The Dr. Hyman Show - The Pegan Diet: Eat Your Meat As Medicine

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

The truth about meat is more nuanced than whether it is good or bad. While factory-farmed red meat is an environmental and climate catastrophe, is inhumane, and may have adverse health consequences, this is not true of meat from regeneratively raised animals. The real question we should be asking is, is meat healthy or harmful? In this mini-episode, Dr. Hyman discusses how to eat meat as medicine, the fifth principle in his new book, “The Pegan Diet: 21 Practical Principles for Reclaiming Your Health in a Nutritionally Confusing World” out February 23, 2021. Learn more and pre-order the book at pegandiet.com The Pegan Diet is Dr. Hyman’s definitive guide to using food as medicine and understanding how food impacts every system of our body. It has 21 easy to follow principles for anyone, regardless of where they are on their health journey. It also contains 30 delicious Pegan-approved recipes. Get Dr. Hyman’s discount bundle which includes discounts to all of his favorite brands when you pre-order The Pegan Diet today. 

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Eating regeneratively raised meat or grass-fed meat is probably helpful, in fact, likely very helpful, in the context of a whole foods, plant-rich diet with lots of herbs and spices. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you're confused about what to eat, you should listen up because I've got a new mini series on my new book, The Pegan Diet, 21 Practical Principles for Reclaiming Your Health in a Nutritionally Confusing World. I'm so excited about this book. It's out February 23rd, 2021.

It's a comprehensive guide that will show you how to start the vegan diet and become the healthiest you. The last thing we need is another diet book, but we do need a way to break through the confusion, to stop the diet wars, to understand that we all agree that we should be eating real whole food and that whatever dietary camp you fall in, there's a set of principles that are foundational, that are based on science and common sense, can help guide you to a healthy life and get rid of all the confusion. In fact, paleo and vegan camps have far more in common with each other than with the standard American

diet or the SAD diet. Now, today's special episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy, we're going to talk about principle five in the book called Eat Your Meat as Medicine. Oh my God, did he actually just say that? Yes, I did. And I will explain why. Now, there are three real considerations when it comes to eating meat. And they all get smooshed together and people are confused about them because they're all smushed together. And I'm going to separate them.

The first is ethical and moral considerations. The second is environmental and climate impacts. And lastly, what is the impact of meat on our health? Is it good or bad? Now, here's the deal. The truth is way more complex than just meat good or meat bad. Now, while factory farmed meat is an environmental disaster and a climate catastrophe, it's also inhumane and likely the factory farmed meat has adverse health consequences. This is not necessarily true of regeneratively raised

animals. I mean, look, is bison or wild elk the same as feedlot steak for your health, the well-being of the animals, or the health of the environment? Absolutely not. Now, regenerative agriculture is a new way of thinking about growing food that applies a science-based approach that focuses on producing the highest quality food while restoring ecosystems by building soil, which of course then sequesters carbon. It's basically a carbon sink and sucks the carbon out of the atmosphere because plants breathe carbon dioxide. That's what they do and they put it in the earth.

And it also holds tens of thousands of gallons of water per acre for every 1% organic matter. This way of farming also brings back pollinators and beneficial insects and wildlife and doesn't use a whole bunch of weird, nasty chemical inputs like fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, glyphosate, you name it, and it produces way more nutrient-dense food. And guess what? More food and farmers make up to 20 times more money farming this way. Now, this is not some crazy hippie idea. In fact, the UN estimates that if we converted two of the 5 million hectares of degraded land, of farmland around the world, and we put it in regenerative farming, that we could stop climate change for 20 years. How much would it cost? $300 billion.

That is less than one-tenth of what the U.S. spends on obesity and diabetes every single year. It's about the global military spend for the entire world for just 60 days. So the debate really shouldn't be meat or no meat or meat versus plants. It should be regenerative agriculture versus industrial agriculture. Ross Konzer, who's a regenerative farmer, said, it's not the cow, it's the how. All right, let's get into it. What are the moral ethical considerations around eating meat? Now, I respect religious, cultural, or ethical reasons that guide dietary decisions. I mean, I have monks and abbots as patients. I help them create the healthiest diet possible without animal products. And I understand, trust me, I understand the opposition to modern meat.

I mean, modern factory farms or CAFOs, which are concentrated feeding operations, they're just an abomination. I mean, and the world is waking up to the horrors of industrial farming. I mean, CAFOs are cesspools. Animals are fed unnatural diets of corn, soy, ground-up animal parts, chicken poop, candy. Yeah, candy. They basically found a truck full of Skittles that overturned on the highway, and then they realized it was on the way to feed the cows at a factory farm. They also give them hormones and antibiotics. And factory farming

is just an unmitigated disaster for our environment, the climate, our health, the health of the animals, farm workers, the workers in the processing plants, and everything and everyone in between. I mean, if you want to do one thing to create a healthier world, stop eating factory farm meat. Now, there's no debate about that. But all agriculture, even organic agriculture, and certainly our growing of plants and grains and beans and vegetables and fruit that we do in America, which is done with heavy tillage of the soil, which causes soil erosion, that uses lots of irrigation, that uses lots of agrochemicals and pesticides and herbicides, that also leads to destruction. It's an inherently destructive act. I mean, even if you're a vegan,

you have to realize that growing plants using agriculture, which destroys natural habitats, kills 7 billion animals a year. I mean, rodents, rabbits, birds, insects. I mean, over the last 50 years, we've lost half of all birds from industrial agriculture. Now, regenerative agriculture restores ecosystems, brings back wildlife, brings back insects, brings back pollinators, brings back all the little critters that live in the wild. So if you are vegan, whether you like it or not, if you're eating vegetables, you're still killing animals just indirectly. Now, is a rabbit that's killed in a cabbage patch less valuable than a chicken killed

in a factory farm or a cow? I don't know. Maybe. So, regardless of your dietary preferences, it's really important that you try to source from farming that is regenerative, at least organic, as best as possible. In an upcoming part of this mini-series on the vegan diet, I'm going to talk about how to eat like a regeneratorian. So stay tuned for that one. All right, so that's the moral ethical considerations. And I have no problem with that. If you want to be a vegan because of that, I understand.

And I can't argue with it. However, let's talk about the environmental and climate considerations, which is another big reason that people want to be vegan, because we are told that if you want to do one thing to save the planet, stop climate change, you have to stop eating meat, that we need no meat or less meat, that we should all be eating processed burgers made from soy? Well, I don't think so. And here's why. The climate change from cows and factory farming is real, but it doesn't mean that all raising of animals is contributing to climate change. And let's get into it. Now, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the IPCC, estimates that 14.5% of greenhouse gases are due to livestock production on factory farms. Of that, 9.5% results from the production of feed for feedlots, meaning soy and corn that's grown in industrial waves, and from processing and transportation of that food

to the farms. Only 5% is from methane produced by the livestock. Now, to put that in perspective, the amount of methane produced by rotting vegetables in landfills accounts for 16% of global methane production, more than three times that of factory farmed animals. Now, while methane is 25 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, it's pretty short-lived in the atmosphere, and unlike carbon dioxide, which lasts forever, the amount of methane actually today in the atmosphere is about the same as it was 12,000 years ago before we started farming and before we started using fossil fuels. Now, the other part about modern industrial agriculture

that's really a problem is fertilizer. Even if you're eating organic vegetables, you're still using fertilizer. They're still often using nitrogen. Now, guess where that comes from? From fossil fuels. In fact, fertilizer production accounts for about 2% of total global energy use. And most of it comes from fracking, which produces about a quarter of all methane released in the atmosphere. And they are a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions because once you put it on the soil, it releases in the form of nitrous oxide, which is 300 times more potent to greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and destroys the organic matter or carbon in the soil, which is bad enough, and runs off into rivers, lakes, and streams, killing millions of tons of nutritious seafood worldwide. Instead of buying fertilizer with all its downstream consequences,

farmers actually can make their own. See, animals integrated into farming systems has been the main source of fertilizer for thousands of years, and taking animals out of an integrated ecological agricultural system and piling them into feedlots has been an unmitigated disaster for the earth, the climate, and yes, us humans too. Now here's the deal. Before we showed up, there was 168 million ruminants roaming around North America, bison, elk, antelope, deer, compared to about 95 million beef cattle today. And guess what? They built up eight to 50 feet of topsoil. And we've lost about a third of that and are projected to lose all of it within 60 harvests, according to the UN. Now, globally, and I was shocked to learn this, that globally, soil carbon loss from tillage and the way we farm accounts for one-third

of all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right now, which is about a trillion tons. So about 300 billion tons comes from the soil losing the organic matter. The only way to build soil is to integrate animals into a diverse regenerative farm ecosystem. You don't have to eat animals, but they have to be part of agricultural production, unless you want to bring back bison and elk and all these animals and run them all over the place, which I don't see how we do that. And get this, regenerative livestock production converts more than 432 billion kilograms of food that's inedible for humans from land not suitable for growing crops into

nutrient-dense, high-quality protein. And it produces 4 billion kilograms of fertilizer, otherwise known as poop, in the process. The side effect is reducing net greenhouse gas emissions by 86%. That makes regenerative livestock production 74% lower in greenhouse gas emissions than the cultivation of commodity crops used for animal feed or even plant-based meats like processed soy burgers, the Impossible Burger, for example. But unfortunately, this only makes up about 1% of our agriculture today. What's really cool about the animal stuff is that ruminants foraging on lots of diverse plants on a regenerative farm actually helps them and helps us.

The saponins and tannins, these phytochemicals in these plants help reduce methane production. And regenerative practices build soil microbiology. And the soil microbiome has these special kind of bugs called methanotropes. And these bugs suck methane out of the air and put it in the soil. You can also feed cows seaweed, which lowers their methane production. And when raised regeneratively, animals are a carbon sink, not a carbon source, even after accounting for all the inputs and cow perps and methane emissions. And this is scalable. Alan Williams, who's a regenerative rancher, has done the math on this and the science,

and it's clearly scalable using all the degraded lands we have, all the lands that are not being used properly by the Bureau of Land Management, and even converting some of our feed lands that we grow corn and soy on to regenerative agriculture, we could literally scale up and produce three times as much or twice as much animals as we do today using factory farmings. In fact, of the 80 science-based methods to mitigate climate change that was documented in Project Drawdown, which found the most effective ways to draw down carbon from the atmosphere with tons of scientists and thousands of research papers, they found that regenerative agricultural practices were collectively the number one solution to suck

carbon out of the atmosphere and reverse climate change. All right, so we covered the moral and ethical issues, respectfully. We covered the environmental and climate issues, which I think are very misunderstood. And it's not as simple as meat or plants. It's about what meat and what plants. In fact, you could be growing plants in ways that are far more destructive to the climate and the atmosphere and to nature and ecosystems and biodiversity and water resources than raising regenerally raised beef. But the next question we have to ask is meat healthy or harmful? Because this is a big one and it's where people get hung up and it's kind of confusing. And that's the real question. Look, ending factory farming and

scaling and progenitive agriculture addresses most of the concerns about climate, environment, and the inhumane treatment of animals. But the key question is, will meat kill you? Or is it a nutrient-dense health food? Well, if you go to the National Library of Medicine and you look up all the research on meat, you just type in meat in the search bar, you're going to come up with about 100,000 studies. So good luck reading all those, but I've read a lot of them, and I've read the main ones and the big ones, and I wanted to know, is meat going to kill me? Because I want it to be 120. I'm not going to eat meat if it's going to kill me. So in that, you could find data that supports meat as a superfood or meat as the devil.

Why? Well, nutritional research is hard to do. Most studies look at just dietary patterns over many years and see what people eat. But there's so many confounding factors, it's hard to know what's causing what. I mean, if people who ate meat also ate a diet of highly processed food, full of junk food and sugar, and didn't eat fruits and veggies, of course they're going to get sick and die. If they eat meat as part of a whole food diet, their risk of disease goes way down. In fact, a study comparing meat eaters and vegetarians who shopped at health food stores,

their risk of death went down in half for both of them. And in a larger view in 2019, of 61 studies of 4 million people looking at randomized trials and all the kinds of studies that were done, the researchers find no link between meat and death or disease. And those studies were conducted on feedlot beef, not rigidly raised or grass-finished meat, which actually may have beneficial health effects. Now, you have to understand that not all food is the same. Meat is not meat is not meat. Eat a flavorless cardboard-tasting tomato grown in a greenhouse, and then go try a ripe, juicy, organic heirloom tomato picked from the vine in your garden on a

warm late summer August day. Both are tomatoes, but they could not be more different in terms of taste, nutrient density, and phytonutrient content. Now imagine a wild elk or even a regeneratively raised cow foraging on phytonutrient-rich omega-3 dense plants. How does that compare to a feedlot cow fed an unnatural diet and pump full of growth hormones and antibiotics? If food is information, how could they be the same? In fact, there was a study done in Australia comparing people who ate wild kangaroo meat compared to the same amount of feedlot beef.

And they found the feedlot beef drove up all the inflammatory markers in the body and the kangaroo meat drove them down. In other words, the kangaroo meat was anti-inflammatory while the feedlot beef was inflammatory. And quality really matters. I mean, a whole foods diet is key if you're going to eat meat and a diet full of spices and herbs that help mitigate any of the inflammatory effects, although that's still in debate. If you eat a whole foods, nutrient-dense, high-fiber, pre- and probiotic-rich, phytonutrient diet, that's good.

But if you eat a burger, fries, and Coke diet and your meat, that's not going to be good. Also, how you prepare the meat matters. If you look at, for example, high-temperature cooking or grilling, even vegetables, if you grill your asparagus, you're going to get the same thing. It produces these toxic compounds, including heterocyclic amines, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and advanced glycation end products. Lots of big words, essentially nasty toxins that damage your arteries that cause cancer. Now, what's interesting is the Maasai, who live long and healthy and don't have heart disease, they're in Africa. They only milk and meat, but they add 12 spices to their milk and 28 spices to their meat, preventing the production of harmful compounds that can occur during cooking. In Morocco, same thing. Their slow cooking of meat with tons of spices that are

anti-inflammatory and antioxidants actually is protective and they don't have the same cancer or other rates as the rest of people who seem to eat meat. Now when you look at meat eaters who consume lots of herbs and spices and polyphenols, even things like red wine, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar, so have your steak with a glass of wine and some salad with olive oil and balsamic vinegar, you're going to do way better and have reduced levels of inflammation. Now, here's mind-blowing research that blew my mind. Meat, if raised regeneratively,

where the animals can forage on hundreds of different wild species of plants, where the innate intelligence of the animals causes them to seek out plants that have different medicinal properties and different phytochemical properties, different vitamins and minerals to complete their nutritional needs. It's really quite amazing. And flavor goes along with phytochemical richness. And that's true for human food too. If it's a wild strawberry that tastes amazing, it'll blow your mind. It's way better for you and much richer in phytochemicals than a cardboard tasting strawberry that looks good, but tastes bad.

Now here's what's so striking. When the animals are left to forage on these wild plants and they can eat from a diverse array of these plants, they're finding phytochemicals in meat, which means plant compounds in meat. You know, you see all those colorful fruits and vegetables, you think I should eat those because they're full of these phytochemicals that protect me. Well, it turns out meat has a lot of these too. In fact, you're not what you eat, you are whatever you have eaten, has eaten, right? There was an amazing paper I read called Health Promoting Compounds are Higher in Grass-Fed Meat and Milk, published in Frontiers Nutrition by scientists from Duke University.

And they found healing phytochemicals in grass-fed meat, things like terpenoids, phenols, carotenoids, and antioxidants that are anti-inflammatory, anti-carcinogenic, and protected your heart. Now, we know about better fatty acid profiles in grass-fed meat like omega-3s and something that's an anti-cancer metabolism-boosting fat called CLA and maybe more vitamins and minerals, but the discovery of these phytochemicals in meat is new ground. Cows raised in feedlots have pretty limited diets, silage, mostly corn, whereas their generally raised cows may eat dozens and dozens of different plant species when they forage, and they contain different phytochemicals and all these other compounds. And different

plants extract different nutrients from the soil. For example, foraging grass-fed dairy cows have up to 23 times more powerful anti-cancer, antiviral, antioxidant, and anti-inflammatory compounds called monoterpenes compared to conventional dairy cows. Goats, for example, that are raised on pasture have the same amount of phenolic compounds as green tea, which is one of the most important superfoods on the planet. Quercetin, which also, by the way, is good for COVID, and it's found in onions. It's also helpful against viruses. And caffeic acid, found in coffee, and it's also anti-inflammatory.

They're high in goats that forage on diverse shrubs and grasses and in the goat milk. This is game-changing. Okay, what about saturated fat and blood cholesterol? Well, it turns out that the main saturated fat in meat, stearic acid, is pretty neutral when it comes to blood cholesterol. And I wrote about this in my book, Eat Fat, Get Thin. There are lots of saturated fats. Each have different properties.

Fats from regeneratively raised grass-fed meat is pretty different from corn-fed meat. So the other thing is that people are different. Some people do fine with saturated fat and others don't. So genetic tests can help and checking your cholesterol can help. All that's really important. So we've just covered the three big issues around meat and maybe discovered that meat could be medicine for you and the planet if it's the right meat. If you have moral or ethical issues or religious issues around not eating meat, I respect that. And we can help design a better vegan diet that suits you and is good. In terms of environment and climate, regeneratively raised meat and regenerative agriculture is the answer, period. And just stopping factory-formed meat is not enough.

We need to scale up regenerative agriculture in order to address the climate and environmental issues that we face that are catastrophic. And third, in terms of meat being healthy or harmful, the question really is what meat? It depends. Eating regeneratively raised meat or grass-fed meat is probably healthful, in fact, likely very healthful in the context of a whole foods, plant-rich diet with lots of herbs and spices. So what are the issues next? Well, it's the cost, right?

And there's a lot of options for getting healthier meat. A lot of people out there are producing this regeneratively now. You can get it direct from the farmers and ranchers. You can go to thrivemarket.com, butcherbox.com, mariposa ranchmeat.com, grassrootscoop.com. You can find ways to get actually a serving of grass-fed meat cheaper than you can buy a McTanel's hamburger for the same amount of protein. So with that in mind, three principles. Meat can be a health food, as we discussed. Two, meat should not be the star of the show. Basically, it's a side dish, a condiment.

And make sure you eat lots of plants and spices and herbs, whatever you're doing when you eat meat. And lastly, don't high-temperature cook, grill, fry, smoke, or char your meat because it's bad. So I think that we need to reconsider our view of meat as medicine. So that's it for today, everybody. Thanks for tuning into this mini podcast series on the Pagan Diet, 21 Practical Principles for Reclaiming Your Health in a Nutritionally Confusing World. Make sure you check out my new book, The Pagan Diet. Order the book at pegandiet.com. And we'll see you soon for the next little episode of the spinach series on the Pegan

Diet on The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey, everybody. It's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introduce to you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing,

which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health and I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays

nothing else I promise and all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up that's drhyman.com forward slash pics p-i-c-k-s and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Hi, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional.

This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their Find a Practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.