Paul Saladino, MD, is a double board-certified physician and a prominent advocate for an animal-based diet, known for his controversial views on nutrition and health. He graduated from the University of Arizona College of Medicine and completed his residency at the University of Washington. Saladino is the author of The Carnivore Code and The Carnivore Code Cookbook, where he argues that many chronic illnesses are linked to poor dietary choices and can be prevented or reversed through proper nutrition. His professional philosophy emphasizes questioning mainstream medical narratives, focusing instead on optimal health through dietary changes. In addition to his writing, Saladino hosts the Paul Saladino MD podcast, where he engages with various experts to discuss health optimization. He co-founded Lineage Provisions, which produces high-quality air-dried meat snacks, and Heart & Soil, offering desiccated organ supplements aimed at enhancing nutrient intake. Recently, he has been involved in projects like a collaboration with Raw Farm USA to create a raw kefir smoothie at Erewhon Market, further promoting his vision of ancestral nutrition and wellness through innovative products. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner https://amac.us/srs https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://americanfinancing.net/srs | 866-781-8900 | NMLS 182334, www.nmlsconsumeraccess.org https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://patriotmobile.com/srs | 972-PATRIOT This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. https://helixsleep.com/srs https://rocketmoney.com/srs https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/SRS https://blackbuffalo.com Paul Saladino Links: Website - https://www.ABNRF.org Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/paulsaladinomd/?hl=en X - https://x.com/paulsaladinomd TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@paulsaladinomd2 YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/PaulSaladinoMD Heart & Soil - https://heartandsoil.co/ Lineage Provisions - https://lineageprovisions.com/ShawnRyan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why did Paul Saladino move to Costa Rica?
Yeah, I live in Costa Rica.
How long have you been down there?
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 Colombia for five years, but 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 mean, 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
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of eating organ meats?
I grew up in a farm town, man.
Yeah, you know it.
We used to have this thing called... I can't even believe I'm bringing this up. There was a family that owned like, 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 of 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 provide like you put a little piece of liver on an embryo that's developing
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Chapter 3: How does Paul Saladino source his food in Costa Rica?
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, you know, 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. Wow. That's amazing. Wow. Healthy babies too. Wow. And 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 everyone of everything 100%, but what bigger lever? 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 like, 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 in 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 and I think 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.
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Chapter 4: What are the health issues related to modern diets?
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'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? 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.
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Chapter 5: How can nutrition reverse chronic illnesses?
Yeah. Seed oils. Yeah, this is a good one. Seed oils is something I've been wanting to dive in with somebody for a while now. Let's do it. So what is it with seed oils?
So 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'd 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, you press the fruit, right? If you've seen an olive press, you know, they make, 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.
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Chapter 6: What is Paul Saladino's daily routine?
And I would say we went in the completely wrong direction, especially since the 1980s, the consumption of soybean oil is 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 don't make polyunsaturated fat. Do you 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 ask 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 the whole thing is kind of this house of cards, in my opinion. When you understand that cholesterol doesn't cause heart disease.
And this pisses people like Peter Attia off. And I would love to debate him on this, you know, because he really believes cholesterol does cause heart disease. All respect to Peter Attia, the whole house of cards falls. And so now let's just pause the seed oil conversation and I'll come back to that and I'll talk about cholesterol. You got 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.
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