Chris and Joe discuss the new film, "The Game Changers" and why it's one of the best vegan documentaries of all time. They also discuss the Roman gladiators and their relationship to the plant-based diet and why they don't really need to be vegan at all. Chris and Joe also discuss whether or not they think James Wilkes is a bad guy and why he should have been able to do what he did in the film, and why we should all be eating meat again. If you like the show and want to support it, please consider becoming a patron patron. Don't forget to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! Thanks to our sponsor, KresserCo.co.nz. Our theme song is Come Alone by The Weakerthans courtesy of Lotuspool Records, and our ad music is by Build Buildings Records, courtesy of Epitaph Records. We are part of the Robots Radio Podcast Network. See all the great network shows at RobotsRadio.net. Episode Music: "Space Travel" by Borrtex "Goodbye Outer Space" by Cairo Braga "Outer Space Warning" by Fountains of Sisyphus "Good Morning America" by Suneaters "Good Omens" by The Good Fight" by Lizzie Borden "Outlaw" by Puff & Steph "The Good Omens "Outro music: "Solo" by Jeffree Star (feat. by Fade by Fizz & The Goodfellows and "Outtropeek" by Ian McKinnon "The Real Thing" by John Rocha Join us on SoundCloud in our FB page Subscribe to our new podcast! and on Podulco Learn more about our sponsorships and become a supporter of our work and support us on our merchandize and social media platforms! Subscribe and review us on iTunes Send us your thoughts on the show! . We'll be looking out for the next episode of Outtro music and other merchandises! Thank you for all the merchandizes we can be reached at by clicking here! by , & , "The Kressersco Co and other links to our social media can you help us spread the word about our work? linktr.co and more!
00:01:16.000Especially for someone who doesn't have the background, you know, or science awareness to critique some of the claims, it's going to be really persuasive and compelling.
00:01:27.000And I've definitely, you know, whenever a film like this comes out, my email inbox just blows up.
00:01:52.000Do you think that they're making these films because they believe what they're saying...
00:01:57.000Or do you think they're making these films because they are trying to convert people to being vegan and they think that distorting reality and just bending things and cherry picking data is acceptable because the long run,
00:02:16.000the benefits of getting the world to shift over to a vegan diet, it's worth not being completely objective or honest about the actual facts.
00:02:26.000I think people like, I mean, James, for example, I think he's genuinely trying to help people.
00:02:31.000I think he's looked at the data and he just came to a different conclusion than somebody like me has.
00:02:37.000And, you know, I mean, this is, there's something called confirmation bias.
00:02:43.000I'm sure many of your guests have talked about, but it's a basic human tendency where we tend to only look at the data that support our point of view and discount the rest of it.
00:02:54.000And it's, you know, even really, really good scientists have a hard time overcoming that.
00:02:59.000Everybody is guilty of it to some degree, including me.
00:03:03.000But I think, yeah, so I think generally the people who are making these films really believe in it.
00:03:10.000They believe in the power of a vegan diet, you know, from a nutrition perspective, and they also believe that it's going to help save the world.
00:03:20.000The beginning of it I thought was so strange when James talked about being injured and doing all the research he did, which seems like an extraordinary amount of, what do you say, like a thousand hours of research?
00:03:31.000And that the thing that stood out was that the Roman gladiators, at least in this one particular location, According to the analysis of their bones, it appears that they had a vegetarian diet, that they ate a lot of grain.
00:03:56.000They're slaves that are forced to fight to the death.
00:03:58.000They had a life expectancy of about two years once they became a gladiator.
00:04:04.000It's interesting they featured Fabian Kanz, who is a scientist, you remember, who they talked to and definitely seemed to kind of buy into the plant-based diet idea or the idea that they were vegetarian, you know, by design or by choice.
00:04:19.000They didn't talk to his collaborator, Carl Grossman, who's been quoted in the media saying, here's a quote, And by the way, all of the references, full bibliography, show notes, everything are at kresser.co slash gamechangers because I want this to be totally evidence-based.
00:04:35.000People can check what I'm saying right there.
00:04:39.000So he said, the vegetarian diet had nothing to do with poverty or animal rights.
00:06:01.000If the purpose of this film was to say, it's possible to thrive on a plant-based diet, and look, here are some athletes that have done that, I wouldn't have had any qualms with it.
00:06:11.000Clearly there are examples of people who thrive on a plant-based diet.
00:06:16.000If all the diet correctly can be done.
00:06:33.000But where I take issue with it is it went a step further and said this is the optimal plan.
00:06:38.000Diet for athletes and everybody else, which, you know, even though it was a film ostensibly about athletes, it definitely crossed the line into this is the approach that everybody should do.
00:06:49.000Yeah, I mean, they made these claims like all of a sudden people got stronger and faster and more endurance.
00:06:54.000Like there's no evidence to support that.
00:06:56.000There's no evidence other than their anecdotal statements of what they did.
00:07:00.000There's no one has ever put anyone on a vegan diet and then run them through extreme endurance tests and found the significant increase in VO2 max or muscle strength or any of those things.
00:07:13.000So, if it's true, anecdotally, for these people, it would have been really interesting if there was some actual data to go with that, where they showed studies.
00:07:21.000I mean, we have James talking about his ability to do the battle ropes, that all of a sudden he could do an hour, and before he could only do 10 minutes.
00:07:29.000Well, I find that really hard to believe, that you gained 50 minutes of your battle rope time just from ropes, and that was the only thing in the film that I found hard to believe.
00:07:55.000I mean, we can go through it and talk.
00:07:58.000I mean, there's that problem, which is there's no peer-reviewed evidence to back that up.
00:08:02.000But even the anecdotal evidence is a little shaky when we start to talk about some of the athletes in the film and then also examples of athletes outside of the film who switched to a vegan diet and we look and see what happened to them after they did that.
00:08:16.000The problem here is something that I call the vegan honeymoon, which is, you know, you take someone who's been on a standard American diet, they're eating KFC, McDonald's, etc., and they switch from that to a plant-based diet.
00:08:29.000Well, of course they're going to feel better.
00:08:31.000They've gone from eating absolute crap to real foods.
00:08:35.000And so for a period of time, they're going to feel better for sure.
00:08:39.000But then what happens over a longer period of time?
00:08:43.000You know, not getting enough protein just in terms of quantity and not getting the right quality of protein, that starts to have an impact.
00:08:52.000Micronutrient deficiencies, you know, vitamin A, zinc, calcium, iron, things like that take a while to develop.
00:08:58.000So you're not going to see that deficiency.
00:09:00.000Decline in performance happen right away.
00:09:02.000It might take three months, it might take six months, it might take nine months.
00:10:40.000I made some graphics here because it's sometimes easier to understand when you're looking at a picture.
00:10:46.000For the peanut butter sandwich thing, it was like there's the same amount of protein in a peanut butter sandwich as there is in three ounces of beef.
00:13:22.000For peanut butter, it's 0.45, and for wheat, it's 0.2.
00:13:27.000Those are among the lowest proteins that have been measured on the scale.
00:13:32.000So even if the quantity was the same, the effect on your body, particularly on things like muscle protein synthesis, which is of concern for athletes, is not even in the same ballpark.
00:13:43.000And when they're talking about the USRDA, they're talking about like how much...
00:13:49.000The United States' recommended daily allowances.
00:15:31.000You know, we saw it with the Joel Kahn discussion, and you see it almost every time someone who's actually informed has a conversation with one of these influencers.
00:15:42.000Like, they're not being 100% accurate, objective, or even honest in a lot of cases.
00:15:49.000Yeah, I mean, there's a great Leon Festinger quote, I don't know if you've heard it.
00:15:53.000A man with a conviction is a hard man to change.
00:15:56.000Tell him you disagree and he turns away.
00:15:58.000Show him the facts and figures and he questions your sources.
00:16:01.000Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.
00:16:04.000The best argument, in my opinion, is this factory farming is disgusting, and that the cruelty of treating animals like a commodity and serving them up for slaughter in these horrific conditions, these factory farming conditions, and these horrible pens that we've all seen.
00:17:28.000So first of all, you know, the idea that plant-based agriculture doesn't kill animals is just false.
00:17:35.000I mean, there have been studies that show that particularly monocropping type of plant agriculture kills animals.
00:17:40.000Far more animals than are killed from eating cows, for example.
00:17:45.000Insects, rodents, mice, birds, fish, all killed in the process of industrial agriculture.
00:17:55.000And so that presents an ethical dilemma, really.
00:17:59.000If you are saying, I'm a vegan because I don't want my food choices to involve killing animals, is killing a whole bunch of small animals Is non-mammal animals better than killing mammals?
00:18:13.000Or what about killing more small animals than one cow?
00:18:36.000So if you want to have a meal out of wheat, most likely more animals are going to die.
00:18:42.000It's like if you have a hundred wheat meals with wheat in them, you're probably killing more animals than if you have a hundred meals with cows in them, because that's like a cow.
00:18:55.000Yeah, I don't know the answer to that question.
00:18:58.000I'm comparing kind of the whole process, you know, like eating animals versus eating plants.
00:19:03.000And I don't know if that per meal comparison has ever been done, but I'm just saying that that's an interesting ethical question.
00:19:13.000Let me give you their argument for that.
00:19:15.000They say that most of these monocrops are to feed animals.
00:19:22.000I mean, where I agree with this film is that conventional livestock practices are harmful to the planet.
00:19:30.000Right, but what they're saying is that you're saying that eating a vegan diet and all these monocrops, that these monocrops are killing all these small animals.
00:19:37.000They're saying, no, these monocrops, most of them actually exist to feed livestock.
00:19:59.000These are industrial GMO monocrops on a massive scale.
00:20:05.000There was a great study published in the journal PNAS in 2017, and it was specifically addressing this claim of would removing animal products from our diet have, you know, saved the world?
00:20:20.000Basically, would it reduce greenhouse gases?
00:20:25.000Basically, they found that it would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2.6%, but our intake of carbohydrates, total calories, would go way up, and the incidence of nutrient deficiencies would go way up.
00:20:39.000And they did the math and found that without animal products, domestic supplies of calcium, EPA, and DHA, which are the long-chain omega-3 fats, retinol, and B12 were, quote, Insufficient to meet the requirements of the U.S. population.
00:20:54.000So translation, everybody would have to be supplementing with those nutrients if everyone went on a vegan diet.
00:21:01.000And they went on to say that basically there's already a surplus of calories in the diet of 145%.
00:21:10.000If we removed animal products entirely, that would go up to 230%.
00:21:16.000So, because the volume of calories in food that would be required to meet basic nutrient and protein needs would be that much higher.
00:21:25.000So, you know, there's a lot of downstream consequences that I don't think have been fully thought through, even if a plant-based diet might work for one person.
00:21:37.000If you take that to the full level of everyone eating a plant-based diet, which is the argument that is being made, does it really work from a nutritional perspective, from an environmental perspective, and even from an ethical perspective?
00:21:52.000The environmental perspective is legitimate.
00:21:55.000They both cause environmental damage, both animal agriculture and plant agriculture.
00:22:01.000Industrial practices cause environmental damage.
00:22:05.000And if you want to feed 320 million people, you're not going to do it through organic farms.
00:22:10.000You can grow food in your neighborhood.
00:22:13.000If you live in a small town, you guys can have a co-op.
00:22:16.000You can have food in your backyard that you can grow.
00:22:18.000But if you're living in a city like Los Angeles, it's highly likely your food is not coming from that city itself.
00:24:32.000So the specific number in the film, they say greenhouse gas emissions from cattle are 15%, and they compared that to 14% for all of transportation.
00:24:44.000But the problem with that is that they're using the full life cycle analysis for livestock.
00:24:51.000So that means the carbon needed for feed, for transport, for processing the cattle, not just emissions, not just methane burps from the cattle.
00:25:02.000Whereas for transportation, they're only looking at what are called direct tailpipe emissions, just the emissions that come out of the tailpipe.
00:25:08.000They're not looking at the carbon needed to manufacture the vehicle, the cars, the buses, the airplanes, the inputs for making the fuel, the fuel production and distribution, the final use of the fuel.
00:25:21.000That life cycle analysis for transportation hasn't been done just because it's enormously complex and it would be a phenomenally big number.
00:25:28.000The EPA has estimated that something around 80% of the greenhouse gas emissions comes from industry, basically fossil fuel.
00:25:37.000So it's not an apples to apples comparison.
00:25:40.000They're doing the full life cycle for livestock versus just the direct emissions for transportation.
00:25:45.000Well, if we look at just the direct for both...
00:25:48.000It's 5% for livestock globally and 14% for transportation.
00:25:52.000But in the U.S., it's only 3.9% for livestock because we have more efficient practices here versus 14% for transportation.
00:26:43.000And I think that when it's all said and done, I would just like people to be informed.
00:26:51.000And everyone is going to have their own ideological bias.
00:26:56.000Everyone's going to have their own preference.
00:26:58.000But to make poorly informed decisions, or that's being kind.
00:27:05.000To be more blunt, deceptive, Information, forming your decisions, and having health consequences because of that, to me, pisses me off and freaks me out.
00:27:17.000The health aspects are not being represented accurately.
00:27:23.000Yeah, it particularly bothers me when kids are involved.
00:27:27.000There was a case recently where I was going to tweet it, but I was like, God damn it, I can't even tweet it.
00:27:33.000It's so sad, where a child had died from malnutrition because the parents were feeding it a vegan diet, and all the other kids looked like they were starving to death, too.
00:27:40.000And then the social workers came in, and it's a goddamn nightmare.
00:27:45.000I mean, if you hear about that from people that are starving their kids on a regular diet, they're just either extremely poor or they're monsters, and they're treating their kid terribly.
00:27:56.000These people don't seem like they're bad people.
00:27:58.000No, they believe in what they're doing.
00:28:11.000Just one more thing on the greenhouse gas question.
00:28:14.000All the numbers I just gave you were from conventional methods, you know, like basically CAFO beef.
00:28:25.000When they have looked at regenerative, holistically managed livestock, they've found that it can either be carbon neutral or even a carbon sink.
00:28:33.000So there's a guy who's written some papers on this, Richard Teague.
00:28:36.000And in his 2018 paper, which again you can find on my website, thecressor.co slash gamechangers, he found that these larger, more complex, holistically managed sites can sequester between 3 to 4 and even up to 7 tons of carbon per hectare per year.
00:28:55.000So these holistically managed beef operations are actually removing carbon from the atmosphere.
00:29:04.000This is a little out of my wheelhouse, but it's part of the whole methane cycle, the natural biogenic cycle.
00:29:12.000And this is important to understand, the difference between transportation, which is basically taking out fossil fuels that have not been part of that natural cycle for millions of years and then just emitting them into the atmosphere, With the carbon,
00:29:28.000the biogenic carbon cycle, you have methane, you know, cows are burping out methane.
00:29:34.000Methane goes up into the atmosphere, and then via hydroxyl oxidation, it's converted into CO2 and water vapor.
00:29:44.000Then the plants take in CO2, and then via photosynthesis, they convert it into food, basically.
00:29:52.000And then the cows eat the food, and the whole cycle keeps going.
00:30:07.000I mean, like Joel Salatin, for example, from Polyface Farms and Savory Institute, they basically educate farmers on how to rotate their livestock.
00:30:18.000Again, this is not my area of expertise, but rather than just having the cattle...
00:30:22.000Stay in the same place the whole time, like in a feedlot.
00:30:26.000They're moving the cattle around, the cattle are pooping, then they bring the chickens to where that was, you know, where the cattle were, and they move it around in a way, again, that I don't fully understand, but the effect of this is that the amount of carbon that is sequestered from the atmosphere is greater than the amount of CO2 that is emitted.
00:30:51.000And these life cycle analyses have been done and published in the literature.
00:30:55.000It's true that right now that type of holistically managed livestock is not very common, but that doesn't mean that it's not what we should be doing.
00:31:44.000I mean, how much land do you need to do something like this?
00:31:47.000So, I knew you were going to ask that question, and I talked to Savory Institute about this, and a few other people, and basically...
00:31:58.000One response is it's the only way we're going to feed everybody because, as I mentioned, there are only 60 harvests left because of soil degradation.
00:32:07.000So continually trying to scale up industrial plant agriculture with soy and corn and all of these kinds of crops is going to further degrade the soil.
00:32:18.000And at some point, we're not going to have any soil left.
00:32:57.000It's like, on the one hand, if we try to scale up plant agriculture in an environment where, according to the FAO, our soils are in only, quote, fair, poor, or very poor condition, and we only have 60 harvests left due to rapidly deteriorating...
00:33:14.000Soil due to erosion and nutrient depletion, then we desperately need new methods of restoring healthy soil.
00:33:21.000And if we can do that with regenerative, holistically managed livestock, which has been shown in the scientific literature to be possible, then that may be the only way we can feed everybody.
00:33:32.000So we would need to almost have a reversal, if that was the case, and have more animal agriculture than plant agriculture.
00:33:44.000So they would have to be like Joel Salatin set up.
00:33:48.000Yeah, so we need three things to happen.
00:33:52.000One would be we need to return all the croplands that are being used to feed livestock and feedlots right now to grassland.
00:34:00.000And number two, we need to put all unused land like the rocky, hilly soil or land that can't be used for plant agriculture into production with animals.
00:34:11.000And number three, farmers and ranchers would need to adopt regenerative practices, you know.
00:34:18.000So I'm not saying – this is an enormous undertaking.
00:34:21.000We're not – we're talking – but so is feeding the world with plant-based agriculture.
00:39:51.000Yeah, so one of the founders was Ellen White, and she taught that meat was a toxic substance and that flesh should be avoided because it increases our carnal urges.
00:40:05.000It was a moral religious thing at first.
00:40:09.000And then one of the other, an early Adventist church member, Lena Cooper, she co-founded the American Dietetic Association, which is still to this day one of our major dietetics organizations.
00:40:23.000And she wrote textbooks that were used in dietetic and nursing programs all around the world for 30 years.
00:40:43.000But the argument is often made that that's related to diet.
00:40:47.000Well, it could be that it's related to, you know, part of their creed is to eat healthy whole foods, but they also don't smoke, they don't drink, they're advised to exercise.
00:40:57.000So, it's kind of like the Dean Ornish studies where, you know, you put together all these interventions, one of which is a low-fat diet, and then you say that the benefit was because of the low-fat diet.
00:41:08.000What you're referring to is the study that showed that, and this is what vegans like to say, that vegan diet is, and Joel loves to use this one, a vegan diet is the only diet that's ever been shown in a study to reverse heart disease.
00:41:22.000But what this study actually shows is these people had terrible diets, they smoked and they drank, and then they put them on a vegan diet, no smoking, no drinking, and exercise, and what do you know?
00:41:37.000But it's not like we have a corresponding diet where they did the exact same thing and gave them an omnivorous diet with like grass-fed bison meat and then showed a similar set of tests and showed a decline or showed a better performance by the vegan diet.
00:41:55.000You have all of these factors that are compiled together.
00:41:58.000Quitting drinking, quitting smoking, quit eating shit food, eating a vegan diet, And exercise.
00:42:04.000And stress reduction and community support, all of which we know have an impact on heart disease.
00:42:21.000And the other thing about that study is that the baseline characteristics of the control group versus the experimental group were totally different.
00:42:31.000Experimental group weighed 34 pounds more than the control group.
00:43:06.000But I had him on to try to pursue this path of objectivity, to try to give him an opportunity to express what's incorrect about what you're saying, and it didn't work out for him.
00:43:19.000I mean, by everybody's account that I saw that he lost that debate.
00:43:23.000So, I mean, you brought up a point which I think is the crux of this whole thing, which is context is everything.
00:43:29.000And the problem with a lot of the research on plant-based diets and, you know, low-fat diets and all this is they make the implicit assumption that a diet that includes meat that is like where the context is KFC, McDonald's,
00:43:46.000you know, cheese doodles, Coca-Cola, the whole standard American diet is the same as a diet that includes meat that's completely whole foods based, you know, like the way you eat, the way I eat, you know.
00:43:59.000Lots of vegetables, fresh nuts, seeds, starchy tubers, whatever.
00:44:05.000If you ask 100 people on the street, my guess is 100% would say those are obviously different.
00:44:11.000But the way that research treats them is they're the same.
00:44:22.000So there have been studies that have been done over the past few years that are looking more at diet quality rather than just the quantity of specific food ingredients or foods like meat.
00:44:33.000And what those studies are universally saying is that quality is what makes the difference.
00:44:39.000So, a great example, we talked about this with Joel, are the studies on looking at omnivorous versus vegetarian and vegan diets and lifespan.
00:44:49.000But instead of just looking at the general population that eats meat, they tried to find ways to, like, at least...
00:45:11.000They're saying, let's look at people who shop at a place like Whole Foods and then let's compare lifespan between vegetarians and vegans and omnivores.
00:45:21.000Both groups live a lot longer than the general population, but there was no difference in lifespan between people who ate meat and vegetarians and vegans.
00:46:06.000And for me to unpack that, I have to talk about healthy user bias.
00:46:10.000I have to talk about problems with data collection and food frequency questionnaires.
00:46:15.000I have to talk about relative versus absolute risk.
00:46:17.000You know, I mean, people are just like, what?
00:46:19.000Well, that's the problem with any of this data.
00:46:22.000It's one of the beautiful things about being able to talk about it on a podcast with a moron like me is at least you're getting a conversation where people are going to ask questions like, what the fuck is he saying?
00:46:31.000So I get to ask you that and then people get to hear it.
00:46:35.000You know, this is a very strange time when it comes to information, because so much of it is available, but almost too much.
00:46:42.000And then when you realize, when you start trying to study nutrition, there is so much to learn.
00:46:49.000There's so many factors, and there's so many biases.
00:46:53.000I listened to your interview with Matt Tybee and the point, I was thinking about it because you were talking about it politically, how we're just living in echo chambers now.
00:47:02.000So you go on social media, you're Republican, you're only going to see stuff that caters to your view.
00:47:10.000And the algorithms are even optimized for that because they know that you'll click on that more and that will lead to more ad dollars.
00:47:34.000So you're just getting this reinforcing...
00:47:37.000Confirmation bias, you know, supporting access to information.
00:47:42.000That is a weird thing about social media algorithms, whether it's YouTube algorithms or Facebook or any of these things, is that they're giving you what you want to see, which you would say, oh great, well that's what I want to see.
00:47:54.000There's so many counter-arguments, especially when you're talking about nutrition science.
00:48:01.000There's so many discussions on both sides of the fence, and it seems like both sides are preaching to the choir.
00:50:07.000And Zach flies in the face of all this stuff.
00:50:10.000And, you know, if you want to include someone like that guy that ran the Appalachian Trail in 48 days or whatever he did, which is no small feat for sure.
00:53:11.000That's based on outdated nitrogen balance studies for determining the RDA. And there's a newer method called the Indicator Amino Acid Oxidation Technique, or IAAO. And this suggests that the RDA should be 1.2 grams per kilogram.
00:53:27.000And again, just the basic minimum, bare minimum, not optimal.
00:53:48.000So, sorry, you know how he said, and James said in the study, the average vegetarian gets 71 grams a day, which is not only, you know, the RDA, but 70% more.
00:56:24.000Three cups of cooked lentils, three cups of chickpeas, two cups of quinoa, three ounces of almonds, three slices of silken tofu, and ten tablespoons of peanut butter.
00:56:41.000But the problem is the Dia score for all of those, like the bioavailability and the amino acid profile would be horrible compared to meat, eggs, dairy.
00:56:54.000Because I know they've done this study.
00:56:56.000There was a study that I'd read or had heard about, I should say, where they compared rice protein to whey protein, and they found that at a certain level of grams, like whatever it was, they had an equal effect.
00:57:18.000I should give credit to the video that I was watching.
00:57:21.000This gentleman, I was watching this video today, Dr. Ryan Lowry.
00:57:27.000And they were saying that what that means is that Correct me if I'm wrong.
00:57:33.000Once you hit a certain level of leucine, it's a point of diminishing returns and there's no added benefit to having more leucine in your diet.
00:57:43.000So if you hit whatever it is, I think it was 48 grams or something like that.
00:57:47.000When you have 48 grams of this and 48 grams of that, you put the two of them together, it's essentially the same effect.
00:57:56.000Well, I'm not sure about that, but I mean, leucine is very important for anabolic signaling and muscle protein synthesis.
00:58:04.000It's the essential amino acid that's thought to be the most important for that, and it's low in plant proteins.
00:58:12.000And the other issue with plant proteins that you have is that they have limiting amino acids.
00:58:19.000So these are amino acids that actually interfere with muscle protein synthesis.
00:58:24.000Because the levels are so low in that food.
00:58:26.000So lysine is a limiting amino acid in grains like wheat and rice.
00:58:30.000Maybe there was leucine and lysine discussion maybe there.
00:58:34.000And then methionine and cysteine are limiting in legumes like soy.
00:58:38.000So, Jamie, on slide 6, I made a chart comparing the amino acid profile in beef to several different plant proteins like white beans, soybeans, peas, and rice.
00:58:48.000What you can see there is beef is higher in every single amino acid than every plant protein that's compared there with the exception of soybeans are slightly higher in tryptophan than beef.
00:59:09.000So beef, it's 2.23 versus 0.58 for white beans, 1.3 for soy.
00:59:17.000Soy is higher in leucine than any other plant protein, which is why it's often used.
00:59:22.000And then like 0.3 for peas and 0.01 for rice.
00:59:28.000If you get to a certain number or a certain level of all these, so if you ate enough food that you would pass a certain marker, Would it be possible to have the same effect by eating cooked peas or soybeans?
01:00:20.000There's a video that Patrick made himself of his own diet on what he eats on a daily basis and it turns out to be a boatload of protein powder and just shakes with all kinds of powders and supplements and things like that.
01:00:36.000So he starts with a bunch of different supplements in the morning, multivitamin, nutritional yeast, zinc, glucosamine, magnesium, calcium, B12, and iron.
01:00:45.000Then he has a protein shake with soy protein powder, creatine, and beta-alanine, which probably is because he's aware of the research showing lower levels of muscle creatine and carnosine in vegans.
01:00:58.000Beta-alanine and creatine would address that.
01:01:02.000Then he has a post-workout smoothie with soy or pea protein powder, glutamine, beta-alanine, creatine, and dried greens.
01:01:09.000And then his first solid meal of the day is fried falafel, french fries, soy sausage, fried peppers, and tomatoes.
01:01:17.000And then he has some more protein shakes and smoothies throughout the day.
01:01:36.000I think there's a role for it, of course, especially with things like vitamin D that you might not be able to get enough of from food or therapeutic supplementation if you're dealing with a health problem.
01:01:46.000But eating a diet that is not sufficient in the amount of nutrients that you need and then using supplements to address that doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
01:01:57.000Well, in his situation, he's got a very unique situation that he's a strength athlete.
01:02:03.000That's all he's doing is trying to lift really, really heavy things.
01:02:07.000So he needs to maintain a certain amount of bulk.
01:02:09.000He needs to have an enormous amount of protein.
01:03:38.000So the comparison between him and a guy like Oberst in those legit top of the food chain, strongest man in the world competitions, it's not comparable.
01:04:04.000And he definitely has broken some records in some competitions and have different weight classes.
01:04:11.000But you're not talking about a guy who wins those Magnus von Magnussen fucking competitions where they're carrying trucks and shit.
01:04:19.000Well, I mean, I guess my point, too, was, like, is it the best example of how an athlete can thrive on a plant-based whole foods diet?
01:04:27.000Well, I think it is, though, because for him, for his size, you know, to be a guy who's 5'7 and is carrying that fucking enormous amount of weight, he's obviously doing something that's very impressive, and he's doing it while he's on this vegan diet.
01:05:01.000But this is a very sport-specific area of performance.
01:05:05.000He's just talking about lifting insanely heavy shit.
01:05:08.000And he's doing that and thriving on a vegan diet.
01:05:11.000Yeah, no doubt, you know, enormously strong and he's succeeding.
01:05:17.000I would argue that he might do even better if he was eating, you know, more nutrient-dense food and he might need to take fewer supplements and drink less powder.
01:05:28.000Yeah, but I think from his perspective...
01:06:11.000Because, you know, fish is actually higher often than meat in terms of protein, ounce for ounce.
01:06:17.000It's also very high in collagen, which is super important for recovery and repair, and explains lack of collagen probably explains why a lot of vegan athletes get injured, which we can talk about more later.
01:06:28.000And then eggs, as you know, are super, you know, they're really high on the DS scale, they're bioavailable, lots of other nutrients, so...
01:06:37.000Here's another problem with that whole comparison.
01:06:38.000First of all, Nate Diaz is a fantastic fighter.
01:06:41.000He's a long-time mixed martial arts veteran.
01:08:09.000Well, except the rematch with Nate was the only time that he's fought at 170. So they made a decision to fight at 170 instead of 155 because Nate did not have time to reduce his calories and cut the weight.
01:10:10.000So, Brian Jennings, the boxer, they talked about he went vegan in the end of 2013. He was 17-0 before he was vegan, and he's 7-4 after that.
01:10:24.000So, you can't say that that's because he transitioned to a vegan diet, but you can't also say, nor can you say that veganism improved his performance.
01:10:33.000I mean, objectively, he's gotten worse since then.
01:10:37.000Well, the argument against that would be that he's moving up into the upper echelons of the heavyweight division, and it's filled with killers, like any combat sport.
01:10:46.000And that as he got in, many fighters don't make it.
01:11:04.000But yeah, I mean, that upper, when you get to these Andy Ruiz, Deontay Wilder, I mean, killers.
01:11:11.000It's like most people that get up into that division, they start losing.
01:11:14.000He's a good example, too, of this principle of context being everything.
01:11:19.000Because he said in the film, my early years growing up in Philly, the only thing we knew was spinach in a can, collard greens and Popeyes, KFC, everybody frying chicken.
01:11:28.000I grew up not even knowing about half these other vegetables.
01:11:31.000Asparagus, to me, just came out like five years ago.
01:12:31.000But what we know about nutrition, it is so important that we are honest about what we know.
01:12:38.000This is the problem I have with a lot of these documentaries.
01:12:41.000They're not honest about what they know.
01:12:43.000They're only giving you little snippets and cherry-picking data and doing things like the study that showed that the vegan diet can clinically reverse heart disease.
01:13:05.000Either they know it's nonsense or they just fucking slap some blinders on their head and just plow straight ahead and ignore anything that conflicts with any of these thoughts that they're expressing.
01:13:15.000I mean, there's so many examples of this in the film.
01:13:17.000One was this lettuce has more antioxidants than salmon or eggs.
01:13:50.000But we could just easily say a serving of salmon has 716 times more selenium than lettuce and provides 100% of the RDA of B12 where lettuce provides 0%.
01:14:01.000But I'm not going to say that because that's ridiculous.
01:14:03.000I'm not trying to get people not to eat lettuce.
01:14:08.000And there's another thing that's going on right now, these carnivore folks, which I find fascinating because they are as ideologically driven as vegans.
01:14:19.000It's like we have Antifa and then we have the alt-right.
01:14:22.000Now we have the carnivores and we have the vegans.
01:14:25.000And both of them dig their fucking heels in the sand.
01:14:27.000And both of them are committed to thinking that their side is the only way to go.
01:14:33.000And Rhonda Patrick has talked about this many, many times when people start discussing negative aspects of eating food, particularly plants, because of stressors.
01:14:43.000And she's like, no, there's actually...
01:14:45.000An effect where your body's reacting to them that's beneficial, much like when you get in a sauna, your body reacts to the heat, it's actually beneficial for your health.
01:14:57.000You lift a weight until you can't lift it anymore, your muscle tissue breaks down and it rebuilds stronger the next time.
01:15:03.000So these folks that are talking about don't eat vegetables, because vegetables give you these things that are bad for your body, like, okay, are you sure?
01:15:11.000I mean, there's a lot of work to be done here, folks.
01:15:13.000There's a lot of fucking research to be read into, and there's a lot of conversations you have to have with people far more educated than you and the subjects.
01:15:20.000I think often as humans we have a hard time differentiating between our own experience and what works for us and then larger, bigger picture.
01:15:31.000So take someone who has a severe autoimmune disease, they go on carnivore, their symptoms disappear.
01:16:26.000So you're introducing an element of uncertainty because if you look at it from an anthropological perspective, every group of people we've ever studied in human history has eaten both plants and animals in different proportions.
01:17:58.000That exclusively and by choice, not from living in a marginal environment like the Arctic, but by choice, ate only animal foods for a long period of time.
01:18:08.000And a lot of the research that we have, the clinical research, suggests that plants have some useful nutrients, especially some fibers that can feed the beneficial gut bacteria.
01:18:17.000There are studies showing that Extremely low-carb diets can have some maybe not great effects on the gut flora.
01:18:23.000So again, it could be fine, but we just don't know.
01:18:27.000And so you're adding an element of uncertainty there.
01:19:14.000And I'm sure most of these athletes that are following a vegan diet, like you were talking about earlier with Patrick, they're taking protein powders.
01:19:22.000So they're allowing themselves to get a large dose of protein to fulfill their requirements simply and easily in a shake form rather than having to wolf down four or five bowls of protein.
01:19:33.000And if they're not, they're probably not doing that well.
01:19:37.000So we have like all these stories of NFL and NBA athletes that went vegan and then stopped because they were not able to maintain their weight or they got injured and they weren't able to recover.
01:19:49.000In the show notes for this, I have many, many examples of pretty high-level NBA and NFL athletes.
01:20:00.000He had the worst season of his career.
01:20:02.000He had minus two yards on five carries in the first two games, and he rushed for more than 30 yards, 33 yards a game only once in his last nine starts.
01:20:12.000How Cam Newton's vegan diet may be hurting Panthers quarterback play in injury recovery.
01:20:29.000It's a broken foot and really hard to recover from.
01:20:32.000And some people think it certainly could be career-ending.
01:20:37.000I mean, if you lose 10, 20 pounds, that's a big deal for a high-level athlete because the studies have shown that that can interfere with muscle protein synthesis.
01:20:48.000It can also increase inflammation and make recovery more difficult.
01:20:52.000But the other thing is if they're not eating the protein powders, they're not taking collagen, for example, a vegan source of collagen.
01:21:00.000Collagen is critical for muscle recovery and repair.
01:21:03.000And it's hard to, you know, you can make some collagen, but I think a lot of people on a plant-based diet, if they're high-level athletes and they're not really getting collagen coming in, it's going to be difficult.
01:21:16.000When Travis Barker was in a plane crash, he was, like, severely burned, and they were having a hard time getting him to heal, and he started eating meat in order to heal, because he's a vegan.
01:21:27.000I mean, he owns, what's it called, Crossroads, in a really amazing vegan restaurant in L.A., and he talked about it on the podcast.
01:21:36.000He was just wolfing down beef jerky, just trying to eat meat in order to get his body to heal.
01:23:10.000He ended up adding small amounts of animal protein back to his diet.
01:23:14.000You've got Gerald McCoy, NFL. He said, quote, the explosiveness wasn't sustainable because I didn't have that extra oomph that I needed because of the lack of the type of protein I was taking in, so I just added a little bit of animal protein back in my diet, and it's given me that oomph back.
01:23:29.000No, again, we're talking about elite athletes with very specific nutritional requirements because they're asking a tremendous amount of their body.
01:23:37.000I mean, these guys could probably need like 4,000 to 5,000 calories a day to function well.
01:23:42.000And of that, you know, if they weigh 250 or 275, they need 250 to 275 grams of protein and it should be high in leucine.
01:25:00.000So think B12. That's the thing that came up in the film a number of times.
01:25:05.000So we should talk about that a little bit because there was some actually just factually inaccurate information about B12 that I want to correct.
01:25:19.000James said B12 is not made by animals.
01:25:23.000It's made by bacteria that these animals consume in the soil and water.
01:25:28.000Before industrial farming, farm animals and humans could get B12 by eating traces of dirt on plant foods or by drinking water from rivers or streams.
01:25:36.000But now, because of pesticides and antibiotics and chlorine that kill the bacteria, this vitamin even...
01:25:51.000So first of all, B12 is made by bacteria, but animals don't get it from consuming soil and water.
01:25:58.000The B12 is made by bacteria in their gut.
01:26:01.000So in ruminants like cows, in the rumen, which is a chamber in the stomach, the bacteria convert cobalt that they get from grass that they eat into cobalamin, which is B12. And then they are foregut fermenters.
01:26:19.000So they can absorb the B12 the bacteria produce in their intestines and utilize that themselves.
01:26:26.000Primates, including humans, also have bacteria that make B12, but we're hindgut fermenters, so we cannot absorb the B12 that our own gut bacteria make.
01:26:54.000There's a whole community now of Reddit.
01:26:56.000Ethical poo eaters is now a new subreddit.
01:27:00.000So we cannot get B12 from our own gut bacteria.
01:27:05.000And if there is any B12 in soil, it's only from manure that's come from animals.
01:27:11.000There's also zero evidence that B12 is fed to cattle, and there's no evidence that humans have ever been able to meet their B12 needs from just eating soil and water.
01:27:20.000If you pull up slide 56, Jamie, Jack Norris, who's a vegan dietician, you know, we don't agree on a lot of things, but I appreciate his rigor with the science.
01:27:32.000He has a big article on B12 and I don't know where to go with that claim because it's demonstrably false,
01:27:55.000even from the perspective of a vegan registered dietitian.
01:28:00.000Yeah, I don't know why he said that either, but I just think that that's something he probably heard, and he was probably having a conversation with someone, and they told him that, and he just repeated it.
01:28:10.000Or maybe one of the doctors on the show brought that up.
01:28:14.000People repeat a lot of these things, and then they become dogma.
01:28:41.000There's four stages of B12 deficiency.
01:28:43.000I don't want to go too far in the weeds here, but basically serum B12, which is the marker that's usually used, only goes down in the fourth and final stage of B12 deficiency.
01:28:53.000There are other markers that will go out of range earlier that are more sensitive and detect those earlier stages.
01:28:59.000So the most sensitive marker is holotranscobalamin or holotc.
01:29:03.000So, in a study in 2013, this is slide 58, Jamie, they compared B12 depletion according to holotranscobalamin levels in vegetarians, vegans, and omnivores, and you can see the results here.
01:29:19.000Only 11% of omnivores had B12 depletion, 77% of vegetarians, and 92% of vegans.
01:30:06.000One more, if I can, because I'm just passionate about this because it's super important.
01:30:11.000Slide 59. So homocysteine is a marker that is also more sensitive than serum B12. It's a sticky inflammatory protein that's associated with heart disease and dementia.
01:30:22.000So 9 out of 10 comparisons that looked at B12 levels or homocysteine levels in vegetarians and omnivores found higher homocysteine levels in vegans and vegetarians.
01:30:32.000Higher means worse, and it means more B12 deficient.
01:30:36.000And in fact, the studies, they said the prevalence of hyperhomocysteemia, which is high homocysteine levels reflecting low B12, among vegetarians may actually be higher than among non-vegetarians already diagnosed with heart disease.
01:30:54.000It's like the B12 issue is serious, and even folks like Jack Norris, to their credit, do acknowledge it and strongly recommend that people who are on a vegan diet supplement.
01:31:04.000So if people watch this film, you know, I'm glad to hear James saying that vegetarians and vegans should supplement.
01:31:14.000I don't think omnivores need to, usually.
01:31:17.000You can watch that film and get the idea that B12 is maybe not that big of a deal.
01:31:25.000A lot of the film was reenactments as well.
01:31:28.000When James was sitting there with the knee braces on, that was not after his surgery.
01:31:32.000I thought he was vegan in 2011 or 2012 or something.
01:31:36.000When he's in the film, when they're filming him, he's sitting there doing his research.
01:31:41.000I don't think they filmed him while it was happening back in 2012 after the injury.
01:31:47.000One of the things that I thought was well done about the film was that they took someone, James, on the journey of starting as an omnivore and then having these realizations and turning into a vegan.
01:32:03.000That journey happened long before the film was made, I think.
01:32:06.000So that was a little disingenuous, too.
01:32:08.000Well, that's why I'm saying he's sitting there with those knee braces on and he's going over his research and just happened to have a camera crew there while he's learning how to heal himself.
01:32:16.000And I'm like, hey, man, I know what you're doing.
01:34:30.000Because we started eating meat and fish, and we came down out of the trees, and we weren't spending more than half of our waking hours eating leaves and low-calorie fruits.
01:34:58.000For a gorilla, the largest volume of their digestive tract is in their large intestine, which is ideal for breaking down tough foods, fiber, seeds, and those kinds of plant foods.
01:35:08.000Whereas in humans, the largest volume of our digestive tract is in the small intestine, which is better for absorbing nutrient-dense bioavailable foods like meat and cooked foods, cooked tubers and things like that.
01:35:22.000A gorilla, in order to get the amount of protein that gets them strong and ripped, they eat 40 to 60 pounds of food a day, and they're eating for more than half of their waking hours.
01:35:33.000So it's really, you know, that's just not comparable at all to compare us to...
01:36:30.000You know, that's why I bring you aboard.
01:36:32.000I mean, and then there was the anthropologist woman.
01:36:35.000You remember that scene in the end where she, that's where I really started rolling my eyes because she was making the arguments that humans have always followed a plant-based diet.
01:36:46.000Okay, so we're going to start with that.
01:36:50.000So, I mean, we've got isotope studies that show that humans have been eating meat for at least two and a half million years.
01:36:56.000And if you go back even before we were really actually human, there's a lot of evidence now that our chimp ancestors were also eating vertebrates.
01:37:06.000One of the biggest shocks for people has been the observation that chimps hunt and they kill other monkeys and other animals and eat them.
01:37:15.000I mean, it kind of blew apart this whole idea of primates only eating plants.
01:37:22.000If that happened, if an animal evolves complex behavior like hunting or tool use in order to eat certain food, it means that food has a lot of value or else that behavior wouldn't have evolved.
01:37:38.000But then we have bone collagen studies.
01:37:42.000Let me see if I can find this slide, Jamie.
01:37:46.000So that's 47 and 48. So bone collagen isotope studies are much more accurate than some of the previous methods that were used.
01:37:55.000And the earliest hominids that were studied with these were Neanderthals.
01:38:00.000So there's three studies that have been done in Neanderthal groups ranging from 130,000 to 28,000 years ago.
01:38:06.000And then they compared those isotope levels with contemporary species.
01:38:11.000And they found that Neanderthals were similar to top-level carnivores.
01:38:15.000So they all derived the vast majority of their protein from animal sources, likely to be large herbivores.
01:39:01.000So on the next slide, there are two stable isotope bone collagen studies that have been done with modern humans, homo sapiens sapiens.
01:39:11.000And the first group was 13,000 years ago in southern England, and the second group was 30,000 to 40,000 years ago in La Gravette, which is in France.
01:39:19.000And they also found that they were, you know, carnivores, mostly large herbivores, but the French group consumed a more diverse mix of protein, including seafood.
01:39:30.000So the fossil record clearly, clearly indicates that humans were eating, you know, humans and Neanderthals, you know, homo sapiens and Neanderthals, all of our hominid ancestors were eating a lot of meat.
01:39:41.000And she wasn't using any evidence to cite this either, was she?
01:39:44.000She was using that lame anatomical argument that we have, you know, relatively flat molars like herbivores do, and we don't have claws, we don't have sharp canine teeth.
01:40:01.000Yeah, and we had fire for a long fucking hour.
01:40:02.000We have these adaptations that make those anatomical characteristics that a lion or a carnivorous animal has unnecessary for us.
01:40:13.000I mean, that's just like Anthropology 101. So they just found someone who's vegan who's also an anthropologist.
01:40:20.000Yeah, one anthropologist, and then they rewrite the whole history of animal food consumption among hominids.
01:40:27.000Yeah, and the argument that human beings over two million years ago, the doubling of the human brain size corresponds with the learning how to hunt, consuming more meat...
01:40:37.000The appearance of tool marks on bones corresponded directly with the doubling of brain volume, the reduction in our gut volume, which indicates a move to a more nutrient-dense diet, the increase in the volume of our small intestine relative to our large intestine, and then what's called the gracilization of our jaw,
01:40:53.000which means our teeth and jaw became less robust, And that's thought to be an adaptation to more digestible, nutrient-dense, bioavailable food where we're not like chewing cud or chewing on leaves or low-calorie fruit like a gorilla is all day.
01:41:08.000And this argument about nutrient density, this is why that term is very important because people always want to use that for plant-based foods, nutrient-dense, plant-based foods.
01:41:18.000Meat is far more nutrient-dense per calorie, per ounce, per amino acid profile, With essential nutrients, yeah.
01:41:28.000So essential meaning nutrients that we can't manufacture on our own and that we absolutely need.
01:41:35.000Organ meats are actually at the top of the list in terms of nutrient density.
01:41:40.000Organ meats and shellfish take the cake.
01:41:42.000Then you have herbs and spices are actually pretty high too.
01:41:46.000And then you have other, you know, muscle meats, eggs, all those things.
01:41:50.000Foods like grains and legumes tend to be towards the bottom of the list, you know, with vegetables in the middle.
01:42:01.000It sounds like you're doing the right thing.
01:42:03.000And this is like where this lingo is coming from.
01:42:05.000I mean, this is where I argue that plants do belong because plants do have certain nutrients, phytonutrients, fibers, and things that actually don't feed us but feed our gut flora that I do think are important.
01:42:18.000Even though they're not considered essential like vitamin B12 or vitamin A, you know...
01:42:24.000Vitamin D or something like that, I do think they're still important and they play a role.
01:42:28.000What I'm talking about is the difference between caveman altering its diet or ancient man altering their diet and this doubling of the human brain size corresponding with consuming more nutrient-dense foods.
01:43:14.000It really kind of went from just like you can do well on a plant-based diet as an athlete to like animal products are horrible and are going to kill you, which was a big leap.
01:43:26.000So they had one study, James Wilkes says, you know, research funded by the National Cancer Institute found that vegetarians who had one or more servings per week of white meat like chicken and fish more than tripled their risk of colon cancer.
01:43:42.000You know, I don't want to triple my risk of colon cancer.
01:43:45.000But again, if you look at the totality of the research, slide 42, Jamie, 2017, a meta-analysis of 16 prospective studies with almost 2.5 million participants found no increase in cancer risk from consuming fish or poultry.
01:44:03.000And then you have a statement from the American Cancer Institute itself saying, So where's that coming from then?
01:44:21.000One study that looked at Seventh-day Adventists who added some of those foods back into their diet.
01:44:29.000This is a perfect example of healthy user bias because Seventh-day Adventists are not supposed to eat meat.
01:44:34.000So if you have a Seventh-day Adventist who's rebelling and eating meat, Then what else are they doing that is also not healthy and not following the dictates of that healthy lifestyle?
01:44:48.000They didn't take that into consideration?
01:44:50.000They didn't ask them whether they're drinking?
01:44:52.000That was a six-year study in the Seventh-day Adventist cohort from 1976 to 1982. And it was what I call them SDA rebels.
01:45:01.000They're supposed to eat vegetarian, but they add meat.
01:45:04.000So what else are they doing that's confounding that?
01:45:07.000And the reason why this is relevant is this is the only study that we know of that does show a correlation between...
01:45:13.000There might be other individual studies that do, but this is why we have these large reviews.
01:45:18.000This one looked at 16 studies with 2.5 million participants and found no association.
01:45:24.000And then that's why you have groups like the American Cancer Institute who say...
01:45:28.000You know, they make this recommendation.
01:45:30.000Well, I mean, people were up in arms at the most recent recommendation that people have been told to avoid red meat.
01:46:05.000They reviewed all of the available literature on red meat and its relationship with any disease, heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes.
01:46:16.000It was dozens of studies following people for up to 35 years and millions, again, millions of participants.
01:46:24.000They looked at randomized controlled trials.
01:46:26.000They looked at observational cohort studies.
01:46:29.000They looked at all kinds of outcomes, total mortality, cardiovascular, cancer, etc., And they found, quote, only low or very low certainty evidence that red meat causes any kind of disease.
01:46:42.000And then in the editorial, in the Annals, which is what it was published, Annals of Internal Medicine, the journal it was published in, they said, quote, this is slide 19, Jamie.
01:46:55.000Over and over again, they, the authors, stressed that even if the results were statistically significant, their certainty was low and the absolute differences seen were small and potentially confounded.
01:47:07.000Meaning, could have been that they were smoking more or drinking more or not exercising or whatever.
01:47:14.000The editorial also said, this is sure to be controversial, but it's based on the most comprehensive review of the evidence to date.
01:47:22.000Because that review is inclusive, those who seek to dispute it will be hard-pressed to find appropriate evidence with which to build an argument.
01:47:36.000The really frustrating thing for people is also recommend it's unprocessed and processed.
01:47:42.000So the dogma has always been, well, just stay away from processed meat and you can avoid.
01:47:48.000Yeah, because some studies showed no difference with fresh, but some difference with processed red meat.
01:47:53.000I think you could make a stronger argument that too much processed meat might be harmful because of things like nitroso compounds that are formed, etc.
01:48:03.000But even then, you have to consider context.
01:48:06.000Most people are eating hot dogs with buns.
01:48:39.000And you see the other side scrambling to refute the evidence and then fire back with all these epidemiology studies that show that red meat can kill you and red meat's causing you to age quicker and red meat kills your boners and red meat does this and does that.
01:48:52.000And it's like there's a religious war going on.
01:48:57.000It's the same thing we were talking about earlier.
01:48:59.000Now, when you have some kind of political event or some event that happens, it gets spun.
01:49:03.000You know, if you go watch CNN, it's going to get spun one way.
01:49:06.000If you go watch Fox, it's going to get spun the other way.
01:49:09.000It's the same event, but you have these totally different interpretations.
01:49:20.000I found that to be entirely hilarious, ruthlessly unscientific, and like the whole thing with the guy saying, you know, I'm going to eat what a gorilla eats.
01:49:33.000I mean, they're showing this guy who's protecting rhinos who are being slaughtered for their horns.
01:49:39.000Like, what does that have anything to do with eating meat?
01:49:41.000Yeah, they're morally equating that with eating...
01:50:05.000Yeah, so for those who haven't seen the film, the boner experiment, if we're going to call it that, it was Aaron Spitz, who's a urologist, and he puts penis rings on a bunch of NFL players,
01:50:21.000and then he measures the effects of different meals on their erections, both the circumference, I guess, the size of the erection, the duration, and the intensity of the erections.
01:50:34.000So he feeds the players burritos with meat in them and then he feeds them the same burrito with like a plant protein.
01:50:41.000I'm not sure what it was, tempeh or something like that.
01:50:48.000And then he claims that the athletes who ate the pure plant burritos had 500% more frequent erections and also increased strength of erections.
01:50:57.000So what can we conclude from this experiment?
01:52:05.000That's why we have a process of peer review.
01:52:07.000That's why we have reproducibility, meaning even if one group comes up with one finding, it's not really worth much until somebody else reproduces that.
01:52:15.000Something like 90% or more of scientific findings are not reproduced.
01:52:21.000That means that we can't trust them, so.
01:52:24.000I would like to know if they were asked to not engage in sexual intercourse or masturbation during that time period because that would make sense that they were getting more erections and more fuller erections the next day, especially the young guys that are savages out there playing football.
01:55:13.000There was a 2009 study that followed subjects for 12 weeks, and they found that a low-carb diet actually improved endothelial function, whereas a low-fat diet decreased it.
01:55:23.000And then there was a 2007 study that followed subjects for a year, and there was no change in endothelial function on a low-carb diet.
01:55:32.000There's strong evidence that high blood sugar and insulin resistance impair endothelial function.
01:55:38.000So a low-carb diet that would lower your blood sugar and improve insulin resistance would be expected to improve it from that perspective.
01:55:46.000So again, when you look at the actual science, the actual peer-reviewed research, you don't see that relationship that they're talking about.
01:55:53.000They didn't even, I mean, when they're showing it to you, it's just scare tactics.
01:55:57.000They're not talking about what that means.
01:57:30.000I've been working with patients for over 10 years.
01:57:32.000I test every single person that comes through the door with a full lipid panel.
01:57:36.000And I have people who are doing keto, super low-carb diets who have totally optimal normal cholesterol.
01:57:43.000And then I have people who go from eating, you know, a moderate-fat diet to like a high-fat keto or low-carb diet, and their LDL-P goes up to 2,500 or 3,000, and their LDL cholesterol goes up to 300. So,
01:58:01.000yeah, I mean, what I can, I think what, stepping back a little bit, as we talked about this with Joel, but cholesterol for decades was, it was the boogeyman, you know, it was like, that led to like egg white omelets and boneless, skinless chicken breast and,
01:58:17.000you know, bagels with nothing on them when I was growing up.
01:58:49.000So yeah, you know, the U.S. quietly actually removed the limitation of dietary cholesterol.
01:58:56.000They used to limit it to 300 milligrams now that they don't have that anymore because the evidence didn't justify having that in the dietary guidelines.
01:59:04.000We were the last industrialized country to do that.
01:59:06.000Every other country had done that years ago.
01:59:09.000But because, you know, how entrenched that was in our country, and I think, you know, they don't want to lose credibility.
01:59:17.000It's like they've been saying not to do something for so long, then to turn around and say, actually, there's no evidence to support that.
01:59:26.000And when people talk about saturated fat and they talk about it as being only a meat or animal diet issue, one thing that I always like to bring up is avocados.
01:59:40.000There's a certain amount of unsaturated fat and saturated fat.
01:59:43.000Every food has all three fats in some proportion.
01:59:47.000So you have saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated.
01:59:50.000And dairy products are actually the only category of foods that consistently have more saturated fat than any other type of fat.
01:59:59.000Pork, for example, often has more monounsaturated fat than saturated and even sometimes lean beef.
02:00:06.000And what's really interesting about that is that studies consistently show that full-fat dairy, which would be like the highest saturated fat class of foods, is associated with reduced risk of heart disease,
02:00:21.000reduced risk of diabetes, reduced weight.
02:01:29.000Started to spread, and now it's about one-third of the world has lactase persistence, which means they can digest lactose all the way into adulthood, and two-thirds don't.
02:01:41.000And it depends a lot on your ancestry.
02:01:43.000So two-thirds people are lactose intolerant to some extent.
02:02:05.000And then East Africans, so you have like the Maasai, you know, people who've been raising cattle for a long time tend to have that capability, whereas like in Asia, other parts of Africa, and other parts of the world, not as much.
02:02:20.000What difference, if any, does it make when it's not homogenized and pasteurized in terms of your digestion?
02:02:27.000Because for me, I don't have a problem with raw milk.
02:02:42.000I would love to see research that further differentiates the health benefits of dairy according to whether it's organic or whether it's homogenized or not and all that.
02:02:51.000But even just talking about dairy as a whole category...
02:02:54.000I mean, you had Dr. Walter Willett in there saying, there's evidence of high consumption of proteins from dairy is related to higher risk of prostate cancer.
02:03:03.000The chain of cancer causation seems pretty clear.
02:03:06.000But if you bring up slide 44, Jamie, there was a 2019 study.
02:03:11.000Largest review of dairy ever been done before.
02:03:14.000It was 153 meta-analyses that they reviewed.
02:03:20.000They reviewed 153 studies that were also reviewing other studies.
02:03:25.000And 84% of the meta-analyses on dairy showed either no association or an inverse association between dairy and cancer, meaning when it's inverse, it means people who ate more dairy had lower rates of cancer.
02:03:38.000So it's frustrating to see someone make a claim like that, and then you go and you look at the full totality of the research and you see a just exhaustive study like this with 153 meta-analyses.
02:03:54.000And 84% are showing no relationship or a beneficial effect of dairy on cancer.
02:04:00.000Why wasn't that mentioned in the film?
02:04:02.000Well, it's consistent with the way the message is being distributed through the entire film.
02:04:36.000It's frustrating because these kinds of movies leverage this rhetorical effect called the illusory truth effect, which is basically if you repeat something enough times, it starts to sound true.
02:04:56.000So, you know, meat is bad, meat is bad, meat is bad, meat is bad.
02:04:59.000We've heard that so many times that someone can get on, make a film, and just include one little tidbit of information and say meat is bad, and it seems like, oh, that's true.
02:05:09.000But then to break that down, we're here for...
02:05:13.000Two and a half hours and we're just getting started.
02:07:18.000You have to recognize with this movie, like...
02:07:21.000A lot of the people who were amazing athletes, they didn't start out vegan.
02:07:27.000They weren't born to vegan parents and then were vegan growing up and then had all these amazing records and performance.
02:07:38.000They built their strength or their agility or their speed or whatever on a diet with animal products.
02:07:45.000And then at some point, they became vegan.
02:07:48.000And, you know, maybe their performance continued and they continued to do well like Scott Jurek or Dottie Bausch.
02:07:54.000Or maybe they had the vegan honeymoon where they did well for a while and then they declined.
02:07:58.000Or maybe they just declined like some of the NBA and NFL athletes we talked about.
02:08:03.000But this is a critical point because there are key developmental periods when we're kids and also in utero that if you're not getting the nutrition you need then, it's going to carry through to your whole life.
02:08:18.000And so it's like, what did your parents eat?
02:08:21.000What did your mom eat when she was breastfeeding you?
02:08:48.000Of the mom starting that way and then getting pregnant and becoming deficient during pregnancy and then the baby being breastfed by a mom who's nutrient deficient and then the kid being fed a vegan diet and developing B12 deficiency which then has irreversible effects.
02:09:05.000Are there any top of the food chain world champion vegan athletes?
02:14:24.000Like I said before, all it takes is a little, because like organ meats and shellfish and fish and eggs are so nutrient dense, you don't have to eat a lot of them to get to meet your nutrition needs.
02:14:35.000Yeah, I've had this conversation with vegans too about mollusks.
02:14:38.000And I was like, you know, I've heard it argued, and Sam Harris was talking to me about this, that you can actually make an ethical argument that mollusks are more primitive than plants.
02:14:46.000And that plants actually exchange more information through mycelium, through their root structure.
02:14:50.000They actually communicate with each other.
02:16:18.000They're eating soy cakes and grass and fobs and things that we can't Digest and absorb.
02:16:23.000But I think the argument would be that if you just grew the same, use that same area to grow human food, you could do that because we're using that area to grow cow food.
02:16:32.000Well, so you replace the feedlot beef with grasslands and then you have naturally, you know, holistically managed cattle there and then you take the land that we can't, as I said before, 60% of land you can't grow crops on.
02:17:03.000But the other option is to use that land for grasslands, which could make it a carbon sink rather than having still emissions coming from mono-industrial agriculture.
02:17:14.000I understand what you're saying, but I mean, if I was on the other side, I would argue, well, wouldn't it be easier to just grow human edible corn in that place instead of...
02:17:40.000If you look at the conversion ratio of feed like corn, which is super nutrient poor, you know, corn is low in protein.
02:17:48.000It doesn't have many nutrients at all.
02:17:50.0002.6 to 2.8 kilograms of corn get converted into 1 kilogram of beef.
02:17:56.000So even in that 14% of human edible food that livestock are eating, they're converting it to highly nutrient-dense, bioavailable protein that humans can eat.
02:18:08.000And if you do the conversion with just protein instead of by weight of food, they take 0.6 kilograms of corn or other low-value protein and convert that into one kilogram of very high-value nutrient-dense protein.
02:18:24.000So it's always more nuanced than the argument makes it seem.
02:20:27.000So just for people who aren't aware, there are companies like Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat that are promoting this idea of fake meat that tastes like meat, but it's made typically from soy.
02:20:39.000So Impossible Burger's main ingredients are GMO soy, coconut oil, sunflower oil, natural flavors.
02:20:45.000Beyond Meat is pea protein isolate, canola oil, refined coconut oil.
02:20:51.000So Impossible Burger has publicly criticized holistic land management or regenerative agriculture and saying, ah, it's not really that different.
02:21:00.000In fact, sometimes the emissions can be even more than feedlot beef.
02:21:05.000But there was a third-party lifecycle analysis, full lifecycle.
02:21:09.000So they looked at the whole process, not just methane emissions from cows burping, but the whole process.
02:21:15.000At White Oak Pastures, which is a beef operation.
02:21:57.000That's something that was offered up as a response to...
02:22:01.000And I don't think it's a large amount of seaweed.
02:22:03.000I think it's a fairly small amount of seaweed in percentage to the overall diet.
02:22:07.000I think the amazing thing about the regenerative livestock or holistically managed beef, though, is it can actually restore grasslands.
02:22:16.000It can restore the soil and improve the soil.
02:22:18.000So you're not only producing this amazing nutrient-dense bioavailable food source, you're actually improving the soil and helping to reverse this really dramatic, threatening problem that we're facing of soil erosion.
02:22:31.000Seaweed could help make cows burp less methane and cut their carbon foot hoofprint.
02:22:35.000LOL. Diet supplemented with red algae could lessen the huge amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by cows and sheep if we could just figure out how to grow enough.
02:23:08.000And what they found in that analysis was that the fake meat was less of a greenhouse gas emitter than feedlot beef, but it was still actually an emitter.
02:23:20.000Whereas the holistically managed beef was taking carbon out of the atmosphere.
02:23:26.000So, you know, if we're going to give them credit for the analysis they did for Impossible Burger, we have to give them credit for the analysis that they did for White Oak Pastures.
02:23:37.000The other thing with Impossible Burger, so the primary ingredient is called soy leg hemoglobin, or SLH. So this is a bioengineered protein additive that adds meat-like taste and color.
02:23:50.000It does not meet the basic FDA generally recognized as SAFE, the GRAS designation, because it's not a food or even a food ingredient.
02:23:58.000And there's a document that you can get.
02:24:01.000I think it came with the Freedom of Information Act.
02:24:04.000I have the reference in my show notes.
02:24:06.000And in the discussion in this document with the FDA, Impossible Foods admitted that up to a quarter of its heme ingredient was composed of 46 unexpected additional proteins.
02:24:17.000Some of which are unidentified and none of which were assessed for safety in the dossier.
02:24:22.000Impossible Burger put the product on the market despite admitting to the FDA privately that they haven't done adequate safety testing.
02:24:29.000And according to these documents, quote, FDA believes that the arguments presented individually and collectively do not establish the safety of SLH, soy leg hemoglobin, for consumption, nor do they point to a general recognition of safety.
02:24:45.000So they don't know what the fuck it does.
02:25:07.000It was the same company that did it for Impossible Burger, and then they turned around and did it for White Oak Pastures, and they found Impossible Burger is still emitting carbon, whereas White Oak Pastures is taking it out.
02:25:23.000Yeah, and there was an article criticizing fake meat by this woman, Dana Pearls, who's part of an environmental organization called Friends of the Earth, and she says, quote,"...instead of investing in risky new food technologies that are potential problems masquerading as solutions,
02:25:40.000shouldn't we be investing in proven, beneficial, regenerative agriculture and transparent organic food that consumers are actually demanding?" The only issue that they would have with this is yes, but now you're talking about killing animals, and we're absolutely morally and ethically opposed to killing animals.
02:25:56.000Yeah, I mean, we go back now to this 2018 paper that I mentioned earlier that examined the impact of plant agriculture on animal deaths and found 35 to 250 mouse deaths per acre.
02:26:13.000And up to 7.3 billion animals killed every year from plant agriculture.
02:26:18.000If you count birds killed by pesticides, fish dust from fertilizer runoff, plus reptiles and amphibians, poisonings from eating toxic insects from the pesticides.
02:26:34.000There's far more life taken by plant agriculture than there is life taken by animal agriculture, even factory farming.
02:26:44.000Oh yeah, we're not killing 7.3 billion cows.
02:26:47.000Right, so the question is, do we value the larger animals more?
02:26:53.000Are fish and insects less significant life forms than mammals?
02:26:57.000Are small mammals like root rodents less valuable than larger ones like cows?
02:27:01.000Is it better to kill many small animals for foods like grains and legumes which aren't very nutrient dense and don't meet our nutritional needs than fewer large animals that are super nutrient dense?
02:27:13.000I mean, I'm not claiming to answer these questions, but I think they're questions that haven't been adequately raised and addressed in this ethical argument.
02:27:32.000You could make an ethical argument that killing an animal explicitly to eat it is ethically different than animals being killed as a sort of side effect of plant agriculture.
02:27:44.000I'm not saying that that's a valid argument, but I've heard that argument.
02:27:48.000I don't think it's a valid argument, because once you're aware of it, you're doing it the same.
02:27:51.000It's like the argument that I've had with people when they say that I don't kill animals, but I eat meat, therefore it's better than what you do, because I hunt.
02:28:01.000And I say, no, you're killing an animal with your credit card.
02:28:15.000The whole thing is very, very strange.
02:28:17.000I think that's very important, though, that you listed those numbers, that data, because that's irrefutable and it's one of those arguments that comes up that they just want to bury their head in the sand about.
02:28:28.000If you're buying agriculture, unless you have your own organic farm where you are 100% aware of every single aspect from seed to plucking and cooking, if you're not, if you're buying from large-scale agriculture,
02:28:48.000And you're also part of the environmental destruction machine because these huge industrial scale monocropping operations are incredibly harmful for the environment.
02:28:58.000And if you, again, you think of pea protein, that's an incredibly processed food.
02:29:06.000First of all, just growing peas at the scale you're going to need to have the world's largest pea protein company.
02:29:14.000And then all of the processing that needs to happen from taking a pea to an isolated protein powder, which involves fossil fuels and all kinds of industrial processes, that is not an environmentally friendly process.
02:29:28.000So, you know, is that better for the planet than having cows that are, you know, being raised on land that couldn't be used for growing plants or other crop production and rotating the...
02:29:53.000It's a proven system than scaling up industry to make more powders.
02:30:01.000Yeah, scaling up industry to make pea powder and killing untold numbers of rodents.
02:30:08.000Or birds and destroying natural habitats because if you clear a field for peas, it doesn't have the normal natural features.
02:30:16.000You don't have the habitat for those animals anymore.
02:30:18.000I think it's so significant that you're talking about these regenerative farms because that really is the only way you ever get the nutrients back into the soil.
02:30:26.000There was a book that I read many years ago called Dead Doctors Don't Lie where Dr. Joel Wallach talked about the mineral depletion of our soil and that this is something that they've known forever that's like a slow degrading of the nutrient density in the soil.
02:30:42.000I mean, that's one of the things that keeps me up at night.
02:31:50.000I just don't know how anyone's going to refute this.
02:31:52.000Like I said, I really like James a lot.
02:31:55.000If he decides to come back and come and sit with you after hearing this and watching this, I don't know what he could say.
02:32:05.000Well, you know, it's like you said, when a new study comes out with the meat, then you get the whole group of people pointing to all that epidemiology again saying, look, this study says meat has a higher risk of cancer.
02:32:19.000Then we have to do the whole thing again.
02:32:21.000Healthy user bias, food frequency questionnaire, context is everything.
02:33:02.000I think they're actually acknowledging that those aren't super defensible positions at this point.
02:33:09.000And so they switched over now to the new kids on the block, which are TMAO, new 5GC, and heme iron.
02:33:18.000So there was a guy who said, let's see...
02:33:24.000Dr. Scott Stoll, that's slide 18, Jamie.
02:33:27.000So he says, in animal products, you're getting protein packaged with inflammatory molecules like new 5GC, endotoxins, and heme iron.
02:33:35.000When we consume animal products, it also changes the microbiome, bacteria that live in our gut, and the bacterial species that have been shown to promote inflammation, overgrow, and begin to produce inflammatory mediators like TMAO. So I'll briefly address each of those.
02:33:49.000But before I do that, I want to just say a word about mechanisms versus outcomes.
02:33:54.000So nutrition research can focus on outcomes, which is like number of heart attacks or number of deaths that happen in a population over a given period of time, or it can focus on mechanisms, what caused those outcomes, right?
02:34:07.000So if you use the example of red meat, early, you know, they saw in these big observational studies that people who ate more red meat We know that that was because of healthy user bias.
02:34:20.000It wasn't, you know, accurate finding, whatever.
02:34:22.000But so then they start going trying to figure out what are the mechanisms.
02:34:26.000And so initially, the mechanism was saturated cholesterol, then it was saturated fat.
02:34:32.000So they're moving on to these new mechanisms.
02:34:35.000Well, research on mechanisms is not very convincing if the outcome isn't there.
02:34:41.000So you had that large paper that was just published, the five papers in the annals, that showed basically no evidence that red meat is correlated with any disease.
02:34:51.000So why are we even bothering looking for all these mechanisms that explain why red meat causes disease when we've got this exhaustive study that says that it doesn't?
02:35:29.000The idea is that new 5GC in meat causes an autoimmune response and that increases the risk of disease.
02:35:35.000The problem is that hasn't been proven at all.
02:35:38.000A 2003 paper found that feeding people large quantities of new 5GC didn't actually increase their serum levels of new 5GC. So that's a problem.
02:35:48.000If you have studies showing that eating it doesn't actually increase it in your blood, Then it doesn't really make much of a difference.
02:35:55.000And then you have groups like the Maasai.
02:35:57.000You could not design a diet higher in new 5GC. They drink blood and milk from cows and they eat cow beef.
02:36:08.000And they have extremely low rates of cardiovascular disease.
02:36:41.000Studies have found that chlorophyll-rich foods, like plants, basically, if you eat them along with iron-rich foods, that cancels out any potential harmful effect of heme iron.
02:37:08.000But I'm just saying this adds an element of uncertainty.
02:37:10.000So yeah, green vegetables, red meat, and colon cancer.
02:37:13.000Chlorophyll prevents the cytotoxic and hyperproliferative effects of heme in a rat colon.
02:37:18.000There was another thing that they talked about earlier that I just remembered while you were talking.
02:37:22.000They were talking about fuel and the difference between carbohydrates for fuel and protein, that protein does not provide you with fuel for muscles, which is not true.
02:37:34.000There's something that happens when your body eats protein that it can break it down to glycogen.
02:38:11.000Everyone who knows, like, if you eat too much protein on a ketogenic diet, it'll knock you out of ketosis because your body will convert it.
02:38:23.000So that was a huge omission or oversimplification.
02:38:27.000I think you said this before and I agree with you.
02:38:30.000For people who are doing explosive types of activity like MMA or CrossFit or basketball or something like that, they're going to typically do better with carbohydrate, a substantial portion of carbohydrate in their diet.
02:38:46.000Whereas, we're seeing a pattern now of endurance athletes or endurance activities.
02:38:52.000A lot of those people can thrive on a very low-carb diet.
02:38:56.000Zach Bitter is one example, but there are others.
02:39:46.000Well, also, hasn't it been shown, I think, Lane Norton, BioLane, was talking about this in his debunking of the Game Changers.
02:39:55.000It's actually been shown that glycogen absorption, or they get more recovery, that's what it was, from carbohydrates mixed with protein than even carbohydrates alone or protein alone.
02:40:09.000That's why post-workout nutrition often is suggested that you have both protein and carbohydrates.
02:40:15.000So there's one more slide I want to show on the heme iron thing, which is 23 and 24. So this is the largest meta-analysis of heme iron studies.
02:40:24.000And again, for people not familiar with the term meta-analysis, it's where you look at a bunch of different studies that have been done and you analyze them together.
02:40:32.000It's considered to be a very high-quality form of evidence.
02:40:35.000So they looked at all significant studies through 2015, and they found a significant association So what does that tell us?
02:41:41.000So TMAO, this is a molecule that's generated from choline, betaine, and carnitine in the gut by a microbial metabolism.
02:41:50.000And some previous studies showed that taking carnitine supplements and taking choline supplements does increase your blood levels of TMAO. In omnivores, they went up by like 37 micromoles per liter and in vegetarians,
02:42:06.00027. And that was used to argue that vegetarianism was healthier because they didn't see as big of an increase in TMAO in response to this carnitine and choline challenge.
02:42:20.000The problem is that research has not shown that eating whole foods rather than taking supplements increases TMAO significantly, especially eating meat and eggs.
02:42:29.000There was a study in 2014 showed you needed to eat four eggs in order to raise TMAO at all, and the max rise was only 3 to 6 micromoles per liter compared to 27 or 37, which I said from supplements in some,
02:42:46.000And then slide 25, Jamie, this 1999 study tested the effect of 46 different foods on the urinary excretion of TMAO in six different subjects.
02:42:57.000And eggs and red meat, as you can see, are barely even registering on the scale there.
02:43:03.000Whereas 19 of 21 types of seafood raised TMAO, and halibut raised TMAO 53 times more than eggs did.
02:43:17.000So here you have this argument, okay, TMAO is bad.
02:43:21.000We shouldn't eat red meat and eggs because of TMAO. But halibut raises TMAO 53 times more than meat and eggs.
02:43:28.000And if you look at the research on seafood consumption, it's almost universally associated with...
02:43:33.000Positive outcomes, you know, lower risk of cardiovascular disease, lower risk of death from early causes, all of the rest of it.
02:43:39.000So how do we reconcile that here with this TMA argument?
02:43:44.000Nobody has ever explained how to reconcile that.
02:43:48.000So again, interesting mechanism, but the research is not really persuasive.
02:43:55.000It seems like it's poorly understood in the cherry picking data.
02:43:58.000The other thing is that back in the original paper by Dr. Stan Hazen about TMAO from 2013, this is slide 26, Jamie, he said the high correlation between urine and plasma levels of TMAO argues for effective urinary clearance of TMAO. So what that suggests is that even if we eat TMAO,
02:44:19.000our body clears it out pretty quickly in the diet.
02:44:22.000So if TMAO is high, it's probably because of other factors.
02:44:26.000And studies have found at least three.
02:44:28.000One is insulin resistance increases TMAO levels via an enzyme in the liver.
02:44:34.000Well, we know that about one in three Americans probably have some form of insulin resistance.
02:44:39.000You know, 70% are overweight, 40% are obese.
02:44:42.000So it's possible that just being an insulin-resistant, overweight American increases your TMAO. It's got nothing to do with meat.
02:44:50.000Gut microbiota, like disrupted gut microbiome, and studies have also shown that SIBO, bacterial overgrowth in the intestine, can increase TMAO levels.
02:44:59.000A ton of people are dealing with that, we know.
02:45:02.000And then kidney disease, which of course happens in people who have diabetes.
02:45:06.000Now 100 million Americans have either pre-diabetes or diabetes, can also increase TMAO. So you've got all of these factors that just have to do with, again, crappy lifestyle, being overweight, being insulin resistant, nothing to do with meat.
02:45:25.000So there was a whole section in the movie about the meat ruining your gut microbiota.
02:45:32.000And I think we're referencing two very low-carb diet studies that did show a decrease in key species of protective bacteria and also in butyrate production.
02:45:42.000So this is also one of my questions about carnivore or super low-carb diet for a long period of time.
02:46:11.000Gut microbiome response to a modern Paleolithic diet in a Western lifestyle context.
02:46:16.000So they took, I think they were Italians, and they had one group that was on a, they put a group of them on what's called modern Paleo diet, you know, so obviously we can't recreate the Paleo diet,
02:46:33.000but just what we all talk about when we say Paleo, And they found, quote, an unexpectedly high degree of biodiversity in modern paleo diet subjects, which well approximates that of traditional populations like the Inuit, Hadza, Matzis, and Peru.
02:46:48.000So they found that eating a paleo diet made your gut microbiota look like a hunter-gatherer microbiota.
02:46:54.000And by paleo diet, what we mean is meats and vegetables.
02:46:57.000Meat, non-starchy vegetables, nuts and seeds, fruits and starchy tubers like sweet potatoes.
02:47:04.000So people who ate that diet had a microbiota that resembled hunter-gatherers, which have the best microbiota.
02:47:11.000Studies have shown that their microbiota is what we want to have.
02:47:15.000So this study shows it's not about the meat, it's about what you eat with the meat.
02:47:54.000I go to regenerative, holistically managed livestock, you know...
02:48:01.000Shifting the food production to smaller scale or at least shifting the method of plant production so it's less industrialized and doing things that actually can improve soil quality and sequester carbon from the atmosphere rather than scaling up more industry and more technology.
02:48:21.000Well, I hope this acts as a guide for people that are confused by this, and I hope people recommend this, because this is probably as thorough a breakdown as anybody's ever done on that documentary.
02:48:31.000And I just wish people would stop doing this.
02:48:34.000I really wish they would just follow the actual science, even if it's inconvenient to their dogma.
02:48:38.000And it's a real problem when people don't.
02:48:41.000It really is, because it's confusing for folks, and there's a lot of people who suffer health consequences because of that confusion.
02:49:01.000We care about animals and animal welfare.
02:49:04.000We just reach different conclusions about, you know, from looking at those problems.
02:49:08.000And we probably have more in common with the average American or person in the world who's just not even thinking about it at all, is eating processed and refined crap and doesn't care.
02:49:18.000We have much more in common with the vegans.
02:49:19.000The difference is these people, like the people that made this documentary and like Joel, they want to ignore evidence that flies in the face of what they're trying to promote.
02:49:29.000And they do it with really frustrating and deceptive methods.
02:49:32.000And that's what I thought when I watched this film.
02:49:35.000It was hard for me to watch the whole thing.
02:49:36.000I'd watched little clips of it before and I kind of had gotten a review of it and knew what it was all about.
02:49:41.000But watching the whole thing, like sitting there going, what the fuck, man?