Welcome to Grounded Wellness. I'm your host Bethany McDaniel,
founder of Primarily Pure, mom of Three, and biohacking
enthusiast. We created this podcast to bring
you practical advice to live a more vibrant and intentional
life rooted in long lasting health.
We record right here on our regenerative farm, grounded with
our feet in the soil, exploring bold truths, overlooked wisdom,
and holistic tools that support true well-being.
These conversations will challenge everything you know
about health and Wellness. Doctor Paul Saladino is a board
certified MDA certified Nutritionist and author of the
best selling book, The Carnivore Code.
He is widely known for pioneering the animal based
movement and for challenging just about every mainstream
health narrative from cholesterol, fear to the
demonization of sunlight. Whether it's ditching seed oils,
living off the grid in Costa Rica, or refusing to use
conventional sunscreen, Paul truly lives what he teaches.
His approach blends clinical experience, ancestral wisdom,
and a deep connection to the body's innate intelligence.
Get ready for a conversation that's radically honest,
refreshingly controversial, and rooted in the kind of truth that
gets people fired up. Let's dig in.
Paul Saladino, thank you so much for coming out here today.
I have been following you and consuming your content for
years. I even read the Carnivore Code
when it first came out. And I just want to say there's
two things that I really admire about you.
One, you are willing to take a bold stance on things even in
the face of criticism. And two, you are OK with
changing your mind publicly, which I think it's something
that a lot of people aren't willing to do.
And to me, it's not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of
humility and courage. So I really appreciate that
about you. Thanks.
For having me out here, it's beautiful.
Speaking of controversy, yeah, let's talk about the sun.
Let's do it. So we just launched a non nano
tallow based zinc oxide sunscreen.
And with that, we did a billboard campaign with the
catch phrase, the sun isn't poison, but your sunscreen is.
And this sparked a firestorm of controversy in the media and
among dermatologists. And I know that this is
something that you've been talking about for a really long
time. So I want to get a full
breakdown of your stance on this.
Do you think the sun is something that people should
avoid? No, definitely not.
I mean, we're outside right now and this is a beautiful podcast
studio. This is amazing.
And there's so many things that I like about being outside and
being in the sun. I think that like anything in
our lives as humans, there's a dose effect.
You know, you can get hyponatremia from drinking too
much water. And we know that no matter how
healthy you are, if you spend too much time in the sun, you
can get a burn on your skin. And that can be harmful for
humans. But if you look at other
animals, every animal knows when to move out of the sun.
A dog will be in the sun sometimes because they want to
be warm, a cat, but then they move to the shade.
And I think intrinsically, humans have the same wisdom.
We know, if we're aware of it, when to move into and out of the
sun. I did my residency after medical
school in Seattle, so I was at the University of Washington.
I spent a lot of time in the hospital, and Seattle has about
90 days a year of good weather. And I can tell you that after a
very long, cold, rainy winter, it felt viscerally good to walk
outside of the hospital or my apartment and be in the
sunlight. Why is that?
It's because when you are in ultraviolet light and basically
full spectrum light with the sun, your body makes things
beyond vitamin D like endorphins.
So endorphins are those feel good chemicals you get when you
go for a run or you lift weights.
And your body, the human body, 375,000 years of evolution and
previous to that hominid and and primate evolution are connecting
us to the sun in a way that makes it feel good.
So why would it be bad for us, right, per SE, or in any dose,
as mainstream dermatologists say, if it feels good to be in
the sun? And anyone who's had that sort
of relative lack of sunlight knows that feeling like, oh,
this just feels good to be in the sun.
Like, put me in the sun. Your body is giving you this
feedback. Like go in the sun, please.
Yeah, it's almost like a basic human instinct, because we're
drawn to it very naturally. Yes, absolutely.
We know that in the morning, being in the sunlight or natural
light is valuable for in training circadian rhythm at the
level of the eye and the Super chiasmatic nucleus.
But even throughout the day, there are benefits to being in
the sun or outside in the shade like this.
So I think it's interesting to compare and juxtapose natural
sunlight like what we have around us right now and indoor
lighting. So natural sunlight outdoors has
a full spectrum, right? You have ultraviolet, you have a
full spectrum of visible wavelengths that are kind of
balanced, red, orange, yellow, blue-green, Violet that are not
enriched in blue. And then you have infrared
light. So you have this full spectrum
of infrared UV, a full spectrum of visible light and it doesn't
flicker, right. So sunlight doesn't flicker at
all. It's just light.
That is a totally different experience for us consciously
and unconsciously at the level of our biology, at the level of
our nervous system, our eyes and our brain then being an indoor
lighting. So indoor lighting depends on
the bulb that you are using to create the light.
If you are sitting by a fireplace or you have candles,
that's pretty close to sunlight. It doesn't really have as much
ultraviolet, doesn't really have any ultraviolet, but it has a
visible spectrum of wavelengths that is kind of balanced and it
has some infrared. But the second you create a
bulb, well, an incandescent bulb is pretty close to that.
So we have indoor lighting. We'll start with candlelight and
fire light. That's what we had originally,
right? That's the, that's amazing.
That's pretty close to being outdoors.
Then you have an incandescent bulb, which is the first light
bulb that we made, right? That's like the idea of an
Edison bulb. And a lot of people have never
even seen one of these bulbs because they haven't been in
circulation in a while. But you can still buy them on
Amazon. They're outlawed in certain
places. I know, and I think that the
current administration may have made them legal again.
Yeah, I heard that you. Can get them on Amazon.
But the way these work is you have a tungsten filament that
goes between two contact points and you run a current, you run
electrons through a tungsten filament and the tungsten
filament heats up and the heat of that tungsten filament
creates light. You know there are photons that
are coming off that tungsten filament.
That tungsten filament goes to like 3000 to 4000°F.
So it's basically fire in a bottle.
And what's interesting about 8, an incandescent light bulb is it
has infrared, again, doesn't really have much ultraviolet,
but it has a visible spectrum that's pretty close to what you
find outdoors. And it doesn't flicker
functionally. Your brain perceives it as a
steady light because you're connecting it to an outlet.
I don't want to get too technical.
All of the electricity that you have in the United States is an
alternating current. So that light bulb is flickering
at about 120 Hertz. You have 120 flickering of the
light bulb per second along the current flickering of an
alternating current from your house.
But because you have thermal inertia in that tungsten
filament, your brain, we don't see this because though the
current may be flickering on and off, the tungsten filament stays
hot and produces light as the current is flickering.
Does that make sense? So the light never stops coming
off the tungsten filament because it doesn't cool down to
0. And what's the problem with
flicker in general from like an LED light or another type of
light? It's probably very disruptive to
our nervous system and I did some content about this.
If you use your iPhone and you do slow MO right, and you're in
Home Depot, we did this, or you're in anywhere with
fluorescent or LED lights and you film yourself walking and
you slow it down, you can see how those lights are flickering.
They're flickering at a frequency that is not really
consciously something that we're gonna note.
But when you slow it down just a little, you see how much it's
flickering. And that's not something that we
are used to as humans, and it probably either jacks up the
sympathetic nervous system that fight or flight nervous system,
or effects our circadian rhythms in a in a negative way.
I know from personal experience this is just my end of one, but
I've heard lots of people repeat this.
The newer iPhones, right? So anything beyond an iPhone 11
has a lot of flicker on it relative to your MacBook.
So the MacBook flickers much more quickly than your iPhone.
But in in this case, the MacBook is actually easier on your eyes,
because the more it flickers, the faster it flickers.
Even though the screen is larger.
Even though the screen is larger, it flickers so fast that
we perceive it as constant light.
The the iPhone flickers much more slowly and that like
there's certain frequencies of flicker that are very disruptive
to us. I know that if I look at my
phone for, you know, more than a few minutes before I go to
sleep, it may affect how easily I'm going to fall asleep for
sure. And that's just that's even if I
take the blue light out of my phone with this, like, you know,
you can change the the color spectrum on your phone.
You can make it more orange and red, but it's still flickering,
still does it. And some of us are very
sensitive this. I mean, you can walk into banks
or other places and you just think, I hate this light.
It just feels horrible. I've become so averse to
fluorescent light now and like, it's painful.
I hate staring at my phone and so I know millennials get made
fun of this, but I will use my laptop over my phone any day for
like a a task that takes longer than a couple of minutes.
Me too, me too. And ideally like outside while
I'm on my laptop. Yeah.
And so the other solution you can do is you can go back to an
iPhone 11. So I have an iPhone 11.
Like it's not as good as your MacBook, but I had a friend on
my podcast and he was telling me this, his name's Tristan Scott,
that the older iPhones, the iPhone 11 has a different pulse
width distribution that gets pretty technical, but it doesn't
flicker as much as the newer ones.
It still flickers more than a a MacBook.
But anyway, it's just like when you go into these environments,
you can almost viscerally sense, like you either get a headache
or you feel stressed or you just feel like I don't feel good.
We know that at the extremes, some people are sensitive to
flickering light and that's how we induce seizures in Western
medicine that some of these either music videos or clubs,
anywhere that there's like really strong flickering light,
people that are sensitive to that they have to these
establishments or some videos have to warn people this may
cause a seizure. So at some level, flickering
light can be so disruptive to some people's nervous system
that they will actually have a seizure neurologically.
So the flicker is something that I don't think many people are
aware of, but it's very disruptive.
And then you have the whole blue light thing, right, that you go
indoors, whether it's LED or fluorescent, it's very enriched
in blue light. And this is the problem with
computers and all the screens we look at, even the Macbooks,
right? It's, it has, you can look at
the spectrum visually and there's this big spike in blue.
And what we know about blue light.
And this is all different wavelengths, right?
So the wavelength of red light is different than the wavelength
of blue light or green light. And yellow, when we see a light,
it's the wavelength that determines the colour we
perceive. And if we're looking out here,
for instance, and we're looking at plants and we see green,
those plants are reflecting that green back to us.
So they're reflecting light at a certain, at a green wavelength
back to us. If you have a light emitting
diode and LED, it's, it's actually producing a green light
or a red light or a blue light at a certain wavelength.
And historically, like so many things, like the food we eat,
like the things we put on our skin, this is what humans are
used to, right? A full spectrum light, not a
light that is enriched in blue. Blue light on its own is not bad
for us. Blue light in the morning is
part of what wakes us up and entrains this circadian rhythm.
But like so many things, if we imbalance it and we create an
environment indoors where we have extra enriched blue light,
that can be harmful. There's evidence that it's
potentially stressful to our bodies in so many ways.
The level of our eye. Maybe blue light is contributing
to macular degeneration and some people were looking at screens
all day. You are dosing your biology,
your tissues, your skin, your eyes with too much of something.
So the strategies are to lower the blue light indoors, to use
incandescent bulbs, to go outside, to use blue blocking
glasses, which we can do at night because we know that blue
light at night can be particularly disruptive to our
circadian rhythm because there is no blue light after dark,
right? And that's what our body
expects. And that has to do with
melatonin production. Or we can sometimes try and
counter it with red because interestingly enough, other
wavelengths don't appear to be as harmful to the human body.
But it's there's a lot of people that feel that this enrichment
of blue light in our environments is very harmful for
us. And so the simple solution is
think about your environment when you are indoors.
Your original question was, is the sun bad for us?
And you think, OK, look, what's bad for us is indoor lighting,
right? That's what we should be scared
of, not outdoor lighting, not outdoor sunlight.
But why are we scared of the sunlight?
Because of this idea that ultraviolet light particularly
causes photo aging and causes skin cancer or is connected with
skin cancer. And I think that to say that
ultraviolet light doesn't cause some degree of photo aging, it's
hard to know, right? I think that we age as humans
and if you are in ultraviolet light too much and you overdose
ultraviolet light, that may cause some photo ageing.
But I think that it's very, there is probably a sweet spot,
right? There's a Goldilocks zone where
the ultraviolet light is beneficial and probably not
harmful to our skin. And so when we exceed this,
yeah, ultraviolet light may be harmful.
But I think that it depends on a couple of things.
And we can talk about this if you want to.
It depends on the health of your skin and the context of what is
actually in the membranes of your skin, right?
Because we have a dermis and an epidermis and how do we create
this? We create this with what we eat,
so we'll get there and then we think about the light that we're
getting. And so it's it's interesting.
And then the idea of sunlight causing skin cancer is really
what you guys, I think, poke the bear with with these
dermatologists. And that is very controversial.
But if you really look at the evidence, you can make a strong
argument that sunlight is potentially not really causing
cancer of the skin in the way that we think it is.
Yeah, it gets a little technical.
We can go down those rappers if you want.
Yeah, I want. To there's so much nuance to the
conversation and our whole goal with with the campaign was just
to spark this conversation because there's been a whole lot
of boldness from the side of avoid the sun 100% at all costs.
Never go in the sun. Absolutely.
What? So for decades, you know, and
we're saying, hey, there's more to the story than just avoid the
sun. And we're actually missing out
on a lot when we avoid the sun. But it's like we can't even have
a conversation about these things anymore.
Why do you think that these health topics have become so
highly charged in our society? I don't know.
I mean, food is religious now. Sunlight is very religious.
I, I think that as doctors, you know, I'm a traditionally
trained Dr. we, we're very proud of the fact that we're doctors
potentially we shouldn't be, we're not as smart as we think
we are. I've changed my mind on a lot of
things. And I think that we just, we
imagine that we know the answers and that people should listen to
us and take our, our, our, our decrees as infallible, which is
just not the truth. And so I don't understand.
I, I don't know why doctors are not open to this, but they're
just, there is no ethos within Western medicine toward
conversation. It's just, this is the way we do
it. And that's, that's how I was
taught, right? This is the way you do it.
Do not vary from this. So I think the, the whole
institution of Western medicine is certainly in order to become
a doctor, you have to be very smart.
And I think that most doctors are very well-intentioned and
work very hard, but I think that the medical system creates a, a
cadre of physicians that are less open to new ideas and
curiosity than average, right? It creates it, it, it kind of,
and it's not the doctor's fault. I think it's the system and the
education system's fault. It kind of locks us into our
ideas. And that's not good.
So it's it's really hard because it's very hard to challenge
anything in medicine and to not get fervent pushback, whether
it's lipids, right, cholesterol, which ties into the whole
equation because, you know, we make certain types of
cholesterol in the human skin and those are the precursors to
vitamin D. But you know, any conversation,
whether it's lipids and LDL, whether it's sunlight, if you
challenge the mainstream thinking in Western medicine,
you are. They're coming for you.
We'll let them come.
You know, it's interesting. You've been accused of fear
mongering before, Probably we've been accused of fear mongering
with this campaign, which of course is not our intention.
Our intention is to spark conversation.
But what would you say to anyone who would call these things that
we're talking about fear mongering?
I think that curious conversation has become the new
fear mongering, right? Anytime that you ask people to
think about hard things, there will be those in society who
have kind of these visceral reactions and the the knee jerk
response is your fear mongering. I think that there's this is
kind of a broader philosophical topic, but I think that so often
now in society, there's just these labels getting thrown
around these sort of like denigrating labels, whether it's
you're an anti this or an anti that, you're an anti science
person, whatever. That's I think that's the way
that a lot of people in our society now sort of invalidate
someone and say you're not credible.
I'm just going to give you a name, I'm going to give you a
moniker. You're a fear monger, you're an
anti XYZ. And and they think that it
somehow invalidates what you're saying, but it's really not the
case. But I think that's just the knee
jerk reaction. I don't like what you're saying.
I'm going. To It makes me feel
uncomfortable so I'm going to label.
You, I'm going to label you as this and I don't have to listen
to you. Yeah, It's just OK.
You don't actually want to have a conversation about this.
That's fine, But it's more about them and it is about us, right?
I think that, you know, bringing up ideas that are contrary to
what people think or that challenge the way that we live
is that's how we grow. And whether it's me talking
about, hey, did you know this is in your drinking water?
Oh, you're fear mongering. Well, no, I'm just pointing out
that like the Environmental working Group has looked at your
tap water and has 259 times the upper limit of trihalomethanes
and you probably shouldn't be drinking that because they're
estrogenic. Or did you know what's in your
toothpaste? Or did you know that these
things that you're doing living near a golf course is associated
with two plus times the rate of Parkinson's?
Oh, you're fear mongering. You know, I'm giving you
information. It's.
Kind of an easy way to just dismiss it and therefore I don't
have to pay attention to it and I don't have to feel
uncomfortable and really consider what you're saying.
Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, I mean, this is this
is kind of the social media in a nutshell.
It's about other people's visceral reaction to us sharing
ideas. And it's not that the idea is
bad or that sharing the idea is bad.
It's that they're having this visceral reaction and that's how
they how they sort of like. Like a coping mechanism.
Yeah, make it into a thought. Yeah, yeah.
OK. I want to go back to the sun.
You have said that Melanoma is not a sun related cancer.
Can you break that down for us? Yeah, so there's three different
types of skin cancer people think about.
There's squamous, basal and Melanoma.
Melanoma is by far the most feared and for good reason.
It's the most aggressive skin based cancer in western
medicine. But if you look at the data,
Melanoma is not really a sun associated with cancer.
Outdoor workers who have sort of chronic low level exposure or
moderate level exposure to the sun are actually protected
against Melanoma. Acute exposure, burning exposure
may increase the risk of Melanoma, but it's not actually
clear. A lot of times when people get
melanomas they occur in places that never see the sun.
Bob Marley I believe died of a Melanoma on the bottom of his
foot, right? Wow, nobody tans like this.
No right. That's not a sun associated
cancer. Melanoma is a cancer of the
melanin producing cells of the skin.
But that like it's not sun associated.
Yeah, I interviewed a dermatologist and he said that
the most deadly forms of Melanoma do not have AUV
signature. I guess they can tell by the
look of of the disease whether or not it has this UV signature
and the most deadly types do not.
So when it comes to Melanoma, I don't think the sun is number
123 or 4 in terms of causes. What is causing Melanoma?
It's a little hard to say. There's definitely some research
that associates higher levels of linoleic acid in the skin with
increased incidence of Melanoma. There's a hundred person cohort
in Australia that showed that the study was published in 1987.
It's no further research has been done on that that I'm aware
of. But there's some research
linking levels of linoleic acid in the skin and the blood and
the fat to higher levels of Melanoma, which would make sense
when you think about it because linoleic acid is this Omega 6
polyunsaturated fat. Any time you have more double
bonds in the fatty acid molecule, it's more susceptible
to oxidation, which is essentially breakdown of the fat
or damage to the fat. And so I, I found this study
today in preparation for, I knew we were going to talk about the
sun and I'd been thinking about this and I actually found a
really interesting study in humans.
There's, there's a good amount of literature in animals showing
that higher linoleic acid diets worsen skin cancers associated
with, you know, ultraviolet light exposure.
And these are probably squamous and basal, not necessarily
melanomas. That's been pretty well
established in animal studies. And in humans, there was a study
done where they took skin stripping, which is a technique
where the dermatologist will take skin.
They take the stratum corneum off your skin and sort of take a
piece of tape and peel it off your skin.
And they use that as an in vivo model.
And when they expose that stratum corneum from human skin
to higher amounts of linoleic acid, there was increased
oxidation and increased inflammation and exposed to
ultraviolet light with a with with linoleic acid.
Linoleic acid directly on the skin, you're saying?
Directly on the skin, not even eating it, Yeah.
Directly on the skin, Just to clarify for our audience, the
primary source of linoleic acid in the diet is from seed oils.
Seed oils. Seed oils?
Yeah, you have soybean oil, 55% linoleic acid, give or take.
Corn oil, peanut oils, canola oil, one of the other common
ones, sunflower, safflower. Yeah.
And the thing about seed oils is we don't really need to belabor
them because they're only in foods that you would not want to
eat, right? So they're in processed foods.
If people are not eating highly processed, ultra processed
foods, you're probably not getting a lot of seed oils.
Just don't buy the canola oil in the store and cook with it.
Unless you're eating out a lot and.
Yeah, you could eat if. Yeah, again, if you're eating
out a lot. And then sometimes I think salad
dressings, yeah, are the sneaky place where seed oils end up
because no salad dressing company is going to put organic
extra virgin olive oil in their salad dressing.
And, you know, this is the, the, the thing about tallow, which is
organic, this is organic chemistry.
Tallow is not liquid at room temperature.
So we can't put tallow on our salad, which is, you know, the
great tragedy of life and the salad.
Tallow doesn't make a great salad dressing.
Tallow makes a great face balm and and cream and can make great
bases for sunscreens. And it's good to cook in.
But tallow's not a good salad dressing, OK?
Great olive oil on salad dressing.
Olive oil's fine on salad dressings.
The thing about olive oil is if you look at the literature,
upwards of 75% of olive oil's tested are cut with lower
quality oils. So you really want to get like a
single source olive oil. And if you're getting an olive
oil, you want it to be in glass, opaque glass, organic and cold
pressed. So you have a long list.
There's a litany of sort of check boxes for an olive oil and
you can do this. But with olive oil, it's almost
like you need to know a farmer to get your meat so you can
check the quality of the meat. You almost need to know an olive
oil producer and know like, OK, this is coming from their one
farm in Spain or the one farm in Italy because you want it to be
single source. If it's multiple sources,
they're just mixing and you just the chances of it becoming
adulterated are quite high. The same is true with avocado
oil. I do think that in general,
olive oil is superior to avocado when it comes to cooking.
Or actually I would use tallow for cooking.
If you're using a salad dressing, I would use olive over
an avocado and certainly over seed oils.
But then you get to this like why?
Why are you eating a salad in the 1st place?
That's like a whole separate, we can talk about that.
We can get to that. Like, fine, if you want to eat a
salad, great, you do you. But yeah, I think an extra
virgin olive oil is better than an avocado.
It's just that avocado has the same problem.
It's a lot of it's cut with seed oils and I think that the even.
If it doesn't say that on the. Label, even if it doesn't say
that on the label just because of the quality standards are
poor. It's hard to find a single
source. Avocado oil, olive oil is like
and art, right? And olive oil has a longer
history and a longer sort of tradition than avocado.
So I think that you can find artisanal olive oil and heirloom
sort of olive oils, but I don't think anyone's doing that at
scale with avocado oil at this point, so.
This is the hard thing about eating out because I, I, I do
eat out. Like we travel, we have kids.
I try to bring things, you know, foods to supplement when we eat
out. But also we go to restaurants
sometimes. And I really try to avoid seed
oils. And I'm that person who's asking
questions who's like really trying to figure out what's
going on because they'll say right away, Oh yeah, it's cooked
in olive oil. And I know immediately, like I'm
sure not not only is it yeah, exactly.
Not only is it probably not just an olive oil that says olive oil
that may be cut with canola oil. Like it's probably one of the
restaurant ones that straight up says like 5050 olive oil canola
right in. Plastic.
Yeah, yeah. Or you go to the omelette bar
and I'm like, can I have it cooked in butter?
And they're like, we only use butter.
And I'm like, no, you don't Like it's they'll say this is what
they say at the omelette bars. They'll say we use ghee or we
use clarified butter is what they'll say.
But it's fully liquid, you know, like I'm like, there's no way.
That's just pure ghee. Like I've researched this of
like what they actually use. It's always it is clarified
butter, but it's cut with canola oil.
And I don't want to like sit there and argue with the
omelette butter guy or the oh, I do.
I don't know. I will no.
Show me. It depends on the mood, I guess.
Like sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, but sometimes I'll just
like grab butter from another section and like bring it over
for them to cook in. But I just feel like if more
people were doing that, if everyone was hassling the
waiters and the the omelette bar guys, like eventually things
would shift. But it is kind of annoying to
have to it's. Super annoying.
So I was recently in DC for this make America healthy again
announcement and that was kind of cool.
But I, I went to dinner with some friends and at a restaurant
and I brought lineage tallow. So this is my this is my go to.
So I do not go to restaurants now without lineage tallow.
So I bring my own tallow. This is BYOT, you know, I'm
like, oh you, you like here cooking this.
Have you ever said no? They they sometimes won't do it.
So we went to Chipotle and I said, will you guys cook food
for me in this tallow? And you know, the, the guys
behind the counter, you know, they're super nice, but they're
just dumb. They're like, I don't wanna get,
they call their boss, they call the manager.
The manager's like, no way. Like OSHA state, they can't do
it right. But some restaurants will do it
for me. I've had a lot of them do it.
And some of them are like, no, we can't do that because of
cross contamination issues. They don't know what's in the
lineage tallow jar that I have, but some of them do it.
I mean, that restaurant that I went to in DC, I'm trying to
think of the name of the restaurant because I would give
them a shout out. They did it for us and they
cooked steaks for the whole table in tallow.
So it's probably 15 or 20 of us. And they cooked all the steaks
on the whole table in tallow because I asked them nice, what
do you cook the steak in? And they go vegetable oil.
And I was just like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Like here, take this whole jar. Please tell the chef cook the
steaks in this. But that's, that's what I do.
And. Is that standard with steaks?
Do they still use vegetable oil or a lot of times do they just
use nothing? It depends on how they're
grilling it, right? So there's like a restaurant in
Miami called Fuego and they have like a, it's the whole idea of
Fuego. I think it's, I forget who the,
the chef is, but it's a, it's an like, it's a very unique thing.
It's a fire based like cooking style, right?
They have wood fired oven and they're in that situation.
They don't have to use oil. If they have a grill, they don't
have to use oil. If they have a flat top, often
they will use an oil because they want the crust on the steak
and they they they don't want it to stick.
That doesn't look as good. Restaurants are under this this
sort of microscope. The steak has to taste good and
look good to the consumer. So you can't have, you know,
like can't be sticking to the skillet.
So a lot of times, and this is more common, people think
restaurants will marinate steaks in canola oil.
So I've been to restaurants, steak houses, and I say, what
what is it cooked in? And which ones are not marinated
in and out of a restaurant menu of 25 to 35 steaks.
This is like, you know, the whole steakhouse.
They have two. They're not marinated.
And you think, OK, well, I'm gonna have one of those two.
Yeah. So you just have to be a little
careful. And look, eating one steak that
was cooked in vegetable oil is not gonna kill you.
But what we're talking about here is cumulative exposure over
time, and the more the more we are aware, the better choices we
make continually, and that's how we sort of change the course of
our health. Yeah.
And yeah, with seed oils, not only are they inflammatory and
fragile within themselves, just by themselves, they are also
messing with this like omega-3 to Omega to Omega 6 ratio within
the body. Like what?
What about seed oils is increasing our susceptibility to
different skin cancers? Because the we know that so
polyunsaturated fats are not made by the human body.
We can make saturated fat and we can convert that to
monounsaturated fat. So we have, we have desaturates
enzymes and we have saturates, you know, so we can make a
saturated fat and we can convert that to a monounsaturated fat.
We have the ability enzymatically to put 1 double
bond into a fatty acid molecule. We can't do any more than that.
That's just our evolutionary history.
So we accumulate polyunsaturated fats.
So the more seed oils you eat, the more they will be in every
cell of your body, in every adipose fat depot in your body,
in every mitochondrial membrane of your body.
That's just a relationship. And that's been shown that
adipose depot stores of linoleic acid are directly proportional
to the amount that we are consuming your body stores these
polyunsaturated fats. The same is true for omega-3
fatty acids. The literature looks different
for Omega threes, but if a human theoretically were to over
consume Omega threes you would have lots of negative side
effects. It's just that we don't cook in
omega-3's because they have so many double bonds they become
rancid immediately and no one they don't taste like it's so
fishy and like it would be horrible.
You never want to cook in a fish oil and it would be a horrible
idea. But linoleic acid is the single
greatest source of polyunsaturated fats in the
human diet and that consumption that we have of linoleic acid is
5 to 10 to 20X what it has been historically for us as humans.
I mean you look at hunter gatherer tribes and Danish
cultures, 1 1/2 to .5% of their calories came from linoleic
acid. 1 1/2 point 5 they're only getting linoleic acid in the fat
of the animals they're eating and maybe an occasional nut that
they find. Like these cultures are not
pressing corn into oil right? It takes 60 plus ears of corn to
make 5 tablespoons of corn oil, which is the average consumption
of seed oils for a human. So we would never have had
exposure to this. Some diets today in the United
States or in Western society have 20% of our calories from
linoleic acid. So you're thinking .5 to 20%.
That is a huge, that is a huge amplification of linoleic acid
calories in in the human diet. And the problem is that that
means that the cell membranes of our facial skin, of our eyes, of
our macula, right, of our skin on our arms and our neck and our
everywhere in our body is enriched with linoleic acid.
And all of the cells in your body are full of this, these fat
cells, the mitochondrial membranes.
And so at every level, there's a potential problem here.
I mean, one of the most well researched issues here is not
necessarily about the skin as much as it is about the the
lipoproteins. So I don't want to get too
technical like cholesterol, but LDL, low density lipoprotein is
clearly more likely to oxidize, more likely to become damaged
when the membrane is enriched with linoleic acid.
And how do you enrich LDL with linoleic acid?
You eat more linoleic acid. So that's been shown multiple
times that if you give humans a seed oil versus olive oil, the
LDL is more likely to oxidize. And I don't think there would
be. I don't think there's many
cardiologists who would debate that LDL that is more likely to
oxidize is more likely to promote atherosclerosis.
So this is a problem for humans. And the same thing is kind of
happening in the skin. We know that ultraviolet light
is energetic and the theory, the hypothesis here is if your skin
is more susceptible to damage from a high energy ultraviolet
light, is it going to cause more DNA damage, more damage to the
skin, more sun aging, more photo aging in that situation?
And so it's been shown, you know, in these animal studies
that yes, when you apply it or when the animals are fed more
linoleic acid, they have worsening of the effects of, of
ultraviolet light on their skin. And nobody's ever done the study
in humans. That would be a fascinating
study. But they did do the study where
they applied linoleic acid directly to stratum corneum.
So, yeah, the, the idea here is historically, linoleic acid is
not something that we would have had this much exposure to.
We have this evolutionary mismatch and we just need to be
aware of that. And the solution is simple.
Just don't eat the seed oils. And if you're eating eggs or if
you're eating meat, preferably that is pastured and not fed
corn and soy, which can enrich linoleic acid in those foods.
But yeah, there's, there's a problem.
What we eat effects our skin. We know this, you know, this is
the, this is what we, this is what we do.
We know that environmental inputs affect our skin.
You know, we see that when we're around someone that's smoked
their whole life, their skin doesn't look great because
they've created so much oxidative stress.
And it's kind of a parallel mechanism with, with the seed
oils potentially. So there's a really interesting
study done with like deep frying.
So, you know, I think that heating oils is, is going to
damage the oil no matter what oil you have.
But we know that seed oils are much more susceptible to heat
damage from frying and deep frying and boiling than more
stable oils like tallow. And there's actually a study
that looked at the formation of these.
There's the very technical organic chemistry terms alpha
beta, unsaturated aldehydes, like acrylene in these, in these
oils. And what's interesting is that
acrylene is a chemical that's also in cigarette smoke.
So I, I, I, you know, I got, I think I got called fearmongering
for this statement, but the paper actually says that if you
look at one large fry serving from McDonald's, right?
So a serving of large French fries from McDonald's contains
the same amount of these alpha beta unsaturated aldehydes like
acrylene as smoking 25 cigarettes.
That's crazy. So.
There's a parallel here, right? These, these breakdown products
of lipids that are damaging to the human body are in parallel
between something that we all associate as clearly harmful and
damaging to a smoking a cigarette as eating something
that we think of as a treat that we're giving our kids, not you,
but you know, like, but a lot of people are giving their
children. Or that I craved growing up,
that I begged my parents let me get French fries, right?
Something that we celebrate within our culture as freedom,
like French fries cooked in seed oils.
That's a pretty hard thing to defend.
Do you think that sunglasses are contributing to skin cancer in
any way? It's possible.
I've never seen research that clearly shows it, but the
mechanism is there. And what's interesting here is
that there are pathways between the eyes and the skin, and we
get inputs from our environment through our eyes that affect the
way cells of our skin react. And so when you wear sunglasses,
theoretically, are you confusing the skin cells, right?
Is your body not putting up the normal defenses that have
happened throughout our history as humans because your body
thinks it's night time because your eyes are not seeing
ultraviolet light? It's very possible.
I think some research there would be fascinating.
There's a lot of difference, yeah.
Yeah, I know a lot of people will adamantly deny that, but it
just kind of makes sense intrinsically.
And then anecdotally, I feel like I've experienced that, Like
I've been trying to not wear sunglasses as much as I used to.
I'm not burning as much. I mean, along with ditching seed
oils, right? But and I've talked to several
people who feel the same way. So I think there could be
something there there. Probably is.
Have you seen the threads on X? And this is just crowdsourcing
information, but if you any time that I post this survey on X or
anyone else does, do you notice that you burn less or more since
you've cut out seed oils? The threads are huge.
Yes, it's hundreds of people saying I didn't expect this, but
I've earned way less now that I've cut out seed oils.
What's going on there? So look, some to anecdote does
not a research study make, but that's a compelling hypothesis
here that the human experience that has lived of thousands of
people now is I cut out seed oils, I burn less.
What's going on? Maybe we should study it.
How long do you think it takes for people to notice that
difference? Because you mentioned the the
seed oils like the effects of those accumulate in the organs
in the skin. How long does it take to reverse
that once someone stops eating seed oils?
So this is interesting. There's a couple of
pharmacokinetic studies we don't really know, right?
The one study that's often cited says that it takes 2 plus years
the turnover all the some membranes and.
Fat. That's kind of discouraging.
Yeah, yeah. But I've seen other studies in
monkeys and humans suggesting that you can accelerate that.
So there's a study in monkeys where they looked at fatty acid
composition, so the composition of the fatty acids in the fat
depot and they gave the monkeys a low fat diet and it happened
much more quickly, right. So it it makes sense that if
you, if you don't give humans fat, that the body has to make
it's own fat. We do de Novo lipogenesis.
You can take carbohydrates and turn it into fat, but again, we
only make saturated fat and then we can desaturate it into mono
unsaturated fat. So is it possible?
This has never been studied in humans, but is it possible that
we could? And this again, this is just
theory. I think low fat diets come with
risks and benefits and some people if they do too low fat
will definitely negatively affect their hormones.
But is it possible that there are strategies that we could use
to decrease the time that it takes to recycle the cell
membranes or your fat depot by restricting fat or restricting
linoleic acid in the human diet? That's I think that's likely.
Like for a period of time potentially.
Yeah, Yeah. So I think that the idea here is
here's the theory. What if maybe you don't have to
eat low fat, you cut down your fat in general a little bit, but
what if you ate low linoleic acid, right?
Because no one, I haven't really heard many people talking about
the absolute amount of linoleic acid in your diet.
So it goes to reason that if you eat less linoleic acid, your
cells are going to turn over and your linoleic acid sores will go
down more quickly. So that would mean not only
avoiding seed oils then, but also maybe cutting out like nuts
seeds for a period of time, like really restricting the linoleic.
Potentially, yeah. Yeah.
So this is the thing about olive oil, right?
And avocado, those are 15 to 25% linoleic acid.
So like, maybe you would just want to use butter or tallow
instead of olive oil, right? You only use animal fats.
You don't use any plant fats for some amount of time and you make
sure that your eggs are pasture raised soy and corn free because
we know that what a chicken eats affects the fatty acid
composition of the egg yolk, right?
It gets to be a little more granular and it gets to be a
little more heavy in terms of the the interventions.
But thinking about the total linoleic acid load that a human
is eating, the biggest mover by far is seed oils.
But beyond that, even going to, you know, not eating avocado and
olive for some amount of time may help it recycle more
quickly. And then there are definitely
ways to check it. You can check linoleic acid
levels in your red blood cells. You can check linoleic acid
levels in the blood. You can check it in your fat.
The fat's going to require a biopsy.
But the other tests are pretty easy.
And so I mean, it's, you know, this gets into the idea of
reference ranges and what's the normal reference range?
But when I do tests in my fatty acid composition, my linoleic
acid comes back low because I'm now probably more than two
standard deviations below the average American.
Yeah. So that's how they set the
reference range, right? They're going to take the mean
or the median, and then they're going to go 2 standard
deviations below and above. And so now I'm like, OK, that's
great. I want to be low because I want
to. Be it's not even based on what's
optimal, it's based on what's the most average.
Well, nobody, yeah, nobody knows what's optimal anymore.
OK, right. Like the testosterone levels are
going down. Like the the reference range for
testosterone on labs is going down because the average.
Is everyone's testosterone? Everyone is testosterone is
going down. So now the reference range with
two standard deviations from the mean is, you know it's following
the population. We should just keep it what it
was at like 100 years ago. Our grandfathers had more
testosterone than we, you know, like as men, you know, we think
about it. And similarly, women's hormones
are being negatively affected by the environment as well.
Well, let's transition to the topic of weight loss because
this is a big thing and a lot of people are turning to drugs like
Ozempic now to lose weight. What is your take on Ozempic?
So GLP one is one of these satiety hormones, right?
Satiety hormones like leptin, like cholecystokinin.
It's how humans decide if we're hungry or not.
And hunger is a very powerful cue for us.
It's one of the most powerful cues.
And so it's very hard for humans to ignore a hunger cue.
So Ozempic and other, these GLP one analogs, they're, they're
very effective at giving us hunger cues that we don't
otherwise have. And I think that in some
individuals you can make an argument that there's a use case
for them. Like extremely obese.
Extremely obese? Unwilling to change your diet?
OK, the better part of valor is probably to give you Ozempic
like you're not willing to change how you shop.
You are probably going to get like more benefit than you are
risk. But all these interventions
carry risk. There are side effects from
Ozempic. It's not a panacea.
It's again, it's not you're not obese because you have an
Ozempic deficiency, right? And you are not having excess
hunger because you were genetically born with an Ozempic
deficiency. It's not a vitamin, right?
You are, I would argue you are excessively hungry because your
satiety cues in your brain and your stomach and your pancreas
and your intestines are messed up because of the quality of the
foods you eat, because it's low quality food.
So I've been thinking a lot about this recently with have
you seen this David Bar? No.
It's it's, it's one of these new protein.
Bars I've yes I have seen it. Right.
It's in a gold package and there's an ingredient in there
and the ingredient is EPG. So it's a it's one of these
technical names. It's a sterified propoxalated
glycerol. OK, so they've made a fake fat.
Do you remember Olestra? Yes, remember anal spotting and
anal anal leakage. Kind.
Of yes, like maybe you never I I never had it it.
Rings a bell, so yeah. Yeah.
Well this is Olestra was the first incarnation of these fake
fats that were very low calorie. Technically speaking, fat is 9
calories per gram, but Olestra probably had half a calorie per
gram or something. And they don't get digested
right? So they give consumers the mouth
feel of fat, which imagine that we like because historically fat
was valuable for us as humans, but they don't have calories.
So EPG esterified propoxalated glycerol is the newest
incarnation of these fake fats. And just like the old fake fats,
it also decreases our absorption of fat soluble vitamins like
vitamin K K1, the study, but almost certainly K2 and beta
carotene. And it causes GI side effects
with like very colorful names like gas with discharge and anal
spotting. So like, you don't want these
things, right? Like This is why are we eating?
Why are why are we eating fake fats, right?
Yeah, why do they use it? They use it to confuse consumers
and convince us that this protein bar has 28 grams of
protein but low calories. And so this is the direction
that you should go. They're they're using it to give
it the bar a mouthfeel of fat without actually having the
calories of fat. So, so much of the weight loss
conversation, I think is misguided.
It's all around this calories, calories, calories restriction
idea, this idea that calories in equals calories out.
If you restrict your calories, you'll lose weight.
It's as simple as that. Why don't you understand this,
you troglodytes? Right.
So this is the sort of criticism.
And I think it's much more complicated than that.
And what we know very clearly now is that the quality of the
food you eat, the quality big capital Q of the food that you
put in the calories in determines the calories out.
It determines how well your metabolism works, how good your
basal metabolism is, and it determines how many calories you
will take in because your satiety is affected by the
quality of the calories you put in.
Why don't people like nuance? They just want it to be.
It's like the sun conversation. It's black and white.
It's like, no, there's so much more to it than just calories
in, calories out. Or avoid the sun versus bake in
the sun all day every. Day, right?
Right. So I think that the calories
conversation is actually kind of an interesting story.
So the calorie, calorie is a measure of heat.
It was originally created by this guy named Wilbur Atwater in
like the 1890s. And he took foods and he put
them in a bomb calorimeter and he burned them up and he looked
to see how much, how much heat a food produces.
Well, that's not how humans work, right?
When you eat a food, you're not like a train engine that someone
is shoveling coal into, and it's a fire that like turns a
propeller or a turbine. You are a complex series of
electron movements, right? When you eat a food, you are
getting energy from the electrons, the potential energy
of electrons in that food, whether it's glucose or fatty
acids. Your body is this elegant system
of extracting the potential energy of electrons from glucose
or fatty acids into these intermediate molecules NAD and
FADH 2 that then move the electrons into the electron
transport chain that then move protons across a concentration
gradient to fuel a nano motor that makes ATP.
That's how you make energy, right?
It sounds a lot more complex. Than it's not just burning.
It's not burning up a bagel in a calorimeter, right?
Like that's not how you do it. Yeah.
And so. But that has become the gold
standard. The gold standard and so Wilbur
Atwater 1890s creates this idea of calories in World War One and
World War 2, because we were rationing and we had to find
some way to feed soldiers, how many calories are we giving
them? The idea gets adopted 1950s and
1960s. There were a few diet books that
started to recommend this idea. Cut calories.
And you may not remember this, I don't, but I was alive at this
time. The idea of a calorie label has
apparently only been on food since 1990.
Wow. So when our parents were growing
up, even in the 80s when I was a young boy, apparently I don't
remember this. Like you would buy a food and it
didn't have a calorie label on it.
That's that's very recent. Very recent.
That's why we think about things as calories.
If I showed someone a chicken breast, they're going to think
that chicken breast is 25 grams of protein and 100 calories.
That's essentially how they're going to see it.
We think about things in terms of calories and macro nutrients,
protein, fat, carbohydrates. But a chicken breast is 37,000
different compounds. There's a, there's a database in
Canada, it's called food b.ca. And you could put in like rib
eye steak, 42,000 components in a rib eye steak, an apple 4000,
garlic 4500, right? So the complexity of our foods
is so much deeper than just protein, fat, carbohydrates,
calories. But we've been sort of sold and
I think this is where the story gets interesting and it's kind
of sinister. We've been sold this calorie
forward model and I think we've been sold this calorie Ford
model potentially by industry interests that are trying to get
us to think about food as calories and not as quality.
There's something called this is where it really kind of makes me
mad. I'm going to stop my do it, bang
my fist. In 2015, the New York Times ran
an expose on something called the Global Energy Balance
Network funded by Coca-Cola secretly.
And what this group does was basically tell us it's OK to eat
junk food, just don't eat too much of it.
Be an energy balance. It's a calorie forward model.
It's promoting calories in, calories out.
You can drink a Coca-Cola. Just make sure you go walk
tonight and burn those calories. You can eat 100 calories of
Oreos in a snack pack. Just make sure you eat less
calories at dinner. So this calories in, calories
out. I really think that there's, and
I'm sort of saying this half jokingly, but maybe not like
it's kind of a psyop and it's like a psyop aimed at convincing
people to eat the lowest quality food.
Because how else do you make this argument?
Why would a human, other than the fact that they're massively
addictive and they've been engineered to be addictive and
they absolutely hijack the tide in our brain.
How do you convince a human that it's OK to eat a garbage
processed Oreo instead of a carrot?
Right. And obviously those have
massively different flavor profiles and reward profiles in
the brain. But I think humans know
intuitively that a carrot or an apple or a steak or a piece of
fish is a different absolutely human experience.
Micronutrients. Human health is completely
different when you eat a whole food a single versus at Oreo.
Yeah, as you're describing this, I'm thinking like, was this
around the time when all of the food or all of the scientists
from the cigarette industry kind of transitioned into the food
and food industry to make those foods more palatable and
addictive? I mean, it just feels like a lot
of marketing. Same time frame.
So RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris in the 80s bought a number of
these ultra processed food companies.
And as you're saying, this is this is human history, right?
This is not conjecture. This is not conspiracy theory.
They use the cigarette playbook to engineer many of these foods
to be more addictive and more palatable.
And then they left in the early 2000s.
And all the other processed food companies followed suit.
So they left this indelible mark on the processed food industry.
So yeah, it was all happening 80s and 90s.
So in that 20 year span, our food changed forever.
I mean, our food being our processed food.
But you know what? Kids eat 70 to 80% of their
foods that processed foods. Most humans upwards of 60 plus
percent of their food is processed food.
So the majority of our food changed, you know, 30 to 40
years ago, underneath our noses, right?
It's so tragic then, because a lot of people they, they want to
be healthy, they want to lose weight, but they've listened to
what they've been told and they're kind of stuck within
this system of, you know, they're eating these foods,
They're they're not getting full from them.
They're just leaves them wanting more.
So what would you tell people who are kind of feeling
discouraged? Like what is the best way to
maintain a healthy weight long term?
I'd say it's simple, but it's not easy, right?
So it's simple single ingredient foods and foods that your great
grandmother would recognize if they have a label.
So single ingredient foods, you walk in the grocery store, it's
basically the outside of the grocery store.
Eggs, milk, cheese, meat, chicken, fish, red meat, right?
Cabbage, Apple, Cucumber. Cabbage.
I'm surprised. Well, I'm trying to be
inclusive, right? If you want to eat, if you want
to eat salads, be my guest. But you know, apple, orange, you
know, pineapple singling, reading of foods, you get the
idea. If you're seeing a label, would
my great grandmother recognize the ingredients, right?
So most processed foods, my great grandmother wouldn't
recognize the ingredients, right?
Like, so my great grandmother is reading the ingredients of a
David bar EPG. What is EPG, you know, and then
the ingredients become artificial and natural flavors.
I have no idea what that is. No one does.
Now I'm channeling my great grandmother now.
And then you have, you know, sucralose, aspartame, Ace K like
no one knows these ingredients and they're problematic for
humans. So that's the simple rule.
Like if you look at, for instance, a package, and I think
the problem here and the reason I say it's simple but not easy
is the convenience piece, right? So I can say you eat single
ingredient foods, it's easy guys.
And I know that your audience is going to say, OK, I work, I have
children, it's hard, it's it's time.
So this is where the process manufacturers get us.
It's convenience. And this is what worries me
about things like this David Bar or these protein forward Pop
Tarts or cereals, is that I think processed food
manufacturers are smart and they've seen the writing on
their wall and they realize, hey, we're getting called out
for Doritos and Coca-Cola. Let's make something that is 1°
better. Wait, is that really a thing?
Pop tarts with protein? Oh yeah, I haven't seen that one
yet. Oh yeah, protein pop tarts.
Yeah, absolutely. Oh my gosh.
Protein brownies, protein cookies.
Oh yeah. It's just like, let's make
something 1° better. Like this is the new iteration.
And you see this with, look, OK, anything is a step in the right
direction, but it's like, I think that they're trying to
fool us in some ways. And they're saying, let's make
things 1° better, one iteration better.
And instead of having a Snickers bar, you have a bar with whey
protein and collagen, but it also has EPG.
You know this fake fat that's going to cause loss of fat
soluble vitamins and it has artificial flavor.
Yeah, it's like the it's these labeling games.
I mean, the same thing happens in the skin Care World.
Like consumers know what to put on the label to make people feel
just a little bit better about what they're using on their
skin. And the same thing happens in
food. Just a little bit better, right?
And so at this rate, we're never going to get back to good food,
right? So you have to take a quantum
leap and say, OK, I'm going to just start eating good food like
this. The number of steps between
like, OK, you have Snickers bar, maybe the next step is a David
bar, but it's like 25 steps to get back to a freaking chicken
breast, right? Whereas you could get the same
amount of protein in a David bar with the same amount of calories
in a chicken breast and way more.
But like you have a, it's the Grand Canyon divide there.
We're just, we're never going to get there at this rate.
So but people get confused and, and they leverage convenience.
So they make something that's 1° better and convenient.
And so that's why, I mean, that's the whole reason I built
lineage. You know, we built lineage.
It's like, like I wanted to try as best I could in my little
small corner of the world to make something that's convenient
but high quality because like you have to fight back somehow.
And look, I would much rather that someone just make a rib eye
steak. But if you're running around
like when I looked at the market like jerkies and meat sticks,
there's nothing that I really liked.
And so like, let me just make that for people.
And that that's sort of my answer.
It's like, let me create this for you because I'm in this
unique situation that I never thought I'd be in.
And I want to help you with the convenience piece.
But the fact of the matter is that if we let convenience
dictate too many of our decisions, it's just so hard to
make good decisions. I flew here yesterday from
Florida, and you look in the airport and I do this now.
It's like my thing. I just look at all the foods
that you can get. I'm thinking like, what is even
here? Yeah.
What is the help if we let convenience be the arbiter of
the choices we make with food? It's very hard.
The convenience is killing us essentially.
I know that you mentioned like it's simple, but it's not easy
and I think that with some intentionality it does become
easy and second nature. Once you create the patterns.
Yeah, once you're there and you've done a great job with
lineage like of providing these on the go snacks and the air
dried steak is insane. It's good, so good.
And you know, having that versus like, I don't know, a protein
bar or candy bar, like you actually feel satiated a.
Protein Pop tart, Yeah. Protein pop tart like there are
ways I mean and I think something that is helpful for me
because I have a lot going on a full life 3 kids business like a
lot going on and I've just we become OK with eating really
like simple meals like this morning I had ground beef and
coffee with raw milk and like felt safe shade was nothing
fancy very easy to make I mean we do pot roast a lot like throw
carrots and steak and you know some water and salt into the
crock pot and it takes 5 minutes and you have a meal for the
whole family at the end of the day.
So like once you kind of get in these rhythms and habits, it
does become pretty easy and you feel better, you have more
energy, which you know, is it? It's a convenience to feel
better. Hormonal balance?
Yeah. Libido.
I. Mean and it makes everything in
life easier once you feel good versus like short term, yes, a
little bit more work, but long term you're really getting so
much convenience back into your life by making these intentional
choices. It's a total, It's just a
mindset shift. Yeah, but that's a hard thing
for people. It is.
It's meaningful and it's lasting, but it's challenging.
And I love that you brought the satiety piece because I want to
just mention this for a minute because I think this is
sinister. There's a study that just came
out a few months ago. So we talked about EPG, you
know, horrible artificial flavors, natural flavors, not
great for humans, but these artificial sweeteners I think
are sinister. And I've talked about these for
years now and. What are some examples of?
Are Supralose, Ace K and aspartame are the big ones, and
Ace K is sometimes as a sulfame K on the label.
Sucralose is sometimes a Splenda is the brand name.
So those are the three big ones. And I've been talking about
these for years. And whenever I would talk about
it, people in the health space would say, look, Paul, here's a
huge meta analysis that shows drinking diet soda is weight
neutral compared to drinking or even better than drinking Chotto
with sugar, right? So you're so there's nothing to
worry about these artificial sweeteners.
And I think like, yeah, you're missing the forest for the
trees. Like they definitely affect the
way the microbiome is communicating.
So there's quorum sensing. Quorum sensing is a word that we
used to talk about how bacteria and viruses and fungi in our
guts communicate with each other.
The artificial sweeteners definitely change that,
potentially in a negative way. And a recent study came out with
sucralose showing that it increases blood flow to the
hypothalamus. So it's it's changing the way
your brain reacts to food in a way that it's probably making
you hungrier. So here is at least the
mechanistic evidence to say this is not benign.
Like, you can show me this meta analysis, but I don't buy it.
I just don't buy it. And I just don't think that any
human that has intuition is going to look at a protein bar
or a protein pop tart because all these protein pop Tarts and
protein cookies have these artificial sweeteners because
they're marketed as 0 sugar, which is great because processed
sugar is not good for humans. But humans still want it to
taste sweet because we have this evolutionary desire for
carbohydrates from our history with sweet fruit, which is a
great thing. And so you put these artificial
sweeteners in, look guys, it's fine, it's safe, no problem.
But then you see studies like this and it's like, wait, it's
actually probably sabotaging your society.
So the amount of satiety, if there were an objective way to
measure satiety, which is lack of hunger from 150 calories of
ground beef versus 150 calories of a fake protein bar with
sucralose. I my money, all of my money is
going on on, on this on the, the ground beef, you know, like the
ground beef horse here. 100 percent, 100%.
And I think the first step is like, we have to admit and
acknowledge and come to terms with the fact that our brains
have been hijacked. And there's no shame in that.
Like, I think that all of us, most of us probably have, have
been in a phase of life where we've eaten a lot of processed
foods or we've grown up eating a lot of processed foods.
I know I did. And so it's like there's no, you
know, we were told this like it's not anyone's, it's not our
fault, you know it. I do think it is their fault,
but like there's no shame, just acknowledging that.
And then like starting that journey and making different
choices. And I think it takes a long time
to for your body to kind of stop craving that stuff.
I mean, I've been on this journey for like 10 plus years
now and I'm still blown away by like even now from six months
ago, I'm like, wow, like chocolate was always my thing,
like dark chocolate, I would crave it and I'm like, I don't,
I, I don't really crave it as much anymore.
So it's like it can be a quick shift, but it also can be kind
of like a slow journey with a lot of ups and downs.
But it does, it does get better over time and it's amazing like
how much more full you are when you are prioritizing animal
based protein and how much easier it is to maintain a
healthy weight once your body gets used to that and kind of
craves that for energy versus junk food for energy.
Yeah, yeah. And I think that's an important
point to bring up for people that there will be withdrawal,
you know. I mean, you know, during my
residency after medical school, I would sometimes do rotations
in like detox clinics and stuff and we would see people who come
into the ER with benzodiazepine withdrawal or alcohol
withdrawal. People can die from like alcohol
withdrawal. And I'm not trying to make light
of this or minimize that, but I think that it like we all and
there are detox Centers for alcohol, right?
I almost feel like there is an unmet need for like we have
processed food detox. Like what is a human to do?
And I'm saying this tongue in cheek, but kind of seriously,
like I think that it would serve a valuable purpose for humans if
there were a place where humans could go to detox from processed
food. Because most of us have had this
subjective experience where you stop eating this processed food
and you just crave it. And unless you have incredible
willpower, a family to support you, a community to support you,
because we do what people around us do, it's very easy to fall
and it's very easy for the convenience to take us down
because you're travelling, whatever you're travelling to
see your family in Atlanta or Florida or wherever.
I'm, I don't have food. My plans got changed and now I'm
in the airport and the only thing here is combos, which I
used to love as a kid. You know, there's like cheese or
protein, like the peanut butter filled pretzels or, you know,
or, you know, here's a, I'm just going to have one, you know, one
like 1 sandwich or, you know, one thing with like this deep
fried thing or this bread or, and then it can sometimes for
some people just 'cause this return to this, this pattern,
which is hard for us. You are notoriously not a huge
fan of vegetables. Most of us have been told our
entire lives to eat our veggies and prioritize veggies.
What is your take on vegetables and why may they not be as
healthy as everyone thinks they are?
So the way that I frame this now, and this is an evolution
and sort of the way that I've talked about this is like, look,
if you're thriving, don't change anything.
You know, if you're not thriving, if you have autoimmune
disease or insomnia or depression or any whatever
condition human might suffer from, maybe think about your
assumptions about nutrition. In my own life and the work that
I've done unexpectedly, I've probably encountered hundreds if
not thousands of people now that in real life and in emails and
comments and stuff who who say to me like, you know, when I cut
XYZ vegetable out, my elbow pain got better or my eczema got
better. So I don't think everyone needs
to be cutting vegetables out of their life, but I think for some
people who are uniquely sensitive from an autoimmune
perspective, the removal of vegetables is pretty incredible.
And when you think about it. So let's just take a step back.
What is a vegetable? A vegetable is the non fruit
part of a plant. What is a fruit?
Well, a fruit is the thing that gets sweet or colorful or has
seeds in it. So a lot of people don't know
that avocado, squash and cucumbers are all fruit, right?
So what is a vegetable? Vegetables are leaves, spinach,
kale, cabbage stems, things like asparagus or rhubarb, and then
the roots and the seeds of plants.
I mean, people don't really think about beans and grains as
vegetables. Technically they probably are,
or the roots of plants like sweet potatoes or white
potatoes. And so those are the non
fruiting parts of plants. And if you look at human history
and you look at indigenous cultures, they sometimes eat
roots. When I went to visit the Hada in
Tanzania, they will eat roots sometimes, but they generally
that's like their least favorite thing.
Yeah, there's a researcher named Frank Marlowe who studied the
Hada, and he actually published a paper.
The title of the paper is Tubers as a fall back food for the
Hada. So he gave him a survey and he
said, what are your favorite foods?
Invariably men and women. Honey #1 honey is #1 #2 for men
is meat and number 2-3. And four, Thai for women is
meat, berries and baobab. Baobab is like this kind of dry
citrusy fruit that they get. It's the tree of life.
It's this really beautiful tree in Tanzania and probably other
parts of Africa. But so men, it's like meat and
honey. For women, it's honey and like
berries. And but for both of them, the
last one is tubers, right? So yes, when you think about it,
historically, tubers are probably the least harmful or
the least problematic for people, though some people are
quite sensitive to the nightshades and white potatoes.
But the the stems and the leaves, Mahadza never touched
them. This is just not part of their
culture. They use the the roots of a lot
of plants as poison for their arrows.
They'll use leaves of plants as medicine if they have a stomach
ache, potentially parasitic or other things.
But it wasn't until so I was there with Anthony Gustin, my
friend, my business partner in Lineage.
I remember that. One, and he got he got like a
stomach thing when he was there. Not surprisingly, it's Tanzania.
And the first thing they do is walk over this Bush and they're
like, here, chew on this, chew on this branch.
And OK, so that's when you use the vegetables.
Like generally within these indigenous cultures, plants are
medicine, not food, Not they don't have a value, right?
Just that they're medicinal, not food.
And so we've, I think that for a lot of people, we've kind of
flipped the, the hierarchy on its head, right?
We've been told red meat is horrible for you.
It'll raise your cholesterol. We've vilified red meat and
animal food, some of the most nutrient rich, Simply put, like
the most nutrient rich foods on the planet, we've vilified them
and subjugated them to the bottom of the hierarchy.
And we've taken, I mean, look, if somebody's eating unprocessed
food, I'm happy. But we've within the unprocessed
food realm, we've taken the vegetables, which are probably
the least bioavailable sources of nutrients and they have the
most toxins. Yeah, you have to eat a lot more
plants to get anywhere near the same amount of nutrition that
you would get from like one steak.
Well a lot of the thing that really important thing to see
here is that a lot of the nutrients in the steak don't
even occur in the plants. Creatine, carnitine, answering
taurine, B12K2, none of these things actually even occur in
the plants. It's not that plants don't have
value. Clearly humans can get some
value from leaves, but not as not in the same ways, right?
And so it's different and, and plants, to be fair and balanced,
plants have higher amounts of some things like beta carotene.
Well, animals have retinol form of vitamin A and plants have
beta carotene or there are a lot of plants that are pretty high
in folate. And if you're looking at animal
foods, you have to eat liver if you want to get folate or an egg
yolk. So you know, a steak doesn't
have everything, but it has a lot, and a lot of the things in
a steak are not actually found in any plant foods at all.
Let's talk about liver a little bit more and maybe this is a
good time for us to try our liver smoothies.
Yeah. So what's in here?
It's kind of separated a little bit.
So it's raw beef liver? Yeah.
Raw milk? No, no.
Strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and lineage honey.
Let's go. So all right.
Pressure's on. Cheers.
I dig it. You like it?
Yeah, it's great. I mean, I love.
It's a little warm, it's been sitting out for a long time.
That's good. Give me all the fermented liver.
So what makes liver such so special?
So some people think about liver as the filter, which isn't
really true. The liver is where we have phase
one and phase two detoxification and that's how we detoxify
things. But then the liver excretes them
or packages them for excretion and poop and pee.
So the liver is kind of this enzymatic manufacturing plant
that like exports things and gets rid of bad things.
But it's not storing toxins. It's not like how can the.
Body assimilate and get rid of them.
Essentially, yes, yes. And when we think about it like
you can look at the liver of animals, it doesn't, it's not
just full of all the toxins the animals eating in its whole
life. Like obviously the quality of
the foods and animals eating effects the quality of the meats
and the organs grassfed versus grain fed.
But the liver, I just think of it like the metaphor I use is
like when I used to make spaghetti in college, you drain
the spaghetti into a colander and the spaghetti, the spaghetti
stays. That's not the liver is not just
a sieve, right? The liver is not a filter.
It's not like your coffee grounds and the liver, right?
It doesn't just catch everything.
It wants to take all that stuff that your body doesn't want and
export it. But because of that, because it
is such an enzymatic powerhouse, it is full of unique nutrients
that often don't occur in other organs of the body.
So that's what's unique is that when you look at an animal like
a cow for instance, it's most of us like to eat, eat beef or a
chicken and you eat that animal from nose to tail.
And you don't just eat the muscle meat.
You get almost a complete array of every vitamin and mineral
that we know of as humans. The only potential thing missing
is vitamin C, but meat actually contains vitamin.
C does it, Yes, I didn't know that.
Yeah, the spleen is the most rich source of vitamin C in an
animal. The liver has vitamin C.
The meat actually has vitamin C now.
I think you can get more vitamin C from cherries and raspberries
and blueberries and and oranges, right?
What about Kiwi? Kiwi is a great source of
vitamin C but meat is known as an anti scorbutic.
So this history of the Limeys and Britain and this idea of
scurvy going across the ocean, they knew that if they eat meat,
that would cure scurvy. So meat cures scurvy.
So meat has some vitamin C. So really you could technically
say eating an animal from nose to tail contains essentially
every vitamin and mineral that you would need to thrive as a
human. If you ate fresh meat, you would
actually get carbohydrates too, because there would be so much
fresh glycogen in the meat. So the idea that like and I, I
eat plants, right I. But for a while you didn't.
You only ate animal. A year and a half.
Yeah, so why did you decide to incorporate some plants and
fruits back into your diet? So I think that one of the
things I've been thinking about a lot recently is bio
individuality. And I was, it was an interesting
experiment for me. So the reason I did carnivore is
because I had bad eczema. So when I started carnivore, I
was in my residency in Seattle and I had eczema, an eczema
flare that was horrible. I think it was related to some
additional mushrooms I was using, not psilocybin, but like
chaga, reishi, Cordyceps. I was doing mushroom extracts
and I had a horrible eczema flare.
Interesting. And I had had eczema flares in
the past related to chocolate or unpasteurized dairy, or probably
things like tomatoes that I wasn't aware of.
Nightshades do seem to trigger my.
Eczema Lectins. In some cases, I mean, tomatoes
have lectins, all foods have lectins.
It just seems like plant lectins are potentially more problematic
from an immune system perspective than animal lectins.
But yeah, I think grains may have triggered my eczema in the
past. So I went strict carnivore and
for a year and a half I eat nothing but meat, fat and organs
and salt. Wow.
And isn't that? Hard.
I I like doing these experiments, so I I really.
I thought it was so gung ho. Yeah, I thought it was really
interesting. And that was the time when I
wrote the book about the carnivore diet.
And since then a lot of things have changed.
And I've I've followed my perspective on a number of
things. But man, there's a lot of people
who have really benefited from that type of a diet.
I mean, you look at Jordan Peterson and, you know, a number
of people have reversed recalcitrant autoimmune
conditions with very simple elimination diet.
So there's a real, there's a role for it.
I found out that for me, adding back carbohydrates did not cause
an eczema flare if they were from fruit.
And I felt so much better. So I think there's a lot of bio
individuality here. And I'm trying to think now
about how to anticipate what are your genetics, right?
Where's your family from? Are you going to do better with
carbohydrates or less or worse? Because I have some friends that
say to me like, I think I feel better with high fat, low carb.
And I think, OK, well, that's great.
Like if you feel better with that and you don't have muscle
cramps. So I had sleep disturbance, I
had heart palpitations, I had muscle cramps.
My testosterone went from about 800 to around 505 fifty.
So it didn't go completely, you know, low, but it went pretty
low for me and then. When you added carbs back in, it
all comes back. It went.
From fruit and honey was what I started with and now I do squash
also. So squash is a fruit and, and
now I mean, I think that what I've learned about myself is
that I, I'm Mediterranean. My family is Saladino.
They're my dad's family's Sicilian.
So I think that, you know, probably somewhere in my
genetics is, yeah, your body likes carbohydrates.
And the more active I am, the more carbohydrates I eat and I
maintain leanness. You know, I don't, I don't do
any hormones. I've never done any hormone
replacement. I don't have a problem with a
man or a woman doing hormone replacement if they've ruled out
any reversible causes of low testosterone or hormonal
decline. But I don't take any hormones.
I stay lean. I stay muscular and so why, you
know, why would I eat less carbohydrates?
I think it's fine. I don't see an issue with
carbohydrates. And I also stay very insulin
sensitive. So I found out that works for
me. So that's really interesting.
So it's like, it's almost like I was getting, you know, different
aspects of the of the equation and trying to see more of the
full picture. Like, OK, look, I do think
elimination diets, this is to your vegetable question are
helpful for people, especially with autoimmune conditions,
right? When you cut out vegetables, if
you have autoimmune disease, it's probably worth a trial of
that. If nothing gets better, include
it. You know, if you love your steam
kale, knock yourself out. Just make sure you check your
thyroid labs because kale and broccoli and those foods do have
compounds in them that inhibit absorption at the level of the
thyroid and can affect the thyroid.
But this is the story of vegetables that they do contain
defense chemicals. I mean that the leaves, the
stems, the roots, the seeds of plants are defended and they
have defense chemicals. It's the only way they can
defend themselves. Animals can run away, they can
attack bite. Plants don't have that
capability. Plants don't have the
capability. So some people are probably more
sensitive to this than others. But I mean, like over here,
people can't see it in the frame, but this is a beautiful
scene. There are sheep grazing on
grass. These are ruminant animals,
right? These are animals evolved to eat
that grass. We are not evolved to eat that
grass. Like, if I eat what that sheep
is eating, I'm not going to feel very good.
I might have diarrhea. I might have.
I might puke. It would be a very bad afternoon
for me, right? So all of these plants are not
just here for my eating. Like, this is not good food for
humans. And even the sheep know this.
And if you take even ruminant animals like this and you can
find them in too small a paddock, you know this, I'm sure
they they sometimes have mass die off because they don't have
enough variety of plants to eat. They're not just eating one
single species. They're eating a little bit of
this one, a little bit of that one, a little bit of that one,
because they have this intrinsic knowledge, OK, that plant has
this defense chemical. My body can handle this much of
it. That plant has this defense
chemical and this plant has this defense chemical.
So that this is what animals do. They graze.
They don't just eat one single species of food.
Like, like we shouldn't, you know, we're not going to be good
if we just eat kale. So they're, they're very smart
about this and they even appreciate that there are
defense chemicals and food. So yeah, it's, it's a, it's a
nuanced thing. I don't think everyone eats kind
of vegetables, but for some people it's very helpful.
Yeah. It's something to play with.
Yeah. And I've known a lot of people
who have had autoimmune conditions that have gone
straight carnivore, not permanently, but for a period of
time, and have experienced a lot of relief from that.
Tell us just quickly, like where you've landed now, diet wise,
what you eat. Like maybe just a brief snapshot
of like what you eat in a typical day.
Yeah. So broadly, I eat meat.
I mostly eat grass fed beef. That's almost all the meat that
I eat. I don't eat fish because for me
it's not worth it because of the heavy metals, the PFAS, the
forever chemicals and the microplastics.
I I like fish, but I just don't choose to eat it.
So I think fish is good for humans.
If you eat a lot of fish, just check your heavy metals, right?
I just find red meat to be more enjoyable than chicken.
So I don't eat a lot of chicken. So, but I eat meat.
I eat fruit, organic fruit that I can find hopefully locally or
in season. But one of the things I like
about being in the States is I can get cherries.
I don't get cherries in Costa Rica and they're one of my
favorite foods. So I eat a lot of cherries.
I eat berries in season that are organic.
I eat squash. I like spaghetti squash.
I like about to squash. I eat raw dairy, so hopefully I
can get raw goat milk or raw cow's milk, and then I have
animal fat and then I have salt and that's pretty much it.
I feel like that is kind of there's everything you need
there and that's pretty much how I try to eat as well.
I do have some nuts and seeds, some chocolate sometimes, but
for the most part, I notice that I do feel the best when I'm
eating the animal based type of diet that you just described.
So this podcast is kind of fresh.
We're still like under a year and we haven't really gotten
into commonly accepted drugs like coffee, alcohol, topics
like that. I know you just came out with a
coffee, but you don't drink it yourself, No.
Can you explain why you decided to come out with a product that
you don't personally consume? You said you drink coffee.
I do. Jimmy over there drinks coffee.
Martin from my team drinks coffee.
How many on your team drink? You guys who drinks coffee?
Everyone's raised. 100% of people over here 100% OK OK, so
that's why I made a coffee. Everyone on my team drinks
coffee and everyone I know drinks coffee.
My girlfriend drinks coffee. Outlier.
Right. And so I was like, look, I'm
going to make a good coffee. This is kind of the, the, the
benefit of of building companies like Lineage, right, is that I
get to have agency with vision aligned business partners like
Anthony to bring products into the world that are unique that
don't exist for an audience that is asking for them.
So, you know, just because a bunch of people say, Hey, I want
this type of coffee or will you please make a meat stick with
the some really good high quality grass?
It doesn't mean the meat stick can exist unless there's the
people that can like bring the project together, right, because
it may not be viable and might not be able to reach enough
people. This is what's awesome about
what you do is that you've been able to create products that
people are asking for in a way that they they didn't exist
before you made them. So this is actually like, I feel
like this is art, you know, making things for people that
they benefit from. This is what we do, and I feel
really good about that. I'm really proud of what we've
done at lineage. And you guys, I'm sure are
really proud of what you do with your stuff.
And you should be because it's very, very intentionally built.
And that's that's very beautiful for people to receive.
And so with coffee, it was like, OK, if I were going to drink
coffee, which I probably never will, I have.
Have you tried it I. Have had coffee.
I tried a little bit of our coffee, OK, just to try it.
But the last time that I had coffee before that was probably
20 plus years ago. Wow.
When I was in PA school. So before I went to medical
school, I went to PA school. And were you like, addicted to
coffee back then or just never sat well with you?
I. It definitely made me feel kind
of hyped up, but I just didn't like the jittery things of it.
It's like my husband, he doesn't drink any caffeine.
Yeah, I mean, I think for some people it's not great, but if
you make a coffee, make it organic, make it shade grown
regenerative, test it for mold and test it for pesticides.
And so that's what we did. And so I wanted to make like a
really good high quality coffee. That's that's kind of what we do
at Lineage. Like it's not interesting to me
to make something unless it's very cool and very unique and
very high quality. That's what we want to do.
So that's why I did it. And I think people love it.
I think it's sold out on the first day.
Wow. Yeah, I don't know.
You get more coffee in stock. What about alcohol?
Do you think alcohol is OK in moderation or should people
avoid it completely? I mean, life is worth living,
right? I don't drink alcohol.
I have had alcohol within my life, but never to excess.
I've I don't really remember the last time people ask me.
Sometimes I do remember the last time I had half a beer was my
first year of medical school. Wow.
So that was many years ago and I was running for class president.
Incidentally, I lost, but I was running for class president and
I was at a bar with people in the class and I was just kind of
hanging out and I had half a beer.
That was the last time, so probably close to 20 years ago
that I had a beer. I don't miss it in my life.
I feel like when I try and frame the alcohol conversation, I just
think that most people, I think everyone is smart enough, good
looking enough, charismatic enough to have friends talk to
people in bars without alcohol. Like people just need to know
that you're good enough without alcohol and it's not great for
you. We know that even one drink a
day averaged over a week thins the neocortex of the brain.
It's just not great for us as humans.
So there's these competing ideas that like, oh, you should drink
a glass of wine per night and then we'll well, one drink a day
thins the neocortex. So I see alcohol as like from
zero to 1. It's a toxin.
Like any amount of alcohol is toxic.
Where all those studies about like the antioxidants and red
wine and the heart health benefits were those funded by
the alcohol industry? I don't know who they were
funding I. Heard something about?
That they may have been, I mean, but look, it's like foods are
complex, right? And something can be have good
qualities for us and bad qualities for us simultaneously,
right. So we just have to kind of weigh
them. That's like a good this is like
this is akin to vegetables. Vegetables do contain nutrients,
but for some people I would argue they're net negative.
And I think that alcohol is kind of the same way.
You can make an argument that alcohol is beneficial because it
affects platelet aggregation and thins the blood.
So drinking alcohol is probably going to lower your risk of
clotting events, but is it then going to do other negative
things in your body? So I think that like most, I
think it's more clear cut than coffee for me that like, I think
most people's lives get better when they cut alcohol out
completely. That's just what I'll say Like,
and but you know, if you want to drink with your wife at dinner
or you're having a drink on your anniversary, be my guest.
But just know that the science doesn't say that like that's
really going to benefit you. What about nicotine?
Nicotine has become popular in the Wellness community.
What's your take on nicotine? So nicotine is a naturally
occurring neurotransmitter in the human body.
But I think that when we use these things supplementally,
there's going to be changes in the human body.
This is kind of like a Ozempic conversation to me.
Like nicotine does things in the human body.
It is bio active and maybe in some people it decreases
cognitive decline if they have, you know, neurologic disease.
But I think that for most of us, you're going to get changes in
the body long term that are not going to be worth it.
And I think a lot of us are using it in ways that don't.
Benefit us long term. So I would not do supplemental
nicotine. I don't I don't like that I've
seen some people use it. I think people use it for
certain neurologic situations. And yes, like I think there are
studies that show that nicotine exposure might improve
Alzheimer's outcomes because if people are metabolically unwell
and you give them more certain signaling of certain
neurotransmitters, that might have a benefit, but what's the
risk on the backside? So I think it's an individual
equation for each of us, but I think for most people it's net
negative to use nicotine and you're definitely going to have
adjustments in the human body that to the nicotine and when
you stop it craving and I don't think it's worth it.
Yeah, yeah, no free lunch. OK.
Microplastics are also a big conversation right now.
This is something that you've spoken out about quite a bit.
How are we exposed to different microplastics in our environment
and what are the negative impacts of them?
So if you look, I mean, you've seen the studies, now they look
in human testicles, human ovaries, human brains.
There's microplastics everywhere.
That's scary. You think my brain has an
appreciable amount of microplastics in it?
And these are essentially like petroleum byproducts, right?
Yep, small fragments of plastic. So unfortunately we don't, we
absorb them and we hold on to some of them and our body
probably detoxifies them gradually in sort of a flux as a
flux, you know, in and out. But I think the most important
thing with microplastics is to understand like the biggest
sources of exposure. When I've looked at sheer
numbers, I think the biggest source of exposure is plastics
like plastic water bottles, plastic lined containers.
But there are a lot of those things that I think a lot that
many of us don't have an awareness of.
So obviously getting your bottled water in plastic is a
horrible idea. Thousands, 10s of thousands,
hundreds of thousands of microplastics per liter,
especially if it's been sitting on the shelf at Costco for six
months or sitting in your car in 200° heat as the car is turning
into a sauna. Horrible idea, but all cans are
lined with plastic, so soda cans.
The worst can is a soup can because soup cans are filled
with hot soup. Yeah.
So the thing you don't want to do is to put hot liquids into
plastic. And believe me, when I was in PA
school, I had plastic containers, and I took my
chicken and pasta sauce and I put it in the microwave and I
dosed myself in microplastics just like the rest of us, right?
Yeah. Oh, this is great.
I didn't even think about it. Just so unaware, but you do not
want to put hot things into plastic.
That's a horrible idea. So soups, all these things
really. That's probably one of the
biggest exposures that we're not aware of.
I was pretty, I was pretty surprised by the numbers with
tea and tea bags. I think I need to see some more
studies, but tea apparently has quite a bit of myoplastics.
You would never want to brew tea.
Have you seen those like plastic tea bags?
They're like the pyramidal shaped bags.
And they're like kind of pearly looking.
They look really pretty. But yeah, I see those a lot at
spas. And I used to drink them and now
I, I just, I just imagine all of the plastic that I'm drinking
when I drink them and I can't do it.
Anymore Well, the worst one for me is do you ever have a camel
bag? One of those camel bags.
They tasted like plastic. And I used to do so much running
and biking. I mean, I yeah, I'm.
You can really taste it like I can.
I can imagine the taste right now and like drinking the the
plastic residue. Yes.
Yeah, and drinking out of plastic bottles when I ride my
road bike or my mountain bike. And you just don't know with
those bottles, like if they've been sitting in a hot warehouse
for however long. Water doesn't expire.
So I mean, yeah, even if, like, it's not hot, when you have it
in your possession, you don't know where it's been stored.
Same with all these foods. Yeah.
So it's, it's tough. I mean, this is another big
exposure of mycoplastics too, because they're in the ocean,
they're swimming in it literally and they're bioaccumulating
this. So what do we do?
So look, none of us is going to be free of microplastics.
One of the most challenging things is just getting meat, you
know, So I still get meat in plastic from the store because I
want to buy meat and it's already packaged in plastic.
I imagine that if it's frozen, there's not as much transfer of
anything from the plastic to the meat, whether it's endocrine
disrupting chemicals or little fabrments, fragments of
microplastics. But we haven't solved it yet.
You know, I've often thought, like, how could we build better
packaging, plastic packaging. I mean, you know, I'm looking at
some cars over here. I'm thinking like the number of
plastic parts to make a car, the number of plastic parts to make
all of the technology that we are using here is innumerable.
But like, that is a problem for us as humans because it's
putting more plastic in the environment and the plastic
packaging around our foods is a big deal.
We. Just rely on it so much, yeah.
How do we? Fix it, I don't.
Know I've gotten like quarter cows or half cows before from
primal pastors and had it wrapped in not plastic but
butcher paper. Yeah, like butcher paper.
That would be the way to do it. I feel like that's a better
option. It's, it doesn't last as long,
but if you as long as you're eating it regularly, you know,
it's, it's fine. Well.
What I've thought about, and again, this is just practice and
it would be more work for everyone involved in the supply
chain, is you can still vacuum pack it.
But if you wrap it in a parchment paper within the
vacuum packing, Oh yeah, but that then it wouldn't actually
be touching the plastic. It's a really good idea.
So I wish the meat were packaged that way, but in a grocery store
the meat doesn't look as good right when there's a piece of
paper between the plastic. People want to be able to see
it. Yeah, right.
But I don't. I'm just like, I trust you.
Give me a steak. I don't want it to be touching
plastic if I can avoid it. So.
And I think the most important thing then is just not to
defrost it, not to like put it in hot water, the plastic
packaging to defrost it quickly. Yeah, just thinking ahead a
little bit and like taking it out of the freezer, putting it
in the fridge to defrost over time.
Yeah, I've got to imagine that that meat touching plastic is
one of the least problematic things.
But it's it's what I think about fixing in my own life.
Just to to the earlier conversation that we had about
coffee, like Keurigs, these like instant, like, these are bad.
These are bad. So my girlfriend is mad at me
about this but she had a Breville.
OK. And I took it apart.
I don't we made, we made contents.
Did you tell her you were going to?
Yeah, I told her I was gunning. I told her I bought her.
I bought her a stainless steel, you know, espresso pot instead.
But like I took apart the brevel and it's all plastic tubes.
We have a piece of content about this.
I don't know if we've published it yet, but it's all these
plastic tubes in the brevel with hot water, right?
So the what the brevel does is it takes water from a plastic
reservoir, puts it into an aluminum heating element, heats
it up and then moves it hot through the the sort of
espresso, the espresso sort of handle.
I don't know these, I don't know the terms because I don't drink
espresso guys, but it moves hot water through tubes after an
aluminum thing. So you don't want hot water
touching aluminum. You don't want hot water
touching plastic tubes. So that's a problem.
But then you have the Keurigs and these like coffee pots,
they're super convenient. Back to that other word that we
talked about earlier. But they're tin and you know,
they're they're aluminum and they're tin that's all going
into the water right into your coffee.
So, you know, you go to Starbucks and I know I'm just
racking people's brains right now.
Look, don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Knowledge is power. Do the best you can.
I'm not trying to fear monger. I'm trying to drop knowledge and
help people make better decisions.
But you go to Starbucks, all the machines there are running hot
water through plastic tubes, right?
Unless you're getting pour over coffee or French press, they're
heating in a stainless steel. You can do it, but you have to
raise, you have to not raise your coffee.
You have to make your coffee in a certain way.
And that's that's interesting. So the Lineage coffee is
designed to be made in a French press.
Sorry, something doesn't have plastic.
What about plastics and clothing?
Yeah. So the main thing that I've seen
with clothing, there's a couple problems with clothing.
So one of the things is the PFAS, right?
So the parafluoroalkyl substances the forever chemicals
because they do seem to transfer to the skin.
So there were studies on lululemon leggings Old Navy like
all I. Used to work at Lululemon.
All the all the companies do this, right?
And a lot of times they will put PFAS into the leggings because
women sweat in the leggings and they don't want it.
They try. It's like a moisture barrier.
Oh, at Lululemon that was like one of the main selling points
that we were taught to educate customers on was the moisture
wicking capabilities. But really it's just the the pee
Foz that are sprayed all over them allow that that barrier to
be there. Yes, yeah, yes.
So, and what we know is that those can be absorbed through
the skin. So that's not a good thing
either. And then there's these other
studies that I've spoken about a little bit recently where and
it's, it's kind of a funny set of studies.
They've done it in humans and in dogs where they put polyester
underwear on the dogs and it actually decreases sperm counts.
After how long? I think it was after six months.
Wow. And they've done it in humans
too. They had humans wear sort of
polyester underwear. They used cotton underwear I
think as a control because oh, it's increasing the heat in the
testicles, right? But it doesn't look like it was.
The cotton underwear did nothing but the polyester underwear,
probably because of like a a bio, like a static effect
electrostatic. It's not like the endocrine,
endocrine I. Don't think it's endocrine
disrupting. It's probably an electrostatic
effect. OK, Yeah.
It also happened in female dogs. So yeah, it's like historically
as humans, we have not had synthetic clothing on where I
think we should ask questions and be careful and be skeptical
about what synthetic clothing may do next to our skin,
especially next to our reproductive organs.
I don't think we have this answer yet, but it's it's
worrisome. It's worth thinking about,
especially with how much infertility exists.
Oh yeah, Oh yeah, and underwear I think is the best place to
start. Underwear's a great place to
start. Yeah, yeah, we'll make some
lineage underwear here. I'm joking.
I don't think we're going to make a little genderwear.
You mentioned creatine earlier and I want to just pick your
brain on creatine real quick. What are the benefits of
creatine and are people getting enough creatine in their diets
today? Yeah, so creatine is
fascinating. It's made in the human body, but
we don't make enough of it. And it is a store of energy.
So creatine is part of the phosphocreatine system.
Your body uses creatine when you do sprints and intense sort of
activities, whether it's a Sprint or a strength building
activity. That's a fast activity and it
serves as a quick replenishment of ATP.
And so even in the brain, in every tissue of the body,
creatine seems to have benefits. In the brain, it can help with
mental clarity or sleep deprivation.
In the bones, it helps with bone density and muscles.
It helps with explosivity, strength and recovery.
It probably helps with fertility.
It's even been studied in high risk pregnancy.
So creatine is just kind of an energy intermediate, an energy
currency in the human body. And getting enough of it is
critical. Your question is very astute.
Most of us don't get enough of it in our diet.
So even if I eat 2 lbs of meat per day, I may not be getting
enough creatine. And very few people eat 2 lbs of
meat per day. And most women especially don't
eat 2 lbs of meat per day or even a pound of meat per day.
And so the amount of creatine that's optimal for humans is.
It's probably depends on a few things.
What are you thinking about it for?
But there's really good studies that most people benefit from 5
grams a day of creatine monohydrate.
There are two main forms, creatine HCL and creatine
monohydrate. Monohydrate is the most studied
form of creatine. It's very effective, it's very
affordable, and it works well. The side effect with monohydrate
sometimes is GI stuff for some people, or a little bit of
bloating or maybe some water retention.
I don't get it. Some people get it.
If you get side effects with creatine monohydrate, use
creatine HCL. If you use creatine HCL, it's a
much lower dose. Creatine HCL is much more
bioavailable than creatine monohydrate.
We make a creatine monohydrate at lineage because it's
affordable, it's very pure, and it's very well studied.
But I think some people will do better with creatine HCL.
You don't tend to get the same GI side effects and because it's
AHCL and not a monohydrate form, it doesn't have the same sort of
water like retention properties. Maybe now most of us it's
beneficial to have hydration in our muscles, but some people
don't like the way it feels or it bothers them.
But 5 grams a day is probably a starting dose for most people.
But there are studies in bone density.
So I think about this for my mom who's 74 osteopenia, she's no,
she's not getting enough creatine like mom, I sent her
some lineage creatine. Mom, you need 10 grams of
creatine per day at least I don't want her to fall and break
a hip. She loves to walk and then doses
up to 20 grams have been studied for the brain.
So there is the blood brain barrier and creatine doesn't
pass through the blood brain barrier very easily.
So you have to get high doses of creatine to get it into the
brain. And especially in like sleep
deprivation or other sort of brain stress states, 20 grams of
creatine monohydrate might be beneficial a day.
So if I'm travelling or I'm in a situation where I haven't slept
well, I might up my creatine. I take 5 to 10 grams a day, but
I might go up to 20 if I really need that, like extra boost.
Yeah. So yeah, creatine is kind of a
no brainer. It's essentially A tasteless
powder. Like I said, it's very
affordable, super safe. There are some myths about it
that will cause like kidney issues or any of these things.
It doesn't do any of this stuff. It's super.
Safe. I love creatine.
I've been taking 5 grams a day. I feel like even with that I
noticed a difference in mental clarity.
Oh yeah. Yeah, creatine is such a hack,
especially for women because I think guys most like growing up
when I was in in high school, I heard about creatine.
Most guys have heard about creatine within our upbringing
because at some point most of us thought about bodybuilding,
lifted a weight or did something that brought us in the sphere of
creatine. I feel like most women have
never heard of creatine and. Or we have and it's like
something that's only for bodybuilding.
Don't do that. You'll get too muscular, right?
Yeah, so. No, it doesn't work like that.
No, there is so much potential for women to benefit from
creatine, like more than men, because men generally eat more
meat and we've heard about it and we've tried it at some
point. But yeah, women and creatine
like what an upgrade. Do you have to consume it pretty
quickly once you pour it into water or pour it into your
smoothie? I've heard something about that,
that it kind of loses its effects if you wait too long.
Once you like, mix it with something.
I think you would want it. You wouldn't want it to sit in a
drink that you had all day. OK, Yeah, you'd want to.
Drink, but if you drink it within like 30 minutes.
You're fine. OK, fine.
Yeah, no. Problem it also absorbs so
easily into everything like you don't even need the frother you
can just do a quick like stir it's.
It's a magical thing. Yeah.
It's a magical substance. It's it like blends.
It mixes. Yeah.
Doesn't taste much.
You can put it. I mean, I can put it in
smoothies for my niece and nephew.
I've given it to like, you know, 5 year olds and seven-year olds
and. Yeah, I love it.
I've been taking your stuff. That's great.
Oh, great. Yeah.
So out of everything we've talked about, for anyone who
maybe lives like in a city, don't have access to nature or
they're just kind of like busy, overwhelmed, we have a lot of
moms in our audience. Like what would you say or
encourage people to do as like a you could just wave your magic
wand and have people implement like two or three things from
our conversation today into their lives.
What would you say? So I think it's like, start with
food, improve the food quality, right?
Stop counting calories. So stop counting calories, start
thinking about food quality. Imagine if we had, we could keep
the calorie label on food. But I want something that gives
you a 1 to 10 score of food quality, right?
So a David Barr gets a one and a steak gets a 10.
I'm trying Snickers bar get. A Snickers bar gets a .5 you.
Know I thought you're gonna say negative sound.
A Snickers bar gets a .5 or a zero, right?
But you know, like Tufts made this crazy food pyramid type of
thing, this food compass and they were saying, they were
saying Fruit Loops and Lucky Charms or Cheerios have more
value than steak or then eggs, whatever, like.
I did the Kellogg's there. So back on the back in the day
on Kellogg's boxes, they had the Kellogg's cereal diet.
You literally were supposed to eat 6 bowls of Kellogg's cereal.
What a day. And I tried to do this.
It was impossible. Like there's, it's not
satiating. There's no way any human can do
that sustainably. So I was just thinking about
that in the in the concept of like food or these like quote
restrictive diets, like some people might consider eating
animal based to be restrictive. Like to me, there's just so much
there. There's like it's satiating, it
fills you up, You're not left wanting more, you're not left
hungry. Whereas these other like diets
that you know, all of us have kind of seen throughout the
years, like none of it is sustainable.
I was a vegan once, yeah, 15 years ago, and I was always
hungry. And I think that yeah, satiety
is about micronutrient density. I don't think of animal based as
restrictive. I think of it as an intentional.
And I think that unless we are intentional with our the foods
we eat, we will never achieve our best health ever.
And so yes, mainstream culture may frame intentionality as
restrictive because you don't eat everything.
And I would say that's just completely, that's completely
false. It's intentional.
The way that I talked about this in the Carnivore Code, and I
still feel this way, is it's hard to call something
restrictive when you eat the highest quality foods on the
planet. Historically, meat and fruit
were the food of kings and Queens.
The peasants didn't get those foods right.
Like they were relegated to oats and meat, oats and grains and
bread and and beans. And those foods can serve a role
in some diets if you want. But what did the royalty eat?
They ate steak and lamb and boar and tables full of fruit and
honey. And that's the luscious.
Those are the most sought after foods by humans in our history.
Like you ask the Hansa, it's honey and meat.
That's not restrictive. It's not restrictive when you
get to eat the most nutrient rich foods that create the most
health in humans on the planet. Like that's not restrictive.
That's just kind of, again, a psyop twisting it like, oh, you
should, you should. You don't eat Breyer's ice
cream, therefore you're restricting yourself.
Well, guess what? I also don't smoke cigarettes,
drink alcohol or do cocaine. Is that restrictive?
Like no, it's intentional. I'm making good choices.
Yeah, that's a good. Comparison so but back to this
idea of like someone living in a city, I think stop counting
calories and think about things in terms of food quality and you
don't have to eat animal based, but most women would benefit
from eating more protein, whether it's from a protein, a
good quality protein powder. We've got a great one in lineage
meat snacks for convenience or just like steak and chicken and
fish, like more protein, 1g of protein per pound of body weight
is ideal. And, and you can imagine like
maybe this will work for people. It's the first time I've thought
about this on a podcast. Like if you pick up a food at
the grocery store, what food quality rating would you put on
it? You know, you get to choose like
1 to 10. You pick up a package of, I
don't know, like protein candy. You're like, that's a three.
You just know, like a steak. Well, it's a 9 1/2 or A10, a
piece of lettuce. Well, it's probably like an 8.
It's a whole food. You know, it's hard to say that
that's not a high quality food, an onion, that's a high quality
food. It's a, it's a, you know, like
certainly meat has more nutrients than an onion, but
it's, it's not processed. It should be A7 or an 8.
It should be a good high quality food.
And if you're only eating high quality foods, then you're going
to do so much better. That's the first thing with
food. I, I try not to be dogmatic
about it. I think I was in the past with a
carnivore diet, but it's going to be individual.
But I think for men and women, eating more high quality food
and worrying less about calories is the way forward.
And in terms of lifestyle stuff, we talked a lot about light on
this podcast. Don't fear the sun, even in a
city. Go outside, get real sunlight.
Don't get burned, but get real sunlight.
This is a nutrient. And I thought about this as this
is whole light versus processed light, right?
So you're eating, you're eating whole food.
Versus junk food, yes, yeah, like junk light is junk food.
Junk light is junk food. So you have to eat whole food,
then you have to get whole light.
It's just, it's another nutrient that we need as humans.
We've always evolved with this. And then, you know, moderate
exercise, like, it doesn't have to be crazy.
It doesn't have to be CrossFit, you know, just moving your body
outdoors. Like it's really that kind of
simple. And then the last piece is
probably just community and relationships.
Do those things. Your life will get better
easily. And it doesn't have to be
complex. It's, it's simple, but it's not
easy. Yeah.
OK, I've been waiting the entire podcast for this last part.
So exciting. We didn't send you this ahead of
time, OK, but we're going to do a fun Would you rather segment?
OK, OK. Are you ready?
Yeah, Trum roll. Would you rather use a chemical
spray sunscreen or eat a large order of fries from McDonald's?
This is impossible. I'm going to use the chemical
spray sunscreen, but I'm going to do like this kind.
Of thing, OK, now you have full dose cloud cloud spray sunscreen
on you. I'm going to use the full
sunscreen. I'm going to go jump in the
ocean immediately and wash it off.
But I'm I'm not eating. I'm not eating the the the fries
from my top. You guys are killing me.
That's impossible. Would you rather swim 500 meters
in a chlorinated pool or shop at Bath and Body Works for 30
minutes? Man, there's a lot of, there's a
lot of chemicals in both of those.
I cannot like I get a headache immediately when I go into Bath
and Body Works. I'm going to go 500 meters in a
pool and just smell like chlorine the rest of the day and
not be happy about it. My pool in Costa Rica is an
ozone pool. That's awesome.
Yeah, I'm not happy about that one either.
You're you're you're you're traumatizing me here.
All right, well, we've got a few more to get.
Oh, my gosh. Right.
So brace yourself, All right? Would you rather drink a glass
of tap water or drink a glass of almond milk?
It depends where the tap water's from.
The worst place you're. Just making this Hardy awesome
if the almond milk has filtered water and just almonds.
It doesn't. One of the horrible ones in
canola. Oil.
All right then I'm drinking the tap water, but I'm not, I'm not
happy about it cuz you know, canola.
Some of the almond milks have canola oil, so I'm not.
Yeah, just I'm not happy about it.
Yeah. OK, got three more?
All right. Wow.
Would you rather use a plastic cutting board to cut a a searing
hot steak on? Why don't you guys go or?
Or use a non stick pan. None of these are easy.
No, there's no good option. Oh my gosh, I don't, I don't
even know. I think I would probably rather
use the non stick pan. I just the cutting boards drive
me crazy. I know that I'm eating the
microplastics and if I'm it's a hot steak on the cutting board,
I know it's going in there and I'm sure a pan isn't amazing,
but I, yeah, I just can't, I can't do the cutting board.
I think I would do the same thing because the pan it's the
most harmful if it's chipped in any way, right?
I would be like super careful to not like not aggravate it.
Maybe just don't inhale it. Wear a mask.
Yeah, yeah, neither put the fan. On like a huge fan on the stove,
yeah. Would you rather use
conventional toothpaste every day for an entire month?
No. Or eat Impossible meat every day
for a week. Oh my God, these are so bad.
The conventional toothpaste kills me because I do not want
that dose of fluoride. I just can't do it.
I would. I would not be happy about it,
but I would eat impossible meat. For what?
Yeah, you would do the soy. I would do it.
I just, I can't do that much fluoride.
I hate it. Wow.
OK, yeah, I you caught me off guard.
I. Couldn't that would be so hard
for me? Yeah.
I mean, it's a month versus a week.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, if you did the toothpaste, there is evidence
that tamarind fruit actually decreases fluoride.
Yeah, that fluoride excretion increases in humans when you eat
tamarind. So maybe I could do the
toothpaste and just jam on some some tamarind, yeah.
I don't know, like make tamarind smoothies.
Yeah. Or going in your mouth.
Yeah. OK, would you rather use Tide
detergent on a load of laundry or eat a microwave TV dinner?
Like this is the worst. I hate these things.
You know when I go to Airbnb's I have to re wash the sheets
because I hate tie detergent so much.
I hate the smell but I think I would probably use the tie
detergent before I would. With fabric softener sheets when
it dries. I mean, you're killing me.
But I can't. I can't.
I mean, I'd have to do the tie. I can't.
I can't do it otherwise. You do the tide.
I do the tide OK stuff through it.
Yeah, OK, That's all I've got. That was painful, you.
Guys like I know you were like sweating like you guys.
Thought hard about it. The worst things ever.
Like would you rather? How can we put Paul in the most
uncomfortable? Yes, position if.
You had given me like, would you rather, and this is this is I
shouldn't even say this, like would you rather eat a piece of
poop from these sheets for anything?
I would rather eat the poop. Oh my God.
I would eat. I would eat poop.
Would you really? Yeah, from any for any of those
things that's frozen, Yeah, I mean, I would, yeah, hopefully I
wouldn't get a parasite, but you could probably.
Would. I don't know, I'd get rid of the
parasite. I love it, Paul, thanks so much
for thank. You for having me?
Yeah. This is so fun.
Great conversation. Where can people find you and
keep up with everything you're doing?
So everything is at Paul Saladino, MD, on all the socials
and lineages at lineageprovisions.com.
Amazing. Thank you.
Yeah.