#1551 - Paul Saladino

Paul Saladino (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Listen, man, I've been telling everybody that I eat mostly meat, and they look at me like I'm going to die.

And it's kind of funny. And I've had these conversations with people, and they were like, oh, well, if you eat too much meat... Jamie, can we get more waters? We only have one water out here. And I've been telling these people that I eat only meat, and they're like, well, if you eat too much meat, it causes colon cancer, it causes this, it causes that. And one of the things that I say, and it's a talking point that I actually stole from you, is that most plants are inedible, but almost all animals are edible. And when you say that to them, they look at you like, oh, shit. Like if you just go out and eat random plants, you'll get sick as fuck.

That's real.

So like when I tell people I eat mostly meat, they look at me like you're doing something really stupid. Like Rob Lowe started laughing at me. I said, I have like an animal-based diet. Some people are plant-based. I'm animal-based.

Paul Saladino (1:06)

I love that word.

Joe Rogan (1:07)

Yeah, animal-based. Just steal what they're saying.

Paul Saladino (1:10)

And make it better.

Joe Rogan (1:11)

But what you said, what I've heard you say, that's an accurate way of describing it. Most plants are not edible, but almost every animal is edible.

Paul Saladino (1:21)

And I think that if people spend time in the wilderness, regardless of the latitude, they'll start to appreciate this. And I've mostly spent time in latitudes that are further from the equator than not. But even at the equator, if you go walking around the woods or the forest or the jungle there, and you try to eat leaves or stems or bark, you're gonna die.

Really freaking fast.

Joe Rogan (1:44)

Well, how about people who collect mushrooms? They make mistakes.

So easy. I remember there was a story about a guy in a nursing home, and he had went out and picked mushrooms for the people in the nursing home and cooked them up, and they all died. This is like, because he fucked up. Probably his older guy couldn't see or maybe just forgot what's edible or maybe was just losing his mind. But the point is, most of these things you see are not edible.

Paul Saladino (2:09)

And if you think about it from the perspective of a plant, it makes more sense. We never do that anthropomorphization, we never think about that. But as I was learning about this and thinking about carnivore diets and animal-based diets, I had to learn a lot of stuff myself. I was trained as a physician. I wasn't trained as an anthropologist, and I took ecology in college. But when you look at what we know about the timeline of life on Earth, 500-plus million years of plant and animal coevolution.

And there's a lot of people who have speculated this, that essentially plants evolve, animals evolve, animals start eating plants, plants evolve defenses, animals evolve defenses against the defenses. And then there's a whole series of enzymatic systems in our liver, the phase one and phase two detoxification system, they're called cytochrome P450 and other reactionary systems in our liver that are meant to detoxify things.

And a lot of people speculate, and I think this is really reasonable, that the majority of the reason we have those is so that we could eat plants from time to time so we didn't starve during our evolution. But there's a real interesting interaction here. This is warfare. This is an arms race. That's 400 million years old between plants and animals. And so what was so interesting for me is I got deeper and deeper into this idea around can humans exist? Should humans exist? Will humans thrive on a completely animal-based diet? You start to realize, wait a minute, why are we imagining that plants are benign? They're beautiful. They're fun to look at, but they are rooted in the ground. They can't run away from us. What's their defense? Well, if you're on the desert, a cacti has got a thorn or a rose has a thorn, a spine, but most of them just have plant defense chemicals, and that's not even conjecture. That's just known botanical science that plants make chemicals, broadly called phytoalexins, that are meant to dissuade animals, insects, fungi from over consuming them. And so my fear is that we've assumed that plants are good for us, and we see everything with these plant compounds through the lens of these are good for us. How can we prove they're good for us?