EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,080 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumming) Joe Rogan Podcast,…
- PSPaul Saladino
(drumming) Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- NANarrator
Yeah, sure.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- PSPaul Saladino
I love that word.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, animal-based.
- PSPaul Saladino
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Just steal what they're saying.
- PSPaul Saladino
(laughs) And make it better.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- PSPaul Saladino
I mean, and I think that if people spend time in the wilderness, n- regardless of the latitude, they'll start to appreciate this.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- PSPaul Saladino
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
You're gonna die.
- PSPaul Saladino
... you're gonna die.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- PSPaul Saladino
Really freaking fast. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, how about people who collect mushrooms? Like, they make mistakes, you know, like, uh-
- PSPaul Saladino
So easy.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- PSPaul Saladino
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Just, like, 'cause he fucked up.
- PSPaul Saladino
Ugh.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- PSPaul Saladino
And if you think about it from the perspective of a plant, it makes more sense.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- PSPaul Saladino
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- PSPaul Saladino
... an arms race-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- 15:00 – 30:00
You're turning on the…
- JRJoe Rogan
cold plunge, from sauna, from exercise?
- PSPaul Saladino
You're turning on the exact same system in your body.
- JRJoe Rogan
But what about the vitamins that you're getting from plants?
- PSPaul Saladino
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
I mean, there are, there are, there are essential nutrients and phytonutrients that you get from plants. What about those?
- PSPaul Saladino
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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?
- PSPaul Saladino
I don't know.
- JRJoe Rogan
Or the guts of a ruminant?
- PSPaul Saladino
I don't know why they would do that. I guess it's fermented... I don't know.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- PSPaul Saladino
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
None? Vitamin C?
- PSPaul Saladino
You can definitely get vitamin C from animal foods.
- JRJoe Rogan
And do you get it from... What do you get it from? Liver or-
- PSPaul Saladino
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
They experimented with conscientious ex- uh, objectors?
- PSPaul Saladino
Yeah, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- PSPaul Saladino
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's kind of creepy.
- PSPaul Saladino
10 milligrams a day.
- JRJoe Rogan
There it is.
- PSPaul Saladino
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Medical experience carried out in Sheffield on conscientious objectors to military service. Wow.
- PSPaul Saladino
And if you scroll down to the next page, Jamie.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's kind of creepy that they did experiments on 'em.
- PSPaul Saladino
You'll see the doses, but yeah. There was, um... 10 milligrams of vitamin C will, will prevent scurvy, so-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. Uh, but obviously that's not an optimum level for health.
- PSPaul Saladino
Well, we don't know.
- 30:00 – 45:00
Oh, not this one.…
- PSPaul Saladino
a lot of interesting nutrients in liver that aren't re- well represented in the muscle meat, which we were talking about. So muscle meat's a great source of B12 and, um, zinc and iron and other things. But, so in the nose to tail folder, Jamie, there's a- a graphic from my book that compares-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, not this one. I was guessing- (laughs) ... except the liver. Whoa, look at that. Yeah. Look at those cool-ass cave paintings. Those, uh, I've, I find that so fascinating, those cave, cave art, cave paintings. Uh, Price also added the notion that liver is truly a prized food for indigenous people regarding an African tribe known as the, how do you say that?
- PSPaul Saladino
Nuer.
- JRJoe Rogan
Nuer. He stated, "I learned that they have a belief which, to them, is their religion, namely that every man and woman has a soul which resides in the liver, and that a man's character and physical growth depends upon how well he feels..."
- NANarrator
... feeds.
- JRJoe Rogan
Feeds that soul by eating the livers of animals. The liver is so sacred that it may not be touched by human hands. Now, if that's the case, how do you explain Bert Kreischer?
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause that motherfucker's liver is overworked, pickled even.
- NANarrator
Maybe delicious.
- JRJoe Rogan
Maybe. Yeah, he probably has, like, foie gras, right?
- PSPaul Saladino
(laughs) Human foie gras.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. I mean, he's-
- NANarrator
Canal liver.
- JRJoe Rogan
Liver is totally overfed, completely fatty.
- PSPaul Saladino
That's not what you want. That's non-alcoholic.
- JRJoe Rogan
Foie gras's not good?
- PSPaul Saladino
Well, no, foie gras's probably... I don't know that I'd be excited about eating foie gras. They're like overfeeding-
- JRJoe Rogan
So delicious.
- PSPaul Saladino
... the, the, the ducks, right? So-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's so good though.
- PSPaul Saladino
It is.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's so good.
- PSPaul Saladino
But it's probably, it's a, it's a diseased liver. We can admit that.
- JRJoe Rogan
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?
- PSPaul Saladino
I wonder what's in it. I wonder what they feed them.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- PSPaul Saladino
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- NANarrator
Oh, these are all being force-fed.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
And so few humans…
- JRJoe Rogan
carbohydrate based. The carbohydrate based guys would, like the soldiers, would crash, and the Comanches could keep going because their body would just go into ketosis and they would live off fat. It was a natural, like, shift back and forth between eating meat and eating fat and eating organs, to not eating for a while.
- PSPaul Saladino
And so few humans in 2020 have gone for more than 18 hours without eating food.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- PSPaul Saladino
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- PSPaul Saladino
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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?
- PSPaul Saladino
So much of what gets done in the nutrition community in research is-
- JRJoe Rogan
Fuckery.
- PSPaul Saladino
(laughs) Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
There's a lot of fuckery, right?
- PSPaul Saladino
It is. And the devil's in the details, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- PSPaul Saladino
Um, what were they feeding them? What were the ratio of oils in the food? What, what were they-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- PSPaul Saladino
... 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Explai- Please explain that to people, the cellular housecleaning. The, the, the, that your body actually does get rid of some damaged cells.
- PSPaul Saladino
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- PSPaul Saladino
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- PSPaul Saladino
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- PSPaul Saladino
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- PSPaul Saladino
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... which is really kind of fascinating as well.
- PSPaul Saladino
It changes the neural physiology.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- PSPaul Saladino
Yeah.
- 1:00:00 – 1:12:51
Mm-hmm. …
- PSPaul Saladino
wastes a little magnesium, a little potassium. And so that started to kinda make sense to me. I thought, "Oh, maybe it doesn't have to be as dogmatic as full meat and organs." Um, "Maybe we can ... You know, maybe more people would benefit if we think about this more like our ancestors, right?"
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- PSPaul Saladino
"More like the Hadza, eating berries, or baobab, or baobab, and then honey occasionally." And you can always look at your blood sugar with a CGM or other metrics. What was fascinating, and I actually have my, all my blood work if you wanna see it, or any of my continuous glucose monitor readings. But you can see, this is all in the lab work or the blood work folder, Jamie. And there at the bottom, there's those three images of my, uh, blood sugar, and there's a few other ones. But you can see that with, with honey and, and meat and organs, don't really have much of a change in the blood sugar at all. It's pretty, pretty mild most of the time, and it stays very consistent.
- JRJoe Rogan
Honey has a lot of really unique properties too, doesn't it?
- PSPaul Saladino
It does, yeah. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
There's, there's a certain honey, I, I wanna say it's from New Zealand. My wife was just talking to me about it the other day.
- PSPaul Saladino
M- Manuka?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes. That actually helps people heal better.
- PSPaul Saladino
I think a lot of honeys do that actually. Now, Manuka has a very good publicist. I haven't seen any, like-
- JRJoe Rogan
Is that what it is?
- PSPaul Saladino
I think it might-
- JRJoe Rogan
Ah.
- PSPaul Saladino
I think a l-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's super expensive.
- PSPaul Saladino
Yeah. I think a lot of honeys can help with that. But if you look at the literature on honey, there's studies. So, when I first thought about honey, I thought, "This is gonna cause dental cavities." And I'm good friends with a periodontist. Incidentally, a periodontist who has an advanced, uh, leukemia, who's on a carnivore diet and doing really well. Um, but he was pointing me to a bunch of evidence that honey's been used to treat oral candida, to treat ... It actually...... um, can have activity against cariogenic bacteria in the mouth. They use it to treat oral mucositis. It's incredible. These compounds in honey look very different than-
- JRJoe Rogan
So the associations that we have with sugar and periodontal disease is really just processed sugar?
- PSPaul Saladino
Probably.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- PSPaul Saladino
Yeah. There might be something different about honey. And then if you look in rats, again we're moving to an animal model, when you give rats a lot of fructose, they don't do good, right? Rats have-
- JRJoe Rogan
Nor do we, right?
- PSPaul Saladino
(laughs) Nor do humans. Nor do humans. But moderate amounts, humans seem to do okay with, like fruit amounts.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- PSPaul Saladino
But massive amounts in rats, or moderate amounts in rats do- don't do well because rats do their biochemistry a little differently. They convert fructose to fat.
- JRJoe Rogan
And do they give it to them in fructose corn syrup or do they give it to them in-
- PSPaul Saladino
It's in their feed.
- JRJoe Rogan
... actual fruit?
- PSPaul Saladino
It's in their feed, so they-
- JRJoe Rogan
What do they add to the feed?
- PSPaul Saladino
They add fructose, and I th- might actually be sucrose as glucose and fructose, yeah, which is essentially the same as high-fructose corn syrup. It just has to do with what the ratios are of the glucose and the fructose. And if you look at rats given honey versus rats given sugar, they have different outcomes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
Episode duration: 3:02:53
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