Science Vs - Vegans: Are They Right?

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

Do vegans have a right to be so smug? We’re finding out whether it really is better for the environment, and our bodies, to go vegan. We speak to environmental researcher Joseph Poore, historian Prof. Connie Hilliard, anthropologist Prof. Katharine Milton, and nutrition researcher Prof. Roman Pawlak. A version of this episode originally ran in 2018; today’s episode contains updated science. Check out the transcript here: https://bit.ly/vegansupdated  The episode was produced by Rose Rimler and Wendy Zukerman, along with Meryl Horn, Odelia Rubin and Kaitlyn Sawrey. Editing by Blythe Terrell and Caitlin Kenney. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Emma Munger and Bumi Hidaka. Music by Emma Munger, Bumi Hidaka and Bobby Lord. Recording assistance from Robbie MacInnes, Paul Reece, Spencer Silva, and Hady Mawajdeh. For this episode we also spoke to Connie Weaver, Nathan H. Lents, Mark Bolland, Ambrish Mithal, Marco Springmann, Mary Beth Hall, Tara Garnett, Tom Sanders, Frederick Leroy, and others. Thank you so much for your help. And a big thanks to the Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. This is the show that pits facts against fried chicken, fish, feta, flan, frittatas, even fricando is off the menu. Today we're asking, should you go vegan? Vegans say no to meat, dairy products and eggs, pretty much nothing that comes from an animal. They say it's better for the environment and their health. But this diet, it is super polarising.

People seem to have very strong opinions about whether veganism is the holy grail for health or a sanctimonious diet that will make you weak. Even around our office at Gimlet, we sent producer Rose Rimler to find out what's ruffling everyone's feathers. So what do you think about going vegan? You need some meat.

I think meat is bad for the planet. I don't think it's crazy to be like, do you need to eat meat? I mean, I think humans evolved to eat meat. Like we ate a lot of,. We've always eaten meat. I f***ing hate vegans. What if they were quietly vegan? Quietly vegan?

What's a quiet vegan? They expect my bones to turn to dust or something bad to happen, but no, I'm still walking around. To be a vegan is to suffer. Many of us have been told our whole lives that we need milk and meat to be strong and healthy. So can vegans actually give up this stuff and still be okay? We are going to dive into the following questions. One, is going vegan actually better for the environment? Two, do you need milk for strong bones? And three,

if you don't eat any meat at all, is it bad for you? We first published this episode a few years ago, and since then, there's been a banana bunch more research on this. Banana bunch, anyway. So we thought it was time to revisit it. And by the way, for this episode, we're going to be focusing on adults going vegan because the science on kiddos can be a bit different. All right. So when it comes to going vegan, there's lots of people saying...

To be a vegan is to suffer. But then there's science. Science vs Vegans is coming up just after the break. It's really not important to me to have a lot of things to show off. Fancy cars, you know, a giant home. Those things are just not part of who I am. But I've been coached and I've learned through my advisor that it's not one size fits all.

Everyone has their own preferences. Everything that I do with Edward Jones is tailored to who I am. Edward Jones. We do money differently. Visit edwardjones.ca slash different. Metro links and cross links are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals, be careful along our

tracks, and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now in-store or online at bestbuy.ca. Exclusions apply. Welcome back. Today, we're looking at vegans to find out if they are, in fact, better than the rest of us. Because some vegans say that this diet is really, really great for the environment. And to find out if that's true, we called up Joseph Poore at the University of Oxford and asked him what is better for the environment, like eating meat or going vegan? I mean, that's an extremely straightforward question for me. Avoiding meat and dairy products delivers tremendous benefits for the global environment.

Joseph did this huge study comparing how farming different kinds of foods affect the environment. And he found that while not all vegan foods are created equal, generally speaking, a vegan diet takes up less land and produces less greenhouse gases than one that includes meat. And it's not just Joseph. Scientists find this over and over again. Without having to feed animals or deal with cows burping out methane, studies estimate that vegan diets reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 70 or 80 percent compared to omnivorous diets. There is one thing to keep in mind though.. Some vegan foods, like almonds and cashews, can be real water guzzlers. And one study found that if you're eating a ton of this stuff,

then a vegan diet could end up using a lot of water. But still, researchers just tend to agree that ditching meat and dairy is good for the health of the planet. But now, let's turn to things that are a little more controversial. Like dairy. So many of us have been told our whole lives that we need dairy to build strong bones. In the 90s, the Got Milk campaign was everywhere.

Got milk. Even the Powerpuff Girls got on board, with ads showing villains stealing their strawberry milk. But why the strawberry milk, Fuzzy? Why? Because I need the calcium for strong bones! And it makes sense that drinking milk would give Fuzzy and you strong bones. Here's why. Our bodies need calcium to function.

It helps muscles and nerves to work properly. And if we don't get enough calcium from our diet, our bodies will actually pull it from our bones. And when this happens, it's believed that our bones get weaker, which can lead them to break more. So for a long time, it was assumed that since milk is rich in calcium, the more you drink, the stronger your bones will be. Research is coming out though, particularly in adults, that's fracturing this idea. It's suggesting that perhaps this link between strong

bones and guzzling milk isn't as straightforward as we've been told. In fact, some researchers are now calling this not science, but... The dogma, the dogma of dairy. This is Connie Hilliard, a professor at the University of North Texas. I think the basic dogma is that dairy is good for everybody. And the thing that made Connie skeptical here was something that she noticed while she was doing research in West Africa. You see, she knew that people typically didn't eat much dairy there. And yet, instead of having weak bones,

they actually had very low rates of osteoporosis. The rate of osteoporosis is, oh, just zero point something something percent. It was so minimal that, you know, interestingly, some doctors had never even seen it. And to Connie, this didn't make sense. Because if we really do need milk to make our bones strong, then how can people who don't drink very much milk have strong bones? Then I thought, well, wow, I just have to keep digging and digging and digging. Connie pulled together data on how much dairy people ate in 40 countries around the world and then compared it to how many people in those countries broke their hips.

And she found that this wasn't just a West Africa thing. Worldwide, people in countries that drank less milk didn't have more broken bones. In fact, what I found was that it was a pattern all over the world. It was just, you know, kind of staring me in the face. That's so crazy. It's so counterintuitive. Oh, yeah, Yeah, absolutely. So I just, I found that so bizarre.

And it's not just Connie's work that's finding this. Other studies have looked at people within the same country and compared those who drank a lot of milk to those who didn't. And although there are some exceptions, generally speaking, they don't find this clear link between downing milk and strong bones. Yeah, that's exactly it. So how is this possible? Well, one reason for this is likely because when it comes to calcium, milk isn't the only game in town.

How do other populations get calcium? And it is primarily from vegetables. Broccoli, kale and bok choy are all packed with calcium. And you can also get calcium from lots of fortified foods like orange juices and cereal. But this is all a bit confusing, Ryan. Because for years we've been told over and over again that we need milk. So we asked Fuzzy about this.

Remember Fuzzy? But why the strawberry milk, Fuzzy? Why? Because I get my funding from the dairy industry. Yeah, the dairy industry. These guys, with the help from the Department of Agriculture, have been making ads telling us that we need milk for strong bones. They've poured millions and millions of dollars into advertising, like recently coming up with that ad campaign

Built With Chocolate Milk to encourage people to chug chocolate milk after hitting the gym. Got milk, milk, milk. Big dairy companies even helped Pizza Hut to make its Summer of Cheese ad campaign several years ago, which gave us this amazing innovation. Only Pizza Hut's new menu gives you your cheese pizza covered in cheese, a triple cheese covered stuffed crust pizza. But the big problem for us is that this industry money is curdling the research too.

Here's how Connie sees it. You know, dairy is a political issue and it's an economic issue. It's very difficult to get authentic research. Yeah, we found some big review papers spouting the benefits of milk that were funded by the dairy industry. So we were all set to say that the dogma of dairy is overblown. You don't need it for strong bones. But then this new study came out in 2020, which looked at vegans specifically.

It wasn't funded by the dairy industry and it behooves us to look at it closely. So researchers in the UK followed almost 2,000 vegans and many more non-vegans for several decades. And they found that vegans had a higher risk of breaking bones, like twice the chance of breaking their legs compared to meat eaters. And so we asked the researchers,

wait, so do we now need dairy for strong bones? And they told us they don't know. They tried to account for how much calcium the vegans were eating and said that even vegans who ate quite a lot were still more likely to break bones. So it's possible that this broken bones thing actually doesn't have to do with their diet at all. Like, who knows?

Maybe more vegans are joining motorcycle gangs these days. With all of this, where does it leave us? Well, the studies on adults eating dairy and having strong bones are actually pretty mixed, more than you might think from those got milk commercials. But the new research coming out on vegans specifically, that's not industry funded, is suggesting that they are breaking more bones than the rest of us. And we're not sure why yet.

So for now, maybe the non-vegans win this one. And by the way, the data on kids is less murky than the data on adults. So it still looks like kiddos who drink milk have stronger bones than those who avoid it. Like, they tend to break fewer bones. Okay, so that is dairy. But after the break... Meat. Are you putting yourself at risk by eating no meat at all?

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Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Welcome back. Now we're going to look at the worst offense in the vegan code. Eating meat. Some vegans argue that by not eating meat, they're doing what nature intended. That is, we evolved to be plant eaters. But, confusingly, you also hear people say the exact opposite. That we as humans have been eating meat for millions of years,

and it's in fact an important part of being human. So burger up, bro. So who's right here? To get some answers, we knew just who to ask. I just am completely crazy for studying monkeys and apes. I really am. That's Katie Milton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley. And for decades, Katie has been studying the diets of primates out in the field, in the tropics of Central and South America. She started out chasing monkeys in the forests of Panama.

And the monkeys are just going through the trees, so they're just whizzing along and you don't know where they are. So I hired a young man to run like a deer after the monkeys, and I'd plod along behind. And Katie was plodding along to catch these monkeys because she wanted to see what their diets looked like. She was actually one of the very first scientists to document what certain species were eating in this very careful way. And the monkeys that Katie saw in Panama relied pretty much on fruits and leaves for food.

This is actually true for a lot of primates. While they might pick off a lizard or two, for the most part, they eat like vegans. And because we humans branched off the same evolutionary tree, that means our ancestors were basically vegans too. We know that we're related to chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, and we know that they are almost totally plant-based diet animals. We were eating wild food, wild plants. And you can see the hallmarks of our plant-based diets in our bodies today. So it's a bit of a funny thing, but we have these colons that are sort of bumpy, whereas animals that come from a long line of carnivores, their colons tend to be much smoother.

So I guess this means the vegans are right. We are naturally plant eaters. No, no, no. No, no, no. Katie's like, enough of this monkey business. Because while we started off as basically vegans, Katie told us we started munching on tasty animals a long time ago. There's no denying the fact that humans definitely turn to eating some meat routinely. When did our ancestors start eating meat?

Around two million years ago. Whoa! That means we were eating meat before we were even homo sapiens. And we know this because we found fossilised animal bones that have obviously been cut up for a meal that are about two and a half million years old. Now, it's not clear why we developed a taste for meat all those years ago, but one of the leading ideas is that the environment where our ancestors were living in changed.

And so they started running out of plants that they could stomach and had to look for food elsewhere. We weren't in the tropical forest anymore, and we were in areas where there are huge herds of animals. And so we began to think, hmm, maybe if I could get some of these huge herds of animals, if I could get one here and there, that would be a useful thing to do. Some anthropologists, including Katie, think that meat eating meant huge changes for us, particularly our brains. I mean, how important was the fact that we ate meat in our evolutionary past? Like, how important was that? It was the key to success. It was the key to success.

Many human beings are the same size as chimpanzees, and yet a human's brain is three to four times as large as the brain of a chimpanzee. And a chimpanzee is the smartest of all of the primates other than humans. The idea is that eating more and more meat helped us to get this big brain. And after we started eating meat regularly, we did gradually start doing more and more sophisticated things like controlling fire, setting up societies, developing language and even making art. That's right.

After we were eating meat, we became the brilliant innovators that we are today. Cheese pizza covered in cheese. The triple cheese covered stuffed crust pizza. Now, as with a lot of arguments about why we evolved the way we did without a time machine, we won't really know what was the key to getting us a triple cheese covered stuffed pizza. But we asked Katie, how is it even possible that meat could have changed our brains? And she told us that this is debated, but this is one idea. She says, imagine you're hungry and you want something big and tasty to eat, like... Elephants.

Really? Elephants? Yes. Yes, sir. Okay. You don't have the body of a great predator. You don't have sharp claws or teeth. So you have to figure out a different way to get that elephant.

You need to make tools, like axes and spears. And you probably need to get a team of hunters together. It's the plan of how to go out and capture the stuff that does the trick. It's the forethought that you have to go through before you get your hands on the meat. Over time, Katie reckons we got smarter and smarter, and then we could catch more and bigger animals. Some scientists also think that nutrition in meat was important for us and helped fuel our big brains. But like we said, it is tough to know for sure if eating meat is really the thing that beefed up our brains. But what we do know is when it comes to this question of, is it natural to eat meat, is this.

We come from a long line of plant eaters, but for a couple of million years, we've been eating animals. And as long as we have been human, homo sapiens that is, we've been eating some meat. Which leads us to our last question for today. So if for millions of years we've been eating meat, are there any risks to just cutting yourself off? Cold tofurkey.

To find out, we spoke to Roman Pavlak at East Carolina University. And Roman is originally from Poland. He grew up on a farm there. I was actually raised on pretty much everything that moved. My family had pigs and chickens and other animals, and we used to kill them and eat them. Today, Roman is an associate professor of nutrition science and spends a lot of time thinking about how what we eat influences our health.

And he says that there's some myths about going vegan, like the idea that because they don't eat meat, they can't get enough protein. The truth is, we can get protein from lots of foods, whole grains, nuts and beans, and that's good enough for a lot of people. But Roman says there are some crucial things that vegans are missing out on. And if you don't get enough, it can be really serious. One of them is vitamin B12. So where do people typically get vitamin B12 from? Beef, pork, lamb, and goat, and also horse meat. If you say nay to horse meat, you can also find B12 in poultry, fish, dairy, and eggs. By now, you've probably noticed there's no veggies on this list.

So if you have a salad, there is zero vitamin B12 in it, okay? As a result, studies have found that vitamin B12 deficiencies plague vegans as well as vegetarians. And Roman says that if you're living off fruits and veggies alone, eventually this will catch up with you. It's not really, in my opinion, the matter of if, but rather when. And this is a problem because B12 is really important, particularly for your brain. Neurons are surrounded in this protective coating and B12 helps keep that coating healthy. And when you're low on vitamin B12, people get all kinds of symptoms, starting with feeling really tired or depressed,

having mood swings, even feeling tingly sensations in your arms and legs. And if it gets really bad... You may have hallucinations. You may hear voices. Oh, my gosh. Like, we found this one report from 2013 of a vegetarian woman from Switzerland

who was found wandering the streets confused and incoherent. Her diagnosis? A B12 deficiency. She recovered and got on with her life after a few vitamin B12 shots. And there were other case reports like this. So bottom line on this one, the meat eaters are right. You can't be healthy on a vegan diet. Well, it's a very easy fix. You just go. You can go to Walmart Supercenter and you can buy a vitamin B2 supplement and take it. Yeah.

Roman says you can stay healthy using supplements and he says vegans should also keep an eye on other nutrients too like iron and omega-3s they're both harder to get from fruits and vegetables compared to meat so a vegan diet will be short on some nutrients like vitamin b12 but for many veg, supplements and fortified foods work and they can be totally fine. Actually, vegans can be better than fine. Researchers in the US have been tracking a large group of vegans, also called a smug of vegans, since the early 2000s.

And then they compared their health to other people who made healthy lifestyle choices, like avoiding smoking and alcohol. And by the way, this study is huge. It includes thousands of people, over 96,000 people. And what has it found? Well, the vegans were less likely to develop type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, some kinds of cancer.

They were even more likely to live longer. You see? So this is just an illustration of the health advantages of being a vegan. Wow. So when you're talking about your health, on average, it really is better to go vegan. Yes, exactly. And without milking this, even that new UK study that found vegans broke more bones, they also found they were at a lower risk of a bunch of diseases compared to those who ate meat. Scientists don't really know why veganism seems to have these health benefits. They say it could be something harmful in meat or dairy, something especially beneficial in all those veggies.

And just quickly, it's worth pointing out that going vegan doesn't automatically make you healthier. Studies find that being vegan or vegetarian can be linked with disordered eating, for example. And these days, you can get vegan chips, vegan ice cream, vegan hot dogs, vegan donuts. That stuff is often packed with crap, even if there's no cheeky bacon bits inside it.

Still, though, Roman reads this vegan research day in, day out. And guess what? I decided that I want to be vegan. And my mom was terrified. She told me that I am going to walk on the street one day, I'm going to die. Things of that nature, you know. But Roman is still alive and kicking and available for podcast interviews. So, knowing all of this, do you need meat and milk to be healthy? Well, if you're careful and you take supplements, the science says that many people can do this and be healthy.

And they're doing something good for the environment. The vegans are right. And, you know, if you don't want to cut out all meat and all dairy, which we get because burgers are amazing, many scientists that we spoke to said that it doesn't have to be this black and white, you know, triple stuffed crust cheese pizza or no pizza at all. Just cutting down on the amount of animal products that you eat

would help the environment. And probably your body too. And it would definitely help these chickens. That's Science vs. Vegans. Hello? Hey, Rose Brimler. Hi, Wendy Zuckerman. How many citations in this week's episode?

This week there is 160 citations. 160. That's right. Yay. I was listening. And if people want to see these citations, where should they go? They can click on the link to the transcript and they can find that link in our show notes. Thanks, Rose.

Thanks, Wendy. Bye. Bye. This episode was produced by Rose Rimler, me, Wendy Zuckerman, along with Meryl Horne, Odelia Rubin and Caitlin Sorey. Edited by Blythe Cherell and Caitlin Kenny. Backchecking by Michelle Harris and Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Emma Munger and Bumi Hidaka.

Music by Emma Munger, Bumi Hidaka and Bobby Lord. Recording assistance from Robbie McInnes, Paul Rees, Spencer Silva and Hottie Mawadjdi. For this episode, we also spoke to Connie Weaver, Nathan H. Lentz, Mark Bollard, Ambrish Mithal, Marco Springman, Mary Beth Hall, Tara Garnett, Tom Sanders, Frederick Leroy and others. Thank you so much for your help. And a big thanks to the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.