Stepping Away from Dietary Dogma with Paul Saladino MD
Summary
➡ The text discusses the challenges doctors face in providing holistic care due to the fear of litigation and the pressure to follow standard medical procedures. It highlights how the medical system discourages doctors from exploring alternative treatments, such as dietary changes, even when they believe it could benefit the patient. The text also criticizes the promotion of unhealthy food substances like seed oils and the overconsumption of linoleic acid due to industrialized food systems. Lastly, it questions the mainstream endorsement of canola oil as a healthy fat, despite its industrial origins and potential health risks.
➡ The article suggests that linoleic acid, a type of fat found in many foods, might be a key factor in metabolic health issues like diabetes. The author believes that reducing the amount of linoleic acid in our diet could improve our health. This could mean avoiding certain oils and foods high in this acid. Additionally, the author discusses the potential impact of different types of carbohydrates on our health, suggesting that grains might be more harmful than other sources like fruits and honey.
➡ The text discusses the idea that environmental toxins, often found in processed foods, tap water, cosmetics, plastics, and other everyday items, may contribute to health issues like diabetes. It suggests that these toxins can interfere with normal body functions, including metabolism. The text also emphasizes the importance of being mindful about what we consume, touch, and use in our daily lives, from the food we eat to the products we apply on our skin. It encourages adopting a more natural lifestyle, such as using natural deodorants, avoiding plastic, and choosing natural fiber clothing, to improve overall health.
➡ Paul Saladino, MD, is active on social media where he shares valuable content. He appreciates the support and hopes everyone enjoyed the discussion. You can find more details in the show notes. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for more Healthy Living interviews.
Transcript
And Paul Saladino has a slightly different take on things, incorporating some plant food into his diet and even honey. But he is really knowledgeable about the research literature and we have a common background of doing form, training and practice in psychiatry. So it’s with great pleasure that I welcome Paul to today’s interview. Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here. So, Paul, we are, you know, talking a little bit about the controversy in nutrition. And because, of course, as a physician, we all go through this if we’re going to stray away from the quote unquote standard of care.
So I wanted to ask you what it’s been like or what type of adversity you faced as a physician. Sort of getting out of the allopathic model and focusing on stuff that will really make people healthy. So I’m curious. When I went to medical school, on like the first day of medical school, they told me that about 50% of what I was going to learn in medical school was wrong, was going to be wrong. And then I found it very ironic when any physician, especially who questions anything that is dogmatic in medicine, gets thrown out of the kingdom.
That’s apostasy. You get derided, denigrated and ridiculed. And so I just think this is so interesting that the first day of medical school, I’m told most of what you’re going to see here is questionable, but there’s not really a forum for questioning things within medicine. My path was that I did residency at the University of Washington. I got interested in mental health, I got interested in neuroinflammation. I got interested in the gut and where it was coming from. And I had autoimmune diseases myself. I had eczema, I had asthma, I had seasonal allergies. I just felt like so much of what we deal with in western medicine is autoimmune in nature, has some immune component.
And I felt like nutrition was such an important lever that wasn’t really being leveraged by medicine. And I just thought there has to be some trigger for so many of these illnesses, and its got to be something in nutrition. And so I experimented with diet for most of my life and couldnt quite figure it out until I did this carnivore, this crazy carnivore thing where I cut out everything, and probably I threw the baby out with the bathwater, but I cut out everything except meat. And that really improved my eczema and my asthma. And I dont really have allergies anymore either.
But what I learned after about a year and a half was that for me, and probably for a lot of other people, carbohydrates are valuable in the human organism for a number of reasons, and that insulin isnt the enemy, necessarily. And theres a lot of nuance and context, all of this. And so at the end of my residency was when I started talking about all that, and I ended up doing some virtual work. But the majority of my time has been just doing educational stuff because I think that if I worked in a hospital, I would have probably been thrown out by now.
I don’t think that I would have been very well accepted by western medicine. I don’t think that. I mean, if I had a private practice, sure. So maybe if I had a practice, whether it was an integrative medical practice or some sort of holistic practice, I could have been counseling people with regard to diet and trying to work through things. And I think that that’s awesome. And that’s kind of what you’re trying to do, it seems like, which is amazing. We need more of that. But I think that if I worked in a hospital, I’m almost positive that I would have, you know, been told, you can’t do what you’re doing.
And to be fair, hospitals are just places where we treat people acutely and we’re not necessarily interested in their nutrition. But at the same time, there isn’t a whole lot of curiosity in western medicine about what’s actually causing things. So, you know, I think that western medicine is not open to these ideas. I mean, I see that all the time. And when I’m talking about apob or lipids and lipid metabolism, you know, you get mds, you know, who are also, you know, practicing, and they just look at what I’m talking about or look at what other people are talking about that’s questioning the canon with regard to lipids or cholesterol or apob or meat or anything, and they just say, you’re idiots.
You think, wow, nobody’s really curious here. So it’s hard, but that’s okay. That makes it fun. But, Paul, wasn’t it peculiar that during medical school, right, when you’re studying pathology and the growing list of diagnoses, and for almost none of them, do they know what the cause is? Yeah. And if you ask them what the cause is, a lot of them get kind of frustrated. I mean, I remember asking in residency or in medical school, what’s causing ulcerative colitis and what’s causing irritable bowel syndrome or what’s causing someone to have depression or, yeah, yeah, anything. Whatever.
Anything. No, we don’t know. Okay. You don’t know what causes 90 plus percent of what we’re dealing with in medicine, maybe 97. Doesn’t anybody, doesn’t that raise alarm bells that nobody is interested in the cause? And I think that when you ask about the cause, people just get very granular, and they just want to pull out the microscope and go deeper and deeper and deeper and say, oh, we’re looking at this signaling molecule and this protein, and it’s, oh, it’s a misfolded protein and it’s this genetic thing, you think, no, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying, like, what is causing it? Like at a, at a macro level, like, what is causing it in our environment? What are we doing? Do we think it’s food? And, man, you say the word food, that’s just, that’s laughable.
That’s not technical enough. There’s no pharmaceuticals for food, so we’re not interested in that. We need to know the actual mechanism. I mean, this is a little bit off topic, but I find the whole kind of cancer space a little bit disingenuous. I mean, we celebrate, and I think this is good. Millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars that go to cancer research every year. And I think, come on, guys, it’s just in our environment. Like, do we think it could be pesticides? Could it be other toxins in our environment that are contributing to cancers? Is any of how much of that, hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially billions of dollars that are going to breast cancer, ovarian cancer, or colon cancer research are aimed at understanding environmental toxins and their impact on cancer? No, they’re interested in understanding molecular mechanisms that are incredibly esoteric so that we can develop pharmaceuticals.
They’re not interested in understanding actual malleable, changeable causes. They’re interested in understanding the granularities and then the pharmaceuticals that correspond to that. And that’s frustrating for me. Yeah, it’s quite frustrating. And, you know, it’s really a business model that they have, and it’s about preserving their organizations, and they’ve lost sight of, you know, what can really help us, because if we can identify the relationship between environmental and other chemicals, because many of these chemicals are in our food, they’re in new products that we buy, that we put in our house, et cetera, et cetera, well, obviously, we can eliminate our exposure and then not have cancer.
But then there’s no business of the oncology industry, which I did practice medicine for a little while in a traditional sense. I don’t do that anymore. A lot of education like you do. And in that experience, I noticed that the oncologists have one of the very few business models in medicine that can make a lot of money because they can generate revenue without them providing a direct service. And this is when people get chemotherapy in their office. They could be on the golf course, and they just have a nurse there who’s administering it. And not only are they getting paid a fee to administer it, but they’re also actually buying, at wholesale prices the chemo drugs and then selling them to the patient at a profit.
So this, I mean, I know that just for a treatment that is, for the side effects of chemotherapy, there were some private oncologists in a solo practice that would bill $100,000 a month, this is procrit just in that drug to treat the side effects. So you could imagine what their total revenue was if they had enough chairs in their chemo suite. So it’s a very big economic interest and very hard to overcome that for the people who, and I know many of the people working in that believe they’re doing a good thing. It’s not that it’s an evil bunch, but they’re not really approaching it in a way that’s going to benefit the health of the nation.
We heard that quote. It’s like I’m paraphrasing. It’s like a man’s ability to understand something is often connected to his financial gain from it or something. You know, it’s like you can’t understand something deeply if you receive financial gain from it, or you can’t. You’re not going to question something that you’re receiving financial gain from. I’m sure someone in your audience can correct me on the quote, but that’s the idea. That, man, if you’re making lots of money as a smart, well intentioned, hardworking physician, it’s not really in your best interest to think, like, maybe I should treat my cancer patients with diet.
And the way that medicine is set up, it’s all litigious. And so if you have a cancer patient that comes to you as an oncologist, this is a good example, we can run with it. And you don’t give them the standard of care, they can sue you. So it’s like a physician’s hands are tied. Before I did my residency in psychiatry and then expanded sort of to more of a holistic focus, I worked in cardiology as a physician assistant. And if someone came to see me as a physician assistant, I’m working with supervising cardiologists. Someone can sue the cardiologists and me in the process.
If I don’t give them statin, if they come in with elevated cholesterol, and I say, have you thought about your diet? I mean, I can give them a dietary spiel for a few months, but if their cholesterol remains elevated and I give them a dietary plan and they have a heart attack, they can sue me if I dont give them a statin. So I think physicians fear this, and as we know a lot of times for men and women, especially if you eat more meat and you eat less seed oils, your cholesterol goes up. So if I were still working in cardiology, I would fear litigation, because someone could come to me and I could say, I’m a cardiologist, I’m board certified.
I’ve been given the stamp of approval. If I’d gone that route, I did not go that route. I’m not board certified in cardiology now. But if I had, then you could be that person and you could say, you know what, as a board certified cardiologist, I don’t actually think statins are net positive for humans. I would like to do this strategy for you, and the patient can then say, no, I’d like to go see another doctor, or, yeah, that sounds good to me. I trust you as a doctor, but regardless of the path that the patient chooses, if I don’t give them a statin, they can sue me, and I could get reported to a medical board.
So it’s like physicians just, we’re led to believe as doctors that you’re going to medical school, and it’s not easy to get into medical school, and it’s not easy to get through medical school. So we have to be reasonably smart. But then we’re not really empowered to use our curiosity and to think about things. We’re just really given a set of decisions that we have to make. We’re given a decision tree, we’re given a rubric and say, follow this, okay? That’s, that’s all you get to do. So as physicians, we really just become lever pullers. Okay, this is, this here’s the med for you.
It’s, it’s really tragic. And it, the tragedy is most at the level of the patients who don’t really find many people who are willing to think outside the box. I think it’s even going to get more so that way because we have clinical practice guidelines now that are forced through electronic health records, and eventually they’ll just be AI making the decisions for 99 out of 100 patients. So it’s really interesting that we have all these parallels in our lives, because I was also a physician assistant, but I worked in oncology, specifically in hematology and bone marrow transplant.
There was something that I observed there. In fact, we all observed it, but I never realized the significance of it until many years later when I looked at nature outside of western medicine, and it was that acute leukemia was almost universally fatal. We had everyone in South Carolina who was an acute leukemia came to our inpatient unit, and often very quickly. There was one variant called AmL M three, or pro myelocytic leukemia that we didn’t treat with chemotherapy. Instead, we gave them a form of vitamin a. It’s called all trans retinoic acid. And almost always they were cured.
And so it hit me later on, I’m like, we had one successful treatment, in my experience, in hematologic malignancies, and it was vitamin a, which is if you eat some liver or some grass fed butter, could that cure the leukemia without having even the pharmaceutical version of it? And in fact, is it even perhaps related to a deficiency of this? Maybe for people who are eating processed food or a strict vegan diet? Even. So, that’s kind of the little experiences that we might collect over time that can lead us to go outside and ask some of these basic common sense questions.
So there are studies showing that in adipose tissue, for example, you’ll find seed oils, linoleic acid, mixed in with our membrane lipids. That means, essentially, our body is storing them and accumulating them. And this is true for many other environmental chemicals. Although this is considered a food substance, it’s common sense to reason that since our body doesn’t produce this molecule at all, that it doesn’t belong there or have a functional role that’s good in our body, right? So the fact that we’re storing it and incorporating it with other lipids that we do know are functional. Right.
It’s got to have some kind of adverse or unnatural health consequences, even without empirical toxicologic data. But we, of course, do have that. A lot of it has been covered up and buried. And I’m not sure if you heard Paul Mason discuss and some others about the research that was not published until 40 years later that it was buried. You know, that some ancestor dug out in magnetic tape and had to convert it into spreadsheets and, you know, all this kind of thing. So, you know, the cat’s out of the bag, so to speak. But in the mainstream, they’re still, you know, promoting Oreos containing seed oils because it will lower your ldl or cholesterol parameters, obviously to the detriment of your health.
And I think it’s ironic also that we have a situation here where we have most of men are being treated for high cholesterol, and they’re also experiencing problems related to not enough or insufficient masculine endocrine production. And even though the cholesterol lowing is all justified by preventing cardiovascular disease, we have men being disproportionately affected by cardiovascular disease. So it’s almost like a triple insult, so to speak. I’ll just say one thing about linoleic acid. So this fat does occur in nature. I think it’s just that we were getting much more of it than we ever would have because of our industrial society and our industrialized food system.
So linoleic acid is about one to maybe one and a half percent of tallow, one to 2% of butter, but it’s 55% of what you find in soybean oil, you think to get the equivalent of five tablespoons of soybean oil, which is what the average american eats per day, across multiple seed oils, you’d have to eat two and a half pounds of soybeans per day. That’s a lot of soybeans. And it’s something like, if you’d have a lot of gas, you’d have a lot of gas. It’s just, you wouldn’t. You’d never eat two and a half pounds of soybeans a day.
You’d have to eat more than two to three pounds of sunflower seeds. We would never have been exposed to these things. To get five tablespoons of corn oil, you have to eat 60 to 80 ears of corn. So it’s, you know, canola is from a plant called a rapeseed plant, and that’s not even food, you know, until 1940, was it actually cultivated so that the oil would be less toxic. Right. Because there’s a very poisonous component to rapeseed oil. Yeah. It’s called a russic acid. It’s a monounsaturated fat that does look like it causes heart lesions.
And I think that took until the 1980s for them to do that, because canola oil was a thing in the 1940s. In World War two, they used it in ships because it’s lubricating on ships because it still stays slippery while it’s wet. So it’s a very valuable thing for military, for industrial applications. And then for canola oil specifically, they had to modify it to get rid of the arousic acid. And that’s what sold to us as canola oil. And that’s what’s told to us in no uncertain terms, is a healthy fat by Harvard mayo. Aha. FDA.
I mean, you can go to Harvard’s website and they’ll tell you, canola oil is a healthy fat. It’s right there in plain view. So, yeah, it’s. But there’s. There’s a little bit of linoleic acid in a lot of foods that we eat. There’s a little bit of linoleic acid in your steak, but not much. There’s a lot of it in seed oils. And that’s, I think, potentially one of the problems. And that, I think, gives us an indication. So this is just the hypothesis, but I think that if that’s the case, then perhaps that’s one of the most important things we could think about for how to reverse all of this.
Because if we’re thinking about, okay, metabolic health, insulin resistance prediabetes as synonyms, and we’re believing that metabolic health and dysfunction are two sides of the coin, the crux of our health. How do we go from being metabolically unwell to being metabolically. Well, now, I think there are a number of things that can cause metabolic ill health, but I think one of the factors that doesn’t get thought about with enough detail is the amount, the absolute amount of linoleic acid in our diet. And this is probably something that is easily. It’s definitely easily actionable for every person listening to this, but it’s never talked about enough.
So I think my hypothesis is that if someone is metabolically unwell, if someone has diabetes, pre diabetes, et cetera, then getting the smallest amount of linoleic acid in your diet is critical, which means getting it out of as many things as possible. That’s the key. And I think that’s one of the potential prescriptions we should be giving men and women. But that’s very important because I don’t think there’s enough talk about absolute amounts of linoleic acid in the diet. And that means no seed oils. But for a lot of people, it probably means no avocado oil and no olive oil either.
If you really, really want to get better as fast as possible. And we believe that this potential problem has merit, we probably want to cut out even olive oil and avocado from our diet because those have 15% to 20% linoleic acid. It’s not to say that you couldn’t become healthy with those in your diet. It just could delay it. So this idea of a coconut oil has some. And. But there’s another difference between the omega six fats in meats versus in seed oils, which aside from quantity, which is that virtually as soon as they’re pressed or extracted from the seeds, they become oxidized and rancid.
They have to be treated so they smell palatable. Actually, with the meat, they remain intact because they’re not, you know, processed out of the meat. They’re. They’re inside of it, and so they’re not oxidized. And they may actually, you know, have different pharmacodynamic properties as a result of that different effect on your body, you know, with not being a problem versus being a problem. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the other things people should be aware of are things that irritate the gut. And lipopolysaccharide seems to be very clearly problematic for humans, also known as endotoxin. And this is an interesting piece of the equation that we haven’t talked about.
But I’ll just mention it for a moment. You mentioned carbohydrates earlier, and when I look at the spectrum, the landscape of carbohydrates, part of my history was getting better by adding some carbohydrates back to my diet, specifically fruit and honey. And those sugar carbohydrates get demonized. But we can talk about that in a moment from my perspective. But if I look at other carbohydrates, right, there’s fruit, there’s honey, there’s other type of sweet syrups, like maple syrup, whatever. Then there’s grain based carbohydrates like rice or wheat or oats, quinoa, and then there’s roots. Generally speaking, you could put squash in the category.
Squash is a fruit, so put that in the category there. But so you have roots, you have grains, you have fruits, you have things like honey. And this is just purely observation, but it’s very interesting to me. I was on a call yesterday and I was talking to some friends, and they were mentioning that in France, women know that after you get to be 25 years old, you can’t eat too much bread or you’ll gain weight. And in Japan, the japanese women know that if they are getting too overweight or if they’re gaining weight, they eat less rice.
And so just purely observationally, there seems to be a difference between a grain based carbohydrate and other types of carbohydrates. And grains, again, would be wheat, rice, oats, these kind of things. Quinoa, if that’s your flavor. But quinoa is probably even worse. And I’ve seen people do pretty good with tubers, and I seem to do pretty good with fruit. Now, fruit and honey have all sorts of things with them that we can unpack. There’s a big difference here, because most people that eat grains like this, right, they’re eating processed grains, like bread, for example, right? It’s processed flour.
So the carbohydrates get absorbed precipitously, not rather than gradually, because they don’t have the benefit of the food matrix, where when you eat whole fruits, for example, or tubers, they’re mixed with the fiber. So do you think it could be related to that absorption rate of the carbohydrates? Perhaps? Because we know all the processed carbs, the candies and the bars, the cereals and all of that kind of stuff. Right. Is all immediate release carbs, basically. I think it’s possible, but I think that there’s something else going on, because I don’t see a problem with honey, and I’ve never seen anyone show that honey causes lipopolysaccharide or gut inflammation.
Honey is pretty quickly absorbed. I think what’s going on with, and again, it’s contextual in terms of the fruit and the honey, not everyone is going to tolerate those well, especially if somebody has metabolic dysfunction at baseline, and we can dig into that. But I think that my suspicion here, and there’s evidence for this in animal models, but nobody’s ever looked at this in humans. So we don’t know that the grains just cause damage to the human gut. And that makes sense. I mean, their seeds, they’re highly defended, and they just, I think that the grains.
My suspicion. So my hypothesis here would be, if you look at a human and you feed them wheat or oats or rice, you’re going to see more lipopolysaccharide coming from the gut, because you’re going to cause overgrowth of certain types of bacteria that have lipopolysaccharide, Lp’s and the toxin. And maybe the grains are directly damaging to the gut, causing that Lp’s to move into the circulation. But there seems to be something that’s uniquely, again, this is just observational hypothesis, uniquely fattening, which probably isn’t good about grains in humans. And I think that other sources of carbohydrates are better tolerated by most humans, be it tubers or fruit and honey.
And I’ll just say a word about fruit and honey real quickly to give people the full perspective here. I think that when humans become diabetic, when we become metabolically unwell, we lose the ability to process carbohydrates. Well, I still think that some carbohydrates that are moderated serve a valuable role in humans, because I think it’s a balance in someone that’s diabetic between excess cortisol, glucagon, epinephrine, stress hormones that happen if you completely restrict carbohydrates. This is just my perspective, but I think that someone who is diabetic, who is metabolically unwell, probably should limit carbohydrates until they become metabolically healthy.
And that takes time and probably potentially employs a strategy like limiting linoleic acid. As I mentioned earlier, that to me is part of the prescription that perhaps in the short term, if you don’t tolerate carbohydrates well, maybe moderating them is a good idea and thinking about where you’re getting them from. If you do tolerate carbohydrates well, if you’re already metabolically healthy, great. I eat tons of carbohydrates. Eat carbohydrates in relation to how much you’re exercising and how much you’re moving. And I think that that’s totally reasonable for humans as well. And again, my suspicion is that in order to reverse metabolic dysfunction, we need to shift our membranes.
And the way we do that is by changing the quality and the composition of the fats we eat. I don’t think carbohydrates cause diabetes, but I think that when we get into that diabetic, pre diabetic spectrum, we don’t tolerate them well, and we have to think about them more intentionally. And I think that the research on fruit looks pretty safe for most people. Again, within the context of all of that. Yeah, I’m also not sure that sugar causes diabetes. And I’ve seen people essentially fully recover in just a few weeks from type two diabetes, eating almost entirely carbohydrate diet, like a vegan type cleansing diet or even a fruit only diet.
And they didn’t stay on that diet long term because it was not very nutritious or nutrient dense, but they were able to completely reverse any insulin abnormalities or sugar abnormalities, even by eating pure carbohydrates. Now, it wasn’t like, eat anything you want. It didn’t include the most, like, for the fruit diet, for example. It doesn’t include the super sweet fruits like bananas and mangoes. And the vegan diet, know, doesn’t include legumes, for example, or other, you know, things that would not be necessarily beneficial, but it does include tubers, and it does include some grains, just not non gluten containing grains.
And people still are able to reverse their diabetes. So there’s got to be, you know, something else going on. You know, if you look at some studies and this kind of maybe get into our last topic, that we’re in various organs and tissues, and the most of the highest number of these studies are looking at adipose tissue, but they can actually find a variety of toxic chemicals in the tissue, right. In the fat tissue. And that’s where a lot of the abnormal metabolism is occurring with respect to glucose. Right. Obviously the liver as well. And you can find many of these things in the liver also.
So my hypothesis is that there are environmental toxins that are really causing much of this. And I’m not saying that they’re from surreptitious exposure. I think many of them are in processed foods, and there may be a variety of them that have some sort of role as a whole, rather than there being just one thing. And that would make sense why you can have a diet that would seem counterintuitive but still result in a clinical remission. If you gave a man estrogen, they would not feel good. If you gave a man estrogen, suppository or whatever, their erections would suffer, their libido would suffer, they would probably gain weight.
It would be bad. And we’re getting that in tap water, right? Exactly. And we’re getting that in cosmetics, and we’re getting that in plastics, and we’re getting that everywhere. We’re getting estrogen mimicking compounds everywhere now. And so it’s, you really have to be almost, you know, crazy or intense about this, for lack of a better word. You have to be very, very intentional about what you touch, what goes on your body, what kind of underwear you wear, what kind of shampoo you use, what kind of soap, what kind of cologne, what kind of deodorant, what’s in your water? Minimizing the plastic that your food is touching.
It’s impossible to have food that touches zero plastic. I get it. But what you’re drinking out of, what’s in your dishwasher, what’s on your clothes, what are your sheets made out of? But I think once you start going down the rabbit hole, it all kind of unfurls, right? You pull the thread and you realize, oh, okay. I mean, it’s just been a gradual process for me. Like, oh, I’m drinking out of a plastic water bottle. I’m going to change it over for stainless steel. Oh, like, I’m not going to use dishwasher detergent anymore because that could potentially be problematic.
Oh, I’m just, I’m going to use a different deodorant. That’s a natural deodorant. Or I’m going to use alcohol or coconut oil or an essential oil or apple cider vinegar. I’m not going to use a shampoo anymore because I don’t need it on my hair. Or I’m going to use a castor soap, you know, or I’m going to use something that’s, that’s different, that’s a more, quote, natural product. As loaded and as woo woo as that word is, if someone came on a tour of either one of our houses, at first, nothing would look out of place or unusual.
But if they started looking closely, they’d see that we don’t have any of these things around. Right. That everything we’ve got, we got things made of natural materials, essentially, right? Or minerals. Yeah. Yeah. A few things in my house might look a little funny, but, yeah, I mean, they walk into my shower and be like, there’s no, nothing here. I’m intense, you know, you walk in my bath, there’ll be no soap or shampoo in my shower. No soap. There’s no shoe. No soap or shampoo in my shower. You know, people always ask me, why do you smell? There’s plenty of natural deodorants.
And my bathroom is just, I have contact solution and I have a toothbrush and I don’t use toothpaste. I just use water to brush my teeth. My toothbrush is boar’s hair bristles. So again, we’re getting far down the rabbit hole here, but it’s like, where can I avoid touching plastic in my life right now? I’m sitting here on a chair in my house, the chair is made from wool and the shorts I’m wearing are cotton. I don’t have on polyester underwear. Who knows if that’s really an issue for humans. But I’ve talked about this recently. There are even some of these leggings, probably underwear for men and women that have forever chemicals in them which could go through the skin.
I think that these, the toxin exposures is interesting because it’s so varied and it’s everywhere. And we just have to think. I mean, I get in my car and I mean, I drive a regular car. It’s not a Flintstones car. So I’m sure I’m getting some flame retardants in my truck. But other than that, I just try to err on the side of wood, concrete, of metal and glass. And I try and avoid polyester, try and avoid soaps and shampoos unless they really. Clothing. Yeah. Even laundry detergents can have xenoestrogens in them. Phthalates, fragrances. Yeah, vinegar.
I use vinegar, baking soda. These work great. Works great. I mean, one of the things about being in Costa, one of the things about being in Costa Rica is it was, I remember going to a store here to get a laundry detergent. I found this ecos laundry detergent, and it was $50 for a jug. And I thought, this is ridiculous. I don’t want to wash my clothes in nuclear blue washy clothes stuff because I hate the smell. But I don’t want to pay $50 for an ecos jug here in Costa Rica, probably would cost you dollar 16 in the United States or something.
And so I was like, oh, I’m just going to use vinegar and it works great. You know, I, $3 for three liters of vinegar and I just pour it in and it’s super cheap, works fantastic. And it’s just white vinegar. These, these simple things. I mean, that’s just like my, my multi surface household cleaner. It’s just distilled water, distilled vinegar, and a little bit of essential oil of your choice. You know, I like citrus oils for cleaning, but that you, it cleans every surface. You know, maybe you don’t want to put it on fine wood furniture, but you only need a damp cloth for that.
You don’t need any chemicals whatsoever. I just went to Miami, and whenever I go to an Airbnb, I always email the person and say, hey, can you remove all of the scented plugins in the house? And they say, sure, sure. And of course, I get there and I’m owing stuff out the door because there’s multiple fragrance bombs in the house. And I think, who lives with this stuff, guys, those are potentially endocrine disrupting chemicals. You don’t want, you don’t want glade plugins, you don’t want febreze. It’s just, you just, you want your windows open as much as possible.
I mean, this is the way it goes. So, yeah, I think these chemicals, air purifier, if you live in, you can’t have your windows open. And, you know, it was even worse during the pandemic years because they were using all those, you know, germicidal chemicals and, you know, they, they advertised proudly, but, you know, some of those things, like quaternary amines are extremely toxic and you can’t get rid of them. And they accumulate, like so many things. So it’s kind of cumulative. And I think that, obviously, I think that what you put into your mouth is, is huge, and then it’s what your body’s made of.
Right? Yeah. And then the second thing you put into it. Yeah. And the second thing to think of is anything that touches your body, anything that you inhale, anything that you put on your skin. So if you can figure out those two levels, those two layers of the onion, those two levels of the bullseye, you’re doing really good. And if you fix those things, most people will feel much better. The third, well, kind of in addition to putting things on your skin, is, I think men need to make sure they’re sleeping enough and sleeping well. But if you get those three things right, your testosterone should, should improve.
Without a doubt. Without TRT. We didn’t even talk about that. Yes, well, I’ve definitely talked about that, and I’m not a big fan of it. But, you know, certainly if you can restore it by just avoiding some of these things, which once you learn a little bit, it’s not nearly as difficult as you think. And I think there are many more products available these days, like, for example, natural fiber clothing that is accessible and more fashionable, that you’ll be able to adopt this lifestyle. And by increasing the demand, there’ll be even more variety and people will start to wake up to this and seek out these more natural ways of living.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, Paul, it’s really been a pleasure speaking with you today. Do you have any events or things that you’d like to mention to our audience, how they can find out more about what you have to offer? No events going on, but I mean, on all the socials, I’m all saladinomd in a ironic twist of fate, my last name has Salad in it, so it’s like salad and dinosaur is how my last name is spelled. But Paul Saladino, MD is all the socials and I just try to put out as much good content there as I can.
Absolutely, and we really appreciate you for doing that, Paul. I will put the link below in the show notes. And thank you everyone for listening to this conversation, which I’m sure you enjoyed. And we’ll see you next time on healthy Living interviews.
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See more of Andrew Kaufman M.D. on their Public Channel and the MPN Andrew Kaufman M.D. channel.
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