#400 How We Eat: Carnivore Diet with Dr. Paul Saladino
Carnivore Diet
Dr. Paul Saladino is the author of the book, Carnivore Code and the host of the popular Fundamental Health podcast.
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Scott Benner 0:10
Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 400 of the Juicebox Podcast.
Just recently had my first episode was someone who was speaking specifically about how they ate. I believe it was with Jordan and she was a vegan. Since then I've been recording more and more episodes with people that are focused around their different eating styles. When the opportunity to have Dr. Paul Saladino come on the show. Now Paul has an incredibly popular carnivore podcast. So while he does not have type one diabetes, he can explain the concept of carnivore eating very, very granularly. So I thought I'd have him on to pick his brain. A huge group of people in the private Facebook group juice box podcast, type one diabetes, sent in questions for Paul, and we did our best to get through them. Please remember, as you're listening that nothing you hear on the juice box podcast should be considered advice, medical or otherwise, please always consult a physician before making any changes to your health care plan. And please remember this as well. I have no vested interest in how you eat. I'm just trying to shine a light on how we this show is sponsored today by the glucagon that my daughter carries g voke hypo pen, Find out more at G Vogue glucagon.com forward slash juice box. This episode is also sponsored by the contour next one blood glucose meter, Find out more at contour next.com forward slash juice box to give you a little background. So you kind of know why I reached out to you. Because I'm the father of a child with Type One Diabetes. I don't have diabetes myself, my daughter was diagnosed when she was two. I wrote a blog about it for a decade. And as the years went by, I started recognizing I had a system. I had a system that I knew if I did certain things at certain times and understood how insulin worked, that she could eat anything she wanted. And I was able to maintain an A one C in the in the mid to low fives most of the time honestly,
Dr. Paul Saladino 2:20
what was the system Tell me about it.
Scott Benner 2:22
It just allbasis around understanding how man made insulin works. Okay, the problem ends up being I think, for most people is that they count their carbs, right. And then they say the doctor told me that I know I one unit is for 10 carbs, so I'm having 30 carbs, I put in three units, they don't recognize that the insulin doesn't begin to work right away, that you have to you have to get the insulin in in a pre bolus situation so that as the insulin is beginning to, you know, to work, it works as the food is starting to try to drive up your blood sugar. And then I noticed that people also didn't understand that their basal insulin was very important people with type one diabetes, right. So you know, they they be using a half a unit of an hour when they needed three quarters of you know, an hour, whatever it was to keep basic life body functions, you know, quelled. And then I think the third most important thing is that they don't understand the impact of food, the glycemic load and the glycemic index of some food. So they'll Count 10 carbs of watermelon and bolus at the same way they would count you know, 10 carbs of rice. And those things don't don't work the same, the rice stays in your system longer, it impacts your blood sugar longer, sometimes long after the insulin that you put in is gone drives your blood sugar up, they don't understand because they count their carbs, and they put in their insulin. So that's kind of the basis of it. I'm I I don't not believe that there aren't better ways to eat for specific people's bodies. And I'm certainly not telling you that I think that the standard American diet is in any way healthy. My goal was just to understand that there were going to be people who ate all different ways. And that none of them deserve not to have blood sugars that were in range because they didn't understand how the insulin works. That was pretty much it.
Dr. Paul Saladino 4:05
Yeah, interesting. I mean, it's tough to use man made insulin and mimic the way the body does it. But we do the best we can.
Scott Benner 4:12
Yeah. And it's coming out. I'll tell you that most people listen, this podcast achieve a one C's pretty easily in the sixes and the people that really work on it, get it into the fives. But more recently, because I really do come from a background of not telling people how to do things. I want to start shining a light on how different people eat. So I have recently recorded with a vegan I've recently recorded with somebody who did keto. And if I'm being honest, I always see you, you know about 10 slots ahead of me and the apple podcast charts in medicine and I'm always like, that guy's constantly they're talking about carnivore and my first thought was, I wonder if he could shed some light on what people with type one diabetes see we call it a fat and protein rise. So you know and I first thought that but then I Went back to my community online. I was like, hey, if I had this guy on, would you have questions and they just asked so many questions. So I'd like you to tell me a little bit about how you eat.
Dr. Paul Saladino 5:07
Well, where do you want to start?
Scott Benner 5:09
Well, I think that the first question that people said was, you know, you talk about a carnivore based diet, can you just define what that is?
Dr. Paul Saladino 5:17
Yeah, I think it can be different things for different people. And over the amount of time that I've been researching and talking about animal based diets, my own views have evolved. And changed. I think that the the basic premise that I've come to and people will hear this, if they listen to the recent Joe Rogan podcast is that if you look at indigenous cultures, and you look at human evolution, if you look at where humans have come from, which I think can inform the way that we should be eating, as humans in 2020 indigenous cultures, and anthropological and ethnographic evidence from our ancestors suggests that animal foods have been favored preferentially for millions of years. And probably you can make a really convincing argument that the inclusion of more animal foods in the human diet about 2 million years ago was probably the single biggest catalyst in the growth of the human brain and was a major selective pressure to make humans who we are today, I would suggest that the reason we are human is because we began hunting and eating animals more. There are tons of adaptations on my website, which is heart and soil Co. There is a show notes page for the Rogen episode, which has all this evidence and the anthropology and many of the things I'll talk about today, are linked there under headings, if people want to go back to those, so I made reference that a number of times we put a lot of work into that site, okay. But there's a lot of anthropological evidence there, you can even look at the way that the human eye is structured relative to a Champions Ei, the human throwing arm, a chimpanzee has a black or a dark sclera relative to the iris. And so you can't differentiate the direction that a chimpanzee is looking like you can with a human, we have a light sclera. And so the hypothesis here is that in in humans, as we were becoming more evolved, we were sort of deciding to become a cooperative species as opposed to a competitive species. And many of the things we cooperated on were probably hunting or evasion of from predators. So we were hunting, we were letting other animals know which direction we were looking without making any sounds with a lighter sclera. Of course, we don't know exactly why it happened. But it's a striking finding that a chimpanzee has a dark sclera. And you can't really tell what direction they're looking by looking at their eyes, and humans have a light sclera. Anyway, this is all to the point that meat and organs are invariably favored by humans as valuable food. And we if we want to thrive as humans, if we want to get the nutrients that we need, we should not listen to the mainstream rhetoric which is wrong, that meat and organs are bad for us, or that they harm us in any way. It's based on bad science that's badly done, and misinterpreted, and then parroted without actually digging into the interventional studies. Okay. So one of the people in the email you sent me asked a question, can you talk about the evidence that meat is inflammatory? It's it's a very short conversation, because there is no evidence that meat is inflammatory. And it wouldn't make sense for me to be inflammatory if humans have been eating it, as the majority of our diet, specifically meat and organs, eating nose to tail for millions of years. So there's no interventional studies that I'm aware of, or that I've ever seen that anyone's ever been able to show me and humans that show that meat or organs or animal fat are inflammatory. These foods are what are meant to be eaten by humans.
Scott Benner 8:36
And by job to be You mean, it's how we evolved? It's Yeah, yeah, it's just it's what happened enough times that are due. So do you think this is crazy? Maybe. But do you think if we ate Pop Tarts for a million years, our bodies would evolve to handle them eventually? Or do you think that would be too much for us, and it would overwhelm us?
Dr. Paul Saladino 8:52
Who knows what would happen there, but if there were selective pressures, and the only thing available for humans were Pop Tarts, maybe the people that do best on Pop Tarts would thrive if there were actually a selective pressure for that. But it's hard to see. But that's what you would have to do, you would have to select the genetics in the people who thrive we may be. It's also possible that we are so far from using Pop Tarts as optimal food for humans, that we will just die out.
Scott Benner 9:18
It might kill us before we got used to it. Right?
Dr. Paul Saladino 9:21
Yeah. And this has happened. And so I didn't talk about this on the Joe Rogan episode. We didn't have time. But if you look at the anthropological evidence, look, all this common fossil is thought to be Australopithecus, Australopithecus afarensis and other Australopithecus species. And it looks like Australopithecus diverged into at least two subspecies Homo habilis and Paranthropus and we don't hear about Paranthropus because Paranthropus went extinct. But there were hominid species from Australopithecus that appear to have gone extinct now in the literature and the links to this are all on the website. It looks like home will have or excuse me, Australopithecus was eating a lot of different foods eating some plants and some animals. And the Homo habilis direction of the lineage began to eat more animals. And the Paranthropus lineage began to eat more plants. So we went from chimpanzees and bonobos, which appear to be the common human ancestor to a split, excuse me to an ancestor, like Australopithecus, which was eating more meat, and some plants on the African savanna. And then a diversion again, into more meat eating and less meat eating, and the less meat eating species went extinct. So you would think that something about the environment wasn't suited to that. That species didn't work well on the plains and appears to have gone extinct. And we can tell this by stable isotopes from the teeth of the species. So the lineage of humans appears to have come from a group of our hominid ancestors that were specialized or well adapted to eating meat. So a carnivore diet for me has become about understanding these things. Where have we come from? What are we adapted to be eating red meat, organs, incorrectly vilified, these are the centerpiece of every human diet that we need if we're going to thrive? Now, the second piece of the equation is that plants exist on a toxicity spectrum and really, are not as benign. So it's the opposite of what we've been told. They're not as benign as we've been told they are, I just don't think that there's good evidence that plant leaves, or plant seeds are benevolent for humans. And there are many downsides of these foods that were never told about lots of different toxins in these foods. So the second piece of the equation is understanding that there is individual toxicity of plants and plants exists on a toxicity spectrum. And if we really want to thrive, we should understand the way that certain plants might be creating toxicity in a human. Okay, like what
Scott Benner 11:46
kinds like you're not telling me like romaine lettuce is trying to kill me, right? Well,
Dr. Paul Saladino 11:50
in a way it is actually. I want to hear you know, I mean, think about it from the perspective of a plant does it does a romaine lettuce plant wants you to eat its leaf? No, it's going to put things in there that are going to dissuade you or any other animal or bug or organism that he from overconsuming it now, humans have gotten pretty smart. And we've figured out ways to sort of breed the most toxic chemicals out of many of these plants. But, um, I would say romaine lettuce is one of the least toxic things out there. But it's just it's not a plant food that the plant is actually trying to get you to eat. It's purposely putting things in there that are bad for you. Kale is a good example. Kale has a great publicist, but it just doesn't love you back. Kale is a leaf of a brassica plant. And there are tons of things in kale, specifically goitrogenic compounds called isothiocyanates, that are found throughout the plant kingdom, that are specifically put there by the plant to dissuade animals from over consuming them. And they have many mechanisms in the human body by which they're acting in an in a negative way, specifically interfering with the absorption of iodine, the level of the thyroid, directly oxidizing phospholipids, etc. But the intention of the plant, and the the way it's acting with these defense chemicals is very clear. So the third piece of the equation, which will be important for your listeners, especially, but really anyone is that there are a few types of food that have crept into the human diet in a very subtle way that I think are evolutionarily inconsistent, and these are acting in a very negative way. We don't think of them necessarily as plant foods, but many of them are derived from plants. The things I'm thinking about here are specifically seed oils, things like corn, canola, safflower sunflower, soybean oils. And my concern with these is that they're very high in Omega six polyunsaturated fatty acid called linoleic acid, which appears to break both our mitochondrial electron transport chain signaling, the way that our fat cells are meant to signal and divide, and also our mitochondria at a membrane level, in both the inner and the outer membrane of the mitochondria, so evolutionarily, inconsistent consumption of food is what I'm talking about here. The overarching idea is, what is an evolutionarily consistent diet for humans? What is a species appropriate diet for humans? And how many ways have we gone away from that? Well, to summarize, we've gone away from that by eating less meat and organs, because we've been told they're bad for us, eating less fat from animals, eating less of the connective tissue of animals, by eating more plants, which are highly defended, and really not great sources of nutrients, mostly full of defense chemicals. And by eating things like seed oils, and processed sugars, which none of your listeners will be great fans of, I'm sure. There's a lot of evolutionarily evolutionary and consistencies in the way that humans are eating, that I'm really calling into question. So that's a long winded answer to your question about what a carnivore diet is or what it means for me and what I'm sort of driving out with my message.
Scott Benner 14:49
No, I think that's perfect to understand where you're coming from.
I have to say that after seeing her I'm gonnablank on her name, but I saw a woman on the bill maher show, maybe this A number of months ago talk about seed oils. And I took what she said to heart, like, like, and so I've eliminated every oil in the house. Um, you know, if I need oil, I'm using cold pressed, non processed olive oil. It's the only then I even I think maybe you would tell me not to use that. But I have eliminated all of the others out of my diet. And I don't understand how those oils are bad. And I think most people don't either. So is it really marketing that I believe in my mind that canola oil is the best oil in the world? Like, like, is that just somebody telling me that and I believe it after I hear it enough times?
Dr. Paul Saladino 15:37
Absolutely. And there's a lot of debate here. It's a deep rabbit hole. But I think that canola oil has been foisted upon us as Americans for the last seven years, hand in hand with the demonization of saturated fat. And that's a whole separate story about why saturated fat is incredibly healthy for humans. Why there are unique saturated fats like stearic acid in animal fat, or more complex named fats like penta decanoic acid and animal fat specifically, that seem to have very valuable and indispensable roles in the human physiology that are left out when we shun animal fat. This all kind of began with ancel keys in the 1960s. And with the demonization of saturated fat is the, the sort of praising or the adulation going to unsaturated fat polyunsaturated vegetable oils. This is all kind of corroborated or shored up by the notion that polyunsaturated vegetable oils lower LDL cholesterol, which has also been demonized for decades. But again, I would call that into question and say, what's the real evidence that LDL is a bad thing or the tracking LDL going up and down really is an indicator or associated with the development of cardiovascular disease, I think it's an extremely poor indicator. And if you really dig into that rabbit hole, you'll notice that if you fill yourself with polyunsaturated vegetable oils, even though your LDL goes down, more valuable indicators, like oxidized LPL or LP little a go up. And what we are learning, though it's not mainstream knowledge this time is that LDL is a horrible predictor of cardiovascular disease. But oxidized LDL, oxidized phospholipids on a fo B, or LP little a are pretty good predictors of cardiovascular disease, those things move in the wrong direction when you eat polyunsaturated fat, but nobody's really talking about this, because we've become so hyper focused on LDL. And again, it goes hand in hand with this long demonization for saturated fat for really no clear reason. It's it's been exonerated recently by the American Association of one of the cardiologic associations, but the mainstream is still very bought into this kind of propaganda, that saturated fat is bad for humans,
Scott Benner 17:53
this one indicator in your blood test has to be lower, you're going to have a heart attack. And that's that there's
Dr. Paul Saladino 17:58
single, a single blood indicator that's looked at in a very myopic way. Yeah, people are not thinking about it from a contextual basis.
Scott Benner 18:04
So I'm not I don't subscribe to any specific way of eating, although I can tell you that I booked you about a week ago. And as a test a week ago, I just started eating meat and nothing else for a week. And I will tell you, I am seven pounds lighter than I was last week.
Dr. Paul Saladino 18:21
That's amazing. That's not exactly how I would recommend you do it. But
Scott Benner 18:26
I needed something to talk about with you. So and I would tell you that I do notice a lot of what people talk about my energy is good. I don't miss carbs once they're gone. And I think of carbs mainly as sugar. Because be I have to be you know, beyond bread. I don't think I'm a really carb person. You know, like, I don't eat cookies. But if you gave me a cookie, I'd eat all of the cookies. I don't have like a you know, like there's no gauge in there. But I'm not I I am never going to be a person who's like, oh, my goodness, a cookie, I'll have this cookie and walk away. But what I what I learned years ago, when the Atkins diet was incredibly popular, and tried it and found it really valuable for weight loss. The one thing I had to keep telling myself while I was doing it, and I don't know if I was wrong or not. But I can't eat these other carbs right now. Because as long as I'm eating these meats, and the fats and everything, my body was processing it fine. But the minute you add in some sugar or some carbs or some flour, your body all the sudden it feels like it holds everything in and I don't know how to quantify that. And I wanted to ask you about it. Like, why does my body begin to retain water and my energy go down when I have like white flour and things like that in my diet? Is there a reason?
Dr. Paul Saladino 19:40
Well, probably I mean white flour is from wheat. Wheat is full of gluten, which is a lectin. There's both gliadin and glutenin component to gluten. And wheat is a grain, right wheat is a seed. It's very highly defended. And the lectin which is a carbohydrate binding protein in wheat is one of the more Highly studied lectins in medicine today, and it's a very immunogenic protein. So I do think this is a good segue into discussing carbohydrates. And I'm not dogmatic to the extent that I think that a carnivore or carnivore diet needs to be low carb per se. I think that low carbohydrate diets can be beneficial for some people, we should talk about it in the context of type one diabetes. That's one context where I think a low carbohydrate diet can be very helpful. And I'll come back to that, because I've specifically seen many type one diabetics do very well with animal based diets that are low in carbohydrates. But generally speaking, I'm not vilifying carbohydrates on their own, per se. I think there are certain types of carbohydrates, white flour, refined sugars, specifically wheat with wheat gluten and other lectins that do not play well with human physiology. There are just too many immunogenic antigens like gluten, like lectins, that are that are not going to be good for you with wheat. Now, whether or not you would have the same reaction to a sweet potato, or white rice, we just had the whole stripped away, and it's a grain, which is in some ways been detoxified a little bit is questionable. And that would be an interesting thing to look at whether you would have the same reaction to that. But you when you're thinking about carbohydrates, it's important or at least valuable to consider how ancestrally consistent they are, and how our ancestors ate them. Certainly seasonally, our ancestors did eat fruit when it was available. And if you think about a plant plant is living in the ground, it's rooted in the ground. It doesn't want you to eat its stem, its leaves, its seeds or its roots. And those are often very toxic on plants. There are many toxic roots out there like cassava, there are some roots that we find in our culture today that have been detoxified. But there are many toxic plants there are many toxic seeds. But if you look at fruit generally speaking, much more fruit is edible for humans than not there is some toxic fruit out there. But there's a lot of non toxic fruit in the world as well. And many ancestral cultures, indigenous cultures consume fruit or honey now, caveat for someone whose pancreas doesn't produce insulin, eating a bunch of fruit or honey may not be a very good thing frequently, right? But for for those whose pancreas is pancreas do work well, in the context of a pancreas that works well. Carbohydrates do not cause diabetes, I should say type two diabetes in my opinion, I think there's no evidence of that. And there are many indigenous cultures that took us into the Kitab ins etc, who eat moderate to large amounts of carbohydrates and remain metabolically healthy. Now, we're shifting a little bit here to type one type, excuse me type two diabetes, which is metabolic health and insulin resistance versus type one. But in your case, if you are eating just meat, that's really interesting. A lot of people will lose a lot of weight when they go to a ketogenic or low carbohydrate diet because the glycogen stores in their muscles shift and you could lose water weight. I do think that if you continue this diet, you will lose adipose tissue in a good way. I would not recommend eating just meat I would recommend eating organs eating nose to tail Okay, getting getting all of the pieces of the animal because our ancestors and indigenous cultures don't just eat meat they eat the bones and they make bone broth and they Oregon's there are unique nutrients in those things. An animal is essentially a huge multivitamin, but you must eat it nose to tail. Now, some people don't want to eat things like liver or heart or other organs, which is why desiccated organs are valuable. That's why I built heart and soil which is my company we make desiccated organs. I mentioned the website earlier it's heart in soil co if people are listening to this, and you want to include more organs in your diet, because they have unique nutrients that are not found in the muscle meat. But you don't want to actually eat the organs. If you can get the fresh organs. That's great. But a lot of people, it's they're not ready for that. So I want to bridge that gap.
Scott Benner 24:02
You're talking about supplements, like you're not gonna send me a bunch of calf livers in the mail or something like that, right?
Dr. Paul Saladino 24:07
I'm gonna send you what what I would send you in the mail is a bunch of calf liver and heart and spleen and pancreas that's been freeze dried and put into a capsule. Gotcha.
Scott Benner 24:17
Yeah, that that seems more palatable for the male system. At the very least.
Dr. Paul Saladino 24:20
It's more palatable for most people and many of those organs are difficult to obtain in general for people, but if you can get the fresh organs, they're valuable. And so just to drive that point home. Animal meat is very nutritious, but it doesn't have everything that humans need to thrive all the micronutrients. So weight loss is about a couple of things. Weight loss is about calories. It's about satiety. And for diabetics, they're thinking about macronutrients how much fat how much protein, how many carbohydrates, that's important, but thriving long term is really about micronutrients. Where are we getting Selenium fully? vitamin B 12 bio And riboflavin vitamin K to full spectrum Amanda Quinones, where are we getting zinc and copper and manganese and molybdenum? Well, this is where animal foods really shine and plant foods start to really pale in comparison. The nutrients we need as humans are in animals. There are some implants but they are, they're less robust. They are less bioavailable, and there are many that are missing from plants in general. So I'll say something controversial right now, but it's a very important summary statement up to this point in the podcast. And the statement is that all of the nutrients found in plants can be obtained in animal foods in more bioavailable forms. And the reverse is not true. animal foods contain many nutrients that are not found at all, or in any appreciable amount in the plant kingdom. Things like creatine carnitine, Coleen carnosine, k two b 12, bieten, riboflavin, the list goes on. And on zinc, iron, copper, there are so many minerals and nutrients that are simply either not found in plants, or found in very small amounts in very, very paltry bioavailable sources. So this kind of goes back to the first notion that I was talking about that there's a real inequality between the value of animal foods and plant foods in our diet, people think that they're eating plant foods for nutrients. But if you really animal foods, nose to tail, there are no nutrients that you cannot get from that. Okay. And I'll repeat that if you eat animal foods, nose to tail, there are no nutrients you cannot get from that. And so when I say that, immediately, people say, what about vitamin C, and the shocker is that there is plenty of vitamin C in animal foods. This is widely documented. Again, it's on the heart and soil co front slash Rogan show notes, there's a whole heading vitamin C, there's vitamin C in animal foods in fresh animal foods, there is vitamin C. And I think that it's if you really look at literature for vitamin C, it's just not clear that mega doses aren't any way beneficial for humans. And I think that the the needed dose of vitamin C is much lower than we think it is. However, the point is just that there are no nutrients and plant foods that you cannot get an animal foods, everything a human needs to thrive, you can get from animals. And so when I make that statement, there are all sorts of rebuttals and questions. What about fiber? What about polyphenols, we can go down any of those rabbit holes you'd like. But I just wanted to make the point that if you're going to eat this way, eating just meat is not the way to do it. You want to get Oregon's you want to eat gnosis Hell is a good start. But you need a little more. Yeah. And for people who have a pancreas that works, carbohydrates are not the enemy, but understand that certain sources of carbohydrates are going to be more toxic than others. And I'll just say this, that in someone who has type one diabetic, on a carnivore diet, I've seen people's insulin use go way, way down. There are also published case studies of reversal of type one diabetes in young children in who it is caught quickly. So there's a nine year old published case study of a nine year old, who they saw c peptide declining, they saw insulin declining, the child was shifted to a nose to tail carnivore diet, and they saw recovery of C peptide. Now, in many autoimmune diseases, whether it's autoimmune thyroid, or autoimmune type one diabetes, it has to do with how much of the gland is preserved. But the underlying question is, why is the gland being attacked by the immune system in the first place? Is there something triggering it and I think that that's a reasonable hypothesis to say there's something in the diet of these kids that is causing the pancreas to be attacked by the immune system. Now whether that thing is cow's milk, or an egg white or a plant is questionable, but I think that if, if kids start to have issues with this, and we put them on a simple type of animal based protocol without milk, without egg whites, and without plants, this can be very helpful. And we can understand why the body is attacking the pancreas or if someone has hashimotos. Why is the body attacking the thyroid? or, in the case of all the autoimmune diseases asking the question, why is the body attacking this organ, whether it's antiphospholipid syndrome or etc, like, it usually has to do with our diet. And there is something in the diet that is triggering the immune system. That's a very radical notion for Western medicine, but I think it's one that cannot be ignored. So taking all that into consideration, I'll just throw it back to you and see if you have any questions and ask you where you want to go next.
Scott Benner 29:30
Yeah, I'm gonna run through some listener questions if you don't mind. The first one is that a person heard that carnivore eating builds his insulin resistance and I wanted to know what you thought of that. g Volk, hypo pan has no visible needle, and is the first pre mixed auto injector of glucagon for very low blood sugar in adults
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dex comm touched by type one right there in the show notes of your podcast player, and it juicebox podcast calm. Alright, let's get back to Paul and the listener submitted questions. What was that very first question again. A person heard that carnivore eating builds insulin resistance, and I wanted to know what you thought of that.
Dr. Paul Saladino 32:51
Insulin resistance is a complex topic. It's usually used as a pathological term. So carnivore eating does not cause pathological insulin resistance or metabolic dysfunction. ketogenic diets, low carbohydrate diets, by necessity result in physiologic insulin resistance. And that is our body's way of partitioning glucose for tissues that need it like the brain, the testicles, the ovaries, the adrenal, the red blood cells, and sparing it at the level of the muscles. That's normal physiology. So if someone says low carb or a ketogenic diet results in insulin resistance, that's completely true. But it's physiologic insulin resistance, and it's glucose sparing. That's a very different physiologic state, then pathological insulin resistance or metabolic dysfunction. So there's nuance there, and I've talked about it I don't like the term insulin resistance, because without insulin resistance, everyone listening to this podcast would be dead. Many people developed some low low level of insulin resistance at the level of the muscle with an overnight fast, or if they've gotten sick and haven't eaten for 24 or 36 hours or so. physiologic insulin resistance is necessary for human life. And it has to do with which tissue is going to be most responsive to insulin. It's normal physiology. Yeah,
Scott Benner 34:14
I found talking to people because I don't use the term either for different reasons, because when I'm talking to people about how much insulin they need to combat a certain food, they, I find that they're like, well, I became insulin resistant. I usually say Well, I think what happened was you ate something that is that needs a ton of this insulin, and it didn't fit into your theory about how much I usually use for this many carbs. And I think insulin resistance in the Type One Diabetes community. The term gets a little bastardized away from the medical meaning of it. So
Dr. Paul Saladino 34:48
it's, it's complicated, right? Because then the real thing we're dealing with here is metabolic dysfunction and pathological insulin resistance. And I think that there's pretty good evidence and I've spoken about this on my podcast, which Just called fundamental health with a number of people, it's an ongoing discussion that I have. I think that in humans, when our fat cells become too large, this is a different side hypertrophy. There is there can be associated impairment of epigenesis, which is the expansion of the fat cell mass, and that's a dip beside hyperplasia. And there are compounds, specifically compounds from seed oils, excess omega six, leading to break down products like for HIV and other nine and 13 hode that appear to contribute to disordered signaling at the level of the fat cell. And if the fat cells become too big, they start to burst their buttons and spew out free fatty acids and other inflammatory mediators that signal pathological insulin resistance or metabolic dysfunction. Now, it is possible for someone with Type One Diabetes, or type two diabetes, to be consuming lots of linoleic acid, lots of seed oils, and potentially be having their fat cells grow so much that they are metabolically dysfunctional, they do have underlying insulin resistance. But there's a lot of nuance here in terms of how insulin responding at the cellular level. And I think that this gets back to another thing for both type one or type two diabetics, you want your tissues to respond to insulin, when it's around, that's very clear. And you want your body to decide when the tissues will respond to insulin and when they will not. If you are fasting, you want your bodies to not respond to insulin so that you can spare the glucose for other places, because as you suggested, people always have a basal level of insulin. Even when I checked my fasting insulin, and it's three, there's always a little bit of insulin around. And if some of my tissues were not partitioning, how they respond to that insulin, after an overnight fast, then all the glucose will get taken up by muscle cells or somewhere else. And there would be none left in my blood. And suddenly my liver would have to make glucose, it would be a major problem. Yeah. So there's a lot of partitioning of nutrients. And people can become metabolically dysfunctional or have this pathological insulin resistance developed if the diet is not correct.
Scott Benner 37:07
If we set aside carnivores eating for a second, and I said to you to make a positive change in your life, you should have less sugar or no sugar, stay away from grains and flour and processed oils. Would that in general, make most people healthier?
Dr. Paul Saladino 37:25
Absolutely. Yeah. That's a huge step in the right direction. Okay. Think about how many foods that would disqualify?
Scott Benner 37:31
Yes, I do. I think about I've been thinking about bread for six days, Paul.
Dr. Paul Saladino 37:36
Very soon, very soon, your your your connection with bread will be severed, and you'll be a stronger human because of it. And again, it's not to say that carbohydrates are the enemy, but my concern is that weed is particularly immunogenic. Okay,
Scott Benner 37:49
hey, people who have chronic kidney disease, if they were going to switch over to this way of eating, do they need to get a full checkup with their doctor before they start this person asks, because of high proteins in the diet, it could elevate creatine and people with kidney chronic kidney disease, is that something you'd know about?
Dr. Paul Saladino 38:06
Yeah, this is important to consider. So in healthy individuals, more protein is not bad for your kidneys, nor is it bad for your liver. And one of the breakdown products of creatine is creatine, and we use creatine as a surrogate marker for kidney function. The kidneys don't release creatine when they're hurt. It's the excretion versus reabsorption of creatine in the tubules of the kidney that gives us a sense of how well the kidney is filtering things, we use that to calculate a glomerular filtration rate. So sometimes when people are eating more protein, they will see the creatinine rise. But if that's the case, they should also get a stat and see, which is another measure of kidney function. Again, neither of these are direct measures of kidney function. They're both surrogates, you get to stat and see to get a sense of what the kidneys really doing. Someone with chronic kidney disease is a totally different story. The jury's still out here, but if you already have damaged kidneys, you may need to check your lipids or excuse me, your your, your blood markers closely, because it is possible that your body won't be able to handle that much protein in which case you want to do a slightly lower protein diet. You can still do an animal based diet but you may not be able to handle that much protein because damaged tissue is damaged tissue a pancreas that's damaged isn't going to start working kidneys that are damaged are not going to start working. If you have normal healthy kidneys you'll be fine with more protein damaged kidneys or like damaged pan cry, damaged thyroids etc.
Scott Benner 39:34
Right so definitely check with a doctor sothis came up a bunch and I found this in my own life like the idea of eating just carnivore How do I do that a in an affordable way. How do I do it for people who are maybe trying to make a change who are picky and talk a little bit about the quality of the meat I found myself this week. Overwhelmingly thinking about something I heard you say somewhere else about if a cow eats grain to grow. I am getting the grain through the cow's meat. Is that right?
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