Everything I Learned In Med School Was WRONG | Paul Saladino
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Hi and welcome back to the Big Deal Podcast. I'm Cody Sanchez and this is for those of you who don't want to just be rich but free and are willing to do what it takes to get there. This episode today is for you if you have ever wondered, "Why am I fat?"

Or why is it harder to get fit? Or what is going on in the industrial food complex? Or is American cheese real cheese? Spoiler, that one is a real doozy. I have Dr. Paul Saladino on the podcast today. This man is basically my go-to list for what should I buy from the grocery store. He talks about all of the things that are happening in the world around us that are creating toxicity. We talk about how to work around it.

in some ways. We talk about what's going on with microplastics. So if you've ever felt like there's too much happening in health, you can't actually figure it out, you want to sound really smart, you want to listen to a doctor break it down live, you want to hear about more studies than you can imagine for the decisions you make on what you put on your skin and what you put inside of your body, this podcast is for you. Spoiler, wait for the part about does he wear deodorant or not and did I sniff him or not?

Do you think today's processed foods are like cigarettes in the 1980s? You mean the thing that we don't quite know is killing us but is actually killing us? Yeah, absolutely. I think RFK Jr. said it really well, and this is timely, that we're clearly being poisoned. I mean, anyone who looks at

Westernized Americans from a zoomed out perspective over the last 50 years can see that something has gone horribly wrong with us. Obesity rates, diabetes, cancer, autoimmunities, everything is going the wrong direction and yet we are being

we are being counseled by our government to eat healthy and more people will respond to surveys saying they're eating healthy. More people will respond to surveys saying they're exercising. Less people are smoking, but everything is going in the wrong direction. We're fatter, sicker, less healthy, more depressed. So what's going on here? There's something happening. - Yeah, and what do you say to people who say,

we're just eating more calories because food is better tasting and cheaper and more available. So it's just calories. It's not the GMOs. It's not the processed foods at all. What do you think? I think they're wrong. I think that if you look at data, we are not really eating more calories. And if we're eating more calories, it's small. And it doesn't account for the increase in all of these chronic illnesses that are just really doubling over the span of 20 or 30 years. I mean, that's not just 100 extra calories a day.

And then you have to look at it from a holistic perspective and ask, why are we eating more calories? Food is not more available today than it was in the 1970s. You can still go to the grocery store. There were no shortages in the 1970s. Humans could eat the exact same amount of food. So some studies suggest that we're not eating more calories. Some studies suggest that we're eating slightly more calories. But

If we are eating more calories, and I think in general a lot of people have the issue, it's with satiety. And I think that that is another insidious problem with ultra-processed food is that it makes us more hungry.

And that hunger cue is very, very hard for us to ignore, if not impossible, nearly impossible. You can be super disciplined and lose weight eating Twinkies, but eventually that hunger is just going to catch up with you. You can lose weight with a caloric deficit of bagels or potatoes or any junk food. It's not that you can't lose weight eating processed food, it's just going to be much more difficult.

And when we look at studies, when we put humans in controlled environments, and there's now two studies on this. Kevin Hall did a study and there was recently a researcher in Japan that did kind of the same thing. They can put humans in a feeding ward where they control all of their intakes

And they present people with very similar sets of meals. One of them is ultra-processed food. One of them is essentially unprocessed food. They try and match the foods for presented calories, presented fat, protein, carbohydrates, presented salt, sugar, all of those things. And people are allowed to eat as much as they want. And the ultra-processed foods group invariably eat more. They come back for seconds and thirds. So there's probably something in...

these foods that are also sabotaging satiety. And that is kind of the beginning of the problem. Interesting. What if the counter argument was that they just taste better than the healthy foods and so we want more of that? Could that be an argument or no? Taste better is such a, that's a subjective thing, right? Taste better is happening in your brain, right? So taste better is

not something that we can objectively measure. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, it gets confusing sometimes as a consumer. Like, you know, I have a lot of people on the podcast and I am not a nutritionist. I am not a doctor. I try to stay fit. But it's confusing because there seems to be a war going on

between multiple sides of the coin. And I think the war is interesting in a few ways. I was watching a video where you said canola oil is toxic sludge and got flagged as misinformation on Instagram. What is canola oil? That was fascinating, your video. And why do you think that gets tagged as misinformation? Right. So it's kind of like who writes the history books? Who determines what is truth?

In 2024, if I'm saying it on Instagram, meta determines what is truth, right? If I'm saying it on X, community notes determines what is truth. And that's a little bit better situation. Thanks, Elon. Not perfect, but a group of community members can have a more sort of democratic process than meta. You know, Mark Zuckerberg and his CEO of Instagram get to say, well, we've decided that we're going to look at this one meta analysis, which is a study of studies on seed oils.

And this researcher, usually they reference a meta-analysis from a researcher at Tufts, his name is Darius Mazzafarian, the same guy who gifted us with the food compass guidelines that told us that Fruit Loops and Cheerios were healthier than ground beef and eggs. That's not great. The same individual, clearly very omniscient when it comes to nutrition, very wise nutritional researcher,

wrote a meta-analysis looking at some of the randomized control trials with seed oils and he determined that no, seed oils are not bad for human health. So if I contradict him without actually getting to debate him or directly criticize his meta-analysis, which is kind of cherry-picked, then Meta can just say, "Nope, we're fact-checking you." So there is no objective truth in 2024. It just depends on the platform in which you are saying something.

So they can say whatever they want, you know, and you see this now post-election you see this now People are just it's a war of fact-checking right and who fact checks the fact checkers There's no one I don't have the ability on meta to come back on the back end and say actually I

Here's why I think you're wrong. Here's why I actually think canola oil is problematic. So, in answer to your question, canola oil is made from rapeseeds, which are not actually a food for humans. It's different, perhaps, if we're talking about corn oil, because we eat corn.

And we can talk about corn oil, right? I'm not a fan of corn oil either, and to get the equivalent of maybe five tablespoons of corn oil you'd have to eat 70 ears of corn, which is a whole separate conversation. But rapeseeds have never been eaten by humans and really cannot be eaten by humans.

If you just take rapeseed oil, there is a large amount of this monounsaturated fat called erucic acid in rapeseed oil. And that is linked to cardiomyopathy, heart issues in animal studies, and so it's actually banned. You cannot sell rapeseed oil. You also can't sell mustard seed oil for similar reasons.

Researchers, I think in the 1980s or 1990s, genetically modified rapeseed oil to a low erucic acid variant, but still containing this fatty acid. And that was what was called canola oil.

So canola is an acronym for Canadian oil low acid. There is no such thing as canola, right? This is the rapeseed or the Canola Producers Association of Canada thinking, hey, we have fields and fields of canola oil. We have fields and fields of this rapeseed, like let's do something with it. This is often how seed oils got into our food supply.

They were used originally for other things. Originally in the early 1900s, they were used as engine lubricants and on ships in World War I and World War II because they stay slippery when they are wet. They still maintain lubrication. So they were industrial byproducts and now they've been used in our food supply. So that's the first thing that kind of make us, should make us question like, is this something we want to eat? So canola oil, not really a food for humans, contains small amounts of erucic acid, but

Like all of the seed oils, and this is why I think we can really draw a swath across the seed oils, whether it's canola, corn, sunflower, safflower, soybean, those are the big ones, sometimes peanut, they're all refined, bleached, and deodorized. So there's a great video on YouTube of how to make canola oil, and you see these little seeds that are in this extruding press, and they're kind of like waxy substances getting pressed out. Then you get this murky oil, which then has to be heated, and then refined, and bleached, and deodorized, and extracted with

hexane which can be contaminated with benzene so you get these neurotoxic components that are even used to make the oil then it has to be deodorized again multiple times heated to very high temperatures as high as 500 degrees Fahrenheit so you have a poly on saturated oil which is a fragile oil which can become rancid quote-unquote quickly being heated to 500 degrees Fahrenheit the boiling temperature of water is 212 right so that's like basically a very very very hot stove

It's an insanely high temperature for an oil like that and you quickly break the oil. You degrade the oil very quickly. So then you take all of that and you package it into a plastic bottle which leaches cadmium, lead, and antimony into the oil and it sits on the shelf of a grocery store getting exposed to artificial light for months at a time and oxidizing further. And we are told by the American Heart Association that that is a heart-healthy option because it lowers LDL.

That is just such a mindfuck. And it's completely myopic because the only metric that we're using to say that it's healthy is LDL. Lowering, which is a whole other ball of wax.

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like so many Americans do. He's older. And what's interesting is I've heard you talk about this, that what does he do? He goes to the doctor. The doctor gives him a series of pills for him to take.

There's some talk of nutrition, marginal at best. And after years of being at the same doctor, nutrition is really not mentioned whatsoever. It's simply management of symptoms with these pills for this long. And I remember once we were going on a trip and he had forgotten his blood pressure medicine. And he's not particularly overweight or anything like that. He's quite normal. And he was worried about that. And I thought, oh my God, we have a healthy man sort of

Tied to a drug for something that I think you could fix with exercise and nutrition theoretically What's going on there? And if you have high blood pressure, should you just take the pills? Is that the right answer alone? So there's two different Categories of high blood pressure, right? There's like primary hypertension and secondary hypertension the majority of people who go to their doctor and get diagnosed with high blood pressure have primary hypertension and

which is just related to diet and lifestyle. And most people, even in the mainstream medical community, would agree with that. Secondary hypertension is very rare. It can be caused by tumors that secrete things, that change the blood volume. We're not talking about secondary hypertension. That's a diagnosable medical condition that requires a more sophisticated workup.

Primary hypertension is the majority of what we see. My father had hypertension, right? And it is essentially an indication of vascular dysregulation. So the inside of our blood vessels, these are veins on my arm, but inside are arteries. When you're measuring blood pressure, you're really looking at the arterial pressure, not the venous pressure. So they put a stethoscope on your arm and they measure the arterial pressure in an artery that runs here in my arm.

And so that is caused by dysregulation of the cells that line those arteries and don't allow them to expand and contract in a healthy manner. This is arterial dysfunction. Vascular dysfunction is what causes high blood pressure. Most of the time related to systemic inflammation in the body and linked to insulin resistance, also known as metabolic dysfunction. Insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction almost entirely fixable with primarily diet, intentional dietary choices, and

moderate amount of exercise. You don't have to be a marathon runner. And in fact, you probably don't want to be a marathon runner because you can go too far with exercise. So yes, this is a condition that is completely fixable, but as physicians, we are not taught to talk to patients that way. We are given this sort of subtle propaganda in medical school that your patients won't make dietary change. It's too hard for them. Don't even bother asking. Or if you do, spend 30 seconds and say, "Hey, do you want to, why don't you come back the next visit?" Like,

Increase the quality of your diet like eat some healthier foods. I'll see you in a month if it gets better That's all I'm gonna say to them eat healthier foods. What is a patient gonna do with that? You know go for a walk around your neighborhood eat healthier foods I'll see in a month not surprisingly in a month their blood pressure is the same or worse, right? So we're never given any reasonable tools in medical school and before I went to medical school

I worked as a physician assistant in cardiology, so I've dealt with a lot of people with high blood pressure even before my residency after medical school. And it's always the same story, right? It's just, it's much easier to say, here's an ACE inhibitor, here's a calcium channel blocker, here's a beta blocker, here's a medication. I know that's going to lower your blood pressure. And my really only job as a physician is to fix the thing that I am charged with, which is your blood pressure. I don't have any responsibility for

really downstream side effects that might occur from this if they're dealing with your endocrine system or That then I'm gonna refer you to someone else and say well I did the right thing right thing right quote-unquote I did what my governing bodies in medicine have told me to do I Checked the box. He got a side effect. That's not my problem. Yeah, and do you think that I

should one expect side effects from having high blood pressure, only taking pills? It seems like maybe that might be a reason why you're having other illnesses and disease pop up, but actually we don't talk about that. It's like, well, if I manage the symptom, then whatever else happens is totally unrelated to said issue. No, it's physiologic whack-a-mole, right? If you have an imbalance in the human body, and this sounds woo-woo, but it's really not. If you have an imbalance in the human body, you simply cannot

whack this mole without three more popping up. It's very difficult to give someone a medication for any condition and not have something else happen because of it. You give someone a proton pump inhibitor because they have gastroesophageal reflux, right? Well, then you have an increased rate of pneumonia because of side effects. Then you have malabsorption of multiple nutrients, including B12 and other things that are dependent on the acidity of your stomach.

So you have all of these downstream side effects because the problem really wasn't that they had a deficiency of a proton pump inhibitor. This isn't a pharmaceutical medication deficiency.

This is an imbalance. It's a signal to us as physicians or as patients, quote unquote, that there's an imbalance in your body. In the case of gastroesophageal reflux, it usually has to do with dysbiosis in the gut at some level, whether it's the small intestine or some part of this that's leading to a reflux and dysfunction of the esophageal sphincter. If you can get at the root of that and correct that with dietary change, lifestyle change, you probably don't need a proton pump inhibitor.

And this is, it's just the story being played out over and over and over in Western medicine. It's so sad and it really forsakes so many people. Yeah, it's really sad. You know, and I think what's interesting about what you do is that, you know, you'll look at these randomized controlled studies and say, let me show you not only why this isn't true, but how to look at studies. And so like you had one where you were looking at seed oil, seed oils in humans, um, and

maybe it was the same guy, but you were saying, here's all the reasons why this study that everything is referencing, turtles all the way down to this study, is actually problematic. And I think that would be interesting for people to hear. Like, how do you determine, no, no, my doctor says this study. And why is it that doctors don't take the next step, which is go, hey, this study isn't actually well executed? It's a lot of time. As physicians, we can talk about that with seed oils because that's a really important point. But as physicians,

Most of us work in an insurance model, which doesn't pay us for outcomes. It pays us for time. And so if we are not seeing four to five to six patients an hour, it's very difficult to even pay your malpractice insurance or make a profit and support, you know, like, so there's a real financial constraint on physicians very quickly. You know that in medical school, the specialties that pay more are more prestigious and they're more competitive.

If you want to be a dermatologist, if you want to be an orthopedic surgeon, if you want to be a plastic surgeon, those are the people who do the best in medical school because they make the most money. The people that make the least money in medicine, those are the least competitive specialties. So medicine is completely based on a financial model and the motivations in medical school are to do as good as I can so I can make as much money

And look, everyone that goes to medical school is super smart and worked really hard to get there. But there's even within medical school, there is a ranking of specialties. And so I have tons and tons of respect for people that work in internal medicine and family practice, but those specialties don't pay a ton of money. And they're doing really good work that people need

to receive and it's very difficult for a doctor to look at the methods and the history of any study that they're basing their decisions on it's so much easier as a physician to just say this is what i learned in medical school this is what everyone else does i am protected from malpractice liability if i do this thing which is what are the guidelines i'm going to do that thing so in the case of the seed oil study or multiple of the randomized controlled trials looking at seed oils

These are nutrition studies, essentially. And there are some single-blind, some double-blind, randomized controlled trials done with seed oils. Most of them were done, in fact, all of them were done really between the late 1950s and the early 1970s. So they're all...

50 to 70 years old. We haven't had a randomized controlled trial with seed oils in 50 to 70 years. No one has done these studies. So we are looking at methods, we are looking at nutritional knowledge that is 50 to 70 years old when these studies were designed. Why? Because there's no funding. What pharmaceutical company stands to benefit from doing a trial comparing saturated fats and

and soybean oil today. None. So much of what we see in the medical literature, so much of what we're taught in medical school is pharma-funded research. That's all that's done today. That's the majority, right? It's not all, but it's the vast majority. And there's a zeitgeist. There is an accepted sort of network saying, you can't even ask this question now. Your proposal will just be laughed at. Everyone knows, Cody, quote unquote, that saturated fat is bad for humans.

You can't even propose a study that's using saturated fat in one of the arms of the study today without getting a lot of pushback. Maybe you could get it through an IRB, but there's become so much groupthink. And I think that's going to change with this administration and maybe overhaul at the level of the NIH. But there are certainly questions that have been omerta, that have been unable to be asked in the last 15 to 20 years of research. It's very hard to do any research on.

today that questions the lipid hypothesis, which is again something we can talk about regarding LDL cholesterol and direct connections of heart disease. That idea is so entrenched that if you propose a study to question that, it's going to be pretty hard to get this approved. So if you wanted to do a randomized controlled trial with seed oils in humans, that's not observational. You're looking at five to seven years with three to five hundred patients maybe to start, a thousand would be better.

you're looking at 20 to 50 million dollars to fund that study who's going to push that bill

Nobody. The Butter Association isn't... There's no Butter Association, right? But if the National Tallow Association funds it, there's going to be so many cries, it's corrupt, right? So agriculture can't fund it. A seed oil company wouldn't. Why would they fund it, right? Why would Kraft or Procter & Gamble or Bungie, which is a company that makes seed oils, why would they fund that study if it could potentially make seed oils look better? And a study like that,

If it were done, that would erode the foundation of so many of the foods that we are given in the grocery store so profoundly that it would probably cause a collapse of our food system for a short amount of time. If RFK Jr. is able to actually get meaningful legislation or meaningful scientific decision-making done on seed oils, think about how many foods in the grocery store are going to have to be labeled differently. That is a multi-billion dollar, potentially hundreds of billions of dollars are on the line here.

There's a lot on the line with this, with seed oils. So there's a lot to be protected there in terms of the conceptualization by the public that Doritos, as long as I don't eat too many, maybe it's not the biggest problem. When the flip side of that coin is, look, we live in a free society. You can do what you want. You're sovereign, but that's freaking poison. And if you like eating Doritos, like you need to understand that's poisonous for you.

We're allowed to do things that are poisonous for us. We're allowed to drink alcohol. You know, we're allowed to do a lot of things that are poisonous, to take risks, to smoke cigarettes. Hopefully we can get some real honest conversation and maybe even some studies that need to be done to help people understand that like that is poison

do what you want but don't give it to your kids thinking that it's okay so it's a really tricky it's like a gordian knot it's really difficult to untie all of this yeah well and what's crazy i think is like for instance and we'll blur this out because this is a buddy's company and we like the buddy but um

I had no idea until I saw another video that you did about aluminum cans. I was like, I'm doing so good. I don't drink plastic. Of course I don't because that would be bad. And people say microplastics are not good. So I have my nice little aluminum can. But talk to me about what is inside here because it turns out maybe this isn't such a good idea. It's not ideal, right? So you're still drinking out of a plastic bottle, drinking out of an aluminum can. There's really clear videos that have been done where they take

acid, a sulfuric acid, and you can dissolve the aluminum. And what you end up with is a plastic bag. It looks like a condom. Yeah, you can kind of twist the plastic inside of it. You can twist the plastic or you can completely dissolve it. There's a plastic bag in your aluminum can, invariably. You cannot put any liquid in an aluminum can like that because the aluminum will leach into...

the fluid. And we know that you probably shouldn't be drinking aluminum. You know, you shouldn't be wrapping your food in aluminum foil for the same reason. We don't want the aluminum touching food. There's potentially problems with excess aluminum in our diet. So what do we do, right? Everything has to be in glass. It's not really tenable in terms of weight and economies of scale, but

I just think it's important for people to understand that knowledge is power, know better, do better. And for those people that are suffering, which is really, this is the ethos of all of the content that I make now, and it's been an evolution, it's like, look, if you're thriving, don't change anything. But if you're not, I want people to know that there are a lot of these inputs that they're doing in their life that could be potentially contributing in a cumulative manner. I did a video recently about these printer receipts at grocery stores. People got super triggered. But look, there's solid evidence that

touching these receipts can lead to absorption of endocrine-disrupting chemicals through your skin. So like, don't hate me. Like, this is thermal paper. This is a big deal. I mean, Shanna Swan's been on Huberman's podcast talking about this. This is not pseudoscience. Now, is one receipt going to kill you? No. And I said that in the video, but people just get so triggered because they can't wrap

wrap their head around the number of things that are toxic in our environment and I get it. We live in a pretty scary place and so it's not about being perfect, it's just about doing better and what I'm about is kind of hope for people. I've met so many people over the years in medical school, in my training, working as a PA, working as a physician who end up at a place of despair because they're sick and no doctor they see gives them any idea that there's a way out. All you can do is take this medication which we know has side effects

So that's incredible to me. If you don't have a way out, what are you supposed to do? You might as well just, you're going to live the rest of your life with a lower quality of life than you could possibly have. That's wild. That's horrible. But I want people to know that there are so many ways out that they may not have heard about. That's what, I just want to put it out there. Tools for people when you're ready. If you're doing great, drink out of cans. Who cares? Touch your receipts. Okay, fine. But if you have...

hormonal dysfunction, infertility, low libido, obesity, depression, like some of these inputs, they matter in a cumulative way. And being intentional with little steps can make a big difference over time. So true. I mean, for instance, I have a lot of girlfriends now I'm a little bit older who are struggling with infertility. And, you know, it always bothered me that the story about reproductive rights was always one-sided. It was like reproductive rights are

you know, abortion rights. And I think you should believe whatever you want to believe about that. But I want the other side of the coin too. Reproductive rights are also why is it harder for women to get pregnant seemingly? And why is nobody talking about that?

So maybe along that same vein, I hear Paul Celadino will not date a woman who wears lotion, perfume, or Lululemon. Is this true? It's pretty true. It's pretty true. Or if she's amazing, I'm going to try and convince her not to do those things. Okay, so let's talk about it. So what's the deal with lotion, perfume, Lululemon, and women? So let's do lotion and perfume first. These are cosmetics, but all cosmetics, anything that we're putting on our skin, whether we're a man or a woman, is being absorbed.

Skin is and it's not a lipid, you know, impermeable barrier. It's not a water impermeable barrier. A lot of things you put on your skin can be absorbed. We know this and this is the problem. We are porous, right? We have pores. This is how we sweat and pheromones come out and we regulate fluids in our body. We are full of holes. We just can't see them. So anything you put on your skin is going into your body and being absorbed into the cells at your dermis and epidermis.

There have been interesting studies looking at women specifically in the study and cosmetics and personal care products, whether it's deodorant or lotions and women who make a change and remove the personal care products that have parabens and phthalates and other endocrine disruptors. A lot of the stuff around forever chemicals is not noted on labels, so it's subtle.

But women who make an intentional change to remove those things, we see noticeable, marked, statistically significant decreases in levels of these compounds in their body within a few days. Wow. And we're talking like the levels can go down by 50%. So there's a massive input. And these are not things that occur naturally in our bodies, right?

These are BPS, BPA, parabens, phthalates, which have many iterations and incarnations. And why are those bad? Why don't we want them in us? Because they disrupt. They look like our hormones, right? They're imposters. And so they mimic, a lot of them mimic estrogen specifically. So they can mimic estrogen at the receptor and block its action. They can stimulate excess estrogen action. They're disrupting our hormones. We are delicate, right? And we're resilient, but we're also delicate, right? So like humans have never been...

in contact with these chemicals. There are things in "nature" that affect us in certain ways, but these are just new things for us. Maybe in

another million years, I don't know if Homo sapiens will last that long, or 300,000 years, our bodies will adapt to these compounds. But they're not very adaptive now. These compounds have only been in our sphere of existence for the last 50, 30, 20, 10, 5 years. That's way too quickly for our bodies to adjust. Who knows if we ever will. So now they're just this new piece of information that our bodies

are unaware of and it really can cause problems for humans in terms of like you said fertility all sorts of hormonal things in women and men. Yeah, you know what's interesting too is have you seen the new trend with young girls where they young girls are starting to put on cosmetics and and skincare products younger than ever. Wow. So if you look at actually the growth in the cosmetic industry in female cosmetic products the number one growth is sub 16 years old.

So we are having facial, like we are having salicylic acid and eye cream for 12 and 11 year old girls who do not need it, by the way, whatsoever, of course. And so fast, with such high margins, that they also are creating these little...

They're like refrigerators for little girls and they I swear to God you can look it up and see if there's a video here for you But there's these little refrigerators that they put on top of the girls countertops that you put all of your face products in This is a new trend for them and they're starting to be these side effects for young women where not young women young girls Where salicylic acid on like a face that that doesn't have that you're not really getting acne when you're 8 9 10 11 and so

It's interesting to see. I can't even imagine what's going to happen to the next generation because I didn't start all that until I was in my 20s, probably. Wow. You know? It's scary. Yeah, I think so too. And you look at young girls hitting puberty earlier and earlier, you know, there are all of these compounds in our environment that are affecting us negatively. You also asked about Lululemon. Yeah. It's the same thing. I mean, I just saw an article a couple of weeks ago about whether it's a sports bra or leggings, when you sweat in these...

it increases the absorption of chemicals in these pieces of clothing significantly. If you're wearing leggings and they're dry, it doesn't look like we absorb much from it. Women don't absorb much from the leggings.

But women, most of the time, this is athleisure, they're like going to the gym after something. - Yeah, or me in the sauna. - Right, you're in the sauna or you're running. So a lot of times, women especially, men don't wear as many of these tight products on our bodies. We can sometimes. Men in jujitsu wear these rash guards, right? Which are kind of the same thing as like a sports bra in some ways, right? It's a polyester piece of clothing that adheres to our body and we get super sweaty in it.

So men are not immune from this, but generally we're thinking of women wearing leggings and sports bras, sweating in them. There is documented research evidence that that increases the absorption of endocrine-disrupting chemicals, again, BPS, BPA, which is a whole bisphenol series, parabens and phthalates.

into the body and then what does it do? We're just now beginning to understand this. - Wow, yeah plus have you seen women's leggings lately? They are everywhere, they are very tight. There's Collective, Taylor's gonna laugh, there's these new leggings that you just see, I'm like I'm a chick and I'm looking, I'm sorry. They are up in everything. So what do you do? You throw your expensive leggings away? You buy only cotton ones? What's the answer here? - Again it's just like knowledge is power,

Know better do better don't let perfect be the enemy of good if you're thriving Maybe that's not the biggest input. Maybe that's not the biggest lever to pull I

If I'm in that situation, I'm thinking, okay, somebody needs to start developing leggings and sports bras in better fabrics. This is a business opportunity for a whole growing segment of men and women. If it's men, if it's rash guards, right? I mean, for me, like I'm a surfer. There are zero companies that make board shorts out of anything but polyester.

And believe me, I've tried to surf in cotton shorts. It doesn't work very well. It's horrible, right? There was a company, Kelly Slater's company, used to make wool board shorts and they discontinued them. So hopefully by education there can be an increased awareness and demand for these products in the market and it's a new space.

I've seen women starting to wear leggings that are cotton or, look, if it's 5% spandex but mostly cotton, that's way better than 100% polyester. Way better. Also, underwear is for women. You know, what is your underwear made out of? I did the whole organic cotton switch. It's probably important. Like, these tissues that are covered by sports bras and underwear are very absorptive. They're mucosal tissues. So, it's a big deal. Okay. Really important comment. Yeah.

The thing is, I haven't met that many super hippie women that age super well. You know, it's like there's a lot of wrinkles.

Oh, maybe that's why. - It's 'cause we're all vegetarians. - You know, my husband's really funny. He'll be like, "You don't need Botox." I'm like, "You never see me without it." Like, you have no idea. You don't know what I look like if I never get Botox 'cause I've had it before. Don't tell me it's bad for me. I don't even wanna know. - We can talk about it. It's a separate conversation. - Okay, okay, okay, fine. But like, what do you think about this aesthetic we have today, at least for women? It looks a certain way and it's really hard to get products that are healthy on your face.

So again, this is just my perspective as a man. You're not doing Botox. I don't do Botox. I've never done Botox. I've never really done anything cosmetic for my face. And people will be like, yeah, that's because your face, that's why you look old. You don't look old. Great. Internet's rude. Thank you. Whatever. People will use that as an opportunity, I'm sure, to hate. But I don't want to put chemicals on my face. I refuse to do it.

And in terms of the Botox, I'll just say this, like as a man, I have trouble dating women whose foreheads don't move. - Look at this. I'm perplexed, I'm upset, I can't even, I can't lift an eyebrow, is it working?

I mean, you want it. You want to see it. You want to see the wrinkles. There are 200 plus people can factor me on this. Maybe I'm off a little bit. There are many, many muscles in the human face. And I think that we've evolved this very delicate communication between men and women, but also between women and their children and men and their children, whereby our expressions like this is, this is so much communication in the way that I move my face beyond an intonation of my words. That's true. So I, I,

can be on a date with a woman and think like, there's nothing coming back at me, right? Like I have no idea what's going on here. How are we gonna form a partnership? And I actually have concerns and there is a hypothesis that women with too much Botox could potentially impair pair bonding with their children. Because the infant is not seeing the woman's face move. Remember during COVID when everyone was wearing the masks and so many kids were sort of delayed in terms of their social skills.

Botox is kind of the same thing but with the top half of the face or you know with the forehead and with around the eyes Now they have these new silicon strips. This is really I'm sure important to you that that you could put on here instead That's supposed to help with the lines But yeah, you can be pretty vain watching yourself on TV all the time as a woman also I think you know we did a series that like opened up my eyes. I mean if you think about my generation, I'm 38 and We went through

Let's see, what did we go through? We went through heroin chic. Remember that? Like Kate Moss. So like as skinny as humanly possible. Oh, I didn't know what it was called. Okay. Now you do. Add that to your repertoire. You tell me about crazy like multi-syllable words in medicine. I'll teach you about heroin chic. Okay, heroin chic. Let's go. Yeah, okay. So we got heroin chic back in the day. That was where we were told be as skinny as humanly possible. That's sexy, right? And then we went from that to actually expanded bodies. So like the big, you know, Kim Kardashian butts, the Pufferfish, the silicon...

chest. Then we've most recently gone to releasing all of those. So now we want to release the fillers. We want to have a more natural look. And so in my lifespan, which is like 20 years of being cognizant of these things, we've had three materially different body types as a woman. And so imagine that. These young women these days are thinking that they actually have to change their body composition in order to fit a beauty norm. How scary. It's so hard. I have a younger sister, so I'm a little bit aware of this because I always...

felt for her having to go through these beauty norms and I think that she's navigated it very well and very gracefully. But I think in many ways, I think that it's got to be very, very difficult as a woman to navigate that today, whether it's dating or marriage and especially a woman who is in the public eye, right? I mean, I'm a man, I'm a 47 year old man and I still get self-conscious about being in the public eye and I've just kind of released it and been like, look, this is what I'm about. Like,

I'm trying to do the best I can to be authentic about the way I look as a 47 year old man. I take care of myself, but it's hard, right? And I think it comes back even more on women because there are such different, I would say impossible beauty standards. Yeah. Well, and also there's like financial reasons for why women care about it. Like we have quote unquote pretty privilege and I should check my validity of my studies, but there's quite a few studies that show that women who wear makeup and

have a double digit, we won't get that specific about the numbers, but somewhere between 15 and 30% increase in pay just from wearing makeup versus not. All things else being relatively equal. - That's crazy. - And so you can kind of see why you might start paying more attention to the way that you look and dress. - Of course. - Which makes a lot of sense. - You have to keep up. It's like, I'm reminded of Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France.

if everyone is doing steroids, if everyone is doing EPO, erythropoietin, if everyone is doing drugs in your sport, you have to do that to even be seen as competitive. And so in the marketplace or...

it's a hard thing for women because if men on the other end, and I always wonder how much of these beauty standards are women doing it for other women versus women. - Probably the most. - Versus women doing it for men. But if men are seeing this, our perspective on this is being warped. Or other women who wanna date women. So whatever perspective partner you want, their perspective of what someone attractive is is being warped again

by social media and these crazy norms that are happening, AI is not helping that. - Yeah, I agree with that. Truth, you don't use deodorant, toothpaste, no lotion, no cologne, and you use beef fat as sunscreen. - Mostly truth, yeah. So I don't use deodorant, generally speaking. If I'm going somewhere and have to be super professional,

I don't want to have any scent. I might use apple cider vinegar or rubbing alcohol, but I don't use any traditional-- - You just rub it underneath? - Yeah, you just spray it or rub it underneath. - Are you smelly? - I don't think so. But I smell like a human. - You smell like a human? - Yeah. - He smells lovely. - Could I potentially-- - Okay, ready? - Let's go. - I'm coming in.

No, you actually smell totally normal. No deodorant. No deodorant. And you're sweating. I'm sweating. I'm sitting here. Yeah, yeah. Wow. I think that a lot of... Cody approved. Okay, wow. That was a tense moment there. Good to God sideways. And I don't use toothpaste. Again, this is one of the things that I get a lot of flack for. No toothpaste. Toothpaste is just silly. Like, look, I don't... First of all, I'm not a fan of fluoride.

And there's a lot of fluoride in toothpaste. And there's a lot of fluoride in drinking water, et cetera, et cetera. So please filter your water with a filter that actually gets fluoride out. You don't need fluoride in your toothpaste. When I was a kid, I had these fluoride trays that they used to put in my mouth at the dentist. I shudder to think about this.

Anyway, you don't need fluoride in your toothpaste and there are natural toothpastes that don't use fluoride but then you have they have things like SDS sodium dodecyl sulfate or diatomaceous earth things that could even be SDS could be disruptive to the gut flora

Sometimes diatomaceous earth or other ingredients are too abrasive for the enamel of our teeth. Isn't that like what murders little insects that you put in plants and stuff? Yeah. And maybe diatomaceous earth isn't in toothpaste anymore, but sometimes they use things that are abrasive. People used to brush their teeth with baking soda. This is not a good idea. It's way too abrasive for the enamel.

Our mouth is like a reflection of our gut flora, right? And if you have bad breath, it's not that you're not brushing your teeth with toothpaste. It's that you have dysbiosis in your gut, right? So it all comes back to quality of food. I used to, I remember this time when I was in PA school. So my late 20s, I was going out on a date with a woman and I had just, I used to love Listerine. I was like, this is the greatest stuff ever. It's just,

and i left the house and my dad was like he just said what you i can smell it it's too much and i was like no it's good it's good i used to just crush the mouthwash but now we know that mouthwash it kills all of the flora in your mouth which are essential for the production of nitric oxide there are studies in people who are working out in the gym that when they use to when they use um mouthwash it actually attenuates how much muscle they can gain

It affects the quality and the improvement in your physiology when you do workouts by using mouthwash. So you don't want to carpet bomb your microbiome in your mouth, in your gut. We need these bacteria and we cannot sterilize ourselves. We cannot. Look, if you go to the bathroom, wash your hands fine. But understand that there are endocrine disruptors, potentially microbiota disrupting chemicals in many of the soaps we use.

And so I don't see the point to using soap on my skin. I'm not like I'm not literally swimming in mud all day. I'm okay, you know no Washing hands with soap after in the bathroom. Well, I

What's in the soap right? Yeah, is it fragrance? Is it paraben? Is it phthalate? Is it triclosan? Which is I think pretty problematic for the human gut microbiota. So if you want to use like a natural soap after you go to the bathroom, okay, but know what's in it, right? And so many of these fragrances and parabens and phthalates are problematic. So just water?

Water most of the time, yeah. - What about like tallow body soap? - Tallow body soap would be much better. - Better, okay. - Much better, yeah. And again, I think that as humans, we are worried about what other people will think. We don't wanna smell it. - Totally. - We don't wanna smell a certain way. We don't want our breath to be bad. And so much of this comes back to the quality of just the way we live our lives, right?

What is the quality of the food you're eating? That's when you get bad breath if you're not eating that well. So that's the issue here. And I think that there are ways to make healthier toothpaste. But again, it's kind of based on this fear around if I don't brush my teeth, my breath will be bad. And that's not really what happens. Like humans have a natural smell, which probably is attractive to people. I mean, the other question is, do you want to we probably cannot cover our pheromones.

But you probably don't want to cover our pheromones for our partners, for potential partners, more than like at all. Like we want people to smell us as humans. That's a connection that we have with other people. And this is all completely against the societal norm. And so it's very controversial. But I want people I'm on a date with to be able to smell my pheromones as a human. We can talk about birth control too. There's so many... I've now smelled your pheromones. What's that? So I said now I've smelled your pheromones. You've smelled my pheromones. We're on the same page. You kind of... You can... And...

you know like if you're on a date with someone or you're dating someone you want to know if there is genetic compatibility there and this and that is affected by our pheromones and these signals and though there hasn't been much research into human pheromones it's the evidence is so overwhelming that they're there just anecdotally or observationally we have humans have pheromones all other mammals produce pheromones why would humans not produce pheromones have you seen the studies on birth control this is relevant so women who take birth control

select different partners when they're presented with sweaty t-shirts. So they've actually, this, speaking of like, speaking of who funds these studies, like look, maybe there's hope for seed oil studies because somebody funded a study where women on birth control were given sweaty t-shirts from men and they knew sort of the immunologic signature of the men in the t-shirts and

And women on the birth control selected different mates in terms of compatibility with their genetics than women off birth control. So what happens is that women on birth control select men who have more similar genetics. Women off birth control select men with different genetics, mostly at this MHC antigen locus in the immune system.

In nature, mates are generally chosen based on genetic diversity. You want someone with different genetics than you so you have the most robust offspring in terms of mate pairing, right? And you can see in populations that have a lot of inbreeding that people generally have more diseases and become less robust quickly. This happens in a lot of populations. You get these rare diseases that are amplified that shouldn't happen. We want diversity in terms of human mating and combinations of genetics, and so women

on birth control are kind of choosing the wrong partners. So scary. And it begs the question of women on birth control choosing a partner, getting off birth control, getting pregnant, and then how many relationships does that end or cause problems with when you're actually not that compatible with your partner now and you've had a child with them or you're pregnant with them. That's wild. So in terms of choosing a partner, pretty important to know these things and sample these things. There's another study that I'll mention which is really wild on the same topic. They looked at strippers.

and there are strippers on birth control and strippers off birth control. And when the strippers off birth control are performing, they earn the most tips right around their ovulation. They have a huge peak in the month when they ovulate.

And the rest of the month is like less tips, right? Women on birth control earned the same amount of tips all month and it was much lower. So if there are any strippers listening to the podcast, and you want to make more money, you got to get off birth control. But clearly men know, right? And men are paying women more when they're ovulating. There's something going on here. They're communicating.

And being on birth control abolishes that. So like making mate pairing more difficult, birth control, pheromones, smelling,

That's how we got on this topic from soaps and perfumes and all these things. That's fascinating. So let's say that you buy into it and you're like, okay, I want to decrease a bunch of these endocrine disrupting extra things that we do. What do you do so that you can still sort of manage through society? Is it tallow soap? Is it shaving your armpits if you're a man? Is it eating certain types of food? How do we not be smelly and also be healthier? So...

Again, the option, it's pretty simple, right? There's like rubbing alcohol, apple cider vinegar. There are more natural deodorants now that have no parabens and phthalates. There are more natural toothpastes. If you absolutely want the minty, fresh feel in your mouth, which whatever, you do you, you know, like there's options. And I think that it's avoiding...

the lesser options, avoiding the ones that are gonna be problematic in a cumulative fashion because there's a lot of things that we're putting on our body and in our mouths that are not even food. We haven't even talked about food yet, right? So yeah, there's so many better options today. Again, there's probably a niche for clothing companies to make better quality clothing, but you don't have to be completely

living in the jungle in Costa Rica like me. Well, you also, you told me about, what is it? Is it Seed Oil Tracker or Seed Oil Scout? Seed Oil Scout. Seed Oil Scout, which is cool. So you can go to restaurants and try to find restaurants that don't use seed oils. Yes, the guy that did that app is coming to the film premiere tonight. Oh, amazing. Yep, so Hardened Soil is doing a premiere of a mini documentary that I did with them. It's called Fed a Lie and it's about seed oils. And that's tonight and he's coming to that. Oh, that's amazing. It's awesome. So when you go to restaurants, again, it's,

The overarching framework that I keep coming back to is that convenience is the enemy of health. If we just do what everyone else does, we get what everyone else gets.

most of the people in our sphere unfortunately are going to have health issues or chronic disease or infertility issues and if we want to live a life that is different than that we have to be intentional and swim upstream and that means inconveniences whether it's inconvenience of cooking your food ahead of time or the inconvenience of going to a restaurant and and being that guy or that girl that asks the waiter what is this cooked in or looking at the menu beforehand and thinking do they have something that is unlikely to be cooked in seed oils and

sauces, these things are almost invariably full of vegetable oils, seed oils. - Yeah, I mean because of you actually, I listened to a podcast you did with somebody else and you laid out this framework and then I thought, well this will be fun, I just want to go for a week and ask all of the different restaurants that I go to, nice restaurants, expensive restaurants, what sort of oil they cook in and it just said, I say I have some allergies, which is true, I have allergies to some things, doesn't happen to be those, but then I feel like they might have to tell me.

I can only find two restaurants here that only use olive oil. - Dai Dui? - Dai Dui and The Well. - Really? - Yeah. - And we talked a little bit about seed oils earlier. I think seed oils are problematic for humans when they're sitting on the shelf. What happens to a seed oil when you heat it?

so now you're heating it again it becomes even more highly rancid and oxidized in process when you heat it so one of the worst things is french fries right that is a fryer you're boiling the oil for days at a time i went to a kfc and an in and out recently to do content and i asked them how often do you change the fryer oil which is peanut and soybean oil they say once a week once a week you have a seed oil to start with which is highly rancid and oxidized and then you're boiling it

for 12 to 16 hours a day and you're changing it once a week? Are you kidding me? - We're gonna have to save the new administration because did you see the new picture of them with RFK held hostage on the plane with McDonald's? - I was so disappointed. - I mean, I have to just, they're the ultimate trolls. It's like the best entertainment of all time. - Do you think they were trolling?

RFK probably was like, yeah, you know, what are we going to do? But I think that they are brilliant at it. But I, you know, I thought it was interesting because I looked at one of your other posts about the number of ingredients that just McDonald's pickles have. Do you remember that? Yeah, it's like, what is it, like?

19 in French fries. I think pickles had five to seven ingredients. Yeah, I think it was 10. Yeah. Which is like, how is that even possible with a pickle? You would think a pickle was just vinegar and salt and a pickle, right? And a cucumber. Yeah. Is that how they make those? Right, a cucumber. So this is...

I'm super excited for RFK Jr. Super disappointed he was in the photo with the McDonald's, but super excited for his overhaul of the FDA, so the Food and Drug Administration. This has to do with this generally recognized as self or the grass designation on foods.

I think in the United States, we don't even know how many chemicals are in our food supply now. People estimate 5,000 to 10,000 chemicals that are part of this GRAS system. So these are chemicals that are supposed to have been tested for humans' safety and are generally not because there is a process of grandfathering these chemicals in over the last 20 to 30 years where companies can just say, "Oh yeah, we tested it. We're just going to say it's safe." And the FDA is allowing this to happen.

One of the really interesting juxtapositions that's been highlighted recently by a number of awesome people in the health space is the difference in European foods versus American foods. In Europe there are maybe four to five hundred of these chemicals and in the United States there are five to ten thousand. We don't even know how many there are. These have all come in and maybe the last 15 to 20 years. So how many chemicals are in our food supply that are problematic for us long term that we don't even know about? And these are not vitamins and minerals. These are additives.

sodium pyrophosphate, sodium benzoate, preservatives, TBHQ. Who knows? Like dimethylpolysiloxane, which is an ingredient in silly putty, which is in McDonald's french fries. These are dyes, red 40, yellow 6, yellow 5, blue 5, right? We don't know what these do to humans long term. There have been some studies, but it's wild to think about. I think this is a huge part of the problem for humans, is that when you eat an ultra-processed food,

whether it's Flamin' Hot Cheetos or Takis or this other Franken foods that I see at the grocery store. There are tons of these things in there and they're just, they're accepted as safe. Kellogg's is saying that Red 40 is safe. I mean, a bunch of people marched to Kellogg's headquarters in Battle Creek, Michigan, and Kellogg's didn't even let them in the door. Kellogg's said, no, the FDA says our food is safe.

When there are multiple studies in kids showing that these food diets can potentially be linked to either allergic conditions or behavioral problems. And the same could be true of so many ingredients that we're not even thinking about in your ultra-processed food of choice. We don't know what these things do to us as humans. Well, and also I think humans are incredible at self-rationalization. So those people that are in Kellogg's and in Pfizer, they're not evil demons trying to take over the world, most likely.

But, you know, it could be. But I think most people were great self-rationalizers. And so if we explain that, hey, urban populations have food deserts, hey, this is a core constituency for most people who are of sub-economic level, thus without us, they can't actually eat, then we will explain our way into really bad practices as humans. And I think that's what we have to watch out for. I mean, have you heard Cali Means talk about this when he worked at Coca-Cola and these other...

you know these other businesses that if there was any suggestion of regulation that they would use a race card or a you know financial hardship card and they would not allow the regulation like it is a you know you that's racist to say that these junk foods which are more affordable are unhealthy how are lower income populations going to be able to afford their food this is there is so much sort of you know maneuvering on the back end

to protect these ultra-processed foods which have huge margins and are easy to make and continue to support their availability for us as Americans. And look, it's a Pandora's box. They're already created. I think humans should have the ability to choose to eat those foods. I just think we need honest, candid conversations about what these things can be doing to us as humans. You know, a cigarette package has a warning label on it.

In other parts of the world, the warning labels are much more graphic than they are in the United States. I've seen cigarettes in New Zealand and other places when I've traveled, and they have pictures of people with tracheotomy, you know, with like trach tubes who can't breathe or on ventilators. They have pictures of people on dialysis or with, you know, plastic surgery need in their face because they've had so much cancer in their nose and mouth from chewing tobacco.

in the united states we have a little warning in words they don't have any pictures but why don't we have warning labels on lay's potato chips and doritos and there's no question at this point that those foods are harming humans yeah in in many ways and in in in kind with cigarettes like every time i make any sort of comparison to cigarettes

the nutrition mob comes after me and says, "Paul Saladino is claiming that Doritos are worse than cigarettes." Like, this is crazy, right? It's like, get over yourself, guys. I'm not saying that, but Doritos are not healthy. And

Cigarettes are an interesting juxtaposition. Cigarettes have a warning label. Why don't Doritos? Yeah, I agree. Well, and you know what? The other thing that's interesting is like my father is a perfect example. You know, it's hard for other generations to get on board with this. You know, I'll talk to him often about like, hey, you know, let's, you know, I saw your post on shredded cheese, American cheese, you know, and trying to explain this to a different generation is very hard. So,

I think the work's really important because we need to push back with some graphic illustrations like that canola oil video of the sludge getting made. You're like, I don't know

I don't know much, not healthy. I can just tell. Not a good idea. That's it. We have an intuition. Right. Yeah, which is true. But as we kill our microbiome, the intuition becomes harder. So I think it's very, very true. Yeah. And as, I mean, this is mirroring the conversation around beauty standards in humans. As the conversation gets diluted and confused, which I think is the main tactic that a lot of these manufacturers are trying to do,

What is healthy and unhealthy becomes more blurred and unhealthy food becomes more normalized and we lose our intuition. A blue potato chip, right? Unless it's blue corn, which, you know, corn is a separate conversation, but like a blue potato chip with food dyes. This is probably, I think our...

grandparents will be able to look at that and think that's a Franken food you know we're only a few generations removed from that level of intuition but at a very simple level when it comes to food if your grandmother didn't recognize this food why are you eating it

- That's such a good one. - You just don't need to eat it. And if your grandmother's mother didn't, like that, a few generations back, we were so much better. Even without any conversations around more nuanced of like meat versus plants, like just what are the foods that were in our food supply 100 years ago?

they're not like what we eat today. - Let's talk really quick about what you eat because you have a unique method for eating that includes like a more limited food supply. Will you talk about the foods you will put in your body? - Yeah, yeah. So I have a history of autoimmune illness. I had pretty bad eczema and asthma as a kid. Both of my parents are in the medical system. My dad is a doctor, my mom is a nurse practitioner. So I got overmedicated as a kid.

They did the best they could, they didn't know. My dad wasn't trained either when he went to medical school at Georgetown University about foods. - So you think that you got those because of over medication when you were younger? - No, I just know that I had those

for whatever reason, a genetic predisposition in the setting, in the context of eating standard American diet, manifests those things and I was overmedicated as a kid. So I grew up with a lot of medications. That didn't affect me positively either. Giving your kid lots of antibiotics can affect their gut flora, right? Giving your kid lots of...

stimulants to treat their asthma because we used to give children theophylline called Theodore. I got this in my applesauce when I was a kid. It makes kids anxious and hyperactive, so that doesn't help with elementary school performance or learning. So these things negatively affected my life and it was this sort of domino effect.

So, at some point in my life, generally when I was out of college, I began to think about my food and started thinking about what I was doing with my food that was giving me this autoimmune condition, this series of autoimmune conditions. Really, it's a triad. It's called an atopic condition, right? It's basically eczema, asthma, and allergies.

And it got to the point that it was bothersome to me. And I had numerous flares of my eczema that were very severe, requiring more systemic steroids, which are not great for anything. And at times in medical school, the eczema would get infected and I would impetigo. So like from being on the mats for jujitsu, so really impairing my quality of life.

spurred me to think more specifically and intentionally about the foods that I was eating. Now, that has been a personal journey that I've written about and talked about on my social media. It began originally with a vegan diet many years ago, a raw vegan diet, which didn't do much for my

Autoimmune conditions, but I did lose 20 plus pounds of lean muscle to the point that I got super super skinny I'm about 165 pounds now. I was less than 145 at that time and that was not intentional I was eating as much as I possibly could but without animal protein the muscle goes away In my case and in many others as well. So that was a raw vegan diet and

Then I sort of did paleo and a paleo diet of meat and vegetables and nuts and seeds. Didn't fix the eczema. And I got to the point where I was thinking in my residency at the University of Washington after medical school, I have really bad eczema right now and I'm eating everything

85 to 90 organic foods that are colloquially considered to be healthy no processed food what is going on there's something in my diet that is still triggering my immune system that was when i did a carnivore diet so strictly meat and that was interesting because it fixes the eczema then fast forward a year and a half later i end up with some issues regarding electrolyte balance due to long-term keto ketogenic diet and so i started to add foods back in which is the ultimate goal i think for a lot of people if they do elimination diets like a carnivore diet

And first I added in honey, then I added in fruit, and I found a pretty interesting middle ground, kind of carnivore 2.0, which I've called animal-based just as a framework for people in hopes that it's healthy. I don't think everyone needs to eat this way, but I think it's a good starting point for people. And so an animal-based diet is basically meat and fruit. But a lot of foods we think of as fruit, a lot of foods we think of as vegetables are actually fruit, things like avocado or cucumber or squash.

So the reason I make the distinction between fruit and vegetables is that one of the interesting things about thinking about food that we eat from a carnivore lens was that there actually are defense chemicals in vegetables. And some of these can be detoxified when we cook them or when we ferment them, but not all of them. And a lot of people with autoimmune conditions do feel better when they eliminate some or all vegetables. Not everyone needs to. Again, if you're thriving, don't change anything about your diet, but

I like this idea of putting tools into the world for people that they can access if and when they need them. So for me, I know from adding foods back that a lot of the vegetables actually do trigger my eczema, whether it's chocolate, tomatoes, which is technically a fruit, but it's a nightshade fruit. That whole family seems to trigger my eczema. White potatoes don't really agree with me. So some foods that we think of as healthy are problematic.

Spinach is a good model to illustrate this because we think of that as like Popeye and it's this super healthy food It's green but spinach has a lot of a compound called oxalates or oxalic acid Oxalates are a major component of the main kidney stone that humans get 75 to 80 percent of kidney stones are calcium oxalate kidney stones and

and dietary oxalate can be a major contributor to that. Probably the biggest contributor to our oxalate levels in our body. Oxalates are naturally produced in our body in small amounts from breakdown of certain amino acids, but spinach and other foods, almonds, navy beans, rhubarb, turmeric powder are some of the big ones. These are huge sources of oxalates. So if you have kidney stones or you have a family history of kidney stones and you don't want kidney stones, it might be well to avoid those things.

We know that there are poisonous plants in the environment. I mean, I grew up in the Northeast and at Christmas we would have these poinsettia plants. Have you seen those? Super toxic, right? So kids, like little kids should not eat the red leaves of the poinsettia. So we like, not all plants are benign for us. And there is this spectrum of plant toxins. So that's an interesting distinction for me to think about. Again, you can detoxify some of these plant defense chemicals with cooking or fermentation, but not all of them.

The problem is that you have so much good content and so many things that I want to talk about because, you know, I think a lot of people listen to this podcast. We're interested in money. We're interested in building businesses. We're interested in, you know, maybe ethics and morals and what it means to be an American. But, man, you can't really have a strong bank account without a strong body. Or if you do, what does it really matter? What's the point? Yeah, what's the point? And so I think this is really interesting for anybody who wants

wants to live a better life. I mean, also just if you wanna have better brain function and cognition, you gotta be healthy. - It's gonna pay dividends, right? Having better mental clarity means everything in your life is amplified. Romantic relationships, family relationships, business, make more money. You wanna express your highest potential.

You know, what's interesting is you have an organ food supplement line. What's it called again? Heart and Soil Supplements. Yeah, you have Heart and Soil Supplements. And I actually forgot to tell you this, but my husband, Chris, is a big user of them. Oh, cool. I brought you guys some. Oh, he's going to love that. He gets all my gifts, actually. But...

He actually got me on them because I found that organ meat was really helpful for my face, like collagen. I found for a while I was traveling a lot, I don't eat enough protein typically, and I don't do fillers or anything like that, and I kind of had these bags under my eyes. And anyway, one of my doctors was like, "Are you getting enough collagen?" And so I started taking some collagen protein, kind of messed with my stomach, I didn't really like it. - You can. - And then I started eating some organ meat. But this is TMI for the internet.

I felt like I smelled different. Is that a thing? Do people who eat a lot of Morgan meat smell different? - Was it better? What did your husband say? Was it better or worse? - Oh, like the smell, but he's a weirdo like you. He's like, I love the smell of you. I'm like, I don't know, it's weird. - It's completely possible that you could smell different. Now, the context is, is there a human that's kind of turned on to this or in the same space and like,

- They're into it. He's a creep, he loves the workouts. The internet's like, we're gonna have so many weird YouTube comments. But what I will say is that the supplements that you have, I don't have that. - Okay, interesting. - Yeah, and so that was actually really helpful for me. But talk to me about, I think if the average person would hear,

You know what I should do? I should eat more heart and kidneys than organ meat. That sounds gross. Plus there was a really big huge guy that did it and there was a bunch of crazy stuff that came out about him. I know. And so why would I do anything crazy like that? Why would I eat organ meats? So if you look at meat, so you go to the grocery store, you see ground beef, mighty chicken, you see fish.

You see steaks. That's all muscle meat. Muscle meat is super nutritionally rich for humans, very bioavailable protein. But it doesn't really have a full complement of vitamins and minerals. And organ meats, especially liver, if you start with liver, are this beautiful sort of completion of a nutritional profile. If you look at what's in a steak and what's in liver, there are very few vitamins and minerals that are not represented there.

Vitamin C, so raw liver and raw steak do actually have vitamin C, but people could argue rightly so that you're going to get more vitamin C from orange juice. But other than vitamin C, there's not much in looking at a whole suite of vitamins and minerals that are not present in animal muscle and liver. People would say fiber, that's a separate conversation, so we get it. But if you just look at muscle meat, high in B12, high in zinc, high in iron,

Not a lot of copper, not a lot of folate, not a lot of biotin. Liver has all that stuff. Liver has copper, which balances zinc. So historically, humans have always eaten the organs. We waste nothing, right? Whether it's for calories or necessity or some sort of historical intrinsic knowledge that these organs are beneficial for fertility and vitality, we waste nothing. I went to Tanzania. I spent time with the Hadza, some of the last hunter-gatherers left on the planet. And when they had the liver of an animal, we hunted a few animals together. They treated it like gold.

Two hands placed gently on a rock, cut into small pieces, distributed evenly among the tribe. This is... Raw? This is a treasure. No, they cooked it. Okay. This is a treasure in their world. The treasure. All of the organ meats are a treasure. The hunter who killed the animal gets to eat the brain.

And that's something that's queasy for us. But there are pieces of the organs, there are parts of the animal, the organs, that are a reward to hunters. Historically, the heart was gifted to also the hunter who killed the animal, some sort of spiritual sort of recompense. So there's a lot of history of humans eating organs. And when you look at the science, it's fascinating around the nutrient profiles.

But one of the coolest things for me is that building this company, Harden Soil, that does these organ capsules for people that I do think make it easier to get organs. They're freeze-dried, which preserves as many of the nutrients as we can in a gelatin capsule. The team over there is amazing, and they did some really fascinating research about

sort of nutritional benefits of organs that go far beyond the vitamins and minerals. And to do this, we had to go to libraries in Germany, like Heidelberg Library, and find the original volumes. Because the historical research has been done since the late 1800s to like the 1950s and 1960s, but most of it has been in Europe. And it's in German originally. So just because it's in German doesn't mean that it's interesting, compelling research, but it does mean that most of us in the Western English-speaking world have never seen it.

And so we actually had to find the original volumes and translate the research from German to English. And what you see is there's a lot of evidence that organs do support the corresponding organ in humans, which really breaks the mind of a traditionally trained doctor like myself. So when you give, we can take an embryo, for instance, and you put a little bit of liver on the embryo and that liver concentrates in the liver of the embryo.

you can do this with radioisotope labeling you can do it with like other types of labeling and you can see like not visually but um in terms of measured research analysis that the organ goes to the corresponding organ so what is going on there it's fascinating and there are

Many, many stories now. It's anecdote, but this is a summed amount of lived human experience that I think is really important not to ignore of humans eating organs or eating the desiccated organs like we make and having benefits in the corresponding organs. We make a supplement at Heart and Soil called Her Package, which has uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, kidney, and liver. And so many women who have struggled with infertility or PCOS have found benefits from taking this. Again, this is just anecdote, but it's a fascinating story.

sort of question to be asking, are these organs beneficial beyond the nutrients in the organs? The dose of the organs is three grams a day or less. And there's interesting research that when you look at the organs, it's a fraction of the organ called the microsomal fraction that contains things like micro RNA. And the hypothesis now is

that we come to looking at this historical research, which is fascinating, is that there are probably signals in the organs that are preserved in the freeze-drying process, but potentially denatured when we cook the organs, that can signal and actually affect

the genetics or the gene transcription and translation in the corresponding organ. So there's actually information and signals that could support an organ beyond the amount of hormones because it's minuscule amounts of hormones in three grams of desiccated ovaries, right? We have another one for men which has testicle in it called whole package, similar results for men in terms of male vitality. The amount of testosterone in whole package is minuscule. It's in there, we've tested it, but there's not a lot of androgens.

And this was an original criticism of the organs that you would have to eat 500 pounds of testicle to get a biologically active dose of testosterone. Maybe that's slightly off, but even a three gram dose appears to be beneficial. And there was actually a guy,

There's been some published research in, I think it's 1889 in the Lancet, which is a historically obviously very long standing journal. I believe it was Brown Saccard who has a neurologic syndrome named after him. He taught at Harvard, elite universities in Paris, who injected himself with a testicle extract.

and reported that he had increased vitality at 72 years old. So this is fascinating, right? Guys doing interesting things over a hundred years ago, most of this research on organs has been lost, but we're just helping to revitalize it and get people back into thinking about like, oh, let me eat the whole animal.

And if you can eat some of the animal, some of these organs raw, which obviously has potential risks that people should be aware of, or desiccated that is freeze dried, it's pretty interesting what's happening here. I think it's going to be a real sea change when people start to understand and maybe we get some new contemporary research on this in a lab. Did you know, for instance, silencer versus raw milk, which is more illegal in war states?

I bet raw milk. Raw milk! Isn't that crazy? Wow. Yeah, like in Texas you have to have permit numbers on raw milk here locally in order to get it and you can't get all different types. But there are more states where raw milk is illegal than silencers, which I thought was interesting. Okay, next one. Homeschooling with no curriculum versus fentanyl.

You're saying, I mean, I guess that's crazy. Homeschooling with no curriculum. That's important caveat versus fentanyl. And it turns out that homeschooling is more illegal. How fucking crazy is that? They want your kids. They want your kids propagandized. They want your kids hypnotized. Oh my God. It's a real problem. But I want to play some other games with you really quickly. Rapid fire. And this is perfect. We can start with raw milk. I just did a, is this a bad idea or not? You can tell me. I just did a raw milk challenge.

goat milk cleanse with like herbs for potential parasites. I did it for like 14 days, eight days only raw milk. At first it was awful I think because of the herbs, like it didn't feel very nice. It's not enjoyable. Also I'm like marginally lactose intolerant. So it's really fun for everybody. But afterwards, maybe but it's placebo, maybe I feel better. Was that a bad idea or no? You know, I don't know anything about

- The... - Raw milk cleanses? - Yeah, raw milk cleanses. I think raw milk is amazing. - Do you drink it? - I drink it all the time. I drank it before I came over here. I've got raw milk in my backpack right there. - Of course you do. - Yeah, in a stainless steel water bottle with some glyphosate-free honey.

That tracks. Because you've also been known to take what to an airport that's really weird? Coconuts. Yes. Although I knew that trick. You did? Yeah, but the straw. Yeah, you knew the straw trick. Yeah, that's an important trick. I take all kinds of weird things through airports. They're always looking at my stuff. I'm like, yo guys, it's just hamburgers in a glass container. There's some squash there. I brought some persimmons on the airplane today. I had some air dried steak and that's about it. It actually sounds amazing. Okay, so we're into raw milk. Shredded cheese. Can I just talk about raw milk for a minute? Yes, do it. Let's do it. So raw milk...

Any raw food has a risk of contamination. There are hundreds if not thousands of people sickened every year by eating salad, sushi, all kinds of things that we are exposed to, beef tartare. Raw foods have a risk and the quality of the raw milk determines everything about how good the raw milk is going to be on the back end.

If there's no difference between raw and pasteurized nutritionally, why drink raw? Why not just do pasteurized? But there's a lot of interesting science about raw milk positively affecting the immune systems of kids who drink it when they grow up on or off farms.

So there are specific studies looking at lower rates of asthma, eczema, and allergies, the things I suffered from but didn't drink raw milk growing up, in kids who drink raw milk, whether they grow up on a farm or off a farm. That's interesting stuff, that raw milk could potentially program our immune system in certain ways. So we're kind of back to the organs thing, right? We're back to animal foods benefiting other animals across species. That's fascinating to me. So I would argue there are unique benefits to raw milk, and we

we should help support producers producing it safely and cleanly. Why did we stop doing raw milk versus pasteurized? Good question. So up until the early 1900s, all milk was raw.

In the early 1900s, people were moving off of farms into cities and people wanted milk. A lot of people were sickened by raw milk because they were milking cows in sub-sanitary conditions, mixing feces or urine with the milk, doesn't sound very appetizing, and they were feeding cows swill, which is the spent grains of alcohol fermentation. That's where the term swill comes from. And so they were feeding cows garbage foods,

They were milking them in sub-sanitary conditions and people get sick. And then the milk was heated and pasteurized. And that helps with the public health issue. And we never sort of got back to the idea that we can now, with more technology, make milk raw in clean conditions and potentially expose this to people who can benefit from it.

Goat milk or cow milk, Ra? I like both. I prefer goat milk, but that's just what I have access to easily in Costa Rica. There's a goat farm near me. I can go and milk the goats and see them. Stop it. No, I've done it. All the time. I'm just picturing Paul Saladino as like a coconut in one hand, a goat in the other. An udder in one hand.

That's pretty incredible. Actually, this is a big movement. I feel like trad wives everywhere are into your lifestyle. You probably have them knocking down your DMs right now. I wish. No? No, I wish. Okay, calling all single women. I need a trad girlfriend. Yeah, you do. I feel like they'd be into this. The thing about cow milk is the casein variant. So there's A1 versus A2 casein in cow milk. And some people find they tolerate A2 better.

So all Jersey and Guernsey cows are A2. And sometimes you'll see this terminology on cow's milk now. It'll say A2, A2. If I'm going to drink cow's milk, I prefer an A2 cow's milk. All goat milk, bison milk, camel milk, horse milk, whatever, everything else is all A2.

So if people are sensitive, think about A1, A2 if you're drinking cow's milk. Or if you want A2 and you can get goat, that's easier. Goat has about 11% less lactose, so still a significant amount of lactose for people that may be lactose intolerant. Despite anecdote, it looks like people can still get lactose intolerance from raw milk. If you start slow, maybe you can change it. I used to be pretty lactose intolerant, and now...

I drink probably a liter plus of raw milk per day and don't have any lactose intolerant symptoms, but it doesn't happen immediately. And if you are lactose intolerant and you want to do milk, you can do kefir, which is fermented milk or yogurt or cheese. There are a number of raw cheeses that are fermented for more than 60 days that have essentially no lactose.

That's fascinating. You know what I found really interesting is when I did the goat milk cleanse, I was satiated. I was not hungry all day. Interesting, right? Going back to our earlier conversation about satiety. 100%. So people are like, are you hungry? I'm like, I'm actually not. Not at all. Do I want that cheeseburger? Yeah, that sounds nice. But do I actually feel like I physically need it? No, I don't.

So it's really interesting. I want to hit on this is this one's call it. This one's for Stanley Sanchez My father let's talk about American cheese and shredded cheese quickly He's a big fan of both and your videos they messed me up a little bit Yeah, so the thing is shredded cheese a lot of shredded cheese has cellulose on it to prevent caking and when you

I've done this in the videos, put shredded cheese in water, you can see that the water turns cloudy. It's just full of cellulose, which is wood pulp. And it's hard to know what type of cellulose the manufacturer uses. Some types of cellulose, some cellulose derivatives are probably pretty harmful for the gut. But if you don't want wood pulp on your cheese, you might just have to deal with shredded cheese that clumps a little bit. A lot of shredded cheeses also have natamycin added, which is an antifungal agent. You don't want your cheese to be moldy, but

Again, do we really have confidence that we know what long-term exposure to an antifungal like natamycin is doing to human guts long term? We have all sorts of species in our gut. Some are bacteria, some are viruses, some are fungi. We want them to coexist healthily and happily and

more additives in your food with shredded cheese. American cheese is not actually cheese. It's only a cheese product. It cannot legally be called cheese because of the actual ingredients in it. And if you look at it under a microscope, it's full of all sorts of garbage, right? It's packaged in plastic. So certainly there are endocrine disrupting chemicals from that plastic leaching into this sort of plastic cheese. It's full of microplastics. It's just not a good thing to be feeding our families. So what type of cheese do you eat?

I like any sort of raw cheese. So there's raw cheeses traditionally, like Parmigiano-Reggiano in Italy. That is a raw cheese by definition. You cannot have a Parmigiano-Reggiano certified cheese that is not raw. An equivalent in sheep's cheese is Pecorino. Gruyere is often raw. I like...

all of the raw cheeses. - Okay, that's good to know. All right, if somebody's listening to this today and they're like, where do I start? Like what are like the three easy things today that I could start to do if I wanna detoxify either the things I put on my body or the things I put in my mouth, what are you leaving them with? - Start with your food, right? Because you're taking it into your body. This is becoming the cells of your body. So I think that there's very little that we do in our lives that has a bigger impact than the food that we eat.

I think that don't let perfect be the enemy of good when it comes to your food. If you have health issues, think simple. Start maybe with meat and fruit and then see if the health issues get better over time and then add things back gradually. And that's just, I think, a good starting point for people as a framework, as a blueprint. It doesn't have to be that exactly. More broadly, just get rid of processed foods. Eat things that your great-grandmother would have recognized and you'll be in a really good space with regard to food. In terms of clothing and everything else, just...

gradually start reading labels and you'll be sort of wide-eyed and surprised and think about what you're putting on your body what you're putting on your skin and improve that as you can I love it I've been lately ending with this question of you know what's one either maybe in your case it's a study maybe it's a book maybe it's a short story that you keep going back to again and again like is there a source of inspiration for you written that you go back to inspiration or a study that I am interested in in terms of the research

Could be anything. Could be your favorite. Maybe you're really into fantasy books. That looks like you. What are you saying about me, Cody? I don't know what it is, but you tell me. What do you go back to or is top of mind for you when I go to something that Paul keeps going back to to learn from? Do you know who Khalil Gibran is? Yeah. He wrote a book called The Prophet. That's one of my favorites.

So in terms of not science related, just life lessons, I always go back to the prophet. Why? I just find it beautiful. I find the words beautiful on marriage, on children, on relationships, on love, on work. You know, it's just, it's a very interesting set of poetry that I think holds a lot of resonance for me. I love that. Yeah. Paul Saladino, thanks so much. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.