#162 Can You Survive Eating the Carnivore Diet with Dr Paul Saladino

Paul Saladino (0:00)

And I think for some people who have severe autoimmune disease or illnesses and inflammation that don't resolve when they leave some plants in their diet, that is a very viable strategy to go full carnivore.

And I think that full carnivore diet is viable for nearly every human on the planet biologically, or at least biochemically. But I also admit, or I suggest, that it doesn't have to be that strict for all people, and appreciation of the fact that animal foods are incredibly nutrient rich, and that plant foods can be toxic. And if we're going to include plant foods in our diet, we should have some sense of the relative toxicities of those. That I think is really one of the take home messages.

Siim Land (0:39)

Body Mind Empowerment.

SPEAKER_3 (0:41)

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Paul Saladino (0:47)

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Siim Land (0:52)

Welcome to the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast.

I'm your host Siim Land and our guest today is Dr. Paul Saladino. Paul is a functional medicine practitioner and an MD who talks about the science and application of the Corniver Diet. Paul, welcome back to the show.

Paul Saladino (1:05)

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

Siim Land (1:08)

Yeah, we talked a few months ago. So what have we been up to since that time?

Paul Saladino (1:13)

I wrote a book.

I wrote a 110,000 word book, which listeners know that's about 400 pages. So somewhere between 350 and 400 pages, depending on how many words per page. But we're trying to make it more condensed. But I wrote a pretty comprehensive book. It's been a fun process, but it's been really challenging.

Siim Land (1:37)

Yes. And the book is going to be titled The Carnivore Code, am I right?

Paul Saladino (1:41)

Yes, The Carnivore Code. And the subtitle is Unlocking the Secrets to Optimal Health by Returning to Our Ancestral Diet.

Siim Land (1:50)

Yeah, it's definitely like a very controversial topic and over the last, let's say, two years or a year and a half, the carnivore diet has become pretty popular and it's kind of put alongside with things like a keto diet and a vegan diet and a paleo diet and those different types of diet and it's kind of making its mark in the scene.

So, what's like some of the biggest, let's say, misconceptions that have been refuted over this time period, you know, people are learning more and more about the science of how it actually works because initially it sounds pretty crazy and dangerous but if you look more into the details then you can see that it actually has some valid applications and it definitely has science backing it up. So, what are maybe some of the, let's say, the last misconceptions that you've managed to break over the year and a half or something?

Paul Saladino (2:52)

Well, great question. When I first heard about the carnivore diet myself, I thought it was crazy because I too was a part of conditioning and the functional medicine sphere and these types of places which really teach the value of plants and teach the central nature of plants in a healthy diet, for healthy gut microbiota, for all sorts of applications, polyphenols, phytonutrients. And so, the notion that perhaps we could or should discard plants in favor of an entirely animal-based diet struck me as a little bit ludicrous in the beginning too. But I was very fascinated by the stories that I'd heard of people getting better from autoimmune disease and diseases that didn't seem to have other good fixes within Western medicine. Things like ulcerative colitis or Crohn's or in the case of Michaela Peterson, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, some sort of other inflammatory arthropathy in the case of Jordan Peterson, et cetera, et cetera, eczema, psoriasis. That really piqued my attention because in general, throughout my medical training, those have been the diseases that have been most interesting to me and the diseases for which I think we don't have any real ability to affect positive change from a Western medical model. We know that the medications that we use for these diseases are not that good. They have tons of side effects and we're not correcting the root cause. So throughout my education and exploration of functional medicine ideas and et cetera, I'd always been interested in things to reverse autoimmune disease. If we can move that needle, if we can affect change in a very fundamental level of autoimmune disease, we're really on to something.

There are multiple interventions that have been shown to do that.

The carnivore diet is just one of them, but the carnivore diet quickly became the one that I was most fascinated with.