Paul Saladino Pt. 1: Why Women Should Eat More Meat, Plant Toxicity, Failures of Western Medicine, Oatmeal is BS, Moldy Coffee, Raw Dairy, & more.
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The following podcast is a Dear Media production. Mari has grown her to fitness and nutrition brand. Co-founder of Bloom Nutrition. Forbes 30 under 30 list. A successful entrepreneur. Someone who has lost 90 pounds. Today's guest is Mari Llewellyn. Mari Llewellyn. My friend Mari. Welcome to the pursuit of wellness.

What's up, guys? Welcome back to the Pursuit of Wellness podcast. I am your host, Mari. I am so excited for you to hear today's episode. I was fangirling so hard over this guest. Today, we have Paul Saladino, previously known as the Carnivore MD. He is a double certified medical doctor, but he's also known for his animal-based diet. Now, even though he's a carnivore, he's also known for his animal-based diet.

Even if you don't eat meat, I urge you to listen to this episode because we covered some super, super valuable topics. And I learned so much. We talk about the problem with Western medicine, benefits of eating meat, specifically red meat for women, healing acne, eczema, and other autoimmune issues. Why plants are so toxic to our bodies.

the problem with oatmeal, the problem with coffee, the problem with chocolate, the benefits of raw dairy, and the problem with nut milk.

and so much more. We really dove deep into so many topics that I had tons of questions about, and I know you guys will too. We actually ended up sitting together for almost two hours. So I decided to split this interview into two parts. You are listening to part one, and part two is on the way next week. I really hope you guys enjoy it. Let me know what you think. Let's get into it.

I think I told you this via DM, but my husband and I have been experimenting with your diet style. I love it. With a little bit of flexibility, I would say. And it has brought up some questions. So selfishly, I wanted you on the podcast today because I want to make sure I'm doing it the right way. But I also just want to learn more from you. So let's start with why do you eat this way? Like what's the backstory? So I think that just from the outset, I'll give a little bit of framework of the way that I think about diet. So I'm a doctor.

And nutrition is not taught in medical school. Nutrition is not thought about in any sort of Western medicine. So I'm an MD. I did medical school, University of Arizona. I went to residency at the University of Washington. And not once did they talk about any dietary things other than maybe some people have celiac disease and that means you cut out gluten.

And, but my whole life, I've really been interested in nutrition and just how food shapes us as humans. There are a lot of things that shape us as humans and determine whether we're healthy or sick, but food is a huge input. I mean, we're putting kilogram quantities of food in our bodies every day. We're putting thousands of grams of food in our body. And that is full of all sorts of nutrients. It's full of toxins. It's full of anti-nutrients. And so what is the formula? I think it's an interesting question to ask.

off the beginning, off the top, like what's the formula that helps people thrive the best? Is there a program for Homo sapiens? Because we're all one species called Homo sapiens. And if you look at other species in the animal kingdom, there generally are species appropriate diets. Now between individuals, there's going to be some variation, but it's an interesting question for me to ask, like how much variation is there between individuals? And are there multiple species appropriate diets? Because it's kind of like, if you

If you go to the gas station and you have a nice car and it says, this car only takes 91 octane, why would you put in the crappy gas? You want that car to perform well. And so you get to kind of determine how well your car drives, your car being this metaphor for your body and your experience of life, based on how well we can figure out what humans are supposed to eat. And then, you know, maybe later in the podcast, we'll talk about other things I think about that affect how we live as humans, but starting out with diet. So I think about diet a lot from that perspective. And I think about it

Personally, from the context of my own autoimmune issues, my own issues growing up. So my dad's a doctor, my mom's a nurse. So that means I got over-medicated as a kid and I had asthma and eczema. And the way that my parents, God bless them, treated that was a ton of inhalers. So albuterol inhalers and theophylline, which was called Theodore when I was a kid in my applesauce.

which is horrible. So theophylline is kind of like caffeine. It dilates the bronchioles of the lungs, but there was never any intention to what we were doing for food to treat me as a kid. And then as I went to college, I had horrible eczema flares and there was never any attention. I ended up taking glucocorticoid steroids and they made me feel horrible. And there was never any thought, maybe it's what you're eating, Paul, because I was eating like a normal college kid.

And then I went to medical school and I had eczema, which was horrible. And I thought, okay, at this point I've thought enough about nutrition. I was a physician assistant in cardiology before I went to medical school. And I'd been thinking about nutrition at that point that I started to make changes in my diet. And I was eating kind of organic paleo at the time. And I started to think what is causing this eczema? Like clearly I have this autoimmune condition that is affecting my skin and it's probably affecting other things in my body. It's not just my skin. So how do I think about this? Is it milk? Is it pasteurized milk?

Is it vegetables? Is it chocolate? Is it meat? Like what is going on here? And that was kind of what I started thinking about. And it evolved into my residency at the University of Washington when I had just this horrible eczema flare. At the time I was eating tons of mushroom extracts thinking that they were going to be great, like reishi and chaga and lion's mane, but like pretty big doses of spoonfuls of these extracts. And I think that caused like a massive,

eczema flare and I thought, okay, there's something misaligned here. So that was kind of the beginning of my thinking about plants and whether or not all plant foods are ideal or beneficial or fully healthy for all humans. And then you kind of fall down this rabbit hole

And not only is no nutrition taught in medical school, but I don't think many doctors or people in the health space are aware that some plant foods, many plant foods contain things that may not be great for all people. Things like, we can talk about oxalates, saponins, digestive enzyme inhibitors, phytic acid, things that inhibit iodine absorption for the thyroid. And again, I think there's bio-individuality and some people are probably better able to detoxify these things or tolerate them than others. But what's interesting for me as a physician now is

thinking about it from the perspective of people who are struggling with issues that aren't getting fixed. And whether or not this could be a valuable tool for them to integrate in their lives, but they're not seeing elsewhere. Because I've talked to so many people now just in my life when I meet people and heard so many anecdotes, but end of one stories of people who say I had Crohn's disease, which is inflammatory bowel disease, or I had eczema or I had psoriasis, big plaques on their skin, which is different than eczema, but still a skin condition, which is autoimmune.

And they went to their doctor and the doctor says, take this biologic medication. That's a TNF alpha inhibitor, or take this steroid, or you're going to need a surgery to remove part of your colon because you have ulcerative colitis or whatever. And they said, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to change my diet. And for all of these people, the diet completely resolved their issues. And what I think about this when I say to all of them is, did you go back to your doctor and just tell them what happened? Because you need to kind of say to them,

say to them, what the fuck, man? I would be scared to do that. And it's interesting to me that you're a doctor because I feel like your lifestyle contradicts what a lot of Western doctors would tell you to do. Absolutely. Which is why it's fun to do because on the flip side of that is my belief that red meat from ruminant animals, cows, bison, lamb, that meat in general, along with organs, which we'll talk about in this podcast, is probably...

there's no question about it in my mind, those are the most essential central food for humans. And Western medicine says the complete opposite. So we have an impasse and it's interesting to talk about that and negotiate that with people and talk about why Western medicine believes red meat should be limited. Why women especially, I think believe red meat is something that's not good for them. And no one is even really thinking about eating organs.

And then going down the rabbit hole of all these other pieces, like seed oils, are they good or are they bad? Because if you ask Western medical physicians and you think about the paradigm there, they would say seed oils, which are mostly omega-6 polyunsaturated fats are good. And I think, well, that's probably, that's a massive difference because I think they're horrible. And the flip side of that idea in my mind is that saturated fats

from animals, things we find in tallow or butter, things like stearic acid and 18-carb, et cetera, are healthy. So we have this really interesting kind of contrast where I'm saying, I think most of what we've been told about nutrition is dead wrong. Yeah. And I really want to speak about the piece you mentioned about women. Yeah. Because I do think there's this massive misconception that eating a lot of meat is a masculine thing to do. Yes. And it could raise testosterone in a negative way, or it could cause acne, renal

Lots of questions there. My podcast is a majority women listening, 95% women. I want to speak to them. For women who are afraid to eat too much meat, to eat red meat, to eat animal based, what would you say? That the main side effects of eating red meat are a healthy libido, good fertility, good skin, normalizing periods and menstrual irregularities, and probably more muscle mass, which leads to weight loss.

Wow. Slam dunk.

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I think that, I mean, you can help me with this too. And when I talk to women on podcasts or in my life, I'm always curious, why do you think it is that it's hard for women to eat meat? Is it just, are women told that it's masculine or that it's going to make you muscular and not attractive to men? Or like, what is that? I can actually tell you an experience I've had, because obviously I've had acne for such a long time. I've spoken to so many doctors. The first question is, how much meat do you eat? And do you work out too much? Yeah.

So I've been told pretty much over and over again that I live in a too masculine, I'm living in a masculine way. Do you know what I mean? So I do think through media, through social media, through doctors, we're being told over and over again that it is a masculine way to live life.

I have kind of gone against the grain with that, I would say, because I feel my best. And I think I've been lucky. I don't know how much you know about my story, but I lost 90 pounds in 2017. And just through experimenting with diet and trying different things, I really figured out that I felt my best and looked my best when I ate high fat.

a lot of protein and low carb. That's amazing. And my husband kind of does the same thing. And luckily we have each other, but we talk a lot about hormonal health on this podcast because I really do think there's an epidemic right now because women have been on birth control for years. They've been on antibiotics. They're on Accutane. They're on spironolactone. So there's a ton of issues happening in the world with women. Plastics.

PFAs, there's a lot of endocrine disruptors everywhere. Yeah, it's a big deal. So you would say that this diet that you live by would benefit a woman just as much? Absolutely. With no difference? Well, I mean, differences maybe in the macros, differences in terms of how many carbs, how much fat, how much protein. You know, maybe women are not going to eat as much meat as a man. And usually it's based, I would say, on lean body mass.

So, you know, what I've given people as just a basic tool is one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day is a ballpark. So I'm 170 pounds. I usually probably will get about 170 to 200 grams of protein a day. So if a woman weighs 100 pounds, 100 grams of protein a day from, I would say,

good sources of protein and I'm couching that in the understanding that animal protein is much more bioavailable than plant protein. Now, if you want to get all of your protein from plants, great. I just think that if you're getting all your protein from plants, you're either going to have to use a very highly processed pea protein or hemp protein, which is going to have all sorts of additives and derivatives and it's just not a great way to get your protein or you're going to eat

so many rice and beans that you're going to have GI issues. So I think that it just getting your protein as a man or a woman from an animal source makes so much sense because then you get all of these other nutrients that are simply not found in plant foods with the protein. I mean, where does someone get the creatine that helps your brain and your muscles? I mean, creatine is the most single studied protein

enhancing thing. And even if a woman is just, is doing Pilates or yoga, creatine is going to benefit you. You need creatine to think clearly. You need creatine in your job, no matter what you do. You need creatine to raise your kids. Creatine makes vegetarians smarter when we give it to them in studies. So creatine is critical, but that's just one nutrient. Choline, critical for both, you know, male and female brain development. For a woman to grow a child, the child's body needs choline. Where do you get it if you're only eating vegetables? You don't. Small amount of broccoli, but no,

nowhere near what you can get from egg yolks and liver and meat. That's just the beginning. What about taurine? I just saw an article about the really clear association between taurine, and that has bull in it, right? That's clearly an animal-based nutrient like carnitine. It has this Latin prefix that tells you it's from meat. Like taurine is associated with healthy aging and there's, the human body can make taurine, but it doesn't make enough. And it's only found in animal products. Then there's carnitine, there's

There's answering, there's vitamin K2, there's vitamin B12. The list is so long that I think that there's a clear distinction between all the benefits of one versus another. And I think that for women, they shouldn't fear the animal protein.

Ethics matters, where are you sourcing it from? Thankfully in LA, there's lots of places or around the world, there's places now to get regeneratively sourced meat, grass fed, grass finished, ethically raised meat. I would never fault anyone for wanting to know where their meat comes from or being ethically concerned about animal agriculture. It's a really valid concern. And I think that there are good ways to do it now that support raising a cow well, that give a cow a good life.

and we all die, you know, we're all part of this circle of life and death. And I think that kind of like I alluded to earlier from an ethical perspective, we all have a gift. And I think our highest purpose is to manifest that gift the best we can. And if we believe that animal foods have unique nutrients, I believe that there's a strong argument to be made philosophically, ethically, that eating animals is the most ethical thing we can do for our children, for our future children, for our friends, for our family, for our partners, if it helps us show up the best way in the world and do the most good.

That's critical. And for ourselves, I mean, resilience, recovery from injury, fertility, this is what makes life worth living. And there's so much good evidence that avoiding meat and organs in the human diet leads to fragility and problems in all those things. We just become a less optimal version of ourselves. That's really tough.

You were vegan for a while. Seven months of a raw vegan. Okay. I'm really curious how you felt during that time, what your blood work looked like, and then how it changed when you switched to animal-based. So I was 25 pounds of muscle lighter.

So I was extremely skinny. - And you're super lean right now. - I'm super lean. I weigh 170 pounds now and I'm moderately muscular. I'm not a bodybuilder at Gold's, but I'm moderately muscular. But when I was on a vegan diet, I lost a lot of lean muscle mass. I was very skinny. - What were you eating? - I was eating, so I would go to the equivalent of Whole Foods. I was in Flagstaff, Arizona at the time and buy two heads of kale per day. So if I was going to the grocery store for three days, I would buy six heads of kale and the people at the checkout would go, "What is this for?"

It's for my two kale smoothies a day. It's like an animal feed type of thing. Yeah, yeah. It's for my 60 rabbits or me. And I would have two kale smoothies. I don't know. Like I was eating raw fruits and vegetables and nuts and sprouted nuts. And we would not be able to do this podcast without me having massive anxiety when I was a vegan about my gas because I would just be farting so much and had massive bloating and just lots of GI issues with that many vegetables and plants. And I was running at the time.

And so I was never a very fast distance runner, but my performance running suffered. Flagstaff is home to some of the best distance runners in the world and I would never keep up with them, but I would try to go on their slow training runs and it was horrible because in the middle of the run, I'd have to stop and poop or just have issues or be hungry or be tired. And I think sleep started to suffer. My eczema didn't get better, but it wasn't any of those things that kind of shook me out of that perspective. It was a girl who,

So I was friends with a guy who was trying to get me to go on some dates because I wasn't going on any dates. And he set me up with this nurse and had us all over to his house. And I met this girl, this woman. And after the night, I asked him like, hey, does she want to go out again? And he said, no, she doesn't want to go out with you. She says you're too skinny. And I think it was, I see pictures of myself and I really did look very, very skinny. It was, it was too skinny. And so I had a little body dysmorphia of my own.

at the time thinking I need to be skinnier for running or just for this. And it kind of shook me out of that, that sort of evolutionary urge, like you must procreate. Like if you keep doing this vegan diet, bro, your genes are never getting passed to the next generation. And so I thought, okay, this makes sense. And also I think at that point, I just heard someone talking about this book of life, these genetics that we have as humans and how humans have eaten meat through our whole evolution. I mean, Homo sapiens, the species, our species is 500,000 years old, according to most anthropologists.

preceded by Homo habilis and Homo erectus, going back 1.8 million years.

And if we look at that time period, there's a lot of interesting anthropology evidence that one of the things that contributed to us becoming human, in air quotes, was the inclusion of meat in our diets. There are mass graves of animals that began 1.8, 2 million years ago. There's all sorts of evidence that humans became proficient hunters at that time. And then if you look at that, that correlates perfectly with the rapid growth of the human brain from 600 cc's the size of like a grapefruit to something the size of what we have today.

And that's 600 cc to 1500 cc. So the size of the human brain almost triples in 2 million years. Whereas before that, in our primate evolution from chimps and bonobos, the size of our brain is essentially constant for 30, 40 million years. So what happened there? There's a lot of interesting theories about that, but somehow we became human. There's lots of questions around that. The East African Rift Valley, I've actually visited it in Tanzania, presumed that some group of chimps or bonobos came down out of the trees and became hominids, Australopithecus. But

But I think that we began hunting more and the unique nutrients in meat and organs corroborate that story.

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I am in my steak era right now. Pretty much every night of the week, Greg and I are making steak, especially this summer. We are just in our moment. What we do is we have a ribeye usually, and we'll season it with salt and pepper. And then I put a big spoonful of ghee butter in my caraway pan, sear it on both sides, let it cook to medium rare, and then have that with a salad. And then I'm going to

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What is the biggest issue with plants and plant-based diets? Like why are they causing autoimmune issues? Why is it resulting in lower body or muscle mass? What do you think? There's two issues. So there's lack of bioavailable nutrients, which we can dig into. And there are toxins, anti-nutrients in the plants. And if you think about it from the perspective of a plant, it makes sense.

an animal can run away from you. Have you ever hunted? No. You should. Do I look like I've hunted? No, but I don't want to assume. Maybe you have. I wouldn't mind trying, honestly. After listening to you and Joe Rogan, I would be interested to try. It's a very spiritual experience, which we can talk about. And I think it's valuable for humans to know where their meat comes from, regardless of their ethics. Because when you eat meat that you've hunted, you sort of understand that animals, if we believe, and I think the science would support this, are the most nutrient-rich sources of

of nourishment for humans on the planet, then it evokes like massive amounts of gratitude when you think, okay, in order for something to live, something else must die. This is the way of life. This animal's going to die no matter what. And if it nourishes me, I can do the most good in the world. But that's a separate ethical conversation.

when you're hunting, you know, the animal can run away from you. And if a plant is there, the plant can't run anywhere. So this co-evolution between animals and insects and other things that feed on plants for 400 million years, we're talking a huge timescale, has been this constant warfare where animals respond to plant defense chemicals by developing detoxification systems. But plants then evolve new defense chemicals or they evolve defense chemicals that turn toxic when the animal tries to detoxify them.

So there's clearly this system or this saga of,

plant animal chemical warfare for hundreds of millions of years. And these chemicals are never talked about and they're potentially problematic for us today. And yet we sort of eat plants without any regard to these. There's a few plants that we think about that people may know as toxic. I don't know, when I grew up in Virginia around Christmas, there were always these really beautiful red leaves, these poinsettia leaves, and they're very toxic. They would always say, "Kid, don't eat that, that's toxic." Well, yeah, and it's because of toxins in the plant leaves.

People have died from eating rhubarb leaves. We see rhubarb stems in the grocery store for rhubarb pie, but the leaves have so many oxalates that people have died from eating these. And people have died from eating sorrel, which is a green found in the wilderness. Also high levels of oxalates.

And there's tons of toxic plants if you're out in nature. You know, like, you're not just gonna let your child roam around eating plants because, or mushrooms, they're very toxic. But for some reason we've said, okay, these plant leaves that we're putting in the grocery store, these are totally fine for you and they don't have any toxins, which is a complete myth. Now,

We can talk more about specific plants and which are worse or better, but can humans deal with those toxins? Could they accumulate in some people? Are they causing issues for people? And the reason they cause issues can be a lot of things. They can prevent the absorption of nutrients or they can damage the gut. And that's very interesting. I mentioned saponins earlier and there are saponins and things like quinoa on the outside of the quinoa. What is a saponin? It's a compound that's essentially like,

It turns into bubbles. It's meant to be there as a plant defense chemical. It's bitter. It's just a chemical that occurs on the outside of things like quinoa or other grains. Oats are full of saponins too. And every...

every grain that has saponins has different saponins. In oats, they're called the avencicides. People are upset about the oatmeal. I know. We got to talk about it. People are angry about the oatmeal. I'm ready to talk about it. Because I've done a couple episodes now where oatmeal's come up and I think people are starting to realize it's not a good option. It's not a good option at all. Not just because of the actual oats, but the glyphosate. Glyphosate, polysaccharides,

pyrethroid pesticides. And can you tell everyone what glyphosate is? So glyphosate is one of the more commonly used pesticides. And it inhibits the

It inhibits some of the enzymatic processes involving folate in the human gut, and it appears to be damaging for the human gut directly. But people have also heard maybe about 2,4-D or atrazine or pyrethroid. There are so many pesticides. Glycosate is really the tip of the iceberg. It's the one that gets the most press, and it contaminates a lot of things. But there are so many pesticides. So you could say, oh, I could get organic oats. But even if you get organic oats, you're still dealing with phytic acid, saponins,

and other problematic things in the oats. So we can talk, the saponins are found in quinoa, they're found in oats and they clearly damage the gut. This has been shown multiple times. So you can see it in cell culture, you can see it in animal and rodent models. They're just not good for the human gut at all. And they're a defense chemical. And they're not denatured by cooking. So the saponins are very resistant to cooking. So even if you have a bowl of cooked oatmeal,

you have saponins in there. And then you have phytic acid, which is a big molecule that chelates. It means it bites onto minerals. And maybe 30 to 40% of the phytic acid is denatured when you cook oatmeal, but it's still 50 to 60%, 60 to 70% of that phytic acid is still there. So the problem with phytic acid is that if you're eating the oats with anything that you're hoping to get zinc or calcium or magnesium or any of the divalent cations, any of the minerals with a positive two charge, you're not going to absorb that.

So in countries where grains make up the majority of the diet, there are pervasive deficiencies in iron, manganese, zinc, copper, selenium, because this phytic acid is a part of these grains and really prevents humans from absorbing it. Right, which I feel like the U.S. is super grain-based. The U.S. is grain-based. Thankfully, it's not as much of a problem in the U.S., but in countries where they have no meat or essentially no animal products and they are virtually 100% grain-based, you see massive problems with this.

You mentioned reishi mushrooms before, and I'm kind of stuck on it mentally because I drink this like coffee every day that has reishi in it. Why are you anti-reishi or anti-mushroom? So my experience was that when I was taking large doses of these mushroom extracts, I had a massive eczema reaction. It's just a correlation for me. But we know that... So mushrooms are interesting because they're really delicious, right? And this is kind of a theme that I've seen when I'm thinking about these plant foods.

There often are compounds in plants that we think of as beneficial. The question that I find intriguing to ask about plant foods or fungi, like mushrooms, is do the benefits outweigh the risks? And can we try and make that calculus as much as possible? And can we observe how we feel with these? Because just because a plant contains a compound that's beneficial doesn't mean it's good for us. And just because it contains a compound that's bad doesn't mean we shouldn't avoid it completely.

So my experience and what I've heard from other people is that in some individuals, too many mushrooms can trigger the immune system. And that kind of makes sense because they do have these sort of like,

they have these peptides in them that can look like immune epitopes. So they can look like immune receptors in our human body. And many of the benefits, quote unquote, of the mushrooms are immune. Meaning that in laboratory studies, they seem to affect the immune system somehow, like lion's mane. And so the question is, are they overstimulating the immune system? Could they be triggering an autoimmune reaction for some people?

In my experience, they clearly were triggering an autoimmune reaction for me. Very interesting. And the point you bring up about eczema, I can relate to in a lot of ways because I've struggled with acne since I was 21 years old. Right. And lately, actually, the reason I found you was because I've been on a journey to healing my acne and the carnivore diet has

came up a few times. And I've heard you say that acne is just an autoimmune response. Acne is absolutely autoimmune. And it's not that your face isn't clean enough. Right. Right. I do skincare like three times a day. I feel like I'm a very healthy individual, but I'm probably eating closer to like a paleo organic diet. Currently, I've been trying to incorporate more meat and organs here and there. But yeah, I'm really interested to pick your brain about that.

about. And this is exactly what I'm thinking about. Someone like you is someone that I hope the content will reach because the idea is, okay, maybe there's some vegetables in your diet or something that you're not aware of that's triggering your autoimmune response. And this is a simple, free, easily accessible way to say, maybe I'll just cut this out for three or four weeks and see how it goes. Right. And then if it doesn't help, you can incorporate it back. But this I think is where it makes me excited because it's so empowering for people when they hear this. Mm-hmm.

Oh, maybe kale is causing my thyroid issues. Maybe spinach is causing my joint pain. Maybe almonds are triggering my acne. And I'm just using examples that are random, not necessarily that almonds trigger acne in everyone. But there are foods that can trigger acne in people. And it is an autoimmune thing. Now, if you look at the actual genesis of acne, it's complex. But when I was in medical school, like nobody knew what caused acne. They said, oh, it's a certain bacteria in the skin. Bullshit.

Like this is absolute bullshit. Yes, the bacteria is there, but why is the immune system not responding to it properly? And is it possible that there's something else going on there? And so medicine wants to treat acne with antibiotics saying, oh, you have acne? You just have an infection of this bacteria in your skin. Well then, why don't people that you're kissing or near get the same infection in the skin? Clearly it's something about the terrain.

This is like perhaps one of the most important concepts of medicine where I think Western medicine goes wrong today is this idea of kind of germ theory versus terrain theory. And that got a lot of press during COVID. And I don't want people to extrapolate what I'm saying. I'll just explain what I mean by that. I think that so often we fear germs.

Whether it's MRSA, Methicillin-Resistant Staph Aureus, or a superbug, or viruses, right? Everyone knows the virus recently that we were all told to be afraid of, right? Yes, pathogens do affect humans, but as we have learned so poignantly recently, the health of the human is probably the most important thing rather than the virulence of the organism.

And what I mean is this is the terrain idea that when I was in medical school and residency, I certainly came in contact with MRSA or other superbugs, VRE, vancomycin resistant and terracoccus, right? I was working with patients all the time who had MRSA and you're supposed to glove up and do all these things, but you can't, it's everywhere, right? These things are pervasive.

So I came in contact, but did I get MRSA? No. And the idea is that if you are a healthy human, your body understands how to deal with these pathogens. This is what our bodies and immune systems have done for hundreds of thousands of years. And so then we started to get into interesting questions around how do we really help the immune system or not piss off the immune system enough? And how do we create...

metabolic health. And I think that's what we saw during the recent past few years. The people were very susceptible to the recent pandemic stuff when they were metabolically unwell. And then the differences were staggering, you know, the hospital admissions, the vitamin D levels, all of which are a reflection of metabolic unhealth and prediabetes is essentially the synonym here or frank diabetes, which people didn't know they have. And so imbalance in the human organism leads to susceptibility to

to pathogens, the pathogens themselves. Maybe we don't need to worry about that first and foremost. You shouldn't, I don't think people should be going to Africa and just walking around, around Ebola, but like other organisms, like the Propionibacterium acne, which supposedly causes acne. Like this is not, it's more about the terrain. What is your body doing?

rather than the bacteria causing it. But it's very convenient for the skincare industry and the people that make face washes to say it's a bacteria that you're just not scrubbing off your skin enough. Highly convenient. Very convenient. I wish I could go back and remove every antibiotic I ever took. Right. And how did those affect your gut? Right.

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Let's hop into a typical what you eat in a day, because I have some questions here. Yeah. So today we're recording at about 1230. And this is pretty typical for me. I'm not in my home in Costa Rica, but this is about the same. So I usually get up and I have raw milk with some honey. I'll eat some fruit. I'll eat some fruit.

and then I'll take a short interlude. So for people listening who are vegetarian, I'm vegetarian for the first 45 minutes of the day. And then I'll usually eat some meat. It's just kind of how I go in terms of hunger. When I'm in Costa Rica, I get up much earlier in the morning, 5:30 or 6:00, I go surf. And before I surf, I'll do raw milk with honey.

and maybe a coconut. Oh yeah. So I have raw milk with honey, maybe a little fruit, coconut. I usually serve, then I come back. Mid-morning I'll eat meat, maybe three-fourths of a pound, maybe half a pound in the morning. What kind of meat? Grass-fed beef, usually. Then I'll do a burger or a steak in the morning. I'll have some organs, usually a little bit of raw liver, half an ounce. We can talk about organs. I'll make some fresh orange juice. I have a juicer, so I'll do some juice.

And that's kind of how it goes throughout the day. Those are the foods that I eat throughout the day. I have raw, maybe have a little more raw milk with honey, maybe some raw cheese, fruit in the afternoon for a snack, maybe a small burger in the afternoon for like a lunch. And then like five, six o'clock, 6.30, I'll eat dinner, which is probably a pound of meat, grass-fed steak or lamb or something.

with maybe a little bit of dairy, cheese, fruit. Yeah, that's pretty much what I do. And then I come back. So you don't drink coffee? I don't drink coffee at all. Okay, because you've never mentioned it. I've listened to a few of your videos. You've never mentioned coffee. Why don't you drink coffee? Okay, so this is a whole thing and your audience is going to hate me. Go for it. They're going to hate both of us at the end of this. Well, they're especially going to hate me because hopefully we're also going to talk about chocolate. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But a couple of things about coffee. So what is coffee? Coffee is a seed from a plant, right?

And when I think about plants and the parts of plants that plants don't want you to eat, seeds are probably some of the most highly defended parts of plants. So we're talking nuts, which are seeds, grains. We talked about oats and quinoa, but also wheat, et cetera. People know those grains.

beans, like a coffee quote bean, which are legumes or black beans or lentils, and then nuts. We talk nuts, grains, seeds, and legumes, right? Those are all seeds because if you plant them in the ground, they grow into a plant. We just call them different things, but they're all seeds. That's a plant baby, meaning that if that gets eaten by an animal and the animal just says, oh, that tasted great, no problem, and it just gives the animal nutrients, those plants are never going to evolve because those animals are just going to eat the heck out of those seeds.

So the plants will put defense chemicals in the seeds and seeds are very highly defended. We talk about saponins, we talk about phytic acid, we've talked a little bit about oxalates, but in the case of coffee, you have defense chemicals in the seeds of that plant like anything else.

Caffeine is actually a defense chemical that the plant puts there. Now, interestingly, in the doses we have with caffeine, it reinforces eating the beans because of the way that caffeine affects dopamine in the human brain. And who knows why this is, but it's a problematic thing for humans, I think mostly from the perspective of sleep. So no one wants to hear this, but the quarter life of caffeine is 12 hours, 10 to 12 hours. Meaning that if you drink a cup of coffee every

at let's say 8:00 AM or 9:00 AM in the morning. A lot of people are waiting now, like 90 minutes after they wake up to drink their coffee. So depending when you wake up, when you drink your first cup of coffee, an average cup of coffee has 150 milligrams to 200 milligrams of caffeine in it. So that 200 milligrams of caffeine, if you drink one single cup of coffee, a quarter of that is still in your body affecting the physiology of your brain

to initiate sleep, to help you through the sleep stages 12 hours after you drink the coffee. So if you drink coffee at eight or nine and you go to sleep at nine or 10, you still have about a quarter of the caffeine, excuse me. So 50 milligrams of caffeine in your body at that point. Now, how is that affecting your sleep stages? This is really the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. So doing that every day. Now that's pretty benign. One cup of coffee, quote benign, at 9 a.m. I don't do it. And I'm saying benign relative to what I'm going to describe next, which is probably a more typical pattern for people, which is a cup of coffee at eight,

a cup of coffee at 10 and maybe coffee at one or two. Now at that point, the half-life of caffeine means you've got half of the caffeine is six hours. So if you drink coffee,

at one or two and you go to sleep at 10 p.m., you've got a lot of caffeine in your body and you've got all of the cumulative caffeine in your body. So say you have three cups of coffee throughout the day, that's 600 milligrams of caffeine and you have them at three different parts throughout the day. You could potentially have 200 milligrams of caffeine still in your body when you go to sleep or 150, which is the equivalent of three fourths of a cup of coffee right before you go to sleep.

that's absolutely going to affect your sleep architecture. And when we're talking about sleep architecture, it's just important to mention that there are a lot of things that we do that can negatively affect sleep architecture, alcohol, cannabis,

benzodiazepines, like Ambien, these all affect sleep architecture negatively. Even though we think that some of them help us get to sleep more quickly, like alcohol or smoking marijuana for people to do that, they definitely change the architecture. And the architecture of sleep is such that the body wants to do non-REM and REM sleep. And if you do these things, you're going to sleep quicker, but the sleep quality is much worse. So how do you feel about decaf?

So, D-Craft usually has much, much less caffeine. So, you're doing a much better thing for your body, but there are still other problems with coffee and caffeine, right? Because it's still seeds at the end of the day. It's still a seed. There are mold toxins, right, in a lot of coffees, unless it's a wet process. That's what's scaring me right now. I feel like everything's moldy. A lot of grains are moldy because you also get mold on oats. So, that's back to the oats. We didn't even talk about that with oatmeal. Yet another reason not to eat oatmeal. Even it's organic oatmeal. Yeah.

It's going to be moldy. You're talking about fusarium molds. You're talking about all sorts of molds that have problematic things. I feel like shit when I eat oatmeal. I'm just going to say that right now. Yeah, well. Because it was huge in the fitness industry for a while, making these protein oats. And I tried it because I wanted to be in with the trend. I felt like shit. Well, it's awesome that you were aware enough to notice that. I think the problem for a lot of people is they're doing so many things. They have so many inputs that they may feel poorly. And they don't know if it's the fact that they slept late last night. They were up until 2 a.m. scrolling TikTok. Yeah.

They, you know, or they ate a donut yesterday morning. There's so many inputs. They can't differentiate signal from noise. I think people are also really checked out of their own bodies. Yes. 100%. Like they can't really tell because they don't think about what's going in and out. And I think when you become really aware of what you're intaking, you become so much more aware of how you feel on an hour to hour basis in the day. Exactly. And that's super important feedback. That is a huge takeaway for people that to get to the point

where you can distinguish, where you can really check in with your body. How are you feeling every hour to hour? That's really powerful because you can think, man, I feel tired. I have a headache. What did I do? Was it, oh, I just ate a cinnamon roll or I just ate some lentils or I just ate some meat and that didn't make me feel good. Okay, great. Like whatever it is,

Like that helps people, I think, distinguish or determine what's going on. Maybe it was the fact that you just worked for an hour with the Wi-Fi router right next to your head or who knows what it is, right? Right. All kinds of things. But going back to the coffee, yeah, there's mold. If you wanted to really have the least problematic coffee, you could do a wet process coffee and

which is supposed to limit the mold. That's decaf. And then even with that, you're still going to have acrylamide from the roasting process of the coffee, but nothing is completely benign. When you toast bread, you get acrylamide.

So you're getting acrylamide and then you're getting some of the perhaps anti-nutrients in the coffee, but it's much less problematic if you're doing decaf and you're doing wet process. So it's not moldy and you're thinking about these things, but then who drinks, who does that? Like how many people drink decaf coffee? Me. Why?

I react really badly to caffeine. I'm an anxious person as it is, so I really don't need the extra caffeine. But also lately I've done all of this lab work and I can see mycotoxins in my system. I can see that I have a little bit of mold. Do you like the taste? Yeah. Okay. So you're saying like, why do I drink it at all? Yeah. I don't know. I think it's the taste. And I also think it's like society. You know, I work in this office all day. I see people with their coffees. I kind of want to be a part of it. Right. What would be an alternative? Goat milk?

bone broth. People sometimes want something warm. I mean,

LA is like tricky. It's kind of cold here sometimes in the morning. I mean, it's the middle of July and it just started getting warm apparently, but I was visiting in March and April. It was freaking cold here. So instead of coffee, which I think people will find, hopefully find valuable, like bone broth, warm milk with honey. If you don't want to do honey, just warm milk, warm raw milk. Okay. So I have a question for you about the fruit because I have been experimenting and I haven't gone full carnivore, but I went almost there. I was eating mostly meat, meat for breakfast, meat for lunch.

meat for dinner and incorporating fruit. One thing I found is that I was having what felt like blood sugar spikes. I kind of had brain fog after the fruit and after the honey, and I kind of felt like it was irritating my skin. Interesting. How do you control, and I'm wondering if it's because maybe I'm just sensitive to sugar or if I'm a woman, I want to hear your take on blood sugar with this diet. You know, for me, it doesn't bother me. And for a lot of people, it doesn't cause an issue. So what I wonder about is,

Is there something else going on that's kind of making you sensitive to that? And I'm trying to troubleshoot it in my mind in real time as we're talking about it. Is it a gut flora issue? You know, if the honey is flaring up your skin or the fruit is flaring up your skin, I wonder if there's something in your gut that like, is the sugar feeding something in your gut? I think that for...

someone that doesn't have GI issues, the fruit and the honey can be great. But if you're finding that it's causing issues for you, then maybe there's something else you need to kind of figure out first. And maybe it's not the best thing for you. Maybe there's something better for your carbohydrates in there. I would think gut first in terms of like, is the sugar feeding an overgrowth? Because sometimes we see people with what's called small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, SIBO, which is

technically when there's a dysbiosis or an imbalance in the amount of gut flora that, or in the populations of gut flora that are in the small intestine. Because you have your stomach, right? Then you have the duodenum, the jejunum and the ileum. And those are three parts of the small intestine, which is much larger than the large intestine. Then you have the ileocecal valve and you have sort of the large intestine, which is kind of the cecum, goes up and around and then out when you poop. And so the small intestine is where a lot of interesting things happen if it gets the wrong type of bacteria.

I think canonically people think of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or SIBO as too many bacteria, but when you actually do

jejunal aspirates, when you actually go into the jejunum and the small intestine and pull out bacteria, you find that it's not always increased populations, it's the wrong type of bacteria. And that can cause issues for people. That can prevent them from eating fruit and honey or certain types of sugars until they correct that. - Interesting. - So that would be where I would look in the gut. Now people will say, well, how do I fix that? And it was funny 'cause I was actually talking to a guy on this trip. When I come to the States, it's so interesting 'cause I learned so much from people that have benefited or figured things out.

And he had this small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. I think a lot of people have gut dysbiosis. They're essentially synonymous. We could get really, really specific and maybe create some differentiation, but call it the same thing, gut dysbiosis. And he did it with like probiotics from raw milk. And so I think, oh, that's cool. That makes sense evolutionarily, right? It's a simple, elegant solution. Because I've always found probiotics to be onerous. Which bacteria do I take? Is it spore-based? Is it this one? Is it lactobacillus? Is it

Does it create serotonin? Does it not? Like what am I, like the back, the probiotic space is just dizzying for people. And it's just, it kind of feels like voodoo to me. Like, oh, this probiotic is better than that probiotic. And how do you know which one is really going to correct? And we don't really have the, we don't have the sort of AI device

big data to know. I mean, there's trillions of bacteria in our gut and 40% of our gut or 50, maybe even 60% of our gut is GI dark matter. Meaning we don't even know what species are there. When we try and sequence the gut, if you do shotgun genomics on the gut, like we don't even know half the things that are in there. It's like a room and half the people in there, you don't even, there's no identification. They don't have fingerprints. How do we deal with that? So I love,

simple throwback evolutionary solutions to this. Like how did it get there in the first place? Probably because of all the antibiotics you took historically for your acne. How do you fix it? Who knows, but one solution might be raw dairy, if you can tolerate it.

I'm scared of that. I was actually raised on raw dairy because I grew up in the UK and we would have glass bottles delivered to the door every day. And I think it's a big reason I never get sick. Never. So I have a good immune system, but I've been told over and over again that dairy is going to trigger my acne.

I would say do an experiment because I don't think it will. Because you know what happens. If I break out, I'm going to DM you. Then you tell me. But that's a valuable N of one. I apologize. But that's an N of one, right? Yeah. Okay, so here's the difference between raw and pasteurized milk. It's important for people to understand. It's heated. And when you heat the milk, it changes the conformation of many proteins in the milk. There's evidence that it changes the conformation of the whey protein at about 160 degrees Fahrenheit. And that appears to limit

lose, that appears to create problems for humans or it leads to a loss of the benefits. Because there's multiple epidemiologic studies that show that kids that grow up drinking raw milk, I wish I had, but I didn't, have much less, much lower rates of asthma and eczema as adults. So it does something when we're programming the immune system. It's beneficial. And hay fever, so allergies.

I have no allergies. So you have no allergies, no eczema, no asthma. This is just an observation, but you have acne coming from somewhere else. My money is on the fact that the raw dairy will not trigger your acne.

but perhaps pasteurized dairy would. And it's cool because I've learned a lot from the folks at Raw Farms. Do you know them? Yes. They've sent me a lot of products. I actually have the cream in my fridge. My husband uses it. Amazing. Yeah. The smoothie collab that I'm doing with Erewhon is with the Raw Farms kefir. And so what they were telling me is that regardless of the casein variant, because there's A1 and A2 casein, the pasteurization process may make the casein more immunogenic.

which makes sense intuitively, you know? Do I have a randomized placebo-controlled trial? No, but I wish we could do one. So I think that, at least anecdotally, what I've heard from people, which I think is very valuable, we cannot discount the power of anecdote and human experience, especially when we're navigating places that no one's ever been. Maybe in 50 years, we'll have randomized controlled trials to help guide us on all of these questions. But for right now, there are people suffering that we try to help.

Anecdotally, people have completely different experiences with raw dairy than they do with pasteurized dairy. And I think that's rye. Can I read you a quote? Yeah. From the CDC? Yeah, yeah. Okay. I'm not going to be able to pronounce all of this. Raw milk is milk that has not been pasteurized to kill harmful bacteria. Raw milk can carry harmful germs such as campylobacter. Campylobacter, yeah. Okay. Cryptosporine.

E. coli, Listeria, Brucella, and Salmonella. These germs can pose serious health risks to you and your family. What's wrong with this statement? Why are they saying this? Remember what we talked about earlier with germ versus terrain? Yeah. And so they say it because it's probably true historically. So milk was almost entirely raw. I believe I'm getting this history right. If someone's listening to this and they correct me, I appreciate that. Until the early 1920s.

when people wanted so much milk that the production volume went up and they were literally milking cows and feeding them the swill, which is the historical reference to the grain byproducts of the alcohol industry. And so historically, milk that's from swill factories and in, you know, cows are dirty, they're pooping and peeing at the same time they're being milked, can have all those things. But raw milk itself is perhaps one of the least contaminated things on the market. If you look at the actual CDC data,

Seafood, vegetables, raw vegetables, so many things have much higher rates of contamination than raw milk. Raw milk is one of the lowest.

And Raw Farm is actually really cool. They go above and beyond. This is not a plug. They're not paying me for anything. I just think they're really cool. And they were telling me about their farm. We're going to go to their farm. Isn't it just up north a little bit? It's in Fresno. Right. So they have a special milking barn where they have like a spa for the cows. They wash the cow before they milk them and they test every batch. Wow. So according to them, like people can, consumers can feel very, very safe drinking their raw milk.

Personal experience, I've never had a problem drinking raw milk and I've had a lot of raw milk in my life. Should we be careful where we're getting it from? Yes, and know who you're giving it to, right?

Raw milk for a pregnant mother, just make sure you're just like, I'm not gonna give any medical advice on the podcast, but that's something to be aware of. Like, okay, that's the risk, right? In medical school, they teach us that. Raw cheese and raw milk for a mother, because if a mom gets listeria when she's pregnant, that can be problematic for the baby. So moms have to make their own decisions about that. But I was recently in Greece and I had a hard time getting raw milk. And I was on a boat and the people on the boat were telling me it was raw milk. And I was thinking, this isn't raw milk. And I looked at it, it was not raw milk.

So we actually found a farmer. We went to his farm and I got some raw milk from him. But he said to me, he's like, you can't drink it raw. You have to boil it. And I said, forget that. I'm just going to take a chance. And I was fine, but nobody else on my team was brave enough to drink it. So maybe a farmer on the islands of Zakynthos in Greece is not where you want to get your raw milk from for the first time. That sounds like a good source to me. It probably was, but I don't know how clean the udders were when he was milking the cow. Theoretically, raw milk is sourced

super safe and good for humans. There are tons of tribes all over the world, the Samburu, the Maasai, who basically live on the stuff. But know the quality of your sourcing. Like anything, right? You wouldn't just eat meat from any farm in the world. So I think that, yes, the CDC, which is kind of this blanket authority trying to help everyone, is telling you be aware. But if you know the sourcing, it's pretty safe. I drink exclusively raw milk in Costa Rica from a farm that does goats, and I've never had a problem. But be aware that there's always risks. And eating anything raw has risks.

Raw meat has risk. People still go to restaurants and eat carpaccio or beef tartare. Raw vegetables have risks. I mean, there's been huge outbreaks of E. coli on spinach.

So let's bridge into nut milks. Yeah. I want to talk about that because everyone obsessed with nut milks. Yeah. Almond, oat. I want to ask you about coconut because I've been drinking coconut and I want to see how you feel because I know you're a big coconut fan. Do you have the coconut milk here? It's native harvest in a green can. Can we look it up? I think it's a good one. I check ingredients pretty religiously. I want to see what you think.

So it's organic coconut milk and then in it we have organic coconut, filtered water, and organic guar gum. Okay, so that's it? So guar gum, right? The research on xanthan gum looks pretty benign, but I just think, really? Why are we using a gum to thicken a milk? Could that be damaging or irritating your gut? And then here's the thing about coconuts. So coconuts are a seed.

And they have defense chemicals too. And if you're eating the coconut milk, that's going to have more of the problematic things in the coconut that could mess your digestion up.

This is my personal experience, but when I was in medical school, I used to make my own coconut milk. What I would do is I would take coconut flakes and put them in warm water and then put it in the Vitamix and blend it up and then put it through a cheesecloth. And I found personally that if I drank that coconut milk, my stomach felt funny. I felt kind of nauseous and I felt like that doesn't taste good. But if I fermented it overnight, that something in there, digestive enzyme inhibitor, who knows, was perhaps degraded as many of these plant anti-nutrients are with fermentation and it was easier for me to digest.

So if you wanted to make your own coconut milk, I would say ferment it. But I also think...

You should try regular cow's milk or goat's milk as well. Yeah. So something like your own fermented coconut milk would probably be the best option if you can't do dairy, but I still think you might be able to do dairy. Should I start with goat's milk, you think? You could, but I think, yeah. And they have a raw goat's milk at Erewhon too. I'm going to stop on the way home. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to try it. And goat's milk tastes different than cow's milk. Okay. It's a little goatier. Goat funkier maybe? Yeah. And again-

You might want to ferment it, see how you do with the lactose. Goat's milk has less lactose than cow's milk, but there's cow's milk, goat's milk, all kinds of things in there that are potentially beneficial. This is something I hopefully I'll be able to have conversations with people at these meet and greets that we're going to do at Erewhon for the smoothie about why they're afraid of milk. I think a lot of people think that they're lactose intolerant, which is possible. So raw milk contains lactase. It contains the enzyme that breaks down lactose. So if someone is lactose intolerant, you can start with small amounts of raw milk and you can probably...

get back some ability to digest raw milk, like not pasteurized because that's going to degrade the enzyme. Or there's kefir. So if you're sensitive to lactose and you want to start with dairy, you can get raw kefir, which is a fermented milk. There's a difference between kefir and yogurt. Yogurt is fermented at a higher temperature. Kefir is fermented at room temperature. And kefir is fermented longer than yogurt and has different organisms in it. So raw kefir would also be an interesting thing to think about for your gut.

specifically in your case, and think, okay, does raw kefir trigger your acne? Does it help your gut? Could drinking raw kefir to bring it back full circle to what we were talking about earlier, would that affect things in your gut? Would it help with tolerance to the sugars eventually? The nut milks are problematic for a variety of reasons. They're based on seeds, kind of like we were talking about oats. Even organic oats are problematic. I feel like oat milk would be full of glyphosate, wouldn't it? Oat milk is going to be full of glyphosate unless it's made from organic oats.

And then even if it's made from organic oats, you're getting saponins, you're getting all the things we talked about. Almonds contain oxalates, they contain digestive enzyme inhibitors. There's an interesting case series on kids with genitourinary issues, recurrent kidney stones, urinary tract infections, pain with urination, that had resolution of all those things when they stopped feeding the kids almond milk. Almond is not a good thing for kids, especially almond milk.

And then I don't know what cashew milk, the same problems. It's all digestive enzyme inhibitors, other things in the nuts. That's just if it's pure water and the nut, presuming the nut is organic. And then a lot of the milks have seed oils. So Oatly contains canola oil. They say it's like on the label, it says low erucic acid rapeseed oil, which is canola oil. And other ones have canola or soybean or sunflower or safflower oils.

What's the point of them in the milk? I think just to make the mouth feel. Right. Kind of like carrageenan makes it creamy, right? Yes. They want it to be creamy like a whole milk. Imagine that evolutionarily humans like the taste of whole milk. And then a lot of them have the carrageenan that you were mentioning or other things that are thickeners. And we know there's good studies, I believe in both humans and animals, that carrageenan causes gut inflammation. And so a lot of things begin in the gut. We do not want to irritate our gut with a variety of things.

Thank you guys so much for tuning into part one with Paul Saladino and congrats if you made it to the end. I don't know about you, but I took so much away from that conversation. I can't wait for part two. We talk about fruit, seed oils, beekeeping.

beef tallow as skincare and how paul feels about greens so make sure you tune in next monday to hear part two don't forget to subscribe leave a review and i'll see you guys next week thank you for listening to today's episode go comment on my last instagram at marie llewellyn with the guest you want to see next

I'll be picking one person from the comments to send our Bloom Greens to. Make sure you hit follow so you never miss my weekly episodes. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to share and leave a review. See you next week.