The Dr. Hyman Show - How The Intelligence Of Plants and Animals Can Help Us Reclaim Our Health with Fred Provenza

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

How The Intelligence Of Plants and Animals Can Help Us Reclaim Our Health | This episode is brought to you by Joovv, BiOptimizers, and Primal Kitchen If we take the time to be quiet, still, and curious, there’s an immeasurable amount of knowledge to be gained from our natural surroundings. In watching grazing animals and their food choices, we see they know how to personalize their nutritional intake to eat plants that match their exact needs. Though many of us have lost our innate wisdom to eat intuitively, upping our intake of phytochemicals and reducing processed foods means we can recalibrate our cravings to lean towards what we truly need. Vitamins and minerals often get most of the attention when it comes to eating for nutrient density, but phytochemicals are the real hidden talent for optimizing plant, animal, and human health. Unfortunately, modern agriculture has actually damaged the phytochemical richness of our food, by breeding for yield, appearance, and hardiness. I enjoyed sitting down with Fred Provenza in this episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy to talk about all this and so much more.  Fred grew up in Salida, Colorado, working on a ranch and attending school in Wildlife Biology at Colorado State University. He is professor emeritus of Behavioral Ecology in the Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State University where he worked for 35 years, directing an award-winning research group that pioneered an understanding of how learning influences foraging behavior and how behavior links soil, plants, herbivores, and humans. He is the author of three books, including Nourishment: What Animals Can Teach Us about Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom; Foraging Behavior: Managing to Survive in a World of Change; and The Art & Science of Shepherding: Tapping the Wisdom of French Herders (co-written with Michel Meuret). He has published over 300 research papers in a wide variety of scientific journals.    This episode is brought to you by Joovv, BiOptimizers, and Primal Kitchen. Joovv is offering Doctor’s Farmacy listeners an exclusive discount on Joovv’s Generation 3.0 devices. Just go to Joovv.com/farmacy and use the code FARMACY. Some exclusions do apply.  Right now, BiOptimizers is offering Doctor’s Farmacy listeners 10% off your Magnesium Breakthrough order. Just go to magbreakthrough.com/hyman and use code HYMAN10 to receive this amazing offer. Right now, Primal Kitchen is offering my community 20% off. Just go to primalkitchen.com and use the code DRHYMAN20 at checkout. Here are more of the details from our interview (time-stamps correlate with audio podcast):  The vital role that plant compounds play in plant, animal, and human health (7:22) Our modern agricultural practices breed against phytochemical richness in our foods (14:38) How animals self-medicate (19:21) The interrelatedness of the soil microbiome and microbiome of plants, animals, and humans (22:50) Our overreliance on GMO foods have negatively impacted plants natural ability to produce their own herbicides and fertilizers (32:54) How we grow our food is driving the chronic disease epidemic and eliminating our body’s natural nutritional wisdom (39:29) Food cravings and overeating are often attempts to correct nutritional deficiencies (49:54) We’re not just feeding our gut when we eat, we’re feeding every cell and organ in our body (1:02:06) Are plants sentient beings? (1:11:10) Variations in feedlot meat, different types of grass-fed meat, and plant-based meat alternatives (1:21:44) The importance of ecosystem diversity (1:38:31) For 35% off Fred Provenza’s book Nourishment: What Animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom go to chelseagreen.com and enter promo code POD35.

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Diverse mixtures of plant species literally create homes, grocery stores, and pharmacies for these creatures below ground. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. Whole body wellness is obviously a huge part of my life and I'm always looking for new ways to make feeling great easier. One of my non-negotiables is getting a daily dose of healthy light. For years now, I've been using Juve light therapy devices to easily do that all year long. And I especially love it during these shorter, cold winter days. You've probably heard me talk about Juve before. That's J-O-O-V-E. I use my Juve light therapy device every day,

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uses lower intensity light to support your sleep and circadian rhythms and helps counteract all the artificial blue light that keeps you up at night. Juve upgraded the setup for the new devices with quick, easy mounting options so your new Juve can fit to just about any space in your home and move around your home easily. I definitely recommend trying Juve out for yourself. And right now is the perfect time. Just go to juve.com forward slash pharmacy. That's F-A-R-M-A-C-Y and use the code pharmacy, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. That's J-O-O-V-V.com slash pharmacy. For a limited time, you'll get an exclusive discount on Juve's generation 3.0 devices. And some exclusions do apply. I'm all about using food first when it comes to nutrition, but there are certain nutrients I

recommend everyone supplement with because it's simply impossible to get adequate amounts from your diet alone. One example is magnesium, which our soils, well, they're not too healthy, and because there's no organic matter, they can't extract the magnesium from the soil from industrial farming, which is a drag. And that leads to 50% less of these minerals in our food than there was 50 years ago. And then, of course, we're doing things that cause us to lose magnesium, like sugar, caffeine, fluoride, even stress, which none of us have, right? 80% of Americans are actually deficient in magnesium, and that may mean insufficient, not necessarily true deficiency, but just not enough for optimal

functioning because magnesium is so important. And it's a huge problem for our health. Considering the pandemic of stress, along with the pandemic of COVID that we're facing, we should all really be conscious about our magnesium intake because it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which keeps us calmer and more relaxed. Magnesium is crucial for more than 300 other chemical reactions in the body and impacts everything from metabolism to sleep to neurologic health, energy, pain, muscle function, and lots more. My favorite new magnesium is from a company called BioOptimizers. Their magnesium breakthrough formula contains seven different forms, all of which have different functions in the body. There was truly nothing like it on the market. I really noticed the difference when I started taking it,

and I've tried a lot of different magnesium products out there. I also love that all their products are soy-free, gluten-free, lactose-free, non-GMO, free of chemicals, fillers, and made with natural ingredients. Plus, they give back to their community. For every 10 bottles sold, they donate one to someone in need, and there's a lot of those. Right now, you can try BioOptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough for 10% off. Just go to magbreakthrough.com. That's M-A-G-B-R-E-A-K-T-H-R-O-U-G-H.com slash hymen and use the code hymen10, and you'll get 10% off this really great formula. I think you're going to like it as much as I do. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F-A-R-M-A-C-Y,

a place for conversations that matter. And if you are an eater, which I assume most of you are, unless you eat rocks or something, this conversation is going to be super important to listen to because it's going to unpack some of the most vexing questions we have today. Should you be a vegan? Should you eat meat? What role does plant-based meats have in our health? Are they good for you? Are they not good for you?

How do we understand the ways we should be eating to actually promote health and deal with some of the chronic diseases we face today. So welcome Fred Provenza, who is joining us today on the podcast. He's an extraordinary guy. We're just off the Madison River where we rafted down on his old Dory. We didn't get too many whitewater rapids, but we did see some bald eagles and some mergansers and got to chat about the nature of the universe, which was really, really awesome. And just a little bit about Fred. He grew up in Salina, Colorado, working on a ranch and attending school of wildlife biology at Colorado State University.

He is professor emeritus in behavioral ecology, which is we're going to talk about what is behavioral ecology at the Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State University, which is also where my daughter went for pre-med. And he worked there for 35 years, directed an award-winning research group, understanding how learning influences behavior and how behavior links soil, plants, herbivores, and humans. And he's written so many books, Nourishment, What Animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom, which one of the most beautifully written books I've ever read. Even if you're not into this stuff, I think you should get the book because it's a game changer in our thinking about how we need to be in relationship to the food we're eating and why we got so off track. He's also written Foraging Behavior, Managing to Survive in a World of Change, and The Art and Science of Shepherding, Tapping the Wisdom of French Herders.

And he's published over 300 research papers in a wide variety of scientific journals i've read probably half a dozen or more but they are just beautiful and you know some of them um i've recently read one is called we are the earth and the earth is us how palates and food scapes landscapes heart scapes and thought scapes and also more recent one health promoting phytonutrients are higher in grass-fed meat and milk. And a new one we're going to talk about, which is comparing the metabolomics of plant-based meats with grass-fed beef, which is going to be an eye-opener. So welcome to the doctor's pharmacy again, Fred. Thank you, Mark.

It's wonderful to be here with you. Absolutely. Wonderful to spend a day with you and Misha on me, Sean. Yeah, it's been pretty spectacular. And we've talked a lot in the hours we've been together, hanging out in Ennis, Montana with Fred and learning about his work some more. I've just dived in this work in a way that a few other things have called to me recently. And the reason is it sort of answers a lot of the questions about why we've gotten so off track with our food, how we get back on track, and what we have to learn

about natural principles of eating that animals have figured out from an evolutionary point of view that we've really lost. We've become disconnected from the landscape, from our food, from the source of our food. And one of the things that you write a lot about, which is just fascinating to me, is the world of plants. You've studied, you know, enormous amount of plants and their compounds. We call these phytochemicals or secondary compounds. I don't like secondary compounds because it's essentially is a word that implies that they're secondary. They're not important as the primary components. And I think phytochemicals are essentially these plant molecules that have been developed by the plants for their own defenses,

but we've evolved with those molecules in what I call symbiotic phytoadaptation, which means we evolve with these plants and we borrow those chemicals to regulate our biology, to regulate inflammation, our microbiome, our detoxification systems, our mitochondria, our immune system, all these are regulated by the plant compounds that we eat when we're eating a rich variety of plants. The problem is we eat 60% of our diet from three plants, essentially soy, wheat, and corn, and about 90% of our diet from 12 plants, which is maybe some tomatoes and onions and

a few other things. So it's pretty bad we've lost the biodiversity of our diet and our hunter gatherer ancestors may have consumed up to 800 different species of plants and even you know the the people who live in the northern cultures like the inuit i mean they foraged on uh on on moss and various kind of arctic plants but they also ate the stomach contents of the other predators that they were hunting which was fascinating to me i wouldn't want to eat somebody else's stomach but it's like something eating vomit i wouldn't really want to do that so you you you kind of unpacked a lot of of the science behind these biochemicals and the role they play in our

biology. And it turns out they're probably as important as anything else we're eating, as important as protein, fat, carbohydrates, as important as vitamins and minerals. And they really are the science behind food as medicine. So we talk a lot about food as medicine, but what does that mean? Well, macronutrients also play a role in regulating our metabolism and biology and the quality of those macronutrients matter. So all proteins are not the same, all fats aren't the same, all carbs aren't the same, all fibers aren't the same. But this other class of compounds that we're now discovering may be as important, if not more important, for promoting health and optimizing our health and how we eat our medicine. So this is a podcast called The Doctor's Pharmacy.

That is exactly why we're talking about this concept. So what you've learned about these animals is that they will, who are allowed to forage and roam in their natural habitats, will select plants based on their particular nutritional needs and even their illnesses. They will self-medicate with various kinds of plants that have medicinal properties. And they might have a couple of main, three or four main plants, but they might eat 50 or 70 or 100 different other plants in small amounts. Sort of like taking their vitamins and minerals.

So can you talk a little bit more about what phytonutrients are, why they're so important, and give us some sort of examples of what you've learned from your research? Absolutely the case, Mark. That's a great overview that you gave, actually, of that. You know, so many thoughts are coming into my mind. And I think one place I would start was this whole idea of secondary compounds and the notion that what roles are they playing? Historically, there's a historical basis for why they were called secondary compounds. People didn't understand what roles they played in plants. And so they knew about N, P, K, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and those sort of things. But it's only been in the

last 50 years, perhaps, that people really started to study these compounds and realize they're not secondary at all with my primary roles and the health of plants, everything under the sun that you can think of, from sunscreen to adaptive coloration to protecting plants against other plants, their natural herbicides that plants produce, to protecting plants from being overgrazed. And if the plant gets injured, they help the plant recover. So on and on and on, they play really important roles in the health of plants. And what we're coming to appreciate, as you were alluding to, is that they're fundamentally important for the health of herbivores, livestock, wild animals. Below and above ground, I like to say often that plants turn dirt into soil and diverse

mixtures of plants turn soil into grocery stores, pharmacies, and homes, basically, for all these herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores below ground and above ground, too. So plants are the givers of life. And then to realize that they're fundamentally important in our health as well, right, in the health of human beings. And I was reading a book recently about the Blackfeet people here in Montana and the huge area that they occupied and moved over seasonally. And those movements were really tied to hunting and gathering, and plants were a fundamentally important part of all of that. And then they're using plants to make things like pemmican, right?

Yeah. What's pemmican? Yeah, well, it's meat and fat, and they eating animals that meat and dairy perhaps that's phytochemically and biochemically rich, they're also realizing the importance of plants as a part of pemmican. Yeah. I mean, we were joking that pemmican was essentially what helped settle America. The Lewis and Clark expedition used pemmican as their main food, which was something they learned from Native Americans, but essentially it was a keto diet. It was 70% fat,

20 plus percent protein, and a little bit of carbohydrate from the berries. Right. Absolutely the case. That's not normal. A pound would feed a man for a day and a half a pound would feed a woman. So if you're a man, you need 30 pounds of pemmican for a month. That's pretty good. It's absolutely the case. Think about going on a backpacking trip and all you got is like 30 bars of pemmican. a month. That's pretty good. Yeah, it's absolutely the case. Think about going on a backpacking trip and all you've got is like 30 bars of pemmican.

I know. That's probably what we ought to be taking on the backpacking trip as opposed to some of the ultra-processed things. So you just said a lot of stuff about what's going on in the relationship between plants, animals, and humans. The plants are part of this profound ecological network that includes the soil microbiome, which they depend on to get their nutrition. That's right. And they provide medicine and food and nutrients for the animals, which then in turn provide food and medicine for us. Right. for the animals, which then in turn provide food and medicine for us. And we also eat the plants, which provide the same benefits,

but our diet's been so depleted because of our ignorance of these phytocannabinoids and ignorance of their benefit. And the way we've actually developed our agricultural system has done absolutely everything to deplete phytonutrients, our breeding and our growing practices. So can you talk about what have we done around plant breeding, not just GMO, but plant breeding, and also about our way of growing food that's really depleted this

phytochemical that our soul might give it? Yeah, absolutely the case. And let's go back to this notion of secondary compounds and how that evolved with plant physiologists and biochemists as they came to appreciate the many roles that they play and that they aren't just waste products of plant metabolism, but there's a cost involved in making these compounds. There's pathways within the plants,

the plants used to create the compounds, and we came to understand that there's a cost involved in that. And so if you are an agronomist, and this is not in any way derogatory toward that, but if you're an agronomist thinking about growth and how do we get more production of fruits and vegetables, produce, those sorts of things, and you don't understand the roles that these compounds are playing, then it's a natural thing to select against them because you can get more growth. You're not, plants not allocated to production of these compounds anymore. It's all going into growth.

And so we've really accented growth at the expense of phytochemical riches in our selection programs and the plant, in the varieties that we're selected for. So basically breeding for plants to have more productive value, more yield, more starch. That's right. With the focus on energy, protein, starch, like you say. Yeah. But we bred out, as a consequence, all these beneficial phytochemicals.

That's right. And we've done the same thing for livestock. When we were starting some of the studies we did on, we were asked by the experiment station during the last years of my career to do a pasture project. They really wanted the ideas that we were doing with plants and animals on extensive conditions to focus on what we're talking about. And we said, okay, we want to plant diverse mixtures of plants, and we want them to be phytochemically rich. And we had a devil of a time to find it because we've done that for the forages. To the point where many of the forages are so high in nitrogen or protein,

that's a protein, that it's toxic to animals. You know, everything's a toxin, right? Paracelsus, everything's a toxin. It all depends on the dose. The dose makes the poison. And so the feedback that we might get into here, these metabolic feedbacks, are telling animals it's too much. And so they're limiting their intake because we've we've selected for such high concentrations of the primary compounds the

energy the protein and those sorts of things so we've kind of screwed ourselves we we have we have and not realized you know when we were doing the studies, and you mentioned this earlier, of looking at food selection by wild animals and domestic animals too. But, you know, we would find that three to five to seven plants made up the bulk of the diet, just as you said. But then there's another 50, 75. And nobody paid much attention to the 50 to 75 because that's not what we're thinking in terms of animals need energy and protein to grow and they need some minerals and that's all it counts the secondary compounds nobody's thinking about that but now when i think back on that i think you know that those 50 to 75 and when you watch them i used to be really like like a physicist in the sense you know for this if you understand that you can

predict and control it all. And so you should be out there watching these animals forging. It's like, there's no way you're going to get a bite of these, a bite of that. All these different things. You follow a cow around all day? Right, or a sheep or a goat. Or when we had students in the classroom field, we would just follow and just watch them. Just watch them for half an hour.

Or the chickens over here in our coop. And you start to think, you know how, and then you watch different ones and you realize no two of them are selecting the same thing. They're all doing something different. So it's personalized nutrition that the animals are doing for themselves. It's personalized, absolutely. There's no one that's going to die for a cow or a goat or a sheep or a chicken. Absolutely.

It's the same like human medicine, right? It is. And so these ideas start to go out of your head that we're not, it's not about predicting. It's about understanding the processes. How do the processes work? And then that relates to every creature. So, but then what I, you know, as I've reflected over the years,

I've just come to think, you know, it's that 50 to 75 that's just as important as the 3 to 5 to 7 in terms of enabling animals to self-medicate both prophytochemicals that, you know, an errant cell maybe can forage in the capillaries on some kind of some phytochemical that it needs to prevent it from going haywire. Right. We know those kind of things. The seven hallmarks of cancer, these phytochemicals can counter all of those, right? That's happening at that cellular level. Even to the degree that the animals will seek out plants that are anti-parasitic, containing tannins, for example, which is a phytochemical, if they have a parasite.

They're like, oh, I went to my doctor and he told me I have a parasite, I gotta eat this plant. No, they just like somehow intuitively know what to eat. Yeah, that's absolutely the case. And a little bit of learning from mother helps them along the way. That's pretty amazing about mother teaching as a start, you know, in the womb. But then as they're born and they start to follow mom around and what she eats and what she doesn't eat, it helps them to get a start in life. And then they aren't just, going back to this individuality, they aren't just a perfect copy of mom.

They're individuals, right? They're different. But what's key is that mom helps them to get started. Those flavors of foods that she's eating that get into the amniotic fluid, we know that a young animal that's had that kind of experience already knows the flavors of foods in the environment that mom's eating from. Yeah, and that shapes their preferences future. Like if you're a human infant in utero and your mom's eating fast food all day and processed food, that's going to sensitize you to that food.

And that's what you're going to want. And that's why we see women who are eating crappy diets or overweight obese diabetic their kids also develop all these problems absolutely the case and so you've really got two strikes against you from the minute you're born right i mean it's and we know that genes are being expressed all these sorts of things so really start out with metabolic syndrome huh yeah i'm thinking you know you know, I think of ladies that I know who have changed their diets over the years. And I think of their children that were born when they were on a much more wholesome diet. And nowadays, as adults, they're thin, they're trimmed, they look really good. And then when the diet went to ultra-processed, really not so

healthy foods, those poor kids are obese. They're fighting it lifelong. And I have no doubt that started in utero. And it started as a function of how mom changed her diet over time. Mom used to be on eating wholesome foods. She got hooked on

the ultra-processed foods. And you just see it. They lost their nutritional wisdom as humans. We lost that. Right. So, so, so getting back to the question of, you know, how are our breeding practices have changed the phytochemical richness of food? Um, that seems pretty clear what we're breeding for, which is energy and protein and basically just not things that are these powerful biochemical compounds. But also, let's talk about the agricultural processes that have destroyed the

microbiome of the soil and the impact of that on phytochemical riches. Because I think people often think that the nutrients in the soil have been depleted, but it turns out that actually the soil's fine from the nutrient point of view, from the minerals and the chemicals in the soil. We've damaged the soil through our agricultural practices

in ways that have reduced the organic matter, right, the life in the soil, sort of dirt, which is dead. And that prevents the plants from extracting the nutrients. Can you talk about the relation between the fungi, the bacteria, the plants, and the soil, and how that changes the phytocchemical richness of the plant? Absolutely, Casey. It goes back to the comment I made earlier

that diverse mixtures of plant species literally create homes, grocery stores, and pharmacies for these creatures below ground. And I think some of the most interesting research nowadays by plant ecologists is showing that when you have no plants at all, it's just an incredibly harsh environment. How can the microbiome live when it has no plants to help sustain it? You know, the plants are fixing soluble carbohydrates, they're fixing energy in the process of photosynthesis, and they're feeding the microbiome below ground. And then the microbiome, in turn, is helping to feed, to turn those nutrients that the plants need. They're helping the plants to get those nutrients. So it's a symbiotic relationship. It's an amazing relationship. And some of the work, I think, that's fascinating is showing that as you go from a monoculture, which is typically how we plant our crops, to more diverse mixtures, you're creating more

homes for a more extensive microbiome in the soil, which is the same thing that happens in us, right? If we eat a diverse array of foods, of wholesome foods, a variety of different plant species and fruits and meats as well, we create a more diverse microbiome in our gut so it's it's absolutely analogous it's totally true and you know ruminant nutritionist people who study these room so cattle sheep goats elk deer they're what's called ruminants a kind of a walking my

composting yeah I'm walking fermentation. But ruminant nutritionists, I mean, the microbiome is really an important and hot topic nowadays, right, in human nutrition. No question, it's a hot topic. But ruminant nutritionists have been studying the microbiome for 70 years. Fred, actually, how I got into nutrition was I was at Cornell, living in a house with a PhD student in nutrition who was studying the microbiome of ruminants. They didn't call it the microbiome back then.

It was a roll of fiber. That's right. And he's the one who gave me that book, Nutrition Against Disease, by Roger Williams. It got me thinking about this back in college. And it's so funny you mention that because, yeah, they studied the microbiome. Peter Van Zost, did you know Peter? and all his graduate students they were doing so much

work along those lines and so you know and they were appreciating the importance of changes in the diet when you change the diet you're going to change the microbiome that's you know, the change to microbiome. And then ecologists were also very interested in that and making the point that the more diverse the diet of the animal, that the more diverse the microbiome is going to be. So it just lines up from the soil through the animals right through to us. And the plants are benefiting from that as well. The more diverse microbiomes help all those plants. It's amazing work, but it all links back to health, right?

To the doctor's pharmacy. And feed is medicine for livestock and wild animals. Food is medicine for us. You just said something that, like, that light bulb went on in my head, something I'd never really considered. And I'm just going to unpack it because it was so rich and you covered it really quickly. So I thought that, you know,

the microbiome of the soil was important for the plants, but the microbiome of the soil is also determined by the plants. Yes. And the plants, the plants in a symbiotic relationship with the soil is also determined by the plants. Yes. And the plants in a symbiotic relationship with the soil put stuff in the soil that feeds the microbiome. And the more diversity of plants, now think about these massive millions of acres of monoculture, what that does to the soil, right?

If you have hundreds of different species of plants on rangeland or farmland, that's putting information in the soil that feeds the celery medicine for the microbiome of the soil and then the microbiome in turn helps the plants by extracting compounds from the soil that it couldn't otherwise extract so we're seeing two phenomena here one is over the last 50 years we've seen a dramatic reduction in mineral and nutrient content in plants. Even if you do broccoli today, it's not as interesting as it was 50 years ago. You're up to 50% lower levels of minerals and also a 10 to 50% reduction in phytochemicals. And it's all because we've disrupted this natural relationship between plants and soil.

Yes. And we didn't understand, right? I mean, when people starting into all this, nobody understood it. And the silos that we live in, right, that we were talking about last night. So you have these ecologists that are going down this path and learning about all these things we're talking about. You have agronomists that are thinking we need yield, yield, yield yield and now those worlds are coming together how we're starting to say look we did this nobody's to blame it had it was just good intentions but we need to have a thing and then these phytochemicals going back to the soil microbiome their health their health promoting for all those bacteria and and mycorrhizae and all it's there

it's so symbiotic and so health-promoting all the way across the board. And you can't extract one thing from the other. They're intimately interrelated. And we're interrelated with all that, right? And we've forgotten that that's so fundamental to our health. We really need to wake up to that, right? That appreciation of how beautiful and amazing it is, for one thing, and then how important it is, fundamental for our health. Hey, everyone. It's Dr. Mark.

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the code dr hyman 20 now let's get back to this week's episode of the doctor's pharmacy and the phytochemicals that are in these plants that have been grown in ways that feed the microbiome of the soil that increase their nutrient density that increase their phytochemical richness have profound effects for our health and they're profound effects for the animals so i'm a doctor you're sort of a rangeland behavioral ecologist, right? We're studying different things. It seems like how could they come together? Dr. Michael Smith Ecological doctor. Dr. John Kroger Yeah, but it's really, when you look at it, it's exactly what's happening in human health and animal health. So we're seeing the need for

massive inputs to animals to keep them growing and healthy. Bee lots using supportive nutritional support, antibiotics, certain kinds of feed. And they're not that healthy. Whereas if you take a grass-fed, fully grass-fed finished animal or a wild animal, they're eating foods all the time that are treating their bodies with medicine. That's right. And they're less likely to get sick. They don't need as much support. And so the costs are way less

to raise grass-fed regenerative beef than it is to feed a lot of animals. And people say, well, it's more expensive. Turns out it's not more expensive. It turns out they gain weight in the right way. And what was fascinating

to me reading your book was that some of these papers was that it was shocking to me that they could eat far less and gain the same weight because and this is just asking because we eat a nutrient replete diet our bodies know what to do yeah absolutely absolutely the case um the the whole notion of the nutritional wisdom of the body of everything from the bacteria in the soil through to the plants themselves through to to the livestock and on us as well you know i want to go back to a point too it's uh

about our reliance on fossil fuels and that all these inputs that plants did naturally now we have to make up with with herbicides herbicides to to protect protect plants and monocultures, glyphosate and all the downstream effects of glyphosate. Plants did that naturally. They produced their own herbicides. And they're called phytochemicals. Right. And they're called phytochemicals. Then insecticides to protect plants from the insect. Well, that's what plants did. Also phytochemicals. That's what they did. Also phytochemicals, then insecticides to protect plants from, from the insect.

Well, that's what plants did. That's what they also find chemicals, fertilizers. We've been talking about this symbiosis below ground. Um, when we got rid of that, then we've got to do the fertilizer. Well, there's cost to every one of those things. And then like you said, a lot of plants, if you have a diversity of plants, they put nitrogen into the soil. So you don't have to put it in.

Right. absolutely. Nitrogen is fixing plants. So we shot ourselves in the foot. And then there's this huge cost that we've talked about. You know, when you take in the… The reason we need GMO foods is because we've depleted the plant's natural ability to protect, defend itself by the breeding we've done. That's the idea. That plans for yield and protein energy. And then, but wait a minute, these are all getting eaten and they're not striving and they're getting sick and we need to give them all these drugs to keep them them healthy which is kind of silly because naturally

these phytochemicals are the plant's defense mechanisms they prevent radiation they they help treat different uh problems that they have with their own health they help communicate with other plants of dangers they have all these incredible benefits right yeah and that's the supreme irony is now we're trying to genetically engineer back into plants all the things that they originally had you know so what's the emphasis as we were talking on programs and there are some in this country that are really trying to think about phytochemical richness and how do we get that back into into the production system in really viable ways so that when you go to the grocery store and

you pick up the medicine kale or the tomato or whatever it is, and you pick something that's phytochemical rich, and you take a bite of that, and every cell in your body is saying, hey, this is wonderful, rather than you don't. Although eating broccoli from the store, even if it's organic broccoli from a great store, if I go and pick it in my garden and eat it, I'm like, wow, what's that? Or if I eat asparagus that I buy in the store, if I eat asparagus i go pick in my garden i'm like that tastes so different right absolutely tastes so different so that's where we would encourage everyone to you know growing gardens getting yourself getting your hands in and i talked to a lot of people anymore who haven't

done that historically but they listen to these kinds of things and they start doing that and so you know it's a spiritual kind of thing in the one sense that it connects you back with with our being kind of but then the the rewards of eating like you say it's it's wonderful how we pick it fresh and bring it in and eat it and and then to realize what we're talking about some of this science that's been dug into, that it actually is very, very healthy for you. And all these phytochemicals. You know, I'll say a word, too. Over my career, I was so involved with natural products, chemistry, ecologists, and learning all these different compounds, all of them, jillions of them. And I don't worry about that anymore, Mark.

For two reasons. One, my memory doesn't hold these things anymore, I'll be honest. But two, you realize it's so complex. I mean, plants will produce tens to hundreds to even thousands of these. Strawberry will produce 5,000 of them. So I think we can become bogged down if we try to think about, you know, well, does it have resveratrol or does it have phenolics of this sort of one? Not to say there, but if you just appreciate that it's that phytochemical richness,

that's really what matters. And then the miracle is that the level of the cells and organ systems in your body, your cells and body know what to do with all that. That's incredible, you know. And you're never going to study that in a reductionist sense. No, it's so complex, right? Because you're literally eating thousands of compounds, not just protein, fat, carbs, fiber, vitamins, minerals, all these other compounds, and your body knows what to do with them.

They regulate all these key functions. It's what I do in functional medicine when I treat patients using food as medicine. I tell people to have green tea, which helps get rid of heavy metals, or have them have broccoli, which increases their detox capacity, or the thiol from the, who assimilates in sulforaphane, or whether I'm having them eat prawns and sandwitching berries to increase their anti-inflammatory antioxidant capacity. So I'm thinking all the time about how do I use these, but it really never occurred to me these deep interrelationships between the plants, animals, and the soil that are driving the phytochemical richness and so your work has really explained how that all works and why we've sort of gotten so screwed up so so essentially we bred plants to remove these

compounds and then we have to use all these agrochemical industrial inputs to compensate for that and two we built an agricultural system a legacy of the Green Revolution that ended up damaging the soil in ways that we never even understood and turned it from soil to dirt. And you wrote in a paper you recently read that the Green Revolution helped feed billions of people but had many unintended consequences, including loss of land and social changes in the culture because of how it affected the farmers and the displacement of land and poverty for countless small farmers. In India, suicide rates are really high among farmers, even in this country.

Loss of biodiversity, which we talked about, and food quality. The degradation of the land from soil erosion and loss of minerals in the soil. Adverse effects from synthetic fertilizers on soil organisms. So when you put nitrogen on the soil, it kills the bugs in there. Pollution from fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides in the overall environment. And more salt in the soil from irrigation. And dependence on fossil fuels. So it really created a system with so many inputs and so many changes and destructive problems that happened to the ecosystem that we've sort of, we've sort of stopped living in an ecological way that it's supportive and

sustainable. And we're now calling regenerative, which is how do we regenerate ecosystems? How do we regenerate soil? How do we regenerate the phytochemicals in time? How do we regenerate human health? Those are all the things that people care about. And yet we've developed the agricultural system that puts a lot of food that makes people sick and kills people. I mean, the one fact around COVID that's just tiring to me is that 63% of hospitalizations for COVID can be linked back to poor diet. The poor diet that caused diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and so forth that led to

the hospitalizations. Absolutely. That should get everybody stopping in their tracks and going, wait a minute, if we are so susceptible to pandemic because of our diet, and we've not only seen that in death and sickness, but also the loss of food security, nutrition security, in so many communities during the pandemic, we've sort of got to get back on track here. Yes, and as everything we're saying,

it relates to all the organisms in the system, right? As you get rid of the phytochemical diversity and diversity of different plant species, that makes all the wild and domestic animals more susceptible to diseases as well. We're seeing it in a pandemic. It's become

very real for humans, but that's the same kind of thing that happens in wild domestic animals as well. And it's not just an animal agriculture, plant agriculture, even if you're a vegetarian or vegan, you're eating plants. And if they're growing, even in organic ways, they can be using killing methods in the soil, they can be doing things that actually decrease biodiversity.

And it's not necessarily going to solve the problem if you're learning large monocrops of soybeans or the new plant-based means you've gotten GMO soy going in huge monocrop cultures that are destroying the ecosystem, we're pouring billions of pounds of, you know, millions of billions of millions of pounds of glyphosate that's on soil, which is destroying the cell, so microbiome, which is our microbiome. And we're ending up having these food products that aren't what they were. And our health is really degraded as a result. Yeah.

You know, glyphosate was originally developed as an antibiotic, right? It's to kill bacteria. I thought it was to kill, to clean out the lead pipes. And then they put it in the pipes and the runoff from the pipes, they found all the plants died around where the runoff was

out of the pipes. Yeah, that's part of the history of that whole thing. That's right. It wasn't deliberate, right? I mean, it was an unintended consequence, and turned it into the herbicide it is today. It's crazy. So as a doctor, I understand, and as a functional medicine doctor, I understand the power of food as medicine and the power of phytochemicals and phytonutrients in plants to actually activate our health and address both the treatment and prevention of disease. That's so clear to me. And your work has really highlighted how we've lost our ability to

be in right relationship with the land and with animals that will lead to more of these phytochemicals being in our diet, including not only in plants, but in animals. And we'll talk about phytochemicals and meat in a little bit. What really strikes me from your work is how we've really lost our natural wisdom of what to eat. And one of the studies that you wrote about in your book, Nourishment, which everybody should get a copy of, is this study that was done in the 20s by a woman, I think in Canada, who took kids from an orphanage. And I don't know if you can get this through an ethics committee today, but she took these kids from an orphanage and she fed them an array of foods. She offered them these foods so they could naturally select what their bodies wanted and these kids would eat stuff

that you wouldn't even think they like for example a dinner might be orange juice and liver and you know some weird thing and brains and and so talk about the study what was learned from it and how as as humans living in a world with a disconnection from our food supply and a disconnection from the kinds of foods that helped us maintain our nutritional system, how it's led to all this chronic disease. So this study really informs a lot of the thinking about why we are all so sick and overweight. Yes. Clara Davis was the scientist who did the studies. She was in Chicago.

And I would have loved to have met Clara. I have to say she's a petite little lady and so much on the same page. But she obviously had this belief in the nutritional wisdom of the body, but wanted to study that and see what happens. So she had 15 children that were given up for adoption, put in an orphanage, and she ran the study over a six-year period. And they had 34 different foods that were offered seasonally, some of the things like you mentioned.

And then they simply recorded what each child ate, meal in, meal out. Can you imagine that amount of data? They just got to pick whatever they wanted. Yeah, the kids could pick whatever they wanted. And they had pediatricians that were involved in that study, and they wrote papers about it. And they said they'd never seen a healthier group of kids ever in their careers. And the kids did things things and this was interesting so there's no nutritionist telling them what to do no dietary guidelines getting in the structure

no nutrition facts labels with all the right stuff and clara made it clear she told the people who were helping on the study you're not to give any indication of to those children of something to put it on that and put it in front of them and it was interesting when they first started started this study they said the kids sampled everything everything went into their into their mouth the napkins the silverware the you know anything that was on there but given a little bit of time each child would figure out what what worked for its body and i just love this because she said no said no two children ever selected the same combination of foods. And no child ever selected the same foods from day to day. Right.

But they all selected diets that met their needs. And they knew when some of the kids would come in with deficiency symptoms, they paid particular attention to what they would select and they would select things that they need. So if they're a vitamin A deficient, they'll go for the liver. That's right. That's absolutely the case.

Or if they come in with rickets, they'll go for vitamin D. Yeah. So they documented all of that. And it's just amazing to think. And we were talking about that. We did studies like that with livestock, with sheep and cattle, where we'd give them choices of foods or no choice at all. These rations that are fed in feedlots, what are called total mixed rations, where they're designed for the average animal. And you try to make uniform groups of animals in terms of age and sex and so forth.

And then you formulate a ration, you grind it and mix it up. So one group would get that in our study. The other group was simply offered the choice of the ingredients. And it was amazing to compare what they did. And that's where, going back to the point that you made, the animals that were given a choice actually ate less food. But gained the same weight. But yeah, they gained weight just as readily. They finished, you know,

when people talk about finishing and you slaughter them, and we did that. And you look at their carcass characteristics, they were the same, but it cost less. It was more efficient. It cost less if you're thinking

just in an economic sense, because they ate less food. Here's the emotion. So you out of a buffet for them instead of giving them a set meal and then they got to pick what they actually needed for their health and they did exactly what claire davis kids did too no two animals ever selected the same combination of foods and they buried it from day to day to day you know and we understand a lot how that works. We don't need to go into those details, but it's amazing. And one of the most amazing things to me, so you can look at different characteristics, but one thing that nutritionists like to look at is protein to energy ratio in the diet. And that varies a lot as a function of need.

And so for the total mixed ration, there's a set protein to energy ratio, right? It's set by what that ration is. And when we looked at protein to energy ratio for the individual animals given choice, they were all over the place. Some were really high, some were really low. But when we averaged all those animals, they were exactly where the nutritionists had formulated the ration. But none of them were that do you know there was no animal average animal they had their own intelligence yes even even a cow yeah it's not necessarily a wild elk or buffalo that's right that's right

it was still they had not lost that they and that's a key point because when we started our work 45 years ago there was the notion among ruminant nutritionists that wild animals must still have this nutritional wisdom in their bodies. Otherwise, how could they be surviving? But domestic animals have lost it as a result of 10,000 years of domestication and selection. And our work just shows in the 300 papers we've published over and over again, it hasn't been lost. But it's the choices that you give them. And are you giving them wholesome choices that allow that wisdom? No different from a human, right?

If you're raised on an ultra-processed diet, then that's your choices. It's not going to work out well for you, right? But if you have all these wholesome choices and they're grown under the kind of conditions we're talking about, then that wisdom can be expressed. And the amazing thing is you don't even have to think about it. It's not something that we say. That's right. It's amazing. We've lost all that.

And we've gotten in a world where we are over-consuming ultra-processed foods in ways that make us the most obese nation in the world and are staggeringly undernourished, even though we're overfed. Overfed and undernourished. And we have significant nutritional deficiencies in this culture. Forget about phytochemicals. So I think probably 99.9% of Americans are deficient in phytochemicals and I think less than 9% of the recommended amount are fruits and vegetables.

That's a minimum. Like five cups is minimum. Five servings, which is basically two and a half cups uh i i would say people should more like eight or nine cups of foods and vegetables a day right right so so we've lost that and the um these the you know these these these compounds we're not getting and we don't know we need but we're so deficient in our diet and the cravings we have and the overeating we do often is an attempt to try to replace those nutrients that we're not getting from our food.

And one of the studies by Kevin Hall and some others was fascinating to me. You talked about it, which is that when given an unlimited amount of ultra processed food or a whole food we eat, that the people who ate the whole foods felt satisfied on far less food they ate 500 calories less a day now that is a massive amount of calories if you're 100 calories off for 20 years you're going to gain 20 or 30 pounds so 500 calories let's say 3500 calories right, right. Which is basically a week of the calorie excess would be equivalent to a pound of weight gain a week. Yeah.

Excess food. So that's why we're so overweight, because we're looking for love in all the wrong places. We're looking for nutrients in nutrient-depleted food. Forget about phytochemicals. Like the whole idea of phytochemicals regulating our appetite and our desire for food was something I just, uh, you know, didn't fully understand until I read your book and the thing that struck me was some of the experiments you did

where you, you help, uh, explain how flavor and nutrient needs and the animal's feeding behavior are all related. So they will find the foods that they need and will eat enough of those to meet their needs. And then they'll go eat something else. They won't eat too much or too little. They have this natural intelligence. And that flavor is associated with these phytochemicals. So most people understand when you eat like a wild strawberry, it's an explosion of flavor in your mouth,

even though it's the size of a pea. Yes. You eat a big fat strawberry you buy in the grocery store, it tastes like cardboard, you know, and there's no real flavor there. And Dan Barber has done a lot of work around this as a chef and created a company called Rose Salmon Foods where he's hybridizing plants, not GMO, but just breeding plants for flavor. He's not thinking about phytochemicals.

I'm thinking as a doctor about the phytochemicals because the phytochemicals are what give the plant the flavor. So the whole relationship between plants, even in humans and their dietary preferences, and plants and animals is something most people don't understand. So can you explain the way in which these flavor feedback loops help regulate animals' feeding behavior and how it might inform, as humans, what we should be eating and how we need to reclaim and listen to our own nutritional wisdom? That's so important. And that was something that really blew my mind. I wish there's a way that we could make this come alive for people there to realize that liking for flavor is being mediated by these metabolic feedbacks, hormones, neurotransmitters, peptides, all those things are those signals are coming from cells and organ systems as a function of their need. And so that's changing liking as a function of need. And when you're eating wholesome foods, then that's

going to be in sync with what your body needs. It can that system can be hijacked. Yeah. We looked at a little video last night. I showed you a sheep and one group of sheep had been when they, when they ate a really a straw, which is not, not a nutritious food at all. We would put either water in one group of sheep directly into their stomach or an energy, a blast of energy.

And the sheep that got the blast of energy, they love that straw. You give them a little maple syrup. That's what the food industry is doing with the refined carbohydrates. You get a flavor and you follow that with a blast of energy and you immediately form a really strong preference. So let's stop there. So basically what you're saying is you take straw, which is like eating processed food, right?

Cardboard. No nutrients. You add sugar on it, and they go, oh, sugar, that's good. I want energy. And they eat the straw even though it has no nutrition, which is what we do as humans when we eat ultra-processed food. We eat fast food, which has no real real nutritional value but it has tons of energy so they add sugar and all these flavorings to it in order for us to start craving it so we

associate the loosened energy with the flavor the flavor of the flavor but it's actually kind of mismatched it is and what we were showing is that it's that feedback and the way you do that is to give the flavor of straw. So we would make maple flavored or apple flavored or whatever it is. And you've got this straw that's worthless. You have to emphasize that it's not nutritionally anything. But when you follow the ingestion of that straw with nutrients in the gut, put the nutrients directly in the gut, that's the cells that

work. Those nutrients are getting absorbed and cells notice this and say, oh, this is great. And it's feeding back to make you say, oh, I love maple flavored straw or I love apple flavored straw. And it's not even the taste because you're not giving them the maple flavor. That's right. That's exactly. That's to try to get that through and then to realize, you know, and none of this is conscious.

As we were talking, nobody thinks about which enzymes to release to digest the food they're eating. And it's the same thing with these feedbacks. It's happening automatically. Yeah, and that's where if you're eating wholesome foods, it works. The system is as solid as it can be. But if you get on the ultra-processed, it gets hijacked. And the food, people in the food industry have really learned how to do that well. And then to put not wholesome herbs and spices, let's say, as a flavoring agent, it's all these 600 million pounds a year or whatever.

Wait, wait, wait. Artificial flavoring 600 million pounds of artificial flavorings are added to our food every year that's frightening yeah it's it's uh and it's caused this disconnect between our natural inclinations to eat foods that nourish us with our with our ability to sort of pick those foods and we tend to eat foods that are associated with these artificial flavors because they've they've scientifically figured out how to hijack our brain chemistry and our hormones and our metabolism and so we tend to crave all the wrong stuff rather than the phytochemicals we've been talking about um we use artificial yeah

artificial flavoring agents and so we're not getting just as you were saying earlier all those things that our bodies evolved with over the years and that regulate all these systems inside our body we're not getting that yeah and these animals seem to have profound ability to sense what's going on not necessarily through even taste although the flavor plays a role it's even the levels of these metabolites of plants in their bloodstream can regulate their eating behavior. So you talked in the book, for example, about eating sagebrush, for example, elk in the winter eat sagebrush, which is not the greatest food, but it has nutritional values in the winter when they can't eat other stuff.

And there's high levels of these things called terpenes, which are potentially toxic to these anions. They will stop eating when their levels of the blood of these terpenes gets to a certain level and they'll go eat something else. Yes. But you kind of hijack that through studying this process where you infused the terpenes in their blood. So they never even kind of, it wasn't like they were tasting it and eating it it was like their body knew immediately that it was time to stop eating that

yeah and if the guests in the audience can just picture so there's an animal that's there eating we were working with sheep on those studies and it's eating its meal and we're slowly slowly infusing terpenes into the bloodstream to look at detoxification and elimination processes. And when we reach a level that's enough for the particular animal, they'll just lie down and stop eating. So we would stop infusing at that point. But it's the animal that's associating the food that it's eating with the feedback signals. They're so in tune with that it it's amazing actually when

you start to watch it if you can picture it and it just changes absolutely changes your views of nutritional wisdom of the body how that's working and so so so basically we've gotten this predicament of a food system that's producing food in a way that depletes the plants of the phytochemicals and the nutrients that's needed to feed animals and humans, in a way that destroys the soil microbiome, in a way that has hijacked our own ability to know what's good for us or not good for us, because our innate nutritional wisdom has been hijacked by these industrial chemicals and starch and sugar and food that is completely disconnect us from our ability to have any nutritional wisdom. And for anybody listening,

if you've ever done a detox or an elimination diet where you get rid of all the junk, all the processed foods, even on my 10-day detox diet, you'll very quickly start to reclaim your natural wisdom. You'll start to crave the things that are good for you. I don't crave starch or sugar or processed food. In fact, I can walk by the Candy Island. I mean, it just looks like a rock to me. I'm like, why would I eat that?

It doesn't even look like food or a muffin or something. I was at a coffee shop today in Montana and I was getting some coffee and although coffee is the richest source of phytochemicals in the American diet which is not a good thing by the way because you just

drink coffee and don't eat any plants but they had this like sugar cookie and this banana bread and lemon bread and it was like, I was like, oh, I want to eat that but I was like, no, I actually don't. Like I looked at it, it sounded good but then I looked at it and I was like no, that doesn't look like edible to me anymore. And I think I used to want to eat that stuff.

I think if we can kind of reclaim our own bodies, it doesn't take long to do that. No, that's right. And I have a story for you. When Sue and I really, many years ago, got moving more and more in this direction of getting all of that out of our diet, we decided, look, that stuff's really hard to resist when you're on it, right? I mean, you talk to a lot of their hosts. Yeah, you're hooked. And sugar can be addicting and all those things. So the place to stop is at the grocery store.

It doesn't go into the basket. It does not go into the basket because you don't get it home. But I love to tease Sue. And I was in the store a while back. And so we'll go down the aisle where all that stuff is. I grabbed this huge old cake and stuff. And this older lady was watching me. And she knew what I was.

And I put that. And I put a couple of things. And Sue came back to the basket and it was just so fun to watch the old lady she's get that out of here you know the older lady but it's a key point though you know you can't surround yourself with that stuff and think that you've got the quote willpower to avoid it it's in your house and so at christmas time when we get really you know gifts from other people yeah it's bad and we yeah and we hate to we we accept them nicely but soon throws them away she just says

because you know it's why don't you why do i want to get into a food bank because you know you know it's like you don't want other people eating that no you don't it's it's not so you know that's one of the the things that we did anyway was to say you got to get on wholesome foods and let your body start to to tell you what you what you need from day to day i'm like claire davis's kids you know and sometimes you say eat this or eat that or eat something i don't want it today my body doesn't want it okay i don't don't need don't need that particular thing today my body's not telling me that. Well, one of the things that struck me from your book was the discussion of the intelligence of your cells and organs that's beyond your brain.

And how those cells and organs are constantly sampling their environment and deciding what they need or don't need and regulating your behavior it's almost like a decentralized brain i don't i just it blew my mind and one of the stories you tell to illustrate that is a woman who had a i think a liver transplant or heart transplant heart and lung transplant heart and lung transplant and she's pretty healthy year before and all of a sudden she's like wanting kfc and wanting junk food and was so confused so tell us about that story implications around how our cells and organs are also intelligent how that works it's it blows your mind because it meant it'll make you stop to think who is this

person i call me actually right it'll really make you stop to think who is this person i call me actually right it'll really make you stop to think that when you realize how all these cells and organ systems are interacting to influence all that you do but so the book a change of heart by claire sylvia it's an old book now but it's so worth reading because, so here's this 40-year-old woman, one of the first people ever to get heart and lung transplant. And so doctors, no one understood much that what would happen. And I remember one part in there related to what you were saying, where she was saying, man, I'm just, I'm a different person now,

but I've got these heart and lungs. It wasn't only food. It was a whole bunch of, so it set her on this quest to try to find out where did these organs come from? It's like football. Yeah, exactly. Where did these organs come from? And the book is telling of this story, and she finds out it's a young man

named Tim that was a you know late teens was killed in a motorcycle accident and that's the heart and lungs she got and so she's telling these doctors about all this stuff and i remember one the doctor said you know the heart's just a damn pump and she said no it's not just a damn pump you don't know it's not in your body you know it's you're not experiencing what i'm experiencing yeah and the and the lungs aren't just a way to get air into your body and then the part you know so she's since she was one of the first people to do that there was great interest and the press was there about the time she's getting ready to be released from the hospital and one of the

reporters asked her if you could have anything you want right now to eat, what would you like? And she said, actually, I'd like a beer. And she said the minute she said that, she wanted to take the words back for two reasons. One, it was a flippant response. But two, I don't even like beer, she said. And so that got her started thinking about this whole deal. And then, like you say, it just went on and on. Things that she never liked before green peppers and on KFC.

She came to like, and so her, her diet, your habits broadened out. She didn't quit liking the things that she once liked. She still liked those, but they broadened out. And then she's asking the family,'s family what did tim like to eat you know and they're saying oh he just loved kfc and she said chicken mcnuggets said first time she could drive her car nearly steered off the road which went by but how do you kind of reconcile that with the promise of reclaiming our nutritional wisdom. Because if the programming of our cells and organs is so intense by the processed food industry that it survives death, you literally give someone else your heart and lungs if you die, and you also give them all your bad habits.

Right, right. How do you undo that? Yeah, I think like you say, I think you have to really, you have to radically change what you're doing. She has to retrain the new heart and lungs. You have to retrain them.

This isn't, and you know, I know people that I visit with quite a lot that were really born, you know, raised on ultra-processed foods and those sort of things.

And it's a lifelong battle for them. They tell me. I still struggle with that. We just talk about it. I guess it's like alcohol. If you want to be an alcoholic, you just leave that stuff alone. You put wholesome things into your diet. You're right, but it lets you know the deep level, right?

The deep, deep level at which all of this is happening. And then the amazing level all right well there's far more there's far more afferents feeding up to the central nervous system then like it's all the same nerves growing from the central nervous system down to the body they're so cute many many times yeah many many more times ascending than descending right in terms of your own So basically your cells and your organs are all talking to your brain and giving information to them about what to do or not to do

and what to crave and what to want. Absolutely right. So if you look at the taste system, nerves for taste converge with nerves from throughout, like the vagus and so forth. Those nerves right here in the brain stem, then they synapse and relay throughout the central nervous system.

They converge with nerves for smell and so forth and so on. So, yeah, we know, we understand a good deal about the basic anatomy and physiology of those systems. And now we're learning that the microbiome is also sending signals, right? I mean, that's... So you're not eating only what you crave, you're eating what your microbiome craves. You're right. Well, it's like the whole thing has got to be fed, right? It's got to feed itself.

And so, and the part that makes me a little bit sad is the microbiome, and it's important, absolutely. It's getting so much press and people are saying, well, the microbiome is sending these signals to the central nervous system. But there never gets a word said about all these other organ systems, cells and organ systems. They're doing the same thing. Everything has to be fed. And the brain has certain needs and the lungs and the liver and they're all it's a democracy, I guess you would say. They're all feeding into

Yeah, and that's where it's humbling, too, for me. And then you think, so an animal eats a meal, tens of thousands of compounds, and these feedbacks are mediating all of that to meet needs. And I think you realize at that point that we can study up to a degree, and then it just points you in a direction right that that you either come to appreciate that all that's going on and that you know this diversity that we're talking about of wholesome foods is what matters and then you figure that complexity the body knows and the more we understand it and it helps us to appreciate that right but then there's a humility for me at this point where you say it's incredible. It's incredibly complex. It's true. And sometimes in our reductionist approach, and I did this for years, you know, we went down that path.

What compound is causing what? Yeah, it's not in that. Yeah. No, it's not how it works. So, I mean, we learned from that. But I'm back so far away from that. It's about the richness of all that and the combinations. And I've heard you talk about it, Mark, and really appreciate it.

You know, so you could say, well, meat's bad. Meat's bad for you. I mean, epidemiological kind of thing. But it ignores something we learned really early on is that you've got to think about all the other things that are in the diet, right? Yeah. that you've got to think about all the other things that are in the diet right yeah how they're how they're synergizing with one another or in good ways or in bad ways to to influence it's not his meat good or bad it's it's the whole diet right it's like what you're eating combination with it it's right you eat fries and a burger and a milkshake it's different than eating a you know regenerative grass-fed beef with tons of spices and marinated and with lots of phytochemically rich vegetables and plants.

It's a totally different experience for your body. It absolutely is. And when you get into that and get on that, it's a very rewarding experience. You feel satisfied. And you don't have to eat a lot. We had a meal last night. And we had a little bit. I just had a half a piece of meat.

And I'm satisfied, you know, and you have all the greens that we had and the broccoli and so forth. Well, you know, essentially, you know, summarize what you're saying, essentially, you know, sort of what I sort of tried to get to in the Pagan diet, which is a set of principles that are universal that we can agree on, that we should all be eating whole foods, that we should need processed foods, that we should eat phytochemically rich foods, that we should eat foods with basically a wide variety and diversity of foods to include all these different compounds that we

need for our health. And it doesn't mean you have to be rigid or fixed, and there's a lot of ways to achieve that. But this whole kind of competition or adversarial relation between vegans and meat eaters, it just sort of doesn't make sense. I want to sort of dive into something that I think is a little bit controversial, but it kind of blew my mind when I read it in your book, that plants have 20 senses. The plants communicate with each other through these phytochemicals,

through messengers that they send through the mycorrhizal fungi. So they might be getting chomped on by a caterpillar, but they might send a message to their neighbor plants, and, hey, guy, you want to ramp up the production of this phytochemical that caterpillars don't like because I'm getting eaten, or how they sense everything around them. So the question sort of arises, where does consciousness begin, and what is a sentient being? And are plants sentient? Are they exhibiting behaviors and communication that makes us rethink their value? Because, you know, this is kind of, well, if you want to be ethical, you should only eat plants. Well, I'm not so sure.

Forget the idea that you're just growing plants, you're going to kill animals through farming techniques that destroy habitats and kill rabbits and birds. And we've lost 50% of our bird species to agriculture. That's for sure happening. And forget the fact that with organic agriculture, you need to use animal products to grow food like plants, right? You need compost or manure.

You need bone meal and fertilizer. You need various kinds of nutrients. You need different oyster shells. There's a lot of animal products that are used in organic vegetable agriculture. So forget that. Just the idea that these plants actually might have consciousness was a really novel idea for me. Can you kind of unpack that? How does that work? That's amazing. was a really novel idea for me. Can you kind of unpack that? Yeah, that's...

How does that work? That's amazing. It's a texture of that. That's amazing kind of research that the plant physiologists are doing. And, you know, there was a book written many, many years ago, The Secret Life of Plants, and it was really talking about these kind of ideas,

but it got highly, highly criticized back in the days because there's no science behind all this stuff well now there's top-notch world-class physiologists and ecologists have been studying all these to the 20 different senses and books have come out about plant intelligence and behavior and it they can't walk but they do a lot of things and if you think about walk. And if you think about it, you know, if you're confined to one space, you probably have to be even more clever, right? I mean, you can't get up and run away. You've got to figure out.

And these phytochemicals that we're talking about become the language of the plant, right? They're the language. They're the ways that they communicate. And so a caterpillar is starting to eat you, and you produce volatiles that send a signal on the other plants. Oh, boy, Charlie's getting eaten over there. I think I'm going to up my – and they do that, literally. I'm joking, laughing a little bit, but they're doing that, you know.

And so it starts when you read about the different senses of plants and they have kind of nervous system too it works more slowly than ours do but some of the neurotransmitters we have they have some of yeah and it's slow but um but it but it works on plant time as to what they need to do and uh yeah you can say they can share nutrients they can do all kinds of things they do and they help one another out right i mean hey jimmy I need some vitamin C. Can you give me some? It's true. Yes, it's being documented that they do those sorts of things. And in ecology, I think it's where ecologists went down, maybe not so good track. Historically, it was all about competition dog eat dog world everything's

competing competing competing and we're thinking all these synergies and how plants might be helping one another helping their offspring sharing resources uh with one another it's it's it's amazing to uh to get into that and then you can think about well are they clever or not you know anybody that's taking classes in biochemistry and some people take to that more readily than others, but a lot of people think it's pretty tough. And biochemistry is probably the most important subject in medical school. We all basically didn't pay attention to it, ignored and learned for the exam. And then we forgot about it.

Right. Right. And you know, so, but so biochemists, um biochemists are the ones creating all these, these genetically modified plants and so forth and so on, but plants routinely outwit, outwit these clever biochemists, agro, agro, agro people. And the example I choose, there's over 500 herbicide resistant plants. You make an herbicide and the plants are going to figure out how to get around it. You know, it's just like antibiotic resistance in humans and in livestock. You put a single compound, right, rather than diverse mixtures of phytochemicals.

You focus on one compound and that's easy for these over 500 herbicide resistant plants. You just go down the list. Yeah, so who's clever and who's not clever, right? I mean, so if there's this incredible plant intelligence, it makes you think about what should we eat? Do we have water or air or rocks? If you really want to be ethical and not kill or injure anything with constitutional sentiments, what should we be eating?

You could be like a Jane, that you don't eat anything, even a plant, until the fruit falls from the tree and so forth. But I think another way to think about that, and for me, is to realize this real irony that for anything to live, something gets consumed, right? It's constant transformation. Your sentence in the beginning of your book was so great.

It says the universe is a restaurant consuming itself. I'm like, what a great line. And you can't get out of this predicament of having to consume, kill, eat life. That's right. And so then does vegan have an impact on that? Well, I don't know. I think there's a lot of questions that I have about that forget the health complications or implications forget the environmental stuff just just from an ethical point of view like what does all that mean and i think start to start to

think about that that that's the way it is on this planet that that is it this horrible thing that life lives on life huh and and then to think well how do you do that with respect? And how, that everything is sacred, whether it's a plant or an animal. There was a guy came here a year ago. He was working on our pump here in the yard, and we were having this kind of conversation, and I knew where he was going to go. He said, you see that plant over there? I don't even want to harm that plant.

And I laughed because I said, I'm the same way. You know, I mean, it's all sacred. I'm sure we do. I mean, that's part of being here. But you can put yourself in a respect for all of that and a sacredness, right? That it's all sacred. And then you start to think that you're a part of all that too. And so whether it's an animal that you're eating or a plant or

whatever it's and it's about the whole system and how do we make ethical systems that consider all that and then the the craziness of it that but it's happening at all levels in the universe right at the center of every galaxy is a black hole that's consuming the galaxy. The whole thing is, yeah. They can't get away from death. No, and if you look at it as transformation, you know, depending on your belief system, but if you... We're going to become food for the plants, we're going to become food for the animals, they're going to become food for us. It's like this virtuous cycle. That's right.

Absolutely. Condemn with respect and honor and integrity. Very different. And that's why, you know, I think the whole movement towards regenerative agriculture also includes the idea of animal welfare. It includes the idea of putting animals in an environment that is their natural habitat, where they have the least touches, the least inputs. I visited a regenerative branch in Maui. It was fascinating. They just let the cows go.

They didn't do anything. They all lived in their natural family groups. They grazed on what they needed. They didn't, they didn't do anything. You know, they, they all went in their natural family groups. They, they grazed what they needed. They didn't get them supplemental anything. They just like had this incredible environment and they were, I mean, they were super super happy and maybe they liked being killed. I don't think they wanted to be killed, but still it was an interesting thing to see how, how they thrive, how they didn't need all these agrochemical

inputs, how they didn't need all these medicines from veterinarians to make them survive, like antibiotics. They were able to actually thrive in this environment by being in their natural habitat. So the recovery. Then if a person realizes, too, just to pick up on a point that you made, that when you do that with animals, and if you allow the animals to be in their family groups and the huge role that mother plays that we alluded to earlier in terms of her offspring learning what not to eat, where not to go, what's a predator, what's not a predator. I have a friend in Tasmania who has moved in her sheep operation toward extended families, letting them. And when she describes that and talks about the calm that's come over those and how it just lets you realize that's the natural world.

And we've broken all that down, too. We used to live in extended families. It's true. And so forth. That's why we get loneliness, depression, isolation. And the roles grandparents played. If you were fortunate to have grandparents, and just how calming and influencing.

I mean, your parents are all hyper, trying to make a living and raise the brats that you've got. But the grandparents, you know, they just... Yeah, for sure. And you start to think, well, that extended family. And then in the Native peoples around the world about the knowledge of the older people and the females, their knowledge of how to forage and all these things, it takes on a real beauty. It's an amazing thing.

And we broke all that down. So it's no wonder in livestock, nobody even thinks about that. But people are starting to think about that and to think about what's it mean for an animal to, quote, know the range. And that if they're born and raised there with mother, they've learned all these things. Plus, how is epigenetics, you know, this expression of genes that changes form and function. We used to study that. How do organ systems change in terms of their form? How do they change in terms of their function as a result of that?

And all that's making them locally adapted, which cuts costs again, right? They're able to live in the environment without all the fossil fuel inputs. That's so true. And so I want to sort of change tack a little bit and talk about the ways in which animals have been found who are living in more natural habitats, foraging on dozens, hundreds of plants with profoundly different characteristics than feedlotting.

We were chatting a little earlier, we were chatting earlier about the kangaroo study in Australia where they basically fed people kangaroo meat or feedlot meat, and then they crossed over and fed the same people the opposite, and they watched what happened. And when they ate kangaroo meat, all the inflammatory markers went down in their body. When they ate the feedlot meat, same amount, ounce per ounce, all the inflammatory markers went up. So, uh, it really kind of speaks to not as meat good or bad, but what meat? Is a wild elk different than a grass fed, vaginally raised cow, different than a feedlot cow, for example.

And, and a lot of the work you've done is really sort of novel in that we, we never knew that these grass fed animals foraging on this wide variety of plants had these phytochemical compounds in them. So we're talking about plants having phytochemicals, but now work by you and Stephen Bambouillette at Duke, who I think is coming to Utah State, is kind of blowing up our ideas about where to get these phytochemicals. And there may be some of these phytochemicals that are in meat or dairy that are at as high levels as you find in the plant foods, which is sort of striking.

And then what are the implications of that for our health? Because we always focus on, you know, is there more omega-3s in grass-fed beef? Maybe there's more minerals and more antioxidants and what is that? But now we're finding these phytochemicals in meat as a reasonable source of plant nutrients, which is kind of wild. So can you talk about the work? Because there's a paper that you wrote called Health-Promoting Phytonutrients or Higher Ingressive Meat and Milk.

And I want to get sort of segue from that into the implication for a metabolism of these chemicals. So talk about the science behind the idea of it. And we talked all over this on our last podcast. But just sort of to update people, where are we at with our science of these phytochemicals and the idea of it. And we talked about all of this on our last podcast, but just to update people, where are we at with our science of these phytocannabinoids and the implications of these, and how do we get there? Yeah, it's such a good point that you raise. And I think anyone, and I know a lot of people don't actually hunt or gather their own food,

but when I was growing up, we did a lot of hunting of of our own of our own food and you come to realize that the flavors really change as a function of the season of the year that you shoot an animal where are the animals foraging and so you have people have had the personal experience of that and now tell us your grouse story. Before you get into the grouse story, what's fascinating about plants is at different times of day and at different seasons, they produce different compounds that have

different effects on the animals. In the Tibetan tradition, if you're a doctor, you have to study Tibetan herbal medicine. Part of that is going to the Himalayas and foraging and harvesting different plants that are turned into medicine. But they know that at different seasons, different times of the year, there are going to be different benefits from a particular plant. And the same way the animals know that, the plants do that. And talk about the grouse story

that you shared about your hunting grouse and what you learned from that and what that informed you about how to think about what's in these plants and how it affects the quality of the meat. That's right. It's so critical to underscore, so I'm going to say it again, that the plants are so dynamic. They're responding minute to minute, day to day to their environment. And so we're changing concentrations of these compounds. And the phytochemicals and the nutrients as well are varying. So morning versus afternoon.

And animals are in tune with that. They're in tune with that. And then seasonally, all these things are changing. And so the grouse story then is, you know, in the fall of the year, in the mountains around Logan, it's a beautiful time of the year, actually. Picture the maples all in these beautiful different colors and the aspens and you're up there it's brisk fall morning and you're hunting these grouse and in the early fall they're foraging on berries and leaves and a variety of different foods and the meat takes on a really wonderful flavor as a function of that. It's like strawberry or blueberry flavored meat.

Yeah, if I was a food taster, I could really describe it. But it's fabulous. It's fabulous. And so we used to love to hunt the grouse. But as it goes into the late fall and so forth, they move into these pine trees. And the grouse are very good at figuring out which pine trees are the best for them nutritionally. But they're eating these pine needles. And those needles are flavoring the meat.

The needles are high in terpenes. And they give a beautiful hint of terpene to the meat. It's like a pine-flavored grouse. Yes, it is. In terms of berry-flavored grouse. Yes, it is, and it's not overwhelming. But that gets you realizing that this is real. And, you know, I know the chemistry, all the different terpenes in these.

Well, you know, if you were to analyze that meat, you're going to find terpenes in there. That's it. So it's not only what you eat. It's whatever you're eating. It's what you're going to find terpenes in there. That's it. So it's not only what you eat, it's whatever you're eating. It's what you're eating. And then, as you're saying, is to realize that these phytochemicals become a really important part of that.

And, yeah, it goes back to the flavor and all that we were talking about and how it flavors now. And so the phytochemicals in meat are a new discovery, aren't they? They are. And you're finding that they have significant impact on human health. Yes. Well, so we wrote the review that you're talking about, and I think that's where Stefan was able to really convince himself. We wrote an earlier paper. Stefan was not. I didn't know Stefan at that time. But it is grass-fed meat and dairy better for human and environmental health.

And we were making the point that grass-fed isn't grass-fed isn't grass-fed. That was a key point that we were making, that it's going to depend on the mixture of things in the diet. We were marshalling together the evidence for that. Because you can have a monocrop grass field that's grass-fed beef, but it's not the same as having a wide variety of diversity of plants that they can eat. That's right. And we have a colleague in New Zealand, Pablo Gregorini,

he and his graduate students are going after that. There's some amazing, and Stefan's involved in this, amazing kind of thing. If you put them on a monoculture, you're going to get one kind of phytochemical and biochemical characteristics of the meat. But if you put them on this really diverse diet, it's going to change that. And so where we are in the studies right now, are on a monoculture pasture versus animals that are on really diverse pastures? And we're doing this work really in New Zealand.

We're doing it here in the U.S., going to have studies going. So that's one part. And we're using metabolomics as a way to do that and people don't have to it's just a sophisticated way that you can look at the huge array of different compounds that and you can track it from the soil to plant diversity to the animals through to us even so that's like a biotechnical snapshot of different products means whatever based on you know they're eating, and it's different. That's right. That's right.

And so that's the first phase. The next phase that we want to get into, you mentioned the kangaroo versus the cattle study. What's amazing is that's the only study that's been done like that. That's a human study, yeah. Yeah, a human study. That's incredible. So that's where we want to go next then is to run a lot of trials with humans, these crossover as you say, where we feed people meat and dairy. Yeah.

That's coming from different sources and then we want to go into a little bit longer term clinical trials to try to, you know, we know these compounds are getting in there, so we want to look at oxidative stress and inflammation, those kind of things. Lipids, everything. That's right. Those whole profiles and Stefan's,

as you mentioned, going to Utah State University and they've got great facilities there, so he's going to be running and gunning on all of this. It's all about the information in food. how different the quality of the food matters. You know, I remember a study was done in England about milk and these raw milk versus my guys milk profoundly different effects on your cholesterol and lipids for the modulant really bad for you. And the raw milk actually was

minimally good for you. I was telling you last night, our dog, when we get the milk from the goats, that's fresh milk from the goats, he loves it. He'll drink it right down, but you offer him organic milk, and I'm not meaning to be negative on it, but he's not interested in that. And there

again, it's like we talked too about cattle and deer, that when they have a choice in the field between GM crops and non-GM crops, they strongly prefer the non-GMO crops to the GM crops. So then you think, well, is our dog Henry trying to tell us something about the milk? Are these wild domestic animals trying to tell us something about these crops? They're in sync with that. And then, you know, this Sirilini did a whole bunch of studies of these things

and talking about all the downsides of the GM and the glyphosate combinations. He did some fabulous work, two-year studies. They were lab-based, but he was showing all the adverse effects on organs and organ systems and cancer, rates of cancer. And, you know, he published that paper, and then it was retracted from the journal, which is, that's stunning to have that happen. And it was, they're laboring this corporate terrorism. So, you know, there's a lot of pressure, right?

I mean. Yeah, it's fascinating. I think one of the things that really struck me, looking at work, was the way in which these, you know, phytochemicals end up in the meat and they end up in human biology and have different properties for it, inflammatory properties, antioxidant properties. But most of the data that we have on meat and all the studies get quoted

about meat being bad for you are based on feedlot meat, they're not based on regeneratively raised organic meat or wild meat feeding on, you know, hundreds different species of plants and having phytochemical rich diets and phytochemical rich meat and having different properties. It doesn't even, then it doesn't even go into the next level, which I want to talk about in a minute, which is how you prepare the meat, then it doesn't even go into the next level, which I want to talk about in a minute, which is how you prepare the meat. Is it mixed with spices and herbs and things?

Is it prepared by charcoal grilling at high temperatures or slow cooked? All these things have an impact. And so when you say, oh, meat is bad for you, here's the evidence, the data, it's complicated. It's complicated. And what makes me sad nowadays is to see there are really big agendas that drive some of these things, right?

And so the nuance that we're trying to really emphasize here, that matters. That matters a lot. That nuance just gets deleted from it all, right? It's one size fits all and the agendas that are being pushed. We all want simple answers, but it's not simple. Yeah, yeah. That's exactly right. And a lot of money to be made in all these all of this right

i have a friend in england who's got a book coming out the great plant-based con jane buxton and uh you know it's a great book it's a great book and she's just pointing out how much money follow the money is one of the chapters in the plant-based con the great plant-based con wow tell us about that yeah well it's it's about you know it's about all this that we're talking about in terms of plant-based meats. But I read many of the chapters. I haven't read the whole book. She asked me to review different chapters. But the one on follow the money just struck me so much.

And some of that people may be aware of, but there's so much that goes on to that follow the money that when you read it, it's like, oh yeah, this makes perfect sense. And why is such and such and so and so, I won't say names. Yeah, there are a lot of traders who invest in plant-based agriculture. Right. Why are they doing that? And what's the agenda that's being pushed, you know? And yeah, and the same with the region in terms of climate and climate change, you know,

so much push that all that meets bad for climate, right? Bad for the environment. Well, it can be, but it doesn't have to be either. That's a whole other topic. But, you know, depending on the diets that the animals have and tannins that you've mentioned, they can help to reduce methane emissions in ruminants. So you don't have to do like cargo and put a mask on that absorbs the methane. You can think about how to raise them in ways that does that in nature's image. You know, really all you're talking about is how do we get back to being,

living, growing food, raising animals in an ecological way that mirrors natural principles that helps restore balance and health in the system. That's what functional medicine is. That's what I do with people. I try to figure out how to restore their natural ecological balance. I don't give them substances to alter that balance. I give them other things that are going to promote the health of that system or remove the things that are peeing and and so from an agricultural

perspective from a food system perspective from a medical perspective it's so important to think about ecological principles as we start to sort of look at the future of our food system because without doing that we are screwed we are i mean we've covered this on this podcast many times but we are screwed and i mean to recap you know we've lost one third of our topso mean we've covered this on this podcast many times but we are screwed and i mean to recap you know we've lost one third of our topsoil we've depleted so much of our fresh water resources we were chatting about for example lake mean here is it 36 capacity hasn't been that way since 1200 years you know of water uh you know now it's illegal to grow grass and i don't mean pot i mean grass in the vatican water depletion we've lost 90 of our biodiversity we have massive nitrogen runoff into the rivers

and streams it causes dead zones uh and kills in just in the gulf of mexico 200 000 metric tons of fish every year we are producing food that's making people sick using this approach to growing food. And we're, you know, driving probably a third to half of greenhouse gas emissions from our agricultural system through fossil fuel inputs, through loss of soil and organic matter, which is the carbon sort of holding sink in the soil. So the implications are huge for what we're doing and the way we're growing food in our food system. And yet, you know, the beauty of this conversation is that by applying ecological principles, we can turn that around. That's right. In a very short time, it can be, you know, nature, when allowed to do its thing, is way smarter than humans and much quicker at actually mitigating, reversing,

and healing the damage that humans have created. That's right. And it gives a hope then, right? It gives a hope. And each one of us can be involved. I like to point this out all the time. Not everyone can be a farmer. What, less than 2% of the population farms?

Used to be 50. That's right. But we each can be if we look out the window here and we look at in this yard we've got some we've got some grass that people would grow but mostly what we've got around here are the native plants the diverse mixtures of of native plants and then we're growing vegetable herbal medicinal gardens so we can each be farmers and we can cut back on the amount of water we need by simply growing the native plants and then coming to appreciate all the beautiful little wild flowers that will grow naturally in your in your yard and the grasses and and until

you when you do if you ever do tune into that and start to look at them, you see the beauty and you start to appreciate, you know, in each season, all these beautiful little, right now, all these, the June grass, the needling thread grass, the poas, all these are blooming. And then you have the larkspur, the local wheat, and the cowboy's delight. It's amazing. Yeah. I'm trying to say that, but you can get hooked on that and you can come to, it's amazing, you know, and then you think everything we're talking about, that diversity is creating life below ground. It's creating life above ground. And so we can each, you don't have to, we don't have to feel hopeless, right? We can, and we don't have to say, well, it's just up to regenerative farmers.

We can say we and we don't have to say, well, it's just up to the regenerative farmers. We can say, we can each be that. And as we were talking, I stopped mowing my lawn and I'm like, this is incredible. As grasses are growing, wildflowers, bees are coming back, birds are coming back. I'm like, whoa, the life all comes. And then you, yeah. And you appreciate that. I am a, I am a part of this. I'm a part of the solution. You don't have to feel hopeless in that sense. And yeah, it's a spiritual thing, I think, really. We're linked to that in really important ways. Yeah, what is our place in the world? And how do we be in the right relationship to our place in the world through our relationship to what we eat, which is the thing that every day we do.

That's right. And every day we get an opportunity to impact not only our own health and well-being, but what's happening to climate change, to the environment. And by choosing different foods, you know, regenerative agriculture is only 1% of agriculture, but if we create policies and shifts that we're working on through the Food Fix campaign to actually drive the change, hopefully we'll start to see the shift. Well, absolutely the case. And then each day we can give thanks to the plants and animals who grace this plant and who daily give their lives to sustain our lives up through meals prepared

with love in a way one could say huh yeah if you do and it becomes then killing isn't killing huh whether it's a plant or an animal, it becomes more than that, huh? Yeah, it's so much more. So I want to dive into a little bit of a different tack, talking about a study that has just come out that I found really fascinating, and it is about plant-based meats and grass-fed meats. And the study was entitled Impossible to Go Beyond Beef, Nutriomics Comparison.

And in that study, you did a metabolomic analysis of the plant-based meats and grass-fed meat. And what were the different compounds that were in each and what were the implications for our health. And it's not sort of black and white, but it's very interesting food for thought because the compounds, even though they look the same on a nutrition facts label,

so let's say the Impossible Burger has been designed to, on the nutrition facts label, kind of marry what a steak would be or a hamburger would be, hamburger would be right it would be you know the same amount of protein fat and all that other stuff nutrients maybe because they can add it all in because it's a science project right so they can kind of dial up dial down whatever they want and yet even though it may look and taste like meat even though it has the same nutrition facts label it's profoundly different in its informational qualities.

So the information in food, the instructions that they're giving to your biology, quite different and have big implications for our health. And they're not equivalent. So to say impossible meat or beyond beef or whatever, burger or whatever, will replace meat, they need a fallacy. They're different things.

Even though they're mimics of each other, right, it's not the same thing. And so this paper that is looking at the metabolomic analysis looked at all these different compounds in each of these things, and they were quite different. So can you talk about what you learned from that study? And then that was just a study of the compounds themselves. The next step of the study's research then that was just a study of the compounds themselves. The next step of the study's research agenda that you're talking about, and I can't wait till this comes out, is

what happens when you eat it? Like if you eat the impossible burger or eat a grass-fed meat, what happens to your biology? Not just what happens with a feedlot beef or a grass-fed beef, but what happens to your biology? That, I can't wait to see that but talk about the the different compounds that are not on the nutrition facts label that are in plant-based meat versus grass fed beef and what the implications are for your health yeah that's what's what's really revelatory about the whole thing and um earlier we were talking about the number of compounds and how much they differed and what we could say simply that there of compounds and how much they differed. And we could say simply that there's 90% difference, right? So they're quite different.

The nutrition fact label would lead you to think, oh, yeah, they're really similar, but they're not. They're not at all. And so 90% difference in the compounds. Yes. And when you think that these compounds are information, they're instructions that are telling your biology, your genes, your hormones, your metabolism, your brain chemistry, everything,

what to do. That's right. That's exactly right. That's the key point. And so there are huge differences. We found that. What, as you say, where we really want to go with this is to actually feed it to people and then look at oxidative stress, inflammation, those kind of things, and compare the two.

And we made a point in the paper, too, you know, that was one point. These are quite different. They're not the same thing. So don't think that they are. We also made the point, though, that as we've been making, that plants have many kinds of compounds that are vital for our health and so does meat and so we're not trying to say you know you shouldn't eat plants or you shouldn't eat meat but we're saying you know they complement what carnivores say plants are toxic and vegans say

animals are toxic right but the truth is somewhere in the middle. So we tried to stay, and deliberately, we had long talks about this, to try to stay in the middle on that. But then to, one of the things that's a concern to me, I'll have to say, is, you know, we're talking quite a lot about ultra-processed foods. And you take all these different ingredients and you put them together and blah, blah, blah. And you take a soybean or a pea or whatever it is and you grind it and process it to death. To me, it's another ultra-processed food.

I really worry about that. And we know we're ultra-processed. Do we need one more ultra-processed foods or should we be? And that's what we want to get into in the clinical trials, going back to Kevin Halls. Well, how much of that do you eat each day if that's your, you know, if that's fundamental, just like Kevin did. Basically, we tried to match them for nutrients, but then one's fed in ultra-processed form, the other's in wholesome form. And as you were saying, people ate 500 more calories per person per day and they gained what they over the two weeks they were on the diet it was a crossover again two weeks you're

on it you're putting on weight and so that's that's really my concern and then it's a more fundamental concern i think we always think we're more clever than nature, right? Yeah, the one with that. We can do, we can Silicon Valley this stuff, right? We know and we don't know. The complexity is incredible. And each time we get into trouble, when we start to move into the more technological kind of approach to this, rather than thinking about natural processes and how does nature work and how can we farm and ranch and grow food in in her image yeah

and it was interesting you looked at so many like dozens of different compounds in each of these and and what was so interesting was that there were for example in the meat there was creatinine hydroxyproline anserine glucosamine andamine, which are only found in beef and have profound effects on our biology. They're immunomodulatory. They're inflammatory. They have been associated, if you don't eat them, with harm to your body, maybe heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, kidney, liver, muscle, connective tissue dysfunction. If you're not getting these things, because they're essential for our bodies to use to make the things we need uh for example uh systemine produces uh the glutathione molecule in our body which is so important for detoxification uh creatine and answering are important for older

adults so they don't get dementia and then i could go on and on about this but the plants also had compounds that the beef didn't have right it had phenols and tocopherols and phytosterols, which are also really helpful. And they're antioxidant, anti-inflammatory. They may protect against cancer. And so, you know, what do we do? Like the key is, again, coming back to diversity and a wide, complex diet. And the idea that ecosystems do better, and our body is an ecosystem. I'm an ecosystem doctor.

That's what functional medicine is. Our bodies do better with complexity. Simplicity is bad, right? The more complexity in your biology, the better you are. If you have a monocrop cornfield and there's a corn beetle, sorry, it's gone. If you have thousands of plants growing in that ecosystem, one plant dies, you probably won't have a big impact. And that's what we're really struggling with in our diet is this monodiet. When you think about it, 60% of our diet comes from three plants, basically corn, wheat, and soy.

And 90% comes from 12 plants. And the plants that we're eating are not the right plants to start with, right? They don't contain tons of phytochemicals. We're eating white flour that probably has zero phytochemicals versus, for example, Himalayan teri buckwheat flour, which has 132 phytochemicals because that plant was grown in adverse conditions. And the phytochemicals and the richness that you talked about is dependent on how the plant's grown. And plants make more phytochemicals when they're more stressed, right?

They make way more. And so a wild plant has more than an organic plant that has more than a commercial-raised plant. That's right. That's absolutely the case. And that's where when you get into fertilizing and irrigating. You're accenting from many of those compounds, accenting growth at the expense of phytochemical richness. Everything you said just in that last, that's perfect, Mark. I mean, it's a great summary of the whole conundrum that we get ourselves into.

What's really interesting, too, about this this study with the metabolites of the meat versus the fake meat were that in each of these foods, there were compounds that you wouldn't get in the other food, but also that help protect you against the effects of the other foods. For example, the phenolic compounds in the plants help protect against any oxidative or inflammatory effects of the meat. And the animal foods help take up nutrients from the plants that you're eating. So it's sort of this complex symbiotic relationship.

The complementarities, again, how that we're talking about and getting back to wholesome foods and a variety of those foods in the diet and then each individual to let their body influence what they want, right? Yeah, it's so powerful. It's a whole feedback system. And I think, you know, we're in a crisis, a global crisis of food, not just the food insecurity, not just, you know, the obesity, chronic disease that comes from that, but the way the food system has disrupted these natural biological, ecological principles at every level of our society. And it's creating massive havoc. I wrote a lot about this in Food Fix, but the food system itself is producing food.

It kills people, makes them sick. It destroys the soil, damages the environment, that kind of removes a lot of the beneficial compounds from our food. And unless we really take this seriously, we're not going to be able to kind of survive much longer, excuse me. No, and all that feeds into this sixth mass extinction that we're participating in. And agriculture has played a really big role in that too, for the reasons that we said and where we started out.

You know, diverse mixtures of plants create homes, grocery stores and pharmacies for lots of different creatures. So starting to think about, as regenerative people are, how do you create diversity? And that diversity can be at different scales, but, you know, how do you do diversity? And that diversity can be at different scales, but how do you do that to create really diverse environments? Everybody's talking about regenerative agriculture these days. Even

President Biden mentioned cover crops in his talk. And for those listening, what is regenerative agriculture? It's being defined with a set of principles, which are crop rotation, so you don't grow the same thing on land, which are crop rotation. So you don't throw the same thing on the land, which can cause depletion of nutrients.

Right. Cover crops. So never leaving the soil bare so that can erode leaving roots in the soil, which is the, actually what really feeds the microbiome and the microbiome of the soil is 50%, as you said, bacteria, they need to eat and that's what they eat. You need to integrate animals. So you really can't have regenerative agriculture without animals providing their part of the ecosystem services.

Animal manures, plant food, right? And food for the microbiomes and all that. And their saliva makes the plants grow more and they eat and chew them down. Their hooves aerate the soil. Their urine has nitrogen which fertilizes the soil. They don't need as much water. The animals, they don't, it doesn't require pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, all those inputs go down. And so you end up with this, this beautiful sort of regenerative system. And also the other principle is that it's context

specific. So what you grow in Arizona, say you grow in North Dakota, then you grow in Iowa, then you grow in Saskatchewan. And that's really important. So these are foundational principles that if we follow, which are ecological principles, it's really near-near nature, we can start to reclaim the denuded degraded land and reclaim our health. It's been a consequence of these unintended policies that really led to the destruction we see today. And if we move from farm ground, which is very critically important, to the more, the rangeland kind of, you know, the more extensive landscape. I think a key point, and the whole reason I early on got involved in this,

is that if they're managed properly, domestic animals can be ecological doctors, seriously, of regenerating landscapes. And they can, that book that you mentioned, The Art and Science of Shepherding, and what the shepherds do, the shepherds learning from the flock, the flock learning from the shepherding and what the shepherds do. The shepherds learning from the flock, the flock learning from the shepherds and moving them around landscapes so that you build up diversity on landscapes. It's powerful.

And you don't want to, it's just, well, all animals do is degrade landscapes. They can't overgrazing and it's led to massive desertification, but it's the wrong kind of grazing. That's right. That's again,

it's like the meat isn't meat isn't meat. And grass isn't grass isn't grass. Yeah, and grazing isn't grazing isn't grazing. And certainly there are cases still today where overgrazing is occurring, many of them, but, you know, that's where we have farmers and ranchers. We all need to get our act together on that too, right? That's critical. So, Fred, you're 70.

You've been studying this stuff for probably 50 years, starting with goats and shrubs and kind of doing the hard science. You've traveled all around the world in the country, working with ranchers and farmers, talking about these principles with your BEHAVE program from Utah State, which really was profound because it linked up scientists and real-life situations with farmers and ranchers to help inform them about what was going on. Looking from your perspective, what do you see happening in the future with all this? Are we going to be able to figure this out? Are you hopeful? Are you just like, let's just float down the river and I'm going to have fun while I can?

You know, with all that's happening nowadays, and it depends on the day for me, ecologically, economically, socially, it's really, it's tough times. It's scary times, right? And so I would say for me, I'm not necessarily optimistic, but I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful for all the reasons that we're talking about, right? And it's trying to make all of us aware and then all of us doing things. All of us not just saying, well, what can I do? You know, everyone can be a farmer, right? We can all be farmers.

We can all think about where we spend our dollars because that influences food systems, right? And this work, a key point, I think, Mark, of the work on the metabolomics and the trials with people and so forth. If we show, as we've argued, as we see in this paper, and then in the literature reviews, there's good evidence, but if we can show that there really are benefits to human health from the way that we're raising animals, that becomes so important for the consumer because it links the consumer back with all these things that we're talking about, right? With my health and the food that I'm eating is linked from soil to plant diversity to the health of the animals.

And there's studies that are starting to be done where they're showing that if they're on a monoculture, not just in feedlot, where we know there's so many downsides, but if they're on a monoculture versus more diverse mixtures, people are looking at immune responses and physiological and nutritional, and they're saying they're healthier. You know, it's better for the whole system. Oh, it totally is. Including us.

It's totally true. Well, thank you for it. You know, I'm left with a little bit of hope because nature is so frigging smart. And it's so quick to regenerate and heal itself. And if you haven't watched this movie, I encourage everybody listening to watch this movie by David Attenborough. I think it's on Netflix. It's his latest thing. He did it at 95 years old and it looks at the arc of his life and the degradation,

the environment and the loss of species and destruction of the earth and how massive that's been over the last 70 or 80 years he's been doing this work. And then at the end, he shows himself in Chernobyl, which was completely decimated and radioactive. But life is coming back because all the humans left. We saw that with COVID. We saw with COVID, people staying at home. Basically, the earth started regenerating very quickly.

Wraiths were coming back. And plant diversity is coming back. And mangrove fields are improving. So it's really fascinating to see how even with COVID, in a short period of time, when we take the pressure off, that it can reclaim itself. So I would be very disheartened if we didn't understand these principles that you're talking about, that we didn't understand these ecological principles, that we weren't as far ahead as we are in understanding the science behind

how to do this. Because we didn't even know this like a couple of decades ago. We were just like, you know, let to do this. Because we didn't even know this a couple of decades ago. We were just like, let's do organic. We didn't really understand the concepts that now are basically in the field. And if we can start to apply these and scale, nature will reclaim itself. And I feel very hopeful. And I've seen the same with people. You take someone who's had 50 years of eating like crap, who's diabetic,

heart failure kidneys failing liver failing high blood pressure and the list goes on and in three days they can get off their insulin in three months they can get off their medications in a year they can lose 116 pounds and reverse every single one of these diseases it's taken them 50 years to accumulate so it's amazing how if we just listen to the natural intelligence of our biology and the biology of nature, that we can reclaim our health and reclaim the health of the earth. Yeah. I,

well said Mark. I absolutely agree. And that's what gives hope. That's what gives hope to the whole thing. I saw David's, I saw David's movie and, and that Chernobyl really brings the point. Yeah,

totally. So in a sense sense we just need to become humble kind of step out of the way and help nature do what nature does not what nature's been doing for eons and uh yeah so great this is great and I and Fred we could talk forever and ever I think we're just getting started but for those listening I encourage you if you're curious about this topic to check out his book. It's called Nourishment. It came out in 2018. What Animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom. It's beautifully written. It's not too geeky, but it's geeky enough for those geeky

people. I also would love you to share this podcast with your friends and family. They need to hear it. And leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. How have you noticed your own nutritionalism being retained by changing your lifestyle, for example? Subscribe to every day of your podcast. And we'll see you next week on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Hyman.

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