​The Melanie Avalon Podcast Episode #54 - Paul Saladino
Dr. Saladino is the leading authority on the science and application of the carnivore diet. He has used this diet to reverse autoimmune issues, chronic inflammation and mental health issues in hundreds of patients, many of whom had been told their conditions were untreatable. In addition to his personal podcast, Fundamental Health, he can be found featured on numerous podcasts including The Minimalists, The Model Health Show, Bulletproof Radio, The Dr. Gundry Podcast, The Ben Greenfield Podcast, Dr. Mercola, Health Theory, Mark Bell's Power Project, and many others. He has also appeared on The Doctors show, many other prominent media outlets and is the author of the bestselling book, The Carnivore Code. Dr. Saladino is board certified as a Physician Nutrition Specialist and in psychiatry and completed residency at the University of Washington. He lives in Austin, TX and can frequently be found exploring wild places when he is not writing, researching or working with clients.
LEARN MORE AT:
www.carnivoremd.com
www.thecarnivorecodebook.com
SHOWNOTES
1:30 - Melanie's Prior Carnivore Episodes:
1:50 - Studies On Defensive Compounds In Dairy And Meat
These 50 Foods Are High In Lectins: Avoidance or Not? (This was the original online article I read)
Immunomodulation of Host Chitinase 3-Like 1 During a Mammary Pathogenic Escherichia coli Infection
Host Defense Mechanisms of Human Milk and Their Relations to Enteric Infections and Necrotizing Enterocolitis and The high lectin-binding capacity of human secretory IgA protects nonspecifically mucosae against environmental antigens (Note: These are about human milk, but they provide a framework to consider for the potential protective host defense mechanisms in milk)
2:50 - IF Biohackers: Intermittent Fasting + Real Foods + Life: Join Melanie's Facebook Group For A Weekly Episode GIVEAWAY, And To Discuss And Learn About All Things Biohacking! All Conversations Welcome!
3:10 - Lumen Lovers: Biohack Your Carb And Fat Burning (With Melanie Avalon): Join Melanie's Facebook Group If You're Interested In The Lumen Breath Analyzer, Which Tells Your Body If You're Burning Carbs Or Fat! You Can Learn More In Melanie's Episode With The Founder (The Melanie Avalon Podcast Episode #43 - Daniel Tal) And Get $25 Off A Lumen Device At MelanieAvalon.com/Lumen With The Code melanieavalon25
LUMEN: Measure Your Breath To Instantly Find Out If You're Burning Carbs Or Fat! Get $25 Off A Lumen Device At MelanieAvalon.com/Lumen With The Code melanieavalon25
The Melanie Avalon Podcast Episode #43 - Daniel Tal
4:45 - BUTCHERBOX: Grass-Fed Beef, Organic Chicken, Heritage Pork, And More, All Raised Sustainably The Way Nature Intended! Butcher Box Provides Access To Nutrient Rich, Affordable Meat And Seafood Shipped Straight To Your Door! Go To Butcherbox.Com/Melanieavalon And Use The Code Melanieavalon For Free BACON And 6 Grassfed-Grasssfinished Burgers In Your First Box!
8:15 - The Autoimmunity Connection To Health Issues
12:10 - Diets Not Working: Veganism, Paleo
15:30 - Starting Carnivore, And The Connection Between Plants And Mood
17:00 - Are We Omnivore? The Connection Between Meat And Longevity
21:00 - What Is An Omnivore?
22:45 - Are Plants Superfoods?
25:00 - Pets And Plants
25:15 - The Vilification Of Red Meat, And The Plant Toxicity Spectrum
27:00 - Do we demonize plants?
29:00 - Perception Of Food - EEG Potential
30:35: FOOD SENSE GUIDE: Get Melanie's App To Tackle Your Food Sensitivities! Food Sense Includes A Searchable Catalogue Of 300+ Foods, Revealing Their Gluten, FODMAP, Lectin, Histamine, Amine, Glutamate, Oxalate, Salicylate, Sulfite, And Thiol Status. Food Sense Also Includes Compound Overviews, Reactions To Look For, Lists Of Foods High And Low In Them, The Ability To Create Your Own Personal Lists, And More!
32:15 - Carnivore Vs Vegan: Dogma in Dietary Movements
36:15 - The Toxin Spectrum: Are There Toxins In Meat?
Stronger By Stress: Adapt to Beneficial Stressors to Improve Your Health and Strengthen the Body (Siim Land)
39:25 - Lectins In Dairy
40:00 - Resveratrol As A Plant Chemical
40:40 - Iron Toxicity
42:15 - Eggs, Dairy, And Host Defense Mechanisms
(See studies at the beginning of the show notes for referenced studies from melanie)
45:30 - Get Melanie's Food Sense Guide App
45:40 - lectins in milk protein And in egg yolk
46:50 - Studies On Plant Toxicity And The role of cooking Adaptations
48:40 - The role of calories In Diet
50:00 - Riboflavin, beta Carotene vs vitamin a
51:30 - BEAUTYCOUNTER: Non-Toxic Beauty Products Tested For Heavy Metals, Which Support Skin Health And Look Amazing! Shop At Beautycounter.Com/MelanieAvalon For Something Magical! For Exclusive Offers And Discounts, And More On The Science Of Skincare, Get On Melanie's Private Beauty Counter Email List At MelanieAvalon.Com/CleanBeauty! Find Your Perfect Beautycounter Products With Melanie's Quiz: Melanieavalon.Com/Beautycounterquiz
54:45 - the 5 Carnivore Code tiers
55:00 - Adding in honey, And Dealing With carb fears
57:25 - Fruit: The Least Toxic Plant Food
58:30 - Paul's CGM Ratings With Honey
Will carbohydrates give me Diabetes? The CGM episode!
1:00:00 - The role of linoleniac acid O6 in insulin issues
1:02:45 - The Importance Of Organ Meats
Heart & Soil — Nose to Tail Supplements: Get 10% Off With The Code MelanieAvalon
TRANSCRIPT
Melanie Avalon: Hi friends, welcome back to the show. Super-duper excited about the conversation I'm about to have. It's about a topic that you guys know I'm obsessed with. I've actually had two prior episodes on this topic, and that is the controversial carnivore diet. I'm back with a repeat guest. That's how you know that they're a good one when they come back on the show.
I am here with Dr. Paul Saladino. Listeners, I actually had him on-- I think it was way in the beginning. I think it was the third episode of this show. We did an episode on the carnivore diet. So, I will put a link to that in the show notes. I also had Shawn Baker on the show as well. So, I'll put a link to that as well, so if people want to get up to speed on the carnivore diet, because, Paul, I was thinking rather than just recap everything we talked about before, we can definitely dive into what the carnivore diet is and all the things but I was thinking maybe for this episode, we could just really go into all the tangents and rabbit holes, and that the new things that you're really interested in, in the carnivore diet. You are releasing-- when this comes out, it will have just been released. That's The Carnivore Code: Unlocking the Secrets to Optimal Health by Returning to Our Ancestral Diet, which I recently read. I'd love to talk about some of the things that really stuck with me from that book. So, I was just wondering if you're down for a random carnivore episode.
Paul Saladino: Let's do it, rabbit holes, away we go!
Melanie Avalon: Love it. Okay. Listeners, definitely listen to the first episode I did with Paul so that you can get-- if you're not familiar with carnivore, get a pretty good idea. But that said, just a little bit of information for listeners. Dr. Saladino, he is board certified as a physician, nutrition specialist, and in psychiatry. He completed his residency at the University of Washington. He also has pretty much the coolest history ever of all the things you've done in with traveling, and just pretty awesomeness. But, would you like to tell listeners a little bit about how you came to carnivore personally, your personal experience, and then ultimately what you found, the science of it and then practicing it with patients?
Paul Saladino: Absolutely. I went to college in Virginia right after high school at William & Mary and I studied chemistry and biology. I thought I was going to go straight to medical school, but I got a little burned out, so I had a six-year period after college where I just traveled around the world and climbed mountains and through-hike the Pacific Crest Trail and was a ski bum at amazing places like Jackson Hole and Alta, Utah. Now, my dad is a doctor, my mom's a nurse. I've always been fascinated by the root cause of illness. I just never really wanted to accept the mainstream medical narrative that we should treat diseases with medications that are only there to ameliorate symptoms. We're just not that good at understanding the root cause of illness.
In my own life, I've had my own autoimmune issues. I've had eczema and asthma. At times in my life, they were very bad. In college, when I was studying chemistry and biology, I had really bad eczema. In medical school, I had bad eczema. When I was doing jujitsu, getting a lot of eczema on my knees and elbows. In residency at the University of Washington, in Seattle, I had eczema all over my back. Throughout all of this, I was really trying to understand what is causing my autoimmunity. If you go to a dermatologist, they'll give you a cream or a steroid to put on to it. I just didn't believe that eczema was a failure of the barrier integrity of my skin.
I thought, “There is something in my diet triggering this.” This is an autoimmune issue and it's not debatable within Western medicine that eczema or psoriasis, or so many of these skin conditions are autoimmune. In general, I'm fascinated by autoimmunity across the spectrum of illness everything from Hashimoto's thyroiditis, to Sjogren's, to lupus, to rheumatoid arthritis, to dermatomyositis, to conditions like inflammatory bowel disease and ulcerative colitis. Even depression, I believe is autoimmune in nature. So, understanding what was causing my autoimmunity was a bigger question for what might be causing these autoimmune conditions in my patients.
I really think of treating humans as a holistic challenge, as a holistic paradigm. I've never liked the way that mainstream medicine wants to balkanize, wants to silo into specialties and say, “You have depression. Therefore, you're going to see a psychiatrist,” who only knows how to give you medications that affect the neurotransmitters in your brain. What if depression is actually caused by brain inflammation, which is coming from something in your gut? Then what doctor is supposed to treat it? There's no such thing and that's where Western medicine fails.
Throughout all of my training, I was trying so hard to bridge those gaps and understand how it all fits together. And that's why I don't really think that mainstream specialties work well, for most people. Certainly in the setting of an acute illness or an absolute catastrophe, like a heart attack or something. else like that, we need Western-trained physicians to put in stance or to splint broken bones or a pair of broken hips. Yes, but generally speaking, Western medicine fails to treat chronic illness horribly. Diabetes, autoimmunity, these are just really not treated well by our system because we don't look for the root cause. But I wanted to know what was causing my autoimmune issue. And I knew that as a physician, I wanted to have some insight through that into what might be causing the autoimmune issues, these inflammatory issues that underlie so many of the chronic diseases we see today in our world and that cause so much suffering.
I iterated over my diet, time and time again. I was a vegan about 13 years ago and lost 25 pounds of muscle mass, not the type of weight you want to lose. I was extremely skinny, had horrible GI issues, lots of gas. I was a terror to be around from an olfactory perspective in any closed space. It was a really tough time for me. Vegan diet doesn't work. My eczema did not go away. Meat is not causing my eczema.
The next thing, I tried was a paleolithic diet. I cut out beans and grains and dairy, and really became enamored with these ideas of what are our ancestors eating? What is our ancestral blueprint? What are our genetics expecting after three million years of human evolution in our environment, in our food environment? Are we really giving that to our body, or is there a real discordance here in 2020? I believe there is, and it has been for hundreds of years, between the way that humans are evolved to eat and the way that we are actually eating. This will come as no surprise to most of your listeners.
The ideas around a paleo diet are fascinating. But the traditional paradigm of what a “paleo diet” is, didn't work for me. I cut out grains and beans and dairy and still had bad eczema. The next step on the ladder is autoimmune paleo. You cut out seeds and nuts, and usually nightshade vegetables. Well, that seemed to make it a little better, but I still had eczema and it got really bad at times. And I thought, “Okay, what is going on here?”
When you think about why a paleolithic cuts these foods out, it's because they're both ancestrally inconsistent and because they have plant toxins. Digestive enzyme inhibitors, lectins, oxalates, all sorts of chemicals, saponins. Things in these plant foods that are just not compatible with human biology.
Milk is obviously an animal food, and it has proteins, casein, and whey, that don't seem to play well with a lot of people's immunology as well. These immunologic reactions to food are not exclusively limited to plants, but I think that the majority of what harms our gut are plant foods broadly speaking. So, I just kept cutting foods out of my diet. I kept understanding or learning about a new toxin. “Well, these are histamine foods.” “Oh, they're these salicylates.” “Oh, there's oxalates.” “There's phytates.” I learned about all these other phytoalexins and foods, and how they could be damaging my gut or just really causing biochemical or immunologic problems that are triggering my eczema.
Eventually, I got to the point where my diet was basically grass-fed meat, berries, avocado, and some lettuce, and I still had eczema. I had occasional mushrooms at the time. I heard Jordan Peterson on Joe Rogan talking about his autoimmune issues, sleep apnea, his inflammatory arthritis conditions, his daughter, Michaela. And I thought that sounds crazy. I know that humans need plants. We need plants for fiber, we need plants for phytochemicals. And you and I talked a lot about how those are probably myths-- at least in my opinion, how they're myths. I write about those myths in my book, The Carnivore Code. We talked a lot about that in the first episode, but at the time, I had a lot of pushback based on my own ideology. I had a lot of conditioning that was saying, “You can't get rid of plants,” but I was really desperate or at least very motivated because my eczema was so bad.
About two years ago, I dove into a carnivore diet. I cut out all the plants from my diet, which may sound extreme, but it resulted in profound improvements in my eczema. It went away completely in two weeks. I've never had a recurrence in the last two years. My overall mood has gotten so much better. That was just a striking thing that I noticed at the beginning of my carnivore diet experience.
I didn't think that I had a problem with depression or anxiety. When I cut plants out, suddenly, it was just much easier to exist in the world. I was just more calm, more focused, more emotionally poised. At that time, which actually mirrors the way that I do a carnivore diet now, I was not in ketosis all the time. It was not even a zero-carb carnivore diet. We can talk about how the diet has evolved over the two years that I've done it, but I was using honey at the beginning. So, I cut out all plants, all vegetables, all leaves, and seeds and grains and nuts and legumes and roots, all the plant food, even fruit at that time. I only had some honey in my diet, and I was eating animal meat, animal organs, like liver and eggs. And I felt so good that I knew there was something else there. That was the beginning of this large exploration, this grand adventure that I've been on that brings us to this conversation today.
Melanie Avalon: I love it so much. As you know, as listeners know, I'm a huge fan of the carnivore diet. I did probably about six months or a year of basically carnivore instead of being meat and honey or all meat. It was like meat, coconut oil. Well, at least it had no fiber and it was very ketogenic in nature. But I still have this haunting question and it's that-- okay, so a big fan of the carnivore, you don't have to really convince me of the benefits, although I do have questions about potential stressors or issues that could occur. If we just look at the human, everything I see to me says omnivore, and if we look at the longest-lived populations, I think we see lots of plants and minimum to moderate meat. Again, omnivore. Everything I see just screams omnivore. When you talk in your book about what is the optimal diet in this riddle of what is this diet it's in our DNA? We still think, well, I guess, yes, but the optimal diet is carnivore and not omnivore. If it's carnivore, why aren't we carnivores?
Paul Saladino: Well, there's a lot of semantics wrapped up in that question. There's a whole part of the book in which I break down the Blue Zones argument. To say that the longest-lived peoples on the earth eat a lot of plants is just factually incorrect. If you look across populations, there are long-lived peoples who eat lots of meat, and long-lived peoples who eat less meat. But there are no populations living on the earth, nor has anyone ever recorded a human civilization that didn't eat any meat. There are lots of populations that are just as long-lived as anyone else on the planet. Perhaps, some of the most longevity displaying populations eat tons of meat. The life expectancy in Hong Kong is 85.6 years. They eat over a pound and a half of meat per day on average. So, to say that the longest-lived people on the earth eat moderate amounts of meat and lots of plants, it's just incorrect. It's based on the falsehood, this misleading concept of blue zones where Dan Buettner went around and sampled seven regions of the world, Icaria, Sardinia, Loma Linda in California and then the Nicoya region of Costa Rica and said, “Look, these are places where people live longer than average. I'm going to look at their diet and I'm going to say they eat a lot of plants and don't eat a lot of meat.”
His research is flawed in so many ways. We can talk about Loma Linda but Nicoya, Costa Rica is only a blue zone “for males.” And if you look at the Nicoyan males, relative to the general population, they live longer than general population of Costa Rica, but they eat more meat and more animal fat than the general population of Costa Rica. I don't know how Dan Buettner missed this.
Icaria in Greece and Sardiniain Italy are well known for their appreciation for meat and their inclusion of large amounts of meat frequently. There's a very well-known dish in Sardinia called Sarda pig. So that's that plant having culture, I think that somebody is off base here and they're reporting, then Loma Linda is perhaps the most striking example of all of this. Loma Linda is a Seventh Day Adventist community in Southern California where the residents are about half-vegetarian, maybe 15% vegan and the rest are omnivore, or I should say they're meat-eating in addition to their vegetables and eggs and dairy. They do live seven years longer than the general California population. But there are other studies in California of California Mormons that show that California Mormons live seven years longer than the general population. Mormons don't shun meat, but what are the Seventh Day Adventists and the Mormons have in common?
They have in common this notion that they live a focused intentional life. They shun what some might call vices. They shun alcohol, tobacco. They generally have community and family life. So, to say that Seventh Day Adventists live longer because they don't eat a lot of meat, is also just a correlation that can't be made and doesn't look factually correct when you compare them to other groups that have similar religious discipline and have similar longevity.
If you really dig deeply into Loma Lindens, as I do in the book, they look to be very unhealthy at a biochemical level. You can look at the sperm quality of Loma Linda males, and it's abysmal. In fact, the people of Loma Linda males who are vegan have the lowest sperm counts and the lowest degree of hypermotility, which is the ability of the sperm to swim, of any population they studied within that group. The vegetarians are slightly better, but the omnivores are much better. So, those argue again completely in the other direction.
Your point is well taken about humans being considered omnivorous, but what does an omnivore really mean? What is a carnivore really? You could argue that a wolf or a dog is an omnivore, but a lot of free-living wolves and canines eat mostly meat. Now, one of the very interesting things about humans is that we are evolved to be adaptive and I think that we are omnivorous, meaning that we can eat plants without dying. We can do that because there have been periods in our evolution in which we were starving, in which we needed to eat plants. But I think if you look at the way that plants and animals are regarded, both at a nutritional level and on a sort of survival level or an importance level by indigenous groups, it's pretty clear that plants are usually survival foods or fallback foods. In the setting of adequate animal foods, plant foods become a very, very small percentage of the diet of many indigenous groups. But what do we know about our ancestors? What do we know about “living in the wild”? You're not always going to be successful in your hunt.
If you're not always successful in your hunt, it's pretty good to have some backup foods. And that's a reasonable explanation for the fact. Yeah, we probably ate some plant foods throughout our evolution, but which type of plants did we eat? How did we prepare them? How did we detoxify them? And then, what is their place in the hierarchy of value for any indigenous group in our history, and where should they be today?
So, the position that I'm advancing in The Carnivore Code is, “Hey, look, your ancestors ate some plants. But they didn't do so with the appreciation that we were doing today.” They didn't see them in the same way we do today. If you go to the grocery store or you talk to any health pundit, they're going to tell you that kale or spinach is the superfood. I just think that's ludicrous. If you look at the bioavailability, and nutrient density of animal liver or animal muscle meat, or any animal organ in relation to spinach or kale, it's not even a question which is more valuable to a human or which is going to promote more vitality long term.
As I talk about in the book as well, there's so much debunking to be done about all this false narrative around any type of meat, including red meat or saturated fat being bad for humans. It's all based on faulty epidemiology that goes back to very misleading claims made by people like Ancel Keys, the Seven Countries Study, which is just cherry-picked epidemiology, much like the Blue Zones are. You can collect data to make your hypothesis look plausible, but when it is subjected to academic scrutiny, these things often fall apart because the researchers are just choosing the places that they want to that fit their hypothesis excluding the ones that don't look so good.
So, yeah, humans might be considered to be omnivorous, you might be able to feed your cat grains. Your cat is a carnivore, your cat is not an omnivore. But you can feed your cat grains and then what happens to your cat? It gets kidney disease. It gets a cancer.
One of the things that's so fascinating to me is just look at our pets. Now, animals like cats are clearly carnivorous. Their relatives in the natural world, tigers and lions, they don't have any plant matter. You can give them plant matter, but they're just not going to thrive on it at all. That's, I think, an interesting thing now. Our biology is not the same as a cat. We can eat plant foods and not get massively sick immediately. I think dogs are similar to humans. They will eat mostly animal foods. They'll eat some plants in nature if they have to if they're starving, but look what happens when we give our dogs lots of plants today? Anyone that has a dog will know this. It's a sad fact, they get cancer, they get heart disease, they get cardiomyopathy, and it's because of eating foods that are evolutionarily inconsistent.
Well, look at a hunter-gatherer incidence of chronic disease. Look at hunter-gatherer incidence of cancer. It's nothing like ours. Our dogs and us are eating the same food and dogs are suffering the same chronic disease that humans are. Just because you can feed a dog or a cat something it doesn't die on the spot, doesn't mean that that food is ideal for that animal. So, I'm not necessarily arguing in the carnivore code that everyone should stop eating plants completely. What I am saying is two main premises.
Number one, that red meat has been incorrectly vilified for really the last 70 years based on shoddy science and flawed epidemiology. And I present lots of science to counter that. Lots of epidemiology that shows that red meat is not bad for humans along with lots of interventional trials that clearly demonstrate that red meat is not inflammatory, but it is not harmful for humans. And that's so much of what we've been told is just fallacy.
The second premise is that plants exists on a toxicity spectrum. The plants are rooted in the ground. They don't want to get eaten. So, in order to survive, they have developed these plant toxins, these plants' defense chemicals, and every one of us has a different ability to detoxify those. So, if someone is not thriving, it may be worth considering which plants we're including in our diet, and perhaps changing those or understanding which plants are more toxic or less toxic. This is all the type of stuff that I try and paint throughout the book, like, “Hey, your ancestor didn't eat a lot of grains and nuts and seeds. And if they did, they fermented the heck out of them.” The idea of salad is an invention of the last 200 years. Indigenous groups do not eat salad.
Plant leaves are just not friendly for humans. They're not calorically dense, they're not nutritionally dense and they create all sorts of GI problems. There's a lot of evolutionary inconsistency in terms of what we think of as healthy in 2020, and what's really probably much more healthy for humans, and much more evolutionarily consistent in the way we're eating.
It's not to say that we're not omnivorous, or that we couldn't eat plants from time to time. It's just that I think we're eating a lot more of the most toxic parts of plants, and a lot of us are eating a lot less of the foods that would have been most [unintelligible [00:20:19] by our ancestors. So, the whole thing has been turned on its head.
Melanie Avalon: We're getting so much. To what you just said, yes, there's this very misleading idea that's cherry-picked and put out there about longevity and plants and all of these things. I wonder if because there is this plant-based vegan agenda often, that's the way it needs to be that. On the flip side, we go to carnivore and we almost do the same thing with veganism, but we do it with carnivore in demonizing plants, like the way veganism or vegans or the plant-based society might demonize meat. The only reason I say that is because I am very much interested in the optimal diet. I know I personally don't respond well to a lot of plants. I'm still just haunted by, is carnivore the optimal diet for everybody all the time. Like what you're saying, I don't know if we can make the same arguments about-- well, grains, I'm not a big fan of but feeding vegetable matter or plant-based matter to an actual complete carnivore cat. If a human's an omnivore, is that the same thing?
Paul Saladino: We'll use a dog. You could say a dog's an omnivore and we see the same thing. Dogs thrive on animal-based diets. I know lots of people with dogs that had entirely nose to tail animal-based diets and those dogs thrive. Dogs do not need any carbohydrates, though I don't fear carbohydrates. Dogs don't need carbohydrates. Dogs don't need grains. Dogs don't need plant leaves. Dogs don't need kale. Like you don't need to feed your dog kale. Dogs don’t need fiber to poop. Dogs don’t need plant fiber to poop. And, yeah, dogs and humans are different species. But dogs are widely considered to be omnivores. And they can absolutely eat animal meat and organs with no problems. So, that's a better example than a carnivorous cat. But I see what you're saying there.
Melanie Avalon: I will say one of the most fascinating things from your book that I want to tell everybody, it blew my mind. It was the study about showing-- I don't remember the exact details, but it was showing vegans versus omnivores, different types of people showing the meat. The people who had not had meat for a long time because of a moral perspective, I think. They consciously did not want the meat but there's-- I don't remember exactly what it was. There's some part of our brain that lights up when we want something, but it's not in our conscious awareness. And that part still lit up when they saw the meat, blew my mind. Blew my mind.
Paul Saladino: Yeah, it's called an ERP or an event-related potential. They can put these EEG stickers on people's heads, and they'll show people of omnivorous or vegetarian or vegan persuasions, pictures of meat. You can look at activity in various regions of the brain at various speeds and you can look at the way the brain responds to different foods. Exactly as you're saying, in omnivores, there's both a pleasant conscious response to meat and animal foods. And there's a pleasant subconscious or deeper limbic response to animal foods. In vegans, vegetarians, there's a conscious aversion to those foods. And other regions of the brain that are more primitive or that are less influenced by our own self-narrative, that are less influenced by our cognitive bias, there is still a positive response to meat. I just think it's such a fascinating study. It's really incontrovertible argument in my opinion that humans are programmed to eat meat at a very basic level.
I hear this criticism or this comment about carnivore versus vegan a lot. I just want to speak to that for a moment. I think they're completely different. If you listen to what I was saying earlier, I'm not dogmatic about this at all. I bristle at being compared to a vegan because when there are so many vegans that I have been connected with, and I've become friends with who are now carnivore, who have started adding meat back to their diet. When a vegan proponent like Jon Venus, or Jacqueline on Instagram or any of these people, my friend, Elise Parker, or Tim Shieff, who I've interviewed on my podcast, which is Fundamental Health, stopped being a vegan. The vegan community literally destroys them.
They just go out them with so much negativity, and they're not happy for their success. They're not happy that they're feeling better. If you've ever seen what happens to a vegan advocate who starts eating meat, it's like they're being burned at the stake. They are literally pilloried. If somebody like most people I know who eat a mostly carnivore diet, still eat some plant foods, I'm never going to say to them like you're a bad person because you're eating plant foods or anything like that. To compare carnivores and vegans is just not an accurate comparison. That's not the same degree of dogma within the carnivore movement, at least not within my framework. If someone is eating plants and thriving, I am happy for them. I'm not going to tell them to change a thing. But what's unique about what I'm saying, I believe, is that there are so many people who are not thriving, the don't have the body composition, the sleep, the mood, the libido. So, many of these things, the mental clarity that they would like, they don't have resolution from their autoimmune disease, and they're not finding answers anywhere.
And no one is telling them that the plants they're eating might be causing a problem. That's the important thing that they know there's another tool. They can eliminate all or some of the plants for a short amount of time, or for a long term and be completely healthy, that humans don't need plants in their diet to thrive. If you're eating plants in your diet, and you're thriving, that's amazing. Reach out to me, I want to study you. I want to be your friend. I want to go work out with you. That's amazing. I'm not going to judge you. But you look at the way a vegan looks at a carnivore or a vegan looks at an ex-vegan who's got omnivore and they literally throw them to the wolves.
Vegans are the most carnivorous, cannibalistic people I've ever met, broadly speaking. Now, I know there are some out there that are very nice and kind. But as a group, I think it's pretty hard to deny that the vegans are eating their own, especially when they go away from the dogma. So, yes, I think that you can paint the picture like carnivore vegan, it's all just too extreme, and I really bristle at that. I don't think it's fair at all, because the messaging is completely different between those and there's much more nuance and acceptance and non-dogmatism is what I'm saying. The messaging here is not plants are horrible for you, don't ever eat another plant again. It's to understand that meat is incredibly valuable, don't fear it, and understand that some plants can be really problematic for some people. If you want to eliminate all of them or some of them, you absolutely can. You won't have any problems. You'll thrive like so many people are. But if you want to keep them in your diet for color, variety, texture, whatever, that's amazing too. That's great. The point is just to help people understand a higher quality of life. So, I just had to say that because I don't really appreciate those juxtapositions.
Melanie Avalon: Well, first of all, I did not mean to prescribe any of those characteristics to you at all. So, I apologize if I meant that. My biggest thing in life is find what works for you and accept everybody. And it drives me crazy when we are judgmental of different dietary choices. I can't stand it. I was literally just having an idea of all plants being good and animal products being bad compared to all animal products being good and then all plant products being bad or toxic in a way, just like that juxtaposition compared to all food on a spectrum of potential nutrition, and potential toxicity. The spectrum of everything.
There's the question of meat, for example, and is there nothing in meat toxic to humans, and is everything in plants toxic to humans? Meat still contains lectins but contains vitamins that in high doses could be toxic to cells.
Paul Saladino: Like what?
Melanie Avalon: Vitamin A, iron.
Paul Saladino: I don't think it's ever been demonstrated. We need to be really careful. I think you're creating a false dichotomy here.
Melanie Avalon: Let me provide some context, so you don't have to argue against something I might not actually be arguing. My point in saying this is, say there's some compounds in meat that if they were in really, really high amounts that we're not going to naturally get from meat, that they would exhibit toxicity to ourselves. Now, let's look at a plant and let's say that has a compound that maybe it just takes a little bit of that compound to exhibit a toxicity, but in that little amount, it takes toxicity but below that at a minute amount, which might be the amount of that compound that we're getting, if we were to have a minimum or moderate amount of plants in our natural diet, and that amount, it doesn't exert toxicity to cells and instead has a beneficial effect. I know like the graph is way different because maybe those compounds in plants, it's like a tiny, tiny bit is okay, and then just a little bit more too much compared to an animal's where you can really have a lot of it before there's a problem.
I just feel if we just step back for a second, it's like, “Okay. Food, they all contain compounds. What are these compounds doing to ourselves? What's happening there?” I don't even know why we need to have a dialogue where we have to put it on a spectrum of this food is not toxic and this food is toxic when maybe every food contains stuff in it, that if there's too much of it actually will be toxic. And if there's not, it'll be fine. And that spectrum varies wildly. I'm just trying to step back. It's like the models of reviewing stress and hormesis and toxicity, and I just feel like we take one model and we apply it to everything rather than having a more nuanced perspective.
I was reading Siim Land's new book about stress, and he went through all the different models of toxicity. I had so many epiphanies. I was like, “Oh, my goodness." They're applying different models to plants versus food, and I can go through those if you want. I don't know, I think about this so much, because I just want to have the optimal diet. That's why I think the nuance is important. I don't know if there was a question in there. I just want to clarify.
Paul Saladino: Well, I think that if you look at the compounds that are found in animals and the compounds that are found in plants, they look very biologically different. There are no defense chemicals found in animal foods.
Melanie Avalon: What about lectins?
Paul Saladino: Lectins are just carbohydrate-binding proteins that occur in all foods. But if you look at the data, the plant lectins look to be much more problematic for humans because they're from a different sort of species. They're much more phylogenetically different from humans than anyone else. I don't think lectins are necessarily a defense chemical in the way that so many of the phytoalexin chemicals are that are found in plants, but plants actually make defense chemicals.
Melanie Avalon: I hate interrupting. I just have a quick question. Does that apply to dairy and eggs as well? The lectins in those, would that be an exception?
Paul Saladino: We'll talk about it. If you look at the way plants are making chemicals, they are making chemicals that are there to defend them from predation. By and large, animals don't do this. There's pufferfish and like poisonous frogs in the Amazon, but a cow, for instance, doesn't have any known chemical in its liver or it's flesh that's preventing it from getting eaten. But if you look at a piece of kale or broccoli or brussels sprouts or the roots like a cassava root or even a sweet potato-- pick your plant food, whether it's a bean or a grain, they have myriad defense chemicals that are there to prevent animals, fungi, and bacteria from eating them. Insects too.
Resveratrol, for instance, is it a plant defense chemical? It's made in response to the detritus fungus on the surface of grapes and peanuts. Sulforaphane is a plant defense chemical. It's brought into existence when myrosinase and glucoraphanin combined as broccoli seed or any brassica leaf or stem is chewed. Animals by and large don't have these chemicals. So, you're comparing apples to oranges here. And I think you have to be very careful, or you'll get confused and it might confuse the listener. You could drink too much water and die, right? To say that you could get too much vitamin A from liver and have harm is something that's never been demonstrated, short of the wives' tales about polar bear liver, which are not really substantial today.
Yes, iron can be a problem for some people, but it really only has to do with a genetic defect or a genetic polymorphism. The vast majority of the population can eat massive amounts of iron, and the gut will just poop it out. It won't absorb it. But for people who have polymorphisms in the HFE gene, which is the gene involved in the reabsorption of iron from the gut associated with hemochromatosis, even moderate amounts of iron can cause overload. So, that's not a problem with the iron per se. It's a problem with the genetics and has to do with certain polymorphisms in certain genetic people, but most of the population can eat lots of iron and never have a problem. I've never seen a clinical case of vitamin A overload related to any reasonable amount of animal liver. To compare that to plant foods, I think doesn't really hold up to academic scrutiny.
Now, if you want to talk about lectins specifically, they are carbohydrate-binding proteins, and they're not really necessarily produced as defense chemicals, but they do identify plants. There are a little bit of plant or animal molecular signature, and there are lectins in dairy and there are lectins and egg whites and there are lectins in meat. And there are also lots of lectins and grains and beans and seeds and other plant foods. I think that clinically and also in terms of research, it's been demonstrated time and time again, that the lectins in plant foods, usually the lectins found in beans and grains like peanuts or beans, are pretty darn problematic for the gut. They can affect the cells in the gut lining, the goblet cells that produce mucus and allow bacterial populations to overgrow in the gut and lead to leaky gut.
Now, you bring up a good point here, and I talk about this in the book as well. If there are two types of animal foods that can be problematic to people, it's not because they contain a defense chemical or a toxin. It's because they contain lectins or proteins that are immunologically problematic for some people. In milk, it's casein and whey. And in egg whites, it's usually the egg white albumin. Now, I think what's very interesting about this is that eggs and dairy were foods that our ancestors probably didn't get that much, and I don't think people should emphasize those on a carnivore diet. I give lots of caution regarding this in the book and say, “Hey, look, if you can do dairy, that's fine.” But I think that the majority of us are going to have some immunologic intolerance to casein and whey, and I would leave it out of most diets.
I also recommend that most people leave out egg whites for the same reason, just that overconsumption of those foods that are not really evolutionarily consistent or not programmed for us can cause immunologic problems. The vast majority of people are having most of the problems with plant foods. But if you can tolerate some plant foods, great. But there's a real difference in the way that these compounds are being produced, and we've only scratched the surface in terms of plant compounds. We haven't talked about oxalates. We haven't talked about saponins. We haven't talked about the polyphenols that are phytoalexins. We haven't talked about isothiocyanates. We haven't talked about salicylates. We haven't talked about a lot of other ones. And you were only able to come up with two potential problems with animal foods, and both of them are not really a real problem. To compare those two, I think just doesn't hold up when you think about it. Animal foods are much safer than plant foods.
And then, if you look at the nutritional quality of these foods, animal foods just absolutely blow plant foods away. There's no equivalent in terms of the bioavailability of animal meat and liver to similar nutrients in plants. If you're looking at vitamin B6 or any of the B vitamins or vitamin A or iron, they're so much more bioavailable in animal foods. Furthermore, there are many important nutrients that are essential for human optimal health that are only in animal foods. They don't occur in plant foods at all. Things like creatine, carnitine, choline, carnosine, vitamin K2, a full spectrum of vitamin K2, all of the megaquinones, and vitamin B 12. The list goes on and on and on.
So, when you really put plant foods and animal foods next to each other, and there's a whole chapter in the book, there's no comparison. To say that plant foods and animal foods both contain toxins, that just isn't true. You're not comparing the same things and you're not looking at it accurately. And then to even try and compare the nutritional quality of these foods, there's no comparison. Animal foods are much more nutrient-dense than plant foods.
Having said all of that, like I said earlier, if somebody is eating plant foods and thriving, great, but if somebody is not thriving or struggling with GI issues or autoimmune issues, it's really important to realize that there are lots of toxins in plant foods that could be triggering them. I would say the same thing as someone if they're having GI issues or mood issues or autoimmune issues, and they're still eating egg whites or they're still eating dairy, I would remove those foods as well. But I just haven't seen it animal meat and liver and fat, the foods that really I think have served as the centerpiece of human diets for three million years, cause problems for really many humans on this planet, if any.
Melanie Avalon: I mean, you definitely don't have to convince me of the potential toxicity of plants. I even-- I'm so obsessed with it, I created an app a lot of my listeners have, called Food Sense Guide and it compares over 300 foods for 11 different compounds so that people might react to. Glutamate, oxalates, lectins, histamine, salicylates, gluten, FODMAPs, it just goes on and on. Quick thing to what you said, it was my understanding that the lectins in milk were to discourage other animals from drinking the milk and that the proteins in egg whites were to protect the egg yolk.
Paul Saladino: I don't think so. They're not defense chemicals. I don't know where you read that, but I don't think it's true. I think it's an immunologic incompatibility. The proteins in milk are casein and whey, and those are just occurring in all sorts of milk. Humans have casein and whey in their milk. The protein in egg white is albumin. It's a normal protein that's found. It's not a defense chemical. It's just a chemical that looks a little differently, and I think sometimes the immune system recognizes it differently. So, I'd be curious where you found that because I don't believe that to be-- I haven't seen any evidence of that.
Melanie Avalon: I will do further research and find the article and the list of studies and put it in the show notes and send it to you as well, we can further discuss. But you were speaking about how there aren't any studies showing cases really of vitamin A toxicity except for these people eating polar bears and things like that. I just wonder if a lot of the studies on plant toxicity-- do we have studies showing a person eating a moderate amount of plants containing these compounds in cooked form? Are we seeing toxicity or the toxicity studies always in supplemental form, reduced form, the isolated compound, cell cultures? I feel maybe the same argument can be made for that as well. Or at least for the more benign ones.
Tubers, for example, are underground, so they already have less of a need for defense compounds. And then if we cook them, we're denaturing a lot of the additional compounds. Something like white rice, most of the defense compounds are found in the bran. Not that I'm a fan of eating all the white rice but we take off the bran and if we cook it-- I mean, goodness, we put in the instant pot, I don't know what defensive compounds will be left in it. I wonder if our adaptation as humans to these compounds, with cooking and things like that might be important. But changing gears--
Paul Saladino: Well, can I comment on that?
Melanie Avalon: Sure. Yeah, please do.
Paul Saladino: Yeah, I think that we know that cooking denatures some of the compounds but not all. Phytates are not denatured by cooking, they are denatured by fermentation. Cooking is not going to degrade glucosinolates which is precursors of isothiocyanates, which are a definite plant defense chemical. Cassava is an example of a root that's absolutely freaking toxic. Even if you cook it, you will die-- cassava. Unless you ferment it or prepare it, let all of the hydrocyanic acid evaporate for three days. So, there's lots of studies. Saponins are not denatured by pressure cooking, or cooking or any of these things. There are many of these compounds that are not denatured with any of those methods.
Again, if you pressure cook something, you're basically creating a mush. How many of the micronutrients, which is the whole reason you're eating in the first place, are degraded? If you're talking about calories, we're really mixing a lot of ideas here. If the point of eating food is to give humans “calories” and “micronutrients,” in order to detoxify many of these plant foods, you are going to destroy all the nutrients in them in the first place. You could do that with white rice, or with rice, you could remove the hull and pressure cook it, and you could basically make a dextrose polymer. You can make mush that's a bunch of glucose, which is great, it'll sustain you, but no one is going to say that white rice is going to make someone virile and happy, or give them good skin. There's no nutrients left in that food and you can eat it if you want the carbohydrates, that's great. I personally have not found white rice to be very nutritive at all or to really improve my health.
We're getting to extremes. If you absolutely nuclearify a plant food, you could probably degrade a lot of the toxins. But at that point, why are you eating it in the first place? What the heck are you doing? You're not going to get any of the micronutrients. At a basic nutritional adequacy level, any human is going to struggle to get all of the nutrients they need unless the majority of their diet is animal foods. That's just basic equation. That's my concern is that as we introduce more and more plant foods, we are excluding more and more animal foods and the nutrient quality, the nutrient density, the nutrient availability, there's no way equivalence between those.
I'll challenge any of the listeners to understand where they get their riboflavin from. How do you get enough riboflavin? If you are not eating liver or heart, I would be very surprised if you are even getting close to the RDA for riboflavin in a day. And so many of the nutrients in plant foods like beta-carotene are often sold to us as vitamin A equivalents when they are not. It takes over 19,000 units of beta-carotene to equal 1 unit of retinol vitamin A. I think that vitamin A deficiency is rampant in the United States, and it's unknown because most people have BCMO polymorphisms and can't convert beta-carotene into retinol and just are not getting enough vitamin A because they're not eating egg yolks or not eating liver if they're sensitive to eggs.
And so, to equate these are to say like we can detoxify these foods, it's like, yeah, and then you can create mush that has no micronutrients and isn't going to promote health in a human. So, we're back to square one, begin with the end in mind. What is the point of eating in the first place? It is to give your body enough calories to do all of the synthesis, and to give your body all the building blocks, the micronutrients. And why would you want to do that in a way that's going to create more toxic damage? Or why would you want to try and do that with foods that are just completely nutrient bereft in order to make them non-toxic for humans?
The equation seems to make so much more sense to me that we would want to eat more animal foods and less of the most toxic plant foods to do both of those things and then we're just going to thrive more as humans. Do you see what I'm saying?
Melanie Avalon: The crazy thing is I'm really on the same page about almost all of it. I kind of shudder if I could see a list of or a number of how much meat I've eaten because I just feel it's the most nutrient-rich thing. I don't feel complete without it. I eat so much of it. I've gone periods to where I was basically just eating meat. I just wonder on the plant side of things, what is that toxicity threshold and if I have berries or just comparing straight carnivore to carnivore plus some plants-- and you talk about in your book, there are five tiers and they have different levels of vegetables and fruits. Listeners, by the way, get the book because there's so much science, so much detail more than we could ever talk about in this podcast, so I hardcore you get it ASAP. I know we're running out of time. I have a question for you though. So, word on the street-- because in your history, you talked about how originally when you experimented with carnivore, you were like carnivore with honey and then you went more carnivore, and now word on the street is your-- I don't know if you still are, but you brought back honey for a bit. Like carbs, fat, honey, what are your current thoughts on that?
Paul Saladino: Yeah, it's really fascinating. The first year and a half that I did carnivore, I was just zero-carb carnivore. My athletic performance was fine, but I did have electrolyte issues, and I really struggled to maintain electrolytes. I think that ketosis is a natural state for humans. Every morning, I'm in ketosis when I wake up. Even now, including honey back in my diet, and I think that our ancestors were in ketosis frequently. I don't think it's a challenging thing for humans or a damaging thing. But I do think that in terms of electrolyte maintenance, humans need more of an insulin signal than you will get from just pure protein and fat.
There are many people out there who appear to be doing just fine on long-term ketogenic diets. But I also think there's a lot of fear of carbohydrates. If you really look at human biochemistry, carbohydrates do not cause diabetes, they just don't. I've done many podcasts on this. There's plenty of research to show this. There are examples of indigenous hunter-gatherer groups to show this. Carbohydrates do not cause diabetes. I think that the real trigger for the underlying insulin resistance that is at the root of metabolic syndrome and diabetes is evolutionarily inconsistent levels of linoleic acid, which is an omega-6 fatty acid in our diet today relative to hundreds of thousands millions of years ago. This is what's found in vegetable oils and foods like chicken and pork that are fed corn and soy, evolutionarily inconsistent foods. So, that’s I think the real trigger.
What I found personally was that when I reincorporated carbohydrates back into my diet, first with honey, and then I did a short experiment while I was wearing a continuous glucose monitor from Nutrisense, and I had berries and sweet potato and a few other carbohydrates just to see what my glucose would do, that I felt much better. Now, incidentally, the more fiber I ate, the worse I felt, and I didn't like squash. My eczema actually came back for a couple of days when I had squash in my diet, and then I cut it out again, and it went away and hasn't recurred. The berries were pretty benign but weren't really amazing for me.
But in the book, as you say, I do give five tiers of a carnivore diet. The first tier is a really a carnivore-ish type diet, and I give some sense of what I think are the least toxic plant foods, and those are fruit. If you look at indigenous cultures, they eat meat and organs and fruit when it's available seasonally. So, I think that humans biochemically can do great in ketosis for some amount of time. But eventually our body's like, "I could use a little bit more insulin signaling from time to time just to hold on to electrolytes." What I have settled on now, it works really well for me is, I eat honey on most days, twice a day. My blood sugar doesn't go crazy. My fasting blood sugar stays very low. You can see in my continuous glucose monitor readings, which I shared in that podcast, I am not insulin resistant from eating honey. I've done labs, my fasting insulin is less than 3 micro-IU per ML. My C-peptide is 0.43 on honey. So, I'm actually more insulin sensitive with some honey in my diet.
If people are afraid of fructose, I talked about that in a recent podcast at length with my friend, Tommy Wood. There's way too much fructophobia out there. There are many isocaloric replacement studies with fructose showing that it doesn't cause weight gain, blood pressure rise, or increase uric acid, when it's eaten in reasonable quantities in whole foods. The carbohydrates piece is very interesting to me and if ever they were anything to suggest that I'm not dogmatic, this may be one of them because, believe me, there are lots in the carnivore community who would say, “No, no, sugars aren't good for you. You don't need any carbohydrates.” And basically, I just say to people, like, “Hey, if you're thriving without them, great. I think your body is very well equipped to be in ketosis as much as you want. But if you are getting palpitations or you are getting muscle cramps, your body is asking for carbohydrates so it can hold on to the electrolytes a little better." That's just normal physiology.
An insulin spike is not pathologic. A blood sugar bump from 80 to 120 for less than an hour is not pathologic. People wear these continuous glucose monitors, and they just want to see their blood sugar flat all day. That's not normal human physiology unless you're fasting. There's no problem with that. But there's also no problem with having a bump after you eat some carbohydrates if your body is insulin sensitive and able to dispose of that glucose very quickly. That's what you'll see on my CGM readings that I show in that podcast, that the blood sugar comes back to normal within an hour. There's none of these huge postprandial spikes that people would expect, which really can suggest some degree of insulin resistance.
In other people, when they eat carbohydrates, they get that response. Usually, when they're eating processed carbohydrates, that would tell me that their underlying metabolism is broken. In my opinion, that's related to years and years of excess linoleic acid, this 18-carbon omega-6 fatty acid that is not supposed to be that high in our diet. There's lots of vegetable oil, there's lots of corn and soy, there's way too many nuts and seeds in our diet that are breaking our metabolism. If you look at hunter-gatherer groups, like I said, the amount of linoleic acid their diet is only 2% to 3% of their calories. In 2020, we're probably upwards of 15% or 17% of our calories from linoleic acid. And these oils have crucial central biochemical signaling roles in our biochemistry.
So, really, really interesting stuff. I think people should do what works for them but understand there's lots of ideas out there that really contradict the notion that carbohydrates are in and of themselves bad for humans. I'm not advocating for Big Gulps. I'm not advocating for processed sugars. I'm just saying it's okay to eat fruit from time to time if you want to eat some seasonally. If you have some raw, organic honey that you want to eat, it's probably very good for you. It's a very healthy food for humans, it's very evolutionarily consistent from time to time. It's totally reasonable to consume that.
Melanie Avalon: The best blood sugars I ever had and diet I thrived on was high-high protein, low-fat, high-carbs from fruit. I could not agree more about polyunsaturated fats, omega-6 oils. If I had to pick one thing that I think is probably the most detrimental to our bodies would be that. For listeners, I actually interviewed Cyrus and Robbie of Mastering Diabetes. Definitely check out that episode if you're interested in the high-carb, low-fat implications of fruit and all that stuff.
Paul, I know you have to go. I can't let you go without asking the last question I always ask. It's just because I realized how important mindset is, so what is something that you're grateful for?
Paul Saladino: Oh, my goodness, it's just really cool to be able to do this work and to be able to share ideas and tools that people that may not be things that are out there widely. There's a lot of misinformation out there. I think that 2020 is a crazy year, but it's also an interesting time to be alive because we get to have conversations with people who may have different ideas and share ideas. And the ultimate hope is just that we can come to some mutual understanding of truth that will benefit people and help them just really live the best life they can. We're all on this earth for a blink of an eye. It's a short amount of time, and a lot of people suffer greatly during this time there on the earth. I really just hope to be able to be a part of improving that small bit, and I'm really grateful to get to do that work.
Melanie Avalon: Well, thank you, Paul. You're really doing that. Listeners, I cannot recommend enough that you get The Carnivore Code ASAP. I know we just scratched the surface. It goes so deep into all of this. Just get it, read it now. Also, check out Paul’s podcast. Any other links you want to throw out there?
Paul Saladino: Well, I also want to let people know, one of the things we didn't really talk about too much in this podcast was the importance of organ meats.
Melanie Avalon: I love those.
Paul Saladino: Yeah. I'm super excited about this passion project that I've recently launched, which is Heart & Soil. It's a company that's getting people desiccated organ supplements, so liver and spleen and pancreas and kidney.
Melanie Avalon: If you had to pick to start with for listeners, what would you recommend?
Paul Saladino: Right now, we've launched with two products. We have bone marrow and liver, which I think is amazing because there's no other bone marrow products on the market that don't have flow agents like rice flour, and the other one is beef organs. If I had to choose one, I would start with the beef organ supplement that we have. It's liver, heart, kidney, spleen, and pancreas. I think getting both would be better because then you'll get some bone marrow as well. But if you're not getting organs in your diet, no matter what you're eating, whether it's omnivore or carnivore, keto, whatever, there's a lot of unique nutrients in these foods that, like I said, are not found in other places.
Earlier when I asked where most of the listeners were getting their riboflavin, if you remember, it's really only found in bioavailable reasonable quantities in heart and liver. It's just a great idea for people to take these organs. Now, basically what I tell people is don't take the supplements that I'm making, eat the real organ, but if you can't eat the real organ or you don't want to eat the real organ, I hope that they'll be valuable for some people. So, check us out at heartandsoilsupplements.com.
Melanie Avalon: Oh my goodness. I currently take spleen and kidney. I'm going to get that organs-- it's available now?
Paul Saladino: Yeah, heartandsoilsupplements.com. Use the code carnivoremd for 10% off. And the book is out now, you can go to TheCarnivoreCodeBook.com for the book. And my website is CarnivoreMD.com.
Melanie Avalon: Perfect. All right. Well, thank you, Paul. I could have talked to you for another five hours. I know you have to go. Maybe we can do a part three in the future.
Paul Saladino: I'd love that. Have a great day, Melanie. Thanks so much for having me on.
Melanie Avalon: Bye, Paul.
Paul Saladino: Bye-bye.
