The Dr. Hyman Show - Does Eating Meat Help Or Harm Our Health?

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Mitopure, and Super Simple Grassfed Protein. While anti-meat advocates and scientists have tried to scare Americans by linking meat to everything from cancer to heart disease, diabetes, and even obesity, research actually shows meat is a nutrient-dense food that can help prevent disease and nutritional deficiencies when you eat it with plenty of plants and vegetables (and not as part of the typical Western diet and lifestyle). That doesn’t mean there isn’t a dark side to eating meat, but there are good scientific and health-minded reasons to eat high-quality, organic, grass-fed, sustainably raised meat as part of an overall healthy diet. In today’s episode of my series I’m calling Health Bites, I discuss why meat is such a contentious food, whether meat really contributes to global warming, and how to make the most informed decision about purchasing and eating meat.  This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Mitopure, and Super Simple Grassfed Protein. Access more than 3,000 specialty lab tests with Rupa Health. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com today. Support the growth of new, healthy mitochondria and get 10% off Mitopure. Head to timelinenutrition.com/drhyman and use code DRHYMAN10 at checkout. Right now, you can get 10% off Super Simple Grassfed Protein by heading to drhyman.com/protein and using code protein10. Here are more details from our interview (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): Commonly held myths about meat (2:49 / 0:48) Meat is the single best source of protein for humans (7:29 / 4:46) How much saturated fat is “healthy”? (12:57 / 10:45) Meat is a nutritional powerhouse (14:35 / 11:50) Grass-fed and regenerative meat is better (15:23 / 12:38) Most of your plate should still be plants (16:24 / 13:38) How you cook meat matters (18:45 / 16:00)  Does meat contribute to global warming? (19:17 / 16:30)   What to look for when buying meat (22:21 / 19:35) What types of meat to eat and avoid (23:25 / 20:39)

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Meat is one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet. It can help prevent disease, prevent nutritional deficiencies, particularly when you eat it with lots of plant foods. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. To all the healthcare practitioners out there, let me ask you a question. Would you like to make your life a little easier? I'm sure the answer is yes.

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a normal process. We used to think disease, frailty, gradual decline were just inevitable parts of life, but it turns out they're not. The negative health effects of aging are actually treatable if you understand the root causes. Mitochondrial dysfunction is one of those root causes of rapid aging that leads to all sorts of long-term health issues. By treating your mitochondria well, you can live a longer, healthier, more active life. And that is why, my friends, I'm super excited about MitoPure. MitoPure is the first and only clinically tested pure form of a natural gut metabolite called urolithin A that clears damaged mitochondria away from our cells and supports the growth of new healthy mitochondria. New science is showing that healthy

mitochondria also improves immune function too. I've been using it for over a year now and at 63, I feel stronger and more energized than ever. Right now, Timeline Nutrition is offering my community 10% off MitoPure, which you can get in a capsule powder or protein blend at TimelineNutrition.com forward slash Dr. Hyman. That's T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E.com slash Dr. Hyman. That's D-R-H-Y-M-A-N. And use the code Dr. Hyman10, just D-R-Hyman10, number 10. Welcome to Doctors Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy. We're going to have a place for conversations that matter. And if you're confused about whether you should eat meat, whether it's going to kill you or save you, you're going to love this podcast because we're going to get deep into the science of meat, what we know, what we

don't know, what you shouldn't, what you shouldn't do, and how to make sense of all the nonsense. So today we're doing this to form one of our health bites, which is little small bits of health information that help you take small steps daily that make significant changes in your health over time. So let's get into it. Eating meat will clog your arteries. It causes cancer, type 2 diabetes, and will take years off your life, right? Well, no. But it's understandable why you believe that because a lot of people do, even meat lovers and abstainers alike, because of all the misinformation, the confusing science, the ideology, the sort of forces of the carnivores and the paleo folks and the vegans making it very confusing for anybody to understand what do we

know and what do we not know. Now, I personally want it to be 120 or more. I don't want to eat meat if it's going to kill me or shorten my life. And so I decided, rather than listening to all the noise and all the headlines, I'm going to go read between the lines. And I locked myself away in a hotel for over a week with all the top studies in meat. So every major publication that looked at the health risks and benefits of meat, and I actually with all the top studies in meat. So every major publication that looked at the health risks and benefits of meat. And I actually read all the papers, the methods, the science, dissected it all and tried to make sense of what we know and what we don't know. Studies are not clear cut. We think science is science, but it's not. It depends on how the study was done, how it was designed, who the subject participants were, whether it was an observational study, a randomized trial,

an animal study, you know, a case control style, control style study, or whatever it was. So it's really important to understand the science. And it's hard for the average person to do. So that's what I did. And here's the deal. Now, look, we've been eating meat since the dawn of evolution of humans. And yet, it seems to be the most controversial thing on our plate. Uh, people are having raging fights about this, uh, warring nutritional theories, you know, our, our, our, uh, our concern about it is growing. We're told that if we eat meat, we're destroying the planet and causing climate change. It's killing us. Um, it's causing all our nation's health issues. It's unethical. It's dangerous for the animals. And I think people are just super confused. So is meat bad or good for us? And if we want to live to be long healthy,

should we eat a lot of it or none of it? So when I began to look at meat, there were really three buckets that were controversial. And they often get conflated. And I want to just break them down. The first is health. Is it good or bad for you? Two is environment and climate. Is it good or bad? And three, ethical. Now, ethical moral arguments are hard for me to counter because it's your belief and you're entitled to whatever you want to believe. If you're a Buddhist monk and you believe in the sentience of all living things and you don't want to harm a living creature or even step on an insect, I understand that. And I studied Buddhism and I fully get that. Although

I know the Dalai Lama eats meat, so I'm not sure how he reconciles that. But basically I respect that. Although I would say that, you know, people don't really realize when they eat vegetables, they're just to grow crops, vegetable crops and plants. There's over 7 billion animals that get killed in the making of those plants. In other words, you're destroying their habitat. You're plowing over them with big machines, killing mice and rabbits. And we've lost half of our bird species because of growing, you know, plant compounds, plant foods. And so it's, you know, there's no way out of this cycle of life and death, as they said in The Lion King, the great circle of life. So I think we have to understand that.

We become food for microbes and fungi and plants when we die. So it's just a big circle of life. But I do understand the ethical concerns. But let's get into the health concerns. And I will touch a little bit on the environmental concerns, because I think health is the most important one. It's the most controversial. Now, does meat harm us? Is it really the thing that's causing global warming? And how do we make a good decision about meat if we want to eat meat? Now, there's a lot of anti-meat advocates and scientists who've tried to scare Americans by linking meat to everything from cancer to heart disease to diabetes to obesity. But actually, the research shows that meat is one of the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet. It can help prevent disease,

prevent nutritional deficiencies, particularly when you eat it with lots of plant foods, with a plant-rich diet, lots of fruits and vegetables, but not part as a typical Western diet with Big Mac fries and a Coke. That's not going to save you, right? And it doesn't mean there isn't a dark side to eating meat. There is, and we'll talk about that. But there are really good scientific studies and very health-focused reasons for eating high-quality, regenerative, organic, grass-fed, sustainably raised meat as part of an overall

healthy diet. So I want to explore some of the top things you need to know about meat. First, it's the single best source of protein for humans. You know, we are animals and we have a lot of muscle. The best way to get muscle is to eat muscle, which is basically meat. Now, you might have heard that beans have a lot of protein, and they do for plants, but they also lack some really essential amino acids, and you have to eat large volumes to actually get the protein you need. Now, think about this. The only macronutrient we need in large quantities is protein. Carbohydrates, there's no biological requirement for. Even the National Academy of Sciences Dietary Reference Index say there's no human need for carbohydrates. We don't need them.

There's no essential carbohydrates. Fats, we do need, but we only need essential fatty acids in gram doses, like a gram of fish oil, a couple of capsules of fish oil will do it. Protein, we need in large doses, probably about a gram per pound to be healthy. Now, that might sound like a lot to you. So if you're 180 pounds, that's 180 grams of protein, which seems like a lot. It's about 60 grams a meal or more spread out over more meals. But the reality is that our bodies, as we age, need more protein, and we need protein to build muscle. And as we lose muscle, we lose our health.

And that's really important to understand. Now, you can get plant proteins, either plant proteins that are processed, like soy protein. But even then, you have to march larger amounts. But here's the key. For example, if you have to eat three cups of beans with 100 grams of carbohydrates to equal six ounces of chicken or fish or meat with zero carbs. Now, one of the most important things to know is that animal foods are much higher in a critical amino acid called leucine.

And we need about two to three grams of leucine per meal to activate muscle synthesis. Super important. And if you don't have enough of this leucine, you actually can't turn on the mechanism that builds muscle. And plant proteins are very low in leucine. So you either have to add leucine to them, or you have to supplement with amino acids, or you have to add huge amounts of plant proteins to just get the equivalent. And it comes a lot of baggage, right? So animal protein across the board and based on the data, and I read this in my book, Young Forever for Longevity, is the single best

source of protein, especially as we get older where muscle loss is the biggest cause of rapid aging and disease. Hey everyone, I'm so excited to share that I have a brand new protein powder called Super Simple Grass-Fed Protein. If you follow my work, you know how critical protein is for building muscle, optimal weight, and overall longevity. I like to get a good amount of protein in every meal, and sometimes that's hard with a busy schedule, and that's why I make a protein-rich smoothie every morning featuring my super simple protein made with really clean ingredients and minimal ingredients and grass-fed beef protein. Right now, I'm offering the Doctors Pharmacy listeners 10% off. All you have to do is go to drhyman. Right now, I'm offering the Doctors Pharmacy listeners 10%

off. All you have to do is go to drhyman.com forward slash protein and use the code protein10. That's drhyman.com forward slash protein and use the code protein10. That's a one to zero. And now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctors Pharmacy. Now meat was unfairly demonized and I'll explain why. And it still is. Basically, there was a discovery that about 50, 60 years ago, that saturated fat raises cholesterol. And that saturated fat hypothesis, that fat causes you to be fat, that fat causes heart disease, particularly saturated fat, was the dogma of the day.

But the truth is that it's not true. Total fat consumption is not linked to heart disease. And even saturated fat consumption, although there may be some associations in some populations, for most people is not associated with increased risk of heart disease. And there was a review over 72 studies, you know, randomized trials, you know, intervention studies, blood, looking at blood levels of fatty acids and observational data. I mean, large amounts of studies, over 600,000 people found really no link between saturated fat and heart disease. So, you know, we, we did a lot of things when we heard that meat was bad. We cut back on meat. We chose lean meat. We trimmed all the fat off our meat.

But it turns out that that's actually not the right idea. Heart disease is very complex. It's not only related to your cholesterol, but also to inflammation and to your blood sugar and triglycerides and your HDL level and a lot of other factors. So it turns out that heart disease is an inflammatory disease. And then your cholesterol is only a problem if you have a lot of inflammation. So it's important to know this is a complicated subject. I encourage you to read my book, Food, What the Heck Should I Eat?

And Eat Fat, Get Thin, and even my book, Young Forever, to kind of understand a little bit more about the science. But saturated fat in meat, for example, stearic acid, doesn't really have an impact on blood cholesterol levels. So we've kind of been cutting out meat to lower cholesterol. Now meat comes with a lot of other things, right? It comes with other things too that may be a factor. But what's even more surprising to most people is that eating saturated fat doesn't necessarily raise the blood levels of saturated fat that cause heart disease. It's actually the carbohydrates and refined starch and sugar that are raising levels of small LDL particles and actually causing more of a,

what we call atherogenic lipid profile. So it's sugar, starch, and carbs that are driving most of the bad cholesterol in this country. There's a lot of people debating what's healthy, what's not healthy. The American Heart Association demonizes saturated fat, but the latest wisdom suggests it's pretty neutral for most people. It's not necessarily a health food, but it's not necessarily as bad as we thought.

Now, combining with sugar and starch, the sweet fat, I call it, deadly. You know, butter and bread, ice cream, cookies, that kind of stuff, which has butter and or saturated fat and lots of carbs, and refined carbs in particular, is deadly. So don't do that. So, you know, what's really interesting is that the American Heart Association says we should have less than 5% of our calories as saturated fat. But, you know, breast milk is 25% saturated fat because it's critical for brain development, for all our cell membranes,

for so much of our body structure. And does that mean we should ban breast milk because it's got five times the saturated fat that the American Heart Association says we should have? I don't think so. I think we didn't have a faulty design. I think breast milk is exactly what we should be having. So people say, well, have saturated fat and meat and butter in moderation. So what does that mean? Well, we need a lot more research, but I would not be worried about having a little grass-fed butter with your food. I wouldn't worry about having pasture-raised eggs. I wouldn't really worry about having a grass-fed steak instead of the halibut next time you eat out. Now, there's some caveats there. I would really recommend it be regenerative or grass-fed if you can get it.

It's a little hard to get, although now I see more and more restaurants offering grass-fed meat. Second thing you should know is that meat is actually a nutritional powerhouse. It provides our only source of B12, which is animal food. It's essential for life. It has lots of minerals and nutrients and vitamins, enzymes we need to access the nutrients, critical amino acids, cancer-fighting antioxidants like vitamin A, which by the way, you can't get from vegetables. You can get carotenoids, but you can't actually get vitamin A from that. Also, if you're vegan, we see a lot of deficiencies. I do a lot of nutritional testing on people. I've done this for decades and it's

just remarkable how even what we call healthy vegans, not just people eating soda and junk food, right? Because you can eat chips and soda vegan, but people actually try and do the right thing. They're deficient in B12, they're deficient in iron, they're deficient in zinc, they're deficient in vitamin A and D. And plant foods have some of these nutrients, but they're way more bioavailable in meat. And now grass-fed regenerative is better. There's some great sources. We had a podcast with Robbie Sampson and Taylor, who actually created a company called Force of Nature that allows you to buy frozen, regenerative meat online. And it's great. It's delicious from all over the world. But you can get grass-fed, regenerative, regenerative meat. It's delicious from all over the world. But you can get, you know, grass-fed regenerative meat.

It's definitely healthier for you. When you look at the phytochemicals in the meat, there's been lots of studies on this, looking at metabolomics. Stephen VanVleet, we've had on the podcast, we've talked about, you know, bison, for example, that was fully pasture-raised or grass-fed versus those that were, you know, finished in a feedlot. Profound, profound differences in the phytochemical content, in the nutrient content, in the fatty acid profile. So really important to understand that. Now it has way better fats, has more omega-3s, less omega-6s, more CLA or conjugated linoleic acid, which boosts metabolism,

prevents cancer. It also, again, has higher levels of minerals, vitamins, and lots of nutrients. But here's the key. Most of your diet should still be plants. You know, people call a vegan diet a plant-based diet. I would say we should be eating a plant-rich diet or a plant-forward diet. Most of our diet should be plants. 50 to 75% of your plate at night should be colorful veggies. And the rest should be serving a meal. And you don't need as much as you think. You probably, you know, if you have, you know, a six ounce piece, which is maybe the size of your palm, a protein, and each meal, for example, you have a protein shake in the morning.

I use whey protein from goat. You can have, you know, a piece of chicken, fish, sardines, mackerel, whatever, and have, you know, another 30, depending on your size, 20, 30, 40 grams of protein in each meal. You're actually gonna be getting what you need. And again, it's not like a 12-ounce or 16-ounce steak. It's a smaller piece, but it actually has profound effects on your overall health. Another thing people should know is that organ

meats are one of the healthiest foods. If you look at, for example, liver and you compare it to any vegetable, it's like winds by a mile in terms of the level of nutrients. It contains a whole range of vitamins, minerals, CoQ10, and lots of protein. I love liver. I love chopped liver. I'm Jewish. Pate is great. I think I love liver.

In fact, I just bought some grass-fed chicken livers at the farmer's market, and it was great. Now, people don't like to eat organ meats, but actually they're what the animals eat. So if you're a lion, the thing you're eating is all the organs first, and then you eat a little meat, but you leave the rest to scavengers. And we kind of think, oh, we shouldn't eat it because it's got high cholesterol. But, you know, dietary cholesterol is not a factor, including even the dietary guidelines said in the last iteration that we don't need to worry about dietary cholesterol. It's really not what's causing our cholesterol to be high. So we can eat egg yolks. We can, you know, have cholesterol from liver and not worry about it. People say, oh, geez, what about all the toxins in the liver? But it doesn't actually process them, and they're stored in the muscle and fat tissues in the brain.

So it's fine. And, you know, when I was a little kid, we lived in Queens in one bedroom apartment. We were pretty poor, and, you know, I thought it was a gourmet food because my mom made it. She would make chicken livers and onions and rice, and that's what we had. I thought it was a gourmet meal, but I love it. And, you know, not everybody's taste, but it's actually good. They even have Oregon meat pills. Also, how you know, not everybody's taste, but it's actually good. You never even have a Oregon meat pills. Also, um, how you cook your meat matters when you fry it, when you smoke it, grill it at

high temperatures, it may actually create carcinogenic compounds called heterocyclic amines or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, basically all that black grill-y stuff. You should be careful not to do that. Slower cooking is better. By the way, if you grill your vegetables, same thing happens. So it's not just meat. You can minimize that by actually marinating your meat in acidic marinades, lemon, vinegar, things like that. Low temperature cooking, baking, roasting, stewing, also great.

What about global warming, climate change? Should we be worried about this? You know, most people say that, you know, animal agriculture contributes 14% of greenhouse gas emissions. I agree. We should not be having feedlot cows. Industrial agriculture destroys the soil. It creates a huge problem for the environment and really is not a good thing. So for sure, we should not be eating factory farmed animals.

I 100% agree with you from ethical perspective, from a health perspective, from a global environment and climate perspective. Now, intestinal gas from cattle, methane, accounts for half of agriculture's greenhouse gas pollution. And if you're using industrial agriculture, it takes about 248 gallons of oil. Think about this, oil. We use oil to produce food, which we don't really need to do if we did it right and followed nature. But basically, 248 gallons of oil required to produce about the 2,800 pounds of corn that are eaten by a conventionally raised factory farm cow during its lifetime. So you need almost 250 gallons of oil to

produce the meat from one cow. Globally, one-fifth of all of our energy consumption is used for industrial agriculture. That's more than is used for all our transportation, cars, trucks, planes, trains, boats combined. Livestock production consumes about a third of the world's fresh water because of how we grow it, not if we did it right, right? And this is industrial agriculture. And also, even more concerning to me is the cultivation of soy and corn crops, which is what factory farmed animals are fed, requires huge amounts of oil inputs through pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, which are all petrochemical products, and also large amounts of irrigation and depletes our water resources because of how we destroy the soil. And I wrote a whole book about this called Food Fix, if you want to learn more.

So what can we do about it? Well, research has shown that regenerative agriculture is the future of how we can grow meat. And it helps the environment. It repairs soil. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions. It actually is what we need to actually build soil. We've lost about a third of all our topsoil because of our farming practices.

And most of those, like I said, farming practices are used to feed animals. We grow crops for feeding animals that then we eat instead of letting them eat their natural food. And actually, by using well-managed grazing practices, we can offset and or even compensate for the methane and other greenhouse gases that are caused by beef production. The grass basically will – our plants will soak up and store and sequester the carbon and prevent the carbon dioxide being released in the atmosphere stored in the soil. In fact, that's where the biggest sink is, other than the oceans, for carbon is in the soil, not the rainforest. And so in order to do this, you have to mimic nature. Like the bison's used to roam. They regularly move the animals from pasture to pasture.

They actually let the grass not be overgrazed. They help restore the water tables. And I did a podcast with Robbie Sampson and Taylor from Force of Nature, which I encourage to listen to, which talks about what it does. It actually restores water tables, uses less inputs, you know, brings back lots of wildlife, and it's great. Okay, so what should we be looking for if we're eating meat? Well, animal welfare approved, certified humane, global animal partnership, food line certified. There are now regenerative organic certifications that are emerging. Grass-fed for sure, and grass-finished, I would say, because they can say, oh, they ate grass, but that means

actually they finished a few lot. So choose beef, bison, goat, lamb, sheep that are certified by the American Grass-Fed Association. Look for the logo American Grass-Fed. That's their certification. Now, all animals that are certified by the American Grass-Fed Association are raised entirely on open grass pastures. Now, some, like I said, grass-fed animals are raised on grass and then they're given grains or other crops when they're finished that way.

But the AGA certification prevents that. Also, these animals are allowed to graze on grass and not forced into small feedlots. They're not given antibiotics or hormones. And they're basically, you know, also for the AGA certification, it's only American meat. But you can get regenerative meat from around the world. So what should I eat if you're going to eat meat? Grass-fed beef or regenerative-raised beef, grass-fed lamb, pasture-raised pork, bison, venison, elk. You can have small amounts of high quality organic nitrate additive-free, sugar-free bacon, ham, salami, turkey, sausages. There is a

small risk of cancer, but it's like basically your know, basically your risk goes from five to 6%, which is not very much. And if you ate five pieces or four pieces of bacon every day for your whole life, which nobody does. And by the way, the studies are challenging because they're observational, so they don't prove cause and effect. So I wouldn't worry about that. Also, what should you avoid? Well, don't eat conventionally raised anything, right? Beef, lamb, pork, avoid all the deli processed meats, the typical ones, hot dogs, conventional sausages, conventionally made bacon, salami, give it all that stuff. So check out The Force of Nature to learn more about how to eat the right meat.

And I hope this has helped clarify some of the issues around climate, health. There's lots more to read about. Check out Food What the Heck Should I Eat, Young Forever, and also Eat Fat, Get Thin. So that's it for today's Health Byte. Be sure to share with your friends and family on social media. I'd love to know what you've learned about your own health, like eating meat or giving up meat. We'd love to learn. And everybody's a bit different. And I'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy.

Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements, to gadgets, to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays, nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up that's drhyman.com forward slash

pics p-i-c-k-s and sign up for the newsletter and i'll share with you my favorite stuff that i use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer hi everyone i hope you enjoyed this week's episode just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner.

If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.