The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Choose Quality Meat

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and Athletic Greens.   There’s no doubt that factory farming should be illegal, but that is a far cry from stating that all meat is bad. Grass-fed beef is extremely different from conventionally raised beef. In other words, the way your meat is raised matters.   In today’s episode, I talk with Chris Kresser, Robb Wolf, Diana Rodgers, and Nicolette Niman about the myths and stigmas surrounding red-meat consumption, how to choose sustainably raised meat, and much more.   Chris Kresser M.S., L.Ac., is the codirector of the California Center for Functional Medicine, founder of the Kresser Institute, creator of ChrisKresser.com, and the New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Cure and Unconventional Medicine. He is one of the most respected clinicians and educators in the fields of Functional Medicine and ancestral health and has trained over 1,500 clinicians and health coaches in his unique approach.    Robb Wolf, a former research biochemist, is the two-time New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Robb is the cofounder of The Healthy Rebellion, a social movement with the goal of liberating 1 million people from the sick-care system. Robb is the executive producer of the film Sacred Cow.    Diana Rodgers, RD, is a “real food” nutritionist living on a working organic farm near Boston, Massachusetts. She’s an author, runs a clinical nutrition practice, hosts the Sustainable Dish podcast, and is an advisory board member of Animal Welfare Approved and Savory Institute. Her new book, Sacred Cow: The Case For Better Meat, and the film she directed and produced, also called Sacred Cow, are available.   Nicolette Hahn Niman is a writer, attorney, and livestock rancher. She has authored the books Defending Beef and Righteous Porkchop, as well as numerous essays for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. Previously, she was Senior Attorney for the environmental organization Waterkeeper, where she focused on agriculture and food production; before that, she was an environmental lawyer for the National Wildlife Federation. Today, she lives in Northern California with her two sons and her husband, Bill Niman, founder of the natural-meat companies Niman Ranch and BN Ranch.   This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health and Athletic Greens.   Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com.   Right now when you purchase AG1 from Athletic Greens, you will receive 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting athleticgreens.com/hyman.   Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Chris Kresser Robb Wolf and Diana Rodgers Nicolette Niman

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. It would be better in some way from a nutrient density standpoint to be a vegetarian that eats organ meats and shellfish than a meat eater that only eats lean cuts of meat. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark. As a busy doctor with multiple jobs, I'm all about tools that make my life simpler. And since testing is something I rely on to help almost all my patients, I was really excited to learn about Rupa Health. Hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, and gut bacteria are just some of the many things I look at to find the most effective path to optimal health for my patients. But that means I'm placing orders

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about. You can check out our free live demo and a Q&A or create an account at rupahealth.com. That's R-U-P-A health.com. People are always surprised when I tell them that even with a whole foods diet rich in plants, we can still be nutrient deficient. And addressing nutrient deficiencies is one of the lowest hanging fruits for optimizing our health and feeling better at any age. And that is why I'm a huge fan of AG1 from Athletic Greens. Since our soils are so damaged, the plants can't extract the nutrients because there's no living matter anymore.

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this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Fee and one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. The question of whether or not to eat meat is always a hot topic in the nutrition and wellness space. Yet it is an oversimplified question to a much more complex topic. In actuality, we cannot consider all meat in just one category. For instance, industrial raised animals are fed inflammatory foods, and when we eat that meat, it instigates inflammation in our own bodies. Alternatively, regenerative agriculture recognizes the essential role of grazing animals in an ecosystem to create stronger soils, healthier crops, and produce better meat.

In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the doctor's pharmacy about why it's important to know how the animals you eat are raised. Dr. Hyman speaks with Chris Kresser on the importance of food quality. He also talks to Rob Wolf and Diana Rogers' Big Picture about raising animals and eating meat, as well as with Nicolette Neiman about the concept of nutritional wisdom. Let's jump in. What if we instead focused on food quality instead of food quantity? You can't talk about how healthy red meat is completely out of the context in which it's eaten. Right. You know, if someone's eating red meat is completely out of the context in which it's eaten. Right.

You know, if someone's eating red meat in the context of Big Macs and fast food and hot dogs and things like that, do we really think that that's going to have the same impact as someone eating a paleo diet where two thirds or three quarters of their plate is vegetables and plants and then they have, you know, a steak? Right. It's absolutely not the same. And yet in a steak right it's absolutely not the same and yet in the research it is it shows up as the same and then usually i don't know if you're surprised i say years ago they looked at vegetarians and meat eaters who shopped at health food stores yeah

presumably ate a healthy diet yeah in the context of having meat or no meat and both of those groups had the risk of death reduced in half yeah and. And, you know, I... But no difference between the meat eaters and the vegetarians. There was no difference. No, there was no difference. And there's so many studies that, you know, you can argue on both sides, which is why the debate gets so confusing because there's epidemiology on both sides. But the randomized trials are really hard to do. Well, let me just address that because that's an interesting point. So the only studies that have shown a lifespan difference for vegetarians

were the Seventh-day Adventist studies. Now, talk about healthy user bias. Seventh-day Advents don't drink, they don't smoke, they're advised to exercise as part of their religion. They have deep community with purpose and meaning, which actually

was a study that came out recently. If you don't have purpose, you die's right so they have purpose so they are not you cannot compare that population with people on a standard american diet eating meat that's comparing apples to oranges yeah if you want to compare them you got to compare them with another healthy reference population which i call like neutrovores let's. So like the health food study was one. There are three other studies. I like that, neutrovore. I like that.

I'm a neutrovore. I'm a heat-seeking missile for nutrients in my food. I like that. Yeah, I get nutrients from lots of different foods. So yeah, there have been three other studies that, aside from the health food study, that your shoppers study that you're talking about, Epic was one of them.

There was a study out of Germany. And I'm not remembering the fourth right now. But they all looked at people who were making healthier choices. In one, they looked at people who subscribed to health magazines and fitness magazines. So it was kind of another way of getting at the health food store. People who subscribe to Chris Kresser's podcast. We don't have that yet. But I'd like to see that study. And then there was a study called the 45 and up in Australia, and they didn't select a healthy reference population, but they controlled for just about every potential confounding factor that you can imagine. And all of these studies

showed exactly what the health food shopper study showed is that neutrovores or people who are conscious about their health live longer and don't have as much early death as people who are not. But there was no difference in lifespan with vegetarians and omnivores, omnivorous neutrovores. Right. So, it so depends on the population. So, in terms of meat, you know, there's arguments around there, the meat from various studies, that one, it increases inflammation. That two, it screws up your microbiome and increases something called TMAO, which is a cause of heart attack.

It's being studied at Cleveland Clinic with Stan Hazen, who we've had on the podcast. That it has saturated fat that's harmful. That it promotes you know all these harmful effects um how do you counter that well i think i just did well that's epidemiology but like experimentally like the tmao study is interesting and yeah i mean it would take it would take five podcasts to counter all of those and i have readers okay so because i've written a lot about

each of these and by the way what is the what is the short link go to kresser.co slash rogan and the reason it's rogan is because i put this all together dot co slash rogan r-o-g-a-n and i should have created one that's slash hyman but this came from i as you know i was uh joe rogan invited me on his show to debate dr joel khan who is representing the vegan perspective and he's a vegan cardiologist vegan cardiologist and i was representing the the neutrovor perspective not the eat a big mac perspective but like eat healthy food that could include meat um and so i go i i break down every single one of those arguments in excruciating detail you can go and read those articles if you want the full

and i encourage people who really care about this to look at it themselves because yeah it's all referenced peer-reviewed studies you can read the study yourself he links to the study you can read it yourself you can make your own decision and. And he kind of guides you through how to interpret it. Right. So inflammation, it is, again, a matter of context. I'm not aware of any study that convincingly shows that eating red meat in the context of a whole foods diet with plenty of plant foods as well significantly contributes to inflammation that that research just hasn't been done there was once today i saw it was fascinating it was a feedlot beef versus kangaroo meat right in australia yeah and and there's something called cytokines in

your blood which are markers of inflammation when they eat you know ounce for ounce, the feedlot meat, it actually caused inflammation. When they ate the kangaroo meat, wild meat, it reduced inflammation. Exactly. Because of the different fatty acid profiles. So that's what I mean about context. You know, someone who is getting, you know, buying pasture raised beef, for example, from a local farmer or a meat CSA, that's going to have a different impact than someone who is eating commodity CAFO beef. That's confined animal feeding operations, factory farmed beef, right? Right. So factory farmed beef versus grass finished beef, different animals, literally.

Yeah. The TMAO thing I've written at least three articles about. It's a very interesting hypothesis. I think it does bear further research. But one of the most troubling next to it. And fish and seafood are consistently ranked, you know, again, this is, you know, nutritional epidemiology, but they're inversely correlated with the risk of heart disease. And it looks like they're protective, eating fish. They're protective. So, I haven't heard a reasonable explanation yet for why, how that could be the case if Tmao in the diet is problematic the other issue is that the tmao production of the production of tmao from carnitine in the in the meat which is

how it happens is highly dependent on the state of the microbiome yeah so again if somebody is eating plant foods and other things and that are helping their microbiome, they're going to be less likely to produce large amounts of TAMO versus someone who is eating a highly processed and refined diet, which we know is antithetical to the health of the microbiome. Not the meat, it's what you eat with it, right? I remember that Stan Hayes ended a study and he basically got these vegetarians or vegans uh and meat eaters and tested their tma levels the meat eaters really at high levels and the vegetarians or vegans they didn't and then he got the vegan to eat a steak

which i don't know how he did that but that was that was interesting and and then he measured and there was no increase in tma levels yeah so i i'm you know like i you know i don't want to have heart disease so i'm like i'm eating grass-fed meats and. And I'm like, I don't want to get in trouble. So I'm like, oh, I'm going to test my TML level. So I went and tested it. Now you can get this test at reputable labs. And I was like, oh, my TML level is low, even though I eat grass-fed meats. And it's because 70% to 80% of my diet is plant-rich diet.

And that's why the vegan didn't see a big increase in TML. Right, exactly. is plant-rich diet. That's right. And that's why the vegan didn't see a big increase in TMAO when they ate the steak. So I was only being partially flippant when I said I already answered it, but it is really all about context and about food quality rather than food quantity. We have to shift out of this reductionist paradigm where we're just looking at isolated nutrients and foods

outside of the context that they're eating in. So let's talk about like feedlot versus grass-fed beef. Because, you know, the real cost of those foods right now don't reflect, I mean, the price that you pay, the price you pay at the checkout counter doesn't reflect the true cost, right? So if you look at the cost of feedlot beef, it's enormous, right? One, it destroys the environment.

You know, the fertilizers that are grown and the pesticides and herbicides that are used to grow their feed, pollutes our waterways, creates dead zones, destroys biodiversity, depletes our soil, depletes our aquifers. It's one of the biggest sources of climate change, it's like a fricking disaster, plus the overuse of antibiotics, causes superbugs. I mean, the literal costs are in the billions, if not trillions of dollars, the secondary cost that we don't actually pay at the checkout counter. Whereas grass-fed beef, on the other hand, restores the soil, protects our water supplies, increases biodiversity, and its cost is

really should be far less it should be a dollar a pound instead of you know twenty dollars a pound and vice versa the feedlot beef should probably be a hundred dollars a pound or a thousand dollars a pound so given that aside okay because the cost is an issue and hopefully that's going to change as we shift to regenerative agriculture but the quality let's talk about the quality of these two different animals and and does it really matter because if you are uh you know on a budget and you know you can't afford a 70 grass-fed ribeye steak yeah like like how bad is it to eat a feedlot cow versus i mean if you had to choose between like a diet that was let let's say, you know, a pure vegan diet or a diet that also included feedlot beef, if you couldn't afford the grass

fed beef, what's the deal? I wouldn't do a pure vegan diet. I think there are a lot of ways that you can get, so the real question is nutrient density. And, you know, if we say we're neutrovores, we're concerned with nutrient intake. I'm going to steal that. That's really good. I'm going to, I'm going to attribute you for a while and then i'm just gonna take it well done well i remember rick warren was he's like he always said you know you hear something you like you go so-and-so said that right and then you go now i've covered my then you go

it's been said yeah and then you go i've yeah. And then you go, I've always said that. Yeah, perfect. You did the CYA part. If I ever come after you, you can point to, I attributed it to you. No, so in fairness, I first heard about this from Sarah Ballantyne. I'm not sure who she heard it from, know it's around so um yeah i mean uh i i actually have uh often say to my patients um it's it would be better in some way from a nutrient density standpoint to be a vegetarian that eats organ meats and shellfish than a meat eater that only eats lean cuts of meat from a nutrient perspective. And the reason for that is that when you look at the liver, kidney, thymus, heart,

you know, all the awful stuff and oysters, clams, uh, and these shellfish, like when you look at nutrient density on a chart and by what, what density refers to is the concentration of nutrients per calorie of food nutrient to calorie ratio we talked about that my first book almost 20 years ago exactly calorie ratio and organ meats are at the top of the list and shellfish are very close to being at the top of the list herbs and spices are up there too yeah i was shocked when i interrupted i was like i look at a chart of nutrient levels liver and and all the best vegetables you could eat. And it made the vegetables look like junk food.

I was like, wow, that's amazing. And, you know, our ancestors knew this. Like even hunter-gatherer tribes that are studied, they'll throw the muscle meat to the dogs. They'll go right for the liver and all the other organ meats because they somehow, they knew even without those charts that the nutrient, most nutrient dense foods were the organ meat. Is that what Kevin Costner ate in the dance with the wolf? Right. Killed a buffalo and ate the liver, right?

That's right. It wasn't chewing on a steak. So, yeah, I mean, most of us don't eat a lot of these foods now, but if a vegetarian or vegan comes to me and they're, you know, anemic and they have a lot of the other deficiencies that can sometimes happen on those diets and they say that they're willing to eat some animal foods, but they want to restrict it as much as possible, then we'll talk about maybe just strategically adding some organ meats and shellfish into the diet. But, you know, going back to your original question, I think there are also

ways that you can work in pasture raised animal foods into your diet that don't have to be that costly. So this is like the nose to tail eating that has become, you know, in big cities, there are lots of nose to tail restaurants. Now we're going to maybe go out to one yes tonight we're gonna have some awful food some awful food that's o-f-f-a-l right so um you know eating the the more affordable cuts like uh the shanks or the oxtail or the chuck roast like those are actually very rich in collagen which i'm sure most people have heard by now is really important um other side of the protein occasion or equation it's good for our joints it's good for our soft tissues and you can go to the butcher and you can often get these cuts even if they're pasture raised pretty affordably so you don't have to eat the 70 rib eye to benefit

yeah it's funny a friend of mine was telling me he has this ranch called the Mariposa Ranch in California and he gets, you know, he buys like a quarter of a cow. Yeah. It's grass fed and it's average is about eight bucks a pound. Yeah. Which when you think about it, if the serving ounce serves has four ounces,

that's four servings. Yeah. So it's basically $2 a serving, which is half the price of a Big Mac. Totally. Yeah. And that's the way we do. We have a big chest freezer in our basement. Half the price of a Big Mac for grass fed meat. That ain's the way we have a big chest freezer in our basement.

Half the price of a Big Mac for grass-fed meat. That ain't bad. Absolutely. That ain't bad at all. So in terms of the other factors, in terms of nutrient quality, what else is different between grass-fed and feedlot beef? So the, you know, two of the biggest differences are the fatty acid profile um and the new and the the levels of uh vitamins and minerals so the in terms of fatty acid and antioxidants yeah so the the fatty acids uh pasture-raised beef will have significantly more omega-3 fats which is the good stuff epa and dha that particularly the long chain omega-3 fats, the good stuff, EPA and DHA, particularly the long-chain omega-3s. What's one of the issues with plant-based diets is they only have the shorter-chain omega-3s like alpha-linolenic acid, and those have to go through an extensive conversion process in

the body to get to EPA and DHA. All this plant-based omega-3s, it's good, but it only about 10% converts. No, actually, less than one- half of 1% of ALA gets converted to DHA. And that's assuming you have enough of all the nutrients required for those enzymes in that cycle, which a lot of vegetarians or vegans can be low in. And genetically that you can do it because a lot of people aren't good at it. Exactly. Some people just don't even have the enzymes for some of those conversions so um fatty acid profile more omega-3s and and uh and then more nutrients because grass is actually pretty nutrient dense but we as humans can't absorb those nutrients i don't recommend

eating grass but the cows can eat grass and and turn that into nutrients that we can then access in a very bioavailable way yeah so so it's it also has more cla which is a special fat that actually is anti-cancer helps speed up your metabolism yeah it has extra levels of certain antioxidants that are really hard to get like catalase superoxide dismutase things that are fancy words but they're like super antioxidants absolutely higher levels of levels of iron, absorbable iron, nutrients. Neem iron. Yeah. So it's quite interesting.

And it's also what we ate forever. Right. Yeah. There hasn't been like a voluntary vegan society on the planet. Not that we know of. Yeah. As a traditional society. I mean, that in itself doesn't mean that that that the vegan diet is

is not healthy or optimal but when you combine that with the modern scientific evidence on nutrient values um and and consider things like bioavailability and then regenerative agriculture and how we could even feed the planet with everybody consuming a vegan diet versus, you know, there's so much land that can't be cultivated for plant foods and crops, but could be grazed if we're doing a better job of it. So it makes sense from a lot of different perspectives. It's true.

I mean, you know, the argument is, oh, well, you can't do that at scale. It won't produce enough cattle. It's good for a couple of hippies on the fringe or,

but you know, Alan Williams was PhD. He was an incredible regenerative farmer, produce enough cattle it's good for a couple hippies on the fringe or but you know uh alan williams was phd he was an incredible regenerative farmer sixth generation mississippi farmer uh and has you know studied this upside and down and published a lot on this uh and and he he said that he did the math in america you know we we slaughter about 29 million cows a year and he said we have enough um land that's either unused or minimally used or is available through different things or we could convert the feedlots to the corn and soy fields that are used for feedlots into grazing that we could produce twice almost twice as much beef or cows as we do now and people say oh well you know you don't get as much meat off

of grass-fed cows a feedlot cow yeah because you're not throwing it full of hormones and antibiotics but even then you still got like almost double the amount of cows it's possible and and around the world much land is not usable for cropland and it's degraded land and it's land that has plants that only the cows can eat and they're like an incredible conversion factory let them do the work i read also fascinating uh as i'm sort of researching my new book food fix that that there are farmers who plant different types of forage grasses and plants that have different properties so just as you know a blueberry has a different phytonutrient profile

than sort of broccoli, so do the plants that they forage on. And that has different qualitative effects on the meat. So it's fascinating. So you actually can get like your, you know, conversion of these phytochemicals into animal foods that can actually improve your health. All of these statistics attributed to cattle, I have to say even typical beef has been overly vilified. So the 14.5% of greenhouse gases attributed to cattle, that was done looking at a full life cycle of cattle. So, you know, birth, transportation, processing, everything it takes to get it to your plate. But then when that was compared to transportation industry, it was only the tailpipe emissions. So it wasn't

a full life cycle assessment because we don't have those numbers globally for transportation. And so if you were to look at just the tailpipe or belching as it is from cattle, it's about 5% of emissions. That's methane. You're talking about methane. Yes, of methane compared to fossil fuels. And then when we consider that the methane from ruminant animals is part of a biological cycle. So I've got this poster behind me here and it's in the book and on the website. But basically when the cattle breathe out methane, which is part of their digestive system, it goes into the air and then is broken into H2O, part of the water cycle, and then CO2. The CO2 is taken up by the plants. They give off O2, which is what we breathe. They take in that carbon and then leak it down to the microbes and all the fungi networks. And so they're feeding them. And then these microbes and fungi are actually feeding the plant back all the nutrients it needs. The fungi are actually going and mining minerals in the rocks.

And then, this is kind of a long story, I guess. Let me just unpack that for people, because it was such a beautiful thing you just described, which is that the plant extracts carbon from the environment, puts it down into the roots. That carbon feeds the microbiology of the soil, the fungi and the bacteria. Then the bacteria and fungi then in turn extract nutrients from the soil to feed the plant, which then makes the plant more nutritious and the food more nutritious. Yes. So that's in a healthy, good system. That's how it works. Really, none of that happens in a conventional row crop model. Like that whole process is interrupted. There is no mining of nutrients out of the soil.

There is no sequestering of carbon via the roots. So that whole process is really hijacked. So essentially what you're saying is that modern agriculture doesn't produce living soil. So there's none of this going on. There's maybe a few bugs in there, a little bit of fungi, but it's not meaningful and it doesn't actually allow for proper nutrition of the plants. It doesn't allow for the storage of water and carbon in the soil. So it's a different view of how do we farm, right? Yeah. Doc, I just want to throw something in there really quickly too. This concern around greenhouse gases is important, but folks really

need a nuanced approach to this and where this is turning into a problem. There've been research papers looking at the discovery that say shellfish produce enormous amounts of methane. Moose in the northern European tundra produce significant amounts of methane. This is an indication of a healthy, dynamic ecosystem. And people are calling on culling moose and seafloor shellfish to reduce carbon emissions. And this is where it's incredibly dangerous to get this story wrong because people are now rushing to judgment in a way that would actually reduce biodiversity. And, you know, huge tracts of the ocean being barren is not good for anyone. So yeah. Killing moose doesn't seem a good solution to climate change.

Really, it's not the place to look. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's so powerful. And I think that, you know, the methane story is interesting because you were sort of unpacking that, Diana, which is that when the cows release methane, we think that's terrible. But in fact, it's probably only a third of the methane that's released from greenhouse gases, methane from landfills, from food waste, which is mostly plant food. So all the wasted vegetables and scraps you throw out, they rot in landfills and they produce methane, which is three times the amount of methane that cows produce.

And then there's another piece, which I'd love you to explain, which is how maybe methane isn't such an issue if you look at a properly run regenerative farm because there's ways of capturing that methane. Can you explain that? Right. Yeah. So that's what I was about to go to next. So when the cow chews on the grass, and we have an amazing animation in the film given by Jason Roundtree, who is a professor at Michigan State University, and he's the one doing all this cutting edge research on cattle and methane. So when the cattle chew the grass, then the roots die back as part of that process. When you take the animals then off and allow the land to rest, those roots will grow back stronger and all the dead material that's in there, mixing with the bacteria and everything, that's stored carbon

that is actually building new topsoil. So the Midwest is not America's breadbasket because of corn farming or kale farming. It's because there were bison there for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years pooping on, you know, across the North America. And when you look at the number of ruminant animals we have today, our beef cattle population is actually less than the ruminants we had before we got rid of the bison. So, you know, in the 1700s, when we had all the bison plus the pronghorn plus the elk, all of those animals, we actually, we had more ruminant animals. I think it was 168 million then, and now it's about 90 something million. So yeah. Yeah. So cattle have taken over, but it's, you know, it's not really a methane issue,

as opposed to fossil fuels, which are mining ancient trapped carbon and methane in the earth's core, and then releasing them straight into the atmosphere. And they're not part of a cycle. That's an unbalanced equation. What's really interesting also is that there's a cycle where bacteria, there's a certain type of bacteria called methanotropes that suck the methane on a regenerative farm out of the air and basically store it. So the net-net is low. And then there's all the other cool things that you can do, like grow plants that have high levels of tannins,

that when the animals eat those plants, foraging on them, those plants on a regenerative branch, it reduces the amount of methane because of the effect of these phytochemicals on the bacteria. And then they can feed them seaweed, which people are talking about doing, which also reduces. So there's a lot of interesting strategies to mitigate this. But the net on a regenerative farm, is it still a contributor to climate change or is it not? Well, so, you know, there is fossil fuels are just, I mean, greenhouse gases are just one component

of ecosystem function, right? So we have to look at what processes are contributing to the most biodiversity and the healthiest ecosystems. And so that's where, when you talk about Impossible Foods and, oh, we're better as far as our greenhouse gases, they actually did a study with White Oak Pastures grass-fed beef and found that for every impossible burger or beyond burger you ate you needed to eat one of those grass-fed burgers from white oak pastures in order to offset your emissions um and but if you eat burger with your plant burger you're good then you're you're you're carbon neutral then yeah this was performed by an outfit called quantis which they do life cycle. And it's a remarkably complex and expensive process where they look at all the thermodynamic inputs and outputs for different scenarios like this.

And it was fascinating because Qantas did this completely separately for both the impossible foods and the white oak pastures. But had these pretty fascinating results. Yeah, compared them. Yeah, it was interesting. Yeah, I saw the same thing. So, you know, feedlot burger definitely is worse than an impossible burger, but it's definitely not as good as a regenerative burger. And I think, you know, there's so much we've had on our podcast about this.

I had Gabe Brown on our podcast, and we've had some really interesting characters discussing this aspect of regenerative agriculture and carbon and carbon sequestration. I think, you know, you have a great quote in your book, which is not the cow, it's the how, right? So it's not the cows are the enemy, it's how are they raised and what is their life like for them? How is they, how is their raising those animals increase the life of the entire ecosystem on the farm, the biodiversity of plants, animals, insects, birds, mammals that are all the things. And then what is the quality of the food? So, you know, before we sort of dive into the health aspects, which I think is a big issue,

because maybe we can convince people that, you know, regenerative agriculture is definitely good for the environment and climate, but people are gonna still go, well, yeah, it's meat, but meat's bad for your health. So I wanna come back to that. But we're talking about these practices and you address this in your book, and a lot of people argue that,

well, it sounds like a great idea, but this is a sort of a niche area. This is not scalable, that we really can't feed the world using regenerative agriculture. What do you say to that? I'm going to pass that to Rob because he just answered that really well on the other podcast we did just the other day. No pressure because now we'll see if I can pull it together. When you do lots of these interviews back to back, you feel like you're losing your

mind because you wonder, did I actually tell this story already? And so it runs together a little bit. You know, it's interesting because it might be helpful to actually flip this around the other way and ask the question, is there any way but regenerative agriculture that we could feed a global population that's heading towards 10 billion people. And just as a null hypothesis, as a good scientist, people should at least stop and ask that question instead of rushing to judgment immediately on this. But when we start unpacking all of these different pieces, Diana's already talked about one piece,

which is this kind of carbon sequestration element. And implicit in that is the health of topsoil. And although there are several things that we would have loved to run with because it would have bolstered our position, there is a meme out there that says we have 60 harvests left of topsoil. Nobody knows exactly where that came from. Diana tracked it down to like a World Health Organization. It was the UN, yeah. Or UN, yeah. Also Obama, before he left office, commissioned a report which was about soil and he's estimated 80 years.

So this is not just a random number. Well, the thing we tracked down was that it was a bit of an offhand comment at a UN meeting, and it's taken on a life of its own. And when you really get in and try to find a really concrete spot, maybe it's 60 years, maybe it's 80 years, but conventional practices of raising row crops, it definitely has an end date on it. It's not something that we could go away for a thousand years, come back and it's still functional, but this regenerative farm, this is the way that food was produced on earth. You know, since the,

you know, the transition from hunter gatherer to different forms of agriculture, it was a biodynamic system between animals and plants. And we've learned lots of stuff in the process of doing that. But those systems more closely mimic what an ecosystem is with that interface of plants and animals. It's a very thermodynamically efficient process. And by that, what I mean is that sun is going to fall on the earth no matter what. Are we going to have lots and lots of grass grown in that process and then that grass consumed by herbivores and then other animals

interfacing in that? Or do we try to expunge that and rely exclusively on synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which are the backbone of the industrial agriculture system. And one further piece to this is that the regenerative systems do not involve food becoming intellectual property, IP. But what has happened in this industrial row crop food system is that the stated goal is to make this like a technology model, to have this food owned as ip by supernatural organizations that are not beholden to any government the seed companies that own the own the seeds the proprietary seeds yeah that farmers have to buy and it puts them in a vicious

cycle it's pretty bad yeah but to push a little harder on this question you know i get the concept of regenerative agriculture i think people can understand that it's a better way of farming, but you know, many people say, well, you know, we have 10 billion people coming along. How are we going to feed them all unless we do large scale agriculture? How does that work? So we, we already are producing way more food than we need. There's a lot of food waste and anyone who's hungry or malnourished, that's a political problem and a distribution problem. It's not a food production problem. So that's just the first thing I wanted to say about that. But secondly, we did go through all the acreage in the U.S. that is underutilized or not utilized. So there's CRP land

that the government is restricting grazing on that could be opened up for grazing. There's a lot of private land that's not being grazed or it's being undergrazed. With regenerative agriculture, even a very conservative estimate is that it increases land carrying capacity by 30%. But I'm sure you've heard, you know, from the other guests that you've had on your show that they've seen much, much higher numbers. So Joel Salatin is, you know, four to five times the county average as far as the food that he's able to produce on his land. So if we take a very conservative 30% increase, we go through all the numbers in the book, we have a whole chapter on feeding the world. We take the ethanol industry and turn that into pasture. And then some of the corn that's

actually grown specifically for livestock taken out and turned into grass. We have more than enough land to grass finish all the beef cattle in the United States. And all cattle start on grass. They're either just finished on a feedlot or they're finished on grass. And so we're really just looking at, can we finish our cattle in the U.S. on grass? And yes, we can. And people say, well, you know, it takes longer to raise cattle on grass. So they're going to release more emissions. They're going to use more water. How do you address that? Well, yeah, I wanted to talk about water really quickly. So we already addressed the, the, the methane is really a non-issue when the animals are raised properly, right? We're actually sequestering more carbon. And when there's more carbon in the soil,

it actually attract carbon attracts H2O. And so it actually will store more water in the soil when you have healthy soil. So when we have flat soil that is not covered at all and it rains, it just runs off. It runs off into our waterways, and it takes all the chemicals with it from industrial chemical agriculture. Like if you picture a cornfield with just those sticks of corn, but nothing actually in between that. In a regenerative system, the soil is more like a sponge. So it's less about the water you get from the air and more about the water you can actually hold in the soil.

Most of the water attributed to cattle is actually green water. So it's rainwater that would fall anyway. And so it's very important to look at the methodology. You know, we do that in, in nutrition science, but we have to really look at the methodology in all of these environmental studies too. So 94% of the water footprint for even typical cattle is green, is rain. 97% in grass fed water is rain. So the blue water, the water that we actually use for irrigation, um, that from aquifers is a very, very small percentage of

the water. So it's not like the cattle are just sucking these blimps that are just sucking and wasting water, but they're also using the irrigation for corn and soybeans that are used for, but that's taken into account in the water footprint. So it's still part of that 94 percent um so when you compare um the blue water footprint which is what we should be looking at what is the irrigation footprint what is the you know not natural rainfall but what is uh the blue water footprint lakes streams yep um beef is actually, even typical beef is better than rice, sugar, avocados, and almonds. Wow. Incredible. I also read that in terms of the speed to growth to market, which is one of the arguments that's used against regenerative agriculture, that it depends on what they eat. And we had Fred Prevenz on our podcast, who's an incredible rangeland biologist. And he said, if you get diverse grasses that have certain compounds and then phytochemicals

and tannins, it actually accelerates the growth. So it's about the same amount of time. And of course, they have a much happier life and they're less stressed and they get to do their natural thing. And the other thing that's fascinating about it, and I said, I want to get into this a little bit, is the health issue. What was fascinating to me was animals learn how to seek out the nutrients they need in the plants they're eating. So if left to their own devices and there's a large enough diversity of plants, they will actually find the nutrients and the phytochemicals that they actually require

for health. And you see this, you know, I was watching this thing the other night with my wife, it was kind of like a David Attenborough nature film. I like those nature films. And it showed these baboons eating, licking the rocks, like licking the rocks to get minerals, right? So animals know what to get and what they need. And these animals will literally go around and find the nutrients that they need and their flavor profile of the plants will actually drive their choices and make meat healthier and actually lead to the increases in phytochemicals and decreases in methane production and increases in growth that happen

as a result of the animals having the choice of what they're eating and having diverse plants. He said, Gabe Brown said on his farm, he had over a hundred different grasses and plants that these animals were eating. And what are they going to feed a lot? A couple of different things. It was corn and ground up this and that, maybe some Skittles, you know. So talk to me about the health issues, because if we can do this, if the science is there, if it's scalable, if it actually helps reverse climate change, increase biodiversity, there are health concerns that people have about eating meat. And before I actually jump onto that, I just want to sort of come back to a point you made about how regenerative agriculture is what we've always done.

I think it's happened in pockets, but humans have been rapacious and they have overgrazed lands. They've turned many areas to desert. We've destroyed soils and civilizations. David Montgomery's written a whole book about this. So I think that humans aren't the most conscious ecological creatures, and they tend to destroy ecosystems. This happened even before industrial agriculture. But I think of this as 2.0 agriculture. This is a definite upgrade, and it includes concepts and

ideas that mimic nature as best as possible. And that's what makes it so unique. There's this new discovery of phytochemicals in meat. What's even more interesting is that the animals modify these chemicals that they're getting from eating hundreds of different plants that all have these medicinal compounds and their metabolites are quite different. So you're almost getting in some ways upgraded phytochemicals when you eat regenerally raised grass-fed beef, which is a mind-blowing concept. Right. No, I have to admit, you know, all these years, I've been studying this. And now I've been practitioner, you know, I've been a practitioner of ranching for the last 18 years. And it was not

until I read Fred Provenza's book nourishment, that I really thought about the question that he talks about in terms of the diversity of the pasture for the animal. Of course, I knew as a general matter, it was a good idea to have a diverse pasture, but he goes really specifically into the science of it and shows to me the most fascinating thing that he talks about in his book, Nourishment, is that they would test the blood of sheep in the morning and then they would have grad students and so forth

follow around the sheep and watch what they ate. And they discovered that every single animal ate something different every day. And that every day, the foods that they selected for themselves individually for that day corresponded to what was sort of lacking in their blood work that morning. And by the evening, they would have remedied that. And he also showed that they were able to prophylactically avoid illness through the things that they were selected dietarily, and that they could treat, they could self medicate through what they were selecting. And so he's arguing that we have an inherent nutritional wisdom, not just sheep, you know,

but that humans have this. The modern industrial food system has ruptured that whole connection that we would inherently have. And he talks about the irony of the fact that we now believe we need to have experts tell us what to eat, you know, because it is kind of fun. Yeah, you know, wild elk doesn't get advice from its nutritionist, this elk nutritionist. Exactly. And he says, you know, we all kind of accept the idea that elk have that, right? And then we might buy it that maybe sheep or cattle can figure out what they should be eating. But then we think it's a giant leap to think that the human has this ability too.

And he says, no, it's not a giant leap. We actually have this. But the problem is right now we're stopping ourselves, you know, from infancy, you know, from the moment we get formula, right, we're getting processed foods, we're not getting the real food as it should have, you know, as it does occur in nature. And when we do that, then our body recognizes what we need, what it contains, and what we need, and we're able to manage our own nutrition. So that's, you know, that whole idea about real foods versus processed foods, is it actually allows your body to do its own, you know, maintenance work to a certain degree of knowing what it needs and seeking that out. And that's where, you know, going back to why I'm eating meat again, that is part of why I'm

eating meat again. I really believe my body was saying you need meat, you know, because I was feeling hungry all the time. And I was, I was, you know, craving sweets all the time. And then I started eating meat and everything starts, you know, that starts receding really dramatically. Yeah. It's fascinating. Yeah. I love, I love that book nourishment. I'm going to have Fred back on the podcast. I'm actually going to visit him in Montana. Cause I just, I'm so inspired by that guy. And I, and I don't, you know, I don't have a lot of people who I go, wow, I really want to meet that guy. You know, he's one of them. And in the book, he talked about this fascinating experiment that they did years ago on kids. They took a bunch of orphans and they stuck them in a lab, which I don't, you couldn't do that study

today, but they gave them all this weird food, like organ meats and weird stuff that kids wouldn't eat, but that, you know, let them select whatever they wanted. And these kids ate all this weird stuff that we wouldn't think would be attractive to them, but because they hadn't been enculturated with what to eat and not to eat, they naturally sought out those foods, which were most nutrient dense, which provided the right building blocks for them to build their robust health. And it turned out after a long period of time, these kids were eating like weird organ meats and all this stuff. They actually were more robust health than all the other kids. Yeah. And also, you know,

what's fascinating about the experiment as well. And I agree with you. It's not something that could be done now, you know, so it's, you know, a historical anomaly, but I think it's called Clara's kids because the researcher was Clara, named Clara, but he says they similar they, similar to the ruminant animals that he studied, they did not choose the same thing day after day. They would choose different foods. And so they were naturally balancing out their own nutritional needs. And that's where it's really fascinating because we keep thinking we have to follow a, you know,

food pyramid or a MyPlate or something. Somebody has to tell us how to get our nutrition. And that experiment really helps make the case that we ourselves have the ability, if we're actually exposing ourselves to real whole foods, right, and we're allowing our bodies to use their nutritional wisdom. It's absolutely fascinating. It's something- That's the whole theory of the book, right? It's reclaiming our nutritional wisdom that we each innately have wisdom. And I, and I always say, listen to your body. It's the smartest doctor in the room. Yep. Exactly. Those people don't connect what they eat with how they feel. And you start to break that down.

People can begin to notice. And we know that for example, the most flavorful foods are actually the best for us, right? We know the phytochemicals in the food provide the flavor. We know in the meat, for example, even the way it's raised, the flavor is dependent on the quality of the food. And that flavor goes along with health. And that's something that people don't understand. That's what these animals are going, oh, I need my vitamin C, I'm going to eat this plant, or I need these phytochemicals because they're going to help me with inflammation, or yeah, my joints hurt,

so I'm going to take this thing that's going to help me more. They're not thinking that. They're just naturally picking foods that are flavorful and that their body intuitively wants. And I think we've missed the boat on that. Yeah. And I'll tell you, my husband, Bill Nyman, really is a meat expert. And he was actually raised, he's from Minneapolis, and his parents had a little grocery store, Nyman Groceries. So he's kind of, you know, grew up in the food world. And he's always been really interested in, you know, eating quality and making delicious food, as well as healthy food. And he's undergone an interesting transition in about the last decade when we started trying to move all of our animal raising to completely pasture-based.

And what he noticed is that not only does he, he likes the flavor of the grass-based meat now, but when he eats sort of conventionally produced meat now, it really tastes bland to him. So he had kind of gotten used to that. But then when he started eating exclusively grass-based meats, he started saying, wow, I really like this. I prefer this. And the other stuff doesn't taste right anymore. So I think our taste buds have in so many ways gotten kind of dumbed down over the generations, but at the same time, we can, what I like about Fred's book too, is it's kind of hopeful, you know, it's, it says, okay, we have gotten into this place where you're used to industrial foods, and we were raised, a lot of people were raised on them. But still, you still have that inherent nutritional wisdom,

and you still can recognize the foods and the compounds that are good for you. And those taste good, you know, like ripe fruit tastes good. And, you know, meat that is raised on grass tastes good, because it has those additional things that our body says, Oh, wow, this is this is good for me. I like this. And it's a kind of a natural process. Yeah, I just sort of had to review a book that was coming is coming out in the fall, called Eat Like a Human. And it's written by an anthropologist, okay, who has been studying food and has gone around the world looking at different cultures and what they're eating we're talking about tribes in africa that you know mix blood and milk from the animals and drink that you know

he explained how how great he felt after he after he had that even though it sounds like it's a weird food to us but but really all the ways that we've sort of processed and prepared foods have really denuded it of its nutritional qualities. And that's really what, in my mind, regenerative agriculture is about. It's about restoring not only the earth and the soils and better conditions for animals, but it's to provide way more nutrient-dense food. As a doctor, that's what I care about.

Now I'm backing up to your book a little bit, Defending Beef, which I really think people should get a copy of. What was it that you learned between writing the book the first time and rewriting it the second time? Oh, there's just so much. I mean, it's, it's such an important topic. And you asked me at the beginning, you know, why did I want to pick it up and rewrite it? And I was invited by the publisher to do it. And I jumped at the chance because we felt, you know, that there's kind of more conversation about this even now than there was five years ago when the first book came out. And also more misunderstanding.

You know, there's kind of this oversimplified, again, this kind of, you know, simple view is beef is unhealthy food and cattle are bad for the environment. And we were seeing, you know, more and more examples around the world where beef are restoring ecological health, for example. And I think there's, you know, I'm sure you've talked about this many times on your podcast, but there's really good research kind of reevaluating the whole connection between the purported connection between red meat and bad health outcomes. And so I wanted to sort of take up the new research and look at that more carefully and present that. But also, I specifically wanted to look at the methane question in particular, because there was so much focus on that. And what I've learned is, I mean, there's so much to say about methane. As you said, there are ways to mitigate it. You know, good management of cattle grazing, for example,

reduces methane production just by about 25%, just by sort of improving grazing practices. But there are also, there's really good research showing that when you have, you know, sort of going back to talking about the insects in the ecosystems, when you have more dung beetles in a system, for example, that there's more methane that comes, there's less methane, rather, that comes out of that production system. And really importantly, the whole science of it, the way it's calculated. I don't want to be reincarnated as a dung beetle. That doesn't sound like fun to me. You know, they're pretty cool. I mean, they're there. You know, you know, I heard somewhere. I heard somewhere that scarab beetle in, you know, in ancient Egypt and all those scarab beetles are holding up the sun. That that's actually a dung beetle holding up a piece of dung. I don't know if it's true.

I've heard that rumor. The ancient Egyptians knew the importance of the dung beetle, you know. But but there was a there's a scientist at Oxford University, Dr. Miles Allen. And I don't know if you've encountered his work or not, but I had read some articles that he wrote. And then I heard him speak in person in England and I met him and spoke with him directly. And I talk about his work in the new edition of Defending Beef, because he's one of the really important, you know, sort of voices that are saying, hey, we've got this methane question completely wrong. And he's a methane expert. You know, he's a physicist at Oxford University, and he was on the international, the intergovernmental panel on climate change. He

was on their scientific advisory committee. And so he's really, this is, this is his area of expertise. He read something, he directed something called the methane project there at Oxford university, and he really knows the topic. And he says this whole idea of global warming potential, which is what is the way that it's always calculated when you talk about policy questions and methane and you, you know, you sort of, you say, well, this much methane equals this much global warming, and so forth. And he says that essentially, the science of that is incorrect. And that everybody who's working on this issue from the science side knows this. But because it was so much more sort of logistically simple, that this was something that was adopted, you know, 20 years ago ago or whatever, and nobody wants to revise it

because it has huge policy implications. So what he says is, we need to revise the way we're calculating the global warming potential of methane. And when you look at the methane from cattle, it's really a minor issue globally. And he says the real issue is the fossil fuel industry. And if you really understand the science behind methane, there's no question about that, he says. And he says, in fact, that if we essentially keep the number of cattle on the globe static, if we're not increasing the global number of cattle, then it doesn't contribute to global warming at all because of the way the science actually works on this. And in the United States, we're actually reducing the number of cattle. And I talk about that in the book in a lot of detail. We've been reducing the total number of large ruminant animals on farms for a long time in the United States.

And so, you know, we talk about deforestation and it's true. That's a big problem. But it's not an issue in the United States. And so, you know, we talk about deforestation and it's true, that's a big problem, but it's not an issue in the United States. And that's not to say there's no deforestation, but the net impact in the United States is we're reforesting the United States. And so again, this is really, you're taking concepts and you're generalizing them. And so when you look at whether the U.S. consumer who's buying American raised beef, which is the vast majority of the beef in the United States, about 80 percent is grown in the U.S. You can easily seek it out, you know, if you if you are concerned, which you should be, you know, you should seek out American raised beef. But if you're doing that, then you know that it is not from a deforestation situation. And you also know that the total herd size in the United States, the herd of the United States, the cattle herd of the United States is not collectively contributing to the global methane

problem. And in fact, there's another professor at Cornell, Dr. Robert Howarth, who heads the methane project at Cornell University. And he's done a ton of work showing that fracking is really the big problem in the United States when it comes to methane. So it's not that methane shouldn't be discussed at all when you talk about cattle. They do emit methane. And there are lots of good ways to mitigate that from a management and an ecosystem um perspective but it's really not the giant issue that people have yeah i think you're right i mean it's my understanding that you know 12 000 years ago the amount of methane

in the atmosphere was the same it is today uh we had a lot well and the ruminants we had ruminants right yeah there were more ruminants. We had a lot more ruminants, right? Yeah, there were more ruminants, wild ruminants, than there are domesticated ruminants today. Buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, yeah. Carabao. Carabao. All those are producing methane, and really it's about the same. It's a short-lived greenhouse gas, not like carbon, which stays there forever. And it seems like there's a lot of ways to mitigate it by, for example, what the

cows eat, if they're foraging on plants, for example, with high tannin levels. And it's important that it shouldn't be called grass fed beef, it should be called grasses fed beef. Right. Because they need a lot of different plants with different properties. And the tannins, for example, in some of the plants, reduce methane, or if they're fed seaweed, they reduce methane, or if they have a real regenerative system that there are organisms within the soil, the methanotropes that actually suck methane out of the atmosphere. So when you put all that together and you say, well, you know, how does that compare to, you know, let's say fracking? Well, that's three times as much methane is produced from that as it is from animal agriculture. And on top of that, you know, you've got nitrogen fertilizers,

which are deriving the fertilizer from an energy intensive process that requires natural gas, which is about one to 2% of the natural gas use in the world globally, of global energy use, is for making fertilizer, which is the nitrogen. But what that does is it gets turned into nitrous oxide, which is 300 times more potent greenhouse gas does is it gets turned into nitrous oxide, which is 300 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So there's a whole bunch of other stuff people aren't talking about, like the fertilizer stuff scares me way more than the methane stuff. And that's used for plants too. That's used for animal agriculture. And there's some very interesting research as well that shows that essentially, when you put the commercial chemical fertilizer on plants, that they begin essentially getting lazy, and they no longer engage in those subterranean microscopic exchanges that they

normally would with the soil. So they are no longer as able to get the nutrients that they need from the soil, and they don't put as much carbon into the soil. So you have to have plants and soils functioning in the way that they're supposed to function in order to have this, you know, healthy food system, a healthy food and healthy ecosystem that we've been talking about. And so the implications of commercial fertilizer are, there are a lot of downstream effects. And a lot of it is stuff that people are not thinking about when they're buying soy at the supermarket and they think they're doing the right thing. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One of the best ways you can support this podcast

is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements, gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a

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