Dr. Paul Saladino - 'Debunking The Carnivore Diet'

[Music] well how's it going everyone i so wish that we could be together in person this is just not going to do it justice but i appreciate the organizers of this conference for allowing some of us to do presentations virtually i hope that this presentation will be valuable for all of you and i very much look forward to seeing all of you in real life very soon this whole coronavirus thing has thrown a wrench into many lives and i think that perhaps my greatest sadness or one of my great sadnesses this year has been that i don't get to see any of you in person there are a lot of high fives to be given there are a lot of hugs to be given a lot of ideas that we should be sharing in person but we'll do zoom so let's get on with it i've got a lot of slides and i don't want to take up too much of your time i think these online presentations get a little bit onerous if they go too long as all of you will know i have a penchant for long-windedness i will do my best to be succinct and to deliver all the goods as quickly as possible in this presentation so thanks for joining me let's get started um here we go so uh my talk is debunking the carnivore diet perhaps some of you have heard about this crazy thing called the carnivore diet and let me tell you it's bonkers uh and i'll tell you why in this talk so here we go uh i have a few disclosures um i wrote a book about the carnivore diet and i eat meat my book is called the carnivore code so clearly i'm being facetious and i'm going to try and show you why i believe that a carnivore diet is a viable diet for humans why animal-based diets in general are incredibly beneficial for humans and i'm not going to be debunking the carnivore diet at all though i will take many of the positions that those who try to criticize a carnivore diet and show you why i think they don't hold up under scrutiny so this is my book the carnivore code all of my controversial thoughts can be found in this book if you are listening to this talk on the in the middle of june or july this book can be found on um on uh oh i'm trying to no no we'll do that go back other way smaller there we go all right sorry guys this book can be found on amazon.carnivorecodebook.com the second edition of the book is now available for pre-order the first edition which is the cover you are seeing here is no longer available that is a collector's item my friends the second edition of my book will be released august the 4th in audible audiobook ebook and print go to amazon to pre-order it for more of my controversial thoughts what is a carnivore diet let me tell you a technical definition of a carnivore diet might be all animal foods excluding plant foods well i think we could also get a little bit more broad and think about a diet that emphasizes animal foods and pays attention to a spectrum of plant toxicity and call that a carnivore-ish type diet so uh i am interested in results over dogma and i think that what we will find uh generally is that if we emphasize animal foods in our diet we will thrive and if we think about a spectrum of plants toxicity we will also find great improvements in many of the things that sometimes western medicine doesn't do such a great job treating so we will talk about a spectrum of plant toxicity today and we will also talk about why the heck you should emphasize animal foods in your diet and make them the center of your diet isn't that completely contrary to what we're told in the western world we'll find out so why would anyone do such a crazy thing let me answer that question for you my friends there is very intriguing evolutionary evidence for meat consumption by humans for over 2 million years but wait a minute aren't plants good for us what about phytonutrients polyphenols we'll dig into that don't we need fiber for a healthy gut we'll talk about it doesn't meat cause colon cancer heart disease shorten lifespan on the list for today as well and finally we'll talk about why cows may or may not contribute significantly to climate change but all of these points would debunk the value the veracity the intentions of a carnivore diet and in fact what i'll be doing is debunking the debunkers of a carnivore diet in this talk and in my book let's start with a little bit of story about me this is me this is vegan paul circa 2009 this is really one of the best photos i have my hair was longer and i smiled but i weighed 30 pounds less of muscle right now i'm 175 pounds about 8 body fat in 2009 i was 140 pounds on a vegan diet so lots less muscle now carnivore paul circa 2020 clearly has end-stage polyphenol deficiency and uh this is what end-stage polyphenol deficiency looks like so that's the end of my talk thank you very much i think we've proved our point here today and uh you can all get back to living your lives if you would like more details you can stick around for the appendix of my talk this is the epilogue so that's my talk and we can move on to the epilogue so in my days of medical school which is what this photo is from from jiu jitsu i had pretty bad eczema i had my own autoimmune disease i had a disease on my skin that was pretty pretty frustrating pretty difficult to handle for me and i knew that somewhere was probably related to the foods that i was eating probably related to the foods that i was eating what was it about the foods that i was eating that were triggering my eczema at that time in my life i was organic paleo and i just started cutting out more and more foods i got pretty close to a carnivore diet when i would cut out all the oxalates when i cut out all the phytoelectins when i cut out all the lectins when i cut all the histamine producing plants when i cut out all the salicylates closer and closer to carnivore but i thought oh i need those polyphenols in my diet i must have them surely they're valuable eventually i just took the plunge and completely eliminated all plant foods and lo and behold a couple weeks later my eczema completely resolved it's much easier to live my life and i felt way better in general had an improvement in my psychological overall perspective on life and haven't looked back it's been about two years since then and as you can see in 2020 i have a lot of i have a pretty bad polyphenol deficiency just want to show you guys my jiu jitsu face some comic relief at the beginning and at the beginning of all these talks on a carnivore diet let's just answer the most important question i pooped today and it was beautiful we'll get to the fiber part no you don't need fiber to have beautiful regular bowel movements i promise you and this is exactly this is an actual picture of my poop from today it was golden um i have a new business opportunity so what are we about we're about cracking the code my friend tommy wood i was lifting with him one time and he said what about the carnivore code for your book title that's a good idea so what's the code well the code is clearly how the heck do humans eat to be as good as possible how do we kick as much butt as possible so we want to crack that code let's talk about a postulate for the ideal human diet i think it would contain all the nutrients that humans need to thrive in the most bioavailable forms without any of the anti-nutrients or toxins found in plants or just let's just say with that with the fewest amount of toxins and anti-nutrients i won't even say in plants and if you accept that as a reasonable explanation of an ideal human diet we'll move forward and we'll see how we all answer that but i believe that is an interesting code that we are all trying to crack so where have we come from let's start at the beginning again this is pretty similar to the stuff i talk about in my book if you want more detail the carnivore code is what you want read my book i'm not an anthropologist but i've gone to great lengths to understand this stuff and i find it quite fascinating many conversations with anthropologists as far as i can tell we became human somewhere around here two million years ago in terms of homogeneous but you know the species we don't know before that was australopithecus which wasn't quite human australopithecus was about 4 million years ago there's homo habilis homo erectus from about 2.8 million years ago and homo sapiens for about 350 to 300 000 years looking pretty similar to the way humans look maybe homo heidelbergensis if you saw homo sapiens from 300 thousand years ago on the street you might just think they were an mma fighter or something they look pretty normal and even back two million years ago we were starting to look pretty hominid so this is where we've come from but way back before this is millions of years 30 40 50 60 million years of private evolution what was the change where did the change come from what happened [Music] this to me is a fascinating graphic from my book primate ancestors back here millions of years ago australopithecus 4 million years ago homo habilis 2 million years ago look at this change in the human brain size boom right there and modern humans 1500 cc 1400 cc up from you know down from an apex of 1500 cc but what happened here what caused this massive turn in the size of the human brain many people theorize but i really think it's pretty clear it was hunting it was the sudden inclusion of lots of human hunting in the lifestyle inclusion of many animal foods in our diet which provided unique nutrients which are myriad which we will talk about later unique animal based nutrients in our life and these are i believe what allowed our brains to grow whether it interacted with certain genes like notch or our brain was just waiting for more b12 or more bioavailable food so our guts could shrink we don't know but as far as we know now fire was much later it doesn't seem like fire corresponds here there's a famous anthropologist richard wrangham who suggested that it was the use of fire for meat or the use of fire for calories from tubers that allowed our brains to grow but i think it was hunting and i think it was there i think there's a lot of evidence for that that it was the inclusion of animal foods in our diet in much greater amounts two million years ago that was this magical catalyst that made us into who we are today an incredible species we don't always seem to make great decisions but we're pretty smart and resourceful so what gives us evidence that there was this hunting now stone tools there are these ashulian tools from 1.8 million years ago that looked just like this a bifacial tool that showed up right about that same time as human brains getting a lot bigger looks like a big arrowhead this is meant to be held in your hand there's also evidence for butchering cut marks on bones hmm it's a tap here and it's from florida showing butchering marks so we see these stone tools and evidence that we were using them to hunt and cut the bones of animals this is not a hunting mark this is a butchering mark on the bone we were eating animals you guys we were eating animals and our ass center you know our our anatomy really speaks to that as well our rotator cuff chimpanzees can't throw a fastball like we can pelvic girdle hand and feet the sclera of our eyes the acidity of our stomach and this trade-off between the smaller large intestine a larger small intestine changing rib angle and this largely energy-intensive organ the large intestine which is shrinking allowing the brains to grow in the energetic trade-off known as the um [Music] this is known as the expensive tissue hypothesis which we'll get to in a moment but the white sclera are fascinating too i did a podcast where i talked to bill von hippel about this this is an ape size they have a brown sclera humans have a white sclera this disguises the direction in which the chimpanzees are looking this lets our neighbors know that we're looking over there at a prey at a predator or for group behavior this could definitely have been an adaptation for group hunting this is advantageous when chimps and primates are inherently competitive i really think that when we made this transition to homo the genus homo we became cooperative and we were cooperating for survival and cooperating to hunt the expensive tissue hypothesis is this change in the size of our guts changing rib angles equals a six-pack if you can get it and that allows more energy for our brain to grow this brain got trade-off as fascinating and seen in other species this is the peter's elephant nose fish which happens to have the biggest brain for its body size of any fish known and also the smallest gut so this is quite fascinating isn't it that even among other species we see a trade-off between gut size and brain size big gut means energetically it's kind of unfavorable to grow a big brain but if you've got shrinks because you can eat more nutritious nutrient dense food like animal foods then your brain can grow not surprisingly the elephant knows fish is a carnivore you know algae for this guy so here's my premise hunting made us human hunting made us human and i think that we know that from all of these adaptations that without hunting we would not be the humans we are today hunting made us human you can pick who you want in this picture the last time i gave this talk i joked that this was me here's sean baker he's the one getting eaten i guess he's the bravest one up here maybe this is my friend tommy wood depending who's in our tribe but this maybe isn't exactly what it used to look like but hunting made us human and it made us human because we had more access to the most nutrient-rich bio-available foods on the planet animal foods so there's all of this other evidence from stable isotope analysis which gets a little bit esoteric here we're looking at strontium the calcium ratios of hominin and bovine enamel and what this paper shows is that the south african early homonyms preferred me that the ratios of ours look a whole lot like carnivores rather than grazers that our ancestors were according to stable isotopes in the teeth and stable isotopes in the bones of neanderthals and first humans our ancestors looked a lot more like known carnivores than herbivores meaning that we were getting the majority of our protein from animals and we can use this with fossilized remains last paper exceptionally high delta 15 nitrogen values confirmed neanderthals as high trophic level carnivores remember that neanderthals were coexistent with homo sapiens about 50 000 years ago in europe you can see canids so this would be like wolves hyena and we compare that to humans we find that humans end up the oas one human way up here even sort of more high on the delta 15 nitrogen graph than a wolf or a hyena other known carnivores so we're having more nitrogen suggesting that we're eating either bigger animals which wouldn't be surprising for hunting those megafauna or more of them the other thing to think about is the plants really look differently today this is not what our ancestors saw this is not what we see when we're in the wilderness these are domesticated plants that are less toxic than their wild neighbors this is what the wilderness looks like where i went to residency in seattle this is actually a picture i took on the north fork of the whole river there's not much edible in this picture and this is one of the most fertile places in the world what are our ancestors going to be eating they're going to be hunting animals maybe in a pinch they're going to be eating some of the most edible plants but it doesn't look like this you can't just go out and pick a carrot some broccoli a potato there's nowhere near this amount of edible plant matter on a natural landscape so where did we go wrong what happened at the end of that graph where the brain size started to shrink this is paraphrasing something that jared diamond said what is the greatest mistake in human history jared diamond says it was agriculture the cult of the sea there's a lot of fascinating analyses at this time in our history about twelve thousand years ago people like graham hancock reynold carlson believed there was a meteor a younger dry ass meteor impact that may have caused mass megaphone extinction others believe we hunted the megafauna to extinction and still others like robert shock believe that there are coronal mass ejections but randall carlson robert shock graham hancock all believe there was a massive change in the availability of humans to get the big animals that we were probably hunting for two million years problem there is what do we do in the absence of those we're kind of stuck maybe somebody figured out hey we can grow these plants this is great except growing plants doesn't turn out to be so good for human nutrition this is a skull and we can see here perotic hyperostosis i believe this is a skull from the ohio river valley right around that time in our history when we see a mass increase a major increase in the amount of fractures the amount of tuberculosis lesions the bone quality degrades massively and we see these periodic hyperostosis lesions and there's sponge form changes in the skull of the of a human related to nutrient deficiency specifically iron and other minerals corresponding with a mass move to agriculture maybe not a good thing maybe not a good thing to forsake the most nutrient rich most bioavailable foods on the planet we may have been forced to we don't know but inevitably we see that there was a pretty significant decline in human health during this neolithic revolution 10 to 12 000 years ago this graphic from my book illustrates that decline in height periodic hyperostosis increased evidence of cavities and tooth decay tuberculous lesions throughout the body including the spine shorter femur lengths poor wound healing bad news bad news probably the worst mistake in human history and here we are so let's just remember also plants don't want to be eaten whenever i say this people say well neither do animals well yeah but animals can run away or kick you or gore you or bite you plants are stuck in the ground right this little plant right here can't run away from diplodocus so what have plants been doing for 450 million years since the time of the dinosaurs they've been co-evolving defense chemicals there has been an ongoing chemical warfare happening between plants and animals for hundreds of millions of years and the idea here is that unless a species is exclusively consuming plants or consume plants as the majority of their diet they may not be well adapted to these toxins so if you remember that perhaps it was the eating of animals that made us human and animals became the majority of our diet did we lose or just not evolve ways to detoxify many of the compounds found in plants i'm not saying plants are uniquely toxic across the board for everyone only that plants exist on a spectrum of toxicity and if we're not sensitive to that spectrum of toxicity many of us will suffer negative consequences because of that that is really one of the two premises of a carnivore diet the first is that plants just are the first is actually that animal foods are wrongly vilified and have been made out to be villains when they're in fact the most nutrient-dense bioavailable foods on the planet in this talk a little later we'll talk about why they've been vilified and how they've been incorrectly vilified but the second is that plants exist on a spectrum toxicity they contain toxins and if we ignore this we will suffer i don't think everyone on the planet needs to be carnivore not even close but if we eat in a way that prioritizes animal foods and understands a spectrum of plant toxicity i believe we will thrive here's the harsh reality kale doesn't love you back why do we assume that plants are good for us what if we think about things from a plant's perspective plants have a myriad of defense chemicals these are only a few phytoelections which is a broad category oxalates lectins salicylates list goes on and on and on this is the chemical warfare that's been going on between plants and animals for hundreds of millions of years this is just an example of a number of phytoelections these are plant defense chemicals this is our friend sulforaphane this is a tannin molecule one of these is curcumin and i believe the other one is resveratrol you can see there many of them are polyphenolic sulforaphane is an isothiocyanate but interestingly many of the compounds that we think are beneficial from plants are polyphenols well here's a list of all the polyphenols made in human biochemistry yeah that's not a mistake humans don't make polyphenols in our biochemistry polyphenols come exclusively from plants does this mean they're bad for us not necessarily but it means that they look foreign to our bodies i just thought this was an interesting observation that i hadn't heard anyone mention when i was writing my book i asked my friend tommy wood i said are you aware of any single polyphenol that is made in human biochemistry he couldn't i couldn't find any if any of you listening to this are aware of any polyphenol in human biochemistry let me know but i haven't found a single one there are many molecules and plants that can mimic human molecules usually for the detrimental effect specifically xenoestrogens but they're not but our molecules are not polyphenolic so isn't this an interesting idea that perhaps the plant molecules just look very different than ours this is the concept of different operating systems that i discuss in the book if plant molecules are different than ours intrinsically because plants are a completely different kingdom we've been evolving differently for 500 million years and plants have been trying to create chemicals to dissuade animals fungi insects from eating them isn't it reasonable they could be bad for us it's just a question and things start to look very differently if we approach it from that perspective so phytoalexins are plant pesticides except not the kind that you spray on plants these are the kinds that are made by plants here's a paper from bruce ames dietary pesticides 99.9 all natural 99 by weight of the pesticides the american diet concludes are produced by plants in and of themselves only 52 natural pesticides have been tested in animal cancer tests and of those half are wrote in carcinogens those known 27 are present in many common foods do we know for sure these are harming us no should we think about this i think so do we need them in our diets i don't think so i don't think they do anything good for us and of course many of these animal cancer tests are high dose but could low doses be harmful as well yes what if we just shift the whole perspective and think about plant foods as potentially trying to harm us then everything shifts and we think well why would we eat something like that unless we needed it and i don't think we do i think we can get all of the nutrients we need from animal foods in more bioavailable forms without any of the toxins found in plants and that's a foreshadowing and a remembrance of the premise which is that might be an ideal human diet for some people again i don't believe everyone needs to eliminate all plants from their diet but if we consider the fact that these chemicals may not be good for us things start to look very differently here are 49 natural pesticides and metabolites found in cabbage cabbage are these good for us are they bad for us is it neutral i think it's more likely they're bad for us and i think it's really hard to make an argument that they're good for us but we'll talk about both sides but this is just in cabbage and none of these are produced in human biochemistry and none of these participate directly in human biochemistry one of the greatest misconceptions that is commonly repeated is the notion that plant molecules act directly as antioxidants and they just don't they do not act in human biochemistry directly they change human biochemistry by acting as pro-oxidants we'll talk about that but plant molecules these 39 49 natural metabolites found in cabbage are not vitamins they don't participate in biochemistry i believe they just gum up the gears cause problems for us because this cabbage doesn't want to get eaten kale doesn't love you back but phytonutrients are magical right well not so much there are a number of studies that show that high consumption of vegetables doesn't really improve immunological antioxidant or clinical markers in subjects at risk of cardiovascular diseases this is a series of studies that you might call the vegetables aren't really that good for you studies these are interventional studies not epidemiology and they pretty clearly show that it's not an open and chuck case that vegetables are good for us in this study which was a four week intervention a low vegetable group which had 800 grams of vegetables per week or a high vegetable group with five times that amount 4 200 grams remember that fourth 454 grams is a pound so you're talking about less than two pounds per week or almost 10 pounds of vegetables per week and they included vegetables that we would consider to be powerful vegetables carrots jerusalem artichoke tomatoes cabbage sweet peppers they looked for immunological antioxidant markers no significant changes were detected in clinical immunological or antioxidant markers except for an increase in the white blood cell count in the low vegetable group study provides evidence about the uncertainty of providing clear evidence for vegetables in modulating markers of immune function antioxidant status isn't that interesting i thought plants were magical further studies are needed all right well let's do further studies is this all just a fairy tale are these all just unicorn farts sasquatch or some others let's see effects of consumption of high amounts of vegetables here's another one oh same title different paper i put that there wrong this study 24 days of complete depletion of fruits and vegetables or daily ingestion of a pound and a half of fruits and vegetables or the corresponding amounts of vitamins and minerals the level of oxidative dna damage was wait for it unchanged this suggests that the inherent antioxidant defense mechanisms in our bodies are sufficient to protect ourselves from reactive oxygen species imagine that imagine if we with the proper nutrients presumably from animal foods or just living what i call a radical life and i'll get into that in a moment could make all of the antioxidants we need as glutathione wouldn't that just make the idea of plant foods beneficial like a unicorn fart like a fairy tale like a tooth fairy or the sasquatch i think so let's do more studies increasing the vegetable intake dose is associated with a rise in plasma carotenoids without modifying oxidative stress or inflammation hmm an overweight or obese post-menopausal women where is the benefit of vegetables of course you're going to see more carotenoids because they're found in the plants but if it doesn't modify oxidative stress or inflammation markers are they really beneficial let's ask the question what about this one in this study with green tea extract what we find is that since no long-term effects of green tea abstract were observed this study essentially served as a fruit and vegetable depletion study the overall effect of a 10 week period without dietary fruit and vegetables was a decrease in oxidative dna damage blood proteins and plasma lipids can competently with mark changes in antioxidant defense my goodness what a different narrative this is so now we have four of many studies i didn't even review all of them that show us that wait a minute either increasing the amount of fruits and vegetables massively in your diet or completely eliminating the fruits and vegetables in your diet doesn't result in a negative effect in terms of oxidative status meaning that vegetables fruits and vegetables probably are not that protective from an oxidative status perspective and in fact this last study found there was a decrease in dna damage well if we think about plants from a totally different perspective like they're not really our friends they don't love us back they're only survival foods in the first place these things begin to make sense do we need them in our diet maybe not maybe they're not that good for us effective increasing fruit and vegetable intake by dieting intervention on nutritional markers this is a fascinating study and what you'll find here is intake increased significantly intervention group compared to controls achieving 8.4 portions per day after 12 weeks the plasma vitamin c level increased folate level increased carotenoids increased but there were no significant differences in the antioxidant capacity dna damage and markers of vascular health so what is going on there what if when given the proper nutrients from animal foods you and i can make all the antioxidants we need from glutathione wouldn't that be radical i think so i think there's a lot of good evidence for it here's their conclusion a 12 week intervention was not associated with effects on antioxidant status lymphocyte or dna damage wow interestingly in this study vitamin c level in the blood increased and their vitamin c increased from 70 milligrams per day to 270 milligrams per day but there was no change in antioxidant capacity or dna damage or markers of vascular health so this is actually this one is one of my favorites because it asks us two important questions where is the benefit of fruits and vegetables and how much vitamin c do we actually need to be to be optimal we'll come back to that what about hormesis this is what everybody always says at this point what about hormesis couldn't a little bit of poison be good for us and i think this concept has been widely misunderstood i think that we have conflated environmental hormesis heat cold and exercise things that we know can be slightly stressful and beneficial because of that with in with molecular or mesis what i mean by that is why do we assume that we need small amounts of plant poisons to be optimal when the veg fruit and vegetable studies show us otherwise and furthermore would we consider cigarette smoke alcohol or lead to be a hormetic maybe not but we have to be consistent with our philosophical views on these things we either have to accept that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons heterocyclic amines cigarette smoke alcohol lead our hermetics just like isothiocyanates or realize that molecular hormesis maybe doesn't act the same way as environmental hormesis so this is a slide that i'll probably skip it's how sulforaphane affects nrf2 but basically this is the important part that oxidative stress induces nrf2 to dissociate from keep one nrf2 is a transcription factor that goes to the nucleus leading to transcription of antioxidant response enzymes but many things can do this broccoli can do it with sulforaphane but so can heat stress so can cold so can ketosis so can cigarettes are these all the same no i don't think so and i'll show you why so would we consider these to be hormetics no i think there's a huge difference between molecular hormesis and environmental hormesis because i think that when you use molecules for hermesis they have what i would describe as a patrick in a package insert they have side effects and when it's smoking or alcohol or lead we're very aware of the side effects but when it's a plant molecule doing a very similar thing in an analogous thing we forget about the side effects mostly because we're not told about the side effects but there's good literature that those side effects exist that there is a package insert here this is just to sew that show that smoking induces nrf2 and glutathione increase as do polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from meat are those hermetics should we make a pill out of that someone call rhonda patrick what if living a radical life is enough this is environmental hormesis what if swimming in cold water getting in a sauna are all we need to spur our nrf2 system from time to time we could do this with things like exercise with cold water swimming being in a hot sun this will create a small amount of oxidative stress without the same collaterally damaging side effects so this is a study of the cold water swimmers in berlin showing that glutathione goes down when you swim but then comes back to a higher level at normal this is a control group with reduced glutathione and this is reduced and oxidized glutathione together you'll see that in the cold water swimmers their baseline glutathione is higher after they go in the water it's depleted and you better believe the next day it's gonna be back up here because environmental hormesis right so i don't really believe in xenohormesis like david sinclair does i don't believe that we need plant molecules to be ideal i think all we need to do is live a radical life which means doing the things our ancestors have always done that you and i probably do without thinking about it exercising being in the sun being in the cold that is enough to have optimal antioxidant status and then we don't get these side effects from plant molecules there are a number of dark side side effects to curcumin i'll let you guys read this paper curcumin can induce dna damage and chromosomal alterations in vivo and in vitro what similar to concentrations were supported to exert benefit what this is the side effect this is the package insert for curcumin that you are never told about it induces co taupe isomerase 2 immediate dna damage inactivates tumor suppressor p53 irreversibly modifies antioxidant enzyme thyroid oxygen reductase wait a minute why are you eating curcumin in the first place because you're treating inflammation not at the root cause with something that you heard was good for it but it has all these bad side effects that you've never heard about you don't need it treat the root cause of the root don't use a plant molecule to ameliorate symptoms and realize that all these plant molecules everything that's going to be molecular hormesis has a side effect oh someone called david sinclair resveratrol reduces the levels of circulating androgen precursors that's not a good thing whether you're a man or a woman you don't want your dha to be lower because you're eating a xenoestrogen and resveratrol but paul doesn't resveratrol have benefits on the sirtuin genes sure you know what else does living a radical life being in ketosis turns on the sirtuins as well being in ketosis changes your nad to nadh ratios just like resveratrol without the androgen reducing side effects be radical my friends don't use plant molecules oh you mean there are molecules that can have estrogenic effects in the human body like flavonoids yup plants don't want to be eaten how many polyphenols are there in human biochemistry none what about oxalates well this group thinks they induce breast cancer here calcium oxalate crystals induce renal inflammation through the nlr p3 inflammasome cinnamon turmeric on urinary oxalate excretion turmeric massively increased urinary oxalate excretion to levels seen in people with genetic polymorphisms causing primary hyperoxaluria a condition that results in systemic oxalosis kidney stones so bad they often have kidney failure do we want to eat oxalates this is i'm shifting gears here but this is yet another thing that is produced in small amounts in the human body massive amounts in plants and doesn't really play well with our biochemistry in this one chronic exposure of breast epithelial cells to oxalate promoted the transformation of them from normal to tumor cells inducing the expression of a proto-oncogene as cphos etc etc that doesn't sound good in my book there's a listing of high oxalate plant foods and this is a microscopic view of an oxalate looks like under the microscope do you want those needles in your joints your breasts your vagina any of these parts of your body there's a whole group of women who believe that vulvar pain the genital pain in women is related to oxalate deposition there that sounds horrible could this be causing a lot of our problems potentially we don't need them they're a waste product in human but look at how much is in turmeric powder now of course you're not going to eat that much turmeric powder these are all per 100 grams but 100 grams of spinach gets you a pretty big dose and if you make a smoothie with spinach almonds and throw in some turmeric powder for good measure you just got an oxalate bomb what about lectins carbohydrate binding proteins well my friend paul mason has talked a lot about this there's a fascinating study in denmark showing that those people who had the nerve that runs from their stomach to their brain known as the vagus nerve suffered due to gastritis had way less parkinson's disease it's an epidemiology study it's observational but why would severing a nerve that runs from the stomach and the gut to the brain result in less parkinson's well could it be that there's something in our gut that could be transiting through the vagus nerve to the brain causing problems well in this study from c elegans that's exactly what they saw dietary plant lectins transported to and affect dopaminergic neurons what the brach and hawks hypothesis is exactly that that something from the gut gut moves along the vagus nerve to the brain negatively affecting dopaminergic neurons in the substantia niagara and other places potentially contributing to parkinson's disease that scary stuff you guys how about one more oh i didn't include it there's another study also done in rats and mice that shows the same thing so do we want to put lectins like this from plants in our body other negative effects in lectins check this one out bacterial overgrowth in a phytohuman gluten in fed rat so what they're saying here is if you feed a rat phytohemaglutinin which is the main lectin found in red kidney beans you get proliferation and consistent adherent of microbial flora in the jejunum with e coli they're causing overgrowth lectins causing dysbiosis in rats and in this study they found that the bacterial electing interactions in the pha induced overgrowth had to do with perhaps a direct ligand to mediate bacterial adherence to or modify mucosal surface to increase bacterial adherence what this means is that the lectin didn't interact directly with e coli but you saw e coli overgrowing it looked like this lectin this phytohemoglobin interacted directly with the gut lining probably the goblet cells producing mucus impairing their mucous production allowing bacteria to touch the epithelium of the gut leading to inflammation dysbiosis holes in the mucous layer bacterial overgrowth that is a bad thing my friends we do not want the mucous layer to be compromised no not having enough fiber does not compromise the mucus layer i'll get to that but in this case phytohemoglobin rat model it sure looks like those lectins in beans impair that significantly tell me more about how beans are so healthy for you when i'm showing you evidence that they could be causing dysbiosis and leaky gut that's not a good thing here's an interesting study done by our friend steven gundry who i would disagree strongly with on his views on animal foods but i agree with him on lectins this is a case series from his office 95 of 102 patients on a low lectin diet that was also high in polyphenols and prebiotics admittedly i'm not a fan of those 95 of 102 patients achieved complete resolution of autoimmune markers and inflammatory markers in nine months that's striking now we can't say whether it was low lectin the polyphenols or the supplements but regardless it's a low lectin diet so i can't say for sure here some might say oh they had polyphenols they got better well i'm going to say this might have been due to the lectins being removed but we don't know more generating hypotheses more testing so let's return to this why use plant molecules for benefits which appear to be redundant why we use plant molecules for optimal antioxidant status when we don't need them for that if they also have package inserts and contain lots of potentially damaging molecules with side effects can we really say that the benefits of these molecules outweigh the risks i'll let you answer that i think you know where i stand bioavailability of nutrients is much higher in animal foods as well let's shift a little bit this is a study looking at zinc absorption and it found some pretty striking things these are subjects eating oysters you can see oysters here you give them oysters with some uh beans and you get much lower absorption of zinc in the body oysters with tortillas almost no absorption of zinc do you think that phytic acid and oxalates in foods could prevent absorption of minerals yes are minerals and animal foods more bioavailable without a doubt do we need zinc to be healthy you betcha bioavailability of iron graphic from my book pretty good in animal foods significant drop off here for plant foods this is heme iron this is not heme iron tell me more about how nutritious your lettuce corn spinach or soy beans are not so good really hard to get enough iron that way furthermore looking at the digestible indispensable amino acid scores rice boom less than half of or right about half of red meat beef and egg and pork significantly less bioavailable in plant foods anyone who says that animal foods and plant foods have the same amount of protein gram for gram nitrogen for nitrogen is lying to you james wilkes you are not telling the truth i will debate you any day of the week my friend i've called you out multiple times you know what's up the diaz is the best we have it clearly shows that plant foods are abysmal when it comes to nitrogen availability animal foods are better than plant foods that's the way it is this is the rotterdam study many of you will know about this the relative risk of coronary heart disease was reduced in the mid and upper tertiles of dietary menoquinone this is vitamin k2 this is the relative risk of coronary heart disease the relative risk of aortic valve calcification the more vitamin k2 you get the less your risk where do you get vitamin k2 animal foods now the story here is nuanced let's go through it sequentially phylloquinone k1 from plants not related to any outcome meaning we're pretty bad at converting k1 to k2 in our bodies you better get real k2 and the skeptics will cry what about vitamin k2 from natto no one eats natto and it's only mk7 mk7 is one of the many menaquinones mk4 to mk11 or even mk13 but only one of them i believe is produced by bacteria what about mk4 and mk6 might those have importance yes in animals we get a full array of menaquinones if we're eating plant-based vitamin k2 which is really only found in fermented foods like natto we're only going to get some of the vitamin equinox it hasn't been studied on its own mk7 alone where is vitamin k2 in the diet in these people it's in animal foods do you think anyone in rotterdam is eating natto no no also i'll note that 32 micrograms per day is a really small amount of vitamin k2 you can get that in an ounce of liver or less what does it look like for more than 100 micrograms per day of vitamin k2 which is what most people eat in an animal diet based diet would get how much lower would the relative risk hazard ratio of chd or aortic valve calcification b we'll see remember vitamin k1 from plants not associated with any outcome animal foods win animal foods are the real superfoods looking at the nutrients and liver they just dwarf everything in blueberries and kale or other superfoods this graphic is in my book and what about all the nutrients only found in animal foods there's all this talk about phytonutrients what about zoe nutrients what about animal nutrients these are really only found in significant quantities in animal foods creatine carnitine choline carnosine anserine taurine k2 b12 on and on and on this is only a partial list how are you going to get these nutrients if you don't eat animals could these nutrients be the reason that our ancestors suddenly grew massively bigger brains i think so well look at this when you give creatine to vegetarians they get smarter meaning that vegetarians aren't getting enough creatine and we know that creatine supplementation is necessary or adequate creatine i should say is necessary for proper cognitive function so this could be a reason that our brains got bigger we had more creatine from animals also more choline etc etc this i believe is the reason our brains got bigger magical animal nutrients these are not the stuff for fairy tales these are not unicorn farts my friends this is real animal-based nutrition in the interest of time i will speed through these last slides this talk is already too long like i said i'm long-winded and verbose what can i say but redmi will give you colon cancer it'll cause your heart to explode you're going to need it to poop and have a healthy gut microbiome no no no red meat in cancer as most of us know is based on a who proclamation from the iarc in 2015 which was based on a extremely shoddily done analysis which excluded the majority of the epidemiology and all of the interventional studies i've done multiple podcasts on this it's in my book trust me my friends links between red meat and cancer are baseless and if that's the case then why would a cohort study from asia find that the more red meat you ate the less cardiovascular disease mortality in men and the less cancer mortality in women is meat good for asians but bad for westerners sorry what we're looking at here is misleading epidemiology fiber [Music] no benefit in diverticulosis if you actually look at the literature no benefit for constipation no benefit for cancer no benefit for obesity and no benefit for alpha diversity this is the all hailed microbiome nope nope nope stopping or reducing dietary fiber reduces constipation it's associated symptoms well-known study often quoted in this study idiopathic constipation this is an interventional study associated symptoms can be effectively reduced by stopping or even lowering dietary fiber intake they had 20 people in each arm of this group the group that completely united fiber 100 percent resolved their constipation tell me again how fiber improves constipation when elimination resolves 100 percent of the idiopathic conservation in this group there's a deep well of literature i've talked out in much more detail later in other spaces it's also in my book diverticulosis high fiber diet does not protect cancer nope new england journal little small journal maybe you guys have heard of it do not support the existence of an important protective effect of dietary fiber against colorectal cancer adenoma multiple studies like this a whole series of these from 99 to 2000. what about the microbiome you do not need fiber for a healthy microbiome my friends you heard it here first dietary fiber intervention involving fructans beta galacto oligosaccharides led to higher bifido and lactose species but does not affect alpha diversity does not affect alpha diversity you could say what about bifidobacterium and lactobacillus aren't those beneficial we don't know the hadza in fact don't even have bifidobacteria we cannot pretend that we know what a healthy microbiome is you can't say fiber increases lactobacillus therefore it's beneficial because in the previous study fiber caused constipation and then removal constipation and eliminate it completely in those people so getting to the granular level that we think we know what can happen with a species of bacteria is fallacy it's complete taciography tea leave reading as my friend tommy wood would say and we know clearly that fiber does not increase alpha diversity if you want a diverse gut it's not about fiber it's about being insulin sensitive and not being inflamed in your gut won't red meat cause your heart to explode well clearly we know that everyone who eats a carnivore diet gets a higher ldl most of them do but is that a bad thing well in this data from the framingham study if you stratify it by hdl what you'll see is that when the hdl is robust correlated presumably with insulin sensitivity there's essentially no increase in risk as your ldl rises to over 220 but if your ldl is low and you're very insulin resistant there's a problem here could this be more about insulin resistance rather than ldl itself i think so there's a whole chapter in my book about this i would encourage you to read it in much more detail but i think here is the takeaway ldl must be interpreted in the context of insulin sensitivity to interpret ldl outside of hdl triglyceride ratios outside of fasting insulin outside of hscrp is myopathy it's myopia excuse me it's myopia could be a myopathy too if you're giving a statin then you get a myopathy but in this case it's myopia it's nearsightedness it's an incomplete view don't let your doctor or any doctor do it know what your hdl is know how insulin sensitive you are that is the context in which your ldl must be interpreted in the book i talk about all the reasons why ldl might go up on a ketogenic carnivore diet or on a diet with higher saturated fat not necessarily a bad thing there are no clinical studies with a carnivore diet except this one very long study done many years ago which is quite fascinating and i'm saying there are no clinical studies of the carnivore diet facitiously because there are clinical studies now with the carnivore diet this is our friend willimer steffensen who lived on an exclusive meat diet for one year and did great none of the measures were problematic there were no vitamin deficiencies there was no evidence of kidney problems and they thrived for a year so they were observed very closely in bellevue hospital for a year very few experiments are done my friends on diets for a year in a controlled setting like this it's pretty darn safe many of us in the community have been eating a carnivore diet animal-based diet for two to three four or five times this ten times this and seen no problems carnivore diets are safe but are we killing the planet well don't believe the hype my friends this is epa data the environmental protection agency data from 2016. livestock accounts for 1.9 percent of u.s greenhouse gas emissions transportation 26.4 industry 21.3 electricity 30.3 you tell me who the villain is but paul how can all the vegans how can everyone say that cattle are causing as much emissions as transportation because they are using faulty fao data that does not compare actual life cycle analysis of cows to life cycle analysis tail pipe a life cycle analysis of fossil fuel emissions they are using data that is faulty it is flawed this is apples to apples this is the actual emissions from a cow to the actual emissions coming out of a tailpipe no one has done a life cycle analysis on the carbon dioxide emissions from transportation it's never been done and everywhere across the world people are parroting information that they don't understand when you compare apples to apples the emissions from cows which are part of a carbon cycle which has always been happening in the world and are not new carbon emissions are a fraction of the carbon emissions of transportation understand this data before you pair it if you believe cows are contributing to climate change research this look at the fao data understand what a life cycle analysis is understand what tailpipe emissions are and make sure you're comparing apples to apples and understand how you are being misled my friends and also understand that regenerative agriculture is carbon negative meaning that when you raise animals on the soil you increase the quality of the soil that soil is rich with organic matter it sequesters more carbon dioxide they are carbon negative greenhouse gas emissions per pound of carbon produced oh white oak pastures is negative carbon negative based on life cycle analysis look at this soybeans impossible and beyond burger are producing more carbon net emissions than regenerative cows tell me more about how cows are destroying the environment this is white oak pastures hopefully we'll do a gathering there in october of this year this is my friend will harris regenerative agriculture allows animals to exist on the land the way they have for millions of years in 1850 there were 250 million ruminants in the united states were they contributing to climate change no way the burps go into the atmosphere they become co2 which gets fixed into plants which the animals then re-eat they poop and pee on the ground and that creates fertile soil which sequesters more rainwater and prevents runoff and sequesters more carbon that is an ecosystem my friends that is how animals are meant to be raised at white oak pastures they've been regeneratively farming for 20 years and you can see that the amount of organic matter in the soil goes up substitution substantially every 1 increase i believe is 25 000 gallons of water held per hectare of water which decreases runoff and much more carbon sequestered many more plants that feed the animals and feed us this is what it's all about soil quality mono crop agriculture depletes the soil of nutrients creates runoff and is destroying our planet how are plants produced mono crop animals on the land is the answer for regenerating our ecosystems let's wrap it up here humans evolved as hunters eating animals made us human plants are jerks not really they don't want to be eaten they're just trying to exist maybe in a pinch you can eat some plants i'm not saying everybody needs to be a carnivore but if you understand that plants have a spectrum of toxicity and understand which plants you may not do well with you will thrive as long as you make animals the center of your diet phytonutrients are magical is a fairy tale animal foods are incredibly nutrient rich tons of bioavailable nutrients eating animals will not give you cancer or cardiovascular disease you do not need fiber to poop i had a golden poop this morning as i said in the beginning these are many deep rabbit holes all of which could be a three-hour lecture and let's return to the postulate animal foods are the most nutrient-rich foods on the planet they're very highly bioavailable they're much more bioavailable than plant foods remember the zinc experiment with oysters beans and tortillas and they don't contain toxins or anti-nutrients i'll let you decide what the optimal human diet consists of and i wish you all a very happy night very happy day and i hope that you will check out my book if you debate the things i've said then i welcome the criticism and i welcome the conversation the reason i do this is because i think there is a lot of bad information out there that is harming people we should not fear animal foods they do not need to be this the entirety of your diet but understanding that plant foods exist on a spectrum toxicity i believe will make your life better you don't also need to be keto all the time listen to my recent stuff my recent podcasts including some sources of animal-based carbohydrates like honey in my diet that have been very interesting it's not dogma it's results so understand which foods nourish you the best don't have to limit all plant foods but eliminating the most toxic ones will allow you to be carnivore-ish animal-based and i believe that will make you thrive i believe that is the ideal human diet but i welcome conversation about this thank you so much for your attention you want to be radical eat nose to tail we didn't talk about organs this is me carnivore md carnivoremd.com fundamental health podcast carnivoremd.com carnivoremd on the socials the carnivore code is the title of my book go to amazon wherever books are sold whenever you listen to this talk pre-order the second edition comes out in august first edition was out you missed it if you don't have my book yet but audiobook print e-book out in august love you all be radical thanks to the organizers conference for sharing their opportunity with me to do this i love doing this kind of thing i hope you all enjoyed this talk and i welcome your feedback reach out to me i can't wait to see you all next year in person my friends take care stay radical so peter that was a mile a minute of information coming in there and did you have any idea that paul saladina actually used to be a vegan no interesting isn't it and it seems to be a lot of people uh ex-vegans uh who finish up being carnival i mean is that just their uh their extremist personalities do you think i i don't think so i mean a lot of people they do vegan because they're they're searching for answers with regards to their health and i think it's a logical extension if the vegan diet doesn't help you then obviously the journey continues one of the things i liked about the talk was this concept of carnivore-ish i've never heard of that before where it is saying that you don't really have to be strict carnival not everyone has to be strict carnivore and that's a concept i like because i think this you know there's no one diet for every person i think we're all different and we all have different toxicities to different uh to different plants so what are your feelings on the carnival ish diet well i really like it because it brings in this concept of uh the problem with diets is not necessarily what's missing from the diet but rather what's already in it and i'll give you an example so yeah we have lots of patients come in and they'll ask what supplement can i take what else can i add to my diet to make it better rather than actually looking at your existing diet and saying well what is in my existing diet that may be actually the cause of my problems and it's not that there's any magical supplement out there that can neutralize that and i think paul did a great job of going through all the potential plant toxicities such as lectins and oxalates and so on and so forth and i think that's a a good way of approaching it we don't have to it's not an ideology against all plant foods per se but i think his approach really seems to be identifying the ones which are perhaps the most deleterious and targeting those the other thing i found interesting was the the brain size you talked about how the brain size had increased as we uh as we ate more and more meat but uh the interesting thing was the little drop at the end uh over more recent times that our brain size i think was maximum at 1500 uh cc is now down to 1400 cc's now what's your theory on uh he didn't really talk much about the cause of that what what's your thoughts on that well i mean certainly uh in terms of timing of that drop it appeared to coincide with the onset of agriculture so i certainly think it's a nutrient-related phenomenon and it probably relates to multiple factors um we know that uh iron zinc and a lot of these things ketones actually are the base ingredient for forming new brain tissue actually because a lot of the brain is actually made from fat and unfortunately that this is very hard to actually get into the brain so the ketones actually cross the blood brain barrier and then they get converted into the fatty substrates which actually used to make brain tissue so i think it's probably just a reflection of uh changes in nutritional status in the same way that we saw that the advent of hunting and was actually able to precipitate that or almost exponential increase in brain size i think it only makes sense that if you then remove some of those uh particularly nourishing foods for the brain from the diet that you'll see a drop off fascinating the whole area of carnivore is i mean if you told me you know five ten years ago that the carnival was a realistic uh diet for for healthy purposes i think uh i and most people would have thought it was a bit crazy but uh the proof of the pudding uh so to speak is uh is there and so many people seem to do well on a carnival diet all right another fascinating talk uh from paul saladino [Music] you

Channel: Low Carb Down Under

Views: 586,309

Keywords: Low Carb Down Under, LCDU, www.lowcarbdownunder.com.au, Low Carb International All Stars, Paul Saladino, The Carnivore Code, carnivore diet, #meatheals, psychiatry, diet and mental health, nose to tail nourishment, biohacking

Id: CsPSJ-dXqks

Length: 68min 3sec (4083 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020