#112 Are Vegetables Healthy, Protein Restriction and Carnivore Diet with Paul Saladino MD

Paul Saladino (0:00)

As we talked about, there are no nutrients that humans cannot get in animals that are in plants. There are no unique nutrients to plants. I mean, people would say vitamin C, and I would say, no, that's not true. There's plenty of vitamin C in animals. If you are protein-restricting and eating carbohydrates, you are triggering mTOR more than your protein. I would argue that the best strategy is carbohydrate restriction rather than protein restriction.

SPEAKER_2 (0:24)

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Siim Land (0:32)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:34)

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Siim Land (0:38)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast. I'm your host Siim Land, and our guest today is Paul Saladino. Paul is a certified functional medicine practitioner and MD. He's a physician and a proponent of the carnivore diet.

Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Saladino (0:54)

Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Siim Land (0:56)

Yeah, you've been a really rising superstar in the carnivore diet world.

This different podcasts. So I thought I'm going to have to get you on my own podcast as well.

Paul Saladino (1:07)

It's been a fun thing recently. We'll have to talk about my journey in carnivore. But yeah, it's been really exciting recently.

Lots of great conversations on podcasts and lots of fun interaction and stuff.

Siim Land (1:20)

But how did you get involved with the carnivore diet as an MD?

Paul Saladino (1:24)

So you know, I think it's basically what happened is that I've been thinking about this since medical school. So I'm in the last few months of my residency in psychiatry at the University of Washington. Psychiatry is a four year residency after your four years of medical school. So I got my MD in 2015 and in a few months in June, I'll be done with residency in psychiatry. And since medical school, I've sort of been thinking about what makes people sick and what makes them well. And I've always been interested in the root cause of illness rather than just using medications to ameliorate symptoms. That paradigm has always frustrated me so much, but that is really the way that traditional medicine does things.

And it's not, I don't think it's a character logical flaw of any of the physicians that are in medicine. It's just the paradigm and the way we're taught. We're not often taught in medicine to think of the root cause of an illness.

But that's always been something that was fascinating to me. And I was always drawn to those ideas. And so I've been thinking about diet especially because we put so much food in our bodies. We put kilogram quantities of food in our bodies. And the idea that diet could leverage health or disease was always so interesting to me. So I've always been interested in whenever I see clear connections or correlations between different ways of eating and resolution or worsening of diet, that's fascinating.

And being a physician, one of the things that's been hard for me is that a lot of the treatments we use in Western medicine don't work very well. Again, there are pharmaceuticals aimed at ameliorating symptoms, and they don't even work that well, usually because they have side effects and other problems. But what I noticed in the last year or so with the carnivore diet was so intriguing. It was resolution of autoimmune disease, which is traditionally incredibly difficult to treat with this type of diet. Now, we can talk about this as well. This isn't the only type of diet that anecdotally has been shown to improve autoimmune disease. And I think the fact that diet, whether it's a vegan diet or a carnivore diet or whatever type of diet can influence autoimmune disease, I think is a valuable thing. And I think it's interesting to study how each one can improve that and the long-term potential or long-term safety of each one of those diets. But I had experimented and sort of researched vegan diets previously, and I wasn't so excited about the longevity of those and the long-term nutrient sustainability of vegan diets. And so when I saw that carnivore diets were improving autoimmunity, I thought that is a really interesting hypothesis.

The idea that something about eating animals, whether people are eating just meat or eating nose to tail, the latter strategy would be something that I would advocate rather than the former. I don't think it's good to just eat meat.

Was improving autoimmunity would seem to suggest that plants might be triggering autoimmunity, which is such a radical concept, you know, because within the functional medicine space, within the alternative health space, most people would say the complete opposite. You know, they would say, you need to eat lots of plants to be healthy. You need to eat the rainbow. You need plants to improve the quality of your gut flora. And so I was so intrigued by this concept that I had to just dive into it. And it's been such an interesting journey.