Paul Saladino Is Missing One Important Thing.. Here's What
In this solo YouTube monologue, Lucas Wilhelm Heddenbeck challenges Paul Saladino’s popular year‑round tropical, animal‑based diet. Heddenbeck argues that Saladino’s approach ignores critical seasonal and latitudinal factors such as daylight length, temperature, and activity levels, which together dictate insulin sensitivity, thyroid function, testosterone production, mitochondrial fuel preference, and circadian biology. He shares his own experience of following Saladino’s protocol in Sweden, describing winter weight‑loss stalls, hormonal sluggishness, cold extremities, and brain fog despite strict adherence to the diet. After switching to a season‑aligned nutrition plan—more animal fats, roots, and warm meals in winter, and increased fruit and carbs in summer—he documents dramatic improvements in body composition, energy, and overall health. Heddenbeck explains the evolutionary basis for seasonal eating, detailing how summer abundance supports carbohydrate metabolism and thyroid activity, while winter scarcity favors fat‑adapted metabolism and lower insulin sensitivity. He critiques the one‑size‑fits‑all messaging, emphasizing that food must match the environmental context to avoid hormonal mismatches and metabolic stress. The video concludes with practical seasonal nutrition frameworks, a promotion of his “Superhuman Protocol” coaching program, and a call for viewers to consider their own latitude and season when designing diets.
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Okay, so Paul Saladino is one of the most influential names in the health space right now. Carnivore turned animal-based, beef organs, fruit, honey, filmed constantly in shorts and a t-shirt looking lean, tan, full of energy. And the message resonates with a lot of people. Eat like our ancestors, right? Cut the processed garbage, get back to real food. And I agree with a lot of that. Don't get me wrong, but there's one part of his message that I think is genuinely dangerous if you follow it without context, and almost nobody is talking about why. He eats beef and fruit year-round in massive quantities whilst living in Costa Rica—constant sun, constant warmth, 12 hours of daylight every single day all year. But if you're watching this from like me, Stockholm, from Toronto, New York, somewhere else, anywhere with an actual winter and which with actual proper seasons, and you try to eat that way the way he eats, you are not optimizing your biology. You are actively working against it. And in this video, I'm going to explain exactly why and what you should be doing instead. And this is a mistake that I used to do because I used to listen blindly to what Paul said, and I didn't follow this philosophy and approach of seasonal. Nutrition and understanding proper biology in the beginning of my journey, and this is how I looked like three winters ago or two however two two winters ago I guess the winter between twenty-three and twenty-four right I was looking bloated inflamed and I was eating exactly as Paul was preaching here animal-based a lot of sugar a lot of fruit a lot of beef and I was doing everything right on paper but Something wasn't clicking. You know, I was actively trying to lose some weight, but I was stuck. You know, I lowered my calories in an in a desperate attempt to to for something to happen, but I was completely stuck. And then we take a look later, just one winter later. Actually, this is the Christmas day on the the winter of twenty four, so the winter twenty four twenty five. The first proper winter where I've two a t followed kind of seasonal eating. Philosophy and framework, and obviously looking completely different, like night and day difference in body composition. So, and this before someone says, oh yeah, you just lost some weight. No, because I'm actually weighing in heavier here to the right compared to here. So this is, I think, around 78 or 79 kgs, and here I'm weighing around 80 to 81. So it's heavier. So you can't come at me and say that. And then obviously we have this winter, which is kind of the second proper one where I followed this to a T. Here, as we see the dates, 22nd December 2025. I should work it with a client John when he was in town. Obviously body composition look completely different. 28th November 2025, completely different. So why is this then? And what is it that that Paul is is missing? Let's once again that's exactly what we're going to cover here. Also before if you're new to the channel, first of all welcome. My name is Lucas. I'm just a regular guy from Stockholm, Sweden. And over the last five to six years, I've dedicated all my time and energy and effort to try to solve complex health problems, right? And all I do on this channel is break those lessons and learnings down from myself and from my own journey and from also working with hundreds of high-level guys and just leave you with some practical implementations that you can walk away. So you'll see improvements in your life. But the problem with this is that most advice, and especially the advice that Paul says, is that Food is living in isolation, and it doesn't. This is the first thing we have to understand: food is only one of the inputs, but your body is also responding to daylight, temperature, geography, geography, sorry, stress, sleep, movement, seasons, right? All of those determine how food is being processed. It's not just about the food that you're putting into your mouth. That's not. That's just one piece of the puzzle, and that's why one person can thrive on a certain diet, and another person can feel terrible doing the exact. Exactly the same thing, not because the food changed, but because the context changed. Once again, this is exactly what happened to me. I was blindly following what Paul said, but clearly I wasn't getting any, or I wasn't getting the expected results out of it. Doing a completely different approach with my context in mind, completely different outcome, right? So this is something that we have to understand, and doing this wrong Is like, this is not something that you'll see on a blood test also, which is very, very important. You don't get a diagnosis of being misaligned from your biology. You experience it as symptoms, right? Something feels off, energy isn't stable, sleep isn't as good as it probably should be, recovery feels slower, libido isn't where it used to be, body composition isn't responding. Brain fog comes and goes unexpectedly. Motivation feels flat, and it feels like you're doing everything right, but nothing is clicking. And this is exactly the situation I was in. I was doing everything right on paper, but I still didn't feel like I was getting the reward and the return out of it. And as an entrepreneur and as an ambitious guy, it's the worst situation you can ever find yourself in, right? Putting in work and not getting anything out of it. It's literally the worst nightmare you could ever have. So that's why I started questioning everything. I started looking deeper into this and just like, Wait, does this really make sense? And that comes into one of the first things that I want to run you through here, which is going to be a bit of a history lesson. So for almost all of human history, food was seasonal. Our ancestors didn't have year-round access to mangoes, bananas, orange juice, honey, and tropical fruit. In summer, food abundance was real. Long daylight, more movement, more UV exposure, and higher insulin sensitivity. More fruit, more berries, more honey, more carbohydrates. And the body evolved to handle that surge of sugar during those months. In fact, carbohydrates during summer will support your thyroid activity, glycogen storage, reproductive hormones, and physical performance. So summer was always a season of growth, a season of abundance, and a season of reproduction. And insulin sensitivity is naturally higher in summer, which we have to understand as well, which means that thyroid output runs higher and testosterone production is supported by that combination of light and carbohydrate availability. This is where context comes in because a lot of people in this space is always like, oh, you need the sugar for for your thyroid, right? Because, um, it's, um, um, that supports it. But we also have to understand that that is going to— that is not exactly how it looks every single, um, season. Because when in winters, when with short days and naturally lower insulin sensitivity, the same volume of sugar does not get the same response. Instead instead of supporting thyroid conversion, it can create chronic blood sugar spike that your system is not designed to handle well in low light. And over time, that will confuse your thyroid regulation. And your body senses the metabolic stress of constant sugar exposure without the seasonal context that normally supports it, and it downregulates your thyroid as a byproduct. So we always have to bring in the context. And this is why I hate the people that is just like, oh, do this, do that, because no one is talking about the context, and that is what actually matters. So that's one thing we need to understand. Once again, winter, completely different. Short days, cold temperatures, less sunlight, lower activity, and the same abundance of fruit and sugar simply did not exist. Instead, our ancestors relied on animal foods, fat, stored roots, preserved foods, fermented foods, and the body adapted its hormonal and metabolic machinery accordingly. Lower insulin sensitivity in winter and more fat-adapted metabolism mitochondria, hormone production calibrated to scarcity rather than abundance. And that's the key here. Food and light were always meant to tell the same story. If we give different stories, that is what creates problems, right? And mismatch. And this is not theory. This is basic seasonal physiology that every traditional culture lived by without ever needing to name it or whatever, because that's just how it was, right? And the problem, the real problem here starts when you eat a tropical high-sugar summer pattern diet, but your light exposure and your environment are telling your body That it's winter. That mismatch is exactly what happens when someone in Scandinavia, someone like me, the UK, New York, whatever, the northern US, Canada eats the way Paul Saladino eats when he's living in Costa Rica. Same thing here. Most people don't experience this as a diagnosis. It's symptoms. Something feels off. Energy isn't stable. Sleep isn't as good as it should be. Libido isn't where it used to be. Body composition isn't responding. Brain fog. You're doing everything right. Something isn't clicking. And they and people never stop to consider that the problem might not be the food itself. The problem might be that the food doesn't match the environment. And here is where I don't align or agree with Paul, right? Food requires context. We can't just copy exactly what someone else does and expect to get exactly the same results because it simply doesn't work like that. It's so much, so more complex and also simple than that, right? And once again, how does it look? Well, if we don't align with the proper biology and the proper The proper seasons. If we follow Paul blindly, as I did, well, first of all, your thyroid is gonna slow down. As I said, sugar can support thyroid function, but only with the light exposure to match it. In summer, long daylight means high insulin sensitivity, and carbs help convert T4 into the active thyroid hormone T3. But in winter, insulin sensitivity drops naturally. That same sugar now just creates blood sugar spikes your body cannot handle well in low light. So your system reads this as metabolic stress and downregulates downregulates thyroid output to protect itself. Result of that: slower metabolism, low energy, harder to stay lean, cold hands, cold feet in the winter. That's something that I used to experience. And I was like, I was always going, uh, going to the toilet and like putting the, uh, the tap on the warmest and just like warming up my hands because they were so cold. And I thought that was just, oh, this is winter, it's a, it's a colder season. No, it's your body not working properly. Testosterone will drop as well. Constant sugar means chronically elevated insulin. Elevated insulin raises SHBG, the protein that binds up testosterone and makes it unusable. So more SHBG means less free testosterone and DHT, even if your level looks fine on paper, right? This is also a byproduct. Your mitochondria get stressed as well. Your mitochondria are built to run on fat in winter and carbs in summer. Force high carbs into a winter-adapted system and you overload it. The result is fatigue, brain fog, and worse energy over time, not better. And then your circadian rhythm gets completely confused as well. Light tells your body what season it is. Food is supposed to confirm that message. Short days plus a high-sugar diet sends 2 contradictory signals at once. Sleep, energy, and metabolism all suffer as a result. This is once again why someone can eat a clean, perfect diet— beef, fruit, honey, nothing processed, best of the best quality— and still feel flat, foggy, and stuck. It's not the food. It is the food completely mismatched to the season that is the actual problem. And this is where the problem, uh, with Paul's message comes in, because the vast majority of his audience does not live In Costa Rica, in perpetual summer, they live in places with real winters, with real seasons, and real light variation, real cold. And they are applying a tropical climate protocol to a temperate to temperate or Nordic biology. I'm wondering why their hormones, their energy, and their body composition are not responding the way his appears to. I'm not here to say beef and fruit are inherently bad foods. Once again, don't get me wrong. Fantastic. I eat a bunch of Of beef and fruit. The principle behind eating real, unprocessed, and ancestral food is one I fully, fully align and agree with. The part that is missing, and the part that is actually dangerous if followed blindly, is the complete disregard for where you live and what season it is. So it's the context. That is what Paul is completely missing. So the better question shouldn't be, should I do animal-based or not? Should I do Paul's diet or not? The better question should always be, Does this food make sense for my current environment? In Nordic winters, I'd rather build around beef, lamb, eggs, fish, seafood, raw dairy, cheese, kefir if you tolerate that, roots, potatoes, sourdough, bone broth, fermented vegetables, seasonal berries when available, warm cooked meals, minerals, and salt. Roots and complex carbs make more sense in winter than drinking tropical fruit juice every single day. And then in summer, well, then you can go you know, bananas on the fruit and the sugars. And obviously, if you want, if you're more interested in the in-depth explanation on exactly how this looks in practice, well, this is something that we do inside my coaching. And obviously, I take a very seasonal approach with all clients because that's how we actually dial in the biology a proper way, which in return is going to lead to fantastic results, not just physically, but Mentally, hormonally, because that's at the end of the day what actually matters. So take a screenshot of this. This is like the instead of doing we can do it like this. Pulse framework is good for for summer, let's say. Although I think it should it should it should have some complex carbs in it as well. But in winter, this is the framework we want, right? Animal foods as the foundation. Carbs match to the season, training and light exposure. More roots and starches in winter compared to in summer. Fruit more aggressively in the summer. Juice strategically, not as a year-round thing, right? And then most importantly, local and seasonal over some bullshit influencer diet copying approach. And if you do that, I can guarantee you that your physique, your well-being, your hormones, your performance, everything will be 10 times better. 10 times better. It's literally night and day difference. I used to think that winters was a bad thing for my health because like no sun and all these things, and I always felt shit. And I didn't stop to understand and realize and question that, well, it might just be because I'm doing and approaching it absolutely wrong. Now my belief is that the seasons are absolutely necessary and important because different seasons fill different functions. And I believe, I truly believe that that is required for optimal health. I think there's a reason why countries living in seasonal kind of climates are progressing a lot faster than countries living in, year-round tropical seasons. So there's something to find, or there's some lessons to learn with that. So this once again goes back to the same philosophy behind everything I usually cover. It's never just about the food in isolation. It is about whether the food matches the system receiving it. And that system includes your environment, your light exposure, and the season you're actively living A diet that works brilliantly for someone in a year-round tropical climate can be generally counterproductive for someone living through a Nordic winter, not because the food themselves are bad, but because the signal they send to your hormones, your thyroid, and your mitochondria depends entirely on the context they are eaten in. So stop asking what the most optimized influencer in the world is eating right now and start asking what your specific biology in your specific climate during this specific season actually needs right now. That is gonna be the difference between borrowing someone else's protocol and actually understanding your own physiology and getting proper results as a byproduct. So if you've been trying to eat optimally by copying someone you've seen online, maybe it's even me, right? Or some other's exact diet, regardless of where you live or what season it is, this is probably part of why it has not been working the way you expected. Because your hormones do not respond to a diet in isolation, they respond to whether that diet matches the environment your body thinks it's living in. So eat with the season, eat for your latitude. That is the actual ancestral principle, not just eating beef and fruit because someone is telling you to. So that's it. This is my little beef I have with Paul. I was about to say, no, but once again, don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm completely disagreeing with him. No, no, no. Disregarding what he believes, we have a lot of similar values, but there's a big factor and part that he's missing that I really want to highlight. And yeah, that is obviously the approach that I take, focusing on the biology first, and then, because my true belief is that a good physique always comes natural as a byproduct if you're actually truly healthy from the inside. So when we shift the focus from just trying to optimize everything externally and focus on the internal, well then we usually get the, The crazy external results as a byproduct as well, and that's exactly what I do with all my clients as well. We take a very root cause approach and focus on what's the actual bottleneck aligning everything here. You know, a good example of this: Uwell, business owner and founder from from Sweden, running a startup, high stress, whatever. This is a transformation over winter where obviously one of the things that we did was was aligning nutrition to the To decision, and that's also something that I do with all clients, which obviously leads to great results in a short amount of time because we we're not just dialing the training; we optimize the biology to work with us instead of against us. And that is the the secret to getting really really good results very very quickly as well. So this is three months for for you. Well, we have Blake here, 105 days between. Yeah, just to name a few. So if you're interested in that, if you're interested in learning how it looks like to work with me one-to-one, you can check the first link in the description to apply to have an assessment call with my right-hand man, Anton, or me. We'll map, walk through your exact situation, understand your current bottlenecks, and see if the Superhuman Protocol, which is my coaching program, could be something for you. And just to be very clear, it's not like, this is not something where you'll, oh, here's a training plan and nutrition plan and, you know, go do your thing. No, This is an in-depth health protocol that actually takes a look at everything, and we optimize absolutely everything in your day-to-day and understand your specific bottleneck and work around that so that we can thrive. This is not here's a training plan, nutrition plan like all the other PTs you see that doesn't understand biology. This is a bit more in-depth than that. Let's just put it that way. But without more, without further ado. Thanks for watching. Hope you enjoyed this little topic. I have another video on my channel breaking seasonal eating down a bit more in depth, so you can search that up, Lucas Heddenbeck seasonal eating or something, and you'll find that that is a bit more practical. But I hope you enjoyed, and yeah, I'll see you in the next one.
