This week on the Joe Rogan Experience, we talk about the snowocalypse in Texas and how to deal with it. We also talk about Diana Rogers and Rob Wolf's new book, "Sacred Cow: How to Eat Healthier in the Winter" and how they're trying to make a difference in their lives by eating meat and fruit. Joe also talks about his new vegan diet and how he's trying to lose weight and get rid of his bad joints, which is a good thing because he says he's never felt better in the past two years and it's all because he's been eating meat. Joe also explains why he doesn't like meat and why he thinks it's the best thing he's ever eaten and why it's better than anything else he's eaten in his life. And he talks about how he got fat and lost weight and how it's not a bad thing and why you should try to eat meat and eat fruit and vegetables in the winter. Thanks to everyone who called in with their snow stories, and to everyone else who sent in snow stories and snow stories about how they dealt with the snowstorm in Texas last week. We hope you enjoy this episode, and we hope you have a great rest of the week! Thank you so much for listening, and Happy New Year, everyone! -JOE ROGAN PODCAST Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Music by Ian Dorsch. Theme by Mavus White. Artwork by Jeff Kaale. . Music and production by PSOVOD and tyops. The theme by Skateboarder. , and the rest is by DJ Khalex . . and , and our ad music is by & with thanks to , the podcast is ( ) on by SONGS. and our logo by , our theme song is by The Good Vibes. (featuring in the Bad Vibez. by ) and , which is , by the Good Vibrant, by The Bad Vibe, which is also by . , , & , is . ( ) and our , we are from , a , , and ) and we also s , all , also , on .
00:01:17.000Got to a Marriott around the corner from here and thought, well, at least I'll be able to walk, if nothing else.
00:01:23.000And my room overlooked this on-ramp, and I just, every day for a week, with no running water and no bottled water, watched the cars just slide up and down.
00:01:37.000And then I finally went out to Rob's house, where he at least had a pool for running toilets.
00:01:51.000I still have a can of wolf chili that she bought here, but she didn't have a can opener and she was just like, I don't know how to get into this thing.
00:01:58.000The thing is, if you grew up in a place that has winter, like Massachusetts, you're like, this is nothing.
00:02:04.000Like, guys, this is a normal winter day.
00:02:52.000And we were in the process of packing our house to move because we moved March 3rd up to Kalispell.
00:02:58.000So all of this chaos is going on and we didn't know if the moving truck was getting in and then Diana...
00:03:04.000We made it to our place and then we weren't sure if she was making it out of there.
00:03:08.000Like it was, I mean, first world problems but kind of sketchy first world problems as far as they go.
00:03:13.000It lets you know that there's a thin veneer of civilization that keeps all the food on the shelves and all the cars moving and it's not much.
00:07:47.000Okay, there's this group of people that seem to be getting these really remarkable results.
00:07:52.000And the thing that was so interesting to me, my background was in autoimmunity and cancer research.
00:07:57.000And I got into this because of gut and autoimmune issues.
00:08:01.000I'm the person that came up with the autoimmune paleo diet.
00:08:04.000I'm the person that kind of formalized that initially.
00:08:07.000And it works pretty well, but when I saw what people were doing on a carnivore diet, it just blew me away.
00:08:13.000People who had done Every other thing and they were so sick, they were crippled from gut and autoimmune issues.
00:08:20.000They would go on this modified carnivore type diet and put their problems into remission and then have really remarkable health at the end of that.
00:08:30.000And it was a few people initially, but as it has grown, it's become this like really watershed moment.
00:08:35.000And I don't think that a carnivore diet is like the first whistle stop somebody should do in dietary change.
00:08:40.000There's a lot of other shit you could do before that.
00:08:43.000But if you're really sick, you know, I think to both of y'all's points, if you're really sick and you're trying to improve things, like it seems like a reasonable thing to use as an intervention.
00:08:53.000Just it's like playing darts and you're just trying to get closer to the bullseye and you can use that as a beginning point.
00:08:58.000Some people add in fruit, like Paul Saladino has added in more fruit and honey and stuff like that.
00:09:03.000Sean Baker is an absolute beast and he wouldn't be caught dead eating fruit, you know, and it just seems to work for him.
00:09:09.000But I think that it's a reasonable place to at least start and begin tinkering with things and maybe you stick with it long term or maybe you modify it down the road.
00:09:17.000Well, it's got to be a function of different requirements for different people's bodies, right?
00:09:24.000Different people ask more of their body.
00:09:27.000Like a guy like you who does a lot of jujitsu that's very physical.
00:11:38.000It's literally the only food that, you know, from Costa Rica to, I guess the only one that it's not part of would be like the Seventh Day Adventist, but yeah.
00:11:48.000That one is, when people want to lump in all the blue zones, like they always like to use Seventh Day Adventist because they're vegetable-based.
00:12:00.000Yeah, and when you compare them to Mormons, who have an almost identical lifestyle, but they eat meat, it's the same lifespan, but the Mormons are left out of the Blue Zones.
00:13:15.000How do you define- This stuff gets a little bit sketchy, but there's some research that suggests that people with inadequate social connectivity, like friends, family...
00:13:28.000Kind of loners, but, you know, they're just socially isolated, that that is as negative on health as a pack-a-day smoking habit.
00:13:35.000Now, that pack-a-day smoking habit gets thrown around a lot because people will say eating an egg is equivalent to smoking six cigarettes or something like that.
00:13:45.000But I think when you think about human evolution and small group environments and stuff like that, there's something really powerful there.
00:13:55.000You had Sebastian Junger on and they talk about, you know, poor communities tend to have more social connectivity and you don't see suicides within these groups and whatnot.
00:15:09.000So, exercise is critical, but not the primary factor.
00:15:16.000I think it provides the quality of life.
00:15:19.000And, you know, when we think about longevity and kind of healthspan versus lifespan, we want to live as well as we can, as long as we can, and then very short, you know, decline and then, you know, fade out.
00:15:32.000And I think that smart exercise, a base level of cardio, some resistance training, and then just doing a variety of activity Good mobility that I think that that feeds into the ability to do all the stuff that we want to do and also like you get sick you get injured you get in a car accident or something like people you know if you're you're better shape you're just harder to kill and I think that that is such a major factor but I my opinion you could you know maybe agree but um I think when people tackle
00:16:02.000exercise as a calorie burning endeavor like you're much better Time spent focusing on good quality food, very protein-centric because it tends to be satiating so you don't overeat.
00:16:14.000So you exercise so you have a kick-ass life, but if you want to lose weight, good body composition, it's really the nutrition part that addresses the bulk of that.
00:16:23.000So the people that do exercise just for calorie burnout, the problem I usually have with that is that I don't think they enjoy it.
00:16:31.000I think they think of it as this task that one must do in order to look better or to justify a sundae, you know, justify an ice cream sundae or a bowl of spaghetti, you know?
00:16:40.000Whereas, like, you should enjoy the results.
00:18:18.000And so then when you go 0.8 grams per kilogram, you're way above what these RDA – you're at about double what the RDA is.
00:18:28.000But then when you look at optimal amounts – so we went through this in the book and I looked at all the research and how they came up with the RDA. And, you know, we really need at least double the RDA of protein.
00:18:41.000And we need it from animal source foods.
00:18:43.000There's a huge difference between animal and plant source proteins.
00:18:47.000Now that's something that vegans, their hackles, get up immediately.
00:18:51.000How much real data is there that shows, like actual real-world data that shows that plant-based protein is not as bioavailable as animal-based protein?
00:19:01.000I mean, that's just basic biochemistry.
00:20:56.000In order to get the same, even close to the amount of total protein, you would need to eat over three times the amount of kidney beans.
00:21:06.000So, and that would be, you know, somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 and something calories of kidney beans.
00:21:13.000And then you need to have rice with it as well to balance it out.
00:21:16.000Versus 180 calories of protein, or 180 calories from 30 grams of protein a steak.
00:21:23.000And you know, on that sarcopenia side, like losing muscle mass as we age, and also just for athletics, isoleucine, leucine, some of these branched-chain amino acids are the really important amino acids because they stimulate anabolic signaling, and you have a threshold with that.
00:21:39.000If you don't hit a certain threshold, it doesn't turn on the anabolic signaling, so you're tending to lose Muscle mass is kind of some bro science, like you need to eat every two hours or you're going to lose muscle mass.
00:21:50.000It's not to that point, but we do need some amount of anabolic signaling.
00:21:55.000Exercise, specifically strength training, causes that anabolic signaling.
00:21:58.000And then eating a protein-rich meal that's rich in branched-chain amino acids causes that signaling, too.
00:22:04.000And it's not impossible to do via plant-based methods, but it's hard.
00:22:09.000Like, it's really kind of a calculus problem.
00:22:11.000To get that part – that box ticked, like you need to do protein powders and stuff like that to usually get in there and make that happen.
00:22:19.000But then you also get a ton of calories comparatively.
00:22:21.000Wouldn't the simple solution be to – if you wanted to have a plant-based diet, is to eat the plant-based protein but then substitute with exogenous amino acids?
00:23:41.000I mean, you've got to separate out the protein, carbs, fat, and then isolate the proteins.
00:23:45.000And whether you do a hydrosylate of the proteins, like kind of pre-digest them or leave it together, usually hydrosylates taste horrible.
00:23:54.000But I mean, in like an idealized world, if somebody's really...
00:23:58.000They want to be vegan, but they want to tick the boxes of...
00:24:03.000Getting that anabolic signaling, preventing sarcopenia, improving body composition, that is a way that you could do it.
00:24:10.000And it would be vegan, and it would give the right amount of protein, not overfeeding you potentially on the calorie side, and that could be a way to kind of thread the needle.
00:24:19.000So someone's like a vegan weightlifter, and that's the way they should do it.
00:24:23.000They should have like pea protein and then substitute with, supplement rather, with amino acids.
00:24:28.000Especially with the branched chain amino acids.
00:24:30.000And these are all the ones that you need?
00:25:45.000And it shows the sirloin steak on the left and the kidney beans on the right.
00:25:49.000And the amount of amino acids is in most cases four or five times more, if not more than that, from the steak than you're getting from the beans.
00:26:01.000The beans have similar calories, but only nine grams of protein versus 30 grams of protein for the steak.
00:26:10.000And then I have this broken out also for minerals and for vitamins just to show the micronutrients that you're getting from animal source foods too, which are far superior to...
00:26:59.000It's just part of the USDA. Oh, I see.
00:27:02.000And vitamin A, again, it's like you only get 1% from steak.
00:27:05.000But the big ones are vitamin B12. That's a big one.
00:27:09.000Because if you look at the big difference in B12 in kidney beans, you have 0%.
00:27:14.000B12 in steak, you have 95% of your USDA. And that's just for four ounces.
00:27:20.000This is a small portion of sirloin steak, and you're getting almost a full daily requirement of vitamin B12. Which that is a big factor with people that are on a plant-based diet is getting their B12. Yeah, and iron and B12 are two of the most common nutrient deficiencies worldwide.
00:27:38.000And both of those are common in meat and not very common in plant-based stuff.
00:27:43.000Yeah, and whenever there is a nutrient in both plants and animals, our bodies prefer the animal source nutrient.
00:27:53.000So, for example, beta-carotene, which is what makes sweet potatoes orange and carrots orange, We have to convert that to vitamin A, retinol, which is the usable form.
00:28:04.000So when we eat an animal source of vitamin A, which is in fats of animals, we're getting it directly.
00:28:13.000And there's about 45% of the population has a gene that makes it so they can't make that conversion efficiently.
00:28:20.000So not only do we have to convert it, but then almost half of all humans can't do it very well.
00:28:41.000That's my guess, because what we see with omega-3s is people that lived along the coast where they were getting their omega-3s from fish lack the ability to efficiently convert plant-source essential fatty acids to the ones that we actually need for our bodies to use.
00:29:10.000Some genetic testing can ferret some of that out, but now that we have people that come from so many different backgrounds, it can be challenging, and the genetic testing isn't perfect on that.
00:29:22.000You can find that maybe you have a high likelihood of converting the carotenoids into retinol, but then some of these nutrient issues are gut-related.
00:29:35.000So if your gut microbiome is deficient in Some type of bacteria, you may not even get the conversion to be able to get the beta carotene into your body.
00:30:00.000Keep kind of an inventory of what you're eating.
00:30:03.000And then if there are some pretty classic nutrient deficiency syndromes, you know, like dry skin and split nails and things like that for zinc deficiency as an example.
00:30:12.000And so it's almost easier to go that way versus trying to get in and then from like first principles figure out what's your genetics and what's the perfect diet that's going to work for you.
00:30:27.000What do we know in terms of the bioavailability of the plant-based proteins versus animal-based proteins?
00:30:36.000How do we know that the body is absorbing the protein more efficiently from an animal source?
00:30:46.000I'm trying to pull up the The protein bioavailability chart, because there is a chart that sets and its animal source proteins are always above plant source proteins.
00:31:01.000Mechanistically, what they do is they'll figure out a given amount of protein and then they've fed that to people and then they will look at serum amino acid levels after that.
00:31:14.000So animal-based proteins, let's say you give them 30 grams of protein, and then you track over a two-hour period all the amino acids that we see go up and then down during that.
00:31:26.000And you can compare that to beans or broccoli.
00:31:29.000And so that is a piece of how you figure out the I like eating some steak tartare here and there and stuff like that,
00:31:46.000but there's just kind of a reality that meat that is cooked is much more bioavailable for the proteins and also the nutrients that are in it versus raw meat.
00:32:05.000Yeah, I suspect that if you were to sous vide something and slow cook it and it's cooked thoroughly, I think that would probably optimize the bioavailability of the whole protein.
00:32:20.000What about the difference between a medium rare and a well done?
00:32:24.000Is well done less bioavailable or more?
00:32:27.000I think that Well Done is probably more bioavailable, but it tastes so bad that what's...
00:32:35.000I don't know for sure, but if you only eat a tiny piece of it because it tastes horrible, then I don't know if it's really okay.
00:32:44.000I'm always wondered, particularly because of game meat, because wild game meat has always been touted as being much more protein-rich than domestic cattle.
00:32:54.000And I eat a lot of that stuff, so I'm always wondering, what is going on?
00:33:00.000So I mean, you're getting a lot of protein per serving because the game meat is so incredibly lean.
00:33:05.000So when you compare it per calorie, or even if you've just got, you know, four or five ounces on a scale, if you have like a ribeye, what is a ribeye, like 20% fat by weight?
00:33:27.000So if you're looking for like what has more protein, like a boneless skinless chicken breast is going to have more protein than a burger only because it has less fat.
00:33:35.000But it also has less nutrients overall because a lot of the fat-soluble vitamins, the E, A, not really D, K, is all in the fat.
00:33:47.000So that's one of the benefits of eating at least some amount of animal fat because those fat-soluble vitamins kind of associate with that.
00:33:54.000What about the difference between a red meat and a white meat, like a chicken versus a grass-fed steak?
00:34:01.000Beef is about 30% more nutrient dense than chicken.
00:34:23.000Yeah, like, you know, you'll see, like, everyone who has these, like, clean eating books that are eliminating meat, but they'll still have boneless, skinless chicken breast in there, of course.
00:34:31.000It's more like, almost more like tofu of meat, you know?
00:35:17.000So I always tell people, like, if you're in a grocery store and you don't have access to, you know, know your farmer, grass-fed beef, and you're just looking at pork, chicken, or beef, from a nutrient density, from an animal welfare, and from an environmental perspective,
00:35:35.000actually beef is going to be the better choice when you're looking at the industrial food system model.
00:35:40.000Okay, so this is where we get into the weeds, right?
00:35:43.000Because when you say that in any way that beef or raising beef is good for the environment in any way, shape, or form, that's when people go nonsense.
00:35:55.000The doctrine as stated up on high is that if we want to save the environment, we have to eat less meat.
00:36:30.000And this is where sometimes I think that we chose to do the book and film because we wanted to commit career suicide and public self-immolation both at the same time.
00:36:44.000This thing ended up pissing everybody off because we don't...
00:36:50.000Totally in the whitewashed regenerative ag camp.
00:36:54.000We see some laudable features to pieces of the industrial system.
00:37:00.000Some of the meat that we brought you is from a local outfit that mainly pasture feeds their meat, but when they were in a drought situation, and so they reached out to some of the local breweries and they got a bunch of residue from the brewing process,
00:37:15.000and that's what they supplemented their animals with.
00:37:20.000And that's a whole other interesting thing is the bulk of the food that is given to cattle comes out of the ethanol industry.
00:37:30.000We're not stealing food from humans to do that.
00:37:33.000With chickens and pork, You kind of are allocating food that could have otherwise gone to humans.
00:37:39.000But even conventional beef spends 70% of its life on grass.
00:37:43.000And then that finishing process, oftentimes part of the finishing process, they put it in a wheat field where the wheat's been harvested and then it eats the crop residues and it's eating the mash from grass.
00:37:56.000You know, industrial or, you know, drinkable ethanol production.
00:38:01.000So there's a whole interesting nutrient upcycling story there that just gets buried, and it's really important, and it's really valuable.
00:38:08.000It's very efficient, but it doesn't really fit into either camp.
00:38:12.000It isn't this beautific view that we would like all these, you know, grass-fed animals.
00:38:18.000Pasture-raised, you know, stories to fit into.
00:38:20.000And it's definitely not the horrors of, like, industrial chicken production, which is super gnarly.
00:39:37.000But, you know, with cattle, because they're ruminants, their digestive system is very different than a pig or a chicken.
00:39:45.000And a cow can actually upcycle stuff that has no other use in our food system, is just going to sit in a pile and emit greenhouse gases anyway if we don't feed it to cows.
00:40:33.000But when you're dealing with industrial levels of that, like in Brazil, there's a problem with the banana peels because the banana peels are actually – Pretty toxic.
00:40:43.000And it's hard to figure out how to deal with those things.
00:41:21.000And he's just slicing into beef and he's eating this like four pound ribeye and while he's cutting into beef on the other side of the screen, you see someone making like tofu ribs.
00:42:06.000I mean, technically there would be some nutrients, but what it has is the anti-predation chemicals to keep things from eating the banana.
00:42:14.000So it has these, I don't know if it's saponins, and I think it's saponins, kind of a soap-like substance, but it will really irritate and damage the gut lining.
00:42:23.000Like, they try to feed it to cattle, and even cattle that are really good at eating kind of squirrely things, it will make the cattle sick.
00:42:57.000That's the thought process behind the way Paul Saladino describes his...
00:43:02.000He calls himself carnivore MD and basically he's got a meat-based diet, but he supplements it with fruit.
00:43:09.000And this is the first time I've ever tried to do it that way, and it's so much easier to do than just eat meat.
00:43:15.000It's great because before workouts, like today I had two bananas, and then I worked out.
00:43:19.000Like, you have no problem exercising, whereas when I was just eating meat, I was a little draggy when I was working out.
00:43:26.000And I love meat, but the only time in my life, like I've eaten kind of a ketogenic diet for 23 years, But there's a little bit of fruit, some vegetables, some different things in there.
00:43:36.000And the only time that I had, like, neurotic food desires was when I was doing, like, strict carnivore.
00:43:41.000And I wanted pizza and ice cream and shit that I never wanted before.
00:43:45.000Like, I went kind of crazy, whereas, like, loosening it up and having a little bit of fruit, a little bit of honey here and there, particularly before, you know, pre or post-workout or something, like, I'm fine with that.
00:44:24.000Yeah, I mean, everything on the inside of the grocery store is just completely...
00:44:27.000Or even going to a taco place, and if they fried the corn tortilla on the same griddle as the flour one, I would have a reaction.
00:44:37.000Celiac is an autoimmune gluten sensitivity, so the villi, the little finger-like things that line the gut that help absorb nutrients, those just get killed via an autoimmune reaction because the body is...
00:44:51.000It's made antibodies against proteins in our body by mistakenly making them against the gluten, gliadin proteins.
00:45:00.000How many people have this and don't know about it?
00:45:03.000I know that they think it's 1 in 133 people have it.
00:46:06.000I mean, you know, I think some people just are prone to addiction.
00:46:11.000Is it a psychological thing or is there a thing you can track in the brain when they're overeating like this?
00:46:19.000My theory on this is that some people are just low dopamine and they may get into heroin, they may get into gambling, or they may become compulsive overeaters and it's just sort of how it plays out.
00:46:34.000Like some of my clients, they do all of the above.
00:46:38.000But so I sat in on a meeting when I was a dietetic student and they all have to identify their trigger food and then agree to not eat it and abstain from it.
00:46:51.000So sort of like an alcoholic type meeting except for, unfortunately for them, you have to eat.
00:47:33.000So what do we think is happening to people's guts?
00:47:38.000Do you think that it's the plant defense chemicals that are messing with people's guts?
00:47:43.000Do you think when it comes to, obviously not celiacs, which is an extreme version, but when people do have issues with autoimmune issues that are food-related, What is causing this stuff?
00:47:57.000Like we have now, you know, antibiotics were developed in the 1930s, like the sulfa-based antibiotics, and it was 1950s-ish that the more penicillin-derived antibiotics started hitting.
00:48:09.000So how many generations now do we have, like mom to baby, mom to baby, like alterations potentially in the gut microbiome?
00:48:17.000Some people who have the celiac gene don't express celiac disease because they have gut microbes that trim up the proleal endopeptidase bacteria that break up the gluten proteins.
00:48:32.000Is that something someone can supplement with?
00:48:35.000Kind of, but it doesn't work that well.
00:48:36.000It will protect you from cross-contamination a little bit, but you get so sick with celiac, it's something that I would be careful playing around with that.
00:49:16.000So there's a lot of different things that go into it, which is a little bit of the problem of trying to figure out how to fix it because doctors have a tendency to just say that people are crazy or it's mainly in their head because there's like this piece and that piece and the other piece.
00:49:29.000Clearly a piece to a loss of gut barrier function.
00:49:35.000Alessio Fasano, he's a researcher mainly looking at celiac disease, but he has celiac disease as a model for autoimmune disease in general.
00:49:45.000But there's a loss of intestinal barrier function.
00:49:48.000When intact food particles can make it into the body, then the body can mount immune responses to everything.
00:49:54.000And then the flip side of this and maybe why carnivore works so well is if somebody eats a very simple diet, it doesn't irritate the gut, the gut can heal and then the body is not primed to be, you know, Reacting as much doesn't mount the same immune response,
00:50:09.000and so you can kind of dial that inflammatory process down.
00:50:12.000There's also other people that think that, you know, when you live in a really clean environment...
00:50:16.000Oh, yeah, the hygiene hypothesis, yeah.
00:50:18.000Yeah, so all of us have immune systems that want to be working and exercising themselves all the time.
00:50:24.000And in places where you're more likely to have parasites or...
00:50:30.000Other pathogens through your food, your immune system is busy working on all that stuff and keeping you healthy.
00:50:37.000But when you are living in a place where there's just not anything for your immune system to work on, then it'll work on you and start attacking yourself.
00:50:46.000How much do you buy into this idea that plants, whether it's like kale or what have you, these plant defense chemicals that these plants emit are causing some autoimmune issues with people?
00:51:01.000It shouldn't really be that way, though, not to the degree that we see now.
00:51:06.000And this is where, just looking back at, like, the 1950s, you know, people weren't—Celiac existed then, but it didn't exist to the degree it does now.
00:51:16.000You didn't see these multiple chemical sensitivities that folks have now.
00:51:21.000Plant defense mechanisms are definitely there.
00:51:24.000I mean, part of the reason why people soak, sprout, and ferment grains and legumes is that it decreases those things.
00:51:30.000So within most traditional food cultures, there's ways of taking relatively toxic foods and making them less toxic.
00:51:36.000Like, what do they do with the taro root to get the cyanide out of it?
00:51:41.000I mean, just cooking, but they will also ferment it.
00:52:03.000You know, traditional Mesoamerican food, even though it was very corn-rich, they figured out that you needed to do some things to prevent pellagra, which is this B vitamin deficiency ultimately, which was the inclusion of lime.
00:52:19.000The inclusion of lime, what do you mean?
00:52:22.000When you make corn tortillas traditionally, you ferment it with lime and that breaks down some of the anti-nutrients with the corn and makes it more digestible.
00:52:51.000I mean, it's just really hard to digest them.
00:52:53.000I mean, when you look back at traditional cultures, pre-agriculture, meat was what you ate when you could get that, and then all the other stuff was what you ate when you couldn't get the meat.
00:53:47.000And now you're flanking the weekends with nutrient-poor both Friday and Monday.
00:53:54.000And it's this ideologically-driven thing that's based on this idea that if you eat less meat, it's better for the environment, like this thing that they say.
00:54:02.000And they also say for health purposes, like, oh, they'll cite the China study.
00:54:07.000It's one fucking study and no matter how much you say, hey, you need to read the rebuttals of the China study because they're pretty brutal and it shows that it's a lot of biased evidence and that they really didn't do a good job of being objective about that.
00:54:20.000So there's one thing that's happening right now that's really interesting.
00:54:26.000So there's this thing called the global burden of disease.
00:55:32.000And according to these researchers, which is going to be global food policy, you can now eat zero red meat safely with no – so they said they did their own systematic review but they didn't show any of the evidence,
00:56:22.000I always thought that with scientific papers you had to cite sources.
00:56:29.000Up until about two years ago, that was pretty consistent.
00:56:32.000And then I think we've seen a loosening of standards.
00:56:36.000Here's the difference between 2017 and 2019. So you can see the top part is what we're doing in excess.
00:56:45.000And you can see that diets high in red meat used to be a very small percentage of the cause of death globally, which is even a silly thing.
00:56:54.000But it used to be sodium was much higher.
00:56:57.000And now meat has gone up, do you see this, 36 times more likely to be the cause of death.
00:58:26.000But the thing is, he keeps saying that we've got to eat less meat, and we've got to cut our consumption of meat out to be healthy, and that we're going to get used to these meat alternatives.
00:58:38.000When a guy like that says that, I'm like, are you making money because of this?
00:59:31.000But when you've got man boobs and a gut and you're walking around and you have these toothpick arms, I'm like, hey buddy, you're not healthy.
00:59:40.000There's a lot of profit to be made in processing something into a Beyond Burger.
01:00:29.000But on the one side, there's this story that meat will cause cancer and diabetes and all this stuff, and it's going to destroy the planet because of carbon emissions, and it's using all the water and the land.
01:00:47.000And then when we start trying to unpack that, it's You have to dig into ecology and non-equilibrium thermodynamics and it's not an elevator pitch and it's a lot of work to unpack what those claims are.
01:01:01.000And then, you know, even what is the motivation to do this, then we start getting into conspiracy theory land.
01:01:06.000It's like, well, there are people that want to control the food system and they want to, you know, turn food into intellectual property that they own.
01:01:14.000But that really seems to be what's going on with this.
01:01:18.000And I think they've realized consumers aren't going to just buy it in the grocery store.
01:01:24.000And by the way, it's twice as expensive.
01:01:25.000Like Beyond Burger is twice as expensive as organic grass-fed beef per pound.
01:02:38.000So here's the water one, and I've broken it down, land use, feed use, but this is just the water one.
01:02:44.000And so what most people don't get is that there's, you know, green waters, natural rain, and then the blue water is like when you look down on a map and see rivers and lakes.
01:02:54.000So what we're looking at, folks that are just listening, is when you look at typical beef versus grass-finished beef, it looks like there's probably like...
01:04:40.000It's not stealing water from anything.
01:04:42.000This is the rain, sleet, and snow that falls on the grasslands.
01:04:45.000And these animals should be there because it's part of a healthy ecosystem.
01:04:49.000Like the Audubon Society in the last 10 years has been getting really...
01:04:54.000Involved in regenerative ag because one of the first things that they see when people start doing pasture-based meat is that the bird species come back and come back in remarkable perfusion because it starts fixing – if you fix all of the ecosystem issues, then these literal canary in the coal mines end up getting addressed and we see more bird species come back.
01:05:14.000This brings us to this whole idea of regenerative agriculture being scalable.
01:05:33.000Yeah, so, because cattle only spend about the last three or so months of their lives on feedlots, and so really good grazing can happen even if they do end up being finished on grain.
01:06:20.000In an area where if he were just to let his cattle graze, cattle wouldn't have enough grass because you guys didn't get any rain in Austin, and so the cows would get sick.
01:10:39.000It makes great fertilizer, but it destroys the topsoil at the same time?
01:10:43.000Well, it makes great fertilizer in that you can short-term, and by short-term I mean like maybe a century, century and a half, you can produce a shitload of food.
01:10:51.000But when we think about our planet, we want our topsoil to last forever.
01:10:56.000Like we want to come back 5,000 years from now and have this topsoil better than what it is today.
01:11:03.000Like in the short term, it's good from a productivity standpoint.
01:11:06.000And we started getting excess food production in a way that we could industrialize things like pork and chicken production by the inputs of grains and whatnot.
01:11:15.000And then in the 70s is when it really ramped up with chicken production.
01:11:19.000And that's when people started getting super affordable chicken because there was also, I believe it was vitamin D, they realized, was a nutrient that these chickens really needed in order to thrive in a factory setting.
01:11:33.000And then as soon as they figured that out, plus the antibiotics, which not only keeps them healthier, but actually disrupts their biome enough to make them gain weight.
01:11:44.000And so those were sort of another couple of magical things.
01:11:49.000And then in relation to the fertilizer, I just want to mention with the war happening or potential war, we're also running out of fertilizer.
01:11:59.000So we have to start using animals for nutrients because there's just not enough.
01:12:07.000You have to mine potash and that's already a limited thing too in addition to nitrogen.
01:12:13.000So you mean fertilizer just for monocrop agriculture?
01:12:18.000Just for growing corn and soy and all that other stuff that we grow in massive, massive quantities.
01:12:23.000So a lot of the concerns that folks have, like damage to waterways from effluent, from CAFO beef production and chicken and all that, it's terrible.
01:12:34.000But it's also something that if we did more decentralized production, we broke this stuff up and we had...
01:12:40.000Cattle integrated with pork, integrated with chickens, and the effluent, you know, their byproducts, the feces, the urine, reintegrate that into the soil.
01:12:50.000Historically, that's what we did before the industrialization of the food system.
01:12:55.000This is what people still do in most of the developing world, is they have plant-animal interactions bringing this stuff together.
01:13:03.000There's certain economies of scale that are really cool with the current system, but it's...
01:13:09.000It's not like a Ponzi scheme, but I mean it's got an expiration date on it.
01:13:12.000Like we are breaking elements of our ecological system by kind of strip mining the ability to produce lots and lots of food right now.
01:13:21.000Yeah, that's one thing that I always try to say to people that are very plant-based centric thinking.
01:13:28.000I just stress on them how unhealthy for the world monocrop agriculture is.
01:13:34.000Like this completely unnatural, like you can grow food, you can grow meat in a very natural way, like the Polyface Farms model, Joel Salatin's model.
01:13:46.000But if you want to feed the whole world with corn and grain, you've got to have these massive fields.
01:13:52.000And you're not going to grow anything else but this one thing in these massive fields.
01:13:56.000And whenever you do that, you are damaging that ground.
01:14:00.000And that's what goes into lab meat and Beyond Burger and Impossible Foods.
01:14:07.000I mean, they're using 100% legit chemical ag to make their products.
01:14:15.000Well, not only this, it's like one of the most processed things you could ever eat.
01:14:18.000So all these people that want to eat healthy, plant-based, like if you want to eat like a healthy vegetarian diet, you certainly can.
01:14:26.000But if you want to eat a healthy vegetarian diet and also pretend that these processed things that are filled with seed oils and like, what exactly is in a fake meat burger?
01:15:48.000And you're still, like, for every calorie that you consume of that, you're not consuming something else.
01:15:55.000So where are you getting the vitamins, the minerals, you know, these other things?
01:15:59.000And in a developed world, you could go to your corner store and get vitamins and do all that.
01:16:10.000This whole story has been so tied into climate change, they're really pushing that the developing world adopt this stuff, too.
01:16:17.000And this is one interesting area that different places in the developed world have pushed back because they're like, we can't be dependent on this.
01:16:25.000We have these traditional food systems, and if you make us dependent on the exports of your industrial row crop food system, one, we're super dependent, and two, we can't afford it.
01:16:35.000And then the third point, which Diana really detailed this well in the book, These folks don't have access to like a CVS to go get their B vitamins and their folate and their zinc and their iron and everything.
01:16:47.000And the same deficiencies that underlie a vegan diet looks shockingly similar to what people face when they're in a malnourished state in a developing country because they eat a very starch-centric, you know, monocrop type of diet.
01:17:03.000That is typically the main deficiencies in there largely arise from a lack of animal foods.
01:17:10.000So when people talk about the difference between seed oils and there's other vegetable oils that are not bad for you, right?
01:17:36.000They're not really supposed to be heated.
01:17:38.000And so they're very unstable, create free radicals.
01:17:41.000So if you use them as salad dressing, are they okay?
01:17:44.000I mean, but they've already gone through the high heat process and are rancid and they just kind of add deodorizers so that you can't smell or taste the rancidity.
01:19:22.000There's nothing redeemable about grapeseed oil.
01:19:25.000And I'd have to look up the omega ratio, but you're much better with avocado oil or just good olive oil.
01:19:32.000So why is avocado oil and olive oil, why are those good for you?
01:19:37.000They tend to be high in monounsaturated fat and then relatively low in the omega-6 fats.
01:19:43.000Like, none of these things have much in the short-chain omega-3 fats.
01:19:47.000Some people get kind of wrapped around the axle, though.
01:19:50.000Like, high oleic safflower oil is typically lower in omega-6s than olive oil is.
01:19:57.000So just on that omega-6, omega-3 side, like, it can get a little bit squirrely.
01:20:01.000But then you have the additional piece of how was it processed.
01:20:05.000Like, if it was cold extracted, Then it's probably safer from like an oxidized fat perspective versus if it was heat extracted.
01:20:13.000So it does get a little bit complex and that's where like a good quality olive oil or like butter or lard or tallow or something is just generally safer for most things.
01:20:24.000Yeah, and so then we get to these fake meat burgers.
01:20:33.000And these fake meat burgers, they're using soy oil.
01:20:36.000And then how are they making it look like meat?
01:22:07.000I don't know exactly, but I mean they're going to extract the protein, some of the fiber, they're going to extract the fats from these different things, and then you start putting it together in a kitchen chemistry format to make it look like meat.
01:22:19.000And the blood, like how they're making it.
01:22:53.000Yeah, but it's amazing like the process that's involved in that like all the kneading and twisting like when he ties it into knots He's putting all this stuff in there And in the film Sacred Cow, when I have Rob and Joel Salatin talking about all the inputs that go into Beyond Burger and Impossible Burgers,
01:23:12.000I actually was able to use their own promotional footage.
01:23:16.000Just with Rob and Joel talking about how disgusting the process is and getting this, what did you call it, biological goo?
01:26:45.000That's for a glutton who's also a vegan.
01:26:47.000There's 80 stacks of patties on that sucker.
01:26:52.000So you're saying like their initial claims that have been...
01:26:56.000Yeah, so now when I go to their websites, I don't see a lot of health claims.
01:27:00.000And I do know someone who's working on really taking those products and comparing them to meat and breaking it out for vitamins and minerals because it's just not going to win.
01:27:40.000And that, I think, really comes from these fake meat companies because that's the only thing that they have.
01:27:47.000You know, is that a valid claim that production of this fake meat is like pound for pound a reduction of carbon emissions versus animal-based?
01:28:36.000And I actually have a graphic showing the methane cycle versus fossil fuels.
01:28:41.000So fossil fuels are mining ancient carbon from the Earth's core and pumping it straight into the atmosphere with no It could be part of a cycle, but it's going to be through plants and animals.
01:28:55.000Okay, so we're seeing there's a beautiful sort of chart, infographic chart, that shows how the carbon from the atmosphere gets converted, and the methane,
01:29:10.000it's converted, and so a lot of people think it's cow farts.
01:29:14.000It's actually cow burps that are the big producer of methane.
01:29:48.000But the carbon that they're emitting and the way that there is a cycle, that they're eating this grass, they're belching, it goes into the air, it becomes H2O and carbon, and then the carbon goes back into the ground, it gets into the grass,
01:30:03.000they eat it again, and it goes on and on and on.
01:30:06.000And it's a normal part of what it means to be a ruminant animal on a planet that has grass and you eat that grass.
01:30:14.000Yeah, and so in the US, in North America, we don't have more methane-emitting animals than we did before we got rid of the bison and the elk and all the other natural ruminants that were already here.
01:30:27.000And so we don't have a net bigger amount of methane.
01:30:31.000We just have cows instead of bison and deer.
01:30:34.000And the crazy thing is, even if we did, it's still part of a cycle to get to the point where the cow is emitting methane You had to pull carbon dioxide out of the air, into the plant, get sequestered in the plant until the animal eats it.
01:30:51.000And he had Stephen Koonen on recently.
01:30:53.000I think he talked a little bit about the differences between the cyclical pieces of this story versus just mining ancient carbon and releasing it.
01:31:04.000But the accounting really needs to be different because the danger that we get into...
01:31:10.000We discovered recently that shellfish produce huge amounts of methane, termites, rice paddies.
01:31:17.000There's all these biogenic methane sources that then people start freaking out.
01:31:21.000And there was actually some scientists that were asking, should we eradicate shellfish so that we reduce their carbon footprint?
01:31:28.000And it's like they're suggesting that we reduce the amount of life on the planet so that we can protect life on the planet.
01:31:51.000This carbon tunnel vision where you get so focused on carbon release and you lose the bigger picture of all this other stuff that's going on.
01:34:01.000I think if someone is young and healthy already, probably was raised breastfed well and raised on enough good nutrition, there does appear to be some people that do okay on a vegan diet for a period of time.
01:34:19.000Is there a rough estimate of like what percentage?
01:35:12.000Because of that, it's an uncomfortable discussion because so many people are so ideologically connected to this idea that a vegan diet is better, more karma-free, healthier.
01:35:28.000And what we're seeing with younger people is that health isn't driving it.
01:36:12.000You know, when we set in to do the book, and this was a long time ago, we thought that we were going to tackle the ethical part of this thing first.
01:36:21.000So we cover the health, environmental, and ethical considerations of a meat-inclusive food system is kind of the big deal.
01:37:04.000Was it Finland that they did the interview with the wealthy Finnish families that were vegan?
01:37:11.000And they had really pretty terrible nutrient deficiencies within these folks.
01:37:17.000And they're wealthy, they're educated, they're supplementing, and they weren't able to consistently pull this off.
01:37:23.000Yeah, we see babies—so B12 deficiency causes permanent brain damage, like irreversible, or it can.
01:37:32.000And B12 supplements, if vegans take the vegan version of the B12 supplement— It is actually an analog.
01:37:42.000It's not real B12, and your cells think it's B12. They'll absorb it, but then it actually blocks real B12. It can make your B12... It blocks?
01:38:34.000Is it – So there was a documented case of a vegan breastfeeding mother who was supplementing with B12 in her baby diet from a B12 deficiency.
01:38:45.000And she was supplementing with the vegan form.
01:38:53.000But when we look at general populations, Kids who don't have access to meat are much more likely to be stunted, to have delayed cognitive development, physical development, behavioral problems.
01:39:07.000And we only have one study that looked at kids with meat versus less meat.
01:39:13.000There's only one randomized control trial.
01:39:15.000Everything else is like, oh, this population ate meat and this one didn't, and these guys got more cancer.
01:41:19.000Normally, L-phenylalanine is the form that we use, but the D form of phenylalanine seems to have some interaction in the brain where it actually causes some pain reduction.
01:41:28.000But normally, the D or the R form of those types of nutrients don't really work in our physiology.
01:41:36.000One of the things that you hear about a lot lately is the idea of bugs being a viable food source.
01:41:45.000And that might be a way to get vegetarians or vegans to eat sort of a living protein source.
01:43:55.000So if you're going to have one cow, that's almost 500 pounds of meat.
01:44:01.000And if that cow was raised in a way that increased total life underground and above ground and brought all these birds back and everything, that was a life that actually led to more life.
01:44:13.000Well, if you buy corn, you're definitely responsible for some death.
01:44:17.000There's just no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
01:44:19.000If you have a monocrop field of corn, the only way they're going to keep those animals from eating the corn and to keep, you know, when they plow over the corn and they extract it, things are dying.
01:44:32.000There's just no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
01:44:34.000And then they'll say, but I didn't intend for it to die.
01:44:39.000I mean if you're like shooting a gun into a crowd and you don't intend for anybody to die, but people die, I think you're still responsible for that death.
01:44:49.000You might not be looking where you're pointing the trigger, but I think that this idea of a zero-sum game, this idea of never losing any life, It's kind of crazy and one thing that people that are proponents of plant-based diets really hate is when you bring up plant intelligence.
01:45:11.000They really hate the idea that plants might not just have strategies to avoid predation but might have Real-time maneuvers that they do in terms of changing their chemicals, where it changes their flavor profile,
01:45:29.000emitting these defense chemicals, because they don't want to get eaten.
01:45:33.000And there's some sort of an intelligence that plants not just have, But they have with this symbiotic relationship to fungus under the ground.
01:45:44.000And this mushroom, the mycelium, and the root structures of these plants are sharing resources and they communicate.
01:45:52.000It's a really complex system that reeks of intelligence.
01:45:58.000And we don't totally understand it, but we have this thought in our head that if it doesn't move, then it's okay to kill.
01:46:18.000It's as removed from us as possible while still being a life form to the point where we could just eat it.
01:46:24.000Yeah, in order to make a field for corn or soy, also you have to annihilate whatever was there before.
01:46:29.000Like whatever forest, like you're killing habitat and animals in order to make room for this monocrop to happen.
01:46:37.000And then the pesticides and insecticides and all that stuff too.
01:46:40.000Yeah, and just having that kind of a structure where you have this one plant growing in this massive quantity is totally alien to anything that you ever find on Earth in terms of like, I mean, maybe you'll find grass, like large grasslands.
01:46:56.000But then again, the grasslands is sort of like this weird little honeypot where the buffalo come over and eat the grass and they shit and then the bugs and the whole thing and the manure and it feeds itself.
01:47:21.000And the amount of cropland that we have that can actually support that, that has healthy enough soil, rainfall, or access to irrigation, is flat so that you can drive a tractor over.
01:51:30.000Crickets are a good source of vitamins, minerals, and fiber.
01:51:32.000In addition to protein, crickets are high in many other nutrients, including fat, calcium, potassium, zinc, magnesium, copper, folate, biotin, panthotic acid, and iron.
01:51:43.000One study found that the iron content of crickets was 180% higher than that of beef.
01:51:50.000But you'd have to eat a four ounce block of cricket.
01:51:52.000You wouldn't be doing that if you were hungry?
01:52:18.000And so we could, you know, when people start asking about scalability, at a minimum we should be better about what we do with the food that we have.
01:52:26.000Like, I forget the name of the outfit, but some folks in New Mexico, they have a pork operation and they've made relationships with the local...
01:52:35.000Grocery stores and restaurants and basically their food that doesn't get eaten, expired food, they send it to the pigs, they autoclave it, they basically sterilize it, and then they feed it to these animals.
01:52:45.000And this would have otherwise just gone into a landfill.
01:52:51.000And this is part of the problem that we have is because of zoning and because of cultural things, like we could produce a lot more food in kind of a regional environment.
01:52:59.000Fashion and then be much more efficient with it.
01:53:01.000We could cut like 50% of our food is wasted right now.
01:53:11.000So what if 10% of that got allocated into cricket and mealworm and different things and we use those to produce...
01:53:19.000A possibly vegan acceptable protein source or it gets used to feed the chicken so that they, you know, there's just a lot of inefficiency there.
01:53:26.000But there's also a lot of like cultural change that needs to happen to make some of those things more acceptable.
01:53:31.000This is sort of unrelated, but there was a guy who ate bad Chinese food.
01:56:22.000On admission to the hospital, a patient had a rapidly evolving, diffuse reticular, purpurish rash on the face, not shown, chest and abdomen, arms and legs.
01:56:32.000So, his whole body was covered in these horrible purple lesions.
01:57:14.000The abdominal pain and vomiting were followed by the development of chills, generalized weakness, progressively worsening diffuse myelgias, chest pain, shortness of breath, headache, neck stiffness, and blurry vision.
01:57:30.000Five hours before this admission, purplish discoloration of the skin developed.
01:57:35.000And a friend took the patient to the emergency department of another hospital for evaluation.
01:57:39.000Upon arrival of the emergency department of the hospital, 4.5 hours before this admission, the patient reported a diffuse myoma on a scale of 8 to 10, indicating most severe pain.
01:57:51.000On examination, he appeared pale, anxious, and moderately distressed.
01:57:55.000He answered questions appropriately and was oriented to person, place, time, and situation.
01:58:00.000Okay, blood specimens were obtained, complete culture content approximately 40 minutes after the patient's arrival.
01:58:09.000During 30 minutes, tachyphena worsened and labored breathing, hypoxema psionis.
01:58:19.000There's a lot of fucking medical terminology here.
01:58:21.000Supplemental oxygen was administered, so he was just like fading fast.
01:58:26.000Resulting in oxygen saturation of 83%.
01:58:28.000Oxygen was administered through a high flow nasal cannula at the rate of 40 liters per minute.
01:59:32.000So, do you think that there is a future where people can have this sort of, you know, this philosophy of having a plant-based diet is like to do the least amount of harm?
01:59:44.000Now, if you had some sort of a organic back garden diet and you lived off of your garden, that's probably the most karma for it, right?
01:59:53.000If you just want to eat plant-based foods and then you have crickets for your protein, I mean, it depends on where you live, because in most of the country, you can't grow year-round.
02:00:06.000And I think if we're talking about least harm, and one of the things, like Rob was starting to say, everyone likes to lead with these ethics arguments.
02:00:42.000Okay, so when we're talking about nutrients, and we were talking about the Impossible Burger and the Beyond Burger and stuff like that, so they don't really claim that it's better for you nutritionally anymore?
02:01:43.000But as an athlete, when an athlete is a young, healthy athlete and they're eating a vegan diet, do you think they're leaving something on the table in terms of the nutrition that they could be getting and the performance that they could be getting?
02:02:34.000It does seem like, you know, like the Game Changers movie, like all the athletes, they kind of detailed in that thing.
02:02:42.000Everybody went retrograde after they went vegan.
02:02:45.000The strongman guy got injured a bunch and kind of retired.
02:02:49.000The strongman guy's a tough case because that guy's chock full of steroids.
02:02:54.000There's just no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
02:02:56.000I mean that's a steroided up business.
02:03:00.000Unless they're testing people on a regular basis, and I'm sure there's some that do get tested.
02:03:06.000When you're dealing with those guys that are just enormous human beings that are lifting the most amount of weight possible, a lot of those guys are on the juice.
02:03:14.000And that can paper over a lot of other stuff.
02:03:17.000It's hard to say what's really going on then.
02:03:20.000Well, and also with these athletes, they're genetically gifted, period.
02:03:24.000They can probably get away with eating a lot of fast food and be a lot healthier than me.
02:03:31.000So I think when you're already starting with the ideal specimen of human, and then if they give up plants or meat for six months, it may not have the same impact as somebody who...
02:03:45.000Has already damaged guts or an autoimmune disease or is an older person or is a developing kid who needs, you know, to grow.
02:03:53.000There's been some football players that went vegan, right?
02:03:56.000That were like elite football players.
02:03:58.000But didn't one of them just kept getting injured after he went vegan?
02:04:23.000What's a cool insight with HRV is that if you're sleeping well and your total stress load, your allostatic load is low comparatively, then you've got more resources to put into recovery.
02:04:33.000But if you're eating a diet, whether it's junk food or what have you, that is So this is where,
02:04:48.000like, optimizing sleep and nutrition and gut health and all these things really is something that if you make money from your physicality, like, it behooves one to do that because you want to put every bit of recovery, you know, juice into that process because it gets you back in.
02:05:04.000You can train harder, can train more often.
02:05:07.000So that's where I could see Like the soft tissue injuries and stuff like that starting to be a problem.
02:05:13.000It's kind of guesswork when a football player gets injured because it's kind of an injury sport.
02:05:17.000You'd be really cherry picking if you said that this is why he got injured.
02:08:02.000A pound for pound from a regenerative farm, pound for pound for beef and chicken and whatever they grow, whatever animal-based protein versus this plant-based stuff that there's more carbon being emitted from the plant-based stuff and the production of, and it's worse for the environment.
02:08:18.000Yeah, and funny, it was kind of weird, but I think it was literally the same number but the opposite direction.
02:08:23.000It was like you had to eat one White Oak Pastures burger to nullify the carbon footprint of one Impossible Burger.
02:08:31.000It was like 4.6 or something like that.
02:09:14.000If we look at the underutilized grassland that we already have, so there's a lot of like BLM land or forest service land that's just not being grazed.
02:09:23.000There's farmers being paid through the CRP program to actually leave their fields fallow.
02:09:30.000So if we look at regenerative agriculture as actually being way more efficient than Typical grazing.
02:09:40.000And I put that at 30% better, but most farmers will tell you.
02:09:45.000I have four times You know, more animals on my property because my soil is so fertile and the grass is so healthy.
02:09:55.000So I did go through the numbers for the U.S. and it does look like we have the land to finish.
02:10:01.000Because remember, all cattle start on grass.
02:10:03.000So it's really just those last three months that we're looking to finish.
02:11:09.000I mean, we turned over every study that you could find in this thing.
02:11:14.000And what you find is that pastured meat has a little bit more omega-3s than conventional meat.
02:11:19.000But if you're looking at just the omega-3s, you need to eat like eight pounds of meat to get as much omega-3s as what you get out of like three ounces of salmon.
02:11:46.000We could have, like, had this, you know, soup to nut story on this thing.
02:11:49.000We even hired an independent researcher, person with a PhD in nutritional biochemistry, and we just said, hey, do a compare and contrast of conventional meat and grass-fed meat.
02:11:58.000We want to know their nutritional profile.
02:12:00.000We didn't give this person any of our information, and they arrived at exactly the same thing.
02:12:04.000But we have people really angry at us.
02:12:07.000But at the end of the day, the crazy thing is even when you're putting things like corn stalks and weird things like that into cows, they're so good at upcycling nutrients that meat is just...
02:12:18.000Ruminant meat is super, super nutritious.
02:12:23.000The ethical argument for grass finishing is strong.
02:12:26.000I think the environmental argument is strong.
02:12:28.000There may be a case for like bioaccumulation, like things like glyphosate and stuff like that, but that's separate from it.
02:12:34.000And I don't think it's as compelling a thing as what most people would think.
02:12:39.000But just nutritionally, like vitamins, minerals, proteins, essential fats, essential amino acids, There's just not that big of a difference.
02:13:42.000So if we're doing that, and you're trying to feed the entire country, how much more of an impact does the methane from the cows burping, how much more of an impact is it in terms of the amount of animals that you have to move around in terms of transportation and the fossil fuels that are emitted through that?
02:14:01.000So ironically, I'm going to Brazil next month to speak at a cattle conference.
02:14:07.000And they are actually having to go more towards feedlots because they're getting so much pressure to reduce their carbon emissions.
02:14:14.000And so when you finish a cow on a feedlot, it's faster.
02:14:23.000So it's actually, this one company, it's actually, they're being pressured to go the feedlot route.
02:14:31.000And this is that carbon tunnel vision where they're missing all the other externalities that could be beneficial around the pasture process.
02:14:47.000You have all the other ecosystem benefits.
02:14:50.000But this is where like this kind of neurotic focus on just greenhouse gas emissions absent this bigger picture is You start making dumb decisions, and we're making decisions at a global food policy level that are potentially going to be really injurious.
02:15:06.000What they're doing in that process then, and I think they're looking just at the...
02:15:13.000The emissions are coming from the animals in that case, but then what about all of the infrastructure that's necessary to get the grains to feed to the animals and what's going on with that?
02:15:24.000And I think when we do these full life cycle analyses like what we do with the White Oaks farms, usually the pasture process wins, but you have to be willing to accept that that is part...
02:15:35.000All that greenhouse gas emissions is part of a cycle.
02:15:37.000That stuff that's in the atmosphere today is going to be part of a plant at some point and then part of an animal and on and on.
02:15:45.000Now, when you're talking about the amount of cows that you would need to feed the entire country, what kind of a quantity of meat are we talking about per capita or per person?
02:15:59.000So right now Americans eat about two ounces of beef per person per day and about twice that much chicken.
02:16:07.000So we're really not eating like too much meat.
02:16:09.000Everyone thinks that Americans are sitting down to a tomahawk steak every night and it's just not true.
02:16:18.000You know, we're going to get our protein from different sources.
02:16:21.000So I'm not saying we all need to be carnivores.
02:16:25.000And, you know, then you have this other dilemma of the carrying capacity of Earth for humans, which gets really dicey when you even start talking about that.
02:16:51.000But if you want people specifically to live on this diet like I'm living on, like if this is something that people adopt, now you're talking about many times more.
02:17:08.000Like, I don't know where that carrying capacity pops in, and I don't know.
02:17:13.000It's interesting, you know, how much of that could be supplemented with seafood.
02:17:17.000How much of that gets, like, if we start integrating, like, the pork and the chicken and making that all biodynamic and not as impactful, how much of that could be offloaded into, like, insect proteins.
02:17:30.000But if everybody ate like Sean Baker, we'd be fucked.
02:17:52.000Study back in, like, 2005 that was suggesting that by, like, 2030, 2035, the U.S. is bankrupt from diabetes-related costs.
02:18:00.000Like, we have more costs dealing with diabetes than what we have GDP. And I don't know what COVID has done to that whole projection and whatnot.
02:18:10.000And this isn't even looking at, like, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and all these other metabolically-driven diseases.
02:18:15.000And if there's one thing that, although I guess it's still controversial, but there's one thing that there's at least a little bit of synergy out in the world, people like Lane Norton and whatnot kind of sign off on this.
02:18:26.000If people under-eat protein, they tend to over-eat calories beyond that.
02:18:34.000And so whether you eat higher carb or lower carb, if people eat adequate protein, they tend to not overeat the other stuff.
02:18:42.000If you undereat protein, then you tend to overeat all the other things.
02:18:45.000And this is probably the big driver of this illness.
02:18:51.000What do we do about addressing the health and healthcare issue in all this?
02:18:56.000In some ways, we can't afford not to address this in some effective way because we have to figure out a global public health food policy that's going to allow people to spontaneously reduce calorie intake or We end up with this kind of global control of the food system and you go to buy meat and it's like a social credit score thing.
02:19:17.000It's like, sorry, comrade, you've already got your protein allowance for the month.
02:19:22.000And then I looked into also the carbon footprint of diabetes.
02:20:57.000See, that is something that, you know, obviously this is anecdotal, but, you know, Jordan Peterson was one of the first guys that I knew that got on that carnivore diet, and he lost 40-something pounds.
02:21:08.000He looks amazing, and it's just like he's completely slim and lean, and he just eats nothing but steak.
02:21:14.000Like, there's something about eating meat where you get satisfied easier.
02:22:06.000He gets maybe 15 minutes into it, and then he just starts visibly turning green and starts gagging, and he's not going to make it.
02:22:13.000And he asked the waitress in this place to get him a giant plate of salty, crunchy French fries.
02:22:19.000And he would eat a couple of french fries and then a little bit of ice cream, a little bit of french fries.
02:22:24.000But because he was able to go back and forth and change the palate experience, his brain didn't tell him to stop.
02:22:30.000So the only way he would have thrown up, he would have failed eating that ice cream sundae without eating like 2,000 calories of french fries, which is just crazy.
02:24:20.000When they have these horrific factory farm conditions where they're all packed in next to each other and they shit through the bottom of their cage because it's a grate and it goes into this big swampy sort of lake of sewage.
02:25:22.000The other day I was at home, I had a rare day off, so I just went through the documentary section of iTunes for a goof, or Apple TV, and I was like, what kind of fucking horse shit are you people selling?
02:25:35.000What I was going to say, though, is there's certain people that are just headline readers, and that is a headline reader statement, that meat is bad for the environment.
02:27:37.000And then what we're suggesting, and we don't even have like a solid endpoint other than mainly we make the recommendation that as to the greatest degree possible, decentralize the food production system.
02:27:52.000And depending on where we- I didn't say that.
02:28:09.000I do think that more of our food should probably be eaten locally.
02:28:13.000But if we produce more food locally...
02:28:16.000We have much more efficiencies generally.
02:28:19.000And then a lot of these environmental problems like the lakes of like steaming pig shit and stuff like that should just be worked back into the farm.
02:28:29.000They shouldn't be growing pigs that way.
02:28:31.000The pigs should be integrated into the whole system the way that we did about 100 years ago.
02:28:36.000But don't you need a vast swath of land to accomplish something like that?
02:28:41.000Not necessarily, because you don't need to always do megascale.
02:28:45.000And this is some of the stuff that we're going to have to come to terms with.
02:28:49.000Also, so like in the UK, there was an experiment where they put in hedgerows around the regular, you know, conventional farms that they had, but the hedgerows allowed...
02:28:59.000For these predatory birds and insects to have somewhere to hang out and then they would get in and eat the bugs that would, you know, cause problems with the, you know, like the wheat or the corn or whatever.
02:29:12.000So there was a decrease in the total amount of harvest that they had because some of the farm was allocated these hedgerows.
02:29:19.000But then the amount of insecticides and herbicides and whatnot that they had to use were dramatically decreased.
02:29:25.000So we have to start putting what our values are.
02:29:27.000Like, markets are really good at optimizing things, but we're not telling...
02:29:32.000Currently, what we've asked it to optimize is make as much cheap food as possible.
02:29:39.000I think it was 2006, 2007 became the first year, somewhere around there, that more humans started dying from overeating than undereating in infectious disease.
02:29:50.000Like, chronic disease outstripped Infectious disease and lack of food as the main cause of death.
02:30:08.000We produce huge amounts of calories, but now it's to the point that people are so sick that we're crippling our healthcare system and people are unhappy and What I was getting at in terms of sustainability is that if you have a pig farm that is a factory farm, pig farm,
02:30:23.000you're raising thousands of pigs on a relatively small footprint.
02:30:27.000What you need is more smaller farms with some pigs and you need not five corporations to own the supply chain.
02:30:39.000What I'm saying is if you run a pig farm, And you only have X amount of acres and you have thousands of pigs on that pig farm.
02:30:46.000That's the only way you're going to be able to raise the same amount of pigs on that farm.
02:30:51.000You're going to have to bring in food to them, you have to keep them contained, you fatten them up, and then you kill them, and you have this giant lake of their feces.
02:31:00.000This is what is the only thing that you kind of can do to have that kind of yield on a small piece of land, relatively small.
02:31:08.000If you have 100 acres and you have 10,000 pigs in these fucking containment facilities, you're not going to recreate that on 100 acres with the Joel Salatin method, correct?
02:31:19.000If you're going to do regenerative farming, you're going to need some land.
02:31:23.000You're going to need some land, but you're also going to need to have a different supply chain.
02:31:26.000You're going to need to sell directly to consumers and not meat as a commodity.
02:31:30.000But what about meat as a commodity to a place like Burger King or Jack in the Box or what have you?
02:31:48.000I mean, in a scenario like that, then I don't know how Joel handles his, but if you're selling to McDonald's, then McDonald's gets its meat from more regional source versus like this consolidated source the way that happens now.
02:32:05.000Do you anticipate a time where they'll be able to, I mean, I know they are doing factory cloned meat now.
02:32:11.000Do you think that that will be scalable?
02:32:15.000The short answer is no, because it's so expensive to do it.
02:32:19.000But for now, it used to be really expensive to get a cell phone, but now they're fairly cheap.
02:32:24.000It's true, and I'm a huge fan of Moore's Law.
02:32:26.000It's a really good point, but the thing that kind of gets missed in this is that it's so expensive to run a lab.
02:32:32.000I actually did tissue culture, and you have to take all the products of industrial farming Pull that out, process it, and then, you know, I've got protein and carbs and fat in these, you know, jars that I put into this vat and then inoculate it with meat cells and have to keep it the right temperature,
02:33:24.000It's a really efficient system versus, again, trying to pull that all under a roof like this and try to grow meat at scale.
02:33:33.000If you're on like a spaceship or something, you have a closed loop deal, I could see something like that working.
02:33:38.000But as long as we have the sun and grasslands and whatnot, there's still a really efficient piece of that.
02:33:44.000Now, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but As marijuana has become more legalized, people have gone outside frequently to produce it where they can because it's just cheaper.
02:33:55.000The infrastructure of that versus a greenhouse scenario tends to be pretty economically viable.
02:34:01.000So I think you run into those similar situations with the lab-grown meat and kind of butting up against the scale piece.
02:34:09.000Yeah, you'd have to talk to a real marijuana farmer.
02:34:11.000But I think there's some questions about...
02:34:16.000You know, quality and how you grow it and the soil, you know, like the difference between the hydroponic versus growing it outside.
02:34:26.000What other pieces of the puzzle are missing in terms of, like, if we're looking at beef and nutrients and we're looking at the carbon footprint and we're looking at all these different things in terms of, like, Like, a viable and sustainable food source.
02:34:43.000What other pieces are we missing in this discussion?
02:34:46.000Well, I mean, one thing I was going to bring up is just with White Oak Pastures and the impact he's had on jobs and this town.
02:34:56.000Like, he's in the poorest county in the country.
02:35:26.000So you could just like buy a side of beef, a half a cow, you could buy the pounds, cuts, steaks.
02:35:32.000Yeah, but they also have restaurants that they supply too.
02:35:35.000But what the beauty of that and also Some of the stuff that Wendell Berry talks about, I don't know if you've ever heard of him, but there's a great documentary they did on him called Look and See, and he's an agrarian thought leader.
02:35:52.000And he just talks about how everyone from a small town, you haven't really made it in the US until you've left your small town.
02:35:59.000And nobody's like coming back and actually working in their small town and loving the land that they're from and making sure that that gigantic, nasty, polluting pig farm doesn't happen.
02:37:41.000Worked in agrarian settings, and then we shifted into urban centers.
02:37:45.000And maybe there's a case to be made that more people need to shift back into a quasi-agrarian setting, both for the employment, but also for like the quality of life and the production of our food and different things like that.
02:37:56.000Yeah, and I was just going to add too, you know, the vegan dialogue works really well for like Norwegian billionaires and Bill Gates and people that can afford it.
02:38:05.000And they've got a Whole Foods nearby where they can get their goji berries and coconut oil and all those things.
02:38:11.000But for the majority of people, they want meat.
02:38:38.000What was the motivation for demonizing meat?
02:38:42.000Other than, I mean, we know about the studies that were done, that the sugar industry funded, that demonized saturated fat, which is really, when you know about those studies, I believe it was the 1960s, right, where they were saying that saturated fat was the cause of all this heart disease,
02:38:57.000and they were trying to take the blame off of sugar.
02:39:00.000They only bribed these guys with like $50,000, which is crazy, because those findings, so this is pre-internet, obviously, That swept through the whole country, and everybody's terrified of saturated fat, and people started drinking low-fat milk,
02:39:22.000If you look at the difference between people that lived in the 1960s and 1970s versus people today, you've seen all those photos of people on the beach from the 1970s versus people today.
02:40:08.000Yeah, I mean, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are one of the, from what I understand, are one of the big donors to this global burden of disease.
02:40:18.000So do you think it's a financial incentive?
02:40:20.000I mean, who benefits from meat being bad?
02:40:37.000So we've got big oil benefits, the ultra processed food industry benefits, not only because they're the ones making this junk, but also it takes the blame off all the cereals and pasta meals and all that stuff and puts it on meat.
02:40:55.000In the book, and I always forget what's in the book and what's in the film, but you dug into the history of, interestingly, Seventh-day Adventists, vegetarianism, they kind of founded the dietetics profession.
02:42:09.000They're out there shoveling shit and oblivious.
02:42:12.000Well, because they're not part of the coastal dialogue.
02:42:17.000And I think some of it, too, is most of the players that own the meat production, they own like the grain, you know, the corn and everything.
02:42:28.000Because it's all consolidated, so they're like, well, maybe we'll lose a little bit there, but we'll make it up here.
02:42:32.000And they're major investors in the plant-based meat as well.
02:44:28.000The areas that we've had some pushback and the most aggressive pushback has actually been the really meat elitist kind of pastured meat scene because there are people out there that say it should be grass-fed meat or nothing.
02:44:42.000They're not understanding the nutritional importance and how that dialogue, grass-fed or nothing, ends up with New York City schools going vegan, right?
02:44:51.000The grass-fed or nothing thing, that sort of, the ideology, is that oriented in like a nutrition system?
02:46:10.000And then the Vegan Fridays is Mayor Adams, Mayor Eric Adams.
02:46:14.000I actually have a public letter on that.
02:46:16.000So I started an organization called the Global Food Justice Alliance, where I'm trying to advocate for the inclusion of animal source foods for people.
02:46:24.000And I have a public letter out to Mayor Adams on all the points why this is a horrible idea.
02:46:35.000And he says, I have a plant-based life.
02:46:40.000Whenever he is questioned, he's like, I don't want to get into the new ones.
02:46:43.000And the Vegan Friday thing is just, I have a photograph, actually, that I sent over in the Dropbox of what the Vegan Friday lunch looks like.
02:47:43.000And we have major problems, even in developed countries in the U.S., with iron deficiency, which is one of the major things you need for growth, for your brain and for physical growth.
02:47:54.000So the biggest pushback that you guys got was from the agriculture or from the grass-fed people?
02:48:02.000Kind of what you would call the meat elitist.
02:48:04.000We had lots of people in the pastured scene that were very gracious towards the book and thankful and everything.
02:48:09.000But there's kind of a weird cross-section of like the health influencers that say grass-fed or nothing and then also kind of the...
02:48:34.000I'm probably one of the people that released that syphilis on a college campus, and then I did something crazy, and I really thoroughly got in and vetted the science, and it was like, oh, it's not that simple.
02:48:47.000There's great ethical considerations for it.
02:48:50.000There are really, really sound environmental reasons, but when you just...
02:48:53.000But up against just that nutrition piece, it's just not the same compelling story on meat by itself.
02:48:59.000Again, like the dairy, eggs, seafood, huge differences there, but just not the same with meat.
02:49:05.000And there's a lot of very large family foundations that are...
02:49:12.000Funding a lot of this grass-fed stuff, and it's a very progressive platform that they're taking.
02:49:20.000And so to say that meat is healthy, period, it's all of a sudden I'm on the right and not aligning with their politics.
02:49:33.000I am totally apolitical on all this stuff, but I'm immediately tagged as a troublemaker if I say that meat is healthy.
02:49:41.000We have so many problems with that in this country where people get so dogmatic and they're so connected to their ideology that they don't even question anything that goes outside of it.
02:49:54.000And this sort of healthy questioning and just reasoning and logic and just looking at data and looking at information and challenging your own personal assumptions, it's so rare.
02:50:07.000I mean, maybe you get 1 or 2% of the people, I don't know what the numbers are, who look at their diet and look at their life and then look at things like this and read a book like that and go, hey, maybe I should try this.
02:50:18.000Maybe I'm too rigid with this philosophy that I've adopted that plant-based is the only thing that's good for the heart.
02:50:26.000Protects the environment you want to be a good person.
02:50:29.000This is the way to go You know, it's it's just so rare most people they get something in their head and they just stick with that and then their Echo chamber that they exist in that that reinforces and supports that and that's all they ever talk about Yeah.
02:50:44.000And there's a lot of very large interests that are pushing the plant-based narrative.
02:50:50.000And then they have this grassroots army of ethical cheerleaders that are just backing them up for free.
02:51:03.000It's so complicated to be able to talk about the environmental – like we have health influencers that understand the nutrition piece but they can't really articulate all the environment and then you throw ethics in there and then environmental people don't fully appreciate the nutritional pieces.
02:52:45.000And they happen to also be Stephen Kunin's publisher, too.
02:52:49.000They're diversifying, sort of like the meat business.
02:52:52.000I think they're diversifying, but they also, like, they're pretty ethically driven.
02:52:56.000And even if in their team, there were folks that were like, I have some real reservations about this, but this is a story that at least needs to be told.
02:53:03.000What was the rejection when you guys got rejected?
02:53:18.000I think that this isn't going to sell.
02:53:21.000And then the weird thing, and it's probably just COVID, but we would have made the New York Times list, well, if the New York Times wanted to put us on the list.
02:53:30.000The first week we sold 7,000 copies, but Amazon only shipped 2,000.
02:54:53.000There's a debate out there about whether or not we should be eating meat.
02:55:00.000Red meat is now worse for us in our minds than fat ever could have been, because there are so many more reasons to avoid red meat, not only for your health, but also now for the goodness of others, including not killing animals, and for the good of the planet.
02:55:19.000You can't blame people for being confused.
02:55:23.000They're trying to make really important moral and ethical decisions about what they should eat and how they should live.
02:55:28.000It's easy to fall for extreme, simple answers.
02:55:31.000The majority of meat produced in this country is under such abhorrent conditions.
02:55:37.000We both are making reactions to the same evil, if you will.
02:55:43.000They're just different choices of how to do it.
02:55:46.000But what if we're arguing about the wrong thing?
02:55:49.000You look at the Midwest now in the United States, it's corn and soy and corn and soy and more corn.
02:55:57.000This massive amount of monoculture is having devastating effects on the environment.
02:56:02.000What used to be great biodiversity is gone.
02:56:05.000The agricultural revolution has been transitioned into the processed food revolution.
02:56:12.000If you want to fatten up your animals, you put them in a pen where they can't run around and get physical activity, and you feed them lots of grain.
02:56:34.000Are we going to be the death that's killing everything, or are we going to be the death that's part of the cycle of life that actually makes life stronger?