Paul Saladino Is Right About Fasting (Starvation) @Paul Saladino MD
Watch on YouTube · 2024-12-03 · 18 min
0:00 Hi everyone. I'm gonna be reviewing Paul Celedino's latest video on fasting. I'm curious what he has to say about it.
[video] 0:08 The literature around fasting and around autophagy is not as clear as someone thought it was. It's kind of murky.
0:16 I'm glad that he says that autophagy means you eating yourself. That's the meaning of autophagy. People in the fasting community, and I put it in quotes because it's really the starving community, I'll talk about it after, believe that you repair your body, you get rid of the damaged and dead cells. Yes, that's part of it. In general, that's just what your body does, whether you're starving or not, obviously. But really, for the most part, you are of course eating your healthy cells. What do you think happens when you eat yourself? When you lose weight? Is your body surviving? And the reason it even works is because you eat yourself. Otherwise, how do you survive without food? You can't. That's autophagy.
1:11 It should be clearly understood that autophagy is you eating your healthy cells, for the most part.
[video] 1:18 And I'm just not convinced, number one, that you need to fast to have autophagy. If you look at markers of autophagy, our body is always kind of doing this.
1:26 Exactly, literally what I meant. Yeah, it's going to be a good video probably.
[video] 1:31 He's always using ubiquitinization of proteins and recycling them. And there's some evidence that you're doing just as much autophagy when you're eating as when you're not. And there are some things that trigger autophagy or autophagy signals that you're eating, like glucose or trehalose, which is a sugar that occurs in plant foods. That apparently triggers autophagy. That's including something in your diet. So eating glucose triggers autophagy. This is not the traditional canonical narrative we hear. To make it this simple narrative, like you must fast to do house cleaning, that sounds very appealing to people. And they're thinking, yes, I just have to fast more and more. I want a clean house. I go home to my house. I'm reading Marie Kondo. I have to put everything in its place. I want a very clean house. Marie Kondo, the life-changing magic of tidying up. So that's what they think about their body when they're fasting. And it's just not that way at all.
2:07 This analogy of cleaning your house doesn't make any sense because the bugs and the plants would take over and slowly eat up your house. Your house would rot. That's exactly what happens to your body when you don't feed it, when you go against your senses and don't eat even though you want to eat. You leave your house, what's gonna happen to it if nobody takes care of it? You already know if you've ever been away from your house for a few weeks or months.
[video] 2:40 And there's some evidence that potentially fasting could induce negative cardiac remodeling or lead to fatty infiltration in cardiac tissue. So it's just fasting is not as benign as people believe it to be, in my opinion, and people get soup.
2:53 It's not benign whatsoever anyway. The reason people call it fasting is because starving sounds worse. If you tell somebody that you should starve a few hours a day or even for a few days, then it doesn't sound as nice. People may not do it. When you say fast, oh, well, that sounds interesting. What is that? When you say starve, they say, well, I know what starving is. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to starve. The only real difference is that when you starve while fasting, then you're kind of doing it on purpose. You're going against your own senses and even though you want to eat, you don't eat, whereas If you're starving, people usually mean that you don't have any access to food, which is why there used to be famine, people used to starve. They didn't do it on purpose, but it should be very clearly understood that when you are
3:53 fasting or starving, which is literally the same, okay, just to be clear, then for your body there's no difference. Is there a difference between you not eating for a week because your brain wants you to do that or because you don't have any food for a week? Your cortisol, your stress hormones will be just as high. There's no difference. Whether you talked yourself into doing that or somebody forced you to do that, or you just didn't have any food available. Whatever the case, it's just as stressful for your body. You don't have food, even though your body wants food. And that's all that matters at the end of the day.
[video] 4:33 Yeah, and that's because people who starve are not mentally well.
4:43 Maybe they are not as bad as vegans, arguably. If they have been starving for some days, they will be worse. But people who do intermittent starvation their body weight is usually very low after a few months, for sure after a few years. Yeah, if you're incredibly overweight, you can starve, you probably won't notice it much because you're eating yourself. But then when you lose the weight and you're still doing that, especially people who do zero carb and intermittent starvation, look at their bodies. Do they look healthy or do they resemble vegans, raw vegans especially? From all of the ones that I've seen, most of them look like starved vegans because their body fat is very low. They have depleted their collagen because they actually literally ate it up. And because their cortisol is high all the time from the starvation, from the zero carbs.
[video] 5:35 I don't think that it should be taken as a completely benign intervention. I mean, it was all the rage four or five years ago. And I used to do...
5:44 Yeah, and before that, when people were obese, they used to do that, but really it wasn't popular. It really got popular just around the same time as veganism.
[video] 5:56 I was doing carnivore, I was doing intermittent fasting, and I just think, that's not how I think about it today. I think that there's benefit to giving your body signals of abundance. And we can talk about cancer more if you want or whatever, but I think that there's interesting evidence that sometimes doing too much autophagy is almost leading you toward cancerous pathways. Yeah, it's too much of a, I mean, it's a constant give and take. I like the way that Mark Sisson actually put it. He was like, I don't even like the word fasting. He's like, I like fractal eating. He's like, I go through periods where sometimes I don't eat, but it's not like I'm consciously thinking about it. And I've come to think that the body should be flexible enough to handle periods of time without food, but it doesn't need to be this deliberate thing all the time.
6:23 Yes, but there's a huge difference between being able to handle something and actually on purpose doing it, because you don't want to actually starve, of course. Your body was created, of course, not to die after not having food for a few hours, obviously, anyway, and even for a few days, and possibly also for a few weeks. Technically, depending on your body fat, you could go without food for months. Not recommending that, but it's possible. There's been many cases. It's just that you will be eating yourself, you will feel pretty horrible. The lower your body fat gets, and also, of course, muscle, you also eat that, the worse you will feel. And of course, if you don't have the electrolytes, which you will anyway lose, you will pee them out, sweat them out, you will get dizzy and maybe even collapse.
7:16 There's a lot of side effects, obviously, because we should always be consuming, especially the B vitamins, the water-soluble stuff. All the time.
[video] 7:26 You know, it's like Mark Sisson, it was interesting. He's just talking, yeah, you know, sometimes I just don't feel like eating lunch. You know, it's fine. I don't want to eat, I don't want to eat, but I...
7:33 Same for me. Most of the time I eat twice a day. Not because I'm in any way restricting myself. I showed this in my last what I eat in a day video. Sometimes I eat three times a day. It just depends. Depends on what I do in a day. If I don't do much, why would I need more food? If I would want more food, I would eat more food. And as you can see in my... what I ate in the videos from many years ago, I ate four, sometimes five times a day and a lot of food because I worked out. Since I stopped working out, why would I need more than two actual meals a day? There's no need for my body. And that really slows down your aging. The more you eat, the more you age, obviously. And this is also another topic which they try to correlate with starvation, but starving on purpose also ages you because it's also stressful. What's the solution? I made a video about this actually recently on Telegram. Stress equals not doing what you want to do. That's literally what stress is.
8:33 If you don't eat, stress. If you overeat, you force yourself, stress. If you do exactly what you want to do, what your body is telling you to do, no stress or as minimal as it can be. And then you'll feel happy and healthy.
[video] 8:48 I feel like I have a level of adaptation that allows me to do that. And it made a lot of sense with me. And, you know, personally, I still, the reasons that I will still train faster in the morning is I feel good faster in the morning. But I also work out first thing in the morning. And it's also just...
9:01 Actually understandable, back when I used to work out, I didn't eat before, because I was still satiated from my meal from the last evening, I didn't want to eat anything. But again, if you don't want to, your body is not asking for it, meaning that it's not gonna cause any stress. If you actually want to eat, but you think, no, I am part of this cult, I can only eat in 10 hours from now, and then you look at the clock all the time, then you've been brainwashed. Your cortisol is going to rise, obviously, because you're in a stress state.
[video] 9:33 It feels weird sometimes, but to your point, if I'm going to eat something when I work out, it's going to be something like watermelon or honey or something that's just like quick absorbing, really quick. So, yeah.
9:43 Yes, most often, almost always, the first food in the morning for me is some kind of fruits, coconut water. Something light, not that raw meat isn't light, but my body is not asking for any meat, fat or anything in the morning. Only hydration, some sugar, that's it. sort of come I would say full circle and accepting that fasting is not the end-all be-all by any means but I do think that for some people and this reminds me of dr. Eric Berg's video I also wanted to review this you can tell me in the comments if you still want me to review that I also don't want to go over this topic too often he said that fasting is more important than diet that's the title of the video it just makes zero sense from the title alone
[video] 10:39 It's psychologically just how it works for them like they can put themselves in a box and not eat during that period of time If that's what works for them and that's what worked for me when I lost a lot of weight and I recently did a video kind of talking like why I don't fast so much anymore myself Okay, I'm down at the body fat percentage. I want to be yet. Is it is it anal retentive for me to say like, okay? I need to fast X amount of time. Yes it is Yeah, so it's uh, yeah, right so it's but I also enjoy how I feel certain times So I just don't keep a logbook of when I fast anymore. It's just like it's just gonna happen when it happens I've recently learned about some metrics on the
11:07 Yeah, that would be you simply doing what you want to do. Just simply going with your body. Of course, you shouldn't write down anything as to when you're supposed to starve or eat or do anything for that matter. That always brings you back to a slave mindset.
[video] 11:30 I'm a carnivore, strict carnivore, just meat and organs, my fasting insulin is low. I add carbohydrates, my fasting insulin is low. I add more carbohydrates to 200 or 300 grams a day from food and honey. you know, something that a lot of people would say is pure sugar, quote unquote. And again, my fasting insulin remains low, sometimes lower than it was on carnivore. So I think we should all also be looking at cortisol to DHEAS ratio and just using this as a metric if we trust or we believe that the science is robust. And I think it's pretty solid with this ratio and saying, hey, I'm going to go do some workouts faster this week. I'm going to get a cortisol to DHEAS ratio. Or if you're keto and you really believe it, get a cortisol to DHEAS ratio and then add carbohydrates and see how it changes. Because on one side is the cortisol, right? This is a stress hormone. And I think that there's a lot of validity to thinking about cortisol as an aging hormone. There are actually papers
12:09 It should be understood that cortisol is more so a response to stress, of course. I also sometimes talk about it as if cortisol in itself is bad. Of course, your body doesn't produce cortisol to harm you because your body never harms you. Everything that your body does is for a reason. It's just that when you will have elevated levels of cortisol all the time, it's more so a good indication of how stressed you are. And he also said that it could be called an aging hormone. Obviously, not directly. I'm sure that he understands that. But again, as far as an indication of your aging goes, yes.
[video] 12:49 Review papers asking the question, is cortisol an aging hormone? And I think the literature there and the evidence is pretty robust that it is.
12:55 And you don't want your cortisol to be... You could correlate it to aging. If that's what he means, I for sure agree.
[video] 13:04 chronically, tonically high in general. And I think if you look at people on keto, they're going to have higher levels of cortisol. I mean, there is this moment in the morning when you get this cortisol awakening response. And yes, that is a physiologic diurnal thing that happens. But other than that, you do not want your cortisol to be high. And I think what we see in humans
13:20 Same with keto. I've also done keto on and off over the years. There was one time for three months at a time I did zero carb, only meat and fat, but that's because I wanted it. Whatever the reason was, my body was asking for zero carb. Then I wanted a mango. I started eating mangoes. Only one every day, but my body simply wanted it. And because I did that, I didn't feel any stress, nothing bad from it. But if you religiously eat keto zero carb all the time, keto doesn't have to be zero carb, but zero carb is really kind of extreme, then you're probably gonna feel stressed.
[video] 14:01 Between meals, if you're fasting, your cortisol starts creeping up. And that to me is a signal. Maybe it's time to, if you have access to them, eat some carbohydrates to keep it down. We live in a stressful world. Driving, you get traffic, you have family things. Why are we putting more stress into our bodies? I think that at some level, it's very hard to make an argument for any formatic.
14:18 but he also serves for hours at a time in salt water. You don't have to stress yourself that much. Yes, life can be stressful today in slavery, but you can also just ruin it for yourself if you exercise for hours at a time in a day.
[video] 14:42 The whole idea of hormesis, I think, is philosophically flawed in many ways, but it's really hard to make a philosophical argument around the benefits of cortisol for hormesis in humans. I mean, it's clearly, there are such strong arguments now that it's aging, that it's pro-diabetic, that it's pro-liver fat. You want to keep this down, and I think that it's very cut and dry just to get cortisol, the DHEAS, and do interventions in your life and see what changes it, and you want to minimize that. You know, you want that ratio to be as low as possible, less than 0.3, perhaps, because you want your androgens, this DHEAS is an androgen precursor in the human body. You want your sort of sex hormones for both men and women, these androgens for both men and women to be high, and you want your cortisol to be low, and that's pretty cut and dry. It's like black and white. This is to watch, yeah. Makes a lot of sense. And that's something that anyone can go get an easy test on. That's a pretty inexpensive test too if you were to just go all the cart. As is fasting insulin, $25, $30 cash. I want to start like a nonprofit and just make fasting insulin free for people and make it accessible because I think it would change the landscape. I do agree on that.
15:29 Cool video by Paul Saladino. There have been some other people who have talked against fasting here and there, but not really. They may say that, autophagy is not always gonna be good for you or whatever, but they don't really actually say that you shouldn't starve at all. They will always try to appeal to the masses somewhat. Starvation has been pushed by the media quite a lot. It's pretty trendy and popular. Maybe, as Paul Celedino said, not as much right now anymore, thankfully, but it for sure used to be five, ten years ago. Overall, very good points. Paul Celadino is really one of the very few people who actually talks about all of these topics that I also talk about. This was a nice one to see. He also explains everything about food and nutrition much better than most people.
16:30 He was actually the first guy that I saw actually talk about the topics that I talk about, about all of the anti-nutrients and what plants really do to your gut and how harmful a lot of them are, especially seeds and about coffee and everything that we add to meat. Yeah, he still cooks his meat, but at least he also eats raw liver.
16:53 He understood that starving and religiously eating zero carbs or at least doing keto was not actually the way to live. He still overexercises, which also goes against your body. Yes, he's not perfect, not that anybody is, but his videos are very helpful, as I've said in the other reviews I did about him. For the general population, his material is very accessible. It's easy to listen to him. He explains things very well. You can understand exactly what he's talking about. He can bring across his points very well, which is not that easy. Not that many people can do that. There's probably some people out there who understand how to live, what to do in life, but could they actually explain it to other people the way he does? Probably not.
17:52 That's also a skill that you have to have. How to talk to people, how to communicate, how to create videos which people can relate to. They watch you and they can actually understand what you're saying, why what you're saying is important, why they should actually listen to you. Good video. Thanks for watching.