Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25CiMHawflk
[Music] hello folks good to see you good to see you thanks for coming i'm glad we didn't make it snow you almost did it i mean it was kind of snow it might snow today it's very possible because it was drizzling when i left the house and it was 30 degrees so which is not supposed to happen it's supposed to be snow hopefully it won't be the snowpocalypse part two yeah last time you were supposed to come it became a complete disaster but it was fun it was fun to watch people slide around and and know that this city has zero infrastructure in terms of like dealing with snow it's it's kind of because i grew up in massachusetts where it's you know they know how to handle snow out here they're baffled do you want to she got tell them what happened with you well well so my flight from mike i'm from boston and uh my flight from houston to austin was cancelled so i got the last suv you don't know how much i wanted to be on your show i got the last suv drove through the ice storm to austin where there was like just dead cars you know it was like zombie apocalypse got to a marriott around the corner from here and thought well at least i'll be able to walk if if nothing else and my room overlooked this on-ramp and i just every day for a week with no running water and no bottled water watched the cars just slide up and down and then i finally went out to rob's house where he at least had a pool for running toys watching the toilets but i was living on basically like white claw and canned tuna oh my god this was when you were supposed to be here yeah last night oh my god i still have a can of wolf chili but she didn't have a can opener and she was just like i don't know how to get into this thing the thing is it's if you grew up in a place that has winter like massachusetts you're like this is nothing like guys this is a normal winter day like what the [ __ ] and it it killed this place for a solid week well that's why i still came because i was like uh they're
overreacting it's just one or two inches of snow but i didn't realize it was gonna be like misting ice yeah yeah but you know i mean come on how much are trucks like take care of this guys get some sand like is that that hard i mean it happens it does happen i mean the idea that you just like shut everything down for a year how much does that cost seems like trucks are less expensive than whatever that costs yeah yeah and all the poor people that didn't know you can't heat your house with a stove well worse people use grills yeah yeah they used like barbecue grills in their house and they burnt wood and they died you know like people got sick yeah that was bad news and we were in the process of packing our house to move because we moved march 3rd up to kalispell so like all of this chaos is going on and we didn't know if like the moving truck was getting in and then diana made it to our place and then we weren't sure if she was making it out of there like it was i mean first world problems but kind of sketchy first world problems as far as they go it lets you know that there's a thin veneer of civilization that keeps all the food on the shelves and all the cars moving and it's not much not much to throw it off right right you know yeah definitely um i'm glad this is a good time to talk about your book the book is sacred cow diana rogers and rob wolf it's available right now the case for better meat all i've been eating since january is meat all i've been eating is meat and and fruit that's that's my diet meat fruit and eggs i've never felt better i've done this before in the past but i never stuck with it i used would do like that carnivore month of january i did it like two years ago i lost 12 pounds i looked great it felt great then i started eating spaghetti again shocker i get fat i get fat and then i my joints hurt again and that that's the thing that drives me the that it's the most wild rather is my joints feel so good like everything feels better when i'm
not eating foods that cause inflammation and for me there's something i mean i'm i'm not advocating this for everybody but a meat based diet for me is 100 at least in a short term i've never done it for like years i know like shawn baker and a few of those guys have done it for years and years paul saladino but for me short term there's nothing that's made me feel better and i can't imagine it would [ __ ] me up long term i mean i take a lot of vitamins i do eat a lot of fruit i'm exercising my exercise is great my i feel healthy i have plenty of energy i avoided all the diarrhea because uh when i just did all only meat i had ridiculous diarrhea like astounding it was my friend tom segura put it when he he tried it he goes this diarrhea is astounding like yes that's a good way to put it i was following that and i was like at some point there may need to be an intervention like somebody like dropping you some imodium or something yeah that sounds well there's something about like for eating a lot of fatty meat only right your body's like what is all this like where's the veggies like you're you always eat veggies right there's how come there's no spaghetti here where's where's the bread yeah so as a dietitian to be talking about things like this is definitely blasphemy blasphemy yeah yeah i mean i get pushed back like crazy from fellow dietitians it's you know but what do they say what's the goal right isn't the goal to feel better to look better and to perform better so if you're eating food that makes you feel better look better and perform better i mean i was at 205 when i started this diet now i weigh 195 and it's only been two months and i feel great like i'm not starving i just lost weight it just went just went away i got my six-pack back like i feel better my joints feel better like i just feel better like isn't that the goal like the whole goal of your diet is supposed to be the vitality of your body right right and the whole goal of science should be to question your bias and seek the truth
well i know sean baker was telling me that there's a large study that's going on that harvard's putting on for the carnivore diet do you know about that they have some preliminary data on it and i mean it's there's not it's not a randomized control trial there's not a control group it's a survey and so you know it can be very critical of surveys but it's interesting like 94 of the people that did it got off of the medications that they were on like entirely and it went through and detailed like some blood sugar changes blood sugars improved dramatically for the vast majority of people they saw lipids improve not everybody some people on kind of a higher fat carnivore type diet they see their lipids go up we're still not sure what the total you know net risk is with that but it's pretty impressive and again you know people will poke holes in that but there was a time in the 1940s 1950s when there wasn't this thing called the mediterranean diet then this guy wrote a review paper about it and nothing really happened for i don't know eight ten years but then more people started writing about it more people started talking about it now we have randomized control trials and we have all kinds of different interventions and we have some proof that something like a mediterranean-type diet is probably pretty helpful for a lot of people so when people criticize this stuff and they just dismiss it out of hand like well there's no research on it okay that's fine but this is where things begin and it's usually observational you know that okay there's this group of people that seem to be getting these really remarkable results and the the thing that that was so interesting to me my background was in autoimmunity and cancer research and i got into this because of gut and autoimmune issues i'm the person that came up with the autoimmune paleo diet like i'm the person that kind of you know formalized that initially and it works pretty well but when i saw what people were doing on a carnivore diet it just blew me away like it people who had done every other thing and they were so sick they were crippled from gut and autoimmune issues
they would go on this modified you know carnivore type diet and put their their problems into remission and then have really remarkable health at the end of that and it was a few people initially but as it has grown it's become this like really watershed moment and i i don't think that a carnivore diet is like the first whistle stop somebody should do in dietary change there's a lot of other [ __ ] you could do before that but if you're really sick you know i think to to both of y'all's points if you're really sick and you're trying to improve things like it seems like a reasonable thing to use as an intervention just it's like playing darts and you're just trying to get closer to the bullseye and you can use that as a beginning point some people add in fruit like paul saladino has added in more fruit and honey and stuff like that sean baker is an absolute beast and he's he wouldn't be caught dead eating fruit you know and it just seems to to work for him but i i think that it's a reasonable place to at least start and begin tinkering with things and maybe you stick with it long term or maybe you modify it down the road well it's got to be a function of different requirements for different people's bodies right different people ask more of their body like a guy like you who does a lot of jiu jitsu that's very physical some people don't some people they just hike and maybe they could have a different diet there's a lot of different things that a person needs depending upon their lifestyle but when you talk about like a mediterranean diet specifically what is what is a mediterranean diet like what's in there that's the kind of funny thing i mean you've got what the literature kind of says and then you have what people actually eat and what folks actually eat is a lot of fatty fish a lot of like lamb and goat and and they definitely eat some legumes they eat local fruits and vegetables a lot of olive oil but it looks very it's not this so like grain-centric you know thing that that is typically portrayed in modern dietetics so but is there like um is there a protocol for the mediterranean diet like if someone says
i'm going on the mediterranean diet what do they mean are they eating lettuce do they have vegetables usually mediterranean diet means emphasis on seafood lean meat low-fat dairy to some degree legumes legumes as kind of a preponderance for the carbs like usually in preference to grains although they'll have some grains in the in the mix too but that's kind of the funny vegetables good amount of vegetables yeah yeah okay olives olive oil so it's essentially like a primal diet yeah the idea is just to cut out processed foods yeah which is always a good step one right absolutely yeah but then when you look at what people in the mediterranean actually eat it's not it's a made-up diet it's not really a diet it's i mean i've been to spain they eat a lot of pork and pork is like not okay on a mediterranean why is it not okay isn't it a fatty meat fatty fish is okay but not funny meat so you have you have the what people are actually doing versus kind of what's been canonized within dietetics and they're really different and also to diana's point like what folks are doing in spain is reasonably different than what they're doing in greece and italy and whatnot you know just kind of a granular level but that just as an aside the only food i think that is common to all of the blue zones is pork but nobody ever mentions that really yeah it's literally the only food that you know from costa rica to i guess the only one with that it's not part of would be like the seventh day of venice but yeah yeah that's a weird one right that one is the when people want to lump in all the blue zones like they they always like to use seventh day at venice because they're vegetable based right right but they also no alcohol no cigarettes and daily exercises right yeah and when you compare them to mormons who have almost identical lifestyle but they eat meat it's same lifespan but the mormons are left out of the blue zones why because it didn't doesn't fit the narrative really plus they're problematic because they're you know their whole thing is a little wacky and they get to have a lot of wives or they used to
and then when you look at uh hong kong um they have the highest meat consumption per capita and the longest life spans yeah people don't like that one they like to ignore that one so socioeconomics by far beats uh diet when you're looking at populations for longevity socioeconomics do so even someone with a poor diet but has a lot of money so they're they're going to have trump better access to health care trump's a good example he's probably a good example yeah i mean he was 74 he got covered and he kicked in a few days and he's really kind of chubby he's super chubby yeah so people with more money generally have less stress they don't work two jobs they so there's all these confounding factors when you're looking at these social connections um social connections helps in what way like when how do you define this stuff gets a little bit sketchy but there's uh some research that suggests that people with inadequate social connectivity like friends family like loners kind of loners but you know they're just socially isolated that that is as negative on health as a pack-a-day smoking habit now that pac-day smoking habit gets thrown around a lot because people will say eating an egg is equivalent to like you know smoking sick cigarettes or you know something like that but but i think when you think about like human evolution and small group environments and stuff like that there's something really powerful there and it's clearly you had sebastian younger on and they they talk about you know poorer communities tend to have more social connectivity and you don't see suicides within these groups and whatnot and there's a lot going on there but i think that that that social connectivity in my mind is on par with sleep and food with regards to overall health like if you're really negatively impacted there it's it's going to be a major piece of of your overall health and if you tick that box you can get away with a lot of
other stuff yeah so so i was listening to a book heartbreak it's amazing it's it's this new book out about a woman that got divorced and she's she gets really sick and she's trying to figure out why her health declines and she's kind of going through all the all the numbers and trying to seek it out and talking to all these neuroscientists and everything but loneliness your chance of dying early for loneliness is by far beats out cancer or autoimmune diseases heart disease it's loneliness wow that makes sense i mean people make you feel good like if you have good friends and you're around them and you're laughing like how's that not good for you right you know it really should be prescribed right yeah so exercise is uh critical but not the primary factor i think it provides the quality of life and you know when we think about longevity and kind of health span versus lifespan we want to live as well as we can as long as we can and then very short you know decline and and then you know fade out and i think that smart exercise a base level of cardio some resistance training then just doing a variety of activity good mobility that i think that that feeds into the ability to do all the stuff that we want to do and also like you get sick you get injured you get in a car accident or something like people you know if you're you're better shaped you're just harder to kill and i think that that is such a major factor but i my opinion you could you know maybe agree but um i think when people tackle exercise as a calorie burning endeavor like you're much better time spent focusing on good quality food very protein-centric because it tends to be satiating so you don't overeat so you exercise so you have a kick-ass life but if you want to lose weight good body composition it's really the nutrition part that addresses the bulk of that
so the people that do exercise just for calorie burn out the problem i usually have with that is that i don't think they enjoy it right they think of it as this task that one must do in order to look better or to justify a sunday you know justify an ice cream sundae or a bowl of spaghetti you know where it's like you should you should enjoy the results like you feel good like it's great for the body it's a stress reliever it relieves anxiety it's like it's so critical if you're going through any like stressful period of your life that is the time where you got to be like disciplined with your workouts you got to hit them hard right it's a medicine that's how i feel yeah and sarcopenia is something so that's age-related muscle loss and we know everyone over 40 starts to lose their ability to digest protein and so your need for protein and your requirement to even just maintain muscle mass goes way up as you get older and the rda for protein is like so far below it's set at the minimum to avoid disease it's not the optimal amount but even that rda is way way way too low really yeah well what is the rda for protein so the rda is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight but then because americans don't like kilograms and and they don't want to do the calculations you'll see these numbers floating around so for women they'll say women need 45 grams of protein and men need 55 grams of protein or something but that's based on this ideal body weight of 125 for women and 155 for men what are we living in the 30s and so yeah so the average weight according to the cdc for for women is 165 and for men it's like 195. is that real the average weight for women is 165 for american women wow yeah and so when so then when you go 0.8 grams per kilogram you're way above what what these rda no you're at about double what the rda is but then when you look at optimal amounts so we went through this in the book and i looked at all the research and how they came up with the rda and you know we really need at least double the rda
of protein and we need it from animal source foods there's a huge difference in animal and plant source proteins now that this is something that vegans their hackles get up immediately how much real data is there that shows like actual real-world data that shows that plant-based protein is not as bio-available as animal-based protein i mean that's just basic biochemistry it's just a fact and what so what is it so if you have like 30 grams of broccoli protein versus 30 grams of beef protein like what is the difference what's happening oh that's a good question i don't know exactly how like broccoli would probably be a lot a lot of mass for broccoli if you wanted to get 30 grams of broccoli protein like how much broccoli would that be a big-ass bowl of broccoli right you have your uh the beans i do have it for um yeah in fact yeah yeah i have it i don't know if um the the dropbox link that i sent came through um so i've got one comparing beans to beef and i have it for protein for vitamins and for minerals and for farts there's really no comparison um but and and the other thing is is that it's limiting so here we have okay so we don't just need protein we need amino acids right and so and there's a popular meme out there comparing broccoli to steak and how you can get all your protein just from broccoli um but kidney beans are a much better source so i went with kidney beans and so four ounces of steak versus four ounces of kidney beans and when when you see these plant-based means they will be comparing uncooked beans and they will be doing it by calorie not by portion okay right so we need to you know look at you know portion portions why are they doing uncooked beans because you get there there's more beans in uncooked beans oh i see because the water is nice it's like double yeah yeah yeah okay but it's not realistic in terms of a portion of food because you'd cook them and they
swell up and you just and the calories that you would need to eat to get all right so we have only nine grams of protein from four ounces of kidney beans so in order to get the same even close to the amount of total protein you would need to eat um over three times the amount of kidney beans so and that would be you know somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 and something calories of and then you need to have rice with it as well to to balance it out versus 180 calories of protein from 180 calories from 30 grams of protein steak and you know on that like sarcopenia side like losing muscle masses we age and also just for athletics isoleucine leucine some of these branched chain amino acids are are the really important amino acids because they stimulate anabolic signaling and you have a threshold with that if you don't hit a certain threshold it doesn't turn on the anabolic signaling so you're you're tending to lose muscle mass it's kind of some some bro science like you need to eat every two hours or you're going to lose muscle mass it's not to that point but we do need some amount of anabolic signaling exercise but specifically strength training causes that anabolic signaling and then eating a protein-rich meal that's that's rich in branched-chain amino acids causes that signaling too and it's it's not impossible to do via plant-based methods but it's hard like it's really kind of a calculus problem to get that part that box ticked like you need to do protein powders and stuff like that to usually get in there and make that happen but then you also get a ton of calories comparatively wouldn't the the simple solution be to if you wanted to have a plant-based diet is to eat the plant-based protein but then substitute with uh exogenous amino acids you could if you did that and stick more with legumes and try not to get your protein from like quinoa or peanut butter like nuts are a really actually horrible way to get protein we'll get to that in a second but when you're making um exogenous amino acids is it possible to do that in a vegan way
yeah i mean they what are they making amount of just synthetic chemistry i mean then it's you know it's other chemicals but you could make it a very completely vegan-friendly way yeah but it's chemicals but not bad for you yeah just yeah the chemical is a weird word right right right so you could in fact get all of your amino acids and have some sort of a plant-based protein yep like what is the optimal plant-based protein is it pea protein is it hemp protein like what's the best one i would probably say p protein would be optimal yeah yeah yeah um but you know it's it's we're meant to eat things in their full form and so if you were to actually eat peas you're that's a lot of peas right and how are they extracting the pea protein i mean a lot of kitchen chemistry i mean you got to separate out the protein carbs fat and then isolate the proteins and whether you do a hydrosylator the proteins like kind of pre-digest them or leave it leave it together usually hydrosylates taste horrible so yeah but i mean in in like an idealized world if somebody's really they want to be vegan but they want to take the boxes of of getting that anabolic signaling preventing sarcopenia uh improving you know body composition that is a way that you could do it and so it would be vegan and it would give the the right amount of protein not over feeding you potentially on the calorie side and that could be a way to kind of thread the needle so someone's like a vegan weight lifter right and that that's the way they should do it they should have like pea protein and then substitute with uh supplement rather with amino acids especially with the branched chain amino acids and these are all the ones that you need cysteine histidine leucine and isoleucine are the main ones in the uh and then valene but the leucine is the most anabolic signaling of all of them and so if someone wanted to do that like would what would you take like what's what's a good dessert good brand branched chain amino acids
does branch change when they say branched chain amino acids does that usually contain all these that we're seeing on this chart not all of them it'll be leucine isoleucine and valene typically and so all those other ones should you have all those in there like how how would one supplement with like a fully like if you look at all the stuff that you're getting from meat it's crazy yeah there's so much more like if you wanted to get those benefits i mean is that what's going on when someone says that meat is not as bioavailable is that part of what's going on is that you just not getting the same benefit from it because it doesn't have the amino acid profile oh and this isn't even taking into account bioavailability that's like a whole another discussion this is just the label like the usda nutrient database numbers but that doesn't take into account the protein digestibility score so let's let's explain it to people that are just listening we're looking at this chart and it shows the sirloin steak on the left and the kidney beans on the right and the amount of amino acids is in most cases four or five times more if not more than that from the steak than you're getting from the beans the beans have uh similar calories but only nine grams of protein versus 30 grams of protein for the steak so this is what we're looking at and then i have this broken out also for minerals and for vitamins just so the micronutrients that you're getting from animal source foods too which are far superior to uh so here we have uh vitamins right but this is just beans right which are not really known as primary sources of vitamins oh they're touted as the magic food beans for vitamins for for nutrient density for vitamin but this is the this is kind of the cul-de-sac you get stuck into though like how do you get enough protein right how do you not overeat and then what type of nutrient deficiencies are you facing at the end of that okay it's well if you look it's funny that they put vitamin d because you really don't get vitamin d from food on both of them have zero percent like why is that
on there then it's just part of the usda oh i see and vitamin a again it's like you only get one percent from steak but the big ones are vitamin b12 that's a big one because if you look at big the the big difference in b12 in kidney beans you have zero percent b12 and steak you have 95 percent of your usda and that's just for four ounces this is a small portion of sirloin steak and you're getting almost a full daily requirement of vitamin b12 which that is a big factor with people that are on a plant-based diet is getting their their b12 yeah and we iron and b12 are two of the most common nutrient deficiencies worldwide and both of those are common in meat and not very common in in plant-based stuff yeah and whenever there is a nutrient in both plants and animals our bodies prefer the animal source nutrients why is that and how do we know that so for like example beta-carotene which is like what makes sweet potatoes orange and carrots orange we have to convert that to vitamin a retinol which is the usable form so when we eat an animal source of vitamin a which is in fats of animals we're getting it directly and there's about 45 percent of the population has a gene that makes it so they can't make that conversion efficiently so not only do we have to convert it but then almost half of all humans can't do it very well really and so to convert uh beta-carotene to vitamin a and that's just one you know heme iron and about half of the people that can't is it because of the location of their ancestors is it that's my guess because what we see with omega-3s is people that you know lived along coast where they were getting their omega-3s from fish lack the ability to efficiently convert plant source essential fatty acids to the ones that we actually need for our bodies to use very interesting and so how would one know how would one find out if they're that means maybe some people could digest sweet potatoes really easily some people can't like what how would one know some genetic testing can ferret some of
that out but now that we have people that come from so many different backgrounds it can be challenging and the the genetic testing isn't isn't perfect on that you know you can find that maybe you have a high likelihood of converting the the carotenoids into retinol but then some some of these nutrient issues are gut related so if your gut microbiome is deficient in some type of of bacteria you may not even get that the the conversion to be able to get the the beta-carotene into your body so that's another layer to it it just gets really complex like i i think you almost go the simpler way of instead of trying to get in and get super detailed on like the genetics how do you look how do you feel how do you perform keep kind of an inventory of what you're eating and then if we if there are some pretty classic nutrient deficiency syndromes you know like dry skin and split nails and things like that for for zinc deficiency as an example and so it's almost easier to go that way versus trying to get in and then from like first principles figure out what's your genetics and what's the the perfect diet that's going to work for you um yeah so the bioavailability um what do we know in terms of the bioavailability of the print the plant based proteins versus animal based proteins like how do we know that the body is absorbing the protein more efficiently from an animal source i'm trying to pull up the um the protein uh bioavailability chart because there is a chart that sets in its animal source proteins are always above uh uh plant source proteins mechanistically what they do is they'll figure out a given amount of protein and then they've fed that to people and then they will look at serum amino acid levels after that kind of track them over time so animal-based proteins you're going to let's say you give them 30 grams of protein and then you track over a two-hour period the branch all the amino acids that we that we see go up and then down during that and you
can compare that to beans or broccoli and and so that that is a piece of how you figure out the the comparative bioavailability of one protein versus another you see this even just with like cooked proteins versus non-cooked proteins like uh i know that there's kind of i like eating some like steak tartare here and there and stuff like that but there's just kind of a reality that meat that is cooked is much more bioavailable for the proteins and also the nutrients that are in it versus raw meat that's interesting like what about rare i'm not sure on that because it's still cooked some so it's cooked on the outside it's cooked on the other hand it's pretty yeah i don't i suspect that you're you know like if you were to sous-vide something and slow cook it and and it's cooked thoroughly i think that it would that would probably optimize like the bioavailability of the um the whole protein yeah what about the difference between like a medium rare and a well done is well done less bioavailable or more i think that well done it's probably more bio-available but it but it tastes so bad that what's i've thought about that it's a really good question i i don't know for sure but um if you only eat a tiny piece of it because it tastes horrible then i don't know if it's really helping you because i'm always wondered like particularly because of game meat because wild game meat has always been touted as being much more protein rich than domestic cattle and i eat a lot of that stuff so i'm always wondering like what is going on how do they know it's definitely lean so i mean you're getting a lot of protein per serving because the game meat is so incredibly lean so when you compare it per calorie or even if you've just got you know four or five ounces on a scale if you have like a rib eye what is a ribeye like 20 percent fat by weight i think it's more like 45 it's 45 by calories or is it 45 by weight well so so there's no carbs in meat so all you have is protein fat so if you're looking for like what has more protein like boneless skinless chicken breasts can have more protein than a burger only because there's less fat
um but it also has less nutrients overall because the a lot of the like the fat soluble vitamins the e a not really d k is is all in the fat so that's one of the benefits of eating at least some amount of animal fat because those fat soluble vitamins kind of associate with that what about the difference between a red meat and a white meat like a chicken versus like a you know grass-fed steak uh beef is about 30 percent more nutrient dense than chicken per calorie and chicken is really high in omega-6s like really high inflammation no the inflammatory fats um so you know we're a lot of people think chicken is more virtuous to eat for some reason but it's virtuous yeah like like you you know there you'll see like everyone who has these like clean eating books that are eliminating meat but they'll still have boneless skinless chicken breast in there of course this is more like almost more like tofu of meat you know it's not on a bone it's like white and you know kind of clean looking plus chickens have a little heartless dinosaurs yeah you know people don't you know cows you could pet them and stuff chickens just trying to figure out if they could eat you and they will if they could oh dude yeah i used to have chickens and they pecked at my daughter's feet and my wife was like she thinks that the the the hen thinks our daughter's foot was a mouse or a woman or something oh no she's trying to eat our daughter like what do you talk she's just dumb this is a dumb little marble brain [ __ ] head he's trying to eat our kid like like that's how i thought about that chicken i'm like [ __ ] off you little [ __ ] it's like shitty birds so i always tell people like if you're in a grocery store and you don't have access to you know know your farm or grass-fed beef and you're just looking at pork chicken or beef from a nutrient density from an animal welfare and from
uh an environmental perspective actually beef is going to be the better choice when you're looking at the industrial food system that's okay so this is where we get into the weeds right because when you say that in any way that beef or raising beef is good for the environment in any way shape or form that's when people go nonsense the doctrine as stated up on high is that if we want to save the environment we have to eat less meat yeah i hear this from people with no evidence i hear it from people and they spout it out and i go what are you saying well you should know already they'll give you that you should know already if you're eating a lot of meat it's bad for the environment like how's it bad tell me how it's bad what's going on and they'll bring up factory farming i'm like oh factory farming is horrible it's horrible everybody everybody says it's disgusting but what about regenerative farming and like well that's not sustainable that doesn't work or we don't have the land for it right and this is where sometimes i think that we chose to do the book and film because we wanted to commit career suicide and public public self-immolation both at the same time because it's like we this thing ended up pissing everybody off because we don't we're not totally in the like whitewashed um regenerative ag camp like we we see some laudable features to pieces of like the industrial system and some of the meat that we brought you is from a local outfit that mainly pasture feeds their their meat but when they were they were in a drought situation and so they reached out to some of the local breweries and they got a bunch of uh uh you know residue from the brewing process and that's what they supplemented their animals with which is some kind of a barley grain yeah and and uh that's a whole other interesting thing is the bulk of the the food that is given to cattle comes out of the ethanol industry we're not stealing food from humans to to do that with chickens and pork you kind of are allocating food that could have otherwise gone to humans but even
conventional beef spend 70 percent of its life on grass and then that finishing process often times part of the finishing process they put it in a wheat field where the the wheat's been harvested and then it eats the crop residues and it's eating uh you know the the mash from you know industrial or or you know drinkable ethanol production so there's a whole interesting nutrient upcycling story there that just gets buried and it's really important and it's really valuable it's very efficient but it doesn't really fit into either camp it it isn't this beautific view that we would like all these you know grass-fed pasture-raised you know stories to fit into and it's definitely not the horrors of like industrial chicken production which is super gnarly yeah super gnarly what is drinkable ethanol beer wine you know just just the stuff because you have industrial ethanol and then you have the stuff for but a lot for for you know beer wine spirits all that time even oatley um they got into trouble from some of their followers because the hulls from the oats were going to feed pigs and oatley is a is a oat milk company okay um and i hate when they say that yeah oat milk like oat water does not come out of an oat it you stop it with the milk you know that's not milk that's just you're doing weird [ __ ] with water right you know it's not milk it's oat tea yeah yeah that's that's really yeah it's called oat white oat tea yeah yeah or but there's a lot of leftovers from their processing so they were uh feeding pigs with it which is an awesome use of that right uh but the vegans found out and put the kibosh on it and now they're trying to form oat bars for humans out of this inedible fiber that exactly oh jesus and so but the you know with cattle because they're ruminants they their digestive system is very different than a pig or a chicken and a cow can actually upcycle stuff that has no other use in our food system is just going to sit in a pile
and emit greenhouse gases anyway if we don't feed it to cows and so they can actually eat stuff we can't eat and turn it into beef interesting so that's the the grain that's left over the mash that's left over from the breweries and that's this oat stuff and so the the vegans got upset and was they're upset because they were bringing it to people that were giving this stuff to pigs that were going to be led to slaughter correct well is there a way to like i mean it seems like it's silly to just not use it i mean you the earth uses it right if it does biodegrade it's gonna compost and it's gonna have some sort of a function it does but when you're dealing with industrial levels of that like in in brazil there's a problem with the uh banana peels because the banana peels are actually pretty toxic and it's hard to figure out how to how to deal with those things how are banana peels toxic when i watched so many people on tik tok make shredded pork out of banana peels if they really get after it they're going to have a a rough day they're going to [ __ ] themselves have you ever seen that yeah i've seen it yeah so that's not edible right like what are they doing they're basically like spicing up garbage and trying to serve it as pulled pork yeah that is so weird when they do that the sean baker videos where he's sitting there if you haven't seen anything has a giant cutting board and literally like a machete yeah and he's just slicing in the beef and he's eating this like four pound rib eye and while he's cutting into beef on the other side of the screen you see someone making like tofu ribs yeah yeah here it is yeah look at him it's some of the best performance art on the internet look at the size that [ __ ] i do love the size that night the knife is so preposterous oh and here's the banana peel big slices of meat and so they're taking this banana peel and they scrape off the stuff
on the inside so he's eating pork too and so he's eating real pork while they're eating this stuff well it's like what what is in a banana peel i mean what is it just plant fiber is there any nutrients at all i mean technically there would be some nutrients but what it has is the anti-predation chemicals to keep things from eating the banana so as he said uh i don't know if it's opponents and i think it's opponents kind of a soap-like substance but it will really irritate and damage the gut lining like they try to feed it to cattle and even cattle that are really good at eating kind of squirrely things it will make the cattle sick so that's just the outside though why doesn't the inside have those things even that stuff that she's scraping out has some of that in it too but the banana itself doesn't the banana doesn't eye that's why fruit is doing well for you right now so fruit wants you to eat it because it wants you to deposit the seeds somewhere else right it wants you to poo it out and so the seeds will be fertilized and then they'll grow somewhere else that's its whole strategic plan yeah that's the thought process behind the way paul saladino describes his you know he's he calls himself carnivore md and basically he's got a meat based diet but he supplements it with fruit and this is the first time i've ever tried to do it that way and it's so much easier to do right than just eat meat yeah it's just it's great because before workouts like today i had two bananas and then i worked out i give no problem exercising whereas i was when i was just eating meat i was a little draggy like when i was working out and i love meat but the only time of my life like i've eaten kind of a ketogenic diet for 23 years but there's some some a little bit of fruit some vegetables some different things in there and the only time that i had like neurotic food desires was when i was doing like strict carnivore like and i wanted pizza and ice cream and [ __ ] that i never wanted before like i i went kind of crazy whereas like loosening it up and having a little bit of fruit a little bit of honey here and there particularly before you know pre
or post workout or something like i'm i'm fine with that do you think that's uh what is that process of converting the meat to sugar gluconeogenesis do you think that that's what that is it's like your body's like it's an expensive process it's a hard process to do yeah mm-hmm it could be that could have been i was just nuts i mean rob and i are already really restricted with our diet both have celiac yeah so like what is it so celiac you can't have any wheat can't have any what it would what is the bulk of the restrictions yeah i mean everything on the inside of the grocery store is just completely or even going to a taco place and if they fried the um corn tortilla on the same griddle as the flower one i would have reaction celiac is an autoimmune gluten sensitivity so the villi the little finger like things that line the gut that help absorb nutrients those just get killed via an autoimmune reaction because the body is crop it's made antibodies against um proteins in our body by mistakenly making them against the the gluten gliadin proteins how many people have this and don't know about it i know that the they think it's one in 133 people have it wow it took me until i was 26 to find out that i had it i had it my whole life and you were just eating pizza and going off and being very sick yeah interesting so um so there's the celiac thing and this requires you to stay away from all glutens is there anything else that it requires you to stay away from are you allow is are nuts okay like peanuts walnuts i mean i definitely feel better when i eat a diet more close to what you described um but yeah strictly meat was a little intense for me although you know i wanted to mention i had a nutrition client who with um compulsive overeating and so and i've sat through these they're like aa meetings but for people that are compulsive over eater so like
the reward signals just light up times a million in their rain when they when they encounter certain foods really what is that yeah i mean you know i think some people just are prone to addiction is it it's a psychological thing or is it a is there like a sync like is there a thing you could track in the brain when they're overeating like this i mean my theory on this is that some people are just low dopamine and they may get into heroin they may get into gambling or they may become compulsive over eaters and it's just sort of how it plays out um well like some of my clients they do all of the or all of them but so i sat in on a meeting when i was a dietetic student and they all have to identify their trigger food and then agree to not eat it and abstain from it so sort of like an alcoholic type meaning except for unfortunately for them you have to eat you can't avoid eating you know and it was white foods that was unanimously the trigger food for like all these people but it still can be overwhelming to figure out what you're going to eat and so anyway i had a young woman who she just wanted to go carnivore it was just easier for her to like just give herself only that and she lost and she had rheumatoid arthritis that went into remission she lost uh gosh like 60. it's still going actually i think the last time i checked was 60 or 75 pounds and her arthritis went into remission yes so wha what do we think is happening to people's guts do you think that it's the plant defense chemicals that are messing with people's guts do you think with when it comes to obviously not celiacs which is an extreme version when people do have issues with autoimmune issues that are food related what is causing this stuff i i think there's a lot like we have now you know antibiotics were developed in the 1930s like the sofa-based antibiotics and it was ish that the more penicillin-derived
antibiotics started hitting so how many generations now do we have like mom to baby mom to baby like alterations potentially in the gut microbiome so some people who have the celiac gene don't express celiac disease because they have gut microbes that that trim up the prolial endopeptidase the prolial endopeptidase bacteria that break up the the gluten proteins is that something someone can supplement with kind of but it doesn't work that well like it it's kind of like a it will protect you from like cross contamination a little bit but like you get so sick with celiac it's something that i would be careful you know playing around with that but you know so you've got antibiotics um you have alterations in in just our environment i think that there's gut issues mitochondrial issues and then changes in our food supply so i think it's a lot of different things low vitamin d levels like the autoimmune diseases track very very closely with latitude you tend to see relatively little uh autoimmune disease near the equator and then you see it much higher at higher so vitamin d is a big factor so there's a lot of different things that go into it which is a little bit of the problem of trying to figure out how to fix it because doctors have a tendency to just say that people are crazy or it's mainly in their head because there's like this piece and that piece and the other piece there's clearly a piece to a loss of gut barrier function like that's pretty well understood uh alicia fasano like he he's a researcher mainly looking at celiac disease but he has celiac disease as a model for autoimmune disease in general but there's a loss of intestinal barrier function when intact food particles can make it into the body then the body can mount immune responses to everything and then the flip side of this and maybe why carnivore works so well is it if somebody eats a very simple diet it doesn't irritate the gut the gut can heal and then the body is not primed to be you know reacting as as much doesn't mount the same immune response and so you can kind of dial that inflammatory process there's there's also other people that
think that you know when you live in a really clean environment behind your hypothesis yeah so uh so all of us have immune systems that want to be working and exercising themselves all the time and in places where you're more likely to have parasites or you know other pathogens through your food your immune system is busy working on all that stuff and keeping you healthy but when you are living in a place where there's just not anything for your immune system to work on then it'll work on you and start attacking yourself how much do you buy into this idea that plants whether it's like kale or what have you these plant defense chemicals that these plants emit are causing some autoimmune issues with people for sure they they are for some people um it shouldn't really be that way though not to the degree that we we see now and this is where just looking back at like the 1950s you know people weren't celiac existed then but it didn't exist to the degree it does now you didn't see these multiple chemical sensitivities that folks have now plant defense mechanisms are definitely there i mean part of the reason why people soak sprout and ferment grains and legumes is that it decreases those things so within most traditional food cultures there's ways of taking relatively toxic food to making them less toxic like what what do they do with the uh tarot root to to get the cyanide out of it i mean just cooking but oh yeah that's a big fermented yeah even with corn and lime yeah corn and lime isn't it so there's a lot of historical food systems that help deal with this stuff but it it just you know when you look at most traditional food systems it took pretty good care of people like not everybody on the planet need to eat paleo to to have really outstanding health you know traditional mesoamerican food even though it was very corn rich they they figured out that you needed to to do some things to prevent pilagro which is this b vitamin deficiency ultimately which was the the
inclusion of lime but there's something that's changed where the inclusion of lime what do you mean the the uh the uh when you make corn tortillas traditionally you you like ferment it with lime and that breaks down some of the anti-nutrients with the corn it makes it more digestible oh yeah yeah so this is when they're making the tortillas right right so what about the difference between a cooked vegetable versus a raw vegetable because one of the things that people love to say is like oh i only eat raw vegetables and i'm like hey man i don't think that's good i used to think that was good but i don't think that's good anymore you're right period i mean it's just really hard to digest them and i mean when you look back at traditional cultures pre-agriculture meat was what you ate when you could get that and then all the other stuff was what you ate when you couldn't get the meat you just ate it to survive right just to give you some calories right yeah but meat meat is the most nutrient-dense perfect food for humans it just is it's such an exhausting conversation when you say that to people though like you said i think you know you're eating all that meat like what about your cholesterol what about you gonna have a heart attack yeah and it's working its way into policy which is really disturbing to me like as a mother like new york city public schools vegan on fridays now in addition to meatless mondays so now you've got a school system where 70 of the kids are economically disadvantaged and might go home on the weekends like they need school lunch right and now you're bet you're you're flanking the weekends with nutrient poor both friday and monday and is this ideologically driven thing that's based on this idea that if you eat less meat it's better for the environment like this thing that they say and they also say for health purposes like right they'll cite the china study like it's one [ __ ] study and like no matter how much you say like hey you need to read the rebuttals of the china study yeah
because they're pretty brutal and it's it shows that it's a lot of biased evidence and that they really didn't do a good job of being objective about that so there's one thing that's that's coming up that's happening right now that's really interesting so there's this thing called the global burden of disease and this is published by the landsat and it's what most global food policy is set on and between their report in 2017 and 2019 meat was 36 times more likely to kill you and there were some researchers some friends of mine that pushed back they wrote a letter to the landsat which was blocked the landsat uh it sounds like is finally going to be publishing it like over the next couple days finally publishing this thing that says that meat is 36 more times oh no that's out the 2019 global burden of disease is out and i actually had a um a graphic on that just to show what are you saying is going to be published so some friends of mine right because these guys didn't provide any evidence at all uh as to why meat so there's this theoretical minimum risk exposure level that you know is supposed to be the safe level of meat you can eat and it went um down to zero according to these researchers which is going to be the global food policy you can now eat zero red meat safely with no so that they said they did their own systematic review but they were they didn't show any of the evidence any of the papers i reviewed and there aren't there's no research that's strong that's showing meat is there's only one randomized control trial if they're not showing you evidence any evidence they're not showing any papers how is this how is this science right and so finally the landsat is going to publish this paper where my colleagues are questioning the results and where is the science and the landsat i mean the global burden
of disease is the landsat this is a really very big deal so i don't understand like what is there i always thought that with scientific papers you had to cite sources and you had so up until about two years ago that was pretty consistent and then i think we've seen a loosening of damage here's the difference between 2017 and 2019. so you can see the top part is what we're doing in excess and you can see that diets high in red meat used to be a very small percentage of like the cause of death globally which is even a silly thing but it was it used to be sodium was much higher and now meat has gone up do you see this 36 times more likely to be the cause of death in two years so this is the study this is and this analysis when when they're doing this how are they coming to this conclusion right nobody knows nobody can tell you they're just saying it they're just saying it so what is their motivation we don't really know um i mean a little tinfoil hattie i i think that there's a powerful desire to consolidate food production globally and this is an amazing way to do it it it it's uh the as it is there's i think that six or seven companies produce like 90 percent of the food that's consumed globally but what we've seen over time is just more consolidation more consolidation and there's this kind of weird interface between tech and venture capital and food there have been some interesting pieces where folks are looking at food like they want it to be operated like ip like software they want you to be able to own when you say that because bill gates is now the largest owner of farmland in the united states yeah we looked at that up once there was some sort of dispute about that but then we looked at it said he was he wants to be he owns a lot of that gates foundation is one of the major
sponsors of the study that i was just talking about so it's [ __ ] so and but the thing is that he keeps saying that we've gotta eat less meat and you know we've gotta cut our consumption of meat out to be healthy and that we're going to get used to these meat alternatives when a guy like that says that i'm like are you making money because of this like why are you saying that and by the way you look like [ __ ] because if you're eating those those plant-based burgers or whatever the [ __ ] you're doing like you're obese like a guy like that telling people about he's got these breasts and this this gut and i'm like this is crazy you're one of the richest guys on earth you have access to the best nutrients the best you could have an amazing trainer you you could be in phenomenal shape and you're giving out public health advice you're giving out health advice and you're sick it's like literally like a non-athlete trying to coach professionals like what the [ __ ] are you talking about how are you giving any health advice when you look like that your health is piss poor i'm not a doctor but when you've got man boobs and a gut and you're walking around you have these like toothpick arms i'm like hey buddy you're not healthy there's a lot of profit to be made in in processing something into a beyond burger there's a lot of profit to me but those aren't even selling anymore have you noticed that yeah they we're kind of lucky in a way like the the consumers kind of got in and poked around that and there was uh forbes did an interesting piece where they there was so much interest from the vegan community around impossible burger and impossible foods and the forbes piece was interesting it made the case that these people are usually very progressive and very anti-corporation we're like the biggest fans or or you know promoters of this corporatization of our food system which is kind of where all the stuff is going what we're duped they really are but you know it's on the one side there's a story that meat will cause cancer and diabetes and all this stuff and it's going to destroy the planet because of carbon emissions and
it's using all the water and the land and it's a it's a slick story it's a it's an elevator pitch it's elegant it's like buttoned up airtight and then when we start trying to unpack that i you have to dig into ecology and non-equilibrium thermodynamics and it's not an elevator pitch and it's a lot of work to to unpack what those claims are and then you know even what is the motivation to do this then we start getting into conspiracy theory land it's like well there are people that want to control the food system and they want to you know turn food into intellectual property that they own but that really seems to be what's going on with this and and i think they're they're not they've realized consumers aren't going to just buy it in the grocery store and by the way it's twice as expensive like beyond burger is twice as expensive as organic grass-fed beef per pound wow but they sell it in half pound packages right next to the pound packages and so but so why not just make it policy and indoctrinate these kids from kindergarten to age 12 with these messages like the meatless monday messages are all wrong like where's the message uh meat is bad for your health and the environment and and they use these beautiful simplistic infographics showing you know livestock takes up three quarters of the land but but okay but it's not talking about the types of land you know or that your burger used 10 bathtubs full of water but then we're not talking about okay the the most of the water footprint for a cow is actually in the grass it's called green water it's like water that's already in the environment in rain whether the cow is there or not it's going to happen do we have that infographic yeah i have the water you want to talk about how much water uh a burger uses up you better not be eating almonds exactly yeah you better not be you better shut your mouth if you're eating
almonds right yeah those things are ridiculous so here's the water one and i've broken it down land use feed use but this is just the water one and so what most people don't get is that there's you know green waters natural rain and then the blue water is like what when you look down on a map and see rivers and lakes so what we're looking at folks that are just listening is when you look at typical beef versus grass finished beef it looks like there's probably like how many dots are on a little different so we're at the bottom i have the percentages so it's 94 green water for typical beef and 97 green water for average and this is average like in vermont it might be different than nevada but so they have it broken down to these droplets and these droplet is 100 droplets on each side and two droplets from the grass finished beef are lake streams and underground water three droplets from the typical beef so and that's what everybody's concerned about what people are really concerned about that they're concerned about the draining of the lakes and streams and so it's not drinking water right and the rest of it the entire graph is natural rain which is rain that exists with moisture that exists in vegetable matter yeah and i mean it's going to fall on this land which is land that has been grasslands for eons and we can't use it for anything else when people say we we use all this land for cattle that's you know bison are a good example i'm good friends with the folks that own roam free bison ranch in montana they they do both cattle and bison because the cattle don't go up these super steep mountains and so the you know they're these grassland mountains that the bison graze and if they don't graze it then the whole ecosystem just collapses the the the ecosystem has been this plant animal interaction for millions of years and this plant animal interaction is based on the animals manure fertilizes the plants the animals eat the plants dung beetles insects birds you know all the stuff so it's not stealing land from anything this is what grasslands do it's not stealing water
from anything this is the rain sleet and snow that falls on the grasslands and these animals should be there because it's part of a healthy ecosystem like the audubon society in the last 10 years has been getting really involved in regenerative act because one of the first things that they see when people start doing pasture-based meat is that the bird species come back and come back in in remarkable profusion because it starts fixing if you fix all of the ecosystem issues then these literal canary and the coal mines end up getting addressed and we see more bird species come back this brings us to this whole idea of regenerative agriculture being scalable yeah and is it so i well first of all 85 percent of the um beef cattle in the us right now are grazing on land we can't crop so these 85 yeah so because cattle only spend about the last three or so months of their lives on feedlots and so really good grazing can happen even if they do end up being finished on grain um so most cattle are not so they don't just eat grain from the moment they grass and then when they're getting ready to slaughter them then for how many months they eat grain three to four usually about three and then they basically get sick it depends on the system i mean it like like this beef that i brought you today they're still out on pasture they're getting some grain i mean there's there's there's like kind of middle ground it's not like all good or all bad you know in an area where if if he were just to let his cattle graze they the cattle wouldn't have enough grass because their you guys didn't get any rain in austin and so the cows would get sick um so it's so they had to do something to supplement what you're saying yeah and we have i mean we're going to have a brewery process we're going to if we're going to do ethanol what are we going to do with all that stuff we can feed it to
cattle too right but when we're talking about scalable when something scalable and i guess we kind of glossed over the beyond meat thing we probably should go back to that but is it scalable in terms of the entire population could you is there like what if everybody abandoned veganism right everybody's like hey i'm sick i'm tired of this this is not working for me we're i'm gonna go to some sort of sustainable agriculture way of living yep is that without any factory farming is that possible for the entire country one thing i want to bring up is that diana had went to southeast asia at the can we talk about the merc deal and all that like antibiotics like i just want to throw that one out there because there's pieces of this system that cannot go on so we use a human to go on yeah so we use a huge amount of antibiotics in chicken and pork production because of the proximity that they like you you can't do industrial chicken without the antibiotic inputs that we have because they're just on top of each other merck and some of these pharmaceutical companies recognize this and so historically like before the 1940s chicken and pork were a background part of the food system like pork was fed largely food scraps chickens were just kind of a background part of of farms it wasn't a a main feature i think it was herbert hoover that said something like a chicken in every pot as like a you know a campaign deal this was the beginning of the industrialized food system chickens were expensive chickens were expensive yeah it was usually beef and lamb and things like that that were the mainstay but we know for certain that the current industrial food system is broken at the the grain production level because of the damage it does to the topsoil and it's broken at the animal production level because of the damage that it does to our antibiotic defense basically like if if we lose the ability to use antibiotics because of creating antibiotic resistant bacteria we're all screwed like it and so merck is starting to educate folks that
produce beef and or pork and chicken that we have to figure out sustainable ways of doing this and it looks a lot more like joel salatin or white oak farms where you're integrating all this stuff so when people just immediately say well does regenerative ag scale we definitely need to address that but like the current system has an expiration date on it we have to find something else and in the book in the film we don't lay out specifically we're we're not trying to be futurist saying this is the way that this is going to work but a lot of what we suggest is that food production should be done at a regional level based off the resources and like the knowledge and the culture of the people that are there like what happens in nebraska should be really different than what's happening in like venezuela or something like that like you have different resources different infrastructure different cultural values but there should be an integration of plants and animals and the whole thing should probably look a lot more like an early 19th century farm with like good technology inputs than just industrial row crops is kind of the the ultimate thing that i think we take away from it does sound like he's dodging so i did go through the numbers in the book okay um and it does look like we have the land in the u.s right now to grass finish in a regenerative way all of our beef herd before we go on to that and i do want to talk about that like what is causing the need for antibiotics specifically is it the factory setting where everyone's jammed in together that's what it is yeah when did that start happening 1940s you know when we so we had the haber bosch process which uh made industrial ammonia for firearms and munitions and then when we got done with that we're like oh this stuff makes amazing fertilizer and it really is amazing but it also damages the top soil but it it produces huge amounts of food like ingredients makes great fertilizer but it destroys the top soil at the same time well it makes great fertilizer in that you can short term and by short term i mean like maybe a century century and a half you can produce a shitload of food
but when we think about our planet we want our topsoil to last forever like we want to come back 5000 years from now and have this top soil better than what it is today so there's there's trade-offs like in the short term it's good from a productivity standpoint and we started getting excess food production in a way that we could industrialize things like pork and chicken production right by the inputs of grains and whatnot and then in the 70s is when it really ramped up with chicken and that's when people started getting like super affordable chicken because um there was also i believe it was vitamin d they realized was a nutrient that these chickens really needed in order to thrive in a factory setting and then as soon as they figured that out plus the antibiotics which not only keeps them healthier but actually disrupts their biome enough to to make them gain weight oh yeah that's right um and so that those were sort of another couple of magical things um and then in relation to the fertilizer i just want to mention with the war happening or potential war we're also running out of fertilizer so we have to start using animals for nutrients because there's just not enough you have to mine potash and we you there's just that's already a limited thing too in addition to nitrogen so you mean fertilizer just for monopoly agriculture yeah just for growing corn and soy and all that other stuff that we grow in massive massive quantities so a lot of the concerns that folks have like um damage to waterways from effluent from like you know cafo beef production and chicken and all that it's terrible but it's also something that if we did more decentralized production we broke this stuff up and we had cattle integrated with pork integrated with chickens and the the effluent you know their their byproducts the feces the urine reintegrate that into the soil historically that's what we've we did before the industrialization of the food system this is what people still do in most of the developing world is they have plant animal interactions bringing
this stuff together there's certain economies of scale that are really cool with the current system but it it's um it's not like a ponzi scheme but i mean it's got an expiration date on it like we are breaking elements of our ecological system by kind of strip mining the the ability to produce lots and lots of food right now yeah that's one thing that i always try to say to people that are very um plant-based centric thinking i i just stress on them how unhealthy for the world monochrom monocrop agriculture is like this completely unnatural like you can grow food you can grow meat in a very natural way like the polyface farms model joel salatin's model but if you want to feed the whole world with corn and grain you've got to have these massive fields and you're not going to grow anything else but this one thing in these massive fields and whenever you do that you are damaging that ground and that's what lab that's what goes into lab meat and all beyond burger and impossible foods they're not using organic products in i mean they're using 100 legit chemical egg to make their products well not only this it's like one of the most processed things you could ever eat so all these people that want to eat healthy plant-based like if you want to eat like a healthy vegetarian diet you certainly can but if you want to eat a healthy vegetarian diet and also pretend that these processed things that are filled with seed oils and like what exactly is in a fake meat burger how bad are those things for you so i mean just on a on a nutrient density level they've never i've never seen a full breakdown like they'll say total protein total fat and it'll line up kind of but like the fats come from soybean oil not natural the protein is limiting in the amino acids but we still have yet to see a full nutrient breakdown of all the junk they put in and of course it's better to eat real meat what is what's the main ingredients of those burgers uh pea protein is one of them and soy ends up like on the oil front and then also just
some of the protein also what if they mixed those burgers in with a branched chain amino acid profile i mean you would you do that like have a bodybuilding beyond burger you could you could you could make a lot of money you'd make a lot of money you'd make a lot of money yeah yeah but you are you causing inflammation are you giving people issues with these seed oils like soybean oil that's not necessarily good for you right exactly yeah and and you're still like for every calorie that you consume of that you're not consuming something else so where are you getting the vitamins the minerals the anti you know these other things and in a developed world you you could go to your corner store and get vitamins and and do all that but what's kind of squirrely is that because this whole story has been so cl tied into climate change they're really pushing that the developing world adopt this stuff too and this is one interesting area that different places in developed world have pushed back because they're like we can't be dependent on this like we have these traditional food systems and if you if you make us dependent on the exports of like your industrial row crop food system we're one we're super dependent and two we can't afford it and then the third point which diana really detailed this well in the book these folks don't have access to like a cvs to go get their b vitamins and their folate and you know their zinc and their their iron and everything and the the same deficiencies that underlie a vegan diet looks shockingly similar to what people face when they're in a malnourished state in a developing country because they eat a very starch-centric you know monocrop type of type of diet that is typically the main deficiencies and they're largely arise from a lack of animal foods so when when people talk about the difference between seed oils and there's other vegetable oils that are not bad for you right like olive oil is not bad for you avocado oil is not bad for you
why it why are some corn based oils in seed based oils why are they bad for you just the the ultra processing and the the ratio of omegas in them um and they're polyunsaturated they're not really supposed to be heated and so they're very unstable create free radicals so if you use them as salad dressing are they okay i mean but they've already gone through the high heat process and are rancid and they just kind of add deodorizers so that you can't smell or taste the rancidity really yes and then they also add coloring to make it look like a butter color like you notice all the oils that's not a natural color for canola oil to be is it white like a clear rather oh there's an interesting video out there on the uh the great con ola and it shows the process of making canola canola oil what is that jamie you got that um the great con oil con ola conola so canola oil is rapeseed oil that was invented in the 40s to be an industrial lubricant [Music] yeah just the name alone is problematic so these um these seed oils they're they're all rancid when they're stored in this way they're they're usually go through a very high heat process in order to extract the the fat out of the seed so just that process alone renders them rancid and if they didn't go through that process there was there's no way to get the oil out of the seed there's cold pressed okay but then olive oil some of it's cold or like grape seed oil you might see in a health food store a cold pressed grape is that okay but you i suppose if you were to use it on like salad dressing and not cook it it might be okay but it's still not i mean there's nothing redeemable about grape seed oil like and i'd have to look up the omega ratio but you're much better with avocado oil
or or just good olive oil so why is avocado oil and veg and olive oil why are those good for you they tend to be high in monounsaturated fat and then relatively low in the omega-6 fats like they none of these things have much in the short chain omega-3 fats some people get kind of wrapped around the the axle though like high oleic safflower oil is typically lower in omega-6s than olive or olive oil is so just on that omega-6 omega-3 side like it can get a little bit squirrely but then you have the the additional piece of how was it processed like if it was cold extracted then it's probably safer from like an oxidized fat perspective versus if it was heat extracted so it does get a little bit complex and that's where like a good quality olive oil or like butter or lard or tallow or something it's just generally safer for most things yeah and so then we get to the first device for certain then we get to um this these fake meat burgers and these fake meat burgers they're using soy oil and then how are they making it look like meat i i mean kitchen chemistry i mean some of the stuff that sean baker has videos of just kids doing in their somebody made a uh a pork roast not a pork roast a ham somebody did a ham and when it i couldn't believe the stuff they put in on the front end but when they were done and they were cutting it like it looked like ham with this yeah i mean i i was super impressed i actually commented on like it kind of gives me a little gut ache to look at that but i mean the finished product and this is somebody just doing it in their kitchen and i thought it looked just looking at it from a video if they had real ham and the this fake ham i wouldn't tell this is sean sean baker would that be on his tick tock you think probably yeah instagram or ticket he's become a tick tock celebrity yeah how many tick-tock fans does he have now i don't know i don't know it's amazing they haven't kicked him off tick-tock is ruthless with kicking people off it's great with kid i have two teenagers and my son
follows paul saldino and is now also doing that diet like and meanwhile i've been telling him forever that's hilarious that's very funny yeah i see his videos constantly which is very funny to me that this is you know like this guy with a big knife eating meat has become ultra popular but they're like they're brutal with their censorship tick tock just remove removes videos left and right but just call it hate speech and just yank you off done yeah but i i don't know exactly but i mean they're going to extract the protein some of the fiber they're going to extract the fats from these different things and then you start putting it together in a kitchen chemistry format to make it look like meat in their blood like how they make beet juice beet juice okay so here it is oh wow that's interesting so this person is look at his face is he doing riding a stationary bike oh god so they're making this like weird dough with some kind of probably wheat gluten weak so this is gonna give celiacs a [ __ ] heart attack and then what is he doing he's like rolling it around and then but look at this when he wraps it that looks like ham pretty wild that looks like candy yeah and that's just this person's kitchen vegan ham yeah but it's amazing like the process that's involved in that like all the kneading and twisting like when he turns it into knots he's putting all this stuff in there and in the film sacred cow when i have rob and joel salton talking about all the inputs that go into beyond burger and impossible burgers i actually was able to use their own promotional footage just with rob and joel talking about how disgusting the process is and getting this what did you get what did you call it biological goo right um just over their own promotional footage of how what a miracle it is of of these vats that they've you know oh we need to see that is that available online can someone see that uh it was a process of making it beyond burger it was an impossible foods it's it's um
i can look if he can't it was just the impossible foods like making of impossible foods uh burger yeah and the funny thing is is their only claim so they can't win on nutrition they try to win on ethics right so they try to say no animal died for this okay here it is the making of an impossible burger wow looks legit look at that it so looks like a burger there it is how do they taste i haven't had one i haven't had one don't you think you should have one just a comment no i could take that bullet i guess i feel like they actually put a team in it there's another one wait a minute no i did have one i had one um my friend ck brought it to one of the shows that uh chappelle and i were doing at stubbs uh heme the magic ingredient the impossible burger it could be that one because um you can see the vats in the background and you just um anyway i had one i had a burger that was in it and it just like tasted like a bland burger it was uh from some local place that makes some uh plant-based burgers and then some like real burgers so this is them getting excited about these smash burgers that are made look at these guys this is just like a real burger has anybody ever eat them and go what the [ __ ] is this this is not a burger why are you feeding me this man i mean it's some great kitchen chemistry yes look at the fake blood the beet juice and then they have to get the flavor profile right so but basically when you're eating it as a burger then you're eating all the other stuff the bun and there's the lettuce and the tomato and the pickle and the you know maybe you got a little sauce on there or some ketchup it's probably easier to get that as a reasonable facsimile with all the other stuff that looks like beet juice i drink beet juice should i drink peaches
it releases nitric oxide like beets and beet juice are pretty legit really good like before training yeah yeah yep but in limited amounts right because isn't too much raw beets toxic yes yeah the salicylates in it yeah it could give you make your kidneys too much raw beets so every now and then have a beet juice i think uh more like a ounce or something yeah it's funny that these people think that they're eating something healthy while they're eating this big-ass bread bun it's kind of funny right it's kind of funny like the the promotion of this as a health food and then you see them eating this fat bread bun like hey so they can't really win on health they've all given up their health claims have they what was the initial health claims uh then you know that it's healthier and everything um looks good i gotta say that looks good they'll say it's less saturated fat doesn't look good jamie is that is the cheese healthy and hot [ __ ] too i like cheese cheese it was probably vegan cheese too unfortunately right which is like who knows what that is it's a lot of whatever it is that's a crazy burger that's for a glutton who's also a vegan there's 80 stacks of paddies on that sucker but you um so you're you're saying like they're initial claims that have been yeah so now when i go to their websites i don't see a lot of health claims and and i do know someone who's working on really taking those products and comparing them to meat like and breaking it out for vitamins and minerals because it's just not going to win um but now so their main claims are now um carbon less carbon right um and completely ignoring all the other ecosystem function pieces that monocropping you know but at least damaging aspects of it right so like in all these um you know united nations food system summit we all have to reduce our carbon and everyone is so laser myopically focused on just carbon um and that i think really comes from
these fake meat companies because that's the only thing that they have you know is that a valid claim that um production of this fake meat is like pound for pound a reduction of carbon emissions versus uh animal based no no how so like even the grossest version of animal-based agriculture factory farming so because most of the greenhouse gases are coming from cattle as part of their digestive system its methane gets emitted and after 10 years the methane gets broken into h2o water and co2 carbon dioxide and it goes back down into the plants the plants release the o2 and photosynthesis and then the carbon becomes the plant the roots and then it can actually store carbon in the ground and then the cow eats the carbon and so it's a cycle and i actually have a graphic showing that methane cycle versus fossil fuels so fossil fuels are mining ancient carbon from the earth's core and pumping it straight into the atmosphere with no it could be part of a cycle but it's going to be through plants and animals okay so we're we're seeing a there's a a beautiful sort of a chart infographic chart that shows how the carbon from the atmosphere gets converted um in the methane it's converted and so a lot of people think it's cal farts it's actually cow burps that are the big producer of uh methane right and then it shows the cows carbon cycle meat and milk and how the poop and this is like to explain this without saying everything on the chart be and even if i said it i have them i have all these charts at sustainable dish backslash rogan and people can just take them and check great sustainable dish is your website yes okay so what the difference is when the cows are emitting this methane we're thinking of it as just carbon carbon equals bad but the carbon that they're emitting and the way that this there is a cycle that they're eating
this grass they're belching it goes into the air it becomes h2o and carbon and then the carbon goes back into the ground it gets into the grass they eat it again and it goes on and on and on and it's a normal part of what it means to be a ruminant animal on a planet that has grass and you eat that grass yeah and so in the u.s in north america we don't have more methane emitting animals than we did before we got rid of the bison and the elk and all the other natural ruminants that were already here and so we don't have a net bigger amount of methane we just have cows instead of bison and deer and the crazy thing is even if we did well it's still part of a cycle to get to the point where the cow is emitting methane he had to pull carbon dioxide out of the air into the plant get sequestered in the plant until the animal eats it but this cyclical part really and he had stephen coonan on recently like he talks i think he talked a little bit about the uh the differences between the cyclical you know pieces of this story versus just mining ancient carbon and releasing it but it it the accounting really needs to be different because the danger that we get into we discovered recently that shellfish produce huge amounts of methane at termites rice paddies like there's all these biogenic methane sources that then people start freaking out and there was actually some some scientists that were asking should we eradicate shellfish so that we reduce their carbon footprint and it's like they're suggesting that we reduce the amount of life on the planet so that we can protect life on the planet and it uh we're in sweden with the moose yeah sweden they're they're uh the green party in sweden wanted to kill all the moose in sweden because they emit methane what yeah they didn't go through it didn't pass but it was proposed oh my god and this is so loony this carbon tunnel vision where you get so focused on carbon release and you lose the bigger picture of all this other stuff that's going on that is so loony kill all the moose because they admit carbon right but
that's limit methane that's what's driving these poor kids in new york to eat vegan school lunches and i mean so who started all this nonsense where's this is it bill gates i think it'd be no i'm not i'm a fan of your operating system [Laughter] i'm not all bad on you buddy i think you need better friends but i mean we we we go into it a little bit how meat became a scapegoat and um meat is a very powerful it's the most powerful food we eat it's it's it's it's masculine it's strength it's um bloody like it represents a lot of things there you know we used to have sacrificial animals um and meat is also seen as barbaric and impure and unnecessary and too masculine um and so there's this like deep weird cultural narrative that's really hard to tease out exactly where it all came from initially i mean we idealize vegetarian cultures as more pure than ours and there's a there's a really great example of that just showing i have two graphs one showing the ideal diets in the world and then one showing the global malnutrition and it's interesting how the ideal diets are causing the malnutrition but we're idealizing them because there's no harm and it's pure and it's all of that so how are the ideal diets causing malnutrition is it from a lack of animal source foods 100 but is it can they be like this has always been the big debate right can you have a vegan diet and and be completely healthy can you do it is there a right way to do it like we were talking about adding sustainable uh or adding amino acids you know adding vitamins is there a way to do it i think it all if someone is young and healthy already probably was raised breastfed well and and raised on enough you know good nutrition um
there does appear to be some people that do okay on a vegan diet for a period of time is there a rough estimate of like what percentage i mean no i most vegans you know give it up 85 percent give it up within three months and it's usually a health event so it's not ideal i mean just from a pure humans are omnivores and we need the nutrients and animal source foods i remember reading about this guy i was a vegan who's a vegan for years and he finally uh decided to he's having all these health problems and he ate a piece of salmon and he said it felt like he was having an orgasm yeah yeah like you couldn't believe how good it is like it's like it's it's sad i hate being the i told you so guy you know like i hate like i want people to be able if you don't want any animals to die for your food and they're gonna die anyway unfortunately but if you want that is anybody wanting coffee or anything i'm good good um because of that you know you you don't like i mean it just it's an uncomfortable discussion because so many people are so ideologically connected to this idea that a vegan diet is like better more calm free like healthier and we're seeing what we're seeing with younger people is that health isn't driving it it's ideology that's driving it right and so they will suffer personally for their ideology and so they're really clinging on to the carbon story and the ethics story well a lot of them become these vegan influencers and then they get busted eating fish yeah like then they get attacked by the community i've seen that happen multiple times right where people were like really suffering and they started eating meat and then people went crazy on them or there was that piece where if they're out drinking they have a tendency to oh yeah like some burgers oh that's a giant percentage of vegetarians will eat meat when they're drunk yeah you know when we when we set in to do the book and this was a long time ago we thought that we were going to tackle the
ethical part of this thing first so we cover the health environmental and ethical considerations of a meat inclusive food system is kind of the big deal but one of the things that became interesting diana really kind of spearheaded the health side of the research is that it becomes really hard to grow a human on a vegan diet i mean like you look at moms and their nutrient needs and then passing that to the next generation breast milk raising kids like when you start trying to attack you know push this thing forward it's really hard people can do it but it's um so you're talking about when a woman is pregnant yeah yeah and there's been documented cases of was it what's that was it finland that they they did the interview with the the wealthy like wealthy finnish families that were vegan and like they they had really pretty terrible nutrient deficiencies within these folks and these they're wealthy they're educated they're supplementing and they weren't able to consistently pull this off yeah yeah we see babies so b12 deficiency causes permanent brain damage like irreversible or it can and and b12 supplements if vegans take the vegan version of the b12 supplement it is actually an analog it's not real b12 and your your cells think it's b12 they'll absorb it but then it actually blocks real b12 it can make your b12 it blocks yeah it's a b12 analog it's not actually b12 it just pretends to be b12 but i thought you can get b12 from algae it's not true b12 really yeah so when you're getting b12 from like blue-green algae and spirulina and all that kind of stuff like what are you from my understanding it's it's a b12 analog and not true b12 that's a it's above my grade i don't know i i think it's a in isomer i think it looks it may be like the folate needs to be a right hand shape and this stuff is a left-hand shape and so it it can so is it partially effective is it so there was a
documented case of a a vegan breastfeeding mother um who was supplementing with b12 and her baby died from a b12 deficiency and she was supplementing the with the vegan form does it this could be a rare it should be yeah one person but when we look at general populations kids who don't have access to meat are much more likely to be stunted to have delayed cognitive development physical development behavioral problems and we only have one study that looked at kids with meat versus less meat there's only one randomized controlled trial everything else is like oh this population ate me and this one didn't and these guys got more cancer it must be the meat but you know that's you can't like make policy on those observational studies so this randomized controlled trials in kenya the kids at school that got a meat snack did better than the milk group and the over calories group and that's the only evidence that we have and so there's no evidence at all that pulling me away from children is going to result in healthier kids now when you get a standard b12 supplement like non-vegan what is that from i'm honestly not sure i don't know if they extract it or if it's purely synthetic i think that it's a synthetic version of b12 wouldn't that be sufficient for a vegan too i would think so yeah i know that that there's non-vegan forms of b12 and i don't know what it is like actually not analog but actually v actual b12 okay so when a person is doing that like what what is going on in their body their body thinks it's b12 so it acts like it's got enough b12 and then it's just not getting it yeah as chris cresser writes about it i'm gonna pull up his study right now so like for there's certain toxins that you can do competitive inhibitions so that the toxin doesn't get into cells so it's something that looks like the toxin it binds to the receptor site it can keep it out but it can work both ways so you can have different nutrients in our body
like amino acids are like they call it l-lysine and l-dopa and what not because they're they're left-hand shaped you if you were to put them together in 3-d space they could have an orientation that's either left-handed or right-handed the right-handed amino acids by and large aren't biologically active and so there's a number of things like that within the nutrients that um trying to think of another one like dl-phenylalanine like people will use that for chronic pain it's both the d and the l form normally l phenylalanine is the form that we use but the d form of phenylalanine seems to have some interaction in the brain where it it actually causes some pain reduction but normally the the d or the r form of of uh those types of nutrients don't really work in our our physiology one of the things that you hear about a lot lately is the idea of um bugs being a viable food source and that might be a way to get vegetarians or vegans to eat like a sort of a living protein source because there's a lot of vegans that don't seem to give a [ __ ] about bugs it's really interesting like i lived next to an ashram when i lived in colorado and i was visiting this lady who lived at the ashram we were talking about something and she was spraying bug spray she was killing bugs and i was like hey what's the story you're supposed to be a buddhist like you're not supposed to be killing bugs and she's like well there's no certain concessions that we have to make and we have bugs that get in our trash i was like oh my god like how do you you're a murderer like this is like mass scale slaughter of of lifeforms yeah if you look at like we have to make this distinction like what is important is it life or is it life with fur is it life that weighs more than a pound is it like like people don't seem to get that upset if you kill a bug right you could kill a bug on you and not even dispose of the body and no one freaks
out like if you swat a mosquito you just basically kind of like move your hand a little bit and [ __ ] you it's like small enough that we seem to be okay with that thing just where's the body like where did you put that he's murdered a life for him no one gives a [ __ ] but if you stomped on a mouse in front of people they'd be like what the [ __ ] is wrong with you rob why did you just stomp on that mouse that's gross clean that like it gets to a certain level where we decide it's either cute enough or large enough you know and when it gets to things like a buffalo that's what's large enough so that like that's too big to kill yeah but is that equivalent to an ant because that lady's out there spraying bugs she's killing at least a life form is that one life form that's an ant this tiny little thing is that as valuable to you as a big bison and if not why tell me why and then especially if you look at how it's produced right regenerative ag versus typical mono cropping right so if you're going to have one cow that's almost 500 pounds of meat and if that cow was raised in a way that increased total life underground and above ground and brought all these birds back and everything that was a life that actually led to more life yeah well if you buy corn you're definitely responsible for some death there's just no if ands or buts about it if you have a monocl monocrop field of corn the only way they're going to keep those animals from eating the corn and to keep you know when when they plow over the corn and they extract it things are dying there's just no way fans or buts about it and then they'll say it but i didn't intend for it to die yeah i don't know if that's good enough you know i mean if you're like shooting a gun into a crowd and you don't intend for anybody to die but people die i think you're still responsible yeah it doesn't hold up very very well you don't you might not be looking where you're pointing the trigger but i think that this idea of a zero-sum game this this idea of never losing any life it's kind of crazy and one thing that people that are proponents of plant-based diets really hate is when you bring up plant intelligence they
really hate that they really hate the idea that plants might not just have strategies to avoid predation but might have real time maneuvers that they do in terms of like changing their chemicals whether it changes their flavor profile emitting these these defense chemicals because they don't want to get eaten and there's some sort of an intelligence that plant plants not just have but they have with this symbiotic relationship to fungus under the ground and these this mushroom the mycelium and the root structures of these plants are sharing resources and they communicate and they it's a really complex system that reeks of intelligence and we don't totally understand it but we have this thought in our head that if it doesn't move then it's okay to kill even though it's a life form but we've made this distinction that a plant life it it does not have the same feelings it doesn't cause pain it doesn't cause emotional harm it's not like us it's as removed from us as possible while still being a life form to the point where we could just eat it yeah in order to make a field for corn or soy also you have to annihilate whatever was there before like whatever forest like you're killing habitat and animals in order to make room for this mono crop to happen and then the pesticides and insecticides and all that stuff too yeah and just having that kind of a structure where you have this one plant growing in this massive quantity is totally alien to anything that you ever find on earth in in terms of like i mean maybe you'll find grass like large grasslands but then again the grasslands is sort of like this weird little honey pot where the the buffalo come over and eat the grass and they [ __ ] and the bugs and the whole thing and the manure and it feeds itself it makes sense there's none of that going on with a monocrop soybean well and it's really not a monocrop too like there can be dozens or hundreds of different plants in that that grass system and they change throughout the season and yeah yeah and the amount of crop land that we
have that can actually support that that has healthy enough soil rainfall or access to irrigation is flat so that you can drive a tractor over it's actually quite small now bugs are bugs good for you for eating them yes i have i mean i've heard that they are i don't think my in my opinion on like crickets is that it's going to be a great animal feed for like chickens i don't think or maybe a bar dare for for dudes you know yeah like you're talking to the guy used to host fear fat crickets are small potatoes okay compared to yeah i ate so much garbage when i was on that show but i don't see them as like a regular but they do have they're a good source of b vitamins right i believe they're b12 rich like you could eat like crickets and they're i believe they're good probably because they're animals yeah and you know it it um it's a little bit even like the cultured meat though is that you still need an input to feed those critters and i'm not i think that they could and probably should play some sort of a significant role going forward but what is it that we're going to allocate to those critters right to grow them yeah feed them with and where are you going to grow them and what kind of how much land do you need to grow crickets also cricket farms are disgusting they are pretty nasty oh yeah yeah any picture of a cricket farm they're like these cardboard tenement cities oh wow there's a lot of poop and if you if you don't right so my daughters got really geeked out because they want to figure out this is a qriket farm these are cricket farms cricket farm so if you don't manage them the crickets become cannibals and they eat each other oh jesus of course they do disasters look at can you show me a video of a cricket farm i want to see what they look like so when i was in mexico we checked into this hotel and they had a bowl of cooked
crickets and it's like a normal snack and uh my girls were like yeah i'm not eating that i was like i'll eat it i got one of my daughters to eat it she ate a cricket we used to get a cricket protein bar and my girls liked it they're kind of salty so why what do you have to do to keep them from eating each other just make sure that you have to make it apparently it hits some population threshold and then they'll just start oh god nature has a built-in safe mechanism to make sure that and so that's them all ground up what is that like a cricket cheesecake what do you think it looks like a carrot cake yeah carrot cake rather oh look at her she's bold she sticks her tongue out with the cricket on it so so these are like different kinds of cricket proteins that they've turned these things into and cricket snacks so look at this poor guy why's he got a mask on is it because of the pandemic or just chicken chicken it's hard to tell right these days like why are they wearing masks is it because of the pandemic or is it because this is what they do when they work around so these guys are working so the titan the shells like you can get a uh an allergy to it kind of like a shellfish allergy so they're probably wearing very closely related yeah i mean if you have a shellfish allergy oh i can speak to this because when we were on fear factor we found out that if you have a shellfish allergy you are also allergic to roaches yeah we found that out by feeding people roaches oh that's a nice way to find their throat seized up and the guy had to leave the show yeah yeah sorry dude uh crickets are anthropods like shrimp crabs and lobsters means they contain some of the same protein so individuals who are allergic to shellfish may develop an allergy to crickets yeah it would have been nice if the people that were running fear factor [ __ ] [ __ ] folks but hey it's a long time ago so um are they what's the protein and the nutrient profile of a cricket is it similar to an animal i think they're
really good you know like pound per pound their conversion of feed into a basically nutrient upcycling i think is really good it's just look at this crickets are a good source of vitamins minerals and fiber in addition to protein crickets are high in many other nutrients including fat calcium potassium zinc magnesium copper foley biotin panthotic how do you say that then pathetic acid and iron one study found that the iron content of crickets was hundred and eighty percent higher than that of beef but you'd have to eat a four ounce block of cricket you wouldn't be doing that if you were hungry what if they're good what they taste good if it's a shellfish thing right like shellfish tastes good right everybody loves lobster right if if they take i mean isn't there a way yeah it and you know the i think that this is at least some of the questions that we need to ask like right now 50 of the food that we produce globally isn't eaten it basically gets landfilled and so we could you know when people start asking about scalability at a minimum we should be better about what we do with the food that we have like there i forget the name of the outfit but some folks in new mexico they have a pork operation and they've made relationships with the local grocery stores and restaurants and basically they're they're food that doesn't get eaten expired food they send it to the pigs they autoclave it they basically sterilize it and then they feed it to these animals and this would have otherwise just gone into a landfill and we could do this like everywhere and this is part of the problem that we have is because of zoning and because of cultural things like we could produce a lot more food in kind of a regional fashion and then be much more efficient with it we could cut like 50 percent of our our food is wasted right now so what if we took 10. that's just nationwide or it's kind of a global global number yeah so what if 10 of that got allocated into cricket and mealworm and different things and we use those to produce uh a possibly vegan acceptable protein source or it gets used to feed the chicken so that they you know there's
just a lot of inefficiency there but there's also a lot of like cultural change that needs to happen to make some of those things more more acceptable this is sort of unrelated but there was a guy who ate bad chinese food it was like leftover chinese amputated yeah his body went septic he had to get his legs amputated his feet amputated the photos are absolutely horrific it was just some some leftover food that apparently it was sitting out maybe something and bacteria gotten it and he ate it and within hours afterwards his body was going septic like in it's he has these lesions all over his body wait do you see this this is so crazy i've never seen anything like this from eating food i thought if you ate bad foods you just get diarrhea and you throw up and you need to poisoning really bad i mean i've had food poisoning i'm sure you guys have as well right it's gross it's it makes you feel terrible is it like botulism did he get botulism from it i can't i don't know you find it uh there's a lot of stories i was trying to find the new york post one is the best because they have the all the juicy photos because you know how the new york post does it classy yeah it's classy as it gets and like it's so crazy oh no this isn't the same one this is uh no it's chinese food yeah it's uh he it's very recent i know but didn't uh new york post didn't come up that way uh just chinese food google chinese food oh there's noodles yeah but just google leftover it's a new story bro it's like leftover chinese food all of these stories are that story it's just not why were they showing a spaghetti bowl then i don't that that particular one went to the wrong one i don't know um it's like well maine i know i have it on my phone because i sent it to somebody just saying didn't the newer post one didn't pop up it gave me a different story i wonder if they they took it down it's too gnarly yeah i don't like something i haven't seen in new york post but it's not all right just try to find one there's one but that's not that's not the correct one right right there try that one and see
if it has the image none of the other ones are happening the image is just the problem um i'm kind of i was doing a lot of clicking really fast and i wasn't finding anything with the images i'm i'm good man is like i can go to images yeah let's go to images i'm sure it'll come up that's just noodles they're just showing noodles that's unfortunate i found it and it it was uh it was horrific this guy like his feet were like a gross multi-colored thing and his all of his skin and it was just from it going septic from bad food how bad did that smell when he ate it like it might not have helped haven't you had food poisoning it didn't smell yeah that's true but i haven't had amputations from it so that's crazy yeah it is that's exactly right so these are the photographs on admission to the hospital patient at a rapidly evolving diffuse reticular purpose rash on the face not shown chest and abdomen arms and legs so his whole body was covered in these horrible purple lesions and barely made it i mean damn it's really really rough when you see it it's horrible and uh so let's go to the top of it so like figured out what happened okay it says the patient had been well till 20 hours before this admission this is crazy when diffuse abdominal pain and nausea developed after a rice chicken and low maine leftovers from a restaurant meal multiple episodes of emesis so the word growing up emesis occurred with vomitus that was either billy what are they trying to do to be here bilios or red brown the abdominal pain and vomiting were followed by the development of chills generalized weakness progressively worsening diffuse myologists is that right myalgias chest pain shortness of breath headache neck stiffness and blurry vision five hours before this admission purplish discoloration of the skin developed and a friend took the patient to the
emergency department of another hospital for evaluation upon arrival the emergency department of the hospital four point five hours before this admission the patient reported diffuse myomel the scale of eight to ten including indicating most severe pain on examination he appeared pale anxious and moderately distressed he answered questions appropriately and was oriented to person place time and situation okay blood specimens were obtained complete culture content approximately 40 minutes after the patient's arrival um during 30 minutes takatakina worsened and labored breathing hypoxima this is a lot of [ __ ] medical terminology here supplemental oxygen was administered so he was just like fading fast resulting in oxygen saturation of 83 and oxygen was administered through a high flow nasal cannula at the rate of 40 liters per minute wow so this is oh this is a medical thing it's a medical journal it's talking about it never really says they did cultures on it but it didn't say what he came back with uh he smoked two packs of cigarettes weekly that's not a lot smoked marijuana daily holla and drank two alcoholic beverages approximately two times per week wow yeah okay crazy okay no more chinese food well it's not that i think i read of another friend ate it too but he didn't get as sick he just had like a little stomach ache and this kid went the other way with it oh wow i think i read that i don't it's not saying that in here i don't think but oh wow i read it initially that dude's got bragging rights that's all he's got left [ __ ] they cut everything else off the other guy the guy that didn't get cut the guy that also ate it but didn't really get sick right you know when he's wheeling his friend around remember i eat the same food bro just tougher horrible horrible joke so do you think that that there is a future where people can have this sort of
this you know this philosophy of having a plant-based diet is like to do the least amount of harm now if you had some sort of a organic back garden diet and you lived off of your garden that's probably the most karma fruit right if you just want to eat plant-based foods and then you have crickets for your protein i mean it depends on where you live because in most the country you can't grow year round so um right it gets tricky and i think if we're talking about least harm and one of the things like rob was starting to say with you know everyone likes to lead with these ethics arguments i want to do least harm and so we were going to lead the book with ethics but my thinking was that you have to fully understand the nutritional implications of like pulling meat away from people who really need it and then you have to understand the environmental argument of like what monocrop agriculture is and all that kind of stuff to then understand the ethical to have like an intelligent ethical debate you can't just say it's wrong okay so when we're talking about nutrients and we were talking about the impossible burger and the beyond burger and stuff like that so they don't really claim that it's better for you nutritionally anymore they not so much i mean you know there's new crazy studies come coming out saying that you should limit your red meat to zero if you want to live um but those aren't this is going to get those are going to be exhausting though because you're going to have to talk to somebody that have read those studies they're going to stick in your face yeah i have a friend who's overweight who's a vegan who's like to claim that i'm going to have a heart attack i'm like bro look at you this is so crazy like you can't be healthy eating whatever you're eating is not good and i think for a healthy you know 25 year old athlete or whatever
if they want to be vegan that's fine as a mom and a dietician i have a big problem with disadvantaged kids being yes um meat being pulled away from them as a policy for virtue signaling for sure but as an athlete when an athlete is a young healthy athlete and they're eating a vegan diet do you think they're leaving something on the table in terms of like the nutrition that they could be getting and the performance that they could be getting it seems like it seems like it right like i don't i'm not aware of any top of the food chain lebron james type people that are vegans you know like when you look at an elite athlete you know canelo alvarez like someone's at the very top of their game you know i don't really see any of them that i'm aware of that are vegans doesn't mean it's not possible but i mean i don't know of any who's the best in their field that's a vegan do you know of any are there any soccer players that are on hand i don't and i mean there's always this this piece too of could they have been better you know maybe they are being vegan or maybe they could have been better with kind of a mixed diet you know it's always a tough one it does seem like you know like the uh the game changers movie like all the athletes they kind of detailed in that thing they everybody went retrograde after they they went vegan like the the strongman guy got injured a bunch and kind of retired like everybody there's a strong man that's a tough case yeah because that guy's chock full of steroids there's just no if ands or buts about it i mean that's a that's a steroided up business you know when you're when unless they're testing people on a regular basis and there's i'm sure there's some that do get tested when you're dealing with those guys that are just enormous human beings that are lifting the most amount of weight possible a lot of those guys are on the juice right and that can paper over a lot of other stuff yeah it's hard to say like what's really going on then right well and also with these athletes they're genetically gifted period right like they can probably get away with eating a lot of fast food and be
pretty a lot healthier than me you know so i think you know when you're already starting with like the ideal specimen of human right and then if they give up plants first or meat for six months it may not have the same impact as somebody who has already damaged guts or an autoimmune disease or as an older person or as a developing kid who needs you know to grow there's been some football players that went vegan right they were like elite football players but then one of them just kept getting injured after you went vegan yeah yeah what would why would you get is it lack of protein you think like what would i think just globally you are consuming less nutrients and definitely the protein piece is a big deal and then if you aren't recovering the same way like do you track heart rate variability do you ever do i do when i wear that whoops wrap yeah yeah so like if what's a cool insight with hrv is that if you're sleeping well on your your total stress load your allostatic load is low comparatively then you've got more resources to put into recovery but if you're eating a diet whether it's junk food or or what have you that is causing some degree of stress that is not providing the fundamental building blocks then more energy has to be allocated to get you back to square one again so this is where like optimizing sleep and nutrition and gut health and all these things really it is something that if you make money from your physicality like it behooves one to do that because you want to put every bit of recovery you know juice into that process because it gets you back in you can train harder can train more often so that's where i could see like the soft tissue injuries and stuff like that starting to be a problem well it's kind of guess work when a football player gets injured because it's kind of an injury sport it's a sport you'd be really cherry-picking if you said right this is why he got injured right um so back to this burger thing so the burger has soybean oil pea protein beet juice and what else is in there that's i think those are the main
and then they what kind of malarkey are they doing to glue it all together i mean we saw again like pretty impressive stuff just with what the person did in the kitchen making the uh the ham that looked nasty honestly but it looked like ham at the end you know yeah but the burger looked pretty damn good yeah with the cheese right on the top of it it was looking all greasy yeah that looked pretty good so it's soy protein concentrate coconut oil something flour oil is good for you right isn't that good for you yeah okay so there's something good for you ingredient number two is good for you sunflower oil potato protein is that good i don't eat you need to eat 10 potatoes to get the protein that you can get in four ounces of beef and just really quick on that what do you need to do so if they're marketing this as like a sustainability feature how much energy goes into raising a potato it you know a bunch of potatoes then you process them extract the protein out so it can be put into that right this is where you know like the what they call a life cycle analysis and they did do that between like white oak pastures and and the impossible burger and white oak pastures ended up having a lower carbon footprint and that again that's not the whole story but there's other pieces to it i'm sorry white oak pastures in comparison to beyond burger and impossible burger so this is compared to their factory their burger the process of creating from the ground yeah a life cycle is like a cradle to grave study where it's the whole so they're following all the plants that can be converted into seed oils and all the all the jazz that i mean there's probably limitations on how far back in the supply i know that they didn't go into some of the mind minerals that they need for um you know all the vitamins and minerals you know like they didn't go that far but pretty far okay and what was the results the white oak pastures ended up being net carbon negative so it's pulling more
out of the environment than what it's putting in throughout their whole process and this includes the composting and the the inclusion of um chicken and pork like it's the whole operation now is this uh pound for pound like how do they do this yeah i believe so it was it was literally like a pound per pound comparison so a pound for pound from a regenerative farm pound for pound for beef and chicken and whatever they grow whatever animal-based protein versus this plant-based stuff that there's more carbon being emitted from the plant-based stuff and the production of and it's worse for the environment yeah and in funny it was kind of weird but i think it was literally the same number but the opposite direction it was like you had to eat one white oak pastures burger to nullify the carbon footprint of one impossible burger yeah it was like 4.6 or something like that i think yeah 3.5 or something like that so it's a grass-fed beef farm in georgia um so in terms of harm to the environment that's so at least from a regenerative farm a regenerative farm like white oak pastures and how do white oak pastures run their thing they run it like polyface very similar yeah now we were talking earlier about sustainability like the ability or scalability rather the ability to do that for the entire country is that really possible yeah so i i consulted some of the top experts in this area when i wrote the book and we went through the numbers and if we if we look at the underutilized grassland that we already have so there's a lot of like blm land or forest service land that's just not being grazed there's farmers being paid through the crp program to actually leave their fields fallow so if we if we look at regenerative agriculture as actually being way more efficient than typical grazing and i put that at 30 percent better but most farmers will tell you i have four times you know more
animals on my property because my soil is so fertile and the grass is so healthy um so i did go through the numbers for the u.s and it does look like we have the land to finish because remember all cattle start on grass so it's really just those last three months that we're looking to finish we're looking to take them it takes longer but it's the three months that would be in a feedlot to then finish them on grass but to finish them on grass it would take longer than three months but but we're not looking at the entire life of the cow is not spent in a feedlot okay when you're saying feedlot are you saying when you are they feeding them hay are they feeding the grass are they feeding the grain so at a feedlot they're getting like a ration of corn of mashed up right you know corn stalks from the ethanol industry so they're getting like like food scraps that we can't and this is to fatten them up but what about pure grass-fed which is supposed to be supposed to be the most healthy correct is that debatable yeah it is actually this is one of the things that gets us in a lot of trouble like we we started with a bunch of assumptions and one of the assumptions was that pastured meat is nutritionally superior to conventional meat and we i mean we we turned over every study that you could find in this thing and what what you find is that pastured meat has a little bit more omega-3s than conventional meat but if you're looking at just the omega-3s you need to eat like eight pounds of meat to get as much omega-3s as what you get out of like three ounces of salmon so it's not the place to look for that and pastured dairy is far more nutritious than conventional dairy wild-caught seafood is far more nutritious eggs are far far more nutritious but it's this weird thing like it would have been so nice if just pastured meat was like nutritionally superior we could have
like had this you know soup to nut story on this thing we even hired an independent researcher person with a phd in nutritional biochemistry and we just said hey do a comparing contrast of conventional meat and grass-fed meat we want to know the nutritional profile we didn't give this person any of our information and they arrived at exactly the same thing but we have people really angry at us but at the end of the day the crazy thing is even when you're putting things like corn stalks and weird things like that into cows they make they're so good at upcycling nutrients that meat is just ruminant meat is super super nutritious and i think that the ethical argument for grass finishing is strong i think the environmental argument is strong there may be a case for like bioaccumulation like things like glyphosate and stuff like that but that's separate from it and and i don't think it's as compelling a thing as what most people would think but just nutritionally like vitamins minerals you know uh proteins essential fats essential amino acids there's just not that big of a difference why does it look so different because it's a darker red meat and now it's cleaner it's definitely leaner so finishing on corn marbleizes it so that's the only difference in terms of the color it's just a lean thing yeah so yeah because i was assuming it was like a nutrient density thing well it's kind of nutrient dense because it's more of the actual meat versus fat for sure but there is a benefit to the fat from meat that's a nutrient too so there is probably some benefit to a fatty piece of meat that is grain finished yeah i mean it has more calories so it just depends on what your goals are but it's not bad so it's not bad okay so uh the omega-3s is the only big issue but you really should get that from salmon anyway yeah i mean it's like saying an organic carrot has three times a protein no one is eating carrots for protein right got it got it so so if we we're doing that and you're trying to feed the entire country how much more of an impact does the methane
from the cows burping and how much more of an impact is it in terms of the amount of animals that you have to move around in terms of transportation and the fossil fuels that are emitted through that so ironically i'm going to brazil next month to speak at a cattle conference and they are actually having to go more towards feedlots because they're getting so much pressure to reduce their carbon emissions and so when you finish a cow on a feedlot it's faster and so the cow's not alive as long and so they're emitting less methane so it's this one company it's actually they're being pressured to go the feedlot route and and this is that carbon tunnel vision where they're missing all the other [Music] externalities that could be beneficial around the pastured process like you can reverse desertification the ground holds more water it doesn't create as much of a heat footprint you get carbon sequestration you have all the other ecosystem benefits but this is where like this kind of neurotic focus on just greenhouse gas emissions absent this bigger picture you start making dumb decisions and we're making decisions at a global food policy level that are potentially going to be really injurious like what they're doing in that that process then and i think they're looking just at the um the emissions are coming from the animals in that case but then what about all of the infrastructure that's necessary to get the grains to feed to the animals and what's going on with that and i think when we do these full life cycle analyses like what we do with the white oaks farms usually the pasture process wins but you have to be willing to accept that that is part all that greenhouse gas emissions is part of a cycle that stuff that's in the atmosphere today is going to be part of a plant at some point and you know them part of an animal and and on and on now when you're talking about the amount of cows that you would need to feed the entire country like what kind of a quantity of meat are we talking about
per capita per person so right now americans eat about two ounces of beef per person per day and about twice that much chicken so we're really not eating like too much meat everyone thinks that americans are sitting down to a tomahawk steak every night and it's just not true um you know we're gonna get our protein from different sources so i'm not saying we all need to be carnivores and you know then you have this other dilemma of the carrying capacity of earth for humans which gets really dicey when you even start talking about that so we don't talk about that but it you know do you want healthy humans or do you want human feed to just have the largest number of humans possible right right so two ounces of beef a day does not sound like a lot no so but if you want people specifically to live on this diet like i'm living on like if that if this is something that people adopt now you're talking about many times more how much is that sustainable that seems like no i don't know like i i don't know where that carrying capacity pops in and i don't know uh it it's interesting you know how much of that could be supplemented with seafood how much of that gets uh like if we start integrating like the pork and the chicken and making that all biodynamic and not as as impactful how much of that could be offloaded into like insect proteins but if everybody ate like sean baker we'd be [ __ ] probably would be some problems probably some problems also we're exporting all the oregon meats to other countries we're not doing a very good job of of eating those and there's a there's a flip side to this is that as as a culture we're super unhealthy so like there was a congressional budget office study back in like 2005 that was suggesting that by like 2030 2035 the u.s is bankrupt from diabetes related costs like we will we have more costs dealing with diabetes than what we we have gdp and i don't know what covet has done to that whole projection and what
just diabetes just diabetes alone and this isn't even looking at like parkinson's and alzheimer's and all these other metabolically driven diseases and if there's one thing that although i guess it's still controversial but there's there's one thing that there's at least a little bit of synergy out in the world people like lane norton and and what not kind of sign off on this if people under eat protein they tend to overeat calories beyond that some of this looks like you're looking yeah i saw yeah and so whether you eat higher carb or lower carb if people eat adequate protein they tend to not overeat the other stuff if you under eat protein then you tend to overeat all the other things and this is probably the the big driver of of this illness so what do we do about addressing the health and health care issue in all this you know like in some ways we can't not we can't afford not to address this in some effective way because we have to figure out like a a global public health food policy that's going to allow people to spontaneously reduce calorie intake or we we end up with this kind of global control of the food system and you go to buy meat and it's you know it's like a social credit score thing it's like sorry comrade you've already got your protein allowance for them and then i looked into also the um the carbon footprint of diabetes oh yeah so medical tubing and amputations you've got dialysis all the plastics involved in dialysis i mean so but that shouldn't that be factored into junk food you know if we're if we're complaining about like methane from i guess it has to be if that many people are gonna bankrupt the country from diabetes right that's real i had no idea that i thought diabetes was fairly rare okay here the staggering cost of diabetes 2.3 times greater health care costs for americans with diabetes 327 billion dollars the annual annual cost of diagnosed diabetes in america more than 34 million americans have diabetes holy [ __ ] and that's just diagnosed right
because there's so many more people on their way more than 88 million have pre-diabetes so you're almost at half the population that's either pre or diabetic that is bananas it's a third essentially but that's still a lot of [ __ ] people one in three is either diabetic or pre-diabetic that's nuts what did we found out that the obesity rate in america was like 40 right wasn't it something like that if you add overweight and obese at 70 70 wow see that is something that you know uh obviously this is anecdotal but you know jordan peterson was one of the first guys that i knew that got on that carnivore diet and he lost 40 something pounds right he looks amazing and it's just like he's completely slim and lean and he just eats nothing with steak like there's something about eating meat where you get satisfied easier when i'm eating meat by itself i you know i'll eat a steak and i'm fully satisfied but if you give me a steak and pasta i will eat i will eat that steak then i'll eat the [ __ ] out of that pasta and i'm somehow another still hungry right i keep digging in there wherever it was steak it was another steak there i'd i'd stop and i'd you know i'd put it in the fridge but i can't stop eating when it's pasta or bread yeah that buffet effect is is interesting where if we get more food options yeah we'll tend to eat more more things uh when i was on the show last time we looked at the uh adam rickman man versus food and he did this uh kitchen sink sunday challenge i think we watched this this thing but he had to eat a eight pound ice cream sundae and he's motoring through this thing he gets maybe 15 minutes into it and then he just starts visibly turning green and like starts gagging and he's not gonna make it and he asked the uh the waitress in this place to get him a giant plate of salty crunchy french fries and he would eat a couple of french fries and then a little bit of ice cream a little bit of french fries but because he was able to go back and forth and change the palate experience his brain didn't tell him to
stop so the only way he would have thrown up he would have failed eating that ice cream sundae without eating like 2 000 calories of french fries which is just crazy it's weird weird tricks you have to play in your brain but yeah there he is yeah look at him he looks so much different now since he doesn't do that show anymore he's all like normal size right like that guy must have been killing himself i mean just killing himself doing that show eight pounds of ice cream is absolutely nuts that is so bad for you and it's orange sherbet at the bottom i mean good god look at him though it's good right now he's getting after it anyway so yeah so your body has this weird thing if you just eat uh protein like when i eat like steak and eggs in the morning i'm very satisfied yeah so we're in this horrible place where people are saying but it's unsustainable yeah and so so that's why we proved it is well so you have to you have to start with what is the ideal diet and how can we produce that in a sustainable way but all the other groups are saying look at our broken ag system what's the most sustainable food and how can we convert that into human feed well they're not even just doing that it seems like they're playing funny games with the numbers like where they're not being honest about the environmental impact they're not being honest about the nutritional footprint they're not being honest about any of these things they just want this ideology promoted which is that meat is bad for the environment meat is bad for you i mean i see that everywhere and then people say it on twitter they say it's like it's just this like cold statement they just say meat is bad for the environment like what kind of meat like what are you saying in what way like yeah is are you saying like those pig farms where they leave lakes of sewage yep i'm with you that's bad for the environment when they have these horrific factory farm conditions where they're all packed in next to each other and they [ __ ] through
the bottom of their cage because it's a great and it goes into this this big swampy sort of lake of sewage yeah that's terrible but if you're talking about like what joel salton does no my thing is though you're not going to get everybody to listen right when people say that anybody listen like like and i used to work at npr i have friends there they want to touch this story yeah i know people at new york times they went in well netflix was super interested in her in the future and got like right to the 11th hour 59th minute and then somebody was like oh [ __ ] like we can't we can't sign off on this so yeah meanwhile they have the most wacky documentaries that are so full of [ __ ] on so many different things right on ufos and bigfoot and [ __ ] you know the origins of currency netflix's got some wacky [ __ ] so does itunes i went to the other day i was at home i had a rare day off so i just went through the documentary section of itunes for a goof or apple tv and i was like what kind of [ __ ] horseshit are you people selling and you won't sell this it's my what i was gonna say though is like you're not gonna there's certain people that are just headline readers and that is a headline reader statement that meat is bad for the environment this is a thing it's it aligns so perfectly with so many other narratives yeah today too so it's just also that are just headlines yeah you know and there's this really weird tendency to ignore facts that are contrary to what you've already espoused and believed in and this is one of them and once you've already said publicly multiple times meat is bad for the environment an animal-based diet is bad plant-based diets are the only diet that reverses heart disease they like to say that one yeah so like i'm in a suburb outside of boston everyone's environmentally conscious right they're educated mess and poor people of course of course they don't eat meat none of them eat like or they're cutting down or they're
flexitarian they're all exhausted yeah yeah they all look like [ __ ] that's what's weird i mean obviously not some of them some look great there's a you're going to run into that vegan it's all jacked it's like bro i'm a vegan i'm [ __ ] healthier [ __ ] okay touche one of the rare ones you're a [ __ ] unicorn pal but it is tough because it's such a airtight beautiful story you know if if you don't eat meat you'll live forever you'll be skinny um those are ethically superior you're saving the planet i mean sign me up it sounds great yeah i think the experience people love that one people love that one because of the social media social media is just it's such a great place to espouse your virtue right you know that if you can do you put that little plant thing next to your your bio and then put your pronouns underneath that you're off and running nice you got a solid pro you know solid bio there and then what we're suggesting we don't even have like a solid endpoint other than mainly we we make the recommendation that as to the greatest degree possible decentralize the food production system and depending on where would you say that what do you mean by that so people in nebraska should probably be doing things different than people even in texas and i'm not in that crew where people get all bent out of shape that like an avocado is going from mexico to canada during the winter like i don't care about that i do think that more of our food should probably be eaten locally but if we produce more food locally where we have much more efficiencies generally and then a lot of these environmental problems like the the lakes of like steaming pig [ __ ] and stuff like that should just be worked back into the farm we shouldn't be poisoning waterways they shouldn't be growing pigs that way that the pigs should be integrated into the whole system the way that we did
about a hundred years but don't you need a vast swath of land to accomplish something like that not necessarily because you you don't need to always do mega scale and it this is some of the stuff that we're going to have to come to terms with also so like in the uk there was an experiment where they they put in hedgerows around the regular you know conventional farms that they had but the hedgerows allowed for these predatory birds and and insects to have somewhere to hang out and then they would get in and and eat the the bugs that would you know cause problems with the you know like the weed or the corn or whatever so there was a decrease in the total amount of harvest that they had because some of the farm was allocated these hedgerows but then the amount of insecticides and herbicides and whatnot that they had to use were dramatically decreased uh so we have to start putting what our values are like markets are really good at optimizing things but we're not we're not telling currently what we've asked it to optimize is make as much cheap food as possible right and we've crushed that like we we've we've crushed it i think it was 2006 2007 became the first year somewhere around there that more humans started dying from over eating than undereating in an infectious disease like chronic disease outstripped infectious disease and and a lack of food as the main cause of death really that's interesting somewhere around that point nobody is the tipping point it's kind of a tipping point but it's a really important point in history but we crushed that imperative we produce huge amounts of calories but now it's to the point that people are so sick that we're crippling our health care system and people are unhappy and what is what i was getting at in terms of sustainability is that if you have a pig farm that is a factory farm pig farm you're raising thousands of pigs on a relatively small footprint what you need is more smaller farms with some some pigs and you need people to you you need not five corporations to own
the supplies but this is a bigger problem what i'm saying is like if you run a pig farm and you only have x amount of acres and you have thousands of pigs on that pig farm that's the only way you're gonna be able to raise the same amount of pigs on that farm you're gonna have to bring in food to them you have to keep them contained you fatten them up and then you kill them and you have this giant lake of their their feces this is what is the only thing that you kind of can do to have that kind of yield on a small piece of land relatively small like if you have 100 acres and you have 10 000 pigs in these [ __ ] containment facilities you're not going to recreate that on 100 acres with like the joel salatin method correct like if you if you're going to do regenerative farming you're going to need some land you need some land but you're also going to need to have a different supply chain you're going to need to sell directly to consumers and not meet as a commodity but what about meat as a commodity to place like burger king or jack-in-the-box or what-have-you they still do that i mean that that's still even joel sells to chipotle yeah yeah chipotle is a pretty good source right chipotle has yeah i mean when you get like a a good beef burrito there a beef ball pretty damn good i mean in a scenario like that then i don't know how joel handles his but if you're selling to mcdonald's then mcdonald's gets its meat from more regional source versus like this consolidated uh source the way that you anticipate a time where they'll be able to i mean i know they are doing factory cloned meat now do you think that that will be scalable no like the short answer is no because it's so expensive to do it like but for now like it used to be really expensive to get a cell phone and now they're fairly cheap it's true and and i'm a huge fan of moore's law it's a really good point but the the thing that kind of gets missed in this is that it's so expensive to run a lab like i actually did tissue culture and you have to take all the products of industrial
farming pull that out process it and then you know i've got protein and carbs and fat in these these you know jars that i put into this vat and then inoculate it with meat cells and have to keep it the right temperature the right humidity i have to pathogens off keep pathogens off of it so i've got to use antibiotics there was actually been a couple of good um business pieces like forbes and stuff like that looking at these things and and some smart systems engineers looking at this and they're like there's just no way you're going to scale this you know and people just they don't realize like the grasslands in the united states or even in like eurasia and whatnot they're just enormous and we have these huge tracks of land sunlight grass animals it's a really efficient system versus again trying to pull that all under you know a roof like this and try to grow meat at scale if you're on like a spaceship or something you have a closed-loop deal like i could see something like that working but as long as we have the sun and grasslands and and whatnot there's still a really efficient piece of that now correct me if i'm wrong on this but as marijuana has become more legalized people have gone outside frequently to to produce it where they can because it's just cheaper like the infrastructure of that versus like a greenhouse scenario is tends to be pretty pretty economically viable so i think you run into those similar situations with the lap grown meat and and the uh kind of budding up against the scale piece yeah you'd have to talk to a real marijuana farmer but uh i i think there's uh some questions about you know quality and how you grow it and the soil you know like the difference between hydroponic versus growing it outside and right yeah um what other pieces of the puzzle are missing in terms of like if we're looking at beef and nutrients and we're looking at the carbon footprint we're looking at all these different things in terms of like
like a viable and sustainable food source what other pieces are we missing in this discussion well i mean one thing i was going to bring up is just with white oak pastures and the impact he's had on jobs and this town like he's in the poorest county in the country and when as we've lost in south western georgia and to see what he has done on this property is incredible he sells direct to consumers and so he can get a good margin when he sells direct to consumers does he have like a like a farmer's market type deal would they come to him he ships so he does it online okay um so you could just like buy a side of beef a half a cow you could it does it buy pounds cuts yeah but they also have restaurants that they supply too okay but what the beauty of of that and also you know some of the stuff that wendell berry talks about i don't know if you've ever heard of him but he's a there's a great documentary they did on him called look and see and he's an agrarian uh thought leader and he just talks about how you know everyone from a small town you haven't really made it in the us until you've left your small town and nobody's like coming back and actually working in their small town and loving the land that they're from and making sure that that gigantic nasty polluting pig farm doesn't happen um so that's part of it but as we've lost all these small farms small town america has just completely dried up and now it's just big box everything and so if we're able to sort of dismantle these like four meat companies that control 80 of our meat and somehow get it back to a more balanced system where there's more regional control over the food systems you're going to have more healthy small communities this gets out in the weeds a little bit but when people talk about ai supplanting jobs it's creative jobs that are going to be the last things that go like even
doctoring and lawyering is so kind of scripted and wrote that they you know they predict that though being a doctor and being a lawyer could be replaced by by ai stuff in the not too distant future but this process of regenerative farming is a really creative endeavor like you're problem solving constantly and people have a tendency to relegate these farmers as just kind of look like inbred idiots and they're not that smart like there's an amount an enormous amount of information that they have to learn about their local situation and what they're doing and again constant problem solving so this could be one of these things that revitalizes middle america and is a really long-term you know job and employment and economic engine is having people do more of this type of work like there was a time when more people worked in agrarian settings and then we shifted into urban centers and maybe there's a case to be made that more people need to shift back into a quasi-agrarian setting both for the employment but also for like the quality of life and the production of food and different things like that yeah and i was just going to add to you know the vegan dialogue works really well for like norwegian billionaires and bill gates and people that can afford it and they've got a whole foods nearby where they can get their goji berries and coconut oil and all things but for the majority of people they want meat they want to be able to eat it and that now we've got even science so corrupted that people are trying to pull it away from people and so it's when you look at the nutritional ramifications of what happens when people have less animal source foods it's not it's it's a social justice issue it's an equity a food equity problem what is what was the motivation for demonizing meat other than i mean we know about the uh the studies that were done that uh the sugar industry funded that demonized saturated fat which is really
when you know about those studies i believe it was in 1960s right where they were saying that saturated fat was the cause of all this heart disease and they were trying to take the blame off of sugar they they only bribed these guys with like 50 000 which is crazy because those findings so this is pre-internet obviously that swept through the whole country and everybody's terrified of saturated fat and people started drinking low-fat milk and low-fat this and low-fat that and everybody got fatter it's it's really wild if you look at the difference you like people that lived in 1960s and 1970s versus people today like you've seen all those photos of people on the beach from the 1970s versus people today it's crazy and some of that has to be attributable to diet so with when we're saying science has been corrupted like what what happened what's the motivation if they know this we know i know this like i'm i'm not an expert how the [ __ ] do i know best i would think that people study food science know this too and they would want to get that word out like hey this is not real like that's not what the problem is not saturated fat the problem is not cholesterol in fact cholesterol is like the building blocks for a lot of hormones and it's very important to you know cellular development right mm-hmm yeah i mean bill mill and the gates foundation are one of the from what i understand or one of the big donors to this global burden of disease um so do you think it's a financial there's acceptance i mean who benefits from meat being bad big oil because now it's not an industrial problem it's a consumer's problem right uh just like recycling like you put it on the consumer it's not the company making the plastic bottles it's the consumer right so we've got big oil benefits the ultra processed food industry benefits not only because they're the ones making this junk but also it takes the blame off all the cereals and and pasta meals and all that stuff and puts it on meat
so they're winning um in the book and i i always forget what's in the book and what's in the film but you dug into like the history of it interestingly like seventh-day adventists uh vegetarianism they they kind of founded the dietetics profession oh yeah so it had a very strong vegetarian underpinning to it because the the religious you know leanings of the seventh day of venice so they founded dietetics and nursing really so a religion founded nursing well you know like loma india university so i mean they're they're operating within science but it definitely had this vegetarian orientation to it yeah and so what why has there in the cattle industry is huge the beef industry is huge there's 95 of the planet eats meat right isn't it something high like that the margins are really small though because meat is such a commodity it's like steak and steak a steak but beyond burger they can their margins are amazing they're new like is this an unorganization thing like did the the the beef people do they not know the existential threat to their existence they don't really they it's weird it's weird yeah yeah they're out there shoveling [ __ ] and oblivious well because they're not part of the coastal dialogue and i think some of it too is most of the players that own the meat production they they own like the the grain you know the corn and everything it because it's all consolidated so they're like well maybe we'll lose a little bit there but we'll make it up here and then they're major investors in the plant-based meat as well the meat the large meat packers just for money diversify why not you're going to win either way oh criminy so when you wrote this book um did you think that there was going to be major pushback did you think that you know you'd basically shored up all your arguments with with data and solid
discussion i thought there was going to be more pushback from like the vegan side of the house and there hasn't been a huge amount and i we did we we tried to [Music] we really even in in the point you know like is pastured me more nutritionally superior we really like we had a discussion i'm like do we just lie about this because it would be great then like everything is consistent but one i think the ethics are dodgy there and then two it's a you know one vegan doctor goes through our work and he looks out he's like no there's a difference there and if you can point out one glaring error like that then it calls into question everything else so we really like whether it hurt or not we tried to be as honest with this stuff as as we could and what we have noticed is that we kind of uniformly piss everybody off like almost nobody comes away reading that book and they feel just super happy and invigorated because it it it filled up the buckets of like their preconceived notions like if you were really really really excited about regenerative ag we we we sing the praises of that but also we're not we're kind of it's not black and white it's not totally black and white yeah like we make the case that like there's all these other foods that could be nutrient upcycled that doesn't really fit into like the grass-fed model so what why don't we take advantage of that so it's uh it's been interesting like the areas that we've had some pushback in the most aggressive pushback has actually been the the really meat elitist kind of pastured meat scene because there are people out there that say it should be grass-fed meat or nothing it's like well that's interesting they're not understanding the nutritional importance and how that dialogue grass fed or nothing ends up with new york city schools going vegan right the grass fed or nothing thing that sort of um the the ideology is that
is that oriented in like a nutrition standpoint no why do they it's a nature thing an environmentalist and ethical thing right yeah and so they cannot tolerate the idea that protein period is important we don't have enough regenerative meat to feed everybody we've got kids who if they just got enough meat in a disadvantaged situation they actually might have a leg up so we should just be feeding them the meat that's available right now instead of waiting for the whole world to go grass-fed who who's responsible for making meatless monday and no meat friday in these school systems so meatless monday uh is partially funded by beyond burger oh god and johns hopkins which is a very anti-meat place now why are they anti-meat i don't know if they have some kind of religious background i mean harvard is also uh walter willa is very anti-meat and he's funded by barilla anti-meat equals woke right a lot of it yes part of what the ideology is today um and then the vegan fridays is mayor adams mayor eric adams i actually have a public letter on the so i started an organization called the global food justice alliance where i'm trying to advocate for the inclusion of animal source foods for people and i have a public letter out to mayor adams on all the points why this is a horrible idea do you know he's not really vegan he has been questioned right about like potty and fish and he says i have a plant-based life whenever he is questioned he's like i don't want to get into the nuance and the vegan friday thing is just i have a photograph actually that i sent over um in the dropbox of what the vegan friday lunch looks like it's so sweet the burrito oh so sad looking yeah um school lunch looks like [ __ ] already right but taking meat away and and if you think about the context for these kids in new york right there if you tell the meat is bad they're just going to go to subway and get a
a sandwich without meat on it it's not like they're going to go get a a tofu bowl somewhere right and so you know the top kid foods that kids love mac and cheese burgers pizza and chicken nuggets and i would argue the meat part of those is the best part and so if you tell these kids meat is bad then they're just gonna pull the meat parts out and just eat the fries instead and the coke when a child is growing do they have different needs per kilogram in terms of like the amount of protein that they need yes and they really we have major problems even in developed countries in the u.s with iron deficiency which is one of the major things you need for growth for your brain and for physical growth so the biggest pushback that you guys got was from the agriculture or from the grass-fed people kind of the what you would call the meat elitist we had lots of people in the pastured scene that were very gracious towards the book and thankful and everything but they're there's kind of a weird cross-section of like the health influencers that say grass-fed or nothing and then also kind of and what are they basing that on because i've said that i've said that because i read it because i read it that it was higher in essential fatty acids it's better for you yeah so they don't like it when i say that because then that takes part of their argument away it's an emotional decision that's not a logical decision i've said that i'm probably one of the people that you probably told me released that like syphilis on a college campus and then i did something crazy and i really thoroughly got in and vetted the science and it was like oh it's not that simple like there's great ethical considerations for it there are really really sound environmental reasons but when you just butt up against just that nutrition piece it's just not the same compelling story on meat by itself again like the dairy eggs seafood huge differences there but just not the same with meat and there's a lot of very large family foundations that are um funding a lot of this grass-fed stuff and they um
it's a very progressive um platform that they're taking and so to say that meat is healthy period it's all of a sudden i'm on the right and and like not aligning with their politics and this should be a bipartisan stay political i i am totally apolitical on all this stuff but i'm immediately tagged as a troublemaker if i say the meat is healthy we have so many problems with that in this country where people get so dogmatic and they're so connected to their ideology that they they don't even question anything that goes outside of it and this sort of healthy questioning and just reasoning and logic and just looking at data and looking at information and challenging your own personal assumptions it's so rare it's so rare i mean maybe you get one or two percent of the people i don't know what the numbers are who like look at their diet and look at their life and then look at things like this and read a book like that and go hey maybe i should try this like maybe i'm like too rigid with this this philosophy that i've adopted that plant-based is the only thing that's good for the heart and protects the environment and you want to be a good person this is the way to go you know it's it's just so rare most people they get something in their head and they just stick with that and then their echo chamber that they exist in that that reinforces and supports that and that's all they ever talk about yeah and there's a i mean there's a lot of very large interests that are pushing the plant-based narrative and then they have this grassroots army of ethical cheerleaders that are just backing them up uh for free and then on our end it's so complicated to be able to talk about the environmental p like we have health influencers that understand the nutrition piece but they can't really articulate all the environment and then you throw ethics in there and then environmental people don't fully appreciate the nutritional pieces that meet is good period
and so you end up with nobody really advocating for me and also there's no money in advocating for me it just it just creates the headache they've just made that idea so it's so prevalent that meat is bad for you meat is bad for your heart high cholesterol bad for the environment you're a bad person that's why we call the book sacred cow because it's just this unquestioned truth that cows are bad and where's the documentary it's on amazon only on amazon uh it's on itunes and um like all those like video on demand type things i couldn't even give it to netflix they wouldn't take it really they probably have some funky deal with like some vegan programming well you know it's worth mentioning the folks that public we were turned down from every single no publisher would take this book so so i'm like i'm i'm not a jk rowling but my books have done really well i'm a uni you know more than a million copies sold of my books and everything like i should be able to get a book deal kind of anytime i want to do it and nobody would sign off on this and then the folks who did were the the publishers of uh the china study it's a vegan publisher yeah really yeah and they happen to also be uh uh stephen coonan's publisher too diversifying sort of like the meat business i think they're diversifying but they also like they're pretty ethically driven and even if in their team there were folks that were like i have some real reservations about this but this is a story that at least needs to be told what was the rejection when you guys got rejected it was always a different answer yeah from like that's when you know it's not really your fault like it was a different reason like i think that this is already been told i think that this is too complicated i think that this isn't going to sell and then and then the weird thing is probably just kovid but we would have
made the new york times list well if the new york times wanted to put us on the list the first week we sold seven thousand copies but amazon only shipped two thousand well we we we sold out the day of release and we were all over them and and this was my third book my other books have done very well so there was something really so i think they were holding it back are you guys kind of seeing foil hats right now i mean we really thought that this was a slam dunk yeah four years of work well let's see what we can do today let's pump this [ __ ] [Laughter] um well thank you guys for coming in here and you're oh and so the film is there uh um a trailer jamie yeah let's end with the trailer um and so everybody let's let everybody know this book is available you can go to it right now right here sacred cow the case for better meat diana rogers and rob wolf right there and here's the uh here's the trailer we'll leave you with this and thank you everybody thank you rob tell everybody how they can find you on the social media rob wolf.com you can find all my stuff from there and diana i am uh at sustainable dish and then the global food justice alliance is awesome thank you guys thank you thank you i really appreciate it all right play this jaime there's a debate out there about whether or not we should be eating meat red meat is now worse for us in our minds than fat ever could have been because there are so many more reasons to avoid red meat not only for your health but also now for the goodness of others including not killing animals and for the good of the planet you can't blame people for being confused they're trying to make really important moral and ethical decisions about what they should eat and how they should live it's easy to fall for extreme simple
answers the majority of meat produced in this country is under such abhorrent conditions we both are making reactions to the same evil if you will they're just different choices of how to do it but what if we're arguing about the wrong thing you look at the midwest now in the united states it's corn and soy and corn and soy and more corn this massive amount of monoculture is having devastating effects on the environment what used to be great biodiversity is gone the agricultural revolution has been transitioned into the processed food revolution if you want to fatten up your animals you put them in a pen or they can't run around and get physical activity and you feed them lots of grain humans are like that too [Music] what if the very animals were fighting about are a key piece of fixing what's broken the animals are going to die and your only choice now is to do it well that is the only choice left are we going to be the death that's killing everything or are we going to be the death that's part of the cycle of life that actually makes life stronger those are really our only options [Music] [Music] so [Music] you