#179 Paul Saladino - The FDA Approved Poison You Eat Every Day

Dr. Paul Saladino, welcome to the show, man.
Thanks for having me. I've been pumped about this interview.
But before we get started, I'll give you the introduction, and we'll go through all that stuff here in a minute, but you're living down in Costa Rica. Yeah, I live in Costa Rica.
How long have you been down there? Four, four years almost. Why did you move to Costa Rica? For fun, for surfing.
That's it? Yeah, that's it. And for nature.
Nice. Yeah, I lived in Columbia for five years, but, uh, I can't say, well, I did move down there for fun, but it got a little too fun and I had to move back.

But I spent some time in Costa Rica in my journeys down south, and man, what a beautiful place. It's jungle, it's ocean.
I was living in Austin, Texas before I moved to Costa Rica. And I had just started a company called Heart and Soil Supplements.
They make organ capsules. And so I was trying to do podcasting and build a company.
And I just felt like I wasn't having enough fun. I've learned over the years that I am the most creative and the most able to do good work in the world.
when I have something in my life that I can do every day or almost every day that just brings me pure joy. It's just play, right? There's nothing productive about it.
It's frivolous. It's just I want to be playing in nature and that joy that I get from playing in nature in Costa Rica at surfing, it fuels everything else I do because every single day in Costa Rica, unless it's a hurricane or unless the waves are absolutely horrible, I'm out in the ocean at 6 a.m.
for two, two and a half hours. No kidding.
Yeah. So I'm getting sunlight.
I'm grounding. I'm moving my body and I come out of the ocean and I'm just happy.
And I don't always get a great wave. I've only been surfing six, seven years, so I'm still a pretty mediocre surfer, but I'm just full of joy.
That allows me to do everything else. It makes all the other stuff that I do in the day easier because I'm just happy.
Dude, you've got to connect with Laird Hamilton. I've connected with him.
I had him on my podcast. I've never met him in person, but I know a bunch of his friends in Malibu.
Yeah, hopefully I'll get to hang out with him soon. He's awesome.
He's awesome. Yeah, he was great.
We did. And he's all about being healthy.
It's everything. I think you guys would really hit it off.
Absolutely. Well, we both think about food, and I'm the same as that.
I think about food as the center of human health, one of the biggest metrics, one of the biggest levers we can pull. And Laird is the same way, and it's served him well.
What is he, in his 60s? Yeah. Still surfing big waves? Yeah.
That's longevity. Yeah, that dude, he's something else.
Yeah, he's incredible. Great person, great person.
But why Costa Rica? I mean, out of all the places you could go on Earth to embed yourself in nature, why Costa Rica? The story is that I was in Africa. I went from Austin, Texas.
I went to Whitefish, Montana, did some snowboarding to take a break from Austin. I thought, I need a break.
I'm a little bit overwhelmed with all the business stuff and building the brand four years ago, four and a half years ago.

And I went to Whitefish, and then I went to Africa with a friend of mine

to spend time with this tribe in Tanzania called the Hadza.

They're some of the last remaining hunter-gatherers on the planet.

And I've spent like two weeks there with the Hadza,

and we can talk about that because it's really interesting the way that they live.

On the way back from Africa, which is a gnarly journey in all these time zones,

I stopped in D.C. to see my family and Austin, Texas had a huge ice storm.
I thought, I don't want to go back to Austin. They had a huge ice storm.
Everything shut down. It's horrible.
I'd been hearing about this place in Costa Rica called Santa Teresa, which is where I lived originally but not where I live now. I thought, well, I've heard that Santa Teresa is a good place to be a digital nomad.
They have good meat, they have internet, and they have good waves, and it's warm water, and I want to get back to surfing, so I'm going to go to Santa Teresa. So I went to Santa Teresa from D.C.
and thought it was going to be an eight-day vacation, and it just kept getting longer and longer because every day I would get up, surf, walk the beach at night, watch the sunset, ground, and I thought, this is the best quality of life I've ever had as a human. I grew up in Washington, D.C.
in the suburbs. And I had a pretty good childhood.
My parents are wonderful people. They're both still married and alive.
My dad's a doctor. Mom's a nurse.
But I never grew up with that much access to something that was close to nature and fun. And so I just kept extending trip.
And eight days became eight weeks, and then six months, and then I bought a house, and then I sold it, and then I moved to another spot in Costa Rica. It's just gone from there.
And I've never really wanted to leave because it's been such a good quality of life for me. Man, I'll tell you another thing..
When I moved out of the country, part of the reason I moved out is I just got sick and tired of listening to the politics and all that shit. And that was a long time ago, probably.
It was over 10 years ago since I've been back. But just to be able to set that load down of all the fucked up narratives and shit that's happening and everybody's pissed off in the U.S.
about how the country's being run no matter who's in office and hearing everybody's opinion. And then you go to a place like Costa Rica or me, Colombia, and nobody cares about that shit.
And it's like you just don't hear any of that noise. And that was a huge relief for me, to put that shit aside and actually just be with myself, you know what I mean, without thinking about that kind of stuff.
It's a phenomenal way to disconnect. It's a really nice balance for me.
Before the show, we were talking about the jungle and infrared light, and I'm sure we'll talk about that on the podcast. But yeah, it feels very disconnected.
I mean, where I live is I've got a house in the jungle overlooking the ocean, and it's just all I see is green. Outside my door is just green leaves reflecting infrared light, and it's warm.
When I got there, I felt very wealthy in terms of sunlight, and that felt really good. I mean, we know sunlight is good for humans.
We have ultraviolet, which makes vitamin D and other things in the human body, but you have a full spectrum of light. And being near the equator, it makes so much sense.
The temperature in Costa Rica is, it's pretty much between 76 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit year round. It's so easy to be a human there.
I rarely wear a shirt. I almost never wear shoes.
I never close the windows in my house. I sleep with all my windows open.
And so I'm connected to the outdoors so much more. I don't have to use air conditioning.
I don't have recycled air. The water for my house comes from a stream on the mountain.
So there's no fluoride, there's no chlorine, there's no pesticides, there's no pharmaceuticals in my water. And it's just clean air, clean water.
There's no cell service at my house. So I have a Wi-Fi router at my house that I turn the Wi-Fi off and I use Ethernet cables.
So I'm sure we'll talk about RF, EMF, Wi-Fi type stuff in the podcast too, hopefully. So I have zero RF, EMF at my house and I can just live in that environment and sort of do the experiment.
Do I feel differently? Because growing up, I lived in the suburbs and there was a time when I was around 22 that I through-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail. so I walked from Mexico to Canada.
And that's on a wilderness trail that's continuous. Every night for three and a half months, I slept on the ground on a sleeping mat, but I was out in nature.
It was one of the most joyous, simple times in my life, but I think that there's something about being in nature that's good for humans, and that changed me. And I feel like I'm closer to that when I'm in Costa Rica.
I'm just closer to nature and closer to that sort of memory of just being in the natural world. And it's just, it's meant everything for me over the last few years.
I went down during COVID. So there was a lot of political stuff happening too.
Oh yeah. Yeah.
Was it pretty political down there? You know, it was a little bit. Every time I went back to the States, I had to do a COVID test.
In a lot of the grocery stores, when I first got down there, you had to wear a mask. They were enforcing some things.
Costa Rica just follows. They don't really question much.
It was much more free, I think, than the States was. They did close the beaches, apparently, in Costa Rica.
I was living in San Diego before I was in Austin, and that was when COVID first started, and they closed the beaches. I heard, dude, I heard that if you got directions on Waze or ordered an Uber in California, there was a warning that went out that was like, are you sure you want to leave your house? That shit was fucking crazy.
It was crazy. When I was living in San Diego, I was surfing, but I also had a foil board.
Do you know what a foil board is? Is that the thing? Layered dust. Layered dust.
That's what layered made. What a badass.
So it's a board with a mast and then a wing below it, and I had an electric foil board, And I would go to this inlet, the Hedionda Reservoir in San Diego, and I would go on my foil board. It's an electric foil board.
You don't need anyone to pull you and you can kind of essentially fly around. The board is out of the water.
And during COVID, they closed it. You couldn't even go in the water.
And I thought, forget this. I just went in by myself, and I'm foiling around the reservoir by myself.
I'm thousands of feet from any human. And a policeman saw it, or someone called it in from the neighborhood, and I saw there were flashing lights at the entrance where I would get out.
And I thought, oh, that guy's going to give me a ticket. And I think it was like a $1,000 ticket for breaking the quarantine or breaking these rules and COVID.
And so I just waited him out. I just stayed in it.
I didn't have anything else to do that afternoon, thankfully. I waited him out.
I just sat on my foil board in the middle of the reservoir. It's like a brackish, saltwater, freshwater reservoir.
I just sat there. And then he waited for four or five hours.
Eventually, I went to this little inlet and kind of snuck around, and there was a house full of people. And I said, hey, can I bring my foil board up? And I went and walked over, and he was sitting right by my truck.
The people in the neighborhood must have said, that's his truck. And the cop was sitting there.
And then eventually he left. Wow.
Something finally more important. Yes.
But this policeman, who I respect, right? Thank you for your service. Literally during COVID, the best use of his time was trying to give me a ticket for foiling by myself in the middle of a reservoir.
And he waited for four to five hours for this. Wow.
Crazy. That's insane.
That's insane. Sorry, we've got to talk more about Costa Rica.
I think about leaving. States.
Yeah. I think about it all the time.
Do you have citizenship down there? You can get it. I'm on a track to citizenship.
So how does it work? Do you just go down there and buy a place? Is it that American-friendly? Yeah, it's very American-friendly. In Costa Rica, you can own property.
I believe in Mexico, you have a 99-year lease, but in Costa Rica, you own the property outright. I bought a house in Costa Rica.
They may have changed the laws, but I think you only have to spend $150,000 or $200,000 on a property in Costa Rica to qualify for citizenship track. No kidding.
I'm a temporary resident right now. In a year and a half, I'll become a permanent resident, and then you can become a citizen maybe five years after that.
I forget the exact progression. You can get a pathway to citizenship in Costa Rica just by buying a moderate property there.
How's your Spanish? It's pretty good. Yeah? Yeah, it's pretty good.
I have some good friends. So one of the things you often do in Costa Rica is you get a caretaker, like a gardener who looks at your house most days, because people will squat in your house if you're not there.
So I have a caretaker who takes care of the foliage at my house and cleans and helps me with errands when I'm not there. And he's Nicaraguan, and we speak exclusively in Spanish, so it's good to practice.
Cool. Yeah, I've been wanting to take my wife down there because she's not going to come down.
But yeah, we will. We will.
Her birthday's coming up up maybe we'll do it then but like so many places there are touristy spots in costa rica and there are less touristy spots in costa rica and you asked me earlier is the place where you are overrun it's not i mean overrun by america yeah yeah they fucking ruin everything man we do often everything gets more expensive we more expensive. We often do.
Yeah. Yeah.
So your place is, you're remote. I'm pretty remote.
I mean, I have running water. I have electricity, right? I have two internet service providers because often one of them will go out, right? So one of them is fiber optic and the road to my house was only paved in the last two years.
A lot of the roads are dirt. The last 300 meters to my house is dirt, but the road up to the dirt road was paved in the last couple of years.
When you're driving up the road, it's gorgeous. The road up to the dirt road is a gorgeous paved road.
On the side are these big trees, big old trees So in the rainy season, you'll get some wind and rain.

And it's very common that a branch will come down and take out power and the fiber optic internet. And in that case, I have a backup so I can still do work or connect with the outside world because no cell service.
Yeah, yeah. Wow, wow.
That's awesome, man. Well, let me give you an introduction here.
Okay. Dr.
Paul Saladino. Paul Saladino is a double board certified MD and host of the Paul Saladino MD podcast.
You question our assumptions about health and the role of nutrition, which is controversial in modern medicine. You say that Western medicine fails to treat the root cause of chronic illness and doctors are only taught to treat symptoms with medications.
You firmly believe that nutritional choices lie at the root of so many chronic illnesses that Western medicine says are irreversible. You stated the most chronic illnesses are preventable and reversible.
You definitely walk the walk and practice what you preach. Paul, welcome to the show.
It's an honor to have you. And I have a gift for you.
Okay. But you're probably not going to like it.
I'm a little embarrassed to give it to you. I'm not going to lie.
Honestly, I don't give it to any of the doctors. And then I had Dr.
Gabrielle Lyons on the other day, and she got upset that I didn't give them to her.

So I felt bad.

So these are Vigilance League gummy bears packed full of

shit that will kill you.

But they do taste pretty damn good and they are made

here in the USA. So if nothing else

there's a little keepsake for you

because they are hard to come by.

I have a gift for you too.

So I bought you some meat sticks from Lineage. This is one of the companies that I founded and they're all grass-fed, grass-finished with organs.
I just crushed a whole bag of these downstairs. They're pretty good, huh? These are amazing.
So, yeah. How long have you been doing this? So Lineage is in its 11 months.
So we've been in business. Lineage has been around almost a year.
And the other company is Heart and Soil, and that makes desiccated organ supplements. I'm going to send you some of both.
We can talk about organs and stuff. But the cool thing about this is, I never thought I'd be an entrepreneur.
I went to medical school, but it's been empowering and exciting to think about making things that people can use to lead better lives. And making them in a unique way, that's all I want to do with these companies, is make products that don't exist in the market that allow people to lead better lives in an easier way.
So it's just the highest quality stuff that I could get people, and it's all animal-based type nutrients, which we'll talk about a ton in the podcast. It tastes amazing.
I guess I'm being maybe a little TMI for the audience, but usually when I have that kind of stuff, when I burp, I taste it. I'll get some heartburn or something, but I can tell by eating those that's not going to happen.
I can tell. It's just real food.
The only ingredients in there and in everything that all my companies make are things like grass-fed beef, organs, vinegar, and salt. That's it.
What's the deal with organs? Organs, we're talking about liver, heart, kidney, spleen, pancreas, testicle, ovaries, brain. Humans have always eaten these, but they're not a part of our diet today.
When I was in Africa with the Hadza, we hunted baboon. Their hunting grounds have been encroached upon by other tribes.
So they're protected now because of tourism by the Tanzanian government, but they don't have as much room to hunt as they used to. They would rather hunt things like eland, which is a large antelope, but oftentimes they end up hunting baboons, which is a little interesting because it kind of looks human.
They have a thumb. But we hunted a baboon with them, and the first thing they did after they killed the baboon was put the baboon on the fire, and then we ate the organs.
So I shared the organs with the tribe. Another time with them, we ate a goat that someone had gifted to the tribe, and they had this raw liver that they cooked, and they put it on a rock before they cooked it, and they were treating it like a precious piece of gold.
They treasure these organs. The day after we killed the baboon, the hunter who delivered the final blow that killed the baboon offered me, this is like Indiana Jones stuff, he offered me brain.
He had the baboon head, and he had roasted the brain, and he said, do you want some brain? Of course I ate it. So I ate this baboon brain with a guy, but that's one of their favorite parts of the baboon, is the brain.
But what's so interesting about organs is they have unique nutrients. And to be fair, muscle is an organ.
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Part of the reason I do what I do is for my family. I want to leave them a better country than the one I was born into.
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Make sure you do everything in your power to help protect what's yours. When you go to the grocery store and you look at the butcher's counter, you see muscle meat.
You don't see heart. You don't see liver, you don't see testicle, but you see meat, and that's an organ, but that's just one organ.
And really, the fatty reserves are an organ in and of themselves. The adipose depots are a separate organ.
And all of the organs have signaling molecules, myokines and hormones, and they have unique nutrients. So you look at muscle meat, like a steak, right? Steak is very high in iron, which is bioavailable because it's heme iron from animals.
Muscle meat is high in creatine, which we know has been studied to help with mental performance, muscle recovery, explosivity. It's high in B12, it's high in B6, it's high in zinc, but it's not very high in folate, and it's not very high in, it has some choline, but the liver has more.
The biotin is higher in the liver. So some organs have complementary nutrients that we know are important for humans.
Liver has copper, and it complements the zinc in muscle meat. So there's this historical pattern of humans consuming animals where if you eat the whole animal, you get a much more comprehensive, robust nutritional profile than if you just eat steak.
Now, you don't need to eat a ton of liver. A little bit goes a long way, but we don't do this anymore.
I didn't grow up. I had liverwurst growing up, but not a ton.
And so I think it's important, and humans do much better when they have organs, even a little bit of organs every day, in connection with their muscle meat. And most people won't eat organs fresh or cooked.
So one of the companies I built was Hardened Soil, which just makes the organ capsules. But fresh organs are better if you want to try it.
Have you ever eaten a testicle? I have. You have? Yeah.
I brought, yeah. I grew up in a farm town, man.
Yeah, you know it. I used to have this thing called, I can't even believe I'm bringing this up.
There was a family that owned, I don't know, the majority of the land in the county that I kind of grew up in, and they were hog farmers. And so they would have, every winter, they would have the testicle festival.
That's amazing. And yeah, that was the thing.
I mean, mostly everybody just got hammered. But out in the fields and in the barn and shit.
But yeah, they would have this thing called the Annual Testicle Festival. So yes, I have had it.
And then I'm sure in my trips overseas, I've had them and not even known it. Yeah.
Why waste the organs? It's unique nutrition. And what's interesting about organs specifically, I'll just say this, is that when you eat an organ raw or freeze-dried, there seem to be unique nutritional benefits for humans, probably beyond the vitamins and minerals.
And this is really cool, because you can eat a liver, and I can say, or you can eat some liver, whether it's cooked on a grill or a piece of raw liver or something, and I say, yeah, Sean, that's good for you because it has vitamin A, which is bioavailable, it has choline, it has biotin, it has folate, it has zinc, it has copper, it has selenium, it has manganese, and then it has peptides, which are these short protein fragments that probably pass through the human gut. The very small ones appear to pass through the human gut and can have roles in the human body, even across species.

But there's also something in organs called microRNA.

And so there's an interesting field of research now about how do these microRNAs,

which is different than messenger RNA,

these microRNAs probably provide a blueprint for our cells,

and especially the cells of the corresponding organ

that might help repair when our organs are damaged. So this is the really fascinating premise around eating organs.
And there's a lot of research about this from Germany from the 1950s and 60s that my team found, but there is evidence in animal models that when you provide either an intravenous injection of an organ or you put a little piece of liver on an embryo that's developing, the corresponding organ gets bigger. And you can give an injection of radiolabeled liver to an animal and you see the radioactivity accumulate in this corresponding organ.
So there's something going on here. The idea that organs could support the corresponding organ is really exciting because you think about people who have low testosterone or erectile dysfunction or women that have PCOS, which is a hormonal issue for women, or dementia.
And organ therapy, I think, is something that I really hope that we can do more research on this and really show the potential of benefit to people that we've never thought about in Western medicine. It's something that happens in these indigenous tribes.
People often eat the corresponding organ, but we've lost this knowledge historically as humans. What do you think derailed the research on the organs? I think that most research today is funded by pharma.
We can talk about the NIH and how many researchers at the National Institutes of Health have ties to pharma. I believe it's over 8,000.
And the majority of research that's taught in medical school, the majority of research that comes out of the NIH is funded by pharma. This gets back to the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, and the USDA.
And so who benefits, right? There's no liver lobby to talk to Congress and there's no one to fund these studies. This company, Heart and Soil, and the nonprofit that I built will hopefully be funding some studies to try and ask these questions and get some more interesting answers in 2024 relative to the 1950 and 1960 studies.
But these are not the studies that have been done. There hasn't been a lot of good nutritional research done in the last 100 years.
There's a little bit, but most of it is really tricky to do. I was going to ask you, sometimes it gets a little too conspiratorial for people to talk about, but it seems like it went off the rails back with, was it the Rockefeller family back in the early 1900s? Very potentially with the Flexner report.
It's possible, yeah, that allopathic medicine, I mean, that's a hypothesis that potentially the Rockefellers were interested in the petroleum-derived pharmaceuticals, and so they wanted to support the pharmaceutical industry. I'm not sure how much historical corroboration there is for that, but there certainly was a document published called the Flexner Report, I believe in the early 1900s, that denigrated alternative medicine, anything that wasn't allopathic.
What's allopathic? That's the traditional medicine. So I'm an MD.
I went to an allopathic medical school, the University of Arizona, did my residency at the University of Washington. Allopathic medicine is what you think of when you think of a doctor who you go to an office and you see them in the office.
That's an MD. That's allopathic medicine.
DOs also practice allopathic medicine. And everything else since the Flexinger report has been termed alternative medicine.
And yes, there are good doctors in allopathic medicine, and there are doctors that don't really do such a great job in allopathic medicine, just like there are good and bad doctors in the alternative world. But to suggest that there are no valuable ideas or interventions outside of what allopathic medicine offers us as humans is pretty ridiculous.
But that's really been the position of the mainstream, is to just push all the alternative ideas. Even calling them alternative ideas is pejorative.

This isn't a gotcha question, but you've embedded with these indigenous

tribes. I've been all over

the world.

I'm not saying I'm embedded

with indigenous tribes, but

we just talked before the

interview all the places I've been to from my prior career with the agency and SEAL teams and Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da- from my prior career with the agency and SEAL teams and da-da-da-da-da. But, you know, a lot of those, you know, a lot of people in Afghanistan, for example, you know, they live, now I wouldn't say they live clean.
You know, they're burning tires to keep warm in the winter. But, you know, the life expectancy is like, I think it's like late 30s, early 40s.
Yeah. What is the life expectancy of the tribe that you embedded with? So this is a super interesting question.
So the Hadza, and I would say across the board when it comes to hunter-gatherers, and really you see this pattern in indigenous cultures across the world, They have high rates of maternal and infant mortality. And that means that there are higher rates of kids dying and mothers dying in childbirth.
But if you average it across the lifespan, that brings down their total life expectancy because the infant mortality and maternal mortality is so high. But that's not related to chronic illness, right? That's being a child or a mother in the wild, giving birth in the wild is sometimes dangerous.
When I was with the Hadza at their camp, there are two to three-year-olds just wandering around. You could step on a rock or fall off a rock.
They were climbing over rocks, snakes, wild animals can just come into camp and take them. There are times that these tribes go through periods of scarcity which can affect immune function and can lead to infections which are hard to treat for them.
But if you look at the life expectancy of a Hadza hunter-gatherer or a Khoisan hunter-gatherer, there are only a few tribes remaining on the earth that are true hunter-gatherers. The Yanomono in South America have some hunter-gatherer members.
If you look at their life expectancy, if they reach teenage years, it's the same as ours. Okay.
And their health span is better. We call this squaring of the morbidity curve, meaning that if you took a 65-year-old Hadza hunter-gatherer and you put that individual up against the average 65-year-old American in any competition of running, climbing trees, shooting bows and arrows, it doesn't even have to be a skill-based competition, the Hadza tribe member would destroy us.
They do not suffer chronic disease the way that we do. In Western society, we have this sort of inexorable march toward decrepitude, meaning that, and we can talk about the statistics, obesity rates, diabetes, autoimmunity, even childhood chronic illness is rising.
So we know that as Westernized Americans, even though our average life expectancy may be 76, 77, I forget where exactly it is, many of us suffer with limitations in our quality of life from 30 to 40 years old till the end of our life. And western medicine can keep us alive, but how vital are we? What is our health span? How many 60-year-olds out there who can run 5 miles or 10 miles or climb a tree hand over hand with the balance needed to do that or have strong enough grip strength to hang on a tree branch and do an actual pull-up or can pull a bow back? The Hadza make the bows themselves.
Who could pull a bow back with their shoulder muscles and their back muscles, who have the vision to see animals in nature? They don't have macular degeneration. So these hunter-gatherer tribes do not suffer chronic disease.
And that discordance is something that was never taught to me in medical school, but it's so fascinating. What are they doing differently than us that allows them to live so well while they're alive? Because most of us want to live long, but we also want to live well.
We don't want to have back pain or shoulder pain that limit us from picking up our children or our grandchildren. I want to be able to surf until I'm 80, 90 years old.
It's my favorite thing to do in the world. It's much fun, right? This is what we want.
Hunter-gatherers have it. We really don't as westernized Americans.
And that statistic around life expectancy is skewed by higher rates of it's dangerous to be a human in the wild type of things. Yeah.
But that's a great question. Makes sense.
A couple more. So, man, I love this interview already, man.
Thanks.

So one thing before we get too far in the weeds, which we're already in,

I have a Patreon account.

It's a subscription account.

They're our top supporters.

They've been with us since the beginning,

and I wouldn't be sitting here, and neither would you, without them.

So one thing I offer them is i offer them every guest

they get to ask at least one question yeah i love it and uh you had a ton of good questions but

this one's from daniel walcott dr saladino considering the numerous additives and

preservatives that large corporations are incorporating into the meats available at

grocery stores are there specific types of meat or food groups that you would recommend we avoid? Processed meat is not the same as a steak. I'm a huge fan of single-ingredient foods.
So it's meat, right? It's a steak. It's a New York steak, right? It's ground beef.
There are no additives.

There are no preservatives. There's no food dives.
So single ingredient foods, it's a chicken breast, right? It's eggs. I think that that is one of the greatest and most powerful metrics that you can use to easily make food choices that will increase your health.
So this is a really astute question because you go to a grocery store and you think,

I can buy ground hamburger or I can buy a hot dog. And these are not the same thing because the hot dog has nitrates and the hot dog has preservatives or lower quality meat.
And because of the lower quality meat and the way it's processed in the factory, it likely has more microplastics potentially contaminated with pesticides. So food quality matters, and single-ingredient foods are king.
So when you go to the grocery store and you're looking for meat, you just want to buy meat. You don't want to buy, I mean, preferably, you don't want to buy hot dogs or sausages or chorizo, right, or any of these ingredient-containing foods.
So when it comes to food choices, the metric that I think is easiest for people at the first level, because I want to give people sort of an on-ramp. So the first metric that I would use in the grocery store, and we'll drill down on this, if people have autoimmune conditions, you can get much more specific and intentional about food choices.
But the first metric that I would use, if you want to lose weight, be healthy, reverse autoimmune disease, have more libido, sleep better, think more clearly, is try to make the majority of your diet single ingredient foods from both plant and animal kingdoms, which means buy meat, chicken, fish, pork, beef, bison, elk, whatever, eggs, milk. These are all single ingredient animal foods.
And then eat single ingredient plant foods. If you want to eat vegetables, that's fine.
We can talk about where I think vegetables could cause some people to go off track with autoimmune conditions, but that's further down the rabbit hole. But if you eat fruit and vegetables that are single ingredient foods and you that are single-ingredient foods, you are going to get healthier.
It's very difficult to not be healthy or to improve your health. It's very difficult not to improve your health if you do that.
If you want to eat foods that have a label because those meat sticks I handed you have a label, you read the label and you want to look for foods that your great-grandmother would recognize all of the ingredients. So for instance, on those meat sticks I handed you, the first ingredient is grass-fed beef.
After that is organs, which is heart and liver. After that is vinegar and then salt and then a collagen casing.
That's it. So your great-grandmother would know what all of those things are.
She might not know what collagen is, but collagen is from the intestines of an animal, which she would recognize. And so the jerky that we make is grass-fed beef, vinegar, and salt.
And there are foods that are in packages in a grocery store where your grandmother would recognize the ingredients. We can talk about bread a little bit.
The grains that we're using now are different than they used to be, and I don't eat bread for a variety of reasons. But if you want to do bread, with this rule, you could eat a bread that was just flour, water, salt.
That's what should be in bread, right? But you go to McDonald's, and the bun of a Big Mac has, I think it's about 55 ingredients in the bun. And this is where it creeps in.
You think, that's just bread, right? My grandmother would, that's bread. No, no, your grandmother wouldn't recognize azodicarbonamide and dimethyl polysiloxane and the four different seed oils, including hydrogenated soybean oil, which are in the bun at McDonald's.
So single ingredient foods or simple ingredient foods is the way to start when you're making food choices. Okay.
I mean, how poisoned, a lot of talk about hormones and the meats and all this kind of stuff. How poisoned is the beef, poultry, pork section, fish section? You can't even find wild caught salmon.
You have to order it online. Right.
Yeah. So every one a little bit...
I'll talk about each of them individually. Let's start with fish.
You point this out correctly. I've done a lot of videos on this.
When you go to Costco or wherever you buy fish, there is no such thing as wild Atlantic salmon. All Atlantic salmon is farm raised.
They'll say Atlantic salmon and then it'll say small letters farm raised. Most of us have heard is farm-raised.
And they'll say Atlantic salmon, and then it'll say small letters, farm-raised. Most of us have heard that farm-raised fish is much worse than wild-caught fish because it has PCBs, which are polychlorinated by fennels.
And they're feeding these fish fish food. They're feeding them basically the equivalent of a Big Mac is what they're feeding the fish in the tank that are farm.
And there are parallels across all the species. I have a dog, and I feed my dog raw meat, raw organs, and bone.
I always get a little sad when I see people feeding their dogs kibble. And again, this is no judgment if people feed their dogs kibble.
I understand that there are financial limitations, and not everyone is going to feed their dog just raw animal foods. But there are better and worse types of kibbles.
The majority of kibble for dogs is full of seed oils and really badly processed grains full of pesticides. Well, essentially what they're feeding, the lowest quality kibble that you're feeding to a dog is what they're feeding to fish, give or take.
So you're feeding your fish kibble in a farm-raised salmon operation and the fish are just less healthy. They accumulate pesticides, pharmaceuticals, contaminants, microplastics and PCBs.
And so farm-raised fish is not something that humans should be eating. Most people don't know this, but every time I talk about it, it gets a lot of engagement.
Farm-raised salmon has coloring added. And sometimes they use beta-carotene, which is a natural coloring, but those farm-raised salmon are not getting the nutrients necessary to make things like astaxanthin, which gives fish its normal pink color in the wild because they're not eating algae.
They have to give the fish extra color. So farm-raised salmon would be the color of tilapia or sea bass.
It would be white if you didn't feed it more coloring. And so don't eat farm-raised fish.
But even when it comes to wild fish, you have to realize that large wild fish, shark, some of the big tunas, swordfish, are very highly contaminated with heavy metals. such that in medicine, if a woman is pregnant,

we say, don't eat that in your pregnancy.

It has a lot of mercury.

What are those fish again?

The biggest ones, swordfish, shark, and some of the big tunas.

Even mahi, pretty high.

The bigger the fish, the higher it is up the food chain

and the more it accumulates heavy metals.

The smaller fish have less heavy metals,

but they still have significant amounts. There are documented cases of mercury poisoning from eating sushi.
Sushi could be a mix of salmon plus tuna. But if you ate tuna every day, you would unequivocally see the levels of heavy metals, mostly mercury, but also cadmium, arsenic, and lead in your body go up just geometrically.
So this is the problem. And some tuna's better than other tunas, but tuna is such a big fish that it just has a lot of heavy metals.
And this probably wasn't an issue for fish 200 to 300 years ago. We have this industrial cycle where we put these pollutants into the air and then they go into the ocean and they bioaccumulate in the food chain.
And we've done this to the ocean. We've created this problem of pollution in the ocean with fish.
Even wild-caught fish has a significant amount of microplastics. Microplastics are things, there's little tiny, tiny fragments of plastic that hold onto because they're plastic.
They kind of magnetize, quote unquote, they get stuck to other chemicals, whether it's organic chemicals, other pesticides. So microplastics themselves are these microscopic or nanotype size plastics.
And we think about this in terms of like plastic water bottles, but plastic cutting boards, our biggest exposures are probably those, but fish is quite high in microplastics. And you know they've done studies now showing that there are microplastics in all of us.
There are microplastics in human testicles, in human brains. There is an appreciable amount of microplastic in all of our brains.
It's not even micrograms. I think milligram.
There's like, I'd have to look at the number. It might be half a milligram of microplastic in all of our brains.
And this is just from things that we're eating in our bodies, bringing into our bodies. So fish have microplastics, even wild-caught.
They have heavy metals. They have forever chemicals, which are called PFAs.
We've been hearing a lot about these.

And so I would not recommend that people make the majority of their protein from fish.

We'll get to it in this interview because we'll talk about

why red meat has become so vilified.

I think that well-raised red meat is my preference

for protein source for humans,

but that's the one that gets the most hate, right?

Because it has more saturated fat, and we'll talk about why that is. But a lot of people trying to be healthy don't eat red meat, and they eat fish, thinking that fish is healthier, but you are accumulating heavy metals, microplastics, forever chemicals, et cetera, when you are eating fish every day.
So you must check that. And there are many high-profile cases of people getting heavy metal toxicity from pescatarian diets.
Tony Robbins is a good example of this. So that's the sort of dismal outlook on fish.
Pork and chicken are grouped together. These are monogastric animals.
So in contrast to ruminant animals, so elk, bison, deer, antelope, cows, those are ruminants. Pigs and chicken are monogastric animals.
Humans are also monogastric, and that will be relevant later when we talk about seed oils. But monogastric animals are problematic because they accumulate polyunsaturated fats.
And a pig or a chicken is not meant to eat a lot of corn and soy, but that's most of what they're fed today. So most of the big operations around chicken, even eggs for chickens and pork, pigs, are feeding them grains, which are corn and soy.
And so you can see historically, and there's actual research done about this, that the fatty acid composition of these animals changes based on what they eat. It does the same for

humans. We can see derivatives of seed oils accumulating in human fat over the last 80 years because we're eating more of these seed oils, which come from corn and soy.
And so the fat of a chicken doesn't look like the fat of an ancestral wild chicken. The amount of linoleic acid, which is an 18-carbon polyunsaturated fat, is much higher in a chicken-fed corn and soy than it would be in a chicken eating what a chicken is supposed to eat, which is bugs and worms and maybe a mouse every once in a while in the field.
Chickens are pretty omnivorous, and pigs are the same way. Pigs root.
They're supposed to eat, they will eat small animals too. And they're supposed to eat, you know, tubers and things.
But when you feed a pig corn and soy, the fat of the pig changes composition. And these grains that most chickens and pigs are fed are not organic.
And so you're getting bioaccumulation of pesticides. So you're getting glyphosate.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't eat chicken and pork. I'm just making a case for maybe a hierarchy of quality.
If you're going to eat chicken and pork, look for something that's pastured from a farmer that you know. I don't want perfect to be the enemy of good for anyone, but there are considerations for each of these meats as we go along the food chain.
So I personally don't eat a lot of chicken and pork because it's hard to find people that are letting their chickens really range and actually eat what they're supposed to eat. The same with pigs.
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And when we talk about seed oils, we'll talk about why I think excess linoleic acid is a problem for humans. It's a little technical, so I'll save it for this moment.
But we'll get to it. But if you're going to eat pork, which is delicious and does have nutrients that are good for humans, and many cultures do eat pigs or chicken, try and get something that's organic.
So that means the grains they're feeding the animals are organic, so you're not getting as much pesticide contamination. Even better, get it from a farmer at a farmer's market that is letting their animals kind of go more pastured in the settings.
And then you have beef, bison, elk, let's call it red meat, lamb. So what's interesting about these animals is there is a growing sector of the farming market, that agriculture market, where you can buy a grass-fed cow, grass-fed, grass-finished.
Ruminant animals are supposed to eat grass their whole life. That's what they do.
In fact, I think there were surveys done in the 1800s that looked at the United States, and there were something like over 50 million ruminants in the United States. So elk, antelope, pronghorn, bison, that's what made sort of the American West and why that land was so fertile.
We've monocropped it and decreased the quality of the soil, but the reason the American West, west of Louisiana and the Mississippi, was so fertile was because these animals were eating grass and pooping and peeing on the land and then stomping and putting all these nutrients from their poop into the land, which makes a healthy soil, and that makes a healthy grass, and it just is part of this grassland ecosystem. So these animals are meant to eat grass

and cows are kind of a cousin of bison.

And when a cow eats grass,

you can see the difference in the stakes.

I've done this in my content.

You can see the color of the fat

and the color of the meat is different.

The fat of an animal that eats grass its whole life

is much more orange

because of the beta carotene and other carotenoids in the grass that it's easing. A grain-fed cow has very white fat.
And to be fair, a lot of grain-fed cattle are actually grain-finished. Most of their life, they're eating grass, but the last 15%, they're taken to a feedlot where they're given lower-quality grains and it makes them fat.
And then the farmers can get more money for them because they're a bigger animal and they sell them by the pound. So ideally, and again, don't let perfect be the enemy of good, any red meat is healthy for humans and provides benefits for us and is full of nutrients.
But ideally, if you can source or find or afford a grass-fed, grass-finished meat, like a grass-fed hamburger or steak, it's going to be more full of nutrients and less full of problematic things that come with the grains. Again, you're having pesticide accumulation in the meat, microplastics, PFAs, all that kind of stuff comes when they're fed grains at the end of their life.
It's not the end of the world, and I've eaten grain-fed, great-finished meat, and some people prefer it because of the taste, but I do think there's a pretty solid case that a grass-fed, grass-finished cow is the closest thing that most people will get to eating a wild animal. Wild game is probably one of the healthiest things we can eat, depending where it's ranging, right? An animal that's eating what it's supposed to eat, and this applies to humans also, is going to be a healthier animal.
And all of us are different species, but there is, I think, in all of us, a genetic programming in terms of what we are meant to eat. Humans are the only species that's kind of forgotten this because we've become so separated from the actual gathering and hunting of our food.
So we don't know what we're supposed to eat. So when we go to the store and it says grass-fed beef, can we trust that? Or does that mean, hey, this was fed grass the first six months of its life and then grain? The way the labeling is now, if it says grass-fed, it really should be fed grass its whole life.
There's an asterisk there because some farmers can get away with this by feeding hay, which is not fresh grass on a field, or even grass pellets. There was a picture or a video that went around the internet recently of cows indoors getting fed grass.
That is grass-fed. It's not ideal, but it's better than a grain-fed cow on a clustered or concentrated feeding animal operation, so a CAFO or a factory farm.
So grass-feeding is better. And again, it's unfortunate that it's become so arduous for humans to have to really understand the quality of their meat.
But if you see the cows that you're eating and you're talking to a farmer, that's the best thing. I know it's not possible for everyone listening to the podcast.
But if you can understand the quality of your meat and where it's coming from and how it's raised, that's better. So grass feeding and grass finishing ideally should be cows on pasture outdoors, pooping and peeing in the land because that's also better for the land.
That's the way it should be. If it says grass-fed in the store, it really is meant, unless the farmer is being totally duplicitous, it should be fed grass its whole life.
There's an interesting little sidebar here, and I will call Whole Foods out for this, and I've done content on this. There is meat at Whole Foods that says grass-fed or grass-finished, and there's meat at Whole Foods that says pasture-raised.
And so that pasture-raised designation does not mean the cow is eating grass its whole life. Oh, God.
And you can ask the butchers at Whole Foods, and they will be forthcoming with you and say, it was on pasture, and then it was fed grains at the end of its life. So that's where it gets confusing for consumers, because pasture-raised sounds pretty good to me, but that's not a grass-finished cow.
And do I think that eating grain-fed meat is bad for humans? No. I think that eating grass-fed, grass-finished meat is better for humans and better for the ecosystem in which the cow is raised.
Where do you get all your food? In Costa Rica? Yeah. So there's farmer's markets.
Where I live, there are three farmer's markets a week, and I can talk to the farmers and I can say, is this organic? I think the challenge with Americans, you're an entrepreneur, so you get it. You're a podcaster.
You go on other podcasts. You have all your different companies with your beet sticks, your jerkies, your protein powder, whatever else you have.
I mean, it's time. It's time.
And so my time, it's like every minute of the day is accounted for. Yeah.
And so going to the farmer store, going to the farmer's market

and having conversations with the farmers.

No, it's not.

It's just not ideal.

It's hard.

Plus I have kids.

Plus I have a wife.

You know what I mean?

And so it becomes a challenge.

You know what I mean?

And so I think there's definitely a movement

in America right now.

Everybody is kind of on to the FDA and the healthcare system and NIH and the Maha movement has exploded. But I don't think anybody really knows where the hell to go.
I mean, I live out in the woods, and so we do have some relationships with with different farmers and we try to source as much as possible from local shops that are on the farm, stuff like that. But I mean, for people that live in the city, especially somewhere like, I don't know, LA, New York, Austin, I mean, Nashville, they don't have

time to venture out

anywhere. LA, New York, Austin, Nashville, they don't have time to venture out an hour and a half out of town to go to a local farmer's market.
So what do we do? I think you do the best you can with the opportunities you're given. So for instance, in Austin, which might be a little easier than most.
It's not exactly a food desert. There are Whole Foods in Austin.
There's Central Market in Austin. Is Whole Foods good? Whole Foods is the one that's owned by Amazon.
Yeah, I know. But it's better than a regular Safeway, I think, right? I'm just using it as an example.
Whole Foods is okay. I'd give Whole Foods mid-rating.
Okay, three out of five. Maybe five.
Oh, yeah, three out of five. I was going to say five out of ten, out of ten.
Whole Foods is probably three out of five. But look, a lot of things we're going to talk about in this podcast are going to seem overwhelming for people.
I just want to provide information. My goal is just to provide information that's as digestible and usable.
And I don't want perfect to be the enemy of good. So yes, the ideal thing is meet farmers in your area, go to farmers.
If you can't do that, you don't have time. I do think that the return on investment, the ROI on going to a grocery store and cooking your own food is massive for most of us.
And if someone can afford to have an assistant go shop for them or to have a chef, great. That's probably a 0.1% of all of us who can afford that.
I think all of us need to understand that life is about choices. I see this as an entrepreneur now.
I'm a traditionally trained doctor, but now I think about ROI. Like you, I think, what's the best use of my time? What is the return on investment? I know, for me, that spending two hours surfing in the morning, I could be working, quote-unquote, but the return on that investment is massive in terms of my happiness and my health and my ability to show up hopefully to podcasts like this and be eloquent and provide value.
And I would say similarly, going to a grocery store and buying your food and cooking it for yourself, that is one of the best ROIs I think that is available for humans, hands down. I mean, it's not a financial return on investment, but in terms of your health, which is an indirect financial cost later, like you must, it is very, very difficult if you do not procure.
Hunting and gathering today happens in grocery stores. You must do your own hunting and gathering today, and you must cook your own food.
If you don't do those things the majority of the time, you don't have to do it 100% of the time, it's going to be difficult to be optimally healthy, and your health will suffer. This is why I created things like Lineage, right? Here's a snack that I've created something that I would eat, the highest quality standards that we can source anywhere in the world, right? So there are things that can easier.
But I wouldn't want you to live on lineage meat sticks. You could do it for a little while, but it's kind of like a ration.
I want you to eat a hamburger sometimes and to eat some fruit, maybe some vegetables if they don't bother your immune system. So I think that understanding where you can find the best meat and plant foods close to you, that's a good thing.
You need to know your terrain. There are food deserts in the United States where it's not easy to even go to those places.
It's not easy to find a grocery store, but I've done content where I'll go into a 7-Eleven or a gas station and say, even in here there are better and worse choices. Even in a gas station you can find the best jerky.
It's not going to be an ideal jerky. It might have nitrates, but look, it's better than eating probably the hot dog over there, or it's better than eating the Slurpee at 7-Eleven.
And a lot of gas stations have fruit. It's not organic fruit, but they do have fruit.
They have cheese. They have more of these single ingredients, simple foods.
So you just do the best you can with what you're given. And even a safe way, now, I've done content at Walmart.
You can go to any Walmart in the country now. I can't say any in the country because I haven't been to every one of them, but I've been to Walmarts in Texas, Walmarts in California, Walmarts in Virginia, Walmarts in Florida.
They all have grass-fed beef now. You don't have to spend money on grass-fed beef, but every Walmart has beef, single-ingredient beef.
And every Walmart that I've ever been to has fruit and vegetables. And again, it doesn't have to be organic if you can't find it, but doing that, that's the hugest step function for humans.
What's the highest-quality grocery store out there that's a chain? Fresh market. Is fresh market good? Is that here in Nashville? Don't tell me fresh market's bad.
It's probably great. You've not been to a fresh market? I feel like I may have, but we don't have those in Texas or other places I've been.
Maybe there's one across from where I'm staying in Miami. We had them in Florida.
I don't mind Sprouts. Sprouts.
I don don't mind sprouts. Sprouts isn't bougie.
It's not fancy, but I often go to sprouts. I can get grass-fed meat that looks good.
Sometimes the grass-fed meat at Whole Foods looks better than sprouts. I can get organic produce with sprouts and they have good honey.
When I go to the grocery store, I buy grass-fed meat. I usually have to bring organs with me, either in capsule form.
None of these grocery stores have liver, although actually Sprouts does sell liver sometimes. Okay.
I'll buy meat. I'll buy a cheese, like a raw cheese.
I'll buy fruit. I'll buy honey.
I'll buy squash. That's what I get at the grocery store.
And I can get that. I can get pretty good at Sprouts.
I mean, I went to Sprouts last night when I got into Nashville. Okay.
Yeah. Okay.
Interesting. Are you a hunter? I do.
I can get pretty good at Sprouts. I went to Sprouts last night when I got in Nashville.
Okay.

Interesting. Are you a hunter? I do.
I hunt with

a bow and I've hunted with a rifle once.

Just once?

Rifle once. Bow

three times. Do you hunt in Costa Rica? Are you out

there killing howler monkeys? It's not legal

to hunt in Costa Rica.

But I have so many howler monkeys

by my house that every morning and every night I'll send you a video. I'm going back to Costa Rica next week.
You hear this. It's like that.
It sounds like a lion. It sounds like a dog and a lion mixed.
That's every morning and every night. It makes me so happy.
I have a video on my phone to show you. There's these jungle sounds.
Yeah. Yeah.
I remember my first encounter with them. We were doing an op down in Panama and totally got compromised because the howling monkeys started screaming at us.
And anyways, then they know exactly where you are. That's the jungle, right? Yeah.
So I love it, man. I love being in the jungle.
It's amazing. You're getting me all fired up about Costa Rica now.
I'm going to go home and tell my wife about it. I can't wait.
I'm on vacation. I'm excited for you guys.
But, well, I mean, American health is, what, probably some of the worst in the world? It's pretty bad. There are metrics that rank our health, and I think that we spend the most, if not top three in the world, on health care.
I think in 2024 or 2023, it was $4.3 trillion was the number that we spent on health care. But our health care outcomes, I think we're like 65th or something in the world, give or take.
So there's a huge discordance. I mean, more than 70% of Americans are overweight or obese, and over 11% have diabetes.
It's a crisis that's spiraling out of control. And I would say the diabetes number is much higher than that even, I would say.
You think so? Yeah, that's formally diagnosed diabetes, but there are other studies that have been done looking at this continuum. And this is what Western medicine really misses when we're talking to patients and when we are taught as doctors to think about this.
Diabetes is a continuum. And the reason this is so important to talk about is because metabolic dysfunction, also known as insulin resistance, is that continuum.
And that pathology underlies, I would say, 90 plus percent of chronic illness. And this is not hyperbole.
The majority of chronic illness that we suffer from as Americans today is based in insulin resistance, also known as metabolic dysfunction. And 90% of our healthcare costs are related to chronic illness, something that is preventable and reversible with the quality of our diet and how we live.
This is what the Hadza don't have. This is what Native Americans did not have historically.
So I'll tell you this story. This is pretty interesting.
I went to medical school in Tucson, Arizona, at the University of Arizona. The Pima Indians are around Tucson, Arizona.
So I went and visited Pima Indian reservations when I was in medical school. The Pima Indians are some of the sickest people in the world today.
The rates of obesity and diabetes are over 80 to 90%. 80 to 90%.
Like what? Okay. And so 200 years ago, rates of obesity and diabetes were less than 1% in the Pima Indian tribe.
This tribe of Native Americans has genetics that are uniquely susceptible to the environment that they find themselves in now. Ultra-processed foods, we can talk about certain things.
But 200 years ago, there are pictures online of Pima Indians from 1860, right? They're fit. They have six packs.
They look like healthy humans, but they have a uniquely susceptible genetic makeup to becoming insulin resistant. And so what happened when the Pima Indians had this explosion of chronic illness,

after we gave them supermarkets full of Cheetos and Fritos and Takis and alcohol,

is the NIH sent researchers to draw their blood to see what kind of genetics they have that make them susceptible to this chronic illness.

We never thought, oh, maybe we just poisoned them.

The cause of their illness is black and white.

It's absolutely black and white. And yet, not once in medical school did this come up.
Never once was I taught to think about this or challenged to think about this from a professor saying, what do you think about the Pima Indians? How do we help them? The way to help the Pima Indians is to educate them, maybe provide subsidies or something for them to buy single- foods. But I would be willing to bet a large amount of money that if you gave the Pima Indians the foods that they ate 200 years ago, they would become healthier.
And we've seen this. There have been research studies done on this.
It's done with Aborigines. I forget exactly what lineage it was in Australia.
The same thing happens with these indigenous people all over the world. When they eat westernized foods, which are full of seed oils, refined grains, processed sugars, pesticides, food dyes, they become ill.
And the same thing is happening to westernized humans. And so when you look at this continuum of insulin resistance, multiple studies estimate that as Americans, 86 to 93% of us, 86 to 93, have at least one metric that puts us on that continuum.
So diabetes is the end stage. But I would say more than 85% of Americans are on the road to diabetes.
And this is the problem. And again, my assertion here very strongly would be, it's not hard to get off that train, right? It's what we eat and how we live.
Majority of it is what we eat and how we live. Very, very rarely there's a genetic mutation, polymorphism that is unavoidable.
This is less than 1% of humans. Most of us are very sick and we're sick because of how we're living and eating, and because these foods are sold to us now.
And then when you go to see a doctor, I was never taught to ask people about what they're eating in medical school. I was never given a single nutrition course.
I was taught what drugs to prescribe for what illness. That was what's on my boards, right? So the step one, the step two, the step three, this is what determines a doctor's success in life.
It means what specialty you can go into, what residency, how prestigious you can go, how far you can go in medicine on your boards. There's not a single question on the board exam.
I mean, I think every board exam is, I forget how many questions. It might be 1,500 questions, thousands of questions that I answered over the course of my medical career to become a licensed medical doctor.
I don't remember a single question about nutrition because we've never taught that. It's not what we're held up to think about.
It's pretty alarming. Yeah, so that's just the crazy standard that we find ourselves in.
But it's important to understand that, yeah, diabetes, maybe formally diagnosed 11%, the number of people going to become diabetic, much, much higher. Because if 70% of Americans are obese and overweight, and those are two different categories of BMI, body mass index, I would argue that almost everyone, if not every single person who is obese or overweight, has some degree of insulin resistance.
And this is metabolic dysfunction. And at a cellular level, this means that you can't take the food you eat and convert it into usable energy in your human body.
That happens through your mitochondria. So mitochondria are these little cellular organelles that are in almost every cell of our body.
Red blood cells don't have mitochondria, but everything else has mitochondria. And so this is where the energy gets made for everything we do in our life.
Human life runs because of the movement of electrons. And the food that we're eating is electrons, essentially.
And those electrons are passed onto intermediates, which move the electrons into the electron transport chain in the mitochondria. So that's very, very microscopic.
And this is, you know, when you eat, let's say you eat an apple or you eat a steak, that steak is giving you nutrients, it's giving you vitamins and minerals, you're getting protein, you're getting amino acids. And in a steak, you're getting mostly protein, which doesn't end up as an energy substrate, but there's fat in the steak.
So fat is broken down to create these energy substrates. And if you eat an apple, you're getting glucose and fructose and sucrose.
If you eat a potato, you're getting long chain polymers of glucose like starches. And that is energy to your body.
And the way that happens is that gets broken down into little smaller fragments, and those fragments donate electrons to molecules like NADH and FADH2,

which... to your body.
And the way that happens is that gets broken down into little smaller fragments, and those fragments donate electrons to molecules like NADH and FADH2, which move those electrons to this electron transport chain. And that electron transport chain in your mitochondria is where everything happens.
Because as the electrons move down the chain, you create a potential. And hydrogen, so protons move across the inner mitochondrial membrane.
I know we're very microscopic now. I'll zoom out in a second.
Protons move across the inner mitochondrial membrane. And then at the end of the mitochondrial membrane, they move down a concentration gradient through this little nanomotor that makes ATP.
And ATP runs everything in your body. That's the energy currency of your body.
That is the sort of dollars and cents of your body that your body spends on creating hormones, proteins, cellular membrane, repairing things, making DNA. You need energy to live.
But that process of energy creation is impaired by the foods we eat. And that is what insulin resistance, metabolic dysfunction look like at a molecular level.
So the engine of our car is being broken by the fuel we're putting in it. Man, it sounds like just a little education could reverse this entire epidemic.
It would go a long way, and we probably need bottom-up and top-down. And top-down, I mean, maybe governmental regulation of things that are, frankly, poisonous for humans.
And the bottom-up is mostly what I do now. Maybe I'll get to be involved in the Maha movement and help RFK with some of this Maha stuff, but we'll see.
But the education helps. People will wake up.
There's a really sad thing I'll tell you, that there are these places, I mentioned this earlier, there are these places in the United States called food deserts where it's difficult for people to actually access single ingredient foods or they have to go a certain number of miles to get to an actual grocery store. And there are grocery stores, these are very rural poor communities.
If you're driving across the country, you're going to encounter these. And there are grocery stores, there are places in the States where it's difficult to find actual meat or fruits and vegetables.
But most of the food deserts are food deserts by choice, which is really sad. That people in these communities haven't been educated, don't understand, and have really been, I would say, addicted to processed food, which is very addictive.
And grocery stores or corner markets in these places in the past may have carried fruit and vegetables,

but nobody bought them, and they rot on the shelf.

And so they become a food desert by consumer choice.

So that's scary, and that actually is a testament,

a very sinister testament,

to how addictive some of these ultra-processed foods are,

that if you provide a choice

in some of the poorest communities in America between a Snickers bar and Doritos and, let's say, an apple or a banana or an orange, most people are going to choose the Snickers bar and the Doritos. And that is a problem.
So what do we do there? That's a good question. And I'll mention this because it's relevant.
So in these poorest communities, SNAP, which is food stamps, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is used significantly. At a governmental level, I think we could help things by not allowing food stamps to be able to be used to buy junk food.
The food stamp budget, I think, is $112 or $15 billion

a year that goes out to people. 70-plus percent of that gets used by people on junk food.

That's the problem, right? That, I think, fixes a big part of this. If you disallow the use of

food stamps for junk food, you make a big step in the right If you disallow the use of food stamps for junk food,

you make a big step in the right direction.

Now, the argument on the other side

is that that is classist, racist, or elitist

because these people don't have access to foods, right?

But the reason they don't have access

is because they've made choices

because they don't want those foods.

So it's some combination, I think,

of governmental programming change

and actual education of people in these communities, potentially bringing them the good foods. The other thing I'll say about food stamps, which is crazy, is that 10% of those food stamps gets used on soda.
You cannot make an argument to me that Coca-Cola and other sodas have any redeeming quality in human health. Yeah.
And 10% of food stamps go toward that. So at a governmental level, a top-down level.
Surprised it's not more. Surprised it's not more than that.
Yeah, right? So I think education could help, and I think that there's a lot of double standards. And, of course, the reason for that is because Coca-Cola lobbies, right? Well, that's what I was going to say.
I mean, I love what you're saying about, you know, that maybe the government should step in should step in and only allow. But how are you going to get past the lobbyists that are paying politicians and news organizations to market? That's racist.
You know what I mean? Because that's what that all stems from, correct? is the lobbyists. And so to me, it seems like the only real explanation

is to educate everybody on, hey, I mean, the marketing, I mean, there's a, I just watched a documentary, about half of it the other day. Amazon was a big part of it.
Apple was a big part of it. How the pollution is kind of, you know, it was talking about everything.
It was talking about how the iPhones are, you know, designed to only last for a certain amount of time. And then you get the new one and it shows how they dispose of the iPhones and the computers and how Amazon does their marketing and how it all goes in the landfills, back into the ecosystem, back into our food, what we're breathing.
And so, I mean, the marketing gets tricky. So it can't even just be an education on nutrition.
It's how these companies are marketing, which will constantly evolve. So you have to re-educate over and over again.
And I mean, you just said it yourself with the pasture-raised beef versus grass-fed. I mean, I didn't know that.
You know what I mean? And I get to interview people like you all the time. And so for somebody, just a single mom out there that's just working her butt off trying to make ends meet so that she can feed her kids.

I mean, she doesn't have time to listen to this. And so, I mean, I would think that just my personal opinion and with how corrupt I know our government is, I mean, it seems like the only way to do it is to educate the people.
and you won't even be able to educate them through a government program

because the lobbyists will take the fucking program out of the educational system. I think that the programming of Americans is a really important thing to talk about.
So we can talk about pharma because the US and New Zealand are the only two countries in the world that allow pharmaceutical ads on TV. Again, we're talking about very disruptive ideas here.
If any of these got into practice, if we stopped allowing pharma ads on television, which I think we should, and hopefully this administration will consider, and I know Bobby is for this, and hopefully he gets confirmed today or on Monday or something something. That would single-handedly change the landscape because so many media companies would collapse.
The budget for CNN would be reduced. Remember during Pfizer? During Pfizer? During Pfizer.
That's what we call COVID now. It was Pfizer.
Remember during COVID? Remember during COVID, which we're renaming Pfizer, there was this sort of meme or this video people made of all the different shows on CNN that were sponsored by Pfizer, whether it was Anderson Cooper, etc. So you think about the budget for so many media news outlets and how much of that comes from pharmaceuticals.
So disallowing pharmaceutical ads on television would change the media landscape. And I don't really, I wouldn't miss any of it.
I think legacy media is horrible, and I think that they're just brainwashing people. But what about, and this is just a suggestion, what about not allowing junk food to be advertised on television? How many ads are there for Frosted Flakes and Skittles? Why food is not good for our children.
It's not good for us. Why are we allowing Nabisco to advertise for Oreos on television? And again, I think that I can hear people responding saying, it's free speech.
I'm all for capitalism. I'm not trying to return to a communist state or socialism, but I'm just thinking out loud, is the marketing that we're seeing on television, programming kids at a young age, is it programming adults? I don't know where you draw the line.
Does Domino's Pizza get to advertise on television? When I was growing up, there was Little Caesars and Papa John's. None of these foods, I can make a strong case that none of these foods are good for humans.
And we can go down the list. But I think that there has been a concerted effort by these multinational processed food companies to shift blame away from them.
And so Coca-Cola, this is really interesting. Coca-Cola has done some pretty sinister things.
And this is just what I know about Coke. I'm sure the other soda companies have done the same things.
But Coca-Cola has funded hundreds of research studies. Coca-Cola has given millions of dollars.
I think it might be in the hundreds of millions of dollars to universities to do research over the years. And what kind of research do they do? They do research on why junk food is not bad for you as long as you stay in energy balance.
And I think this idea of calories and energy balance is one of the most misleading concepts for Americans in our nutrition space. Coca-Cola actually funded something called the Global Energy Balance Network.
And the whole idea here is you can eat junk food as long as you exercise. You can out-exercise a bad diet, Sean.
To me, this is completely false because there are so many components in the junk food that impair mitochondrial energy production. The simple fact of the matter, and I would love to debate anyone about this, and hopefully more of these will happen in a way that people can actually understand when we're doing the debates, but all calories are not created equally.
Weight loss does happen if you're in a caloric deficit. This is thermodynamics, right? Yes, you can lose weight eating 1,500 calories of donuts per day.
You will not be healthy, and I guarantee you will be very hungry. And when you stop keeping yourself in a calorie-restricted prison, you will overeat and you will binge and you will gain that weight back because you have impaired your mitochondrial electron transport chain because of the poisonous, I would say, toxic additives in these foods.
So this is a crazy debate that happens on X and these forums. People will advocate all foods fit, Sean.
That is the rallying cry of dieticians all over the world. All foods fit.
Just don't eat too much. This is why things like Weight Watchers were created.
And you see those little snack packs of Oreos and it says 150 calories. And it's okay to eat junk food as long as you don't exceed your caloric threshold.
What we're not being told is that additives, ingredients in these ultra-processed foods impair our ability to make energy from them. They're poisonous to our metabolism.
They're poisonous to the very things that give us life as humans. We are sort of an anti-entropic process.
Entropy is one of these laws of thermodynamics that all things in the universe tend toward disorder. But look, this is not disorder.
There are incredibly complex cellular processes happening in you and I as we sit across this room. We are breaking entropy, and physicists will say that because we're producing heat, the overall amount of entropy in the system is still going up.
But you and I are bounded. We are membrane-bound organisms that are fighting against entropy.
And the way that we fight against disorganization is with ATP. When a human dies, the body decays.
What's different? We may say the soul, but also cellular energy production is not happening in a human that's dead, right? And that person is buried or cremated or something. But a dead animal is the same thing.
The animal starts rotting. If we do not make energy in our cells, we begin decaying in the same way.
We begin dying. We need this energy.
And that is what this is all about. Metabolic health, the ability of your mitochondria to make energy.
And so many of the ingredients in these processed foods, whether it's dyes or things that disrupt our gut microbiome or seed oils, directly impair energy production in the mitochondria. And so saying to someone, Coca-Cola's global energy balance network says, it's okay to drink Coca-Cola, just make sure you get a walk-in.
That's sinister. That's nefarious.
That's how these companies are working against us and brainwashing us and our children into thinking all foods fit. It's okay to feed your children Oreos.
Just make sure they get some green beans on the side. But what we're not being honest about is how the ingredients in the Oreos, the ingredients in the Doritos, the Takis, whatever, are actually poisonous for humans.
The quality of the calories in impairs your ability to do calories out. So that's the equation that people will come back to online.
Calories in, calories out. Yes, it works thermodynamically, but the quality of the food we eat affects how much energy we can make on the back end.
And that's where we've really gone wrong. Because believe me, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Kraft, Nestle, Nabisco, ConAgra, they do not want you to eat quality food.
They want you to eat their ultra-processed food, which is cheaper, has a better shelf life, and has more of a profit margin for them. They don't want you to eat a banana.
They don't even want you to eat oatmeal. They want you to eat an oatmeal cookie or a banana-flavored gummy bear, right? Something like this.
Or they don't want you to eat meat. They want you to eat a plant-based alternative.
Or they want you to eat an ultra-processed meat thing at a restaurant or something. So this is the problem, is that the quality of food is paramount.
And we've really, really been misled. And I think it's a concerted effort.
I think it's an intentional misleading of humans to confuse us. And that's really bad.
But I think that the way forward is very simple. Returning to high-quality food, and we can drill down on what I think is best for humans.
We've talked a little bit about the spectrum of meats already. Returning to high-quality food solves these problems.
And this is what I wasn't taught in medical school, but it's why I do what I do today, because I have seen and met and talked to online now thousands, if not tens of thousands of people who have had their chronic illnesses reversed by changing the quality of the foods they eat. Diseases that I was taught in medical school were incurable.
Name a couple of the chronic illnesses you've seen reversed. Diabetes, obesity, depression, suicidality.
I personally had eczema that I reversed by changing my diet. What's eczema? Eczema is a skin condition with itchy, bumpy skin, psoriasis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's, and ulcerative colitis.
So I've met people who said their doctor wanted to surgically remove their colon. In ulcerative colitis, we often physically scar people for life.
We remove the colon. Some people who have ulcerative colitis end up with a colostomy bag, which is how medicine treats this.
And if they need it, they need it. But that's very difficult for someone to live their life.
Imagine dating or living your life with a colostomy bag. Man.
Right? But I've met people who said, my doctor wanted to operate in my colon, and I changed my diet. They did a carnivore diet or an animal-based diet, which is basically meat plus fruit, and they no longer need a colectomy or a colostomy back.
What timeline are we talking about? You've seen these reversals happen. Is this years? It happens in weeks to months.
Weeks to months. Weeks to months, depending on the condition.
Yeah, weeks to months. Wow.
It doesn't even take that long. The human body is very malleable, and it doesn't happen overnight, right? It's not, you know, you skip one meal, right? But it happens within weeks to months.
Some people, it takes a year or so, but some of the most striking ones are the psychiatric illnesses, bipolar, suicidality, psychosis, depression, because those affect so much else in people's lives. Infertility, I mean, this is one of the most endearing things is when a couple wants to have a child and they try everything and then they just change their diet, maybe adding in some organs, and suddenly they can have babies.
That's amazing. Wow.
Healthy babies, too. Wow.
I mean, the list goes on. It's almost, if you can name a medical condition, I can find you a case study of someone that I've met or talked to that has almost certainly reversed it with their diet.
Now, I want to be clear to clarify this. It doesn't work in everyone 100%, right? But what I've seen, I think, is nothing short of miraculous.
And everyone is complex. Sometimes people have other things going on in their life that are beyond food.
They have traumatic things. They have trauma in their past.
They live in a very toxic environment. Sometimes if someone is living in a moldy building, right, and they have brain fog, they're going to need to do more than change their diet.
So I'm not saying that changing your diet cures every one of everything 100%, but what bigger lever, you know? And I was never taught about this in medical school. And so it's cool to get to do this work and to see these people.
And living in Costa Rica, one of the downsides is I don't meet people in person. When I see a comment on a thread or something I've done online that said, hey, this really helped me, I think that's great.
But having the person walk up to me every single time I smile. And I think, tell me your story.
What happened? And that keeps me doing what I do because that means so much to me. And there's so many stories of people.
And sometimes, you know, I don't think that a carnivore or an animal-based diet are the only ways to do that. I think broadly, improving food quality is the first step.
And some people with autoimmune disease need to really clarify and intentionally choose foods. And they have to go carnivore or animal-based.
Not everyone needs to go that far, but not falling prey to the calories marketing, to the you can drink Coca-Cola, just go on the exercise bike, 15 more minutes marketing and improving food quality. That is an act of rebellion that is so powerful for humans.
It's so cool. And so that's really, as I come back to this and what I do, that's what I really feel most excited about sharing with people.

I was recently at a conference in Phoenix and I gave a talk.

There were probably 10,000 people in the audience.

Trump spoke there.

It was really cool to see him in person.

And I just want people to know that whatever you're suffering from,

any of the chronic illnesses we listed,

it's almost certainly able to be massively improved, if not completely

reversed, by changing what you eat, and your doctor won't tell you that.

Interesting.

Let's take a quick break.

Yeah.

When we come back, I want to hit you on your daily routine.

Okay, absolutely.

Cool.

All right, Doc, we're back from the break and um i'm just curious can you can you go through your daily routine i'm just curious how you live so in costa rica um i get up real early i get up at probably 5 or 5 30 because the comes up early there. One of the things I like about living in the equator is that there's not a lot of variation, days and nights, different times of the year.
It's kind of 12 and 12 all year round with a little bit of variation seasonally. But sun comes up between 5 and 6 a.m.
all year round. So I get up with the sun.
I don't use an alarm. First thing I do when I get up is I go outside.
I get sunlight in my eyes, grounding, a little bit of light movement, and I eat in the morning immediately. I don't do intermittent fasting or anything.
And the first thing I eat in the morning in Costa Rica is pretty consistent. So I can tell you what I eat in the day as a part of this, and it's the same every day.
I'm very consistent with this. I do raw goat's milk with a local honey that's organic.
I put in some organs from hardened soil and I put in some creatine. I put in some methylated B vitamins because I have polymorphisms around folate metabolism, this MTHFR polymorphism, and throw in a little bit of salt.
And so that's my morning breakfast is raw milk with organs, honey, creatine. You put the organs in with the milk and the honey? It's the desiccated organ capsule from heart and soil.
Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you could mix it up, but no, it's an organ capsule. And then I go surf.
So I'll go in the ocean for two, two and a half hours, and I'll surf. And I'm just, to go crazy.
I'm just trying to enjoy myself. Sometimes I'll spend a little extra time on the beach.
I'll put the slack line up and just hang out with friends. I usually get home 8.30 or 9.
Sometimes there's a farmer's market. If it's a farmer's market day, I'll go to the farmer's market and get meat from a local butcher that has local grass-fed cows or local fruit, organic fruit, and get some raw goat milk from the farmers.
I've been to the goat milk farm, which is pretty cool. Then I'll eat some breakfast.
Breakfast is usually about half a pound or three-fourths of a pound of meat, some kind of red meat. I eat red meat every day.
Red meat is 99% of the meat that I eat. I don't fear it.
We can talk about saturated fat and how it's become vilified, how I think it's very misleading for people to be fearful of red meat. But I eat red meat, whether it's a burger or a steak.
I'll cook it on my grill. I'll have a little more raw milk, some fruit, maybe some squash for breakfast.
And at that point, I'll start doing whatever work I'm going to do for the day, whether it's calls with my team, social media team, or research team. I might do some research.
Maybe I'll do a podcast in the afternoon. If I have somebody on my show and we're doing virtually, I usually take a break in the middle of the day and do a slight workout, like a mini workout.
I've got a gym at my house. Maybe I'll do some pull-ups.
I like Nordic curls. You know what a Nordic is? It's like you're facing the ground and you have your ankles and you hinge at your knees and go down like that.
It's incredible for your hamstring. Maybe do a couple sprints on the treadmill.
I built a skate ramp at my house in Costa Rica to practice surfing, so maybe I'll skate for a little bit in the middle of the day. In the afternoon, I'll go back to productive block time.
Same kind of stuff, whether it's research, content creation, ideation with my team, or podcasting. Then by three or four, I'm usually turning off for the day and trying to wind down and unplug a little bit.

No shit.

Yeah, sometimes.

So you're doing what,

like two, three hours of work during the day?

Four to five.

Four to five hours?

Max.

That sounds fucking amazing.

Yeah.

I'm at like 12.

I mean, you're doing a lot of great work.

Maybe I need to be doing more. But I do these work blocks where I'm doing focused work.
Right now I'm writing a book, another book. I wrote one book about the carnivore diet.
Right now I'm writing another book. So in the afternoon I'll use maybe one of those focused work blocks to do editing of the book or talk to my editor about ideas or something.
But yeah, I probably work four to five hours a day max. But that might be on a weekend too.
There's no definition between weekdays and weekends. But yeah, I protect my time.
And then when the sun is going down, I'm not working. The sun goes down at five or six.
I'm trying to be off the computer. I probably had a little snack or another meal in the middle of the day.
Then I'll eat dinner. And for me, my food is kind of the same.
It's red meat. It's raw milk.
It's a little bit of organs. And it's fruit or honey with squash.
I eat that throughout the day. And that idea of organs, meat, fruit, honey, raw dairy is kind of like the carnivore diet 2.0.
I've just termed it animal-based. Actually, Joe Rogan kind of termed it animal-based when I was on his podcast many years ago.
But I like that definition just so people have a working term of the way to eat that I'm eating. It doesn't have to be for everyone, but it's a good framework for people.
I'll eat that way throughout the day. In the evening, I'll hang out with friends, maybe go watch a sunset.
Yeah. And then at dark, all the blue lights, I don't even use blue lights in my house because I have a bunch of windows.
Everything is open air in my house. All the windows are open during the day.
I'm trying to get grounding and sunlight during the day. And then at night, I use just red lights because I'm really protective of my circadian rhythm.
And I try to be off my phone for a few hours before I go to sleep. Maybe meditate, maybe creative work, reading a book, like a real book, or a non-flickering device, like a Kindle or a daylight tablet or something, or listening to an audio book or a podcast.
And then I'm usually going to sleep at like 8.30 legitimately. Wow.
But I don't have kids. I mean, how often do you eat the raw meat? We just had a raw steak downstairs.
It was not near as bad as I thought. I mean, I like my steaks medium rare anyways.
Very rarely. I was telling you that my Airbnb, they're hit and miss, right? Airbnbs.
And so I went to grill this morning. I think that

you talked about time earlier

and I really feel like the return on investment

for me of preparing my food is worth it.

So I brought you some meat sticks.

I'm traveling with some meat sticks from Lineage,

this company that I built that I value.

But I also want to bring my own food.

So I made squash in the oven last night

and you had some squash. I have a glass container

with meat and squash. 99% of the time that meat in that container is cooked on a grill.
Oh, good. So it was just this random thing that happened this morning where I opened the grill at Airbnb, and I thought, that is disgusting.
I can't find a grill brush. I'm preparing for your podcast.
I don't want to spend the time. I'm just going to eat it raw.
So I just put a little salt on it and I'm just eating. Well, it's great to partake with you.
Yeah, I mean, the four to five hour work day, I mean, that sounds I get so much anxiety if I'm not working. I don't know.
I think maybe it came from training a long time ago. We always had this mindset of every time you're messing around at the bar, playing around, the enemy is training, getting stronger, and you're sitting here getting softer and weaker.
I don't know if that carried over into my entrepreneurial life or not, but I always think like that. I'm like, if I'm not working, somebody else is, and they're trying to do it bigger and better and more efficiently.
I am a workaholic to a fault. But it's something that I've been, I mean, I used to do 16-hour days.
I mean, you're incredibly successful, and what you've built brings value to so many people, so could criticize it my wife my kids do you get enough time with your kids? no no I don't I grew up with a dad who I didn't see much he was an internal medicine doc and so I think I learned or I decided early on in my life that I didn't want to repeat that and And when I have children, I want to spend as much time as I can with them. So I've just kind of built my life in a way to do that.
Now, my life hasn't always been like this. I think that founding two companies helps.
Right now, most of my work is podcasting, research, writing a book, and working with my team. But I have the resources to have a social media team now, which helps me.
I don't have to be the one posting on Instagram. I don't have to be the one editing videos.
It creates a lot of efficiency for me in that stuff. But yeah, I value my free time personally.
It's just kind of something that I do. And do.
I really love to surf and spend that time outdoors. For years and years, first I went to PA school, so I was a physician assistant before I went to medical school.
I worked in cardiology for four years as a PA. I had two years of a master's degree to become a physician assistant, then four years in cardiology for four years as a PA.
So I had two years, a master's, a PA, two years of a master's degree to become a physician assistant, then four years in cardiology. Before that in college, I worked my tail off, man.
I was so insecure in college about my intelligence that I just studied all the time. I basically ate junk food in college that I ate, worked out and studied.
And then in medical school, I studied really hard. In residency, I worked really hard.
And then for the first few years, building my brand and my companies, I was super grinding. But throughout all of it, I've had this kind of persona of my father in the background never wanting to become my father.
So what I'm very careful of is I don't want my work to ever affect my health negatively. I mean, you guys see it.
I really do try to live what I preach, sometimes to a fault. I think that I'm pretty intense about it.
And when I'm traveling, I'm bringing all my food. I don't eat in airports.
I rarely eat in restaurants unless I know the quality. But that's all worth it to me to spend time doing those things.
And I really keep my own health as a prize. And I saw my father's health suffer.
My father had his first heart attack when he was in his 40s. And I'm 47 years old.
Wow. So I have a history of early onset heart disease in a primary relative.
And I had a coronary artery calcium scan a few years ago. And I have zero.
And a CAC scan is not the most perfect metric of coronary artery calcium, but mine was zero, eating a similar diet to what I eat now. I think I was 43 at the time, and I should repeat that scan now.
But it was just preventative, and I wanted to sort of prove things to the community because at the time my cholesterol was higher than it is now. But I saw my father have a heart attack, become obese, sleep apnea, and he was a doctor.
He should have known better, but he never really struck that work-life balance well. And so I think it's just become a value of mine and kind of central to me to stay fit and to like prioritize time to play and relax as much as I can.
And it doesn't always work out like that. Sometimes when I'm traveling, you know, I'm kind of, I'm really.
You're wrapped up in it. I do.
You know, I'm working a lot when I'm traveling, if I'm making content with my team when I'm traveling and studying and researching. but I do try to prioritize my sleep and keep the

circadian rhythm good because I know how much this affects everything else in my body. So it's just a big value for me is to stay healthy in what I'm doing and not push too hard because I think you can easily, I could easily go over the edge there too.
I mean, I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this. Do you drink? No.
Nothing. No wine? No nothing.
I've really only

drunk

five, six times in my life. I've only been drunk four or five times in my whole life.
I never really enjoyed it. Had a major hangover after.
I've probably consumed alcohol ten times in my whole life. It just doesn't do much for me.
Yeah. I've been off for almost, it'll be three years this Valentine's Day.
Amazing. Yeah, yeah, thanks to psychedelics.
Oh, incredible. I mean, alcohol is such a, it's poisonous, you know? I mean, you know, many people have highlighted the fact that there are studies showing that even an average of one drink per day thins the neocortex of your brain.
So it's just not a great thing for humans. And I'm not trying to pretend that I'm a saint or that I think people should be held to impossible standards.
And I think enjoying your life is part of it. But for me, the value equation with alcohol doesn't compute.
The calculus isn't there. So, I mean, obviously you're super fit.
What are your workouts like? Is it strenuous? Is it, you know, I mean, what is it like? You said light movement in the morning. In Costa Rica, it's mostly surfing.
And then I still dabble in martial arts. So when I was in medical school, I did a moderate, I did a bunch of nogi jiu-jitsu for about two years.
And I've kind of started to do a little bit of striking Muay Thai boxing. And I'm not proficient in any of it by any means, but I like it.

When I'm not surfing, if I want to work out,

I have a Muay Thai bag at my house and some mats,

and I might train a little bit in terms of the martial arts stuff.

I like movement, whether it's surfing.

I love the technicalities of movement and boxing

and kinetic chess of jiu-jitsu and wrestling. Sometimes I'll do that.
I don't lift a lot of weights because I'm not trying to get bulky. I don't want, not that lifting weights makes you bulky, but I think that I just have a physique that stays muscular without a lot of weights.
So I'll do pull-ups. I like things that lengthen my body.
I like bodyweight exercises. I like the way that a pull-up feels because I can feel my spine release and lengthen after sitting during the day.
I'll do pull-ups. I might do 20 pull-ups a day.
I'm nothing crazy. I'm not like Goggins.
I'm not doing 1,000 pull-ups a day or anything. I like mobility.
I like squatting. I like banded mobility for my shoulders.
Like I said, I skateboard sometimes on my ramp, which is just kind of fun. So you turn your hobbies into your workouts.
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah, I sprint sometimes on the beach, but when I go to a gym, when I'm traveling, I hit the punching bag. That's just what I like to do.
So in addition to looking for raw milk everywhere I go, I now have to look for punching bags. Yeah.'s harder and harder because the gyms don't have punching bags.
And sometimes I get stuck at Lifetime with this crappy punching bag, but it's better than nothing. And I travel with my boxing gloves everywhere.
What's your social life like? I mean, you don't drink. It doesn't sound like you go out to dinner very often.
You cook at home. I mean, that really narrows the scope.
Yeah, I can go to restaurants on dates and stuff. I'm single.
If I'm going on a date with a woman, I can go to a restaurant. I just want to know they don't cook in seed oils, so I don't get to the restaurant and decide not to eat anything.
Because if a restaurant cooks in seed oils, I will not eat at the restaurant. I will not eat food cooked in seed oils.
I'm fairly hard on that line. So I can go to restaurants sometimes.
And when I'm traveling in the States, if I'm on a date with a woman, I might go to a restaurant. And I try to like, the circadian rhythm stuff is probably the most impactful with regard to socializing.
Because I like to try and go to sleep at the same time every night. But I was just in D.C.
for the inauguration at the Maha Ball and another ball. And I was happy to completely tank my circadian rhythm by staying up until one in the morning.
But I know, and this is actually what happens when I wake up in the morning, I feel foggy. I don't feel great.
I have to get a workout before I feel. I know that the next day I'm not as productive.
I'm not as sharp. And this comes from training jujitsu, I think, in medical school, thinking, I'm going to

be on a mat with a guy who wants to break my arm, destroy my knee, or choke me unconscious. I'm going to show up to that as sharp as possible.
So I'm always thinking, what's the return on this investment? I'm willing to stay out late if I really feel like it's great friends and I want to connect with people. I'm not willing to make bad, quote unquote, choices with regard to food, but I am willing to flex the circadian rhythm some

but I try to really just show up as good as i can every day in the world because it's much less fun to surf when i'm kind of foggy from staying up too late the night before so i just try to bring my friends to me you know by creating a fun environment and hang out with my friends earlier and say, hey, can we go to dinner at 5 and not

7.30 or 8 o'clock

at night? But it is just kind of give

and take, and I have great friends.

Sometimes people ask me this online.

They say, well, how do you do that?

Isn't that hard to make friends? And I think, look,

if somebody doesn't want to be friends with me because I don't drink

or smoke or any of these things,

our values are not aligned.

It's not going to be a great friendship anyway. So, yeah, I mean, I am not a hermit.
I like humans. I like talking to humans.
I value relationships, both friendship relationships and romantic relationships. I value all of that.
It's just kind of this, I just probably put the dial a little more toward being boring and square than most people do. So, I mean, what do you do socially? Sometimes I go to restaurants.
At home in Costa Rica. What's that? At home in Costa Rica? Yeah.
Go to a friend's house for dinner. I'll have dinner with friends, have them over to my house with friends.
I'll surf with friends. We watch sunsets together a lot.
It's uniquely Costa Rican things, yeah. Go on the beach together, take my dog for a walk on the beach and see friends, yeah.
Put a slack line up. I just built a really cool pool at my house, and I was able to put an ozone generator on the pool so there's no chlorine in the pool.
And I built a platform on the roof of my house. It's 21 feet from the roof to the pool.
So the pool is 12 feet deep. I have people over, and we hang out at the pool and listen to the howler monkeys.
Cool. Yeah.
Cool. You talked about grounding.
Yeah. In your daily routine.
Yeah. So I've been hearing a lot about grounding.
I don't know exactly. I mean, I know, walk barefoot on the soil and stuff like that.
Why? You know, humans tend to accumulate a voltage. And when we touch the earth, the voltage goes away.

This is the movement.

The actual movement of electrons can go between the human body and the earth.

And I was super skeptical, but there's actually published literature about grounding,

decreasing inflammatory markers, grounding, changing the charge on the outside of your red blood cells.

Yeah, so it just kind of feels good.

So when you say grounding, what are you doing? Just laying on the ground? No, no, I'm just walking barefoot on the earth. And that sounds more hippie than it needs to be.
I mean, you can ground. Most of the time, you can ground on cement.
You can just walk out your house. I even do it here.
I did it this morning at my Airbnb in Nashville. I just go outside of the Airbnb barefoot and try and walk on the ground a little bit in the morning.
In Costa Rica, it's much easier for me because I'm barefoot all the time. You don't even have to wear shoes to go into a grocery store in Costa Rica.
Grounding is an interesting thing. It's something that humans have always done.
We've always been touching the earth, but we're more separated from it now. There seems to be benefits.
I don't think it needs to be something that people obsess over, but just go take— I think even in the winter, it's okay to take your shoes off and just go stand in the grass for a couple minutes. It's good to be outside in general.
And this is something we were talking about with the jungle. So I've been thinking a lot about light recently.
So I think a lot about food and nutrients, but I've been thinking a lot about light. And light is in a lot of ways a nutrient.
And so in order to be in the podcast studio and to get the lights to look good, we're using artificial lights. This is obviously not outdoors in the sun.
So the light, the spectrum of wavelengths of light that we're getting in here is not what we would get outside. There's no infrared light indoors.
And there's also no ultraviolet indoors, which is something we can talk about as well. And this light that we're using indoors is enriched in blue, which is around 400 nanometers or 10, something like that.
So it's an artificial type light indoors. And so I'm not sure that it's good for humans to spend all of our time in fake, or I should say, sort of partially limited indoor lighting, right? And this, again, I'm not trying to make it impossible for anyone to live their life.
What I am trying to highlight is the idea that it's very valuable to be outside for even part of the day. So we were talking on the break of the podcast for a minute, and I said to one of the guys, let's just go step outside for a minute.
It just feels good to be outdoors for me in the sunlight. And it's winter in Nashville, so there's no ultraviolet right now because the sun isn't very high, but there's infrared, and there's a full spectrum of wavelengths that are visible.
And so that's interesting because the infrared light specifically is valuable for humans at the level of the mitochondria. And I didn't know this until recently, but there's actual data and published studies to show that infrared wavelengths, whether it's 800 nanometers on up, it's a very large amount of infrared in the spectrum, they allow our mitochondria in the whole body to produce melatonin.
And that melatonin gets used as a systemic antioxidant in our body. We traditionally think about melatonin in the brain and the pineal gland through the eyes and the suprachiasmatic nucleus as part of the brain that, in conjunction with the paraventricular nucleus and the superior cervical ganglion, are connected with our circadian rhythm.
This is why you hear people say, don't look at blue lights, don't have your phone on at night, because essentially, partially my body thinks it's the middle of the day here under these blue lights, which is okay for the most part, because it is still the middle of the day, right? It's not nine o'clock at night. But the concern when we're under these blue lights, which are both flickering, the sun doesn't flicker, and they're enriched in these blue wavelengths more than the outdoor lighting would be, is that it's going to confuse the entrainment of my circadian rhythm between the eyes and the brain, and that's going to affect melatonin production.
And this normal cycling of rhythm in the human body is essential. It's connected with so many hormonal processes and DNA repair and important things that are happening in our brain and all of the organs of our body.
So our clock mechanism in our body is essential that that is protected if we truly want to be healthy. What you eat is important, but also the light you take in can affect your body's inner workings.
So it's definitely more multifactorial than just food, as I mentioned earlier in the podcast. So when I'm thinking about grounding, I'm also thinking, oh, I get to be outdoors and I want more infrared light because I want the exposure to that.
I want my body to be exposed to that. Infrared can go through clothes, so you don't need to be naked or anything, and I'm not butthole sunning in Costa Rica.
You don't have to do any of that. But there's evidence that also getting some ultraviolet light increases testosterone in males.
So getting ultraviolet light on your skin is probably essential and is something that humans have always done. The other interesting thing about full spectrum natural light is that the infrared wavelengths balance out the ultraviolet wavelengths.
And so the potentially damaging effects of the ultraviolet wavelengths are in some ways countered by the infrared wavelengths. So if tanning beds are bad for us, it may be because they don't have enough infrared to go with the ultraviolet.
And so ultraviolet is good. If you get too much ultraviolet, you can get burned, which is bad.
And I think that for a lot of people, our propensity to get burned is higher because we're eating too many seed oils, which are high in this linoleic acid. And we know that linoleic acid accumulates in all the membranes of our body, including our epidermis and dermis in our skin, when we have fragile polyunsaturated fatty acids in our skin, I think that probably predisposes us to damage from the sun.
And there are studies, there are associational observational studies, but there are studies that associate seed oil consumption with increased rates of melanoma. This is all to say that our diet can affect our skin's ability to receive light in a healthy or unhealthy way.
And that if our light environment is not what we've been having historically as humans, that can be challenging for us as well. So this is all to say that taking off your shoes and touching the ground at least once a day for a little bit of time is great.
How much time? Who knows? I don't know. How much time do you do it? I do it as much as I can.
I mean, this is one of the things I love about surfing and why I hope I can get you in the water in Costa Rica. When you're in the ocean, that is the biggest electron reservoir right on the planet Earth.
So I'm in the ocean for two to two and a half hours. I'm walking on the beach barefoot.
I almost don't wear shoes in Costa Rica because I don't have to. So I'm touching the ground, not when I'm sleeping, but hours a day.
Hours a day. Hours a day.
Now, I couldn't offer a study that says you need to touch 20 minutes a day or this. I think the grounding literature is still in its infancy and we could look at the protocols that people have used for joint pain or things like this, but I think just start with some amount of time barefoot.
And it brings out kind of this playful, childlike mindset. And then you're outdoors, getting that full spectrum light.
In terms of light, I try to be outdoors as much as I can. And again, it depends.
It's worthwhile to me to spend this time indoors with you. And when I'm in Costa Rica, I spend a lot of time outdoors.
And on the way here in the car, I had the sunroof open and the window down, even though it was cold outside because I don't really mind the cold. And I wanted some infrared.
Who knows what kind of a dose I'm getting. But I just wanted to be outdoors as much as possible, both for entraining the circadian rhythm because of the brightness of the full-spectrum sunlight and the potential for those infrared wavelengths.
But I think about light a lot like I think about food. There's whole food, which is a term that's overused today, but there's whole food, which we know of.
We know what that is. Single-ingredient foods that haven't really been processed.
And there's also processed foods, which have had those food components taken away and mixed up. And there's whole light, which is sunlight, and then there's processed light.
And unfortunately, most of us spend 90 plus percent of our lives indoors. And that's probably not great for us as humans either, whether it's lack of UV or lack of infrared or lack of full spectrum light or changing our circadian rhythm entrainment in a negative way.

So being a human used to be really simple, and we've kind of complicated it in a strange way.

And I don't advocate for us returning to wearing loincloths, but I think that in 2025, there's value to be had in returning to some awareness of where we've come from as humans, both in terms of our food environment and our light and systemic environment and lifestyle. You had mentioned raw milk.
Yeah. What is the deal with the raw milk? Raw milk is interesting to me.
So milk comes from cows, predominantly in the U.S., and the majority of milk that we get is pasteurized, meaning it's heated. I grew up drinking pasteurized milk.
Because my dad was a traditional doctor, we had a fear of milk fat and saturated fat growing up. So I grew up mostly drinking skim milk, which is horrible, pasteurized homogenized skim milk.
If we were really getting crazy, we'd have 2%. But my family had a fat phobia growing up.
That was kind of the part of the zeitgeist in the 1980s and 90s when I was growing up. And so I never had raw milk until maybe 10 years ago.
So raw milk is milk from a cow that hasn't been pasteurized. And any of us that were lucky enough to be breastfed had raw human milk when we were an infant, and that is very beneficial for humans.
And it is not sterile. Raw milk is teeming with organisms.
It's teeming with bacteria from the mother's skin flora from the breast. So raw milk from a cow is kind of the same.
It's full of commensal, normal skin flora from a cow from the udders. And humans have been domesticating animals for 10,000 to 20,000 years.
We've been using raw milk and making it into cheeses or fermented milk, which is known as kefir in Bulgaria and other countries, and yogurts. And these are often associated with great longevity or health benefits, but it's only really in the last 120 years that we've been doing things that are pasteurized with regard to dairy because we moved off of farms into cities.
And when we moved into cities, those of us from farms still wanted to drink milk, but people were getting sick drinking raw milk that was produced in a city in the early 1900s because the cows were being milked in sub-sanitary conditions, and the cows were sick because they were being fed swill, which is the spent grains of alcohol fermentation. So the introduction of pasteurization certainly was probably a good thing originally in terms of milk because a lot of milk was contaminated because it wasn't produced properly.
It wasn't produced in the cleanest conditions. And when you're milking a cow, for humans, we probably should clean the udders and make sure that if the cow poops, that doesn't go into the milk.
And now there is this resurgent interest in getting back to consistently, intentionally produced raw milk. Can humans do that? And so when I look at the literature, it's quite fascinating because there actually have been studies done comparing raw milk to pasteurized milk.
And there are multiple studies that show that kids who grow up on or off farms drinking raw milk have lower rates of asthma, eczema, and allergies. That's interesting, right? You might think, oh, it's because they're on the farm, they have the microbial difference from the farm.
But even kids who grew up in cities drinking raw milk have lower rates of asthma, eczema, and allergies. Now, is it that the pasteurized milk is causing the allergies and eczema, all of those things that I had personally, or the raw milk is protective? It's probably some of both.
But I think when I look at the literature around raw milk, and there's a robust literature around raw milk, and raw milk is many immunologic components. There's lactoglobulin, lactoferrin, there's immune factors and peptides.
Colostrum is the first milk of animals, and that's been studied a lot now. Colostrum is a huge thing today.
I mean, the company that I mentioned earlier, Heart and Soil, we have a colostrum capsule powder. And the studies on colostrum are massive.
I mean, gut benefits with the gut flora, potential neurologic benefits, recovery benefits. So it's a medicinal food that mammals produce.
And even across species, it seems that milk is beneficial for humans and maybe loses that beneficial ability when you pasteurize it. We know that when you heat milk above 150 degrees, the whey protein changes conformation.
So for a long time, people thought raw milk, maybe it's beneficial because it's a probiotic, but I'm not sure that's the issue. It might have to do with the whey protein and something with our immune system.
I don't think we fully understand why raw milk is beneficial, but there's some interesting evidence in the published medical literature about raw milk being a uniquely valuable functional food for humans. Of course, anytime you have a raw food, you have to be careful about the production of the raw food.
Did you see there was an outbreak of salmlla in cucumbers? So every year, thousands of people are sickened from spinach, from sushi, right? So yes, people do get sick from raw milk when it's from a farm that isn't doing it properly. Raw food carries the risk of contamination.
We were eating raw meat earlier. I'm sure that if, you know, that somewhere somebody eating raw meat today is going to get contamination.
So it's just a matter of what's the risk benefit and I would say raw milk has benefits we need to study it more and help scale practices to do it safely so that people can access it I think raw milk, this is just my opinion but I think raw milk is one of the least discussed potential therapeutics for the human gut. You think about how much human mammalian breast milk affects our gut flora.
What if raw milk could be studied and we could see how the gut flora changes in a human adult when they're drinking raw milk from a cow that's been treated properly and it's clean raw milk and you can test test it. So that's interesting to me, that milk is this kind of functional food, and so much of what we experience today as health issues is related to the microbiome of our gut, specifically, and dysbiosis.
And is it possible that some of these raw foods, especially the raw milk or colostrum, could help with that? It's something we shouldn't ignore. But in the mainstream press, raw milk is now seen as a right-wing conspiracy thing.
And you get vilified, and people will say, oh, it's not safe. Well, yes, there are examples of contamination.
They're very rare. And there are many other foods that are more likely contaminated than raw milk.
So it's like anything. If you want to eat raw meat or raw liver or raw milk, which are all things that I do, the raw meat and the raw liver, more occasionally than raw milk, you just have to be aware of the quality of it.
It's something that humans have done for a long time. You had mentioned early on in the podcast about EMF waves and you turn your routers off at night and you do an Ethernet cable to stay connected.

Did you feel a difference coming off,

turning all that stuff on,

moving down to Costa Rica, getting into nature?

I do.

It's multifactorial.

I surf every day.

The food is different.

The environment is different. I'm getting infrared from the environment.
But it's hard. When we're talking about EMF, we're talking about cell phones, Wi-Fi routers generally, and microwaves.
They're all kind of the same span of frequencies. A lot of people don't know that their microwave is basically similar to a cell phone in terms of the frequency of radio frequency EMF that it's putting out.
The electromagnetic spectrum is fascinating. So visible light is on the electromagnetic spectrum, but radio frequency EMF is also on the electromagnetic spectrum.
The waves are just much larger in wavelength. And these are all light, and they all have this wave-particle duality to them, and they all come in as photons.
And so the human eye can't see radio frequency EMF, but we can see EMF in the visible light spectrum. It's all kind of the same thing.
Light is incredible, and I should say electromagnetic waves slash particles, they're all around us, and there are all sorts of sizes to these waves, which are wave-particle duality. This is physics.
But historically, humans were never exposed to much in the RF band, which is a certain set of frequencies. It's only with the advent of radio and Wi-Fi and cell phones that we've now become bathed in this.
And questions remain. And I think that like so many things, whether it's a COVID vaccine or RF EMF, we should be able to ask questions about whether these things are benign or harmful for humans.
And yet, hopefully it's changing, but so many times, if you even ask about EMF, people think you have a tinfoil hat. I proudly will wear my tinfoil hat and ask questions.
The reason people don't think RF, EMF from your cell phone or your Wi-Fi router is harmful, and look, I appreciate Elon, he's brilliant, he's done so much for us, but he's been on Rogan saying it's completely safe and you can make a helmet of cell phones and it would be fine, and I think that's a little ludicrous and premature to say that, is that RF-EMF is not ionizing. So x-rays are on the same electromagnetic field, electromagnetic wave continuum.
Ultraviolet light is on the same. And at some wavelengths, you have enough power to ionize DNA and to create DNA damage.
So RF-EMF isn't powerful enough to be ionizing. People say it's not ionizing.
But just because it's not ionizing doesn't mean it can't affect the function of biological systems. There are many studies, hundreds of studies, with radiofrequency EMF suggesting that they do affect biological systems at the level of calcium channels, at the level of ion channels in the human body.
Things which are delicate. The thing about these waves is they can pass through clothing.
They pass through walls. This is not science fiction.
You can have a Wi-Fi router in one room and that wave is coming to you. It's passing through your whole body.
The signal from your cell phone can reach you through a wall. And the signal is depleted in a square function.
So if you have your cell phone far away from you, three or five feet, the signal is significantly less. And so the further you have it away, the radius from you, it's going to be R squared that

the signal is going down. So it's a factor of R squared.
So if you move away from these, the signal is going down very quickly. It's the proximity that's a problem.
But how many of us walk around all day with our cell phone in our pocket or in our front pocket as men or women or in a sports bra, right? Or we have AirPods on our head

with a signal going through our brain

to... pocket as men or women or in a sports bra, right? Or we have AirPods on our head with a signal going through our brain two, three, six hours a day.
A lot of people I know now work with AirPods and they could have these in for eight hours a day. So the jury's still out on this, but the questions remain around, is this safe for humans or is it negatively affecting our biology? And that's the question that I think is worth asking, and that was the experiment that I kind of wanted to do when I was in Costa Rica.
What if I just create an environment in my house that's zero EMF? Zero RF EMF. And so there are meters that sample the radio frequency range of EMF, and you can look at my house, and it's 0.05 microwatts per meter squared in my house.
0.05. When I'm mostly, like if I'm in Los Angeles, just walking around at a hotel, it's usually 1,000 or 2,000 microwatts per meter squared.
If you hold this device up to your cell phone, it could be anywhere from 30,000 to 3 million microwatts per meter squared. Holy shit.
So we're talking about orders of magnitude, and we just don't really fully understand if these are benign for humans. When you run a microwave and you hold the device a few feet from the microwave, you're getting 2 to 3 million microwatts per meter squared.
So your mom might have said this to you when you were growing up, don't look at the microwave, don't stand there, because that microwave radiation is pouring out of the microwave, and we don't really know what it does to humans. Well, by wearing AirPods, you are essentially walking around with a small, low-powered microwave on your head all day long.
Interesting. And I just think it's interesting that we are so easily, we're just dismissing it.
I went to a gym when I was in Washington, D.C., a lifetime fitness, and every single person in the gym is wearing AirPods. And again, this is not hyperbole.
I like connecting with people and every single person is in their AirPod world or their sort of, you know, Bluetooth headphone world. So that's, we need to questions.
And potentially, the people that it is most relevant to are children. Because children are developing and they're growing.
And how does a child's brain react? Should a child be sitting around for hours a day with an iPad on their lap that is putting out thousands, tens of thousands of microwatts per meter squared onto their developing sex glands and hormones and thyroid and brain.

That's not to mention the screen that they're looking at,

which is full of blue light and flickering and doing all these things

that are potentially affecting their neurotransmitters

or their attention span, disrupting their circadian rhythm.

We have devices that are everywhere.

They're a part of our lives.

I'm not saying we should get rid of them.

I'm just saying we should ask some reasonable questions

and really take an honest look at the literature.

I know everybody out there has to be

just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS

and the rhetoric that the mainstream media

continuously tries to force feed us.

And I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source. It's getting really hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world.
And so one thing we've done here at Sean Ryan Show is we are developing our newsletter. And the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman, former CIA targeter.
Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams, call sign super bad. She's made two different appearances here on the Sean Ryan show.
And some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mind blowing. And so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief.
So it's going to be all things terrorists, how terrorists are coming up through the southern border, how they're entering the country, how they're traveling, what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to. And here's the best part.
The newsletter is actually free. We're not going to spam you.
It's about one newsletter a week, maybe two if we release two shows. The only other thing that's going to be in there besides the intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that.
But like I said, it's a free CIA intelligence brief. Sign up.
Link's in the description or in the comments. We'll see you in the newsletter.
I've done, this is what's interesting, and I hope this changes now with Meta's policies, but I do content about this and it gets fact-checked on Instagram, right? I do fact-checked, I do content about raw milk, it gets fact-checked. I do content about seed oils, it gets fact-checked.
When I do this content, I'm not doing it from the hip. I'm citing articles, but in the past, and again, hopefully Zuckerberg is changing this, in the past they could just say, no, we're using this fact-checkers article, your stuff is false.
So who knows? The EMF stuff is real. I don't know how much it affects humans.
My subjective experience is I feel better when I'm in a lower EMF environment. There's a lot of variables there, and it's impossible to do a single variable experiment.
Humans have never been exposed to this much EMF, and I don't think we know how it's affecting us. Have you thought about using a lead-based paint to block all of that? You don't want to do that with a paint because then it starts reflecting, right? Interesting.
Imagine putting a mirror. I didn't know that.
Yeah. If you paint, because I thought about doing this, if you paint your entire bedroom with lead-based paint, you won't get a signal in there.
As long as you have curtains that also block it because it'll come through the window. Okay.
Then you think, is it bouncing around? I don't think painting the walls is a good idea. The easier thing would be to just turn off the Wi-Fi router at night

and not have your cell phone next to your bed

and turn your cell phone on at airplane mode and put it away.

In most places, unless you live in New York City

in a high-rise apartment or a condo

with a bunch of other apartments around you,

you can get down to pretty low levels of RF, EMF

just by doing those things. I'm talking 50 to 100 microwatts per meter squared.
That's pretty easy to get to if you just turn off the devices at night. And that's a much lower exposure than 1,000 or 2,000 or 10,000 that many of us are being supposed to constantly in these urban environments.
If you live in New York City, I mean, amazing city, and you're in a high-rise building, and you look at how many Wi-Fi networks there are, you might see 50. And in that case, you're probably going to have to build a curtain around your bed to block the RF EMF.
And that's an option too, and you can put something on the floor. But again, it's difficult.
I wouldn't paint your walls just because that's a little trickier condition. But you can construct a Faraday cage.
And there are also, I mean, on Amazon, for $20, you can buy a Faraday bag. I mean, you're probably familiar with Faraday bags from your work.
You can buy a Faraday bag to go around your Wi-Fi router. So when I'm traveling at Airbnbs, I'll just bring a Faraday bag.
And I'm not turning off the Wi-Fi in my Airbnb so I can work in the day or my team has to work. But at night, nobody's working.
We'll just turn off the Wi-Fi. And during the day, I'll just put a Faraday bag around the router and it decreases the signal, but you can still use it.
There's ways to mitigate it. I think, what's the better part of valor here? I'm just going to be cautionary here and see because I'm not complacent about that kind of thing.
It's all interesting and it all contributes to human health. Seed oils.
Seed oils is something I've been wanting to dive in with somebody for a while now. What is it with seed oils? In 1900, there were no seed oils, essentially.
Maybe the first seed oil was like 1860, but there were no seed oils in the American food chain until 1911 when Procter & Gamble made Crisco, which was partially hydrogenated cotton seed oil. So in 1900, there were no seed oils.
And this is just an association, but I think it's an important thing to note for the whole conversation. Because inevitably, when we talk about seed oils, we will talk about saturated fat.
So rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, obesity, every chronic illness were a fraction of what they are today in 1900. And we were eating 98, 99% of our fat as beef tallow, butter, ghee, and lard.
There were no seed oils. And olive oil wasn't a big portion of our diet in 1900.
There was no such thing as avocado oil. So most of our fat was animal fat in 1900.
And the association there is striking to say, okay, we've had periods in recorded history not too long ago when we had almost all of our cooking fat was animal fat, and heart disease wasn't through the roof. So any hypothesis, any assertion that saturated fat causes heart disease needs to be questioned on historical basis from the get-go.
Seed oils came in in 1911. Procter & Gamble made Crisco.
They had slow adoption into our food supply, I would say, over the next 40 years. In 1940s, with World War II, canola oil was produced for the first time.
And it was used on ships because the seed oils stay slippery when they're wet. They're used as engine lubricants.
Previously, they've been engine lubricants or lamp oils. So 1940s, canola oil gets produced.
Canola is an acronym that stands for Canadian Oil Low Acid. There's no such thing as a canola plant.
It's a rapeseed plant. So that's just a canola oil sidebar, and I'll come back to canola oil.
And then since 1940s, we've had the introduction of various oils into our food supply. Soybean oil, corn oil, canola, safflower, sunflower, peanut.
These are all seed oils. Anything that comes from a seed is a seed oil.
In terms of an oil that comes from a seed. It's important to understand that olive and avocado are fruit oils.
And I'll talk about those later. But those are not seeds.
We don't make avocado oil from an avocado seed. We make it from the actual avocado pulp from the fruit.
And olives are made from the fruit of the olive, not the seed of the olive. So there's a big difference.
When you make an olive or an avocado oil, you just press the fruit, right? If you've seen an olive press, they either do it by centrifuge where they spin it and the oil goes out, or they have a big press and they kind of press the oil out and the oil comes out. How do you get oil out of a cotton seed or a soybean? They're not very oily.
How do you get oil out of a sunflower seed or a kernel of corn? You have to go through this complex industrial process to refine the oil out of those things. So this is an interesting thing to consider.
Today, in 2025, the average American eats the equivalent of around five tablespoons of seed oils per day. 1900, we had zero.
To get five tablespoons of seed oil from corn, you'd have to eat 70 ears of corn. So you have to use massive amounts, two and a half plus pounds of soybeans to make five tablespoons of soybean oil, similar figure with sunflower seeds, right? So these are historically inappropriate amounts of consumption of these substances.
We never would have been exposed to this historically. Hunter gatherers, they eat seeds and nuts sometimes, but mostly when they're starving.
I didn't see the Hadza eat a single seed or nut when I was there. So to get oil out of these things, which we've done because of an industrial process that makes oils that are cheap, very profitable, and very shelf-stable, you have refining, bleaching, deodorizing, so you have to heat the oil to over 450 degrees Fahrenheit, which essentially damages the oil, oxidizes the oil, makes it rancid.
You have to extract it with hexane, which is contaminated with benzene. You have to do sodium hydroxide washing.
You have to deodorize and bleach because if they didn't do this industrial process, it wouldn't even be palatable for humans. So what you end up with on the back end is this historically inappropriate concoction of something that is now marketed to humans as a healthy oil.
Well, how can that possibly be? It's clearly an industrial hyper-processed food. Well, the whole reason that seed oils are told to us as healthy is because of the cholesterol idea.
So we kind of have to talk about cholesterol any time we talk about seed oils. So 1900, no real heart attacks in the population.
Most doctors had never even seen a heart attack. Heart attacks became a thing in the zeitgeist in the United States in the 1950s when Eisenhower had his first heart attack.
And I think it was 1955 that he had his first heart attack. And that was around the time of a guy named Ansel Keys who was very sort of opinionated.
And He did this study called the Seven Countries Study, which he published later, that associated saturated fat consumption with higher levels of cholesterol and heart disease. In retrospect, we know that he cherry-picked the data.
He excluded countries where that association doesn't actually hold true. He included countries where it did hold true, but then he excluded places like France, Germany, and Switzerland where they eat a lot of saturated fat, but they don't have higher rates of heart disease.

But nevertheless, this faulty study based on cherry picking because of Ancel Keys' sort of persuasiveness

and this obsession with heart disease in the 1950s

because Eisenhower had multiple heart attacks

and Eisenhower's cardiologist, Paul Dudley White,

was influenced by Ancel Keys.

We suddenly began to believe as an American people that saturated fat, which raises cholesterol in many individuals, and we can talk about that, is a cause of heart disease. And then we'll table the discussion about cholesterol as a cause of heart disease for the moment, but we'll get back to that.
So for years and years now, USDA policy around dietary guidelines has been based on the paradigm that saturated fat causes heart disease. And so if saturated fat causes heart disease, it must be bad.
We must eat less butter. We should be eating margarine instead of butter, right? Tallow has gone out of our population.
Most people don't even know what tallow is. You never see lard.
What's healthier is mazola corn oil. There are ads from the 1960s and 70s from mazola corn oil saying, Susie, polyunsaturated her family tonight.
They're so funny to see. The companies were proud of the fact that they were using these polyunsaturated oils because for so long, we have been told that polyunsaturated fats are heart- and saturated fats are heart unhealthy.
And we've got it all reversed. It's all backwards.
It's all backwards. So the reason it's backwards is because polyunsaturated fats are fragile and they become incorporated into all the membranes of our cells.
And there are multiple studies showing that when we have more polyunsaturated fats in our diet, specifically seed oils, this LDL, which is often termed bad cholesterol, is more likely to oxidize, more likely to become damaged in our bloodstream. And that leads to heart disease in so many steps.
Again, we also have to talk about the cholesterol piece and the heart disease piece with all this, so it's a little involved and it's tricky. But the idea is that polyunsaturated fats lower cholesterol a little bit.
Saturated fats raise cholesterol a little bit. So we've been told that polyunsaturated fats are healthy, and yet humans are eating less saturated fat, more polyunsaturated fats, and rates of heart disease are still skyrocketing, right? So it didn't do anything.
It didn't fix the epidemic of heart disease. Clearly, we've missed the boat here, and I would say we went in the completely wrong direction, especially since the 1980s.
The consumption of soybean oil as the major seed oil consumed by humans has gone through the roof. And I mentioned this earlier in the podcast.
You can look at human fatty tissue, adipose tissue, and you can see that over the last 60 to 80 years, we are really polyunsaturating ourselves. When we eat polyunsaturated fat, we hold onto it.
Our bodies bodies don't make polyunsaturated fat. Remember earlier when I talked about pigs and chickens as monogastric animals? These animals don't make polyunsaturated fats either.
Ruminants can make polyunsaturated fats. So they don't hold on to polyunsaturated fats.
They can get rid of them and they can make them. We cannot make polyunsaturated fats.
So we need a little bit. And historically, as humans, we had a small amount of polyunsaturated fat in our diet, both as omega-3 and as omega-6.
And omega-6 is the linoleic acid. Omega-3 is the kind of stuff you get from fish, generally speaking.
Omega-6 and omega-3 have different pathways in the human body in terms of the downstream metabolites. We'll talk about that also.
But historically, we never had much omega-6, 1% of our calories. Today, 10 to 15% of our calories is omega-6.
Some people have 20% of their calories as omega-6 fatty acids. So we have a historical inconsistency here in what we're doing as humans.
And that should raise the alarm. That should challenge us, that should challenge us to ask questions.
But because of the cholesterol piece, because this lipid hypothesis has been at the center of medicine for so long, since the 1950s with Eisenhower, and we've been told that cholesterol causes heart disease, we have really, I think, been, we've been misled. And so thing is this house of cards in my opinion.

When you understand

that cholesterol doesn't cause heart

disease, and this pisses people

like Peter Atiyah off, and I would love to debate him

on this because he really believes cholesterol

does cause heart disease,

all respect to Peter Atiyah, the whole house

of cards falls.

Let's just pause the seed oil conversation

and I'll come back to that and I'll talk about cholesterol. You have any questions so far? Let's keep going.
Okay. So cholesterol is a building block for steroid hormones in your body.
Testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, aldosterone. These are all built out of a cholesterol backbone.
Cholesterol and triglycerides, which are fatty acids, are packaged into buses in your body that move these things around. One of those buses comes from the liver.
It's called LDL, low-density lipoprotein. LDL contains a protein called ApoB100.
ApoB-containing lipoproteins are felt by Western medicine to be causal in atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis is the process of plaque formation in your arteries of your heart, right? And I have a couple, I have a lot of problems with this theory.
I think that they're close. I think Western medicine is close, but we're missing the mark.
And we're not seeing it because 90 plus percent of people are insulin resistant. And that'll make sense in a moment.
So LDL is this lipoprotein particle. It has an ApoB100 marker on it that says it's LDL.
Other ApoB-containing lipoproteins are things like VLDL, IDL, LP little a, chylomicron remnants. That's not terribly important for this conversation.
Just know that LDL is thought of as the bad cholesterol. And in most humans, when you eat saturated fat, LDL goes up.

But if you look at the saturated fat literature, there was a study published in 2020 in the Journal of American College of Cardiology saying, hey, we looked at tons of studies, it's meta-analysis, there's actually no real relationship between saturated fat and heart disease. So that's the first problem here, is that saturated fat, which raises LDL, is not associated with heart disease.
And some saturated fats, like 15-carbon and 17-carbon saturated fats, which occur in dairy, pentadecanoic acid, and heptadecanoic acid, are actually felt to be protective against cardiovascular disease. So there's lots of inconsistencies in the theory.
But you have LDL going up, and mainstream medicine says LDL is causal. Therefore, the more LDL you have in your body, the more likely you are to get heart disease.
Except when it doesn't, right? So if LDL is causal in heart disease, then why don't we get atherosclerosis in our veins, and we only get it in our arteries? So veins are the vessels that your body uses to return blood to your heart. Arteries are moving away from your heart to your body.
So I have a heart here. It pumps blood through my aorta.
My aorta branches into all sorts of arteries. They go down my abdomen, into my legs.
So I have arteries moving blood from my lungs, which is oxygenated, to my body, to my toes. And then in my toes, I have capillaries.
And then it turns into a vein, it comes back. So in arteries, humans get atherosclerosis, but we do not get atherosclerosis in native veins.
But there's the same amount of LDL circulating in all of these vessels. It's a continuous system.
So why is that? Because arteries are higher pressure. And I would argue that you must have injury to the endothelial wall.
That is often the beginning of atherosclerosis. That is one of the proximate events of atherosclerosis.
If LDL was causal, and the verbiage here is really, really important, if LDL is actually causing atherosclerosis, it should cause atherosclerosis in my veins. The assumption there is that LDL is somehow damaging to the endothelium.
But we know that LDL that's not modified, not oxidized, doesn't damage the endothelium. It doesn't happen.
Atherosclerosis is a process by which LDL particles move into the sort of arterial wall. So in an artery, if you have like a tube and you cut the tube this way, or if you cut it lengthwise, and you look at the artery wall, you see there's an endothelium on the inside of the artery, and the LDL moves through the endothelium to this subendothelial space.
And in that subendothelial space, it's almost like Velcro. There's a matrix of proteins called proteoglycans, and the LDL can get stuck to those proteoglycans.
And when LDL gets stuck to those proteoglycans, it gets oxidized. When an LDL is oxidized or modified, stuck in an arterial wall, an immune cell called a macrophage comes along and takes it up.
And that's the beginning of an atherosclerotic plaque. When those macrophages are full of LDL, they form a foam, a fatty streak, or their foam cell, which is a precursor to a fatty streak, which becomes a plaque, an arterial plaque.
That's atherosclerosis. But what should happen, what happens in normal physiology in a healthy artery that doesn't have damage, someone that's not insulin resistant is the LDL moves in and it moves out of the arterial wall.
It can get stuck, but then it gets stuck for a short amount of time and it moves out. I think that what's happening here is that LDL isn't the culprit.
LDL is part of the causal cascade, but it didn't cause the fire. LDL is a fireman, right, essentially showing up to the fire, but they didn't cause the fire.
LDL is part of the cascade. We know you need LDL to make atherosclerosis, but I think that LDL actually causes atherosclerosis is very shaky.
What does cause, what does initiate it, it's this insulin resistance. Remember I was talking earlier about this metabolic dysfunction, this insulin resistance, and how that underlies so many of our diseases? That, I think, is the problem.
When you are insulin resistant, which remember is when your mitochondria don't work real well, you don't make energy well, you don't move things down that electron transport chain. When you're insulin resistant, your immune cells don't work well, and you have a more enriched proteoglycan layer in your endothelium, in the subendothelial space.
So your arteries are stickier when you're insulin resistant, and the immune cells moving in your artery walls don't work in the same way. You don't repair the endothelium.
You don't repair your vessels as well. So there's more injuries to your endothelium, and the LDL particles are more likely to get stuck.
When you eat more seed oils, which are these polyunsaturated fats, the LDL that gets stuck in the proteoglycan layer are more likely to oxidize. We know that for a fact.
So you have LDL that's more fragile, full of polyunsaturated fats, getting stuck to a proteoglycan matrix because you're insulin resistant. You're getting injury to the endothelial wall that we all get when we are living our lives that doesn't get repaired because the insulin resistance impairs your immune function that repairs those endothelial walls.
But LDL didn't cause any of that. It's just getting caught up in the process.
So this is the major problem with the theory for me is that there are plenty of examples of people with high LDL that don't get atherosclerosis or that don't get atherosclerosis at the rate that they should. And there are examples of people with low LDL who are insulin resistant who get lots lots of atherosclerosis.
So there are so many inconsistencies in the theory that I think what's going on here is we have conflated LDL as causal when it's actually just part of the causal cascade. So I'll just zoom way out for people.
I think about this like wood and fire. If you're going to build a campfire, you must have wood, right? You have to have wood.
But wood didn't cause the fire, right? Gotcha. But wood also has other valuable things.
If you get rid of the wood, you won't have any fire. You can lower someone's LDL and they will have less atherosclerosis.
But that doesn't mean the LDL caused the atherosclerosis. If you lower wood, if you take away wood, if you have a forest a forest fire, you're going to have, it's going to be hard to find wood to make a fire.
But that doesn't mean wood caused the fire. It was the lightning that caused the fire, right? You need the spark to cause the fire.
So what's the spark? It's the insulin resistance. It's the mitochondrial dysfunction leading to extra damage to the endothelial wall, leading to immune cell impairment, leading to LDL that's more likely to oxidize, leading to more proteoglycans in the matrix in the subendothelial space.
The other thing, and where the metaphor extends, is that wood is also valuable. If you're living in the woods, you can build a house from wood.
In the human body, LDL is valuable. LDL serves an immune role.
We've often been told LDL cholesterol is just there to kill us, which makes no sense evolutionarily. Sometimes you hear this explanation that we don't need LDL anymore because now we have antibiotics.
But I think that's a little bit, that doesn't really jive with me. Historically, all throughout our time as humans, LDL is an immune particle.
It interrupts infections in our body, whether viral or bacterial. Bacteria and viruses communicate with each other using something called quorum sensing, and LDL particles and other lipoproteins can interrupt that.
So LDL has value in the human body. And it's probably not surprising then that if we look at some of the longest-lived people, they often have elevated levels of LDL because they're not insulin resistant.
So my assertion, and this is very controversial and I'm happy to defend at any time in the right forum, is that if you are insulin sensitive, if you are metabolically healthy, LDL is good for you. It's an immune particle.
It's valuable. It's when you become insulin resistant that it becomes a liability because it's part of the causal cascade.
What is a problem if you live in a place with a lot of lightning storms and you have a bunch of dry wood around? If you don't have lightning storms, wood is great. You want to build things.
I can build a canoe. I can build a fishing rod.
I can build a house. You don't want to get rid of all your wood.
And we know that when you lower LDL, there are potential problems in humans. Now, the data around lowering LDL becomes muddy because drugs that lower LDL can have side effects.
But for instance, statin

drugs, which lower LDL by interrupting their synthesis in this cascade of cholesterol synthesis, they're HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors. They inhibit an enzyme in this cholesterol synthesis pathway.
They're associated with slightly increased rates of diabetes, dementia, myalgias, lower libido. So So lowering LDL, lowering cholesterol production is not always, it's not without problems.
And to think that historically, or by design, or evolutionarily, that LDL is just there to kill us, that doesn't make any sense. And that eating a food that is at the center of the human diet for all of human history, like red meat that has saturated fat, would raise LDL, and that's increasing your risk of cardiovascular disease.
That doesn't make sense to me either. So we end up with this whole kind of just real confusing story, right? Where we've been told, we knew 120 years ago that animal fats were great, right? People that eat animal fats, they're vibrant, their skin looks good, they're fertile, they have libido.
Then seed oils come on the scene. They're cheaper.
They're shelf-stable. And they lower cholesterol.
And now we're being told to fear cholesterol. And there's some sinister things in there.
I can also tell you about the American Heart Association. But we're being told to fear cholesterol when cholesterol is not the problem.
And there are actually some interesting studies that have been published very recently showing that people who have higher cholesterol, in some cases very high cholesterol, and that are insulin sensitive, don't have increased rates of cardiovascular disease at all. They have actually lower than a regular cohort.
So this study is so important. I'll just highlight it for you.
It's from Dave Feldman and Matt Budoff. It's called the Keto Study, I believe.
They published the first part of the study, I think, in 2024. And they took people on a ketogenic diet.
Now, sometimes people on a ketogenic diet, because you're doing fat-based metabolism, see LDL go up. But generally, people doing a ketogenic diet, which is low-carb, are not eating seed oils.
They're not eating processed food. They're pretty insulin-sensitive as a group.
So they looked at a group of 80 people in this cohort who have average cholesterol, average LDL cholesterol. I think the average LDL was 273 milligrams per deciliter.
So very high LDL and corresponding LDL-C. And they looked at them and they did CT coronary angiography.
Matt Budoff is one of the co-authors. He's a CT coronary angiographer.
He's preeminent in his field, a very well-respected radiologist. And what they found when they compared that to a cohort from Miami who had an average LDL cholesterol of 123 was that the two groups had the same amount of plaque in their arteries.
One group has more than double the amount of cholesterol. The other group has, you know, but they have the same amount of plaque.
And the group on the keto group actually was trending toward less fat, less fat in the arteries, less atherosclerosis. And so people might say, but they still had atherosclerosis.
Well, yeah, you don't know what they did before, right? So what's being said here is that these people had been on a ketogenic diet for an average of three years. They probably had elevated cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, for three to five years, which most cardiologists, most in the lipid space would agree is enough time to see accelerated atherosclerosis when you have more of that cholesterol in your body.
And if LDL cholesterol is causing atherosclerosis, you should see more atheromas. You should see more atherosclerosis in that population, but you don't.
Again, we don't know what they did before. It's not that people on ketogenic diets in the study had zero, but we don't have any idea what they were doing before.
They could have had it previously. They had less.
They had less than the Miami heart group, which has a much lower LDL. That raises some pretty major questions.
And when you look at the analysis, there was no correlation between serum cholesterol, LDL-C, not LDL. Yeah, LDL-C.
There was no correlation between LDL-C and the plaque burden in those people. Zero.
Oh, shit. So if LDL is causal how is that possible? We just see the whole thing starts to get really complicated and confusing, but the framework, the context is important.
It's all about insulin resistance, in my opinion. My strong belief, I should say.
It's all about metabolic health. If you're metabolically healthy, LDL is not a problem.
And you really have to be metabolically healthy. And whether you're keto, which I'm not a huge fan of long term for most people, or you're not keto, being metabolically healthy is what we should be focusing on.
We are hyper focused in Western medicine on LDL cholesterol because the statin industry is a multi-billion, potentially more than that, you know, industry. So if LDL doesn't cause atherosclerosis, there's still a place for statins in the drug supply, but maybe we wouldn't be giving them out as much as we are now.
And the whole paradigm starts to shift. We need to fix insulin resistance.
And that is something that, again, 86 to 93 93% of Americans have some degree of. That's the problem.
But we think we're doing a good job as doctors. Remember, I did four years of cardiology as a PA.
I gave a lot of statin prescriptions. And I was proud of it at the time because I didn't know any better.
So I've been in this world. We're treating the wrong thing.
And we're worried about the wrong things. And the reason this is important to me is because people invariably get healthier when they eat more red meat, when they eat more animal fats, and when they decrease seed oils.
And their LDL goes up. Do you think that this, I mean, does this stem from a centralized location or narrative? Or is this mis-education? What is this? I think it's a centralized narrative from the 1950s, from Ancel Keys, this lipid hypothesis that is then fueled by potentially company data that are trying to muddy the waters and confuse people.
Because... So there is a group that knows.
Yeah, I think so. I mean, this is very contentious in Western medicine, and there are many very intelligent, well-intentioned doctors that disagree with me and still strongly believe that LDL is causal in atherosclerosis.
But when I look at the data, there are too many inconsistencies. There are studies like Dave Feldman's and Matt Budoff's.
There are so many examples of people with elevated LDL who do not develop atherosclerosis. And I think that it may come down to syntax and linguistics.
I would agree. LDL is involved in the causal cascade.
If you are insulin resistant and we lower your LDL, your risk of heart disease is unequivocally lower. However, we didn't treat the real cause, which was your insulin resistance and your metabolic dysfunction.
And I hope that we were honest with you about the side effects of the statins or whatever we use to lower your LDL. And major questions come up, not necessarily with statins, but overall with LDL lowering about all-cause mortality.

Just because you're decreasing someone's risk of cardiovascular disease death

doesn't mean they're living longer or living better

because sometimes you just shift it, right?

We know that you can just shift the pathology

from cardiovascular disease to dementia or to cancer

or to some of these other issues.

And so that's not the goal.

That's not treating a human.

That's not a healthy human.

We want humans to live long and live well, like the Hadza.

We want squaring of the morbidity curve.

We want you to be able these other issues. And so that's not the goal.
That's not treating a human. That's not a healthy human.
We want humans to live long and live well,

like the Hadza.

We want squaring of the morbidity curve.

We want humans to be vital into old age.

I'm not excited about giving someone an increased rate of diabetes or dementia,

myopathy, lower libido,

decreased sex hormones

by lowering their cholesterol with a statin.

That doesn't solve the problem to me.

We have to understand what is causing the insulin resistance. And so I'll just talk about that because it kind of wraps back to seed oils.
And I'm sorry this has been so technical and such a long story, but it's a big Gordian knot, all of this. So I mentioned this earlier, metabolic dysfunction, insulin resistance, this primarily happens at the level of the mitochondria.
If you cannot take substrate from food, which is glucose or fatty acids, and process them into NIDH and FADH2 and move those electrons through the electron transport chain to make ATP, you are going to become insulin resistant. So how does that get broken? It gets broken in two major ways.
The first of these is seed oils, and the second of those is sugar. And I'll talk about sugar in a minute.
Next. Seed oils, I think, are a problem at the level of the mitochondria because that linoleic acid is the most common, most abundant polyunsaturated fat that we consume today as Westernized Americans.
And that linoleic acid accumulates in the membranes of the mitochondria. And there's evidence from animal models and cell culture that when you have excess linoleic acid from seed oils in the mitochondrial membrane, you get proton leak.
And the whole point of the electron transport chain is to create a gradient that the protons can flow down to make ATP. If you are leaking protons across, down the gradient, you are making less ATP.
At the cellular membrane, we also know that excess linoleic acid, excess polyantetrable fats, creates leak and problems or overactivation of the sodium potassium ATPase. That's all very technical, but suffice it to say that my concern is that when you stuff yourself full of seed oils, you are creating an ATP leak in your body.
You are not producing energy as well, and that leads to metabolic dysfunction. And that is actually the root molecular cause.
What's the solution? Stop eating so much linoleic acid. Return to a historically accurate, a historically consistent amount of fat.
We're doing these historically inappropriate things, right? We're doing historically inappropriate lights. We're doing historically inappropriate types of fat.
Humans are meant to be eating a mix of saturated fat and monounsaturated fat with a little bit of polyunsaturated fats. We have far too much polyunsaturated fat today, and I think that's driving, at a molecular level, the mitochondrial dysfunction that is underlying insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction.
So the solution is simple. Return to what you've always been doing.
Remember that seed oils also increase the propensity of LDL to oxidize when it gets in that arterial wall.

So in so many ways, this historically horrible industrial processed oil full of hexane, benzene derivatives, oxidized oils, antimony from the plastic it's being stored in that humans have never been exposed to, which is being sold to you as safe and healthy by Harvard and Mayo because it lowers your cholesterol based on a faulty paradigm of atherosclerosis, is a major, major driver of illness in humans today. So that's the seed oil story.
I'm sorry that was so long. Wow.
You were going to go into sugars. Yeah, so the second thing is sugar.
Sugar drives metabolic dysfunction also, but not in the way that we think it does. So this is another interesting story.
Sucrose is a disaccharide of glucose and fructose. Glucose and fructose are monosaccharides.
Sucrose is a disaccharide. Starches are polymers of glucose.
When you have a fruit, an apple, I gave you guys strawberries downstairs, right? That has glucose and fructose in it. It has sucrose and it has both of those sugars.
If I give you a strawberry, that doesn't cause insulin resistance in humans. That's pretty clear, both at an associational or interventional level.
If I give you pure sugar, which is pure sucrose that's been refined out of that strawberry or from sugar cane or from beets, or I give you high fructose corn syrup, which is pure sucrose that's been refined out of that strawberry, or from sugarcane, or from beets, or I give you high fructose corn syrup, which is another industrial byproduct from corn, or they take corn, which only has glucose, and they isomerize it, and they combine it to make a high fructose corn syrup, which is essentially like a fake sugar. If I give you either of those things, it does induce insulin resistance in humans.
It's not because it raises your blood sugar. It's because it affects your gut microbiome negatively.
Historically, humans would never have consumed sugar without all of the other compounds in that strawberry. That strawberry is a complex food.
It's not just sugar. It's red.
It tastes, right? There are thousands of components in that strawberry, hundreds of different chemicals in that strawberry that your body is used to getting with that sugar. And whether it's strawberry or banana or orange or honey, any of these sugar containing foods that humans have historically consumed, these compounds prevent the overgrowth of bacteria in our gut.
But if you give a human pure sugar, you get dysbiosis. That is a strict, fast pathway to dysbiosis.
If you want to mess up the gut flora, give a human sugar. It doesn't matter if it's high fructose corn syrup or pure sucrose.
It doesn't look like it's good for humans. But if you give a human a banana, it's fine.
Or even like orange juice, it doesn't even have to have fiber because orange juice has these same chemicals. There are naturally occurring chemicals in fruit, in honey, that mitigate the negative effects of sugar in our body.
So sugar causes insulin resistance, but not because of why we think it does. We think sugar causes insulin resistance because it raises your blood sugar.
That's not why it happens. There are plenty of cultures all over the world that have 95% of their calories as carbohydrates.
They don't get diabetes. So insulin-induced insulin resistance is not the pathology of carbohydrate.
That's not why carbohydrates are bad. Carbohydrates are not bad as a class.
It's processing of carbohydrates that strips chemicals that naturally occur with these that our body has always expected that actually prevent overgrowth of bacteria in the gut. And there's plenty of studies that show that if you give a human or you give a mouse pure glucose, pure fructose, or pure sugar, you will get something called endotoxemia, metabolic endotoxemia.
Endotoxin is a word, it's a synonym for lipopolysaccharide. Lipopolysaccharide is a component of a bacterial cell wall, a gram-negative bacterial cell wall.
So when you feed a human pure sugar, the wrong type of bacteria overgrow. This is dysbiosis.
You mess up the gut flora. And that signaling of endotoxin, it binds to TLR4, which is toll-like receptor 4.
And you get cytokines, TNF-alpha, IL-6, and others, which signal inflammation in the human body. And your body says, whoa, I've got an infection.
But you don't have an infection. You just ate a bunch of sugar.
And that causes you to become insulin resistant due to an inflammatory mechanism. I think seed oils cause insulin resistance at an energy generation mechanism at a mitochondrial electron level.
And sugar causes it at an inflammatory level due to dysbiosis in the gut. Those are two major pathways.
And again, what have we done here? All I'm saying is don't eat processed food, guys. Like, because if you eat single ingredient foods, meat and plants, fruits and vegetables and meat, you're not getting seed oils and you're not getting processed sugar.
Problem solved. Humans get healthy.
Diabetes fixed. Obesity fixed.
Heart disease fixed. Cancer, mostly fixed.
That's so easy. But no.
Global Energy Balance Network, Sean. Just think about calories.
Don't think about food quality. You can still do the Coca-Cola.
This is the problem here. It's all kind of connected, right? And because who gets paid? So yeah, humans, it's easy.
And it's not that humans either need to eat rabbit food or food that's not palatable. I mean, I gave you raw steak earlier because the Airbnb grill was garbage.
But I could have given you cooked steak, squash, and strawberries. That's not horrible.
It's maybe not as dopaminergic and as addicting as a Big Mac or Skittles, but that's hardly depriving yourself of good tasting food. So the answer is really simple.
The molecular mechanisms I think are important to explain so that people understand what's going on beneath the surface and why all this happens. But essentially what's happened is that in the last 150 years, all of these foods have come into the human food supply, the American food supply, through the FDA, which really didn't do the right safety trials on them.
And now we're just metabolically broken. But the way forward is super simple.
We don't need AI vaccines. We don't need crazy things.
We really don't even need GLP-1 antagonists, even though that helps some people. We don't need Oz Zempic.
We just need to stop eating garbage food and return to the foods that humans have always eaten. It's that simple.
It's crazy. You know, I've heard you talk.
I think we've talked about fruits. We've talked about meats.
Yeah. Talked about fish.
What about, you know, it's... Would I be wrong to say that you don't like your vegetables? Vegetables are a whole separate thing, yeah.
So for me, anecdotally, cutting vegetables out improved my eczema. What's your eczema? Eczema was the itchy rash that I had.
Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, it's the autoimmune condition that I have.
It often pairs with asthma and seasonal allergies. So for a- Try to dub it down a little bit.
Yeah, did I get too much for you? Try to dub it down just a hair. So for some people, vegetables, I think, trigger the immune system.
Not for everyone. So let's just differentiate fruit versus vegetables.
Vegetables are the leaves, the stems, and the roots and the seeds of plants. Fruit is often the colorful, sweet packaging around the seeds.
So if I gave you a strawberry, you know that's a fruit. A cucumber is actually a fruit because it has seeds inside of it.
An avocado is a fruit. A squash is a fruit, right? Kale, spinach, those are leaves.
Those are vegetables, okay? Celery, that's a stem. That's a vegetable.
Asparagus, that's a vegetable, okay? What are other good examples of vegetables? You know, any leaf, stem, root, or seed is a vegetable. But a fruit is different.
And you can see that historically, fruits are colorful and they're sweet. The plants are trying to communicate to us, eat this.
The plants are also trying to communicate to us, don't eat my leaves. Because the plants need their leaves to make photosynthesis.
The leaves are a plant's solar panels. Plants are pretty incredible.
And they've been around as long as we have. And plants take energy from the sun and make it into glucose.
If we could do that, the would have the obesity epidemic would be solved, right? Because you could just go outside and get energy, right? So plants do this through a process called photosynthesis, and they're sort of chloroplast, which is in some ways their equivalent of a mitochondria. That's how they make energy.
But they take sun energy, and they make it into glucose, almost reverse of what we do. So plants make glucose, but they need their solar panels.
And so humans and plants have, and animals, animals, humans, and plants have always coexisted. But if humans can just go eat plants, then all the plants are going to be gone because plants can't run away from us.
When you're hunting an animal, we were talking about hunting, it's hard to hunt a deer or an antelope or a bison. They can run away or they can kick you or gore you or use their antlers.
These animals have mobility as a defense mechanism generally or venom, right? A snake or a scorpion or whatever. Plants are just kind of stuck in the ground.
I can just walk up to any plant outside here and go start eating its bark. So that plant out of necessity, historically, has developed or was created with defense chemicals to dissuade insects, fungi, humans, animals from eating it without regard to what's in it.
And this is not the stuff of fairy tale. It's not opinion.
This is botanical science. Plant defense chemicals are real.
There are so many plants that if we go eat them, we'll die immediately, right? I mean, think about mushrooms.

There are so many poisonous mushrooms that do this. Mushrooms are kind of stuck in the ground too.
Mushrooms are a different story for the most part, but they're an interesting story separate

from plants. They're not in the same kingdom as plants.
They do reverse respiration. They inhale

oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide like us. Plants inhale carbon dioxide, exhale oxygen because of

photosynthesis. So mushrooms are interesting.
We can talk about them too. But the whole plant

I think that's a good thing. hail oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide like us.
Plants inhale carbon dioxide, exhale oxygen because of photosynthesis. So mushrooms are interesting.
We can talk about them too. But the whole plant idea is that plants, out of necessity, contain defense chemicals.
And those defense chemicals can be harmful for humans at the level of our gut, at the level of our immune system, at the level of absorption of nutrients. And some people are uniquely sensitive to plant defense chemicals.

Historically, when hunter-gatherers eat vegetables,

they almost always ferment them.

We don't do that so much.

Think about how we eat grains today.

And I haven't really mentioned grains a whole lot.

I'm not a huge fan of grains.

I think most humans get much healthier when they stop eating grains.

Probably because we eat grains by just cooking them.

And that gets rid of some of the defense chemicals,

but not all of the defense chemicals.

So take a look for instance. Oats are high in a compound called phytic acid, which is a big molecule that chelates minerals.
And if you cook oats into oatmeal, and oats are a plant seed, right? It's been rolled into like a little flat oat. If you cook oats into oatmeal, you degrade maybe 40% of the phytic acid, but still 60% is left, meaning that if you're eating oatmeal in the morning for breakfast, and say you're putting milk on your oatmeal, you're not absorbing as much of the calcium or magnesium in the milk because the phytic acid in the oats is binding it and it's going out in your poop.
Oats also contain zinc, but you're not absorbing much of the zinc in oats because it contains phytic acid. So historically, what would humans have done to eat oats? We would have fermented it for days.
And this makes this kind of nasty fermented sour oat mash, but that's a much safer way to eat oats. You can degrade more than 90% of the phytic acid in oats, but you have to ferment it for four and a half days at a temperature of 78 degrees Fahrenheit and a pH of 4.8.
It's possible, but no one does that, right? We go to the store and we get Quaker oatmeal and we just put, you know, oats are also full of saponins, which is another type of defense chemical that is not degraded with cooking that is irritating for our gut. It's a defense chemical in oats.
Many oats today are contaminated with glyphosate as a pesticide. So grains are plant seeds.
So seeds, nuts, grains, and beans are all plant seeds. If you plant those in the ground, it grows into a plant.
That means it's a seed. So all of those have potential problems for humans in the way that we digest them.
All of those contain digestive enzyme inhibitors because plants don't want them to get digested or plant DNA doesn't move to the next generation.

Plants are interested in reproducing also.

We find meaning as humans in moving our DNA

to the next generation.

That's what we're kind of programmed to do.

Some would say that's the point of life.

I think that they might not be very wrong in that.

Plants do the same thing.

Plants want to move their DNA to the next generation,

but because we coexist with plants, as do animals and other things that want to eat the plants, plants have defense chemicals. So the idea of shunning vegetables is most applicable to those people that are very immune sensitive.
If someone has an autoimmune condition, whether it's lupus or Sjogren's or rheumatoid arthritis, and there are a lot of autoimmune conditions. Inflammatory bowel disease is autoimmune.
My eczema, psoriasis, skin conditions, these are all autoimmune. In that case, I think it's worth considering a trial, a temporary trial of vegetable elimination to see if your autoimmune disease gets better.
Interesting. So I just did a podcast with my friend when I was in D.C.
Her name's Courtney Swan, and this will be on her podcast. We talked about her fiance.
His name's Hector, and I'll tell the story because it's so striking, and I've heard this over and over and over. He's had psoriasis for the last 10 to 15 years.
They tried everything. She's in the health space.
And finally, he just got fed up and said, I'm going to do a carnivore diet. And I said, okay, do carnivore plus fruit.
Do meat plus squash plus fruit. And for the first time, his psoriasis is getting better.
It's almost completely resolved. No shit.
No shit. This happens all the time.
Does everyone need to get rid of all the vegetables? No. Some people with autoimmune disease, Jordan Peterson is a great example, are uniquely sensitive in an autoimmune fashion.
And is it because of her gut flora? Is it because of exposures I had as a kid? Is it because of my genetics? Who knows? Vegetables are way healthier than Snickers bars. But for some people, eliminating vegetables results in incredibly just profound immune resolution.
I don't know anybody that would have a problem getting rid of vegetables.

Some people really like vegetables, Sean.

Every once in a while, I'm talking to somebody,

usually a girl, who says,

but I like my vegetables.

I think we've also been programmed to believe

that salad is good for us.

And I think a lot of people use salad,

ladies, I'm talking to you,

as just to fill themselves up.

And they feel like that's how they can lose weight.

That's the wrong way to lose weight.

The way to lose weight is to eat higher quality foods. Don't substitute lower nutrient density foods.
The other problem with vegetables is that the nutrients in vegetables are less bioavailable than they are in animal foods often. So plant protein, animal protein, you probably talked about this with Gabrielle Lyon, animal protein is much more bioavailable, about twice as bioavailable as plant protein.
So 50 grams of protein from tofu is not the same as 50 grams of protein from a steak, both in terms of coexisting nutrients that you get, because there are many nutrients in meat that occur only in animal foods, creatine, carnitine, anserine, taurine, B12, K2, uniquely important, vital role for humans in their diets. They don't occur in plants.
Plants may have other nutrients that are useful for humans, but nutrients that occur in plants often not as bioavailable. So 50 grams of protein from steak, much more bioavailable 50 grams protein from tofu.
You could eat twice as much tofu, but again, you're still not getting any of the nutrients in meat. And I would argue there are other downsides to eating tofu.
There is a study that shows that soy actually decreases androgen receptor density. Soy doesn't decrease testosterone or sex hormones.
You heard the term soy boys? And the colloquial notion is that soy decreases androgens or testosterone. That doesn't seem to happen in humans based on what I've seen.
But it does decrease, at least in one study, androgen receptor density, which is interesting because in order for testosterone to work, it has to bind to a receptor. So I'm not a huge fan of soy for a lot of reasons.
Soy is also a hugely subsidized crop in the United States. We can talk about, I think, $45 billion annually.
Maybe, I'll have to check that. But $45 billion potentially annually in crop subsidies for soy.
And all that soy, most of that soy goes to soybean oil. Wow.
It goes to seed oils. Wow.
Well, I mean, we've covered a lot of information here. I'm on overload.
But, you know, what I want to... I didn't mean to break your brain.
No, no, it's good. I, a lot of information in here.
But what I want to get to as we kind of wrap this up is how do... So we've all been eating shit basically for damn near our entire life if not our entire life.
I did as a kid. Is it reversible? Absolutely.
So you move to single-ingredient foods, move to high-protein, high-meat, fruits. Moderate, yes.
Does your body cleanse itself? Absolutely. How long does that take? Weeks to months, like we talked about.
Weeks to months? Weeks to months, yeah. Humans see radical changes.
Let's talk about macros for a second to give people the idea of how to do this you don't have to move to a lot of meat but i do think in terms of protein fat and carbohydrate amounts you want about one gram of protein per pound of body weight from animal protein that's important not plant protein animal protein so i weigh 165 pounds on a daily basis i'm thinking and this just happens intuitively for me now I want about 165 grams of animal protein. So I weigh 165 pounds.
On a daily basis, I'm thinking, and this just happens intuitively for me now, I want about 165 grams of animal protein per day. I get that from meat.
I get it from raw milk. That's about it.
Sometimes I get it from protein powder if I'm on the go. And if you're using a protein powder, be aware there's a lot of junk protein powders out there also.
You want something good with ingredients your great-grandmother would recognize. Once you get one gram of protein per pound of body weight from animal food, which is actually a little more than most humans need, the number is probably 0.8, but if you aim for one, you'll probably get plenty.
You have fat and carbohydrates left, and you can dial your fat and carbohydrates based on how active you are. When I'm in Costa Rica surfing for a few hours every day, skating, doing a little bit of stuff,

maybe some sprints on the treadmill,

swimming in the pool with friends,

I eat a lot of carbohydrates.

I personally, which doesn't work for everyone,

often have 300 grams of carbohydrates a day

from honey, from fruit, from squash.

Not everyone needs 300 grams of carbohydrates a day,

but I think it's important to at least track

and know what you feel good with.

I think individually,

that difference between fat and carbohydrates

is going to be something that you'll have to figure out for yourself. Some people do a little better with more fat.
Some people do better with more carbohydrates. I wouldn't do no carbohydrates.
I wouldn't do keto for most people. Ketogenic diets have applications if you have epilepsy, advanced dementia.
But I think for most people, a ketogenic diet is not needed to be optimally healthy, and it can have some downsides to it. Electrolyte insufficiency, energy production issues, stress on the human body.
So getting enough carbohydrates, I think from more bioavailable, less toxic sources, so get rid of the grains would be my advice to most people, or ferment the heck out of your grains. Fruit, honey, raw dairy.
If you get carbohydrates from there and then you get fat just along with your food, a lot of times if you're eating animal meat and you're not looking for the leanest animal meat because now you're no longer fearing saturated fat, then you're getting fat with your foods you're eating. Oh, good.
So that fat-carbohydrate ratio can be determined person to person. I am probably 15% to 20% of my calories is protein, more likely 17%.
I'm about 35% to 40% of my calories as carbohydrates, and the rest is fat on a daily basis, depending on what I'm doing. So just to give people a baseline, everybody's not going to be the same as me.
So is there anything people can do to speed this up? We talk weeks, months, possibly a year. What about some of these things people are doing like plasma exchange? I believe the reason plasma exchange works, well, plasma exchange is just plasma.
Maybe you're cleaning out some of the broken proteins. That might help.
The blood transfusions are interesting. This idea of getting blood from a younger human.
I'm not advocating for this. But you see it in animal studies, right? And the reason it works mechanistically, which is why this is interesting, is because you are getting cells that have membranes that are not as full of polyunsaturated fatty acids.
That's why I think it works. So you can recreate that in your own body, but in animal studies, and some people have dabbled with this as humans, although it's super controversial when this happens, right? And this is like the conspiracy theories, getting blood from kids or something.
That's not what I'm advocating for, but in animal studies, you can see that if you give the blood from a young animal to an older animal, the older animal does better, And vice versa, older animal to younger animal, younger animal does worse. Aging blood is often just full of all of these components in this garbage food.
And this linoleic acid is accumulating in our membranes. So I really think that the better you make your diet, the faster you will heal.
And again, all of this is framed in the part of our earlier conversation, which is that's difficult. Behaviorally, time-wise, that's difficult.
But I would say it's a geometric progression. The more you improve the quality of your diet, the faster you're going to feel better.
And I think nearly invariably, you will feel better. And it doesn't have to happen overnight.
Other things, I mean, I think peptides have applications in certain individuals. If you work with a qualified provider, get to the root cause.
Don't use peptides, TRT, or any of these therapies without correcting the actual foundation, which is how you eat and how you live. So you can speed it up.
I think most people, if they're very sick, should consider that, but it can be used as an adjunct. Interesting.
You know, one of your guys was asking me about TRT earlier, and I'll just make a comment about that if it's okay. So he said, what do you think about TRT? And I said, I think most men who go on TRT do so without having their doctors really try and figure out what's causing the testosterone to be low.
As an example, I'll use myself. I'm 47.
I take no drugs, no hormones. I've never done TRT.
And my testosterone is 850. So I have a normal healthy testosterone for a man who's nearly 50 years old.
I know that there are some men who have had injury to the testicles

in rugby or something, or they've had PTSD

or a concussive injury, traumatic brain injury,

and that can affect the production at the level of the pituitary

to the gonadotropins that tell the testicles to make testosterone.

So there are some actual physical reasons

for the testicles not to make enough testosterone,

but I think that the majority of men with low testosterone are sleeping like crap and they're eating like crap. And if you fix those two things, you can probably correct the root cause of your low testosterone and you may not need TRT.
Because TRT, it's not a bad thing for humans, but it's not normal circadian biology in terms of how it's fluctuating in a day, and

oftentimes it can affect fertility,

and sometimes it causes the testicles

to stop making as much testosterone,

which leads to dependence on it long term.

So before you go on TRT,

work with someone who can think about

what you're eating and how you're living,

and maybe that helps.

Great advice, great advice.

Well, Doc, I appreciate you coming in.

You all right?

Yeah.

I got a lot to think about.

Too much?

I'm making a lot of changes, and I can't wait to talk to my wife about some of this.

How's your diet?

It's getting better.

Yeah?

It's getting better.

So, yeah.

Have you heard of the Yuka app by chance?

I have, yeah.

I haven't used it, and I'm not sure that I would always agree with their assessment of those things, but I'd be curious. I'm not saying that I buy off on everything either, but that got introduced to me, I don't know, maybe about six months ago.
And the thing I like about it is it talks about all the additives and shit like that. It's all garbage sometimes like i mentioned at the beginning you know being an entrepreneur being busy all the time and um and a lot of travel and stuff i mean for somebody like me that's not educated in nutrition or the medical field i mean i i think we talked about educating the public and i'm not affiliated with them i would would love to be, but I don't get anything out of calling them out.
But I think it's a good, I mean, for me, it was a good start. And you scan the barcode, and you see these things you think might be healthy, and you scan the damn barcode, and they rate it one out of 100.
And it's like oh this is a 15 and it's like oh shit like i thought this so i think it's i think it's a great way for people on the move that are busy yeah um to to at least get somewhat of a handle on on what they are consuming and it will tell you it's like these are theitives. These are the things that the additives are known to cause,

health deficiencies and diseases and such.

And so it's really revolutionized my diet.

The thing I'll say about yuca, I've seen some examples,

and I think, I could be wrong about this,

I think it doesn't like saturated fat.

I just look at the additives.

Yeah, okay, yeah, that's important. I didn't look at, you know, it's like, yeah, I can scan my gummy bears and I know they're shit and I know, you know what I mean? We'll make them better.
We're going to make them better. But what I'm saying is, you know, it's like at least I don't have all the additives going into my body.
And once we get the additives out, then we'll move into some of the other stuff like what you're talking about. What about seed oils? Are you aware of seed oils in your diet? I'm not.
You're the first person I've really kind of dug into on this, and this has been a discussion. I just had Gabrielle Lyons on.
She was kind of saying that there is no proof that seed oils are bad for you. Oh, I disagree with her on that.
I completely agree. Major disagreement.
She knew she was going to get some flack from talking about that. But all in all, for people that don't have the time to do a deep dive study like I just did with you, I think it's a good start.
I know there's a couple other apps. I think there's one called Bobby Approved or something.
Yeah, that's my friend Bobby Parrish. Maybe I should make an app too.
It is helping people, man. It's helping thousands and thousands of people make more conscious, better decisions with their food, including me.
Do we have a minute or two for me to respond to that from Gabrielle about the seed oils? Yeah, go ahead.

This actually really kind of grinds my gears.

I didn't know that she felt that way.

I'm going to have to have her to have a discussion.

Maybe I can have a friendly debate with her on my podcast.

She is saying that based on randomized controlled trials with seed oils.

Earlier in the podcast, we talked about

the history of seed oils.

They've never been in the human diet.

They're much more prevalent than they ever were. They increase the propensity of LDL to become oxidized.
They become incorporated into membranes. They lead to proton leak at the level of mitochondria.
They lead to overactivation of the sodium potassium ATPase. And the proponents of seed oils, because there are actually people out there who say there's no evidence they're bad, will look at randomized controlled trials with seed oils, which are the gold standard.
The problem with the randomized controlled trials with seed oils is the majority of them were done, in fact, all of them were done between 1950 and 1985. And between 1950 and 1985, we didn't understand that trans fat was harmful for humans.
And so I would tell this to Gabrielle respectfully, if you actually look at those randomized controlled trials, which is what everyone who says seed oils are benign, or there's no evidence for them being harmful, if you look at those randomized controlled trials, you need to throw the majority of them out. Because there are trans fats in the control groups of those trials.
Whether you're talking about the Finnish mental health study, or you're talking about the DART trial, or St. Thomas angiography re St.
Thomas angiography

study there or St. Thomas angiography study.
There's so many of these trials that have trans fats in the control group or that are multifactorial interventions. So I've been trying to organize a debate about this and really show people.
And at the top of my X is a thread pinned where I go through all 11 randomized controlled trials on seed oils, and I break every single one of them down, and I show people how badly these trials have been done. And the only way that I think anyone could come to the conclusion that seed oils, that there's no evidence they're harmful for humans, is to not have read those trials and to not understand how flawed they are.
Because there are many trials, the Sydney Diet Heart Study, the Minnesota Coronary Study, the Rose Coronary Trial, which all show that seed oils increase the risk of heart disease in relative to saturated fats from animals. The problem is that there are many other trials that get thrown into a meta-analysis, and then Darius Mazzafarian or Hamley has a forest plot, and they're using faulty in their meta-analysis.
That's really the conversation that I think needs to be had, that anyone who thinks that seed oils are benign needs to take another look at the studies and realize the studies that you are citing are badly flawed. I think that the best trials with seed oils versus saturated fat clearly show they're harmful.
To be frank, we need another trial. We need a trial that's done in 2025.
We need a trial that shows, that answers this question now, because we cannot fully rely, because doctors are not reading the studies, because they're coming to conclusions like that. So I appreciate, Gabrielle, I respect your opinion, and I disagree with that very strongly if you actually read the trial.
So that's important because there are many very intelligent,

well-intentioned people.

I shouldn't say many.

There are a few intelligent, well-intentioned people out there saying

that there's no evidence that those are harmful.

And like, man, put me in the ring.

Well, I hope you guys have that debate.

Let's go.

Yeah.

Let's go.

Love to see it.

I think just use your intuition is what I would say to people.

I'm sorry I got a little technical there. No, no.
It's all, no, that wasn't a hit. That's good.
Okay. You know what I mean? Use your intuition is what I would say to people.
I'm sorry I got a little technical there. No, no.
That wasn't a hit. That's good.
Okay. You know what I mean? Use your intuition.
Eat single ingredient foods. Eat foods that your great-grandmother would recognize, and you'll be fine.
And seed oils are not on that list. And if people want to get super technical, I'm happy to go to the mat with them and show them the actual problems with all these studies they think are vindicating or benign for seed oils, and it's just not true.
It's a big deal. It's important that we have these conversations, though, because people get confused.
Then you have people putting sunflower oil or canola oil on their food, and I think that's a real contributor to problems with human health long-term. Well, Doc, I wish you the best of luck.
I hope to see you again, too. I can't wait, man.
Down in Costa Rica. It'll be much more fun.
We'll be surfing. We won't be so technical.
I had a great time. Thank you, brother.
Thank you so much. Appreciate you.
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