, if you've been listening to the show. And it is the way that I feel good at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning, because it is pitch dark in San Diego right now that early, especially in October. And I can tell you, there's nothing better than turning this light on. For me, I'm addicted to it, but it is a positive addiction. It causes you to literally feel better. You get higher in serotonin and dopamine, almost like sugar and carbs, minus the calories. It's just light therapy. And if you've heard of seasonal mood disorder, this is the time to get it as we enter fall now and it's actually getting colder. And then we have November, December. The best gift you can give yourself is the gift of near-infrared light. And, uh, Joovv is the leader in this. They're going to give us a free gift with the promo code Jorge, J-O-R-G-E, all caps. Just go to their website, joovv.com/jorge. I'll spell it for you, J-O-O-V-V.com/jorge. You're gonna love it, guys, and it's incredible. Makes you feel great, and it's good for your skin and metabolism. Does a million things.

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And then finally, we're also brought to you by shopdrtesse.com. Now, what the heck is shopdrtesse.com? Well, Dr. Tess is a personal dear friend of mine. She's also one of my dermatologist experts that I use on speed dial when I have a celebrity that has an issue, whether it's the need for a wrinkle to be removed, or they need something with collagen, or they need, uh, more supple hair. This woman has dedicated her life to making us beautiful. I met her, gosh, 10 years— more than 10 years ago with Sharon Osbourne when I was in LA filming The Talk, this really great show out in Los Angeles. And we met on set, and we've been friends ever since. She keeps my skin looking gorgeous because of collagen, and I love that. And this is a collagen pill now that I take. I don't even do shakes anymore because, you know, I eat in an hour window or so, so I don't have that much time, and I also don't want to overeat. And so I take these little capsules. It's called Lively Healthy Skin. Healthy Skin. Literally, it's rich in collagen, but it has antioxidants, and it just makes my skin, hair, joints, nails beautiful. And she is giving all our listeners 50% off, um, if you use this coupon code at checkout: DRTESS. So D-R-T-E-S-S is the coupon code, and you can get her Lively Healthy Skin. Uh, it's H-E-L H— I'm sorry, H-E-A-L-T-H-I. I love how she spells it with an I, not a Y. Healthy skin, great product, 50% off. Just go to her website, ShopDrTess with two S's, so it's shopdrtess.com, and the coupon code at checkout is Dr. Tess, one word all together, for 50% off, exclusive to our listeners. All right, and tell her that Jorge sent you. All right, with that all said and done, I think we've got the green light, literally, to start the show. We're ready to rock and roll. And remember, Dr. Paul Saladino is truly, um, leading this revolution, I think, more than anyone else out there when it comes to head-to-toe nutrition, uh, meaning that you are going to be intrigued not just by an animal-based diet, but he's also going to talk about why things like collagen, right, which comes from bone marrow, but also other animal organ meat can help us improve our immune system, can help us improve our longevity, can help us feel better than ever. And I've been doing this with liver, collagen, all sorts of stuff. I don't want to get into it because it'll spoil the show, but listen to this show like your life depends on it, because I think it's going to give you not just the control you've been wanting with your hunger, but it's going to make keeping your longevity and best self super simple.. It's really a simple diet. It's going back to ancestral health. It's the way our ancestors ate. Let's get started right now.

Dr. Saladino, welcome back to the show, buddy.

It's so good to be on. Thanks for having me.

Of course. Good to see you again. And, uh, thank you so much for your work because, you know, out of all the people that Mark talks about, and he talks to a lot of people out there, you know, he's now in a, in a stage of his life where, um, I think he knows what he's talking about, right? At 67, you figure it out. He's been doing it for 20 years.

And he—

I've never even asked the story, but did you reach out to him or did he reach out to you? Because he endorsed— let me show everyone the COVID of your incredible book. By the way, tell everyone that it just came out again because you did a revision to it, correct?

The Carnivore Code. Yep. And Mark Sisson wrote the foreword to the book. I connected with Mark through Brad Kearns, and this is the second edition through Houghton Mifflin. Uh, broad circulation now, came out in August. I reached out, I got to connect with Mark through Brad Kearns, and Mark and I did a podcast together and have been great friends ever since. And it's been a fun conversation. And I think that animal-based diets are kind of an evolution of primal, and it's been fun to just share ideas.

It is. And I think it's such a simple, profound idea because for me, you know, my story's a little different than Mark's because Mark has been an athlete in phenomenal shape all his life. And as he's gotten older, he's proved that you can stay at an athletic level, uh, by just following our blueprint, but I think it's just such a basic idea that if you go back over the course of our history as a species, there was a certain method we had to eat and it wasn't like by choice, it's just by, to survive, you know, and then to thrive and there were periods in our history as a species that we survived and grew the most with a high-fat, high-protein diet and when you look at all this, I mean, the evidence is just, it makes it almost like a no-brainer. It may blow the mind, right? And I think when Mark, what were his thoughts when you shared the original version, I would say draft one of The Carnivore Code, when he was considering writing the introduction, because he doesn't write forewords to books that often. And he says the best things about your plan. And really, I know that for him, you, you, you, you popped, you know, something you said. Do you remember what it was for him that got him to make that aha moment?

I think it was just, it made sense to him. Yeah, you know, yeah. And, and what we're talking about here is not a diet diet entirely composed of meat. It's a diet like you're saying, and like Mark has said, that tries to think about what our ancestral blueprint is. How are we programmed to eat? What is a human species-appropriate diet? And the book goes into a lot of ideas, the first of which is that red meat and organs— eating nose to tail— is part of our ancestral blueprint. These are the foods, like you said, Jorge, that have really made us who we are. They have unique nutrients, they're good for us, and they're a part of our history. They, they really shaped the formation of our human body and brain. Now, we've been told they're bad for us over the last 70 years and you and I are gonna debunk some of those myths on this show. But the red meat and organs are the centerpiece of the human diet. And the second part of the equation is that plants don't want to get eaten. They're not entirely benign. They're not—

this is the part I love, because I was just listening to Joe Rogan. You know, he just jumped to Spotify. He had Miley Cyrus on there. I don't know if you've seen his new show with Miley, and she was a big vegan, and now she's an ex-vegan, saying that her mind was— she literally was losing her mind and told Joe Rogan, which I know, you know, he loves eating red meat. And I feel like a lot of people think plants are these benign, wonderful ways to not kill the animals. And Miley, you know, as much as she's grown up quite a bit, she did it originally not to kill animals, which I get. I mean, these poor creatures, we don't want to kill them. We don't want to eat them. But she's like, screw it. You know, if I have to eat fish and fish oil, I'm going to I had to kill the fish to be healthy because she was literally going crazy. She told this to Joe Rogan. And I feel like plants aren't benign. So we're going to talk about that too, right, Dr. Paul, about how certain plants are toxic. The majority, I think you shared last time, what are they, like 98%, 99% of most plants are toxic?

Well, we can think about it in terms of the parts of plants, but a lot of plants are highly defended. Plants don't want to get eaten. They don't want us to eat their seeds and leaves and stems or roots. They're not so— they're not so bothered if we eat the fruit sometimes, but the fruit is kind of seasonal. But yeah, the problem is that animal foods, as we said, are the real nutrient sources. If you eliminate animal foods, you will become nutrient deficient. And if you eat mostly plant foods, you're just going to accumulate lots of these toxins. Now what's interesting about Miley is her ex-husband— I'm friends with Liam Hemsworth. Yeah, well, Liam Hemsworth went vegan, I think, because of Miley. And what did he get? He got a massive kidney stone, horrible problems, also no longer vegan, um, you know. So he's another success story in terms of ex-vegans that have, you know, gone to more animal-based diets and are doing much better with the nutrients in animal foods. But yeah, we should not be misled into thinking that plants are benign. I mean, they look beautiful in your house, they are pretty, yeah, but that— just like an animal runs away from you and doesn't want to get eaten, that plant doesn't want to get get eaten. And because the plant can't run away from you, it has developed so many defense chemicals that we can't see. Plants usually don't have visible fangs. Yeah, sometimes they have spikes. Yeah, but, but most of the time their spikes are hidden, their teeth are hidden, but the teeth are in there. Don't be, you know, don't be misled. Plants have teeth too, and they will bite us back. And so there's this plant toxicity spectrum. And, you know, my message—

I think it's brilliant—

animal-based diets is not to convince everyone in the world to not eat any plants, but to help them understand what are the most toxic plants and what are the least toxic plants. And so if you do those two things, if you consume a lot of good animal foods from good sources, eating them nose to tail, getting the organs in, and you eliminate the most toxic plants, that is a recipe for a flat belly, you know.

Speaking of that, I have to show off, you know, I have— I'm on a yoga block just to be taller, but it's as tall as I am. So my abs, look at them. I give some credit to Mark Sisson because he connected us, but at age, you know, and I'm gonna do the whole, because you did this in Mark Sisson. I think, did you get this from Mark Sisson where he runs around with his shirt off?

I just like hanging, I just don't like to wear a shirt because I—

All right, all right, well then, stand by, stand by. Stand by. But I feel like, if you guys can do that.

Should we both do it shirtless?

If you're watching the ver— Yeah, well, in honor of Mark Sisson, look at me and I'm as tan as Mark right now at 49 and my abs have never been this strong. My core is strong, my chest is strong and I think what is also really cool, Dr. Paul, for me, I have gained, Literally, I was 175 before I started this, before your book, and before Mark says, "Oh, look what I wrote the foreword to." I was like, "Well, what is this book about me?" He's like, "You got to do it." You know the story. I've told it before. We've done another show together, but I really feel because of this reading and because of Mark Sisson that I've gained. Now I'm at 200, 201 pounds, and as you can see one more time, and show them your abs now. Let's see your abs. You've got pretty good abs. Come on, let's not be shy. We got the Latin guy, we got the white boy here, and Mark Sisson Jonathan, wherever he is, he's very envious. Look at those abs. This is the abs show, guys.

Yes.

You look great. So tell us, have you— now what's your weight? How tall are you and what's your weight real quick?

Now that I'm 5'10", 175 pounds. Okay.

All right. Now, were you ever more plant-based and were you not as healthy? Were you more like a Miley, a little cuckoo, or were you always plant-based or were you ever meat-based and never into the plants or was there a time where this body didn't quite look as good, your body, that is.

Well, there was a time. So I was vegan, I was raw vegan for 7 months, maybe 13 or 14 years ago, and I lost 25 pounds of muscle. Oh, all right.

So tell us your origin story one more time. Tell us, recap the story because you are a doctor as well. So however you want to tell it, but tell it in a minute or two. We don't want to spend too much time because you're a legit doctor. A lot of people are like, oh, he's not a real doctor. Please come on. You're an incredible doctor, but tell us your origin story because you've been even a vegan. So you were like Miley for a while.

I was like a vegan. Should we do the rest of the podcast shirtless? We'll see. I've never done a podcast shirtless.

Yeah, I'm okay with it.

I'm actually—

I've never done a podcast shirtless.

We'll see.

No, I'll tell you.

Well, our abs are looking good. I mean, if we had to hide stuff, we will. And you know, I have to say there's some vegan doctors out there that I've interviewed and I'm not going to mention names, but when you look at them, they could not— not that they're overweight, God bless them, but they look— They don't look strong. You know what I mean? I mean, I think what was your—

not strong.

What would you say? Well, tell us your story. So when you were vegan, what happened to your body? You were much thinner and less energy, right?

So I weigh, I weigh 175 pounds now. I was actually 145 pounds, so 30 pounds lighter then, and it was all muscle. I've always been pretty lean, but yeah, I lost a lot of muscle mass. The reason I started iterating my diet was because of eczema. And my eczema didn't get better. And eventually, you know, I had horrible GI problems. I had tons of gas and bloating on a vegan diet, and it was just really hard to be around people socially. And thankfully, I, I woke up at some point and realized that humans are meant to eat meat, that humans are just meant to eat meat. And so, you know, like, I incorporated back in my diet, started to feel good. I didn't quite understand nose-to-tail at that time and incorporating organs.

That—

now tell us, how far back was this? Was it while you were studying medicine? And tell us a little bit about about what got you into the medicine world and what— and how you're doing what you're doing now as an author, podcast host, because you're not— you're doing so much more than just working with clients now as a doctor. But tell us how that started. Give us the history for those that haven't heard the first part of our interview.

Yeah. Yeah. So I had eczema all my life as a kid and I was starting to think about diet. At the time I was a vegan. I was actually a physician assistant working in cardiology. My experience in cardiology showed me very quickly that a symptom-focused, pharmaceutical-based paradigm was not the answer for humans. And I wanted to go back to medical school to really understand the roots of disease. So I went back to medical school at the University of Arizona, I got my MD, I went to residency at the University of Washington. And throughout that whole time, I was trying to understand what my body was asking for in terms of diet. What, what, what did I need to do? What is the species-appropriate diet for humans? Why am I still having eczema? Why am I still having autoimmune illness? With this rash that was at times pretty darn pervasive. And I kept—

where was it? Was it all over your chest, your arms?

It was on my chest. I tend to get it on my wrists, my hips, my back. Yeah, all kinds.

And it's a form of autoimmune. Uh, break that down for anyone listening that has this possible issue, because a lot of times people see it, but sometimes they feel it. They're just chronically tired or they have bloating. What were some of your other symptoms for people listening that may related.

Yeah, so, um, so it's, you know, mostly what you have with an autoimmune illness like eczema is a skin condition. It's itchy, it's red, you know, it's, it's kind of a— it's just it— and it can get pervasive. Like when I was doing jiu-jitsu in medical school, it was all over my knees and elbows and get super infected. And it's an indication that the immune cells are, are activated underneath the surface and are causing problems. It often co-occurs with eczema. And it wasn't until I It wasn't until I cut out all the plants that the eczema went away. And I kept iterating, I kept going closer and closer to an animal-based diet. I was paleo and then autoimmune paleo and further and further down there. And it just, I didn't get better. I just couldn't get rid of it. And then I thought, okay, I heard Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan. I thought this carnivore diet seems crazy over 2 years ago, but I'm gonna give it a try.

Tell us his name again, who was the guy?

Jordan Peterson.

Jordan, okay, Jordan Peterson. Is he an author? What's he, what does he write?

He's a very well-published author. He wrote 12 Rules for Life. He's very well known. Yeah.

So that popped for you. You heard this talk. And what did you say? I got to give this a shot.

I got to give it a try. I got to give this a try with these, with these organs, with this meat and these organs. And I got to stop, you know, I got to stop eating these plants. I don't need them in my diet.

Yeah.

And then quickly my eczema got better within a few weeks. You know, it was crazy. The eczema gets better within a few weeks. And surprisingly, I felt a lot better in terms of, in terms of my mental state. I didn't really think that I had I still had mood problems or issues with anxiety or depression, but I felt clearer. I was more emotionally poised. I just felt like a more complete human mentally once I had cut the plants out of my diet. I thought, this is amazing. And that was really the beginning of my interest in, you know, what are humans really supposed to eat? Are all these plants really necessary? Are they good for us? I don't think they're so necessary or indispensable. And of course, as you know, in 2020, and even in 2019 or 2018 when all this was happening, there's so much mainstream messaging around, um, around what humans are supposed to eat, and very little of it says that red meat is good for us. Most of it says that plants are good for us. So it's completely bucking the norm. It's completely counterculture.

I, I want to do a show someday where I invite my buddy Marco Borrago, who's the author of The Green Print, and I know him because he's a trainer to Beyoncé and Jay-Z, and he's a strong plant-based doctor. And I feel like I would like to have him do a discussion and I can moderate because I feel like you've got a very great point. And I know he does too. And he's very respectful, professional guy, Marco, really great guy. He's kind of private, but he's now written all these books with Beyoncé and Jay-Z. And I feel like they influence millions of people because she has over 200 million people on Instagram, Beyoncé, you know, and I feel like this needs to be said. So for anyone out there that has been on a plant-based diet or knows the Green Printer, knows Marco Braggo, You know, for me originally, I was plant-based for a while. I was vegan. I always said vegan until lunch. I'd always have a plant-based morning, you know, and kind of ramp up that way and then have a little piece of meat in the day and all that. But it was always like 2 or 3 ounces.

Now it's like the COVID of your book.

It's a good piece of meat. And we're going to talk about the sample data. Let me get my shirt on too, because now I feel naked. All right, shirt is coming back on. But do this, take a minute, walk people through this, because the biggest question I want us to try to debunk is that meat causes cancer. My clients, mainly women, you know, over 40s, 50s, and 60s, they've had scares with cancer, whether it's breast, maybe their husbands had colon, maybe they're concerned about it. And I think the biggest concern when I asked everyone before today's show, like, what is your question for Dr. Saladino? What would be your number one question? Their greatest fear to turn on the light to eat meat is cancer.

And it's a valid concern.

Hey, a lot of people are concerned with that. And a lot of what they've been reading from Harvard University and other very established and recognizable names have said that a low fiber, high meat diet causes colon cancer. And this is not the— I'm not the first person to mention this to you. You know about this and you talk about it in your book. There's a whole section in here about that debunking. But before we get to that, would you tell us the story of these plants that you were just saying on how You know, because I always think it's very cool, this ancestral story of how plants were on this planet. And obviously, as a species, we avoided them because of their toxicity and because they made us sick. And a lot of us now believe that we've been eating plants forever. But I feel like the ancestral history of our species, whether it's 2 million years or 3 million years, has been very clear and led down a path. And when we ate more meat, we were successful. Can you share with people your anthropological— how do you say this word? Anthropological? Is that the word?

Exactly.

Background on this, because you're incredibly researched in this on our species and how as a species, we didn't eat a lot of plants and mainly because it made us sick. And that's obviously why you were doing what you were doing. And when you stopped it, you became well. So as I feel like a lot of people don't believe that they really think, no, no, no, no, you've been eating plants. Since day one, we were in the garden of Adam and Eve, we're in the garden, you know, eating fruits. And you did mention fruits are different. So maybe dive into that. And then let's get into this debunking, because I think that's, no pun intended, the meat of the matter here, please. I want people to not feel scared. You know what I mean?

Yeah. So if you think about it, our ancestors are primates and we are evolved from chimps and bonobos. And primate ancestors going back 60, 90 million years. And we really only diverged from those primate ancestors 3 to 4 million years ago with Australopithecus and some of these other species on the East African Rift in the savanna. And so what we find is that—

and that was how many years ago, did you say, Dr.

Paul? Not, um, did not grow for 60 million years eating a lot of plants. Uh, eating, you know, eucalyptus leaves and fruit is not how you grow a big brain. You grow a big brain by getting the unique nutrients found found in animal meat and organs, things like B12, K2, niacin, choline, carnitine. These are uniquely found in animal meat and organs. And we're going to talk about why organs are so important later. But these are the nutrients we need to grow a big brain, creatine. And if you look at the size of the human brain from Australopithecus to Homo habilis to Homo erectus, it exploded in size, not literally, but figuratively between 2 million years ago and now. It went from 500 cc to 1,500 cc, which is a big difference. It tripled in size. In 2 million years after staying the same size in our primate ancestors for 60 million years. And what was the difference? We began hunting. There's tons of fossilized archaeological evidence. We began hunting. There's tools, there's cut marks on bones, there's injuries, there's mass animal graves, and we can look at stable isotopes of those bones. We can compare strontium and barium and calcium from fossils that are 2 million years old. And we got fossils that go back back 4 million years, but we can compare fossilized remains of, you know, pre-hominid and hominid humans from 2 million years ago and see, hey, the majority of the protein we were getting was from animals. And there's a divergence in the species, Australopithecus to Homo habilis and Paranthropus. And Paranthropus ate a lot of plants and Homo habilis ate a lot of animals. And we don't have Paranthropus anymore. Paranthropus went extinct. And it's, you know, it's very clear that that species did not do well on a more plant-based diet. That species went extinct. Homo sapiens is derived from Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, which are hominid species that ate predominantly animals. There is almost incontrovertible evidence for that. Now, did we eat some plants occasionally? Yes, but I believe it was as fallback foods. They were survival foods. And we talked about this with Maile and Liam. Plant foods are not as rich in nutrients. They don't have as many nutrients. That may come as a shock to people, but I explain all that in the book. Not only they have less nutrients, the nutrients are less bioavailable. Animal foods are the most nutrient-rich sources of foods on this planet. Animal meat and organs, hands down, that is unarguable. That is not even contestable in a nutritional, in a nutritional debate. So we have been eating animal meat and organs as the majority of our diet for 2 million years. If we just consider that fact, why would they be bad for us? It's an evolutionary inconsistency to imagine they would give us cancer. But let's, let's think about why this might happen now. Now, when you say we have been told that red meat causes cancer, that's actually incorrect. We've been told red meat is associated with cancer. There's a key difference in those words, causes versus associated. The studies that show that red meat and cancer connection are associational correlation studies. They are observational epidemiology. They are not interventional studies. There is no experiment being done. I would challenge any listener scientist, physician, or anyone, layperson, layman or woman, to find me a single interventional study in humans that shows that red meat causes cancer, because they do not exist. They do not exist. What we do see in westernized countries is that in the US, in North America, those who eat more red meat may develop higher rates of cancer of the colon or other tissue. Now, okay, all right, that is an association. What else do we know about people who, who do those things? Let me just back up. These are correlations. We cannot draw a causative inference from a correlational study because what do we know about people who eat more red meat? They are bucking the health advice. What have we been told for the last 70 years? This is the whole reason we're having this podcast. Well, you and I have been told since we were children, red meat is bad for you, vegetables are good for you. So who eats red meat? It's the person who goes to McDonald's and gets a Big Mac with special sauce, french fries, and a Coca-Cola. Observational studies cannot differentiate a soda, french fries cooked in vegetable oil, sugars, you know, vegetable oil in the special sauce, or bread. You can't blame meat for what all the other processed foods did. How many times have you been to McDonald's? You probably never been to McDonald's in recent history, but how many times have the listeners been to McDonald's or a fast food restaurant or even a barbecue you and seen someone eat only red meat. It essentially never happens. They're eating red meat with a beer or red meat with mayonnaise or red meat with French fries or coleslaw or red meat with a cookie or a donut or a brownie. So those who eat red meat—

buns usually, yeah, and buns—

those who eat red meat are much more likely to do other unhealthy things because they disregard health advice. They're also much more likely— less likely— they're much more likely to do dangerous things like ride motorcycles, smoke cigarettes, be obese, have other comorbidities, and they're much less likely to exercise or be in the sun. The flip side is also true. Who listens to health advice? Who are the vegetarians? They're the people who get colonoscopies and mammograms and are playing tennis on Sunday with their friends. They're out in the sun and they're doing healthy behaviors. Now epidemiology similarly cannot differentiate between the vegetables they're eating and those other healthy behaviors. And there are great studies to show that if you normalize these epidemiology studies and you compare vegetarians to omnivores who eat meat, who do healthy behaviors, the outcomes are exactly the same. Exactly the same. It's the healthy behaviors that are showing protective effect. Most likely these epidemiology studies cannot tell us causality with regard to meat. And another thing I want to mention is that if you look at epidemiology studies in Asia, these are multiple epidemiology studies in countries like Thailand or China, Japan, other Southeast Asian localities, over 200,000 people. The men who eat the most red meat have the lowest rates of heart disease. The women who eat the most red meat have the lowest rates of breast cancer. Why is this? Is red meat good for Asians but bad for Caucasians? No, it's the narrative. What's the narrative in Asia? Have they been told red meat is bad for them? No, red meat is associated with affluence. So the people who eat vegetarian in the U.S. Are the same people who eat red meat in Asia, and vice versa, right? So the people who don't eat red meat in Asia are the people who are poor, they can't afford it, which means they're gonna smoke more, drink more, exercise less, do less healthy behaviors. So the groups are reversed. And that's called like a crossover effect. It's very fascinating. Yeah. But it starts to shed light on how limiting epidemiology is. And you really need to generate a hypothesis, a guess, and then test it with interventions. When those interventions are done, red meat does not cause problems in the human gut. It does not cause breast cancer or colon cancer. In fact, red meat and animal organs— liver, heart, things like this— provide unique nutrients that we need to fight cancer. And being nutrient deficient is going to predispose us to problems more. There are specific things found in animal meat like stearic acid. It's a saturated fat, and we hear saturated fat, I think that's bad. Bad. But I can show you studies that show that stearic acid fights breast cancer. And in our last podcast, we talked about linoleic acid. That's a seed oil that's in a lot of plant foods. That one seems to worsen breast cancer. So here we have plants worsening breast cancer and an animal fat, stearic acid, an 18-carbon saturated fat that actually protects against breast cancer. So the, the roles are completely reversed. And again, I will challenge anyone to find a single study study that shows an interventional, not observational, that red meat is harmful to humans in any way, shape, or form, whether it's cancer, inflammation, whatever. I don't know if we talked about the study on the first podcast, but there's an interventional study that's been done where they replaced carbohydrates in the diet with 8 ounces of lean red meat.

Tell us.

Interventional study. So this is following people for 8 to 10 weeks. At the end of the study, those people who ate 8 ounces more, half a pound more red meat, a significant amount, lower markers of inflammation, lower markers of oxidative stress, lower markers of DNA damage. The prevailing hypothesis is that DNA damage precedes cancer in many cases. So interventional studies with red meat show that it's helpful. Now, I don't wanna— I wanna bring something up just observationally because this is current knowledge. You may know that Chadwick Boseman recently died.

Yes.

This is the guy in Black Panther.

Yeah, no, I was gonna ask you about that because so many people right now, I think this is such a timely topic. You know, he died of colon cancer.

He was a vegetarian.

So tell us, all right, get into it. So say the name one more time for everyone out there, Marvel Comics, you know, the Black Panther.

Black Panther, I believe his name is Chadwick Boseman.

That's correct.

4-year struggle with colon cancer. He was a vegetarian. And it's not to say that vegetarian diets cause colon cancer, but it's saying a vegetarian diet isn't going to protect you against colon cancer, right? He got colon cancer, he didn't even eat meat. So it's a totally different story. Now, again, we're looking at associations in an N of 1, but it's a real story. Strong story because people know of Chadwick Boseman. Now what you bring up with Beyoncé and Jay-Z is interesting. Yeah, plant-based diets can be calorie deficient, but they're also micronutrient deficient. So if women are looking to lose weight, you can, you can lose weight on a plant-based diet, but you're not gonna feel good long-term. The key to losing weight and feeling good and keeping muscle and staying healthy is getting the right types of animal foods, which give you the nutrients. Animal foods won't cause you to gain weight. Processed foods, seed oils cause you to gain weight. We can talk about that. But I think the reason that plant-based diets are popular with women is because it enables women to feel like they're eating a lot of food with very few calories. And that's not what you want. You want food that is nutrient-rich, and meat is not incredibly nutrient-dense. But if you eat food with lots of cat— with lots of bulk without nutrients, you are going to be nutrient deficient. You don't just want to fill your stomach. I will ask this to anyone eating a plant-based diet. I've heard this over and over. Are you ever fully satiated? Are you ever not hungry? Most people say no, right? Starving yourself is not the way to lose weight.

Well, that's why they're snacking every couple hours, because they're not—

and you might lose weight. When I was a vegan, I lost 30 pounds. I lost 30 pounds of muscle. You can get really skinny, you can get waifishly skinny and lose muscle on a vegan diet, but that is not what you want. And ladies out there listening, muscle is sexy. You want to be muscular. You don't need to look like a bodybuilding male, but if you want to have strong bones and you want to be metabolically healthy and carry children around and play with your kids and live a long, healthy life, you need to be strong. You don't need to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. We don't want you to look like guys with big, broad shoulders. You don't need to look like Jorge or I with, you know, like these, these arms, but you need muscles. And if, you know, like, it's not sexy, it's not healthy for a woman to have no muscles, to be completely skinny.

That gives you shape and it gives you strength for the bones. And as you said, to be functional. And I think the greatest concern for women is that they're going to become somehow like more manly. And that's just not true. I mean, that's such a, such a myth. I love the point that Chadwick was a vegan. That I did not know.

I think he was vegetarian.

Vegetarian. What would you say your theory is? And this is just a stab in the dark based on someone who obviously passed from colon cancer. How can a— and now this is to flip it. Now we're going the opposite of the Harvard studies and all this, that meat causes colon cancer. How could plant-based nutrition actually, I don't want to say prevent it, but could cause colon cancer to be heightened? Or do you have a theory on that maybe, Dr. Paul? What are your thoughts on plants and colon cancer? The very thing people think is the solution to not getting colon cancer can actually cause it to become more prevalent. What are your thoughts on plants and cancer?

Yeah, if you are nutrient deficient, if you are micronutrient deficient, that, that can impair the immune system. The immune system is what we use to, to monitor cancers. And so like, your body needs nutrients. Nutrients are found in meat and organs. And so I'm looking online, I see actually some information that Chadwick Boseman may have been a vegan. Um, he was—

can you pull it up on your screen? Do you mind?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Oh, you have to enable screen sharing for me. Next to the screen share icon, there's a little—

let me see, stand by.

This is in order.

This, yeah, because I love this. This is great. And this is under screen, under window, under screen share. Screen share.

See screen share.

Multiple.

Done.

How's that? Okay, so I'll show you guys.

All right, so stand by, guys, if you're watching the video version of this. Tell them what we're about to see.

So here's a quote from The Hollywood Reporter saying that Chadwick Boseman is vegetarian in his usual style, you know, that saying he was vegetarian. There's another one here. Chadwick Boseman described himself as mostly vegan January 18th, 2019. Yep. Fitness regimen and vegan lifestyle had given him maybe the handsomest years of his life.

Wow.

It's just kind of eerie and sad, right?

Yeah.

This is on Vegans of LA, is the website.

Wow, yeah, let's not upset them.

Uh-oh. Chadwick Boseman drops ton of weight, worries his fans. Well, that's because it's on vegan diet, you know? Yeah. So, like, I don't know if he went vegan because he got the cancer diagnosis, but this is not the answer, you guys.

So walk us through this idea, because I'm just thinking out loud. Common sense corner here, you know, like I'm thinking primal, the whole ancestral thing. Plants have fiber. Hopefully he's eating ones that aren't toxic. You would think that that fiber in the colon would keep it healthy, give it a little massage, clean out the poop.

Doesn't work like that.

So tell us what is— how does it— tell us how it works because when you eat these plants that have fiber, because meat doesn't have fiber, just to clarify.

Not plant fiber.

Yeah, the plant fiber. How does that work? And then does meat have a different type of fiber? Explain the difference, please.

Please take it away.

Yeah, so people think fiber prevents cancer, and that's not even a question. You know, you can look up New England Journal of Medicine, 1999. There were two landmark studies in the New England Journal of Medicine, both interventional. I think they were 4 years, and there was a third study published in 2000 that was 8 years. And in these studies, they had two groups of people, and these are interventional studies following people, and they had increased cancer from— increased, excuse me, fiber from fruits and vegetables, and then another group that had increased fiber as a fiber supplement. Supplement. And at the end, at the end of these trials, they looked for recurrence of colonic adenocarcinoma, which are precancerous lesions of the colon visualized via colonoscopy. And they looked for these, uh, and they found no difference between the fiber and no fiber supplementing groups. So there's, there's absolutely no evidence, zero.

Would you send me that article? We'll share with everyone on the show notes.

Yeah, there's absolutely zero evidence.

And I think what I'd like to do with your help, buddy, if possible, your best articles from your book— and I know I've been gathering these from Mark Sisson over the years— I'm going to put them all thejorgecruzeshow.com as a special place where— because I think this is the biggest question people want to have answered, is this idea that plants versus meat and how meat doesn't cause colon cancer. Because I feel like this is a big issue, and this is science that's been pretty much shown to do exactly what you just said, where, you know, it actually is counterintuitive. And that more importantly, meat and eating meat, even though it doesn't have plant fiber How would you describe how the colon stays healthy? It's the nutrients from the food that gives the immunity, the body, the ability to stay healthy. How does it affect the actual organ? Because for the most part, when I've been eating more plant-based, I was always in the bathroom. I mean, literally I used to do chia seed smoothies all the time.

I was pooping night and day.

And now with a meat-based diet, I, it's very different. I go once a day and it's much more, how shall we say, modest, you know? It's not this big mess.

So this is the thing. Yes, fiber will give you bigger poops, but bigger poops are not the— not what you want. You want easy to pass poops, right? So I poop every day. I have for 2 years. I am not constipated. I have zero, zero fiber in my diet. You do not need fiber to poop. In fact, most people do much better with zero fiber. I want to screen share these. I'll send it to you.

Beautiful.

New England Journal of Medicine, January 21st, 1999, Dietary Fiber and the risk of colorectal cancer and adenoma in women. Our data do not support the existence of an important protective effect of dietary fiber against colorectal cancer or adenoma. That is the most prestigious journal in all of medicine. All right, one more here. Please, the same again. This is also New England Journal of Medicine. This one was published a year later. Lack of effect of a high-fiber cereal supplement on the recurrence of colorectal adenomas. As used in the study, a dietary supplement of wheat bran fiber does not protect against the recurrence of colorectal adenomas. So really, anyone who tries to claim that fiber prevents breast— uh, colon cancer, yeah, is, is not citing any evidence that I'm aware of. There's zero evidence of this. There's also no interventional evidence that fiber prevents breast cancer. So people imagine fiber like massaging your colon. Really, fiber just prevents you from absorbing nutrients nutrients in food.

Hey everyone, it's Jorge Cruise. Hey, I wanted to interrupt the show just for one single minute to invite you to join the number one newsletter that really is about controlling appetite. I called Zero Hunger Live, uh, and you can go to zerohungerlive.com. The bottom of the page, we have a sign up for this newsletter. Comes out every Friday from yours truly, and it really is the number one source on my best biohacks that we don't even cover on the show to help control appetite, including emotional hunger. So if you are struggling with that, please join our newsletter. Check it out at Zero— the number zero but spelled out Z-E-R-O— hungerlive.com, and you'll sign up and get it for free every Friday, and it's exclusive to listeners. All right, just go to zerohungerlive.com. Let's get back to the show.

You don't need fiber to poop. Fiber is not something that humans need. Now, if you don't have trouble eating plant fiber, then great, but there's some really fascinating studies that show that the removal of fiber significantly improves constipation in a lot of people.

I say that again, so the removal of fiber Listen to this, guys.

Say it again, Dr. Paul.

The removal of fiber improves constipation in many people. So this is a fascinating—

That is profound. That's an aha moment there. Oprah would be saying, whoa, say that again, a third time. She's like this, I'm gonna make this a slide because this is something that people don't ever say.

I know, and it's totally true though. I mean, constipation is a real, real problem. And it, you know, the removal of fiber— this is a study from the World Journal of Gastroenterology from 2012.

Okay.

And, um, and I'll, uh, I'm gonna try and find it and pull it up here. I'll show it to you if I don't find it right now. No, no problem. Um, the— and it basically, it's— they took 3 groups of people, all who had idiopathic constipation, and they decreased fiber. They— one group had zero fiber, one group had moderate, one group had fiber as normal. The group that completely resolved the constipation was the zero fiber group.

This is crazy, crazy. I mean, Benefiber hates us, Metamucil, all— I mean, I have so many clients.

They hate this thing. They don't want this.

Yeah, no, they're obviously—

this is—

there's, there's a, there's a business in fiber, high fiber diets. I mean, you even hear about high fiber paleo diets or high fiber keto diets. And I feel like fiber, what you said, to break it down to its simplest form, it's just a tool that basically does not allow nutrients to be absorbed into the body. And it's just a leftover residual matter of survival mode of eating plants. But if you're going to thrive, the meat, literally when you absorb that and you eat that, how much of it are we pooping out? Not much, right? Because I don't see a lot come out when I eat meat.

I'm not sure about that. Yeah. Here's the study, stopping or reducing dietary fiber intake reduces constipation and its associated symptoms. Wow. World Journal of Gastroenterology. I was doing all that by memory, you guys. Uh, idiopathic constipation, its associated symptoms can be effectively reduced by stopping or even lowering the intake of dietary fiber. You'll see here that if you read the abstract, um, you know, for no fiber group, reduced fiber, and high fiber groups respectively, symptoms of bloating were present in 0%. There was no, no bloating in the zero fiber group. No bloating.

Screenshot that, everyone, please.

Right? No, no bloating. And so again, I'll send it to Jorge Cruise. Yeah, he can, uh, he can put it in the show notes. But you know, we could do a whole podcast on fiber. I'm happy to go as deep into this as you'd like. But you know, people get worried about fiber for the microbiome, fiber for pooping. It's just, it's a fallacy. It's a fairy tale. We do not need fiber as humans. If you don't do bad with fiber, then great. But if you have gas or bloating or constipation, or you don't want your partner to go in the bathroom after you poop, or you're spending a lot of time in the bathroom, or you're having gas at the office, you need to get rid of your fiber. You need to cut down your fiber. You need to think about that because you should not have that. When I was a vegan, I shared an office with two other physician assistants, and I feel bad for them to this day with the amount of farts that I, you know, it was just so bad.

And they were not just loud, but how did they smell, right?

They smelled horrible. They're not gonna be loud. I'm embarrassed to like fart, right?

But they smell elegant, but still you knew it had smell.

Right.

The room was like, whoa.

Yeah, my car smelled. It's no— like, farts are no good. I'll tell you, I, I don't even fart on a carnivore diet. It makes my dating life so much easier.

There you go.

Yeah, like, I used to go on dates with women and, and I would, I would be like, oh, my stomach hurts, but I don't want to fart. I don't want to pass gas right now because it's embarrassing. And then, you know, it's so much easier. Like, I don't fart anymore. Yeah, more diet. So this is the, you know, this is the answer. There's— it's so crazy is fiber is all in vogue now. It's more fiber, more fiber, more fiber. And I will directly challenge that notion. And I will directly challenge the notion that red meat causes cancer or that fiber prevents cancer. And we can talk about anything you want, constipation or whatever, but I think we've pretty much talked about that.

No, you did a great job. And I think right now let's get into organ meat because I feel like what you do, we're really, I think not other people do. And I don't hear even Mark Sisson talk about organ meat other than he eats liver and I've been eating liver and it's a little harder to find, but you know, liver, heart meat, nose to head. I mean, I once was in New York at Broderick's Brodo, this really cool chic restaurant. I think it's called Brodo.

Yeah, Brodo.

Brodo.

And they, I think I had a burger with brain meat in it.

Amazing.

It was hard. It was a tough, I've never had brain before. Do you eat brain too? I mean, mainly what are the organs that most of us could eat that we can get at the store? Because it's hard to find. I mean, liver is out there.

You can get liver.

You can find heart meat. I think liver is easier. Would you agree when you go to Whole Foods or something like that?

Liver is the easiest, and most people are only going to be able to find liver. And if you can find grass-fed, grass-finished liver, the sourcing is important, you know.

Does it matter if it's from a chicken or from beef, or what would you suggest?

Beef is the best. Beef liver is more nutrient-dense, and sourcing matters. I know a lot of people worry about hormones in meat. They don't want to, you know, have the hormones in meat affect them. Grass-fed, grass-finished meat is going to be so much better. Even in, even in grain-finished meat, there are not really any significant amounts of hormones.

For the folks on a budget, if they're doing non-grass-fed, is that okay? I mean, it's not as— but some people say it's not a big deal, but what— how big of a deal is grass-fed or grass-fed finished versus— I mean, obviously eating the traditional diet, it's way better if it's just regular meat.

It's way better. But what I would say in response to that is eat the cheaper cuts of meat. You can get grass-fed ground beef for $6 a pound. You can get grass-fed stew meat for $8 a pound, and it's really good. You can just blanch it. 99% of the meat that I eat is $10 a pound stew meat.

And where do you get your meat at? Do you have online? Is it, uh, ButcherBox?

Or who do you go to? I do Belcampo and, um, White Oak Pastures. So if you're on the West Coast, Del Campo is great. If you're in the middle of the country or the East Coast, White Oak Pastures is great. They're both regenerative farms and they do grass feeding and grass finishing. Del Campo has a certified organic line. I do— 90% of the meat that I eat is $8 to $10 a pound of stew meat, which is cheaper than salmon, it's cheaper than chicken. Like, that's as cheap as you're gonna get for like super high quality meat. You could even get cheaper for ground beef. No, that's, that's what I eat.

Now for people out there, before we get to the— No, no, this is great. The organs are important, but before we even get to that, you mentioned chicken, fish. I feel like as much as I could have chicken, I haven't had chicken honestly in 2 months. I've just been doing beef.

Well, okay.

So tell me why chicken is— Well, yeah. Help me understand what you just said because fish too. I mean, I haven't been doing fish. I feel like I'm just doing my steak 5 minutes on each side with a little sea salt and I'm ready in 10 minutes. I have this delicious meal. Meal and I'm done. I mean, talk about a 10-minute meal prep. I mean, it's so easy. Fish, you got to do stuff, you got to take the skin off, you got all this stuff. I mean—

House smells like fish. Yeah.

And then chicken and you get all those bones. Don't get me wrong. I like to chew on some bones and get the broth out of them. But why is beef, as a carnivore, you know, because obviously carnivore could include things like eggs. Does that include cheese?

Dairy? A lot of people have trouble with dairy. It can if you're not sensitive to it, but I recommend— So my recommendation for people is if they have autoimmune disorders is to consider do something called like an autoimmune carnivore diet, right?

Okay.

There's an autoimmune paleo diet. My version of an autoimmune carnivore diet is grass-fed beef, organ meats, bone broth, salt, and a carbohydrate if you want. So it's a very simple diet, right? One source of carbohydrate, fruit or honey or white rice. That's a simple autoimmune diet. That's very simplistic for healing bad problems, or if you really want to, really lean down and get a flat belly quickly, that's going to be optimal. That's basically how I eat. Okay, now you're not going to get hormones from the meat, especially if it's well-raised. It's not going to cause you to look like a man. I, I need to ask more women in my life why they avoid red meat. I think women avoid red meat because we've been told saturated fat, or they think it's bad for them, or they think it's going to make them look like a man, and it's just not the truth.

I think those are them. Yeah, I don't know.

Cancer, cancer. Yeah, and again, all We've kind of debunked all that stuff too. Red meat is so much more nutritious. Chicken is okay, but it's just not going to be— it doesn't have all the nutrients that you really want, especially when you think about the organs. Red meat is just better. It has more iron, more of the nutrients that you want to absorb, especially when you start eating it nose to tail and you get things like liver. So you don't have to eat all red meat. I'm not a huge fan of fish because a lot of it is full of heavy metals and mercury and selenium, selenium. And you know, it's, and it's very expensive if you're going to get good fish. I mean, a king salmon is $30 a pound. Now you're talking expensive. You know, that's like a primo ribeye, $30 a pound. Like I'm not asking anyone to do that.

And we don't need to spend that kind of money, no. I don't think so. No, yeah.

You know, scallops are $25 a pound. And I don't like having a lot of fish 'cause it's full of heavy metals. It's not that, you know, the red meat is not gonna cause you to gain weight. You're gonna feel better, you're gonna lose weight, trust me. But incorporate organs too. And if you go to Jorge Cruise—

I'd say go there because think of organs, I mean, it's the easiest way to think of organ meat as a tool from your perspective for more rare nutrients that aren't in the actual tissue of whatever you're eating, whether it's a thigh. I mean, what are these cuts we're eating of beef? They're not the organs, they're the muscle tissue of the animal. So those are primarily— tell us what's in traditional red meat and then why, say, the liver has something special. What's in there that we don't see in the red meat?

Tell us a little bit. Yeah, yeah. If you think about the way our ancestors have eaten meat and the way that animals in the wild eat other animals, animals, they always eat the organs and they always eat the organs first. In fact, the liver is often so sacred that it can't be touched by human hands. If you've ever seen a lion eat a gazelle, that's kind of gruesome, but they go for the organs. Crocodiles do the same.

What's in there? What do they want in there? What's— it's not candy.

It sounds like— No, it's not candy. It's probably folate, riboflavin, vitamin K2, choline, carnitine, copper, zinc. The liver, if you look at the liver, it is absolutely the best multivitamin in the human body. An ounce or two—

Say that one more time. That's worth, that's worth quoting.

It's absolutely the best. The liver is absolutely the best multivitamin in the whole human body. If you combine the liver with other parts of organs, then you're getting even better. But, you know, muscle meat is high in zinc, it's high in heme iron, it's high in B6. Doesn't have a lot of biotin, doesn't have a lot of folate, doesn't have quite as much riboflavin, doesn't have any copper. There's a lot of nutrients that are much more richly represented in the liver. And then you can think about things like heart And heart is gonna be really hard to find at your butcher, but these online sources can do it, or you can get a desiccated organ supplement, which we can talk about. Yep. And, but you know, if you find heart, that's great. But beyond the heart, most people have never eaten a pancreas or a spleen or a thymus or a brain.

You're not saying we need to get into those organs, or yes, a little variety.

They would be beneficial if you want to eat them, but I know that they make people so squeamish, but that's why we try to make them into capsules and do desiccated. I do think they're beneficial. Beneficial for humans. Yeah, our ancestors would have eaten them, but they're so hard for us.

They weren't picky. Our ancestors ate— I mean, they just left the bones behind, literally, right?

Yeah, yeah. And as do animals. And those organs have unique, you know, nutrients. So for instance, you know, you think about something like anemia. A lot of anemia is iron deficiency anemia. Red meat is good, liver is good, but spleen is the real superhero. There is so much heme iron in spleen. If you have anemia, you need to eat spleen. Yeah, but nobody thinks about spleen. You're never going to find it unless you order it from a farm and so you can get these like desiccated organs in the pill that'll help you do that. But, and then pancreas can help with digestive disorders. Obviously brain is super nutritious, but how many people are going to eat brain? It was a little hard to eat.

It was very hard. It wasn't seasoned enough or what, softened? What's that called when you make the meat more—

Tenderized?

Yeah, tenderized. But, you know, I ate it. I ate it and it was expensive. It was like $120 meal.

I was like, oh my gosh.

No, and I got a chance to talk to the chef and all that. And it was really powerful. But for people out there that aren't squeamish about liver, because my mom, bless her heart, she's passed 20 years ago, but she used to make liver once a week. Tell us what you would suggest, because obviously we're eating meat every day. We're hopefully eating like the COVID of your book, but then how often could we have a little liver? A couple times a week? And how much would you prescribe if you were to prescribe liver? And let's talk about these other forms too.

Yeah, I would recommend 4 to 12 ounces a week of liver. So you could eat liver every other day, every day. I eat liver every day. I eat a I eat a couple of ounces of liver every day, but you could eat liver a few times a week, would be a huge improvement.

And this is beef liver you're saying, or what happens if you find chicken? Because all I find is chicken at Whole Foods.

It's not as good. I mean, you really have to cook the heck out of chicken liver. Chicken liver is much more likely to have contaminants just because chickens have salmonella and campylobacter. Beef liver is cleaner in my opinion, better raised.

How do you prepare it? Is it different than meat? Just not that it's a cooking class, but what, 5 minutes on each side, high temp? Beef tallow, or what do you— how do you do it? Salt? How do you make it?

So if you want to eat liver and you want to cook it, you just pan sear it on both sides and leave it pink in the middle. Okay. Most of the time when I eat liver, I just eat it raw. I'll do like a liver shooter.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, you said what?

I'll eat it raw. I'll eat liver raw. Yeah, people don't want to do this, but the other way—

is that not unsafe, or is that another myth?

Pretty safe, pretty darn safe, because it's usually been frozen. Yeah, I've eaten a lot of raw liver.

Do you put lemon on it, or what do you do?

I just do a shooter Yeah.

Like, yeah, like oysters or something.

Yeah, it's kind of like an oyster. But that's why things like, you know, that's why desiccated organs when you freeze dry them are so good. Because if you really get into this, what does that word mean, desiccated?

Because I know you're talking about an alternative way here. Because the good thing is, and I want to congratulate you because you guys have launched with you and your partners, this is kind of one of your side projects and your passions is helping people get these nutrients. And as we've been talking And it, I mean, especially raw. I don't know if I could do that. I mean, you do that raw, but for those that can't even do it cooked with salt and as delicious as that is, because it can be delicious with salt. I do feel salt fixes a lot of stuff, makes meat delicious. But what is this way of having these organs and these nutrients in this kind of capsule form? How does it work?

Tell us about that.

Yeah, so because I'm so passionate about helping people get these organs, I launched a company called Hardened Soil. I'll show you our stuff. You can see behind me.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, there it is. Yes. Yeah, Beef Organs.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

Yes, let me see it again. What's it say on the COVID Pull it in. We want to see this baby. Let's see. Look at that. So what does it say there? So be— so this is— what is it? What are we looking at here?

Tell us what we're— grass-fed, grass-finished, regeneratively raised.

Is this the liver we're looking at, or what?

It says liver, heart, kidney, spleen, and pancreas. Get out of here.

So it's the whole mix.

And it's—

show us the pill.

How big are the pills? And you take 6 capsules a day. They're 500 milligrams. And what we were able to do is, and you get, there are capsules, so you can open it into something, you know, you can open it into a smoothie. Um, but this is, these are like the organs, they're freeze-dried. So yeah, so you can freeze-dry the organs, you take them and it's when you do low temperature dehydration. So it's not like a dehydrator where you're dehydrating them at, dehydrating them at 140 degrees. You're dehydrating them at, uh, at like 38 degrees. So it preserves the nutrients. So like I was saying, you know, I think liver, you want to preserve as many of the nutrients as you can. And the best thing to do is really to desiccate it for people, which is what's so, so interesting, that if you desiccate the organs, you can put them into a capsule. And it's so great. Like, my mom will take it, my dad will take it, my sister will take it. Yeah, it gets you these unique nutrients. So I'll screen share.

And they can travel well because the organ meat means Steaks you can get anywhere, hopefully. God bless America that we love steaks here. But the organ meats, I wouldn't say people are eating a lot of that. I mean, they should. And I know people in the past, you go back 10, 20 years, my mom probably was doing it in her 30s, you know? But I think what happened, because why do I feel like people were having liver much more often? My mom's generation should have been in her mid-80s right now, were doing this. Did someone scare people off from eating liver meat? Because she used to have it once a week and I'd make fun of her. I was like, "Oh, gross, Mom." But what happened? Theories on that? Because I think no one does it anymore.

We lost it culturally. You know, most people who are from Hispanic or Asian families, or, you know, they, they, they're— those cultures have eaten the organs and they've appreciated. I mean, yeah, we don't waste. Yeah, you don't waste, and it's very nutritious. And but it's just become gross. We've just become more and more refined in our tastes. And, you know, it was funny because I recently was in Montana doing a podcast with a hunter up there named Steve Ranella, and he said— he was telling me this interesting history of of these trappers, these fur trappers, and they used to, even in the mid-1800s, people were just eating the choice cuts of meat. We'd lost a lot of the organs, at least in terms of westernized North American culture. And the trappers were just eating the choice cuts and they would get sick. You know, these are people living off the land and hunting and you get sick. You don't get enough nutrients unless you eat the organs. And so they didn't do well. So they had to—

Even if we're eating just a carnivore diet, so we're eating our red meat, what would you say we're missing in a cut of red meat? Meat, like on the COVID of your book versus a liver? What are the primary, if there were 2 or 3 nutrients that are critical, what are you going to get in liver or some organ would you say that we're missing in a nice cut of meat?

Folate, biotin, riboflavin are the biggest ones probably to start. Folate is necessary for—

Folate. I'm going to write these down. Folate.

Riboflavin.

Riboflavin.

And biotin.

And biotin. And why are these 3 amigos, we'll call them the 3, why are they so important for us, Dr. Pompa?

Well, biotin is important for hair, skin, and nails. If anybody listening to this has taken biotin, you know it's hair, skin, and nails. Well, you can get it naturally if you eat liver, right? Like, this is the much more bioavailable part of it.

And the other ones?

Riboflavin is a B vitamin that's crucial for proper biochemistry in the human body. It's crucial for red blood cells and energy and mood and libido. And folate is crucial for our development, for red blood cell development, and to make a healthy baby, to be fertile. So there's so much of this. And again, you know, this kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier. If you want to be fertile and have libido and have healthy hormones, you need the nutrients and the precursors found in animal foods and animal organs. And they're just not found in plant foods. And if you talk to people who eat plant-based diets, most of the time they're going to say, hey, I just— my libido went away. I have so many vegan friends. I've interviewed vegans on my podcast, Fundamental Health. And, you know, they said, you know, I thought I was asexual. I just didn't want to have sex, which is, that's a vital sign. Libido is a vital sign.

You know what I'm hoping? You'll invite me on one of these days to your show because I want to bring on with me one of my clients. I want to surprise you because she has been listening to our interviews. Her name is Sandy. Take a look at Sandy. If I can zoom in on her. She has now lost 91 pounds working with me. She's 56, I think. Amazing.

Yep.

And she's going to be possibly on the COVID I'm talking to Woman's World magazine. They have 9 million readers. She's going to be on the COVID on there. She's been doing my interval training, but in her story, her number one digestive tip, Sandy's, is eating and transforming her diet with The Carnivore Code. And she's been doing organ meat as well. And she's a phenomenal client of mine. And she is your biggest fan.

She really adores you.

She thinks you're very handsome. Of course, you have great body, all this stuff. But she really does say that she was, as a woman, as most women are, were very concerned about eating meat.

Me.

And because you and I started this conversation before I talked to any other doctor, I mean, because of Mark and what Mark did with your book, she has been following our every word. And she is now— I mean, I'll send you some pictures, but she is excited to share. And if that's something we could do, I know she would be honored to talk and we could do a discussion about how women in particular, you know, and I've been working with primarily most of my celebrity clients are women, I would say, from Oprah to her, but, you know, there are a couple men too. And I feel I feel like people need to know, you know, and especially as a trainer, I've been doing this for 20 years, that this way of eating obviously has affected my body as we showed earlier and has— you've gained muscle as well from back when you were in that place and Sandy's body. And this is the part I wanted to save for right now. Her body is back in business. She shared, we did an Instagram Live about how her husband and her really lost that intimacy, you know, but her libido Libido came back and now her husband literally just says, "When are we having our steak? When are we doing forever?" Because Sandy taught— and most women will not talk about their age. Sandy will.

She's in her 50s, 55, I believe.

She talks about her weight, which most women won't talk about as well. And then she talks about her libido and her libido has been transformed. And she did this on a livestream with me on Instagram Live. And it's because she really says, but she was doing intermittent fasting.

Fasting.

She was doing the interval training with me, but the piece she was missing was what you have been teaching. And she does liver as well, loves her liver meat.

She'll sauté it.

And what were you saying for most people, like maybe twice a week, right?

I would say 3 to 4 times a week. Yeah. Yeah. Or daily with the supplements. We have another supplement. Yeah. Yeah.

What else do you have?

Yeah. So we have, you know, this is our website, Heart and Soil. Heart and Soil.

And what a great name.

Yeah, yeah, and the soil is about— because we want to support regenerative agriculture, and we've got— so these say— yeah, walk us through this.

You have beef organs, that's the one you showed us, right?

Yep, that's, that's, uh, heart, liver, spleen, kidney, pancreas, bone marrow, and liver. So you could just take a liver supplement.

Nice. So it's got collagen, that's collagen as well, right?

But collagen as well, and calcium and all kinds of good stuff in there. Blood Builder is going to be in next week. Um, we've got—

what's that one for? Or what, how does it— what's in that one?

What part of the Blood Builder is spleen, liver, and, um and it actually has blood in it. So it's gonna be a really good one for iron deficiency anemia.

Nice.

And then we have this one, Gut and Digestion, and we have Firestarter, and we've got all kinds of cool ones.

And what's in those two? Really briefly, the Firestarter, what's that?

Firestarter is tallow. So we talked about this on the last interview. It's tallow, yeah. This is stearic acid. This is stearic acid that helps us get rid of that belly fat and replace linoleic acid. Okay. And Gut and Digestion has stomach and liver and kidney and pancreas to help with digestive issues 'Cause we know, it's so interesting when you look at humans, there's unique things found in the stomach of animals that help heal our guts. Yeah, so these are all gonna be in the next week, but—

I love it.

We're just seeing—

And then the main one that's out right now is the one you were showing with everyone, sure.

Well, the beef organs and bone marrow and liver are out now. Depending when this podcast comes out, most of those will probably be in stock.

Awesome, I'm so excited. Congratulations on that, because I think no one has really taken it and made it something that was enjoyable and easy and practical and make it at the level that you've done.

I want my sister to be able to do it and her kids and my parents. And if you can get the fresh organs, great. But if you can serve this need, it makes me so happy.

I love that.

I love that.

And tell us the website one more time for the new one, the new heartandsoil.co.

Heartandsoil.co.

All right.

And obviously, if they go to your website— not that we're going to wrap up, but let's start wrapping up— give everyone your information where they can find your work, because you still work with clients independently. Uh, tell us a little bit about where they find you and and what they can expect, what services you have at your website and on your social and all that, please.

So my— so the best place to find everything I'm doing is heartandsoil.co right now.

Perfect.

I put all my podcasts there, all my videos are there. Yeah, everything is at heartandsoil.co. You'll find all about me, my book, and you'll find the social handles all there. So just go to heartandsoil.co for everything.

Okay, perfect. That makes it easy. And then on Insta and Facebook, where do they find your personal page? Give us— remind us because you have a great handle. I love it.

@carnivoremd.

Yeah, that's great. Well, I love that. And you have your podcast show as well. Tell us the name of that. And how—

Fundamental Health.

Fundamental Health, right there. So, and hopefully we can do a story about women and health whenever, whenever you have time, because I know your show is busy. How many shows do you guys do a week, would you say?

Uh, one. I do one a week. Um, sometimes I'll do a bonus episode, usually just one a week, but maybe more in the future. I got so much else going on now.

Oh, you're busy Well, end with this. Tell us your average day. I think this is the perfect way to end it. From start to finish, because you work out, you're eating healthy, you get enough sleep, I believe. End on that, because I think everyone likes to have a template. Give us your template briefly in a minute or two, and then we'll wrap up.

Yeah, so I just want to say that my template is not the way it has to be.

So, no, sure, sure.

In the book, in The Carnivore Code, which you can find at heartandsoil.co, the, the idea is I, I have an expanded spectrum of plants. It's not all just animal meat and organs. It's not meat and liver every day for everybody. Mostly what I eat personally is meat and organs. And, you know, I'll do a little bit of honey from time to time and bone broth. But that's just what works for me.

You put the honey on the meat or how do you use the honey?

I just use a spoonful a couple times a day. Yeah, I like carbohydrates occasionally.

Okay.

Sometimes a little bit of fruit. But, you know, I want people to understand—

Avocados, things like that?

Yeah, yeah. Avocados, berries, squash, things like that.

Kind of And I love that chart that we showed them because you updated it recently, not to interrupt you, but that's— what page is it on in the physical book? Do you happen to have it?

I don't have the page number off top of my head, but it's, it's a plant toxicity spectrum. It's in the book, or you can just reach out to me. People can always email me, Dr. Paul, drpaul@heartandsoilsupplements.com. Perfect. And, and you'll get— and I'll answer your questions. But yeah, I'm, I'm more about animal-based diets, having people focus on animal meat and organs, and then understanding which plants are toxic than having people get rid of all the plants in their diet. I think it's much more sustainable when people think about eating meat and liver or the desiccated organs and bone broth with avocado and berries and squash and maybe olives. It's just like, that's so much bigger palate and it's doable for people. But, you know, if you read the book or you listen to the first interview, it'll make sense. Like, what you really want to avoid, and this is counterculture, are things like leafy greens, nuts, seeds, grains, and legumes.

Those are Kale.

Kale doesn't love you back. Kale doesn't love you back. Don't eat the kale.

I think it's just so empowering that you really have taken so much of what pop culture has done. And I'm not going to say it's all Beyoncé, but people like Beyoncé have been talking about the plants. And so was Miley Cyrus not that long ago. And I think everyone has these good intentions and we all do. I think that is something I firmly believe that we're all trying to improve our health and whether we're plant-based or meat-based or somewhere in the middle. I love that you give people the option to be there, you know, and to incorporate the right and to give people the information and the science. And thank you for sharing all those studies, because I feel like the science can set people free sometimes, you know, really gives them—

It's the hope.

The breath, and they can exhale. And I think that's so important because I feel like in today's world, our health with COVID-19 continuing, you know, is so important. And I feel like, you know, if we can have you back on sometime later in the year, that'd be lovely before the year ends. But I just can't thank you enough for spending this time right now, because I know you're as busy as ever with your new book, with these new products and working with your clients. Clients, and I'm just so excited for my listeners to really embrace this and to remove the fear. I hope the show today, guys, if you're listening, has given you the confidence to embrace this lifestyle and to obviously research it for yourself. Definitely please, guys, you got to get the book. I bought it as the new download because the new download has replaced the other one, right, Dr. Paul? And I love it. I love this new edition because I think it really— let me pull it up here so everyone can see the COVID Cover really has taken it to a new level and you updated it with charts and all sorts of great data as well, correct? It's not just a replay of the original book.

Yeah.

Well, it's a new cover, broader distribution index. Yeah.

Yeah, I know it's wonderful. And then obviously the new products as well. And just to end on this, the website one last time and then we're good to go.

heartandsoil.co. So it's my heart, my heart, my heart is getting you guys good nutrition and the soil is so important that we take care of that by farming properly with regenerative agriculture.

I love that, buddy. Well, thank you so much for all your time, and, you know, best wishes to the rest of 2020 here. We're, we're halfway through, uh, halfway through it— more than halfway through it. But I can't wait to another discussion, and hopefully we'll, we'll bring Mark Sisson into the fold. I know he's traveling right now, but I, I know I owe him a big thank you. So if he's listening, thank you, Mark, for always being this connector of incredible minds. And thank you for all your hard work, Dr. Paul. I think what you're doing is Brilliant. Ah, my pleasure.

So excited that you're thriving. I can't wait to hear more about your story and your clients, and I hope this conversation will be helpful to your audience.

Oh no, absolutely.

You're the best.

All right, peace and purpose everyone. Take good care. Thanks, Dr. Paul. We'll talk soon. 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 with 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. 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.

Join.

All you have to do is text my Malibu number. It's a 424 area code number. So I'm gonna 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.

I'm gonna give it to you one more time. It's area code 424-228-9548. . Now, it's gonna work only in the US. I have to say that if you're listening to our show outside of the US, sorry, no international texting yet at least. 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 going to 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 glances 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.