Dr. Paul Saladino | Your Guide To The Carnivore Diet | Wellness Force #Podcast

Why would these animal meat and organs that we have been eating for our entire evolution as hominids be bad for us? That's completely evolutionarily inconsistent. And yet we're told in 2020, the best foods you can eat are plants. And you think, wait a minute, that's not true. They're clearly less nutrient rich, the nutrients in them are less bioavailable, and they have a lot of things in them that are meant to kind of piss off our digestion and inflame our gu. Sam.

Paul Saladino, the author of the bestseller Carnivore Code, board certified physician, nutrition specialist, also just a seeker of truth podcast host, Fundamental Health. Paul, welcome to Wellness Force.

So good to be here, Josh. Thanks for having me on, brother.

We were talking before we clicked the red button and there's like seven, eight people that have said, you need to have Paul in this podcast. And I finally listened. I finally, like, opened my ears and listened. Because the message that you're bringing to the world is not about just everyone needs to, quote, eat meat. And I think that's what people are getting wrong about Carnivore and about your voice right now. You have been all over the broadcast world, man. I mean, Dr. Gundry's, Ben Greenfield, Rob Wolfe, some of the biggest mentors that I've learned from over the past 10 years. What is the timing of this book for you? We're going to dig into all things carnivore today. The emotional, the physical, the spiritual, the mental. But what is it about the timing of this book for you that made you want to launch it now?

You know, I think that, like so many things we do in our lives creatively, sometimes they just build and build and build, and you're so pregnant with them that you're like, now is the time to create this and bring it out. It just felt right. I've been in this sort of carnivore, animal based diet space for over two years now. And a little over a year into that last summer, I just thought, I need to write a book. There's so many things I'm thinking about that I want to just share with the world, like you said, just trying to share things that I believe to be helpful and true. And now is the time that it's all kind of come to fruition and finally getting out there in the world. So it just feels like that kind of little seed of inspiration or seed of creativity that just starts to grow and grow and it's like, okay, now is the time to just let it go. And get it out in the world and share it with people in hopes that it'll be a benefit. It just felt like that was the time to birth that baby, if you will.

I have so many great questions for you. This is the book right here, the Carnivore Code. And we're talking about this way that people can sustainably, I guess that's the real phrase, isn't it, man, sustainable agriculture, sustainable animal harvesting. Because we're in a system right now that's fundamentally broken. I mean, look, you and I are talking in the middle of the. A health epidemic with forced mask wearing and people being in total fear, which if you look at the research of suicides and also obesity and just health conditions in general, everything is skyrocketing right now. And in my experience, which I'm curious for a jumping off point, how you'd answer this. In my experience, when I'm stressed, when I'm upset, when I'm like, emotionally, you know, bothered, I tend to go for like sugar, carbs and fat. It's no, it's not in my mind that I would ever like go eat a steak if I was stressed out. As we look at the emotional aspect of carnivore and then obviously you're going to share what carnivore actually is. Two things. What is carnivore? And then right now for people in this moment, how can carnivore help them deal with their stress, deal with their emotional eating?

Well, I think you're absolutely right. If you look at the data regarding Covid and this lockdown, this is not a very natural, quote unquote way for humans to be living or eating. There's a lot of advertisements coming at us encouraging us to even eat processed foods or more processed foods. People are getting less healthy. How many people do you know? How many people that I know? How many people do your listeners know who will say they've gained weight during coronavirus, they're drinking more, they're eating more junk food. There is a lot of stress right now. One of the things that I point out in the book is this notion that we as humans really need to make an intentional choice about what our highest quality of life is. And then we can live into that however we decide to embody that highest quality of life. If someone listening to this really believes their highest quality of life is feeling good, thinking clearly, good body composition, libido, muscle tone, good sleep, emotional stability, then we need to make choices that support that. And those choices may not always be the same. Entertainment choices with regard to food that we're used to making. If we choose to use food as entertainment, for many of us, that may preclude or that that may take the quality of life equation to a different space that may become the highest quality of life. So what's interesting is for so many of us, it may be difficult to make food your entertainment and your ultimate sort of delicacy, sort of culinary enjoyment and still create the highest level of health. And I'm not putting a judgment on either one of those. It's up to us to decide what do I want out of my life? What do I want out of this health? Am I going to use food as entertainment? Am I going to use food to deal with stress, to get me through moments where I am bored or uncomfortable or anxious? Or am I going to try and use food to embody, to create, to manifest this highest level of health that I can in my body? And that second choice is really why I have written this book. It's not meant to be paternalistic, it's not meant to be patronizing. Like you said in the beginning, I'm not convinced that this is all about admonishing everyone in the world to stop eating all plants. This is really about helping them understand a few things. Number one, red meat and organs. Eating nose to tail is something that's been a part of the human diet for millions of years. It shaped us as humans. It's a central part of who we are. And if we don't do that, we will not attain optimal health. Eating those foods well raised is integral to our optimal health as humans. That's always been part of our evolutionary blueprint. Number two, plants do exist on a toxicity spectrum. And if we're struggling, I want to give people tools that help them understand which are the most toxic, which are the least toxic and then how to leverage that so they can find their optimal health. They can solve that quality of life equation for the best answer for them. The third piece of that equation is something that most of your listeners will be familiar with. The processes. Vegetable oils and overall processed foods are completely evolutionarily inconsistent.

Vegetable oils equal death.

And I major for so many reasons. Yeah, so that's really what it's about. It's not about telling people, hey, don't eat plants, eat all meat. It's about how people understand meat is central to the human diet. Meat and organs central to the human diet. When from well raised sources, plants can harm us. They exist on a toxicity spectrum. If you are not thriving, it's offering someone a tool. It's kind of like say, hey, here's a new hammer or a new saw. You can put it on your tool belt. I'm not telling you when to use it or how to use it. But what felt meaningful for me about this book and this project and these ideas is it doesn't seem like anyone else is saying this. And that means that there are a lot of people out there who are continuing to struggle with their help. They're stuck and they're not finding answers. They're thinking, I'm doing a paleo diet, I'm doing autoimmune paleo, or I'm doing plant based. I've been told that plants are good for me, I've been told that meat is bad for me and I'm not getting well, what is left? And I want to bring hope to where there is none. Because I think there are more options here for people, more tools in the setting of these stressful times. I think it kind of goes back to that as well. Understanding that there are more answers for us. We don't have to use food to sort of assuage these anxieties and these stresses, but overall, that's sort of the framework of the diet.

Wow. So much to unpack there. I'll just start with my biggest question that came up for me, and that was when we look at Carnivore, is it literally only nose to tail? I mean, no extra fats, no butters, no olive oils, nothing like that. Can you just go into the high level structure? We'll get low level as we go along in the show. But what's the high level structure of Carnivore? Just if people don't know anything about Carnivore.

So in chapter 12 of the book, I kind of outline five tiers and these are just my framework that I created to help people understand. And the first tier is what I call carnivore ish. It actually includes some plant foods and I think that it's time to put aside dogma. I've been posting about this recently. I've noticed a lot of dogma in the carnivore community recently and it really saddens me. It's not about being a, quote, carnivore or fitting into a tribe of people who only eat meat. Like I said, it's about people helping people understand that meat and organs are central to the human diet, super nutritious, and that plants exist on a toxicity spectrum. So tier 1 carnivore ish diet, in my opinion, is meat, organs all of those types of foods, plus the least toxic plant foods we can get into why I think these foods are the least toxic and which ones are the least toxic. But if you just pause for a moment and think about things from a plant's perspective. Plants are rooted in the ground, they're part of an ecosystem. And plants have had to defend themselves against predation for 450 million years of CO evolution with animals and insects and fungi. Out of necessity, they've developed chemical defenses. We're aware of some of these, but we are really not aware of the majority of them. Nor is the research on the majority of these defensive plant chemicals really in the forefront of people's consciousness. It's not talked about, but it's out there. But from the perspective of a plant, it makes sense. There are defense chemicals in there, and a plant is in a unique space, it has to reproduce, but it also doesn't want to get eaten before it does that. So a plant seed grows into a plant sprout, goes into a plant with roots and leaves and stems, and eventually the plant produces a flower and a fruit or some sort of reproductive part. But the stems, the roots, the seeds, the leaves of plants, these are what the plant defends most highly. And you can really look at this pattern in plants as well. This is really getting to botanical science. The more vulnerable the plant is, the more highly defended it is, the more full of toxins, digestive enzyme inhibitors, things that don't play well with human biology. There are in that part of the plant. So plant seeds are some of the most harmful for humans, broadly speaking. We have to remember that plant seeds encompass seeds, grains, nuts and legumes. They're all plant babies. They're like this little plant baby put on the River Nile that's very defenseless, very susceptible, very vulnerable to attack. But plants have encased in that a lot of these little chemical ninjas. There are myriad defense chemicals, digestive enzyme inhibitors, lectins, oxalates, all kinds of things to prevent animals from over consuming the seeds. But there's one part of a plant, the fruit, that is often less toxic. Because the plant is saying, it's okay to eat this part of me, I'm going to allow you to eat this fruit, to spread my seeds. So generally speaking, the framework that I'm working from in the book is that the least toxic parts of plants are the fruit. And there are many fruit that we think of as vegetables. Things like avocado, olives, squash, these are all plant fruits. But more, you know, more specifically speaking, Going back to the seeds, the stems, the leaves, the roots, these are highly defended and I think that if we cut those out of our diet, we can include some fruit. Most people can and do okay while we're making the meat and organs, the centerpiece of our diet, getting all the good nutrition in there. So that's where it starts. That's what I would call a carnivore ish type diet. So it can include.

That's the jumping off point for most people.

That's the jumping off point for most people. So it could be something that's like, you know, grass fed steak, some wild salmon, some well raised chicken, some turkey with some berries and avocado.

And I mean, this sounds really good to me. This sounds like we can do this.

That's the idea, is to help there be a starting point where it's much more approachable. Right. And to help them understand that it's approachable and yet intentional with regard to what foods are in and what foods are out. This idea of eliminating the most offensive plant foods is not original to me. Autoimmune paleo ideas have done this. The original paleo ideas have done this. I've just tried to extend this and say, hey, I'm really kind of the anti broccoli crusader. Kale doesn't love you back. Just realize this, you guys. Kale and almonds do not love you back. The seeds, the leaves, if you cut those out, most people get pretty close to what I would consider a carnivore ish type diet. The other piece that's often left out is the organs. And we can talk about why. Including organs like liver or heart or other organs is so important in the future. But there are unique nutrients in these organs that help us thrive at a biochemical level. There are lots of ways to get organs in our diet. The fresh I think is the best. But if you can't get the fresh organs, something like desiccated organs is a great idea as well. These sort of capsules. I started a company, Hard and Soil, we're making the desiccated organ capsules for people as well. But I think it's important that people get the organs in their diet however they can. But this idea of meat, organs, bone broths, nose to tail, plus the least toxic plant foods is the jumping off point. Then you can progress as you see fitness in terms of which plants you want to cut out. Some people take all the plants out of their diet. But I think for the majority of people, this sort of tier one perspective, that's Most inclusive is going to be the most sustainable. Does that help paint the picture?

I love it. And honestly, Paul, like, one thing that I felt the strongest when I was going through carnivore code was this is a call to come back home. Like on this show, we talk about emotional and physical, and there's obviously the spiritual component in there too. But mentally, we're such a mentally focused world and we are so susceptible to the mass media and really, whatever you want to call it, it could be the agenda, it could be just somebody's narrative. And unfortunately, if you look at most narratives in our world, especially in the past 30 years, and really it started in the 60s when Earl Butz was hired for the agricultural system in America. And we had monocrops and it just decimated. And then meat became the enemy and butter was bad and all this stuff. We just had wave after wave after wave of financially incentivized health recommendations. And what I loved about your book is you unpacked so many of the myths and honestly, let's be real, just the bullshit in this world from a science perspective. And so. And that jumping off point where you talked about, you know, eating certain vegetables are okay, but there's a very skinny list, and then eating the fruits are okay. The next phase of this is for us to all return back home to eat the way that we were always eating before there was any financial narrative whatsoever. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah. So the beginning part of the book is this evolutionary story and this idea of where humans have come from. And we can look back at the ethnographic record, the archaeologic record, the anthropologic record, and we can look at currently living indigenous hunter gatherer groups, and we begin to see very similar patterns among all of these. The pattern is that they prioritize animal foods. I love this idea. This idea of ancestral eating is so fascinating to me. Some may debate the validity here, but I think that it's pretty clear that our genetics haven't changed much in 3 million years, and really certainly not much in the last 350,000 years of homo sapiens sapiens evolution. We have a genetic blueprint and there does appear to be a species appropriate diet, quote, unquote, for a human. Just like there's a species appropriate diet for a cow or a, a chicken or your dog or your cat. We know what our pets are kind of supposed to eat. A lot of us get that more than the fact that we under that that we're really able to understand that humans have a similarly species appropriate diet. So that's the idea, like what is a species appropriate diet for humans? What can we take from these ancestral narratives about what that might be? And it's, that's what I'm trying to recreate with a carnivore diet. And if you look at these indigenous groups, this is essentially what they're eating. There's a group in the Amazon called the Kaiwi Menno. There's a researcher and anthropologist Douglas London from Harvard who has studied this group. They were previously uncontacted by westerners and they eat animal meat, animal organs and seasonal fruit. You look at African indigenous tribes, it's very similar. Mostly meat, organs and fruit. Seasonally. It's like, okay, this makes sense. Their fruit, prioritizing animal foods. They're prioritizing animal meat and organs above everything else. If they can kill something, respectfully, gratefully, sharing it with a tribe in a beautiful celebration, they will make that the center of their diet. They may go looking for other plant foods, but it's really only in times of scarcity. They use plant foods as survival foods. These are fallback foods. They're not the center of their diet. And that's completely different than the narrative we've been told today. And I try so hard in the book to debunk so many of these myths and we can get into those if you'd like. There are so many essentially non supported narratives that we are told today about red meat at through heart and soil. I've been getting emails from people with questions asking, you know, what should I do about this? What should I do about that health condition? And people tell me every day things that just make me very sad. They say, my doctor told me red meat worsens my X, Y or Z. I've gotten emails saying psoriasis, diverticulitis, cancer, heart disease. And I think, wow, we as humans in 2020 are very badly misled by epidemiology, by observational science. There's no real evidence that red meat is bad for these things. And why would it be? Why would these animal meat and organs that we have been eating for our entire evolution as hominids be bad for us? That's completely evolutionarily inconsistent. And yet we're told in 2020 the best foods you can eat are plants. And you think, wait a minute, that's not true. They're clearly less nutrient rich, the nutrients in them are less bioavailable, and they have a lot of things in them that are meant to kind of piss off our digestion. And inflame our guts. I mean, we know this with things like gluten. People are aware, oh, wheat has gluten. Well, gluten is a lectin. It's just the tip of the iceberg. But there are molecules like gluten. There are other lectins, There are oxalates. We'll get into all the plant toxins. But why are we told these plants are so good for us there? They may have some nutritional value, but they're really, in my opinion, historically fallback foods. They're survival foods. To make them the centerpiece of our diet foregoes what I believe is really our ancestral birthright to pretty profound health. And I think a lot of people are experiencing that. We're just not thriving the way that we should.

The real juxtaposition, Paul, that and I already love where we are in this conversation. We haven't even gotten to the specifics yet. The real juxtaposition is that in order to live through an ancestral lens, you have to be committed to actually living that you have to embody it as we always talk about on the show. So if people are looking at this pathway ahead where it would be great for them to eat whole. Whole foods and buy whole foods, you can tell us what that is later. And eat sustainably harvested animals and maybe live away from 5G and get more sunlight in their lives. There's all these components of living this way, yet it requires massive internal changes about what their core values are, what they. What people actually care about in this world. And traditionally, what happens. And this is where I'd love for you to share a little bit of your backstory. And your father was in medicine, and he had his own health struggles. You've had your own skin issues. Traditionally, what happens to most healers like yourself, because you're a healer, you're an educator, you're a physician, you're a healer, is that they go through some kind of a deep, dark night of the soul where they're experienced some kind of, like, deleterious health condition, and then they find the truth in that, and they end up sharing the truth of the world based on the only thing they have, and that is the path they walked. Your father was in medicine. Your mom, I believe, was a physician assistant or a nurse practitioner. You have a deep medical background in your family, but you noticed at one point, like, your dad didn't have that great of health, you yourself were experiencing skin issues. Can you walk us there? Because that totally relates to all the different things we're Going to talk about later in the show. Just give people a little story about what that was for you.

Yeah. So I did grow up in a medical family. I've been fascinated by human illness most of my life. You go to the hospital with your dad as an 8 year old or a 10 year old and you think, why are these people sick? You see fragility. You see human life differently when you see people sick and dying as an 8 year old. So it was pretty striking. But my child mind, my young mind was very curious. What is causing this? I used to ask my dad what causes cardiovascular disease. I've been fascinated by heart attacks most of my life because that is really the big guy, the big scary killer for us throughout our generations of our lives. And I was asking, what causes it? He says, nobody knows. And I thought that's not, that's not satisfying. But with all these illnesses, I always wanted to know what causes it. What causes it. Most of my education, I wanted to be a doctor. In college I went to William and Mary. I studied chemistry and biology. I got pretty burned out in college. Took six years off of just kind of traveling around the world, skiing, climbing mountains. I hiked the Pacific Crest Trail.

Eventually I went, how did you do that? How'd you take six years off?

Well, I mean, when you come out, I went to a state school. I didn't have any debt. And you can just kind of live like a vagabond. Yeah, okay.

You didn't have to pay for Stanford?

No, I didn't have to pay for Stanford. I went to William Mary. So, yeah, so that was just my exploration period. I eventually went back to school and became a physician assistant. It was around that time that I thought, okay, human health is interesting. I got pulled into this kind of vegan narrative and I went to be a raw vegan. I was a raw vegan for about seven months. I lost 25 pounds of muscle and had had the worst gas of my life. I feel so, so bad for anyone that shared an office with me at that time in my life because it was an olfactory nightmare. It was just really hard to be around people when I had that much bad gas.

Like a physician, an olfactory partner. You didn't want to say fart on the show.

I had the worst farts. It was so bad.

Yes.

And you know, I thought, okay, this is not the way to do it. I added meat back. I was able to get some of that muscle mass back. But throughout most of my life I've had a condition called atopy. Or atopic dermatitis synonymous with eczema. I had coexistent asthma. So I've had this autoimmune condition. And I knew from that point in my life as a pa like food is triggering, this food is connected. A vegan diet didn't help it. It kind of got worse at times and I went back to Paleo. It seemed to get a little better, but continued eventually as a physician assistant in cardiology, I realized the paradigm was not something I could live with. It was way too symptom focused and pharmaceutical based. I had to go back to medical school with really the intention of practicing from an integrative perspective. I wanted to do medicine and understand what was at the root, root of all these things. I'm sort of this, this kid, this guy who wanted to be. At the same time I wanted to be a mechanic, a human mechanic and a race car driver. I wanted to understand how the human body worked. You know, I didn't want to, I didn't want to just. I always hated bringing my car to the mechanic, right. I didn't like just handing it over and not knowing what was happening under the hood. So I wanted to be a human mechanic. And I also realized that if the food that I at affected my quality of life so deeply, affected my experience of life so deeply, that that was a really important thing to maximize in humans. The analogy is basically that if the food we, the fuel that we put in our cars affects the kind of car we get to drive. If we can understand which foods are compatible with our biology, are part of our species, appropriate diet are biologically equivalent to what our genetics are affecting are expecting. We get to experience life differently emotionally. All in all the ways, the way we think, the way we interact with the world, our strength, everything is different. If we can understand this compatibility, put the right fuel. Do you have an electric car? Do you have a diesel? Do you have an unleaded car? Is, you know, the really broad way of saying it. So that was fascinating to me. So I wanted to be a race car driver and I also wanted to know what was under the hood. I wanted to drive the fastest car I could and I wanted to feel as good as I could. And this vegan diet wasn't working for me. I went back to medical school, kept having eczema at a very severe level. I was doing a lot of jujitsu. Then I would get horrible breakouts on my knees and elbows. And I thought, okay, this Paleo diet is not enough. I have to keep iterating And I started learning about plant toxins. And thus began a long journey of wow, there's a lot of different plant toxins. There are oxalates, there are lectins, there are phytic acid type molecules, there are saponins, there are phytoalexins. There are so many different molecules in plants that can trigger this problem with me. And I thought, okay, great, what do I do now? So I just kind of kept simplifying my diet, simplifying my diet, pulling things out, pulling things out, and it didn't work. I still, no matter what I did, I just couldn't figure it out. Eventually, in residency, my eczema was continued. At times I heard Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan's podcast talking about a carnivore diet, talking about a diet that excluded plants completely. And my first reaction was, that's crazy. That's crazy. Everything I'd been told argued against that plants are valuable for humans, we need them for fiber or polyphenols or valuable plant compounds. But I thought, okay, I'm willing to give it a try. I'm willing to question those notions that are deeply held within my previous teachings and I'm going to give this a shot. So I cut all the plants out of my diet and immediately the effects were pretty pronounced for me. I felt much better. My eczema resolved within a few weeks and psychologically I felt like a different human. I felt more poised, I felt more calm, I felt more clear headed, thought, wow, there's really something cool here. There's something to it. And so thus began my own personal journey with a carnivore diet a few years ago. Since then there's been so many different rabbit holes to go down when you talk about this idea of even carnivore ish or strictly animal based diet. All those questions that I had came up come up for people listening. What about fiber, what about plant molecules? And we can go and answer any of those questions you want. But that's been the work that I've been trying to do so much over the last few years is understand what do we know about this, what do we know about that? And it's been a fascinating journey that has led to a lot of discoveries. And I really feel at this point that we have understood or that I've come to an understanding. And this is the stuff I write about in the book the Carnivore Code that wow, humans can thrive on only animal foods. We can get all of the nutrients that we need from animals when we eat them. Nose to tail. There is not a single nutrient that humans need to thrive. And I can back that statement up. We can talk about any nuance you want that is not found when you eat well raised animals nose to tail, which kind of goes back to the importance of getting the organs. But that's a pretty striking statement. Now, that's not to say everyone needs to eat exactly that way, but if you can get everything you need eating animals nose to tail, that opens up a lot of doors for people, gives them a lot of freedom to try elimination diets and then bring foods back in if they want, or really get levels of nutrients that they never have had before when they make nose to tail animal meat and organs the center part of their diet. And so many of those interventions can be incredibly healing and really change the experience of life that people have. They get to drive a whole different car.

Oh, man, there's so much there. I was actually a technician for Mercedes Benz at one point in my life, and so was, by the way, Paul Check, who is a friend of ours. And you're on his podcast. I've been in his podcast too. And. And it's interesting this, this mental faculty we have where it's like, well, I want to know how the car works. The only difference is, you know, as a physician yourself, the car isn't running when a mechanic works on it. Like you actually would work on people who are living and breathing. And so there's so much complex nuance there to explore. And I loved one of the things you said when you were talking about the foods that were like alternate foods. How did you phrase that? Where it was like specific foods that we. That we would eat only when interventions would happen. You called it a certain name, I.

Think, survival food or a fallback food.

A fallback food. Because I think about that, like, when we're eating the way that nature intended and we're living with the seasons, we don't really ever need to fall back. We're just living in the present moment. We're just right here. And it leads to the next question. For me, about right here is also connected to all the moments that came before it. In other words, the memories, the health scares, the hunger for learning. Like, there's so many things that come before right now in this moment. You know, I'm projecting on you right now just like you're projecting on me. And we're having a good time while we do it. But there was something that happened when Your dad was 45. He had a heart condition. Did that shape the way that you experience right now and the way that.

You wrote carnivore code, I'm sure it did. I mean, I remember being in the molecular biology lab at William and Mary and you get this call from your mom. I get this call from my mom and she says, oh, your dad had a heart attack. He's in the hospital and he had his heart attack when he was 43. So I am 43 now. He had his heart attack when he was my age. He did fine. He was a physician. He knew the signs and symptoms. He was having chest pain and shortness of breath. He went in immediately, he had an angioplasty. So they do a cardiac catheterization, they do a balloon dilatation of the cardiac artery and he was okay. So as a 43 year old man, to have an angioplasty, a balloon dilatation of a stenotic or narrowed coronary artery is, is very accelerated. It's very accelerated. And that is an indication of early advanced atherosclerosis. So what most physicians would say that as a man, I now have a family history of early atherosclerosis in a primary relative, which is a major risk factor for coronary artery disease for me. So that's made me think like, I don't want to get that, I want to avoid that. And I think that's always been a major driving factor for me. I want to live well. I want to drive a sports car through life. I don't just want to limp around. I don't want to be driving around with a donut on my car, you know, one of the spare tires. I want to experience everything I can. I'm only on this earth for 80 or 100 years if I'm lucky. And I want those experiences to be rich and vital and I want to be surfing when I'm 90 years old. That's the goal. So how do I do that? I'm not going to accept the mainstream narrative of the, what I jokingly call the inexorable march to decrepitude. You know, there's this, there's this real narrative that humans just gradually decline, that we just get weaker and weaker and weaker. We just kind of get more hunched every year and our joints start to hurt and we get less vital and less clear headed and people say, I'm just getting older. I've always rejected that inexorable march to decrepitude, you know, narrative. If you look at indigenous people, they have what's called squaring of the Morbidity curve. Their vitality doesn't decline linearly over time. They're pretty vital up until the last few months of their life. You'll see people on their seventh or eighth decade of life in indigenous cultures doing the same things everyone else does. Running around, hunting, throwing spears, dancing, singing. They don't have this sort of, this gradual decline. But that's what we've all been told is normal for humans. That's what we're taught in medical school. It's okay for your patients to develop hypertension gradually. We're told every decade of life is 10 millimeters of mercury, systolic blood pressure, or 20 milliliters. You know, it's. We're told it's okay for people to get less and less vital as they age. And I thought, that is bs. That is not true. That is not the way I want to live my life. So seeing my father go through it, I thought, I need to understand what's causing this and I want to avoid it because I do not want to have that fate. And it's really interesting and, and we can talk about my recent blood work if you'd like, because my blood work is quite striking and challenges a number of the mainstream narratives, I'm sure, especially.

Regarding cholesterol wise, right?

Yes, yes. Challenges many of the mainstream narratives regarding lipids and LDL and lipid hypothesis stuff. But we don't have to go there if you don't want to.

Paul, question. Because I think about, like, we're really in an explosion of like, insulin resistance. And we talked about insulin resistance before. Before, but also how insulin resistance relates to long term chronic disease. Is it really the carbs? Is it really even the saturated fat? Like, what is it? Because we have two camps that are both narrations from someone's decision. Everybody decides. Just like you decided when you were early in your life and you're like, how do I get better? I saw what my dad went through. You made a decision yourself, but you made it because you were tired of the results you were seeing and you were getting and you're experiencing. Is it really the saturated fat? Is it the carbohydrates? Like, what is causing the insulin resistance and what is insulin resistance? You talk about it in the book.

This is a fairly complex discussion, but I'll try my best to simplify it. So insulin resistance is synonymous with what we might call metabolic dysfunction. And there are really two types of insulin resistance. There's physiologic insulin resistance and pathologic insulin resistance. We'll just Talk about pathologic insulin resistance. At the level of our muscle cells and most of our body, it is normal for them to refuse glucose during states of ketosis, I.e. physiologic insulin resistance, which is essentially synonymous with glucose sparing. That's not the same thing as pathological insulin resistance. In the former condition, if we limit carbohydrates or we fast, the body is smart enough to say, hey, I'm going to spare glucose, this critical molecule, for so many of the cells in the body, for the brain, the testicles, the ovaries, the red blood cells, the kidneys, the tissues that really depend on glucose exclusively or absolutely need a supply of glucose. Many other tissues in the body can use ketones. They can burn these fat derived molecules and can use those for fuel. So there is a partitioning of energy in the setting of low carbohydrate diets. Our body does not have what I would call pathologic insulin resistance because there's not an energy overload. Fasting glucose is low and fasting insulin is low. Now that's physiologic insulin resistance. Pathologic insulin resistance is a completely different condition. That's the way it looks in diabetes. You have lots of glucose in your cells, or lots of glucose in the cells and the bloodstream, and your fasting insulin is high and your fasting glucose is high. So these are very different metabolic conditions that are driven by kind of underlying processes that are quite different. But the second one is what we would equate with metabolic dysfunction. And as you suggest, that pathologic insulin resistance, which is the insulin resistance that is associated with high fasting glucose, high postprandial glucose, high fasting insulin, because the insulin is not the signal from the insulin is not working at the level of the cells, and the body has to jack up the levels that is associated with basically every single chronic disease we suffer from today. And that is not really hyperbole. We're talking about Alzheimer's, we're talking about cardiovascular disease, we're talking about stroke. Even autoimmune disease has been associated with metabolic dysfunction in so many people. So what is causing that is a fascinating question. And you bring up a couple of culprits. And my answer is that it's neither of those. Certainly it's not saturated fat. There's a lot of great literature now about saturated fat and the fact that humans have been eating this type of fat for millions of years. It's been at the center of our diets as we've eaten animals Saturated fat does not result in metabolic dysfunction in humans. It just does not. There are so many good studies now to show this, so many good studies to show that when you look at increasing saturated fat in human diets, they don't become more metabolically broken or have more diabetes or have more heart disease or have more strokes. In fact, it's the opposite. There are interventional studies. Specifically, I'm thinking about the Minnesota coronary experiment from 1968 to 1973, which show that when we replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat from vegetable oils, the people who got more polyunsaturated fat did much worse. They died more, they had more cardiovascular disease, and they had more incidents of cancer. So the other camp of people says carbohydrates cause diabetes or carbohydrates cause insulin resistance. And this is also false. This is just not physiologically true. And so many people on the low carbohydrate camps or ketogenic camps end up being way too dogmatic with regard to this. And it's confusing at a physiologic level, because if you have underlying metabolic dysfunction, adding carbohydrates is like fuel for the fire, and your body doesn't respond to that well, but it doesn't cause the metabolic dysfunction. There are so many examples of indigenous people and metabolically healthy humans eating moderate or large amounts of carbohydrates without diabetes. I'm thinking of Kitavans, Tavaruans, Tuka, Sinta Islanders. These are sort of Polynesian, and, you know, these islanders throughout the world who do not have vascular disease, they do not have illness, and they eat a lot of their diet as carbohydrates. So to suggest that carbohydrates cause diabetes or carbohydrates cause insulin resistance or metabolic dysfunction is not supported by the literature. It just doesn't happen that way. But we conflate the two, because if you are metabolically broken, if your mitochondria don't work, which is ultimately kind of the. The underlying. The underlying etiology of metabolic dysfunction, then adding carbohydrates can cause real problems, and I'll try and explain why. So I think that the main driver, there's a lot of good evidence for this, is the polyunsaturated fat. And this is surprising to people because if you go to your cardiologist and you ask them what's better, lard or butter or canola oil, they're going to probably tell you canola oil. But I'm going to say the exact Opposite, the canola oil is very, very high in an 18 carbon omega 6 polyunsaturated fat called linoleic acid. And I think that excess amounts of linoleic acid are the main driver of metabolic dysfunction in humans. So this is really, I think, where the story gets interesting, because if that's the case, we have been told the wrong information for the last 70 years, and it has potentially cost us millions of lives. My father, you know, all these physicians working in the 80s and 90s and even the 70s, we have been telling people to eat vegetable oil over saturated fat for decades, for decades. And if that is the wrong information, which I believe strongly that it is, we are killing people every day with that incorrect physiology.

I have to interrupt you, and I'm sorry. We'll please continue in a second. I feel like it's this reductionistic, like, Dan Party calls it, a heuristic in the brain. Like, we all have these shortcuts where it's like, okay, well, all fat is bad, all vegetables are good. We have this reductionistic lens that sometimes I think we all fall into where it's like, just tell me what to do, Dr. Paul. Just tell me what to do and I'll do that. Or even with their own physician. This is a more nuanced conversation. This isn't something where you guys are going to listen to this and Paul's gonna share with you. Just do this one thing. There's many things that we get to explore and take our time with. Like, that's the pace of nature. This linoleic acid, what is that as it relates to health? What does consuming that do to our health? Just so people know.

So you're absolutely right. And I think that it seems complicated because we're living in a strange world for our biology. If we go back 20,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 years, none of this would have been complicated because we wouldn't have been able to do anything else. Just by being free living humans 100,000 years ago, without grocery stores, just hunting our food, and occasionally getting seasonal carbohydrates as fruit and berries or honey, we would have been doing exactly the things that I think lead to the best human health. So it seems complicated because we're undoing our conditioning in 2020. But it's not necessarily complicated from an evolutionary perspective. So that's an important point to highlight. One of my friends has a podcast, Anthony Gustin, called the Natural State. And I really like that idea. If we return, if we can understand what the natural state is for humans, A lot of this stuff falls in line, and it's not quite as complicated as it seems. But in 2020, it seems complicated because we're undoing all of those sort of inadvertent mental shortcuts which really don't do us any favors. So linoleic acid is interesting. It's primarily found in vegetable seed oils. Corn, canola, safflower, sunflower, peanut, soybean. These are the big ones. The unfortunate thing is that most olive oil and avocado oil is also cut with a lot of these oils. Even if it's organic, it depends on how good it is. So 80 plus percent of olive oil and avocado oil is cut with vegetable oil. If it's organic, it's probably okay, but.

We can have to list that on the label. Right.

If it was fat, they're supposed to. But it's tricky. Yeah. A lot of it is.

We'll have to get your best olive oil company.

Yeah.

In the show notes.

Yeah. But the problem appears to be this. When humans eat linoleic acid, these fats have different signaling roles in the human body. We are all familiar with hormones, testosterone, estrogen, cortisol. There are many molecules in our bodies that can signal just like that. Our fat cells release adipokines like adiponectin or lipokalen. And these actual fats can act as lipokines. These are fat molecules that appear to have a signaling role in the human body because of the way they interact at the level of our mitochondria. So evolutionarily, it appears that linoleic acid, this 18 carbon omega 6 fatty acid, which really only resides in significant amounts in vegetable seeds, it would have been very rare in our diets previously, is a signal to our fat cells to grow. And I think this makes sense when we think about where we've come from. It's like a signal for scarcity. If you are forced with your tribe to eat lots of nuts and seeds and things that are high in linoleic acid, it kind of makes sense for you to grow your fat temporarily. And similarly, there is another signaling molecule called stearic acid, which is an 18 carbon saturated fat that appears to have the opposite signal. It appears to tell our body that there's abundance and we lose fat. This is what's so interesting. If you look at humans or even animal studies like mice or rats, you can give mice or rats stearic acid and they basically get a six pack. They. They lose their visceral fat. They lose up to 70% of their visceral fat, which is the fat within the peritoneum around the gut. But if you give them oils that are high in linoleic acid, corn or canola or safflower oil, the visceral adipose tissue grows like crazy. In humans, you can see the same thing. They've done studies with kids who have non alcoholic fatty liver disease. These are kids that are some of the sickest, most metabolically broken kids there are. When they take the linoleic acid down, they give them a very low linoleic acid diet. The NAFLD resolves very quickly. It gets much better. So the non alcoholic fatty liver disease gets better. The hepatic fat mass decreases. Many of the markers of metabolic function of insulin resistance improve just by lowering the linoleic acid. So it seems to be a signal to our bodies that it's okay to grow fat. And stearic acid is the reverse. And like I said, it kind of makes sense like winter is coming, you're not getting animals, so you probably need to bulk up a little bit for the winter to survive.

This is when you're going to eat the fallback foods.

Exactly. If you're eating the fallback foods, if you're eating the nuts or the seeds or things that will be higher in linoleic acid in nature in 2020, we have foods that are much higher in linoleic acid than anything we would have ever seen evolutionarily. So I think it kind of breaks our biochemistry because we get this huge, huge signal. We get these completely massive amounts of linoleic acid in our diet. If you look at humans, the studies have been done looking at fat biopsy. Humans store polyunsaturated fats. We can't make them in our body. Over the last 70 years, the linoleic acid consumption has increased 135%. Basically, humans only had 2 to 3% of their calories as linoleic acid in, in maybe the 1900s. But in 1911, Crisco started making vegetable oil. When you had these vegetable oils, these linoleic acid rich vegetable oils. And since then, vegetable oil has just gone up and up and up in our diet. And what else has happened? Obesity skyrocketed, diabetes skyrocketed. So many of our chronic autoimmune conditions have skyrocketed. It's a correlation, but it's an extremely compelling correlation when you look at it. So what appears to be happening is in nature, I think evolutionarily, this is my hypothesis, we would have been exposed to slightly larger amounts of linoleic acid during these fallback times and our body gets a little bit fatter. You might get up to 4, 5 or 6% of your diet as linoleic acid. In 2020, most of us, if we're eating traditional foods, could get as high as 10, 15% of our diet of our calories from linoleic acid. It's a huge signal to just put on fat. Whether it's belly fat or visceral adipose tissue, it's a real problem for humans. It's totally evolutionarily inconsistent. The problem then becomes that as we start to get fatter and fatter, eventually our fat cells get so full that we become metabolically broken. It's like this slippery slope. It just goes down and down and down for a little while. Humans can incorporate more adipose tissue. If you look at human physiology, we don't get pathologically insulin resistant until we reach a certain level of adipose tissue. It's different for every person. It's different between cultures. Some Asian cultures get insulin resistant much faster than Americans. White Americans, we can get very fat before we become massively insulin.

Why does that happen for the white Americans? What's that all about?

It's just a genetic, it's a genetic sort of set point in the adipocyte. So it has to do with a fat cell. And once the fat cell gets so swollen, it starts sending out signals to the rest of the body to refuse insulin. And that makes sense because what causes the fat cell to grow in the first place? Insulin signaling. Insulin is generally a signal to the fat cell that it's okay to grow. Right? Insulin is, is really, it's not technically anabolic, it's mostly anti catabolic. But when you have insulin signaling at the level of our fat cells, they are signaled to grow. And linoleic acid appears to open the door wide for insulin signaling. At the fat cells, they grow. They just grow and grow and grow. And these are visceral adipose cells within the peritoneum, which are particularly metabolically active, and subcutaneous, which are between the skin and sort of the muscles. There's two types of fat on the human body, but as that grows, once we hit our set point and those adipocytes get totally full, they start sending out free fatty acids to the rest of the body and signaling to the periphery. Hey, we have got a crisis. We have way too many nutrients. You guys refuse everything insulin is doing. And that is essentially the beginning of metabolic dysfunction. It's a gradual, long term process. But linoleic Acid is kind of that original signal that's pushing us in that direction. Doesn't happen instantly, it happens over time. But the more we get the signal, the worse we get. So your original question was such a good one. What is causing this? It's not carbohydrates. Yeah. But if you have fat cells with the doors wide open to insulin, they're saying, come on in, come on in, you. We can grow all we want in that setting. Excess carbohydrates can fuel the fire. So I'm not saying that low carbohydrate diets are not helpful for people who have underlying metabolic dysfunction or who want to lose weight. Limiting the carbohydrates temporarily can be extremely helpful. They're fueling the fire. They're part of that sort of wood. They're part of those building blocks that the fat cells are using to make more fat, to get bigger, to get bigger. But at the same time, they didn't cause the problem in the first place. It's really that, I think disordered lipokine signaling from this inconsistent from this incongruent level of linoleic acid in our diet. And more and more people have been talking about this vegetable oil problem. Now it's a little bit insidious because there are many foods that we haven't even mentioned that could still create more of this signaling for us as humans. The big ones are certainly the vegetable oils. And I think most people, if they are listening to this, if they eliminate those oils from their diet with rigor, they will do so much better. Now, this means asking when you go to restaurants, like most restaurants are going to cook your food in an oil that is very high. Yeah, that's gonna. They're gonna cook it in canola or safflower or corn oil.

Even whole foods. For those of you that go whole foods, most of the whole foods food bar is all canola oil.

Exactly. And we can talk about why that is. Because whole foods is kind of of the opinion that. That vegetable oils are good for you, right? Yes. It's cheaper. Yeah.

Whole foods, before you move forward, because I know you're about to go into something really specific, just can we pull the E brake here? For the men and women listening, and specifically the women, when we look at the fat storage mechanism and you talked about how there's the visceral fat and then there's the subcutaneous fat, and we also look at that through lens of this really, like plant based narrative where people are eating a lot of these linoleic acids? Is there a, is there a guidepost for people? Like, is there some three foods you can mention specifically that are super high in linoleic acid besides just the oils? Are there actual foods that people should steer clear of if they're already noticing they have a lot more visceral fat or subcutaneous fat?

Well, you could think of like a lot of the grains may have it, some of the nuts might have it. You know, so you're, if you eliminate the seeds, you'll be getting a lot of the seed oils. And you can think about, you can look at how much linoleic acid is in any nut or seeds. But you know, sunflower seeds have a lot of linoleic acid. A lot of the nuts that we're eating are pretty high in linoleic acid. The other thing to mention here, and this is where people often get kind of frustrated or concerned, is that if you are eating a lot of animals that are fed corn and soy, the fat tissue of those animals is enriched with linoleic acid. So even in the confines of an animal based diet, I'm not a huge fan of things like bacon from pigs that are fed corn and soy because that fat in the bacon is going to be 15 to 20% linoleic acid, whereas a wild pig is going to have a much lower amount of linoleic acid in its fat tissue. So it's, there's a real evolutionary issue here in terms of species appropriate diets for the food we are eating.

Thank you for answering that because I'm thinking about all the changes that people can sometimes feel. Let's be honest, Paul, some people can get a little defeated, like, okay, wait, I can't eat almonds, but I can eat like maybe a strawberry here and there. You go deep into this in the carnivore code and we talked a lot about the science and I think people that are listening to this for the, the second time, maybe the third time, are really writing down the notes. And the show notes are@wellnessforce.com podcast for all you science people out there, but for the emotional people, for the people that understand, like how the carnivore diet and how eating healthy, sustainable, agriculturally raised animals can help their emotional intelligence. I think about there's so much of the serotonin that's released in the gut and if our gut is unhealthy and if our body's unhealthy, then aren't we also going to make more clouded mental and emotional decisions? How do you incorporate emotional intelligence into the Carnivore diet. And how have you seen that reflect in your own life and maybe in people's lives who have read your book? Because there's far much more to eating carnivore than just physical nutrients and protein, carbs and fat. Like, there's an emotional component here too.

There is, and that goes a little bit back to what we were discussing earlier with the quality of life equations. But as you suggest, at the risk of being a little bit too biological, a lot of our mental environment is determined by our biology. And I've worked with a lot of people with psychiatric issues. And a lot of these underlying issues, whether it's anxiety, depression, et cetera, they're based on some degree of neuroinflammation. There is some irritation, there is some activation of the immune system in the brain. And like you're suggesting, that can absolutely be connected with issues in the gut. If we have problems, if we have irritants to the gut, plant toxins, inadequate nutrients or excess linoleic acid can sometimes do it by changing the balance of different gut flora that can be transmitted to the brain through the immune system, which resides around the gut. So much happens in the gut. People call it our, our second brain. And you're right, a lot of neurotransmitters are made there. It's not quite clear how many of those neurotransmitters cross the blood brain barrier. But certainly neurotransmitters are made in the gut. They're the majority of our immune system surrounds the gut. And so that immune system will traffic across the blood brain barrier, sometimes can send signals called cytokines across the blood brain barrier. So emotionally, our eating environment, our inflammatory environment, our metabolic health can absolutely affect us at that level too. And so that's what this is all about, understanding what the species appropriate diet is, understanding how to create something that recreates where we've come from and to calm it all down as much as possible. I experienced that when I did it in the beginning. I think that was part of what my personal experience of this was, that emotionally I felt different within the first few days of doing this diet. And that was one of the things that was most striking for me.

Yeah, because the big part of this is like, and this is the conversation that I don't think most people are having around carnivore. Is it really eating the high quality meats that really just focuses away from the linoleic acid, or is it the fact that by doing primarily carnivore, you're also Taking out. You're doing a food elimination diet of the BS foods, the gluten, the soy, the plant toxins. Which one really is it? Is it the focus on the high quality meat or is it the focus on the high quality meat and the removal of all these irritants?

It's both, right? I mean, it's. It's a. It's a totally comprehensive system. It's. It's all of them combined. It's hard to say which is more important. It might be individual, but I think the combination of those two things makes a lot of sense. Give your body as many nutrients as it can get. Eat nose to tail, eat the organs. If you can't eat the organs, consider the desiccated supplements like we make at hardened soil. Get the nutrients your body needs, get the building blocks, and then also remove the things that are irritants, remove the toxins.

So it's both of them? It's not one or the other. They're not mutually exclusive at all?

No, they're definitely not mutually exclusive. I mean, that's the way it would have been. I mean, you could do one or the other, but I think that doing them together makes the most sense. Right.

One of my friends, Mike Salemi, he followed your work and he did 30 Days of Carnivore.

Right.

And I was talking to him yesterday because I'm like, I'm gonna have Paul on the podcast. And he's like, all right, ask him this question. He did a very strict approach, and in the first week or so, he had like, diarrhea. His bowel movements were challenging. He was doing like, I think he either was or was not doing the psyllium husk. For people that really want to go for this and that are maybe experiencing a lot of brain fog in their very serious about implementing some of the things in the Carnivore code book. Can you share what maybe Mike was going through? I mean, I know you didn't work with him specifically, but why is it that first week that people have such an adjustment period with stool and. And possibly fiber? Can you wrap that up in an answer?

Yeah. So there's a whole section in the book about this. It's a common thing that happens for humans. When we eat meat and fat, our gallbladder secretes bile, which is made of bile salts, bilirubin, and cholesterol, and that those bile salts emulsify fat globules to allow them to be digested more thoroughly throughout our small intestine. Now, 95% of those bile Salts are supposed to be reabsorbed in the small intestine before they make it to the ileocecal valve and get into the colon. And once they get to the colon, they can act as cathartics because of the chemistry there. If too many of the bile salts end up there, they will pull water into the colon. It causes diarrhea. So the majority of the loose stool I see at the beginning of carnivore is an adjustment phase for the small intestine to start reabsorbing those bile salts. Salts more avidly from the bile. For people who are coming to a carnivore diet with a little bit of a damaged gut or an irritated gut, that can take a little longer. And if that persists in people or it's uncomfortable, I do recommend a more gradual transition off the fiber. A lot of people, when they hear about this type of diet, they get worried, don't I need fiber to poop? You really don't. And I discuss that in the book. There's a lot of people who have experienced this. There's actually good experiments which have shown that in people with constipation, removal of fiber results in almost complete resolution of that idiopathic constipation. There's a study in the book in which there was a group of 60 people divided into three groups of 20. The last group is of 20 had 0 fiber. And all of those people with idiopathic constipation completely resolved gas, bloating and constipation with no fiber in their diet. So the idea that we need fiber to poop is another one of these inconsistencies. But once we get past this beginning phase, you might be able to completely eliminate fiber. For those who get diarrhea, which is obviously the opposite of constipation, tapering down on the fiber a little bit more might be helpful. You don't need to go completely off the fiber. Add a few things in. If I had talked to Mike at the beginning of his, I might have suggested, oh, if you're having diarrhea, it's bothering you. Add in a little bit of avocado for a week, kind of. We're back to this tier one carnivore diet. It's okay to have some fiber.

Yeah.

If fiber doesn't bother someone, I don't have a major problem with it. I just definitely don't think it's necessary for humans. There's so many different rabbit holes we can go down here, but I don't think fiber is necessary for humans. Humans can also use the connective tissue from animals, things like bone, broth, collagen. Our gut bacteria can ferment that in much the same way that we do with plant fibers to make the short chain fatty acids that are needed for the colonic epithelial cells. There's lots of evidence, both mine, anecdotal and then research evidence in the medical literature to suggest that constipation is not a lack of fiber. Adding fiber to the diet isn't necessarily going to make people more healthy. For a lot of people, it just causes way more problems. In the case of diarrhea at the beginning of a carnivore diet, adding a little bit into allow for adjustment at the level of those bile salts can be super helpful.

You just turned the paradigm upside down because like the narrative is if you can't poop, eat a bunch of fiber, right? So.

Well, I mean, it's like, what narrative? Yeah, what narrative haven't we turned upside down today?

I know, man. Well, I'm excited about this because I've been looking at doing more of a carnivore approach in my own life. But one thing for me specifically, and Chris Kresser has talked about this, I'm really, really curious how you feel about this. I have, when I did my panel, apoe 3, 4, apolipoprotein 3, 4. Some people have a 4, 4. I was told on a previous show by Dan Pardee that a Mediterranean diet was better for me because of the higher levels of saturated fat possibly being deleterious for like the APOE three fours and especially the four fours. For people that don't know what that is, can you just quickly share the high level of what that is? And I'm just curious from my own knowledge, which is like the whole basis of this, this show, I'm just sharing what I learn with my family, with my friends. How do I do this as an APOE 3 4?

Great question. So there's a whole section in the book about ApoE4, that isoform of the ApoE gene. So this is apolipoprotein E, which is used in the brain as a bridge between the astrocytes and the neurons to move cholesterol around. It's also in a lot of our LDL particles. It's a protein inserted to the membrane of lipoproteins. What's very interesting about Apoe 2, 3 and 4 isoforms is that ancestrally, Apoe 4 is the oldest isoform. Up until 200,000 years ago, every human walking the planet was Apoe 4 4. Think about that evolutionarily. Up until 200,000 years Ago, every single Homo sapien, Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Neanderthal was ApoE4 4. Yet we have been eating red meat and saturated fat for 3,4 million years of human evolution. It's really only an evolutionary blink of an eye that the isoforms ApoE3 and ApoE2 arrived on the scene. To imagine that red meat would be bad for us, when for our entire existence, or the majority as humans, we were all APOE 44 is a little bit strange. What's also compelling to look at, and I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with Dan Pardee here, is if you look at tribes of indigenous people, specifically in the book I talk about the Bolivian Simone and the Nigerian Yoruba, Apoe 4 isoforms are protective in indigenous people against cognitive decline and other metabolic diseases. They're protective meaning that people who have APOE4 have less incidence of cognitive decline in those semi indigenous people. What it appears is that ApoE4 is an isoform that is a little more adapted to to high parasite burden to indigenous people who are in that sort of an environment is protective in that situation. Apoe4 also appears to be a little bit less suited to our current environment because so many of us are metabolically unhealthy. So the assertion that I would make is that everyone who is telling you Apoe 4 is battle saturated fat. That is an epidemiology study. There's not an interventional study. It's an epidemiology associational study. They're saying these are the people who had Apoe 4, they ate more saturated fat and they did worse. It's not an interventional study. This is correlation. We can't draw causative inference from correlation. I think that what is going on here is that those with APOE4 respond much more, much more badly, much worse to metabolic dysfunction, that those with APOE4 develop insulin resistance at a greater degree and then develop sort of the sequela of insulin resistance, specifically in this case dementia, more rapidly when they get, when they have that isoform and when they get metabolic dysfunction, it's not saying that saturated fat is causing it. Saturated fat might be associated with it, but that doesn't mean it causes it. Because over the last 70 years, and we see this pattern over and over and over, and I talk about this in the book repeatedly, who has eaten more saturated fat over the last 70 years? People that are ignoring mainstream health advice and doing everything else to ignore mainstream health advice. This is called an unhealthy user bias. Correlation is not causation. And the semen a the Bolivian Yoruba, the Bolivian semen a the Nigerian Yoruba argue strongly that APOE 4 is not a death sentence. It's not causative, it's an associated factor. But it probably just tells you that if you become metabolically unwell, you are at a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's. Well, if you, if you stay monabolically healthy, there is really probably no risk of you developing dementia. And in those populations, it was protective. Now, as we've already talked about, saturated fat does not lead to metabolic dysfunction. It does not. That has never been shown in an interventional trial. But if we look at these epidemiology trials, who is eating more saturated fat? Well, those are people who are doing other bad things which are making them metabolically unwell because who is disregarding health advice. People who are exercising less in the sun less, getting other health checks less. How many times have you gone to a barbecue and seen someone eating only a hamburger patty with nothing on it, without ketchup, without French fries, without coleslaw, that's pretty rare without potato salad? I mean, the circles you travel in, you might see it. How many Americans do you think, answering these surveys, talking about how much saturated fat they're eating, are not eating something else bad with that saturated fat? And here's the assertion. How much vegetable oil are people eating with the saturated fat? How many people get a Big Mac with just the patties? They get a Big Mac with special sauce. What's in the special sauce? A whole lot of canola oil. How many people eat mayonnaise with their saturated fat? So this is the problem with epidemiology. We can't draw causative inference. We can generate a hypothesis and we need to test it. But giving people saturated fat, even people with APOE 4, has not resulted in results that suggest more dementia. In fact, in the book, there's a case series that I talk about, and one of the cases in that series is a gentleman with APOE 3 4, your genotype, and they put him on a high saturated fat ketogenic diet. He had dementia. One of the ways that we assess dementia is with something called a MOCA score, Montreal Assessment of Cognitive Ability. And it's just something we look at to give a score for how bad someone's memory loss and neurocognitive dysfunction is. They put him on a high saturated fat ketogenic diet. He was pre diabetic, that went away and His MOCA got so much better that he was normal afterwards. So this is a gentleman with dementia with some degree of mild dementia with some degree of pre metabolic dysfunction. They put them on a high saturated fat ketogenic diet and both of those resolve completely. So how is it that saturated fat is worsening dementia in people with APOE 34? When we see interventional studies like that, does that make sense?

It makes so much sense. And I'm literally, I'm just like, I gotta talk to Dan party about this, let's do it. Well, because I, I think about three fours and four fours like myself. It's really. And I felt this ever since I was a little kid, Paul. I just really am more sensitive to lifestyle factors than I feel like most people. And like if I'm not moving well, if I'm not sleeping well, if I'm eating like deleterious foods and I'm eating inflammatory foods, I guess I just feel it so much more than most people because I have friends that, you know, I'm 40 and so I have friends that are in their 40s and they can still eat like a sleeve of Oreos and, and wake up with like an extra ab muscle. Like some people are just like that, man. It's crazy. But I can't do that. And I've always known that about myself. And so you just really flipped the script on me where I thought about, okay, is it really the saturated fat for me as a 34 or a 44 or for anyone? Or is it just respecting and honoring this ancestral lens of living, like sleeping, eating, moving, breathing, also the type of people we hang out with, do we have community? Like there is such a massive emotional component to this. Don't you think that that's really just as important as the carnivore itself?

I do. I think it's absolutely important. And I think it's important that we understand what the studies can tell us and what they can't. And in this case the saturated fat is being implicated when in fact it's not the cause at all, or we can't say it is. And the experiments that have been done don't suggest that it is in any way, shape or form. So it is completely flipping the script. It's not that saturated fat is bad for people with APOE fat. Why would it be like that? We've had, everyone on the planet had Apoe 44 until 200, 000 years ago. That's a, that's a real genetic inconsistency. That's a genetic Mismatch. If the main food we've been eating with lots of saturated fat was causing us to have more development of dementia, that's not very. That would have been selected out of the population long ago. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense for humans. There's a different narrative here. These epidemiology studies are so misleading. You have to be so careful. And these two issues, unhealthy user bias and healthy user bias, come up so often. People need to really be careful of the health information they're given. That's what I try to do so much through hardened soil and through the book, is just help them understand, hey, look, you are being sold a bill of goods. You're not being told things really the way they are. And the ancestral lens helps clarify most of it. Most of this stuff doesn't make any sense evolutionarily. We've been eating this way forever. Why would this be bad for us? Oh, it only is. We're only told it's bad for us because of epidemiology, because of observational studies that need to then be backed up by interventional studies. And so often when we test those hypotheses with interventions, they don't show any problems. Like the APOE3.4 intervention that I talked about. People will say, you could say the same thing about red meat. There are studies that associate eating red meat with worse health outcomes, shorter life, more cardiovascular disease in the West. But when we do the interventional studies and we replace carbohydrates with meat in people's diets, the inflammatory markers go down. They go down. And then if you look at epidemiology studies in Asia, they tell a whole different story. So I bet with regard to red meat in Asia, actually, I'll mention this, and then I'll. I'll mention something else about Apoe 4. If you look at interventional studies or, excuse me, epidemiology studies in Asia. So observational studies in Asia, the men that eat the most red meat have the lowest rate of cardiovascular disease. The women that eat the most red meat have the lowest rates of cancer. So how can that possibly be? That's a study of over 200,000 people. Is red meat good for Asians but bad for Westerners? No, it's the narrative. It's that in Asia, red meat is associated with affluence, and in the US, red meat is associated with being a rebel. So who eats red meat in Asia? People that do healthy things. Who eats red meat in the us? People that don't. Don't do healthy things. So repeatedly, red meat is going to be associated with problematic outcomes in the U.S. we must test those hypotheses with interventional studies. And if you looked in Asia, I bet you would see a very different story with Apoe4 as well. I'd have to look at the incidence of ApoE4 polymorphisms in Asia, but I'd be willing to bet that APOE 4 and saturated fat are not associated with any sort of worsening of cognitive decline in Asia for the exact same reason. And there's a whole different narrative around those there. It might even be more protective, at least if you look at epidemiology studies.

You had mentioned earlier, like some of your biomarkers were off the charts. And I remember with Mike Salemi, he was telling me the same thing. He was like, you know, on paper the doctor was like, oh my God, your cholesterol is going to go like through the roof of the Empire State Building. But when he had his performance and the way he felt and just his, his well being, his sense of well being, he said it was the best he'd ever felt in his entire life. Can you share, like some of your, I guess you could say crazy if looked at the mainstream lens biomarkers, but yet how. Maybe those biomarkers can actually be seen differently from now on, especially with this new understanding of an old way of living. What were your biomarkers really?

Everything. If I went to see a traditional doctor, traditional quote, unquote, most of what I have would look very good until I get to the ldl. So we can talk about that one last. But if they looked at my lipids, they would say, your HDL looks great, your triglycerides look great. They looked at my fasting insulin. It's very low. My C peptide is low, my inflammatory markers are low, my kidney function is fine, my liver function is fine, my fatty acid profile looks great. So they might look at everything and go, wow, you are the picture of health, Paul, and you look healthy. And then they look at my LDL and their eyes bug out of their head and they go, wow, that's a really high ldl. But why have we been told that LDL is bad for us? We've been told that based on what's called the lipid hypothesis, the idea that more LDL equals more heart disease. But what we're finding more and more now is that that hypothesis, that paradigm is badly flawed. And stories like mine and Mike's and many others, and so much research literature begins to argue Argue it's all contextual. It's not about how much LDL you have in your body. It's about the underlying metabolic health of the individual. Because there's very good evidence to suggest that in metabolically healthy people, there is essentially no correlation between LDL levels and atherosclerosis, between LDL levels and heart disease. But if you are metabolically unhealthy, we begin to see a correlation. So what is this telling us? It's telling us, number one, there's more to the story than just LDL equals heart disease. LDL equals heart attacks. When my father had a heart attack, his LDL was 110mg per deciliter. Okay? My LDL right now is 533mg per deciliter. And I had a coronary artery calcium scan last week and it's zero.

What is a coronary artery calcium scan?

A coronary artery calcium scan is a CT scan of the arteries of my heart that looks for calcified plaque. So as a 43 year old, at the exact same point in my life as my father, who had a heart attack with an LDL of 110, I have no calcified plaque in my heart with an LDL of 533. Clearly there's something else going on. And usually when I tell people that number, they get scared for me. I had a nurse call me today. I double checked my number. So I did an ldl. I did a lipid panel a few weeks ago and I got another one back today. And she said, you should really go see your doctor. And I said, yeah, I'll be okay. I am the doctor. And she says, she was like, I.

Could have D at the end of my name.

Yeah, yeah. I was like, I'm going to be okay, trust me. Yeah, but. But, you know, most people would question this, but my story is quite revealing. My LDL is so high that most cardiac radiologists would say, you should develop atherosclerosis. You should have cardiac calcification within six months. I have had an LDL, a low density protein, for over. For over two years. That's greater than 300 milligrams per deciliter. And the last two have been over 500. So if that's causing atherosclerosis, where is it? I have so many friends in the medical community who have similar stories. These are all anecdotes, but they go into a repository of data that start to create an interesting story. I have a physician friend who's had an LDL above 300 for 10 years, he's had seven coronary artery calcium scans. These are the scans that can see calcified plaque in the arteries.

Is that the number one test to see, like, the heart health, calcium and the functionality of the heart to actually breathe and do its job?

Well, it's not going to tell you functionality. It doesn't show you how the heart is moving. That would be an echocardiogram, like a transthoracic echo. But a coronary artery calcium scan or a cta. A CT coronary angiogram are the best tests that are non invasive to tell you if you have calcified plaque in your arteries.

And calcified plaque would lead to CHD and ultimately death.

Yes. Calcified plaque is a surrogate marker. It's a proxy for coronary vascular disease, saying, hey, you have enough plaque that it's calcified. Now some people might look at my scan and say, well, you could have non calcified plaque. You could have soft plaque. But eventually soft plaque is supposed to calcified. So I will keep doing these and ensuring people that I have no plaque developing in my arteries with a quote, massively high LDL.

I'd love to see you after 10 years so you could look back and go see, guys. Well, I. I mean, I have something.

I already have friends who have done that. You know, I have a friend here in Austin who's a physician who's had an LDL greater than 300 for 10 years and his CAC remains zero. These stories are out there. They're absolutely just. It's all about metabolic health. So what's interesting about ldl, this will paint it in a little bit different context for the listener as well, because. Because I'm sure everyone's freaking out and thinking that everything else I've said is completely invalid because my LDL is so high.

Stay with us, y'.

All. Stay with us. But LDL has positive roles in the human body. I think we are so told our. The narrative has always been LDL is horrible for the human body. We want as little of it as possible. Well, two things. There's a genetic condition with essentially no ldl. It's called Smith Lemli Opitz Syndrome. There's a polymorphism or a mutation in one of the enzymes that makes cholesterol. Those kids, a lot of them, tragically die in utero. Those that are born have severe mental retardation, massive infections, and a number of medical problems, and they usually die as children. So this is what happens to Humans developmentally, if we don't have cholesterol. Cholesterol is packaged into LDL lipoproteins with triglycerides. So why do we think this is such a bad thing for us? I think it's mostly because of the same epidemiology. If you look at the roles of low density lipoprotein in the human body, it has so much, so many valuable roles. It's an immune molecule. People with low LDL have been shown to have more susceptibility to infectious illness. We've even seen this with COVID People with lower LDL have more severe courses of coronavirus, ldl, hdl. These lipoproteins serve immune roles in the human body. LDL is also a bus. It moves cholesterol and triglycerides around the body to make membranes. It is moving building blocks around the body. If people are afraid of cholesterol, they should also be afraid of all the amazing hormones that cholesterol makes. Testosterone, cortisol, estrogen, the things that make our lives livable and enjoyable. The sex hormones. So many of the other hormones are steroid based. They're based in cholesterol. We need this molecule. LDL delivers cholesterol to the uterus, well, to the ovaries, to the testicles, to the adrenals. This makes us who we are as humans. Why is this so demonized? Why would a molecule that is essential for human life also be killing us? Josh? It doesn't make any sense. And furthermore, we know that LDL goes up when we are fasting. Why would a fast. Why would scarcity of food lead to an increase in a molecule that's killing us as humans? That also makes absolutely no sense evolutionarily. Do you see how many of these stories. I mean, you're absolutely right. We talked about this at the very beginning. These stories don't make sense when we think about them from that ancestral lens. Why would this particle, this lipoprotein, be killing us if it has all of these essential roles? Protects us from infection, delivers key building blocks. I should be celebrating. In fact, I do most days. The fact that I have an LDL of 533, it means there are all these molecules moving around my body that are fighting infections, that are picking up bacterial molecules that might be trying to communicate with each other to infect my body, that are delivering cholesterol to my testicles, to my adrenals, that are making cell membranes. This is a bus system. There's a lot of building blocks moving around my body to say that as.

Nuanced as this is, there still is a starting point that's unique to each person. Because in your book you talked about the five ways to get into the carnivore and to follow the path. But is there something deeper? Where do you offer a resource where. Because this is a very. It deserves respect. It deserves time and breath and presence and not just like going full in. I'm going to eat nothing but nose to tail and I'm not going to have any preparation like this. This involves a lot more of a conscious effort for people beyond the book. Or maybe it is in the book. Do you have a one on one or a group or some kind of a way that can hold people's hands through this journey?

The best thing is to email me directly at drpaul. So drpaul@heartandsoilsupplements.com and that's really my forum to answer people's questions and to be interactive with people. That's the best way to do it. And the website heartandsoilsupplements.com is where to find most of my stuff. The podcast, the information, because it is complicated, but I like that through Heart and Soil, this company that I have that is making these desiccated organs that we are able to interact with people and answer so many of these questions. So every day I'm answering, answering like tons of emails from people. And I think it's so interesting, it's so interesting to hear their stories and to hear their successes and to be able to help them with these little pieces, but that's really the best vehicle to do it. But so many of these things I'm talking about really challenge the mainstream. And there are so many stories like mine and Mike's where people say, I feel the best I ever have, and yet my doctor is freaking out. What is going on here? Either we've got something completely wrong or it's time to change the narrative. And I really think it's the latter. And if it is, which I believe strongly. Wow. How badly misled? I mean, people should think about the breadth that we have covered in this podcast. How many mainstream paradigms have we challenged? If these are all wrong, if these are all harming us, how badly misled have we been? And I think how far have we come from this ancestral blueprint? And perhaps if we return to it, we're going to live way more healthily. And it's just critical that we take a deep breath and kind of step back from our conditioning and understand, wow, this is some Pretty radical stuff, but there's a lot of science behind it. I mean, the book has 650 references in it. I really try to back it up. I made it. I tried to make it both readable and also substantial and very, very researched and very referenced. Because so much of what I'm saying flies in the face of what we've heard. But like I said, I think so much of what we've been told traditionally is based on really bad science, mostly observational epidemiology. We haven't been told the whole story.

You know, when I was getting ready for this show and I was researching, going through the book, and I was looking at your site, I saw this quote that really, in my opinion, is the lens of how you communicate your gift to the world. Because when I first found out about Carnivore, I'll be honest, like, it was a year ago, and I got turned off and I was like, what do you mean, everybody should just eat red meat? It's obviously way more nuanced than that. And then when I heard your podcast with my mentor, my friend Paul Check, I was like, okay, I'm really going to dig into Paul Saladino's work. And just from talking with you and understanding, I can feel your heart. I can feel your intention behind your work. And that, to me, is the most trustworthy thing, stacking on your academic history and all your experience as an md. But this sentence really summed it up for me, and it's on heartandsoilsupplements.com Soil is the only place in the universe where death is converted to life. I mean, when I read that, I was like, okay, he obviously honors the closed organic cycle. He obviously understands that this. This bright orb in the sky hits plants, and then animals eat those plants, and we get all the nourishment, and then we eat the animals. And then I just really want to honor your work. Like, this is a totally different conversation than I ever thought I would have personally a year ago about eating meat and carnivore, because I've always eaten meat. But the way that I see you talking about it and the narrative that you're putting out in the world, man, it's just so important, especially right now, as so many paradigms are being challenged with health and Covid and racism and the way we're treating each other. Like, I feel like, dude, every single paradigm in the world right now is being decimated to the floor, including how we eat animals and how we regenerate agriculture. So thank you for your work, man. We scratched the surface. The book is the Carnivore Code. It looks like this. We're going to link all of this@wellnessforest.com as we say goodbye. Man 2 Questions. Paul. We probably talked for like another hour and a half, but, like, there's a lot here. I know. I want people to read the book, but if you've got. When you feel the inspiration from Paul and you feel how I feel about Paul, just get this book. Carnivore Code. Two questions. First is, what did we miss? What did we miss? We covered a ton of ground. And then lastly, as we say goodbye, what advice and what kind of guidance can you bring to our audience about living life? Well, about the definition of what wellness actually is. So those two questions.

Oh, man. Well, like you said, we could have talked for another few hours. I would love to continue the conversation at some point in the future about. You mentioned it a little bit at the end. I think the ethics of eating meat are important. Regenerative agriculture is critical. We talked a lot about insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction, which is key. We didn't get into really the plant toxins a ton. We didn't really talk about the evolutionary stuff a ton. There's so much here, you guys, and there's so many other myths that need to be debunked. And I do all of this in the book to the best of my abilities. But there's conversations around cancer, around the microbiome, around fiber, around heart disease. We talked a little bit about some of those, but the main things we didn't touch on were the cancer, the longevity piece, the blue zones, the regenerative agriculture piece, and sort of the evolutionary piece. And there's a lot there to dig into. Again, it's a very interesting discussion for me, which is why I've been so fascinated and grateful to be able to have it for the last year. And I think that wellness is. I would bring it back to the quality of life equation. All of your listeners get to define their wellness. They get to define their highest quality of life. My hope is not to convince people that no one on the planet should be eating plants. My hope is to offer tools and unique perspectives that may help people who are suffering get to higher degrees of quality of life, if that's their goal. And like we talked about, those main tools are understanding the value of meat and organs in the human diet, understanding that plants are on a toxicity spectrum, and understanding the really big problems that come with processed vegetable oils and how these really hijack our biology and make us fat, essentially, which is nothing good for anyone. So that's the key, man.

Wow. Thank you so much for sharing your gifts about this new way, which is really an old way of eating to honor the earth.

So I think so for coming on.

The show, man, we appreciate you.

It's a pleasure to be here, man. Thanks for having me.

Now, until we see you again, Paul and I are both going to wish you something special here. And it's we're wishing you all the love and the wellness that the world possibly has. So go out there in the world today, give love to someone and take one little step, even if it's like trying a new food or letting go of an old food so that you can have more love and wellness. So we're both wishing you love and wellness as we say goodbye. We'll talk to you soon.

It.