Joe Rogan Experience #1551 - Paul Saladino

Paul Saladino 0:02 (drumming) Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 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.

Narrator 0:27 Yeah, sure.

Joe Rogan 0:28 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.

Paul Saladino 1:06 I love that word.

Joe Rogan 1:07 Yeah, animal-based.

Paul Saladino 1:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09 Just steal what they're saying.

Paul Saladino 1:10 (laughs) And make it better.

Joe Rogan 1:11 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.

Paul Saladino 1:21 I mean, and I think that if people spend time in the wilderness, n- regardless of the latitude, they'll start to appreciate this.

Joe Rogan 1:27 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 1:28 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-

Joe Rogan 1:41 You're gonna die.

Paul Saladino 1:42 ... you're gonna die.

Joe Rogan 1:42 (laughs)

Paul Saladino 1:43 Really freaking fast. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:44 Well, how about people who collect mushrooms? Like, they make mistakes, you know, like, uh-

Paul Saladino 1:48 So easy.

Joe Rogan 1:49 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.

Paul Saladino 1:58 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:58 Just, like, 'cause he fucked up.

Paul Saladino 2:00 Ugh.

Joe Rogan 2:00 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.

Paul Saladino 2:09 And if you think about it from the perspective of a plant, it makes more sense.

Joe Rogan 2:12 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 2:12 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-

Joe Rogan 3:15 Hmm.

Paul Saladino 3:15 ... an arms race-

Joe Rogan 3:16 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 3:17 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 4:10 Hmm.

Paul Saladino 4:10 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?

Joe Rogan 4:43 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.

Paul Saladino 4:53 Right.

Joe Rogan 4:53 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-

Paul Saladino 5:09 Right.

Joe Rogan 5:10 ... 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.

Paul Saladino 5:27 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.

Joe Rogan 5:43 I'll grab your book. It's right here.

Paul Saladino 5:44 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

Paul Saladino 9:17 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.

Joe Rogan 10:18 How does that work?

Paul Saladino 10:19 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.

Joe Rogan 10:39 Mm.

Paul Saladino 10:40 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.

Joe Rogan 11:14 This is all sulforaphane?

Paul Saladino 11:15 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.

Joe Rogan 11:35 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 11:35 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.

Joe Rogan 12:16 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 12:16 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.

Joe Rogan 13:36 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?

Paul Saladino 13:51 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.

Joe Rogan 14:43 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?

Paul Saladino 15:03 You're turning on the exact same system in your body.

Joe Rogan 15:06 But what about the vitamins that you're getting from plants?

Paul Saladino 15:08 Right.

Joe Rogan 15:09 I mean, there are, there are, there are essential nutrients and phytonutrients that you get from plants. What about those?

Paul Saladino 15:15 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.

Joe Rogan 15:30 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?

Paul Saladino 15:39 I don't know.

Joe Rogan 15:39 Or the guts of a ruminant?

Paul Saladino 15:41 I don't know why they would do that. I guess it's fermented... I don't know.

Joe Rogan 15:45 Hmm.

Paul Saladino 15:45 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.

Joe Rogan 16:12 None? Vitamin C?

Paul Saladino 16:13 You can definitely get vitamin C from animal foods.

Joe Rogan 16:15 And do you get it from... What do you get it from? Liver or-

Paul Saladino 16:16 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.

Joe Rogan 16:43 They experimented with conscientious ex- uh, objectors?

Paul Saladino 16:45 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 16:46 Wow.

Paul Saladino 16:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 16:47 That's kind of creepy.

Paul Saladino 16:48 10 milligrams a day.

Joe Rogan 16:50 There it is.

Paul Saladino 16:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 16:52 Medical experience carried out in Sheffield on conscientious objectors to military service. Wow.

Paul Saladino 16:56 And if you scroll down to the next page, Jamie.

Joe Rogan 16:58 That's kind of creepy that they did experiments on 'em.

Paul Saladino 16:58 You'll see the doses, but yeah. There was, um... 10 milligrams of vitamin C will, will prevent scurvy, so-

Joe Rogan 17:09 Right. Uh, but obviously that's not an optimum level for health.

Paul Saladino 17:11 Well, we don't know.

Joe Rogan 17:13 No?

Paul Saladino 17:13 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.

Joe Rogan 18:29 And how long is the study?

Paul Saladino 18:30 I think it was eight weeks. I'll pull it up.

Joe Rogan 18:32 ... is that long enough to see a detrimental effect or a positive net benefit?

Paul Saladino 18:37 Well, I think that if you're thinking about things in terms of oxidative stress, that happens pretty quickly. You would definitely, I think, begin to see increased DNA damage. We measure it with this marker called 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine, lipid peroxides, inflammation. I think you would see it... You start to see it pretty quickly when you get lower levels of vitamin C. The, the higher vitamin C group, with more fruits and vegetables certainly had a higher level of vitamin C in their blood, but they didn't have any differences in terms of those, uh, markers. So this one is...

Joe Rogan 19:06 What about the benefits of vitamin C in fighting off, uh, colds and infections?

Paul Saladino 19:11 Right. The, um... So the interventional studies with that have generally failed. Um-

Joe Rogan 19:17 Really?

Paul Saladino 19:17 Yeah, yeah, uh-

Joe Rogan 19:18 But the consensus wisdom is that, like, if you have a virus-

Paul Saladino 19:21 Right, take vitamin C.

Joe Rogan 19:22 ... take vitamin C.

Paul Saladino 19:23 Take vitamin C, yeah. I'll show you this one. So if you go to the vitamin C folder, Jamie, and then you go to the Vitamin C From an Evolutionary Perspective study, you'll see a, a list of all the interventional studies with vitamin C. Scroll down to the table two. So one more table down. That one. So you'll see, these are interventional studies with vitamin C, and, um, there's an RCT there for, um, the common cold. It's a meta analysis actually, which, uh, 11,306 participants, and there was no effect on the incidents of the common cold. So this gets into the interesting conversation about epidemiology, and I know you know about this. The way that epidemiology is so misleading for us.

Joe Rogan 20:13 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 20:14 And if you look at the association of vitamin C in the blood, there's an association with better outcomes. But when we do interventional studies, we don't see it, and with... In this table you can see no effect on mortality, no effect on the incidence of the common cold, no effect on cardiovascular events, and, uh, essentially no decrease in systolic blood pressure with intervention.

Joe Rogan 20:36 No effect on... No incidences... Uh, no effect on the incidences of the common cold, but what about once someone has a cold?

Paul Saladino 20:44 I don't-

Joe Rogan 20:45 That is like when Emergen-C and all these different vitamin C, uh, supplements. This is what they're always claiming is that taking it while you have the cold is what's gonna reduce the, uh, duration of the disease. "Concluded that vitamin C supplementation has no effect on the incidence of the common cold, however a modest reduction of symptoms was consistently found in reviewed studies."

Paul Saladino 21:06 Yeah, so maybe.

Joe Rogan 21:07 So, so good while you have it.

Paul Saladino 21:10 Maybe while you have it. (whistling) Maybe not forever.

Joe Rogan 21:11 So if you have something, then jack up the dose. Yeah.

Paul Saladino 21:17 Vitamin C is a complex one, because there are many things which can lower vitamin C as well. So metabolic dysfunction decreases levels of vitamin C in our body. So the playing field is not always level, right?

Joe Rogan 21:31 Okay. So if you have a cold, your m- your vitamin C level is gonna be lower, right?

Paul Saladino 21:35 Could be lower.

Joe Rogan 21:36 Right.

Paul Saladino 21:36 Or if you have a baseline of unhealth, something that's been super relevant with the current COVID conversation.

Joe Rogan 21:42 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Paul Saladino 21:42 If you have a baseline of ill health or a baseline of metabolic dysfunction, sometimes synonymous with insulin resistance, per a given vitamin C intake, there's lower levels of vitamin C in the body. So if you look at animal foods, like if you eat nose to tail, if you're eating a couple of ounces of liver per day and some meat per day, and other organs, you can get pretty close to 70 milligrams of vitamin C a day, which is basically the RDA. I think the RDA might be 70 or 90 milligrams of vitamin C in animals.

Joe Rogan 22:09 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.

Paul Saladino 22:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 22:15 Yeah, is eating organ meats 'cause most people when they think of eating animal products, they think of just eating tissue, muscle tissue.

Paul Saladino 22:23 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-

Joe Rogan 22:51 Hmm.

Paul Saladino 22:51 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 23:01 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."

Paul Saladino 23:28 If you, if you eat liver, you get to be an alpha male or an alpha female.

Joe Rogan 23:31 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.

Paul Saladino 23:42 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-

Joe Rogan 23:51 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 23:52 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?

Joe Rogan 24:00 I have.

Paul Saladino 24:01 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.

Joe Rogan 24:50 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.

Paul Saladino 25:17 So, they tend to favor the fat and the organs.

Joe Rogan 25:21 Bro, they're eating monkey hands. Should we really listen to them? (laughs)

Paul Saladino 25:24 (laughs) I've never had monkey hands. You ever had brain?

Joe Rogan 25:26 No. I've had calf's brain-

Paul Saladino 25:28 What'd you think?

Joe Rogan 25:28 ... 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.

Paul Saladino 26:10 It, liver is amazing. I- I know you had the guys from, um, Black Rifle on.

Joe Rogan 26:14 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 26:14 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.

Joe Rogan 26:24 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 26:24 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.

Joe Rogan 26:32 Have you ever done with vile, with bile? Like, where you slice the liver and squirt the bile on it?

Paul Saladino 26:37 I haven't. I'm hopefully gonna hunt this year and I wanna do that with a gallbladder.

Joe Rogan 26:41 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 26:41 But I- I think that it's so interesting to s- to see that they would savor the things that were salty.

Joe Rogan 26:46 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 26:46 There was a little bit of salt in the gallbladder, and yeah, I've heard of indigenous cultures using the gallbladder as a condiment.

Joe Rogan 26:52 I think Rinella did that on one of his shows-

Paul Saladino 26:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:54 ... where he cut raw liver and ate it with the gallbladder.

Paul Saladino 26:57 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:58 That's- that's gotta be a strong flavor. Have you-

Paul Saladino 27:02 I'll- I'll report back.

Joe Rogan 27:03 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 27:04 I've eaten a lot of the animal, but I've never eaten the gall, the gall fluid. So I've never eaten the, you know, bile.

Joe Rogan 27:10 I know the Comanche used to love to do that with buffalo liver. They would take the buffalo liver raw and warm right from the fresh kill and squirt gallbladder on it.

Paul Saladino 27:18 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 27:19 I mean, it can't be that, uh, I would say it can't be that bad. But then you hear about, like, the people in Iceland, they eat that pickled shark that-

Paul Saladino 27:27 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 27:27 ... Anthony Bourdain told me was the single most disgusting thing he's ever eaten in his life. And they love it. It's like a delicacy.

Paul Saladino 27:33 Well, I've eaten w- warm liver out of a deer. So I hunted in December.

Joe Rogan 27:38 Is this-

Paul Saladino 27:38 It's January.

Joe Rogan 27:39 Is this Rinella doing it?

Paul Saladino 27:40 Oh. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 27:42 Okay. So, he is, that's the gallbladder he's cutting open, or he's tearing open, I should say. He's taken out, look at that, all the grass and everything in there. Isn't that crazy?

Paul Saladino 27:52 That doesn't look appetizing.

Joe Rogan 27:53 Not at all. No. Is that what that is right there? I'm not sure. I mean, if it's, if-

Paul Saladino 28:00 With the gallbladder, that's the bile.

Joe Rogan 28:02 ... but what's all that grass?

Paul Saladino 28:04 I don't know if it's grass or just bile.

Joe Rogan 28:06 Is that-

Paul Saladino 28:06 It could be just coagulated bile.

Joe Rogan 28:08 Yeah, let's give him some volume. And all their food goes from their crop, which is a little holding tank- Oh, that's a bird. ... down to the gizzard. So this must be a turkey. And all that gravel they've got in the gizzard- Oh, it's a turkey. Edible organs. ... pulverizes it. Okay. It helps digest it.

Paul Saladino 28:21 Oh, this is a gizzard.

Joe Rogan 28:22 So you see, here's all the rock. Yeah, okay. That makes sense. I've had gizzards from chickens before, you know? My family, I'm Italian. As you are, right?

Paul Saladino 28:29 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:30 Yeah, we, uh, we ate a lot of gizzards when I was a kid. I don't know why. Um, see if you fi- the edible organs thing, that's- that's wild turkey. See if you can find, um, Rinella Eats raw liver with, uh, bile.

Paul Saladino 28:45 Have you ever had, have you ever had raw liver?

Joe Rogan 28:47 I have not.

Paul Saladino 28:48 Joe, we could do it.

Joe Rogan 28:49 Yeah?

Paul Saladino 28:49 I brought some.

Joe Rogan 28:50 You did?

Paul Saladino 28:50 I brought some.

Joe Rogan 28:50 Go get it.

Paul Saladino 28:51 It's right here.

Joe Rogan 28:51 Let's go get it, let's eat it.

Paul Saladino 28:52 It's right here.

Joe Rogan 28:53 I'll eat some raw liver. Jamie's gonna throw up. (laughs) Look at him. He already started making noises. (laughs) I'm getting outta here. Ugh.

Paul Saladino 28:59 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 28:59 (laughs)

Paul Saladino 29:00 He already started making noises.

Joe Rogan 29:01 I've already had milk today. It's bad. You already had milk? What does that have to do with this? (laughs)

Paul Saladino 29:05 Milk's a bad choice, Joe.

Joe Rogan 29:06 Milk's a bad choice? So we'll grab a piece?

Paul Saladino 29:08 Anchorman.

Joe Rogan 29:08 Yeah, okay. Here we go, raw liver.

Paul Saladino 29:10 Raw liver.

Joe Rogan 29:13 What kind of liver is this?

Paul Saladino 29:15 It's cow's liver. This is from grass-fed, grass-finished regeneratively raised cows from white oak pastures in Georgia. Real-

Joe Rogan 29:22 This is quite chewy. So what's supposed to be the reaction? It doesn't taste much different than cooked liver.

Paul Saladino 29:28 I think that the, in the tribes, so there's a interesting tribe in Africa called the Nuer tribe. And liver is so sacred that they couldn't even touch it with human hands. I don't know how they got it from the animal to people's mouths. But they would, they would eat it, a lot of cultures eat it raw. They'll just cut it up and eat it raw. I think that the idea is you lose a little bit of nutrients when you cook it. Not much, but you lose a little bit. So I've always been fascinated by how many of... This is such a nutrient-rich organ. How much of it can I actually preserve-

Joe Rogan 29:55 Hmm.

Paul Saladino 29:56 ... in terms of nutrients? And do I feel differently when I eat it raw? And there's, you know, there's 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-

Joe Rogan 30:15 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?

Paul Saladino 30:35 Nuer.

Joe Rogan 30:35 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..."

Narrator 30:51 ... feeds.

Joe Rogan 30:52 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?

Narrator 31:02 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 31:03 'Cause that motherfucker's liver is overworked, pickled even.

Narrator 31:09 Maybe delicious.

Joe Rogan 31:09 Maybe. Yeah, he probably has, like, foie gras, right?

Paul Saladino 31:13 (laughs) Human foie gras.

Joe Rogan 31:15 Yeah. I mean, he's-

Narrator 31:15 Canal liver.

Joe Rogan 31:16 Liver is totally overfed, completely fatty.

Paul Saladino 31:20 That's not what you want. That's non-alcoholic.

Joe Rogan 31:22 Foie gras's not good?

Paul Saladino 31:23 Well, no, foie gras's probably... I don't know that I'd be excited about eating foie gras. They're like overfeeding-

Joe Rogan 31:28 So delicious.

Paul Saladino 31:28 ... the, the, the ducks, right? So-

Joe Rogan 31:29 It's so good though.

Paul Saladino 31:30 It is.

Joe Rogan 31:31 It's so good.

Paul Saladino 31:31 But it's probably, it's a, it's a diseased liver. We can admit that.

Joe Rogan 31:34 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?

Paul Saladino 32:06 I wonder what's in it. I wonder what they feed them.

Joe Rogan 32:08 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.

Paul Saladino 32:19 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.

Joe Rogan 32:37 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-

Narrator 32:49 Oh, these are all being force-fed.

Joe Rogan 32:51 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.

Paul Saladino 33:21 Yeah, it is.

Joe Rogan 33:21 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.

Paul Saladino 34:07 And feedlots. I mean, I think I agree with you completely. Factory farming is a scourge, and it should... I don't know why-

Joe Rogan 34:12 It's creepy.

Paul Saladino 34:12 ... we keep doing it.

Joe Rogan 34:13 It's creepy.

Paul Saladino 34:13 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-

Joe Rogan 34:25 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.

Paul Saladino 35:10 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.

Joe Rogan 35:21 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 35:22 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-

Joe Rogan 35:42 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 35:42 They're not raised from calves-

Joe Rogan 35:44 Right.

Paul Saladino 35:44 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 36:06 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 36:06 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.

Joe Rogan 36:51 Right.

Paul Saladino 36:51 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.

Joe Rogan 37:01 Right.

Paul Saladino 37:01 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.

Joe Rogan 37:20 Right.

Paul Saladino 37:21 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.

Joe Rogan 37:31 Love that guy.

Paul Saladino 37:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:31 Love him.

Paul Saladino 37:32 Yeah. And so Will has a, uh, two jars in his, in, in one of the churches on his property in Bluffton. And one jar is soil from his farm, and it's the color of coffee grounds. It's like 5% soil carbon. The other jar is from 25 yards away on his neighbor's pasture, growing cotton or soy. It's, it's, it's like a wh- it's like the color of this wood table. It's a light brown. They're completely different. And if you look at the soil content of carbon, it's 0.5%. So, you have 10 X the amount of carbon in the soil when it's farmed regeneratively. They've been doing regenerative agriculture there for 20 years, and you can see this steady increase in the amount of soil carbon. I'll pull it up. There's a graphic from this in my book.

Joe Rogan 38:13 Well, it just completely makes sense because manure is fertilizer. Animals eat the grass, they make manure, the manure is fertilizer. Worms and bugs live under the manure. There's an entire ecosystem that evolves around these animals living the way they've lived for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. It makes sense that it all works together synergistically to feed the soil and to provide nutrients for the very animals. And those animals will die on that land and they will rot and they will provide even more fertilizer, and then other animals will live off of them and live in that area, and they too will die, and they will, m- m- shit all over the place and piss all over the place and they will, you know, feed the soil. And this is a system, and we fucked that system up by growing corn. We fucked that system up by growing, you know, a million acres of soybeans, like whatever the fuck we do. It's-

Paul Saladino 39:03 Why, why are we eating those things?

Joe Rogan 39:05 Well, it seems like we thought it was a great idea during World War I and World War II because they needed food. The reason why all this, like, subsidies of farmers happened is not that, you know, the, um, agriculture business is evil, uh, and the government is in bed with them. What happened was during the, the first and second World War, there was a, a need for surplus food. There was a need for food because there was, back then there's a v- very real concern for supplies for troops, for supplies for the United States. We- I mean, we were at war. I mean, a crazy war that I don't think today in our 2020 version of war, which always happens in some remote far away land and it's always a domination by the United States, I don't think we really understand the, the desperate and terrifying times when they were, you know, asking people to donate metal and rubber. I mean, it was, it was a crazy time, and the government stepped in and said, "We are gonna pay farmers to grow corn. We need food." And so they subsidized these farmers to grow all this food. Now it's become a different animal because now they're subsidizing people to grow corn that is mostly e- in a lot of ca- like I have a friend who has a farm and they grow it for livestock. They have a huge area that they grow corn and it's all, by the way, Monsanto corn, right? They're spraying that fucking Roundup on it, which is, you know, glyphosate is terrible for you. And I had a podcast about that recently, about environmental chemicals and how bad they are for you and then how that stuff actually can be in the meat and can in turn get into your system and provide, uh, you with all sorts of problems. And this is why there is, th- there's subsidizing of farmers. I mean, it's also 'cause we need farmers, we need to keep them healthy and... This is just not the way to do it though. This mo- if we could just get people off the tit of corn, get people off the tit of these mono crop cr- you know, uh, mono crop agriculture, we would be a healthier country. If we can have these giant areas where people can grow all kinds of things like, like Polyface Farms, the way Joel Salatin runs things. He moves all of his animals around. He, he, he lets all of his, his pigs, they live like wild pigs. They just eat acorns and nuts and all these different things and he supplements 'em sometimes and, and th- and he has incredible soil like the other farm you're describing, and incredibly healthy animals.

Paul Saladino 41:30 That's the way it should be.

Joe Rogan 41:31 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 41:32 And I love that you said that. It's just, we have this dependence on soy and corn based-

Joe Rogan 41:37 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 41:38 ... economies now. And I love that the regenerative agriculture movement is starting and that peop- slowly, slowly there are more farms that are shifting and shifting and shifting. Before the podcast I was telling you about a ranch in Fredericksburg called Roam Ranch.

Joe Rogan 41:50 Yes.

Paul Saladino 41:51 And they're, they're really cool. They h- they raise bison. And if you look at the ground... So when I was out at Roam, I stood like a couple of feet from a, a buffalo or a bison, I don't know which one.

Joe Rogan 42:00 Was there a fence in between you and the bison?

Paul Saladino 42:01 No. No.

Joe Rogan 42:01 Why are you doing that, man?

Paul Saladino 42:03 It was-

Joe Rogan 42:03 Don't you watch videos?

Paul Saladino 42:04 (laughs) It was-

Joe Rogan 42:05 Don't you watch YouTube?

Paul Saladino 42:05 (laughs) It was just this, it was this universal moment. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 42:08 Bro, there's some great video of a bison charging another bison and launching it into the air. Think about how big, what does a bison weigh? Like 2,000 pounds?

Paul Saladino 42:17 It was intense.

Joe Rogan 42:18 And-

Paul Saladino 42:18 It was just kind of like this, we had this bond.

Joe Rogan 42:19 Look at that. That i- those are amazing animals.

Paul Saladino 42:22 They're beautiful animals.

Joe Rogan 42:23 They're so amazing.

Paul Saladino 42:24 And if you look at the ground at Roam Ranch, this is Fredericksburg, Texas. This is land that was mono cropped, I believe. This is land that used to be fertile in southern Texas that was destroyed. Okay? And then actually, you know, they're starting to regenerate it. They've been regenerative I think for three or five years, and they start to get more grass growing on a piece of soil. So if you look at a square foot-

Joe Rogan 42:47 Hold up, scroll that down there. The, the hunt? How are you gonna hunt something you can stand right next to?

Paul Saladino 42:51 They have axes out there.

Joe Rogan 42:53 Oh, okay. That's a different animal.

Paul Saladino 42:54 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:54 They will not let you stand next to him. (laughs)

Paul Saladino 42:56 They will let you stand next to the-

Joe Rogan 42:57 Axis deer?

Paul Saladino 42:58 Oh, they won't let you stand next to the ax, but you can stand next to the-

Joe Rogan 43:00 Yeah. No, I'm saying, uh-

Paul Saladino 43:00 ... bison with-

Joe Rogan 43:01 I'm saying axis deer will not-

Paul Saladino 43:03 No, no.

Joe Rogan 43:03 ... let you stand next to them.

Paul Saladino 43:04 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:04 Oh, so they have axis deer hunts there.

Paul Saladino 43:06 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:06 And so this is only like an hour plus from here.

Paul Saladino 43:08 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:09 Oh, they have archery hunts there too.

Paul Saladino 43:10 Yeah, absolutely.

Joe Rogan 43:11 Oh, holla.

Paul Saladino 43:12 Yeah, it's a great spot.

Joe Rogan 43:14 Mm.

Paul Saladino 43:14 ... but if you look at the ground and you look at a square foot of the ground at Roam Ranch, you can see that on the pastures that the bison are in, maybe only 30 or 40% of that earth is growing grass. But you know that in the future, if you s- you know, move it out 20 years, like, like White Oak Pastures has done... When I was in Georgia, every inch, every millimeter of that ground is growing grass. It's like thick grass, right?

Joe Rogan 43:39 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 43:40 And it, and y- That's feeding the cattle in a much more rich way. And so that's what regenerative agriculture is about. You increase-

Joe Rogan 43:45 We should go there. We should go there and we should make a video-

Paul Saladino 43:47 We should.

Joe Rogan 43:48 ... of us going there and talking to them about that.

Paul Saladino 43:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:50 And throw it up on YouTube. I think that would be really interesting.

Paul Saladino 43:52 I'd love to. They're great folks.

Joe Rogan 43:53 Just see how they d- I'm not gonna get near the fucking bison, though.

Paul Saladino 43:55 (laughs) You might-

Joe Rogan 43:56 I, I'm gonna learn my lesson from other people. (laughs)

Paul Saladino 43:58 Well, we go out there with, like, we go out there with Katie and Taylor, who, who own the farm and take care of it. And there's people out there who us- work with the bison and they know which animals are more-

Joe Rogan 44:08 Yeah, see, that's f-

Paul Saladino 44:08 ... aggressive.

Joe Rogan 44:09 Fuck all that, man. What if you make a mistake? "Oh, I thought it was Mike. That's Bill. Bill's crazy."

Paul Saladino 44:14 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 44:14 "Don't go near Bill." (laughs)

Paul Saladino 44:16 The head of the buffalo, the head of the bison was-

Joe Rogan 44:17 It's so big.

Paul Saladino 44:18 ... the size of my torso. It was moving, man. I was like, "Wow."

Joe Rogan 44:21 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 44:21 I l- I like experiences that make me feel small.

Joe Rogan 44:24 Yeah. Well, that will do it, man.

Paul Saladino 44:25 S- You know, s- back country skiing or being on the Pacific Crest Trail, or any of the stuff, you know?

Joe Rogan 44:30 This whole area used to be overrun with bison, which is really crazy when this is where the Comanche lived and that was their primary food.

Paul Saladino 44:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:37 The Comanche were an animal-based culture, which is really interesting.

Paul Saladino 44:41 It's that book, Empire of the Summer Moon, right?

Joe Rogan 44:43 Yes, yes. Fantastic book.

Paul Saladino 44:45 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 44:45 But they, they really didn't eat much else. They ate a little bit of berries here and there, but most of what their diet was, was meat. And that, they also had... There was a benefit to that in terms of the way they c- traveled, because they could go without food longer than people that were mostly 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.

Paul Saladino 45:17 And so few humans in 2020 have gone for more than 18 hours without eating food.

Joe Rogan 45:23 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 45:24 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.

Joe Rogan 45:51 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 45:51 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.

Joe Rogan 46:00 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?

Paul Saladino 46:33 So much of what gets done in the nutrition community in research is-

Joe Rogan 46:36 Fuckery.

Paul Saladino 46:37 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:38 There's a lot of fuckery, right?

Paul Saladino 46:39 It is. And the devil's in the details, right?

Joe Rogan 46:41 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 46:41 Um, what were they feeding them? What were the ratio of oils in the food? What, what were they-

Joe Rogan 46:45 Right.

Paul Saladino 46:46 ... 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.

Joe Rogan 47:39 Explai- Please explain that to people, the cellular housecleaning. The, the, the, that your body actually does get rid of some damaged cells.

Paul Saladino 47:48 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.

Joe Rogan 48:53 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 48:53 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.

Joe Rogan 49:02 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.

Paul Saladino 49:24 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.

Joe Rogan 49:38 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 49:38 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.

Joe Rogan 50:26 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-

Paul Saladino 50:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 50:39 ... which is really kind of fascinating as well.

Paul Saladino 50:40 It changes the neural physiology.

Joe Rogan 50:42 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 50:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 50:42 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.

Paul Saladino 51:01 I agree with you.

Joe Rogan 51:02 Whatever you could... I mean, you know, obviously y- you don't get fruit all year round. You get it at a specific time when the fruit falls from the tree. But animals were available 365 days a year, and that's most likely what a lot of people ate.

Paul Saladino 51:15 And if you look at hunter-gatherer tribes, that's what we see.

Joe Rogan 51:18 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 51:18 They're... And it's so interesting to me that they have a preference for animal foods.

Joe Rogan 51:23 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 51:23 A lot of them will eat tubers occasionally. There's actually a pretty cool study, I think you'll find it in the, the anthropology folder, Jamie, or... That's termed Hadza fallback foods. It's the fourth one there. And this is such a cool study. I, I really wanna go spend time with the Hadza next year.

Joe Rogan 51:41 My friend David Cho did.

Paul Saladino 51:42 I, I heard him on the podcast.

Joe Rogan 51:42 Dude, that is th- one of the most intense, uh, things that I've ever heard described on the podcast when he was talking about them hunting baboons. Because the area where they live has been so depleted of game that they're, they're reduced to baboon hunting. You know? And he was like, "It's really crazy and really dark when, you know, you see a baboon got hit by an arrow and they grab the arrow, like, with their hands." I'm like, "Yikes."

Paul Saladino 52:07 That, that story was poignant for sure. When-

Joe Rogan 52:10 That's, that's too deep for me, man.

Paul Saladino 52:11 (laughs) It was intense.

Joe Rogan 52:13 (laughs)

Paul Saladino 52:13 But I c-... When I heard that conversation with David Cho, I, a couple of things stood out for me. And one of them was that when he asked them, "What was the best day of your life?" they, all the people he asked said, "It was the day that I killed the biggest animal and fed the tribe."

Joe Rogan 52:28 Yes.

Paul Saladino 52:28 "It wasn't the day that I found this huge patch of berries or I got, I dug the biggest tuber."

Joe Rogan 52:33 Right, of course.

Paul Saladino 52:33 "It was the day that I killed the biggest animal and fed the tribe." And the other thing that they communicated to him was that the animals that they hunt now are different, that they can't hunt the same animals, which has probably changed their food patterns in modern day.

Joe Rogan 52:47 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 52:48 And that, he even said this in the podcast, that they're, they were sort of describing to him, there used to be big animals everywhere. And you can imagine what it was like for the Comanche as they came to the plains and there were herds of thousands of buffalo.

Joe Rogan 53:00 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 53:00 Like, there is no scarcity of food. There is a ton of big animals. And these animals are not even big relative to what might have been here when they were megafauna, you know, tens of thousands of years ago. But you just think about the way that currently living hunter-gatherers might have changed their, their foodstuffs to survive, and if you had woolly mammoth all the time, man, I think you're probably gonna eat some honey if you can find it. But honey and woolly mammoth sounds like a good diet to me. I mean, that's a, that's a huge smorgasbord.

Joe Rogan 53:28 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?

Paul Saladino 53:39 Gluconeogenesis.

Joe Rogan 53:40 Gluconeogenesis.

Paul Saladino 53:42 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 53:42 Okay. So, that is what occurs if you just eat nothing but meat. You will develop some glucose.

Paul Saladino 53:50 You have to. You have to.

Joe Rogan 53:51 You have to.

Paul Saladino 53:51 In ke- in ketosis, your body will do gluconeogenesis.

Joe Rogan 53:54 And your body does this without... You don't need any carbohydrates?

Paul Saladino 53:59 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.

Joe Rogan 54:18 And this is why if you eat only meat, you will get knocked out of ketosis, if you have too much protein.

Paul Saladino 54:23 Mm-hmm. Yeah. Which may not necessarily be a bad thing.

Joe Rogan 54:26 Right. Does-

Paul Saladino 54:26 It's just, it's human physiology.

Joe Rogan 54:28 It's pretty fascinating though, that your body has, i- knows how to do that-

Paul Saladino 54:32 It doesn't al-

Joe Rogan 54:33 ... knows how to convert it。

Paul Saladino 54:33 Yeah, yeah. Because you, you would die otherwise.

Joe Rogan 54:35 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 54:35 If we didn't make glucose from protein and glycerol backbones and other substrate, we would die. We need glucose.

Joe Rogan 54:42 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.

Paul Saladino 55:48 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 55:48 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.

Paul Saladino 56:23 That's a, that's a v- very large amount of weight to lose in a month.

Joe Rogan 56:26 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 56:26 And I heard you also say your vitiligo got better.

Joe Rogan 56:28 Yes, it did. Yeah.

Paul Saladino 56:30 That is amaze- That's really cool.

Joe Rogan 56:31 That spot started filling in, which is really strange.

Paul Saladino 56:34 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-

Joe Rogan 56:51 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 56:51 ... triggers an im- immunologic reaction in the small intestine. Could that model be at play on a bigger scale for people with vitiligo? I had eczema and asthma, which is an autoimmune condition. What about autoimmune thyroid disease? What about psychiatric illness, which I believe is autoimmune as well?

Joe Rogan 57:07 I think there's probably quite a few of them that are. Now, when you said you had eczema and asthma, was that cured with the carnivore diet, or is it in remission? Like ...

Paul Saladino 57:16 I think that's just syntax, right?

Joe Rogan 57:18 Of course.

Paul Saladino 57:18 So, I have not had any flares of eczema since I've been eating a carnivore or carnivore-ish diet for the last two years, except one time when I reincorporated some plants back in my diet in an experiment with squash. So, I'll get eczema on like, my wrists, my elbows-

Joe Rogan 57:34 So you got it just from taking squash?

Paul Saladino 57:36 Yeah, the squash.

Joe Rogan 57:37 And it kicked it back in?

Paul Saladino 57:38 It kicked it back in a little bit.

Joe Rogan 57:39 So, you had nothing for two years, and then you have squash, and then it kicks in?

Paul Saladino 57:43 I had a little bit of eczema on my lower back.

Joe Rogan 57:45 And then you stopped eating squash and it went away?

Paul Saladino 57:47 It goes away. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:47 Wow.

Paul Saladino 57:48 And there are ... I mean, squash is one of the foods that I would think is fairly ancestrally consistent and fairly less offensive to humans. Because in the book, I don't ... The book is not meant to convince everyone to stop eating all plants. The book is really meant to do a couple things. It's meant to help people understand that animal meat and organs are the foods that we've been eating throughout our evolution. They're wrongly vilified today, and we can talk about why with the epidemiology. And they should be a part of any ... They're an integral part of any healthy human diet. And then I created kind of a spectrum of plant toxicity, thinking about hunter-gatherer tribes and which parts of plants they favor, and which parts of plants they discard. And then thirdly, I think it's important to understand what we talked about, processed vegetable oils and processed sugars, hugely bad for humans. But I'm really interested in carnivore and carnivore-ish type diets so that it can, uh, the most number of people can benefit.

Joe Rogan 58:36 Now, what about fruit? What D- When you say you eat a carnivore-ish diet, I know you incorporate honey, but do you eat any fruit?

Paul Saladino 58:44 I've experimented with it, and I ... So for about a year and three quarters, I had just meat and organs and fat, and I was in ketosis all the time depending how much protein I had. And then I had, um, some thoughts about, "Well, what does, what does my blood sugar look like when I do this?" I got a CGM, I got one of these continuous glucose monitors, and I started, um, I started incorporating carbohydrates first as an experiment. And what I noticed was that with sort of these less toxic carbohydrates, or what, what I think of as more ancestrally consistent sources of carbohydrates, I felt even better. The eczema didn't come back with honey. I had occasional fruit. I found that I couldn't overeat fruit. I couldn't ... If I ate too much fruit, I felt bloated and kinda just farty and didn't feel good. Fruit seems to have this built-in mechanism where we can only eat so much of it. Honey is ... You know, I can eat a moderate amount and feel just fine. But the inclusion of those carbohydrates actually made me feel a little better. I slept a little better. With long-term ketosis for myself, and what I've observed for some people, perhaps not all, with long-term ketosis i- electrolyte deficiencies a lot of times develop. People get cramps. They get palpitations.

Joe Rogan 59:48 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 59:49 And we know that when ketogenic physiology happens, our body partitions electrolytes differently. Sodium, you know, sodium retention in the kidney is different, and then when sodium becomes a little bit funky, our body 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?"

Joe Rogan 1:00:14 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 1:00:15 "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.

Joe Rogan 1:00:52 Honey has a lot of really unique properties too, doesn't it?

Paul Saladino 1:00:55 It does, yeah. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:00:55 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.

Paul Saladino 1:01:00 M- Manuka?

Joe Rogan 1:01:01 Yes. That actually helps people heal better.

Paul Saladino 1:01:05 I think a lot of honeys do that actually. Now, Manuka has a very good publicist. I haven't seen any, like-

Joe Rogan 1:01:10 Is that what it is?

Paul Saladino 1:01:10 I think it might-

Joe Rogan 1:01:11 Ah.

Paul Saladino 1:01:11 I think a l-

Joe Rogan 1:01:11 It's super expensive.

Paul Saladino 1:01:12 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-

Joe Rogan 1:01:46 So the associations that we have with sugar and periodontal disease is really just processed sugar?

Paul Saladino 1:01:52 Probably.

Joe Rogan 1:01:53 Hmm.

Paul Saladino 1:01:53 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-

Joe Rogan 1:02:03 Nor do we, right?

Paul Saladino 1:02:04 (laughs) Nor do humans. Nor do humans. But moderate amounts, humans seem to do okay with, like fruit amounts.

Joe Rogan 1:02:10 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 1:02:10 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.

Joe Rogan 1:02:18 And do they give it to them in fructose corn syrup or do they give it to them in-

Paul Saladino 1:02:21 It's in their feed.

Joe Rogan 1:02:22 ... actual fruit?

Paul Saladino 1:02:23 It's in their feed, so they-

Joe Rogan 1:02:23 What do they add to the feed?

Paul Saladino 1:02:25 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.

Joe Rogan 1:02:41 Really?

Paul Saladino 1:02:41 Yeah, yeah. That's in the honey folder, Jamie. The honey rats protective-

Joe Rogan 1:02:45 So there's something about the consumption of honey that's actually net beneficial?

Paul Saladino 1:02:50 Y- well, it seems to mitigate the oxidative stress. So if you look at the bottom there-

Joe Rogan 1:02:54 Mm.

Paul Saladino 1:02:54 ... see where it says compared with those fed fructose?

Joe Rogan 1:02:56 Yeah. Interesting. Well, it tastes good too. It doesn't-

Paul Saladino 1:03:02 Honey is delicious. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:03:03 It doesn't taste like you're doing anything wrong. Like, when I eat a piece of chocolate cake, it tastes great.

Paul Saladino 1:03:07 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:03:07 But it tastes like I'm fucking up. You know what I'm saying?

Paul Saladino 1:03:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:11 I don't know if that's psychological or what, but when I have honey with my tea, like it's delicious and it feels like I crave it, like it, I'm enjoying it, like it's doing something for me. I like it.

Paul Saladino 1:03:21 Hopefully in the future when I get to go spend time with the Hadza, I'll be able to eat in an ekom like they do. But in the, in the anthropology folder, Jamie, there's a study of the Hadza fallback foods. The Hadza, both the men and the women in the Hadza tribe rate honey as their favorite food.

Joe Rogan 1:03:34 Mm.

Paul Saladino 1:03:35 And the men say meat is their second. The women say meat, baobab, and berries are all... So if you go down to the third or the fourth page, you'll see-

Joe Rogan 1:03:43 W- what is graphic of?

Paul Saladino 1:03:44 ... this graphic of-

Joe Rogan 1:03:45 Baobab?

Paul Saladino 1:03:46 Baobab.

Joe Rogan 1:03:46 And what is that?

Paul Saladino 1:03:47 Uh, B-A-O-B-O-B. So you see that's the, the black bar is how many people like honey, right?

Joe Rogan 1:03:53 Wow.

Paul Saladino 1:03:53 And the next bar is meat, and then baobab, berries, and tubers. So both males and females, they don't, they don't really like tubers (laughs) a whole lot. They'll dig them as a fallback food, and actually the title of this paper is Hadza Fallback Foods.

Joe Rogan 1:04:07 Mm.

Paul Saladino 1:04:07 But at the end of the paper, they say there's this observed behavior that if there's a lot of meat in the camp, the women will stop digging tubers for two to three days. Baobab is this tree in Tanzania that has this fruit. I've never had it, but it has this kind of dry, um, this dry fruit pulp on the outside of the seeds. Maybe you can find a picture of baobab, Jamie, but, um, yeah, that's interesting stuff. But they all love honey in the Hadza tribe. And the-

Joe Rogan 1:04:32 That's it. Wow.

Paul Saladino 1:04:33 Yeah, it's a really cool looking tree.

Joe Rogan 1:04:34 What a freaky tree. If I saw that, I'd be like, "That's a trap. That's not a real tree."

Paul Saladino 1:04:39 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:04:39 That one in the upper left hand corner, like that looks really different. I'd be like, "Dude, that is not a tree."

Paul Saladino 1:04:43 Some-

Joe Rogan 1:04:44 There's someone in there.

Paul Saladino 1:04:45 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:04:45 They're gonna grab you when you walk by. (laughs)

Paul Saladino 1:04:46 That almost looks like the tree from, remember that tree in The Princess Bride?

Joe Rogan 1:04:49 Yes! Yes.

Paul Saladino 1:04:50 Look at this guy.

Joe Rogan 1:04:51 He's climbing into a hole in the tree.

Paul Saladino 1:04:53 And the Hadza have this special ax they use, and if, if they, if they see-

Joe Rogan 1:04:57 Wow, those are crazy.

Paul Saladino 1:04:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:59 That's the weirdest tree. Like, it's, for folks that are just listening, they're really fat and wide, and then the top they have these tiny little branches. Jamie, go to the left side, the left of the other images that you, you were looking at. Go drop down into the lower right hand corner, that one, the bulbous one that looks like an onion.

Paul Saladino 1:05:17 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:05:17 Look at that thing. That is so crazy.

Paul Saladino 1:05:19 Amazing. Apparently this tree is common and the fruit are fairly prevalent.

Joe Rogan 1:05:24 Hmm. (snaps fingers) Interesting. Baobab.

Paul Saladino 1:05:26 Baobab.

Joe Rogan 1:05:26 Okay.

Paul Saladino 1:05:26 I think that's how you pronounce it.

Joe Rogan 1:05:28 Okay.

Paul Saladino 1:05:28 But if you look at, and if you look at tooth decay in the Hadza, there's some interesting findings. The women actually that are in, that eat indigenous an- ancestrally don't really have significant tooth decay. The men have higher rates of tooth decay, and we don't know whether that's because they're eating more honey or because they also smoke tobacco and marijuana.

Joe Rogan 1:05:46 Ah.

Paul Saladino 1:05:46 And tobacco and marijuana are certainly associated with dental cavities or periodontitis.

Joe Rogan 1:05:50 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 1:05:51 So there's been some concern about that. But at least in myself, I haven't seen anything, and I've actually talked to a number of dentists who have said, "No, honey is protective in the mouth," which goes against everything we think. But there are studies that look at the pH of the mouth. So I'm not a dentist, I'm a medical doctor. But when I've been educated by dentists, tooth decay appears to happen when the pH of the mouth drops. When we eat sugar or something that's fermentable, or, um, in the setting probably of fat-soluble vitamin deficiency, the pH of the mouth drops and the bac- the cariogenic bacteria are able to thrive. Well, if you look at the pH of the mouth when you eat honey, it drops and then it rebounds more quickly.

Joe Rogan 1:06:26 Hm.

Paul Saladino 1:06:26 So what's interesting, is there something in the honey that prevents that? It's certainly an ancestrally consistent food. If you look at where honey is available in the world, it's eaten everywhere it's available.

Joe Rogan 1:06:35 Well, it, it just makes sense. I mean, you see animals eat it. You see bears eat it, of course. You know, they're famous for just letting bees bite them while they just sting them while they eat their honey.

Paul Saladino 1:06:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:46 Um, what i- what's... There's things about high fructose corn syrup that makes it particularly damaging to the body. What, what are those things?

Paul Saladino 1:06:55 So, fructose and glucose are different molecules, and fructose and glucose have different biochemistry. In glucose biochemistry, there's a stopgap. There's a rate-limiting enzyme called phosphofructokinase, meaning that if you try and overeat glu- glucose, your body's gonna put the brakes on it and not do glycolysis, which is the process by which you turn glucose that you're eating into energy, right? There's no brake on fructose. So fructose bypasses pho- phosphofructokinase and can essentially move down the shared glycolytic pathway into the formation of the glycerol backbone and triglycerides, which are essentially fats, without any, uh, without any brakes. So the problem is not high fructose corn syrup itself, it's that you can eat it in-... without, without stopping, right? That you can get massive amounts of it-

Joe Rogan 1:07:45 Hmm.

Paul Saladino 1:07:45 ... and they're calorically bereft. So if you were to eat, if you, if I were to give you, if you look at isocaloric studies of fructose, there's no evidence that they, that fructose increases uric acid or blood pressure or weight gain, isocaloric. But when anything with high-fructose corn syrup is going to be so enticing, is going to short-circuit your satiety mechanisms so much, that you're just gonna overeat it-

Joe Rogan 1:08:09 Hmm.

Paul Saladino 1:08:09 ... in a way that fruit doesn't do, right? Like we said, u- fruit has this stopgap. It kinda has this brake on it. You're like, "Oh, I can't eat any more fruit."

Joe Rogan 1:08:16 That's another thing that I noticed about doing the carnivore diet for that one month, was that satiety, um, when you're only eating meat, you don't eat as much. You just don't. I mean, it's, it's, it's a, you could t- call it, i- it's not just an elimination diet, but it is, it's in many ways, it's you're reducing calories just because you're just not as hungry. And you eat to satisfaction, but overall, the calorie consumption is much less than if you were eating it along with, like, um, macaroni and cheese or, you know, creamed corn or bread or all these other things. You would keep eating. Like, if you have a steak and you only eat this 18-ounce rib eye, y- you will, you're, you're only gonna eat a certain amount. I mean, maybe you'll eat the whole thing, but maybe you'll get, like, three quarters of the way and you'll be like, "I'm good." But if you've got mashed potatoes and gravy and bread, you'll just keep fucking eating. And it's weird. It's weird. Your body just wants to stuff more stuff into your mouth.

Paul Saladino 1:09:17 There, there are different satiety mechanisms, I think, happening at the level of the hypothalamus and the brain when you're just eating protein and fat versus protein and fat and carbohydrates.

Joe Rogan 1:09:25 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 1:09:26 And there's nuance there as well. I s- I, there's some really interesting evidence that polyunsaturated fatty acids probably hijack these satiety mechanisms as well, and that linoleic acid specifically and other omega-6s can have negative consequences at the level of the brain and you don't get that satiety response to turn off. But yeah, I agree with you. Every once in a while, on strict carnivore diets, people can't eat enough because of this.

Joe Rogan 1:09:48 Yeah.

Paul Saladino 1:09:48 And they, and they do benefit from including some carbohydrates in their diet. And I think, you know, our ancestors have done that occasionally. But again, I do think that for humans to thrive, we should not fear meat and organs, and you make that the center of your diet. And like you're saying, I think that there is a benefit to a carnivore-ish diet.

Joe Rogan 1:10:04 Mm-hmm.

Paul Saladino 1:10:05 Just like you, how many people are going to eat just meat and organs for their whole life? Uh, some, a devoted few, and they're definitely gonna benefit. But I think that the number is 10 to 20 to 100X who might benefit from understanding that meat and organs are valuable, incorrectly vilified, and that there's a spectrum of plant toxicity. And that expands it, because when I tell people that I eat meat and organs and fat, they look at me really funny. But if I tell them that occasionally I eat an avocado or some raspberries or some blueberries or some honey, their eyes kind of, like, the gears start turning. They're like, "Maybe I could do that."

Joe Rogan 1:10:39 Hmm.

Paul Saladino 1:10:39 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?

Joe Rogan 1:11:27 Right.

Paul Saladino 1:11:28 It doesn't want you to eat its seeds. Those are the reproductive parts of a plant.

Joe Rogan 1:11:31 Right.

Paul Saladino 1:11:32 So like-

Joe Rogan 1:11:32 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.

Paul Saladino 1:11:39 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.

Joe Rogan 1:11:51 But they don't mind if you swallow them and shit 'em out.

Paul Saladino 1:11:53 Shit 'em out in a nice pile of fertilizer.

Joe Rogan 1:11:55 Right.

Paul Saladino 1:11:56 And-

Joe Rogan 1:11:56 Which is how they wind up growing.

Paul Saladino 1:11:58 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