Pursuit of Wellness - Paul Saladino: Is Oatmeal Bad For Us? Why Women Should Eat Meat, Plant Toxicity & Failures of Western Medicine

Episode Date: August 8, 2024

Ep. #122 On today’s episode of Pursuit of Wellness, we're revisiting one of our standout interviews with Dr. Paul Saladino, a leading expert on the animal-based diet. In this engaging conversation, Dr. Saladino explores the transformative power of animal-based nutrition for tackling autoimmune conditions, chronic inflammation, and mental health issues. He shares his insights on food quality, the limitations of Western medicine in nutrition, and the benefits of raw dairy, creatine, and regenerative farming. Whether you're a seasoned health enthusiast or just curious about dietary approaches, this episode offers valuable information for making informed and effective dietary choices. Leave Me a Message - click here! For Mari’s Instagram click here! For Pursuit of Wellness Podcast’s Instagram click here! For Mari’s Newsletter click here! For Paul Saladino’s Instagram click here! For Heart and Soil click here! For POW Brand Promo Codes click here! Sponsored By:  Cozy Earth provided an exclusive offer for my listener’s today. Up to 40% off site wide when you use the code “PURSUIT” at https://cozyearth.com  So, if you want to take the next step in improving your health, go to lumen.me/POW to get 15% off your Lumen. That is lumen.me/POW for 15% off your purchase. Show Links: EP 30 Paul Saladino EP 31 Paul Saladino EP 70 The Shocking Truth Behind Nutrition Trends with Simon Hill Lineage Provisions You Are What You Eat documentary Seed Oil Scout  Topics Discussed 07:12 - Contrasting western medicine as a doctor  08:34 - Raw veganism vs carnivore  14:16 - Health issues and plant based diets  17:44 - Toxins in oatmeal 19:58 - Reishi mushrooms  21:28 - Acne and autoimmune conditions  25:38 - What Paul eats in a day  31:21 - Decaf coffee, mold, coffee alternatives  35:01 - Paul’s daily routine  35:50 - Fruit, blood sugar spikes, gut issues  39:34 - Raw dairy  46:26 - Nut milks 50:29 - Nightshades and lectin  54:06 - Sal approved fruits  55:56 - Seed oils, fruit oil, animal fat  59:52 - Our body’s response to seed oil  01:04:05 - Seed oil scout  01:09:16 - Seed oil impacts on cholesterol  01:12:34 - Women and red meat  01:18:30 - Buying high quality meat  01:19:43 - Eating organs  01:22:49 - Bloom, veggies, and nutrients  01:26:40 - Get rid of processed foods! 01:29:01 - What wellness means to Paul? 01:32:13 - Linoleic acids and skin

This is the Pursuit of Wellness podcast, and I'm your host, Mari Llewellyn. What is up, guys? Welcome back to POW. I am currently in Jackson Hole. And today we are revisiting one of our most popular episodes of all time with Paul Saladino. You've probably heard of him. He used to go by CarnivoreMD. He is a double certified MD, host of the Fundamental Health Podcast, and author of the Carnivore Code and the Carnivore Code Cookbook. He believes in questioning our assumptions about health and nutrition, and he brings up some controversial topics regarding modern medicine. He loves talking about optimal health and kind of going against the mainstream narrative.

In this episode, we're talking about why women should eat more meat, plant toxicity, failures of Western medicine, is oatmeal actually good for us, moldy coffee, raw dairy, what's the tea, and more. We had an absolutely amazing conversation. I love Paul Saladino. I think what he does is amazing. He definitely brings up a lot of controversial topics and has a very strong opinion. And I just wanted you guys to keep in mind, I am bringing Paul on to bring a new perspective to hear his opinion. This isn't necessarily what I agree with 100%, but I do think there are things we can absolutely take from this discussion. If you're

someone that struggles with SIBO, gut, autoimmune issues, I think carnivore can be a really good temporary tool. I know that Paul has seen great improvements in his health and his eczema. He has this beautiful life in Costa Rica and he lives off the land. So I highly recommend tuning in and listening to a new perspective. So without further ado, let's hear Paul Saladino. I think I told you this via DM, but my husband and I have been experimenting with your diet style. I love it. With a little bit of flexibility, I would say. And it has brought up some questions. So selfishly, I wanted you on the podcast today because I want to make sure I'm doing it the right way. But I also just want to learn more from you. So let's start with

why do you eat this way? Like what's the backstory? So I think that just from the outset, I'll give a little bit of framework of the way that I think about diet. So I'm a doctor and nutrition is not taught in medical school. Nutrition is not thought about in any sort of Western medicine. So I'm an MD. I did medical school at Nutrition is not thought about in any sort of Western medicines. I'm an MD. I did medical school at the University of Arizona. I went to residency at the University of Washington. And not once did they talk about any dietary things other than maybe some people have celiac disease and that means you cut out gluten. But my whole life, I've really been interested in nutrition and just how food shapes us as humans. There are a lot of things that shape us as humans and determine whether we're healthy or sick,

but food is a huge input. I mean, we're putting kilogram quantities of food in our bodies every day. We're putting thousands of grams of food in our body. And that is full of all sorts of nutrients. It's full of toxins. It's full of anti-nutrients. And so what is the formula? I think it's an interesting question to ask off the beginning, off the top. Like, what's the formula that helps people thrive the best? Is there a program for Homo sapiens? Because we're all one species called Homo sapiens. And if you look at other species in the animal kingdom, there generally are species-appropriate diets.

Now, between individuals, there's going to be some variation. But it's an interesting question for me to ask. Like, how much variation is there between individuals and are there multiple species appropriate diets and so that's an interesting question for me because it's kind of like if you go to the gas station and you have a nice car and it says this car only takes 91 octane why would you put in the crappy gas you want that car to perform well and so you get to kind of determine how well your car drives your car being this metaphor for your body and your experience of life, based on how well we can figure out what humans are supposed to eat. And then, you know, maybe later in the podcast, we'll talk about other

things I think about that affect how we live as humans, but starting out with diet. So I think about diet a lot from that perspective. And I think about it personally from the context of my own autoimmune issues, my own issues growing up. So my dad's a doctor, my mom's a nurse. So that means I got over-medicated as a kid and I had asthma and eczema. And the way that my parents, God bless them, treated that was a ton of inhalers. So albuterol inhalers and theophylline, which was called Theodore when I was a kid in my applesauce, which was horrible. So theophylline is kind of like caffeine. It dilates the bronchioles of the lungs. But there was never any attention to what we were doing for food to treat me as a kid. And then

as I went to college, I had horrible eczema flares and there was never any attention. I ended up taking glucocorticoid steroids and they made me feel horrible. And there was never any thought, maybe it's what you're eating, Paul, because I was eating like a normal college kid. And then I went to medical school and I had eczema, which was horrible. And I thought, okay, at this point I've thought enough about nutrition. I was a physician assistant in cardiology before I went to medical school. And I'd been thinking about nutrition at that point that I started to make changes in my diet. And I was eating kind of organic paleo at the time. And I started to think, what is causing this eczema? Like, clearly I have this autoimmune condition that is affecting my skin and it's probably affecting other things in my body. It's not just my skin. So how do I think

about this? Is it milk? Is it pasteurized milk? Is it vegetables? Is it chocolate? Is it meat? Like, what is going on here? And that was kind of what I started thinking about. And it evolved into my residency at the University of Washington when I had just this horrible eczema flare. At the time I was eating tons of mushroom extracts, thinking that they were going to be great, like reishi and chaga and lion's mane, but like pretty big doses of spoonfuls of these extracts. And I think that caused like a massive eczema flare. And I thought, OK, there's something misaligned here. So that was kind of the beginning of my thinking about plants and whether or not all plant foods are ideal or beneficial or fully healthy for all humans. And then you kind of fall down this rabbit hole. And not only is no nutrition taught in medical school, but I don't think many doctors or people in the health space are aware

that some plant foods, many plant foods contain things that may not be great for all people. Things like, we can talk about oxalates, saponins, digestive enzyme inhibitors, phytic acid, things that inhibit iodine absorption for the thyroid. And again, I think there's bioindividuality and some people are probably better able to detoxify these things or tolerate than others. But what's interesting for me as a physician now is thinking about it from the perspective of people who are struggling with issues that aren't getting fixed and whether or not this could be a valuable tool for them to integrate in their lives, but they're not seeing elsewhere. Because I've talked to so many people now just in my life when I meet people and heard so many anecdotes, but end of one stories of people who say, I had Crohn's disease, which is

inflammatory bowel disease, or I had eczema or I had psoriasis, you know, big plaques on their skin, which is different than eczema, but still a skin condition, which is autoimmune. And they went to their doctor and the doctor says, take this biologic medication. That's a TNF alpha inhibitor, or take this steroid, or you're going to need a surgery to remove part of your colon because you have ulcerative colitis or whatever. And they said, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to change my diet. And for all of these people, the diet completely resolved their issues. And what I think about this and I say to all of them is, did you go back to your doctor and just tell them what happened? Because you need to kind of say to them, what the fuck, man? I would be scared to do that. And it's interesting to me that you're a doctor because I feel like

your lifestyle contradicts what a lot of Western doctors would tell you to do. Absolutely. Which is why it's fun to do do because the flip side of that is my belief that red meat from ruminant animals, cows, bison, lamb, that meat in general, along with organs, which we'll talk about in this podcast, is probably, not probably, there's no question about it in my mind. Those are the most essential, central food for humans. And Western medicine says the complete opposite. So we have an impasse. And it's interesting to talk about that and negotiate that with people and talk about why Western medicine believes red meat should be limited. Why women especially, I think, believe red meat is something that's not good for them. And no one is even really

thinking about eating organs. And then going down the rabbit hole of all these other pieces, like seed oils, are they good? Are they bad? Because if you ask Western medical physicians and you think about the paradigm there, they would say seed oils, which are mostly omega-6 polyunsaturated fats, are good. And I think, well, that's probably – that's a massive difference because I think they're horrible. And the flip side of that idea in my mind is that saturated fats from animals, things we find in tallow or butter, things like stearic acid and 18-carb and saturated fat are healthy. So we have this really interesting kind of contrast where I'm saying, I think most of what we've been told about nutrition is dead wrong. Yeah. And I really want

to speak about the piece you mentioned about women. Yeah. Because I do think there's this massive misconception that eating a lot of meat is a masculine thing to do. Yes. And it could raise testosterone in a negative way or it could cause acne. Lots of questions there. You were vegan for a while. Seven months of a raw vegan. Okay. I'm really curious how you felt during that time, what your blood work looked like and then how it changed when you switched to animal based. So I was 25 pounds of muscle lighter. So I was extremely skinny. And you're super lean right now.

I'm super lean. I weigh 170 pounds now. And I'm moderately muscular. I'm not a bodybuilder at Gold's, but I'm moderately muscular. But when I was on a vegan diet, I lost a lot of lean muscle mass. I was very skinny.

What were you eating? I was eating, so I would go to the equivalent of Whole Foods. I was in Flagstaff, Arizona at the time and buy two heads of kale per day. So if I was going to the grocery store for three days, I would buy six heads of kale and the people at the checkout would go, what is this for? It's for my two kale smoothies a day. It's like an animal feed type of thing. Yeah. It's for my 60 rabbits or me. And I would, I would have two kale smoothies. I don't know, like I was eating raw fruits and vegetables

and nuts and sprouted nuts. And we would not be able to do this podcast without me having massive anxiety when I was a vegan about my gas because I would just be farting so much and had massive bloating and just lots of GI issues with that many vegetables and plants. And I was running at the time.

And so I was never a very fast distance runner, but my performance running suffered. Flagstaff is home to some of the best distance runners in the world. And I would never keep up with them, but I would try to go on their slow training runs. And it was horrible because in the middle of the run, I'd have to stop and poop or just have issues or be hungry or be tired. And I think sleep started to suffer. My eczema didn't get better, but it wasn't any of those things that, that kind of shook me out of that perspective. It was a girl. So I was friends with a guy who was trying to get me to go on some dates because I wasn't going on any dates. And he set me up with this nurse and had us all over to his house. And I met this girl,

this woman. And after the night I asked him like, Hey, does she want to go out again? And he said, no, she doesn't want to go out with you. She says you're too skinny. And I think it was, I see pictures of myself and I really did look very, very skinny. It was too skinny. And so I had a little body dysmorphia of my own at the time thinking I need to be skinnier for running or just for this. And it kind of shook me out of that, that sort of evolutionary urge, like you must procreate. Like if you keep doing this vegan diet, bro, your genes are never getting passed to the next generation. And so I thought, okay,

this makes sense. And also I think at that point, I just heard someone talking about this book of life, these genetics that we have as humans and how humans have eaten meat through our whole evolution. I mean, Homo sapiens, the species, our species is 500,000 years old, according to most anthropologists, preceded by Homo habilis and Homo erectus, going back 1.8 million years. And if we look at that time period, there's a lot of interesting anthropology evidence that one of the things that contributed to us becoming human, in air quotes, was the inclusion of meat in our diets. There are mass graves of animals that begin 1.8, 2 million years ago. There's all sorts of evidence

that humans became proficient hunters at that time. And then if you look at that, that correlates perfectly with the rapid growth of the human brain from 600 cc's the size of like a grapefruit to something the size of what we have today. And that's 600 cc's to 1500 cc's. So the size of the human brain almost triples in 2 million years.

Whereas before that, in our primate evolution from chimps and bonobos, the size of our brain is essentially constant for 30, 40 million years. So what happened there? There's a lot of interesting theories about that. But somehow we became human. There's lots of questions around that. The East African Rift Valley, I've actually visited it in Tanzania, presumed that some

group of chimps or bonobos came down out of the trees and became hominids, Australopithecus. But I think that we began hunting more and the unique nutrients in meat and organs corroborate that story. I get a lot of questions about good tools to use on your fitness journey, and I wish I had had a Lumen. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. And on the app, it lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs and gives you tailored guidance on how to improve your nutrition, workout, sleep, and even stress management. All you have to do is breathe into your Lumen first thing in the morning and you'll know what's going on with your metabolism, whether

you're burning mostly fat or carbs, and then it gives you a personalized nutrition plan for the day based on your measurements. You can also breathe into it before and after your workouts and meals so you know what's going on with your body real time. Lumen will give you tips on how to keep on top of your health game. Metabolic health is super important. It's your body's engine and how your body turns the food you eat into the fuel that keeps you going. And because the metabolism is at the center of everything you do, it translates into so many benefits, including easier weight management, improved energy levels, better fitness results, better sleep, etc. I remember trying to figure out what the best foods were for me during

my fitness journey was probably my number one struggle. I was trying to figure out, am I in a calorie deficit? Am I in a surplus? And am I in maintenance? Then this is something that would have really helped me. So if you want to take the next step in improving your health, go to lumen.me slash pow to get 15% off your Lumen. That is L-U-M-E-N dot me slash pow, P-O-W, for 15% off your purchase. Thank you, Lumen, for sponsoring this episode. What is the biggest issue with plants and plant-based diets? Like why are they causing autoimmune issues? Why is it resulting in lower body or muscle mass?

What do you think? There's two issues. So there's lack of bioavailable nutrients, which we can dig into. And there are toxins, anti-nutrients in the plants. And if you think about it from the perspective of a plant, it makes sense. An animal can run away from you. If you're ever hunted. No.

You should. Do I look like I've hunted? No, but I don't want to assume. Maybe you have. I wouldn't mind trying, honestly. After listening to you and Joe Rogan, I would be interested to try. It's a very spiritual experience,

which we can talk about. And I think it's valuable for humans to know where their meat comes from, regardless of their ethics. Because when you eat meat that you've hunted, you sort of understand that animals, if we believe, and I think the science would support this, are the most nutrient-rich sources of nourishment for humans on the planet, then it evokes massive amounts of gratitude when you think,

okay, in order for something to live, something else must die. This is the way of life. This animal is going to die no matter what. And if it nourishes me, I can do the most good in the world. But that's a separate ethical conversation. But when you're hunting, the animal can run away from you. And if a plant is there, the plant can't run anywhere. So this co-evolution between animals and insects and other things that feed on plants for 400 million years, we're talking a huge timescale, has been this constant warfare where animals respond to plant defense chemicals by developing detoxification systems. But plants then evolve new defense chemicals, or they evolve defense chemicals that turn

toxic when the animal tries to detoxify them. So there's clearly this system or this saga of plant-animal chemical warfare for hundreds of millions of years. And these chemicals are never talked about, and they're potentially problematic for us today. And yet we sort of eat plants without any regard to these. There's a few plants that we think about that people may know as toxic. I don't know. When I grew up in Virginia around Christmas, there were always these really beautiful red leaves, these poinsettia, poinsettia leaves. And they're very toxic. They would always say, kid, don't eat that. That's toxic. Well, well yeah and it's because of toxins in the plant leaves people have died from eating rhubarb leaves

we see rhubarb stems in the grocery store for rhubarb pie but the leaves have so many oxalates that people have died from eating these and people have died from eating sorrel which is a green found in the wilderness also high levels of oxalates. And there's tons of toxic plants. If you're out in nature, you know, like you're not just going to let your child roam around eating plants because, or mushrooms, they're very toxic. But for some reason we've said, okay, these plant leaves that we're putting in the grocery store, these are, these are totally fine for you. And they don't have any toxins, which is a complete myth. Now we can talk more about specific plants and which are worse or better, but can humans

deal with those toxins? Could they accumulate in some people? Are they causing issues for people? And the reason they cause issues can be a lot of things. They can prevent the absorption of nutrients, and we can drill down on any of this, or they can damage the gut. And that's very interesting. I mentioned saponins earlier, and there are saponins and things like quinoa on the outside

of the quinoa. What is a saponin? It's a compound that's essentially like, it turns into bubbles. It's meant to be there as a plant defense chemical. It's bitter. It's just a chemical that occurs on the outside of things like quinoa or other grains. Oats are full of saponins too. And every grain that has saponins has different saponins.

In oats, they're called the avencicides. People are upset about the oatmeal. I know. We got to talk about it. People are angry about the oatmeal. I'm ready to talk to talk about it. People are angry about the oatmeal. I'm ready to talk about it. I've done a couple episodes now where oatmeal's come up, and I think people are starting to realize it's not a good option.

It's not a good option at all. Not just because of the actual oats, but the glyphosate. Glyphosate, pyrethroid, pesticides. And can you tell everyone what glyphosate is? So glyphosate is one of the more commonly used pesticides. And it inhibits some of the enzymatic processes involving folate in the human gut. And it appears to be damaging for the human gut directly. But people have also heard maybe about 2,4-D or atrazine or pyrethroid.

There are so many pesticides. Glyphosate is really the tip of the iceberg. It's the one that gets the most press and it contaminates a lot of things. But there are so many pesticides. So you could say, oh, I could get organic oats. But even if you get organic oats, you're still dealing with phytic acid, saponins, and other problematic things in the oats. So the saponins are found in quinoa, they're found in oats, and they clearly damage the gut. This has been shown multiple times. So you can see it in cell culture, you can see it in animal and rodent models. They're just not good for the human gut at all. And they're a defense chemical. And they're not denatured by cooking. So the saponins

are very resistant to cooking. So even if you have a bowl of cooked oatmeal, you have saponins in there. And then you have phytic acid, which is a big molecule that chelates. It means it bites onto minerals. And maybe 30 to 40% of the phytic acid is denatured when you cook oatmeal, but it's still 50 to 60%, 60 to 70% of that phytic acid is still there. So the problem with phytic acid is that if you're eating the oats with anything that you're hoping to get zinc or calcium or magnesium or any of the divalent cations, any of the minerals with a positive 2 charge, you're not going to absorb that. So in countries where grains make up the majority of the diet, there are pervasive deficiencies

in iron, manganese, zinc, copper, selenium, because this phytic acid is a part of these grains and really prevents humans from absorbing it. Right, which I feel like the US is super grain-based. The US is grain-based. Thankfully, it's not as much of a problem in the US, but in countries where they have no meat or like essentially no animal products and they are virtually 100% grain-based,

you see massive problems with this. You mentioned reishi mushrooms before and I'm kind of stuck on it mentally because I drink this like coffee every day that has reishi in it. Why are you anti-reishi or anti-mushroom? So it was just, so my experience was that when I was taking large doses of these mushroom extracts, I had a massive eczema reaction. It's just a correlation for me, but we know that, so mushrooms are interesting because they're

really delicious, right? But, and they certainly, and this is a kind of a theme that I've seen when I'm thinking about these plant foods, there often are compounds in plants that we think of as beneficial. The question that I find intriguing to ask about plant foods or fungi, like mushrooms, is do the benefits outweigh the risks? And can we try and make that calculus as much as possible? And can we observe how we feel with these? Because just because a plant contains a compound that's beneficial doesn't mean it's good for us. And just because it contains a compound that's bad doesn't mean we shouldn't avoid it completely. So my experience and what I've heard from other people is that in some individuals, too many mushrooms can trigger the immune system. And that kind of makes sense because they do have

these sort of like, they have these peptides in them that can look like immune epitopes. So they can look like immune receptors in our human body. And many of the benefits, quote unquote, of the mushrooms are immune, meaning that in laboratory studies, they seem to affect the immune system somehow, like lion's mane. And so the question is, are they overstimulating the immune system? Could they be triggering an autoimmune reaction for some people? In my experience, they clearly were triggering an autoimmune reaction for me.. In my experience, they clearly were triggering an autoimmune reaction for me. Very interesting. And the point you bring up about eczema, I can relate to in a lot of ways because I've struggled with acne since I was 21 years old. And lately,

actually, the reason I found you was because I've been on a journey to healing my acne and the carnivore diet came up a few times. And I've heard you say that acne is just an autoimmune response. Acne is absolutely autoimmune and it's I would say it's it's not that your face isn't clean enough. Right right right I do skincare like three times a day I feel like I'm a very healthy individual but I'm probably eating closer to like a paleo organic diet currently I've been trying to incorporate more meat and organs here and there. But yeah, I'm really interested to pick your brain about that. And this is exactly what I'm thinking about. Someone like you is someone that I hope the

content will reach because the idea is, okay, maybe there's some vegetables in your diet or something that you're not aware of that's triggering your autoimmune response. And this is a simple, free, easily accessible way to say, maybe I'll just cut this out for three or four weeks and see how it goes. And then if it doesn't help, you can incorporate it back. But this I think is where it makes me excited because it's so empowering for people when they hear this. Oh, maybe kale is causing my thyroid issues. Maybe spinach is causing my joint pain. Maybe almonds are triggering my acne. And I'm just using examples that are random, not necessarily that almonds trigger acne in everyone, but there are foods that can trigger acne in people. And

that is an autoimmune thing. Now, if you look at the actual genesis of acne, it's complex. But when I was in medical school, like nobody knew what caused acne. They just said, oh, it's a certain bacteria in the skin. Bullshit. Like this is absolute bullshit. Yes, the bacteria is there, but why is the immune system not responding to it properly? And is it possible that there's something else going on there? And so medicine wants to treat acne with antibiotics saying, oh, you have acne, you just have an infection of this bacteria in your skin. Well, then why don't people that you're kissing or near get the same infection in the skin? Clearly, it's something about the terrain. This is like perhaps one of the most important concepts

of medicine where I think Western medicine goes wrong today is this idea of kind of germ theory versus terrain theory. And that got a lot of press during COVID. And I don't want people to extrapolate what I'm saying. I'll just explain what I mean by that. I think that so often we fear germs, whether it's MRSA, methicillin-resistant staph aureus, or a super bug, or viruses, right? Everyone knows the virus recently that we were all told to be afraid of, right? And, you know, like, yes, pathogens do affect humans. But as we have learned so poignantly recently, the health of the human is probably the most important thing rather than the virulence of the organism. And what I mean is this is the terrain idea that when I was in medical school and residency, I certainly came in contact with MRSA or other superbugs, VRE, vancomycin resistant, and teracoccus, right? I was working with patients all the time who had MRSA.

And you're supposed to glove up and do all these things, but you can't. It's everywhere, right? These things are pervasive. So I came in contact, but did I get MRSA? No. And the idea is that if you are a healthy human, your body understands how to deal with these pathogens. This is what our bodies and immune systems have done for hundreds of thousands of years. And so then we started to get into interesting questions around how do we really help the immune system or not piss off the immune system enough? And how do we create metabolic health?

And I think that's what we saw during the recent past few years. The people were very susceptible to the recent pandemic stuff when they were metabolically unwell. And the differences were staggering. The hospital admissions, the vitamin D levels, all of which are a reflection of metabolic unhealth and pre-diabetes is essentially the synonym here, or frank diabetes, which people didn't know they have. And so imbalance in the human organism leads to susceptibility to pathogens. The pathogens themselves, maybe we don't need to worry about that first and foremost. You shouldn't, I don't think people should be going to Africa and just walking around Ebola. But like other organisms, like the propionibacterium acne, which supposedly causes acne, like this is not, it's more about the terrain. What is your body doing rather than the bacteria causing it? But it's very convenient

for the skincare industry and the people that make face washes to say it's a bacteria that you're just not scrubbing off your skin enough. Highly convenient. Very convenient. I wish I could go back and remove every antibiotic I ever took. Right. Let's hop into a typical what you eat in a day because i have some questions here yeah so today we're recording at about 12 30 and i and this is pretty typical for me i'm not in my home in costa rica but this is about the same so i usually get up and i have raw milk with some honey i'll eat some fruit and then i'll take a short interlude. So for people listening who are vegetarian, like I'm vegetarian for the first 45 minutes of the day.

And then I'll usually eat some meat. It's just kind of how I go in terms of hunger. When I'm in Costa Rica, I get up much earlier in the morning, 5.30 or 6, I go surf. And before I surf, I'll do raw milk with honey and maybe a coconut. And then I come back. So you don't drink coffee? I don't drink coffee at all.

Okay. Because you've never mentioned it. I've listened to a few of your videos. You've never mentioned coffee. Why don't you drink coffee? Okay so this is a whole thing and your audience is going to hate me. Go for it. Okay. They're going to hate both of us at the end. Well they're especially going to hate me because we're hopefully we're also going to talk about chocolate. Yeah. Yeah yeah but so a couple things about coffee. So what is coffee? Coffee is a seed from a plant. And when I think about plants and the parts of plants that plants don't want you to eat, seeds are probably some of the most highly defended parts of plants. So we're talking nuts, which are seeds, grains. We talked about oats and quinoa, but also wheat, et cetera.

People know those grains. Beans, like a coffee quote bean, which are legumes or black beans or lentils, and then nuts. We talk nuts, grains, seeds, and legumes, right? So those are all seeds because if you plant them in the ground, they grow into a plant. We just call them different things, but they're all seeds. That's a plant baby, meaning that if that gets eaten by an animal and the animal just says, oh, that tasted great, no problem, and it just gives the animal nutrients, those plants are never going to evolve because those animals are just going to eat the heck out of those seeds. So the plants will put defense chemicals in the seeds and seeds are very highly defended. We talk about saponins. We talk about phytic acid. We've talked a little bit about oxalates.

But in the case of coffee, you have defense chemicals in the seeds of that plant, like anything else. Caffeine is actually a defense chemical that the plant puts there. Now, interestingly, in the doses we have with caffeine, it reinforces eating the beans because of the way that caffeine affects dopamine in the human brain. And who knows why this is, but it's a problematic thing for humans, I think mostly from the perspective of sleep. So no one wants to hear this, but the quarter life of caffeine is 12 hours, 10 to 12 hours. Meaning that if you drink a cup of coffee at let's say 8am or 9am in the morning, a lot of people are waiting now, like 90 minutes after they wake up to drink their coffee. So depending when you wake up, when you drink your first cup of coffee, an average cup of coffee has 150 milligrams

to 200 milligrams of caffeine in it. So that 200 milligrams of caffeine, if you drink one single cup of coffee, a quarter of that is still in your body affecting the physiology of your brain to initiate sleep, to help you through the sleep stages 12 hours after you drink the coffee. So if you drink coffee at eight or nine and you go to sleep at nine or 10, you still have about a quarter of the coffee, the quarter of the caffeine, excuse me. So 50 milligrams of caffeine in your body at that point. Now, how is that affecting your sleep stages? This is really the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. So doing that every day. Now that's, that's pretty benign. One cup of coffee, quote benign at 9am. I don't do it. And I'm saying benign relative to what I'm going

to describe next, which is probably a more typical pattern for people, which is a cup of coffee at eight, a cup of coffee at 10 and maybe coffee at one or two. Now at that point, the half-life of caffeine means you've got half of the caffeine in six hours. So if you drink coffee at one or two and you go to sleep at 10 p.m., you've got a lot of caffeine in your body and you've got all of the cumulative caffeine in your body. So say you have three cups of coffee throughout the day, that's 600 milligrams of caffeine, and you have them at three different parts throughout the day. You could potentially have 200 milligrams of caffeine still in your body when you go to sleep, or 150, which is the equivalent of three-fourths

of a cup of coffee right before you go to sleep. That's absolutely going to affect your sleep architecture. And when we're talking about sleep architecture, it's just important to mention that there are a lot of things that we do that can negatively affect sleep architecture. Alcohol, cannabis, benzodiazepines, like Ambien, these all affect sleep architecture negatively. Even though we think that some of them help us get to sleep more quickly, like alcohol or smoking marijuana for people to do that, they definitely change the architecture. And the architecture of sleep is such that the body wants to do non-REM and REM sleep. And if you do these things, you're going to sleep quicker, but the sleep quality is much worse. When it comes to optimizing sleep, I think the comfort of our beds is so, so, so important. I've talked a ton about optimizing sleep and how crucial it is

on this show. Many times it's important for energy, mood, fitness, weight loss, whatever your goals are, getting better sleep is always going to help. And that's where Cozy Earth comes in. Cozy Earth was named one of Oprah's favorite things in 2018. They have an amazing viscose temperature regulating bamboo set that is incredibly soft and luxurious. It makes your bed feel like a hotel bed. They also have a breezy linen collection, which is amazing for the hot weather. I think it's important to try to make your bedroom a sanctuary and have that luxurious, comfortable feeling when you get into your bed every night.

And I really think Cozy Earth is the best place for that. Cozy Earth has provided an exclusive offer for my listeners today, up to 40% off site wide when you use the code PURSUIT. That is the code PURSUIT, P-U-R-S-U-I-T. So how do you feel about decaf? So decaf usually has much, much less caffeine. So you're doing a much better thing for your body. But there are still other problems with coffee and caffeine. Because it's still seeds at the end of the day. It's still a seed.

There are mold toxins, right, in a lot of coffees unless it's a wet process. That's what's scaring me right now. I feel like everything's moldy. A lot of grains are moldy because you also get mold on oats. So that's back to the oats. We didn't even talk about that with oatmeal. Yet another reason not to eat oatmeal. Even if it's organic oatmeal, it's going to be moldy a lot of grains are moldy because you also get mold on oats so that's back to the oats we didn't even talk about that with oatmeal yet another reason not to eat oatmeal even it's organic oatmeal it's going to be moldy you're talking about fusarium molds you're talking about all sorts of molds that have i feel like shit when i eat oatmeal i'm just gonna say that right now

yeah well because it was huge in the fitness industry for a while making these protein oats and i tried it because i wanted to be in with the with the trend i felt like shit well it's awesome that you were aware enough to notice that. I think the problem for a lot of people is they're doing so many things. They have so many inputs that they may feel poorly. And they don't know if it's the fact that they slept late last night. They were up until 2 a.m. scrolling TikTok. Or they ate a donut yesterday morning.

There's so many inputs. They can't differentiate signal from noise. I think people are also really checked out of their own bodies. Yes. 100%. They can't really tell because they don't think about what's going in and out. And I think when you become really aware of what you're intaking, you become so much more aware of how you feel on an hour-to-hour basis in the day.

Exactly. And that's super important feedback. That is a huge takeaway for people. That to get to the point where you can distinguish, where you can really check in with your body, how are you feeling every hour to hour? That's really powerful because you can think, man, I feel tired. I have a headache. What did I do?

Was it, oh, I just ate a cinnamon roll or I just ate some lentils or I just ate some meat and that didn't make me feel good. Okay, great. Like whatever it is, like that helps people, I think, distinguish or determine what's going on. Maybe it was the fact that you just worked for an hour with the Wi-Fi router right next to your head. Or who knows what it is, right? Right. All kinds of things.

But going back to the coffee, yeah, there's mold. So, yeah, if you wanted to really have the least problematic coffee, you could do a wet process coffee, which is supposed to limit the mold. That's decaf. And then even with that, you're still going to have acrylamide from the roasting process of the coffee, but nothing is completely benign. I mean, when you toast bread, you get acrylamide. So you're getting acrylamide and then you're getting some of the perhaps anti-nutrients in the coffee, but it's much less problematic if you're doing decaf and you're doing wet process. So it's not moldy and you're thinking about these things, but then who drinks, who does that? Like

how many people drink decaf coffee? Me. Why? I react really badly to caffeine. I'm an anxious person as it is. So I really don't need the extra caffeine, but also lately I've done all of this lab work and I can see mycotoxins in my system. I can see that I have a little bit of mold. Do you like the taste? Yeah. Okay. So you're saying like, why do I drink it at all? Yeah.

I don't know. I think it's the taste. And I also think it's like society. You know, I work in this office all day. I see people with their coffees. I kind of want to be a part of it. Right. What would be an alternative? Goat milk? Bone broth. People want something warm. I mean is kind of uh la is like tricky it's kind of cold here sometimes in the morning i mean yeah it's the middle of july and it just started getting warm apparently but i was visiting in march and april it was freaking cold here so i'll show you the coffee i drink it's really weird it's like this instant reishi ganderma coffee that

i might just throw in the trash at this point because after listening to you i'm like why am i drinking this every day maybe just hold off on it for a few weeks and see if you feel differently yeah 100 and see how my skin does i interrupted your what i eat in a day so okay but i was just saying instead of coffee which i think people will find hopefully find valuable like bone broth okay warm milk with honey if you don't want to do honey just warm milk warm raw milk we should talk about raw milk in this podcast oh yeah so i i have raw milk with honey maybe a little fruit coconut i usually surf then i come back mid-morning i'll eat meat, maybe three-fourths of a pound, maybe half a pound in the morning. What kind of meat?

Grass-fed beef, usually. And I'll do a burger or a steak in the morning. I'll have some organs, usually a little bit of raw liver, half an ounce. We can talk about organs. I'll make some fresh orange juice. I have a juicer, so I'll do some juice. And that's kind of how it goes throughout the day. Those are the foods that I eat throughout the day.

I'll maybe have a little more raw milk I'll do some juice. And that's kind of how it goes throughout the day. Those are the foods that I eat throughout the day. I have raw. I'll maybe have a little more raw milk with honey, maybe some raw cheese, fruit in the afternoon for a snack, maybe a small burger in the afternoon for like a lunch. And then like five, six o'clock, 630, I'll eat dinner, which is probably a pound of meat, grass fed steak or lamb or something with maybe a little bit of dairy, cheese, fruit. Yeah, that's pretty much what I do. Okay. So I have a question for you about the fruit because I have been experimenting and I haven't gone full carnivore, but I went almost there. I was eating mostly meat, meat for breakfast, meat for lunch,

meat for dinner and incorporating fruit. One thing I found is that I was having what felt like blood sugar spikes. I kind of had brain fog after the fruit and after the honey, and I kind of felt like it was irritating my skin. Interesting. How do you control, and I'm wondering if it's because maybe I'm just sensitive to sugar or if I'm a woman, I want to hear your take on blood sugar with this diet. You know, for me, it doesn't bother me. And for a lot of people, it doesn't cause an issue. So what I wonder about is, is there something else going on

that's kind of making you sensitive to that? And I'm trying to troubleshoot it in my mind in real time as we're talking about it. Is it a gut flora issue? You know, if the honey is flaring up your skin or the fruit is flaring up your skin, I wonder if there's something in your gut that like, is the sugar feeding something in your gut?

I think that for someone that doesn't have GI issues, the fruit and the honey can be great. But if you're finding that it's causing issues for you, then maybe there's something else you need to kind of figure out first. And maybe it's not the best thing for you. Maybe there's something better for your carbohydrates in there. And I would think gut first in terms of like, is the sugar feeding an overgrowth? Because sometimes we see people with what's called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO, which is technically when there's a dysbiosis or an imbalance in the amount of gut flora that, or in the populations of gut flora that are in the small intestine. Because you have your stomach, right? Then you have the duodenum, the jejunum, and the ileum.

And those are three parts of the small intestine, which is much larger than the large intestine. Then you have the ileocecal valve, and you have sort of the large intestine, which is kind of the cecum, goes up and around, and then out when you poop. And so the small intestine is where a lot of interesting things happen if it gets the wrong type of bacteria. I think canonically, people think of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or SIBO as too many bacteria. But when you actually do jejunal aspirates, when you actually go into the jejunum and

the small intestine and pull out bacteria, you find that it's not always increased populations, it's the wrong type of bacteria. And that can cause issues for people. That can prevent them from eating fruit and honey or certain types of sugars until they correct that. So that would be where I would look, in the gut. Now, people will say, well, how do I fix that? And it was funny because I was actually talking to a guy on this trip. It's when I come to the States, it's so interesting because I learned so much from people that have benefit or figured things out. And he had this small intestinal

bacterial overgrowth. I think a lot of people have gut dysbiosis. There is essentially synonymous. We could get really, really specific and maybe create some differentiation, but call it the same thing, gut dysbiosis. And he did it with like probiotics from raw milk. And so I think, oh, that's cool. That makes sense evolutionarily, right? It's a simple, elegant solution because I've always found probiotics to be onerous. Which bacteria do I take?

Is it spore-based? Is it this one? Is it lactobacillus? Is it, does it create serotonin? Does it not? Like what am I, like the probiotic space is just dizzying for people. And it kind of feels like voodoo to me. Like, oh, this probiotic is better than that probiotic. And how do you know which one is really going to correct? And we don't have the sort of AI

big data to know. I mean, there's trillions of bacteria in our gut and 40% of our gut or 50, maybe even 60% of our gut is GI dark matter, meaning we don't even know what species are there. When we try and sequence the gut, if you do shotgun genomics on the gut, like we don't even know half the things that are in there. It's like a room and half the people in there, you don't even, there's no identification. They don't have fingerprints. How do we, how do we deal with that? So I love simple, I don't think basic is the right word, but maybe throwback evolutionary solutions to this. Like, how did it get there in the first place? Probably because of all the antibiotics you took historically for your acne. How do you fix it?

Who knows? But one solution might be raw dairy, if you can tolerate it. I'm scared of that. I was actually raised on raw dairy because I grew up in the UK. And we would have glass bottles delivered to the door every day. And I think it's a big reason I never get sick. Never. So I have it's a big reason I never get sick. Never. So I have a good immune system,

but I've been told over and over again that dairy is going to trigger my acne. I would say do an experiment because I don't think it will. Because you know what happens. If I break out, I'm going to DM you. Then you tell me. But that's a valuable end of one.

I apologize. But that's an end of one, right? Yeah. Okay, so here's the difference between raw and pasteurized milk. It's important for people to understand. It's heated. And when you heat the milk, it changes the conformation of many proteins in the milk. There's evidence that it changes the conformation of the whey protein at about 160 degrees Fahrenheit. And that appears to lose, that appears to create problems for humans, or it leads to a loss of the benefits.

Because there's multiple epidemiologic studies that show that kids that grow up drinking raw milk, I wish I had, but I didn't, have much less, much lower rates of asthma and eczema as adults. So it does something when we're programming the immune system. It's beneficial. And hay fever, so allergies. I have no allergies. So you have no allergies, no eczema, no asthma. This is just an observation, but you have acne coming from somewhere else. My money is on the fact that the raw dairy will not trigger your acne, but perhaps pasteurized dairy would. And it's cool because I've learned a lot from the folks at Raw Farms. Do you know them? Yes. They've sent me a lot of products. I actually have the cream in my fridge. My husband uses it. Amazing. Yeah. The smoothie collab that I'm doing with Erewhon is with the Raw Farms Kefir.

And so what they were telling me is that regardless of the casein variant, because there's A1 and A2 casein, the pasteurization process may make the casein more immunogenic, which makes sense intuitively. You know, do I have a randomized placebo controlled trial? No, but I wish we could do one. So I think that at least anecdotally, what I've heard from people, which I think is very valuable, we cannot, we cannot discount the power of anecdote and human experience, especially when we're navigating places that no one's ever been. Maybe in 50 years, we'll have

randomized controlled trials to help guide us on all of these questions. But for right now, there are people suffering that we try to help. Anecdotally, people have completely different experiences with raw dairy than they do with pasteurized dairy. And I think that's right. Can I read you a quote from the CDC? Yeah, yeah. Okay. I'm not going to be able to pronounce all of this. Raw milk is milk that has not been pasteurized to kill harmful bacteria. Raw milk can carry harmful germs such as campylobacter.

Campylobacter, yeah. Okay. Cryptosporidium, E. coli, Listeria, Brucella, and Salmonella. These germs can pose serious health risks to you and your family. What's wrong with this statement? Why are they saying this?

Remember what we talked about earlier with germ versus terrain? Yeah. And so they say it because it's probably true historically. So milk was almost entirely raw. I believe I'm getting this history right. If someone's listening to this and they correct me, I appreciate that. Until the early 1920s, when people wanted so much milk that the production volume went up and they were literally milking cows and feeding them the swill, which is the

historical reference to the grain byproducts of the alcohol industry. And so historically, milk that's from swill factories and in, you know, cows are dirty, they're pooping and peeing at the same time they're being milked, can have all those things. But raw milk itself is perhaps one of the least contaminated things on the market. If you look at the actual CDCdc data seafood vegetables raw vegetables so many things have much higher rates of contamination than raw milk raw milk is one of the lowest and raw farm is actually really cool they go above and beyond this is not a plug they're not paying me for anything i just think they're really cool when they're telling me about their

farm we're gonna go to their farm isn't it just up north a little bit it's in fresno right so they have a special milking barn where they they have like a spa for the cows. They wash the cow before they milk them and they test every batch. So according to them, like people can consumers can feel very, very safe drinking their raw milk. Personal experience. I've never had a problem drinking raw milk and I've had a lot of raw milk in my life. careful where we're getting it from. Yes. And know who you're giving it to, right? Raw milk for a pregnant mother. Just make sure you're just like, I'm not going to give any medical advice on the podcast, but that's something to be aware of. Like, okay, that's the risk, right? In medical school, they teach us that. Raw cheese and raw milk for a mother. Because if a mom gets listeria when she's pregnant, that can be problematic for the baby. So moms have to make their own decisions about that. But I was recently in Greece and I had a hard time getting raw milk. And I was on a boat and the people on the boat were telling me it was raw milk. And I was thinking, this isn't raw milk. And I looked at it, it was not raw milk. So we actually found a farmer. We went to his farm and

I got some raw milk from him. But he said to me, he's like, you can't drink it raw. You have to boil it. And I said, forget that. I'm just going to take a chance. And I was fine, but nobody else on my team was brave enough to drink it. So maybe a farmer on the islands of Zakynthos in Greece is not where you want to get your raw milk from for the first time. That sounds like a good source to me. I probably was, but I don't know how clean the udders were when he was milking the cow, you know? Like theoretically, raw milk is super safe and good for humans. There are tons of tribes all over the world, the Samburu, the Maasai, who basically live

on the stuff. But know the quality of your sourcing. Like anything, right? You wouldn't just eat meat from any farm in the world. So I think that, yes, the CDC, which is kind of this blanket authority trying to help everyone, is telling you be aware. But if you know the sourcing, it's pretty safe. I drink exclusively raw milk in Costa Rica from a farm that does goats,

and I've never had a problem. But be aware that there's always risks. And eating anything raw has risks. Hopefully in this podcast, we'll get to eat raw liver. That has risks. Raw meat has risks. People still go to restaurants and eat carpaccio or beef tartare. Raw vegetables have risks.

I mean, there's been huge outbreaks of E. coli on spinach. So let's bridge into nut milks. Yeah. I want to talk about that because everyone in LA is obsessed with nut milks. Yeah. Almond, oat. I want to ask you about coconut because I've been drinking coconut and I want to see how you feel because I know you're a big coconut fan. Do you have the coconut milk here? It's native harvest in a green can. Can we look it up? Yeah, we can look it a green can. Can we look it up? Yeah, we can look it up. You want me to look it up right now? Or maybe some of our...

Ana, do you mind looking up native harvest coconut milk? Can we look up the ingredients? I think it's a good one. I check ingredients pretty religiously. I want to see what you think. So I'll comment. I don't... This is something I...

Hopefully, I'll be able to have conversations with people at these meet and greets that we're going to do at Erewhon for the smoothie about why they're afraid of milk. I think a lot of people think that they're lactose intolerant, which is possible. So raw milk contains lactase. It contains the enzyme that breaks down lactose. So if someone is lactose intolerant, you can start with small amounts of raw milk and you can probably get back some ability to digest raw milk, like not pasteurized because that's going to degrade the enzyme. Or there's kefir. I've heard it pronounced kefir and kefir, but I'm pretty sure it's kefir. Kefir sounds way fancy.

I know. And I've talked to Bulgarians about it. I'm pretty sure it's kefir, but tomato, tomato. So if you're sensitive to lactose and you want to start with dairy, you can get raw kefir, which is a fermented milk. There's a difference between kefir and yogurt. Yogurt is fermented at a higher temperature. Kefir is fermented at room temperature. And kefir is fermented longer than yogurt and has different organisms in it. So raw kefir would also be an interesting thing to think about for your gut, specifically in your case, and think, okay, does raw kefir trigger your acne? Does it help your gut?

Could drinking raw kefir to bring it back full circle to what we were talking about earlier, would that affect things in your gut? Would it help with tolerance to the sugars eventually? We can circle back to that more in the future. But the nut milks are problematic for a variety of reasons. They're based on seeds, kind of like we're talking about oats. Even organic oats are problematic. I feel like oat milk would be full of glyphosate, wouldn't it? Oat milk is going to be full of glyphosate unless it's made from organic oats. And then even if it's

made from organic oats, you're getting saponins, you're getting all the things we talked about. Almonds contain oxalates. They contain digestive enzyme inhibitors. There's an interesting case series on kids with genitourinary issues, recurrent kidney stones, urinary tract infections, pain with urination that had resolution of all those things when they stopped feeding the kids almond milk. Almond is not a good thing for kids, especially almond milk. And then I don't know what cashew milk, the same problems. It's all digestive enzyme inhibitors, other things in the nuts. That's just if it's pure water and the nut, presuming the nut is organic.

And then a lot of the milks have seed oils. So Oatly contains canola oil. They say it's like on the label, it says low erucic acid rapeseed oil, which is canola oil. They say it's like on the label, it says low erucic acid rapeseed oil, which is canola oil. And other ones have canola or soybean or sunflower or safflower oils. What's the point of them in the milk? I think just to make the mouth feel. Right. Kind of like carrageenan makes it creamy, right? Yes. They want it to be creamy like a whole milk. Imagine that evolutionarily,

humans like the taste of whole milk. And we can talk about evolutionary consistency of drinking milk. And then a lot of them have the carrageenan that you were mentioning or other things that are thickeners. And we know there's good studies, I believe in both humans and animals, that carrageenan causes gut inflammation. And so a lot of things begin in the gut. We do not want to irritate our gut with a variety of things. Do we have ingredients on that one? You can read it. So it's organic coconut milk. to irritate our gut with a variety of things. Do we have ingredients on that one? You can read it.

So it's organic coconut milk, and then in parentheses, we have organic coconut filtered water and organic guar gum. Okay, so that's it? Yeah. So guar gum is like, how do we know about this guar gum, right? The research on xanthan gum looks pretty benign, but I just think, really? Why are we using a gum to thicken a milk?

Could that be damaging or irritating your gut? And then here's the thing about coconuts. So coconuts are a seed and they have defense chemicals too. And if you're eating the coconut milk, that's going to have more of the problematic things in the coconut that could mess your digestion up. This is my personal experience, but when I was in medical school, I used to make my own coconut milk. What I would do is I would take coconut flakes and put them in warm water and then put it in the Vitamix and blend it up and then put it through a cheesecloth. And I found personally that if I drank that coconut milk, my stomach felt funny. I felt kind of nauseous and I felt like that doesn't taste good. But if I fermented it overnight, that something in there, digestive

enzyme inhibitor, who knows, was perhaps degraded as many of these plant anti-nutrients are with fermentation. And it was easier for me to digest. So if you wanted to make your own coconut milk, I would say ferment it. But I also think you should try regular cow's milk or goat's milk as well. But so something like your own fermented coconut milk would probably be the best option if you can't do dairy. But I still think you might be able to do dairy. Should I start with goat's milk, you think? You could, but I think, yeah. And they have a raw goat's milk at Erewhon too.

I'm going to stop on the way home. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to try it. And goat's milk tastes different than cow's milk. Okay. It's a little goatier. Goat funkier maybe? Yeah.

And again, you might want to ferment it. See how you do with the lactose. Goat's milk has less lactose than cow's milk, but there's cow's milk, goat's milk, all kinds of things in there that are potentially beneficial. On the topic of fruit, I have some questions for you because I, you know, while experimenting with this diet, there's a couple of things I'm unsure about. For example, tomatoes, avocados, plantains. I know you're very particular with fruits.

So what fruits are okay? Is there a particular season you'll eat them in? How do you go about that? Yeah, that's a great question. So when we think about fruit, just to help people understand the framework, fruit is the part of a plant that plants want us to eat if we can anthropomorphize. We have them as mostly colorful. They usually change from green to a color when they're ripe. Not always, but often. You know that when you go to the store and you see the green bell peppers, those are kind of unripe and they turn to red or orange when they ripen. Like their plants are giving us a signal, this is ripe. And we see

that in those fruits, many times plants will put defense chemicals, which decline as the fruit ripens. The plant is really saying like, wait, wait, wait, it's not ready. Don't eat this. A green banana, different in terms of anti-nutrients and defense chemicals than a yellow banana. And it makes sense, right? A green banana tastes like crap. And this new movement to like eat green bananas and green mangoes makes no sense. Like we can talk about resistant starch and why I think that whole thing is misguided. But like a ripe mango tastes 100 times better than a green mango.

Like you can't debate this. So plants are giving us a signal that they want us to eat the fruit. And this is kind of this synergy between animals, humans, and plants. Hey, eat this fruit. A mango seed is obviously too big to eat. And then the seed will end up somewhere else. It'll get moved around. Or you'll poop the seed out somewhere else.

Because plants want to be spread. Plants want to be spread. Or the plant is going to put so many seeds in something like a strawberry that you're not going to be able to destroy all of them in your mouth. This kind of thing, right? And so the idea is that in general, fruit is clearly the least toxic part of plants relative or in contradistinction to things like leaves and stems and seeds and even roots. And those are the parts I think people should be most careful of. Leaves like spinach or kale, roots like white potatoes, especially are problematic

for people. But even within the family of fruits, there are some fruits from a family called nightshade, which traditionally have immunologic issues for people. So not even all fruits are probably that good for people. And we know this because there are not, some fruits in the wild are just poisonous to humans or you can't eat everything. And so tomatoes are one of those fruits because they're part of this night shade family that also includes white potatoes, eggplant, goji berries are actually in the night shade family. These tend to cause, may cause autoimmune issues for some people. I think they cause autoimmune issues for me. Manifest differently in all people, whether it's acne or for me, my low back just gets kind of tight. And I think, oh, that's weird. Like, why does my low

back feel tight now? And this is probably because of lectins, something that's been in the nutritional zeitgeist for almost a decade now. They're carbohydrate binding proteins in all foods, but plant lectins appear to be most immunogenic or more highly immunogenic for humans. And white potatoes, things like tomatoes have more of these lectins, so it can cause issues. Tomatoes, if you remove the skin and the seeds,

that gets rid of some lectins. Isn't that what italians do supposedly yeah okay yeah when you make the tomato sauce but even with that personally my experience which is just my end of one is that even a tomato sauce that i made from no skin and no seeds seems to trigger my are you italian i am i feel like saladino saladino yeah my father's from sicily yeah but you still don't react well to tomatoes i don't interesting so to tomatoes? I don't. Interesting. So kind of in my head was like maybe ancestrally someone from that region would be okay with tomatoes.

I also have genetics from my mom, German and Irish, and it's so complicated at that level. Yeah, I'm from the UK and I feel like tomatoes probably aren't the best for me. Maybe not, but you could include them or exclude them in C and do that kind of intentionally and follow the signal. What specific fruits do you consume? So in Costa Rica, I'm doing a lot of tropical fruit because it's there. And the nice thing about being in Costa Rica is I have a very clear signal to what's in season because I just get my fruit at a farmer's market. And we don't import a lot of fruit in Costa Rica.

And when I'm in the grocery store, which I rarely go to, I just go to farmer's markets for my fruit because I like the community aspect of it. You can see, oh, there's blueberries. And I'm thinking, there's no blueberries in Costa Rica. Like, first of all, they're sprayed with a ton of pesticides or, oh, there's grapes. There's no grapes in Costa Rica that I'm aware of. Correct me if I'm wrong, anyone listening. But you can tell there's not a lot of apples in Costa Rica. So there are some oranges. Obviously, there's banana, mango, guanabana, which is a special type of fruit in Costa Rica. There's things like mamey, whatever whatever mamonchinos which are like um rambutans uh kind of like lychees all kinds of tropical fruit that people may not have here so when in the states i like to eat what's seasonal here so right now i'm it's actually enjoyable to be in los angeles because i love cherries and then

peaches are in season and apricots are in season and you know oranges are kind of going out of season and bananas are coming from another part of the world. So I think there's probably some wisdom to eating more locally and eating what's in season. It's just that when you go to a grocery store, you need to have a little more awareness of what is from the actual region-ish where you are. I don't think there's a lot of – I don't know. I imagine in the Central Valley they're growing cherries in California and this kind of thing. But you asked about avocados earlier too. So avocados are a fruit. They're probably fine for most people. What else did you ask about? Avocados, tomatoes.

Plantains. Plantains are, you know, they're probably fine. Plantains are a little more fibrous, and I think they're better cooked. Obviously, most people are going to cook the plantains anyway. And if someone has oxalate issues, plantains have a moderate amount of oxalates. It's one of the fruits that has more oxalates. Kiwis also have a significant amount of oxalates, usually around the seeds that are protecting the seeds. And bananas and plantains are interesting because there's lots of little seeds in there that we don't see because of the way we've hybridized them.

So I'm going to jump to seed oils. Let's do it. I reposted one of your videos the other day in regards to switching from olive oil, avocado oil to beef tallow and ghee or butter, which I actually had done already because my naturopath recommended it. Great. And I feel great. I think it tastes great. Me reposting that caused an uproar. Like I got phone calls from my husband's mom, from Fee's mom, from, no, seriously, people freaked out. Oh my God, what do you mean? I thought avocado oil was great. So everyone's freaking out because I just managed to convince my husband's mom to get rid of the margarine. And she switched to olive oil. And I was like, very happy with that. And

now she's like, what do you mean I have to switch again? Can you tell us why it's so important to switch? What was wrong with that with cooking an olive oil and avocado oil? So the first thing to say is that avocado and olive are better than seed oils. They're from a fruit. So they're fruit oils. Because, you know, to make olive oil, and I was just in Greece, so it's like the home of olive oil. You take the olives and you just press them.

There's no refining, bleaching, deodorization. There's a great video on YouTube of how they make canola oil, which is rapeseed oil. I've seen it. It's disgusting. It's disgusting. I actually went to a full course on how canola oil is made. Oh, yeah. I've seen it. It's disgusting. It's disgusting. I actually went to a full course on how canola oil is made. What? Oh yeah, I went to a course

and I left being like disgusted and I made like a PSA on my social. This was three years ago because it looks like tar. It's like black. I need to go to that course. Oh yeah,

it was fantastic. That's great. Okay, I'm going to go to that course and like do some combat journalism or something. They're not even going to know

I'm there. I'm going to put a mustache on and sneak into the canola oil. It's Paul Saladino. Yeah, don't tell anyone. All the seed oil companies, they're going to find out on this video that I'm coming to your course

and I'm going to sabotage you. But so seed oils are from the seed of a plant, whether it's a grapeseed or a sunflower seed or a soybean, which is a seed, or a corn grain, which is seeds, or corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, soybean, gra is a seed, or a corn grain, which is seeds, or corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, soybean, grapeseed oils. And these oils are much higher in linoleic acid than animal fats and then the fruit oils.

So olive oil, avocado oil, better than seed oils. And I'm making that distinction in terms of, number one, the way that they're produced and the amount of linoleic acid in the oil. So the problem with the seed oils, just to make sure people understand this, is that the refining, the bleaching, the deodorization creates oxidation in the oils and breaks down the oil and creates a lot of problems with the oil. And there are residues from the production of the oil in the oil. They're an industrial byproduct, essentially, originally used in the late 1800s, early 1900s as machine lubricants. They're not really meant for human consumption, but I think it was Procter & Gamble in 1911 made Crisco and figured out they could sell people this garbage. And we've probably gone down a really

negative path since then. So seed oils versus fruit oils versus animal fat. Animal fat has a significantly lower amount of linoleic acid than any of those. 2%, 1 to 2% linoleic acid in animal fats. This is butter, this is ghee, this is tallow, and this is lard from a pig that's not fed corn and soy. So we'll talk about those kind of fats in a moment. But just the animal fats from ruminants being tallow, ghee, and butter, much lower linoleic acid, 2%, 1%. Olive oil, avocado oil, 10 to 15, up to 20% linoleic acid. Canola oil, 25. Soybean oil, 45. Grape seed oil, 55% linoleic acid. So if we believe that this 18 carbon omega-6 polyunsaturated fat linoleic acid is a problem for humans, then we want to limit it. And I believe that to be true. And that's kind of the paradigm with seed oil. So

olive oil and avocado less. But the problem with olive and avocado is that they are number one, they still have a significant amount of linoleic acid. And number two, they're such a big business that they're often, they're often fake. And I mean, there's been studies and I can send you these references. With avocado oil, there's a recent study, which is almost an expose. I mean, I think like 60, 70% of the avocado oil was tainted or oxidized. Tainted with what? Tainted with seed oils. Oh, wow. To like fill it up. So olive oil has to be in a dark glass bottle and cold pressed and extra virgin. And organic.

And organic. And that's still okay to use on a salad, even though I know you're anti-salad. If you're going to use it raw, it's okay. Never heat it. Okay. Never heat it. Yeah. And what's happening to our bodies when we intake seed oil? So this is interesting. We accumulate it and we specifically accumulate that linoleic acid. The human body can interconvert saturated fats and monounsaturated fats. So a saturated fat is a chain of carbons that with no double bonds between the carbons. There's a molecule on the end. There's a few atoms on the end that are not just carbons, but essentially it's a chain of carbons. A monounsaturated fat has one double bond in the whole chain. And these are 18, 16, 20 carbon chains. And polyunsaturated fats have multiple double bonds. And the omega designation says, where is the first double bond

from the end of the molecule? So omega-3 means the first double bond is three carbons from the end. Omega-6 means the first double bond is six carbons from the end. That's just what omega-3 versus omega-6 means. It's nomenclature for fatty acids. So omega-6 fatty acids appear to be very problematic for humans because they have multiple double bonds. Omega-3s are also very unstable. We can talk about that as well. But omega-6 are what are most pervasive in the supply chain, in the food supply, because of these processed oils. So historically, evolutionarily, for our 500,000 years as Homo sapiens, we never had access

to large sources of linoleic acid. You could eat a few nuts maybe if you were starving, but there are a lot of work to get them. And do you have any idea? I did some content on this, and it was really interesting for me to do the research, how much corn is needed to make five tablespoons of corn oil, which is the equivalent of the average consumer's consumption every day in the United States. So if you look at seed oils, the average American eats five to seven tablespoons of seed oils a day. So how much corn would someone have to eat to get five tablespoons of corn oil?

How many cobs? 60 to 90 cobs 60 to 90 cobs in three tablespoons five three to five yeah that's insane so we'd never get this right you would never get that much linoleic acid you can do the same calculation with soybeans you can do the same calculation with grape seeds you can do the same calculation with canola or sunflower i mean it's i think it's two to three it's like two plus pounds of sunflower seeds to get five tablespoons of oh my god i'm so triggered right now i was already anti-seed oils and now i'm just terrified we would never have gotten this but it's you you know you go to so we did uh we threw chipotle under the bus maybe three tablespoons

of rice these businesses just hate you by the way? I mean, I've had people warn me about these things. I'm sure they hate me, but interestingly, Chipotle's awakening and perhaps shifting their oil, which is interesting. Yeah. We can talk about that. Um,

I don't know if that had anything to do with me going in there, but they kicked us out when we were filming, which is always the best part. They're like, you can't film in here. So Chipotle uses rice bran oil and they use about three tablespoons in one serving of a bowl or a burrito. So to get three tablespoons of rice bran oil, and they use about three tablespoons in one serving of a bowl or a burrito. So to get three tablespoons of rice bran oil, you would have to eat something like

two pounds of brown rice, three pounds of rice with the bran, like two pounds of what the heck? Well, you'd never do that. So are there carbs in that oil? There are carbs. Carbs, like carbohydrates? No, no, no. It's all just the oil. Okay. Yeah. But the point is it's an evolutionarily inconsistent amount of linoleic acid. When it's 1% in tallow and then it's 55% in grapeseed oil. So if you look at the amount of linoleic acid in human adipose tissue in our fat, it's gone up steadily in the last 50 to 70 years since we've been measuring it.

And adipose tissue is really the only reliable indicator because we store linoleic acid. So your original question is why is linoleic acid. So your original question is, why is linoleic acid bad? Because we store it, because it accumulates in our cells and our membranes and in our skin, which is really important for anyone that is in the sun, men or women. And that's a problem because we can't get rid of it easily. If you or anyone listening to this stops eating seed oils today, it takes two years to completely turn over, based on the best pharmacokinetic studies we have of cell membranes and adipose tissue depots,

it takes two years to turn over all that and go back to whatever level you're eating. That was my next question. How long is it in the system? Essentially two years. This is why I'm so intense. I'm speaking to everyone who hangs out with me, why I'm so intense about asking what's in the things I order,

because I know how long it's going to be in my system. We were just out for a birthday dinner for my lovely assistant Fi at a steakhouse and everyone ordered their steaks. And I said, may I ask what this steak is cooked in? And the waiter told me, I was like, is it cooked in butter? That was my request.

And he was like, I'll go check with the chef. Comes back and tells me that the chef said it's cooked at such a high heat that it has to be cooked in butter? That was my request. And he was like, I'll go check with the chef. Amazing. Comes back and tells me that the chef said it's cooked at such a high heat that it has to be cooked in vegetable oil. What? And he's able to finish it off with butter. And I said, first of all, you're wrong. I didn't say that.

I said that in my head. I'm too polite to say that out loud. I would have brought my own tallow. I would have preferred to have brought my own tallow and said, please make it in this. Do you want to throw the restaurant under the bus? What was the name of it? It was in Laguna Beach. It began with an s great steak and i know a lot of chefs prefer corn fed meat because it tastes better and they prefer vegetable oil

but it's to me it's just not worth it to have that one meal and have that be in my system for two years well i'm sorry green leaf i love you guys but you got to stop cooking in seed was you got to cook in tallow and you'll get a million. It would be a fantastic restaurant if they just removed the seed oils. But most places I go to with steaks, they do not cook in seed oils. So the meat on ocean doesn't use seed oils.

I've gone all over LA asking this because I go out to dinner sometimes and I don't want to have the things. I went to Boa. I don't think they cook in seed oils on the steaks because I'm not paying $80 for a steak. It's marked up like crazy

and have them cooked in seed oils. For everyone around the country listening, whether they live in Kansas, Florida, LA, what's the best way to avoid seed oils when you eat out or when you're traveling? My friend has an app called Seed Oil Scout. I have it. Yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah. You know about it.

So it's really cool. We actually went and I met the guy that built this. No affiliation, no financial connection with him at all. Just a really great guy. And I went to Hearth, a restaurant in New York City that's very forward thinking with regard to this. And yeah, it's really cool. So you can, it's like this kind of, it's like Waze. It's like this crowdfunding, crowdsourcing of no-seed oils.

But you can just ask to like get, be militant and do guerrilla warfare in restaurants. Because if enough people ask at restaurants, then restaurant owners are going to wise up. And it's not, the restaurant doesn't, a lot of them will just flame boil or they'll cook the the steaks on a grill you don't have to do much and if they're going to cook it on a flat top just put tallow on the flat top and you're great but if a restaurant says they cook in tallow you have to be careful and say is it just tallow yeah because i've been to some places we went to smash burger and i said what are your i don't know if it was burgers or fries. It might've been the burgers. Was the burgers or the fries, Jimmy? I think it was the fries. And they said they cooked

the fries and tallow. And it was like, oh, this is great tallow fries. I'm not a fan of potatoes, but if you want it to be fries, fries cooked in tallow would be great. And some amazing person in my audience actually emailed their PR department and said, actually, it's a mixture of canola and tallow. Kind of defeats the whole purpose. It does defeat the whole purpose. It sounds better if they say tallow for marketing. You know, McDonald's used to cook their french fries in tallow. No. Oh, yes, I did know that. Until 1990.

Is it because, like, is tallow more expensive now? It's much more expensive. Okay. It's become kind of like a fancy health food. It's becoming a fancy health food. And you have to grow a cow to make tallow. And there's fields of rapeseeds in canada so canola is canadian oil low acid that's an acronym there's no canola plant it's just a canadian sort of psyop in my opinion to get rid of all the rape seeds um which they can grow in canada and there's also great evidence that all of these rape seed rape plants these canadian oil low acid these canola

plants rape plants are really destroying bee populations in canada and around the world because of the way that they're spraying them with pesticides and moving the bees out of the area. So it's a big issue. Seed oils are problematic at every level. So I'll just finish the story about seed oils. Linoleic acid accumulates in membranes. And then because it's a polyunsaturated fat, I mean, this is basic organic chemistry that is much less stable. It oxidizes way more quickly and it causes the membranes to have to shift their fluidity. They need to do different things to manage the sort of fluidity of the membrane. And then it just causes membranes to break down more easily and more quickly over time. So acutely, seed oils don't cause inflammation, but in the long term, they cause lots of problems

for humans because of this membrane structure. So every cell in your body has a membrane and your mitochondria, which are little power factories inside the cells, have membranes and all those membranes get full of linoleic acid. And they're always recycling and turning over, but it takes two years to get out of your system. And so it causes problems at the mitochondrial level, causes problems at the cellular signaling level, causes problems at the membrane level. And I think that there's good evidence now to say that. So we know basically every piece of the equation. We know that if you reduce the amount of linoleic acid in your body, that reduces basically bioactive metabolites of linoleic acid associated with inflammation, things like 4-HNE, they have these fancy names. And we know that if

you have more linoleic acid, there's more linoleic acid in your membranes and you get more of these things in your body over time. So it's a real problematic thing. But I'll tell you this because people are going to respond to this. The reason the Western medical system likes seed oils is because they lower LDL. They lower cholesterol. Western doctors are a fan of seed oils. Yes, you can find it on Harvard websites. I mean, we were just, when we were in Greece, we were looking at the Harvard Mediterranean diet pyramid. On the Harvard Mediterranean diet pyramid, in a paper published by Walter Willett, it says, choose vegetable oils, canola. They also say olive, which is great if it's organic and all the things we talked about, but probably not as the only oil. But they say, choose canola oil, choose vegetable

oils over animal fats. That's on the Harvard. Why does this divide happen? Like at what point are doctors being told that that's a healthier option? Because we're using the wrong metrics, right? We have the wrong goalpost. If the goalpost is lower your LDL as much as possible, then it looks like canola is better for you. But if you realize that there are great studies which show that if you lower the amount of LDL in your body, or at least in circulation with a seed oil, you also increase the amount of oxidized LDL and LP little a, which is a marker for cardiovascular disease. LDL is essentially, there's a type of LDL called LP little a, which is a marker for cardiovascular disease. LDL is essentially, there's a type of LDL called LP little a, which is highly associated with cardiovascular disease. The whole lipid conversation is very complex and nuanced.

Yeah. But just suffice it to say at a high level, we can go down this rabbit hole if you want, or people can follow my content to find more about it. That lowering LDL, I think is clearly not the best metric for cardiovascular disease. You have super high LDL, correct? It used to be very high. It's actually not that high anymore. It's funny. LDL fluctuates a lot. So the last time I checked my LDL, it was 160.

I think I've even had one recently that was 139 milligrams per deciliter, which is above the reference range. If I went to a doctor, and we're going to do this, actually, hopefully we can find a doctor that's willing to have this conversation with me, most might recommend that I go on a statin. I'm 46 years old. I have a father with a history of heart disease. But what I think most doctors are missing is that my HDL is high, my triglycerides are low, my fasting insulin is low. So this myopic focus on LDL to me is so misguided. It's such a, it's a very poor predictor of cardiovascular disease. And again, I don't want to get too technical in the LDL discussion, but I think the evidence

that LDL is directly injurious to the endothelium of human arteries is not there. It's just bullshit. And people will say ApoB. ApoB is just a fancy name for LDL and a few other particles in our circulation that are lipoproteins that contain the ApoB lipoprotein, chylomicrons VLDL. But essentially, ApoB is talking about LDL as well. So I don't worry about an LDL in someone that is metabolically healthy, meaning a fasting insulin less than five micro IU per ml. How would you measure that? A continuous glucose monitor? Oh, no, you can just get a blood test. Oh, okay. Maybe $25 for a fasting insulin check.

So just to summarize everything you said. Everything. Not everything. Just in terms of the cholesterol for everyone listening, we shouldn't be worried about high LDL because I think a lot of people, when you say you're eating an animal-based diet or you eat a lot of eggs or something, that's the first response is, what about your cholesterol? And it's a very interesting question. And it's predicated on this notion that LDL is directly causing atherosclerosis. And I think that's false. Okay. this notion that LDL is directly causing atherosclerosis. And I think that's false. And I think that there are other nuanced things to be aware of your metabolic health,

get a fasting insulin, all these kinds of things. So I don't worry about LDL in someone that's metabolically healthy. And I don't think a food that might raise your LDL 20% is problematic if it also improves your metabolic health and your insulin sensitivity. Does that make sense? Yes. So to, I think I'll just say this for people. So my point is really clear. My position is clear. I don't worry about people eating red meat. Even if it's a diabetic, I don't worry about them eating red meat because the nutrients in the red meat and the red meat is not making you more insulin resistant. The red meat is not worsening your diabetes. Right. Red meat is

only helping your diabetes. And if you get rid of the seed oils, which I think are the major cause of your diabetes and maybe other garbage you're eating that are damaging your gut and increasing cortisol i think you're putting yourself in the right direction let's talk about meat yeah obviously we've been alluding to meet this whole conversation but i feel like we need to dive in my podcast is a majority women listening 95 95% women. I want to speak to them. For women who are afraid to eat too much meat, to eat red meat, to eat animal-based, what would you say? That the main side effects of eating red meat are a healthy libido,

good fertility, good skin, normalizing periods and menstrual irregularities, and probably more muscle mass, which leads to weight loss. Wow. Slam dunk. I mean, I think that like, I think that I, I mean, you can help me with this too. And when I talk to women on podcasts or in my life, I'm always curious, why do you think it is that it's hard for women to eat meat? Is it just, are women told that it's masculine or that it's going to make you muscular and not attractive to men? Or like, what is that? I can actually tell you an experience I've had, because obviously I've had acne for such a long time. I've spoken to so many doctors. The first question is how much meat do you eat and do you work out too much?

So I've been told pretty much over and over again that i i live in a too masculine i'm living too masculine in a masculine way do you know what i mean so i do think through media through social media through doctors we're being told over and over again that it is a masculine way to live life i have kind of gone against the grain with that I would say because I feel my best and I think I've been lucky I don't know how much you know about my story but I lost 90 pounds in 2017 and just through experimenting with diet and trying different things I really figured out that I felt my best and looked my best when I ate high fat a lot of protein and low carb that's amazing and my husband kind of does the same thing. And luckily we have each other. But we talk a lot about hormonal health on this podcast because I really

do think there's an epidemic right now because women have been on birth control for years. They've been on antibiotics. They're on Accutane. They're on spironolactone. So there's a ton of issues happening in the world with women. Plastics, PFAs, there's a lot of endocrine disruptors everywhere. Yeah, it's a big deal. So you would say that this diet that you live by would benefit a woman just as much? Absolutely. So no difference? Well, I mean, differences, maybe in the macros differences in terms of how many carbs, how many, how much fat, how much protein, you know, maybe women are not going to eat as much meat as a man. And it's probably usually it's based, I would say on lean

body mass. So, you know, what I've given people as just a basic tool is one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day is a ballpark. So I'm 170 pounds. I usually probably will get about 170 to 200 grams of protein a day. So if a woman weighs a hundred pounds, a hundred grams of protein a day from, I would say, good sources of protein. And I'm couching that in the understanding that animal protein is much more bioavailable than plant protein. Now, if you want to get all of your protein from plants, great. I just think that if you're getting all your protein from plants, you're either going to have to use a very highly processed pea protein or hemp protein, which is going to have all sorts of additives and

derivatives. And it's just not a great way to get your protein, or you're going to eat so many rice and beans that you're going to have GI issues. So I think that it just getting your protein as a man or a woman from an animal source makes so much sense because then you get all these other nutrients that are simply not found in plant foods with the protein. I mean, where does someone get the creatine that helps your brain and your muscles? I mean, creatine someone get the creatine that helps your brain and your muscles? I mean, creatine is the most single studied performance enhancing thing. And even if a woman is just, is, is doing Pilates or yoga, creatine is going to benefit you. You need creatine to think clearly. You need creatine in your job, no matter what you do. You need creatine to raise your kids. Creatine makes vegetarians smarter when we give it to them in studies.

So creatine is critical. That's just one nutrient. Choline is critical for both male and female brain development. For a woman to grow a child, the child's body needs choline. Where do you get it if you're only eating vegetables? You don't. A small amount in broccoli, but nowhere near what you can get from egg yolks and liver and meat. That's just the beginning. What about taurine? I just saw an article about the really clear association between taurine, and that has bull in it, right? That's clearly an animal-based nutrient like carnitine. It has this Latin prefix that tells you it's from meat. Like taurine is associated with healthy aging, and the human body can make taurine, but it doesn't make enough, and it's only found in

animal products. Then there's carnitine, there's, you know, there's anserine, there's vitamin K2, there's vitamin B12. The list is so long that I think that there's a clear distinction between all the benefits of one versus another. And I think that for women, they shouldn't fear the animal protein. Now, ethics matters. Where are you sourcing it from? Thankfully in LA, there's lots of places or around the world, there's places now to get regeneratively sourced meat, grass fed, grass finished, ethically raised meat. I would never fault anyone for wanting to know where their meat comes from or being ethically concerned about animal agriculture. It's a really valid concern. And I think that there are good ways to do it now that support raising a cow well, that give a cow a good life. And we all die. We're all part of this circle of life and death. And I think that kind of like I alluded to earlier from an ethical perspective, we all have a gift. And I think our

highest purpose is to manifest that gift the best we can. And if we believe that animal foods have unique nutrients, I believe that there's a strong argument to be made philosophically, ethically, that eating animals is the most ethical thing we can do for our children, for our future children, for our friends, for our family, for our partners, if it helps us show up the best way in the world and do the most good. That's critical. And for ourselves, I mean, resilience, recovery from injury, fertility, this is what makes life worth living. And there's so much good evidence that avoiding meat and organs in the human diet leads to fragility and problems in all those things. We just become a less optimal version of ourselves.

That's really tough. Greg and I order our meat from Force of Nature for the most part. What would you recommend for people who maybe don't have access to an earworn or a local farm? Where should they get high quality meat? Force of Nature is great. They do all the different animals. I know the guy who runs it personally. He's a friend of mine, Robbie Sansom. And they source from Rome Ranch, part of their

meat, which is a farm in Texas. There's a great farm in Georgia. White Oak Pastures does good stuff. I'm trying to think of other farms. There's a farm outside of Austin called Shirttail Creek. I should have this list, but I think if you just look online, there's all sorts of these regenerative farms popping up. And if people want to find raw milk, circling back to that, there's a website called realmilk.com, I believe. And that is actually a website. It's kind of like a Google map of where you can find raw milk in any city in the US. California is nice because raw milk is illegal and it's sold in grocery stores. Here in LA, you can get it at Sprouts, you can get it at Rainbow Acres. What is it called? Rainbow Acres, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And you can get it at Erewhon. But other places I go, like when I was in Arizona, I go to realmilk.com. I have to find the raw milk. Some states it's illegal. I'm sorry, guys.

You live in the wrong state. You should move. But if you can't get raw milk where you are because it's illegal, raw cheese is illegal almost everywhere. Okay. And how about organs? I was telling you off mike i've

been on my organ journey i swallow a chunk of frozen liver every morning you said you already had it today i had it today i feel amazing and i will say i was telling uh my friends that when i swallow it it hits my throat and i just taste blood it's disgusting but the benefits just outweigh it for me it feels i just feel so much more energy and just it's this feeling of being alive it sounds dramatic but it's true um so what's interesting is i have a niece and a nephew they're five and three and what i've seen with kids is that if you give them liver early they love it it's like their favorite food i've had friends and family of people that have contacted me on social media who give liver to their six month old. It's often a first food. It's a great first food.

Again, sourcing matters. The quality of the sourcing is important. And if you give a child liver, they will kind of grow up with the taste and appreciate it. If you don't give a kid liver by the time they're two or three, they're just, they've had so many other things on their palate that are not like liver in any way, shape or form that it's going to be difficult and you have to undo it. I didn't like liver when I first tried it. I probably first had liver 10 years ago and I pretty much gagged. Right.

And so it takes time and you can hide it in a smoothie. I built a company called Heart and Soil, which makes desiccated organ capsules. And we're actually putting this desiccated organs in the smoothie I'm doing with Erewhon. No way. Yeah, yeah.

It has the beef organs in the capsule. I'm really curious to see how people are going to react to this. I'll tell you. I mean, come Friday. I'll come. Yeah, yeah, yeah. capsule i'm really curious to see how people are going to react to this i'll tell you i mean come friday i'll come yeah yeah yeah 100 i'm excited to see how people react to it too but so there are ways to get organs so we you know with hardened soil you can get organs in a desiccated capsule to start and it's so funny as i was in um i was in san diego and i met a woman there who said um i was at a rock gym and she just came up to me and said uh your stuff really helped me. I was a vegan. And the first thing I did was started taking the organ capsules from hardened soil to get the animal foods back in my diet. And that was really cool.

And then she was able to kind of gradually incorporate the meat and stuff. So there are ways to get organs. And hopefully we'll eat some liver. Maybe this is a good time to eat some liver on the show. Oh, I'm down. Let's do it. Should we get it? Let's get the liver.

I'll do it. I'll do it raw. If I trust the source, you can do it frozen. Are we eating it raw right now yeah okay yeah and it's probably not frozen i don't think it's frozen but we'll find out i'm gonna really feel it but the can we have the liver please but if it's not if it's not frozen it's actually easier because you can do a shooter um so what do you mean it's just down? Yeah, it just slides down. That actually didn't help me mentally. That actually made it worse. But I feel like the heart and soil pills are probably a great first step for people who can't mentally even look at it. I have some for you. They just didn't arrive. If you come to the Erewhon thing, I'm going to

give you some because we have some really cool ones. So we have a capsule that's beef organs. So it's a bunch of the organs. But we have one for women that has ovaries and uterus and fallopian tubes. And that's kind of interesting. This office, the Bloom office, is 90% women. So I would like to hand these out. Oh, yeah. Slash sneak them into people's food. Yeah, yeah, we can.

Yeah, that one is called Her Package. We have one for men that has testicle in it. Wow. And that one is probably our best sell. I've eaten testicle with liver king, actually. Really? Not to flex, but. That's a pretty good flex. Are you guys yeah we're good friends okay so i would regret

not asking obviously we're at the bloom office we sell greens i think you know that i'm not going to be offended i just want to hear your take so i think that like i said there are nutrients in plant foods, right? I think, I don't know exactly what's in bloom. My concern would be that some people are sensitive to certain leaves. And that can be problematic, right? And that if you don't have a problem with it, great. Combining bloom with hardened soil could be a lot of nutrients. Oh, I love that response.

Combining bloom with the capsules from hardened soil, you be a lot of nutrients. Oh, I love that response. You know, combining bloom with the capsules from hardened soil, you get a lot of great nutrients. Or combining bloom with liver or meat, that's great. If you don't have a reaction to it, that's kind of how I feel about everything. Look, like vegetables are not public enemy number one, in my opinion. I think that for people who are struggling and are really dialed in, can't quite figure things out, then they should look at vegetables and they should look at mushrooms and they should look at the nuance. But if you're really kicking ass and you're eating some kale every once in a while or you're eating some broccoli, it's fine. It's not the worst thing

in the world. I think seed oils are a big... Seed oils are probably enemy number one, but if I had to rank them, in my mind, it's seed oils, processed food in general, which has a lot of fillers and carrageenan and gums and artificial colors, artificial sweeteners, artificial flavors, like the artificial colors. And what I'm learning more and more is that processed food adds a lot of things to the food that are problematic. It just results in a bunch of excipients, which are binders and things like this, like silicon dioxide, which we know triggers inflammation in the gut.

Or you get things like hexane or you get things like heavy metals occurring in the foods when you process it too much. That's the main issue for people. The gums, the seed oils, like the things that get added to processed food. For a lot of people, it's possible to eat vegetables from time to time

or moderate amounts and not have issues. But what I want people to know is if you have issues and they're not being solved, then think about the vegetables and think about kale, think about spinach, which is high in oxalates. And people can follow my stuff if they really want to dig down into which are probably the biggest ones for people.

But look, like if you want to, I think you can even ferment your vegetables and that makes them less problematic. So cabbage, for instance, that's a brassica. That's like in the same family as kale, which I'm not a huge fan of because it has a compound that inhibits iodine absorption and level of thyroid. We know this from science. But if you

ferment the cabbage and make sauerkraut, most of those are gone and you can get different flavor. I mean, people need variety and spice in their life. So yeah. And the way I like to think of it also is kind of like a bridge to wellness. When I started Bloom, it was because I was on the far end of the spectrum eating muffins every day, living a super unhealthy lifestyle. And I wanted something that would take me to that healthier lifestyle. And I think sometimes if you can have something that you can incorporate every day and tastes good, it just takes you to that next level where you can start learning more about your body. I know a lot of people that eat significant amounts of vegetables and they're super healthy.

Think about how you cook them. Obviously, think about organic and the pesticide residue on the vegetables. I think if I had to think about plant foods, vegetables is kind of this idea that it's the non-fruit part of a plant. I think grains are probably the most problematic thing for humans. The grains being the oats, the wheat, that kind of stuff. And then probably nuts and seeds are also problematic for humans. So if you were going to get something out, think about those first. And then the leaves are probably less problematic. And then the roots, some people have problems with white potatoes.

Sweet potatoes, probably not the worst thing in the world for some people. But people react to all kinds of things. But people also react to eggs, in all fairness. Some people react to egg whites because of the albumin. So it's not to say that animal foods are some holy thing that doesn't cause problems for anyone. I've had people who react to beef. And I think, okay, you need to eat lamb. It's just helping people navigate and understand that a lot of the foods we've been told are healthy, seed oils, things like this, and even vegetables are not great for all people. For someone who's listening who might be intimidated

by an extreme lifestyle, like they're too intimidated to go full into carnivore, what is a key takeaway you hope they have from this conversation? I think that it's just that the first step in my mind is get rid of the processed foods. And that's been said so many times. I always struggle with how do you say that in a way that actually lands for someone? Maybe it's by describing the problems with the processed foods or what it does to them. Or I could just say something like, you know, I think getting rid of the processed foods will improve it does to them. Or I could just say something like, you know, I think getting rid of the processed foods will improve and potentially completely reverse so many of the chronic issues people have.

And this is all kinds of things we didn't even talk about on this podcast. Like even mental health issues get better when people improve the quality of their diet, depression, anxiety. That's autoimmune too. That's neuroinflammation. So the spectrum is broad and there's so much hope for people who suffer from so many things. And just getting rid of the processed foods means if you're just eating vegetables and fruit and meat, that's a great diet. That's a fantastic diet. Increase the

dietary, the quality of the foods in your diet. That's the first step. And you will eliminate the seed oils. But people have to understand that it is that, those ingredients in the seed oils and these little things sneaking into the processed foods that are problematic for them. So I think that's kind of the high level. Like you don't have to get that extreme about it. You don't have to cut out all those things. You can, there's a lot of on-ramps, you know, if you're start with seed oils, start with processed foods, go from there, start with eating more meat,

not fearing meat, start with eating organs. Those three, those four things alone will massively change someone's health and they'll be able to feel it. And I hope they'll get the feedback and think, wow, I do feel better. Even if it's a woman or a man who's fearing eating meat or bringing it back in their diet. You don't have to go full in.

And the verbiage is a little complex for people. So I'll just clarify this. When I started doing this, I did carnivore, which was only meat and organs and fat for a year and a half. That actually didn't work well for me because of the electrolyte issues that came with ketosis. I've tried to talk about this term called animal-based, and the smoothie at Erewhon is called an animal-based smoothie, which is meant to be positioned in contradiction to plant-based so that you have some plants in your diet, but it's mostly animal-based. So that's what I think of as fruit and, you know, raw milk and maybe

even a sweet potato or something. That's like a little more in that sort of middle ground. Hopefully there's something there that can be an on-ramp to someone. I'll need to have you on for a part two because I have questions about keto as well, but I'll save that for next time. Now it's time for the question we ask every guest. I started this podcast because I believe everyone's pursuit of wellness looks different. What does wellness mean to you? It means getting up after having slept really well and feeling good and feeling happy and excited to do things in the

world, whether it's interact with nature, spend time with friends, you know, do quote work that brings value to people's lives. It's having the energy, the mental fortitude, the mental clarity, and the zeal and the enthusiasm to live life well and do things that I find valuable. Fantastic. I love that answer. Where can people find you and Heart and Soil online? So Heart and Soil is at heartandsoil.co. And I am at Paul Saladino, MD, like medical doctor everywhere on all the platforms. You used to be Carnivore MD. I did. Why'd you let that go? So we rebranded it because I wanted to be not as dogmatic. Right. You know, I have good friends here in Los Angeles and they, who are the minimalists, you know the minimalists? Yeah.

And they were saying, I think they thought that carnivore MD would turn people off. Right. It might scare people away before they get to know what you're actually talking about. Right. And that was why I wanted to just add clarification to when you were saying carnivore, because I think when you say carnivore, probably your male audience goes, yeah, I want to be a carnivore. My 5%. And the females go, I don't want to be a carnivore. My 5%. And the females go, I don't want to be a carnivore. Exactly. Right.

Exactly. I really prefer this approach. And I think people will actually get to hear the full story and get the full picture. Exactly. Because I really think it benefits women as well. I mean, so Heart and Soil is an amazing group of people now. I'm so proud of what we've done. They're in Austin. They're outside of Austin in Dripping Springs. And they've been doing a lot of people now. I'm so glad, I'm so proud of what we've done. They're in Austin,

they're outside of Austin in Dripping Springs and they've been doing a lot of film projects and they did a film called Nourish. Did you see this one? No. It's on YouTube. So Heart and Soil has a YouTube channel and it's all about sort of animal products

and women's fertility and it's incredible. There's a midwife on there, Lindsay Milas, who's actually here in LA. And she, we have this scene in there where she looks at two different placentas and one of them is from someone who's eating meat and one of them or someone who's vegetarian and it's the difference is really striking Wow and you hear this from midwives and this isn't really my world but I hear

midwives say all the time that vegetarian placentas especially vegan placentas look like smokers placentas. And I think this has got to hit women, you know, in the ovaries because and men too, but especially women who want to conceive or have had kids like that is very striking to me that animal foods shouldn't be feared. It's just that it's just a healthier human when you're eating animal foods. That's insane. Yeah. And so there's a documentary on YouTube called Nourished from Hardened Soil. It's just a healthier human when you're eating animal foods. That's insane. Yeah. And so there's a documentary on YouTube called Nourished from Heart and Soil. It's amazing. What's your demographic split, if you don't mind me asking? You know, it's changing, which is really encouraging. It used to be like 70% men. And I think my brand manager was just telling me it's like 60% men now.

So we've... That's pretty good. So it's like 60. So they have 40% women listening to me talk about meat and liver is incredible. I think this will help as well. I hope so. There was one more thing I want to talk about. Hopefully we can sneak this in somewhere in the podcast because we were talking about linoleic acid accumulating. Yeah. And I think your audience of women will appreciate the fact that one of the things I worry about most with linoleic acid and seed oils is it accumulating in the skin. And so this goes back to sun fearing, right? And you think about what is in some quote healthy sunscreens contain seed oils. Yep. So just like you don't want to eat a seed oil, you don't want to put a seed oil on your skin. Like sunflower seed oil. Like sunflower seed oil. I've seen that in a ton of products. And you can look at the ingredients

of your face care products or your personal care products. And this is complex, but you can look at the ingredients of your face care products or your personal care products. And this is complex, but you can actually search the amount of linoleic acid in various oils. I think it's, I'm actually building a skincare brand. So I was doing some research on this. I think it's argan oil is actually pretty high in linoleic acid. And that ends up in a lot of skincare. Carrot seed oil is very high in linoleic acid. Raspberry seed oil is very high in linoleic acid. A lot of times they're low on the list, but the goal is to create skincare with very little linoleic acid. Are you going to do beef tallow skincare? Yeah, yeah. No way. No way. Have you seen the clip of Paul rubbing beef tallow on his face? Oh yeah. It's iconic. I feel like that blew up for you, didn't it? Yeah. Yeah. People are,

people were shocked. Yeah. And it's amazing. I was tempted. I'm just so scared. I'm so scared of messing my skin up. I get it. Like, I don't think it will. It's not really, it doesn't really, it's not really comedogenic. Let me try the raw dairy. Yeah.

I'll get back to you and then I'll try the beef tallow. You can put it on your skin, you know, beef tallow. Yeah. Like your arm or something or your shoulder. Hand moisturizer. Yeah. It's definitely moisturizing for your hands. I mean, we're going to mix.

It's not going to be all tallow, but it's going to be tallow based because we like the animal moisturizer. Yeah. It's definitely moisturizing for your hands. I mean, we're going to mix, it's not going to be all tallow, but it's going to be tallow based because we like the animal fats. Yeah. And probably a little bit of MCT oil in there too, but just for texture because you want it to absorb. Right. And that's tricky. But the thing is that don't put seed oils on your skin and realize that if you're eating seed oils, your skin is more susceptible to aging. Wow. So that's what I really want women to know, because I know that women think about that. Some men think about that, but not as many. So you think about this face and this whole body that you have. And if you're eating seed oils, you are filling every cell membrane in your body,

including your dermis and all of your epidermal, everything facing the sun, with seed oils. And that's a problem. And I think that, you know, it's funny because I was talking to Lauren, and she has this book, you know, Get the Fuck Out of the Sun. And I was like, we have to talk about this, but we didn't have a full conversation. I think sun is valuable for humans in moderate doses. And I don't want people to fear the sun because of vitamin D and the nitric oxide and the endorphins. There are things produced in the sun that are not produced when you take a vitamin D capsule. And the light and the circadian rhythms, we sun on our face on our eyes and our skin all

these things and i don't want women to fear that and i think the way to make your skin resilient and healthy for as long as possible is to eat a very low linoleic acid diet because you think it's in every cell membrane in your body love that yeah thanks for joining us on the pursuit of wellness podcast to support this show please rate and review and share with your loved ones. If you want to be reminded of new episodes, click the subscribe button on your preferred podcast or video player. You can sign up for my newsletter to receive my favorites at mariawellen.com. It will be linked in the show notes.

This is a Wellness Outloud production produced by Drake Peterson, Fiona Attucks, and Kelly Kyle. This show is edited by Mike Fry, and our video is recorded by Louise Vargas. You can also watch the full video of each episode on our YouTube channel at Mari Fitness. Love you, Power Girls and Power Boys. See you next time. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and does not constitute a provider patient relationship. As always, talk to your doctor

or health team.