Pursuit of Wellness - Paul Saladino Pt. 3: Optimizing Fertility, Cholesterol Truths, Creatine for Women & Weight Loss

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

Ep. #82 On today’s episode of Pursuit of Wellness, I catch up with Paul Saladino for another informative conversation on nutrition. My previous episode with him holds a lot of contrasting views to my recent conversation with Simon Hill, so we take some time to address that and Paul also shares how to dissect differentiating studies online. Known for his Carnivore Diet, Paul talks to us about all things nutrition today, including heavy metals in the body, the negative effects of the vegan diet, and how to eat an intentional diet. Finally, we dig into EMFs and how our electronics may be negatively affecting us.  For Mari’s Newsletter click here! Leave Me a Message - click here! For Mari’s Instagram click here! For Pursuit of Wellness Podcast’s Instagram click here! For Paul Saladino’s Instagram click here! For Paul Saladino’s Lineage Provisions meat sticks click here! Show Links: EP 30 Paul Saladino PT.1 EP 31 Paul Saladino PT.2 EP 70 The Shocking Truth Behind Nutrition Trends with Simon Hill Lineage Provisions You Are What You Eat documentary Sponsored By: Bite is offering our listeners 20% off your first order. Go to trybite.com/POW or use code POW at checkout to claim this deal.  Treat yourself to the best bras on the market and save 20% Off at honeylove.com/POW Visit BetterHelp.com/POW today to get 10% off your first month Topics Discussed: 04:00 - Paul’s Updates 05:10 - Heavy metals in the body 10:52 - Simon Hill and the Danish food pyramid 15:43 - Increase the quality of your food  22:31 - Dissecting varying studies 27:32 - Make intentional dietary choices 28:06 - Debate with Simon Hill 30:45 - Creatine 33:50 - Hadza Tribe 37:07 - Fertility diet suggestions 39:03 - Opinions on potatoes 43:00 - Glucose spikes 45:18 - “You Are What You Eat” 46:52 - Iron and cholesterol 01:01:25 - EMFs and the issue with airpods 01:07:16 - Lineage Provisions

There's a really interesting study where they took human sperm in like a petri dish and put a cell phone under the petri dish, right? And what do they find? They find the sperm like don't move as well, right? The motility is impaired in the sperm when it's sitting on top of a cell phone. Imagine that. This is the Pursuit of Wellness podcast and I'm your host, Mari Llewellyn. What is up? Welcome back to the Pursuit of Wellness podcast. Today we have Paul Saladino back for a part three. You guys loved his part one and two so much. It caused such a stir on the internet. We had to bring him back. Paul is such a lovely, lovely guy in person, you guys. He's so freaking nice he chatted with

me and greg for an hour before the podcast giving us advice on fertility talking to us about costa rica he really is such a nice person and we brought him on today because he has very contrasting views to my recent guest simon hill so we talked that. We also talked more about some changes Paul has made to his diet recently. He's most known for his carnivore diet, but he talks about heavy metals and other things as well. In this episode, we really dove a little bit deeper today. We talk about fertility diet suggestions, his opinion on potatoes and glucose spikes. He talks about weight loss, diet sodas, the documentary on Netflix, You Are What You Eat. This is causing a lot of controversy online right now. I'm sure you've heard about it. We talk all about that. Iron and cholesterol and some of the

myths around that topic. We talk about EMFs and the issues with AirPods. And we also talk about his brand new meat sticks lineage, which are really, really good. I tried them myself. So without further ado, let's hop into our part three with Dr. Paul Saladino. I hope you enjoy. Paul, welcome back to the Pursuit of Wellness. Thanks for having me back on. This is technically our part three, because our last conversation was so long that I split it into two. It's hard for me to stop talking. Well, I have to tell you, a lot of people ask me who my favorite guest was and who had the most impact on me personally.

And your name always comes to mind. Oh, that's awesome. Thank you. I'm glad it was helpful. It truly was one of my favorite episodes, one of my most downloaded episodes. It had a really big impact on me and my husband. You were just talking to Greg out in the lobby. Yeah. He's full carnivore.

That's hilarious. And loves it. And I have seen such a big improvement in him, his sperm count, like we were talking about. We were talking all about it. Oh my God. He didn't have sperm and now he has sperm which is incredible i kind of subscribe to like a majority carnivore lifestyle but i throw in some potato here and there i do a little bit of vegetable when i can but like definitely limited i do some berries um but you really made a big impact on the way i live my life a lot of people ask me like which episodes did, you know, change the way you were doing things and yours is one of them. So

I wanted to tell you that before we hop in. That's so cool. It makes me so happy to know that it's helping. How do you feel with that change? Amazing. Amazing. And I was just telling you I had the clearest skin I've ever had when I was really strict about that diet um and anytime i reintroduce sugar or kind of deviate from the plan my acne comes back and i think it's candida related um but also our episode did cause a lot of ruckus on the internet okay our reel has over a million views i don't know if you know that and the comments you know people were popping off in the comments what's up you know that's what happens that's what happens yeah a lot of people were upset and i also had a lot of experts reach out asking to come on and kind of like debate you okay so i feel like we have a lot to address today

sure i would love to start with you personally and what has changed since our last conversation i know you've been experimenting with some new foods, some new, you know, ways of living. So I'd love to hear like, what you've changed. Yeah. So my diet is still what I would consider to be animal-based, meat and organs. There's a lot of good grass-fed beef in Costa Rica. Unfortunately, we don't have quite the same variety of cows down there, so we don't get the most amazing steaks, but we get good meat and there's some good farms. I eat a little bit of heart, a little bit of liver every day, either from desiccated organs or got the new meat sticks, which are exciting with some heart and liver in them. I eat a lot of fruit personally because

my gut does fine with that. We can talk about all this stuff because we were talking to Greg and talking about your gut. I think there's some caveats to fruit for some people and even sugars like honey. Generally, I think they're healthy for most people, but if there is a gut dysbiosis issue going on, people don't always tolerate them. So I eat fruit, I eat honey, I eat raw dairy. My diet's pretty much the same as it was, but I did try some things

because I'm always curious and trying to expand. So I've tried white rice and a lot of people do fine with white rice, white versus brown, because there's a lot of heavy metal in the hull of the of the brown rice so if you look at the data it's pretty clear that brown rice is a pretty solid source of heavy metals and i'm always thinking about heavy metals and the sources and that's actually something we should talk about because when you look at heavy metals across foods um there are some vegetable sources that are pretty significant in heavy

metals sunflower seeds are pretty high in heavy metals. Sunflower seeds are pretty high actually. Rice can be pretty high, especially the brown rice. Some leafy greens can accumulate heavy metals from the wrong source. It's just that some leafy greens tend to accumulate heavy metals. So if they're not grown in soil that's low, they'll kind of suck it up. And just to be clear, can you explain the problem with heavy metals in the body? Yeah, so heavy metals are things like lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium. There's a couple others, but those are the big three or four. And if you look at the periodic table, they're just a series of elements that occur naturally in nature.

And some foods accumulate them. Seafood tends to accumulate them, probably because we're polluting the oceans with, you know, pollution from the air, whether it's just industrial pollution from the air and car exhaust has a lot of heavy metals and it ends up in the ocean and sort of circulating in those ecosystems. And also soils can naturally or unnaturally have heavy metals. And so foods can accumulate heavy metals. Another one that breaks a lot of people's hearts is chocolate tends to accumulate heavy metals. Oatmeal, oats are a grain that can accumulate heavy metals, especially cadmium from certain sources. And it's not saying that these foods

are all bad. It's just saying that if someone has heavy metal overload or is interested in heavy metals and understanding how much they have, if they're interested in conceiving, right? If they're, or they have, they're currently pregnant or they're having issues with anything and they want to think about heavy metals, it's important to know that if your heavy metals are elevated when you test, these are foods that might be a problem. Basically every food has heavy metals, but if you look at them, generally these are the foods with the highest ones. Like a lot of plant foods can. So when they get into the human body, we can get rid of them, but it's slow. We need to use things like glutathione, major antioxidant systems.

The liver can detoxify them. We can excrete them in the urine and the poop, but they can accumulate in the bones and other organs. And then they cause oxidative stress because of the way that they're structured sort of just as elements on the periodic table. So people are very familiar with lead poisoning for kids and lower IQs, but there's connections between cancer rates and heavy metals. There's connections between dementia and heavy metals. There's connections between autoimmune

conditions and heavy metals. And it's hopefully probably not a problem for everyone or most people, but if someone has an issue with it, it's important to know that some foods we think of as healthy can be problematic in that vein. Yeah. My blood test results showed that I had heavy metal overload. So I was doing glutathione shots every week and it was definitely impacting my acne. We talked a lot about my skin last time and that was one of the things that I've been working on because I was eating salmon a lot and I had to really decrease my seafood intake. A lot of people think about meat and fish and they'll say red meat is bad for you. And we can talk about why I don't think that's the case, especially when it's from good sources, grass fed, grass finished, regeneratively raised.

And they'll say fish is better. And you think, okay, I understand the argument. I disagree with it. But then you have to understand that fish comes with its own set of problems. So heavy metals are a big problem with fish, even salmon. Definitely the bigger fish like tuna, mackerel, yellowfin, mahi, these are all even higher amounts of heavy metals of a variety of types. So it's lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic

are the big ones again. And those are all in the bigger fish, but salmon have it. Even little sardines have it. I mean, Joe Rogan has kind of famously talked about having high levels of arsenic from eating sardines every day. So it's just bioaccumulates because literally fish are swimming in the environment. And I live in Costa Rica most of the time now,

and people will say, what about food from Costa Rica? It's clean ocean, but it's continuous. There's no real evidence that any one part of the world is going to be able to raise fish that are better than another part of the world in terms of heavy metals. Certainly we know that farm-raised fish, traditionally farm-raised fish is probably the worst

for a variety of reasons, even beyond heavy metals. Talk about PFAs, these are the forever chemicals. We talked about it last time in terms of Lululemon leggings. I was talking to Greg about his underwear and he's changing out his polyester underwear, which could contain PFAs. They're forever chemicals, but fish accumulates PFAs. Fish accumulates microplastics, but so do

land animals. It's just that fish tend to have more. And so even if we talk about meat, let's be very clear and set a level playing field here. Cows can have microplastics in them too, and meat can have PFAs, but the meat, the red meat, that's going to have more PFAs, forever chemicals and microplastics is going to be the meat that's fed grains. So there are ways to get meat, red meat from grass-fed, grass-finished farms.

If they're really only eating real grass, they're going to have much lower levels. So there's differences in quality and there's differences in quality in fish. Farm-raised worse in terms of forever chemicals. Farm, farm raised worse in terms of heavy metals. Generally, sometimes farm raised fish even has a little less heavy metals, but they have more of these other things. Polychlorinated biphenyls, PCBs. So farm raised really bad. Even wild fish though, like you were probably eating wild salmon, has heavy metals, PFAs, microplastics. It's just a troubling food.

And it's not necessarily because of the fish itself. It's just because we live in a polluted world. And for those of us really trying to get granular with our health and looking at this stuff, or specifically seeing an issue come up in our labs, then we have to really say, okay, where could I be getting this contamination? And even though fish is a healthy food, quote unquote, it can give us excess amounts of these for some people. So that's a problem, right? I think a lot of people end up kind of feeling despondent when they hear this. What am I supposed to eat? It's crazy.

I had Simon Hill on the show. Yeah. And for anyone listening who hasn't listened, I recommend you go listen because I specifically asked him, he was talking about the benefits of seafood. Yeah. And I specifically asked about the heavy metals

because I know from personal experience that I had heavy metal overloads from eating seafood too much and he didn't really have a good answer for me he subscribes to the danish food pyramid do you know anything about that no i literally want to pull up for you because you're gonna die is it mostly fish v can you pull up i just want to look at it it's like vegetable oil oh seed oils yeah let's be clear seed oils not vegetable oils let's call it let me show you this pyramid because my jaw dropped i like had it in front of me and i was like this is the opposite of how i live my life and then he looked at my blood work and said it was bad even though i feel like it's in a good place well we can talk about. What did he say was bad in your blood work?

I think it was like my cholesterol. Wait, no, can you show Paul? Yeah. I'm friends with Simon. I really appreciate him as a human. No, he's great. I think the last time I was in Los Angeles, I spent two and a half hours

working out with him at Gold's. And probably in that two and a half hours, we lifted for like 20 minutes and just talked. But you guys like- We didn't record it, but- but don't you guys kind of have internet beef am i wrong um i don't have internet beef with him he might i don't even know what he's saying about me i don't pay attention to this stuff marie like i think he has internet beef with you i mean like that's a lot of people have internet beef with me and i'm just i don't know like i'm just on my grind you know like i don't care, like, I'm just on my grind, you know, like, I don't care. I love this approach.

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. I have always said therapy is just a non-negotiable for me in my entire routine. Since I was 14 years old, I've been in therapy. And it always is just a nice grounding moment to pull yourself back in and really evaluate what you're going through, what you're thinking and have something to bounce off ideas that isn't biased or personal to you in your life. I feel like BetterHelp is such a great solution if you're looking to try therapy. It's entirely online and designed to be convenient, flexible and suited to your schedule. All you need to do is fill out a brief questionnaire to

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I am the biggest fan of Bite. Most commercial toothpastes are filled with harsh chemicals, artificial flavors, and preservatives. Not things I want to be putting in my mouth, let alone eating. Bite makes dry toothpaste tablets made with clean ingredients that are sulfate free, palm oil free and glycerin free. It comes in a cute glass refillable jar with refills and compostable pouches. I love this system. I feel like it's really easy to travel with whether I'm on the go for meetings or headed to a podcast. I obviously want my breath to be fresh, but I don't want to be having like, you know, the awful ingredients that come in like a mouthwash. So Bite is absolutely

perfect. And it looks really cute on your countertop as well. Bite is offering our listeners 20% off your first order. Go to trybite.com slash pow or use code pow at checkout to claim this deal. That's t-r-y-b-I-T-E dot com slash pow. Philosophically, I just feel like I don't do my best work when I worry about what other people are saying about me. Obviously, I love respectful scientific discussion. I love sharing of ideas, but...

You know, I think a lot of people use your name because it gets views. I'm beginning to see that. Yes. I imagine this is sort of an offhand compliment. So the Danish food pyramid is eat plant-rich, varied, not too much, eat more vegetables and fruit, eat less meat, choose legumes and fish, eat whole grain foods, choose vegetable oils and low-fat dairy products, eat less sweet, salty, and fatty food, thirsty, drink water. Okay. Yeah, we can talk about any piece of that you'd like, but... I mean, what do you think of the Danish food pyramid? I think it's the opposite of what I would do.

I think, let's just start with where I think vegans, vegetarians, Simon, and I all agree, right? Ultra-processed food, horrible for humans. Anyone listening to this, if you increase the quality Ultra processed food, horrible for humans. Anyone listening to this, if you increase the quality of your food, and this means eating more unprocessed whole animal and plant foods, whether it's fruit or vegetables, you're going to get healthy. And we can all agree on this. What we disagree on gets into the nitty gritty a little bit. First around seed oils, because I

think that one of the things we find a lot in ultra processed food are seed oils. I think we talked some in the last podcast here. Corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, soybean oils are the main oils. And just so people understand the context of these oils, never in the American diet or really Western diet until a hundred years ago with Procter & Gamble and the creation of Crisco.

And so 130 years ago, Americans, Westerners essentially eat zero seed oils. Previously, they were used as machine lubricants, which they're quite good at. So if you have a greasy axle in your car, you can use the canola oil from your Airbnb to use them. If your lawnmower needs some lubing or you've got a rusty hinge on a door, that's about all the canola or corn oil is good for. So just in terms of associations, what we see, which is very interesting to me, and this is just correlational data, we can't draw causative inference, is that 130 years ago, Americans specifically eat exclusively or 98% animal fats. We're eating tallow, which is rendered beef fat. We're eating butter.

We're eating eggs. We're eating not much ghee, but probably some ghee. And then lard, which is from pigs. And correlation, no causative inference here, heart disease, vanishingly low, vanishingly low. So even in times when Americans were eating all animal fat and no polyunsaturated fats, canola oil wasn't a thing.

There was none of this. There really probably wasn't much olive oil in the American diet 130 years ago. Very, very low rates of heart disease. So if anyone is gonna claim that tallow, butter, ghee, lard, especially lard from pigs that are not fed corn and soy, so these are not industrial, we can look at the arc of industrial production of pigs and cows over the last 130 years too,

and find some deterioration in the quality for sure. But if anyone is going to argue that animal fats are causing heart disease, that's a tough thing because we have a really interesting historical experiment to say, there's nothing going on here. Seed oils get introduced, increase in popularity, and there is actually kind of industry collusion. There's interesting historical experiment to say, there's nothing going on here. Seed oils get introduced, increase in popularity, and there is actually kind of industry collusion. There's interesting history around what happened in the 1950s and 1960s around the American Heart Association, switching its position on saturated fat because saturated fat is in our blood as Americans. And most cultures have always prized saturated fat containing foods. So there's been a real shift in the last 60 to 70 years.

Most of us are too young to remember this, but our grandparents might see this discordance. And there's just kind of, most of our parents might remember that when they were young, they might've eaten more butter and then margarine came in. And then we realized there was a problem with trans fat, but there's a lot of plant-based margarines now that are essentially new age margarine

and they're seed oils versus butter, tallow and ghee. And this is an important thing to talk about, but I guess this is really the crux of nutritional science. Like is saturated fat good or is saturated fat bad? And the other side of the seesaw is saturated fat is bad, then polyunsaturated fats, which are essentially seed oils, are good. And in between lies olive oil and avocado,

which are mostly monounsaturated. And we can talk about those in a moment, but let's just, I'll contrast saturated, polyunsaturated for now, because it makes a clear distinction. And just so people understand what we're talking about, a saturated fat, all fats are carbon chains, and it just has to do with how many hydrogens

are attached to the carbons. A polyunsaturated fat has more double bonds, so it has less hydrogens attached to the carbons. A saturated fat has every carbon, which is fully saturated with hydrogen. That's what it means, saturated versus polyunsaturated. And so in the 1950s, an interesting thing happened because Eisenhower had a heart attack,

and his cardiologist was Paul Dudley White. And Paul Dudley White kind of got influenced by Ancel Keys, who's a physiologist who did this thing called the Seven Countries Study. And Ancel Keys was obsessed with this concept of cardiovascular health and what was causing humans to have heart attacks. Because the 1950s, 40 years after the introduction of CETOLs,

were really when we started to see the first notable blips of heart attacks in our society. And it became a thing and it became a meme really because of Eisenhower's heart attack. And so Paul Dudley White, the cardiologist for Eisenhower was influenced by Ancel Keys. Ancel Keys was influenced by something called,

he did this thing called the seven country study, which is an observational study. Observational studies are not actually experiments. They're just trying to make correlations. They can be reasonably good or they can be confounded or they can be essentially limited in their purview and not very valid for us as humans. So what Ancel Keys did was he looked at seven countries

in Europe and correlated saturated fat intake to I believe it was incidence of heart disease. And the problem with this is that when we go back and look at the history, he left out a lot of other countries which didn't fit his graph. He drew a nice line that said, the more saturated fat you eat in this country, per country, the more heart disease you have. But if you actually look

at 37 or 38 countries in Europe at the time he was doing it, there's no correlation. He just picked the data points that fit his line. And famously, he looked in Crete, in Greece, at Lenten period when there was no consumption of animal foods. And so he said, oh, Crete has low heart disease and low consumption of saturated fat except they were in this very unique time period when they weren't eating animal foods because of their religious the religious view so this is the problem with these type of observational studies sometimes and this is the famous seven country study which really got integrated into the american consciousness by paul dudley white who was influenced by Ansel Keys, Eisenhower's heart attack.

The American public is afraid for the first time of heart attacks. And then the American Heart Association comes in right around that same time in the 1950s. And not a lot of people know that the American Heart Association received a donation from Procter & Gamble at that time. And that was really what kickstarted

the American Heart Association's life in the American public. And now a lot of what we hear comes from the American Heart Association. If you look American public. And now a lot of what we hear comes from the American Heart Association. If you look in a grocery store at Cheerios or oatmeal, a lot of it has this AHA or American Heart Association heart healthy heart on it because it's low fiber and we can talk about why. Even some oils like canola oil will have a heart healthy certification because they lower cholesterol. So we'll get to that. But what's interesting is that Procter and Gamble donated 1.7 million, the equivalent of over

$20 million today to the American Heart Association. And then suddenly the American Heart Association is talking about how polyunsaturated fats are the healthy fats. Procter and Gamble, remember, made Crisco in 1910. So Procter and Gamble makes- I feel like this is always the case. Like it always comes back to money. It often does. My question for you before we continue, having someone like Simon on and then you

who have just such polar opposite views on things, it's like, how could studies be so, like interpreted so differently? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, let's talk about this for a moment and then we'll return to this sort of history. So I cannot imagine the way that a health consumer feels today. There are so many discordant voices. The word that I think of here is cacophony and it's just how is anyone going to navigate

this? And so I think that what Simon is an advocate of, and I hope I won't misquote him, as I said, we're friends and I respect his views, but what Simon and people in the plant-based communities will often say is the weight of the evidence, quote unquote, the weight of the evidence shows that, for instance, plants are associated with more longevity for humans. And so what they're looking at is if we look at all of the studies that are done on a topic, do more of them favor meat or plants? Or do more of them favor polyunsaturated fats or saturated fats for any outcome, cardiovascular disease? And the problem is this.

When you say the weight of the evidence, there's no metric in there for the quality of the studies. You said that you guys just moved to Austin. Did you get a house there? Did you buy a house? You rent a house? Bought a house, yeah. is your house built on a landfill? No, does your house have a solid concrete foundation? I think so. Okay. Have you ever seen like a multi-million dollar condo building built on a landfill? No, you'll see where i'm going with this So for me when we aggregate all of the studies

We're looking at very varied quality of studies. And the problem with meta-analyses oftentimes, the problem with saying the weight of the evidence is there's no metric to say how good the studies are. So what we end up with is a pile of garbage and garbage in, garbage out. You don't build nice houses on garbage. You don't build scientific hypotheses. You don't build scientific ideas or hypotheses about human health on studies that are not good quality. So for me, when someone says the weight of the evidence, I always say, whoa, like I don't care what the weight of the evidence shows. I care what the most well done trials show. So what do the best studies show? Not what do the majority of studies show? What are the best studies show? And we clearly know that there are some studies

that are better than others. Observational studies can sometimes be valuable, but can often be confounded by healthy user bias and unhealthy user bias. And even interventional studies, like Simon mentioned on this podcast with you, can be confounded by poor techniques. So let's just talk about this for a second specifically.

So one of the things that Simon said on the podcast is that there are interventional studies in humans showing that when you replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat, essentially replacing saturated fat with seed oils, that you have lower rates of cardiovascular disease. And this is true. But when you look at the quality of those studies, what you quickly realize is they are poorly, poorly done. So this is something that I frequently will disagree with people in the health space on with regard to seed oil. This is a very contentious issue. I think most people are realizing now that regardless of all the science, they feel far better when they get rid of industrially processed seed oils in their diet. But if we're actually going to have a scientific debate, which I think is valuable,

there are about nine or 10 trials that have been done in the last 60 to 70 years looking at the replacement of saturated fat with polyunsaturated seed oils. And the problem with those trials is that seven of them actually used trans fat for the saturated fat in the control group. So this is what we mean. This is what I mean when I say, what do the best trials show? Wait, so when you say they use trans fat, meaning they use, let's say, margarine instead of butter. Yes. As the saturated fat. Oh, that's messed up. Yeah. So the control group, which is the saturated fat group, is getting a poisonous fat. What the heck? And then it makes it look better when you give the control group a seed oil. Who's like monitoring these studies? It's very clear.

I'm so confused. Are these like rogue scientists just doing whatever they want? It's just, you have to really read, you have to read the results carefully. I mean, there are multiple meta-analyses on seed oils. Darius Mazzafarian, infamous for the Tufts guidelines, the food compass guidelines,

telling us that Froot Loops and frosted mini-wheats are healthier than beef and eggs. He did a meta-analysis on seed oils and included most of the studies that had this horribly constructed control group full of trans fat. So if you throw out the bad studies on seed oils, what you're left with are Minnesota Coronary Study,

Sydney Diet Heart Study, and Rose Corn Oil Study. And all of those, I would argue the best studies, show that when you replace saturated fat from animals with seed oils, you get higher rates of cardiovascular disease, higher rates of death in general. So there's a lot of confusion in the science. And it's just, I think for a lot of people,

it's just, it must be dizzying to understand unless you have a PhD in this stuff. And to be fair, there's even people with PhDs in the science who don't understand this and disagree with me. So back to the word cacophony, I just think that people, I hope that the most important step people can make in their health is just making an intentional dietary choice. And once you make that intentional dietary choice, just letting the way you feel guide you will lead to the right place I don't think it's important that people get it right the first time just that you begin the process

So I was a raw vegan once and I respect everyone's path, right? and so what what I end up with thinking is that maybe Respectful discussions are the answer. But then again, you know, Simon and I are trying to make a debate discussion happen. It's just tricky to find the right platform. I'm hoping to have a discussion with an anti-seed,

a guy that is pro seed oils at some point in the future. But it's hard because I think that most people will think, okay, this is great. I'm going to listen to this debate and they'll turn it off in three and a half minutes because it's immediately going to get so technical. Yeah. It's just so technical when I'm talking about trans fats

and the control group and different study titles and confounding and healthy user bias and observational studies. And so we can talk about it. And I think that it's important for me and all of us to have respectful discussions, but most people I don't

think will find it that engaging and it'll be very difficult for them. So I just, ultimately, I just hope that people will try to make intentional food choices, improve the quality of their food, do the things we all agree on, which is less ultra processed foods. And if you want to eat more plants, great. If you want to eat less meat, that's great. If you want to eat more meat, that's great. But just have an honest idea of how you're feeling and realize that a lot of people don't do well with, I mean, maybe this is a bias, I'll just admit it, but I think a lot of people don't do well

with vegan and vegetarian diets. And we don't really have the same studies for carnivore and omnivore diets because they haven't been around as long, but there are studies. I mean, there was a 2014 study done on over 11,000 people and it looked at their course of vegan and vegetarianism and they found that 84% of people who went vegan within four years returned to eating meat. I feel like we all know a vegan who did that.

Yes. And there's more and more prominent vegans who returned to eating meat. I mean, it's kind of sensational when a raw vegan or a vegan gets caught in a restaurant eating salmon and it happens all the time. And the majority of those people who returned to eating meat did so because of health issues. And so my concern for people is just that meat contains unique nutrients. I mean, Greg and I were talking about coenzyme Q10 earlier and taurine, things that are important for both male and female fertility, zero in plant foods. I'm not saying plant foods are bad. I'm just saying that there are unique nutrients in animal foods that we can't get from plants.

And I think, I'll say this, and I hope I'm representing Simon's position honestly. He would say, okay, 300 grams of meat is enough per week. And I would say, not even close. I mean, you can look at creatine, for instance. We know that creatine is vital for humans. It's the single most studied ergogenic aid because it's a supplement in like nutritional science, exercise science, probably over 1,500 studies. Everything from fertility, mental performance, memory, athletic performance, recovery, hormonal health, energy.

I just saw a study looking at high-risk neonatal pregnancies with creatine creatine only occurs in animal foods can you take creatine pregnant yeah absolutely oh okay yeah it's the most studied supplement there is right it's it's a it's a combination of arginine and glycine then you get a methylation you get methylated from sammy your body makes it but our bodies only make maybe 20 25 percent of what we need. And I think Simon would even agree with this. And I suspect Simon supplements with creatine, right? So you can get it from meat to get five grams a day, which is the amount that somebody like Greg needs,

like a reasonably sized male. You have to eat around two pounds of meat per day. Average size female, maybe three grams of creatine per day. And you can get that from about a pound and a half of meat. A lot of us don't eat that much meat. So a little bit of supplement is valuable, pretty safe supplement. It's really not had any negative effects on humans.

But my point here is that you can supplement with it. So a vegan or vegetarian can supplement with it, but doesn't this tell us that like meat is valuable? And that's just the tip of the iceberg, right? There's a million nutrients, not a million, but there's probably 50, 60 nutrients I could just list off. I think I probably rambled them off last time. Creatine, carnitine, choline, anserine, taurine, K2, B12.

That list is long of all these things. So meat and organs are vilified because of the saturated fat, because of Ancel Keys, because of Paul Dudley White and Eisenhower in the 1950s, probably because of the American Heart Association, potentially because of Procter & Gamble donating the equivalent of $20 million. And so where do we arrive today in 2024 with our nutritional guidelines? It's basically this

70-year memory, this reverberation in our consciousness of this is what we were told as kids. This is what our parents were told. Saturated fat butter is bad for you. And it's based on shoddy science. If you know me, you know I am not the biggest fan of bras. I will go without if I can, but I really want one that's supportive and comfortable. And that's where I found Honeylove. Imagine a bra that you actually want to wear. You probably can't think of one unless you already own Honeylove. Today's sponsor, Honeylove, has revolutionized the bra game. Say goodbye to underwire and bulky fabrics that trap heat. Honeylove's bra features supportive bonding that eliminates the need for underwire without sacrificing lift.

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to hear is when you're confused on what to do or who to listen to kind of think back to what we did as you know our ancestors what were we doing originally and i really subscribe to that way of living and i personally i mean they know but I feel amazing eating a super high protein diet getting red meat in really focusing on where I'm sourcing everything from and I think it's just like a really valuable conversation to have but it is so confusing when we have all these studies out there as consumers we're not reading them like I can't I can't read a study and understand what's happening so we go to experts to decipher the information, but then there's, you know, people like you, there's people like Simon, like it is really, really confusing for people. So I appreciate you saying focus on how you feel because really that's

all that matters. It's all that matters. And you can add to that maybe blood work, some objective metrics like for women, are your periods painful? Are they regular? Are you fertile? For men, libido, sleep, mental clarity. If a man wants to get his sperm count checked or motility checked, there are objective metrics. You can see these things. So you can focus on how you feel and some basic objective metrics will get you there.

But I love that you brought this up. I mean, we don't have time machines. We don't know how our ancestors really were, but we have some windows into that. The Hadza, who it sounds like Simon also visited and we can talk about this. So I spent, you know, like a little bit more than a week with the Hadza a couple of years ago.

Herman Pons has written a book about the Hadza. And it's very clear if you ask the Hadza and we should post a video and I can send you a video from when I was there. What is your favorite food? Unquestionably, it's meat. And by meat, they mean meat and organs because they eat the whole animal.

So they're gonna eat the liver, the heart. I ate baboon brains with the Hadza. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. So they eat the whole animal. They eat the whole animal. And that's unquestionably their favorite food.

There are studies. I mean, there's a guy named Frank Marlow, famous anthropologist who did his PhD dissertation on the Hadza, wrote a book about the Hadza, published a study called Tubers as a Fallback Food for the Hadza. And in the study, he basically surveys a few hundred of the Hadza.

There's only a few thousand of them on the planet right now. There's very few true or pseudo hunter-gatherers left. And he asks them, what are your favorite foods? And both the men and the women, their first favorite food is honey, not surprisingly. Second favorite food for the men is meat. For the women, it's a three-way tie between berries baobab and meat both men and women say that tubers are their least favorite food we talked about tubers me and simon yeah so i mean they do eat tubers i've never said that the hadza don't

eat plant foods because they will eat tubers they do eat berries what's important to note and i think that this is difficult to debate is that they don't really care about leafy greens. They don't really care about leaves and seeds very much. So they don't really like seeds. They don't eat the seeds of plants unless they're starving. They will use the leaves for like maybe medicine sometimes, but they don't eat a lot of salads, the Hadza. So this is interesting to note that like, if you think about this hierarchy of foods, meat is at the top and that's pretty difficult to question. And people have tried to push back and say, they do eat plant foods, but it's, and I've said, yes, they do, but they like the meat the most. And that's, you look at what they give preferentially to pregnant women,

women wanting to conceive and elderly, perhaps the populations that need the most concentrated nutrition it's just extra meat and organs do you have a recommendation of what to eat more of when you're trying to conceive as a woman yeah i mean i think it depends on where the woman is starting and so there's things you want to take out and things you want to eat more of i think obviously eating more meat don't fear it red meat chicken although we should talk about chicken and we talked about fish so be careful with fish if you're trying to conceive because, don't fear it. Red meat, chicken, although we should talk about chicken and we talked about fish. So be careful with fish if you're trying to conceive because you don't want a whole bunch of heavy metals.

And this flies in the face of mainstream narratives. So I would say controversially, eat more well-raised red meat. Eat a little bit of liver. You don't need more than half an ounce a day. A lot of women get worried about vitamin A and liver. Most of those studies, in fact, all those studies are done on synthetic forms of vitamin A. And I think that liver,

whole forms of vitamin A are probably completely safe, but a nickel or quarter size piece of liver a few times a week for a woman wanting to conceive is going to be great. Organs like heart, either in a food like the sticks or a desiccated organ supplement, like we make at Heart and Soil or a fresh heart that you can grind into a burger. There are more and more companies like Force of Nature making heart grinds. Things like eggs are good, but the sourcing of the eggs is important, right? Pasture-raised organic is probably the best you're going to do in most grocery stores. And the tricky thing here is the chicken-fed corn and soy. Some people, both men and women, are allergic or at least sensitive

to the albumin and the egg white. So, but eggs are incredibly nutritious. And then in terms of plant foods, I would say do what works for you. If you don't have a problem with vegetables, great. Get rid of seed oils, get rid of high fructose corn syrup. I'm not a fan of artificial sweeteners.

I think if someone is eating, a man or a woman is eating prominently unprocessed animal foods and plant foods, they're gonna be great. And I would say, you know, the asterisk there is just don't fear red meat and organs associated with that. And women are going to be fantastic. And don't fear the calories either, because you want to make sure you're going to have carbohydrates from some source. I've had my time in ketogenic diets, and I don't think a ketogenic diet is going to be great for people in terms of that stuff. So you think fruit, how do you feel about potatoes, by the way?

So one of the experiments I did, we talked about that a little bit in the beginning, was with rice and then one with potatoes. Neither of them worked great for me. And so it's humbling feedback for me that there's a lot of bio-individuality. I have friends who do great on rice and I got organic rice. I washed it 17 times in the sink and then I fermented it overnight with apple cider vinegar and put it in the crock pot and I put it in a pressure cooker. And man, I wanted to love this because rice is delicious, but it just makes me feel kind of foggy. Yeah. I don't like, it doesn't make me feel good. I love it. It's delish, but it doesn't make me feel good. I feel amazing on potatoes. If you feel good with it, then that's awesome. All of the foods have little caveats, right? So

potatoes have a little bit of moderate amounts of oxalates. If somebody has arthritis or issues with oxalates, it's one of those oxalate foods. But I'm not saying that to dissuade people from eating potatoes, just be aware. Because I was talking to our mutual friend Joshua from The Minimalists yesterday. We're actually doing a documentary here.

That's one of the reasons I'm in LA right now. And the documentary is not on animal-based science. It's just on, I think that if I were to summarize it, the documentary, which is still in production, it's going to be a little while, is about improving food quality. And the idea, the thesis of the documentary is just that I want people to understand

that most of the illnesses that we suffer from are fixable, contrary to what Western medicine says, by improving the quality of our diets. But he and I were talking and he said, if he eats white potatoes, he just feels like his ankles are on fire. And I thought that's

Potentially a sensitivity to the oxalates or a lectin or something about the potato Yeah, his ankles don't feel good when I eat potatoes. I don't always get that. Maybe my low back feels a little stiffer I just feel like they make me feel almost too full. It's a strange sensation I get with white potatoes and When i'm in costa rica, my lifestyle is really active. I'm surfing two hours a day and plus sometimes. And so, and then I'll go skate. I just do things for fun. I've got a gym at my house. So between work sessions,

I'll go down and do Nordic raises or Nordic squats. And it's just, I'm active. And so my challenge in Costa Rica is to keep weight on. So I need to have carbohydrates and lots of calories. I'm not struggling with weight gain. I'm just trying not to lose too much weight. So when I eat something and it makes me feel very full and I stop eating foods, I think, okay,

what was the food that I ate that makes me feel that full? And potatoes have a lot of good nutrients, but I don't want to not eat meat. Yeah, I don't want to have my meat consumption go too low because I'm eating potatoes. So it's lifestyle-based too? Yeah, it is. So there are lots of sources of carbohydrates. I think tubers are an in-between carbohydrate. What is it? Is it a root?

It's essentially a synonym of a root. It's a tuber. Yeah. A carrot. I mean, there's botanical nuance here. But let's contrast this. Yeah. A carrot. I mean, there's botanical nuance here, but let's contrast this with other sources of carbohydrates that I think are problematic for more people. Not everyone, the grains. And we talked about rice, but I'm not a fan of oats either. And for some of the reasons we mentioned earlier, heavy metals, oats are often contaminated with glyphosate. Oats have saponins, which is like this soapy compound that is irritating people's guts. So like, I'm not a fan of oats, but people love oatmeal for breakfast. So if we're thinking carbohydrates, that's where the challenge comes for people in terms of figuring out where the carbohydrate that they're going to use to fuel their life is going to be,

what carbohydrate is going to be the best for them. I tend to backload my carbs. So with breakfast, I pretty much today I had like a bowl of grass-fed beef, two slices of bacon and some berries. That's like every day. I don't have my potato till the evening. I don't know if that's weird, but that's how I feel the best. If you feel the best, like that's so valid. Yeah. I eat carbs all day. Well, it sounds like you legit don't stop moving. I don't stop moving. I mean, I get up in the morning and the first thing I do at 5.35 in the morning in Costa Rica, the two cans are out,

the howler monkeys are going crazy and I have raw milk and honey before I go surf. So the first thing in the morning I have is that. Insane. Yeah. So, I mean, let's just also address another piece of this. I don't worry about glucose spikes at all. Okay.

Yeah. Give us the tea on glucose spikes because I had glucose goddess on the show. Right, right. And we talked all about that. So you don't... I don't worry about it. Another person that I would love to respectfully debate.

You versus glucose goddess. She doesn't seem particularly interested. So when I look at the research and I've been to her website, all respect to her. I think that whether it's me and Simon or what's her name, Jesse, I think we're all trying to do good in the world. I fully respect the intention of all of us. But when I look at the research that she is using to support her hypothesis that glucose spikes are problematic, it's entirely in people who have

diabetes and underlying metabolic dysfunction. And so if you look at someone with metabolic dysfunction and they have a glucose spike, it's a massive glucose spike because they have glucose intolerance. And you're looking at a glucose spike, 180, 200 milligrams per deciliter in the setting of metabolic dysfunction. So the whole context is messed up, right? Their mitochondria are dysfunctional because they're diabetic. And we can talk about what I think causes that, but you cannot, it is not wise to try and translate something that happens in a diabetic when they eat a piece of fruit to something that happens in a healthy person when they eat a piece of fruit. Because I suspect that most of Jesse's audience, Glucose Goddess's audience, is 20 to 35-year-old women who don't have diabetes, right? And so

if you do have diabetes, you don't probably want to make the majority of your diet fast-digesting carbohydrates. I don't believe there's any evidence in the medical literature that fruit or honey cause diabetes, but once you get to a point of metabolic dysfunction, you don't handle that well. So you have to wait before you make that any particular,

particularly large part of your diet until you reintroduce it. But to say to people, it's all about the glucose spike and not have attention to food quality, I think it's wrong. Just respectfully, I'll say that. And on her website, there's literally a banner with her supplements. And in the background is pizza and donuts and bagels. And the message is, you can eat whatever food you want as long as you moderate the glucose spike.

In the right order. In the right order. You know, with vinegar, as long as you moderate the glucose spike, you can eat whatever you want. And I think that's not the way that people feel good and lose weight long-term. I'm assuming you've heard of the new documentary on Netflix,

You Are What You Eat. Yeah, I did some content on it. The twin experiment. Just for context for anyone listening who doesn't know, there is a new documentary on Netflix, You Are What You Eat. Yeah, I did some content on it. The twin experiment, just for context for anyone listening who doesn't know, there is a new documentary on Netflix with twins. One eats an omnivore diet and one eats a vegan diet. And they basically follow the twins through life and show how they grow up differently. What's your take on that documentary? So funded by plant-based. Beyond Meat. Done at a plant-based center.

Lead researcher is plant-based. And also the lead researcher, wasn't he funded by Beyond Meat? Yeah, there's the part of the Stanford Center that was also separately funded by some of these things. And I think that, yeah, Beyond Meat had a lot of fingers in the documentary. So it's a lot of funding things going on there, a lot of potential bias. If you actually look at what they did,

they don't talk a lot about what they gave the omnivore group. They say it's a healthy omnivore diet, but they didn't really talk about it. And in the paper that they published, they said, oh, the study was so great, the vegans lost more weight. Well, if you look at the data, the vegans also ate less calories. great, the vegans lost more weight. Well, if you look at the data, the vegans also ate less calories.

They gave the vegans less calories and then the vegans ate less and then they lost more weight. So, okay, well, the omnivores also lost weight but the vegans lost more weight because they either gave them less weight because they gave them portions of food in the beginning and the vegans lost more weight.

So it's kind of like stacked in a weird way. And then the other metric they used was LDL. So this will wrap us into a conversation around cholesterol. And they said, oh, look, the vegan diet decreased LDL more than the omnivore diet. That was the problem Simon had with my blood work. The LDL, the cholesterol. Yes. This is one of Simon's hangups again, and I'll try to represent his position as accurately as I can. From, I think I was telling you before we started the podcast that Simon and I recently had a, we hung out at Gold's Gym in Venice and we didn't record this conversation.

We probably should have. We worked out, quote unquote, worked out for two and a half hours. And I think we probably lifted weights for 25 minutes and the rest of it was just talking and kind of debating, friendly, not being recorded. And I learned a little bit of his story from him. And the main reason that he communicated to me, and again, I'm hoping I'm representing this accurately. He can correct me if I'm not,

is that he was concerned about his iron levels and his cholesterol. That was the reason he went vegan. He didn't feel bad. He just didn't want his cholesterol to be so high. So Simon is very concerned about cholesterol and we can talk about why he and I differ in our views here. So we'll wrap back into that. But that was the main reason that he went

vegan and he thinks a lot about ApoB and LDL. And that's one of the main concerns he has about omnivorous diets. The iron thing is a separate conversation. Some people accumulate excess iron due to their genetics. I don't know what Simon's genetics are, but there are lots of ways to mitigate iron levels, even if you're eating meat, which has all the unique nutrients we talked about earlier. And a lot of people, especially females, are deficient in iron, and iron deficiency is the single greatest nutrient deficiency in the Western world today.

I believe I'm accurate with that statement. So in the twin experiment, though you are what you eat, they said, oh, the vegan diet lowered ApoB, lowered LDL more than the omnivore diet. And we know very clearly that if youB, lowered LDL more than the omnivore diet. And we know very clearly that if you just look at LDL levels, this gets complicated. I'll try and keep it simple.

If you look at cholesterol, you have good cholesterol, bad cholesterol. Obviously these monikers are inaccurate, but those are LDL and HDL. And if you look at LDL, when LDL goes up, people get worried. And we know that seed oils lower LDL and saturated fats from animals When LDL goes up, people get worried. And we know that seed oils lower LDL.

And saturated fats from animals raise LDL in probably 70% of the population and they may raise it 10 to 20%. So when I get my blood work done, I don't have any seed oils in my diet. I'm very strict about this. And I eat a lot of saturated fat, relatively speaking. I eat butter. I don't worry about the fat in my steak.

And that's where I get my saturated fat from. So my LDL is usually 20% higher than Western medicine would like to see it. And but what's interesting is that if you look more deeply, and this has been studied many times in interventional studies in the medical literature, as polyunsaturated fats like seed oils lower LDL, they increase oxidized LDLl and lp little a and i don't know how simon would respond to this because those two metrics are even stronger predictors than apo b of cardiovascular risk so apo b is essentially ldl contains apo b but there are other apo b containing lipoproteins and so

when you look at your cholesterol there's just this calculation of like what is your apo b and then what is your ldl and if you look at the cardiovascular literature apo b is perhaps more predictive of cardiovascular risk than ldl but they're almost the same thing so we can just talk about ldl slash apo b and we know that these go up with saturated fat, but oxidized LDL goes down, LP little a goes down. And oxidized LDL and LP little a are very strong predictors of cardiovascular risk. And so never have I heard really anyone who is worried about ApoB address this apparent discordance.

What we also know from natural studies of free-limbing humans is that when you give humans saturated fat, their LDL goes up. I mean, there's two really fascinating populations of humans in the Polynesian atolls. The names are amazing. There's the Pukapukans. That's the real name. Oh my gosh.

That's so cute. And the Tokelauans. And the Tokelauans get 63% of their calories from coconut. So they have a lot of saturated fat. Now it's shorter chain saturated fat, 12 and 14 chain saturated fats than a lot of the saturated fats that occur in meat, which are 16 and 18 carbons. And the Pukapukans also get saturated fat, but less. And so you look at these two groups. Now, both of these groups eat unprocessed food,

unprocessed meat, fish, coconuts, and some other plant foods, roots. That's essentially their diet. They don't have a lot of seed oils. They're generally un-Westernized. Neither group has high rates of cardiovascular disease. I think compared to the Western population, they have vanishingly low rates of cardiovascular disease. And the rates of cardiovascular disease are low in both. The Toca Lawans have cholesterol that's 30 to 40% higher than the Pukapukans because they eat more saturated fat. But their cardiovascular disease are low in both. The Toca Lawans have cholesterol that's 30 to 40% higher than the Pukapukans because they eat more saturated fat, but their cardiovascular disease risk is no higher. And we see this across the literature. And this is where Simon and I disagree. If you look at humans who are metabolically healthy, who don't eat ultra processed foods,

increases in LDL cholesterol, increases in ApoB don't always have the same increase in cardiovascular disease risk that you see in someone that's diabetic. The context here is super important and it's often missed. And it's often wrapped into broad swaths of experience saying, we know that when you have more ApoB, you have more cardiovascular disease, which is not true.

Yeah. Because there are populations that defy this metric. The weight of the evidence suggests that in many people, more ApoB equals more cardiovascular disease. But those many people are generally diabetic, overweight, obese, metabolically dysfunctional. So the point here is, is the ApoB the problem or is the metabolic dysfunction that's the problem? And I would argue it's the latter. The arguments around LDL and cholesterol hinge on the notion that ApoB is directly injurious to the endothelium. So if more ApoB is bad, ApoB must be causing damage to the arteries. And that I think is not supported by the literature at all. There are so many unique functions of ApoB in the human body or LDL that never get talked about.

So we talked about quorum sensing in the gut. Well, when you have an infection, bacteria also communicate in your blood via quorum sensing. And one of the unique roles of the lipoproteins in our body is to interrupt the quorum sensing to prevent pathogenic bacteria because you're supposed to have bacteria in your gut. You're not supposed to have bacteria in your bloodstream.

So LDL particles, all lipoproteins actually, HDL, chylomicrons for a moment, they all interrupt the quorum sensing of these bacteria. So it's not surprising that if you look at elderly populations, those who have the highest levels of cholesterol live the longest in Leiden 85 plus cohort, in the Lothian birth cohort, the lowest rates of cancer, the lowest rates of dementia, and the lowest rates of cardiovascular disease, if you look at elderly people.

So how do you explain that, right? They have the lowest rates of cardiovascular disease. This is observational, but it completely flies in the face of the notion that ApoB is causing endothelial damage. Again, people can look this up. This is the Leiden 85 study and the Lothian birth cohort. And Lothian is like Edinburgh in Scotland. They looked at people in 1936 and they followed them for 70 plus years. And they found at the end of the study,

the people with the highest amount of cholesterol, more than 250 milligrams per deciliter, that's total cholesterol, had all these things I talked about. Lowest rates of cholesterol, more than 250 milligrams per deciliter, that's total cholesterol, had all these things I talked about, lowest rates of dementia, best mental functioning, lowest rates of cancer, lowest mortality.

And there was a subgroup of those people who was on statins, who were on statins, and they had the worst mental functioning. Now, statins can have other problems in the human brain besides lowering cholesterol. What's a statin? A statin is a medication

that inhibits the production of cholesterol in the liver. Oh, wait, why would they be on that? Because the doctor... Because they had high cholesterol and the doctor was trying to lower it. Okay. Yeah. One of the things Simon said in your podcast with him was that statins decrease the risk of cardiovascular disease. Oh, he did talk about that. Yeah. But the problem here is that we don't know that it's the lowering of ApoB that decreases cardiovascular disease. Statins also improve endothelial function. They also have negative effects.

When they inhibit the production of cholesterol in the liver, they inhibit the production of coenzyme Q10, this key component of the mitochondrial electron transport chain, which is why people on statins have increased rates of dementia, actually increased rates of diabetes, muscle aches, erectile dysfunction, all kinds of problems with statins. They're a dirty, dirty drug. So when we look at ApoB, when we look at LDL, there are, like I said, I just want to reiterate this point. There are many studies that show that if you are insulin sensitive,

there is a much, much lower increase in cardiovascular risk. The cardiovascular risk is attenuated massively when your LDL goes up. So there's not the same increase in cardiovascular risk with every elevation of LDL. And I think it's a really hard argument to make that a 10 to 20 to 30% increase in LDL from eating more saturated fat, less seed oils, which gives you less oxidized LDL, lower rates of LP little a

is going to increase your cardiovascular risk. When you feel better, more energy, better hormones, more fertility, right? So there's a real, and don't get me wrong, it's a complex discussion, but it's the center of this discussion. And again, we say saturated fat raises LDL, but people look pretty healthy when they eat saturated fat.

This is what frustrates me with documentaries like the twin study that came out on Netflix. I have a very tangible example. One of mine and Greg's close friends, he was mostly plant-based, avoided red meat at all costs, had a little bit of chicken here and there. After, I think, talking to Greg and hearing the podcast and, you know, kind of being around me and Greg more, he got more confident around red meat and he looks amazing. He's lifting weights. He put on muscle. He was feeling good. And I think his concern was that, um, heart disease runs in his family. He then watched the documentary and came back to us and said, he's nervous and kind of wants to go back

to his old diet. And that's what concerns me because I feel like having things like that on the internet, people don't have people like you telling them the truth behind these studies. Although I do feel like the internet is kind of fighting back on this. I hope people understand where this documentary is, like what the documentary is based on

and the lack of true science behind it. But still there are people like this who may be harmed in the short term. Yes. The amount of fear around cardiovascular disease is wild to me. I think that it's also important that people understand that if you look at total mortality, death from all causes,

there's really not an association with ldl cholesterol and lowering ldl cholesterol doesn't consistently improve all-cause mortality so it is true that if you take a statin and a pcs k9 inhibitor which is a monoclonal antibody we can get your ldl cholesterol or anyone's ldl cholesterol apo b down to neonatal levels 30 milligrams per deciliter we can get your LDL cholesterol or anyone's LDL cholesterol, ApoB, down to neonatal levels, 30 milligrams per deciliter. We can erase your risk of dying from heart disease. But are we also going to increase your risk of dementia, cancer, muscle aches, infertility, low libido, I mean, muscle strength?

Like what are the costs of that? And if you look at the studies across the board, it is not clear. It actually looks like very clearly that lowering LDL does not improve overall mortality. So people may die less of cardiovascular disease and they die more of something else. And we don't have a metric that associates quality of life in there. So my concern is that there are a lot of longevity experts now also out there who are sowing the seeds of ApoB fear and essentially saying, be on a statin, be on a PCSK9 inhibitor, or consider these things strongly so you don't die of heart disease. And the message they have is

cardiovascular disease is the number one killer or one of the highest killers. So if you lower that, you'll live longer. This is not true. We don't know that. And your quality of life may be far worse. And we don't know that having an LDL of 120 or 130 and ApoB of 90 or 100, we don't know that's going to shorten your life because none of these conversations around lowering ApoB are taking into the context of metabolic health versus disease. There's one more thing Simon said that I want to push back on if people are technical about this. If you look at Mendelian randomization, so this is quite technical, it looks at genes and genes that associate with higher versus lower amounts of cholesterol, LDL, ApoB in humans. On the far end of the spectrum at the top right

is familial hypercholesterolemia. And people that have familial hypercholesterolemia have higher rates of heart disease. So a lot of people in the space will say, look, more cholesterol, more heart disease. But the problem with this is a couple of things. But what we know, there are two different types of familial hypercholesterolemia. There's monogenic and polygenic. And so you can have one gene that changes your LDL receptor or something else that raises your LDL. And those people have very clear impairments in other immune cells that are connected with this one gene that's mutated.

So it's not just the LDL that's high in people with monogenic FH. What also happens is their LDL is more likely to get taken up by macrophages. And that's the inside of your blood vessel when the immune cells engulf the LDL is more likely to get taken up by macrophages. And that's the inside of your blood vessel when the immune cells engulf the LDL particle. That's the inside. That's the beginning of a fatty streak and an atheromatous plaque. So no one in the space is talking about the fact that the far end of your correlation between high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease is skewed by genes that also affect cholesterol metabolism at the level of mitochondria. Does that make sense? That was kind of technical. I'm sorry. I mean, I'm nodding, but hopefully someone listening

understood that, but it sounded lovely. Okay. We'll move on. What was the thing that you said at the beginning that you tripped up on a little bit? Familial hypercholesterolemia, polygenic versus monogenic. I don't know. That's an insane phrase to say out loud. But anyway, so maybe... You and Simon really do need to have this debate because he looked at my blood work and which, by the way, I'd worked so hard on my blood work. Everything was improved. My holistic health practitioner said it was amazing. Can I see it? Yeah, I'll show you after, of course. But he was like, look at that LDL. Of course. So this is the problem. It's LDL myopic focus, right? I eat too many ribeyes. Of course. So this is the problem. It's LDL myopic focus, right?

I eat too many ribeyes. Of course. You eat just enough ribeyes, Mari. You don't eat too many. I told him how many ribeyes I eat, and he was like, you should be having one a week. Yeah, right.

You should be having one and a half a day, or two a day. I eat a lot of meat. I had like half a pound of beef this morning, I think. That's fantastic. I feel good on it. I know we have been talking for a while, but I do want to touch on EMFs. Yeah, yeah. We were talking about this before. AirPods, I mean, we're surrounded

by EMFs these days. What's the problem with the AirPods? So I wish I'd brought my EMF meter. I saw it in your video. It's very dramatic. It makes a crazy noise. It makes a crazy noise. It has big numbers, which are in microwatts per meter squared, which is how you measure microwave radiation, which is RF, radio frequency, electromagnetic fields. But there are things in our environment that are unseen that can potentially be harmful for us. And so we hearken back to this idea of what are we doing, experiencing, or living like as humans now

that's different than when we did 50, 150,000 years ago. Our exposure to EMFs is one of them. So it just raises a concern. And when you look at the studies on EMFs, so these are, this is like your cell phone, your AirPods, your wireless headphones, your wireless router. What else? Whoop bands, sometimes Apple watches have some. What about Oura Ring? Oura Ring can be low if you put it on airplane mode. I had a wireless mic that I used to record. It was a DJI wireless mic that had massive amounts of EMFs coming off it if it's connected to your phone, right? So if it's a Bluetooth thing somewhere, right? So Bluetooth, anything Bluetooth can have significant EMFs, electromagnetic fields,

which are radio frequency, microwave radiation. It's basically the same thing coming out of your microwave, right? And microwaves get measured at like millions of microwatts per meter squared, but you can simulate that with your wifi router. And the problem is at a high level scientific issue that it's going to heat up the cells in your body. So if you slept on a wifi router, you could heat up a bunch of cells near that, and that could cause problems. The other problem that I think is just beginning to be understood is that calcium channels and other cellular channels are probably affected by these EMFs.

There's over 1800 studies on these and the vast majority, over 85% suggested they're harmful to humans, either increasing oxidative stress, creating more DNA damage. There's a really interesting study where they took human sperm in like a Petri dish and put a cell phone under the Petri dish, right? And what do they find? They find the sperm like don't move

as well, right? The motility is impaired in the sperm when it's sitting on top of a cell phone. Imagine that. Me and Greg have been talking a lot about motility. Yeah. And they kept it equal temperature between the two things. So this is just pure EMFs affecting sperm. And this is the study that gets cited a lot for men or women putting their cell phone in their front pocket, for men with testicles and sperm, women in their sports bras for memory glands, or women putting their cell phones over their ovaries,

whatever, this is probably not a great thing. So if you look at AirPods, AirPods are interesting to me because if you put a phone up to your head, you're actually doing something in the pamphlet that comes with your iPhone. It says, don't put this next to your head. Does it? Yeah, I think it does. You're supposed to have it at least an inch or two away from your head. You're not supposed to put it next to your ear. You should

put it on speakerphone. Yeah, speakerphone. But even speakerphone is significant, but it's significantly mitigated as it goes away from your body quickly. The problem with AirPods is they're transmitting through your head and they're right on your face right on your ears for an hour Two a day. I mean I see people walking on the street with airpods In los angeles, I see people on airplanes for five hours with airpods on or wireless headphones I see people in the gym for an hour a day. Some people fall asleep with airpods in And that's that could be a real problem. We don't really have data to say confidently that it's safe. Is it potentially affecting tumors?

Is it affecting our mental health? Is it affecting anxiety? We don't really understand what this is doing. And the reason I mentioned this is because there are simple solutions, right? Wired headphones or just putting your phone on speakerphone, getting it out of your pants, putting it on airplane mode. And I showed Greg this. Maybe can we show an iPhone real quick on the film? Like,

okay. So Mari's entrusted me with her iPhone. So you're already on airplane mode. I'm going to take you off airplane mode. Maybe you can zoom into that. So when you do this, right, you've got this airplane mode and then you hit this button to go in airplane mode, right? Yeah. And a couple of things happened. It took off the cell signal and it took off the Wi-Fi, but the Bluetooth is still on. And if I hit the Bluetooth, it then goes white. The Bluetooth is still on your phone, even when it's white. So the Bluetooth has to be gray. And when I showed Greg this and I hit airplane mode, both his Wi-Fi and Bluetooth were still on.

So what you have to then do is go to your settings. I don't know where your settings is, but you can show them this. Go to your settings and actually find Bluetooth and turn Bluetooth off in the settings, and then it'll go gray. Because you can't actually, with a shortcut, you cannot turn Bluetooth off there. So what does the white even mean? I don't even know. It means it's not, I don't know. It's just Apple messing with us. Okay. So now I should be good. So now you pull it down and it's all gray.

Yeah. Wait, hold on. Oh yeah. It's all gray. It's all gray. But when the wifi and the Bluetooth are white, they're still on. on okay and then we're getting emfs yes you're getting them in your pocket so if someone's on a fertility journey they should for sure be careful of where they're putting their phone yeah yeah and then people can turn the wi-fi router off at night yeah right i think i've heard of people installing these like buttons where you can literally turn off every, you know, technology you have in the house. Yeah. I would like that.

Like a breaker in your house? Yeah. You get it in every house. Yes. I feel like that's genius, but also kind of annoying, I guess. Yeah. I mean, sometimes you will just like turn off

all the electricity in their house. That's pretty intense. It's pretty intense. Yeah. Because if you want a security system or who knows. Yeah. I like having my cameras. Fair, fair.

So it is what it is, but there's ways to do it. It's just interesting to go down the rabbit hole. But I think that the AirPods are kind of top of mind for a lot of people and would definitely decrease the inputs a lot. Tell us what's new with you. I know you've just launched Lineage Meat Sticks. Tell us all about them. So me and Anthony Gustin friend the guy that

i went to tanzania with good friend um he developed perfect keto and now is my partner with this one we did 54 trials of these meat sticks it's so hard to get the flavor right they're the only meat sticks that have heart and liver and so what i I want to do with this, the vision is just, how do I create something that makes people's lives easier? I want people to eat a steak and heart and liver that are fresh. But if you want it on the go, here's a cool thing. On a plane, before a workout, after a workout for kids. I mean, I have a niece and a nephew and they kill beef sticks. They love this stuff for a snack. I mean, I just, I don't have kids, but it's just like, wait, what? Like kids eat snacks all the time. And I don't know how most parents

handle this. So that's pretty genius. Yeah. So I wanted to create something like that. I wasn't really stoked about the other meat sticks that were on the market. So what we did that's different is we have an air dried meat stick. So these are never heated above 78 degrees Fahrenheit. They're in a beef collagen casing and they're in a drying room for five days, which means they never get heated. And because we're air drying and not cooking them, like most other meat sticks on the market, there are some meat sticks with grass-fed beef now, but there's no meat sticks on the market widely

that you can get that are air dried like this. And the air dried meat sticks don't require nitrites or nitrates in the form of celery powder. This can be problematic for humans. I don't think we know these are safe or lactic acid or citric acid or any of these other preservatives. All we use is vinegar in here.

So the ingredients are grass-fed beef, grass-fed heart, grass-fed liver, vinegar, and salt and a collagen casing. That's it. So really proud of it. It tastes good. You tried it before the show. I was about to say Greg and I did try before and it was delicious. I think it's just salty enough. Like I'm very salt sensitive and I feel like it's perfect amount of salt. If you're like me and you're a little squeamish around getting organs in, I didn't even really notice that I was eating heart and liver. Delicious, super easy on the go. And I have to give you props for doing it the hard way. I know how difficult that must have been. It must

have taken a long time and it's expensive. So I think this is a wonderful product and I'm so excited about it. Super proud of it. And this is the classic flavor. There's going to be more flavors coming. Probably we're going to see what people want or maybe do a spicy flavor, garlic herb, because, you know, some of the feedback we got was they're bland and I think they're good. They don't, they don't taste bland to me. They just taste like meat. But I think a lot of us are, are trained to want meat sticks that have jalapeno or garlic and herbs. So we're going to make more flavors and lineage is cool. It's a different company than Harden Soil. Harden Soil makes the organs in the capsules. We talked about this last time and different unique organs from Harden Soil. A lot of the organs we

make at Harden Soil are hard to get in anything else. I think it's really fascinating what things like testicle can do for men or uterus ovaries and fallopian tubes can do for women. But the vision for Lineage is just to create food products. So we've got a lot of other food products coming. We talked about the honey. I don't know how much I can talk to you. We got a tallow coming and all kinds of stuff coming in the next few months. And it's going to be a fun project to build like animal-based foods for people just to make their lives easier. I think it's a fantastic idea and very in line with who you are. Where can everyone find you online? Where can they buy Lineage? I'm at paulsaladinomd, all the socials and lineageprovisions.com

if you guys want to get beef sticks. I don't know when this podcast is coming out, but I'll say they've sold out twice now. Oh. On the day we released them. Yeah. So we released them a week ago. They sold out.

Greg bought a lot of them. First day. He probably bought them. Greg was maybe the reason. And they sold out again today. So we released them again today. They sold out. But we're ramping up production

and we're going to be getting them back in stock. But it's good that people are liking them. Incredible. Yeah, it's fun. Paul, thank you so much for coming on for part three. Fun times, it like flies by. I know, we'll have to do part four in Costa Rica, I think. I love it.

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 marilowelland.com. It will be linked in the show notes. This is a Wellness Out Loud production produced by Drake Peterson, Fiona

Attucks, and Kelly Kyle. This show is edited by Mike Fry, and our video is recorded by Luis 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.