Barbell Shrugged - Food Systems, Protein and Amino Acids w/ Peter Ballerstedt, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash #744

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Peter Ballerstedt is a prominent figure in the fields of forage agronomy, ruminant nutrition, and sustainable agriculture. With a background in forage production and utilization, Ballerstedt has dedicated his career to promoting the importance of forage-based agriculture in supporting healthy ecosystems and livestock production systems. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Agronomy from the University of Kentucky, a Master of Science in Agronomy from Oregon State University, and a Ph.D. in Forage Management from the University of Kentucky. Ballerstedt has served in various roles within the agricultural industry, including as a forage extension specialist for the University of Georgia and as a forage product manager for a seed company. He has also worked as a dairy forage consultant, providing expertise on optimizing forage production and utilization in dairy operations. In addition to his practical experience, Ballerstedt is a passionate advocate for sustainable agriculture and has been active in promoting the benefits of grass-fed and forage-based livestock production systems. He is a sought-after speaker and educator, known for his engaging presentations on topics such as the role of ruminants in sustainable agriculture, the nutritional benefits of grass-fed meat and dairy products, and the environmental impact of different farming practices. Ballerstedt's work emphasizes the importance of incorporating forages into agricultural systems to improve soil health, enhance biodiversity, and produce nutritious food in a sustainable manner. Through his research, writing, and outreach efforts, he continues to influence and inspire farmers, ranchers, and policymakers to adopt more environmentally friendly and economically viable farming practices. Work with RAPID Health Optimization Peter Ballerstedt on Twitter Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram  

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Peter Ballestet is coming into the show and we're going to be talking about sustainable agriculture. So getting away from a little bit of the meat-headedness and we're going to be talking about where the animals live and how they are raised and how kind of like sustainable agriculture plays into the overall health of the food that you're eating, which I love any conversation on the food system because if we are able to take not just the food that we are eating, that's like that grocery store to our mouths, but actually what is the process of getting that food to the grocery store?

Where are the animals raised? And how are we able to actually make sure that the animals and the food that we are eating is healthy before it even comes to us? We wouldn't want to be eating unhealthy food. And what are the systems that we can start to put in place, as well as just digging into protein, amino acids, and a great conversation around food. As always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance

analysis. And you can access that free report over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash, Peter Ballerstedt. Welcome to the show. This is going to be fantastic. We're going to be talking about the food system to start, sustainable agriculture, ruminant. Hold on, we need to break down that right there too. What does that word mean? Ruminants are those animals that have multi-compartmented stomachs. So cows, sheep, goats, deer, bison, buffalo. All the ones we like to eat. Well, you know, we, human beings, I think, have a history of eating anything that hasn't already eaten them. So, um, and even, you know, like once the tigers distracted with Og that didn't run fast enough, then maybe we'll take a go at the tiger too, but I like it. Um, I'd love to kind of start highest level talking about the

food system, which is obviously a gigantic bucket that we could probably talk for hours about. We spend a lot of time talking about proper nutrition of the food that we're hoping people are going to be eating, like high quality proteins. But we never get to talk about the health of the animals that we are supposed to be eating. And that really is probably a part of the equation that very rarely gets discussed. And then I turn on like a Netflix documentary and I see these CAFOs and hundreds of thousands of cows shoved into these little things. And then the chickens, that one scares me too. Chickens is a thing. I've seen that.

When you drive, Travis, when you're driving down 40 in North Carolina, all you got to do is like look past that first row of trees and there's hundreds of chicken farms. Son, I know. I grew up right near Wilkesboro where Holly Farms started. You know none of those chickens are having a fun life and then are crammed in. No, no it's sad but I still eat the chicken but it's still sad. It's probably appropriate to make sure that we're not anthropomorphizing animals, right? That there is something that humans have that animals don't.

That's maybe a philosophical question for me. Dig more into that. I want to hear that. I love your thoughts on all these documentaries too. They're all biased in one direction. So if you could give us a more nuanced view of all those, that would be wonderful as well. Well, sure. I mean, we're all free of bias, right?

It's those other people. Yeah, those other bad people. That's right. But let's just say that one of the unique things about ruminants is that there's no feed food competition between ruminants and humans because ruminants are capable of taking this biomass that we can't utilize directly and upcycling it into meat and milk and then a host of other products that humans can utilize and do and have throughout their existence. And even one could argue that that grain that does get fed to cattle in a finishing system, first of all, globally, if you look at all the domesticated ruminants in the world of all the feed that they consume every year, only about 4% of that is human utilizable. And, and, and, and

a quarter of that so 1% of the total is off grade, it's not fit for human consumption. And then we could argue about whether humans should be consuming the grains that make up the 3%, right? But in any case, they take that. So in the U.S., the primary grain used in feeding cattle in commercial systems is corn, right? And that only 10% of the lifetime feed consumed by a commercial steer in the U.S. is human-utilizable. And so if you just run, you know, sort of cowboy math, back-of-the-envelope kind of math and look at it, we end up getting 240% more human-utilizable lysine from the beef that's produced than the corn they were fed so we're increasing Humanity's food supply and we're improving its quality by having these

ruminant animal systems and you could make a similar argument for other animals um are you are you bringing all that up because mo there are people making the argument that we should just to, you know, agricultural land that's being used to raise livestock, you know, and then the assumption is that you could grow human utilizable crops on that land if it wasn't being grazed. And that's another fallacy because the vast majority of even agricultural land is not suitable for cultivation. And we're finding more and more that by cultivating that land that is suitable, we're seeing some degradation of that land over time. In other words, it's better if we can have livestock as part of that cropping system. So instead of just going crop, crop, crop, crop, crop

year after year, if we throw in a cover crop or some short rotation forage crop, and especially if we can put grazing animals on that, that actually will improve crop yields, it'll improve soil characteristics, it will cut down on the need for inputs we'll get more food produced from the same area and that's the kind of thing we need to do more of sorry if you just do crop crop crop eventually you steal the minerals that we need from the soil doesn't it and then becomes somewhat unusable we're definitely not as good as it was in the first place unless you do something like you're saying where you you know put some put some cattle or

grazing animal in there to get the minerals back well right right uh we we have to pay attention to the removal rate and whenever we're removing these crops we end up removing more nutrients from that area than when we graze livestock on the same area so a cow grazing is going to excrete about 90 percent of the nutrients it consumes oh wow and then what and so if we have a system, and we're going to get a little wonky, there's a group of plants called legumes. Legumes are those plants that form an association with specific bacteria in their roots that allows for the conversion of nitrogen, which is like three quarters of the atmosphere, but isn't directly utilizable. These organisms

can take that nitrogen and convert it into a form that then fertilizes the plants and then nourishes the animals that graze it. And so now we've got this system going where we can actually increase the fertility. And then of course, what's provided to people is in its most utilizable form so we get greatest efficiency of use of those nutrients yeah a few moments ago you mentioned you mentioned that there was more lysine available from from eating the cows and then eating the grain i kind of expected you to say leucine did i did i hear that correctly why why did you make that distinction well because that's another one of the essential amino acids and the lysine tends to be deficient in cereal based rash I mean diets got to keep it straight rations animals diets people it's like feed, food, people. When you jump back and

forth between these tribes, you need to make sure you keep the language straight or they get upset. So cereal-based rations are low in lysine. It's a globally limiting amino acid. Gotcha. So in your world, that specific amino acid gets a lot of attention? Well, it should. But again, one of the wondrous things about ruminants is there is no essential amino acid in a ruminants diet. Just like there's no essential fatty acid in a ruminants diet. But there are those in human diets, right? And there's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate in a human's diet, but there are two forms that are essential for a ruminant.

You have to have both the structural and non-structural carbohydrates available for a ruminant's diet, rumen to function properly. In other other words to support the microorganisms in its rumen properly so you know we we take uh an animal grazing grass and you can't put very much fat into a ruminant and still have the room and function properly so somewhere around five percent of the diet dry matter can be fat and still have everything function properly. Interestingly, the more polyunsaturated fat is in there, the lower the total has to be. So it seems like polyunsaturated fatty acids are more toxic to the rumen microorganisms than other fatty acids. Okay. So it's four, it's five, let's say 5% going in, but the rumen microorganisms, as they break down the fiber, produce volatile fatty acids. So maybe 70 some percent of its energy comes from those volatile fatty acids that are produced

through the fermentation process in the rumen. So low fat in, high fat out. Shrug family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean?

It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside-out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that

based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program. And we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and it's my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. again it's rapid health report calm and let's get back to the show so for the average consumer what's what is the most

relevant part of that why is that's important to know if you're just kind of a regular person making making basic diet choices for yourself or your family well it's to assuage any guilt someone wants you to have in service of their worldview. And I want people to understand that there are no sustainable food systems without animal agriculture in general and ruminant animals in particular. I want people to understand that public health will be harmed by further restrictions in animal source food in the diet and i also want people to understand these are our ancestral traditional foods right regardless of where that ancestry or tradition starts right it looks different different parts of the world in different traditions and i want to acknowledge all those. The idea that human beings can exist with no animal sourced food in their diet, not just exist, let's say flourish,

can develop properly. That is a myth that's refuted by really good quality evidence. It's basically a construct from rich white Europeans and they want to inflict this on the rest of the world there's a word for that it's called imperialism yeah so but I but I digest so if the whole world all of a sudden became vegan like you wouldn't it's not sustainable correct and and and i've i've worked up this new definition a definition for agriculture and the history of agriculture is basically humanity's manipulation of its environments wherever they've existed to increase the productivity of biomass in those environments above what the natural environment was producing right does that make sense yeah totally okay and and if I grow a crop of corn or wheat for grain over half of that biomass in that total crop is not human edible and and when people take so so you can't wait let

me let me can i clarify what you're saying so of that corn that we eat it's not going to be utilized in our bodies no no i'm sorry good question no okay when you just think of you know iowa and and a cornfield and you you see all that plant material there right from the ground up I got that that biomass obviously is not you know over half of it is not human edible right like the stalk I mean even the cob the leaves yeah exactly but it is suitable for ruminant food. And that's another thing back to the land use. You totally clarified everything. Now I get it.

Now I get what you're saying. Feeding the cows, we can use all of that. Exactly. Or other ruminants. And one example from Europe, they used a term vegan food which I'm not completely clear on I think some kind of a processed food um but be that the quote was that for every kilo of vegan food produced there were four to five kilos of inedible biomass oh man so we're creating a lot of waste. Well, it's waste or it's a feed resource, depending on how you do it. And the other thought to explore a little is you cannot replace food production with food processors. And so if I'm taking some, you know, OK, now we've taken that less than half of the biomass that was the corn crop,

so I've got the corn grain now, and I start processing that. Well, I don't get anything new out of that. I don't even get the same amount out of it in the process, right? There's some loss, there's some separation, and those materials go somewhere else. So, and then there's the whole question about what happens to nutritive quality in processing and it tends to decrease it. So now we're not only decreasing the amount of food by processing it, we're decreasing its value. Okay.

And so, and all of this consider in light of the observation or estimation that 60 of the calories in adult americans diets today come from ultra processed foods yeah yeah and for children and teenagers it's 70. okay so when people talk about these forgive me but artificial diets they sort of track you into that kind of food right and and you think about all of the analog products that they want you to believe or somehow a substitute for animal source foods. And those are all ultra processed foods. Sure, they have to be.

I mean, how do you make something that's like meat out of some type of grain or vegetable unless you process the hell out of it, you know? Yeah, yeah. I can't wait to send this to all my vegan friends. Every single one of them. Travis, I was at Costco this weekend, and they had this little egg thing covered in guacamole. And then I looked to the right of the sample stand, and it was fake eggs. It was vegan eggs.

And I went, how did you make it shaped and look like an egg? And it's not an egg. That is disgusting. I don't know. No chance. That's good for magic. You're trying to pull on me here. This is freaky. Um, one question I would love to get into, and this is probably like, um, one of the most, most frequently asked questions that I would, I would owned my gym. Because we would always push, make sure you're getting grass fed beef. And then grass fed beef turned into grass fed, grain finished. And then there's always the just, this cow's been eating grains its whole life. Where kind of are the health benefits of each of those and how do like what is the highest quality meat that we could be eating great question well um so you know my

background is 2007 i realized i was a you know 51 year old balding obese pre-diabetic. Today I'm just balding. You got pretty much hair. I think you got enough hair there. I got you. Oh, okay. I am not worthy. So, you know, that led me, that got me into reading books like Gary Taub's Good Calories, Bad Calories, Protein Power Life Plan by Michael and Mary Dan Eads. There's a list of others. And me into reading books like Gary Taubes good calories bad calories protein power life plan by Michael and Mary Dan Eads there's a list of others and I have a few on the bookshelf and some of them I've actually read I find it's helped

more helpful when you actually read the book than just have it on your bookshelf but maybe that's just me so I was a forage agronomist. I specialized in grazing systems. That was my thing. And so I start coming into this space and I start hearing all this about the benefits of grass fed versus. Okay. And of course, it tripped all my confirmation biases, right? I was just all over that. And then I made the mistake of reading the studies that were being cited as evidence for. Now, I don't mean to read those things. I was like, I don't know if, you know, this makes me as convinced as you seem to be. And so, again, one of our concerns must be avoiding creating barriers to adoption. And so if somebody is facing economic challenges, and I've heard people say this, they say, if you're not going to go all grass fed or not going to go all organic, don't even bother well okay now we know we're you're just like we're not dealing with evidence here because we know that if somebody shifts from the standard american diet almost in any direction they'll make an improvement right because it's so bad now i think featuring the

animal source foods to make sure that we're getting sufficient protein and all of the nutrients that come with it i think that's the key i think that's 80 of the issue now maybe i know of people who tell me that you know they have some experience that would say that you know grass-fed is a requirement for them i'm not going to argue with anyone's personal experience. At some point, though, we need to understand maybe why that is, what is it? Because when we look at the actual data, I think that we can, how did I put this? We can measure quantitative differences at a really exquisitely small scale making then the biological significance of those differences known for the consumer yeah is is i think a step beyond where we are with the data and i'm certainly prepared you know to to say that my present understanding is not correct. If an honest man is shown to be in

error, he either ceases to be in error or he ceases to be honest. Let me clarify. So you're saying that grass-fed or non, it's not significant indifference? Right. I know of physicians who have restored metabolic health in individuals who were basically only able to afford the cheap 80-20 hamburger at, you know, Piggly Wiggly or whatever the appropriate market is, and buy the loss leader eggs, right? And so that, you know, sustainability has many factors to it. And one of them has to be economics, right? And the strain of fiscal, you know, issues is something that has a health impact, right? And so I want us to be really certain before we start telling people thou must do do this and so and and again I'm an agronomist I'm not a physician I'm not a human nutritionist but I know people who are and they tell me from decades

of experience that they've been able to achieve these things without these label claims being part of it yeah right I think the idea of going from mcdonald's to a cleaner healthier just like ground beef just eliminating the processing and just getting the one ingredient has to be an improvement but he's saying it's not a whole lot but what about hormonal from the ultra processed to a single ingredient ground beef is going to be an improvement but going from a a grain bed all the way to perfectly grass-fed only does not have kind of like the the the incremental value that that makes me so happy i heard lane norton the i don't know if you're familiar with lane norton dr lane norton

but he had said the same thing years ago about like the grass fed the difference just isn't there to make these massive claims so it's just so good to hear you know you prefer you know so those studies that i referenced they they go back to what i call the greenland paradox right we've had these series of observations that contradict the major story. So then we come up with an explanation for why, you know, so the Greenland paradox was that you had these natives of Greenland who had very low rates of heart disease. And I think the quote was exactly despite eating a diet high in fat, Right. So what could it possibly be? Could it possibly be that fat in the diet doesn't cause heart disease? Well, we can't go there. So it must be something special about what they're. Okay. So then it turns out that that launches the fish oil industry. Right. Right. And the awkward little observation here is the majority of the fat in their diet wasn't coming from fish.

So there's just lots and lots of, you know, there's sort of these layers of confounding. So if, in fact, as people who I respect have been suggesting, you know, heart disease begins with, you know, in the liver with insulin resistance, you know, et cetera, et cetera. The people start maybe drawing this picture of insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia being the unifying theory of chronic disease. Well, we've had decades of other, I was going to say explanations, but that's being charitable, you know, theories about have Alzheimer's have brain energy disorder that can be, you know, picked up a decade or two prior to, you know, and so they start calling Alzheimer's disease type three diabetes. And now you have people who are extending this beyond the physical, well, that's not even the right right they're looking at the linkage between

metabolic illness and mental illness right and so so now i'm trying to run the numbers and you know we're like what four or somewhere around four and a half trillion dollars of health care spend in the u.s and like% of that's chronic illness. And a significant portion of that is metabolic, which means it's nutritional lifestyle. So one of the problems that we have in our language is we think of obesity as over nutrition, Right? You eat too much, you're not exercising enough. And I'm along with others promoting the idea this is malnutrition. You know, malnutrition is not merely too few calories. Although that's, that's an

important one. You know, that's like what 800 million people still in the world. Yeah, there are 2.2 billion who are overweight or obese you know and and and we're seeing these signs of malnutrition across income level countries so a fifth of women of childbearing age in the u.s are anemic you know so somebody said 95 of the world's vegetarians are economic vegetarians they're not philosophical vegetarians right so if they could afford it if it was accessible they would eat more animal source food right in the u.s we have people choosing not to eat it, and we're seeing similar conditions show up in both places. Yeah. When we dig into the sustainability, I feel like the pushback you mentioned earlier, if everybody kind of went 100% vegan, it's completely not sustainable.

Thank God. vegan it's completely not sustainable thank god i feel like that's the same thing i hear when people say that the idea of like sustainable farming and local farms uh buying buying your meat from like the local uh distributor local farmer that that model also is not sustainable to be able to feed the number of people that we have to feed in the United States. Well, neither one is true. They were dead. Yeah, I know. So I'd love to understand how kind of sustainability on with farm animals,

not using kind of like the CAFO model where we're just cramming tons of animals into these very unhealthy pens, basically. But how do we create a sustainable way where people are able to get healthy meat if both people are saying the vegan side doesn't work and we can't have local farms feeding the town or the city that you live in? Well, I'll push a little bit. One is there's too much either or us and them going on in our culture today. So it's just like saying it's not a question of plant agriculture or animal agriculture. There is no plant agriculture without animal agriculture. And there's a few statistics I can run through real quickly. Over half of the nitrogen fertilizer that humanity depends upon to produce the edible crops is coming from livestock manure. Half of the world's farmers are still using draft animals, you know, to pull plows or

carts or whatever. You know, half of the world's cattle live in either Africa or Asia. Three quarters of the world's sheep live in Africa or Asia and 95% of the world's goats live in Africa or Asia. So whatever we think of in North America, we need to think of globally. And so when people say we can't, my reply is we must. We must find a way for people to be able to feed themselves appropriately,

producing the foods in a way that is appropriate to their environment, their culture, et cetera, et cetera. And it's a multi-layered problem. It's like, I can't just go to my shelf and pull off the forage science book and mail it to everybody and say, there, problem sorted. I mean, it's rule of law issues. it's land ownership issues, it's infrastructure issues, it's the fact that 45% of humanity today consumes less electrical power per year than a large North American refrigerator, right? I mean, a thousand kilowatt hours of electricity per year, 45% of humanity consumes less than that. And so they, you know, now, okay, we're going to take a highly perishable product like meat, unless we cure it or preserve it in some way, and we're going to get it to market.

Well, how are you going to do that without reliable electricity for refrigeration? How are you going to, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So it's, but part of this is getting people to understand that our truly existential crisis as a species is insufficient animal source food in their diet. And we can, you know, we can see this in children whose brains aren't developing properly because they're not getting the animal sort the nutrients that are best provided or solely provided by animal source foods like can you give some examples yeah can you dig into that sure we all have little kids

so that's that's interesting to us ready yeah so if i can cite an authority that might not be respected as much as it once was, the WHO says that the best source of the essential nutrients that children six to 34 months of age or 36 months of age that they need for proper development come from meat, eggs, dairy, seafood. I wonder what those nutrients are oh things like preformed vitamin a zinc iron choline b12 the the essential amino acids in the proper amount right and and and animal source foods provide those and they're most digestible and okay we can get into that unicef though says that 60 60

percent of children globally six months to 36 months of age do not get meat eggs dairy seafood in their diet how many we said 60 60 so this is a shame this is a shame. This is a scandal, right? There are other studies where they've gone into communities and made significant but relatively minor supplementation of their diet, an egg a day. It's not a heavy lift, right? Wow. And they see differences in the scholastic and social behavior of these students at age nine. They can see this stuff showing up. And it's also a model then for empowerment because, long story, in the communities that they were working, the women got to manage the home flock of chickens, right? And they then had the ability to sell some, but the expectation was they wouldn't sell all, right? Some of that would go to feed their own children

that were in this project. Well, what they did was they very quickly started feeding all their children the egg a day, right? And getting more chickens because then they could like sell, right? So, and it's really important for us to recognize that this is a worldwide problem. So they say that in sub-Saharan Africa, the impact from stunting could represent a 10 or so percent drag on GDP. Because these human beings aren't able to achieve their potential because their brains aren't fed properly. And if you don't do that, as that child from conception through adolescence is developing, they never make that up.

That's the rest of their life kind of thing. Yeah. When did all of this kind of start shifting in our population? Like if I were to go back in my history class, all of the Native Americans, they were eating good. They had lots of buffalo buffalo lots of buffalo to eat and then we had lots of farmers that were able to go and make their food and then cereal showed up somewhere like general mills just started cranking cheerios at people and things went

really south very quickly but why why did all of that shift happen um if it seems like we had it figured out where you you like this negative reference to the South man that's not right I'm just kidding I know deliver now yeah I'm part of the people. Yeah. So we understand that about 10,000 years ago, the cultivation of cereals really is manifest, and we can see this take. It's a very interesting story. We don't need to go into that too much. Wow. 10,000 years ago is when cereal started being a thing?

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So that leaves a few years ahead of that, where what were we eating? And if we go back into colonial and early U.S. history, first of all, the people that came here generally did it because staying in Europe wasn't an option for any number of reasons, right? It wasn't the wealthy and the well-to-do. It was what was the phrase, the mongrels of Europe that came over and yeah, they got rid of me early. But they came to the colonial North America and suddenly their access to animal source foods skyrocketed game and you know domestic and and the visitors that came over then to tour around and see what was going on they were amazed at the quantity that was being consumed like throughout every day like this was not happening back for the common folk in europe and we had the stature of americans grow to the point

where we were tall so that when the dough boy showed up in europe in World War I, my God, you know, it's like the Redwoods came in. Okay, well, that's been decreasing. We can look in post-World War II Netherlands, where there was a famine that was part of the occupation and all of that after the government said we're going to emphasize dairy food access and consumption and you know now i'm not small but i go walking around these people and i go holy yeah and and so and and we can see it with other populations that come to the U.S. And within a generation, their height increases. What? That is insane. What about like, you know, Iceland, Sweden, Finland, they all have the tall.

You think this is something similar to what you're saying? They eat more like... Animal source food. Right. And they're big. Yeah. I mean, one point to say is. Pick up the rock.

Red meat is an animal source food, but not all animal source food is red meat. Right. And so if somebody chooses not to eat beef, like, you know, some conversations with India later this uh this week um not eating beef doesn't mean that they don't eat animal source food right they'll eat lamb they'll eat goat they eat eggs they eat a lot of dairy right poultry and so it's like the the when the seventh day adventists define what is a you know a vegetarian and a vegan like you can eat meat once a week and be considered a vegetarian per their definition and you can still terrible you can eat meat yeah i agree but you can eat meat once a month and still be a vegan.

Now, I don't think most people think that's what those words mean. No, not even most vegans would think that. My buddy is a vegan. It's like, yeah, he's a vegan because he loves animals, not because of healthy reasons. He just, you know, he's over the top. I hope he doesn't listen to that. But he loves animals a lot. Yeah, and so do I. Me too, but i love to eat them too man and you know there's a story that i got from a gen a family medicine practitioner in dillon montana and he's all he's all over

metabolic health and he's working with the people in that community and he told me the story that he got a call from the emergency department at his local hospital saying could you please come talk sense to your patient his his patient this rancher in his 50s or 60s had turned up in the emergency room showing signs of a heart attack and so they want him admitted and he's saying, no, I'm not, I can't, you know, and, and so he comes and he's talking and, you know, the, the, the rancher is saying, doc, I'll sign whatever release is necessary. I'll be here tomorrow for whatever has to happen. But I need to take care of the cows tonight and make arrangements for them to be taken care of, you know, beyond that. Yeah.

And I can't do that now. And then, you know, so cows come first. Yeah, man. I have friends who are ranchers in North Dakota. And, like, he couldn't just leave, especially when they're calving. It's like an around-the-clock thing. Yeah. Heart attack and down, you know. And a lot of people don't understand that you know they don't understand some of and and so and then you could look at it it's like this ultimately is

a business right if you don't there's no sustainability without profit there are people who think that profit's ugly and we should't, you know, that's a different conversation, but they bring it into this one. Go to Venezuelan, tell me that. Yeah. And so we know that stress is bad for us. Well, animal husbandry knows that stress is bad for animals in any number of ways, ultimately in terms of profitability. So quite apart from... Hold on. That was not what I was expecting to come out of your mouth, profitability and stress on the animals.

Is that because the meat is less quality? Right. They don't perform as well. Gotcha. Right? Same reason men can't have sex if they're stressed all the time yeah they're not in it you know you're less useful not me brother i've been told um um so so all of these things and and part of my effort, I hope, has been to try to connect people from the agricultural tribes

that I've been trained to serve and I've been introduced to over the course of my career with the metabolic health and wellness groups. One, because people in agriculture need to hear this message, right? You look at the audiences, and it's not a lot different from the general population statistics, right? But on the

other hand, we have people who are trying to do better for themselves, and they've heard all these stories. And I get it, you know, if that's all I knew, I'd be concerned too. But the good news is that in this country, the foods that we need for proper development and function and longevity and quality of life are available at the lowest cost in the rest of the world. And we can have faith in the safety of those products. We don't need to fear that. And people who are producing them in this country are doing a really good job doing it. Can they do better? Of course. Should they? Obviously. Right? We can always improve.

But having a conversation about improvement and change without understanding where we actually are is a little condescending, right? But what about, let me ask one question. What about the added hormones? Did you clarify that? Is that a problem? Like I have a brother-in-law who worries about you know what we might add well so the the difference between hormone implanted a beef from a steer that received hormone implants versus a steer that did not is on the order of one or two nanograms oh okay and okay. And if we look at other animal source foods like butter or eggs, we will find higher contents.

Right? And that makes sense. And then there are plant source foods that have compounds that are sufficiently similar that they will produce an effect in mammals that consume them oh wow and and so and so people have been concerned

about it but let's you know if we're going to talk about hormonal disruption how about we just look at what's the hormonal disruption that comes from a diet that chronically elevates insulin and keeps it there because insulin plays a role in all these other functions right insulin is one of the older hormones in you know evolutionary history so that you can find women women who are suffering from PCOS that is, by my understanding, I'm not an endocrinologist, but they tell me that the chronically high levels of insulin interferes with the normal ovulatory cycle in women. PCOS is the leading form of infertility in women today and people who work with women in terms of metabolic health and therapeutic carbohydrate reduction and women of childbearing age they say

if you are not on contraception and you don't want to become pregnant you must start contraception or remain abstinent while you start this diet. Because that condition can resolve so quickly that women who believe themselves incapable of becoming pregnant suddenly turn up pregnant. Because and so there's one wonderful story. And a woman grew up in Tanzania, educated in Canada, got her medical degree, went back to Tanzania, wanted to practice medicine, ended up setting up a clinic, working just with women. Because, you know, women doctors weren't going to in that society. So, OK, she worked with women and she helped a bunch of these middle-aged women, right? Lose weight and feel better and resolve a number of issues. She was very successful,

but then this rumor started, don't go to her, she'll get you pregnant. Well, I'm not sure that's exactly how that happened, but what happened was, you know, we had late thirties age women who thought they were done having children and weren't upset about that. And suddenly they realized they weren't done having children when the metabolic health improved. right, that said, the reason we're seeing all these derangements in people is because of this factor, when in fact, it might be due to diets that evoke chronically elevated insulin, which leads to insulin resistance in some tissues, not in others, right? It's a complicated thing. But okay, so now we have people who are saying we can't do it because of this. It's like, well, that isn't even on the board anymore. Now the critical thing is you need to find a diet.

You need to do whatever you can through lifestyle, exercise, meditation, diet is the primary one, right? Other forms of stress elimination to restore to the degree possible your insulin sensitivity. And then if part of that is fitness and building lean muscle mass, then we need to be sure that we're feeding your body what it needs to build lean muscle mass as you're doing whatever you're attempting to do to achieve that goal. And, you know, there's a much more complicated story about protein and quality than we've been led to believe because, you know, people go to the table or they look at the label and they say, oh, there's so many grams of protein in this. It says so on the label. And then they add those up and, you know,

they track those. And the reality is that number isn't protein. But we've been taught it is. But meanwhile, for a couple decades, we've had swine nutritionists who've been balancing the rations on an individual, indispensable amino acid basis, right? So they've been tracking how much lysine, how much leucine, right? Making sure that that was meeting targets that they understood. I don't think we're anywhere close to that

in human nutrition. And yet we're both monogastrics. And so I've sat in audiences of meat science, you know, whatever, different sciences. And somebody said, you know, and a talk like that was given. And somebody who apparently had been in class with the speaker said, well, you know, Dr. So, Professor so-and-so was telling us this 40 years ago. Why isn't this better known in the human community? And without thinking or control,

I said, well, because human nutrition isn't a functional scientific discipline. Oh, did I say that? I thought I only thought it. I mean, I'm starting to agree with you just because of all the non-science in that world that we hear or like you know or you know comments absolutes that lack any type of backing so i'm definitely starting to agree with you on that well if we if we look at the dietary guidelines we see that they haven't adequately addressed protein and amino acids is barely discussed at all. And, and, and so the, you know, the knowledge is there, but you have to know where to go to find it. Right. And that's the problem though, except people don't know.

So they just go wherever someone, they might land on some site and they go with that person. There's no other, there's no other reason behind their bias. So, so yeah. If you were to dig into kind of like the carnivore diet um and not comparing it to the vegan diet i think we've we've uh we've cleared that gap but would you say that that is a a kind of a an optimal diet that many people would get a a lot of benefit out of it if they just went straight meat for kind of like their full existence and didn't even worry about other macronutrients. Okay. There's several questions in there. Worrying about your macronutrients. I agree.

It's probably the data. What are you using to track? Where is that data coming from? Because when I look in a table, that's an average of averages. Yeah. And it was an approximation. So it's an average of averages of an approximation. When they say there's so many, when there's four calories per gram of carbohydrate or protein, that that's an average value. And so if you go back and find Atwater's tables, and they did lots and lots of these, you'll find significant variation around that. You just blew me away. I didn't know. Yeah, hold on a second. So four grams of protein per gram. Four calories per gram. Four calories, sorry, yeah. And like nine per gram of fat, right?

Yeah. But those are approximations. Those aren't hard numbers. Oh, I thought for 30 years now that was a hard number. No doubt. Me too. Yeah, no. Welcome to my world.

I apologize to everybody I've put on a macro plan for the last 13 professional years. I don't because it's my it's the university taught me so blame them yeah yeah but but you know so okay finish that if it helps their mindfulness of what they're eating right they're tracking what they're eating okay great just don't put too much onto the numbers right and we all know the fallacy of calories in calories out out, right? That, you know.

Hold on. Let's go with that because what do you mean you don't believe in calories in, calories out? So I do not believe that people become obese because they're overeating. I think people overeat because they're becoming obese. Digging into that one. Lack of micronutrients well that could be possible right because if if if i so we know from swine nutrition that when we put animals on a diet that's deficient in these essential amino acids in some way lys lysine in particular, we then see greater fat deposition, right?

We see animals that are then consuming more of that ration in order to get what they need, right? So what we eat influences what we eat. There's that relationship, and it's hard to suss out all of it, but it's reasonable to expect. The point about the, so back, and now this is going back into the ancient memory of reading Gary Taub's Good Calories, Bad Calories. But he ran through a number of animal models that were used to look at fat accumulation. For example, they took normal rats. They weren't genetically selected to become fat.

Normal rats on a decent chow, these animals ate as much as they wanted and they remained lean. They took those females. They removed their ovaries. Following the surgery, these animals began to overeat and began to get obese. Okay, so clearly hormonally related, something affected ingestive behavior. Now, they said, okay, what if we only allowed them to eat the amount of food they ate before the surgery, right, when they stayed lean, it's the same chow. So they, another group of over-rectomized rats and here's the study and they got just as fat as the previous group, but they became almost completely sedentary. They basically only moved to get back to the food. I see what you're saying. But a lot of humans live like that too.

So it's hormonal. Okay. And there are other examples of these things called Zucker rats, which accumulate a great deal of fat. And these animals can be starved to death and the fat tissue will remain intact yeah like they'll consume their heart right yeah and and if and if you calorie restrict those animals from birth they end up just as fat is is there some sort of Scott sorry they They'll have smaller organs, smaller skeletons, less muscle mass, but the fat tissue will make sure that it's fed. There's an abnormality in that.

So in an animal husbandry, we look at the amount of energy available to be metabolized by the animal. And then we say, how much of that's going to be used to maintain the animal? How much of it is going to be used to support growth? And then if it's lactation, how much is for lactation? If we shift those numbers hormonally, it doesn't have to be a big thing and we can see a profound difference. And so if we imagine a human being that because of a diet that raised insulin and kept it there, it would shift energy storage, you know, the energy would preferentially go into fat tissue,

and then it would be kept from coming back out those are two functions of insulin and and so you you then have an animal or human being that would have less energy to move around right less activity energy so is there yeah is there some sort of relationship between the amino acids and like leptin and ghrelin specifically that are going to regulate hunger and also regulate kind of the overeating side well i guess we're getting to the raggedy edge of the ice of my knowledge right and so i hear it i can get it guys um there is such a thing as incretin effect that I'm aware of, and I don't really feel qualified to go into. But the highly processed foods are ones that evoke a having fat as a significant part of it leads or having these amino acids there in the food. They have to be available in a form that can be absorbed, and then they have to be once absorbed in the right ratio to each other to support muscle synthesis, et cetera. And so it's more complicated than

people have spoken about, but it's easier if you just include muscle meats in your diet, then you don't really have to worry about it. Right. And, and so, and when we think about ancestral diets, it's like, well, yeah, probably that's what we ought to be looking at the fact so back to your question about carnivore diets i i know of a number of people who basically when they eliminated everything but beef and water then saw relatively quick significant improvements in some chronic conditions that they had been living with yeah and okay then people can explore okay if if I really miss something then carefully add it back into your diet and see how it works right it doesn't mean go face first into it it doesn't mean go back to your other diet

right but but there are clearly there's a number of people that can tolerate a range of foods in their diet. One question is, once you're metabolically ill, then can you eat a diet that somebody who never got metabolically ill can eat? And these are questions. But for individuals, they need to know that eating nothing but beef and water for three months or a month or whatever that I think it's probably got to be at least a month, it's not going to kill you. You're not going to destroy your kidneys, your liver, your heart.

You're not going to destroy the planet, right? When you improve your health, you are improving the world. So do that. Don't listen to the people that sold you the diet that made you sick in the first place. It's the same people, you know, and so I think that for some people they end up needing to be, and the more profound, you know, I listened to people like Matt Buzuki, who, you know, he was basically disabled with bipolar. And he is now drug free in remission. And when you start thinking about the burden of medicalized chronic illness in this country. So how many people with type 2 diabetes now know that drug-free remission is a reality and possibility for type 2 diabetes? You know, the stories of the parents who are struggling with children that are intractable childhood epilepsy who discover

that when their children go on a diet that's 80 calories from fat essentially zero carbohydrate the seizures resolve wow yeah what about the bipolar real quick I'm just curious like what did he do to to um get his bipolar condition but what would you say in um remission i would refer everyone to matt bazuki and the bazuki group and i'll send the link um but you have, my understanding is basically a strict ketogenic diet. Got it. And I think less, and maybe the phrase is therapeutic ketogenic diet. So maybe less, you know, typically I think it's like 30 grams of carb or less per day is considered ketogenic.

Low carb is somewhere around 50 i think i'm right on that um and and like i was thinking it had to be below 20 for him i'll check on that that's awesome yeah and and the bazooki group is a charity that was set up by his parents to fund research in this. And if you look into Dr. Georgia Ede, E-D-E, she's a psychiatrist, trained and practiced at Harvard no longer. And she's just written a book called Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind. And this metabolic psychiatry realm. There's another Chris Palmer, his book is called Brain Energy. It came out sort of toward the end of last year. Georgia Eads just came out the end of January. So this gets back to the good news, right? I mean, there are people who are struggling with these things. And the good news is a lot of this could probably be improved if not resolved by this kind

of a diet not that it's me it's for a friend I was asking understood yeah completely completely um Peter this has been fantastic sir I really appreciate you coming on the show uh Where can people find you and learn more? I'm on Twitter, sorry, X, and Instagram at Grass-Based, one word, Grass-Based. I have a Facebook page called Grass-Based Health. Peter Ballersted is all over YouTube. You can find lots of the talks that I've given there. Awesome. Fantastic. There's a sub stack i've just recently started ruminati.substack.com because my title is don pedro the sod father of the ruminati oh man you're all ours now wow travis bass good luck following that one up. I'm not. I am going to give a quick shout-out. This is funny.

My son, we listen to this podcast, Journey with Story. It's about kids. It's storytelling. And this lady shouted him out for his birthday and our whole family, whereas this other podcast who I won't name, who he asked them to shout him out, didn't. Shout-out all these kids but him. So, Kathleen Pelley, Journey with Story, thank you for doing that for my family, and that's all I'm them to shout him out. Didn't shout out all these kids, but him. So Kathy,

Billy journey, which story, thank you for doing that for my family. And that's all I'm going to shout out today. There you go. Look at that. Yeah. Doug Larson.

Right on my Instagram. Peter really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for coming on the show. Happy to be a part of the, the Ruminati with the sod father. So I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. Make sure you get over to RapidHealthReport.com.

That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis. And you can access that free report at RapidHealthReport.com. Friends, we will see you guys next week.