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Summary
On episode 448 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Dr. Paul Saladino, a board-certified psychiatrist and functional medicine practitioner who has used a meat-based diet to reverse autoimmune issues, chronic inflammation, and mental health struggles in hundreds of patients.
Paul argues that red meat has been wrongly vilified by decades of weak science, while many plants most of us consider healthy actually sit on a toxicity spectrum and can quietly cause the fatigue, weight gain, and mood issues people can’t otherwise explain.
The conversation covers the human body’s physical evidence for eating meat, why the famous red meat and cancer link falls apart under scrutiny, and why eating an animal nose to tail, not just steak, is what actually delivers complete nutrition.
Links
- https://thecarnivorecodebook.com
- https://heartandsoilsupplements.com
- https://carnivoremd.com
- https://www.spuriouscorrelations.com
Key Takeaways
- Red meat carries unique nutrients that plants simply cannot provide. Creatine, carnitine, choline, carnosine, vitamin K2, and B12 occur in appreciable, bioavailable amounts almost exclusively in animal foods, and Paul argues these nutrients were essential to the historical growth of the human brain.
- The human body shows physical evidence of being built for hunting meat, not grazing on plants. Humans have a more acidic stomach than herbivorous primates, a much smaller large intestine paired with a larger small intestine (the “expensive tissue hypothesis” that traded gut size for brain size), throwing shoulders, and even white sclera that let hunting partners silently track where each other was looking.
- The 2015 report linking red meat to cancer was built on weak, cherry-picked evidence. The IARC committee excluded every animal study and all interventional research, based its “carcinogen” classification on just 14 epidemiology studies, and 8 of those 14 showed no association between red meat and cancer at all.
- Only one study in that review found a statistically significant link, and it was badly confounded. That single study looked at Seventh-day Adventists, a group that largely avoids meat, so the few members who ate red meat were also more likely to be obese and outliers on other health behaviors, making it impossible to separate the meat from the confounders.
- Epidemiology on red meat is skewed by who actually eats it. For 70 years, people who ate red meat in the West were also more likely to smoke, skip exercise, and avoid preventive care, while people who ate more vegetables were making broader health-conscious choices, which is why large studies from Asia show red meat eaters with less cardiovascular disease and less cancer.
- Not all “hormesis” is good for you. Environmental hormesis, things like exercise, sauna, cold plunges, sunlight, and fasting, genuinely makes the body stronger, but plant defense molecules like sulforaphane in kale are pro-oxidants with real side effects (thyroid interference, gut irritation), not the harmless antioxidant boost they’re marketed as.
- Eating an animal nose to tail, not just muscle meat, prevents nutrient deficiencies. Organs like liver and heart supply folate, choline, riboflavin, and vitamin K2 that muscle meat alone can’t provide, which is why Paul built a company making desiccated organ supplements for people who won’t eat organs directly.
- You do not need fiber or large amounts of plant food to be healthy. Paul says most people can get complete nutrition from a steak, some liver, and bone broth, while a plant-based diet requires deliberately combining dozens of foods that never grew together in nature just to approach the same nutrient profile.
- Paul’s three strategies to get and stay well: understand which foods actually nourish your body versus which quietly harm it (red meat is nutritious and wrongly feared, plants exist on a toxicity spectrum); live like your ancestors did through sunlight, community, cold exposure, sauna, outdoor exercise, and occasional fasting; and do work that feels meaningful to you.
“Eating animals nose to tail provides humans with all of the nutrients they need to thrive. End of story, full stop, period.”
Dr. Paul Saladino
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