E138 - 15 “Normal” Habits You Do Every Day Destroying Your Body, Brain, & Testosterone

23:46Paul Saladino:you basically need a faraday cage yeah would you know what like i would if i can find one i would definitely give it a try and look if anybody comes around because it's i also live in a bachelor pad i'd just be like look i have a really bad mosquito problem and this just keeps the mosquitoes out or you can take it down before somebody comes over or something but yeah i'm sure you could get it they sell these things on amazon man like just look for emf EMF tent on Amazon. You can put it over your bed. You know, I'm, I'm, we talked about this. I'm going to get a place in Miami and I'm going to have a condo and a building and I'm going to put one of those up and it's just going to be, you know, my, you know, my girlfriend is like rolls her eyes and I'm like, it's cool.

24:31You know, it'll be good. It's just, I just, I mean, I don't think

24:37Paul Saladino:anything would surprise her at this point. No, no, no. But it's like for me and we were kind of hinting at this, I mean, the two single biggest levers in human health, quality of your life and longevity are food and sleep, in my opinion. And probably community is another one, right? So like there's three huge levers, but like optimizing your sleep, that has such a high ROI. Like anything you can do to improve your sleep, man, that's going to affect your mental clarity, your motivation, your mood, your libido, your energy, your workouts. Sleep is huge. I was talking yesterday to a professional boxer that I'm probably going to work with.

25:19And I said, how much do you sleep at night? He said, six and a half hours. And I thought, dude, you're at this level. This guy's previous heavyweight champion of the world in boxing. You're at this level and you sleep six and a half hours at night? And he's talking to me from the UK in LED lights. And I'm really improve things for you just by improving your sleep. And then we're also going to work on his food too. But the idea is like sleep and food, man, huge levers, huge levers. Don't, don't, don't ignore the quality of your sleep. And if putting an EMF 10 over your bed improves your sleep in Dubai, that's, that's so, so worth it.

25:58Yeah.

25:59Paul Saladino:Speaking of food, you, I think you recently did a video where you kind of documented your full day of eating or at least what you're currently eating, which was, that was quite interesting. I mean, one thing that I liked to see was that you consumed over 3000 calories. It was like 3 ,177 or something, which is good because, I mean, I try and also preach that like you want to turn your body into, you know, a calorie burning machine. You want to have a high metabolism and, you know, you can see when you take your top off, like you've ripped you're like 10 body fat or even less probably at sometimes so i mean i would imagine a lot of the calories that you're burning is coming from the surfing because i've surfed a few times and if you go out there and you surf for a couple of hours like the just the constant paddling especially if you're fighting against a pretty gnarly swell like you are constantly going to be just paddling all the time so you're doing that almost on a daily basis and then on top of that, you're doing your some sort of like your training, resistance training, functional training.

27:06Paul Saladino:I was wondering when you do travel, for example, and you're not doing the surfing, do you make quite a significant adjustment to the calories you consume or do you still keep it around about the same? You know, this is an interesting question. I don't think about calories except when I'm trying to quantify them for a video or something to give people some sort of a blueprint of what I do. But occasionally for fun, I will sort of reverse engineer this and go into chronometer or whatever app and put in my food. And it usually ends up around 3 ,000 to 3 ,500, no matter what I'm doing. So you're right.

27:47I surf in Costa Rica every morning for an hour and a half to two hours. It's warm water. So that doesn't use as many calories, but depending on what the waves are doing and how much I'm paddling, it definitely burns who knows, you know, 500, 1 ,000 calories, 750. Like I'm out there, you're working. Some days it's chill and the waves are small. And some days you're, it's awesome waves and you catch a wave and then you're paddling all the way back, right? And your shoulders are tired and you're working hard. And then in the afternoon, I have a gym at my house. I'll go down to the gym and hit the bag.

28:18I'll do some mobility stuff. So I'll do another workout. It's not a huge workout in the afternoon. If I've surfed for two hours in the morning, it might be 45 minutes, but I'll go down there and get on the balance board. I'll do, you know, sets of pull-ups. I'll do like deep squats. I might do some like Bulgarian split squats. I'll hit the punching bag a little bit. And so I'm burning a few hundred more calories in the afternoon. That's mostly a mobility session, but I do get a little bit of a sweat. So I've probably reasonably got 750 plus calories a day that I'm burning just through exercise.

28:52across those two things. And I think that most days when I'm getting that many calories burned, I'm probably closer to 3 ,500 calories a day in terms of my food. And I agree with you completely. I think that you want your body to work. And this actually boils down to your thyroid gland and the health of your mitochondria. And that word gets used a lot. I can try and clarify that. But you want your metabolism to work. Your metabolism is basically how efficiently you're able to take the potential energy of the electrons you're eating and convert that into usable energy, namely ATP at the level of your mitochondria.

29:29So when a lot of people don't realize this, like when we're eating food, that's electrons, essentially. Those are electrons with potential energy. And those electrons get broken down and then turned into intermediates, NADH, FADH2, which then gets shuttled into your mitochondria and move those electrons down an electron transport chain, which causes an electromotive gradient for protons to move across the two membranes of the mitochondria. And then at the end of all of it, at the end of this incredibly elegant system by which humans and really all life on the planet essentially extracts energy in the form of electrons from food or sunlight, you move protons down their concentration gradient through this little nanomotor that spins.

30:13It literally spins and it makes ATP. and ATP is adenosine triphosphate. And that high energy bond of those phosphate molecules on adenosine is what's used to fuel all of the cellular reactions in your body. That's life, man. That's really cool. And so if you're not efficiently converting the potential energy from electrons that you're eating into ATP, it's essentially either going to fat, which causes metabolic problems for humans, or you don't run well because your thyroid isn't telling your body to do these things. And so there's like a dimmer switch in your body that controls that energy production and like how much heat you make and kind of gives your body the signal of abundance versus scarcity.

30:56And that happens at the level of your thyroid, this gland in your neck.

31:00Paul Saladino:So when, when I have people come up to me and they ask me about losing body fat and they tell me that they're consuming, I don't know, two and a half thousand calories, maybe even less because they apparently have been cutting for a while. is usually they're either not tracking properly and they're still over consuming more than they actually think they're consuming and on top of that when they think oh well i'm just going to continue to drop my calories even further and go lower than 2000 i'm like don't do that like just just move your body more dude just get out there just just move like you don't want to be in a situation where you're consuming as a male less than 2000 calories a day like the amount of problems that will follow on through that is just going to be endless.

31:44Well, this is so well documented in the literature. Calorie restriction fails long-term for weight loss, eight and a half times out of 10 for humans, men or women. It's crazy because we'll lose weight in the short term, but then you get adaptive thermogenesis where your thyroid just turns down the thermostat because your body realizes that you're starving. And so cutting calories, this has always been a frustrating thing for me. Yes, calories in versus calories out works at a laws of thermodynamics level, but there are multiple problems with this model. It's highly oversimplified. Number one, it's very hard to understand calories out.

32:24And calories out are not as simple as a calculation of your basal metabolism and your exercise because your basal metabolism changes based on your sleep and your basal metabolism, which is the majority of your calories out, changes based on the quality of the calories in. So what I tell people is improve the quality of the calories in, meaning don't necessarily get hung up. If you want to count calories, fine, but don't get too hung up on the calories in until you have really, really improved the quality of the calories that you're eating. And this is where I have a major divide from a lot of people in the space who would say, all that matters is macros, just eat the calories.

33:01Doesn't matter if it's Gatorade, pop tarts, sweet tarts, or gummy worms. And I think that's completely wrong because what we know very clearly is that at the level of your hypothalamus in the brain and your hunger signals and your thyroid and your mitochondria, the quality of the food that you eat, the quality the calories in absolutely affects how well you're able to burn those calories. It affects how hungry you are. It affects how much your thyroid gland is turning up your thermostat, which is going to increase your basal metabolism, and it affects the efficiency at which you convert potential energy from food into usable ATP.

33:37So if you're eating garbage calories, that's not like, this is my retort, is 2 ,000 calories of garbage is not the same as 2 ,000 calories or 2 ,500 or 3 ,000 calories, whatever. 3 ,000 calories of garbage food is not the same as 3 ,000 calories of steak, chicken, fish, fruit and vegetables. Those are completely different. You might be able to say, oh yes, on the front end, they have the same potential energy, but the way they affect your body in the middle is completely different and that's going to affect calories out. And so you're absolutely right. If you try to just cut calories, cut calories, cut calories without improving the quality of the foods you eat, you're digging yourself a hole.

34:18You're going to end up in adaptive thermogenesis. You're going to end up with a thyroid gland that doesn't work. your testosterone is going to crash, your sleep's going to crash. And the whole reason you were cutting calories in the first place, which was to look better, is going to completely crumble. And you're going to feel horrible. And we see this, obviously, you know this as well as anyone being in the aesthetic space, being in the bodybuilding space. When bodybuilders get on stage, their hormones, their natural production of hormones is abysmal. They're so lean. I did a post about this the other day on X.

34:49It's pretty clear from the evidence that 9 to 11 % is the ideal body fat for men. If you go too far above that, you start to decline your testosterone, about 12 nanograms per deciliter per 1 % body fat above maybe 12 or 13 % body fat. But if you go too far below that, you're going to tank your testosterone too. So a lot of people you're talking to who are going 2000 calories are probably not dieting from 9 % body fat to 5 % body fat. They're probably trying to get from 20 to 13, but you're still digging yourself a hole. And the point remains that like, and this is sort of, I've been kind of beating the drum about this recently and trying to tell people, it's not a very sexy thing to talk about, but it's, I just think if you just improve the quality of the foods you eat, if you just stop eating bullshit, everything works because the human body knows what to do with that.

35:37But if you insist on eating garbage, not you specifically, but people listening, you know, if you insist on eating pasta and pizza, and we can talk about why these foods are bad or cereal or this garbage food, you're just, you're never going to get out of the hole. And then the answer is Ozempic, Wagovi, Reda, you know? Because then you've messed with your hypothalamus so much that you don't understand satiety signals and you have to take an injectable peptide or, you know, one of these GLP-1 agonists because you've so badly damaged your satiety signaling in your brain. I mean, this is what happens to people.

36:11This is what these medications do is they just address, they address a problem that didn't exist 100 years ago. And I don't think people are honestly or candidly talking about the fact that we are literally poisoning our brains with this food. And one of the only ways out are peptides, you know, these GLP-1s, which have their own issues, which we can talk about. Yeah.

36:32Paul Saladino:I mean, I experienced it myself back in the day when I used to follow a if it fits your macros approach where I would probably say 50 % of what I was eating was okay, acceptable. But the other 50%, now that I look back, it was really not good. I mean, I documented all of this. Like I started making YouTube videos like 10 years ago. And even you see like just the way I was preparing the meals, like with a nonstick pan that had lost all of the nonstick. Every time I was cooking, frying my chicken, I was getting a nice little dose of microplastics with every meal. So, um, I mean, I noticed that when I was eating the garbage or more garbage that you just visually look different.

37:18Paul Saladino:I mean, other people may not notice it as much as you do when you look in the mirror, or at least I noticed it, but you get like this puffy face and this inflammation and you just don't like, you don't have a glow to you that you usually would do if you were to have like just a much cleaner diet. I mean, even if you were to eat more clean, I know people debate whether clean is a good way to say it or whatever, But if you eat food in their natural state and you're eating the right kind of foods, like naturally your face just looks leaner. Everything is like more tight and more tucked in. yeah i mean there's the macros are super important and we can talk about macros but the other thing that follows naturally here is that when you're eating natural food whatever we want to call it i would call it food for humans simple single ingredient foods food that doesn't even need an ingredient label beef chicken fish lettuce tomatoes cucumbers right fruit simple simple foods you get more micronutrients.

38:19And the micronutrients are all the little building blocks that allow your body to function well. Sometimes I'll ask people, where do you get your selenium from? Or where do you get your folate from? Or where do you get your riboflavin from? And if they don't know, then we often have a big problem because it's not difficult. But if you're eating a lot of processed food, you're almost certainly going to have micronutrient deficiencies. And then you're also leaving a lot of money on the table in terms of everything, in terms of energy, libido, body composition, the way your skin looks, your mental clarity.

38:52Because when a little piece of your biochemistry is missing, nothing runs well. It's like, you ever seen those watches with all the little gears and levers in there? They're really beautiful, right? Or like a big clock. That's your biochemistry. Human biochemistry is hundreds and hundreds of little cycles with little cofactors and enzymatic reactions. And so many reactions in the body require magnesium or selenium or zinc or copper or iron or manganese or riboflavin or B6 or pyridoxine or thiamine. And if we're not getting enough of those, then these little watch gears just kind of grind to a halt and we're so suboptimal.

39:31And when you eat more of these simple food for humans, if you just eat unprocessed food, you will usually by default get far more of those micronutrients you need every once in a while you can insert like one micronutrient with a supplement that someone may need and it's really helpful but most of the time if you just if you just eat simple high quality food you're going to do so much better from the micronutrient perspective also a lot of people think oh i could just take a multivitamin it's not always that simple yeah i i've noticed with with a lot of the people i've

40:07Paul Saladino:spoken to in this space who really take what they eat seriously a lot of them tend to do a lot of their own food shopping and meal prep which is interesting because these people are usually they're very successful they're running multiple businesses and you know even for myself back in the day i used to do all the food shops i used to do the meal prep and then i was like look i don't really need to be doing this anymore so i would then find places to prep food for me and it would get delivered to my door. I would pay more to get the healthiest option I could find. But even then, the more that I learn, the more questions I ask.

40:45Paul Saladino:And then I'm like, something seems off. I have no idea how this is prepared. I don't know what additional ingredients are added to this. I don't know what the macros are. And then I'm thinking, I'm going to have to go back to doing my own food shop at these special farmers markets, and then doing some of the meal prep myself. I mean, I don't like doing anything too fancy i would probably just do the most the most simple things and just cook it and eat it like minced meat and some liver and then maybe a couple of dates and then uh maybe some bone marrow like that would be that would be perfect i was wondering do you in your in your you showed what you ate in a day are you doing everything yourself still or do you have a chef do you go do the food shop myself?

41:33I cook it all myself. I cook everything myself. Um, it's really important to me. I don't have a chef. Um, I do, I do, I have an assistant here in Costa Rica and sometimes my assistant goes to the farmer's market. Right. And, but I tell him, Hey, I want these foods. He knows, okay, get the raw milk from these people, get these melons from this guy that sells organic melons. And then I have a farm in Costa Rica that I get the meat from and he'll go and get the meat for me. And so like I have help getting the food sometimes just for the sake of time, because in Costa Rica, the upside is I can get a lot of really good quality food.

42:09The downside is it's from seven or eight different farms, right? So that just makes it a little more challenging in the States or depending where people are, you might be able to go to a place like Sprouts or Whole Foods or whatever grocery store that you like. And a lot of the higher quality food is in one place and it's easier. And in the States, I'll just do my grocery shopping myself because I like going grocery shopping. I think it's an interesting experience and I'm always curious and I want to see the produce and pick it out myself. It's just such a central piece of who I am, but I'm like you, man.

42:38I make simple food. My girlfriend loves to make salads. I don't eat salads, but she loves to make interesting food and use spices. And I'm so simple. I just want salt. I don't even use pepper because it kind of irritates my gut. And I can't do hot pepper because that irritates my eczema also. I'm sensitive to the nightshades, but I'll do things. I mean, in that video, the what I eat in a day, I'll just run through it real quick. What I eat in a day right now, I get up in the morning first thing and I'm up early cause I'm going to go surf in Costa Rica. So I'm usually up at like five or five 15, but I went to bed at eight or eight 30 at night.

43:11Right. So I'm up really early. I value my sleep. And the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is I have a glass of water with some creatine, uh, maybe a little bit of salt. And then immediately after that, I'll go outside for, you know, 10 minutes and just get sunlight in my eyes. And so by then I'm back inside by like 5.30, 5.40 in the morning at the latest. And then I eat my first simple meal of the day, which is usually a smoothie. I'll put raw milk in a blender. I've got a stainless steel blender that I show in the video. And then I'll add some whey protein, like a good quality grass-fed whey with no additives.

43:41It's just pure grass-fed whey protein and milk. I'll put salt, I'll put blueberries, I'll put a local honey. And that's good for me. I mean, I might put some organs in there. If I don't have liver or testicle, I might get some of the organ capsules in there. And that's pretty much it. I'll make the smoothie, I'll drink that, and I go surf. So that's where I start. And that I like for me because I don't want a ton of food in my stomach when I surf, but I don't want to surf fasted because I don't want a steak. Because if I'm in the ocean, I don't want a steak in my stomach because you can feel it when you're exercising and you can feel in terms of holding your breath.

44:13I want the first meal to digest pretty quickly or I'm not going to be able to hold my breath under the ocean as easily. But then I come back from surf and I have a pretty big breakfast at nine or 9.30 in the morning. And so that's going to be meat, moderate amount of meat, usually ground beef, which is great. Or a stew meat. I don't even need an expensive cut of meat. Even Costa Rica, it's hard to find meat that's super tender. So a lot of times I'll eat ground beef. I might cook it on the grill. I don't burn it, but I'll grill some ground beef. I have fruit. I have honey, maybe a little more of the milk.

44:50And then sometimes I experiment with new things. And one of the things I talked about in this, this day in life video, I was, I've been experimenting with new things. So for, I mean, I'll just pause there for a moment. People don't know my story. So I went to, I went to medical school at the university of Arizona. I got my MD at the end of medical school. I was like, what am I going to do? What specialty? I liked internal medicine. My dad's an internist, but I really liked psychiatry because I found depression, anxiety, and suicidality really fascinating. When someone wants to kill themselves, there's nothing more poignant than that.

45:23And I really liked the human story aspect of that. And I got really interested in the connections between food, the gut, and the brain, and the neuroinflammatory processes that are happening in the brain to cause psychiatric illness. So I did my residency in psychiatry at the University of Washington in Seattle. And unfortunately, my whole medical career was very disappointing, because as much as I hoped that Western medicine would want to try and address the root cause of an illness, they don't really want to do that. And so during my four years in Seattle at the University of Washington, my eczema, which is the main autoimmune condition that I've struggled with my whole life, got really, really bad.

46:00And so I did something kind of crazy, which was I did the carnivore diet. And that was really fascinating. I did it for about a year and a half eventually, but in the first couple of weeks I did carnivore, my eczema went away completely. And at the time, I had a really bad flare with eczema on my hips and like my, my back. And I would get, you know, like weeping around my belt line so bad that when I would come home from the hospital and I was wearing like a button down shirt, I would have like saris fluid. It's gross, you know, in the shirt and I have to wash my shirts because my eczema was so bad.

46:30But what's interesting in retrospect is that I realized carnivore, which is just straight meat, right? So basically for in the beginning weeks and months, I just had meat and fat and a little bit of liver or heart and salt, it's like, it's so extreme. It's almost in retrospect, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but it works because it's so extreme. It's just, okay, if you get rid of everything but meat, your eczema goes away. And then the goal was always to reincorporate things gradually to see how many different foods I could eat. I sort of got forced into doing that because I didn't do well with long-term keto.

47:05I think humans do really well with carbohydrates. And so long-term keto caused electrolyte issues for me. My testosterone started to drop. I had heart palpitations and sleep issues. So then I added fruit and honey and did really well with that. Basically what I would call an animal-based diet for the last basically five and a half years. Added some dairy and usually raw. But in the last like four to six months, I've been thinking like, okay, I feel good on animal-based. What if I try some yucca, which is a root here in Costa Rica? Or what if I try some white potatoes? What if I try some asparagus?

47:36So like just as I added foods to carnivore, Can I add these foods back in and see how I feel? And some experiments go well and some experiments don't. So back to my day in the life, at lunch, I might try, sometimes at breakfast, I'll have a little bit of yucca or some potatoes. Again, it's an ongoing experiment. It doesn't always work for me. For instance, in the past, I tried potatoes, excuse me, I tried tomatoes and my eczema comes back. So I know there are some foods that still trigger me, especially these sort of nightshades. Not everyone has this sensitivity, but my immune system is particularly sensitive.

48:11So in the whole scheme of things, the goal has always been eat the most varied diet possible that keeps my immune system calm. So that's the goal. The breakfast I described is mostly meat and fruit and dairy, maybe some experimental foods, see how I do. And lunch and dinner are kind of the same simple repeating thing. I love the idea of eating the same foods throughout the day. I'm not making complex foods. I'm thinking, okay, what are my macros today? I do think about this maybe like, okay, I'm active. I want to get 300 plus grams of carbohydrates. I'm aiming for maybe a little bit below one gram of protein per pound of body weight.

48:48I'm not a huge guy. I'm 5 '9", I'm 165, but I do have muscle. And I do have a low body fat. It's probably right around 10 or a little bit below. So I want to get like 150 grams of protein from animal foods. And then I'm aiming for probably around 100 to 110 grams of fat. That's the way I think about it. I kind of trend toward that without thinking about it too much. And so I'm getting probably 40 % of my calories from carbohydrates, probably 40 % of my calories from fat and like 20 % of my calories from protein is usually the way my macros go. Sometimes it's a little less on the fat, 30 % fat, a little more carbs.

49:26I don't usually go much above 20 % of my calories from protein. I don't see much point to that. But, you know, lunch is going to be something similar, maybe Greek yogurt, honey, some fruit in the yogurt, dinner, put a steak on the grill, maybe experiment with some asparagus. My girlfriend gets happy when I experiment with foods. But again, it doesn't always work for me. And I think people have to figure out what their immune system is saying. So what I've learned through the whole journey and what I was kind of excited to show people in this most recent What I Eat in a Day video is, look, the overarching piece here that's so interesting to me is that eczema, which is what I have, psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, depression, anxiety, inflammatory bowel diseases, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, these all have an autoimmune component.

50:16and my doctor never told me that eczema was fixable with diet. And I've met so many people with psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, all the diseases I just mentioned who have reversed their issues by eating carnivore or animal-based or just doing some sort of intentional elimination diet. That's incredible. Because Western medicine that I trained in for, I mean, the better part of 20 years, man, never says to you, your depression is likely neuroinflammation related to your gut, which is related to the garbage foods you're eating. Western medicine never says you have psoriasis.

50:53It's these huge plaques on your arms. It's kind of disfiguring. It causes people to feel self-conscious. That is very likely related to some foods you're eating. If you eat a simple diet for a month or two, let's see if that gets better. No, Western medicine says, here's a steroid cream for my asthma. They would say, here's an inhaler. And that's really what I've wanted to rebel against my whole time doing this work. That was why I started talking about the carnivore diet, why I've been talking about an animal-based diet. I don't think people need to eat exactly like me. What I want them to understand is what we said earlier, which is that the quality of your food is king.

51:30Don't really get so caught up in calories. But if you have an autoimmune condition, which so many of the chronic issues that people suffer from are, it's very likely fixable with your diet. If you just simplify your diet, and we've got all sorts of, there's all sorts of kind of blueprints you can follow there that I talk about on my website and social media. But that's been really cool for me to see because it's like, I mean, that was why I left medicine. It's just, these are debilitating illnesses, especially the psychiatric illnesses. I mean, depression sucks. I just saw Theo Vaughn on Rogan's podcast talking about, he's been on antidepressants for years.

52:06They just give him the med, you never get off. You never get off the meds and you think, your doctor didn't tell you that the meds make you feel kind of flat, you know? And this is probably just related to the quality of the food you're eating, man. Theo, like, I don't know him yet, but there's ways around this. And so, yeah, the most poignant stories are in psychiatry, but it's pretty incredible when I'm walking in an airport or somebody sends me a message on Instagram and they come up to you or they send you this DM and they say, hey man, my doctor told me I was gonna lose my colon because I had ulcerative colitis or I was gonna need a surgery because I had a fistula for my Crohn's disease and simply eating just like meat and fruit and maybe sweet potatoes, like that just healed it.

52:48And I think, oh, that's cool. It makes me feel good. You know, like if you think you've helped one person and they come up to you and you see the story in real life, you're like, fuck, okay, cool. I did something good in this life. You know, just a little bit. I did something good. Yeah.

53:01Paul Saladino:We'll get back to the podcast in a second. But first of all, I want to say a massive shout out to Bionic. I have been using their supplements for the past four years. I never knew what supplements I needed to take. I'd always go into the pharmacy and buy a load of random bottles and end up popping pills all day, every day, not having a clue if I was consuming the vitamins, which I should be consuming at all. But Bionic came to save the day. They are a tailor-made supplement company that will put together your own specific formula based on your activity, your gender. I have Bionic Pro, where I get the blood test done every three to four months.

53:38Paul Saladino:And based on that blood test, I get my own personalized formula. For those people who don't want to do a blood test or don't have access to that, then you can go with Bionic Go, where you just have to fill in a short questionnaire. And based on that questionnaire, you will get your tailored supplements with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy. So stop the guesswork, sign up to Bionic, and ensure that you remove those deficiencies and build up your immune system. Yeah, I think, as you said, one of the best things you can do is just eliminate most of the foods and keep it as simple as possible and then gradually reintroduce things and see how you feel.

54:17Paul Saladino:Because, I mean, of course, there's just a vast array of technically healthy foods out there, but it's not going to be suitable for everyone. And there might be a particular fruit or vegetable that just doesn't agree with you. And that's just the way it is and it's completely normal. But I was wondering if there is, is there any reliable test which you can do, which would give you a list of foods, which you should maybe try and avoid, or do they tend to be quite unreliable and you're just better off just experimenting? It's almost not worth it. It sends you on these wild goose chases. You know, the gold standard is, is basically food elimination.

54:57That's what it always boils down to. And that is not sexy. And you don't have to pay someone 500 or$700 an hour to tell you this. You know, I'm telling you this right now. Like it's just elimination diets. And I think I've always felt like meat and fruit is such a good starting point for people, like an animal-based approach. You don't have to do it exactly, but that's why I'm so excited about that way of eating it. People don't have to do it for sure, just like I did it. But I think carnivore is often too, it's too extreme for most people. I wouldn't do carnivore long-term. I tried it that way and I sort of learned through my own stumblings that it doesn't work great for most people.

55:33It can be very powerful in the short term, but finding some sort of an intentional elimination protocol for your food, and elimination is such a negative framing, but being free from your illness is such a positive thing to understand. Once you have simplified your diet enough to see these conditions get better. And I've seen women improve too. I mean, PCOS, endometriosis, the most moving stories are the infertility ones. I love it when, and people send these stories to heart and soil also with the organs or wherever, they'll say, hey, we were infertile, we were trying to get pregnant, and then we improved our diet, and now we have three babies.

56:10And you think, that's so cool. Like there's literally humans on the planet that may not have been on the planet because of just simple dietary change. And these people, maybe they don't have enough money to afford IVF or you don't want to do IVF, which, you know, I mean, a natural conception is always the way people would rather have a baby, right? So that's really cool. So both women's and men's issues, nothing is a panacea. Nothing is like the magic wand, but I don't think people understand how profound the quality of their diet is on every aspect of their life. I mean, we've talked about this so many times already today.

56:43And so many of these diseases can be fixed with just changing your diet. It's wild. It's really cool. I always find it interesting because obviously I'm speaking to a lot of people in this industry.

56:58Paul Saladino:And when it comes to the training side of things, for example, when it comes to building muscle mass or losing body fat, generally people tend to be quite, I don't know, they agree with the methods of doing that. But when it comes to nutrition, there is this, I mean, you get people from one extreme to the other. For example, like the carnivore diet, that is in itself quite extreme. but there's studies behind it and there's experiments which have been done and experience which have been shared which shows that it does work and it can work but then you get other people on the other end of the spectrum who are just completely vegan who talk about the the downsides and the potential harmful effects of a high protein diet or carnivore diet will have on the human body and it's just like well i mean both of them are like pretty well respected and they've dedicated their life to it so even when i speak to these people i'm just like i'm very open-minded to all like approaches and what people say and i like to listen to what their points of view are but i do find it interesting that two very extremes still exist today and people follow it and it works for some people it doesn't work for others it's interesting just like there are stories of healing with carnivore or animal-based, there are stories of healing with a vegan diet.

58:23So there's something to it, right? I think that a lot of the people who do better with vegan probably are cutting out processed food, right? So if you're eating a whole foods plant-based diet, I would say that's better than a junk food diet. But I mean, I'll just, you know, I draw the line in the sand pretty clearly for people and say, if you look at what humans have done for literally hundreds of thousands of years as Homo sapiens and millions of years as pre-hominids. So Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo hydroboidensis, these pre-human ancestors of ours, we've always eaten meat. It's just, it's unquestionable.

59:02And then you look at the biochemistry and you look at the nutrients and there are so many nutrients that humans thrive on, that humans need to thrive, that occur only in animal foods or in the most abundant or bioavailable forms in animal foods. So you look at people like, I would think Brian Johnson is probably the most prominent vegan today. And you look at his supplement regimen and a large portion of his supplement regimen are nutrients, vitamins that occur in meat, right? So taurine, CoQ10, creatine, glycine, collagen, these things all occur in animal foods, right? And they do not occur in plants.

59:47And the list is even longer than that. And I think that by being vegan and trying to supplement his way out of it, he's leaving a lot on the table, unless you're going to supplement with creatine, carnitine, anserine, taurine, choline, B12. You've got vitamin K2, which doesn't really occur in any meaningful amount in plant foods unless you're eating natto, which nobody does, unless you're in Japan. I mean, the list is so long and that's just the nutrients. We're not even talking about peptides or microRNAs, which is probably a lot of the benefits of organs. And so I think, you know, I was pretty extreme for a little while with carnivore, but I've come back to the middle now.

1:00:27If people want to eat plants, do it. Just understand that a lot of plants do contain defense chemicals. Potatoes are a good example. Potatoes contain solanine and chocanine, especially in the skin or the little green sprouts. And so these are alkaloids, and they're problematic for humans. And so some people are going to be more sensitive. Potatoes are also in the nightshade family with tomatoes, with eggplants, with peppers, both the hot peppers or the bell peppers. And so they contain lectins, which are carbohydrate binding proteins that can trigger the immune system. And so if you have immune issues and you want to eat potatoes, you can do that.

1:01:09You just probably need to peel the potatoes and boil the potatoes and eat the potatoes as a single intervention so you can watch what happens in your body and you know, so that if your eczema comes back, you don't think, oh, I have no idea what triggered my eczema. You think, oh, I added potatoes in, or I added tomatoes in, or I added spinach in and I got joint pain. So a lot of people can eat these foods, but if you have issues, it's critical to understand that the plant foods do have more defense chemicals than animal foods, which don't really have any because animals can run away from you. So if you have issues, just being cautious with the plant foods can really help you untangle this.

1:01:45But I mean, I eat plant foods. I had a mango this morning. I had a cantaloupe this morning. I have eaten asparagus, you know, and it didn't kill me. It doesn't seem to bother me, but tomatoes are an issue for me. I'm still on the fence about potatoes. I actually think including potatoes back in my diet has re-triggered some of my eczema. But there are other routes that I could probably eat, like sweet potatoes. So there's an individuality here. And I think there is a middle ground, but I'm willing to stand very clearly on the perspective that including animal foods in the human diet, wow, that's essential for, I would say, all humans unless you really, really, really have some sort of inborn error of metabolism in the urea cycle, and you're not going to handle methionine well, like less than a tenth of the pop, you know, a tenth or a hundredth of a percentage of the population.

1:02:38Like, I think most people who go vegan end up eventually not going vegan, you know, like the statistics are pretty crazy. And like all respect and appreciation to vegans, because they're doing something intentional. And I appreciate that. But there's some crazy number that like 86 plus percent of people who go vegan end up eating meat again within three to five years. And the majority of those people cite the onset of symptoms or fatigue as the reason they reincorporated meat. I don't think humans need to eat only animal foods. I've been down that road. I think having some plants is fine. Just be careful with them.

1:03:12And I think there is a middle ground, but I think that the vegan way is not, it's just, it doesn't make sense for humans and i'm happy to continue to argue that with vegans or debate that or just have respectful discussions with them because i think that people generally they generally hurt themselves when they go vegan um either quickly or over a long time and we see

1:03:33Paul Saladino:that over and over and over again yeah um i wanted to switch a bit on supplements i mean first of all in that the full day of eating it was quite interesting when you were talking about the creatine and how you need to ensure that the creatine is fully kind of dissolved into the water because if he if you leave it all clumped up that's going to be one of the causes of potential bloating which i never used to think about i would just be like pop it in down it and then i'd get like all the the gritty at the end yeah so that was a good thing which stood out to me and then on top of that um i think this is probably one of the things that actually got us engaging in conversation so organ meat right this is something which i very rarely eat myself because um i think from a lot of places where i was getting food delivered from they just don't serve organ meat i knew that i mean organ meat has like so much goodness packed inside of it so i was like all right okay instead of me actually eating it let me just see if i can find some to to buy and i went on amazon based in dubai obviously went on the dubai or the the united arab emirates amazon website and i looked at a few different um organ meats and obviously i came across yours which i didn't know it was yours though i just saw i saw heart and soil and what i what i had understood is that it doesn't matter if it says like organ meat like the actual quality of the organ meat itself is going to be down to the animal it came from and the the life how good quality of life that animal had like what was the food it was eating so i compared a few different products i think there was ancestral which was also there which i thought that's probably not going to be that good so um yours checked out when i did a bit of research as being like the that the highest quality so i've been having these for like the past year and obviously in that i was making a video just a casual full day of eating just in miami and i took these with me uh along with my bionic supplements as well and i think somebody must have seen it and then mentioned it to you.

1:05:39Paul Saladino:And then we just start talking. No, it was great. I was really, I'm really, I'm really honored about that. I'm really proud of that company. That was the first company that I built because I really believe in organs. And I think most of us don't want to eat liver or testicle is one that I recommended to you because Heart and Soil makes another supplement called Whole Package with Testicle. And man, I mean, it's pretty interesting. And I think that this is really the forefront of nutrition. And I would always prefer that people eat the fresh organs and I have fresh frozen liver in my freezer and I have some frozen testicles in my liver.

1:06:12I have some frozen testicles in my freezer also. But for a lot of us, we can't get, you know, testicles or ovaries for women or like intestines or stomach or brain or spleen or pancreas or kidney or liver or heart. And so that was why I thought like, let's make an organ supplement company for people to have these in capsules, gelatin capsules. And we source entirely from New Zealand on grass-fed farms. And if you've ever seen the way that the cows are raised in like down under, like New Zealand or Australia, they're on like the greenest pastures you've ever seen. And so you're absolutely right.

1:06:49I mean, this goes down to the meat. Like in terms of steaks, you can tell when you eat a steak how well-raised that cow is, you know? But for most of us, we're not eating organs enough to understand or to care. But yeah, we wanted to make the highest quality organs we could. And then we wanted to package it in glass. And so it's all in glass bottles. And so we're just trying at every point we can. And it makes everything more difficult. When I started the company, we were shipping these glass supplement bottles and they were breaking in the mail and we had to figure out how do we package these things.

1:07:18And so Heart and Soil recently, like in the last year, made a whey protein and we put the whey protein in paper. Like it's a paper. That's one of what I use in my smoothie is this whey protein from Heart and Soil. And it's in a paper packaging. It's in like a paper cylinder. And there's no other company I'm aware of. Even the scooper is paper in this thing. Because we were like, oh, let's just try and create this inertia for other companies to make less plastic packaging. But that's the same level of attention that we're giving to the packaging we're giving to the quality of the ingredients that go in there.

1:07:50And so I think organs are really important. You look at liver just broadly, either desiccated or fresh, it's a powerhouse. And so a couple of years ago, one of the coolest experiences I ever had in my life was going to Tanzania to spend time with the Hadza, these hunter gatherers. And if people have heard me on podcasts, I talk about this all the time because it was so impactful, but they are literally hunter gatherers. They live in the bush. They live in these temporary thatched tents basically that they make and then they break them down. They don't have phones. They don't use money. They hunt all of their food and they gather their food.

1:08:27And so it's crazy. This exists. I mean, I went in 2022, I guess, or 2021. But to think this exists in our modern times is wild. They literally wear like animal skins. They have track shorts, I think, that the missionaries gave them. So their balls are not hanging out, I guess, to scare the tourists. But they're wearing sandals made that they've made themselves. They use bows that they have hewn. They have made their bows and they have knives that they get from metal that they traded stuff with another neighboring tribe who does the togas who like, you know, forge metal and make points of their arrows that they use for poisonous arrows.

1:09:08So anyway, we go hunting with them and we hunted baboons, which is hard for a lot of people to understand because we don't like to think about primates. They look like humans, but we hunted baboons. So we hiked for probably seven or eight kilometers and they're like hiking fast. They're running. And then we find the baboons and they go off in all directions. They sprint. I'm looking at my buddy, just a couple of us there. There's only like two of us on this hike. We're like, what the heck is going on? And then they come back and they've killed this baboon. And the first thing we do is put that baboon on a fire and singe off all the hair.

1:09:43They cut it open and we all eat the organs. So we shared the heart, the liver, the spleen, the pancreas, the kidneys. The first thing we do is eat the organs. And then we take the carcass, which is just the muscle meat and the brain back to the camp. And then everyone in the tribe shares the muscle meat. And then the next morning, the guy who killed the baboon cooked the head of the baboon, cracked it open and offered me like a stick full of brains. So it's like a scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. you know it's pretty gnarly but it's just to say which i ate by the way which i ate um and maybe otherwise it's disrespectful yeah like i'm thinking like okay like let's do this let's do this and so if i get prion disease you'll know why i think i'm in the clear now at this time frame but um yeah like they they treasure the organs and then another time when i was with them we slaughtered a goat they had traded for a goat from a neighboring from a pastoralist herd they killed a goat.

1:10:41It's pretty gruesome by today's standards. They cut the neck, they drain all the blood, they put all the organs in the blood and they boil it all together and store eating organs boiled in blood. But the liver of the goat, they did not boil in the blood. They took the liver out and it was like they held it with two hands, like it was sacred, and they put it on the stone to save it. And then they just cut it up into the smallest pieces. They were so intentional with the liver. And then everyone in the tribe got, you know, a small like nickel size piece of the liver. It's so interesting. So the thing about organs, especially liver, is you don't need a lot.

1:11:15You just need like a half an ounce, you know, a couple of times a week can really fill in some of those nutritional deficiencies or just help augment all that stuff. And then like I hinted at earlier, we don't really understand the peptides because peptides are all the rage now, right? But a lot of these peptides occur naturally in organs. And so many of these peptides below a certain size can pass through the stomach undigested. And so there's potential that these organs have peptides that affect us in certain ways. They certainly have growth factors. Many of them contain hormones, which probably enter circulation.

1:11:51And they have microRNA, which is different than messenger RNA. And the microRNA appears to be able to survive digestion also if you're eating the organ raw or desiccated. So I don't know when we're going to get the studies to understand this. We're starting to do these studies at heart and soil, but the potential that organs have nutrients that we don't even really think about that are not listed on any nutrient label is strong. And plants probably have this too, but the animal organs are unique in that they have these things in unique ways. So it's pretty fascinating stuff. So getting some organs, easy,

1:12:25Paul Saladino:easy upgrade in general however you do it yeah so the i mean ideally you would be eating the real thing but if you don't have access to it supplementing is the next best thing probably yeah is there a particular like i mean i see on your website like you have stacks is there like would would the beef organs cover everything or would you want to go for like liver in particular or because there's some of them which have i think in this one there's you've got liver heart kidney pancreas and spleen so you're getting a you get a mix of everything but then how do you even think about the ratios of all of them like do you want it at even balance of each or because i've seen some that have more liver and then like smaller ratios of everything else and it's like well what's the science behind that?

1:13:20Paul Saladino:What's the reasoning? You know, we don't know, right? We're sort of, this is forgotten knowledge that we don't know that, you know, probably in the Hadza tribe, they think about these things. For some, for some conditions, there are targeted organ support. So the best selling one at Hardened Soil is the whole package, the testicle. And so for men, it's like, okay, you, if you don't want to eat like bull balls, you might want to try some desiccated testicle. And that one's really interesting. And so for women, similarly, the HER package is ovaries, uterus, and fallopian tubes. And that seems to really help women too.

1:13:58But if you have gut issues, the sort of high-level hypothesis is you might want to try to eat the stomach and the intestines. Are there nutrients? Are there cofactors? Are there peptides? Are there micro RNAs in those organs that could help those things? So another interesting one is the spleen, right? Spleen is very, very high in bioavailable iron, so heme iron. So if people have anemia, more of an issue in women, you'd wanna try and eat more spleen. People get a little grossed out with the brain, but where we source the cows from in New Zealand, there's never, ever been a single case of BSE.

1:14:35So there's never been prion disease in New Zealand. They're so strict on that. So, I mean, that's like a thing in England, right? Like you wouldn't eat cow brain in England, but it seems pretty darn safe considering that there's never, ever been a single case of BSE, bovine spongiform encephalopathy in New Zealand. People with, you know, neurologic issues or dementia or memory stuff might try the brain. And there's actually studies using bovine derived, I think it's sphingomyelin or phosphatidylserine. I'd have to look at the actual study. It's a bovine-derived compound, and it actually improved cognition in people with early-onset memory loss.

1:15:16And they tried the same compound derived from plants. Like, you can make, I'm blanking whether it's phosphatidylserine or sphingomyelin, but maybe a combination of both. You can make those compounds from plants, and it didn't have the same effect. So, it may not actually be the phosphatidylserine or the sphingomyelin. It might be another cofactor peptide or microRNA that's in the brain of a cow that somehow affects gene transcription in a human. Because we know this happens across species, it's really fascinating. I mean, yeah, it's really, it's sort of, it's cutting edge stuff that like nobody's thinking about.

1:15:52But I, you know, it's, you don't really have to know the research to think like, well, I'm just going to eat some organs. It makes sense evolutionarily and probably it'll benefit me. So I would say to your question, The beef organs is a great supplement that's just sort of like a balanced supplement. But if you have specific issues, if you're looking to optimize maleness, if you want to optimize testosterone or androgen traits, whole package, if women are looking for fertility or other things, then try that stuff. So it's, and it's pretty cool. I mean, again, there's no panacea, but the organs seem pretty powerful.

1:16:26However, you can get them. Yeah. Yeah.

1:16:30Paul Saladino:I mean, I do have quite a lot of entrepreneurs who are listeners of the podcast. So, I mean, I'm just curious to know from your experience, starting a supplement company, like what's been the most challenging thing? And I know this isn't your only one. I'm quite interested to know why you separated heart and soil from lineage. I mean, I can see lineage seems to be more like the the snacks and actual like foods and protein sticks and things like that um i'm just curious to know i mean i know obviously why you started the company because you probably were like well most of the supplements on the market are absolute garbage and we can do better than this which is one of the reasons why i just distanced myself from being an ambassador from most supplement companies because as i got older as i got more intentional with what i was eating and what i was putting on my body i was like you know i can't attach my face to this protein supplement anymore because it's just made of crap so i just i kind of stayed away from it in the end and but still to this day when it comes to buying protein powders there's very few on the market where where i'm like okay this is this is actually like legit stuff you know few ingredients highest quality possible and at the same time consume it and don't have a load of issues with digestion bloating.

1:17:51Paul Saladino:So what has been the most challenging things and why have you separated the two? You know, I think that the challenging part is you have to have an ethos for the brand, right? And the ethos for both of the brands is let's make high quality products. The trade-off is that they're going to be a little more expensive. So I think that what you're describing is kind of this like lowest common denominator race to the bottom. Everybody's trying to undercut everybody else in terms of price because people are mostly price sensitive. And I get it. Like the economy is always tricky. Dollars matter. We want our dollars to go further.

1:18:28But with both of the companies, I wanted to make products that were higher quality. And so when you do that, it's like, okay, you're going to diverge from other people and your stuff's going to be 10 % more expensive or 15 % more expensive. But that means with that margin that we can source the better quality organs, the better quality meat, the better quality protein powder. I mean, heart and soil protein powder is a great example that way, you know, that's not a cheap way, but there's probably not a better whey protein on the market hands down. Um, you know, you look at the immunoglobulins and you look at the immune proteins, whether it's lactoferrin, lactoadherrin, or the IGA, the IGM, the IgG, like ours blows it out of the water, but it's more expensive.

1:19:08So I wanted, because I feel better about promoting that kind of product. If I'm making the brand for myself. You know, I originally made hardened soil for like my family, my mom, my sister, like, Hey, you guys should eat some organs. Let me make something good. I want to take it. I don't want to eat junk, you know? And so with lineage, the reason we built lineage was just like, let's just build another company that can branch off into more of the food. And so the idea has always been to give each company a little bit of like its own identity. And so lineage is more of the food products and hardened soil is more of the supplement products.

1:19:39And so you have kind of like the two things, and then you can do more different skews and kind of reach more different people because it's, they, they overlap somewhat, but as you see, not entirely. Lineage just came out with a protein bar that I'm really proud of because similarly, and I'm sorry guys, I don't mean to like promote the products, but I think they're good. You know, like they, like the protein bar market was crazy and it's just garbage stuff with weird ingredients and like fake fats that are trying to like fake the calories and the macros or do weird stuff. And so we're like, let's just make a protein bar that's like simple food ingredients, but still has protein and low calorie.

1:20:15And I'm really proud of that one too. So yeah, it's been a fun thing to kind of do those two companies. And I mean, that's, man, I never expected to be here. You know, I went to medical school thinking I like the human body. I like illness, fixing illness. You know, I like thinking about what's causing these things. And I ended up just making videos. And then I thought like, well, let me make some good products for people. So, so I make money because I'm not, you know, seeing patients anymore and it's worked out really well. And it's been cool to have now the agency to create things in the world that didn't exist.

1:20:47You know, like you have to get to this point where you have some sort of financial success and freedom to say, let's try and make something really good. It might completely flop, or maybe it'll be really popular, but we're going to make something that's really different than what's out there and make it much higher quality. And that's what I'm excited about. It's just like, not just making another quest bar, you know, I don't mean to throw them under the bus, but like that's pretty low quality stuff. You know, I don't just make another quest bar. I don't just want to make another protein with natural flavors and artificial flavors.

1:21:19And I want to make like really good stuff for people that are more discerning and that value those things. And then it's so satisfying when people take it and they feel good or they take the whey protein and they're like, actually, this doesn't bother my gut. That's so cool. so many of these whey proteins mess with my gut and we're like yeah this stuff matters you know

1:21:36Paul Saladino:it's like the whole point yeah i mean i i don't even know if there's a protein bar out there that doesn't completely mess me up i'm talking about like the ones that you would typically see on the shelf of a grocery store or supermarket or in a airport shop like literally all of them just make me blow they make me gassy they make me feel terrible so i think that's one of the things which I mean I hope your stuff gets into the supermarkets and the grocery stores sooner rather than later because for me my biggest issue is when I travel if I haven't pre-prepared something to take with me then I'm out there looking for like a high quality high protein snack and there's very few things that will kind of meet my standards now I mean even which is one thing I noticed in america they love their jerky in america but there's so much garbage jerky like it's you look at it and it's just full of sugar or it's it's got a long list of all these ingredients when in reality it should be like beef and a bit of seasoning so i mean what's what's the process of trying to get it to you know these on the shelves is it is it easy it will be it will be yeah hardened soil is now in sprouts.

1:22:53So hardened soil is now in wholesale or retail. It's just the tricky part is like for the entrepreneurs out there, when you grow a business, if you want to get into grocery stores, you kill your margins, you know? So you have to grow the business big enough that you have enough capital or you have to take on investors to then go into retail because you need thousands and thousands of units to go across retail. And then the grocery stores want to take a bunch of the margin, which is fine because they're putting it in front of consumers. So the enterprise value of the business goes up because you are in more places, but your overall profits and your EBITDA are going to go down, right?

1:23:27Because you're just, you're cutting your margins. And so the goal is to get the, especially the lineage stuff and especially the protein bar and the jerkies and the beef sticks, we make it lineage into retail probably in 2027. but you just need to like grow it to a certain scale where you can do that financially with the business. It's like, it's very hard to launch a business and immediately go to retail unless you're okay with just zero profits ever, or unless you're taking on investors from the very beginning. And the cool thing about both of those businesses is we have no investors. It's just me and one business partner in each of those businesses.

1:24:00So we don't, you know, I own all of those businesses, which is great rather than having to take investors unless we want to, you know, we haven't done any, we don't have a series B, we don't have a series A, we don't have any of that stuff. We own those businesses. And so if we want to now sell those businesses and then scale them, we can, but that's the way we built them was like, okay, let's build them from the ground up as like simple, small businesses with high quality. We don't have to take on investors. We don't have to take on VC or private equity who's going to change the way we do this.

1:24:27It means you can do those things. Because if you take on like private equity in the beginning, they're not going to, they're not going to be so excited about a protein parter that's like higher quality, but doesn't have the same margins. That's the trick, you know? So now we've built the businesses with this unique ethos and then we can slowly get it to retail. But it's very intentional how you have to do these things. If you're coming straight out of the gates and going into retail, you're going to have to have, almost certainly going to have investors, you know, for that capital, you know, the capital outlay of that.

1:24:54It's tricky.

1:24:56Paul Saladino:Yeah. Well, is it an issue shipping worldwide or is that not was that okay it's tricky i mean we could ship like i'm sure we ship the stuff at least from lineage to dubai but then the shipping costs get to be astronomical yeah well it's the timing as well which is frustrating because i mean like i it's it's either that do it online or i have to go to a place to find like the right stuff but i mean that is one of the issues that i have with dubai is there is barely anything grown here because it's a friggin desert so almost Everything is getting imported and you do have to make more of an effort to really get the best quality food because a lot of it is no doubt sprayed with chemicals to preserve it to some extent.

1:25:43Paul Saladino:Can you guys get raw milk there? I think you can. Yeah, you can. Yeah. But you have to go to a special. They do have farmer's markets here. And you can get an unpatched red milk. Yeah. Yeah. that's an interesting one yeah but it's i mean the the some of the things which they do great here is the dates i mean i love dates i bet that's like this that's like the date palms everywhere yeah but but everything else is a little bit problematic so yeah i mean that's why the the i mean the supplements i've tried yours and the only other ones which I feel like I respect their way of doing things and the quality is the Maui Nui venison.

1:26:29They're very good.

1:26:30Paul Saladino:They have, they have this, uh, their, their farms or whatever it is in Hawaii. And they purposefully don't like, they almost don't want to scale too much because they know it's going to reduce the quality of, uh, the, the, the livelihood of like the, the animals, which they're getting the meat and the supplements from. So I guess that's probably a nice problem to have if you've got so much demand that you need to have more livestock, but then you want to keep the livestock, or at least the quality of livestock as high as possible. So you need more land, I guess, for them to roam around freely.

1:27:07Paul Saladino:Yeah. Because you don't have more and more cows in like one place. Yeah. I mean, the Maui Nui is ax, I think it's deer. You know, it's ax is deer. So that's interesting. And it's cool because it's ruminant animals eating what they're supposed to be eating, which is presumably just a bunch of plants. I think it's on Lanai or one of these islands in Hawaii. But yeah, the supply chain is tricky, right? Like there's only so many of these Axis deer there that are wild and they can do some. And then they're just kind of constrained by the supply of the deer. Yeah. Moving on to travel, because I mean, I do a lot of traveling.

1:27:43Paul Saladino:I'm sure everyone, a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, it always tends to be the case when they're at home and in a good routine, everything is a little bit more, I would say more convenient in terms of where they're getting their food from, how they're prepping it. But then the moment they travel, there's all these hurdles. I mean, what do you do on airplanes? If it's a long haul flight, do you eat anything? Do you eat the food that's provided for you on the plane or do you avoid it, eat the food that you brought or do you just straight up not eat anything at all and kind of fast until you get there?

1:28:11Paul Saladino:and then how do you deal with the jet lag? Is there a way to deal with jet lag or do you just have to kind of suck it up and get used to it? I always bring my food. People might not know this, but at least out of the United States, and I think in most other airports in the world, you can bring a food bag on the plane. It doesn't count as one of your carry-ons. So this is maybe an airline policy like United, American. I imagine all of these airlines are the same way. So you can go onto a plane with a backpack with two carry-ons and a bag of food. And I don't know why you'd actually ever want to bring that much on an airplane, but I'll do that a lot of times.

1:28:51I usually bring a backpack with my laptop and some paper and maybe a book or a tablet and maybe like a hat or my blue blocking glasses. We can talk about all these things. And then I'll have a separate bag of food. And it's a big bag because I eat a lot of food or if I'm traveling with my girlfriend, I have food for both of us. And in the bag is either stainless steel containers or glass containers with fruit and meat. You know, you can't bring gels. So there's only so much honey I can bring on a plane, but I can bring a bunch of cut up fruit. I can bring a bunch of meat. I can bring a bunch of sweet potato or squash on the plane.

1:29:30And so it's, you never see people doing this, but I'm willing to go upstream and I'm willing to be the weird guy so that I have better food on the plane. And then the trickiest part is probably the fluids on the plane. There was kind of this viral thing that I did with coconuts. If you're leaving from a place with coconuts, you can bring coconuts on a plane, which is kind of cool. So you can have fresh coconut water on the plane. I'm pretty ridiculous about plastic and not drinking out of plastic if I can avoid it. So I don't want to get plastic in the airport. It's hard to find glass water bottles in the airport.

1:30:06Most airlines will not let you bring liquids onto the plane. So the coconuts were kind of the coolest hack I could think of. You can bring coconuts. They're cumbersome, but a lot of these coconuts you get in Costa Rica, they're called pipas, are just kind of like husked coconuts and they have the three eyes on top. And if you have a metal straw, you can just pierce the metal eye with a straw and then you can drink the coconut on the plane. This may not be totally doable for a lot of people, but I'm just trying to get the best water that I can. If I can't get fluids like coconuts on planes, I'm bringing a stainless steel water bottle and using the filtered water in the airport or something if I can find glass water.

1:30:43It's a short, I mean, it's just one amount of water. It's not going to kill me, but I try to do the best and I will not drink water out of plastic really ever. I kind of have a hard and fast rule on that. If you look at that specifically, there's one lab in Columbia at Columbia University that does a technique called ramen scattering. And it's not like ramen noodles. It's a type of microscopy called ramen scattering microscopy. And they looked at nanoplastics in plastic bottled water. And this study isn't talked about enough. Like the size of the plastic matters. I'm digressing for a moment, but I'll come back to the plane and traveling.

1:31:21If you have less than one micrometer, you think of it as a nanoplastic. And so most of the plastic in bottled water is probably on the order of 100 nanometers to 500 nanometers, so 0.1 to 0.5 micrometers. And you're not going to get that in most microplastics testing. So you have to use this special method or like these methods of microscopy called Raman scattering like Columbia does. And when they do that, they found 250 ,000 plus nanoplastics, excuse me, per liter of water. So you're thinking like hundreds of thousands of nanoplastics in a single thing of bottled plastic water, that's not being talked about enough.

1:32:02Like how bad plastic bottled water is for humans. Hundreds of thousands per liter is, that's substantial, substantial. So anyway, I'm not doing plastic bottled water unless it's like the end of the earth. And I'll bring all my food on the plane and then I'm eating on the plane just normally. I am quite sensitive to light. So if I'm going somewhere and I'm going to be exposed to light or it's going to change my sleep patterns, I'm going to try with my blue blocking glasses like the goober I am as much as possible to protect myself from that light in the airport. And then there's really no perfect way to combat jet lag other than the fact that you just have to realize that for every hour that you're changing your schedule, people usually estimate it's a day or half a day to totally shift your schedule.

1:32:54Once you get to where you're going, I just try to have the best light environment possible. So say I'm traveling internationally and I'm going somewhere and I want to go to sleep when I get there and it's gonna be daytime or I'm shifting my time zones, I'm trying not to be exposed to a bunch of blue light, which is gonna make me bright and awake. It's easier to extend the amount of time you're awake than it is to compress the amount of time you're awake. So if you're traveling, I guess, depending whether you're overnight or something, if you're traveling a long time, it's easier to stay up later and then go to sleep when you get there if you arrive somewhere when it's nighttime, right?

1:33:33And then say you had, you extended your day and your day was 28 hours. You went to sleep four hours later or six hours later. Then you go to sleep when you get there and you try and just mark the beginning of your nighttime when you get there. And then when you get up in the morning, that's super important. That's probably the easiest thing with jet lag is that, and everybody always talks about this, but I'll repeat it, that morning sunlight is super important to entrain your circadian rhythm. So if you're changing your circadian rhythm, wherever you go, that morning time is really important that you're outside in bright light to give your body the signal like, okay, this is when I'm supposed to bookmark cortisol because you have this cortisol awakening response when you wake up.

1:34:13And you can see the blood sugar rise when people wake up. And if you're tuned to your sleep, you can feel it. I can feel it here in Costa Rica. When it gets to be five or 5.15 in the morning, my body's like, okay, you can feel the cortisol come on. It's not a bad thing. It's just your cortisol awakening response. I can feel it in my bowels. I'm like, okay, time to poop. I can just feel your body saying, okay, wake up now. That's because my circadian rhythm is tightly attended to. And that's because I'll get up, I'll poop, I'll pee, and then I'll go outside very quickly and be outside. And that gives your body that sort of circadian bookmark.

1:34:49So wherever you're going, get your sleep when you get there, be careful about the blue light while you're traveling as much as you can. And then in the morning when you get up, go outside. And even if you wake up at noon, go outside. Because you want your body to think, okay, this is morning. and the next morning if you wake up at 10 a.m go outside okay this is morning then 9 a.m this is morning you keep making it earlier you know say you're going somewhere and it's further time zone is completely different you know 12 a.m or 12 p.m where you're arriving

1:35:20Paul Saladino:recently I went from LA to Tokyo and that was 16 hour difference yeah but it's actually like an 8 hour difference but it's the next day yeah Yeah, yeah. So you want to just... That one was a weird one. The important thing is just the morning. You go outside in the morning as much as you can. Don't sit in your house, right? You have to go outside, get the morning sunlight. And then in the evening, the following day, you want to really protect yourself from that blue light. So you do everything you do at home. You protect yourself from blue light at night and you get the bright light in the morning and you want your bedroom and the nights to be as dark as possible and the mornings to be as bright as possible.

1:36:01and within a week, your body will usually adjust, but it's kind of painful.

1:36:09Paul Saladino:Yeah, and then I imagine when you get to that destination is the first thing you're doing is doing a food shop? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll go to the grocery store, I'll get the food. That's a big part of it. Yeah, sometimes I have enough food that I just go straight to the Airbnb where I'm saying go to sleep. But yeah, the food shopping is critical. That's the first thing I do everywhere I get to. And oftentimes, I mean, again, it's different than what most people do. I will do the research before I get there and I'll think, okay, where am I actually going to go shop? It's just like hunting, you know?

1:36:45We would never have gone anywhere as humans without our hunting implements, our knives, our bows, our spears, you know? But today, when I go somewhere, I'm going to know these are the hunting grounds. I'm going to go to that Sprouts or that Whole Foods. If I'm going back to Miami, I know where I'm going. I'm going to get my food when I get there and get good quality food so that I don't compromise that along the way.

1:37:08Paul Saladino:Yeah. I mean, one of the best things about my trip to LA, it always is when I go to Irwan. I mean, that place, I like, I don't know if I like it because it's just so ridiculous, some of the things that are on sale there. But everything is, especially the fresh food counter, it is delicious. And I mean, even every time I go in there, I just see something I've never seen before. And I just want to try everything. but obviously I can't try everything. And then obviously if I do that, I end up spending like $200 a day on groceries, which I can do, but it is just a little bit outrageous. So, I mean, aside from the, uh, whether it's overpriced or just, um, high price, uh, where else is, uh, good chains, uh, to, to buy from if you're looking to improve the quality of your shopping bag?

1:37:56Paul Saladino:I mean, I guess I just know example. Yeah. I just know the United States, I guess in Texas, you've got like central market is like a better version of H-E-B in California. You've got Erewhon in Los Angeles. I don't think you need to go to Erewhon. It's a little bit ridiculous. I like Erewhon mostly for the social aspect of it. It's just interesting to see who you meet in Erewhon. Whole foods is what it is. Sprouts is good. Sprouts, I feel like it's kind of the blue collar Whole Foods. It's a little cheaper than Whole Foods, but they have good stuff. None of it's perfect. In Miami, there's a place called Southwest Ranches, which is amazing farmer's market.

1:38:35And it's a farmer's market in like Southwest Ranches, about an hour outside of Miami. And they're some of the best. So when I go to Miami, I know I'm going to have the best food because those like smaller farmer's markets, and it's not like a recurring farmer's market, that has great stuff. And they import cheeses and milks from the Northeast, from the Amish, and they'll have raw milk. They have raw buffalo milk there, which is incredible. You've never tried it. They have camel's milk and good quality cheese, good quality meat. They have good quality produce. They're incredible. And so that's what I do in Miami.

1:39:11Miami has Whole Foods, which is my backup. On the West Coast of Florida, around St. Pete, there's actually a place called Lakeview Farmer's Market, I think. Lakeview Farm Store. So if people are on the west coast of Florida, Lakeview Farm Store is amazing. They're kind of the same as Southwest Ranches. Just a little, I love that these little farmer stores, farm stands are popping up and they have incredible quality meat, butter, milk, produce. Those are my favorites. And I guess they're local. So Florida is where I usually travel to in the States right now. And so I would just say, look for the natural market.

1:39:46Again, you don't have to spend$200 a day. You don't have to go to Erewhon and buy the$300 Manuka honey. That's not necessary. I think, unfortunately, Erewhon

1:39:56Paul Saladino:is generally - The$20 strawberry as well. Yeah, the$20 smoothie. I used to have a smoothie at Erewhon, so I had a$20 smoothie at Erewhon, but no longer. Just get good quality meat, get some honey, get some cheese, get some butter, get some produce, preferably organic. I think it's worth it to get organic fruit and vegetables and you're going to be good. And you can do that at Sprouts or Whole Foods or wherever. And if you, I honestly think when I go to the States now that it's generally not worth it to buy steak. I usually am just going to buy ground beef, like a good quality ground beef because the steak has gotten so expensive in the U S now.

1:40:33It's like over$30 or close to$30 a pound for ribeye. And I think that's just not worth it. I prefer like, I would rather eat a skirt steak or a sirloin flap or, you know, some of the flank steaks are good, but I don't want them to be too tough. I would prefer those steaks to ribeye these days. In New York, it can be hit and miss. Sometimes it's too lean. I almost never buy tenderloin. Sometimes, you know, my girlfriend's like, I want a tenderloin. I'm fine. I'll buy you a$40 a pound tenderloin. This little steak is like$20. It's such a waste, but it's tender. But I mean, ground beef is the hack.

1:41:10Or if you have a crock pot, get like a shank or get some of these roasts in a crock pot. Or if you can slow cook, you can get like a big, what am I thinking of? Like a rump roast or one of these roasts for eight or nine or$10 a pound. And it's so much cheaper than a steak and you get this like really tender meat if you just slow cook it in the crock pot or

1:41:34Paul Saladino:pressure cooker okay um one one final thing like last question i know you've you've got the rest of your day to crack on with uh you you mentioned the i guess the importance of how damaging and how abundant microplastics are everywhere and that it's not talked about enough for those people you know just just your average people who are maybe trying to make some changes and avoid consuming so many microplastics what are some very simple things that they can do to at least try and go in the in the right direction yeah i think you know how you said earlier it seems to be everywhere they're they're very common you know how you said earlier in five or ten years we might look back at AirPods and think, oh, they were horrible.

1:42:29I think I'm pretty confident that in five or 10 years, we're going to look back at microplastics and nanoplastics and think we should have paid more attention to this. And I know they're getting a lot of attention now, but I think this is not one to sleep on. I mean, endocrine disrupting chemicals, BPA, phthalates, PFAs, which are forever chemicals, can also ride on the microplastics. So the microplastics are particles of plastic of varying sizes that can act as Trojan horses to get more problematic chemicals, these endocrine-disrupting chemicals into the human body. And you look at man's testosterone, it's like the average is 450 today for 19 to 40 years old, whereas 50 years ago it was 800 or 850.

1:43:10So this is just chemical exposure that is partially, in some ways, chemically castrating us as men. And so I saw one of these guys on X that I always argue with, you know, had this pithy tweet that said, you know, men used to go to war and build castles and now they're afraid to touch receipts. And my response was, yeah, when men were building castles and fighting wars, they had testicles that worked and their testosterone was 800 or a thousand. And, you know, and most of our testosterone today is 450 because we're just living in this horrible soup of these plastics and plasticizers. So microplastics, nanoplastics are a hugely important thing to pay attention to, whether you're a man or a woman, but especially for men.

1:43:53And then the biggest sources here, this is really important. A lot of these you wouldn't think about at all. The biggest sources are plastic water bottles. We talked about the ramen scattering microscopy, 250 ,000 nanoplastics per liter. But I think potentially the same as that, or even worse, are these coffee cups you get at Starbucks, which are paper, but they're actually lined with plastic. So you think anytime you're putting hot liquid, nearly boiling liquid in the case of Starbucks or any coffee shop into contact with plastic, you are just exploding it with microplastics and nanoplastics, probably on the order of a million particles per liter.

1:44:32So you probably drink more water than you do coffee, but these, and I, you know what I'm talking about? Like coffee cups, they're all lined with plastic. Like I've done content on this.

1:44:43Paul Saladino:The thing that annoys me the most when I used to ask for an iced Americano, so they would get the plastic cup and they would put the boiling coffee in the plastic cup, then put the ice in, then put the water in. And I just watched them make it. I'm like, I'm not even going to touch that. Like I'm not having it. It's tough. It seems we all get made fun of saying that we're extra, but I think this is real. And so paper, when you go to a coffee shop, you really need to bring your own mug or your own stainless steel container. It's important. Don't sleep on it. Don't touch receipts for any amount of time.

1:45:25Just throw them away. You don't want to have a bunch of receipts in your hand. You know, it's easy to touch receipts five or 10 times a day without thinking about it between the gas station, the grocery store, unloading your groceries, wherever else you go. The tickets that go into garages or thermal paper also, So it's just crazy. And then for microplastics, also you think about soup cans. So soup in cans is filled hot. And that's, again, just sitting on a plastic membrane inside the can. The can is aluminum and then it's lined with plastic. And so that's a huge source of microplastics is soup cans.

1:46:01And then you have potentially, I mean, this is the tricky thing. I haven't seen any studies of this, but that like soda cans and energy drink cans. These are all lined with plastic. And I've never seen a study, so I can't say, because I don't think these are filled hot. But I've seen content where people say, I'm drinking out of metal with a soda can or an energy drink can. It's like, no, you're drinking out of plastic still, because that's lined with plastic also. So my suspicion is that those are probably on the order of plastic water bottles, but nobody thinks about it, right? Because it looks like it's metal and you think it's better.

1:46:41And now we're seeing electrolyte drinks in these, energy drinks in these, sodas in these, waters are in these, like liquid death. And you think, oh, okay, now I get it. I think I'm drinking out of metal, but I'm drinking out of plastic almost all the time every day. It's just a big deal. So, you know, plastic containers for your food. Don't reheat your food in plastic. Don't store your food in plastic. And, you know, to be fair, I'm not perfect either. People commented this on my day in the life or what I eat in a day video. All the meat in my fridge is wrapped in plastic because that's the way it comes from the butcher.

1:47:18Like I haven't figured this out. You know, I don't have a solution to everything, but, and I think that plastic around your meat is probably the least problematic because it's not a liquid. It certainly is going to shed some plastic particles, but I'm not heating the meat in the plastic. But yeah, I mean, there's, I don't want people to think that I'm perfect because there are some things that we just haven't solved at all in this frame. We just, I can't fix it. I guess I could say to that butcher, hey, please wrap all of my meat in wax paper before you put it in plastic. And if they were willing to do that, great.

1:47:54But when I'm traveling or Whole Foods, it's just not, that's not realistic for people. So you do the most you can, but I think, you know, paper coffee cups are easily changed. Plastic water bottles are easily changed. Cans are a bit harder, but you can not drink out of cans if you're careful. Soup cans, these things are important. Those are the biggest sources I can think of right now, but it's like anytime anything hot touches plastic, we're going in the wrong direction really important to consider yeah well i appreciate everything you're doing all the

1:48:29Paul Saladino:videos you make it even today just uh binge watching some of your youtube videos i learned a lot about um some of the water brands i mean my fridge is absolutely full of evion and fiji which i'm not going to be buying anymore after seeing the uh the video you did where you tested them i think i can get a hold of some glass vos water bottles and then obviously a reverse osmosis machine is probably your best bet if you can find it. That's what I was going to say. I'm sure you could find that in Dubai. That's the easiest thing. I mean, when I'm traveling and I don't have a reverse osmosis in my Airbnb, I'm just going to get glass bottled water.

1:49:07The best glass bottled water we tested was Icelandic. That one consistently tests really well. It's not available everywhere, but if you can get Icelandic, Mountain Valley is pretty good. saratoga mixed quality both of those have concerns over mixing with municipal sources based on like bromo bromoforms and chloroforms in the water but um icelandic looks really good and the best thing is just to have a reverse osmosis that's what i have at my house here in costa rica and then people say like okay do i need to remineralize it yeah but remineralizing water is just as simple as adding a pinch of a good quality sea salt to the water it's not rocket science.

1:49:47And if you're eating meat and plants, you're getting a lot of minerals and trace minerals in your other food. I don't really worry about reverse osmosis water per se. People say, oh, it's dead water. I would take dead water that has zero, like that's just pure, pure, clean water over spring water that's contaminated with metals or uranium or bromine or chlorine derivatives or trihalomethanes or PFAs or, you know, tap water contaminated with pesticides or pharmaceuticals. So, yeah, I mean, I think one of the best investments most people could make in their home is just a reverse osmosis filter.

1:50:27And then, you know, you're going to get trace minerals from everything else you're eating. It's not a big deal. Yeah.

1:50:34Paul Saladino:Awesome. Well, thank you for your time this evening evening time for me where can people find you paul saladino md medical doctor paul saladino md at all of the socials so on instagram youtube x tiktok paul saladino md and then my website is paulsaladino md.com there's a quiz on the website and a bunch of dietary guides to get people started with like just basic eating protocols. We try to help people say like, okay, what are you struggling with? Where do you want to start? Carnivore, animal-based, high quality food. And then we can give you, you know, like some blueprints to start. It's all free on my website, paulsaladino, md.com.

1:51:20Paul Saladino:Awesome. Thank you very much. Yeah, man. Great talking to you.

1:51:33Thank you.