Author Leah Keith joins us on the show to discuss her new book, The Vegetarian Myth, and how she came to write it. She also talks about her own experience with veganism and why she doesn t think it s a bad thing.
00:00:26.000So, listen, this book I've been reading for a while now.
00:00:29.000I'll be honest, you know, I've probably read about two-thirds of it, two-thirds of the way through.
00:00:33.000You make some, first off, for the audience who may not be familiar with you, why don't you tell them your story as to how you came about writing this book?
00:02:55.000We'll bring up the hopper cam for people watching online.
00:02:58.000We adopted a 90-pound, looks like the world's biggest, meanest pit bull who was balding.
00:03:04.000He had alopecia, broken leg, Lyme disease.
00:03:07.000Because we love it, we're animal lovers.
00:03:09.000But I don't see it as something that is unnatural or goes against nature or in any way displays hatred because of the way we are designed as human beings.
00:03:18.000You talk about that a lot in your book.
00:03:21.000Tell me a bit about that, and as someone who is really more of an environmentalist and more of an animal rights person, how you sort of rectify that.
00:05:42.000And we've wiped out 98% of the all-growth forests and somewhere around 90% of the world's prairies have been destroyed, mostly in the service of agriculture.
00:05:51.000So for anyone to say that wiping out the massive amounts of habitat for every living creature that needs a home, there's nothing that's environmentally sound about this.
00:06:01.000In fact, I've got all kinds of wonderful quotes from very serious people about the fact that this cannot be done sustainably, that it's an absolute oxymoron to call anything sustainable agriculture.
00:06:11.000The only thing that sustains it is petrochemicals, plows, and fences and subsidies, federal subsidies.
00:06:17.000That's what keeps the whole system going at this point.
00:06:20.000And so there's nothing environmental about this.
00:06:23.000It's been sold to us as the way to eat green, and nothing could be further from the truth.
00:06:27.000Now, the part where we can disagree is about factory farming, because I think everybody can see that, A, these poor creatures are just living horrible lives.
00:06:35.000And B, it is absolutely just a total waste of everybody's energy, from calories on up, to feed bizarre things to animals that were not designed to eat them.
00:06:53.000It makes us unhealthy when we eat them.
00:06:55.000I hate to cut you off, but I want you to hold that thought because I'm with you here.
00:06:58.000Lotta with Crowder will be right back after the break.
00:07:00.000We are back with who I think is a fascinating guest, Leah Keith, who is talking right now just about factory farming.
00:07:06.000So, to be fair, a lot of problems with the other things that you said, but I agree with you on the federal subsidies and the factory farming.
00:07:12.000Listen, I just wrote a piece in the Blaze magazine that went up this week.
00:07:17.000The scam of the FDA and USDA, or first off, supplements, it was an all-encompassing piece, but also the organic food scam.
00:07:24.000I actually went down, and I buy locally from farms.
00:07:28.000I buy lamb, I buy eggs, and they will never be certified organic because they can't afford it.
00:07:33.000The subsidized mega farms can afford the right fence posts, or they use the right chemicals, even though there's plenty of pesticides and chemical fertilizers that are used in organic food.
00:07:43.000Tell us a bit about that and the sort of the shell game that is factory farming and why people of all political walks should know about it.
00:07:51.000Okay, so back and way up, 1950, factory farming is invented because they took all the ammunition plants from World War II and they converted them to nitrogen fertilizer.
00:08:00.000Since that point, we've been eating oil.
00:08:03.000Okay, that's what the entire thing is based on.
00:08:05.000And what that created was a mountain of corn, just a vast amount of corn.
00:08:09.000There was no way to sell that much corn, to eat that much corn.
00:08:13.000What were they going to do with all that corn?
00:08:14.000And the answer was, hey, let's put animals in really hellacious conditions and Essentially make them live in cities on concrete floors inside steel buildings, and we'll force feed them corn and make them get really fat really fast, which makes the meat cheap, but it also makes the animals really sick, and it makes us really sick.
00:08:29.000This is not the meat we were designed to eat, and it's not the native diet of a cow.
00:08:33.000And the only reason this is possible is because of the farm bill every year that subsidizes the growing of that corn.
00:08:40.000And what it's meant is that all of these poor farmers are essentially serfs to the six corporations that control the world food supply.
00:08:47.000So they're hand in glove, and that's our tax dollars are going to pay for this stuff.
00:08:52.000And by making those subsidies every year on things like corn and wheat and soy, it means that the cheapest calories out there are this crap carbohydrate.
00:09:01.000And that's why America's got fat, especially poor people, because it's all they can afford.
00:09:05.000And the only reason they can afford it is because that's what's subsidized.
00:09:33.000But, you know, you're right, and it's funny because I know you would obviously align yourself more to the left.
00:09:37.000But I couldn't be more against subsidies for farmers.
00:09:41.000I hate it when politicians on either side, and of course what they do is they do it under the guise of, oh, we have to help the American farmer.
00:09:47.000The poor little American farmer, you know, weather is so volatile and seasons change and they don't know their crops aren't so consistent.
00:09:54.000We have to subsidize them because we have to save the American farmer.
00:10:00.000Whether you're a vegetarian, a vegan, or liberal or conservative, I think it's a point that's missed on a lot of people.
00:10:07.000Just like with banks, the Federal Reserve, when you pick winners and losers in any industry, and it's a centralized power from the federal government, it always favors the big guys.
00:10:17.000And in this case, like you're talking about, in the United States, it favors the big farms who can afford the lobbyists who can manipulate policy.
00:10:24.000And you've talked about that in your book, and that's something that I can completely agree with and I'm on board with.
00:10:30.000So, you know, and the other environmental problem, of course, is that none of this is ultimately sustainable.
00:10:35.000You know, every single civilization that's ever sprung up around agriculture, it's the basis of civilization is agriculture, collapses, and it's because it wears out the topsoil.
00:10:44.000You can't clear all the life off the land.
00:10:47.000Plan it to nothing but what humans are going to eat and expect that to last.
00:10:51.000So civilizations last between 800 and 2,000 years, and then they collapse.
00:10:55.000Because that's the exact point when the soil gives out.
00:11:10.000Because this is an activity that cannot be sustained, that's the problem.
00:11:14.000So basically, if we go vegan, fast forward a couple hundred years, we're Lord of the Flies, smacking chubby little piggy for his glasses to create a fire.
00:11:44.000Having been to the climate summits, Copenhagen, Cancun, watched the speeches from Ted Turner, do environmentalists see, or let me just ask you, do you see an irony in obviously condemning big government and their cozy relationship with big business, completely on board, but then a lot of the solutions that are offered by people that tend to involve the government or needing some sort of government policy if we can't trust them right now with their food supply if we can't trust them right now to enact sensible food policy
00:12:12.000why would we entrust them to you know save the planet well i think the only way we ever get a government that works is by just constant pressure applied constantly it's You can never be not vigilant in the case of people in power.
00:12:29.000It's not like, oh, here, fix this for us.
00:12:31.000It just means constant struggle against those in power to try to get them to do something right.
00:12:35.000And I think that at this point the problems are so gigantic and so systemic that we need every solution anybody can think of to try to turn this around before it's too late.
00:12:46.000But do you really think that solution can come from the government, or even if we bring it to the government, that they wouldn't screw it up?
00:12:52.000Listen, I think we all want a cleaner Earth, and I just certainly don't want to get off into the areas that we disagree too much, but I'll just leave it at that, then.
00:12:59.000It's one of those things where I do not trust the government with something as mammoth as saving the planet.
00:13:04.000If I can't trust them with a checking account, I don't know why I would trust them with the ozone layer.
00:13:44.000And my doctor said, well, yeah, you know what?
00:13:46.000If you're doing all the raw spinach and the kale, which we've all been told is the best thing for you in as much as you can stuff in a blender, it's not.
00:13:55.000Tell us just, if only to save one thyroid gland out there, why the whole green smoothie, green juice thing might not be as good for you as you think.
00:14:05.000Yeah, a lot of those vegetables are really hard on your thyroid.
00:14:09.000They just are their goitrogens, and they're going to do damage really hard on your thyroid to deal with all the compounds that are in those vegetables.
00:14:16.000A lot of vegetables are not particularly edible until you cook them, first of all.
00:14:20.000You know, a lot of people want you to believe, a lot of those sort of vegan, raw vegan people, oh, if they cook it, it's bad.
00:15:53.000Those are very good things to eat raw.
00:15:55.000Some things are very edible raw, some things are not.
00:15:57.000Raw organ meats, you should eat a little of those every week too.
00:16:00.000I know we are very grossed out in this culture by this, but around the world, across human history, those are the foods that are considered sacred.
00:16:43.000What do you say to someone who might argue, obviously vegan, like you said, is ideological extremism, and now you've kind of gone the other way.
00:16:50.000Do you think that maybe people who do what you do either just have a fascination with sort of self-experimentation or more extreme personalities?
00:19:17.000And so you have to factor that out and say, okay, so if you got over all the environmental factors that made being a baby really hard in prehistory, in fact, past that, you had really, really good solid health.
00:19:27.000That changes when people take up agriculture.
00:19:32.000It was actually a complete disaster for human health when people switch from these nutrient-dense diets based on animals to diets based strictly on carbohydrate.
00:19:39.000And the archaeological record could not be clearer.
00:19:42.000Their bones just crumble, their teeth fall out, and they shrink six inches almost immediately.
00:19:59.000See, this is the thing where I am fascinated with these guests.
00:20:02.000And I know we do mainly politics in the show, though we'll have professional athletes or actors.
00:20:07.000But Lear Keith wrote this book, The Vegetarian Myth, which the way I found her was I thought that she was somebody very different than who she turns out to be.
00:20:14.000And who she turns out to be is very interesting.
00:20:16.000Lear, thanks so much for being back with us.
00:20:19.000So you were just talking about how catastrophic agriculture can be to human health.
00:20:27.000I tend to believe that mainly meats and then some veggies and fruit, and I don't think oatmeal's going to kill you.
00:20:33.000But I can understand the argument for the paleo crowd.
00:20:36.000But I do think, like you said, it's undeniable that a lot of this, like a lot of things, is influenced through those in political power or those who can...
00:20:46.000Those who have the most amount of cash, let's be honest, you were talking about super farms earlier.
00:21:09.000And in the last generation, most of all.
00:21:11.000And it's exactly because of those government recommendations and the way that they put those policies forward and changed the way everybody ate.
00:21:19.000And it was a huge experiment on public health.
00:22:05.000Well, what about people like Rob Wolf out there, some paleos who say, you know, tubers and root vegetables, things like potatoes, sweet potatoes, uh, for high performing athletes, it's actually better to have a higher carbohydrate intake provided they're not coming from processed grains.
00:22:17.000Would you say that's a, that argument holds water or are they off base?
00:22:46.000Like I said, I don't agree with you on everything that you've brought forward.
00:22:49.000But I do hate it when people on the other side just make simplistic arguments like, well, life expectancy is a lot longer.
00:22:54.000Well, you know, people used to have 19 kids because 12 of them would get kicked by horses.
00:22:58.000The difference is now they're being taken out by a few boxes of Froot Loops.
00:23:01.000So the cause of death is very different.
00:23:04.000And obviously there were acute, I guess you can say, environmental consequences.
00:23:08.000The reasons is the term you used earlier, or acute causes of death were much more common, right?
00:23:12.000But nowadays, the chronic disease is definitely a problem that I think everyone kind of acknowledges.
00:23:18.000Just everyone tries to solve it a different way.
00:23:20.000And the misinformation out there, I want to get back to your book, The Vegetarian Myth.
00:23:25.000You do realize that you are considered, like you said, an apostate, but not only by vegans, but by general mainstream health right now.
00:23:32.000You should be going to a Jamba Juice and getting a smoothie.
00:23:36.000A majority of your plate should be salad and fruits.
00:23:40.000How does that make you feel when you know what you've done to your body, you know the research you've put into it, and for some reason a majority of the country is just flat out wrong?
00:23:49.000Well, you know, a lot more doctors are coming around.
00:23:52.000This is pretty much every day in the news you can find, okay, another study that shows, gosh, saturated fat actually doesn't hurt people.
00:24:00.000It was even on the cover of Time, you know, where they're like, oops, butter isn't bad, you know, and it's coming round because they did try this terrible experiment on us all and it failed.
00:24:10.000So, you know, they're having to retrench.
00:24:12.000And I don't know how long it's going to take for the really big institutions like the USDA to come out.
00:24:16.000The thing to know about the USDA is that they are not charged with protecting public health.
00:24:20.000They are charged with selling commodity agriculture.
00:24:23.000So they're going to keep pushing that food pyramid basically until they're dead.
00:24:27.000Because that's what's the most money for those giant corporations.
00:25:54.000Everyone said, the occupiers are the first people to do this.
00:25:57.000I was at, and I'm not a tea partier, I was at the first tea party rally.
00:26:01.000And, you know, you may disagree with them on a lot.
00:26:02.000The biggest signs they had from the get-go.
00:26:05.000We're down with Wall Street and no more big banks, no more bailouts.
00:26:09.000So this idea that leftists are the only ones against big banks, and I don't know a single conservative, not one, not one, who is a fan of the Federal Reserve or big bank bailouts.
00:26:21.000It's one of those things, I feel like it's been pushed for some reason just this false political narrative, and I think it's maybe, I don't know why people would want to malign one world view as being with big banks when it's not the case, but We agree on that.
00:26:34.000I think pretty much everyone in the country agrees, yeah, we need to do away with big banks.
00:26:45.000One thing I find very interesting that you talk about, and I don't think you claim it as original, but you do articulate it, I think, in a way that is better than most people.
00:26:54.000So you talk about animals and the domestication of animals.
00:27:00.000But you talk about how people say, you know, animals weren't designed to be this way.
00:27:04.000And you use an example of, I think it's 10 million domesticated dogs versus, or maybe it's 50 million domesticated dogs versus 10,000 wild wolves.
00:27:15.000It's sort of funny that we don't see that as evolution from an animal perspective.
00:27:20.000These dogs have evolved to make themselves useful to human beings, and they live longer, healthier lives.
00:27:26.000So this idea that domestication of animals is inherently against some animal moral code could be backwards.
00:28:16.000You know, like wild apples are basically inedible, but they were willing to shift their genome enough to make themselves sweet enough that we decided we really liked them and we've planted them all over the planet again.
00:29:06.000I mean, before it was lichen sort of creeping along at a really slow pace.
00:29:09.000And all of a sudden, you've got insects that fly, and you've got plants making flowers, and the world just blossoms, like literally just turns green very, very quickly.
00:29:18.000So it works, but it's because they work together.
00:29:20.000Everybody gets something out of the arrangement.
00:29:21.000And it's the same thing with domesticated animals and humans.
00:29:25.000We get something out of it, they get something out of it, and we all live longer.
00:30:23.000Isn't it pretty easy to then create the moral equivalency between, if we're all the same, why would plants deserve any less consideration than the animals above them or humans?
00:30:35.000Well, this was a problem I had when I was a vegan because I didn't want to make those hierarchies, and yet I was.
00:30:40.000So meat eaters would sort of taunt me with that question about, well, what about the plants?
00:30:43.000And I never had a good answer because I didn't want to be the person that said, well, you know, animals count, but plants are just dead matter.
00:30:50.000They're just insensate salads, and I'm allowed to just help myself because I didn't want to put forward those kinds of hierarchies.
00:30:57.000I mean, this really goes back to ancient Greece.
00:30:59.000And their belief was that there's no sentience at all in stone, and then there's dirt on top of that, and that's not really alive either.
00:31:05.000And then you've got plants, and they're sort of alive, but not really.
00:31:08.000And then you've got animals, and they're more like us, so they sort of count, but then finally at the top you've got humans.
00:33:34.000We have a very eclectic mix of guests, but I think a lot of people think if you eat meat, you love meat, you have a concealed carry, that you're inherently a violent person.
00:34:13.000So you'll see upcoming appearances, all my books.
00:34:16.000You can write me email if you want, all that.
00:34:18.000I don't read hate mail, so don't bother.
00:34:20.000But if you really have questions or you're intrigued by some of this, I can give you more resources, lots of good information.
00:34:25.000I mean, we barely scratched the surface, obviously, in a half-an-hour interview.
00:34:28.000But there's so much information out there that I really want people to have, both for their health and for the health of the planet.
00:34:34.000Well, it is probably an even harder name to spell or find if you're on a vegan diet and you're not getting enough saturated fat for your brain.