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Realfoodology - The Carnivore Diet, Sugar, & Seed Oils - What’s Actually Healthy? | Paul Saladino
Episode Date: March 4, 2025235: In this second installment, we continue peeling back the layers on the nuances of carnivore eating, seed oils, and autoimmune issues. We also dive into my fiancé Hector’s incredible psoriasis ...healing journey and how diet can impact thyroid health. Paul brings his unique perspective as both a trained physician and a passionate advocate for ancestral eating, and this episode dives even deeper into some of the most misunderstood areas of nutrition. We also touch on the intersection of food policy, healthcare, and how misinformation has shaped modern dietary guidelines. Whether you’re new to Paul’s work or a longtime follower, this conversation will leave you questioning much of what we’ve been taught about health and nutrition. Topics Covered: Hector’s psoriasis healing journey and the role of diet Why seed oils are so damaging—and where they hide in our food supply Tracking macros, protein intake, and transitioning away from strict carnivore Dangerous ingredients in infant formula What carbs and sugars are actually good for you Check Out Part 1!!! Sponsored By Our Place Use code REALFOODOLOGY for 10% off at fromourplace.com Timeline Timeline is offering 33% off your order of Mitopure while supplies last Go to timeline.com/REALFOODOLOGY33 and use code REALFOODOLOGY33 SuppCo Get 100% free access today at supp.co/REALFOODOLOGY. Function Skip Function’s waitlist at www.functionhealth.com/realfoodology Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Introduction 00:02:21 - Psoriasis, eczema, and the carnivore diet 00:08:33 - Foods that trigger autoimmune and thyroid issues 00:13:19 - Sugar, fruit, and metabolic health 00:17:46 - Breaking down sucrose 00:18:45 - Benefits of fruit juices 00:24:41 - Tracking macros and meal planning tips 00:27:48 - How to make oats healthier 00:30:01 - Ancestral wisdom and environmental factors 00:31:59 - Seed oils: what they are and why they’re problematic 00:38:07 - The science behind seed oils 00:41:27 - Why food guidelines need reform 00:44:18 - Seed oils hiding in baby formula 00:48:48 - Mislabeling issues in infant formula 00:49:58 - Paul’s medical school experience and personal health journey Show Links: Part 1 With Paul Saladino Check Out Paul: Website Instagram Youtube Check Out Courtney: LEAVE US A VOICE MESSAGE Check Out My new FREE Grocery Guide! @realfoodology www.realfoodology.com My Immune Supplement by 2x4 Air Dr Air Purifier AquaTru Water Filter EWG Tap Water Database Produced By: Drake Peterson
Transcript
Discussion (0)
on today's episode of the Real Foodology podcast.
When we're eating some of these foods, we're eating them wrong today.
And we're just not thinking about where we've come from historically.
Welcome back to the Real Foodology podcast.
This is part two of my conversation with Paul Saladino.
If you missed part one, go back and listen to that first.
Thanks for listening.
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So I wanted to share this with my audience
because you and I texted about this personally,
but I haven't even shared this on my Instagram yet.
So my audience is very invested in Hector's psoriasis journey right now,
because I've been sharing with them for the last year.
So when Hector and I first met, he has had psoriasis for almost a decade.
And he, in his mind, had tried everything to get rid of it.
But in his mind, it was the creams and steroids and all that.
So when we met, I was like, oh my gosh, we got to get rid of... He was in his mind it was the creams and steroids and all that. So when we met, I was like,
oh my gosh, he was doing the Tide Pods,
we were getting rid of his toxic body wash.
So I started at the low-hanging fruit, right?
Got rid of all that.
There was nothing budged.
We tried a gluten-free diet.
Saw a little bit of improvement, but not really much.
And just so people know how it manifests on him,
it's on his scalp, and then he has these really big scabs
on his arms.
So one of them we can see,
we can like really see the progress on it.
And we've done, I mean, we went so far as doing BPC 157.
We have done stool tests, we have done blood work.
Like I just want to outline for like everyone,
like we have gone really far to try to figure this out.
Nothing really made it budge.
So he wakes up on January 1st, he's really active on X,
and X is going crazy for carnivore right now,
I think because it's like New Year
and I don't know what it is.
So he wakes up January 1st and he's like,
I'm going to try the carnivore diet.
And I was like, great, I love this.
He's like, I think that it might work.
Also, we had dinner with Michaela Peterson
maybe a month ago and she was like, you've
got to do carnivore diet.
She was proponent for lion diet, but he was like, I don't think
I can do that.
So fast forward to maybe like day three and he's like, I don't
feel well.
So I text you because I'm like, I have Paul's number.
I'm going to check in with him and see like kind of what we're
doing.
And he was only doing meat and like electrolytes basically.
And you told him to add in a little bit of orange juice
and some fruit and maybe some more carbohydrates
to do like honey.
So he feels so much better.
Now, as of today since recording,
I've never seen, I'm like so blown away.
I know it happens, but to see it with my own eyes
is really crazy.
His psoriasis is going away.
This is so cool.
It is going away. So is so cool. It is going away.
So just so your audience knows, I wrote a book about the carnivore diet in 2020, and
I did a carnivore diet of meats and organs and animal fat for a year and a half. And
my eczema went away. After a year and a half, I ran into some pretty serious consequences
from long-term keto. And I went to something that I've just termed animal-based to give it a framework that people
can talk about.
Animal-based, in my mind, is meat and organs.
So it's like a carnivore diet, but you add in things like fruit and honey and raw dairy.
So I think of it in terms of like, what are the least toxic plant foods?
And we can talk about why I think fruit is less toxic than vegetables and what vegetables
are. And so I see animal- less toxic than vegetables and what vegetables are.
And so I see animal-based, because I saw you post something.
You were like, he's eating carnivore-ish or carnivore-adjacent.
I was like, Courtney, it's animal-based.
Call it whatever.
I don't understand the terminology.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, because everybody was writing me being like, what's carnivore-adjacent?
And I was like, I don't even know.
Like I can't even.
Right.
But some people use the term carnivore now and they mean animal-based.
A lot of people are saying, I'm carnivore, I eat meat plus strawberries.
And I'm like, okay, that's cool, you're carnivore, but just call it animal based so
people understand.
And it's just so people understand what it is.
Joe Rogan actually came up with the term when I was on his podcast and I was like, great,
I love it.
It's like plant based but better.
Because the idea is that you base the majority of your calories in your diet around animal
foods.
I get up in the morning, I eat raw milk with honey and organs in the morning, and then
I have meat, and then I have fruit.
But most of what I eat in the day where I'm getting most of my calories and nutrition
is from animal foods, whether it's meat, whether it's organs, whether it's raw milk, butter.
And then I'm using the plant foods for carbohydrates on the side.
That's why I think of it as animal-based with some plants.
But when people eat carbohydrates in the form of fruit and honey, it makes it so much more
sustainable because you think a cucumber is a fruit, an avocado is a fruit, squash is
a fruit. I just cooked some squash today. The reason I don't recommend people do
vegetables is because a lot of the vegetables do contain defense chemicals which can trigger autoimmune
conditions.
So you have like a hierarchy, right?
If you're just eating a standard American diet, and I know Hector wasn't doing this,
but you got to get rid of the processed foods, right?
You got to get rid of the seed oils and the dyes.
And so then you get to a pretty healthy diet, which is a mix of vegetables, a mix of fruit,
maybe you're eating nuts and seeds, you're eating all single ingredient foods, right?
But a lot of people who still eat, quote, healthy and are eating all single ingredient
foods or foods their great grandmother would recognize still have autoimmune conditions.
And this is where I think carnivore and animal based, which is meat and fruit, gets really
interesting because for me with my eczema, like I had eczema eating strict organic paleo.
I was eating really good in my residency.
After medical school, I went to residency at the University of Washington in Seattle.
I was eating salads with avocados and almonds and I was eating mushrooms because they're
healthy.
I'm eating grass-fed beef.
I was eating really, quote, healthy foods that a lot of people could do fine on.
My immune system was reacting to it and I couldn't see it until I pulled everything
out and just ate meat.
I went too far and I've tried to come back to something that works for me.
I don't think everyone needs to eat animal based, but I think that it's a good framework
for people who have autoimmune disease or who are looking to see if their underlying
gut issues or autoimmune conditions could be related to some of these foods that we
think of as healthy that do contain defense chemicals.
Because then I look at like, okay, within the foods that are even single ingredient,
are there problematic foods for some humans?
Yes.
I do think that the nightshade fruits and vegetables cause immunologic reactions as
an example.
These are things like tomatoes, eggplant, goji berries.
I love tomatoes. I love
tomatoes. I'm Italian. My last name is Saladino, which I get endless comments about. His salad
and his last name. But I'm Italian. My family is Sicilian. And I love tomatoes and I've
tried to make tomato paste. I get organic tomatoes from the farmer's market. I stew
them. I take the skin off, take the seeds out, make tomato paste. In three days, I always get eczema.
My body doesn't like tomatoes.
They're a great food for humans, but some people get immunologic reactions from the
nightshades.
I think some people get immunologic reactions from leafy greens.
Kale has chemicals in it of the isothiocyanate family, which prevent the absorption of iodine
at the level of the thyroid.
If you have thyroid issues, I think it's worth avoiding all brassicas. of the isothiocyanate family, which prevent the absorption of iodine at the level of the thyroid.
If you have thyroid issues, I think it's worth avoiding all brassicas.
This is broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collard greens.
The whole mustard family should be taken out of your diet to see if your thyroid problems
get better, right?
Yes.
A lot of people eat spinach every day thinking it's healthy.
It's full of oxalates.
It's full of oxalates.
Explain what those are for people that don't know.
So oxalates, they're dicarboxylic acids. It's oxylic acid. It's a waste product
of a couple of different amino acids in the human body, proline and hydroxyproline.
And we make oxalates in the human body, but we excrete, we only make a small amount per day.
But they occur in plant foods in 10 to 100x times what we're used to getting.
There are documented medical cases of people dying from eating foods that are high in oxalates.
This is medical literature fact.
You never see rhubarb leaves.
Remember rhubarb pie?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So rhubarb stems are okay, but the rhubarb leaves have so many oxalates that they can't
even be sold.
There are documented cases of people dying from rhubarb leaves have so many oxalates that they can't even be sold. There are documented cases of people dying from rhubarb leaves.
And there are documented cases of kidney failure from spinach green smoothies.
Some of the interesting cases are a woman who had a ruin Y gastric bypass, so she was
absorbing more of the oxalates than regular.
But at a subclinical level, it's hard to say in you or I, like, are oxalates benign, you know?
Could they be causing joint pain? So I think if people have joint issues, any history of kidney stones,
really any thyroid issues, any autoimmune issues in general, it's probably worth thinking about what kind of oxalates you're getting.
There's another whole series of literature on oxalates
around vulvodynia.
It's women who have pain in their vagina and cystitis,
and it gets a lot better when they eliminate oxalates.
Are the oxalates accumulating in the vagina,
in the women's reproductive tract,
in the bladder causing pain?
This is nothing, never even talked about in medical school.
Well, my brain immediately went to, I had a friend when we were in our 20s, it
was a really big problem for her and I wish I'd known this then.
Oxalate.
And again, it's like, doesn't cost anything.
You just have to know, like, okay, try cutting this out.
Like Hector did, like, okay, try cutting these foods out.
And so this is why I think an animal-based diet is valuable.
It's just a framework of starting point, right? And it's more sustainable than strict carnivore, which is just meat or meat and eggs, all animal
foods, because you need carbohydrates.
Most humans do better with carbohydrates.
I've talked about this on my podcast.
The ketogenic diet works for some applications, but I think for most people it doesn't work
long term.
And Hector experienced this, right?
Because after three days, he's going into ketosis, he doesn't feel good.
You don't need to go there.
It's not really great for humans to do that.
You can get there and I was in long term ketosis for like a year and a half and I ended up
with declining testosterone.
My testosterone went from like 800 to 500.
I had heart palpitations at night because of electrolyte deficiencies and imbalances.
I had heart palpitations at night because of electrolyte deficiencies and imbalances. I had sleep disturbance.
I had something called hypnagogic jerks, which is so traumatic.
So hypnagogic means you're falling asleep.
Every once in a while, most people get this.
You fall asleep and you jerk a little bit.
I would get it so bad that it would wake me up.
And it's a magnesium deficiency in other electrolytes related to long-term ketosis.
So I would startle myself awake and then my sympathetic nervous system is on high alert
and I can't go back to sleep and then I start to fall asleep again 20 minutes later and
I startle myself awake and this is all related to keto in me and it was traumatic.
I didn't realize it at the time but it can have a lot of issues.
I'll just say as like a nugget, people can look at my material if they're interested
in this, a ketogenic diet works for people who have broken mitochondria that can't be
fixed because it delivers electrons to the electron transport chain at a different place
than glycolysis and aerobic respiration.
If you have pyruvate entering the mitochondria, you're going to get electrons delivered to
the electron transport chain differently than you do when you do ketosis because you're getting beta
oxidation.
So you have basically beta oxidation, it's a little bit different and it can circumvent
issues in the electron transport chain for some people.
But I think so like in people with recalcitrant epilepsy or who have dementia, ketogenic diets
seem to work.
And maybe in some people who have mental illness, schizophrenia perhaps, but I think that for most of us,
ketogenic diets create unnecessary stress
and they do kind of put the body
in this evolutionary scarcity mindset that we don't need.
I don't think carbohydrates are harmful for humans at all.
Okay, well. From the right sources.
Which goes to my next question,
because I'm really curious to know
what your thoughts are on sugar.
So this is one that I really have had a hard time letting go of because in my own
personal experience, I was always very, very addicted to sugar growing up.
And now granted, it was like candy, cookies, you know, all this stuff.
And the way that I was able to ultimately get over that was completely cutting out all
sugar consumption.
Like I cut out honey, I cut out maple syrup,
and then because there was a time period there
when I was on my journey,
I feel like most of us probably have this story
where it's like, as I'm learning, I'm trying different things,
and as I'm getting healthier,
then I just replaced everything with maple syrup and honey,
and then I was still struggling with the sugar cravings and all that.
And then we hear, too, there's kind of this back and forth between, like, OK, well, sugar
is sugar is sugar, no matter if it's coming from fruit or if it's coming from cane sugar.
And so you want to be aware.
Now, I've always said, I've always told people that we don't want to vilify fruit, but I've
always had the notion of, like, you don't want to go out and have, like, five bananas.
Like, do you remember that woman that was online
and her name was Freely the Banana Girl?
Yeah, she's still out there.
So there was a very small, I mean like maybe a couple months
where I never went and did what she did,
but I was kind of, I was making banana and ice cream
and I was like kind of like dabbling in it.
I feel like shit.
I felt like my blood sugar was always spiking,
I was starving all the time, and so for me,
I just never felt like eating a lot of sugar was that great.
So what are your thoughts on that
and where do you kind of lie with all that?
I think sugar is bad for humans,
but not for the reasons we think it's bad for humans.
Okay, tell me about it.
So sugar is bad for humans
because it causes dysbiosis in the gut.
And I don't hear people talk about this a lot.
And by sugar, I mean processed sugar.
So this is the difference between high fructose corn syrup or sucrose and fruit.
Because we know, like in the kitchen over here, I have blueberries and strawberries
and I have squash.
All of those contain sucrose.
Sucrose is a disaccharide of glucose and fructose. And fructose is a
sugar that gets a lot of, I think, incorrect vilification. Like, it gets a bad rap.
Tell me more because I vilify fructose a lot.
No, you shouldn't.
Well, because it bypasses the whole cycle to create ATP and go straight to the liver.
We'll talk about it. We'll talk about it.
Okay.
Yeah, we'll talk about it.
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So in a strawberry, right, you have sucrose,
which is fructose and glucose.
And that strawberry also contains hundreds,
if not thousands, of other chemicals, right?
It is a chemically diverse entity.
And what's so interesting about strawberries or honey,
which also has hundreds of compounds, those compounds, many of which are polyphenolic, not all of them are, they actually act to
mitigate the damage that sucrose has in the human body.
And what's the difference here?
The difference is that if you eat pure sucrose or hypochondriac corn syrup, it causes dysbiosis
in your gut.
It causes overgrowth of the wrong bacteria.
And this is the problem, is that we would never have eaten pure sucrose historically.
Even if you make sugarcane juice, which is delicious by the way, have you ever had it?
Sugarcane juice is freaking delicious.
It is green.
It's full of polyphenols and other chemicals.
Sugarcane juice is really healthy for humans.
And I know your audience is going to lose their mind.
Even I'm a little bit like, ugh.
No, I promise you.
But I'm available.
I'm available for it.
There are controlled studies in humans with sugarcane juice showing benefits.
There are controlled studies in humans with watermelon juice, orange juice, blood orange
juice, pomegranate juice, grape juice, blueberry juice.
I don't know about coconut water.
All of the juices that I just listed, there are controlled studies in humans showing improved
endothelial function, decreased lipid peroxidation, decreased oxidative stress, decreased DNA
damage.
There's actually a study in humans where they gave watermelon juice while they were doing
an oral glucose tolerance test.
So they're feeding someone a glu-cola, which is basically a Coca-Cola with pure glucose,
which is meant to spike your blood sugar, and they give watermelon juice with it, and it mitigated, it improved
insulin sensitivity when they gave it with a glu-cola.
So they gave extra sugar in watermelon juice, and because of the components in the watermelon
juice, it improved insulin sensitivity relative to control of pure glu-cola.
So there's a very big difference between pure sugar, which is sucrose, or high fructose
corn syrup, which has its own problems, and fruit and fruit juice and honey that's raw
and real.
And the difference is in all of these other chemicals, which mitigate overgrowth of bacteria
in the gut.
And the reason dysbiosis is so harmful is because it causes metabolic endotoxemia.
So endotoxin is lipopolysaccharide.
This is a gram negative bacterial cell wall component, LPS, and we know that LPS is toxic
to our mitochondria.
LPS causes metabolic dysfunction.
So the problem here is if you get dysbiosis, if you get metabolic endotoxemia, if you get
increased endotoxin, you're going to get metabolic dysfunction.
You're going to break your mitochondria.
You don't want that.
But humans never just stumbled across a pile of cane sugar on the ground.
We never did that.
We would get, you know, you'd eat a beet, you know, which are full of oxalates incidentally,
so maybe you don't eat too many beets.
Even though they're delicious, that's the previous conversation.
You eat a sugar cane, you're getting all these other chemicals.
You have honey, which is a prize food for humans throughout our
existence and there's tons of evidence from the Hadza or other hunter-gatherers in Africa.
Some examples of hunter-gatherers in Africa, at times of the year they make 60 plus percent
of their calories from honey and they're not insulin resistant.
That's interesting.
Yeah. So they don't get fat and they don't get insulin resistant.
Yeah.
Now, what Freelee the Banana Girl is doing is raw veganism, fruitarianism, which is the
problem there is that you're deficient in all the nutrients that come in animal foods.
But like I just got into a debate with Brian Johnson, the Don't Die guy on Twitter yesterday about
this.
But I was calling him out because he did a tweet a few months ago or a couple months
ago, right when we were in Phoenix, I think for AmFest, talking about he thought seed
oils were healthy.
And then he did another post on X about how red meat was so harmful to humans, citing
all of this observational research.
And so I was like, look, dude, I'm done with this.
Put up or shut up.
I've invited him on the podcast multiple times to have respectful conversation and
debate and he came back and said, show your blood work Paul, show your blood markers and
I responded and said, I've done it.
I do it every six months.
I have no less than five podcasts on my YouTube channel where I spend an hour and a half discussing
all of my comprehensive blood work and so that's just to say that I get my blood work
every six months at a minimum and
my fasting insulin is 3.2.
My hemoglobin A1C is 5.2.
My fasting glucose is 76 or 82 milligrams per deciliter depending on the time you do
it.
And so my HSCRP is 0.2 milligrams per liter.
So it's like the blood work kind of tells this detail.
I'm not insulin resistant.
There's no issue and I'll eat a lot of carbohydrates.
And so to wrap it around full circle here, I think in some people who are metabolically
broken, which happens at the level of the mitochondria and we can talk about what I
think actually happens if you want, you're not going to handle carbohydrates that well.
So if you give a tablespoon of honey to a diabetic, their blood sugar might go up.
I don't actually think that's the worst thing in the world because there is a study where
they gave diabetics honey and it improved insulin sensitivity.
Their blood sugar goes up a little bit, but the insulin sensitivity improves, probably
related to improved gut flora from the compounds in the honey.
So when we think about diabetes, we're so glucose-centric
that I think we're missing the plot.
Glucose is a symptom of diabetes.
It's not the cause.
You don't get diabetes by eating so many carbohydrates
that you just exhaust your pancreas.
That's not what happens.
You get diabetes by breaking your mitochondria.
Because the prevailing narrative now is kind of that like,
oh, you're just eating too many carbs. Bullshit.
Like, I can show you people who have 95% of their diet is carbohydrates.
There's tribes in Africa, tribes in the Polynesian atolls.
90 plus percent of their diet is carbohydrates.
They don't have diabetes.
So my question is, do you think that maybe, depending on where your ancestors come from
and what your genealogy is, that maybe there's some people that would affect them more than others.
S? Because, for example, with me, we've done a lot of genetic testing on me,
and I've been a guinea pig for all these diets for the last 15, 20 years.
I've tried keto, I've tried everything,
and I got to a place, and my genetic tests show this,
that I actually thrive on a higher protein,
higher fat, lower carbohydrate diet.
Now that doesn't mean I don't eat any carbs at all because I was really not doing well
on keto, but I actually thrive when it's a little bit lower because if I have too much
carbohydrates I'm sluggish, I'm fatigued.
So there's got to be, there's some bio-individuality there too.
There's bio-individuality, yeah.
And I mean, my ancestors are Mediterranean.
I'm a little more equatorial.
If yours are more Norwegian.
Exactly.
Norwegian, French, German.
Right.
If you're more Northern, yeah, potentially, yeah.
And I think that's an interesting nuance that you can kind of...
So let's just talk about macros for a minute because I think this is a helpful conversation
for people.
When you think about macros, which is protein, fat, carbohydrates, it seems kind of pedestrian,
but I think it's so valuable.
I think about protein first.
And my recommendation would be one gram of protein per pound of goal body weight for
men and women from highly bioavailable protein sources, which is essentially synonymous with animal meat, eggs, fish, red meat, essentially milk, these type of sources, not plant sources,
which you have to count double because they're about half as bioavailable and they have a
lot of anti-nutrients that come along with that.
So plant sources of protein-
And you have to eat way more of them too.
Way more and then you're going to have other potential confounding issues like phytic acid,
which is a big molecule that chelates minerals and steals it from your body.
So I recommend people get the majority of their protein from animal sources, depending
what you tolerate and what you prefer, at one gram of protein per pound of goal body
weight.
I'm 165 pounds.
I probably get around 165 pounds a day.
And most people don't even need one gram, but I think if you aim for one gram, you're
going to get 0.8 and that's enough for everyone, basically even if you're bodybuilding.
And so after protein, once you meet your protein goal, and this doesn't mean you have to eat
your protein first, just make sure you're hitting your protein goal in the day, you
can dial in the level of fat versus carbohydrates based on what your body wants.
My body actually does better with more carbohydrates.
That's interesting. My body actually does better with more carbohydrates. So I'll probably do 35% of my calories as fat and then I would say 15, 20% as protein
and the rest is carbohydrates.
So depending on my activity level.
I'm not as active when I'm in the States because in Costa Rica I'm surfing every day
and I'll have more carbohydrates.
For me, which is just me, people always lose their mind when I say this, I'm probably upwards
of 300 grams a day in Costa Rica, yeah, but I'm also surfing two hours a day.
And your blood sugar also shows that you're fine.
76, yeah.
And you can look at my CGM and there's a clear, you know, the blood sugar goes up, which I
don't worry about, and then it comes right back down because I'm very insulin sensitive.
And I can do that multiple times a day and I do not become insulin
resistant.
But I think you're right.
There's probably some bio individuality.
It's going to shift for me based on seasons.
Right now I'm in Virginia.
It's winter.
I'm eating less carbohydrates probably and I'm trying to get a workout every day, but
I'm not surfing for two hours.
So yeah, and then you can just decide what kind of fats do you feel best on.
I would say make sure you're getting saturated fat.
Oh yeah, I'm not scared of saturated fat.
And don't do the polyunsaturated fats from seed oils.
And then the carbohydrate sources, you can eat the carbohydrates based on what works
for you in terms of macros, but I think a lot of people do better with carbohydrate
sources that are not grains.
So this is the other issue where you get into like the single ingredient foods that may
work for some people but don't really work for everyone.
I've seen a lot of people just lose weight effortlessly when they get rid of grains.
I just don't think... I mean, a lot of people know that wheat doesn't work for them, whether
it's subclinical, gluten intolerance, but even rice.
Some people can do rice, but a lot of people don't do great with rice.
I've seen it just cause weight gain for people.
Oats are full of phytoacid.
It's so funny.
I'm upset.
My body loves rice, but that doesn't mean I'm like chowing
down on rice. But I don't see any issues with it.
And I think there might be a genetic thing there.
It might be.
Because people always like to cite Asian countries have a lot of rice and don't seem to have
an issue with it.
Exactly. But then oats, like I do not do all oats. I get a headache, I don't feel good,
I hurt my stomach. Oats are very hard for humans.
Oats are full of phytic acid.
Very full of phytic acid.
And it's very hard to get rid of the phytic acid in oats.
So phytic acid again is this large molecule that chelates and bites onto minerals like
calcium, zinc, magnesium, and it prevents their absorption in the gut.
So if you are eating oats with milk, for instance, you're not absorbing the calcium in the milk
because the phytic acid in the oats is pulling it out.
And there's magnesium in milk and you're not getting that because the phytic acid is
– and there's zinc and you're not absorbing the zinc.
And so if you're eating oats with steak, you're not getting as much zinc, you're
not getting as much selenium because the phytic acid is pulling it out of your body from your
gut.
The phytic acid won't go into your body and rob it from your cellular stores, but it will
from the gut.
And so to get rid of the phytic acid in oats, you have to do more than cook them.
If you just cook the oats, maybe 30% of the phytic acid is degraded, maybe 35.
To really get rid of 90 plus percent of the phytic acid in oats, you have to ferment them
for four to five days at a pH of four at a temperature of 78 degrees Fahrenheit.
So just soaking and sprouting them is not going to-
Not enough.
Do anything. Wow.
Overnight oats, maybe 45% of the phytic acid is gone.
You still have.
It's better, right?
But to really remove phytic acid from oats, you have to do this arduous process that no
one is doing.
No one is fermenting their oats for five days at 78 degrees Fahrenheit in a pH of four to
four seven.
There's got to be a homesteader out there somewhere doing it.
Like no one.
But this is the way that humans used to eat grains.
And this is the way that humans used to eat beans.
This is kind of the work of Weston Price that when you see humans eating seeds and seeds
are seeds, nuts, grains and beans, we were always fermenting them.
We were fermenting a lot of vegetables, which are the leaves, stems, roots and seeds of
plants because the fermentation process actually gets rid of a lot of the defense chemicals.
Not all of them, but many of them.
I think that when we're eating some of these foods, we're eating them wrong today.
And we're just not thinking about where we've come from historically.
Well, I was just talking about this recently.
Who was I talking about that with?
It doesn't matter.
But we've lost this ancient wisdom that we've passed down for generations, right?
For probably once, for the first time ever, probably, I would argue, in human history,
we are so confused about what to eat.
And before that, our ancestors were never confused.
They didn't need double-blind placebo studies to know what to eat.
It was passed down through generations.
There was also this ancient innate wisdom that we had,
and nobody seems to have anymore.
We've lost it.
And when you talk about it,
we are derided or denigrated as anachronistic, right?
Oh yeah, people just collapse.
You know, the historical fantasy,
this is your ancestral fallacy fantasy. There's a lot of wisdom there.
Yes.
I've been learning a lot about light recently. And it's the same thing with light. And this
podcast isn't mostly about light, but look, humans are meant to see the sun in the morning.
We're meant to have bright days and dark nights. We're not meant to look at flickering screens
which have way too much blue light in them.
These things are bad for us, you know?
That's messing up our sleep.
We're just meant to be outdoors.
We're meant to see acute angles and not all these,
you know, we're meant to see not just 90 degree angles
and doors and squares.
We're meant to see fractalized patterns outside
that like calms us.
We're meant to like actually be in nature.
Like how simple is it? And yet people people think, oh, it's a fantasy.
No, there is this idea of landscapes of despair. This is a concept I heard Michael Easter, who
wrote The Comfort Crisis, discuss. There are landscapes of despair. Right now, we're looking
out at trees. And granted, there's the GW Park right there and the Potomac River, but there's nature
out of these windows.
And the reason that the architect built
a panoramic glass window here
is because that's beautiful to a human.
And to say that that isn't something that we need
is just ludicrous.
Okay, so you've mentioned seed oils a couple times,
and this is obviously a huge conversation
being had right now publicly.
A lot of people are fighting over what is it?
Are they healthy for you?
Are they not?
Right.
What is the truth about seed oils?
So the historical truth about seed oils is that they were never in the human food supply
until 1911 en masse when Procter & Gamble came out with Crisco.
Same Procter & Gamble that then later donated the equivalent of $25 million today to the AHA.
It was like one point something million dollars in 1942 or 45, but it was the equivalent of
$25 million today.
So again, back to this adage that I keep repeating, 1900, 1890, no seed oils in the human diet.
This is just an association, but it's a compelling association.
So anytime a food, whether it's a food dye or a preservative or a glyphosate or a pesticide
or ultra-processed refined bleach and deodorized seed oils comes into the human food supply,
we probably should be a little careful.
Maybe we should be skeptical of it.
And so that's the reality.
They've become a huge part of our diet now.
You can see the polyunsaturated fats in seed oils accumulating in human fat.
And the problem here, the way I see it is that these oils are something that humans
would never have been exposed to at the levels that we're exposed to.
Like did humans eat a sunflower seed historically?
Yeah.
Did we eat two and a half pounds of sunflower seeds a day?
No. You would have to eat 70 ears of corn to a half pounds of sunflower seeds a day? No. You would
have to eat 70 years of corn to get five tablespoons of corn oil, right? So the average American
consumes five tablespoons of seed oils per day between the chipotle and the salad dressings
and whatever your food is cooked in at the restaurant.
Maybe the oat milk or all the things.
Five tablespoons a day. This is a completely evolutionarily inconsistent amount of linoleic acid, which is an 18-carbon
omega-6 polyunsaturated fat.
Those seed oils are made in a way that's very highly refined and processed.
Those seed oils are made by refining, bleaching, and deodorization.
If you look at the actual process, it is astounding.
It is heating to over 450 degrees Fahrenheit, it's extraction with benzene contaminated
with hexane, often contaminated with benzene, sodium hydroxide washing.
There's just the amount of degumming industrial agents.
There are traces of organic chemicals and seed oils.
We know they are highly oxidized because they must be heated to such high levels which breaks
the fats which causes rancidity and oxidation.
So there are high levels of lipid peroxides in seed oils.
Seed oils are then stored in transparent plastic containers on supermarket shelves which are
known to leach heavy metals like antimony directly into the seed oil.
So the more-
Why is that? I've never heard that. Yeah, there's antimony in the plastic. Oh. So the more- Why is that?
I've never heard that.
Yeah, there's antimony in the plastic.
Is it from the shelving?
It's from the plastic.
Oh, in the plastic.
Got it.
It's in the plastic that they're packaged in.
I didn't know that.
So first of all, you would never store anything in plastic, hopefully, but definitely not
something that's lipophilic.
Like a fat, you have two compounds that are sort of like, they're similar.
And so compounds from the plastic can migrate into the seed oils.
They're also probably being transported in the back of really hot trucks, especially
during the summer, and then it's heating up the plastic.
And how old is the seed oil on the shelf?
Those last forever.
So I have a non-profit foundation called the Animal-Based Nutrition Research Foundation.
It's abnrf.org.
And this year, at the beginning of the year, we're going to do some research into seed
oils and just pull seed oils off the shelves and test lipid peroxides, test antimony levels.
I want to go to some fast food places and pull oil out of their fryers and test levels
of these chemicals that are found in cigarettes and these breakdown products of lipids, acrolein
and others, which are known to be harmful for humans.
So this is the other issue with these polyunsaturated fats.
When you heat them, either in your pan, when you're frying with them, or in the fryer
when they're making your French fries, and fast food, it's even worse.
You generate compounds that are known carcinogens that are exactly some of the same compounds
that occur in cigarettes.
So there's a crazy study that I've talked about that if you had a large French fry at McDonald's,
which I've done in my life, I'm not innocent, it is the amount of acrolein and other breakdown
products of these seed oils that are found in a pack of cigarettes.
One large fry, and whenever I say this, people always say, he's saying seed oils are as
bad as cigarettes.
No, I just said that the amount of this chemical is equivalent between the two and there's
multiple research papers to corroborate that assertion.
So that's what I'm saying, that doesn't sound good.
At a biochemical level, the problem here is that all of the randomized controlled trials
with seed oils were done between 1950 and 1980, give or take.
And we didn't know what trans fat was until the 1990s.
Oh, yeah, interesting.
And so the control groups in these seed oil randomized controlled trials in humans were
almost invariably fed trans fats.
So the way these trials were designed was you had a control group which ate more saturated
fats and an experimental group which ate more seed oils.
And so if the control group is eating more saturated fat with more trans fats, that might
confound the results of some of these studies.
It might make it a little hard to interpret it.
But those are the same randomized controlled trials that get put into a meta-analysis written
by Darius Mazafarian or others, Darius Mazafarian of the same Tufts food compass fame that said
that Lucky Charms were, this is the same author.
Better than Ground Beef.
Yeah, the same author that says that Lucky Charms are better than Ground Beef, yeah,
published a meta-analysis where he's using, and a meta-analysis is a collection of trials.
They're taking multiple randomized controlled trials and some section, some selection of
authors says, we are the preeminent authorities.
We're going to decide which studies we're going to read.
We're going to tell you what all these studies say.
We're going to put eight or nine trials.
We're going to make a forest plot which shows,
you know, favors seed oils, favors saturated fat.
It's like a, it's just a graphical statistical description
to try to summarize it.
But when the people summarizing the articles
can't understand that the articles themselves are flawed,
like garbage in, garbage out.
You don't build a house on a landfill.
You don't build a house on a garbage dump.
There's no foundation there.
So the problem with the seed oil literature is that most of the studies that are randomized
controlled trials are very poorly done.
I think that the best trials done with seed oils actually show that they're harmful for
humans and have increased cardiovascular risk.
But those trials are outweighed in numbers by trials that are confounded by trans fats
in the control groups that are very difficult to interpret.
So we end up with a health landscape where we're all arguing with each other and we're
kind of talking like this and like now we're back to the government.
What is the FDA going to say?
And then I get fact checked on meta when I talk about seed oils and they refer to an
AFP blog post,
which refers back to Darius Mozaffarian's meta analysis,
which is looking at flawed studies.
So you just follow this little ping pong ball down
and you end up at the exact same place,
which is flawed studies,
result in meta fact-checking me on Instagram.
Those finally just lifted this year for me,
but I texted you about this.
I had four or five flags just talking about seed oils,
and they were pushing my content down lower
so that people couldn't see.
So I'm curious, too, about that study,
because we know there were that study that came out,
I think it was last year,
where they supposedly found that eating diets higher in red meat
is linked to cancer.
And then you go and you look at the study and the foods that they were classifying as
red meat were lasagna, hamburger with the bun on it, things like that.
So I'm wondering what were they classifying as saturated fat in those?
Well, they were classifying saturated fat full of trans fat in those studies.
And so the devil's in the details.
With nutrition study, the devil's in the details.
And so much of this ends up on the news as
a flashy headline which says, eggs shorten your life as much as cigarettes and you go,
come on guys.
Oh my God.
They did that in what is, what the health or whatever they did this whole thing.
I can't.
Come on.
Like use your common sense.
Humans have been eating eggs for hundreds of thousands of years.
It doesn't make any sense.
And so I don't know if we will ever
get better randomized controlled trials on seed oils, but I hope that at some point we
could have an honest, authentic conversation. But then, I'll tell you this, Courtney, this
is what's hard. It gets so convoluted and so technical so fast. Because if I'm on a
podcast and believe me, I'm trying to organize this to do a debate, I guarantee you that
90% of people are just going to tune out in the first 20 minutes because it's going to
be so technical and convoluted and it's going to be so boring.
We're going to be talking about the control group of the LA Veterans trial and we're going
to be talking about the control group of the diet and the DART trial or the St. Thomas
Aquinas atherosclerosis regression trial.
It's so technical and boring that nobody cares and nobody's going to listen.
And so...
Except for the people that are studying this and hopefully publishing the data and maybe
they're the ones that need to hear it.
I guess.
I mean, it would be really interesting.
Not even maybe they are.
But I think that if I could debate Darius and get him on a pocket, he won't do it.
So let's talk about this meta-analysis you did and why it's flawed.
And then, or maybe it just needs a conversation like that if it could happen on Rogan or a
big platform.
But again, it's so unwatchable.
This is so not entertaining for people to see.
To be honest, what I think needs to happen is we need to sit down with heads of the FDA
and the USDA and get people in a room at the Senate
and have people both sides of the aisle present all of their studies and research,
and so have people like you and then have people on the other sides of the aisle
and just spend like 10 hours in there and get to the bottom of it,
because I don't know how else we're going to figure this out.
I think it's a big issue,
because if we could come to a consensus in US food policy about
seed oils, it would have reverberating effects in our health outcome, in our health landscape.
The reason this is so important is because think about how many processed foods have
seed oils.
And how many restaurants cook with it.
If you eat out, you are pretty much guaranteed to eat seed oils unless you're going to a
restaurant that's not using them. It's so hard. out you were pretty much guaranteed to eat seed oils unless you're going to a restaurant
that's not using them.
Yeah.
It's so hard.
And because this is a multi-billion dollar question, potentially a trillion dollar question,
Courtney, or more, because of the food industry.
If the US government were to come out and say seed oils are unhealthy, it would have
potentially trillion dollars of economic impact.
So whether it's Procter & Gamble or ConAgra or Bungee, who happens to fund Darius Mazzofari
and make seed oils, by the way.
Of course they do.
Yeah, yeah.
You can find Bungee funds him.
They're a seed oil producer and they won't let you into their factories because I've
tried to go to a seed oil factory.
They won't let us in.
I don't necessarily want to go into a factory using hexane and all these chemicals, but I tried to go to like a seed oil factory. They won't let us in. I don't necessarily wanna go into a factory
using hexane and all these chemicals,
but I wanna go and get some like,
you wanna see how, let me show you how butter's made.
You take raw cream and you churn it.
People do, there's viral videos on Instagram.
You can do it at home.
I've done it at home, right?
How is seed oil made?
Like, I don't know.
Like it's in a factory with huge boilers and, you know, like, ex-ane extraction.
And people are wearing hazmat suits in seed oil factories.
I guarantee you.
Like they're wearing goggles and gloves and skin protection.
This is the food that you're feeding to your kids in the dino nuggets, moms.
Like, the...
Oh, which by the way, I just found out, speaking of dino nuggets.
So apparently, if you fry your chicken nuggets or whatever in seed oils for less than, I
don't want anybody to quote me, I don't know what the time frame is, but it's something
like less than like three to five seconds or whatever.
So if you just kind of go like this and then pull it out, you don't have to disclose that
on the ingredient label.
So there's some companies that are saying that they're using olive oil.
I think there was even a company that was saying that they're like organic and they're
a healthy one.
And somebody did some digging and found out that they do the flash fry thing in like soybean
or canola oil, but they're not required to disclose that on the label.
Again, reform at the level of the FDA, reform at the level of the USDA.
This is blatant corruption and collusion.
You know, and it's the story that's as old as time.
Would your great-grandmother recognize the ingredients?
Or, in this case, they're not even being transparent.
No.
I mean, that's a whole other issue, that's a whole other rabbit hole that we can't even
go down.
You'd mentioned seed oils and baby formula.
When we eat polyunsaturated fats, they accumulate in our body, which is the reason linoleic acid I believe is harmful for humans.
I think we are consuming an evolutionarily inappropriate, inconsistent amount of linoleic
acid.
We know it accumulates in cell membranes.
We know it accumulates in mitochondrial membranes.
There's evidence from animal studies and cell culture that when you accumulate linoleic
acid and other polyunsaturated fats in the mitochondrial membrane, you get proton leak. And proton leak means less ATP produced.
And that is the actual sort of most magnified zoomed in definition of metabolic dysfunction
is impaired energy production.
So if you are not making ATP efficiently at the level of your mitochondrial electron transport
chain, you are going to become insulin resistant.
And seed oils by packing our membranes with linoleic acid are causing proton leak across
the membranes and they cause utilization of ATP in the cell membrane because there's
inappropriate activation of the sodium potassium ATPase because there's leak across that membrane
because they're too polyunsaturated and that uses up the ATP that we're making.
Callie and Casey have talked about this so eloquently.
Metabolic dysfunction is impaired inefficient energy production and that's in the mitochondria.
And the way you break your mitochondria is by messing up their cell membranes and the
way you mess up their cell membranes is by eating seed oils.
It's not the carbohydrates, it's the seed oils.
You can also mess up your mitochondria by getting metabolic endotoxemia.
I think those are the two predominant pathways by which humans become insulin resistant.
Gut dysbiosis leading to metabolic endotoxemia and seed oils leading to broken membranes
in mitochondria and cells.
This is relevant to breast milk because when human mothers eat more seed oils, they put
more linoleic acid into their breast milk.
So you can look at the linoleic acid content, again, omega-6, 18-carbon, polyunsaturated fatty
acid content of a hunter-gatherer woman and a westernized American woman.
The westernized American woman puts way more linoleic acid into her breast milk because
she's eating more linoleic acid.
Hunter-gatherers eat far less linoleic acid than us because it's not in their diet.
They might eat a nut, but there's almost none, right?
There's no linoleic acid in their diet.
They're not eating two and a half pounds of sunflower seeds.
They're not eating 70 years of corn.
They're not eating two pounds of soybeans a day.
None of them are doing this, which is the equivalent of these seed oil consumption that
we have.
So when the FDA goes and tests pregnant women's breast milk, they come up with a certain amount
of linoleic acid.
But they're testing mothers who are eating garbage food and they say formula needs to
contain this amount of linoleic acid.
Wow.
Well, you're testing a sick population.
That's like testing a diabetic and saying everyone's blood sugar needs to be 160.
Okay.
I have never thought about it like that and that's so interesting.
I also had, I was just telling you about this before we started recording, I had Sally Fallon on my podcast yesterday who works, I believe she's the president,
she works for Westin A. Price Foundation.
And she was also telling me that when you put a baby on formula, they're not getting
enough cholesterol and the cholesterol helps your body make your hormones.
And for baby males, for example, she said that when they're infants, they,
I could be wrong on this, so correct me if I'm wrong, but baby male infants are making
the same amount of testosterone for a period of time as like an adult male and then it
goes back down.
Huh, it's possible. I don't know the specifics.
Okay. And so she was saying that that's another really big concern with baby formula is that
they're not making enough testosterone because they're not getting enough cholesterol because we've also vilified cholesterol.
We have. And so when the FDA sets standards for how you make formula, they're saying it
has to have this amount of linoleic acid in the breast milk. And the only way to get that
much linoleic acid in the breast milk is to put seed oils in the formula. The only way
to get that much linoleic acid in the formula is to put seed oils in the formula. The only way to get that much linoleic acid in the formula is to put seed oils in the
formula.
So if you look at any formula on the shelf without fail, even an organic formula that's
labeled an infant formula, it must have seed oils.
It will have soybean oil without fail.
Even the best quality infant formula.
Now there's a loophole where you can call it a toddler formula, I think.
And the toddler formulas don't have to have that.
But if it's an infant formula, you must have seed oils in the infant formula.
So people message me about this all the time and they say, well, if I needed to do formula
or I'm having a hard time producing enough milk, which is a whole other podcast that
we could totally do because I think it's dependent a lot on the health of the mother.
They ask me what do I recommend and I always tell them Serenity Kids and then there's also
one called Sammy's Milk which is raw goat's milk and I can't remember what oil they use.
It might be coconut or palm oil and then everybody comes back and they say, oh, that's toddler.
I'm like, but you can give that to your infants.
The only reason they are labeling that is because it doesn't have seed oils. You can't say on YouTube that you can give toddler formula to infants and you can't
make a recommendation for any infant formula other than like a mainstream infant formula
on YouTube because I've been censored for this. So it's amazing because if you guys
are listening to this on a streaming platform, you're getting
the full thing and you can post this on Instagram, this section of the podcast, but if you post
this section on YouTube, you'll get censored because you can't.
So you can post the whole discussion around seed oils and infant formula, but whenever
I start making recommendations for breast milk or infant formulas, the whole video gets
taken down on YouTube.
That's so annoying.
Censorship at so annoying. Yeah.
So you know.
Censorship at its finest.
Yeah, yeah.
But I mean, meta probably won't do it.
So just, I mean, I would use this little section as like something else and like, yeah, but
just be careful with that.
But people know, you guys know the truth now.
Yeah, exactly.
You know the truth.
Okay.
That's amazing.
Well, let's wrap up.
It's funny because we probably should have started out with this, but I just wanted to
get right into it.
For people that don't know your story, I think it's really interesting because you went to
just allopathic medical school, right?
I'm an MD.
Yeah.
So you just have conventional training.
At what point did you start waking up and how did you wake up to all of this?
You know, it's a good question.
I've been asked this on a lot of podcasts and I think about it more and more.
I don't know why.
I grew up in kind of a traditional family.
Yeah.
My dad is a traditionally trained doctor.
My mom is a traditionally trained nurse practitioner.
I've just always been fascinated by the roots of things and why things work the way they
do.
And so I always wanted to know in all of my medical training.
I went to PA school before medical school, so I worked as a physician assistant in cardiology
for four years before I went back to medical school for four years at the University of
Arizona. Then I did four more years at the University of Arizona.
Then I did four more years at the University of Washington.
So I kind of have had this like one and a half medical school career.
And in PA school, I didn't have any awareness of any of this.
And then as I started working as a PA, I had this like sort of time when I was a physician
assistant in cardiology and I found functional
medicine and the work of people like Mark Hyman and people are asking like what's the
root cause and it just got my brain thinking a little bit and I think the snowball just
continued to grow over time and I started to think about my eczema and my issues and
I mean I definitely started experimenting with diet but really before I found functional
medicine too deeply I was a raw vegan myself and had all sorts of health issues associated
with my seven months as a raw vegan.
I was never fruitarian, but I was making these huge kale shakes and having massive gas and
really bad GI side effects and it didn't help my eczema and I lost a lot of lean body mass.
I was so skinny that like a girl literally that a girl I went on a first date with and she said she would not go on a second date with mass. I was so skinny that a girl literally that a girl I went on
our first date with and she said she would not go on a second date with me because I
was too skinny.
She said that to you? Wow.
Yeah. But I was 25 pounds of muscle mass lighter than I am today. I'm 165. I was around 140.
So you can imagine like 140 pounds, 510. That's pretty skinny. That's like marathon or skinny.
And I was running like distances at the time.
So I didn't see it.
I probably had some body dysmorphia as a man at the time.
But I think it just gradually happened.
When I went back to medical school, I knew that I wanted to do something that was root
cause based, integrative, whatever word you want to use.
And it just kind of got deeper and deeper over the course of medical school.
But again, I wasn't really thinking about things the way I do now and I had a lot to
learn. And so I think like once I started about things the way I do now and I had a lot to learn.
And so I think like once I started falling down the rabbit hole, it just went deeper
and deeper and I started thinking about it.
Being in medical school, seeing what they were teaching us, I always saw it through
the lens of, ah, this isn't the whole story.
This isn't the whole story.
I know this isn't the whole story.
And then really most of it came in my residency at the University of Washington when I started thinking about this for myself, doing a strict carnivore diet and then seeing
my eczema get better, but then having issues with keto, doing a lot of self-education and
learning and trying to piece it all together and think, wow, the lipid hypothesis, I think
it's wrong. Wow, I think that saturated fat and the diet heart hypothesis is wrong. Wow,
I think that humans don't need to get this much cancer. Wow, I think pharmaceuticals have their place,
but I think that we're being hoodwinked here.
Wow, I think, holy shit, the FDA is completely corrupt.
Oh my God, the USA, you know, it's just like,
it all kind of happens gradually.
But I will say this one thing,
which I've never said on a podcast before,
I think that a lot of it actually came
from being in the wilderness.
So this is kind of woo-woo,
but I think that being in nature is good for humans.
And I was talking to my friend about this on this trip.
I think that part of the way that I think was shaped by spending a lot of time, mostly
by myself, in very wild places.
So I through-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail when I was 22 years old.
So I walked from Mexico to Canada one summer, 2,700 miles on a wilderness trail.
I did it with a buddy, but it was a lot of time semi-alone in the wilderness.
Before that, I spent three and a half months backpacking, I mean, like wilderness backpacking
around New Zealand by myself.
So I think that time alone in nature, I don't know, it did something to me.
I agree with you on that.
I don't know if there's an innate wisdom that we download
and people are probably going to come for me for that, but I believe that there's something
else happening outside of what we consciously know.
Yeah, I feel like I got plugged in, you know, in some way. And I don't think about things.
I'm not really woo, but when I think about my history, I think that
something happened when I was like swimming rivers and getting lost or getting swept away
and flooded rivers in New Zealand and sliding down mudslides and getting near hypothermia
or getting caught in avalanches in Jackson Hole when I was backcountry skiing or just being in
the wilderness and seeing sunrises and sunsets and just all of those experiences just I think it just changed me as a person
and probably changed the way that I think about things.
And I think you said it well like is it some sort of innate wisdom and I realized that
I sound super whatever kooky right now but I do think there's some sort of innate wisdom
in nature and maybe that affected the way I think. And I carried that forward, and when I went into medicine,
I just had this fundamentally semi-permanently changed perspective on the world.
Yeah.
I mean, it's interesting.
I had a very...
When I went to school for my master's program,
I told you I was initially on the dietetic program,
and then I pulled myself out because I was seeing all the corruption and the colluding
and the colluding
and the funding that was coming from Coca-Cola and Pepsi
and that's not where I wanted to get my education.
I went to a master's program that had a more integrative approach
but it was very, very science-based heavy.
I did biochem, I did organic chem, I had to do all of that stuff too.
And I was very focused on, like, I want the science, I want the science,
like anything else you can miss me
with what I would consider to be like woo-woo and whatever.
And I was very much in that mindset.
And we took a class that they made us take
for our master's program that literally showed us studies.
And we have proof of the way that our cells change
with just our thoughts.
And there's scientific proof.
So if anyone out there is like,
this sounds so woo woo and there's no science to back it up,
we actually have a lot of science to back up,
a lot of what we maybe don't necessarily have the words for,
but we know that there's something else happening around us
that we also maybe have not fully been able
to grasp or discover yet.
Totally agree.
Yeah, and that, It blew my mind.
That class really made me have a different perspective,
because I was so focused on like, I want the science,
I want the studies, I want the chemistry and all that.
And then I took that class and was like, oh, there
is science to back this up.
There is science.
When we look at it carefully, you can see it.
Humans are affected by nature.
100%.
Just like any other part of our environment.
And the light too.
Yeah, it's all part of it.
Yeah, yeah.
It's really interesting.
Well, I feel like we covered everything. It was amazing the light too. Yeah, it's all part of it. Yeah, it's really interesting. Yeah.
Well, I feel like we covered everything.
It was amazing.
Thank you.
Yeah, this was so amazing.
We did it.
Tell everybody where they can find you.
I'm Paul Saladino, MD, medical doctor, MD on all the platforms.
Amazing.
This was awesome.
Thank you so much.
I'm glad we made it happen.
Me too.
Thank you.
Let's do it.
Yay. Thank you so much for listening to the Real Foodology podcast.
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