Carnivore vs. Vegan: Which Diet Really Saves the Planet? | Dr. Paul Saladino

Hey everyone, Dr. Josh Axe here. Welcome to the show where each and every week I cover the science and principles behind how to grow in body, mind, and spirit and take your health and your life to the next level. Today I'm going to be joined by Dr. Paul Saladino. Dr. Paul is someone that I've talked to before and have been really impressed with all that he's done. He's a double board-certified medical doctor, he's the host of the Fundamental Health Podcast, and he's the founder of Heart Soil and a new company which I'm excited to try, uh, some of his new product Lineage Provisions Lineage, uh, has created meat sticks that have grass-fed meat plus organs in them. So really an amazing superfood product. On today's episode, we're gonna be diving into, uh, really some controversial topics around modern medicine, the root cause of finding chronic illness. We'll talk about, uh, veganism versus carnivorism and which is actually better for the environment, all on today's episode. Dr. Paul, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on. It's good to see you again.

Yeah, great to see you. You know, I know every time we've talked, I've, I've learned a lot, and I love talking about all things carnivore diet and just food is medicine. And I know for you, I'd love for you to kind of share your story a little bit about how you got into this space and industry, because I know you as a kid were overmedicated, you suffered with autoimmune issues. So talk to us about sort of your background and how you healed yourself. And also, I'm kind of interested, if you had autoimmune disease and started to reverse it, how that sort of correlated related with you becoming a medical doctor?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the reasons that I went into medicine originally was because I grew up in a family of doctors. My dad was a doctor, my mom was a nurse practitioner, and I was just curious and really wanted to understand how human bodies work. I, I think I had this, this really bad experience when I was like a young adult taking my car to the mechanic, and I hated the feeling I had. The— my first car was a Honda Accord. It was a two-door 1985 Honda Accord. Um, my dad drove it, and then he, he gave it to me when it was, you know, kind of on its last legs, but I got a car as a teenager. I remember it started to break down, and I, I hated the feeling of bringing a car to the mechanic and not understanding how to fix it myself. You're kind of just— you're just— you're at somebody else's mercy, you know. The mechanic knows how to fix it, maybe. Maybe they'll do it right. Maybe they're honest. You hope. Maybe they get the right problem. Maybe they don't. Maybe the car drives better. Maybe it's back in the shop in a month or a week. And that feeling to me was powerlessness, and I didn't like that. And I thought the same way about my body, and I realized, like, I never wanted to feel that way about my health or the health of my friends or my family. I thought, I don't want to have to go to a doctor when I have asthma or eczema, which were problems that I suffered with as a child, or know people in my life, whether it's a future girlfriend or a wife or children or my parents or my sister, my niece and nephew, when they're having problems and, and, and not really understand what's going on as much as I possibly could. Because what if the doctor doesn't know, or what if the doctor doesn't think about things the way that I think about things? Maybe the doctor is a very intelligent, well-intentioned physician, but it's just from a medical model that's based on pharmaceuticals or thinks about, you know, the diet differently than I would or has different goals than I do or doesn't have enough time to spend with me or my family. So that was really the genesis of my interest in medicine was I wanted to take— I wanted to be sovereign over my health and then understanding what I could, thinking about things from a root cause perspective, hopefully translate that or share information that was helpful for other people. So first I went to PA school in cardiology because my dad was a medical doctor and he worked way too much. And I thought, I never want to work that much.

I never want to overwork.

And then once I started working as a PA, a physician assistant in cardiology, I quickly realized that I was kind of just in a system that I didn't have a lot of ability to, to really change because I was below the physician and kind of had to do what they said. So they, they would even mime to me, you know, just think here, just think within the heart box, don't think outside the heart box. When here I was, a curious, you know, person learning about medicine and practicing medicine at the beginning of my career a number of years ago, thinking, well, I'm really interested how our metabolic health connects to the heart, or what about the connections between the thyroid and the heart, or the gut and the heart. But it was hard to go outside of the heart box when I worked in a cardiology practice, even though the guys I worked with were great. So then I went back to medical school and then back to residency at the University of Washington, and then the University of Arizona was medical school. And through all— out all of that time, I had my own autoimmune issues, which I'd been trying to fix my whole life, which were eczema and asthma. And it wasn't really getting fixed. I tried a lot of different things before I was a PA. I tried veganism, I lost a lot of weight. I was very skinny. I should say I lost a lot of muscle mass. I lost a lot of lean muscle weight. I was too skinny. Right now I weigh about 167 pounds. I'm 5'9" and I'm pretty lean. I'm about 10, 11% body fat. But when I was a vegan, I got down to 145 pounds. So probably 20 pounds of lean muscle mass lighter because I just couldn't sustain the muscle on a vegan diet. I was also running a lot at the time. So I had a vegan phase, then I was kind of paleo for a while, but my eczema continued, which was interesting to me. I even tried autoimmune paleo, but my eczema still kind of came and went. I couldn't quite figure it out. It became a problem for me in medical school specifically because I did a lot of jiu-jitsu in medical school and I would get eczema on my elbows and my knees from kind of wrestling on the mats. And that sometimes would get super infected like a staph or a strep. And so I really wanted to figure this out. That eventually led me in my residency at the University of Washington to doing one of the more extreme experiments I've done with a strictly carnivorous diet, which is all animal products. So I basically ate meat, eggs, organs and animal fat and salt for a year and a half, and that really improved the eczema. But I ran into some issues long-term with electrolyte balance, probably due to keto— just ketosis long-term was hard for my body. So then I kind of trended back toward maybe the center a little bit, and now I include some plant foods, but I still need a lot of vegetables. In fact, I don't eat any vegetables, and we can talk about why if you want. So right now I eat something that is— I've kind of termed an animal-based diet in contradistinction to a plant-based diet, which is mostly plants with some animal foods. I have this idea of an animal-based diet, and I think of this as just thinking, well, we get a lot of our nutrients from meat and organs. That's kind of the center of the diet, or the animal foods. For me, it's meat, organs, and raw dairy, raw milk, raw kefir. And then I have in my diet a moderate amount of fruit and fruit juice, honey, those kind of things as well now. So, and that, that's can be more broad than people think when you imagine that things like cucumber or avocado and zucchini and squash, These are all fruits in contradistinction to vegetables, which are like the leaves and stems and roots and seeds. But I've also, you know, I think over time it's been interesting for me and then I'll let you chime in here. I, I, I'm much more, you know, relaxed about all this now and feel like, look, if people eat vegetables and they enjoy them, those are much better than so many of the other ultra-processed foods that we eat. I think that what's interesting for me is to see that especially with people who have autoimmune disease, a lot of people do seem to benefit, at least anecdotally, from cutting out some of the foods that we think of as healthy, whether it's grains like oatmeal or wheat, or some vegetables do trigger people. So that's really where I've landed at this point, like just, just kind of raising this gentle little flag to people to say, hey, if you're, if you're struggling with an autoimmune disease and you're not doing great, you might try and cut out the salad and see how you do. But if you can eat the salad and you feel great, then more power to you.

Well, Paul, we have a couple things in common. One is we both had our first cars as Honda Accords. So I drove a 1988 stick stick shift that my dad insisted I learn on a stick shift. And so I, uh, anyways, so, so, so enjoyed that. And, and I, and then my family, we were Honda family, so I mean, I drove an Accord for a long, long time. And then, um, and then, you know, I think over time, and this is one thing I can appreciate about you, is that, you know what, like, our minds can change over time. And I think through experience and working with patients and, and, and, you know, we, we tend to learn. And I know that I used to be a lot more strict and militant about the way I and really soften. And one of the things I think that really helped me is realizing that everybody's different, and it's really important. You know, I, I think I realized too, one of the most important things that you and I can do as practitioners, but also helping our patients do this, is have a higher level of awareness. It's like, if you want to grow spiritually, you want to be spiritually aware. If you want to have great relationships, you need to have emotional intelligence and self-awareness and other awareness. But the same goes for our health, is really keeping track of of what works for our own bodies. And this is one of the things I've really loved about Chinese medicine. It's that so, so many of us are different. Some people can eat vegetables, and there's a few people who maybe shouldn't eat vegetables at all. And so that's the reality I think that I'm living in, at least right now, is, is that I think that there is a lot of flexibility based on somebody's, uh, you know, current health status and genetics in terms of what foods they tolerate or don't tolerate. And so I'd love to hear more about sort of your, your, you know, why you don't eat vegetables. I do want to mention I interviewed, if you know, Dr. James D. Nicolantonio recently. And so, you know, he had mentioned his— some of his research on, you know, carnivore, but in thinking it's good for a period of time, but also worrying about what you had mentioned, that sort of alkaline and acidity and that electrolyte balance and some of what happens. You're obviously getting fruits in your diet, especially certain fruits watermelon or whatever it might be could, you know, help remedy that pretty quickly. But I would love to hear more about that in terms of why you are, you know, why you're vegetable-free. Which, by the way, I have a nephew who would really, you know, be interested in this diet. So, you know, share.

I think it's interesting because, you know, I have a niece and a nephew. I don't have any kids right now, but I have a niece and a nephew. And, um, you know, I think that if you look at kids, it's pretty easy to feed kids meat, and it's pretty easy to feed kids fruit. I think as humans, we're drawn to those things. Yeah. And even within the category of fruits, there are some things that I don't tolerate well. In fact, on my wrist, it's hard to see now, but on both wrists I have healing eczema because I recently tried to reincorporate tomatoes into my diet. And tomatoes are technically a fruit. If people are curious, you know, a fruit is anything that has seeds within it. That's probably a fruit. And then the vegetables canonically we think of as the leaves, the stems, the roots, and probably the seeds of plants. That's the difference there. The fruit are the, the sort of the reproductive parts of plants where they they kind of encase the seeds often and try and push the seeds out into the environment. They'll put the fruit around it. Sometimes the fruit is colorful and sweet, sometimes it's not. But the vegetables are the other parts of the plant, the plant's roots that support it in the ground, that bring nutrients from the ground, the water from the ground, through the stem into the leaves where the plants do photosynthesis. But I think that as humans, we've always been drawn to the fruit, and we've pretty much always liked meat. And it's interesting that I think that for some people they have more sensitivities to the defense chemicals in the plant parts that are not the fruit. And we see fruit— plant defense chemicals are something that I think is becoming more and more controversial, but I think that they do affect humans. And the problem here is that there probably will never be an NIH-funded randomized controlled trial that could ever be done looking at how plant defense chemicals affect humans, because it's very bioindividual, as you said. And yeah, I don't think anyone would ever fund it, but But one of the unique things about the world that we live in today is that social media provides both you and I with this opportunity to gather hundreds, if not thousands or tens of thousands of stories from people. And what I've seen from that, and in my clinical practice previously, is that there are some— there are some people, there's a subgroup of people, bio-individuals, who just do better without some of these plant parts like vegetables, whether it's because of oxalate sensitivity, oxalates being this dicarboxylic acid found in things like spinach leaves. It's found in rhubarb, which is actually toxic if you don't eat it. Like, the rhubarb leaves are quite high in oxalates. Oxalates are moderately found in things like almonds and other foods. So some people are sensitive to oxalates. They just accumulate in our bodies, whether it's because of the absence of certain gut flora or other genetics. I, for whatever reason, seem to be sensitive to it, whether it's a lectin in tomatoes, even though it's a fruit. There are these individual sensitivities. And so, like you said, I think being aware of how foods affect us is such a gift. And it really takes a lot of intentionality and planning and awareness of our foods. Because for me, some people might think this is boring, but I basically eat the same foods every day now. I get into a routine. The first thing I do in the morning when I get up, I, I live in Costa Rica. We were talking about this before the podcast. I get up around 5 or 5:30 cuz I wanna go surf. And the first thing I do in the morning is I have a glass of raw kefir with some honey before I surf. Surf, maybe have some watermelon juice. I go surf for 2+ hours. I come back and I have breakfast, which is some kind of meat, maybe some organs. I have a little cucumber cut up in it. It's with salt, maybe butter. I'll eat, you know, a little more fruit juice, maybe more kefir with honey. And that's kind of how I do it throughout the day. I'll eat some meat, some organs, maybe some cheese, some raw dairy, some honey, and some fruit or fruit juice throughout the day. And I kind of repeat that throughout the day. And so when I vary something, if I add one thing to my diet and My most recent past experiment was tomato paste. I went to the farmer's market here in Costa Rica and I got 12 or 13 organic tomatoes cuz I wanted to do an actual experiment. I take the skin off and then I take the seeds and I try and boil them down and, and it tastes great. I mean, I really appreciate tomatoes, like, like a homemade tomato paste in my burger, but within a few days my eczema's back and I think, okay, something about that doesn't affect me positively. But if you look at the nutrition space, there are many people who will respond negatively to me talking about that, and perhaps I haven't done an elegant enough or a clear enough job talking about it, but they'll say there are no randomized controlled trials that tomatoes are bad for humans. And I can say like, well, they clearly don't seem to work for my immune system. Yeah, it's the idea that, that if people are struggling with generally autoimmune diseases, I think where we see this most manifest, whether it's a joint pain issue like an osteoarthritis, a rheumatoid arthritis, an inflammatory bowel disease or an irritable bowel syndrome, a thyroid issue like autoimmune thyroiditis, skin issues like eczema, psoriasis, Multiple sclerosis. I mean, I think a lot of illnesses that we suffer from as humans today are autoimmune in some nature. I think that there is this, this sort of curiosity that I've talked about throughout the time that I've been on social media around, do some people benefit from cutting out some of these foods? And that's really why I do it, that I think some people are more sensitive to those. Now, I'll just say this and then I'll pause. Cutting out vegetables, I think, is probably the last thing most people should do if they're trying to improve their diet, with the first things being cutting out soda, cutting out seed oils, cutting cutting out ultra-processed and refined foods, probably cutting out grains, um, especially moldy grains. And then, and then at the very bottom, you know, is, is like, well, maybe then you take a look at the vegetables. But I think that for the majority of people, there are much more high-priority things to do before looking at the spinach and the kale and the almonds. But if people get through all the other stuff and then they get to the bottom of the list and they're still kind of suffering like I was with eczema, then cutting those things out for some amount of time to do an experiment, I think, is worth it. And it's the kind of thing that's pretty safe as long as you're eating other nutrient-rich foods like meat and organs and fruit, you'll be fine. And then, hey, if it works great and your symptoms get better, you don't have to reincorporate. And if it doesn't work, then you can go back to including those foods, and I think you've done a valuable experiment.

Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, again, I think you've done a great job in educating people. In fact, if anyone's not following you on Instagram, they should be. You do, uh, I love when you go around and you, uh, you know, hold up certain foods and you educate on them, or the side effects of certain things people should be staying away from. And so I think, again, you've done a great job as as a medical doctor and educator helping people get healthy. And again, I— again, in this conversation compared to— I interview a lot of people, you know, sometimes people get very ideological, right? On, no, this is the way, it's only keto, or it's only this. I was interviewing someone recently, we both know Dave Asprey, and he's like, raspberries are bad. And it's that— and I really think he meant for everybody. And I thought, well, I love raspberries and actually thrive on them. But, you know, I— but I do think, again, things can be very bio bio-individual, as you're saying. So now I, I appreciate your softness because I think, you know, if I were to go and interview some of the most well-known people in our space, you know, could be again yourself, Dr. Mark Hyman, you know, Will Cole, Vani Hari. I mean, there's all kinds of people, right? Asprey. There's a lot. It's, you know, I think all of us have a little bit of a different perspective today than we did 10 years ago, right? I think we're continually learning and And so I, uh, anyway, so I appreciate what you're sharing. You know, one of the things that I've been thinking about recently, and I'd love to get your take on this, is that, you know, in Chinese medicine, they really— one of the things that we'll talk about is sort of, you know, yin versus yang foods, right? So these yang foods will be very, uh, it's going to be organ meats, meat, things that create— they're, they're anabolic in nature, okay? So they're going to help us grow and develop things, versus foods that are very yin are going to be the watermelon, the cucumber, a lot of things. You know, those are very yin. Kefir is actually as well. These are very yin foods. And so they really help balance each other out. And yin are better for being catabolic and breaking down certain things. For instance, eliminating things like senescent cells, right? Those zombie cells. And so it's very good for that and helping balance each other out. But, you know, I see all these studies now on longevity and people talking a lot about your longevity, about things like mTOR. So you've got David Sinclair and some other people saying, well, you shouldn't eat meat at all, or do low protein. But I think this all goes back to the individual. Well, well, does this person need to be more anabolic or catabolic? And ideally, people are really operating at a high level of both if your body is healthy. But I know I'm just— I'm sharing a lot of thoughts here, but any thoughts on that? Because I've seen a lot of the people, these longevity people, and again, a lot of them are in this vegan camp, which it's low protein, low meat, that's longevity. But I also don't think they realize what they're talking about in certain regards when it comes to, um, you know, the side effects of low protein. So any, any thoughts on that?

Yeah, that's something I've been thinking about a lot recently. In fact, I just started writing another book about this, basically this exact topic. Um, when you look— and this was fascinating to me, and it was really one of the things that spurred me to write this book, or begin writing it— when you look across species, humans, dogs, and mice, the individuals within a species, the individuals that live the longest have the highest metabolic rates. So that's something to consider. And then also we know that, that all that kind of flies in the face of using caloric restriction or overusing fasting, because there are people in the longevity space who will boast about their body temperature of 96.6 degrees. Well, the human body is supposed to be about 98.6. Obviously there's some bio-individuality there, but when you have a body temperature that's 2 degrees lower Fahrenheit than, quote, a normal body temperature, you know that your body is not having a high basal metabolic rate. And that to me is just not considering all of the research or considering all of this incorrectly. So I don't think that caloric restriction actually leads to, um, a, a net longevity benefit. We can talk about why it may be beneficial in some regards, which actually loops back into seed oils. But I think that too much fasting, it turns down your basal metabolic rate. We know that we want the thyroid to work well. And curiously, these many of these same influencers that boast about low body temperatures also have to take supplemental testosterone and thyroid hormone to normalize their hormones.

And so let me jump in because this is such a good point because I was going to say it's, you know, it's hypo— hypothyroidism and low testosterone. And low testosterone is linked to shorter lifespan. I mean, it just— and so So yeah, keep going there. I love what you're saying.

So I think that that is kind of the same illustration what we have with meat. It's just saying, okay, well, there's some research that if we overactivate mTOR, that could be negative for humans. But what happens in most humans is that when we exercise, or when we consume certain amino acids like leucine, or when we consume carbohydrates— because insulin also activates mTOR— we turn on this this set of, uh, cascades, this signaling cascade in the human body that leads to rebuilding or making things stronger in the human body. And I don't think that's a bad thing. Overactivation of mTOR is different than simply activating mTOR. This is, I think, the problem with the longevity space is they conflate a lot of these ideas. And you mentioned this, we know pretty clearly that frailty is a huge risk factor for shortening your life. And so lower protein diets, limiting leucine, limiting methionine, limiting amino acids that are prevalent in animal foods in favor of plant proteins will— it very often leads to frailty. And people in the plant-based community will argue, no, no, you can get those amino acids in plants. But the whole point here is to limit those amino acids so you limit mTOR. And this doesn't make sense. It's just we humans cycle mTOR on and off. Obviously, this is an oversimplification, but we are going to cycle we're going to cycle this cascade on and off when we're eating and not eating. We all have a fasting window built into our day when we sleep. There are some of us that will get up in the middle of the night and eat, but that's probably not a great health behavior for many people. I think the majority of people listening to this podcast have a significant window every night when they sleep, and at that point your mTOR is turned off and all of these sort of mechanisms that are quote-unquote fasting can be activated. And so I worry about both caloric restriction, protein restriction, animal food fearing, and they're all kind of looped into the same way of thinking, which I think has flaws when you examine it carefully. Overfasting, anything that really is pushing against your metabolism or lowering your basal metabolic rate should be carefully considered when it comes to a goal of healthspan or lifespan and longevity. Because like I said, we know that it— well, it's, it's pretty clear that higher metabolic rate, having a thyroid that works well, having testosterone that's healthy, these are real indicators of longevity. And if you look at people in the longevity space, many of them are— they're, they're completely— they're just missing the plot because, like we said, they're, they're taking thyroid, they're taking testosterone, and they have lower body temperatures. They're sort of like thinking they're doing something right, but they're just misinterpreting the research. And that to me is a little dangerous.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think that, you know, one of the things I think I'm, I'm very aware of now as well, you know, they'll talk about You know, methionine being this big issue, of course, it's— methionine is important for so many functions in the body. But also, I think a lot of it comes down to balance. You know, one of the things I really admire, and I think, I think you're spot on when it comes to when you're sharing about what your diet is, that, that we— that most people do not incorporate at all today, is you're consuming sort of this nose-to-tail diet, right? You're getting muscle-building proteins from muscle meat, you're getting organ meats, and you're getting broth. And when you think about what our body is made up of, right, it's, it's going to be predominantly the, the proteins are going to be muscle building, 60 to 70%, but that other 30 to 40%, those are going to be collagen, those are going to be, you know, these, these unique peptides that some of them are only found in organ meats. You know, one of the things that's so popular today, right, is peptide therapy. When you look at whether BPC-157 or TB-500 or a lot of these peptides people are paying sometimes thousands of dollars for, for their hormonal balance, well, when you're eating duodenum stomach, you know, like you eat in terms of getting some of these organ meats, you're getting BPC-157 in that form in your diet. My point is, is that I think that there's a balance that should happen in the body, just like there should be an omega-3 to omega-6 balance. You mentioned these seed oils earlier, which is causing so many people to be inflamed, somewhere that 1 to 25 ratio, when it should be closer to a 1 to 1 or 1 to 4. I think the same thing should be happening in the body with a balance of amino acids. Acids like methionine and glycine, there should be sort of this balance there in those, and, and that's going to allow our bodies to function at a better level and maybe even dampen some of those, uh, you know, if there are side effects at all that some of those, those people are talking about. Talk to us a little bit about— I think a lot of people, Paul, have, uh, are turned off by organ meats, right? If anybody's tasted liver for the first time, most of us have not developed our palates enough. They're not sophisticated enough to like organ meats. They're very bitter in most cases. That's not a, that's not a flavor that most people are attuned to. How have you gone about getting organ meats into your diet? Flavors? Any recipes, ideas? Why? And also, why do you think organ meats and broth and some of these other things, even outside of animal muscle meat, is important to incorporate in our diet?

Well, you, you said it. I mean, there are unique nutrients in the organs, it's kind of like— I mean, this is probably a misused metaphor— it's like the peanut butter and the jelly, right? It's just better together. Yeah, nutritionally speaking, if you add— if you look at muscle meat now, muscle is an organ, but it's just one organ. I think we go to the grocery store and we look at the meat counter and we're looking at one organ. We're looking at ground muscle meat, we're looking at a New York strip steak, we're looking at a ribeye, we're looking at a filet mignon, and we're looking at a skirt steak, and it's all the same organ, right? It's all muscle meat. Now, that's very nutritious for humans. It has iron, it has B12, it has some K2, it has choline, and it has, you know, a small amount of things like— well, like riboflavin. But if you look at the liver, for instance, liver has bioavailable vitamin A in the retinol form. There's really not much of that in muscle meat. It has much more riboflavin, it has much more bioavailable folate. There's almost no folate in, in the muscle meat. It has more biotin, it has more vitamin K2, more choline. And then it has other, uh, minerals that are not so much found in muscle meat. So muscle meat is high in zinc, liver is high in copper. Again, there's this balance here that happens over and over if we look at these. And then you look at an organ like the heart. Well, the heart has higher amounts of taurine, this amino acid that's kind of getting a lot of press recently because it's been studied across species and associated with longevity. Well, that's interesting, uh, only found in animal foods. And a lot of the vegan, uh, longevity folks will supplement with taurine and other animal-based nutrients, which is kind of ironic as well, circling back to the previous part of the conversation. So heart is higher in taurine, heart is very high in coenzyme Q10 or ubiquinone, which is a key part of the mitochondrial electron transport chain. And so there's, and, and the heart and the liver, and also like you said, the pancreas, you could pick any organ, unique peptides. We're really just scratching the surface of what we know about nutrition in these organs. There's so much nutritional dark matter. You look at the universe. So we switched to like, you know, sort of a telescopic view of the outside of our our lives at night looking at the stars. There's so much dark matter, there's so many things we don't even understand in the universe, stars and things that we can't see. And then we applied the same term to our gut because 60% of the species in our gut are dark matter. We don't even know what's in our gut. Yeah, we can apply the same term to the nutrients found in a piece of liver and also a piece of muscle meat. There's this great database I found out about recently, it's called, it's called foodb.ca. I think it's a Canadian database. And if you look in foodb.ca, meat and you look at a piece of garlic, garlic has over 4,000 components. And that's incredible. It's such a complicated food. You know, we want to try and take a multivitamin, like, uh, you know, you go— I used to go to CVS, or when I was in college, I would get a multivitamin. Maybe there's 40 things in the multivitamin. A piece of garlic has 4,000 different—

yeah, it's crazy.

A piece of meat, 42,000 components. You know, liver is probably on the order of 30 40,000 components. You really can't recreate that in a synthetic multivitamin. You say, oh well, I can make a multivitamin with creatine. Well, you probably couldn't make with creatine because you couldn't make it that big enough. But you— I can make a multivitamin with vitamin A and all those things you mentioned, Paul. Vitamin K2, I can put that on a multivitamin. Yeah, but can you put, uh, hepatocyte growth factor? Can you put— yeah, taurine? Can you put this? Can you put this, you know, a certain peptide in heart? Can you put tufsin and splenin and splenopentin from the spleen? Can you put the BPC-157 and other peptides we don't know about? So there's this, there's this level of complexity of our food that we're not even aware of. And I think that the take-home for people is just high-level: whole plant and animal foods are just rich sources of information for the human body that can't be recreated at this point in time. Our technology is, is inadequate to recreate these in a multivitamin. And so So this is the benefit of eating organs, just like there's a benefit to eating, you know, a diversity of foods from both the plant and the animal kingdoms. Again, something that I've kind of changed my mind on over time and evolved with. But if you're eating just muscle meat, you're missing out on unique nutrients in a lot of those organs that aren't in your diet. And you asked, how do you do it? I mean, with liver specifically, which I think is probably the first organ for people to include, maybe not the easiest, but the first, you can just do half an ounce of liver per day. There's lots of ways to do it. You can do it in a desiccated capsule. That's Heart Soil, the company that I built. Or you can do it a piece of raw liver if you trust your source and it's previously frozen. All raw food has some risk, but if you're— if you trust your source, it's pretty safe. Nothing is perfectly safe, but you could do raw liver, like half an ounce. You could just grill it very lightly, you know, not completely charring it. Or, you know, you can grind it into muscle meat and make a burger with an organ in it. I've been eating a lot of heart recently, and I'll just— I'll actually grind the heart and mix it with muscle meat. So you can make a hamburger. And there are great companies doing this now, like Force of Nature. That's exactly what we did with Lineage, is we made these air-dried meat sticks with liver and heart in the meat stick. And so you can mix them in with the muscle meat, and then they don't taste as much. That's one of the things we're proud of. I mean, yeah, I'm proud of the fact that we got some liver and some heart into the Lineage meat sticks, but I'm also proud of the fact that you can't taste it.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, I— we've used Force of Nature. They're a great company. Me. And yeah, and you really don't taste it. I mean, and if you do, it's by a— just a pinch, and the health benefits are worth it. I don't notice it at all. And of course, there's loads of benefits there. Yeah, and you mentioned it, it is astounding and amazing that, that you've got, as you mentioned, 4,000 or 42,000 compounds in these foods, whether it be meat or plants, that you're not getting in these other foods. And this is why, remember, supplements are for supplementing a healthy diet. And if you do use supplements. I know Paul and I have both founded supplement companies, and both of us have a big focus on just putting food in our supplements. It's like, we're just— our supplements, they're food that we get in a capsule. So, so like, for instance, Paul here, so you don't have to taste, you know, the, the liver in the capsule. So anyways, yeah, these are, these, these are, these are great, uh, yeah, these are, these are great points.

And I think there's a time and a place for other supplements. Um, I've I've been experimenting recently with more creatine in my diet. Um, yeah, you know, because creatine is so valuable for humans, and I don't always eat 2 pounds of meat in a day anymore. And 2 pounds of meat— a kilogram of meat is between 3 and 5 grams of creatine. And gosh, there's a lot of benefits to humans for 3 to 5 grams of creatine per day. So yeah, let's just experiment. And, uh, and this is technical, and we don't have to go down this rabbit hole, but I've been thinking about methylation a lot recently. I've known that I polymorphisms in my MTHFR, which is the methylene tetrahydrofolate gene, for a long time. And, um, I just, I think that for me as a human, I feel better when I take a methylated B vitamin if I'm not getting quite enough liver, or I'm just, you know, if I'm traveling or something. So getting a methylated B vitamin and having that in my, in my sort of, you know, my wheelhouse, in my toolbox, or when I'm traveling or I can't get enough of the organs, really helps supplement with those extra B vitamins. So I think there's a time and a place for supplements, but the idea that you can recreate what is present in animal— whole animal and plant foods with a multivitamin that you get at a grocery store that's quote unquote synthetic, um, is, is fraught with problems.

Yeah, I do want to mention something about methylation here, and I think you'd agree with me on this, is that I, I do think a lot of people out there are going and buying who knows, on anywhere, buying a methylated B vitamin. And I do think that can be great, you know, a vitamin, essentially a methylation B vitamin complex. But I do also want to say I think there's even greater benefits if you're taking an organ, like a multi-organ supplement, because there are so many nutrients, as you know, in organs that help with methylation. I mean, methylation is more than B vitamins. So I do see a lot of these methylated supplements out there They have a few of those things in there. Of course, they have methylated folate and B12 and some others, but I do think taking that Multi Organ Supplement Plus, that would benefit a lot of people who are, who are concerned with methylation.

I totally agree. I think start with the food, and I kind of use it sparingly when I don't have access to the organs as much as I normally do. The other thing to point out there, people may not be aware of, is that there are forms of the vitamins. One of the things that's nice about methylated quote-unquote B vitamin supplements is those usually the bioavailable forms, the forms that our body makes these B vitamins. And the same can be applied to other forms of these vitamins that can end up— vitamins and minerals that end up in multivitamins, quote unquote. They're not always the form that the body uses. Folic acid is a big problem, and I don't think enough people are talking about this, that there is an enzyme in the human body called dihydrofolate reductase. And there's some good evidence that dihydrofolate reductase is pretty much tapped out if you're taking more than 226 micrograms of folic acid, I think is the study— what the results of the study body. And most prenatals on the market, 98%, have folic acid. Most wheat and grains are, are fortified with folic acid. Folic acid is a form of folate that doesn't occur in nature. It's all, um, you know, either dihydrofolate or tetrahydrofolate in nature. And so you have to— your body has to do work to turn folic acid into the first forms of folate that your body is expecting. And then if the enzyme is saturated and it can't metabolize the folic acid, you end up with unmetabolized folic acid in the human body. And I think This area still needs more research, but the concern is that unmetabolized folic acid could potentially block folate receptors and other things in the human body. So the take-home for me is we should not be eating food that is fortified with folic acid, and we should not be taking supplements that contain folic acid. The same could be true of, of B12 in the cyanocobalamin form. Again, I think they're very small amounts for cyanocobalamin, but again, you're, you're putting literally cobalt cobalamin with cyanide in your body. Now, it— I don't think it's going to kill someone like a toxic dose of cyanide would, but cyanide is a mitochondrial toxin. And so we shouldn't be taking supplements that have these, I would say, non-natural— that term is fraught— but non-natural forms of the vitamins in them.

I mean, there's no doubt the ones you mentioned, and there's many more, right, that are just cheap, uh, cheap minerals, right? A lot of these calcium— you know, I remember one of the first times I realized this, this is when I was in, uh, studying, is that, uh, before I opened up my practice, was I read a study on calcium and how calcium supplementation may actually cause calcification of your arteries and actually lead to heart disease. And so it's, it's wild to think about, like, you get what you pay for. If you're buying supplements, buy food-based supplements, not a lot of those cheap, cheap supplements we talked about, ones that are absorbable I agree, Paul. I'd like to switch gears. I wanted to mention one of the things I, I've, I heard you communicate on once, and I thought you did a fantastic job of, is why, uh, I'm, I'm trying to think of how to word this, but basically it's like the difference between if we lived in an all-vegan society or an omnivore society, what is better for the climate and the environment? I own, Jordan Rubin and I own 4,000 acres of certified organic organic land where we raise a lot of animals. We raise zebu, we raise water buffalo, we have yaks, we have a lot of different animals. And we really believe and know that we are actually helping the planet build back topsoil. But a lot of people today, I, I'll even tell you, like, I, when I was taking courses, this wasn't that long ago, I went and got a master's at Johns Hopkins University in leadership because I wanted to continue to learn more about leadership and in psychology. And when I was there, this one prof— I mean, actually this was multiple professors. Like, they gave the example eating meat destroys the environment. And, and, you know, I started getting an argument online. I'm like, you know what, I can't, you know, anyways, this probably isn't helpful for my, my grades. But all that being said, please share your thoughts on, on that topic.

Yeah, so, um, one of the other projects I'm working on now is a documentary, and the documentary is not specifically about environmental concerns, but we were, we were talking about the environment in the documentary. The documentary is about about how humans can transform their health with choosing better food. Um, and, and it's not just, you know, limiting calories. It's the quality of your food is, is the key arbiter of our health long term. But as part of the documentary, I went to a farm here in Costa Rica, just at the bottom of the mountain where I live. And, and I'm walking on the farm, there's maybe 25 Brahman cattle, and it's not a big farm, but the grass is green, there's cow poop which is going to become fertilizer for the ground, there's little ducks over in a stream to the side, there's birds flying around, there's bugs. You know, if I dug up the soil, there's worms. You can see this all around Costa Rica with some of these small farms. These cows are not destroying the environment. It's not— they're just, they're not just trampling the grass. And it's not just a dead field of poop and cows. It's, it's actually an ecosystem. And you can see that if you go to any operation that's small scale or a large-scale operation in the States or in Europe, or especially in Australia where the agriculture is very incredible. Where people are actually trying to mimic the way that ruminants, cows specifically, these are animals with a rumen, whether it's a buffalo, an elk, a deer, an antelope, or a cow, uh, these animals are meant to live on grasslands. That's what they've always done. I mean, there's an incredible study looking at the methane emissions— I think it's the methane emissions and the carbon dioxide equivalents, the greenhouse gas equivalents, in the United States in, I think it's like 1885. And it's fascinating because there were millions and millions of buffalo in the American West. And in 1885 or even 1865, perhaps I have to get the year. I continue to study. Yeah. The amount of methane and greenhouse gases was about 85% of what it is now. I think people don't understand that there were millions and millions of the close cousin of cows, buffalo, in the American West before they were killed out by settlers and Native Americans overhunting. But what those animals did was not destroy the American West. They made some of the most fertile topsoil on the planet, which was then turned into monocrop agriculture. Right. That's now the breadbasket of the United States. And now we have a problem. And then you enter into the Dust Bowl. So what happens is you have animals, millions and millions of animals producing almost the exact same amount of greenhouse gases that we have in the United States today, over 100 years ago, making incredibly fertile topsoil because because they poop on the land, they pee on the land, their hooves push all that into the ground. In the ground is an ecosystem, a microbiome of bacteria that is eating this stuff and, and multiplying. The grass gets more nutrients from the roots, the grass becomes more nutrient-rich, and the cows eat the grass and the cycle continues. And what you have is just a very rich ecosystem. And like you said, a topsoil that looks like coffee grounds. It's dark, it's full of nutrients. It's the kind of thing that like, it just, it's just striking when you see it side by side with a monocrop soil. And then we can come in as humans and, for better or for worse, we can then plant agriculture, we can plant crops there, and we can monocrop. And we'll get a few harvests out of it that'll be very fertile. But if we don't put animals back on the land to regenerate all the nutrients those plants are taking into one direction, into themselves, and we're pulling off the land, slowly the soil becomes less and less healthy. It becomes less and less nutrient-dense because there's no longer a cycle You're growing something and that something is not dying and going back into the soil. You're harvesting it and taking it to eat and you're harvesting it and taking it to eat. And this is what monocrop agriculture looks like. I mean, there's a great photo that my friend Robbie from Force of Nature shared with me. And it was a photo of an organic farm that was monocrop on one side of the photo and an organic regenerative farm, uh, with cows on the other side. And the one side was like kind of a barren wasteland. Obviously it had just been harvested and the side with the cows was green grass. And so it's, it's not the most fair comparison because the, even the organic monocrop agriculture will look green when it's before it's harvested. But what's happening is that after you harvest it, it's down to dirt. And cows raised on grass will never have that grass. It'll never look like that organic monocrop farm. It'll never be barren. Yes, you can plant things on it again, but what you've done is take the nutrients from the soil, put them into the plants, and out it goes. And so I don't understand how plant-based advocates can want a world with no animals. I mean, that is the mission of some of these plant-based meat CEOs. They stated it in no uncertain terms. Yeah, that is, that is a, that is a certain recipe for an apocalypse because the food system will completely collapse without the animals to put it back. And that's the whole reason that an NPK, a nitrogen, phosphorus, phosphorus fertilizer was developed, I think, around with the Haber process over 100 about 100 years ago because we were just stripping the soil so bare and you couldn't grow as much on the soil because the animals were not on the soil putting the nutrients back. So the idea here is, number one, monocrop agriculture with plants, not great either. It's even if it's organic, it's not awesome because you have to put the nutrients back in. Yeah, factory farming of cows, not awesome because then you're basically just feeding cows grains which can be contaminated with glyphosate pesticides, mold toxins, plastics, microplastics, PFAs. The list is long, but there are better ways to do both of those things. And especially, perhaps the most important point here is that there's a very good way to do animal agriculture which can make the soil. And if you talk to these farmers, I mean, Will Harris at White Oak Pastures actually showed me two jars of soil. One was from his farm, dark coffee grounds. The other was from his neighbor's farm a few hundred yards away, a peanut farm. It looks like light chocolate milk. You know, it wasn't that dark at all. And, and what he says is that he's a dirt farmer and he just has cows. And so that's really what you're doing is you're creating dirt and dirt isn't super sexy, but dirt is what makes the world go round. If we don't have healthy dirt and fertile dirt, plants won't grow and the animals won't have anything to eat and we all die. And how do you get healthy, fertile dirt? You need the animals as part of the system. And again, just the last piece of that is the greenhouse gas piece. I want to reiterate the fact that like the amount of greenhouse gases being produced by the ruminants in the United States was slightly— is slightly more now, only slightly more now than it was over 150 years ago with the ruminants that were on the, you know, that were on our patch of land. So to suggest that the methane coming from ruminant animals is the problem. In terms of a greenhouse gas total effect is just really turning a massive blind eye to transportation industry, uh, generation, which are the huge generators of greenhouse gases. And when you have a cow, it's producing just— it's producing methane, but the methane is a burp. It goes into the atmosphere, it becomes CO2, and then that CO2 is, is inhaled by plants. That's plants' quote oxygen. That's what plants breathe in. So it's this incredible cycle. Like, none of that carbon, whether it's carbon in the methane which is CH4, it's carbon in methane or carbon in CO2. None of that carbon is new carbon. It's carbon that's been circulating in the environment for millions and millions of years, and that's not new. But when we go into the ground and we take coal and we burn the coal, that carbon was kind of sequestered in the bedrock of the Earth and we're burning it. That's new carbon being released into the atmosphere. And those are very different things in terms of how we should be looking at them if we are concerned about greenhouse gases. One of them is carbon carbon cycling as part of a healthy ecosystem that feeds us all and allows us to become healthy humans. The other is new carbon being burned. But it's kind of the same playbook, right? It's like, look over here at the cows, don't look at the— don't look at airplanes and cars and electricity. And those are not easy problems to solve. But don't look at these things. Let's just blame the cows. And we can get people feeling like they're doing something when in fact, they're just kind of pushing more and more people toward worse nutrition at the cost of— I don't— I, I— with the result of, I don't think, any real net environmental benefit.

Yeah, don't look at Bill Gates on his, you know, private jet flying around. So who's— I mean, I mean, I saw him in the— it was, I think, the founder of Beyond Burger. I did an episode on this recently in terms of saying our goal is to go 100% meat-free, like, for the— either the— I mean, it's the, the agendas of some of these people are crazy in terms of— and it also puts people, you know, the average people like you and I, at a— in just all, you know, really all Americans, all over the world, in a position of we have less control, they have more control. I mean, you know, when we can— when someone else controls your food supply, I mean, that's a pretty big— that's a pretty big deal.

Scary thing. I mean, people have talked about the fact that Bill Gates has bought up so much farmland. What's— he's not— he's not—

he's not raising cattle on Yes, yes, exactly.

Scary stuff. It's scary stuff. But yeah, I agree. I think that, um, I think humans— I have faith in humanity, and I think humans would rebel if people really tried to take away meat. I think most of us know at the— in the deepest regions of our brains and our bodies that this is critical food for us as humans.

Yeah.

And we— that would be, you know, the beginning of a, of a civil war or rebellion if people tried to take it away. But, um, I hope it doesn't get to that point even.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, same here. You know, I want to go back to some of these nutritional components here, some, some that we'd kind of touched on, uh, just a few minutes ago. One of them being, you had mentioned, you know, you're, you're more vegetable-free right now for the most part. Um, you're doing fruit. Explain again, what, why did you add fruit back in? Because for a while you were full carnivore. Why did you add back in fruit? And some— and any other foods that you added that aren't fruits, and, and why, why did you do that?

Yeah, thanks for circling back to this. You, you mentioned, uh, James DiNicolantonio, and he did raise a good point with you about the, the, the pH of the body. Now, this is a little misleading because you know this, but it's a little complicated. The, the pH of the human body is tightly regulated.

Yeah.

Um, the blood pH doesn't change much, but you can see the pH of the urine change significantly based on what you were eating. When I was eating eating only meat, the pH of my urine was often less than 5. And a lower pH means more acidic. A higher pH, especially above 7, means you're trending toward alkaline. And now that I have fruit, my— the pH of my urine is 8 or something. So it's, it's a totally different environment in the human body. And we can measure the blood pH. That doesn't change whether you're eating only meat or plants and meat or only plants. But the cellular pH and the interstitial, the space between the cells, that pH may change. So I think James has a legitimate concern here that if you're only eating meat— and this was something that it took me a while to figure out, to realize also— and you're not getting enough of those alkaline minerals that are coming in the plant foods, or, or some other— I mean, basically you pretty much need to get plant foods for the alkaline minerals— it could change the pH of the interstitial fluid or the cells and create stress on the body. Specifically for me, probably in connection with that, but more in connection with the electrolytes, things like sodium, potassium, chloride, calcium, magnesium, was that long-term keto for me, and this may be an individual thing, but I think this is pretty foundational to human physiology, led to pretty severe electrolyte deficiencies. I had heart palpitations at night. I had racing heartbeat. I had, um, at one point a little bit of swelling in my feet, which would come and go. I had, uh, muscle cramps when I would go climbing and like try and tense my calf muscles. I would actually get muscle cramps in the morning when I would wake up, uh, just, and you're trying to stretch and your whole calf cramps. I had my testosterone went down. So right now my total testosterone is around 800. I don't do any, uh, hormones or no drugs, no TRT. But when I was on strict carnivore, it was, it was the lowest it went, I think was 495, uh, nanograms per deciliter. And the sex hormone binding globulin went, went way up. So my free testosterone went down. My thyroid hormone panel starts to change where the TSH doesn't change much, but you see the free T3 and the free T4 sword go down significantly. So you started to see a lot of changes in the hormones with long-term keto. For me, I always felt a little cold, and again, I didn't understand this at the time, but I, I— my body temperature was lower than normal. I would measure, and my body temperature was never 98.6 on long-term keto. Again, I did this for about a year and a half, and like I said, it significantly improved my eczema and autoimmune disease. Yeah, I know there's a lot of people who do strict carnivore who find benefits, but I've also met a lot of people since I've been speaking about this who ran into problems and felt better when they added some source of carbohydrates back. And the issue is that though insulin as a hormone gets demonized, I think it's a very valuable, essential part of human physiology, of course. And one of the roles of insulin is to signal to the kidneys to hold on to these electrolytes. It holds on to sodium, and then once you hold on to sodium, everything else kind of falls in line, whether it's potassium, chloride, magnesium, etc., calcium. But if you don't get enough insulin insulin signaling to the kidneys, we just waste these minerals, we waste these, quote, electrolytes. And this is a problem, I think, for all sorts of people who have insulin too low. It's one of the reasons that a type 1 diabetic needs to use insulin. But some of the people doing these ketogenic diets, they really, really get very little insulin. Protein is insulinogenic, but not as much as carbohydrates are. And so I think that a lot of people doing this don't get enough insulin, and they just— you see people in the ketogenic community who I think are well-intentioned, but they have to do 15, 20 grams of salt per day, and even that doesn't fully replenish what they're missing and losing. And so you just see these like crazy electrolyte— you know, you have to do so much effort with your electrolytes. Uh, at times I tried to supplement potassium, which is a very bad idea. It can be problematic for— you can get too much potassium. Oral potassium would be harder, but I think you probably could make yourself sick with even oral potassium. And so it just— I couldn't figure it out. And then eventually I realized, oh, this is just— long-term keto isn't working for me. Again, it's one of these moments in my life that was humbling and also enlightening for me at the same time. Adding carbohydrates back, I thought, what, what will I do for carbohydrates? And, you know, the options for carbohydrates for humans are basically grains. So you have wheat, oats, barley, rye. You have tubers— sweet potato, white potato, these kind of things. Maybe you have squash, which is basically a fruit. It's kind of a mix of glucose and fructose, kind of. It's not a starch. It definitely has more fructose than a tuber. And then you have fruit and fruit juice and honey or maple syrup. And when I looked at those, I thought, I just was kind of thinking in this plant toxin perspective, and I thought, well, let me start with fruit. It makes the most sense to me personally, evolutionarily, and I think it's gonna have the fewest amount of toxins. And I felt the best when I was doing it. So that— I added fruit and honey back to my diet and felt a lot better. It took a little time, actually, probably a few months for the electrolyte issues to kind of resolve, but over time it definitely resolved. Now, I will say that for me, going from strict keto to adding fruit, I started with maybe 100 or 150 grams of carbohydrates a day. There was some adjustment there because when I was— when a are strict ketogenic, there is a physiologic insulin resistance that develops. And so I think a lot of people who try to add fruit or honey or any carbohydrate back to their diet after they've been low carb get this— there's definitely a coming back online effect. There's a, there's a definite adjustment time that it takes for your body to make the enzymes necessary to use carbohydrates, whether it's glucose or fructose. So there is a, there's probably a lot of wisdom in doing that, that transition gently. And gradually, but it— most people can adjust and do better long term in terms of hormones, in terms of electrolytes, in terms of energy, libido, sleep. I see it so often now, and I think that I don't want to invalidate anybody's positive experience with keto or carnivore. I just kind of like with vegetables, I think that if, if somebody's struggling with autoimmune disease and, and you want to try cutting out vegetables, great, it might help. If somebody is on a ketogenic diet and has found benefits but is also having sleep issues, hormone issues or electrolyte issues, consider adding back a source of carbohydrates gradually to see if those get better. And don't fear that. And with that conversation, we can have all this conversation if you want. People fear fructose, which I don't think is necessary. I think if you really look at the literature, fruit and honey are not bad for humans, although that's— it's been hard to change people's mind on that.

Yeah.

And I just think anecdotally and probably clinically, my judgment is that grains don't— are not the best source of carbohydrates for humans. Some people can do just fine with sourdough bread if it's a good wheat or like an einkorn or something, or a— and maybe people go to Italy and they eat the pasta and they feel fine, but most people that I know and myself, when I do grains, I don't feel great. And I don't feel as good on tubers as I do on fruit. But I think that there's, there's room in there for people to navigate what source of carbohydrates they choose to reincorporate in their diet. Just know that I think some things are easier. And one of the things that I've started talking about more in the last few years is don't fear fruit. If you do fear fructose, I think that there's— it's worth people investigating why they fear it. And I think it's actually very, very good for a lot of people. And there's great research on fruit juice and the benefits.

Yeah, yeah. I, I was talking to Joe Mercola here recently. He was on the podcast and he was telling me— I mean, he's like, I eat pounds of watermelon a day. So it was interesting because, you know, he had said— because again, everybody changes, you know. In the past he had mentioned— I mean, he had written whole books on how fructose is evil, you know. And so, and now it's— and we all come back around, you know. The reality is I I think we all, all are continuing to learn and grow. And so, you know, I can appreciate that. And so I, uh, yeah, you know, it's interesting, I started wearing one of those continuous blood glucose monitors, and, um, and I do say, I, I do think for a lot of people, if you're introducing new foods, sometimes give your body a little time if you know that it's a good real food. But, you know, like, I, I did really well with potatoes, and some of that is I'm wondering if, like, my heritage is very you know, it's, it's a lot of Germans and Irish, you know, and so maybe I tolerate it better. It's interesting when you look at studies on Japanese, they digest rice and, um, seaweed better than we do, uh, in certain cases. So it's just, it's, you know, so much of it, as you mentioned early, can be bio-individual. You know, one of the— you go ahead.

I wanted to just mention about fructose real quickly. If people fear fructose, just realize that, that most of the reasons that both Joe and I used to fear fructose is because we didn't really understand all of the literature. Almost all of the negative studies on fructose are done with isolated fructose. And when you feed humans or lab animals isolated fructose, it, it gets malabsorbed. It's not absorbed properly in the gut. Isolated fructose doesn't exist in nature. It's always paired with glucose in almost a 50/50 ratio most of the time. And that is part of the fructose transport into the gut. But unabsorbed fructose leads to overgrowth of bacteria, and then you end up with probably gram-negative overgrowth and lipopolysaccharide, increased amounts of endotoxin, which is just a synonym for lipopolysaccharide. So I think most fructose fearing is based on flawed design of the research. And then also the fact that mice and rats don't metabolize fructose in the same way that humans do. We know that's very clearly that they do much higher rates of de novo lipogenesis, which is the turning the transformation of fructose into fat than humans. Humans do that a very, very small degree. Most fructose we eat is transformed into lactate, it's transformed into glycogen and glucose. It's such a small amount, less than 1% or around 1% of the fructose gets turned into de novo lipogenesis. And so you think, I mean, that's just a vanishingly small amount if you're eating, even if you're eating 40 grams of fructose a day, you know, 0.4, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

It's like, it's a vanishingly small amount. And mice and rats do much more than that. So if you really look at the, the literature on fructose, I think that the people who have been sounding the alarm about it are well-intentioned, but it doesn't check out when you really read the research. And I mean, I, I share my blood work all the time on my podcast and you know, my hemoglobin A1C is, is lower than it was when I was a carnivore. My fasting insulin is still around 3. It's just, there's, there's no evidence that fructose is harmful. And I mean, this is another point that often gets overlooked. Looked in keto communities. There's a very interesting randomized controlled study looking at Atkins diets, either low carb or zero carb. And one of the fears with fructose is advanced glycation end products. But we know that a ketogenic diet and a low carb diet actually increases advanced glycation end products more. The one they were studying was methylglyoxal, MGO, and it increased, I think, 2.4 times on a zero carb Atkins diet. Anyone in the ketogenic community who is concerned about advanced glycation end products, I've never heard anyone really explain, like, a ketogenic diet increases advanced glycation end products because of the way that the physiology works. So this is just not something to fear in humans. And not everyone needs to get all of their carbohydrates from, from fruit. But I think that, again, it gets a little granular for people. But let's— I'll just point out a few things. Rice, just be aware that a lot of rice has arsenic, so be careful with the rice, right?, right? And then oats. Okay. Oats also accumulate cadmium. One of the things that's fascinating to me, and we get back to this kind of vegetables piece, is that plants will accumulate heavy metals in their seeds sometimes. So just be careful with that. And if people are eating those foods, I think you can eat those foods, but just if you have symptoms, just make sure you check the heavy metals because rice is traditionally a problem with arsenic. Some rice has more than others. Even, even chocolate, if it's grown in a soil with high amounts of cadmium, can have significant amounts of heavy heavy metals, even lead. So the seeds of plants just tend to accumulate metals. So I don't think people should stop eating chocolate. It's just kind of like, be aware that you should check your metals if you're eating a lot of those foods. If you're eating rice with chocolate and oats, that— just check your heavy metals.

Yeah, I, I think there's always a conversation around— in the way that I'm going to be doing a podcast episode on this in the future, on, um, well, it's related to how untrue most studies are. You know, there, there's a study came out on studies and basically it found like 51.3% of studies just can't be trusted because if you would go and redo the exact same study, it would be sometimes on the totally polar opposite. You know, they've done this anyways. And so, so you're really aware of this. But one of the things that you know is incredibly unfair is, is any of these documentaries that they do on meat. Of course they're doing it on conventional grain-fed meat, and then they're just saying, oh, meat is bad. And you're like, well, why didn't you take the, you know, at your friend's farm or our farms, the, you know, the grass-fed animals that were slaughtered properly and it had a perfect diet and a perfect life? Like, you know, use that one. My point there though is I, I just want to point this out. I do think the same can be said for certain grains, right? I think when you're— if you going to buy grains, and you are going to eat the way that people ate grains. As I've studied this, thousands of years ago, the grains were sprouted by some people if they're doing it properly, and then they were fermented, and then they were in organic soil. So it is a very, very different type of grain. And even some today, they've also been hybridized. And so be careful, it, it is a completely different food that you're getting today oftentimes. And so when you're reading studies, just for everybody listening If they're telling you meat is bad or fruit is bad or this is bad, which fruit? The ones that were growing in, you know, Paul living in Costa Rica, or I'm in Puerto Rico right now, like in our backyard, or the ones that are like basically bags of water that they, you know, anyways, so just, yeah.

Did you see, I mean, you mentioned David Sinclair earlier in the podcast. Did you see what came out recently about the resveratrol stuff? There was something on Twitter that was pretty interesting, just so people know. I mean, there was kind this— I mean, yeah, there was just this crazy comedy of errors where, you know, he was touting resveratrol in super physiologic amounts, amounts you would never get from a grape or a peanut or a blueberry, and, and touting it as a longevity substance. But when they repeated the experiments, nobody could— nobody could repeat his experiments and find that it actually did what he said it did. So, um, that—

yeah, there's Yeah, there was one study showing positive and then like, you know, multiple studies showing no, it's really not doing your body any good. And I actually read somewhere and I need to find the study basically going through that the main— one of the main researchers of that first study was compromised in terms of had financial connections to the— and of course this happens constantly and that's why so many studies tend to be— or a lot, not all, but a lot tend to be inaccurate.

It's dangerous. Yeah. So if you're taking a resveratrol supplement, my advice would be throw it out.

Like, it's not— here's another idea: eat grapes. Yeah, yeah, eat blueberries, resveratrol as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but yeah, you make a great point that, like, it's— it— I think that it's not— again, I want people to understand, I'm not saying don't eat chocolate, don't eat rice, don't eat oats. Just know that if you're, if you're struggling, there are all sorts of different avenues to pursue. And that, that's what's been most interesting for me over the years, and to try and refine the message as I'm thinking about it. Because, you know, I mean, hand up, I've been guilty of saying saying oats are harmful for humans. And I think in retrospect, I think that's too brazen a statement. But I do think that behind that there was good intention in science saying not everyone digests oats. Some oats are high in cadmium. There are digestive enzyme inhibitors in oats, and not everyone does great with oats. I mean, personally, and I think that I had stress fractures from oats because of the high amounts of phytic acid in oats when I was a runner in the past. Wow. Yeah. But I think it's just, I just want people to understand, and this is perhaps something we've been coming back to a lot in the podcast, that the first step is getting rid of the garbage that everyone knows is garbage. The seed oils, the highly processed sugars, the high fructose corn syrup, which is not the same as the natural sugar you find in fruit, the highly processed food, which has all this historically, you know, imbibed or, you know, imbued with nutrition and information into the food. Food. When you get rid of that, you can run into problems if people are doing all those things. And there are some foods that we think of as healthy that could be triggering people, you know. And that's where I think the nuance of what I'm trying to communicate to people as gently as possible comes out. I don't think everybody needs to do those things, but know that some of those are possibly harmful for people. Reminds me of something I'll just mention as I'm, as I'm rambling here. So if caloric restriction is beneficial— we're circling way back, Josh.

Yeah, yeah, it's great.

Caloric restriction is beneficial crucial. There are studies in animals that show that when they calorically restrict the animals, the membranes change composition. And this to me is fascinating because it loops into the seed oil conversation. So the membranes become less unsaturated, the membranes become more saturated when animals have caloric restriction. So caloric restriction, we talked about earlier, probably problematic for humans and animals in general because of hormonal problems long term. But if there's a benefit, it's possibly because it allows the body to remove some of the polyunsaturated fats that have accumulated in the membranes. So most of these studies are done in lab animals which are fed seed oils. I mean, the lab animal diet is not, uh, the natural mouse wild diet, right? It's a mouse chow which is full of soybean oil. And so if they're calorically restricting a mouse and you see the membranes becoming more saturated, then you have essentially— you're undoing some of the damage that the seed oils in the mouse diet has done. And potentially in humans, that could be the same beneficial effect. But I think there's better ways to, to saturate your membranes, which is to eat less polyunsaturated fats from seed oils. So I just wanted to mention that because I think it in some ways corroborates the notion that seed oils are harmful for humans. Seed oils are, of course, the corn, the canola, the sunflower, the safflower, the soybean oils, which are high in an omega-6 polyunsaturated fat called linoleic acid.— one of the unique things from a bad perspective about linoleic acid is that it gets stored in our membranes. And so if your membranes become more highly full of linoleic acid, it probably leads to problems for humans. And so it's interesting that we see if caloric restriction has any benefit, it's because it's undoing the effect— it's potentially undoing the effect that we've been doing with these seed oils. And I would say don't calorically restrict because you'll just hurt your thyroid and your sex hormones. Hormones, which you need to be vital, just get the seed oils out of your diet and eat more saturated animal fats— butter, ghee, tallow— the fats that we're told are so bad for us but are probably incredibly healthy, or almost certainly incredibly healthy, and certainly the fats we've been eating for so long. So that's just an interesting little aside.

That's amazing. You know, it's amazing. And when it comes to fasting as well, I want to say my experience— and I've worked with thousands of patients on this and fasting— and it, to me, it is incredibly bio-individual, you know. And I think that, and I think women tend to be even more sensitive, uh, than men, you know. I think a lot of times due to hormone fluctuations and, and that sort of thing. But I, um, you know, one of the things I was thinking about with fasting is, is that, like, for me, by the way, I don't, I don't do like an 8:16 fast. I did for a year or two, and, uh, you know, when I was in my 20s, and, um, and it was, you know, I did okay on it. But I found that for myself, I mean, you know, and I typically eat around 8 AM, so maybe I get up, move, do a little bit, and then I'll eat around noon. I eat an early dinner around 5 typically, so I probably do have a smaller window than, than most people. But I look back even throughout history, you know, a lot of fasting was done for religious purposes more than anything when you look historically. And I know that a lot, a lot of, you know, Jews would oftentimes do fasting around religious festivals. So it it every day. It was certain times of year. In the early Christian church, what they would do is typically fast oftentimes one day a week. And so, and they would still eat dinner, but fast for a day or sometimes two. But it was just this sort of seasonal or once or twice a week. And I think we're going to start seeing research. Like, I want to compare it to this cold plunging. You know, I see a lot of people doing these cold plunges every day, and I think there could be benefits for some people of cold plunging, but I don't think it's the this. Every single person should cold plunge. Because I think about— if you got a— in Chinese medicine, if you have a cold internal body temperature, where especially something like a thyroid issue, hypothyroid, and you're doing that constantly, or a compromised immune system, you'd actually be better off with heat most of the time. My point is, is that when we're looking at hormesis and good stress, I think for some people's bodies, maybe cold plunging or a cold shower is okay, but it might be better once a week and not 7 days a week, you know, and your body being able to adapt. So any, any thoughts on You know, yeah, yeah.

So, okay, so fasting you mentioned. I think there are benefits to fasting from the perspective of LPS, which I mentioned earlier. So LPS is lipid polysaccharide. Yeah. And gosh, you would, you would be hard-pressed to find anything— there are not many things in the medical literature that look as problematic as LPS in the human body. It's basically just bacterial cell wall fragments that end up in our body. And man, They cause havoc. They cause a huge immune system activation. They cause inflammation. They cause all sorts of problems. I mean, you do not want high levels of lipopolysaccharide in your gut or in your body. And so one of the clear benefits of fasting is you're removing everything, you know. Think about all the foods that we eat as humans, and I think a lot of people don't know which foods are really damaging their gut or irritating their gut. Again, this could be bioindividual, and. And it comes down to potentially some of the things that are in our food supply, especially in ultra-processed foods that often get overlooked. Like, is it carrageenan? What about xanthan gum? Do we really have enough research? What about these gums? Are these damaging our guts? Like, what about these additives or these dyes? Or, I mean, who knows what's happening, but we don't really understand how— what's going on at the, at the microscopic level in our guts and what is really opening the gap junctions or potentially causing pathogenic subsets of bacteria to overgrow. And it's incredibly complex. Hopefully we'll understand that in the next few years with machine learning or the next few decades perhaps. But what's very clear is that, and we've known this, this is something that, that you've been talking about for many, many years, like having an irritated gut is a very bad idea. You know, we don't really understand all of it, but your microbiome has to be happy. We don't really know how the microbiome gets happy totally. And, uh, that's a separate podcast, you know, But we— you don't want to piss off your microbiome. You don't want a lot of LPS. And so fasting is like, okay, there's nothing going in your gut. That's definitely going to benefit you and lower levels of LPS in your body. The problem is that humans have to eat. So you have to eat something. And we know that if you fast too long, all the same things happen. Sexual decline.

And can I point out, in regards to the diet that you're currently on, I think that if you can't eat nothing which you don't want to do because the problem— then you want to eat the foods that are the easiest to digest and assimilate. What is that? It's meat and fruit.

I think so. Yeah, I think so. Um, and I think I'm particularly sensitive. I think there are a lot of people who could eat more than just meat and fruit. But one of the things I think is cool about an animal-based diet is it gives people— and a carnivore diet— gives people a good starting point from which to build on. And so, yeah, so I think fasting Fasting is great, but too much fasting we know is a problem. A little bit of fasting can really help people understand what it's like to not have so much LPS in their system.

Yeah.

And since we're talking about lipopolysaccharide, I'll just add this one nuance that I, I recently learned about. A lot of times saturated fat gets blamed when you're talking about endotoxin and LPS. Mm-hmm. There's a, there's a really interesting part of this, the literature, if you look at it carefully, that saturated fat, though it's increasing levels of LPS, it's forming these lipid rafts and it's actually actually detoxifying LPS. It's pulling it out of the gut and through the liver, so it's detoxifying it. So people in the plant-based communities will often point to saturated fat and say saturated fat is bad, look at its increasing levels of endotoxin, but it's doing it in a different way than other things that increase endotoxins. Like alcohol would increase lipopolysaccharide, things that are clear gut toxins, glyphosate, etc. Yeah, saturated fat very much looks to be detoxifying LPS. So I would argue that saturated fat is protective against LPS, and things like polyunsaturated fats are damaging and probably, um, are gonna stoke the flames when it comes to lipopolysaccharides. So if people end up in that kind of rabbit hole, just know that there's, if you look carefully at the research, saturated fat, especially from animals, the longer chain saturated fats are probably protective when it comes to LPS. And so you mentioned cold plunging. I think it's great people are starting to push back on this a little bit. The science on cold plunging is actually pretty shaky. Um, you know, there's, there's not a lot of great research on cold plunging. Does it feel good? Yeah, because your body thinks it's dying. I mean, it's a lot of epinephrine, it's a lot of epinephrine, and it's a lot of catecholamines. You know, it's epinephrine, norepinephrine, and dopamine. But I think that we have to be able to ask the question, is it good to have that much of a catecholamine release in humans? I don't know. Does cold plunging have benefits in terms of mental resilience?

Sure.

Yeah. I, you know, I think there's a lot of benefit to cold water for resetting our psychology. For me, I know that if I'm frustrated or I'm angry about something, if I go in the ocean, which is actually pretty warm here in Costa Rica, but even if I just get in a cold shower, like it just, it's kind of a state change, you know?

Yeah.

So I think that, I, I think cold water is very valuable for us as a state change. If we're in a bad mood, if we're just— if especially for me, just personally, I can just relate it just if I'm angry or I'm frustrated, state changing in water of really any temperature, but especially a colder water helps kind of snap me out of my, my ruminative, my ruminating thoughts, right? That's beneficial. But I think we also need to admit that putting yourself in very cold water too much probably has a breaking point at which point it's very harmful for humans. And there's lots of anecdotes out there now of people. I mean, I was just I was just talking to a friend and he said, gosh, if I cold plunge too much, I always get sick. And I thought, yeah, it's probably, I don't know if anybody's ever done the research, like it's probably immunosuppressive, which, yes, I mean, there are things in our environment which are immunosuppressive, which can be beneficial in the short term if you have immune overactivation. But a lot of those immunosuppressive things you wouldn't wanna do long-term. Yeah. Whether we're talking about a biological in, in Western medicine. Medicine that they would give someone for rheumatoid arthritis. I mean, the immunosuppressive drug is going to help them symptomatically short-term, but long-term it's going to increase their rate of, uh, blood-borne cancers and pneumonias and all kinds of things. So just because something is immunosuppressive doesn't mean you always want to do it. And certainly if you have immune overactivation, immunosuppression can help in the short term, but I think you have to get to the root cause of what's activating your immune system in the first place. So I'm actually not a huge fan fan of cold plunging. I sold my cold plunge, Josh. Wow.

Yeah, man, you're like the first. Wow.

Yeah, and I think that there's levels, right? So I am also fortunate to have a river below my house, and the river is probably 70 degrees, and that's perfect. Like, yeah, I think a 65-70 degree river feels great, um, and that, that's great, and it's, it's enough to kind of state change and chill my mind out and change my environment. But I don't, I don't need a 35-degree cold plunge anymore. I just didn't find a use for it.

Yeah, yeah. And this goes back to, I think, part of a theme of what we've talked about is too, is there's a level of awareness. If just because one study says it or one expert on social media says it doesn't mean it's for everybody. I think really so much of this stuff, again, as we've talked about, is vital individual learning what really does well with you. And in Chinese medicine, it would be if you've got a lot of too much internal body heat, which some people do, it would be good. But a lot of people don't. 50% of people probably don't. And so in that case, you want to be really cautious and wise about it. So anyways, yeah, I think, I think these are great points. One of the last questions I want to have for you, Dr. Paul, is you've interviewed a lot of people. Uh, I know you, you, you, you come and converse with some of the top, you know, medical doctors and health experts in the country. What is maybe one of the best pieces of advice or something new you've heard recently that just sort of opened your eyes to something. Again, it could also be a piece of life advice if that's something that's striking you.

Yeah, you know, um, I was actually talking to one of my friends yesterday, um, and I was asking him like how he deals with like negative feedback on social media and stuff. And he was just, he said like, I, I'm gonna paraphrase him and I hope I don't butcher it. He said like, you know, if if you expand your purpose, basically his advice was nobody's, nobody's criticism of you really matters if you expand your purpose. And I thought that makes a lot of sense to me, like, because I think that for me as a human, one of the hard things, and this probably just has to do with the way that I was raised or my experience as a child, like, I'm just sensitive to criticism. It's just hard to think that I was wrong about something. And you know this, like, there are people in the health space who are, um, who can respectfully discuss ideas. But there's a lot of people in the health space now, and I'm not sure if this is increasing, I hope it's not, who are kind of making their brand about cutting other people down. Like, it's kind of a zero-sum game, and that their brand is about becoming arbiters of truth. Like, they're the only person who knows what's right and everybody else is wrong. And I'm going to show you why this this guy is wrong and this guy is wrong and this guy is wrong. And a lot of times they do this with like a lot of shouting and a lot of bloviating and, you know, histrionic action. They get really triggered. And, and I just— that stuff, I just think as a human, it's just— it affects me negatively. And I think like, wow, like, that's just such a bummer. I don't understand. It borders on ad hominem type of attacks. And I think that there's just— I don't understand why it's out there. And I think the hardest thing for me is to see those people gaining traction and my friend said, you know, just like expand your purpose and all those people become less relevant. I thought, that doesn't make sense. Like ultimately for me, the less I pay attention to comments on social media, the happier I am. And the more I meet people in person, I'll tell you this, John, I've never met, there's probably a selection bias here, but no one has ever come up to me in person and said, you know, what you said hurt me. It's like invariably it's people coming up and saying thank you for the work you're doing.. But yeah, I mean, it's just as, it's just as valid for somebody to come up and say, hey man, I cut out all plants from my diet and I did horribly. You know, you should really think about not saying that to people. Or, or I tried your animal-based diet and I felt horrible. No one's ever said that to me in person. And I'm sure that there are people in the world, everybody's individual. It doesn't work for everyone. But I guess this, the point here is that I think for me and for all of us in the space, like it's just been interesting to remember like the majority of people are, are gaining a lot from what we're doing and are really being helped by it. And so just not focusing on the negative, cuz it's all— that's the other thing I kind of realize, like, it's always going to be there. Somebody is— oh, and this is, you know, maybe people listening to this are thinking, okay, I'm not in the health space, but realize that I heard Tim Ferriss say this, like, 10 or 15% of people are just gonna not like anything you do. Oh, okay, great. Like, I get it. If you're within that margin, like, okay, whether you're doing a presentation at in school or in like the church group or what, I don't know. People are always going to disagree with anything like that. Yeah, that was just interesting advice. Like just focusing on my purpose, which is just to share ideas that I think will help some people. And if those ideas are unique, then even better. Just, you know, sharing ideas in a way that I think is unique and maybe people aren't hearing these ideas from other sources that feels meaningful to me and just not focusing on the negative has been a struggle, but it's— I think it's been a good, a good effort for me.

Yeah, it's good. I mean, that's, that's good advice and good wisdom. You know, I think about, you know, the people that change the world, they're going to get more pushback. I mean, if not, you're not saying things that probably matter. And so, you know, obviously, I mean, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, John F. Kennedy, Jesus. I mean, there's a lot of people because when they were speaking truth. And so it's, it's Yeah, I mean, that's a, it is hard though, you know, I think that, and I do think because we've become more politically divisive, I think that's, you know, maybe that's part of it too. I think there's more taking sides now and you're just on one side or the other. There's less people maybe in the middle than there's been. And so anyways, and of course it's much easier to say something mean to somebody when you're invisible and versus to their face, you know, It's, um, yes, yes.

I wish I actually wish I could meet a lot of these detractors in person. I think we'd probably have really productive conversations, but I mean, the social media, the internet allows for so many people to consume our content in free ways. It's great, but it also, I think, brings out bad parts of us as humans where we say things about people in ways that we wouldn't if they were in the room. Yeah. And then, oh yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Never. I mean, yeah. Or maybe, maybe 10% of the 10% would, then it'd be incred— it'd be so much lower. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that you have done that some, some other people have done, but not a lot, you're, you're a medical doctor who has reversed autoimmune disease. And there are a lot of people listening, I think. And a lot, a lot of people will see this video, or listen to this podcast who are struggling with autoimmune disease. What is your best advice? Just like you were able to reverse autoimmune disease, what are a few steps? And you've covered some of them probably, but what are some of the steps people should take in terms of if they've got autoimmune disease, want to reverse it, what are some of the things they should start doing, uh, today?

I think start with your diet and make it as simple as you can, which is really like we talked about. You summed it up really well. I think that an animal-based diet is a great place to start. That's just my perspective. If it's valuable, people can, can espouse it or try it. But yeah, I think simplify your diet as much as you can for some amount of time, uh, and then see if the autoimmune condition gets better. And then the goal is always to add things back and have the most diverse, interesting, fun, you know, life-giving diet in all of the ways that you can. But at the same time, uh, I think that quality of life is multifaceted. And for me personally, I think for a lot of listeners, quality of life is personally for me is not having eczema. And so. So I'm willing to not eat tomatoes because I don't like having itchy patches on my arms.

Yeah.

And I know that that's kind of my immune system getting a little pissed off underneath the surface. It's not just my skin, it's systemic. And so that to me is the compromise that I'm willing to not eat. Chocolate also triggers my eczema, bread. I'm willing to not eat these foods even though they're all delicious because that's my sort of highest quality of life in net. And so I think I think if people are struggling with autoimmune disease, and we talked about some of the, the, the ideas of which autoimmune diseases are out there, there's so many, just simplify your diet as much as possible. Make your diet as high quality as you can, which is just obviously unprocessed plant and animal foods. Uh, make as much of the food as you can at home. Understand the details of, of everything you're putting in your body and putting on your body. That's really, I think the devil is in the details and the more you are intentional about everything that you're eating, drinking, and putting on your body, the better you'll do. I think that's— I think I really strongly believe that so much— I mean, probably north of 95% of autoimmune disease is fixable if people can put that much intention into it. And that's not a small feat. I mean, it's hard to change where you're getting your water from. You got to get a water filter. It's hard to change the foods you eat. It's hard to cook your own food, especially if you have a family. But I think that's where the biggest, the biggest movers are. And I'm really encouraged by all the people that I've seen because I think that the flip side of that is desperation and loss of hope. And the only answer— or not the only answer, but one of the main answers that Western medicine will provide is medications, which inevitably have side effects and don't correct the root cause. So if people want to use medications to correct an autoimmune disease, that's totally valid. That's your decision. But I think that when people are able to avoid that, it's such a such a cool story for me to hear because I think, wow, you've saved your life. You've saved yourself a lifetime of, of side effects and you've given yourself a higher quality of life than you would have had on that medication. Without a doubt.

Yeah. So good. Well, I encourage everybody to check out Dr. Paul Saladino here. Check out— he's got a podcast. He's got a great book called The Carnivore Code book, and he's also got a cookbook. Also check out his new beef sticks. They've got organs in them, right? We all need more organs. And so I encourage you guys, it's called Lineage Provisions. You can go online and search Lineage, L-I-N-E-A-G-E, Provisions to get your organ and grass-fed meat sticks that you can't taste the organs, which some of you are going to love.

We're so proud of them.

Yeah, I want to say, uh, thanks everybody for tuning in today. Remember, each and every week we uncover the science and the principles behind how to take your body, mind, and spirit to the next level. And, um, hey, if you're not subscribed, make sure to subscribe, like, and share this podcast. And just again, so grateful, Paul, for you coming on and sharing your wisdom with us today. Uh, thanks again.

Thanks, Josh. Great to see you, man. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Me as well.