Diana Rodgers and Robb Wolf challenge plant-based dogma, citing Harvard data showing 94% of carnivore dieters cut medications while grass-fed beef outperforms Beyond Burger nutritionally—four ounces of steak vs. 10 potatoes for equal protein—and with a lower carbon footprint than lab-grown substitutes. They expose "Meatless Monday" as misleading, highlight antibiotic-resistant bacteria from factory farming, and argue regenerative agriculture could restore ecosystems without land expansion, though scaling high-meat diets remains debated. Their book Sacred Cow and film push back against ideological extremes, advocating for meat’s role in health and sustainability when responsibly sourced. [Automatically generated summary]
Got to a Marriott around the corner from here and thought, well, at least I'll be able to walk, 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 toilets.
I still have a can of wolf chili that she bought here, but she didn't have a can opener and she was just like, I don't know how to get into this thing.
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 Like it was, I mean, first world problems but kind of sketchy first world problems as far as they go.
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.
Yeah.
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, they're like, well, there's no research on it.
Okay, that's fine.
But this is where things begin.
And it's usually observational.
Okay, there's this group of people that seem to be getting these really remarkable results.
And the thing 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.
I'm the person that kind of 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.
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 carnivore type diet and put 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 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 shit you could do before that.
But if you're really sick, you know, I think 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 wouldn't be caught dead eating fruit, you know, and it just seems to work for him.
But 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.
It's literally the only food that, you know, from Costa Rica to, I guess the only one that it's not part of would be like the Seventh Day Adventist, but yeah.
Yeah, and when you compare them to Mormons, who have an almost identical lifestyle, but they eat meat, it's the same lifespan, but the Mormons are left out of the Blue Zones.
This stuff gets a little bit sketchy, but there's some research that suggests that people with inadequate social connectivity, like friends, family Oh, 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 pack-a-day smoking habit gets thrown around a lot because people will say eating an egg is equivalent to smoking six cigarettes or something like that.
But I think when you think about human evolution and small group environments and stuff like that, there's something really powerful there.
You had Sebastian Junger on and they talk about, you know, poor 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 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 going to be a major piece of your overall health.
And if you tick that box, you can get away with a lot of other stuff.
And, you know, when we think about longevity and kind of healthspan versus lifespan, we want to live as well as we can, as long as we can, and then very short, you know, decline and then, you know, fade out.
And I think that smart exercise, a base level of cardio, some resistance training, and 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 shape 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 burnout, the problem I usually have with that is that I don't think they enjoy it.
I think they think of it as this task that one must do in order to look better or to justify a sundae, you know, justify an ice cream sundae or a bowl of spaghetti, you know?
Whereas, like, you should enjoy the results.
Like, you feel good.
Like, it's great for the body.
It's a stress reliever.
relieves anxiety.
It's so critical.
If you're going through any stressful period of your life, that is the time where you've got to be disciplined with your workouts.
And so then when you go 0.8 grams per kilogram, you're way above what these RDA – 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 between animal and plant source proteins.
Now that's 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 bioavailable as animal-based protein?
And you know, on that sarcopenia side, like losing muscle mass as we age, and also just for athletics, isoleucine, leucine, some of these branched-chain amino acids 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 tending to lose Muscle mass is kind of 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, specifically strength training, causes that anabolic signaling.
And then eating a protein-rich meal that's rich in branched-chain amino acids causes that signaling, too.
And 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 simple solution be to – if you wanted to have a plant-based diet, is to eat the plant-based protein but then substitute with exogenous amino acids?
I mean, you've got to separate out the protein, carbs, fat, and then isolate the proteins.
And whether you do a hydrocylate of the proteins, like kind of pre-digest them or leave it together, usually hydrocylates taste horrible.
So yeah, but I mean, in like an idealized world, if somebody's really, they wanna be vegan, but they wanna tick the boxes of getting that anabolic signaling, preventing sarcopenia, improving body composition, that is a way that you could do it.
And it would be vegan, and it would give the right amount of protein, not overfeeding you potentially on the calorie side, and that could be a way to kind of thread the needle.
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 – so here we have vitamins.
And vitamin A, again, it's like you only get 1% from steak.
But the big ones are vitamin B12. That's a big one.
Because if you look at the big difference in B12 in kidney beans, you have 0%.
B12 in steak, you have 95% 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 B12. Yeah, and 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 plant-based stuff.
So, for example, beta-carotene, which is 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% 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.
That's my guess, because what we see with omega-3s is people that lived along the 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.
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 genetic testing isn't perfect on that.
You can find that maybe you have a high likelihood of converting the carotenoids into retinol, but then some of these nutrient issues are gut-related.
So if your gut microbiome is deficient in Some type of bacteria, you may not even get the conversion to be able to get the beta carotene into your body.
So that's another layer to it.
It just gets really complex.
I think you almost go the simpler way of, instead of trying to get in and get super detailed on 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 there are some pretty classic nutrient deficiency syndromes, you know, like dry skin and split nails and things like that 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 perfect diet that's going to work for you.
I'm trying to pull up the The protein bioavailability chart, because there is a chart that sets and its animal source proteins are always above 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, let's say you give them 30 grams of protein, and then you track over a two-hour period all the amino acids that we see go up and then down during that.
And you can compare that to beans or broccoli.
And so that is a piece of how you figure out the I like eating some 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.
I'm always wondered, 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, what is going on?
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 ribeye, what is a ribeye, like 20% fat by weight?
So if you're looking for like what has more protein, like a boneless skinless chicken breast is going to have more protein than a burger only because it has less fat.
Yeah, like you'll see everyone who has these clean eating books that are eliminating meat, but they'll still have bone-and-skinless chicken breast in there, of course.
It's 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.
So I always tell people, like, if you're in a grocery store and you don't have access to, you know, know your farmer, grass-fed beef, and you're just looking at pork, chicken, or beef, from a nutrient density, from an animal welfare, and from an environmental perspective, actually beef is going to be the better choice when you're looking at the industrial food system model.
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 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 regenerative ag gameplay.
We see some laudable features to pieces of the industrial system.
Some of the meat that we brought you is from a local outfit that mainly pasture feeds their meat, but when they were in a drought situation, and so they reached out to some of the local breweries and they got a bunch of residue from the brewing process, and that's what they supplemented their animals with.
And that's a whole other interesting thing is the bulk of the food that is given to cattle comes out of the ethanol industry.
We're not stealing food from humans to do that.
With chickens and pork, You kind of are allocating food that could have otherwise gone to humans.
But even conventional beef spends 70% of its life on grass.
And then that finishing process, oftentimes part of the finishing process, they put it in a wheat field where the wheat's been harvested and then it eats the crop residues and it's eating the mash from grass.
You know, industrial 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 isn't this beautific view that we would like all these, you know, grass-fed animals.
Pasture-raised, you know, stories to fit into.
And it's definitely not the horrors of, like, industrial chicken production, which is super gnarly.
But there's a lot of leftovers from their processing.
So they were feeding pigs with it, which is an awesome use of that.
Right.
But the vegans found out and put the kibosh on it, and now they're trying to form oat bars for humans.
Right.
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.
So that's the grain that's left over, the mash that's left over from the breweries, and that's this oat stuff.
And so the vegans got upset and they were upset because they were bringing it to people that were giving this stuff to pigs that were going to be led to slaughter.
But when you're dealing with industrial levels of that, like in Brazil, there's a problem with the banana peels because the banana peels are actually – Pretty toxic.
And it's hard to figure out how to deal with those things.
And he's just slicing into beef and he's eating this like four pound ribeye and while he's cutting into beef on the other side of the screen, you see someone making like tofu ribs.
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 it has these, I don't know if it's saponins, and I think it's saponins, 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.
And I love meat, but the only time in my life, like I've eaten kind of a ketogenic diet for 23 years, But there's 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.
And I wanted pizza and ice cream and shit that I never wanted before.
I went kind of crazy, whereas loosening it up and having a little bit of fruit, a little bit of honey here and there, particularly before, pre or post-workout or something, I'm fine with that.
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 – it's made antibodies against proteins in our body.
by mistakenly making them against the gluten, gliadin proteins.
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 overeaters and it's just sort of how it plays out.
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 meeting 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.
So 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 when it comes to, obviously not celiacs, which is an extreme version, but when people do have issues with autoimmune issues that are food-related, What is causing this stuff?
Like we have now, you know, antibiotics were developed in the 1930s, like the sulfa-based antibiotics, and it was 1950s-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?
Some people who have the celiac gene don't express celiac disease because they have gut microbes that trim up the proleal endopeptidase bacteria that break up the gluten proteins.
It will protect you from cross-contamination a little bit, but you get so sick with celiac, it's something that I would be careful playing around with that.
So you've got antibiotics.
You have alterations in just our environment.
I think that there's gut issues, mitochondrial issues, and then changes in our food supplies 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 autoimmune disease.
It's 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.
Clearly a piece to a loss of gut barrier function.
That's pretty well understood.
Alessio Fasano, 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 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 much doesn't mount the same immune response, And so you can kind of dial that inflammatory process down.
So 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?
So there's a lot of historical food systems that help deal with this stuff.
But 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 have really outstanding health, you You know, traditional Mesoamerican food, even though it was very corn-rich, they figured out that you needed to do some things to prevent pellagra, which is this B vitamin deficiency ultimately, which was the inclusion of lime.
When you make corn tortillas traditionally, you ferment it with lime and that breaks down some of the anti-nutrients with the corn and makes it more digestible.
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.
And it's 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, oh, they'll cite the China study.
It's one fucking study and no matter how much you say, hey, you need to read the rebuttals of the China study because they're pretty brutal and 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 some friends of mine, right, because these guys didn't provide any evidence at all 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 down to zero.
And according to these researchers, which is going to be global food policy, you can now eat zero red meat safely with no – so they said they did their own systematic review but they didn't show any of the evidence, any of the papers they reviewed.
And there aren't – there's no research that's strong that's showing meat is – there's only one randomized control trial.
But the thing is, he keeps saying that we've got to eat less meat, and we've got to 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?
Why are you saying that?
And by the way, you look like shit.
Because if you're eating those plant-based burgers or whatever the fuck you're doing, you're obese.
A guy like that telling people about...
he's got these breasts and this gut, and I'm like, You're one of the richest guys on earth.
You have access to the best nutrients.
You could have an amazing trainer.
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 literally like a non-athlete trying to coach professionals.
Like, what the fuck 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 and you have these toothpick arms, I'm like, hey buddy, you're not healthy.
But on the one side, there's this 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 slick story.
It's an elevator pitch.
It's elegant.
It's like buttoned up, airtight.
And then when we start trying to unpack that, it's 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 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.
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 this?
Dung beetles, insects, birds, you know, all this 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 ag 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 remarkable profusion because it starts fixing – if you fix all of the ecosystem issues, then these literal canary in the coal mines end up getting addressed and we see more bird species come back.
I just want to throw that one out there because there's pieces of this system that cannot go on.
So we use a huge – Yeah, so we use a huge amount of antibiotics in chicken and pork production because of the proximity that they, like 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 farms.
It wasn't a main feature.
I think it was Herbert Hoover that said something like a chicken in every pot is like a campaign deal.
This was the beginning of the industrialized food system.
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 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 we lose the ability to use antibiotics because of creating antibiotic-resistant bacteria, we're all screwed.
And so Merck is starting to educate folks that produce beef 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 and the film, we don't lay out specifically.
We're not trying to be futurists 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 ultimate thing that I think we take away from it.
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 5,000 years from now and have this topsoil better than what it is today.
So there's tradeoffs.
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 by the inputs of grains and whatnot.
And then in the 70s is when it really ramped up with chicken production.
And that's when people started getting super affordable chicken because 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 make them gain weight.
So a lot of the concerns that folks have, like damage to waterways from effluent, from like 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 effluent, their byproducts, the feces, the urine, reintegrate that into the soil historically.
Historically, that's what 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'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 ability to produce lots and lots of food right now.
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?
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, you know, these other things?
And in a developed world, you could go to your corner store and get vitamins and do all that.
This whole story has been so 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 the developed world have pushed back because they're like, we can't be dependent on this.
We have these traditional food systems, and if you make us dependent on the exports of your industrial row crop food system, 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 their zinc and their iron and everything.
And 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 diet.
That is typically the main deficiencies in there largely arise from a lack of animal foods.
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.
But you – I suppose if you were to use it on like salad dressing and not cook it, it might be OK.
But it's still not – I mean there's nothing redeemable about grapeseed oil like – And I'd have to look up the omega ratio, but you're much better with avocado oil or just good olive oil.
They tend to be high in monounsaturated fat and then relatively low in the omega-6 fats.
Like, none of these things have much in the short-chain omega-3 fats.
Some people get kind of wrapped around the axle, though.
Like, high oleic safflower oil is typically lower in omega-6s than 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 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 is just generally safer for most things.
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.
Yeah, but it's amazing like the process that's involved in that like all the kneading and twisting like when he ties it into knots He's putting all this stuff in there And in the film Sacred Cow, when I have Rob and Joel Salatin 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 call it, biological goo?
So now when I go to their websites, I don't see a lot of health claims.
And I do know someone who's working on really taking those products and comparing them to meat and breaking it out for vitamins and minerals because it's just not going to win.
So their main claims are now carbon.
Less carbon.
Right.
And completely ignoring all the other ecosystem function pieces, that monocropping.
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 the 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 seeing there's a beautiful sort of chart, infographic chart, that shows how the carbon from the atmosphere gets converted, and the methane, it's converted, and so a lot of people think it's cow farts.
It's actually cow burps that are the big producer of methane.
Right?
And then it shows the cow's carbon cycle, meat and milk, and how the poop.
And this is like, to explain this without saying everything on the chart, and even if I said it on the chart, it would work.
So 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 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 US, 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.
And the crazy thing is, even if we did, it's still part of a cycle.
To get to the point where the cow is emitting methane, you had to pull carbon dioxide out of the air, into the plant, get sequestered in the plant until the animal eats it.
But the cyclical part really—and you had Stephen Kuhnan on recently— I think he talked a little bit about the differences between the cyclical pieces of this story versus just mining ancient carbon and releasing it.
But the accounting really needs to be different because the danger that we get into – we discovered recently that shellfish produce huge amounts of methane, termites, rice paddies.
There's all these biogenic methane sources that then people start freaking out.
And there was actually 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.
I mean, we go into it a little bit, how meat became a scapegoat.
And meat is a very powerful—it's the most powerful food we eat.
It's masculine.
It's strength.
It's bloody.
Like, it represents a lot of things.
You know, we used to have sacrificial animals.
And— Meat is also seen as barbaric and impure and unnecessary and too masculine.
And so there's this 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 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.
I think if someone is young and healthy already, probably was raised breastfed well and raised on enough good nutrition, there does appear to be some people that do okay on a vegan diet for a period of time.
Because of that, it's an uncomfortable discussion because so many people are so ideologically connected to this idea that a vegan diet is better, more karma-free, healthier.
You know, 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, 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 push this thing forward, it's really hard.
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 a B12 analog and not true B12.
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 control trial.
Everything else is like, oh, this population ate meat and this one didn't, and these guys got more cancer.
It must be the meat.
You can't make policy on those observational studies.
So this randomized control trial was 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 meat away from children is going to result in healthier kids.
So like for there's certain toxins that you can do competitive inhibition 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 could 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 whatnot because they're left hand shaped.
If you were to put them together In 3D 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 – I'm 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 actually causes some pain reduction.
But normally, the D or the R form of those types of nutrients don't really work in our physiology.
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.
Well, if you buy corn, you're definitely responsible for some death.
There's just no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
If you have a monocrop field of corn, the only way they're going to keep those animals from eating the corn and to keep, you know, when they plow over the corn and they extract it, things are dying.
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 for that death.
You might not be looking where you're pointing the trigger, but I think that this idea of a zero-sum game, 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 changing their chemicals, where it changes their flavor profile, emitting these defense chemicals, because they don't want to get eaten.
And there's some sort of an intelligence that plants not just have, But they have with this symbiotic relationship to fungus under the ground.
And this mushroom, the mycelium, and the root structures of these plants are sharing resources and they communicate.
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 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, 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 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 honeypot where the buffalo come over and eat the grass and they shit and then 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.
And the amount of cropland 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.
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, folate, biotin, panthotic acid, and iron.
One study found that the iron content of crickets was 180% higher than that of beef.
And, you know, 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 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 their 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 environment.
Fashion and then be much more efficient with it.
We could cut like 50% of our food is wasted right now.
So what if 10% of that got allocated into cricket and mealworm and different things and we use those to produce a possibly vegan acceptable protein source or it gets used to feed the chicken so that they – 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 acceptable.
On admission to the hospital, a patient had a rapidly evolving, diffuse reticular, purpurish rash on the face, not shown, chest and abdomen, arms and legs.
So, his whole body was covered in these horrible purple lesions.
So let's go to the top of it, so we figured out what happened.
Okay, it says, the patient had been well until 20 hours before the submission.
This is crazy.
When diffuse abdominal pain and nausea developed after you ate rice, chicken, and lo mein leftovers from a restaurant meal.
Multiple episodes of emesis?
I'm throwing up.
Emesis occurred with vomitus that was either a bili What are they trying to do to me here?
Biliose or red-brown.
The abdominal pain and vomiting were followed by the development of chills, generalized weakness, progressively worsening diffuse myelgias, 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 of the emergency department of the hospital, 4.5 hours before this admission, the patient reported a diffuse myoma on a scale of 8 to 10, 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.
During 30 minutes, tachyphena worsened and labored breathing, hypoxema psionis.
There's a lot of fucking medical terminology here.
Supplemental oxygen was administered, so he was just like fading fast.
Resulting in oxygen saturation of 83%.
Oxygen was administered through a high flow nasal cannula at the rate of 40 liters per minute.
Wow.
So this is a medical thing.
This is a medical journal that's talking about this.
So, do you think that there is a future where people can have this sort of, 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 for it, 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 of the country, you can't grow year-round.
And I think if we're talking about least harm, and one of the things, like Rob was starting to say, 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.
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?
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 the nutrition that they could be getting and the performance that they could be getting?
The strongman guy's a tough case because that guy's chock full of steroids.
There's just no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
I mean that's a steroided up business.
Unless they're testing people on a regular basis, and 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.
And then if they give up plants or meat for six months, it may not have the same impact as somebody who has already damaged guts or an autoimmune disease or is an older person or is a developing kid who needs, you know, to grow.
What's a cool insight with HRV is that if you're sleeping well and 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 what have you, that is So this is where,
like, optimizing sleep and nutrition and gut health and all these things really 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.
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, you know, a bunch of potatoes, then you process them, extract the protein out so it can be put into that.
This is where, you know, like what they call a life cycle analysis.
And they did do that between like White Oak Pastures and the Impossible Burger.
And White Oak Pastures ended up having a lower carbon footprint and And again, that's not the whole story, but there's other pieces to it.
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 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 mined minerals that they need for all the vitamins and minerals.
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, so I consulted some of the top experts in this area when I wrote the book.
And we went through the numbers.
And 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 look at regenerative agriculture as actually being way more efficient than Typical grazing.
And I put that at 30% 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.
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.
This is one of the things that gets us in a lot of trouble.
Like 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 turned over every study that you could find in this thing.
And 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.
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, weighty, 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 compare and contrast of conventional meat and grass-fed meat.
We want to know their 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.
The 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 I don't think it's as compelling a thing as what most people would think.
But just nutritionally, like vitamins, minerals, proteins, essential fats, essential amino acids, There's just not that big of a difference.
So if 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, 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?
And this is that carbon tunnel vision where they're missing all the other externalities that could be beneficial around the pasture 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 process then – and I think they're looking just at the emissions that are coming from the animals in that case.
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 lifecycle 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 then part of an animal and on and on.
Now, when you're talking about the amount of cows that you would need to feed the entire country, what kind of a quantity of meat are we talking about per capita or 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.
You know, we're going to 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, you know, do you want healthy humans or do you want human feed to just have the largest number of humans possible?
But if you want people specifically to live on this diet like I'm living on, like if this is something that people adopt, now you're talking about many times more.
Like, I don't know where that carrying capacity pops in, and I don't know.
It's interesting, you know, how much of that could be supplemented with seafood.
How much of that gets, like, if we start integrating, like, the pork and the chicken and making that all biodynamic and not as impactful, how much of that could be offloaded into, like, insect proteins.
And there's a flip side to this is that 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 US is bankrupt from diabetes related costs.
Like, we have more costs dealing with diabetes than what we have GDP. And I don't know what COVID has done to that whole projection and whatnot.
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 one thing that there's at least a little bit of synergy out in the world, people like Lane Norton and whatnot kind of sign off on this.
If people under-eat protein, they tend to over-eat calories beyond that.
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 undereat protein, then you tend to overeat all the other things.
And this is probably the big driver of this illness.
What do we do about addressing the health and healthcare issue in all this?
In some ways, we can't afford not to address this in some effective way because we have to figure out a global public health food policy that's going to allow people to spontaneously reduce calorie intake or We end up with this kind of global control of the food system and you go to buy meat and it's like a social credit score thing.
It's like, sorry, comrade, you've already got your protein allowance for the month.
See, that is something that, you know, 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.
He looks amazing, and it's just like he's completely slim and lean, and he just eats nothing but steak.
Like, there's something about eating meat where you get satisfied easier.
When I'm eating meat by itself, I'll eat a steak and I'm fully satisfied.
But if you give me a steak and pasta, I will eat that steak and then I'll eat the shit out of that pasta.
And I'm somehow or another still hungry.
I keep digging in there.
Where if it was steak, it was another steak there, I'd stop.
Yeah, that buffet effect is interesting where if we get more food options, we will tend to eat more things.
When I was on the show last time, we looked at the Adam Rickman, Man vs.
Food, and he did this Kitchen Sink Sunday Challenge.
I think we watched this thing, but he had to eat an 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 starts gagging, and he's not going to make it.
And he asked 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 seems like they're playing funny games with the numbers.
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 the environment.
I mean, I see that everywhere.
And then people say it on Twitter.
They say it.
It's just this cold statement.
They just say, meat is bad for the environment.
What kind of meat?
What are you saying?
In what way?
Are you saying like those pig farms where they leave lakes of sewage?
Yup, 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 shit through the bottom of their cage because it's a grate and it goes into this big swampy sort of lake of sewage.
Yeah, that's terrible.
But if you're talking about what Joel Salatin does, No.
My thing is, though, you're not going to get everybody to listen.
On UFOs and Bigfoot and fucking the origins of currency.
Netflix has got some wacky shit.
So does iTunes.
Right.
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 fucking horse shit are you people selling?
And you won't sell this?
What I was going to say, though, is like you're not going to – there's certain people that are just headline readers.
And that is a headline reader statement that meat is bad for the environment.
And then what we're suggesting, and we don't even have like a solid endpoint other than mainly we make the recommendation that as to the greatest degree possible, decentralize the food production system.
Not necessarily, because you don't need to always do megascale.
And 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 put in hedgerows around the regular, you know, conventional farms that they had.
But the hedgerows allowed for these predatory birds and insects to have somewhere to hang out.
And then they would get in and eat the bugs that would, you know, cause problems with the, you know, like the wheat 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.
So we have to start putting what our values are.
Like markets are really good at optimizing things, but we're not telling – currently what we've asked it to optimize is make as much cheap food as possible.
I think it was 2006, 2007 became the first year somewhere around there that more humans started dying from overeating than under eating and infectious disease.
Like chronic disease outstripped infectious disease and lack of food as the main cause of death.
We produce huge amounts of calories, but now it's to the point that people are so sick that we're crippling our healthcare system and people are unhappy and 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 I'm saying is 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 going to be able to raise the same amount of pigs on that farm.
You're going to 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 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.
If you have 100 acres and you have 10,000 pigs in these fucking containment facilities, you're not going to recreate that on 100 acres with the Joel Salatin method, correct?
If you're going to do regenerative farming, you're going to need some land.
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 source the way that happens now.
It's a really good point, but the thing that kind of gets missed in this is that it's so expensive to run a lab.
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, 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.
pathogens off of it, so I've got to use antibiotics.
There's actually been a couple of good business pieces like Forbes and stuff like that looking at these things 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 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, I could see something like that working.
But as long as we have the sun and grasslands 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 produce it where they can because it's just cheaper.
The infrastructure of that versus a greenhouse scenario tends to be pretty economically viable.
So I think you run into those similar situations with the lab-grown meat and kind of butting up against the scale piece.
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 and 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?
Yeah, but they also have restaurants that they supply too.
But what the beauty of that and also Some of the stuff that Wendell Berry talks about, I don't know if you've ever heard of him, but there's a great documentary they did on him called Look and See, and he's an agrarian thought leader.
And he just talks about how 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.
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 percent 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.
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 predict that being a doctor and being a lawyer could be replaced by AI stuff in the not too distant future.
Yeah.
This process of regenerative farming is a really creative endeavor.
You're problem solving constantly.
People have a tendency to relegate these farmers as just kind of inbred idiots and they're not that smart.
Like there's 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 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 our food and different things like that.
Yeah, and I was just going to add too, 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 those things.
But for the majority of people, they want meat.
They want to be able to eat it.
And 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-sourced foods, it's not – it's a social justice issue.
Other than, I mean, we know about the studies that were done, that the sugar industry funded, that demonized saturated fat, which is really, when you know about those studies, I believe it was the 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 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.
Everybody got fatter.
It's really wild.
If you look at the difference between people that lived in the 1960s and 1970s versus people today, you've seen all those photos of people on the beach from the 1970s versus people today.
It's crazy the difference.
And some of that has to be attributable to diet.
So when we're saying science has been corrupted, What happened?
What's the motivation?
If they know this, I know this.
I'm not an expert.
How the fuck do I know this?
I would think that people who study food science know this too, and they would want to get that word out.
Like, hey, this is not real.
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 cellular development, right?
Because now it's not an industrial problem, it's a consumer's problem, right?
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 pasta meals and all that stuff and puts it on meat.
In the book, and I always forget what's in the book and what's in the film, but you dug into the history of, interestingly, Seventh-day Adventists, vegetarianism, they kind of founded the dietetics profession.
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 we did, we tried to, we really, even in the point, you know, like is pastured meat nutritionally superior to, 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 one vegan doctor goes through our work and he looks at it and 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, whether it hurt or not, we tried to be as honest with this stuff as we could.
And what we have noticed is that we kind of uniformly piss everybody off.
Almost nobody comes away reading that book and they feel...
just super happy and invigorated because it filled up the buckets of like their preconceived notions.
Like if you were really, really, really excited about regenerative ag, we sing the praises of that.
But also we're not – we're kind of – It's not totally black and white.
Yeah.
We make the case that there's all these other foods that could be nutrient upcycled that doesn't really fit into the grass-fed model.
So why don't we take advantage of that?
So it's been interesting.
The areas that we've had some pushback and the most aggressive pushback has actually been 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.
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?
And then the Vegan Fridays is Mayor Adams, Mayor Eric Adams.
I actually have a public letter on that.
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.
And 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.
We had lots of people in the pastured scene that were very gracious towards the book and thankful and everything.
But 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?
I'm probably one of the people that released that 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.
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 funding a lot of this grass-fed stuff.
And it's a very progressive platform that they're taking.
So to say that meat is healthy, period, it's all of a sudden I'm on the right and like not aligning with their politics.
And this should be a bipartisan – I am totally apolitical on all this stuff, but I'm immediately tagged as a troublemaker if I say that 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 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 1 or 2% of the people, I don't know what the numbers are, who 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.
Maybe I'm too rigid with this philosophy that I've adopted that plant-based is the only thing that's good for the heart.
Protects the environment 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.
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.
And then the weird thing, and it's probably just COVID, 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 7,000 copies, but Amazon only shipped 2,000.
There's a debate out there about whether or not we should be eating meat.
The 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.
The agricultural revolution has been transitioned into the processed food revolution.
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If you want to fatten up your animals, you put them in a pen where they can't run around and get physical activity, and you feed them lots of grain.
Humans are like that too.
What if the very animals we're 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?