Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1551 - Paul Saladino
Uploaded: 2020-10-16T17:00:29.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1551 - Paul Saladino' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-10-16. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1551 - Paul Saladino' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-10-16. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1551 - Paul Saladino

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Listen, man, I've been telling everybody that I eat mostly meat,
and they look at me like I'm going to die.
And it's kind of funny.
And I've had these conversations with people,
and they were like, oh, well, if you eat too much,
Jamie, can we get more water?
Let's only have one water out here.
I've been telling these people that I eat only meat,
and they're like, well, if you eat too much meat,
it causes colon cancer, it causes this, it causes that.
And one of the things that I say,
and it's a talking point that I actually stole from you,
is that most plants are inedible,
but almost all animals are edible.
And when you say that to them, they look at you like, oh, shit.
If you just go out and eat random plants,
you'll get sick as fuck.
That's real.
So when I tell people I eat mostly meat,
they look at me like you're doing something really stupid.
Rob Lowe started laughing at me.
I said, I have an animal-based diet.
Some people are plant-based.
I'm animal-based.
I love that word.
Yeah, animal-based.
Just steal what they're saying.
And make it better.
But what you said, what I've heard you say,
that's an accurate way of describing it.
Most plants are not edible,
but almost every animal is edible.
I mean, and I think that if people spend time in the wilderness,
regardless of the latitude,
they'll start to appreciate this.
Yeah.
And I've mostly spent time in latitudes
that are further from the equator than not.
But even at the equator,
if you go walking around the woods
or the forest or the jungle there
and you try to eat leaves or stems or bark,
you're going to die.
You're going to die.
Really freaking fast.
Well, how about people who collect mushrooms?
Like they make mistakes.
So easy.
I remember there was a story about a guy in a nursing home
and he had went out and picked mushrooms
for the people in the nursing home
and cooked them up and they all died.
This is like, because he fucked up.
Probably his older guy couldn't see
or maybe just forgot what's edible
or maybe he was just losing his mind.
But the point is most of these things you see are not edible.
And if you think about it from the perspective of a plant,
it makes more sense.
We never do that anthropomorphization
and we never think about that.
But as I was learning about this
and thinking about carnivore diets
and animal-based diets,
I had to learn a lot of stuff myself.
I was trained as a physician.
I wasn't trained as an anthropologist
and I took ecology in college.
But when you look at what we know
about the timeline of life on earth,
500 plus million years of plant and animal co-evolution.
And there's a lot of people who have speculated this
that essentially plants evolve,
animals evolve,
animals start eating plants,
plants evolve defenses,
animals evolve defenses against the defenses.
And there's a whole series of enzymatic systems
in our liver,
the phase one and phase two detoxification systems.
They're called cytochrome P450
and other reactionary systems in our liver
that are meant to detoxify things.
And a lot of people speculate,
and I think this is really reasonable,
that the majority of the reason we have those
is so that we could eat plants from time to time
so we didn't starve during our evolution.
But there's a real interesting interaction here.
This is warfare.
This is an arms race.
Yeah.
That's 400 million years old
between plants and animals.
And so what was so interesting for me
as I got deeper and deeper into this idea around,
can humans exist?
Should humans exist?
Will humans thrive on a completely animal-based diet?
You start to realize,
wait a minute,
why are we imagining that plants are benign?
They're beautiful.
They're fun to look at,
but they are rooted in the ground.
They can't run away from us.
What's their defense?
Well, if you're out in the desert,
a cacti has got a thorn
or a rose has a thorn, a spine,
but most of them just have plant defense chemicals.
And that's not even conjecture.
That's just known botanical science
that plants make chemicals,
broadly called phytoalexins,
that are meant to dissuade animals, insects, fungi
from over-consuming them.
And so my fear is that
we've assumed that plants are good for us.
And we see everything with these plant compounds
through the lens of these are good for us.
How can we prove they're good for us?
There's a whole different part of the story.
What if we think about it from a plant's perspective?
What if these plant chemicals are not good for us?
And we're misinterpreting the research
and I can talk about why I think we are.
And maybe the plants are just making these chemicals
to say, hey, if you eat a lot of me,
you're not going to feel good.
I'm going to affect your thyroid.
I'm going to affect your androgens,
your sex hormones or whatever.
I'm going to make you have diarrhea or nausea
or I'm going to kill you.
And we've just been thinking
more plants, more plants, more plants
when it's like, wait a minute,
why are we eating plants in the first place?
Yeah, well, here's a question though.
Is it good to eat some of them
because there's this thing,
and I know you've discussed this as well,
the hormetic response.
Right.
Like where your body responds
to these effects
that these plants are producing
and it actually,
the response by your body is good.
The same way the response
from a sauna is good.
Your body really doesn't belong
in 180 degree temperature.
Right.
But when you put it
in 180 degree temperature,
it develops these heat shock proteins
and it's actually good.
It's good for you to do that
for short periods of time.
Is that possible with plants?
Like maybe some,
like I know Dr. Rhonda Patrick
is really into broccoli sprouts
and I think for that very particular reason.
Yeah.
So this is really interesting
and if you think about it differently,
it starts to make more sense,
I believe,
or there's a whole different paradigm,
a whole different lens
through which we can view this.
So as I was writing my book,
I came up with these terms,
environmental hormesis
and molecular hormesis.
I'll grab your book.
It's right here.
Molecular hormesis is broadly termed
xenohormesis by some people.
Xeno is this Latin term
that means alien or foreign.
So when you think about these,
a lot of,
in common parlance,
people lump together exercise,
ketosis, sunlight, sauna
with plant compounds.
But I think that's not accurate.
I don't think we should be doing that.
I think we have environmental hormesis
and molecular hormesis
and they're different things.
So I won't debate
that plants can be beneficial as medicine.
But to use them as food
presupposes that molecular hormesis
is good for us.
And I'll tell you why
I don't think it is.
So when you go in the sauna
or when you are in ketosis
or when you're in the sun
or when you exercise,
you do generate
reactive oxygen species,
superoxide radicals,
and they activate a system
in your body called the NRF2 system.
I can pull up a picture of it
in a second.
And that turns on genes
that are involved
in the antioxidant response
to manage these free radicals.
Life is this,
elegant dance
of electron movement
and protons too
and other functional groups
in chemistry.
But the movement of electrons
is oxidation and reduction
with the loss of electrons
being oxidation,
the gain of electrons
being reduction.
And so when we think
about oxidative stress,
we're talking about
molecules pulling electrons
from other molecules
creating free radicals,
which is broadly means
that there are
unpaired electrons.
Now these are very reactive
molecules that can then
create things like
lipid peroxides
or, you know,
free radicals within proteins,
which change the
conformation of the protein.
And we know these
can be damaging for humans.
One of the reasons
that cigarette smoking
is bad for us
is because it creates
a ton of free radicals,
lots of oxidative stress.
But a little bit
of oxidative stress
or just the right amount,
the Goldilocks amount,
is necessary for life.
We don't want to get rid
of all of the oxidative
radicals in our body.
They're critical signaling
molecules at the level
of the mitochondria.
So this whole movement
toward antioxidants
and more antioxidant,
you know, chemicals
is eventually,
if we snuff out
all of the oxidative radicals
or all the reactive oxygen species
in the human body,
we'll be dead.
We need these for signaling.
So a little bit
of oxidative stress is good.
Too much, stressful,
creates problems.
Not enough,
stressful, creates problems.
It's definitely
a Goldilocks thing.
So when you are in the sauna
or you are in the sunlight
or you exercise,
you will create oxidative stress.
That oxidative stress
turns on NRF2.
This is essentially
a transcription factor
that translates to the nucleus,
turns on genes involved
in the antioxidant response,
things like glutathione peroxidase,
thioredoxin,
things like this.
They manage those free radicals.
And that's just,
it's kind of clean, right?
You have an input to the system.
It turns on a gene.
Molecular hormesis
is a little different.
It's like going to the pharmacy
and taking a medicine.
But what we never get with plants
is the package insert,
quote unquote,
that comes with medications
in the pharmacy.
If you go to the pharmacy
and you get a drug,
lisinopromatoprolol,
a statin drug,
even if you get ibuprofen
or naproxen
and leave at the pharmacy,
on the bottle,
there's a list
of all the side effects.
When we use exogenous molecules
for humans,
we know that they don't really play well
with our biochemistry.
They're going to do one thing
which may be an intended effect,
but then they're going
to have other effects elsewhere
which could be damaging.
And invariably,
we see this
with medications we take.
We know that beta blockers
can affect glucose tolerance
and they can affect
sympathetic signaling
in the human body
with the nervous system.
And we know that lisinopril
and drugs like this
which affect the kidneys
can have problems
with electrolyte balance
or other things.
They can affect the lungs
because they're affecting
the way that angiotensin-converting
enzyme works in the lungs.
They have side effects.
And so my concern
is that we're conflating the two
and we're forgetting
about the side effects
that are associated
with molecular hormesis.
I think that there certainly
are studies with molecules
like sulforaphane
which is this isothiocyanate
compound from broccoli
that show that it also triggers
NRF2.
It triggers this antioxidant
response system.
But what we aren't told
about much
is the other side effects
of sulforaphane
the so-called package insert
that sulforaphane has.
And when you look at that
there's a large amount
of evidence
that this whole class
of molecules
isothiocyanates
actually have many
negative effects
in the body.
And when you think
about it
from a plant's perspective
sulforaphane
is pretty clearly
a toxin.
It's a booby trap.
So one of the things
I like to ask people
is how much sulforaphane
is in broccoli seeds.
And the answer is zero
until you chew them.
There's no sulforaphane
in broccoli
or kale
or kohlrabi
or any of these
brassica vegetables
until you chew them.
And Ron has talked about this.
How does that work?
There's a precursor molecule
called glucoraphanin
which is a glucosinolate.
And it's like a booby trap.
It's like superglue.
You get two things combining.
So you get glucoraphanin
is the precursor molecule.
There's an enzyme
called myrosinase
in a separate compartment
of the cell.
When you chew the cell
and you break the cell wall
they combine.
And then out comes sulforaphane.
So it's a booby trap.
It's like if you're going to eat me
I'm going to make this molecule.
It's going to affect you.
It's going to be a pro-oxidant.
Right?
Because if you look
at the chemistry
of sulforaphane
it actually is a pro-oxidant
meaning it's pulling electrons
from other molecules.
It's not actually
coming into our body
and acting as an antioxidant.
It's 