Skip to content
The Joe Rogan ExperienceThe Joe Rogan Experience

Joe Rogan Experience #1551 - Paul Saladino

Dr. Paul Saladino is a physician and board-certified nutrition specialist. He’s a leading expert in the science and practice of the carnivore diet, a food regimen to which Saladino credits numerous health benefits seen in the patients under his care.

Paul SaladinoguestJoe Roganhost
Oct 16, 20203h 2mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:02 – 2:09

    Why “animal-based” shocks people: edible animals vs. defensive plants

    1. PS

      (drumming) Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

    2. JR

      Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. (rock music) Um, listen, man. I've been telling everybody that, uh, I eat mostly meat. And they look at me like I'm gonna die. And it's kinda funny. And I, I've had these conversations with people and they were like, "Oh, well, if you eat too much meat..." Jamie, can we get more waters? We only have one water out here.

    3. NA

      Yeah, sure.

    4. JR

      I've been telling these people, like, e- that I eat only meat and they're like, "Well, you know, if you eat too much meat, it causes colon cancer, causes this, causes that." And one of the things that I say, and, uh, is a talking point that I actually stole from you, is that most plants are inedible, but almost all animals are edible. And when you say that to them, they look at you like, "Oh, shit." Like, if you just go out and eat, like, random plants, you'll get sick as fuck. That's real. So like, when I tell people I eat mostly meat, they look at me like, like you're doing something really stu- Like, Rob Lowe started laughing at me. I said I have, like, an animal-based diet, you know? Some people are plant-based, I'm animal-based.

    5. PS

      I love that word.

    6. JR

      Yeah, animal-based.

    7. PS

      Yeah.

    8. JR

      Just steal what they're saying.

    9. PS

      (laughs) And make it better.

    10. JR

      But what you said, what I've, I've heard you say, that is, that's an accurate way of describing it. Most plants are not edible, but almost every animal's edible.

    11. PS

      I mean, and I think that if people spend time in the wilderness, n- regardless of the latitude, they'll start to appreciate this.

    12. JR

      Yeah.

    13. PS

      And I've s- mostly spent time in, in latitudes that are further from the equator than not. But even at the equator, if you go walking around the woods and, or the, the forest or the jungle there, and you try to eat leaves or stems or bark-

    14. JR

      You're gonna die.

    15. PS

      ... you're gonna die.

    16. JR

      (laughs)

    17. PS

      Really freaking fast. (laughs)

    18. JR

      Well, how about people who collect mushrooms? Like, they make mistakes, you know, like, uh-

    19. PS

      So easy.

    20. JR

      I remember there was a story about, uh, a guy in a nursing home. And, uh, he had went out and picked mushrooms for the people in the nursing home and cooked 'em up, and they all died.

    21. PS

      (laughs)

    22. JR

      Just, like, 'cause he fucked up.

    23. PS

      Ugh.

    24. JR

      He probably was an older guy, couldn't see, or maybe just forgot what's edible, or maybe he was just losing his mind. But the point is, most of these things you see are not edible.

  2. 2:09 – 4:43

    Plants and animals as a 400-million-year arms race (and why we detox)

    1. PS

      And if you think about it from the perspective of a plant, it makes more sense.

    2. JR

      Yeah.

    3. PS

      But we never do that anthropomorphization, and we never think about that. But as I was learning about this and thinking about carnivore diets and animal-based diets, I had to learn a lot of stuff myself. I'm a, I was trained as a physician. I wasn't trained as an anthropologist, and I took ecology in college, but when you look at, like, the, what we know about the timeline of life on Earth, 500 plus million years of plant and animal co-evolution. And there's a lot of people who have speculated this, that essentially plants evolve, animals evolve. Animals start eating plants, plants evolve defenses, animals evolve defenses against the defenses. And there's a whole series of enzymatic systems in our liver, the phase one and phase two detoxification systems, they're called cytochrome P450 and other reactionary systems in our liver that are meant to detoxify things. And a lot of people speculate, and I think this is really reasonable, that the majority of the reason we have those is so that we could eat plants from time to time so we didn't starve during our evolution. But there's a, there's a real interesting interaction here. This is warfare. This is, this is-

    4. JR

      Hmm.

    5. PS

      ... an arms race-

    6. JR

      Yeah.

    7. PS

      ... that's 400 million years old between plants and animals. And so what was so interesting for me as I got deeper and deeper into this, this idea around can humans exist, should humans exist, will humans thrive on a completely animal-based diet, you start to realize, wait a minute. Why are we imagining that plants are benign? They're beautiful, they're fun to look at, but they are rooted in the ground. They can't run away from us. What's their defense? Well, if you're out in the desert, a cacti's got a th- a thorn, or a rose has a thorn, a spine. But most of 'em just have plant defense chemicals. And that's not even conjecture, that's just known botanical science that plants make chemicals broadly called phytoalexins that are meant to dissuade animals, insects, fungi from over-consuming them. And so my fear is that we've assumed that plants are good for us. And we see everything with these plant compounds through the lens of these are good for us.

    8. JR

      Hmm.

    9. PS

      How can we prove they're good for us? There's a whole different part of the story. What if we think about it from a plant's perspective? What if these plant chemicals are not good for us? And we're misinterpreting the research, and I can talk about why I think we are. And maybe the plants are just making these chemicals to say, "Hey, if you eat a lot of me, you're not gonna feel good. I'm gonna affect your thyroid, I'm gonna affect your, your androgens, your sex hormones," or whatever. "I'm gonna make you have diarrhea or nausea, or I'm gonna kill you." And we've just been thinking, "More plants, more plants, more plants," when it's like, wait a minute, why are we eating plants in the first place?

  3. 4:43 – 9:17

    Hormesis debate: sauna/exercise vs. plant ‘medicine’

    1. JR

      Yeah. Well, here's, here's a question though. Is it good to eat some of them because there's this thing, and, and I know you've discussed this as well, the hormetic response.

    2. PS

      Right.

    3. JR

      Like, where your body responds to these, uh, effects that these plants are producing, and it actually, the, the response by your body is good, the same way the response from a sauna is good. It, your body really doesn't belong in 180 degree temperature-

    4. PS

      Right.

    5. JR

      ... but when you put it in 180 degree temperature, it develops these heat s- heat shock proteins and it's actually good. It's good for you to do that for short periods of time. Is that possible with plants? That lay- maybe some ... Like I know, uh, Dr. Rhonda Patrick is really into broccoli sprouts, and I think for that very particular reason.

    6. PS

      Yeah. So this is really interesting. And it, if you think about it differently, it starts to make more sense, I believe. Or there's a whole different paradigm, a whole different lens through which we can view this. So as I was writing my book, I came up with these terms environmental hormesis and molecular hormesis.

    7. JR

      I'll grab your book. It's right here.

    8. PS

      Uh, molecular hormesis is broadly termed xenohormesis by some people. Xeno is this Latin term that means alien or foreign. So, when you think about these, a lot of, in common parlance, people lump together exercise, ketosis, sunlight, sauna...... with plant compounds, but I think that's, that's not accurate. I don't think we should be doing that. I think we have environmental hormesis and molecular hormesis, and they're different things. So I won't debate that plants can be beneficial as medicine, but to use them as food presupposes that molecular hormesis is good for us, and I'll tell you why I don't think it is. So when you go in the sauna, or when you are in ketosis, or when you're in the sun, or when you exercise, you do generate reactive oxygen species, superoxide radicals, and they activate a system in your body called the Nrf2 system. I can pull up a picture of it in a second. And that turns on genes that are involved in the antioxidant response to manage these free radicals. Life is this elegant dance of electron movement, and protons too, and other functional groups in chemistry, but the movement of electrons is oxidation and reduction, with the loss of electrons being oxidation, the gain of electrons being reduction. And so when we think about oxidative stress, we're talking about molecules pulling electrons from other molecules, creating free radicals, which just broadly means that there are unpaired electrons. Now these are very reactive molecules that can then create things like lipid peroxides or, you know, free radicals within proteins which change the conformation of the protein, and, and we know these can be damaging for humans. One of the reasons that cigarette smoking is bad for us is because it creates a ton of free radicals, lots of oxidative stress. But a little bit of oxidative stress, or just the right amount, the Goldilocks amount, is necessary for life. We don't wanna get rid of all of the oxidative radicals in our body. They're critical signaling molecules at the level of the mitochondria. So this whole movement toward antioxidants and more antioxidant, you know, chemicals is... Eventually, if we snuff out all of the oxidative radicals or all the reactive oxygen species in the human body, we'll be dead. We need these for signaling. So a little bit of oxidative stress is good. Too much, stressful, creates problems. Not enough, stressful, creates problems. It's definitely a Goldilocks thing. So when you are in the sauna, or you are in the sunlight, or you exercise, you will create oxidative stress. That oxidative stress turns on Nrf2. This is essentially a transcription factor that translocates to the nucleus, turns on genes involved in antioxidant response, things like glutathione peroxidase, thioredoxin, things like this. They manage those free radicals, and that's just... It's kinda clean, right? You have a, uh, an input to the system. It turns on a gene. Molecular hormesis is a little different. It's like going to the pharmacy and taking a medicine. But what we never get with plants is the package insert, quote-unquote, that comes with medications in the pharmacy. If you go to the pharmacy and you get a drug like Lisinopril, Metoprolol, a statin drug, even if you get ibuprofen or Naproxen, Aleve at the pharmacy, on the bottle, there's a list of all the side effects. When we use exogenous molecules for humans, we know that they don't really play well with our biochemistry. They're going to do one thing which may be an intended effect, but then they're going to have other effects elsewhere which could be damaging. And invariably, we see this with medications we take. We know that beta blockers can affect, uh, glucose tolerance, and they can affect sympathetic signaling in the human body with the nervous system. And we know that Lisinopril and drugs like this which affect the kidneys can have problems with electrolyte balance or other things. They can affect the lungs because they're affecting the way that

  4. 9:17 – 15:06

    Broccoli sprouts and sulforaphane: the ‘booby trap’ mechanism and thyroid effects

    1. PS

      angiotensin-converting enzyme works, and look, they have side effects. And so my concern is that we're conflating the two, and we're forgetting about the side effects that are associated with molecular hormesis. I think that there certainly are studies with molecules like sulforaphane, which is this isothiocyanate compound from broccoli, that show that it also triggers Nrf2. It triggers this antioxidant response system. But what we aren't told about much is the other side effects of sulforaphane, the so-called package insert that sulforaphane has. And when you look at that, there's a large amount of evidence that this whole class of molecules, isothiocyanates, actually have many negative effects in the body. And when you think about it from a plant's perspective, sulforaphane is pretty clearly a toxin. It's a booby trap. So one of the things I like to ask people is how much sulforaphane is in broccoli seeds? And the answer is zero until you chew them. There's no sulforaphane in broccoli or kale or kohlrabi or any of these Brassica vegetables till you chew them. And Rhonda's talked about this.

    2. JR

      How does that work?

    3. PS

      There's a precursor molecule called glucoraphanin, which is a glucosinolate, and it's like a booby trap. It's like Super Glue. You get two things combining. So you get glucoraphanin is the precursor molecule. There's an enzyme called myrosinase in a separate compartment of the cell. When you chew the cell and you break the cell wall, they combine, and then out comes sulforaphane.

    4. JR

      Mm.

    5. PS

      So it's a booby trap. It's like, "If you're gonna eat me, I'm gonna make this molecule. It's gonna affect you. It's gonna be a pro-oxidant," right? Because if you look at the chemistry of sulforaphane, it actually is a pro-oxidant, meaning it's pulling electrons from other molecules. It's not actually coming into our body and acting as an antioxidant. It's turning on our antioxidant defense system, but it's also doing other negative things in the human body. In the case of isothiocyanates, it's actually been shown to damage DNA, which is a process called clastogenesis, and it inhibits iodine absorption at the level of the thyroid.

    6. JR

      This is all sulforaphane?

    7. PS

      All sulforaphane, yeah, and there are other molecules like this that are also found in these type of foods, the Brassica family of foods, things like goitrin or allyl isothiocyanate. They're all isothiocyanates. So they're widely known to affect th- iodine chemistry at the level of the thyroid. Have you ever seen people with the big necks in Africa, like the goiters? There's an endemic goiter.

    8. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    9. PS

      You get this huge neck. That's hypothyroidism because they're consuming lots of foods that have goitrogenic, that are goitrogenic foods, lots of foods that have, similarly, isothiocyanate compounds that are inhibiting the absorption or at least the, the, um, utilization of iodine at the level of the thyroid. So there, it's working against the thyroid. So the intent of plants is very clear here. It's saying, "If you eat too much of me, I'm going to affect your thyroid negatively, and that's going to affect every other hormonal system in your body." So yes, sulforaphane can be beneficial, uh, because it turns on our antioxidant response system, but it also has many side effects which are ignored, and we see this pattern over and over and over, and this is what was fascinating.

    10. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    11. PS

      We see this pattern over and over and over with plant molecules.And then if you look at these two, people might say, "Well, is the risk worth the benefit?" And I would argue it's not. Or I would argue the benefit is not worth the risk because you can get your NRF2 system turned on without those molecules because you can do environmental hormesis. You can go in the sauna, you can exercise, you can fast, you can be in ketosis. There's really good studies, um, in cold water swimmers in Berlin and their show- they show that cold water exposure, so they go and they swim in cold water for like an hour, and they'll show that their glutathione level goes down, meaning that they- their oxidized level of glutathione goes up, the reduced level of glutathione goes down. They're using their endogenous antioxidant molecule, one of them which is glutathione, to mitigate these newly produced oxidative radicals, these free radicals in the human body produced by cold water swimming. And then the next day they'll see their glutathione is a little bit above normal. That's hormesis. That's environmental hormesis. So my argument is, can we really say that plant molecules give us a net benefit? I don't think we can. There's lots of interesting studies here that would argue that we don't really get a net benefit from plant molecules. It's kind of a redundant effect. We can get this NRF2 system, this antioxidant response system turned on without them, and then we're getting all of the downstream negative side effects of these plant molecules.

    12. JR

      Have there been any independent studies that show people taking, like, broccoli sprouts and then doing it for a prolonged period of time, measuring their system, and then doing environmental hormesis and seeing if they, they measure up?

    13. PS

      Well, there's actually studies that show... They have two groups of people, and I can pull these up if you want. There's studies that compare people that eat essentially no vegetables or low fruits and vegetables to high fruits and vegetables, and they'll compare them at 4, 8, or 12 weeks. And at the end they see no differences in the oxidative stress markers, the inflammatory markers, markers of DNA damage. So it's pretty shaky ground to say that invariably all the studies with fruits and vegetables show that they provide this benefit. In the short term, sulforaphane can create more, uh, antioxidant response. You can get more glutathione. But if you take it out a little bit of time, it doesn't look like there's any difference between people who are eating things like broccoli or Jerusalem artichokes or carrots or cabbage or any of these other vegetables compared to a group that eats none of them. So there's these fruit and vegetable intervention studies which don't show any differences between these people.

    14. JR

      That's bananas. So all the people that are thinking that they're doing a good thing for their system by taking these vegetables and fruits that have this her- h- your body has this hermetic response for, you can have the exact same response from cold plunge, from sauna, from exercise?

    15. PS

      You're turning on the exact same system in your body.

  5. 15:06 – 22:09

    Do fruits & vegetables improve biomarkers? Vitamin C, scurvy, and RCT skepticism

    1. JR

      But what about the vitamins that you're getting from plants?

    2. PS

      Right.

    3. JR

      I mean, there are, there are, there are essential nutrients and phytonutrients that you get from plants. What about those?

    4. PS

      So this is really interesting when you look into it. There are really... This is gonna sound extreme when I say it, but I'll back it up. There are no nutrients in plants that you cannot get from animal foods in essentially equivalent or more bioequivalent forms.

    5. JR

      How come when, like, cats eat an animal, they go for the guts first and they'll actually eat the grass that's in the guts of the cow?

    6. PS

      I don't know.

    7. JR

      Or the guts of a ruminant?

    8. PS

      I don't know why they would do that. I guess it's fermented... I don't know.

    9. JR

      Hmm.

    10. PS

      Because if you look at the nutrients in, um, in animal foods, right, there are many nutrients in animal foods that do not occur in plants, and we know this. B12, but the list is much bigger. Vitamin K2, choline, carnosine, carnitine, anserine, taurine. The list is extremely long. But you can't say the same thing about plants. There are no nutrients that occur in plants that you can't get from animal foods.

    11. JR

      None? Vitamin C?

    12. PS

      You can definitely get vitamin C from animal foods.

    13. JR

      And do you get it from... What do you get it from? Liver or-

    14. PS

      Liver, heart, muscle, it all has vitamin C. So in the 1930s, from 1935 to 1942 or '43, they did a series of studies, I think it was in Sheffield, England. I've got the study, I can show you. And they had conscientious objectors to the war and they had them take different amounts of vitamin C to see how long it would take to get scurvy. And doses as low as 10 milligrams of vitamin C per day could prevent scurvy.

    15. JR

      They experimented with conscientious ex- uh, objectors?

    16. PS

      Yeah, yeah.

    17. JR

      Wow.

    18. PS

      Yeah.

    19. JR

      That's kind of creepy.

    20. PS

      10 milligrams a day.

    21. JR

      There it is.

    22. PS

      Yeah.

    23. JR

      Medical experience carried out in Sheffield on conscientious objectors to military service. Wow.

    24. PS

      And if you scroll down to the next page, Jamie.

    25. JR

      That's kind of creepy that they did experiments on 'em.

    26. PS

      You'll see the doses, but yeah. There was, um... 10 milligrams of vitamin C will, will prevent scurvy, so-

    27. JR

      Right. Uh, but obviously that's not an optimum level for health.

    28. PS

      Well, we don't know.

    29. JR

      No?

    30. PS

      Yeah. Because if you look at the, um... If you look at the, the amount of vitamin C... The- They show y- They say there that between the 70 milligram group and the 10 milligram group, there was no difference in clinical outcomes. The prevailing thinking is that 10 milligrams is not enough for optimal health, but we don't actually know. There are roles of vitamin C beyond the formation of collagen, which is the main thing that gets broken when we see scurvy, or at least that's the physical manifestations. You get bleeding gums, your teeth fall out. This is all collagenous tissue. The connective tissue in the human body starts to break down because you can't hydroxylate proline residues on the collagen molecule. But when you look at it beyond that, there's actually some pretty good studies. I'll see if I can find one. I've definitely got one in here, um, that shows that if you look at people eating... They did another experiment with excess fruits and vegetables, and they had one group that had small amounts of fruits and vegetables, and now we're gonna skip up to 70 milligrams. So th- it's a little bit more than 10. There's no experiments with like long term 10 milligrams of vitamin C per day, but there's an experiment that compares 70 milligrams of vitamin C per day from low fruits and vegetables to 270 milligrams of fruits and vegetable- 270 milligrams of vitamin C from fruits and vegetables, and there were no clinical differences in those outcomes in those people. So one group has low fruits and vegetables, one group has high fruits and vegetables.

  6. 22:09 – 31:34

    Nose-to-tail eating: organs, indigenous priorities, and raw liver challenge

    1. JR

      Now this, this expression nose to tail, a lot of people don't know what we're talking about. What, what you're talking about is organ meats.

    2. PS

      Yeah.

    3. JR

      Yeah, is eating organ meats 'cause most people when they think of eating animal products, they think of just eating tissue, muscle tissue.

    4. PS

      And, you know, it's so funny. I recently was hanging out with Steve Rinella, and he was telling me historically the trappers, like these fur trappers maybe in the 1800s... At some point along the way, we've lost this ancestral knowledge that eating organs is so important, and that all indigenous cultures do it and they savor the organs really above all other things, and they distribute them among the tribe. And these trappers went out and they started to just not... They get, started to get sick from just eating the muscle meat, and they had to start incorporating organs-

    5. JR

      Hmm.

    6. PS

      ... in their diet. It was a historical reference. I'm not sure where he read it. But yeah, if you look at the way that indigenous cultures do this, and you look at the way that other animals do this as well, they, they don't waste anything.

    7. JR

      Particularly w- uh, we have... Well, we've talked about it many times in the podcast. Wolves, the alpha wolf will eat the liver and the other wolves have to stand by. And there's a crazy documentary about a guy who lived with wolves, and one of the ways he tricked these wolves into thinking that he was the alpha was he would have an animal and he would put a liver in the animal. So they would bring a carcass and he would be growling at them while he ate the liver. And they were like, "Wow, I guess this guy's the fucking boss. He's eating the liver."

    8. PS

      If you, if you eat liver, you get to be an alpha male or an alpha female.

    9. JR

      Well, it was, it was weird that he knew and that this is just... The wolves know in their pack mentality that the alpha is the one that gets the most nutritious piece of the animal.

    10. PS

      And there are even organs beyond the liver that are uniquely nutritious. The heart is, is prized. I mean, the spleen, the pancreas. These are things we don't eat much as Westernized humans, but-

    11. JR

      Yeah.

    12. PS

      Kidneys are prized. I mean, so there was this really interesting, uh, arctic explorer, Viljar Stefansson. Have you heard of his adventures in the early 1900s?

    13. JR

      I have.

    14. PS

      Yeah, so he wrote The Fat of the Land, Not by Bread Alone. And, um, he, he had quotes. Um, I think I have a quote from him here in the, um... Let's see. I think it's in the anthropology. So he would say that the, um... Actually it's in the nose to tail folder, Jamie, if you're looking for that. There's a screenshot there. So he would say that, um, "While meat of any kind is in great demand, it is interesting to note the following are the favorite cuts. The brisket of the beef with the fat and the cartilages." So these indigenous cultures in the, um, in the Arctic would, uh, they would favor things with fat and connective tissue. "The skin and subcutaneous fat..."... of the warthog, pig skin, hog's head and brains, and number four is the liver of any animal.

    15. JR

      Look at that. "Pig skin is never saved for rawhide and leather. It's too valuable as food, and is eaten after singeing off the hair and a prolonged boiling. Plump b- cow skin is similarly eaten. A lean cow skin will be saved for rawhide and leather. The hog's head, brains, and fat are both delicacies. The liver of any animal, the hands and feet of monkey because of the fat content." Whoa.

    16. PS

      So, they tend to favor the fat and the organs.

    17. JR

      Bro, they're eating monkey hands. Should we really listen to them? (laughs)

    18. PS

      (laughs) I've never had monkey hands. You ever had brain?

    19. JR

      No. I've had calf's brain-

    20. PS

      What'd you think?

    21. JR

      ... when I was a child. I don't remember. It was a long time ago with my Uncle Vinny. He used to, uh, he- they used to, I guess, it was calf's brain or lamb's brain. I don't remember. But I remember they would grill it and, uh, I- I found it so strange they were eating it. I wish I could remember if I liked it or not. But I also, like, I pr- I was probably six, you know? And I don't know if I had a sensibility towards different, you know, interesting f- like, I enjoy liver now. I actually like it. I enjoy heart. I eat it. I- I like some things that other people, I like sea urchin. I like things that people might find weird because of the texture alone. So, I don't know if I felt that way when I was little.

    22. PS

      It, liver is amazing. I- I know you had the guys from, um, Black Rifle on.

    23. JR

      Yeah.

    24. PS

      And they were saying that when they were taking the desiccated organ supplements, they had a- a rush of energy. But I- I kinda have this thing that I like to do with people where I have them eat raw liver.

    25. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    26. PS

      And it's really cool to see how it turns their brain on. The baseline nutrition depends, you know, will determine how much of a buzz they get. But, of course, there's always food contamination issues.

    27. JR

      Have you ever done with vile, with bile? Like, where you slice the liver and squirt the bile on it?

    28. PS

      I haven't. I'm hopefully gonna hunt this year and I wanna do that with a gallbladder.

    29. JR

      Yeah.

    30. PS

      But I- I think that it's so interesting to s- to see that they would savor the things that were salty.

  7. 31:34 – 45:17

    Foie gras ethics to regenerative agriculture: soil, subsidies, and scalability

    1. JR

      Yeah. Well, b- and, and people are like, "Well, you shouldn't do that," 'cause the weird thing about it is the ducks go to the feeding pipe. They go to it. They want it to happen. Like, in our eyes, like, this forced feeding is a terrible thing. But they actually gravitate towards that pipe. It's a very tw-... Look, I'm not in favor of doing weird shit to animals like that. I'm not in favor of giving them food they're not supposed to eat. I'm not in favor of overfeeding them or force feeding them. But I just find it odd that they go to that pipe. Like, there's a... You ever seen how they do it?

    2. PS

      I wonder what's in it. I wonder what they feed them.

    3. JR

      Pl- pretty sure it's grains. Um, uh, I'm pretty sure that's what it i-... Like, see if you can find them, uh, ducks getting fed grains for foie gras.

    4. PS

      Yeah, I wonder if they do anything to the grains to make them overeat it, because there are lots of studies in rodents. Sometimes you can use rodents that are genetically predisposed to become obese. But if you alter the food, and we know this with humans, you can alter food in some ways to make it more palatable and to kinda short-circuit the satiety mechanisms.

    5. JR

      These ducks are not into it. This guy's grabbing him by the neck, but this is a different setup. This is, this is, uh, a handmade one, like, or a handheld one, and they're just pumping it in there. The video that I saw, like, this-

    6. NA

      Oh, these are all being force-fed.

    7. JR

      Yeah. Well, I'm sure... Uh, it's... The, the way I saw it, it was like there was a pipe in the center of the room. Force feeding ducks at Hudson Valley Foie Gras. Go up that, "feeding ducks for foie gras," 'cause this, I think this is probably one where they, uh... Yeah, see, it's th- they're... It's weird, 'cause you're grabbing the duck. Uh, they're not gonna be into that no matter what you do. And you're making them open their mouth. It just seems gross.

    8. PS

      Yeah, it is.

    9. JR

      And here's, and here's what's weird about it. Is that any grosser than things that are legal? You know, 'cause there's a lot of stuff that's legal that we do to animals. Like, when do we decide what's legal and what's not legal? Because factory farming should be fucking completely illegal, and it's legal in California. You can get factory-fed animals, and you could buy them left and right. What you can't get is foie gras anymore. And I'm like, "Well, listen, guys. You got... You're not making any sense." Like, this is one small moment of this duck's day where they're feeding him. And they're, they're shoving a tube in his mouth and overfeeding him. The life of a pig that you eat for bacon is a terrible, tortured life, and you're okay with that. You're just not okay with this fucking duck getting extra grain pumped down its mouth. Meanwhile, they're just living a normal life other than that.

    10. PS

      And feedlots. I mean, I think I agree with you completely. Factory farming is a scourge, and it should... I don't know why-

    11. JR

      It's creepy.

    12. PS

      ... we keep doing it.

    13. JR

      It's creepy.

    14. PS

      I think there's a lot of corn and soy subsidies that are supported by it, and it's really unfortunate. But there's a lot of really interesting discussion about the sustainability of grass-fed, grass-finished meat and this regenerative agriculture concept, but-

    15. JR

      Is it sustainable in... at scale, though? Like, could you still have Jack in the Box if you had grass-fed, grass-finished meat? I think we can both agree that grass-fed, grass-finished meat is healthier to consume. But the disagreement comes, like Bourdain, again, rest his soul, would say he prefers grass, uh, um, grain-fed cows because he finds the meat to be more delicious and tender. He liked it better as a chef. Um, and, you know, that's, that's a culinary choice. Like, he, as an artist creating food, he preferred an animal that was, you know... Like, people like Wagyu, you know? They like that kind of... I, I think that's... That's a fucking dying animal, man.

    16. PS

      I agree with you. There... I mean, if you look at the way that cattle are factory farmed, the reason they have all that intramuscular fat is because they are less metabolically healthy than their grass-fed, grass-finished cohorts.

    17. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    18. PS

      The sustainability or the scalability argument is so important to consider. So, when I think about this, I think about it from a couple of perspectives. There's the land use perspective, but there's also just the actual mathematics of it, that 99-ish percentage of cows that we eat that are grain finished had 85% of their life on grass. They don't-

    19. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    20. PS

      They're not raised from calves-

    21. JR

      Right.

    22. PS

      ... in the factory farm. So, and you, then I think like, wait a minute, we haven't... We're already raising all of our cattle on grass for 85% of their lives. We're just sending them to factory farms at the end. And I think it's a consumer-driven thing. It's people who want that type of meat, or they're not familiar with the gamey flavor or texture, or they want it to be intramuscular fat. They want it to have more marbling.

    23. JR

      Yeah.

    24. PS

      And then the other, the other aspect is, is the actual land use, and then when you think about how much land is used to grow corn and soy, and then if we get rid of all the corn and soy that goes to animals and feedlots, we can graze cattle there. And then there's actually, I believe it's called the Conservation Reserve Program. The federal government pays farmers to let their lands lay fallow for decades. There's hundreds of thousands of acres in the Uni- United States that are not being farmed because they were monocropped too basic f-... They were monocropped so badly that they had no nutrients. They can't grow plants on it. So, what I think what everyone is missing, well, not the people in the regenerative agriculture space, not you, but I think that the mainstream is missing the fact that in order to regenerate land, in order to make land healthy, you put animals on the land.

    25. JR

      Right.

    26. PS

      That's why the center of the country where there were millions of bison and elk and antelope and deer and pronghorn had the richest soil anywhere until we monocropped it.

    27. JR

      Right.

    28. PS

      And then we deplete the nutrients. It's a net negative, it's just a, it's just a sink. We're just pulling nutrients out. But when you talk to the folks at White Oak Pastures in Georgia, or other regenerative farms, and you look at the soil, it's incredible. The, when animals live on the soil in an ecosystem, it puts nutrients back into the soil. The soil is like the color of coffee grounds.

    29. JR

      Right.

    30. PS

      So, I was in Georgia recently at Bluffton, at White Oak, um, doing photographs for a cookbook I'm writing, and Will Harris, who's, um, a colleague of Joel Salatin, I know you've had Joel on the podcast.

  8. 45:17 – 53:28

    Hunter-gatherer metabolism: fasting, ketosis cycling, and autophagy

    1. PS

      And so few humans in 2020 have gone for more than 18 hours without eating food.

    2. JR

      Yeah.

    3. PS

      Very few of us, in, in how many decades we've lived or, have utilized the fat burning systems in our body. You know, you can use glucose or fructose or sugars. You can use carbohydrates and you can do glycolysis, but there's a whole nother system where you can either use fat that's coming in or use fat from your body in beta oxidation and ketones, move the, you know, the fat basically precursor molecules around your body. And when we get adapted to that, we have this extra engine. We have two engines.

    4. JR

      Yeah.

    5. PS

      We're both hybrid and gas. But if we go long enough without ever using the, the hybrid, you know, fat burning engine, we kinda lose it. But you can get it back pretty quickly.

    6. JR

      It's kind of interesting today that there are a lot of people that are interested in, in intermittent fasting, or, you know, having a, a very specific feeding window. And there are, they are seeing benefits of that. You know, I was reading some article recently that was saying there's, it's, a study shows that there's no weight loss benefit to intermittent fasting. And I'm like, "Who made that fucking study? And who were you studying? And how is that re- Everybody that I know that's done it has lost weight." Like, what are you talking about? Like, how, what is that study about? And who... Why would someone be even interested in promoting that?

    7. PS

      So much of what gets done in the nutrition community in research is-

    8. JR

      Fuckery.

    9. PS

      (laughs) Yeah.

    10. JR

      There's a lot of fuckery, right?

    11. PS

      It is. And the devil's in the details, right?

    12. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    13. PS

      Um, what were they feeding them? What were the ratio of oils in the food? What, what were they-

    14. JR

      Right.

    15. PS

      ... doing for intermittent fasting? Were they intermittent fasting with junk food? Were they intermittent fasting with standard American diet food? I think it's pretty clear. There, there's a lot of compelling data in both, at least in animal models, and I believe in human models too, that having a feeding window and having time when your body shifts from, "Carbohydrate burning," or using the glycogen stored in your liver to making ketones, even on a daily basis, that cycling is beneficial for humans. You're flipping back and forth between anabolic and catabolic pathways. At a broad level, you're looking at systems like mTOR, the mammalian target of rapamycin and AMP kinase. They're, they're, they're balancing systems. This is a... I mean, they're, they're kind of this see-saw. And we know that when you have AMP kinase at a very broad level, when you have more of this ketogenic physiology, when you e- when you exhaust the glycogen in your liver, you turn on these autophagy mechanisms. You do the cellular housecleaning. And that's beneficial for humans. Our ancestors would certainly have done that.

    16. JR

      Explai- Please explain that to people, the cellular housecleaning. The, the, the, that your body actually does get rid of some damaged cells.

    17. PS

      Damaged cells and damaged proteins within cells, and damaged mitochondria. So within the cell, there are these "powerhouse factories," which are probably ancient bacteria, you know, billions of years ago, that combined with a single celled organism, and we became eukaryotic with a membrane bound nucleus and a membraned bound organelle called a mitochondria, which produces ATP for the body. And so within the body, there are all these organelles within our cells. And some of them, the, the job of that, that organelle is to basically be the trash compactor. Old proteins are ubiquinated and they're moved to organ- to the organelles that recycle them. And so you do this cellular housecleaning but... And it seems to happen more when you're in this state of ketosis or, uh, when you're not using the glucose from... Or when you're not in sort of an anabolic physiology. And so you can see that with our ancestral, with our ancestors, we would have switched back and forth. We wouldn't have been successful in hunts every day. We would have had some hunts that were successful and some gathering sessions which were, which were successful, and others which weren't. And when they're not successful, you're, you're fasting.

    18. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    19. PS

      And so that's a, that's a beneficial thing. I mean, and I think that that, that intermittent cellular housecleaning is an ancestral pattern that we would do well to, to espouse, to mirror.

    20. JR

      Like, so your body doesn't have any food to digest, so it's like, "Look, let's do some cleaning up. We got a, a bunch of junk laying around the attic. Let's sweep it up." But if we're doing the standard American thing, which is to eat constantly and snack throughout the day, and then can't wait to have dinner, and then can't wait to have breakfast, and can't wait to have lunch, and...... your, your body never really gets a break. It's always digesting.

    21. PS

      It's always digesting. I mean, it would be so interesting to look at the, the Western population or the American population and, and see how many of them actually exhaust liver glycogen overnight, how many people actually wake up with ketones in their blood. I think it would be a, a fraction.

    22. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    23. PS

      I think the majority of people never get rid of their liver glycogen, never actually flip. And, to be fair, (sighs) I, I actually don't think we should always be in ketosis either. I think that that can pre- present some challenges to the human physiology and that intermittent, you know, uh, inclusion of carbohydrates can be beneficial for humans. And this is a cycle, it's a circle, like many things are in our life. And our ancestors, in spite of the fact that they favored meat and organs, they certainly would have had carbohydrates from time to time when they were available. So, there's this, this balance. I think that, personally, with the people I've worked with and in sort of the reading that I've done, everything I've learned, it's, it works better to be cyclic ketosis rather than persistent ketosis all the time. Though ketogenic physiology, I think, is intrinsic to humans, it's beneficial, super healthy, and a lot of people find massive benefits from it.

    24. JR

      Well, ketosis particularly for people that have epilepsy or, and for seals that work on those rebreathers, you know, um, the, the, they found that being in ketosis can keep them from having seizures-

    25. PS

      Yeah.

    26. JR

      ... which is really kind of fascinating as well.

    27. PS

      It changes the neural physiology.

    28. JR

      Yeah.

    29. PS

      Yeah.

    30. JR

      Well, for children, children that have epilepsy, they found a great benefit in being in ketosis. Uh, it just, it makes sense that your body would fare best on the things that it evolved with. And the things that it evolved with are mostly animals, fish, and fruits.

  9. 53:28 – 1:10:39

    Carbs on an animal-based diet: gluconeogenesis, fruit limits, honey + CGM data

    1. JR

      I w- I wanna get into the honey thing, but I also wanna talk about w- what is, what is it called? I a- I always screw up the word. Is it glucogenesis? Like, what is it called when your body converts protein into glycogen?

    2. PS

      Gluconeogenesis.

    3. JR

      Gluconeogenesis.

    4. PS

      Mm-hmm.

    5. JR

      Okay. So, that is what occurs if you just eat nothing but meat. You will develop some glucose.

    6. PS

      You have to. You have to.

    7. JR

      You have to.

    8. PS

      In ke- in ketosis, your body will do gluconeogenesis.

    9. JR

      And your body does this without... You don't need any carbohydrates?

    10. PS

      You don't need any carbohydrates to do it. It will use... There are certain amino acids that are gluconeogenic. The backbone of a fat molecule is glycerol. That's gluconeogenic. Lactate, there are acetate, there are other molecules that can make glucose. We have a backup system to make glucose, because there are tissues in the body that require glucose.

    11. JR

      And this is why if you eat only meat, you will get knocked out of ketosis, if you have too much protein.

    12. PS

      Mm-hmm. Yeah. Which may not necessarily be a bad thing.

    13. JR

      Right. Does-

    14. PS

      It's just, it's human physiology.

    15. JR

      It's pretty fascinating though, that your body has, i- knows how to do that-

    16. PS

      It doesn't al-

    17. JR

      ... knows how to convert it。

    18. PS

      Yeah, yeah. Because you, you would die otherwise.

    19. JR

      Yeah.

    20. PS

      If we didn't make glucose from protein and glycerol backbones and other substrate, we would die. We need glucose.

    21. JR

      One of the things that I found when I did a total animal diet for a month is my energy level was really sustained throughout the day. It was very even. An- and I found it to be very unusual. Like, there was no difference between me at 11:00 AM versus me at 7:00 PM. It was f- a flat line throughout the day. And I cannot say that about any other diet that I've ever been on. There's been these ups and downs, and especially when I'm eating just normal, whatever, whatever I feel like eating, cheeseburger, have a bowl of spaghetti, whatever I'm thinking about, you know, whatever I feel like eating. When I do that, I, there's horrible crashes. Like, and the way I feel after meals is so different.... way I feel after meals when I was on the carnivore diet, which again, admittedly, I only did really strictly for a month. Like, now I'm on the carnivore diet until I go out to dinner, and then I eat whatever the fuck I want. Like last night, I had sushi. Um, but for the most part, during that month, uh, I had, like, real amazing energy and a lot of clarity. And I felt extra aggressive, which was weird.

    22. PS

      (laughs)

    23. JR

      And I, I wa- I don't know if that was just 'cause I felt better and that's just my nature when I'm not tired. But, uh, not aggressive in a bad way, but aggressive, like, I was quicker to, like, mock things. I'd be like, "Fuck that." I was qu- I was, I had more energy. I wa- And mo- It was more fun to make fun of things too. Like, I had more energy to exercise. I had more, more, uh, ambition to do things. It was very weird. And I was thinking, like, "There's w- without a doubt some sort of physiological change to my body that's, that's happening while I'm on this." And I lost a lot of weight too. I lost 12 pounds in a month, which I thought was pretty extraordinary.

    24. PS

      That's a, that's a v- very large amount of weight to lose in a month.

    25. JR

      Yeah.

    26. PS

      And I heard you also say your vitiligo got better.

    27. JR

      Yes, it did. Yeah.

    28. PS

      That is amaze- That's really cool.

    29. JR

      That spot started filling in, which is really strange.

    30. PS

      Mm-hmm. Because I first got interested in the carnivore diet because of autoimmunity and, and the way that ... just the hypothesis. Could some of these plant toxins that we were kinda talking about earlier, could these be triggering immunologic reactions in humans? And we know they do. Gluten is a plant lectin, and it certainly-

  10. 1:10:39 – 1:19:36

    Plant toxicity spectrum and vegan ‘ideology’ dynamics (seeds, lectins, cyanide)

    1. PS

      And it starts to look like, I would say, a reimagined version of a Paleolithic diet, because that's what we're essentially asking. What is the species-appropriate human diet? What is the genetic congruence between our environment and our genetics in 2020? I believe we're really still programmed to eat like our ancestors and that we still thrive doing this. But it can be a little bit more broad for people than just a strict carnivore diet for those that will, will espouse that. You know? If I say, "Hey, well, what about avocado?" So in the book, in chapter, uh, 12, I talk about this spectrum of plant toxicity. And if you think about it from a plant's perspective, there are parts of a plant that it wants you to eat, s- usually, like the fruit, and a lot of parts of the plant that it doesn't want you to eat. And it doesn't want you to eat its leaves. D- why would a plant want you to eat its leaves?

    2. JR

      Right.

    3. PS

      It doesn't want you to eat its seeds. Those are the reproductive parts of a plant.

    4. JR

      Right.

    5. PS

      So like-

    6. JR

      So if you chew the seeds, that's where this, you were talking about these negative compounds that only happen when you chew certain seeds, like apple seeds.

    7. PS

      Apple seeds have amygdalin. It's a cyanogenic glycoside, and yes, you can, there, there's enough, it, it actually can release cyanide moieties in the human body. It's frankly toxic. Apples do not want you to eat the seed.

    8. JR

      But they don't mind if you swallow them and shit 'em out.

    9. PS

      Shit 'em out in a nice pile of fertilizer.

    10. JR

      Right.

    11. PS

      And-

    12. JR

      Which is how they wind up growing.

    13. PS

      How they grow. And it's the same with all the stone fruits. So all the stone fruits, uh, peaches, plums, even almonds, they have this cyanogenic glycoside, amygdalin. And they're toxic, like apricot kernels. The FDA, I think, had to lead- step in, or the USDA had to step in and have manufacturers remove apricot kernels from trail mix. There was a big, uh, there was a big fervor about the Hunza oh, a couple of years ago, maybe a decade ago. And there was this, this widely promulgated false notion that they were having this longevity benefit from this amygdalin in the apricot kernels. And it was really potentially dangerous for humans. So there, they ended up with these apricot kernels, the apricot seed, in trail mix, and the USDA or the FDA had to step in and say, "No, no, no. You can't do that. That has a toxic compound." And almonds were very toxic, and we kind of bred it out of them. So a lot of the foods we eat today are sort of, we're stripping the toxins away from the plants, but the intentions were clear.

Episode duration: 3:02:53

Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript

Transcript of episode s8tJ-R28HX8

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.

iOSAndroidClaudeChrome