SHAWN STEVENSON: Alright, I've got a question for you today, is counting calories actually a trap? Today you're going to hear compelling evidence in calorie science that will likely make you rethink how you view this dietary juggernaut. We're also gonna dive into some shocking information about sunlight exposure that you're not going to want to miss. I mean, this blew my mind, all of this and so much more with our very special guest. Now, before we get to our special guest, have you noticed that the beauty industry is talking a lot about collagen right now? Well, multiple studies have found that in addition to reducing the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, collagen protein can help support metabolic health, our joint health and more.

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Paul Saladino MD is a licensed physician and leading voice in nutrition and regenerative health. Dr. Saladino has millions of followers across his social media channels where he shares educational content that challenges mainstream nutrition and advocates for radical food transparency. Trained at the University of Arizona and the University of Washington, he blends medical expertise with a deep commitment to ancestral health. Let's dive into this conversation with the one and only Dr. Paul Saladino. Dr. Paul Saladino. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Thanks for having me on again. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You say that calorie counting is a trap. What do you mean by that? 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: It's like a psyop man. I think calories might be a psyop. It's like, I mean, we were just talking about this before the podcast, but the history of the calorie is so interesting. A calories is a measure of heat. Yeah, and it was originally, you know this, but maybe your audience doesn't. It was originally devised or came from a guy named Wilbur Atwater in the late 1890s, and he basically put foods into a bomb calorimeter, burned them up and looked to see how much heat a food creates.

And then throughout the 120 years that have followed a calorie has gradually been adopted into our society in the 1920s and 1940s in World War I and World War ii. It was used for rationing and for troops to give some sort of an indication of how much of a calorie content was in foods, but it's essentially a metric that doesn't really apply to the foods we eat. And then in the 19, probably basically fifties through the seventies, it became the context or the subject of dietary books. And then you had Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig. And the idea was if you limit the amount of calories you eat. That is the way to lose weight. But what we know now, I mean, there are meta-analyses of 80 plus studies of calorie counting.

What we know very clearly from those huge studies and from TV shows like the famous, the Biggest Loser, that when you employ calorie counting as a weight loss method, 80 to 90% of people regain the weight in five years. It just doesn't work because the human body is really smart. And we have this historical, ancestral evolutionary programming that doesn't want us to restrict calories.

We get something called adaptive thermogenesis, where the thyroid actually turns down the body's thermostat when you restrict calories. So you restrict calories, you lose weight in the short term, but then your metabolism goes down and you burn less calories. So it doesn't really work long term, but the story gets worse and. Did you know that in 2015, Coca-Cola was revealed to have funded something called the Global Energy Balance Network? This idea of energy balance, calories in calories out is probably funded and propped up by ultra processed food companies. So we know from the 1960s and seventies, that's something called the Sugar Research Foundation secretly funded researchers at Harvard to shift the blame away from sugar towards saturated fat.

And then, you know, 10 years ago in a New York Times article, Coca-Cola is seen as guilty for trying to kind of promote this narrative of calories in calories out. It's okay to drink this coke, you just need to exercise more on the backend or just restrict your calories. But we know now with the research that it doesn't work, right? You cannot restrict calories without attention to food quality and hope to improve your health or lose weight long term. So that's so interesting to me that it's this kind of strange history. You know, we make energy from food, from electrons in glucose and in fatty acids and sometimes from amino acids.

And those electrons turn into intermediates like NADH and FA DH two that are used in the electron transport chain and mitochondria. And then you make a TP. That's how we make energy. We don't make energy from burning a bagel in our stomach and getting heat out of it. So it's strange that we use a heat metric to count calories. And I think still in the prevailing thinking of people today when they're overweight, they're thinking I'm eating too much. And what do they do? They try to restrict calories. I mean, weight Watchers is still alive today, right? And the tragedy there is that unless you have attention to food quality, it doesn't work long term for weight loss. It's so interesting. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: So you're saying the human body is not like a bomb colorimeter? 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: We are not little bomb calorimeters. It doesn't work that way. And, and we probably get more energy from fat. We know that than we do carbohydrates. But to measure the amount of energy that you get from a food simply based on the amount of heat it produces when you incinerate that food in a bomb calorimeter doesn't take into context co-occurring micronutrients, minerals, and vitamins and whole foods. Doesn't take into context, your stress environment doesn't take into context your metabolism, your weightlifting, or any of these things that have to do with how many calories your body burns, right? So this idea of calories in, calories out, it, it appeals to the first law of thermodynamics, right? This conservation of energy.

Yes, if you eat less energy, you will lose weight. But we know that the body is so much more complex than that. And when you say calories in, calories out, it sounds good from a thermodynamics perspective, but it misses this nuance that you start to see when you look at where calories have come from and you see that. Basically the quality of the calories you put in affects the calories out because what we know now is that when you eat higher quality food, which is less processed food, the calories out changes, right? You will burn more calories when you are eating better quality food. Your body adjusts to this. And similarly, when you eat lower quality food, especially if you're calorie restricting lower quality food, your body turns down the thermostat at the level of the thyroid adaptive thermogenesis, you burn less calories.

So where does that come into the calories and calories, that equation, but global energy balance network. Guess who's funding this narrative in the zeitgeist? Guess who wants you to believe that? It's just about restricting calories. And guess who doesn't want you to understand what real food quality is? Because I think that's the way to really get healthy and lose weight long term. And nobody ever talks about that, right? 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know what, this has got me thinking about my very expensive nutritional science class in college. And this was the first day of school stuff like, you know, it's teaching the class. If you wanna lose weight, you just need to expend more energy than you take in. If you want to gain weight, then you're going to consume more energy, then you burn. And if you wanna stay the same weight, it's, it's gonna balance out. It's just math. Taking out all of these human factors. What you, earlier you mentioned the impact of the thyroid. We've got multiple studies on this that somebody can consume two different people. The same , "calorie intake", that says that it says on the food.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Calories.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And they can absorb hundreds more calories or less calories than a, than a person doing the same exact thing. And this also reminded me, you will put this study up for everybody to see. When you mention the food quality impact the calories in, the quality of those calories in impact the the calories out. That is a game changer for everybody to get, and this was published in Food and Nutrition Research. And scientists had test subjects to consume two different types of sandwiches. One made of ultra processed versions of food, so like a cheese product and highly refined bread. And then one was whole grain bread and cheddar cheese.

And what the researchers found was that when individuals consumed the ultra processed version of that sandwich, they burn, "burned" far less calories after consuming that sandwich. What consuming those ultra processed food did was create what they referred to sort of like  a hormonal clog. It kind of gummed up the system so their body wasn't expending that energy.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: It's essentially poisonous, right? I mean, that's a, that's a high level, overly simplified way to think about it. But these ultra processed foods, which are sold to us as okay in moderation, are potentially really damaging the very mechanisms by which we convert food into energy and that all moves through the mitochondria. And so when we clog the mitochondria up, when we sort of damage our ability to move food into usable energy, that gets sort as fat at a high level. Obviously I'm oversimplifying, but why do we get fat? I think we get fat because we can't make potential energy in food into kinetic energy, in energy through the mitochondria, right?

So food is potential energy. And whether we measure that potential energy as electrons in glucose or, fatty acids that go through glyco, that go through, you know, the process of glycolysis and then the kreb cycle and beta oxidation to make the intermediates that move through the mitochondria, or we measure it in other ways. Like if that potential energy doesn't move through the mitochondria, we. It just doesn't work, right? It, we don't have the energy on the backend that's usable. That's essentially ATP. So somewhere along the way, we are storing fat. We are storing energy from the food we're eating as fat, and that's such an amazing study.

The quality of the food impacts that in every way. And the quality of the food we eat also impacts our hunger. So this is another interesting piece, is that humans are driven by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution around hunger cues. We do not want to be hungry. I think of this as like a calorie restriction prison and you are going to break outta that prison however you can. You can definitely lose weight eating donuts or pizza, but you are going to be hungry and irritable and eventually micronutrient depleted. And there's a great study by Kevin Hall at the NIH where he took two groups of people and everything was controlled for, and he presented them with the same amount of calories and the same matched protein, fat, salt.

They tried to match for as many aspects of the food as they can, very similar to the study you're mentioning. But they gave whole meals over the course of two weeks, and one was ultra processed and one was essentially unprocessed. So you could imagine, you know, one meal is like a filet of fish sandwich with tartar sauce and french fries and coke. And the other meal is like salmon plus vegetables, and they're trying to match for everything, but then they let people eat as much as they wanted. And what happened was that on the ultra process side, people ate 500 plus calories per more per day. And by the end of two weeks they had gained multiple pounds, two to three pounds extra weight be just because they were hungrier, the satie was kicking in.

These are evolutionary mechanisms that are so hard for humans free living humans to really fight against, and you can fight against 'em in the short term. But ultimately there's something about the processing of food, whether it's the stripping away of the micronutrients or this food matrix effects in terms of satiety hormones that makes us hungrier, gives us less satiety, causes us to become micronutrient depleted, which is a whole nother issue and then over time, we're just going to eat more. And so again, it all comes back to this global energy balance, nefarious idea, calories in, calories out. And you're thinking, no, that's what's so crazy. And what worries me now is that we're starting to see new incarnations of this, and that's where I get worried. Have you heard about this? This new ingredient that's in some of these protein bars? EPG, Esterified Propoxylated Glycerol. It's this, it's interesting. Do you remember Olestra? 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Of course. Yeah. Okay. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: You remember anal leakage?

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. One of the side effects. Yes.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: So Olestra was sort of version 1.0 of this indigestible form of fat, and there's a company called Epage or Epogee that in 2019 applied for and got granted this generally recognized as safe designation from the FDI For FDA for EPG, Esterified Propoxylated Glycerol. Basically they take canola oil and they separate the fatty acid tails from the glycerol head with a propoxl molecule. And it makes something that's been described by this company as the texture of warm candle wax, gives you the mouth feel of fat, but you can't digest it.

That's the same thing that happened with Olestra. So when they've done studies with EPG, it causes all sorts of GI side effects. Like they, in the papers it'll say anal spotting, gas with discharge like akin to the Olestra stuff. And over an eight week study, it did appreciably decrease absorption of fat soluble vitamins like betacarotene and vitamin K1. They didn't test for vitamin K2, but surely it decreased vitamin K2 also. So what's scary here? Is that I think this is the next incarnation of these processed foods. And again, it's all based on this calorie model, right? Calories in, calories out. They're saying EPG has 0.7 calories per gram. It's a indigestible fat that is causing all sorts of GI side effects, stripping you of fat soluble vitamins, but it only has 0.7 grams.

Point seven calories per gram. So, and it's, it's crazy. It's gonna show up in more and more foods. It's in this bar, this David bar, have you heard about this David Bar? They have this, they're touting this bar as the highest calories per gram. They're saying it has 28 grams of protein and 150 calories because they put this EPG in there, this fake fat that you can't digest. And so it just bothers me because I think that they're, we're going in the wrong direction with these high protein processed foods that are packaged like a wolf in sheep's clothing to be like, Hey, that, that, that, the marketing on the David bar literally says this is protein perfected. It says, you know, it's just like, you know, you're not perfect, but the DA or it's just, I forget the actual, the actual line is, but it's like David Bar is protein perfected.

Like something isn't perfect, but the David Bar is like it's perfect protein. And again, they're appealing to this perspective, which is get more protein. Okay, we can talk about that. But at the lowest amount of calories possible. And of course it's ultra processed, so there's essentially no micronutrients. It's full of artificial flavors. It has sucralose, which I wanna talk about also. So it just worries me because this is the direction that convenience foods are going in. And I think we're gonna see this EPG in a ton of different foods really soon. The makers of EPG are actually being sued now because of like a monopoly thing.

They're saying that they're monopolizing. I think actually the David Bar people are being sued because they bought Epogee. The people that make this. A terrified ated glycerol, and they're trying to monopolize the supply. But previously chocolate bars, peanut butter spreads. I think we're gonna see in the future, once this lawsuit gets settled, a bunch of foods have this EPG in it. I want people to be aware of like how sinister this is, because it's basically, like I said, it's depleting you of micronutrients and it's completely the wrong, the wrong, the wrong way to go with your, your food. I mean, if you want high protein, low calories, eat a chicken breast, eat a piece of sirloin steak, right?

Like that's so much better. But I get it, people want convenience. And so it just, I think that there will always be this, this niche for convenience foods, and I think that people will always be reaching for and grabbing those convenience foods. I was on a plane today, I was in the airport. Every time I'm in the airport, I'm looking at like, what's sold. It's all these convenience foods and I'm thinking like, what is what, what are even the good options here? What is the best option in an airport? It's pretty tough. So it's just interesting to me to think like, okay, humans want convenience. We're never gonna get around that. But I think that it bothers me when these companies are making this consumer demand met. They're meeting the consumer demand with lower quality foods, packaged as good foods. That's, that's not good to me. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Mm-hmm. Airport, let alone everywhere else. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Everywhere. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah . 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Airport is like a microcosm, but yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Exactly. You know, this, this also reminds me of, you know, this, this paradigm shift with calories being something that was brought into the fold in the realm of physics early on initially.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: It was never really made to be utilized in nutrition because the human body is so complex and one of the early pioneers of like that, that there's like a bridge between Atwater and getting it to the public.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And that was Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters. And she wrote really the first major bestseller, propagating the importance of minding calories. And it made a shift mentally where we stopped looking at food as food and started looking at it as calories. Right. And so now you don't eat bread, you eat a hundred calories of bread. Now you don't eat pie, you eat a hundred calories of pie. You don't eat butter, you eat a hundred calories of butter. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Or a hundred calories of Oreos. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Or a hundred calories of Oreos and the anal leakage fat or whatever. You just start looking at food through that lens.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Yes.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And you forget that it's food and it's complex and your complex. So one of the big takeaways today that I'm hearing from you is that the calorie paradigm, there's some value in finding some minute measurements with this, but it is massively oversimplified. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: And I think that it's being leveraged against us. I think there's a sinister component, and we've seen that. 2015 Global Energy Balance Network, Coca-Cola's funding that secretly, and they get exposed, like why are they funding the idea of calories in calories out? Because they're leveraging it against us. That's how Weight Watchers becomes a multi-billion dollar company. That's how you get sold a hundred calories, snack packs of rich crackers with cheese or Oreos, and you think, okay, this is how I'm gonna lose weight. It's completely leading humans down the wrong path. It's so scary. Did you know that before 1990 calories were not even on the food labels, on foods? It's only been in the last 35 years.

I mean, you know, of our, most of our lives, but you know, when I was born, I don't remember it, but there were, there were, none of the calories were not even on the food labels before 1990. I know a lot of your listeners might not have even been born before 1990, but like, that's crazy to me. This is not, this is not like, it's not intrinsic to a food. You have an apple, you have a banana, you have a piece of steak, and you have, you know, a processed bag of Doritos. Like the idea that those all have calories is a very recent invention. I guess it makes sense from a governmental perspective. I understand the history of World War I, world War II rationing.

We need a way to say like, how much food are we sending to the soldiers, right? And then, like you said, this dietary strategies, like you can restrict calories and it does work in the short term, but we know from these meta-analyses and studies and biggest loser. Time and time again, if you try and lose weight by restricting calories without having attention to food quality, you will fail. And so it, it bothers me that there's this, this calories in, calories out ideas being leveraged against people. And that the only innovation that I see happening, or a lot of the innovation I see happening is toward foods that are packaged as healthy or better for you that are not. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You mentioned sucralose earlier.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And this got me thinking, and I want to ask you about this and, and maybe this can be a bridge for that conversation. There's also multiple studies and even there are many that are being conducted now. And I've actually had some of these researchers that are doing this work in the lab on the impact of the microbiome makeup and how your body associates with calories as well.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And so sucralose got me thinking about some potential impact with the microbiome. So let's talk about sucralose in this whole equation. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Yeah. So the artificial sweeteners are pretty interesting. So there's sucralose, which is Splenda. There's Ace K, there's aspartame, and those are the three big ones. And then there's Stevia and Monkfruit, which are a separate conversation, but they, the Ace K sucralose aspartame, definitely affect the microbiome. Definitely. There's clear evidence that they disrupt or change quorum sensing, which is the ability for bacteria to communicate within your gut, right? So they're going to change the quorum sensing.

But a recent study just came out showing that sucralose actually changes blood flow in the brain. And this is crazy because it changes blood flow to the hypothalamus. And the hypothalamus, as you know, is where the satiety centers are. And so the conclusion of the study was, Hey, sucralose is probably making you hungrier by changing blood flow to your brain center for satiety. And of course, david Barr has sucralose in it. Definitely all these, all these protein forward, Pop-Tarts, se not all of them, but a lot, most of the protein forward bars, cereals also have artificial sweeteners because the marketing is zero sugar high protein. You know, I'm gonna add on absolutely micronutrient devoid, but that's how these things are being marketed.

Zero sugar. So consumers still want something that tastes sweet, so they're almost all gonna have sucralose, ACE, K, and aspartame. And now we have a study saying, sucralose is actually changing the way your brain interprets and the brain responds again. Calories in, calories out. Not all calories or even non caloric molecules affect us in the same way. This is the problem. And so I've been talking about artificial sweeteners for years, and I would get pushback from, from time to time. People would say, Hey Paul, there are meta-analyses that show that diet soda versus sugar soda, actually is weight neutral or improves weight loss. And you're going, okay, but look at this mechanistically.

You know, it's a broader context. And I think that sometimes, and not surprisingly, these same people that would push back on me and look, I love nutritional conversations. We all learn from each other. I'm open to people disagreeing with my ideas respectfully. But the same people that would disagree with me on artificial sweeteners are also the people who will make posts saying, you can lose weight eating donuts and pizza, and it's calories in, calories out. Why don't you guys understand thermodynamics? So I think there's just kind of like, there's almost two camps now, and I hate that nutritional science and medicine has become so tribal. But there's like this calories in, calories out camp, and a lot of these people are the same people behind these new bars that are having low quality ingredients.

And then I really feel like I need to be beating the drum for just high quality food and saying, okay, that doesn't work. What's the answer? Eat real food. But. I get that people want convenience too, but I think that at a high level, if we're not even talking about convenience foods, 'cause we'll come back to convenience foods. Like I think the answer to people is so simple and the answer is really just eat meat and eat plants. Eat unprocessed food. It's so simple. Like I've, I've talked about this, I don't know if I stole this from someone, but I, it's like, I call it the great-grandmother rule. You know, so eat, eat single ingredient foods, eat milk, eat eggs, eat meat, eat plants, right?

They, they're single ingredients. They don't even have a nutrition label. Or if you're going to eat a food that has a nutrition label, eat ingredients that your great-grandmother would recognize. My great-grandmother doesn't know what is terrified propagated glycerol is right? Like my great-grandmother doesn't know or didn't know what sucralose is, and so don't eat foods that have complex ingredients that your great-grandmother, that two generations ago or three would not know what these foods are. That's the sim. It's so simple, right? It's unprocessed foods, it's simple height. That's what I mean when I say food quality. High quality food is essentially unprocessed food. But then people will say, well, what's a processed food? Ground beef is processed. Look, everybody knows what a processed food is versus a, you know, everybody knows that. Like, okay, ground beef is different than a Snickers bar. There's no, but you know, we can tell the difference here. It's not rocket science. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. The yo, listen, my, my great-grandmother and number one, the fact that she lived that long to where I got to hang out with her quite a bit. Ride the senior citizen bus with her and all that stuff.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Wow. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know, my and my grandmother as well had a garden and my grandfather hunted. But my great-grandmother, same thing. She had these inputs, but it was in that transition period in the eighties. I grew up in the eighties on one of those senior citizen bus trips to the grocery store. She got me Fruity Pebbles, my first memory of that bowl of cereal because she wanted to make me happy. It had, I picked it out, it had a cartoon character that I liked. Fred Flintstone, Toy in the Box. This is what I want. Momo, that was my, we called her Momo and uh, we headed back to, you know, to her place. And I had that bowl of cereal change my life. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Dopamine explosion. Yeah. How old were you? 

SHAWN STEVENSON: I was probably about four.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: I mean, you think a 4-year-old. How does a 4-year-old differentiate? How does a 4-year-old understand the dopaminergic response that comes from a processed food like this? I don't have kids right now, but I have a niece and a nephew and they're five and seven, and my sister's pretty darn good about feeding them good quality foods. But in their earlier years I could see it with them. It's just like when you see children that are that young, this is again, leaning onto evolutionary mechanisms in human like consciousness, human reward pathways in the brain that are hundreds of thousands of years old. There was no such thing as fruity pebbles a hundred thousand years ago.

Right. There was a ripe berry at certain times of the year. There was honey, if you smoked the bees out of a hive, there was meat. But that was the level of dopamine, the level of reward that you would get from a food. And now foods are engineered, you've probably talked about this in other shows, they're intentionally engineered to overload our dopamine.

So you give that kind of food to a 4-year-old or a 6-year-old, or what are they gonna do? Their dopamine is going through. It is legal drugs. It's legal drugs being given to kids. And that sounds hyperbolic, but it's so true because that 4-year-old, and I'm, I'm just imagining, I know what happened to my niece and nephew. The next time they don't get that dopamine. There's a behavioral problem, you know, that's a temper tantrum. And now mom and dad are in, it's hard. They're so, these manufacturers are just making it harder and harder. And you can see it's a full circle. This is Fred Flintstone and a toy. What kid could resist that. How, I mean, and, and I was talking to a friend of mine who's in the uk and he was saying the same thing. He has a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old, I think. And he said they watch, I think it was Peppa The Pig, which is maybe a UK cartoon character. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Peppa. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Peppa the pig. Maybe it, it's it's in the states too then, huh? And he said they go to the grocery store and they see Peppa and they want that cereal. And you think, oh, this cartoon is created to sell the product.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Wait a minute now.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Like, that's sinister. They don't just create a cartoon. And I wonder how much of what we see in our society is, is reverse engineered in that way? You know, it's, they're saying we're gonna make an animated movie for the backend toy sales. Certainly with this cartoon, you think it's not, I mean, obviously if Peppa the Pig gets people to watch this cartoon on tv, you get revenue from commercials. But the, I bet the real hit is when kids go to the grocery store and you're licensing it on cereals and stuff, that's where it gets to be scary. So you can see between global energy, balance network, the calorie, potentially psyop, the way that we're feeding kids at such young, a young age. We are just, we are set up for failure, man, and the solution is simple, but the path is challenging. 

You know, it's like you just have to go back to eating what we ate even 150 years ago.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. You know, and again, there's, we know this stuff already, there's been studies done on this. One of them took cereal specifically and had kids come in and have these two bowls of cereal not knowing that they're the same bowl of cereal. Oh really? But in one setting, they had a cartoon on the box for the cereal and one setting.

They didn't have the cartoon character mascot and the kids rated and they use a five point smiley face scale. They rated the, the cereal that had the cartoon character. Far superior. They, it's, they said that it tasted better. Oh my God. And this was a cereal that they would choose over the other, and it was based on the marketing.

And so these food manufacturers and marketing agencies, like they are some evil geniuses in many ways. And, and specifically with Food Eng, you said it very, you know, explicitly food engineering. There's brilliant food scientists who are finding ways to bypass, even if you have a staunch strict belief in calories to utilize vanishing caloric density to mess with your brain. So you can eat these calories and your brain is like, no, I didn't. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Sucralose. Yeah. Perfect example. Sucralose. And I think that it's just, yeah, it's all being leveraged against us. And, you know, the history of RJ Reynolds and some of these other cigarette companies in the eighties and nineties that moved from cigarettes to processed food. And so the cigarette addictive playbook was then leveraged into the processed food industry. And most of they all got out in the early two thousands, but the, the stamp was left, the indelible mark was left, and all the other processed food companies followed suit. So you see a massive change, and it's really happened before my eyes and before your eyes. Within our lifetime, Shawn, eighties, nineties, two thousands, you know, 2010 into this decade.

Like it's happened within our lifetime, even to the 1960s and 1970s. Processed food was nothing like it is today. So it's, it's had this metamorphosis and I think it affects both children and adults. And so we talked about the kids, but I think that the other piece, the parallel piece for adults is the convenience piece. So I think they get us, these manufacturers get us when we're kids with cartoon characters and chemicals, food dyes, and it's so cool to see these food dyes coming out. Did you see that Kraft Heinz is gonna remove food dyes? I mean, props to, you know, like, I mean, this is bipartisan. No political leanings here, but like this administration has pressured these companies to get food dyes out.

Small step like this is a big deal because these food dyes absolutely make that food more desirable to a kid when it's brighter. That's, that's evolution, man. That's, that berry is really red. It's ripe. I'm gonna go eat it. Of course. But I think that at a, at an adult level, they get us at convenience. So just like kids, they get us with cartoon characters as adults. They get us with convenience. Because I was at the gym a couple of days ago, maybe two days ago in, I'm in St. Pete right now in Florida, hanging out with my girlfriend a little bit. And I, I met a guy and he was like, Hey, I love your work. And I was like, he was like, I do the animal based diet a lot.

Sometimes I go off and I like to talk to people and hear their story. And I said, why did you go off? And he says, convenience. Convenience. And I, that's the, I hear it so often, Shawn. It's like, convenience is the enemy for us, but I get it like. I think that we've just all become a part of a society that's quite fast paced. And so the convenience factor is the, that's the lever for adults. The kids get the cartoons, the adults get convenience. So if you make a food convenient, we are more likely to eat it. And I, 'cause I've offered a solution, which is eat steak, eat hamburger, eat chicken, eat fish, eat eggs, eat milk, eat fruit and vegetables.

And I know people listening are saying, I don't have time to do that all the time. Right? Like, I am a single mom or a single dad, or I work two jobs, I have three kids. Maybe you're, you know, it's like, okay, so I get it. People need the convenience. And so it's a, it's a big deal. And so it, it kind of, it just, it makes me, I don't know, it makes me kind of frustrated that most of the convenience foods out there are just not going in the right direction. So, I mean, this is a big deal. I don't, I don't like to talk about this stuff too much, but like I will mention that like, this is one of the reasons that I built Lineage. 'cause I feel really proud of what we've done with this company, you know, and the fact that like when I looked at convenience foods, there just wasn't that much out there.

And so I just think it's cool that we've been able to create a company and I mean, you know, over the years I never thought I'd be in a position to do this, but it feels good to have some agency to actually bring something to life and to create healthy foods that are convenient. You know, we make like meat sticks and jerky and this kinda stuff and it's grass fed. And so I think like, okay, lineage is my effort to fight against like processed food companies. And granted, yes, it's a company, it's a business, it makes money, that's great. But like I want there to, I want it to be the start, the spark of a movement and other companies to come out and do the same thing and realize there's a huge amount of people that want healthier foods. And to not just be stuck in a grocery store looking at an aisle of like protein candy bars that are just horrible for you. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Got a quick break coming up. We'll be right back.

It cannot be overstated. How much stress can wreak havoc on our mental and our metabolic health. And there's one nutrient, one antioxidant nutrient that stands out above all others when helping our bodies to manage and metabolize stress Data published in the Journal of Nutrition and Food Sciences states that both emotional and physical stress can affect a person's vitamin C status. It increases the requirement for vitamin C to maintain normal. Blood levels went under stress. Stress depletes vitamin C levels in the body and reduces the body's resistance to infections and diseases and increases the likelihood of further stress. So this truly does become a vicious circle. And when vitamin C intake is increased, the negative effects of excess stress hormones are reduced, and the body's ability to cope with the stress response improves.

Now, I've been sharing this information like crazy and enlightening people to this little known fact, but more and more people are realizing this, that the vast majority of vitamin C supplements on the market, those little vitamin C supplements, those little packets out there at the checkout counter, for example, are made from genetically modified corn syrup and corn starch. It is truly bottom feeders, the worst forms of vitamin C from these very, very low quality sources. And it simply does not work as effectively in the body. In fact, a randomized placebo controlled study published in the Journal of Cardiology had people that were undertaking a pretty oxidative habit, which was smoking to have concentrates of my favorite form of vitamin C, which is from Caou Caou berry, versus standard vitamin C supplements, which come from, again, genetically modified cornstarch and corn syrup.

What the researchers found was that over the course of the one week study, participants taking the concentrate of Camu Camu berry has significantly lowered oxidative stress and lowered inflammatory biomarkers. And there were no changes in the group when they're taking the synthetic form of vitamin C. Bottom line, we definitely wanna make sure that we're getting in high quality vitamin C from our food, and also superfood concentrates that have Camu camu berry, AMLO Berry, and Acerola cherry. These are the top tier forms and sources of vitamin C, all organic from Paleo Valley in their incredible essential C complex.

Head over to paleovalley.com/model and you're gonna get 15% off your entire order, including their essential C Complex. That's P-A-L-E-O-V-A-L-L-E y.com/model For 15% off. Hook yourself up, hook your family up. This is the Vitamin C supplement that I've been utilizing for years, especially during times of stress. Check them out. paleovalley.com/model and now back to the show.

SHAWN STEVENSON: What are a couple of things that are unique with Lineage? What some unique products? 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Oh man. So we brought you some. So the first product we made was our meat sticks, and we went to Australia to source these from grass fed, grass finished farms, and these are regenerative cows in Australia, and I had never been to Australia. But what I saw outside of Southern Australia, outside of Melbourne, they actually say like Melbourne, but like in the Victoria region was the greenest grass I've ever seen. I looked at cows. I went to a farm that actually raises cows that we sourced from, and those cows had a view to the ocean. It was a million dollar view for the cows. There's cows grazing looking at the, the sea. You know, they're looking toward Tasmania in Australia. So like, we sourced like really, really high quality grass fed regenerative meat.

And then we did 52 or 53 trials of the meat sticks to get them right. So they're different than, like, they're not a cooked meat stick. It's a dried meat stick. So it has a totally different flavor. And we were able to sneak in some organs in there, some heart and liver. And then the other one that people really love is just the air dried steak, which is like a pure jerky and it's like a thinly slice, but it's from the same meat. So it's just like a really high quality thing. But all the products we make at Lineage I like, they're all things that I would eat and I am one of the pickiest humans on the planet. You know, when we made honey, we made a raw, organic, glyphosate free honey. We tested it for glyphosate. Very few honeys are actually tested for glyphosate.

And we, when we actually looked at the supply in the US, a lot of the US organic honeys actually were contaminated with glyphosate, which is this herbicide that's cross contaminating between fields and stuff. And so it's, it's really cool. I'm really proud of what we built. We built like a suite of products. We have a tallow a Honey, we have a protein powder, we have meat sticks and jerky, all kinds of good stuff. We just released a coffee. We have collagen powder. I don't drink coffee, but we did, when we did a coffee, we did organic. Mold free, pesticide free, you know, like regeneratively raised. So it's just cool to be able to bring that to life.

That feels good to me. Yes, it's a business. Um, you know, but it's awesome to make, I think that like we live in a society where it's, it's a way that I get to express like, this is the highest quality food that I wanna make available to people if I didn't, if we didn't do it, like it's not really available.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. When you mentioned the cows having this view of the ocean.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: It's cool.

SHAWN STEVENSON: I was thinking about just these natural inputs that we evolved having as humans, and one of those inputs is sunlight.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And you came in here with the crisp tan and, you know, coming from Florida and just like, this is one of the things that's been a staple in your life and when some people hear about your time that you spend in the sun, they get concerned. Shouldn't you be hiding from the sun? Because again, getting a little bit of sun Sure. I, I can get. But the amount of time that you spend in the sun playing, having fun training hanging out, should we be fearing the sun? Paul, talk about this. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, look, I'm 47 years old. I'm gonna be 48 in like two weeks. And I definitely, I've lived in Costa Rica primarily for the last four years. I probably, um, still spend the majority of my time in Costa Rica, but I'm just in St. Pete for a little bit right now. And for the first couple years I served in Costa Rica, I did not use any sunscreen on my face when I was surfing.

I probably should have used like a good sunscreen. So there's all sorts of levels to the sunscreen and the sun conversation. So like, look like I'm 47 years old. I've spent my life in the sun. I've got wrinkles, you know, but what's the flip side? Like? Should we fear the sun? I say absolutely not. The human body makes vitamin D in the sun, but we also make endorphins, nitric oxide. And, you know, other compounds, we, you know, we, we make a sulfated cholesterol at the level of the skin. It's a precursor for vitamin D in the sun. And the endorphin connection has always been interesting to me. Right. Why would the sun be bad for us? Obviously, dose is important. You can give yourself hyponatremia by drinking too much water.

I think humans and all animals understand when they should move out of the sunlight. And some of us don't move outta the sunlight and we get burned. So don't get burned. But we make a compound in the human body that is linked with good feelings, endorphins, when we are in the sun. I did my residency after medical school in Seattle, Shawn. So I, I haven't had this feeling as much in the last four years of my life because I'm very sun "rich" in Costa Rica and Florida. But in Seattle, I would spend most of my time indoors in the hospital on call. And for 90 days in the summer in Seattle, you get sun and it was viscerally pleasurable. To walk outside into the sun for that short amount. So like I think most humans who are sun deprived will have experienced this objectively. Sun feels good, right?

The sun is not there to kill you. The sun is there for us to get nutrients. Before the advent of vitamin D supplements, we needed the sun to get vitamin D. Now we sort of have a bypass, but not really. I'll talk about limitations of vitamin D supplements in a minute, but like it viscerally feels good for us to be in the sun. I think that we all have a genetic background that affects how much we can be in the sun. You're darker skin than me at baseline, so you can be in the sun more. We have different ancestries if you are from norwegian or Northern Europe descent, you are a very efficient sun harvester. You don't need to be in the sun as much, right?

If you are from the equatorial regions, your body has evolved to protect you from the sun, and you might need to be in the sun more to get the same amount of ultraviolet light and the benefit of the sun. So we, we can all place ourselves within that sort of contextual timeline and, and decide how much we wanna be in the sun. But I think that there are so many benefits, and if you look at this specifically, this is actually to both of these points, vitamin D and the benefits of the sun. There's research in animal models. I've never seen this in humans, but there's research in animal models that UV radiation has benefits with regard to weight loss that vitamin D supplements do not have.

So I suspect there's something going on here. It's never been studied in humans either positively or negatively. But back to weight loss, this conversation like ultraviolet light in animals mitigates some of the negative effects of the harmful food that they feed most animals, this like animal chow, and improves weight loss more than a Vitamin D supplement. So, okay, you can't, you can't fake, you can't fake that. Obviously if you're not in the sun, you want to get vitamin D. Lots of benefits to vitamin D in the human body, but I think there are other benefits to being an ultraviolet light. This is actually pretty parallel to our conversation about processed and whole foods.

I think about indoor lighting and outdoor lighting as processed foods or processed sun, processed light and whole food light in parallel, right? So you think about outdoor light, it doesn't flicker, it's all the visible spectrum and it's not enriched in blue, right? It's just a balance of visible spectrum. It has ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths. Those are two sides of the spectrum. Indoor light, flickering, enriched in blue. No infrared. No uv. It's like a processed light, right? It's a completely different set of light than humans are used to. And look, I'm willing to sit under these processed lights with you 'cause I like you and it's fun hanging out with you.

And I hope people benefit from this conversation. But if we are spending the majority of our time indoors under processed light, might there be negative side effects to this? And I think there are, right? I had a guy on my podcast, Tristan Scott, and had he, he said something to me that was so interesting. He told me that infrared light, which is outdoors and not indoors ever, unless you're under an infrared light panel, like a red light panel, benefits us at the level of the mitochondria. So the mitochondria systemically, not just in the brain, make melatonin when we are exposed to infrared light. And that melatonin is used protectively as an antioxidant systemically in the human body.

So wait. Sunlight is bad for you. No, no, no. Wait. Like infrared light makes melatonin, ultraviolet light and infrared are probably part of the same equation. Infrared light in whole food sunlight is probably protective against ultraviolet light. So this made me reconsider something that I did in residency, which probably was not a good decision, which was a tanning bed. So in a tanning bed, I mean, obviously I was desperate, man. I was desperate. I was in Seattle. A tanning bed is really enriched in uv but doesn't have enough IR infrared. So this is the difference. And I thought, okay, that might have also caused some photo aging for me. And I thought, okay, maybe it's 'cause I didn't.

I, for the longest time I thought, are tanning beds good or bad? I think ultraviolet light is okay for humans as long as we don't overuse it. A tanning bed is very easy to overuse. We don't have any sense of this until you get after the bed, outta the bed and you're red. I've had a, a couple of tanning bed burns in my life, I'm embarrassed to say. But sunlight has infrared plus uv and those probably compliment each other, so it's protective. So it's really interesting to me to think about this whole light and process light. And the idea is not live outside all the time, but make sure you're getting time outdoors and understand the potential harms or potential. I think burden that comes with indoor light, especially around sleep, I mean, you've written a book about sleep.

You understand blue light at night and flickering light at night is something that I am very sensitive to. I actually changed my cell phone because the older iPhones have a different pulse width modulation. We don't have to get too detailed here, but the way that it flickers on an iPhone 11 is different than an iPhone 15 or 16. So I'll just add this, this might be too granular for people, but a MacBook Pro is actually not bad in terms of flicker a MacBook Pro Pro Flickers so fast. That your body perceives it as constant light or more close to constant light. But iPhones are particularly bad. The pulse with modulation on the iPhone and night for flickering is very disruptive to people's sympathetic nervous system and the circadian rhythm.

So if you have to work at night, you want to be looking at your MacBook Pro. I'm not affiliated with Apple, but you know, not your iPhone because they have different pulse width modulation. They flicker at different rates. So I think a lot about flickering of lights also, in addition to the blue. And the last thing I'll say here, which is really fascinating and I can't not talk about it, is incandescent lights. Remember these bulbs we had growing up an Edison bulb? The way an Edison bulb works is a tungsten filament that gets hot. It goes to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit when you run a current through it, and a tungsten filament in canes and bulb still flickers because the current in our outlets is alternating current.

It's about 120 hertz. It's still flickering, technically 120 times a second because of this alternate current, but because it has thermal inertia, it's on fire, the Ts and filament is sort of on fire. It doesn't switch on and off completely, and your body perceives an incandescent light as steady light like outdoors. An incandescent light bulb is essentially fire in a bottle, so it's the closest thing you can get to outdoor light indoors. So we've gone away in so many ways, Sean, we've gone to processed foods and we've gone to processed light, and there are governmental stipulations, energy regulations, right? We have to balance it all.

We've gone, I would say, to less healthy, but more efficient light. So we're sacrificing our human health for an energy payoff in the end, right? An LED light is more efficient, but I would say less healthy for humans. So that's a, I've kind of meandered my way away from sunlight, you know, but. But you think like incandescent lights are healthier for humans than LEDs.

The last thing I'll say is this. LED lights, when they go on and off, they go completely on and off. An incandescent light looks more like this, right? It's a wave and your body perceives it as steady light, incandescent light. I mean, LED lights do this. So it's very jarring for our central nervous system when it does that. And then sunscreen, you have to think like if you're outside in the sun, what kind of sunscreen are you using? Most sunscreens are for of oxybenzone, Ava Benzone, Ryle. This long list of chemicals that we know are absorbed through the skin, excreted in the poop, potentially associated with endocrine disruption and cancer. So if you want to be in the sun for long amounts of time, I surf every day in Costa Rica, you either have to wear protective clothing or like a zinc based, mineral based sunscreen is much better than a chemical based sunscreen. But the, the long-winded answer to your question is no. We should not hear the sun context matters.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Absolutely. I'm glad you spent some time on that because this is where, this is one of the major. Fields that health is moving towards is paying attention to circadian. Yeah. Rhythms and circadian medicine overall and the, the Salk Institute has affirmed that thousands of our genes are regulated by light, right? And so if we're talking about the expression of certain symptoms positive or you know, things that we don't want to happen. There's a huge implication for these light inputs and regulating what our bodies are doing at any given time, because our bodies are always trying to sync up to this 24 hour solar day, how we evolved again for thousands and thousands of years.

But now we're manufacturing these artificial conditions and it's throwing these clocks off so you're not producing the hormones when you want them to be produced. You're not cortisol's too high at this time and too low at this time. Testosterone's not getting produced properly. The list goes on and on, let alone our hunger and satiety cues as well. And that's specifically why I brought up the Salk Institute. And so they were sharing some data on how light impacts our association with food and our appetite. And again, and even if you think about this. We've got some really interesting data on you. You kind of like tiptoed into this a little bit, but how the sun influences our appetite. It is a powerful regulator of our appetite and our food choices. Right? We want to eat different sh*t when we're in the sun for a while, and chances are you don't wanna eat a glizzy. You know what a glizzy is? 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: No. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Its a hot dog. That's what the kids call a hot dog now. So, yeah, it's like, it's like your, your appetite changes.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And also the, the sun spending time in the sun, especially if you haven't been in the sun for a while, people fall asleep like immediately on their vacation. They're just chilling, knocked out, getting that sun input. It's just like, well isn't this a daytime thing? Like, shouldn't you be sleeping at night? Whatever. But it's like helping to sync certain things up, like serotonin channels. And you mentioned this, these pathways, serotonin is a precursor for melatonin and, but just helping our bodies to sink up, you know, this coherence happens.

And sometimes that coherent hit to your nervous system can get your ass to just totally shut down, get some anabolic stimulus going, some healing going, and we, we need the sun. Like this is what creates life here on earth. And so being scared of it is, is a little bit silly. Of course, we don't want to get burned, we don't want to overstay our welcome, but it's just being mindful and some of those tips that you shared are super helpful. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Yeah, I think the biggest things are, you know, you, you, you talked about it getting outside first thing in the morning, getting that circadian biology in your eyes, that that bright light in the eye just had their circadian rhythm. And then being outside throughout the day trying to get as much natural light as you can. If you're working in indoors, try and work under as many incandescent light as you can. Have a window. If you can have the window open, depending on the time of year and the temperature. An open window allows some infrared radiation to come in.

There's another hack that's actually pretty funny that I've done. It's not super feasible for most people. Have you seen these? Do you have chickens? I don't you ever had a lizard growing up? Remember those like red, they're these red lights they sell on Amazon. They're they're, they're lizard lights, right? 

They're like these warmer lizard lights, and some of 'em actually have some uv, but you can get 'em just like as pure infrared and they, you put them in lizard cages because when you bring a lizard, an animal that is meant to be outdoors into your house, it will die unless you supplement it with the proper amount of light and the right wavelengths of light.

But you can take those lizard lights, those red, they're, they're, I think they're halogen bulbs. They put out a lot of infrared and you can sit next to them while you're working to get more infrared radiation while you're indoors. It looks pretty funny. I did a story about it. People were really interested because, if I'm sitting in Austin, I remember I was sitting in Austin in January of this past year. It's cold outside. I can't work outside all day. Right. I can't work outside at all. I, they had a cold snap in Austin in January, and so that was around the time I did the podcast with Tristan. And, and he, he recommended this to me. So I went on Amazon. They're 20 bucks. And it, you know, you can put a, an a ha I think it's a halogen, uh, or it's at least an incandescent red bulb.

It's quite strong and you can put it right next to you and it shines a red infrared light on you while you're working. You have to be careful because they get so hot that it can cause a fire. So it actually burns it. You could see like a burn mark on some of the papers that I had it on, 'cause I put it on like papers. But you can get infrared light indoors by doing that. It's kind of a, a crazy, it gets into the realm of like biohacking, but it's 20 bucks. Kind of fun. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, I love that. I love that. And also just in particular, in the evening, you know. Red light is probably a lot better than, you know, the stuff that we're currently using.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Oh, if you come into my house at night, it looks like I'm in a lizard's cage. 'cause it's all red lights. It's all, it's all red lights In Costa Rica, because I'm so close to the equator, the sun goes down between five 15 and six 15 all year. So the longest day of the year, which is coming up here really soon, is gonna be about a 6 15, 6 20 sunset in Costa Rica. So the, the longest it's gonna go down to six 20. So basically after the sun goes down, all my whole house in Costa Rica's red. I don't have many neighbors around me, but if I did, they'd be like, he's having a party 'cause it's all red, but there's no techno music.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Or some freaky stuff.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Yeah, yeah. Some freaky stuff, which is great. Like candlelight red light is great for like romantic times. Right. That's why we have candlelight dinners. It's like, it works great in relationships too. Red light is multifactorial. But you know, now in the states, when I'm at a higher latitude, the sun goes down, you know, so late that I don't even really, I just go to, when the sun goes down, I go to sleep. But if I'm in my house after dark, it's all red lights and it's preferably incandescent red lights that are not flickering or zero flicker LEDs. So there's lots of ways to hack it, but it, it can be kind of fun or it's different, you know, it's different the first time you do it. Your, your house seems like your where my lights, but you kinda get used to it.

I even went as far, and this doesn't really fix the problem, but it made for good content. I was putting a plastic, they saw these plastic sheets on Amazon and you can put them in your refrigerator. So the refrigerator light, like I, this is maybe like how crazy I am, but at night I hate going to the refrigerator because the whole house is like dark and chill and red and you open the refrigerator. Oh, it's so bright. Boom. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Beam you up. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Yes, it beams you up. So I put a red piece of plastic in the refrigerator at night, made for good content. I was like, look, even my refrigerator's a red light. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Paul's about that life, man. I love this. You know, this has been so insightful. And um, you know, just to pivot back to the Salk Institute. So they have published a lot of data on the impact of light on our genes, and also we've got Nutrigenomics nutrigene genetics and looking at what they shared second to light as, as far as like this circadian timing system influencing our genes and our gene expression. Which if you're like, what, what are genes? Well, they're functional. Genes and proteins essentially, and that regulate other genes and proteins. 

So if we're talking about these kind of circadian clocks specifically, so these circadian clocks, they're functional genes and proteins themselves that impact our other genes and proteins. With that said, they, they share that the second most influential thing outside of light being the primary influence over our gene expression, these circadian clock genes, is food. Right. And specifically when you're eating. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Hmm. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: And so we started this conversation talking about this calorie paradigm. Let's talk about, if you can, in closing some best practices. How can we get out of this calorie first mindset, respect the, the validity that, that we do have around calories, right? Giving us a metric to be mindful of, but what are some best practices? Gimme three things for us to focus on with our nutrition. And including if you can't, if you can put into this three does when we eat have any influence as well? 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Yeah, it definitely does. So I think that the first thing is food quality, and that sounds general, but I want people to understand that's what we talked about earlier with the great grandmother rule. Simple foods, single ingredient foods, meat plants, foods your great-grandmother would recognize. That's the first, that's what high quality food is. That's what food quality means. It's, it's those foods are going to have more micronutrients, they're going to be less industrially processed. Those micronutrients are going to play a role in satiety along with higher quality macronutrients that are more digestible, less toxins, less pesticides, all the things that our body has had and expected for hundreds of thousands of years as as humans, as homo sapiens.

So food quality first, and that, that's really the resounding message that I want people to understand is. Stop thinking about calories, think about food quality. Food quality is king. If you do not eat high quality foods, you will fail. Your weight loss will fail. And the magical piece of this is that when food quality is increased, a lot of times other things get better that you weren't even expecting. As you're losing weight, your autoimmune disease starts to get better, your sleep gets better, you become more fertile, your libido gets better, everything gets better because it's all connected, right? And so the second thing is don't let convenience be the enemy, right? Like you have to fight. Fight against it.

And, and this means swimming upstream. And increasingly, I think in our lives today, this is a broader statement than just food. I think the more intentionality with which we live our lives, the better our lives become. If you do what everyone else does, you get what everyone else gets. And most people in our society, most of our brothers and sisters are obese and sick and unhealthy, and becoming increasingly and fertile. And that is not what we want. We have to like lift them out. We have to bring them with us, our families, our friends. We have to be the beacon in our communities to bring people out of this kind of despair that we are in. So if we go with the flow, we will end up with what everyone gets. I think that was one of the major like motivators for me growing up, was I saw my dad sick.

You know, he was a doctor. I saw him sick at an early age. He had a heart attack when he was 44. You know, I'm 47. You know, it's, it's just, I didn't want to have obesity like my dad and sleep apnea like my dad and a heart attack, you know. And I saw my grandparents and they had arthritis and they were not able to move. And I thought, that's not what I want. But that is the path that we go to. Whatever illnesses your parents have, you will have those illnesses if you continue to live in the way that everyone lives. And it's, it's up to us to kind of, we have to swim upstream on the convenience piece, you know, and hopefully some of the things I've built will make that easier for people at some levels like lineage.

But basically we have to rebel against convenience, which means making your food when you can, packing food with you, looking for high quality foods. I mean, gosh, it's a rebellion today to go to a grocery store shop. You know, if you go to a grocery store and cook your own food, you are a, you are a rebel. Congratulations. I wanna be your friend. I wanna give you a high five because that is one of the most rebellious, but one of the most powerful things you could ever do today is just go to a grocery store and cook your own food. And the third thing is to your point, when we eat, if we're thinking about sleep, you don't wanna eat too close when you go to sleep.

Right? Give it two or three hours. And I think that there's differences in genetics in terms of how we respond to that morning time, right? Some people probably do better with intermittent fasting than other people. I don't do well with it. I feel best when I eat first thing in the morning. And I think we know, we get this cortisol awakening response, a natural spike in cortisol when you wake up. And for some people when they do intermittent fasting in the morning, that cortisol persists later in the morning. So if you don't eat in the morning, you're going to get more cortisol later in the morning, which is probably not a great thing. I think some people probably have the genetics and they respond very well to intermittent fasting.

I would say know your body and experiment on both ways. And this is something I've been thinking about a lot is how much I'm constantly humbled by the bioindividuality between humans. You know, I think for a while I thought we're all the same. We all just need to eat meat and boy was I wrong. You know, like I've, I've tried to evolve and learn from this, but I think there are probably some people that do better with high fat, low carb, some people that do better with low carb, high fat, you know, or high carb, low fat, both sides of the spectrum, you know, I think we know.

How much protein we need when it comes to food and individuality. We know, okay, like 0.8 grams of protein per pound, a gold body weight, that's pretty solid. Get your protein, leverage the protein use, high quality protein that has micronutrients as opposed to low quality protein with a bunch of fake ingredients that are gonna give you like, uh, gas with discharge and anal spotting. You don't want fake fats in your protein. Protein bars are not the solution. But once you figure out how much protein, you kind of just need to figure out, am I gonna be a high fat person or am I gonna be like a high carb person or am I gonna be somewhere in the middle? Because there's probably those three phenotypes.

But I think that in the same vein, when we eat, it's probably very individual. Some people do well with like no food in the morning and some people it's really gonna crash your, your hormones and stuff. And so see what works best for you. But I think most people are gonna do better if you don't eat within, like you wanna stop eating at least two hours before you go to sleep. That's what I would say on the timing. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Fantastic advice. You know, I gotta tell you, man, one of the things that I appreciate about you. And you just shared it. Like you said, the words like, I was wrong. Yeah. Some people get mad at you of course. And don't like you because, which first of all just saying somebody doesn't like you is f**ked up. You're an awesome guy. But just because you change and evolve your perspective on certain things, and I think that that is, that, that means you're a smart person because like you're learning and you're, and you're experimenting and you're figuring things out, and you're sharing it and you stay true. There's certain principles that are true because they've been true forever. Yeah. Like it's just a part of like how stuff works here on planet earth. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Yeah. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: But just being able to evolve your, your beliefs and your perspectives and your teaching and, and what you're advocating for. And all the while it's the heart of like advocating for us and advocating for humanity and having that bedrock underneath everything. So I appreciate you, man.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Thank you.

SHAWN STEVENSON: For being that person because somebody has to do that. Like, this is what I thought at one time, this is what I believe today based on, like, I was open and I took in the information and I experimented, and I looked at things and I worked with people and yes, this is where I'm at today and I'm continuing to evolve. That's a masterful life, man. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Thank you. I mean, it's, it's been humbling, you know, but it's, it's been good. And I think that there are still, there are people who do really well on a carnivore diet, and I learned for myself that carbohydrates were great. You know, like adding fruit and honey made me feel way better then strict carnivores. So I think that, and, but you know, what's interesting about carnivore is that like, I think that like there's, I forget where it's from, but there's a quote that says, don't say that I have the truth, but that I have a truth. Right? So, I think there is a truth in keto, there's a truth in carnivore, there's probably a truth.

There's a truth in veganism, there's a truth in plant-based. All of these things have a truth and we try to bring them all together in some ways, you know, some people are gonna benefit from a vegan diet because they cut out all these processed foods. I think a lot of people benefit from carnivore in terms of autoimmune stuff. And that was my original enthusiasm was, Hey, my eczema went away when I went to just meat. And then I humbly learned a year and a half later, Hey, long-term keto doesn't work for my body, but it works for some people. So yeah, I'm trying to keep humble and keep learning and people can criticize me all they want for that. I'm, I'm never gonna have all the answers, I'm just trying to share how I put things together and I think it's fun to try and connect the dots. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. I love this, Man. Well, can you let everybody know where they can connect with you, get more information and all the good stuff? 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Yeah. So I am at Paul Saladino MD on all the socials and we talked a little about Lineage today. If they want convenient, like super high quality, grass fed meat stuff, it's at lineage provisions.com. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Amazing.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Thank you, brother. It's good to see you.

SHAWN STEVENSON: I appreciate you. Anytime. Anytime.

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Thank you, man.

SHAWN STEVENSON: The one and only, Dr. Paul Saladino. 

DR. PAUL SALADINO: Thank you, man. 

SHAWN STEVENSON: Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value outta this. Thank you so much for just hanging out with me today. And if you want to hang out with me in the studio, pop over to the Model Health Show YouTube channel, and you could sit in, be in the room with us with these incredible minds, and we're also doing some exclusive content over on YouTube. I'm telling you, you don't wanna miss it, so make sure that you're subscribed to the Model Health Show YouTube channel, because it's just gonna add so much more value to your life.

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