What is the Carnivore Diet with Dr. Paul Saladino

Today I'm super excited because I have a fascinating guest today. His name is Paul Saladino, M.D. you might have heard of him or seen him online. He has the Instagram page, carnivore diet. It's CarnivoreMD 2.0. And honestly, I was first attracted to his page out of the marketing aspect. I thought, okay, this guy's a disruptor. What's happening here? I sort of got captivated into his videos and I. And I didn't really fully understand what he was doing. But the more I started digging, I thought, you know what, he's got some, actually some interesting science here. He's got some interesting things. And I thought, I want to interview him for myself. It's not as extreme as it looks online sometimes. So I wanted to have him on. So thank you so much for being here today.

Of course. Thanks for having me.

So I want to start sort of with your journey. I mean, when you go to your Instagram page, it says basically all you eat is meats, organs, honey, I believe, and some fruit. That's basically what you eat and tallow. That's what I saw. And not, not any vegetables. And it looks like extreme. So I want to just kind of take us back. Like what was your journey in health and how did you even get into this version of how you eat?

There's not a lot of nutrition taught in medical school or mainstream medical training at all. So I went to college at William Mary, majored in chemistry, was a pre med, was required to take zero nutrition courses to apply to medical school. Ended up going to PA school at George Washington University first. Zero nutrition courses in PA school, zero really zero teaching around any paradigm that looks for the root cause of chronic autoimmune or inflammatory illness or diabetes or obesity or any of these things. Worked for four years as a pa, a physician assistant, cardiology, basically. Learned drug algorithms very well. I realized I'm really good at taking tests and I'm really good at regurgitating memorized decision trees. And most of Western medicine is pharmaceutical based algorithms. So went back to medical school, got interested in root cause medicine at the University of Arizona, zero nutrition courses required in four years. Went to residency at the University of Washington, zero nutrition courses. But throughout all of it, I had this suspicion, this real belief that nutrition was a huge, huge lever in human health and illness that we were ignoring in Western medicine. And it was really driven by my own experiences throughout all that time. So if you rewind the clock again to when I was a physician assistant, I began to get Interested in nutrition. And I did something that a lot of people do, which is I made a mistake and I went vegan. So I was raw vegan for seven months. I was 25 pounds of lean muscle mass, lighter. I had really, really bad gas and bloating and generally didn't feel very good. And I was eating a lot of kale, two heads of kale a day and kale smoothies, and doing all the things like any good raw vegan should be. I remember going to raw vegan dinners and they had these, what were in the moment, delicious sort of almond cakes. And then I would leave bloated and uncomfortable and just farting. It was horrible.

I feel crazy if I eat that way.

Exactly. So I realized that wasn't going to work for me. I heard a talk by someone talking about our book of life, really what's written into our genetics throughout our path as humans and pre hominids. And that really got me interested in anthropology, ethnography and the intersection of human evolution, where we've come from as humans for the last few millions of years. And then how that might give us some indication of what the ideal diet is, what might be written into our genetics, our book of life. So that at least got me eating meat again. So I didn't cut out vegetables for another decade, but I was paleo, so meat and vegetables and fruit and nuts and seeds for maybe the next 10 to 12 years. And during that time I worked as a PA, I went to medical school and generally I felt better. I didn't have nearly as much gas. I was able to maintain much more muscle mass, but I still had eczema and connected with asthma. This is my autoimmune disease that I've had my whole life. I remember being a kid having to take puffs in my inhaler. I had eczema on my hands as a kid. But throughout medical school and residency at the University of Washington, I had some of the worst eczema flares of my life, like full body, wrists, elbows. I was doing a lot of jujitsu in the Thai, which was a mat based martial art, like a wrestling, grappling martial art. And I couldn't do it because this eczema was getting infected, something we call impetigo. So I just got to the point after medical school, in my residency where I threw my hands up and I said, this is annoying. I believe I am eating a good diet. All of my food is organic.

Because you were doing no grain. If you were doing paleo, I'm assuming you Were doing no grains. No grains, probably were not doing any dairy.

No dairy, no grains, no vegetables and protein.

Really.

Vegetables and protein? Essentially, yeah. But I was still getting really bad eczema, so I thought, okay, this isn't working for me. Maybe there are other people who continue to have autoimmune illness or other issues connected with their diet and there has to be another level. So that was where I started to fall down the rabbit hole regarding carnivore, which is pure meat. Now I haven't ended up there, which is another part of the journey that I'll tell you in a second. But what I did for the next year and a half was only meat and organs. I've always been a fan of organ meats like liver and heart, and those are a little gross. We can talk about that in a moment. And then animal fat and salt. So I did that for a year and a half and the eczema goes away, gets a lot better.

You were having zero vegetables during this time. Zero vegetables, no nuts, no seeds. Literally just protein and fat, basically.

Protein and fat, yep. Essentially no carbohydrates, which was a problem that I ran into later.

So ketogenic. You are pretty much ketogenic at this point.

Okay, yep, ketogenic. So eczema gets better, mood gets better. But after about a year, a year and a half, I started to have long term ketogenic diet side effects. So things like electrolyte imbalance, which lead to muscle cramping, heart palpitations, skipped beats, testosterone is starting to decline. This happens in both men and women. If they go keto too long, if they cut out carbohydrates too much, they will see hormonal decline or hormonal changes.

And I think they look old too. I mean, I'm just saying people look like they've rapidly aged to me when they're on a strict keto diet for.

Too long sometimes, yeah, the muscles don't feel as full. If you look at pictures of me when I was ketogenic, I don't think my muscles were as full as they are now that I eat carbohydrates. Then I had to kind of think about this because during the time I wrote a book, mind you, called the Carnivore Code. And in the book I was not terribly, not completely against fruit, but I wasn't recommending fruit to people. I had tears of the diet and I thought, okay, but I had to reexamine my approach and continue to sort of adjust course along the journey and realize, okay, this isn't working for me with the carbohydrates. But I do think that cutting out the vegetables was a benefit to me in terms of my autoimmune disease. We can talk about why. So I added back in honey. Originally made by bees. Fermented doesn't really have defense chemicals like plants do. And then I added in fruit. And the thinking there was, okay, fruit is probably the least toxic part of plants. And that whole discussion is probably framed in a larger discussion of plant toxicity. And so I'll just tell you about why I don't eat vegetables. That's okay.

Yeah.

So the whole reason that I began this approach was I hated botany in college. It was my worst grade in college. I think I got a B. I was a super nerd in college. I was so pissed. I got a B in botany. Hated it forever. I hate phloem and I hate xylem, and I hate photosynthesis and chloroplast. I didn't really want to learn about plants at all, but when I.

You just didn't like the truth was coming out. You really just didn't like plants.

I just don't like plants. I still like plants. I just don't like them at all. I can't grow them. They always die. I just don't want any plants in my life. That's not true. I have lots of plants in my yard. They're beautiful. But when I thought about this more, what you realize, what I realized is, like, plants want to move their DNA to the next generation, like any animal, like any life form on the planet. I'll often say plants don't want to get eaten. Well, animals don't want to get eaten either. But animals can run away from you or kick you or bite you or gore you with their antlers. Plants have none of those defenses. Some plants make spikes like cacti or roses. But most plants are pretty much sitting ducks. I'm mixing my metaphors there, but they're just. They're rooted in the ground and they can't do anything. So plants and animals and insects and fungi have co evolved. For 500 plus million years, plants have needed to develop defense chemicals in order to kind of keep up in that arms race. Animals and insects have developed detoxification mechanisms in our livers, the CYP450 system, et cetera. But there is this constant arms race between animals, insects and humans and plants. And so there's no question that plants contain defense chemicals. It's just a matter of which plants and how many defense chemicals they have. How bad the defense chemicals are and how well we can detoxify them as humans. Again, none of this was taught to me in medical school. It was the type of thing I had to dig into the literature for myself. And then you find this really interesting, sordid world of plant toxins. And the hypothesis then becomes, is it possible that these plant toxins are not as good for us as we believe and that vegetables may be overrated for a lot of people? So that's a hypothesis, that's a guess that you seek to prove looking at the literature, doing studies, or your own empirical experience, or the experience I've had working with people. And so my experience was, yeah, when I cut out vegetables, I feel better. Less gas, less bloating, and my eczema, my autoimmune disease, gets better. Why would that be? Well, there's a number of these defense chemicals that can damage the gut. Things like lectins, carbohydrate binding proteins or oxalates, high end things like almonds or spinach leaves like that. There's also compounds in plants like kale or broccoli or brussels sprouts, isothiocyanates, which inhibit absorption at the level of the thyroid and are built to disrupt our hormones. So the list of plant defense chemicals is long. We can go down that rabbit hole if you want. But suffice it to say that when you look at plants, what you discover is that they really don't want to get eaten. And they're beautiful and they're nice, but they're a whole separate kingdom. And they don't really want humans or animals eating them. So they've made this fence, they've made this kind of. They've made this defense barrier in terms of chemicals, and it depends on the species, how well any species can detoxify that. If you look at human evolution, what you find is that around two years ago, our brains started getting a lot bigger. This is the transition from Australopithecus to Homo habilis and Homo erectus. And that coincides with the advent of stone tools, bifacial tools, Acheulean tools, cut marks on bones. Evidence of hunting began 2 million years ago. So what do we think happened? Most people agree that the advent of hunting animals made us human. That was the transition between Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and then eventually Homo sapiens 350,000 years ago. So though we evolved as humans from primates, I think that the reason that we became human was because we began eating meat. And we have not really kept up with those Defense mechanisms and plants. Our ancestors clearly favored meat and organs. Currently living hunter gatherers. Not a lot of us understand this, but there are humans left on the planet that are quote unquote wild. They live in thatched huts that they make. They are nomadic. They don't have phones, they don't have Internet, they don't have electricity, they don't have running water. There's probably a few thousand of them left on the planet among 7 billion plus people. But I've gone and visited some of them I've tried, called the Hadza. And what you find in all of these cultures, whether it's the Hadza, the Kong, or South American hunter gatherer cultures, is they don't eat a lot of vegetables. In fact, they usually don't eat vegetables. They don't celebrate vegetables the way they celebrate meat. There's a clear hierarchy historically, ethnographically, anthropologically, in terms of what we want as humans. And it's meat and organs and animal fat first, followed by honey. Sweet, colorful fruit comes next. And maybe a distant fourth or fifth is something like a tuber, maybe. And then when you get into vegetables, those are clearly survival foods for hunter gatherers, which are probably the best remaining window into where we've come from as humans. So you see these converging lines of evidence, medical evidence, showing that there's a lot of oxalates in things like spinach. And there's case reports of a lady getting kidney failure from doing a green smoothie cleanse from the oxalates.

So this is what I want because I have so many questions that are coming up for me. But I do want to share this because my audience, especially if my audience is on here, because they're in my fat loss programs or my nutrition programs, this is what I want to share. This was very foreign to me because even I. My whole second book is about medicine, plants as medicine, which I'm going to ask you about. But this is why I'm open minded to this right now. I actually witnessed a few people I know get very, very sick from green smoothies, like, and they didn't know. It took digging to figure out that that's what was causing it, from having overloads of spinach, having overloads of kale. So I. It just opened my mind at least to how much are we consuming of these things. So I'm curious, but here's my questions, and these are different directions, but I want to know this. I want to understand from your perspective and opinion why people, Bill and I make it. It's like this negative thing to want to eat animals. Like, where does that even come from? I'm curious your thoughts on that. And two, why do we actually crave vegetables then? Because, like, I'll tell you right now, if I don't eat enough vegetables, I will literally crave things like parsley, celery, or lettuce. Like, my body feels like it craves it. And I know I don't eat overloads of them, but I do eat them. So if you could help me with those two things, that would be two things there.

So the first question was, why is meat villainized? I think that meat is villainized because of poorly done science. Most medical science that is communicated to the consumer is observational epidemiology. It's not actually interventional studies. So this means that most studies that we do in medicine are done lazily. We give a thousand people, 100,000 people a survey, and we say, what did you eat over the last five years? And then we look to see how healthy you are. Now you might say, oh, the people that eat more eggs have more incidents of whatever, colon cancer or heart disease. And then the study will come out and say, eggs are associated with colon cancer or heart disease. Well, correlation does not causation make. And maybe it turns out that people who eat more eggs are also eating those eggs while they're smoking a morning cigarette or eating them with processed foods, like processed meats, or they're eating them with processed sugars, or they're eating Those eggs at McDonald's on an egg McMuffin which has seed oils and special sauce. And so this is the problem with epidemiology and observational studies is it cannot disentangle all of that complexity in human behavior. And what we know about humans is that for the last 70 to 100 years, those humans that eat more meat are doing so against mainstream dietary regulations or guidelines. So, you know, Ancel Keys was in the 1950s with, you know, Harry Truman and his heart attack. And for the last 75 years, we've been told that meat is bad for humans. So who's eaten more meat in the last 25 years? James Dean Rebels Without a Cause. People that smoke cigarettes or don't go in the sun, don't play tennis, don't get colonoscopies or mammograms or lower socioeconomic status, like to eat more meat at barbecues with. With brownies and beer and chips and candy and soda. How many people do you know that go to McDonald's?

Yeah.

And just eat a Hamburger patty with nothing on it.

Yeah.

People don't eat meat in isolation. So in these observational studies they must be taken with a grain of salt and then you must follow them up with an interventional study. And when we do the interventional studies and the intervention studies have been done, they're just not talked about in the mainstream literature. And you take diabetics and you replace 100 grams of grain based carbohydrates with 8 ounces of meat, red meat, they get better, their inflammation goes down, their insulin resistance gets better, they use less diabetic medications and less injectable insulin. So those studies clearly show and evolutionary history, anthropology and ethnography would suggest meat is the central food for humans. And by meat I mean meat and organs. Because of the unique nutrients found in those. Meat is not a harmful food for humans. And studies that suggest otherwise are invariably observational. So it gets nuanced. And it's hard for a health consumer that doesn't have a medical degree and a deep knowledge of medical literature to really feed, you know, it's really cycle out to, to really, you know, sift through the wheat from the chaff here.

It's quite, I'm hearing you correctly, it's not necessarily, it's not the meat, it's what the lifestyle that's happening with a lot of traditional meat eaters. So it's the other things that are happening with that. Now I do have a question about that because I do eat meat and I'm going to ask you a minute about chicken and fish and like if all is created equal and what you feel there. I think I know what you're going to say, but I want to, I want to ask about that, but what about. Because I do feel strong that if you're going. When you are eating meat, which I hope people are, that they are eating grass fed, antibiotic free, hormone free, not farm, just a different quality of meat. Do you feel that's important or do you feel that's not important?

I don't want perfect to be the enemy of good. But yes, that's critically important. So do what you can. I've done a couple of reels on my Instagram. How to eat an animal based diet, which is a term that I've applied to a carnivore diet that adds fruit and honey and raw dairy more than just meat and organs. How to eat that for less than $25 a day, which is totally doable at the highest level. That's what it costs me to eat animal based and all of my fruit is organic. The milk that I eat is raw goats milk that I fermented kefir and the meat that I eat is grass fed and grass.

Okay, so good.

But a lot of people, some people may not have $25, they just spend on food. So I went to Walmart when I was in Texas and I said, look, you can eat this diet for less than $10 a day. And I think that is perhaps the most disruptive idea because most people who are spending less than $10 a day on food are not buying health food with less than $10 a day. They're going to McDonald's or they're going to Walmart and getting junk food for.

Less than $10 with nitrates or meat with nitrates in it and things like that.

Sure, yeah, yeah, they're getting a lot of junk food with that. But you can go to Walmart and get conventionally raised beef and non organic pineapple, mango and honey I think I found with some bananas for less than $10 a day. So you can eat a diet that is still going to result in good health as a human for less than $10 a day. So cost should not be an impediment for people. But I do think that grass fed and grass finished is super important. It's the right way to do it because it supports an ecosystems approach to land management, which is a whole separate thing to go down in terms of the way animals are treated. Conventionally raised beef is not that great. It's farm raised on a, on a feedlot for the last 15% of its life. So we, I believe that we should support grass fed and grass finished agriculture. It's better for the land, better for ecosystems. But people also need to understand that monocrop plant agriculture, which grows the majority of the plants they're eating, is horrible for the planet as well, and essentially scorch and burn agriculture for the planet. When you till the ground and you use pesticides or you don't use pesticides, even if it's organic, if it's monocrop that is destroying an ecosystem and that land will take hundreds of years to recover because of the unidirectional flow of nutrients from the soil to the plants, there's no answer, I think, for humans moving forward other than animal based agriculture in connection with plants. So animals and plants need to be on the land for the soil to be healthy. We know this from, I mean, any soil biologist, any ecosystems biologist will tell you that if you make a mono crop culture or a mono species environment it's going to die. Species need each other. So we can't just grow plants. That's not the answer. We have to put animals on the land. So.

Paul, I have not since I was 12 years old, had red meat. Not because I don't think it's good for me, but because I just, I just like cows. I just, I would have them as a pet. I have a weird thing with cows, so. But I eat a ton of chicken, turkey and fish. So talk to me about that because that, that's what I'm scared to ask you. Like what am I getting not getting benefits by eating those the way that you talk about eating cows and be. You know, because I don't. Not because of a health reason, just because I, I just feel like I maybe was a cow in another time or something. I love cows. So I get all my protein pretty much comes from turkey, chicken, fish, shellfish. Well, I, my blood iron higher is actually really high. I get lab tests every. I was actually too high on iron. I get, I eat a lot of clams. I eat a lot of, a lot. I eat a lot of clams and shellf like that. So I, so I, my, my iron actually was at a dangerous level at one point. So I had to back. I was doing clams and I was having too much vitamin C with it. So it was contributing. Um, but that's my own issue. But, but I want to understand. Do you like, do you eat turkey, chicken and fish? Are they okay for people that don't eat red meat? Are you like, Natalie, you better wake up and start eating red meat. I'm curious all the thoughts here.

So chicken and turkey and fish are animals. They don't contain intrinsic defense chemicals. They are nutritious for humans, but I think they are a rung below ruminants red meat, that being beef, bison, lamb, et cetera for humans, nutritionally, yes, they're less nutrient rich. They're fed. Essentially what you are eating with chicken and turkey is a feedlot raised bird. Um, just like you might be concerned about eating per commercially feedlot raised beef. It's very hard if not impossible in the United States to avoid feedlot raised chicken and turkey. Even something that says it's pasture raised is fed grains. It's fed corn and soy and it's essentially very similar to a commercially farm raised cow. So a cow that eats grass its whole life is the closest thing that most Americans can get to a quote, wild animal. Cows are descendants of bison, sort of aurochs. This is what these animals do they graze on the grasslands. Bison is essentially a totally wild animal. It eats grass and that's what it's supposed to eat. So it is eating an evolutionarily appropriate diet. Just like cows or bison should eat their species appropriate diet to be the healthiest version of themselves. Humans also need to eat a species appropriate diet to be the healthiest version. Now, I would look back at our anthropology and our history to say we know what humans have eaten for millions of years. Like I said earlier, it starts with meat and organs. Those are the most celebrated foods. They also celebrate honey and fruit, and everything else is really a distant fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth. And those are really survival foods. So I think that's where we get a sense of the importance of an evolutionarily appropriate diet. So I think most chicken and turkey that you're eating is not eating an evolutionarily appropriate diet. That increases the amount of linoleic acid in the fat of those animals, which then increases the amount of linoleic acid in you. As humans, we store polyunsaturated fatty acids. We can't turn polyunsaturated fatty acids into monounsaturated fatty acids. We store them in our fat cells. And I believe strongly that excess polyunsaturated fatty acids, acids primarily 18 carbon linoleic acid is a driver of much chronic metabolic disease that humans see and consistent problems with weight loss, hunger inconsistencies.

And that makes sense why we. I tell people not to have seed oil, so I'm going to ask you about that too. I mean, my list of questions is growing for you right now. But my. But now. But. So explain this again because I want to make sure I'm understanding this. So you're saying by eating chicken and turkey, I'm increasing the same. I'm creating the same problem I would by having seed oils. Is that. Did I hear you correctly?

Essentially, yeah. Depending how much of the fat you're getting from the chicken and turkey, because the fat. So if you look at a wild turkey, the amount of linoleic acid in the fat of that wild Turkey is maybe 4 to 5%. If you look at a turkey that you're buying in the store, it's probably 15 to 17% linoleic acid. So 3x the amount of linoleic acid. Wow. You. If you look at a chicken egg, right, and that chicken is fed, not fed corn and soy and not fed vegetable oils, then that egg is going to have maybe 3% linoleic acid. But most eggs have 6 to 8% linoleic acid in the yolk because chickens are fed corn and soy. So monogastric animals like humans, chicken, pigs and turkey cannot move out excess polyunsaturated fatty acids from their body to store them. So this is why it's very important to have an evolutionarily consistent level of this fatty acid. It would have been essentially impossible for get nearly anything like the linoleic acid we're getting today. Evolutionarily, historically, because you can't squeeze corn into oil a hundred thousand years ago, you can't eat, you know, nobody's going to eat, you know, two pounds of soy a day to get the equivalent of five tablespoons of soybean oil that's in most processed people's diet today. So you think like seed oils are a concentrated form of oils we would never have had as humans in anywhere near that amount. And so this, this idea of linoleic acid, which is an esoteric, complicated point, but that's a pretty big. For humans. So I advise against that for humans. Like, if you. The same thing with a chicken or a pig. This is the problem I have with pork for a lot of people too. Most pork is fed corn and soy. Almost all of it is fed corn and soy. If you can find grass fed and grass finished pork, you're really lucky. But a wild hog, so I was recently in Texas and I hunted and one of the guys shot a wild hog. And that hog is going to have 4 to 5% linoleic acid in its fat.

Fat.

But a pig is going to have 15 to 20% linoleic acid. And it's fat because they're fed corn and soy. So we're essentially fattening these animals with these inappropriate diets for humans. Inappropriate diets for these animals. And then that's passed along to us as humans. So you can get something like a seed oil in the chicken and turkey fat.

Wow.

Right. The problem I have with fish.

Yeah, that's. What's my next question.

Fish and shellfish. I mean, fish is just dirty. We've polluted the oceans and even small fish like sardines are pretty high in arsenic and bioaccumulate heavy metals. Mussels, clams that you love, oysters, scallops.

I eat a lot of clams. Like, a lot. Like, I crave them.

Right. They're benthic. They're on the bottom. That's where a lot of the heavy metals bottom feeders. Yeah, yeah. Oysters, even lobsters and crabs. So if you look. So one of the things that I would do with Clients who are eating a lot of fish was check their heavy metals, and you can see this immediately. I once had a guy come to me and he said that opa, which is a white fish, was on sale at the grocery store. So he'd been eating a lot of opa and his, his mercury was off the charts. Just in a week of eating opa. I see it in other clients who say, oh, I eat wild salmon three times a week. Their mercury is above where you want it to be. Even wild salmon three times a week will increase mercury above where I want to see it. That's a fish that people think of as low mercury. So, you know, if you're eating. I used to live in San Diego. A lot of people would dive and they would. They would free dive and they would get the lobsters in San Diego Bay. Those are so full of heavy metals.

You're like, you're. You're making me really upset right now. Like everything that I eat.

Knowledge is power. Have you checked your heavy metal level?

Yes, I have. And I. And I am good there. So I'm, I am consistent with my lab testing.

So good.

Yeah. So. But like I said, I had high iron. I don't eat red meat. But. But I'm. I'm opening my mind right now. I'm listening to you. So talk to. Okay, so, so I'm hearing this about, so fish, and I understand seed oils, but can you explain it from your perspective? And I do have a question about when you look up, like, like what seed oils to avoid. Flax oil is never on there. So do you still consider flax oil a bad seed oil? Is that something different? Can you talk to me about seed oils?

Yeah, I don't see a reason to ever eat flax oil or any seed oil. Seed oils are corn, canola, safflower, sunflower, soybean, grapeseed, peanut, flaxseed, et cetera. Any oil that's coming from a seed is a seed oil to be differentiated from olive oil and avocado oil, which I'm also not a huge fan of, and we can talk about why. But those are fruit oils. Those are from the actual fruit rather than the seed. Olive oil is not made from an olive pit. It's made from the olive fruit. Avocado oil is not made from an olive from an avocado seed. It's made from the avocado pulp. But let's bookmark those. I'm not a huge fan of those. I'm a huge fan of animal fats. So seed oils Are the seeds that we talked about, corn, canola, safflower, sunflower, et cetera. They're. They're much higher in linoleic acid than even the numbers I talked about. Grapeseed oil is 65% linoleic acid. Soybean oil is 55% linoleic acid. But what is the second ingredient in most baby formula? That's soybean oil. The first ingredient is corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup. That's a whole separate conversation. So there's a big problem with these oils. If you go to any grocery store, whether it's Whole Foods, Safeway or Kroger or anything, most salad dressings are going to have seed oils. Most processed food is going to have seed oils everywhere. Very boutique brands that are not using seed oils. And when they don't use seed oils, they might use an avocado oil, and some of them will use coconut oil. Very few, few brands are going to use tallow in any of their foods because it's so expensive. Tallow is oil from cows. It's like butter, but from.

My husband cooks with it. So he's winning on your. On your level.

Yeah. Tallow's fantastic. And we'll talk about why.

I didn't understand what it was. We have this huge tub of it. I was like, what is this? He said, it's animal fat.

It's magic. Yeah. It's the cause for celebration of every culture in our history. Like, that is the center of our fertility and vitality. If you have animal fat, you're going to live. It's probably the most valuable substance throughout our history, evolutionarily than that's ever been. But. So the problem with seed oils, like I said, is that when you eat more linoleic acid, you accumulate more linoleic acid. Your body stores that it takes. We don't know exactly how long, but some estimates, you know, estimate a half life of six to seven months, which means, you know, three years to get rid of the linoleic acid in your cells. There's a strong correlation. Again, correlation is not causation. But we do see a strong correlation between the amount of linoleic acid in your fat cell and cardiovascular disease outcomes. Meaning people who have more than a lac acid in their fat have worse cardiovascular outcomes. We also see a strong correlation between linoleic acid in your fat cells and melanoma rates, which is a. Which is something that I wasn't aware of until I recently discovered that in literature. So the amount of linoleic acid in your fat cells is a good predictor of a lot of bad outcomes for humans. And we can show clearly that over the last 100 years, the amount of linoleic acid in our diet and in our adipose tissue has increased over 135%. So it's more than double cold. In the last 100 years, there wasn't.

Which is interesting because a lot of people will say, and I'm somebody who's had skin cancer. I've had basal cell carcinoma a couple of times. I attribute. I attribute mine to tanning beds and seed oil when I was in my early twenties. But a lot. But I do go in the sun now. I don't lay out and get tan, but I make sure I'm in the sun every day on my skin. And people. It creates controversy when I bring this up. If I bring about the tanning bed, and it's interesting. Could you explain that a little bit more about what that's doing with skin cancer? Because I know you're a fan of the real sun, not tann beds and not seed oil. Can you explain that a little bit more? Because I think I want people to really understand this.

So you're made of cell membranes, and all the cell membranes are made of lipids. And if you eat more linoleic acid, you're going to change the composition of your cell membranes, including the epidermis, which is your face and your skin. So if you want your skin to be made of more linoleic acid, a fragile polyunsaturated fatty acid, then you should eat more seed oil. And the converse is also true. The problem with polyunsaturated fatty acids is they have more double bonds. Double bonds are weaknesses in a fat. When we say saturated fat, that means it has no double bonds. It's all single bonds between the carbons. Every carbon is saturated with hydrogens. That's why we call it a saturated fat. That's a very stable fat. We think of fats that are solid at room temperature, like butter or coconut oil or tallow. Those are. Those have more saturated fat than they do monounsaturated fat. As you increase the unsaturations, you end up with things like olive oil, which is mostly monounsaturated fat, but has more linoleic acid. It has more polyunsaturated fat than animal fats. Or you could get things like grapeseed oil, which are almost all linoleic acid. They're highly unsaturated. The problem with an unsaturated oil is that it oxidizes Quickly. This is my problem with flaxseed oil, as you asked. Flaxseed oil is actually even more unsaturated than linoleic acid. Flaxseed oil is high in alpha linolenic acid, which is a longer chain omega 3 relative to an omega 6 fat, which has to do with where the first double bond is relative to the end of the fat molecule. But omega 6s are unstable. Omega threes are even more, more unstable. So omega 3s are valuable in the human diet, but you can get them in animal fat.

So you're not taking fish oil. You're not.

Definitely not. It's all oxidized and rancid. It's a horrible idea. In my opinion, you can get plenty of omega 3 from animal fat. Butter has omega 3. Egg yolks have omega 3. Tallow has omega 3. I think excess omega 3 is horribly harmful for humans. And there are people in the health space who would recommend tons.

Oh yeah. Every, every naturopathic doctor is going to.

Tell you to take horrible ideas. Idea. It's a horrible idea. It's way too much. You don't need anywhere near that amount. You know, when I check my fatty acid levels, I have tons of EPA and dha, which are the long, the longer chain omega threes. And I don't supplement with any fish oil. Why is that? Because I don't have any seed oils in my diet. What we know about fatty acid metabolism is that your body can take ala, which is alpha linolenic acid. I'm sorry, this is getting a little technical, but. No, it's. There's plenty of ALA and EPA and DHA in animal foods. But to get enough oil to get enough EPA and dha, which is probably the primary marker of health, those are omega threes in your body. You should let your body make it from ALA. And the way you let your body make EPA and DHA is by not giving it too much Omega 6 because they share a series of enzymatic steps, desaturated and elongates between the omega threes and the omega 6 fatty acids. They have parallel pathways. And so if you eat too much omega 6 linoleic acid seed oils, you will prevent your body from making EPA and dha, which are really critical fats for human biology. So you should let your body make these things. Things. If you give your body lots of EPA and dha, that's better than not having it. But the way you're getting it is in the form of probably rancid, oxidized, problematic fats. And you can get too much. EPA and dha, we know that if you give someone lots and lots of fish oil, you can cause bleeding and it can cause platelets to misfunction.

So the body, they tell you not to take it before surgeries.

And yeah, it will cause. And people will say, oh, it's good not to. It's good to be, you know, anticoagulant. Well, until you start bleeding out of your eyeballs and it's your brain or you have a hemorrhagic stroke in your brain, it's a horrible idea. So. So, I mean, there's. There's cases, you know, of people having massive hemorrhage that are possibly related to excess omega 3. So your body's really good at regulating this unless you do something that is evolutionarily inconsistent, like eat a bunch of seed oil or eat a bunch of oil pressed from a fish. So fish oil is essentially the same as a seed oil. You're taking a fish and you're squeezing out all the oil. Like you wouldn't ever do evolution. Right. You're going to eat a certain amount of salmon and you'll get, you know.

It'S a good point.

Oil.

Yeah.

Right. And then you're squeezing a seed. We shouldn't do this as humans. It's kind of like it's evolutionary inconsistent. We're not prepared for it.

No. And there was a time I can think back to when I used to have oatmeal in the morning with flax oil sprayed over it. And then. And then I'd have my fish oil with it. So it's like I'm. I'm thinking back to these things that we learn. You know, I mean, I don't do that anymore. But that's. At one time, that's what we were.

Told was healthy to do the best of intentions. I, When I was a vegan, I took udo's oil, which is 6.

I had 1.2. Yeah.

369 blend. And it's like, why would I ever take a 3, 69 blend that's in a liquid? And I used to take fish oil myself that was in a. You could get fish oil in a. In an open jar and you could just open the fish oil that's absolutely rancid and totally oxidized. So let's just talk about avocado and olive oil.

Yes, I want to hear about that. And I still have my vegetable question. We can't.

Oh, yeah, I'm bookmark. Don't worry. So olive oil and fish Oil, I mean, excuse me. Olive oil and avocado oil are about 15, 10 to 15% linoleic acid.

Acid.

The goal is 2% linoleic acid. So butter and tallow are 2% linoleic acid. I'm not saying we don't have one, any linoleic acid, just that that's an evolutionarily consistent level of linoleic acid, maybe 2% of your calories or 2% of your total fat intake.

And you, assuming you include ghee in that too, that you're okay.

Yeah. Ghee is just clarified butter. You can take out the milk solids by heating it. But olive, olive and avocado are 10 to 15% and they're mostly monounsaturated and a lot of them are quite rancid. There was recently a quite a large recall of, of a prominent health influencer who's a big champion of olive oil. And he had to have a lot of his olive oils recalled because they were so oxidized. So you don't know how long that olive oil has been on the shelf. And it's just to me, when you're eating olive oil or avocado oil, you're eating it on something called a salad. And I don't know why anybody would eat something called a salad.

Well, I eat a lot of them, so we're going to.

Why are you eating salads?

I crave them. I crave them.

We'll talk about it.

Okay.

There's no reason to eat salads in my opinion. So. And you're, you're taking away fat from your body that could be animal food fat. And the animal fat is really the key. And this is something that men and women have been told to avoid. But I think it's a hundred percent wrong. And this is why a lot of people don't thrive in their life. There are unique fatty acids found in animal fat like stearic acid, which is an 18 carbon saturated fatty acid that are associated with fat loss and turning on the mitochondria. There's a great study in Nature Communications about stearic acid and how it turns on mitochondria in humans. But no humans are aware of stearic acid or the fact that it's in butter, that it's in tallow, that you should get more steric acid and less linoleic acid if you want to lose weight. So that's a simple formula. If you want to lose weight. More steric acid, less than a lake acid. The way you get more steric acid is more animal Fat, more tallow, butter and ghee and less seed oils, linoleic acid. But there's also odd chain fatty acids. I mean, we can go down some super geeky.

No, but this is what you're saying for my listeners. What I want them to really hear in this, he's not saying to eat more animals and animals fat with your process, processed junk food too, because that is a disaster. So you're saying we're still talking about eating an unprocessed natural food diet. You're just talking about instead of having a lot of the foods that we think are the healthy foods that we've been doing, let's substitute with animals and animal fat. So, but you still really do support an unprocessed food diet. I want to be clear about that because some people hear, oh, I can still have my processed junk. I just need to add in meat and fat. And that's not going to work.

Doesn't work like that. I mean, this is, that should have been a foundation of this whole discussion. Like step, step zero is, is no processed sugars and no seaweed. That step zero, nothing happens if you don't do that, it doesn't work. And actually I was just writing some content before I got on this podcast. One of my greatest frustrations in the nutritional and dietetics world is the recommendation for people to eat more, eat less, move more. That doesn't work. Portion control doesn't work. Calorie counting doesn't work. We know this fails long term. I found a statistic on the Internet that I haven't been able to corroborate the source, but it' repeated everywhere. So maybe it's true. 97% of weight loss dieters gain back all the weight in three years, which is probably pretty close to true. That's millions of years of human evolution telling you that if you don't change your food quality, you will never lose weight long term. I don't believe that we should limit ourselves in any way, shape or form to lose weight. I think we should get a select set of high quality foods and eat only those foods to satiety. And that is the way to lose weight. You can't put yourself in a calorie prison or a portion control prison and expect to lose weight because that doesn't change food quality. Weight Watchers, all these other things, they give you the same garbage. Lasagna with tomatoes and chicken and spinach that's full of seed oil grains. And they say, oh, here's a 350 calorie portion that works for the first few months and then your body eventually rebels because your hypothalamus and your brain is really good at saying, I need this amount of calories. And if you don't give me this amount of calories, I'm just going to downgrade your metabolism. I'm going to turn your thyroid down, which means you're going to burn less. It just doesn't work like this. You can't eat less and expect to lose weight long term. Look at the biggest loser on tv. Those people gain the weight back. It's. It's criminal what they do to those people. But it doesn't work. It doesn't work long term because we have a 2 million year old, probably a 60 million year old mechanism in our brain that says if you're not getting the nutrients you need, you're not going to be healthy. The way to lose weight is to be metabolically healthy. And the way to be metabolically healthy is to start with cutting out processed sugars and seed oils. Full stop, end of story. You must cut those out if you want to be metabolically healthy. And we talked about the seed oils, the linoleic acid. Processed sugars are a given. But there's a clear delineation there between processed sugar and the sugar found in fruit and honey. I'll just.

Let's talk about that. Let's talk about honey and fruit because I know you are a fan of that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so that's, that's essentially what's really important to note with regard to weight loss, that those strategies don't ever work. Um, we can just. Let's take a little side detour to talk about food and honey. People in many nutritional circles will see, say, fruit and honey are the same as cane sugar. That's not true. I won't say that there's a lot. Well, I'm not saying you would, but many people do. People that I know have said 2 tablespoons of honey is the same as a Coca Cola. That's clearly not true for humans. There's good research with raw honey showing that it increases nitric oxide precursors, that it improves endothelial function, which is the inside of your blood vessels. You can do research with red orange juice showing that it improves endothelial function in the blood vessels. Vessels. But you can do the same research with processed sugar. And you see negative effects both in animal and human models. So there's something going on. Food is information. And as you've said, if you process the food, if you strip away too much of that informational quality, your body doesn't really understand what's coming into it. So taking processed sugar is very different than eating a grape, a cherry, or 10 grapes and 10 cherries, or you know, a peach, or you know, a papaya, a mango, a banana. Those are very different informational qualities for your body body. A tablespoon of honey is fine. Then eating a processed sugar, a soda, or even a soda with a artificial sweetener, which we should probably talk about as well. So I do want people to understand that when I do my blood work, when I look at my clients blood work, no one becomes insulin resistant pre diabetic or diabetic eating fruit and honey. That's just not how it works. You can give honey to someone with diabetes and their insulin sensitivity improves, they become less diabetic. When you give them honey, their blood sugar is going to go up because they have blood sugar regulation, but they have, have less, less diabetes when you give them honey because they are becoming more metabolically healthy. Eventually you could give someone with diabetes honey and they would stop being diabetic along the way they would have high blood sugars because their blood sugar response is broken while they're metabolically unhealthy. But carbohydrates, unprocessed carbohydrates didn't cause that. That's what I want people to understand. And as I mentioned earlier, if people go too low carb, they fail. The thyroid turns off, your electrolytes will get all messed up. So you must eat carbohydrates while you are losing weight. Even if you have diabetes or pre diabetes. Some carbohydra are essential for proper human health. Maybe not as many as a healthy person that is looking to sustain like I do. I can eat a lot of carbohydrates a day and I do from fruit and honey with no adverse effects. I have a very low fasting insulin, I don't have a high blood sugar. You can wear a cgm, a continuous glucose monitor, whatever you want. So people should not fear fruit and honey. But I think the amount of carbohydrates someone eats, it's going to depend on their lifestyle and what their goals are and what their preexisting conditions are and how well their thyroid and other hormones are functioning. So this is all part of the equation.

Now let's talk about artificial sweeteners in there too, because I'm, I'm also not for those. But there's people have questions a lot about well, can you do stevia or can you do monk fruit, are those considered the same as doing something like sucralose or sorbitol or saccharin? So can you touch on. I would love to hear your, your take on that.

Yeah, so obviously not obviously, but let's just say sucralose, you know, NutraSweet, which is a sulfane something or any of the mainstream artificial sweeteners are garbage. They disrupt quorum sensing in the guts. There's this microbiome in the gut of all the bacteria and they're going to interrupt the way the bacteria talk to each other, but so do the non nutritive sweeteners that are more natural as well. So stevia is used as a contraceptive in indigenous cultures and there's reports of allergy to stevia. I'm not a fan of stevia or, or any of the stevia derivatives for those reasons. And stevia can also disrupt quorum sensing in the gut. I don't understand why people would use monk fruit because I think we haven't really researched it enough to understand, but I would suspect there's going to be the same sort of problems in the gut microbiome with that chemical. Um, it's just, it's a fear of sweetness. And I say don't fear it. Just give yourself a little honey, you'll be fine. Eat a cherry, eat a blueberry, eat a strawberry, eat fine.

Do you know my most controversial post of all times, and I don't really post a lot of controversial things, was that I just shared about artificial sweeteners being good for us. And I could not believe the dietitians that came out of nowhere and doctors telling me that I was a whack because I said artificial sweeteners are bad. It was, it was unbelievable how convinced mainstream media, mainstream is that artificial sweeteners are good for us.

How can they ignore the data regarding the microbiome and quorum?

I don't know. They're paid by food companies, they're paid by who knows what. But it was just, it's a lot of registered dietitians came after me. It was just, it was unbelievable how I couldn't believe it. I thought I was like, I thought this was common sense. It's not, apparently.

Well, I think that a lot of common sense has been lost in dietary strategy for humans in general. And that's something that I hope to hearken back to with the evolutionary perspective. I think that if you and I are in a tribe with our listeners and we just go into the wilderness, maybe a lot of people spend time camping in the wilderness? Maybe not, but I think deep in our brains there's this knowledge that we want meat and organs no matter what. And you're going to want to hunt an animal and you're going to share it with your tribe. You're going to hunt it and kill it. Respectfully, a lot of people listening to this probably never killed an animal. Animal don't like the thought of it, but look, it's survival. If you're doing this for your kids or yourself, like, do it gratefully and realize that that animal is going to nourish you. And the nutrients in the animal are unique and are not found in plant foods. This is another inequality that I didn't really touch on earlier. But there are many nutrients found in animal foods, meat, and especially organs, which are totally left out of our conversation in nutrition for health today that are essentially non found, not even found at all in plant foods. Things like creatine, carnitine, choline, answering, taurine, biotin, K12, riboflavin, K2, B12, K2. It's insane.

All the things we're supplementing with.

Yeah, all the things you supplement with, all the things you find in energy drinks that people realize help them, you're getting them in a synthetic form that's probably not bioequivalent or not bioavailable. They're all found in meat and organs, especially. For instance, liver is a great source of vitamin A. It's a great source of riboflavin. You've got choline in there, you got zinc, you have bioavailable iron, you got selenium, you got copper to balance. This is zinc. Heart is a great source of Coenzyme Q10. Nobody ever thinks about their Coenzyme Q10 levels, but we know we take it.

As a supplement and then we take.

It as a supplement because you're not eating enough meat, you know?

Yeah, yeah, it's true.

I know that there may be some prenatal moms or pregnant moms or recent moms listening to this podcast, but when we. When babies are born in the hospital, the traditional therapy is to give them a vitamin K one shot because there's an increasing incidence of hemorrhagic disease of the newborns in our modern society. Well, why would nature have designed babies to bleed everywhere? It's an indication that moms are not getting enough vitamin K in their diet. Now, K1 is a plant source of vitamin K. K2 is an animal source canonically. So I think this is a really clear indication that mothers and men also are not getting enough vitamin K. There's a great study out of Rotterdam called the Rotterdam Study, looking at the tertiary of vitamin K2 intake and the top tertia, which means they divide the group into three sections of vitamin K2 intake, was more than 35 micrograms of vitamin K2. That's the amount in like less than an ounce of liver per day or an ounce of liver plus maybe a few ounces, eight ounces of meat per day would get you 35 micrograms. Vitamin K2, that group had the lowest incidence of cardiovascular disease and the lowest incidence of calcific aortic sclerosis. But there was no correlation with vitamin K1, which is the vitamin K that's found in plants. So I actually went on a show called the Doctors one time and they screamed at me, there's no vitamin K in your diet. And I said, what are you talking about? There's no vitamin K2 in your diet. Like they didn't even understand the difference between K, K1 and K2. Humans are very bad at converting K1, which is phytoquinone, phylloquinone into K2. But we're good at converting menaquinones, which are K2, into K1. So if you get enough K2, which is found in cheese and yogurt and butter and meat, all the things we've been told are bad for our heart, the studies would suggest that that is correlated. Again, it's not causation, but there's not a lot of other good explanations with the lowest outcomes in terms of heart disease. The best outcomes of heart disease are in the people who get the most vitamin. Where do you get it? Essentially animal foods. You can get it from natto if people want to eat fermented soybeans. But it's the bacteria in the natto that are making the K2, not the soybeans. And I think you should avoid soybeans in general because of phytic acid.

Okay, here's a question I haven't wanted to ask you because this is going to. This is disrupting everything I know and believe and think. But I'm wanting to be challenged. So I'm just, I'm just trying to understand. So I eat a lot of vegetables, I crave them. I. If I don't have them, I, it's. I'm weird. I'll sit in front of the TV eating raw parsley and than celery. I just, I like vegetables. I don't juice them, I don't Think I OD on them, but I, I do like them and I've really attributed that to why I look younger than my age, why I feel good, why I have not had autoimmune flare ups. Like I, I've believed that. So, so help me here. Tell me, tell me, tell me what I'm doing wrong and is just if it's working for me, is this something critical to change? I just want to understand, understand more.

So what I would say is. Are you aware of sore lens? Do you know what a sorelin is?

No, I don't.

So sorts are found in celery and carrots and parsnips. They're also found in parsley. You mentioned a lot of plants in the apa ace family. And sorelins do accumulate in the skin and they cause photo damage when you're exposed to UV light. This is not, this is mainstream medical science. Yeah. So I'm thinking back to. There's actually a case that I talked about recently of severe phototoxic injury in a tantal running bed from somebody who was juicing celery. So I just want to counter and say that those things you're eating are not entirely benign.

Okay.

Do accumulate in your skin and when you're exposed to the UV light, they do cross link with DNA and they are associated with photo injury which could.

Have even explained my years ago tanning bed issues.

Maybe if you were eating a lot 30 years ago, a lot of celery. If you were eating a lot of celery before.

I mean, I don't juice like the juice guy. Celery. I mean, I'm just talking. I eat a handful of celery or whatever.

It's still possible that that could have contributed long term if you have long term sore lens in the same skin. The other thing is, I think I know this about you, that you don't eat organs right now. Is that true?

Not currently. I don't even eat regular meat. I'm working on this. Okay.

Right. So I think that humans, psychologically, what we know about humans is we're very, we're pattern driven animals. We're habitual, we crave what we know. Right. So maybe the celery or the lettuce are a source of something that your body knows that it needs. Needs. But you haven't eaten a lot of red meat and you haven't eaten a lot of red meat.

I haven't had any red meat since I was 12. I'm 50.

Okay.

So zero.

So my suspicion would be that psychologically Your body craves what it knows, which is why it's important to give babies a variety of food. Though as an aside, I would recommend that babies do meat as their first food. And that's actually part of the dietary guidelines. That's amazing. I actually just did a podcast on that. My podcast is called Fundamental health the new 20 to 2020. 20 to 2025 guidelines recommend meat as an ideal first food for infants. But I think we should also be given babies organs or desiccated organ capsules, which we can talk about to expose them to all those flavors. So my suspicion is, and this is just my hypothesis, I wonder if you would crave parsley and celery and clams.

I have a weird clam addiction too. So I'm wondering if all that.

I wonder if you would have the same cravings if you reintroduce nutrient rich red meat and organs, and if you couldn't do fresh organs like liver, then you could try something like we and soil with the desiccated organs. So I knew that when I was going down this path, I knew that my sister and my mom and my sister's kids, who are the cutest kids on the planet, I may be biased, would never or might not eat raw liver. Raw heart.

I'm pretty confident I will not be eating raw liver or heart, but.

So the nice thing is that you can get these organs freeze dried in capsules. And that's why I built this company called Heart and Soil. So I send my mom and my sister the bottles of hardened soil every month and we can get you some if you want. But my mom will say anecdotally that she feels a big difference when I.71,72 this year. Actually, she feels a big difference when she's eating them and she's not. It's just a real. There's.

I could do that. I could take a capsule and pretend like it grew on a tree. I could do that just like I pretend bone broth grows on trees. I just. That I can do.

I mean, you don't even have to pretend it grows on trees, right?

It's just the eating of the actual. Like I see you on your Instagram eating heart for breakfast and I'm just like, good for him. I don't, I don't know about it.

Let's talk about that too. Let's talk about that too. But my suspicion, in summary, my suspicion deficient is that your cravings may change if you change your diet. And if you provided your body and said, hey, actually red meat is an option. Desiccated organ pills are an option. Or fresh organs. If you get super, you know, maybe, maybe when you're sitting eating the celery, you might think, I'm actually craving a hamburger right now. So two things I want to mention to you at this moment. There's a study done with vegetarians and omnivores and they put EEG leads on their head. So electroencephalography, they can look at the, what they call the evoked response between potential in the brain, what they see. And they can look at the cortex, which is the more evolved, folded part of the brain and the deeper brainstem regions. What they see in omnivores is when they show the omnivores a picture of meat, they have a positive response at both the cortical and deeper brain levels. When they show the vegetarians a picture of meat, they have a negative response at the cortical level, but still a positive response at the, at the brainstem level. So they're there, they say, you know, the motivational salience, this is their words, the motivational salience of meat is preserved in the vegetarians. So I suspected if we did this on you, we would see the same thing, that you might see a hamburger and have a negative cortical response. Because this is kind of your behavioral patterning. That's not a pejorative statement. It's just, that's your behavioral patterning. But I suspect that even in the deeper regions of your brain, you would see a positive response because all human, humans are Homo sapiens, as far as we know, there's not a new species. And I strongly believe that every Homo sapiens is built to have a species appropriate diet like we talked about, chickens and turkeys and cows, and that those animals are going to respond to these evolutionary appropriate foods. So I believe that in your brain stem, your body wants cow, but in your brain, yes, it's telling you eat.

Clams and eat this because, because of.

Something in your childhood. Right. Because of this idea like, oh, it's cruel to talk to eat the cows. And so that's something that you might want to work through on your own.

Yeah, I'm going to. I'm committing. I'm listening. I'm not on the organ thing yet, but I'm committing. And I'm not on the fully giving up vegetable thing either. But I, but I'm on board with, let me figure out a way to introduce meat. I can't, I can get there. That's a big start for me.

I think it would Be a huge upgrade for you to introduce meat and organs, either fresh or desiccated.

I think I'm going to try your capsules, and I just don't see myself eating raw liver or heart or any of that. It's just not going to happen. Yeah, do it. Can't go there.

But there's, you know, there's this book I really like called the Tracker, and the Tracker's written by Tom Brown. He is a man who was apprenticed to this Apache Indian in, like, the 1960s, growing up in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. And Tom learns to hunt and kill animals, and he gets really good on the stuff. And so he tells a story that I've often recounted on podcasts. When he's nine years old, he kills his first animal. He hides in a tree, and he drops down on this lame deer, and he kills it with a knife. And he. He brings this deer back to camp, and he sobs, sobbing, thinking that he's killed his first animal. And this Apache Indian that he's apprenticed to says to him, you know, why are you crying? And I'm paraphrasing the book, so I'll probably mess it up. And Tom says, I killed this animal. And this man, who he calls grandfather in the book says, doing something that stuck with me a long time. And he says, when you realize this, you'll understand. In order for something to live, something else must die. This is the way of life. You know, the life of a blade of grass is no different than the life of that deer. And so life is precious no matter where it is. We don't disrespect it. Right. So if you. Do you have kids?

Yes, I do.

So if your kids went up to, like, a tree in your yard and just, like, broke a branch off of a living tree, you'd be like, why.

Are you doing that?

As humans, we kind of know, like, why would you kill that tree if you don't need to go on a good George Washington chop down a cherry tree. You don't kill a living thing. But, you know, it's a human construct to say that, like, the life in that tree is different than the life in a cow and something else. We say, oh, well, trees don't feel pain. Well, actually. Actually, we kind of think plants do feel pain. When you cut your grass, the grass releases, you know, pheromone, like, actual chemicals, you know, plant pheromones that signals other grasses that it's being. It's being cut.

Yeah.

Like, plants probably do feel pain. And a Lot of things do feel pain.

We're just guessing at bait, what we think we know or don't know.

Exactly. And so. But the first part of the statement is also really critical. In order for something to live, something else must die. This is the way of life. I don't think it's bad to be a part of that cycle of life and death. And we can't escape it no matter what we do. There's a vegetarian.

If we were in the jungle, some animal would eat us without thinking anything.

Exactly. Like, does a tiger feel guilty because it kills a deer? Does a lion feel guilty hunting an antelope on the plane? No. This is what they do. And it helps them express their. Their highest form that allows a lion to be a lion. I strongly believe that in order for you to be your best version and for me to be my best version, and for everyone listening to this animal foods are essential. So eat them with respect and gratitude and use them to be a better version of yourself.

Do you ever get crazy? Do you ever get crazy and eat a salad? Like, I'm just wondering, like, do you ever get like, is that like your cheat? Like, some people cheat on pizza, you cheat on broccoli.

I don't crave it at all.

You don't ever.

You never ever, ever, ever. I don't do cheats. I never do cheat days. I don't do cheat meals. I don't believe in it, and I just don't. I don't crave anything. I mean, I crave. I eat essentially the same meal for breakfast and dinner every day, and I never get sick of it. And I never get sick of meat. I never get sick of organs. I never get sick of butter and honey and fruit. Fruit. It's, it's. It's uniquely rewarding every single day. I have gotten sick of plant foods many times.

Okay?

When I was a raw vegan, I was juicing wheatgrass every day. And I came home from a run one day and I nearly puked. And I just thought I hit my. I hit my absolute ceiling with those plant alkaloids. And I thought this. I'm never going to eat wheatgrass again. I was a vegan. Yeah, Cortex said that I liked it, but my brainstem was saying, screw you, dude, that wheatgrass is toxic. You've had enough of it. So I got sick of vegetables a lot, but I never get sick of animal foods. And that is an experience that I see repeated in both men and women time and time again. It's in perpetuity. So do you think so compatible.

Okay, so if you, if I, if somebody's listening like me and they're going to add meat in, they're going to consider doing organs or organ pills. Do you think every people should fully give up vegetables or are you on board with like you just have less or you, you really change it up and you don't overeat one of them? I'm curious, are you more like. No. You really need to have zero for.

People if you are thriving, right. Mood, sleep, body composition, libido, emotional stability. Why change anything in your diet? Right? So I'm not so dogmatic that I'm going to tell people, give it up. But I want people to be really honest with themselves and to realize that a lot of things that they think will never go away, might go away if you got rid of vegetables. You hear this all the time. Time, like, oh, that tennis elbow that I had for the last 10 years went away when I got rid of my knee pain. Or you know, actually this little spot of like eczema on my neck that I've just got. It's gone now.

This is just so hard to wrap. I mean, I, I know I'm not alone on this. It's just so hard to wrap my brain around, you know, and I'm a nutritionist and I'm, I teach fat loss. I teach. So I'm, I'm listening and I'm trying to understand. It's just, it's very hard for us to wrap our brain around what we've been taught about vegetables being healthy.

It's hard to deprogram, it's hard to think outside the box. I mean, I think that people need to realize that and it's okay, it's okay to be, to have struggle with that. But I think that we need to realize as humans, like we've been fed this, we've been fed this, this narrative our whole life and it's not easy to change that. But a lot of times we do better if we are open minded and we consider that there may be some lack in that, in that paradigm. Maybe not optimal for a lot of people, wasn't optimal for, for me. But I think if people are thriving, why give up your vegetables? But I do think you'll be better without them.

And I do like your response. You know, it's, which is similar to what I would say to somebody if they didn't like what I was teaching. I've seen you comment back to people or your response is just that if what's working for you is working. I'm not telling you to change it. I mean, you're not. You don't tell people. You're more talking to people that things are not working for them. And you're like, let's look at this. Let's explore this. Gosh, this is. This is fascinating. The other question I had for you, this is just. This is less about nutrition, but more just a personal note. You are such a great, like, disruptor of how people are thinking. And so did you have to battle the whole people. I mean, I'm like, you don't care about people pleasing. I'm. I can tell. Like, do you did. Was that a battle for you or you just so in your conviction that you're like, I have to get this message out. I'm curious how you navigate that. You get angry people, I'm sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It takes time. I think in the beginning, I was more sensitive to it. And then years go by and you just see enough people benefit and you. You have enough debates with people and you read enough medical science on both sides that. That I believe that. No, I think this is really a good thing for a lot of people, and I think it's really important to offer this other perspective.

Yeah.

I think that vegetables are highly overrated. And I think kale is bullshit. Is like my. My. My tagline now or one of them.

And kale got really overly. I need to know who kale's PR was, because they got. It got really popular in the last several years.

It did. I mean, there's a lot. I think celery's bullshit, too.

But I read somewhere that the biggest purchasers of kale, for years before it became this. This widely known health food, that people think it's a health food. It was mostly used on buffet tables at restaurants at, like, chain restaurants that they would put the kale. Yeah. Pizza Hut. Was that. Is that accurate? I think I read that somewhere.

I don't know if it's an urban legend, but I've heard the same thing, that Pizza Hut is the largest.

It's more a decorative thing.

Yeah. I mean, you used to get parsley on your plate growing up, and they'd say, oh, you don't eat that. It's not actually food. It's just. It's just. And then you try. Oh, it's horrible. It's really. But you, like. I don't know. Yeah, because your body's craving something and meat and organs. Yeah.

Okay. Well, this is fascinating. I, you know, thanks for doing this today. I'm going to take it all in. I hope my listeners take it all in too. It's just, it's always good to learn different perspectives and learn different things and be open minded because really we're all figuring things out, we're all learning. There's not, we have to keep up with what, what's new out there and be open minded versus judging. So I think this is fascinating. I highly recommend his very interesting Instagram. I love watching what he eats for breakfast every day, which is not pancakes, hint, hint. It's like today I'm having raw heart, organ and raw egg. I don't know what year. I just, I look at it every morning now.

Standard. Yeah.

I'm always like, what is he having breakfast? And then so that, that's fun. And then your book, tell people about your book and where they can find you, where they can learn more about your supplements.

So books are interesting. You know, you write a book, it kind of gets frozen in time. And then I wrote a second book which is a cookbook. So the cookbook is called the Carnivore Code Cookbook. It has more of like updated ideas. It's on Amazon everywhere. So if you want recipes or you want to see how you might put an animal based diet of organs, meat, fruit, honey and raw dairy in a practice, check out the cookbook. The supplements are at Heart and Soul Soil Co. That's Dot Co. And there's all kinds of stuff, different formulations. They're all grass fed, grass finished from New Zealand. And I think that the supplements are meant to be there if you don't want to eat fresh organs. But I would recommend the fresh organs. But it's the next best in your life one way or the other.

It's the next best thing, right?

It's pretty darn good. Yeah, it's pretty darn good.

Do you do both by the way?

Do you. Do I do both? Yeah. I want to travel or. Yeah, it's hard to get things like burger brain for instance, fresh. But there's a lot of benefits to phosphatidylserine. I mean bovine desiccated phosphorusidylserine has been studied in Alzheimer's models and dementia models and cognitive decline in the elderly. It improves mentation. A lot of people, the compliments, I mean the comments we get at Heart and Soil are crazy with that's mood, memory and brain has a lot of that. And then for men, I mean that we have one called whole package which has desiccated testicle. It's hard to get testicles, but I do do eat. I do eat raw testicles from time to time on Instagram.

This is interesting.

Okay, men. The men respond like crazy to that one. And you can guess what their responses are. Gym performance and, you know, the romantic responses and things like that. We have one.

I need to order this for my husband, basically.

Yeah, yeah. It's called whole package. And then just the beef organs is just a multivitamin. But it's like heart, liver, kidney, spleen, and pancreas. But we've got lots of different things. A gi one, it's. There's a whole range there. And we've got an amazing team. Team at heart and soil that's like, we've got health coaches on staff that just so. Heartandsoil co. Heartandsoil co.

This is so great. Thank you so much today. Of course.

Yeah, my pleasure.