The Chris Cuomo Project - Paul Saladino, M.D.

Episode Date: August 8, 2023

Dr. Paul Saladino (physician, nutrition specialist, and author, “The Carnivore Code: Unlocking the Secrets to Optimal Health by Returning to Our Ancestral Diet”) joins Chris Cuomo to explore the animal-based diet, including the reasons he avoids eating grains, vegetables, and processed foods, why he believes that the pharmaceutical is more interested in profits than curing patients, how sleep is the ultimate performance enhancing drug, the health benefits of eating animal organs like liver, whether alcohol or THC is a better vice, and much more. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is no question that the shape that you want and the way you want to feel is more determined by what you eat than anything. So what are we supposed to eat, when, and why? I'm Chris Cuomo. Welcome to another edition of the Chris Cuomo Podcast. I know that let's get after it is a motto that applies to politics and your own interests, but that goes every bit as much for your own state of wellness and your fitness. And I've learned one thing in all my years of training, you can't beat a bad diet. And the question then becomes, well, what's a good diet?

You ever heard the name Dr. Paul Saladino? He looks like a younger, more healthy version of me. And there are really good reasons for that. This guy checks all the boxes of what I will rely on for influence, okay? Clinical training, he's an MD. He's gone outside the bounds of the behaviors of his own type, meaning what doctors are about and not about. He lives what he believes, and that's huge for me. Why? Not just from an ethical perspective, but from whether it works or not. He knows from his own book study and from his life study of his own experiences. So I am going to have a conversation

with the man who is telling us that everything we think about vegetables and grains and the food pyramid is actually wrong scientifically, and that we're all eating the wrong things in the wrong amounts for the wrong reasons, and that especially if you're worried about your body mass and your ability to perform and all the things that seem to matter so much to us in living our best lives, we may be doing it the wrong way. Mr. Saladino, MD, living la pura vida in Costa Rica. Here he is. We don't fake the funk here, and here's the real talk. Over 40 years of age, 52% of us experience some kind of ED between the ages of 40 and 70. I know it's taboo, it's embarrassing, but it shouldn't be.

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price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. The Chris Cuomo Project is supported by Cozy Earth. Why? Because I like their sheets. That's why. A lot of people don't get a good night's sleep for a lot of reasons. One of the ones that you can control is bedding. One out of three of us report being sleep deprived. Okay, well, what is it? Well, it stresses all kinds of things, but the wrong sheets can make you hot, can make you cold. I'm telling you, I don't even believe it either, but Cozy Earth sheets breathe. And here's what I love about them. Cozy Earth's best-selling sheep is a bamboo set, okay? Temperature regulating. Gets softer with every wash. I'm not kidding you, all right? Now, so if you go to CozyEarth.com and you enter the code, enter the code CHRIS,

and you can get up to 35% off your first order. CozyEarth.com and the code is Chris. Dr. Saladino, thank you for taking the opportunity. Good to be here. Thanks for having me. So doc, you are a pivot point of controversy in my household. My wife runs a business called Purist, P-U-R-I-S-T. It is about wellness as an ethos. And she

is a big proponent and student of the animal-based diet, which you are also a big proponent of. Yes. An animal-based diet. Absolutely. Yeah. Maybe we can define that for people. They may not know what it is. Oh, well, we're going to that for people. They may not know what it is. Oh, well, we're going to define it, my brother, because here is my position. We are not fucking tigers, okay? And you and my wife and you guys who are all animals and fruit and don't eat the vegetables and stay away from the grains, I don't understand why the paradigms keep shifting. And I've done all this research about you and you have such an interesting science-based approach to what you're doing.

There's like zero fad factor, which is why I wanted you on the podcast to discuss this because everybody's looking for shortcuts. and you really clinically and cleanly break down that, look, it's not about shortcuts. It's about what you do every day and how you do it. But I don't understand. I thought the vegetables were the way to go. You know, I watched the Game Changers documentary and the pea protein, and now you're basically telling me to chase it down and eat it. You basically throw it in the compost. Yeah, but we can back up. So I'm a doctor. I went to medical school. I had my own autoimmune issues. And like so many people who find a way of eating

dietarily, cutting out plants improved my eczema. That's just my end of one. That's my anecdote. But it kind of got me thinking about these things. And I had a circuitous route to medicine. I was a ski bomb in my early 20s. I first went to PA school, so I was a physician assistant in cardiology. And then I got really disillusioned with the medical system as a PA and could see from the inside as a mid-level provider, as a physician assistant, that it was kind of based on symptoms and then pharmaceutical focused. And there wasn't a whole lot of interest or attention or teaching of future doctors or current doctors about the way that the food we eat affects who we are as humans, especially autoimmune disease. And so many things that we think of as chronic illness are autoimmune

in nature, involving the immune system being dysregulated. So I went back to medical school because I didn't want to be a PA for my whole life. I wanted to have some autonomy. And so basically I went to medical school almost two times. And the second time around, I had a different perspective and I kept thinking, food has to be a cause here. I know that food is a huge lever and why is it never being discussed? My sister's a doctor and she says that they didn't really teach her anything about food in medical school. It doesn't matter what medical school you went to. I went to the University of Arizona. I've talked to people from every medical school in the country. Nobody gets taught about nutrition, not at Harvard, not at Yale, nowhere. It doesn't matter where you go. And essentially no residency tells you about nutrition either. It doesn't matter if you do

psychiatry, which is what I did for my residency because I was interested in neuroinflammation and how the brain goes wrong when we eat the wrong foods and how that leads to suicidality or mental illness. And then I realized that this is kind of the same paradigm that plays out for all of the autoimmune diseases. We see that brain inflammation is really coming from the same things that causes skin inflammation and eczema and psoriasis coming from the same things that causes gut inflammation, which leads to Crohn's and ulcerative colitis, really leading to the same sort of pathologies we see everywhere. So everything's all connected. And I kind of took a step back and no longer think about things from a mental health perspective. And after residency, went on and did some board training and nutrition just kind of to prove to people that I had some chops there

because people love to criticize you no matter what you did. So it doesn't matter what residency you went to, nobody gets taught about nutrition. And it's just, it's such a powerful lever. I would say it's the most powerful lever for people that's not being talked about. And this goes so many different directions and we can go wherever you want to take this. We can talk about why it's not being talked about.

We can talk about pharmaceutical industry, kind of affecting the way that medical students are taught, affecting the way that you're and your family and everyone listening to this is receiving information. Do you really believe that big pharma is trying to keep people from the truth? I believe that big pharma is driven by profit. They're a business. And I think that it's not profitable to have patients getting better. It's not profitable to have patients getting better. It's not profitable to have people healing their illness. Curing diabetes, reversing diabetes, which is completely possible, is not profitable.

Like, you know, we can talk about Ozempic. We can talk about these drugs, semiglutide for weight loss or diabetes. These are billion-dollar drugs, right? At least hundreds of millions of dollars in these drugs. And if you can just fix diabetes with the way you eat, or you can just lose weight by changing what you eat, the pharmaceutical industry isn't going to be super happy about that. So I'm not so convinced that they're trying to keep people sick, but I don't believe they're really interested in letting people know how simple it can be to fix a lot of the things that affect us

all. When people tell you that they lost 40 pounds on Ozempic or Rogovi, what do you tell them? You mostly lost lean muscle mass and bone and potentially functionality of organs. It's the wrong way to lose weight, in my opinion. Look, we have a crisis of obesity, and connected with that, we have a crisis of metabolic health, metabolic dysfunction,

also known as insulin resistance in this country. But I don't think Ozempic is the right way. That's a shortcut that you were talking about earlier. That's a definite, like, not the way to do it in my opinion. Because when you lose muscle mass, you get weaker. When you lose bone density, you get weaker. Fragility kills so many people today, especially in the older ages. But even younger people can have massive impacts on their health if they become fragile. It becomes easier to break a bone, longer to recover from an athletic injury. All of these things are massively bad for us as humans. And when you lose lean muscle mass, along with that declining bone density, your basal metabolic rate goes down. So the key to

weight loss is not necessarily starving yourself or not feeding yourself. The key to weight loss, I think for the vast majority of people, is changing the quality of the foods you're eating. And then you lose weight, but you maintain hormonal health, you maintain bone density, and you maintain muscle mass. So when people say they've lost 40 pounds with Ozempic, I say, that's great. And you also did a lot of negatives to your body that way. There was an easier way to do that, or perhaps a healthier way to do that, that didn't try and shortcut those things. It's a shame that it's become so popular. And it kind of, it goes to what we were saying earlier about pharmaceutical companies. They're super happy about this. I'm a fan of the strong is the new skinny, especially for my girls, you know? Yeah.

They've got a great example in their mom. My wife is strong. She's not big, but she's strong. And I like that because I think that people, men too, are addicted to the numbers. They want to be 100 and whatever pounds, as opposed to what kind of quality of the mass are they. And food winds up being everything, especially once you get over 40 years of age, you cannot out-train a bad diet. You can't out-train a bad diet anymore. It doesn't work. And you can't five days on, two days off it. You can't do it. It's too much. If you drink and you eat whatever you want over the weekend, you pay until Thursday. And so I believe it. Now, the problem is two problems that I want to unpack. One, how do we know what the best way to eat is? And what does that inform us? Not just in terms

of what to eat, but how much and when. And two, what have we learned about supplementation? Saladino has a cool company name. It's Heart and Soil Supplements, which is really interesting. But I like what he's putting out there essentially because I also like that there's not like 5,000 products there because I think it gets very confusing very fast.

But I want to talk about supplementation and I want to talk about the big question because it's all about food for me. And I don't know what the right way is to do it. I don't know if it's plant-based, if it's a little bit of everything, if it's a little bit of everything, but you only once a day, I don't know.

I really don't know. And you've done a lot of work on it. And I want to hear your case for what you believe the answers are. If you think about the way that humans eat intuitively, which is a hard thing for a lot of us, because we don't live the way that our ancestors have lived for so long. And this may sound like an anachronism, but I believe that our genetics as humans still see us

as humans living in the jungle, humans living in the forest, humans living on the prairies. So our genetics are at least 20,000 years old. We haven't really had any consistent changes in our genetics to say, you're ready for spam, you're ready for processed foods, you're ready for emulsifiers, carrageenan, E471 in your latte at Starbucks. We're just not ready for these foods. So're ready for emulsifiers, carrageenan, E471 in your latte at Starbucks. We're just not ready for these foods. So I think first and foremost, the most important thing that people can do in their diet is cut out processed food. And you said it really well. You can't do it five days and then not do it two days. That doesn't work that well because the effects of

processed food will linger for many days beyond those two days. If somebody listening to this did nothing else but cut out all processed food, and I'll define that in a moment, they would improve their health, whether they were eating vegetables or not, whether they were eating meat or not. The problem gets to be that if you really want to go the next step and you really want to optimize as a 30-year-old, a 40-year-old, or you have any chronic immune illness, or you have anything that's just not optimal, people often need to go further than that. Now, let's just pause for a moment right there and define processed food. I would say processed foods are anything with a label, basically, anything that's not around the outside of the grocery store, anything that's not a vegetable,

a fruit, or meat, or I would say raw dairy, which we can talk about if you want. So unprocessed dairy is a processed food, in my opinion. That means all the cookies, all the crackers, all the cakes, all the candies, anything in the middle of the grocery store, all the bread, that's a processed food, in my opinion. So if you cut all of that out and just ate fruits, vegetables, meat, hopefully some organs, and raw dairy, you would do great. And a lot of humans do amazing on that type of diet. What are you, the liver king? Are you going to grow out a big beard and start doing stupid exercises and biting in the raw stuff that you got at the meat market? No, you can cook it. And it's probably better to cook it because if you don't cook your meat, it's like food poisoning is common. Unless you're getting

stuff that's super, super clean, you're going to get campylobacter salmonella. So you don't have to eat anything raw, but you can cook it all and you'll be fine. But the reason the processed foods are bad is important to note, because I think that the most problematic ingredients in processed foods are seed oils, things like corn, canola, sunflower, safflower, soybean, peanut oils, which are in a lot of processed foods and are told to us, are sold to us as good by the American Heart Association, by the United States government. You know, the Harvard food pyramid includes seed oils. So this is a real differentiation here. I would say, I would take a strong stance and say seed

oils are horrible for humans. We've never had them evolutionarily. Our 20,000 to 50,000 year old genetics don't know what to do with all of those things in seed oils. Specifically, there's an oil in there, a fatty acid called linoleic acid, which in excess, I think, causes massive problems for humans. So if you cut out all the processed foods, that's step one. What are the sneaky processed foods, Doc? So bread, pasta, rice, potatoes is what we used to be told. Now, rice and potatoes aren't necessarily processed, but pasta, bread, what are the sneaky ones that I may not be thinking? Bread is a very sneaky processed food. If you look at the ingredients in bread, there's all sorts of fillers and emulsifiers, and sometimes they add extra gluten, seed oils.

All right, so no bread, no pizza, no bread. No bread. I mean, pasta is technically processed in my opinion. I'm not a huge fan of grains and we'll kind of get to that. Rice, if you believe that the de-hulling of the rice is processing, maybe it's processed, maybe it's not. I think white rice is probably better than brown rice. A lot of people might think brown rice is healthier,

but when you look at rice, so rice is a grain and this kind of starts to tiptoe into the region of plants and vegetables and why I'm not a huge fan. A lot of these grains accumulate heavy metals just because of the soils they grow in. So brown rice is quite high in arsenic. So if you're eating a lot of brown rice, you're getting heavy metals. And heavy metals are things like lead, mercury, arsenic, and cadmium.

They occur in a lot of foods that we think of as healthy. And I can talk about chocolate if you want to talk about it. It's going to break a lot of people's hearts. But Consumer Reports recently did a survey of 28 different chocolate bars, all different qualities. Basically, every chocolate bar that you're eating had significant levels of lead and cadmium. And many chocolate bars had over the maximum daily allowable intake

in lead or cadmium or both from a one-ounce serving. And this is because chocolate is made from cacao, which is a seed of a plant. And these plant seeds like to hold on to heavy metals. So no chocolate either. Well, if you want to eat chocolate, eat it in moderation and check your heavy metals. And it kind of gets to this overarching idea that the seeds of plants, even the leaves of plants, may not be the ideal thing for humans. So if you get through the processed foods and you've cut out seed oils and you cut out emulsifiers

and you're just eating vegetables and fruit and meat and maybe raw dairy, then you get to the part that's probably a sticking point for you, which might be kind of the mind-blowing part, that vegetables, are vegetables good for people? And I don't think vegetables are the major killer of people, but I think that eliminating vegetables

and vegetables being the leaves, stems, roots, and seeds of plants, seeds including seeds, grains, nuts, and seeds of plants. Seeds including seeds, grains, nuts, and beans, which are all seeds because if you plant them, they grow a plant. There are now, I would say thousands, if not tens of thousands of anecdotes of people who have chronic autoimmune issues, things from thyroid to eczema, psoriasis, you know, joint pain, sleep disturbance, mental health issues, gut issues, especially they get better when they cut up vegetables. And that was kind of my story.

So it got me thinking, is there another level for those of us that really want to optimize or those of us that still have chronic health issues, but we've gotten rid of the processed foods. And that's where the animal-based diet kind of takes that left-hand turn that's unexpected and says, if your 20,000 year old genetics

go back to 20,000 years ago with your ancestors and you're in the forest or you're in the jungle. What foods are you really going to seek? And I've seen this because I've been with the Hadza in Tanzania, some of the last hunter-gatherers on the planet. And I've read so much anthropology, things that I was never taught in medical school, but should have been taught. It's very clear what humans want intuitively in the wild, quote unquote. It's meat and organs because we always eat the whole animal. It's ripe fruit, which is sweet and colorful. And it's honey when it's in season. And then recently in the last 10 to 15,000 years, we've figured out how to domesticate animals and we can get milk. But you ask the Hadza about vegetables, they don't care about vegetables.

They don't want to eat vegetables. They're not going to eat a plant leaf unless they have diarrhea and it has anti-diarrheal properties in it. When I was with the Hatsabe, which is very cool that you went with it, by the way. Yeah. They were digging up those roots, though. They do eat some roots. And they don't love the roots. When I went to dig up the roots, we did one root.

I don't know if it was equa or which root. But the men would eat it. And I tried it. And then spit out the fiber. They would just eat it for the starch. And then they would spit it out because there's two fibers. I know they cook some and they have this division of labor. So the women dig the roots and the men hunt and the men actually go and get honey usually. And the women will get berries and things like that. I thought honey was like all sugar. It spikes, you know, your glycemic levels. So you're

not supposed to have it and you can't eat too much meat because of the cholesterol and the fat and it'll clog your heart and kill you. And now I gotta be on a statin. So what was all wrong with all that? How, what happened? So the medical literature is complex. And I think that most of what we've been told

about nutrition is just wrong. Honey is great for humans. I mean, if you really dig into the medical literature, you can find studies with honey showing that it improves insulin sensitivity in diabetics. So you can look at diabetics who are given 100, 125 grams of honey per day, and they improve their glucose sensitivity. So we've just been, it's sort of oversimplified reductionist thinking. Honey is great for humans. Obviously, if you are diabetic or you're pre-diabetic,

you don't have to eat jugs of honey per day because you don't handle that glucose well. This gets into complex human physiology. But I don't worry at all about natural raw honey. The hods don't worry about it. Berries, fruit, a papaya here in Costa Rica where I live, a banana. These things are good for humans. We need the insulin response, and that helps us conserve electrolytes at the level of our kidneys. So we shouldn't fear carbohydrates, especially in the form of honey and fruit. These are things we've always had as humans. Can you eat them at any time during the day, or are you one of those people where you can only eat fruit in the morning? No, I think you can eat it all day. I wouldn't worry about the timing. It's super simple. If the Hadza are out hunting at 4 p.m. and they come across a beehive, they're eating it. They're not saving it until tomorrow. They're not saying, oh, I'm going to sleep. I can't eat some honey. I think

it's great. And a lot of people sleep better when they have a tablespoon of honey before they go to sleep. How much food do you eat a day? So, I mean, I could take you through what I eat in a day. Yep. How tall are you? How much do you weigh? So I'm 5'9", 5'10", 5'9", and I weigh 170 pounds. I'm probably 10% body fat. You've seen pictures of me online. I mean, I'm pretty big. Yeah, you're in good shape.

Yeah. And so I'm 170 pounds. I would say slightly above average musculature for my height. That changes based on how much surfing I'm doing or not. When I surf more, I get a little less muscle. And so I eat probably a pound and a half of red meat per day from grass-fed animals. I'll eat some liver. I'll eat some other organs like heart.

I have probably 200 to 350 grams of carbohydrates a day from fruit, seasonal fruit, from honey. I have raw milk. So I have raw goat's milk or raw cow's milk every day, maybe some raw cheese, and I'll make fresh squeezed orange juice. So those are the things I eat. I eat meat, I eat organs, I eat fruit, I eat honey, and I eat raw dairy. And that's kind of the way that I've conceptualized an animal-based diet. And it's based on anthropology and this intuition. And then I think that if you look at the medical literature, there's a lot of science to support. Like we talked about, number one, fruit and honey, not bad for humans, good for humans. Definitely some contextualizing there to be done on your baseline metabolic health. And then you mentioned this, this is a super important point to hit on.

metabolic health. And then you mentioned this, this is a super important point to hit on. Meat, widely vilified, incredibly valuable for humans. So badly misconstrued. Meat is so much misunderstood in our society. This whole cholesterol myth is a little complex and we can unpack it, but if you ask me, I have a hard time thinking of any single food that is more health promoting and life giving for humans other than red meat and organs, things like liver or heart. And these are the things, this is the way our ancestors have always eaten. And maybe it wasn't red meat, maybe it was a bird, but it was meat and organs. It was eating the whole animal. And you just look at the nutrients in meat. There are so many nutrients in meat that you cannot get anywhere else. I mean, you look at these indigenous cultures and the tribes, the members of the tribes that thrive the most, that have the most fertility,

that are the tallest, the most muscular, are the ones that are the most successful hunters. There's clear correlation that you can see it in these people. They're incredibly beautiful people. They have straight jaws and they have beautiful teeth. And this is from animal foods. It's not from vegetables. It's from animal foods. So give me two breakfasts, two lunches or two dinners or how many meals do you have a day? And give me like a list of what you would eat in like two or three days. So for breakfast, I usually kind of do two breakfasts.

I get up early in the morning, 5.30 or 6 to go surfing. So I'll have maybe a coconut. I live in30 or 6 to go surfing. So I'll have maybe a coconut. I live in Costa Rica most of the time. So I'll have a coconut. I'll have coconut water and I'll have raw milk, which is something that's really valuable for me. I really love raw dairy and I'll have some honey before I surf. So I'll have some protein, some fat, some carbohydrates. I'll go surf. I come back and I will eat. So I'll eat second breakfast. I'll eat like a hamburger. So maybe a grass fed hamburger patty, maybe some raw cheese or cream with honey so I'll eat, second breakfast, I'll eat like a hamburger, so maybe a grass-fed hamburger patty, maybe some raw cheese or cream with honey.

I'll have some orange juice. I might have some local fruit. If people want it to vary breakfast, you can think animal foods and fruit. You can do a smoothie. You could add raw milk to a smoothie. You could do a raw yogurt with fruit in a smoothie. You could have eggs.

You can do other animal foods for breakfast, but I'm not a huge fan of most conventionally produced chicken and pork, especially the fatty kinds. And this kind of loops back to linoleic acid. Most conventionally produced pork is fed corn and soy. And that means that the fat of the pig is enriched in linoleic acid. That's why you want the grass-fed.

But grass-fed steak sucks compared to corn finished. It depends on where you're getting it from. It really depends on where you're getting it from. And it just, it depends on this cut and the sourcing. I've had lots of grass-fed meat in the States. That's amazing. I've definitely had grass-fed steaks in the States that are a little chewy, but I, if I'm going to get a chewy steak, I'd rather just eat a hamburger from a grass-fed animal. If I need more fat in there, I'll add some tallow, which is rendered beef fat or butter, raw butter especially is great. So the thing about cows, let's talk about grass-fed versus grain-fed. So grain-fed is usually the last 20% of their life. If you go to Whole Foods, this is a little misleading. They have grass-fed meat and and it says 100% grass-fed,

and they have pasture-raised. And I have a beef with Whole Foods about this, pun intended. No pun intended. Their pasture-raised is actually fed grains at the end of its life. Right. But they don't really say that unless you ask.

So they're raised on grass, and in the last 30% of their life, 20, 30%, they're fed grains. And farmers will know this. They feed grains to fatten the cows up. But cows eating tons of grains are not as healthy as cows eating grass. And there's been many studies, Stephan Van Vliet, many people, he's at Utah State University now, have looked at the vitamin and mineral and essentially other micronutrient composition of grass-fed meat versus grain-finished meat. And grass-fed meat clearly is better for you

than grain-finished meat. The other problem with grain-finished meat, and this isn't the end of the world, but this is another reason that I prefer grass-finished, is that those grains they're feeding the cows are often moldy and they're often sprayed with pesticides. So a cow that's eating grass its whole life is eating an evolutionarily consistent diet. And that's what we're looking for with humans too. All right. So you have the honey and the berries and the raw milk, and then you have a hamburger and some more fruit and honey. Were you just taking spoonfuls or whatever of like manuka honey or something like that? You're one of those guys? I mean, I usually put it in my milk when I'm eating honey. Yeah. But I mean, I've found that for me, and probably for you, I think you would find this, Chris, as active males or females, more carbohydrates leads to

better recovery, better sleep, better libido. I don't fear this at all. I don't see- But it's the kind of them. It's the kind of carbohydrates. The kind of carbohydrates is important, yes. Because you don't want me eating any leafy greens or anything like that. You just want the fruit. There's not a lot of carbohydrates in leafy greens, but I don't want you eating any leafy greens or anything like that. You just want the fruit. There's not a lot of carbohydrates in leafy greens, but I don't want you eating leafy greens for other reasons, like the defense chemicals in those leaves or the heavy metals that accumulate in those leafy greens.

But I'm not a fan of you eating bread because bread is a processed food, seed oils, but also the grains. I don't think humans do great with grains. You have to process them a lot. I just don't see humans thriving on grain-based diets. And we see this. There's not a lot of nutrients in a grain. Again, it's like a survival food. So most people listening to this podcast have this incredible ability to exist at a time when we are all the best hunters that have ever lived. We can go to a grocery store

and get whatever we want. And so if you make the choices wisely, you can really create incredible signals of abundance for your body. And that leads to good sleep. Again, all the things I talked about, good libido, healthy mood, stability, mental clarity, good body composition, resilience from injuries, recovery, all the things, it all kind of comes together. That's what we're looking for though.

And I'm always learning too, but I've changed my mind on things over time. How many calories a day? It's between 3,200 and 3,700 calories a day. And again, I'm 170 pounds and nine to 10% body fat. When you look at my labs, which I've shown on my blood work on the podcast, my fasting insulin is usually three, which is very, very low, which means I'm very insulin sensitive. So I try to provide people with proof that at least in this vessel, my own experience, I'm 46 years old, by the way, I'm a healthy human. I have a testosterone between seven and 800 total testosterone between seven, 800. I take no

supplemental hormones. So it's a healthy vessel. We can talk about the cholesterol specifically if you want, but for me, 3,200 to 3,700. But again, I spent two hours in the morning, this morning surfing. So I'm active. You know, I might skate for an hour and a half this afternoon. So you're working out. You're doing double sessions most days of activity things

and you live in Costa Rica. So you're one of those dudes. So you're burning a lot of calories. Burning a lot of calories just because I love it, you know, because I want to surf and it's my favorite thing ever. So I'm going to get out there and do it. Most people probably don't need 3,700 calories. How much do you sleep? I

probably sleep nine hours plus per night. Like if there was one single performance enhancing drug that I could give you, it's sleep. What time do you go to bed? I go to bed at like eight o'clock or eight 30, man. That's why you're living in Costa Rica. You're in the jungle. But here's the deal. You got no life at night. The sun goes down here at six o'clock. So sun goes down at six o'clock. After dark, I don't use any blue lights in my house. It's all red lights. So all I have in my house are red lights

or candles after dark. There's a lot of discussion now about blue lights, circadian rhythms. That's a separate podcast. But the sun goes down at eight. I'm asleep, 8.30 most every night. And then I'm up at six. Maybe sun goes down at eight. I'm asleep 8.30 most every night. And then I'm up at six, maybe I'm up at 5.30 to go surf. So I'm getting light in my eyes in the morning when I surf, I'm getting grounding. Like these are important things to me because they

affect our quality of life. It's harder for me to go to sleep at 8.30 when I'm in the United States in the summer when the sun is out until, you know, late at night. So there's some variation here because I live at the equator. And for people that have lived at the equator, they'll know this, but there's not a lot of variation in terms of the day and night cycle when you're at the equator, different times of the year. It's pretty much always 12 and 12 or thereabouts. The closer you live to the equator, the more closely it is to that. So sleep is really important to me. And I sleep a lot and I let my body recover and I can feel it. I'm sure you can feel this too, Chris. And I sleep a lot and I let my body recover and I can feel it.

I'm sure you can feel this too, Chris. Look, no shame in my game. I've been using AG1 for over five years. Why? It works, it's easier, and it's less expensive. That's why. Since 2010, they've been getting their formulations right and tweaking their formulas. Why?

Because the science changes, okay. It's not like politics where people decide to believe one thing and no matter what happens with the facts, they never shift. This is the opposite. Oh, prebiotics work with probiotics, but in this way, D works with K and this type of B works with that. They have the scientists doing it. So I don't need all the bottles. I don't have to spend all the money and I don't have to figure out when to take what and why. More importantly, it's not just the regular list of vitamins. It's the extras, okay? The adaptogens, the prebiotics, the probiotics that support your body's universal needs.

Gut optimization, immune support, stress management. That's what foundational nutrition is about. And these are the people at AG1 who've been doing the work to get it right, okay? I tell friends, I tell family, I get no complaints, okay? If you wanna take ownership of your health, it starts with AG1. Try AG1, you get a free one-year supply of vitamin D3K2 and five free AG1 travel packs. Okay?

That's what happens with your first purchase. So make it. Go to drinkag1.com slash CCP. Drinkag1.com slash CCP. Check it out. We don't fake the funk here, and here's the real talk. Over 40 years of age, 52% of us experience some kind of ED between the ages of 40 and 70. I know it's taboo, it's embarrassing, but it shouldn't be.

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Restrictions apply. You see the website, you'll get details and important safety information. You're going to need a subscription. It's required. Plus, the price is going to vary based on product and subscription plan. Do you remember the last time you had a really good night of sleep? Nope. And I don't recover for shit. And when I fight now, when I spar and train, I hurt for days and I train a lot. I never sleep more than six hours. Never. And we've solved your problem, but I don't even know how to do that. First of all, I'm on TV at eight o'clock, so I don't even get home till nine. I'm not going right to bed. If I go to sleep at 11, when am I going to wake up? Nine o'clock in So I don't even get home till nine. I'm not going right to bed. If I go to sleep at 11, when am I going to wake up? Nine o'clock in the morning? I got to get up. I got to do things

in the morning. But you got to bring your family to Costa Rica and you'll see how it feels for a week or two. And then you can kind of scale that back. My wife loves Costa Rica. She got the name for her business. She got the concept for her business. She wanted to call it Pura Vida. the name for her business. She got the concept for her business. She wanted to call it Pura Vida. And obviously, that name was all over the place already. But that's where she developed Purist, which is wellness as an ethos. She's not a clinician, even though she is doing a nutrition thing right now, because she's obsessed with what you're saying. She hates, she doesn't hate anything. She gets very upset when you're on this show. And I'll tell you why.

Because she's like, what a waste of Saladino to be talking to your caveman ass when he could be talking to me. But she's preaching to the converted. Her people all know. My audience is one, mostly a political audience, but to the extent that there are a lot of guys who are kind of like me. They're like clanging and banging.

You know, they lift weights. They're outdoorsy people. But we're very shapeable. I just don't know which way to go. Like one minute I'm being told never touch meat again. And then, you know, you're telling me something else. But I want to talk about cholesterol because I'm sure there's men. So we kind of, we troubleshot the testosterone a little bit for men. So here's

the thing. Here's the, the, the cliff notes on testosterone. Make sure you're getting enough meat. Make sure you're getting some organs. We can talk about those in a moment. Make sure you're getting enough sleep and make sure you're getting enough carbohydrates. If you do those things, most men's testosterone will get better. As long as you get rid of all the bullshit in your life, like plastics or xenoestrogens, most men will get better with just those simple things. Most men are not eating enough saturated fat from animals. They're not eating enough meat. They're scared of it. They're eating too many vegetables. They're eating too much soy or bullshit. Who knows? Almond milk, some kind of crazy shit. And then they're not getting organs and they're not sleeping enough

and they're overexercising. So you do those things and get some real sunlight. Your testosterone will improve. I can almost guarantee you. But when you do those things, here's what will happen. And I've seen this over and over and over, Chris. You go to your doctor and you say, I feel better. I lost five pounds. I have a six pack again. I have morning erections. I have more libido. I'm having a better sex with my wife. I feel better in the gym. I'm recovering. And your doctor says, that's great. And your cholesterol is high. So stop doing what you're doing. And you think, what the heck? I'm recovering, and your doctor says that's great, and your cholesterol is high, so stop doing what you're doing. And you think, what the heck? I just told you I feel the best I've ever felt in my life, and you're telling me one marker is, quote, wrong, and I should stop it.

It's all about this quality of life equation. The goal is not for Chris to live a life that looks just like Paul. The goal is for you to have the highest quality of life, and you kind of have to figure out where it all fits for you. And every listener of this podcast is going to define their quality of life differently. For some people, it might be eating chicken or pork occasionally or eating a vegetable occasionally or eating vegetables frequently or going to sleep and getting less sleep. But it's the highest quality of life. So it's all give and take, right? It's all just what variable, what lever do you want to pull?

How do you achieve the highest quality of life for you? Eggs count as chicken, obviously, so you don't eat eggs. You know, eggs kind of count as chicken, but I think that eggs are such a critical part of most people's imagination of breakfast that I don't want to make it, I'm not going to say don't eat eggs. Just try and get the best quality egg you can. You can find corn and soy-free eggs. A lot of people have access to eggs that are better quality than they do chickens. And some people are sensitive to the egg white in terms of autoimmune stuff, but I think eggs are a good part of most people's healthy diets. And if you look at eggs, they're incredibly nutrient rich, biotin, folate, vitamin A, all kinds of

good stuff in eggs. So don't get too granular about the eggs. Organs and supplements. Yeah. So when you spend time with a Hadza, as you know, the first thing they do when they eat an animal is they eat the organs. So we kill an animal, the animal goes on the fire, they burn off the fur, and we're all sharing the heart, the liver, the kidneys, and the pancreas. And then the next day we're eating the brain together, which is a whole separate story, but we're eating the organs. So there's nothing is wasted. And when you look at muscle meat, steaks, hamburger, that's just muscle meat. It's very nutrient rich, but it doesn't have as many nutrients or it has a different collection of nutrients than you find in organs like liver.

I think liver should be the first organ that most people eat because if you do nothing else but eat meat and liver along with the other foods in your diet, then you have a complement of animal foods in conjunction with fruit and honey and whatever else you want to eat. That is incredibly nutrient rich. I struggle to even think of a nutrient that is missing. If you are eating fruit and honey and whatever else you want to eat, that is incredibly nutrient rich. I struggle to even think of a nutrient that is missing if you are eating fruit and honey and whatever else you want to eat for carbohydrates and maybe some milk and then meat and liver. That's just, you get so many things. And liver is a unique source of things like vitamin A. Liver is a great source of riboflavin, which is hard to get in other foods. Good source of biotin, selenium, zinc, copper. And the idea that it processes

toxins in the body so you don't want to eat it? So the liver exports toxins to the poop and the pee. It doesn't store the toxins in a way that's meaningful for humans. And there's a farm in Georgia that I have worked with a lot called White Oak Pastures, and they've done analyses on the organs. The liver doesn't really store significant amounts of heavy metals, maybe a little bit, but nothing major. Most seafood you eat is much higher in heavy metals than the liver. So liver is just very rich in nutrients that are unique and difficult to find other places in the human diet. Do you eat fish?

I don't eat fish. And this is kind of a tough thing for people. I'm not saying fish is something you should never eat. Kind of like I'm saying chocolate is something you should never eat. I'm just saying that if you eat a lot of fish or eat a lot of chocolate, you should check your heavy metals because both fish and chocolate are pretty good, strong sources of heavy metals. Fish, mercury, arsenic, cadmium. It's just, we've polluted the oceans and that's where things concentrate. So even small fish like salmon are pretty heavy in mercury, shellfish,

a lot of cadmium. So you just have to know kind of like how to navigate it. I don't want people to never eat scallops again because they're delicious. But if you make your diet predominantly fish for your protein, like a pescatarian diet, you are almost certainly going to end up with heavy metal toxicity. And that to me is a travesty because so many people out there believe that a pescatarian diet is ideal for humans and they just end up with heavy metal toxicity. It's just, it's non-tenable in 2023. You cannot do that. How do you eat the organs? Because do you cook in olive oil, or do you don't use olive oil? I don't cook with olive oil. So I was recently in Greece,

and they eat a lot of red meat in Greece, interestingly, as part of the Mediterranean diet. And in Greece, they told me something that I suspected, which is they don't like to heat olive oil. A good quality olive oil is not a seed oil in my opinion because it's pressed. It's not refined, bleached, and deodorized like most seed oils are. If you think about extracting oil from an olive, you can just press the olive and the oil comes out,

kind of like an avocado. But if you want to get oil out of a canola seed, which is actually called a rapeseed or a piece of corn, you have to grind it up and heat it and then bleach it and deodorize it and use hexane to extract it. It's a massively complex process that makes a much different, more toxic product. The problem with a lot of olive oil and avocado oil is that it's impure. It's cut with bad things. So there's been studies looking at these oils. Both avocado and olive are very frequently cut with seed oils

because they're such a profitable business. And a lot of oil gets, olive oil gets to the shelf, and avocado oil gets to the shelf, and it's already has a high peroxide value, meaning it's already kind of rancid. It's not a good thing for humans. So olive and avocado, better than seed oils. If you can get a really good quality olive oil, something that's like pressed last fall, because olive oils always get pressed in the fall, You want to get like last year's pressing. It should be in green opaque glass. It should be organic. It should be cold pressed and it should be single source. That might be okay to put on something if you don't want to heat it. But if you want to cook with an oil, I would use a butter or a tallow. A more saturated fat is going to be more stable when you heat it.

And I don't end up heating a lot of oils because I put most of my meats on a stainless steel grill for a minute. So when I eat liver, I will eat liver raw, but I'm not recommending that because most people don't want to do that. And this is what I was thinking of when I built Heart and Soil. So at Heart and Soil, we make desiccated organs.

We make freeze-dried organs. We get grass-fed, grass-finished organs from New Zealand, put them in a freeze dryer so you can make them into a powder at a very low temperature. You can basically lower than your freezer in your house. Like it's colder than that. You can take the water out of them and then you can put it in a capsule. So it saves as many of the nutrients as possible, makes it easy for people to get organs. I would prefer people eat fresh organs, but I thought about my sister and my mom as I stuff and thought they are never ever going to eat

raw liver or fresh liver or heart or pancreas or kidney or spleen. A lot of men really benefit from eating testicle. And it's number one, it's very hard to find fresh testicles. And number two, I don't think many men are gonna eat a bull testicle, although maybe we could convince them to.

So these all can be found in the capsules that we make in hardened soil. I would prefer people eat the fresh stuff, but if you won't do that, the freeze-dried organs are a good on-ramp to this. But I just want people to get more organs. So if you want to do liver, you can just saute it in a pan with tallow.

Make sure it's a little pink on the inside. You can grill it. Don't overcook it. Heart is delicious grilled. Again, don't overcook it. Why are you so careful about overcooking? Oh, because you want to preserve some of the, like you don't want to overcook all the nutrients in there.

Some nutrients in these foods are heat labile. Biotin, pretty resistant to heat. Riboflavin, kind of denatured if you heat it too much. So taurine is a very interesting one that I mentioned earlier that we should talk about. Taurine is a type of amino acid that is made in small amounts by the human body, but has been studied and is only found in animal foods,

but it's denatured by cooking somewhat, 50% denatured by cooking. So you want to eat your steak medium rare or rare sometimes to get taurine. You want to eat your liver a little bit pink on the inside. You want to get heart a little bit pink on the inside to kind of maximize the taurine. Why am I such a big proponent for taurine?

I think it illustrates what we're talking about so well. You can't find it in any plant foods and it's clearly beneficial in humans and animal models as we age. Isn't that what they put in Red Bull? That is one of the things they put in Red Bull. But you got to imagine that in a food, it's going to be more bioavailable and better for you than in a synthetic supplement in a drink that also has tons of caffeine and other garbage in it. Oh, you don't drink coffee either. I don't drink coffee, and I probably lost all of your audience with that assertion. God, Saladino. First of all,

you're such a terrible Italian, by the way. I want you to know. I mean, no pasta, no sauces, no tomatoes, no desserts. You can do, I mean, I have a lot of desserts. I'll tell you, like raw cream plus honey, I'd challenge you to find anything better than that. Like raw, it's like a mousse, man. That's amazing. I have a lot of sweet foods in my life. You can eat tomatoes if you want to. You have to take off the skin and the seeds because most people I think do have some level of sensitivity to nightshades. Even though tomatoes are fruit, there are lectins in there, which are carbohydrate binding proteins that do tend to trigger some autoimmune illness in people. But I think good Italians know that most pasta

sauce is made without the skin and the seeds. So you just got to be aware of that. But I've found that personally, and this is kind of what I think is at the core of what we're talking about. If I try and include nightshades in my diet, even if I cook the heck out of them, whether it's a white potato or a tomato, my lower back gets stiff. I mean, I'm usually very mobile. I can deep squat very low. I love mobility stuff. But when my lower back gets stiff. I mean, I'm usually very mobile. I can deep squat very low. I love mobility stuff. But when my lower back gets stiff, I think this is my autoimmune stuff flaring up. And I think, okay, whatever I ate did not agree with me. So this is kind of separating signal from noise from people. And what I want people to know is that you can probably feel

twice as good as you feel now in terms like you, recovery from MMA, sleep, mood, libido, all these things. Most of us can probably 2x feel twice as good as you do, maybe 3x. And so I'm always trying to optimize the way I feel. And I know that I feel good right now. As long as I get a good night of sleep and I'm mobile and feel good. And then every once in a while, I'll put something in my diet and I think, oh, that worked. It didn't bother me or it did bother me. And I think, okay, this is my experimentation. But this is the power of food rather than pharmaceuticals. If I get a stiff low back, I don't take ibuprofen. I just think, what did I eat differently that gave me that? And within a few days, my immune system calms down.

It usually takes a few days for the immune system to kind of get back to normal. And I'm back and I think, okay, I'm not going to eat tomatoes. I'm not going to eat potatoes. But I just brought that up because you mentioned it. I think most of us have food reactions where we feel crappy after food. You have the donut drop. You feel sluggish. Imagine eating a food and feeling better. That is very possible when we eat the way that our ancestors always have. It always goes back to that, right? That's the framework. And then so much science has been done to support that. It's just that we're not taught about that science. This work is valuable and I need to keep doing it

because I want to continue to contribute to this movement because it's not strong enough yet. Not enough people have heard these other ideas and it's helping so many people. It just makes me feel really good. So thanks for the opportunity. Listen, thank you for living it. Now, and just as an end note for people,

you don't drink alcohol then. No, I don't. I don't. What about THC? I don't. And I don't want people to think this is about becoming me, right? It's just how I do it.

I think that in my mind, I'm wired a little differently than people. And that is a foible, but it's also a superpower in some ways, right? So I think that this level of discipline around food and substances allows me to live this way and maybe has allowed me to do good in this work and communication. It's not that you can't never have a piece of chocolate or a piece of fish or a drink of alcohol or coffee or THC or any of these things. It's just, I want people to understand which things kind of build you up

and which things may be fun, but will in some ways decrease your energy and these things on the other side. And it's all balanced for people. And I'm not saying live my life or be as strict as I am, because that's not doable for most people. If you do 80%, then you're doing better for yourself. And we talked about, you know,

maybe you can't do five on and two off at the beginning of the podcast, but if doing anything will improve your health, and I don't want to give people unreachable goals by giving like, oh, he doesn't drink alcohol. I could never do any of that. I don't want people to not try any of the things we talked about with that idea.

It's just, I'm a little bit, you know, I'm a little bit of an alien, Chris. That's all right. I dig it. I dig people who live their life in the extreme, especially when it's done to be ultimately more reasonable. THC or alcohol? If you had to pick one. Oh, man.

Well, neither of them is great. Both of them are going to disturb sleep. We know that both of them affect like REM and non-REM sleep. The data I've seen on THC suggests that it can decrease androgens. And we know that even moderate doses of alcohol can thin the neocortex of the brain. So I think that I would do alcohol.

And if I were going to do alcohol, I would do moderate amounts. I would understand that it's a little bit of poison, but I'm using it as fun. And I would understand that some alcohol is probably more pure than others, like clear alcohols, like a vodka or a gin, something without, they're called congeners in the alcohol is going to be easier on you long-term. But again, it's a poison. And I

understand we all, we all have vices. I get it. I mean, maybe surfing is my vice, but so I would probably do alcohol over THC. Why do you do THC yourself? Can I ask you that? Is it anxiety? Is it sleep? Is it muscle recovery? Is it pain? I do CBD if it was about pain, and it's never really worked for me. I do THC as a alcohol substitute, and I do it basically to slow down my brain. That's what it is. It is a de-stressor for me. I mean, we could talk more about this offline, but I would say that, you know, you're, I don't know. Do you like Post Malone? I do. He has a new song out. It's called Overdrive. And that's what I think of with you. Like you're doing what you're passionate about, but you're like in freaking seventh gear, man. And so I think that.

I am in fight or flight mode 24 seven, but that's not going to end anytime soon. I got all kinds of battles going on that I just have to go through. But I do have to make the changes that I can. That's why I cut booze back. I mean, I actually had a couple of drinks with a buddy last night, and we were actually talking about the blessing that it is to be able to have just a couple, because there's so many in our lives, mine and his, that can't. But I rarely drink because it doesn't make me feel good. It interacts with my antidepressant. It gives me inflammation problems. And I definitely have

inflammation problems. I can swing seven pounds in a day. I mean, I'm a big dude. I walk around, my lean is like 220, but I can swing seven pounds in a day based on food. So I'm very inflammation sensitive. Just to troubleshoot this for a moment, maybe it's valuable for your audience. Are there other ways that you could de-stress or turn your brain off? If someone were to walk in and just knock me unconscious. When I wake up, I generally am a little bit more cleared. Of course there are. You can take a walk. I love, you know, you won't do this, but like, you know, I love cigars.

I love cigars and like to take a walk and think and do, you know, ironically, some breathing exercises or I do a lot of walking. It does a lot of clarifying for me. The weed is just faster and it allows me a party proxy. So I'll be around people who are doing more conventional things. And I use that as a substitute. This is more of an excuse than an explanation. And I know that, but it's better than me being drunk, making bad decisions, changing my mood. I agree. The other thing I would

say, and this may sound like too goody two-shoes for people, is like cold showers or any cold body of water, preferably the ocean or a lake, are an amazing way to state change. So if your brain is spinning and you're in that kind of fight or flight thing, even just putting your face in a bowl of ice water, some kind of state change helps me a lot because I get stressed too. And I will state change by going in the ocean or sauna and a cold plunge will do it.

So like, just actually, I wonder if that would help your body kind of calm down if you just state change. It's not as much fun. Let's see, like you want to have some THC or you want to jump in a bucket of ice water. Like, I think, you know, like we're talking about fun, but if we're talking like just practical solutions

that may not have the same consequences, I think state changing people getting out of that loop. I think you're right. I mean, it's so funny. You sound so much like my wife and I understand why she's a fan. She's a surfer and she is a huge, I mean, she's, you know, not putting I understand why she's a fan. She's a surfer. And she is a huge, I mean, she's not putting 40 pounds of ice in a bucket and sitting in it yet, but she absolutely

believes in that. And she is a different person when she comes out of the water. And it's valuable. And whether it's surfing or just jumping in a lake, not everybody has access to that, a river, even just a bathtub. But the bathtub probably needs to be a little bit chilly for someone or a cold shower. These things can be state changes that can help you turn your mind off. Because I think that, yeah, I mean, you're doing the things you're passionate about. I'm just thinking, like, where do we, and we don't have to belabor it, but just how could we insert things that kind of let a little pressure off in the easiest way possible or the best way possible. So let me thank you. I appreciate you, Dr. Saladino. Thank you for spreading the message and living it So let me thank you. I appreciate you, Dr. Saladino.

Thank you for spreading the message and living it. Thank you, man. I appreciate you too. The drinking, that part won't be that hard for me. The no THC, and about six other things. And I don't know how many kidneys or testicles I'm going to pound down in the middle of the day. So thank you for subscribing and following and being part of the Chris Cuomo Project. Don't forget me at NewsNation.

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that you care about. I'll see you soon.