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March 19, 2019 - Dr. Oz Podcast
29:50
The New Meat Theory

Just how much does meat affect your health? And what about your environment? In this interview, Dr. Oz sits down with Impossible Foods founder Dr. Pat Brown, and Dr. Neal Barnard, to understand the benefits of veganism, and whether or not eating fats is causing you to gain weight. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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You would start lowering atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Like, people think, oh, can we stabilize them?
Or can we make them go up a little bit more slowly?
No, you could actually lower them.
And over the course of a couple of decades, you could pull out of the atmosphere by just doing nothing except getting the livestock out of the picture.
You could lower atmospheric sea tube concentrations by the equivalent of about 15 years' worth of current emissions.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We'll see you next time.
Bye. you Welcome everybody.
I thought today we'd talk about the food plant revolution.
How you can actually make food that's good for humans and the environment.
And in order to do that, you need to get into the nitty gritty of actually what is it about food and science that's so confusing.
And I want to start off with a discussion with two people.
That are very influential in this space.
One of them, a physician who's got a very strong belief system around the benefits of being vegan, and arguments that he's making are ones that are embraced and quoted by many others in this space.
And the other gentleman actually came from a whole different place.
He was on the faculty at Stanford, wasn't all interested in food in the beginning, but he has built something It's a meat that's made of vegetables.
And I'm talking about a garden burger here.
I'm talking about literally something that's made with little vegetable proteins bound together that taste like meat.
You can't tell the difference.
So let's start off with Neil Barnard.
Now, Neil's been on the show a bunch of times.
He's a physician.
He's an adjunct associate professor of medicine at the George Washington University School of Medicine.
He's done tons of research bodies, does a lot of primary research looking at the effects of diet on diabetes, body weight, chronic pain.
He's done some groundbreaking studies on type 2 diabetes, which is what he's going to focus on today.
And, you know, Neil understands the space so well, and he's not afraid to mix it up.
So he was on a panel that I was hosting at the Vatican with Walter Willett, someone that many of you have heard of, and he'll be on the show in the future.
And the two of them got to mix it up a little bit about exactly how much of a problem fats are.
And in that argument, I really wasn't sure who won.
Neil basically says, you don't want any fats in your diet.
And Walter Willis said, we can't correlate fats with illness.
But what they both agreed on was there's a problem with meat and diabetes.
Something that I hadn't thought that much about, but I want you to hear it from Neil firsthand.
Neil, your presentation was spectacular today.
I've teamed up with four other luminaries who know a ton about food and were trying to explain what that meant, especially under the filter of the spiritual path that many in the audience are seeking.
We're at the Vatican, after all.
I would love for you to summarize your main arguments for why a vegan lifestyle makes a meaningful difference to your health.
Not just a little nudge in the right direction, but a dramatic shift, as powerful as many prescription medications.
Yeah, I really think it's true.
And it started with studies where you weren't actually changing anybody's diets.
You were just looking in observational studies, people following their own dietary pattern.
And the people who were following vegetarian diets were slimmer and healthier than people following meat-based diets.
And then the people who were following the vegan diet, I mean, no animal products at all.
They were skinniest of all.
And then when you looked at diabetes...
Dramatically lower rates.
There's a study called the Adventist Health Study, too.
They study Seventh-day Adventists because they're not smokers, they don't drink, but they differ in diet, so it gives you a great basis for comparison.
Among the meat-eaters, you see diabetes around 8% of that population.
Among the vegans, about 2.9%, something like that.
But that's just an observational study.
So my research team has brought people in that got type 2 diabetes, and we put the diet to the test.
And I have to say, it just works better than any other diet when it comes to getting the weight off.
Getting the blood sugar down, getting the cholesterol down, getting blood pressure down, it just really is very, very powerful.
So I can understand, most of the listeners can as well, that if you eat less fat, they get less fat.
That's been an argument that's been made for decades, if not longer.
But you stunned me anyway by the magnitude of impact on diabetes.
You just brought it up again.
What is the reason why eating less fat impacts on diabetes?
Most people, they get sugar.
It's a completely different way of viewing the disease.
And I've got to tell you, 20 years ago, I couldn't have said this because we didn't really have the technology.
But here's what's happened.
If you look inside the cells of the body, specifically the muscle cells, and why muscle cells?
Because that's where glucose is going.
Your muscles are fueled by glucose.
Every movement you make, that glucose is your gasoline powering your muscles.
If you've got type 2 diabetes, you've got the glucose in the blood.
It's trying to get into the muscles, but it can't get inside.
And the reason is what we call insulin resistance.
The insulin hormone that's like a key that's trying to open the door on that muscle cell to get the glucose inside.
The key is in the lock, but it just won't open.
That's insulin resistance.
Why not?
We've looked into the muscles of the body with a special technique called MR spectroscopy.
And we found the answer.
And the answer is microscopic fat particles.
I mean, you can't see these.
I mean, they're much smaller than an individual cell.
But as they build up...
Then the insulin attaches to the cell.
The fat stops it from being able to do any kind of signaling anymore.
It's like trying to walk on a grease-covered floor.
You slip and you fall.
So the insulin doesn't work anymore.
And so if we use a diet It has no animal fat in it.
It has no animal products at all.
There's no animal fat.
And if we keep oils low, that fat drains out of the cell, and suddenly the insulin can work again.
So all those patients who have been saying, I don't eat bread, or I don't eat sweet potatoes, or I don't eat beans, or I don't eat pasta, in our view, that wasn't really the issue.
The issue was the buildup of these microscopic fat particles inside the muscle cells stopping the insulin from working.
You get that fat out, the diabetes improves, and in some cases, It's just gone.
It goes away.
You might not know the answer to this.
I don't know if anybody does, but is it more important to lose weight to reduce the diabetes or reduce the fat dramatically enough to activate the mechanism you're speaking to?
Fantastic question, and I only know part of the answer.
In 2003, NIH funded us to do a head-to-head test of a vegan diet versus a conventional diet.
And we found that people's blood sugar control improved dramatically on the vegan diet.
And so we asked your question, is why?
How much of it was weight loss?
A lot of it was weight loss.
I'm going to say most of it was, probably.
But not all of it.
So even after you accounted for the weight loss, there was something else.
And I suspect that what it is, is you're just not taking fat into your body anymore.
I'm talking about even a very thin person, say.
That person doesn't have much weight to lose.
Maybe none.
But even they improve with this kind of diet.
Let's move past human beings to the world we live in.
Part of the reason the Vatican was interested in this panel is because we have a higher obligation to protect the place where we live.
Not just for ourselves, but for our families, for our children, other species.
And that ethical dilemma that's created when we don't take care of the planet is something that has become ever more apparent.
You and others in the panel felt strongly that the single biggest thing we could do to help our planet would be move away from animal sources of fat.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
I think now there is really no question that our planet is changing, the environment is being degraded, and that the biggest driver of that is the way we raise food.
Now let me raise my hand and give you a mea culpa because my family...
I come from the Midwest.
My dad was in the cattle business, and his dad and his dad and his dad, and I drove cattle myself to East St. Louis to slaughter.
Do you have any pictures of that, by the way?
I would have used this.
Not that I'm going to show you.
I've got to tell you.
But here's the thing.
Number one, cows are not ordering room service.
They've got to eat something.
And so to raise food, you're raising corn and you're raising soybeans, and it's acre after acre after.
When I go home to Fargo, you should see it.
Beautiful.
It's, as far as the eye can see, corn plants all identical.
All genetically modified.
And same with the soy.
And to make it grow, you also need pesticides, fertilizer, irrigation.
And so then the pesticides and fertilizer get into the streams, they get into the rivers.
That's degrading the environment too.
And then when you feed it to a chicken or a pig or something like that, all of that pollution is accounted for then by the meat product.
If you feed it to a cow...
You get something else.
A cow is a ruminant animal, unlike a chicken.
And so the cow swallows the corn and...
How do you say this delicately?
They bring it back up and they chew...
That's it.
They chew it again.
They bring it back up.
And all the while...
They are belching methane.
Methane is a simple carbon-containing molecule that is very potent as a greenhouse gas.
And cows are belching up methane all the time.
And that's true if it is a cow destined for meat or a cow on a dairy farm.
And if you put all the people on this planet on one side of the balance and all the cows on the other side, the cows outweigh us dramatically.
I mean, each one is as big as a sofa, and they are belching methane all day long.
And so people will say, well, we need to cap smokestacks.
You know, true.
Drive a smaller car, go hybrid.
Absolutely.
But if we're not changing our diet, then what are we doing?
We are destroying the rivers, the streams with all that pollution, and the greenhouse gases are continuing to go into the atmosphere.
Is it too late to change?
I don't know.
I hope not.
But time is up.
We do need to change.
Got a lot more questions to go, but first, let's take a quick break.
Well, the statistic that blew my mind was that we have more cows' biomass on the planet now than all the other terrestrial beings together the statistic that blew my mind was that we have more cows' Now, I don't know if I can even validate that, because who's ever added up all the biomass
but if there's any semblance of truth to that statement, it's shocking to everybody.
In fact, in the room of 300 luminaries who sort of know this stuff, one person One person in the very back, an African-American woman, put her hand halfway up.
That was about all in terms of endorsing.
But I'd love to hear from you if you think that's even possible.
I do think it's possible.
And the difference between the United States and some other areas In the United States, also in Europe, you don't see these farms anymore, really.
They're industrialized, where the animals are often in enclosures.
I recently visited a dairy farm in Indiana.
You're not going to see it from the highway.
They've got 32,000 cows inside there.
So I think it is true.
Let's heat up the debate between you, Walter Willett, and others about weight loss and dietary advice.
So assuming that we got the high-level stuff right, don't drink trans fats, don't do the things that most people agree are sabotage, simple carbohydrates, and the like.
How important is it to reduce fat intake in order to lose weight?
You argue It's vital, and your own data has reflected that.
Others like Walter Willard, a well-known Harvard researcher, argue that it doesn't seem to make as much of a difference.
I keep reading studies saying basically count nutrients, don't count calories.
So break it down for us.
Yeah, it's a huge debate right now, and we're going to see where it ends up.
But here's what my experience has shown and what our research studies have shown, is that if your goal Is to help a person to either lose weight or to reverse their diabetes.
That's where I'm zeroing in, not just on the bad fat.
That's the butter fat or the palm oil or something like that.
But I'm really zeroing in on all fats.
And even extra virgin olive oil.
And the reason...
Don't get me wrong.
It's a better fat.
It's not going to...
Harm your arteries the way butter will.
But all fats have nine calories packed in every single gram.
That's more than carbohydrate, more than protein.
It's the calorie-dense food.
So if a person is trying to lose weight and yet they're eating fatty foods, they're going to have trouble.
And I have good friends who will look at walnuts and almonds and olive oil.
And these are foods that you'd have to say are healthy.
You know, if there's a healthy fat, that's it.
But you can make a person's weight loss just grind to a halt by digging into those foods because they are so fatty.
And the other thing is, not only are they dense in calories, but if you eat bread, you eat a loaf of bread, and eventually that can turn into body fat, but it's hard for your body to turn bread into fat.
You have to break down the glucose molecules.
To turn fat into fat, Really easy for the body.
There's no metabolic cost to it.
If you eat a little bit too much olive oil, it's like in your thighs.
So very easy.
Walter argues that when he looks at the raw data from other studies, the amount of fat that people eat doesn't seem to correlate with weight loss, perhaps because it satiates you.
The best example I'll pick is dairy.
I'm unaware of data showing that skim milk helps you lose weight any more than whole fat milk.
Both of them might be an issue, and for you probably they are, but there's not an incremental benefit of torturing yourself with skim milk if you don't like the taste because you want to get that satiated flavor elsewhere.
Yeah, it's a great question.
I don't know if anyone's ever really put it to the test in a good way.
Milk is a really interesting one because if you take whole milk, the main nutrient in it is fat, bad fat, saturated fat.
You take all that out.
Now I've got skim milk or nonfat milk.
The main nutrient in nonfat milk?
It's sugar.
It's lactose sugar.
It's looking a whole lot like a soda at that point.
I don't mean to say that it's bad to take the fat out of the milk.
I think it is.
But they should take the sugar out, too.
And take the hormones out.
In fact, take it all out, and you'd be left with a glass of water.
Rewarding as always, Neil.
Appreciate it, my friend.
Thank you.
That's Neil Barnard.
And I'll tell you, at least he gets you to think differently about stuff.
He's very passionate, very opinionated.
This is an area of evolution.
It's very difficult to study how food affects humans because you can't put humans in randomized trials where you say, okay, this group of people only eats meat for 10 years and that group gets no meat for 10 years.
But when you look at some of the data that he has, even if it's not based in humans, you at least have to ask the question whether the meat that we're eating is potentially responsible for some of the diabetes that we're seeing, in addition to other potential health problems.
Now, with that in mind, a lot of you are sitting saying, oh God, Dr. Ross took my meat away now.
I'm not gonna eat broccoli and kale the rest of my life.
You know, I might live longer, or maybe it'll just seem like it.
And so, saying that brings up the possibility that we might be able to engineer meat That's different.
So I want you to meet Pat Brown.
Pat Brown started something called Impossible Meats.
This is literally meat that tastes like meat, looks like meat, has heme in it, which is iron, but it has no actual animal products in it.
Take a listen to Pat Brown.
I was fascinated in our discussion yesterday about the numbers you rattled off about the changes in biomass on the planet.
In particular, a statement that I've been thinking about since you mentioned it, which is we have 10 times more biomass of cows now than all other terrestrial beings put together.
All other wild vertebrates put together.
So if you can, share with the audience.
So giraffes, pandas, crocodiles, frogs, birds.
Ten times more cows.
And what was it?
Probably way more than ten times.
So there was a guy, an ecologist named Václav Smil, who is someone you'd probably enjoy talking to, who did a calculation about five years ago and came up with a similar estimate.
And I thought, okay, I'm not going to believe it until I do the math myself.
And so I spent – actually, I was anticipating this meeting and kind of because – I'm going off on a tangent, so I'm sorry – because Pope Francis has been quite explicit and even in his talk today – What
animals did I see?
Right?
Cows.
Cows and sheep.
The occasional prairie dog or, you know, squirrel or crow or something like that, but it's pretty much that.
So it's kind of consistent with everybody's experience, but yet I just thought I wanted to check it up.
So I did a ton of research.
I dug up a bunch of papers, and there's really no systematic research, but you can look at...
A couple of papers that look at, okay, what's the total density of vertebrates in the Serengeti or in Kenyan rangelands or in the Patagonian forest or, you know, the Canadian tundra or whatever.
And I looked at, you know, dozens of these papers and did a very conservative estimate, summing them all up.
And that's where I got my number.
And I'm actually thinking that because there's never been a paper that really put this all together in a scientific journal that I may write up a paper about it, even though it's not original research.
It's just a compilation of stuff.
You also pointed out massive changes that have happened as we have moved more and more towards eating cows.
And you actually showed slides comparing the inefficiency of different sources of animal meat.
This almost encyclopedic, in fact it was, if I knew better, I'd throw away Google because I've got you next to me now, was – it stunned the audience.
And I think it's a nice way of revisiting something we think we already know, which is making animals is expensive for society.
But it actually seems to dwarf a lot of the other things we would prefer to blame like coal-fired plants and exhaust from cars – It turns out the animals that we're eating and what we do in order to make that possible is changing the world in ways most of us never anticipated.
Oh, absolutely.
So, just categorically, the use of animals in food production technology is responsible for more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector.
That's something I think that is, at least in certain circles, pretty well known.
It's also by far the biggest user and polluter of fresh water.
It uses somewhere between a quarter and a third of all the fresh water on Earth.
And it occupies about half of Earth's land surface.
To me, that is...
Both the most kind of shocking, and yet true, shocking number.
You take all the land, everything that's not covered by ice or water on Earth, okay, and tally up what fraction is being used, actively being used, grazing livestock or raising feed crops for livestock.
It's half of all the land on Earth.
It's a land area devoted to raising animals for food, bigger than North America plus South America plus Australia plus Europe.
Devoted to that.
Growing all the time because the demand is growing.
And that's land that not only previously supported Biodiversity, wildlife, but also plant biodiversity.
When you replace the native creatures with cattle and sheep, it not only displaces all the other wildlife there because they're competing for a very limited photosynthetic productivity, it changes the plants that grow there because different animals...
You know, have different grazing patterns, different patterns of walking around and so forth.
So we're trying to homogenize.
I mean, no one's trying to do this, but effectively what we're doing is we're homogenizing the surface of Earth to basically be that simple ecosystem that supports, you know...
So, there's a calculation I did, but I can point to the original scientific research that basically shows that if you could, thought experiment, snap your fingers, make the land-based animal food production go away.
And now, just allow the vegetation that had existed on the land before it was put to that purpose to recover.
You would immediately start doing something that no one even contemplates.
You would start lowering atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Like, people think, oh, can we stabilize them?
Or can we make them go up a little bit more slowly?
No, you could actually lower them.
And over the course of a couple of decades, you could pull out of the atmosphere by just doing nothing, except getting the livestock out of the picture.
You could lower atmospheric CO2 concentrations by the equivalent of about 15 years' worth of current emissions.
That to me is magical.
And this is one of the things that most motivates me.
So the mission of my company is to completely replace animals in the food system by 2035. And we're dead serious both about that goal and the timeline because it's so urgent.
And if we can make this happen over the next couple of decades, I think, you know, it solves so many problems.
It gets rid of, well, it turns back the clock on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.
It relieves the biggest source of pressure on the freshwater supply, which is probably the biggest single trigger of conflicts and regional warfare and so forth.
And the other biggest source is conflict over land.
So here's another interesting statistic which I can give you the data for.
If you take all the cities on Earth...
Or another way of looking at it, if you take every structure, building, highway, road, beautiful wall on Earth, and you put them all together, they occupy a land area of about half a percent of Earth's surface.
It's one one-hundredth of the area occupied by land-based animal farming.
So...
People think of like, oh man, we're going to mess up with ecosystems because the cities are expanding into farmland and so forth.
That is completely wrong.
It's the farmland that's the problem.
The cities add up to virtually nothing.
And for all practical purposes, the land footprint of humanity is animal farming.
Full stop.
Does last more to come after the break?
You're a professor at Stanford.
What was your specialty?
Well, I was trained as a pediatrician, but then I did post-doc in molecular biology, virology, studying how the AIDS virus replicates.
And that's what I started doing at Stanford.
But then, relatively early on, when I saw that the genome was on the horizon, I started developing tools for...
Basically, being able to look at the expression and the behavior of all the genes in the genome at once, called DNA microarray.
And then I started applying that to both fundamental biological problems related to how the cells program themselves and so forth.
The diversity of cells in your body and so forth, and also cancer diagnostics.
And a bunch of other things.
I mean, actually, someone in my lab did the first study that comprehensively described how a newborn baby acquires its microbiome.
And the great thing was, because I was at Stanford and I was supported by Howard Hughes, I could literally do anything I wanted.
It was the best job in the world.
You may think you have a pretty good job and you probably have a pretty good gig, but I could basically just get a new idea and start working on it and have the resources to do it and great colleagues and students and so forth.
So that's what I gave up to take on this mission of Impossible Foods.
And I have no qualms about it, but boy, I have it good in my Stanford career.
I look forward to the name of the company being changed to Not Impossible Foods.
Pat Brown, thank you very much.
Sure.
Thank you.
So that's Pat Brown.
This guy, by the way, got his MD and PhD in biochemistry at the University of Chicago, was at Stanford developing DNA microarrays.
Forget about all this stuff.
You'd never have to know it.
But this is a true basic scientist guy.
The new technologies that he's making allow us to look at how genes in a genome work.
I mean, what the heck is he doing making meat?
Well, he looked around and realized that there was a way to make delicious, affordable meat and dairy products directly from plants.
And he thought, if I could do that, it's better for the consumers, but it's especially better for the environment.
And then he began to quote a bunch of facts that you all, I hope, heard.
That we have 10 times more cow biomass than all other wild terrestrial beings ever.
Think about that.
That's why when you drive along on a road, you see mostly cows.
You don't see giraffes, obviously, but you don't even see horses that often.
Were you aware of that, Lisa?
No, not to that degree.
What caught your attention?
Because you were in that panel, and you heard how passionate he was about the environment, and then more so than human health.
Well, yeah, it's hard to deny the repercussions of eating an animal product-based diet.
So what caught your attention on what Pat Brown was saying?
Well, certainly the impact on the environment of eating meat and the fact that we're going to be, we're already over 7 billion people, I think, and just eating meat is not sustainable, especially as the rest of the world models their diets on ours.
Well, I tell you, what caught my attention is you've got a guy, Pat Brown, who's a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine.
He's gotten the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor.
This is huge.
He's also brilliant.
Yeah, but he's a member of our most respected organizations, and he's out there saying it can't go on.
We don't actually have the ability to make enough meat for all the people on the planet.
Literally, you couldn't do it.
And it, you know, leaves the lots of things that no one wants to talk about, you know, pollution and energy consumption.
I get all that.
But here's the part that works me up.
You and I, and all the people listening right now, we're actually paying a lot of money to make sure that meat is cheap.
That's right.
If you don't know it, wake up.
Meat is probably a third the price, maybe half the price of it would be if it wasn't for subsidies.
And it's not bad people doing bad things, but every part of the chain, from the people who are making the soy or whatever the cows you're eating...
And then you have the energy to transport the product that costs money and then, you know, the retail areas.
Everything costs money and it's all subsidized so it's made more affordable.
And I'm saying, hey, listen, why don't we just either subsidize the vegetables as much so the broccoli is one-third the price and so are the tomatoes or subsidize none of it, which is where I land.
Just let business run.
I think we're all Americans.
We believe in competition.
I'm an entrepreneurial person.
As long as it's equal playing field, let everyone just earn their money.
I don't want to hurt anybody's business.
Just don't subsidize people to do stuff because you perversely influence the process.
So take away the subsidies from the things that we don't really believe are good for us, or at least give equal amounts, if not more, to the foods we think are good for us.
But you listen to Pat Brown and Neil Barnard and Walter Willard and all these famous, iconic figures participating in this Vatican panel on the food plant revolution.
I began to appreciate and respect much more why the Pope had pulled together these folks.
Because what he's basically saying is there are opportunities to do things that are good for humans and for the environment and the planet, which we are the custodians of.
And the temple of the soul, our body, has to be protected.
And so for us to ignore the opportunities to improve everything around us by making wiser food decisions is not the right thing for us to do.
It doesn't fulfill our spiritual journey.
So think about that, guys.
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