The Joe Rogan Experience - #1389 - Chris Kresser Debunks "The Gamechangers" Documentary

Episode Date: November 21, 2019

Watch James Wilks from The Game Changers debate Chris Kresser on his critiques of the film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq4Apc2Xk7Q Chris Kresser, M.S., L.Ac is a globally recognized leader in the fields of ancestral health, Paleo nutrition, and functional and integrative medicine. Link to notes from this podcast by Chris Kresser: http://kresser.co/gamechangers

ladies and gentlemen Chris Kresser Joe good to be back buddy good to see you yeah we are here because of the film the game changers I watched it I watched it today I watched the whole thing from start to finish and I have to say before we even start I like the guy who's in it very much james wilkes a very nice guy he's an excellent fighter he won the ultimate fighter um and uh i don't think he's a bad person i i've only had a little bit interacts with him just over the past couple days via email he seems like a really great guy yeah very good guy genuine i i would we're gonna talk we just going to get into it. So let's, what, what, what was your thoughts on the film and, uh, what did, what stood out immediately? Okay.

So a little bit of context. Um, you know, I think this film was the best of all the vegan documentaries that have been made. I'll just say that up front. I think it's pretty well done as a film. Yes. You know, it's got a big budget, pretty good storyline. James Cameron, Jackie Chan.

Lots of celebrities. Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know, it's good graphics. Like, it's just a well-made film. Yeah. And I think it's, especially for someone who doesn't have the background,

you know, or science awareness to critique some of the claims, it's going to be really persuasive and compelling. And I've definitely, you know, whenever a film like this comes out, my email inbox just blows up. Like, have you seen this film? What? Oh, my God.

You know, like, I'm eating meat. I'm going to kill myself. It's just like. It's the same as cigarettes. Right. And, you know, I was talking to Jamie about it before we started recording. Like, I could set my watch to it every year. If something like this happens and i've got to do a response i consider it part of my it's part of my public do you think that they're making these films because

they believe what they're saying or do you think they're making these films because they are trying to convert people to being vegan and they think that distorting reality and just bending things and cherry picking data is acceptable because the long run the benefits of getting the world to shift over to a vegan diet it's worth not being completely objective or honest about the actual facts? No, I think they believe it. I think people like, I mean, James, for example, I think he's genuinely trying to help people. I think he's looked at the data and he just came to a different conclusion than somebody like me has. And, you know, I mean, this is, there's something called confirmation bias. I'm sure many of your guests have talked about, but it's a basic human tendency

where we tend to only look at the data that support our point of view and discount the rest of it. And it's, you know, even really, really good scientists have a hard time overcoming that. Everybody is guilty of it to some degree, including me. But I think, yeah, so I think generally, people who are making these films really believe in it. They believe in the power of vegan diet,

you know, from a nutrition perspective, and they also believe that it's going to help save the world. The beginning of it, I thought was so strange. When James talked about being injured and doing all the research that he did, which seems like an extraordinary amount of, what do you say, like a thousand hours of research? And that the thing that stood out was that the Roman gladiators, at least in this one particular location, according to the analysis of their bones, it appears that they had a vegetarian diet. Yeah. That they ate a lot of grain. That was strange, too. I mean, first of all, gladiators were basically prisoners of war criminals.

So the diet they're being fed is not— Prison food. Yeah, it's prison food. They're slaves that are forced to fight to the death. They had a life expectancy of about two years once they became a gladiator. And it's interesting. They featured Fabian Kahn, who was a scientist, you remember, who they talked to and definitely seemed to kind of buy into the plant-based diet idea or the idea that they were vegetarian by design or by choice.

And they didn't talk to his collaborator, Carl Groschmidt, who's been quoted in the media saying, talked to his collaborator, Carl Groshman, who's been quoted in the media saying, here's a quote, and by the way, all of the references, full bibliography, show notes, everything are at kresser.co slash gamechangers, because I want this to be totally evidence-based. People can check what I'm saying right there. So he said, the vegetarian diet had nothing to do with poverty or animal rights. Gladiators, it seems, it seems were fat consuming a lot of simple carbohydrates such as barley and legumes like beans was designed for survival in the arena packing in the carbs also packed on the pounds gladiators needed subcutaneous fat a fat cushion protects you from cut wounds and shields nerves and blood vessels in a fight so they were basically fattening them up so they could survive longer in the arena.

It's not an ideal diet for fighting and muscle protein synthesis and nutrition. It was basically to fatten them up so they could survive longer. Yeah, this seems so obvious that I couldn't believe it was actually in the film. And it just seemed blatantly deceptive because everyone knows what their life was it's not like these were these elite athletes that were competing in the

olympic games these were people that they were sending out to die for other people's enjoyment right and the name uh my latin's terrible i bet i think it was hordiari or something it means like barley eater yes It was an epithet. It was an insult. It wasn't, you know, a compliment. It was like, ha ha, you only can afford to eat barley. So, yeah, it was a bizarre way to start the film, I thought. There could have been better ways to do it.

And let me also just say, like, if this film, if the purpose of this film was to say it's possible to thrive on a plant-based diet and look, here's some athletes that have done that. I wouldn't have had any qualms with it. Clearly, there are examples of people who thrive on a plant-based diet. If you follow the diet correctly, it can be done. Rich Roll, we talked about last time. Scott Jurek, who's one of the athletes in the film, seemed to do well. Dottie Bausch, who's one of the athletes in the film, seemed to do well. Dottie Bausch, who's one of the athletes in the film. If you really plan it well and you understand what you're doing and you're on it, it's totally possible.

No dispute with that. But where I take issue with it is it went a step further and said this is the optimal diet for athletes and everybody else. Which, you know, even though it was a film ostensibly about athletes, it definitely crossed the line into this is the approach that everybody should do. Yeah, I mean, they made these claims like all of a sudden people got stronger and faster and more endurance. Like there's no evidence to support that. There's no evidence other than their put anyone on a vegan diet and then run them through extreme endurance tests and found a significant increase in VO2 max or muscle strength or any of those things. None of this has ever been done. So if it's true anecdotally for these people, it would have been really interesting if there was some actual data to go with that where they showed studies.

I mean, we haveames talking about his ability to do the battle ropes that all of a sudden he could do an hour and before he could only do 10 minutes well i find that really hard to believe that you gained 50 minutes of your battle rope time just from ropes and if that was the only thing in the film that i found hard to believe you know i'd have to let it go i mean the guy's an athlete he's an amazing athlete he was a great fighter he's got fantastic endurance. He has excellent martial arts technique. I would just buy it at face level or at face value.

But there's a lot of those. There's a lot. And, I mean, we can go through it and talk about, I mean, there's that problem, which is there's no peer-reviewed evidence to back that up. But even the anecdotal evidence is a little shaky when we start to talk about some of the athletes in the film, and then also examples of athletes outside of the film who, you know, switched to a vegan diet, and we look and see what happened to them after they did that. The problem here is something that I call the vegan honeymoon, which is, you know, you take someone who's been on a standard American diet,

they're eating KFC, McDonald's, et cetera, and they switch from that to a plant-based diet. Well, of course they're going to feel better. They've gone from eating absolute crap to real foods. And so for a period of time, they're going to feel better for sure. But then what happens over a longer period of time, you know, some not getting enough protein, just in terms of quantity and not getting the right quality of protein that starts to have an impact. Micronutrient deficiencies, you know, vitamin A, zinc, calcium, iron, things like that take a while to develop.

So you're not going to see that decline in performance happen right away. It might take three months, it might take six months. It might take nine months. It depends on all kinds of factors, genetics, health status going into it, the type of exercise and activity that they're doing, the way they're implementing the diet, et cetera. So you have to not just look at what happens a month after someone goes vegan. You have to look at what happens six months, a year after, or two years after. And we can look at specific examples of that.

So in the absence of the correct amount of amino acids, the correct amount of specific nutrients, you start to see a slow decline. Right. And this is something that they're not taking into account. Yeah. One of the things they talked about was protein content. And I immediately knew that this was not correct

or that they were being deceptive. They were talking about three ounces of steak versus uh what do they compare a peanut butter sandwich and maybe some lentils is that what it was oh boy well the problem is the amino acid profile of that steak is far superior the amount of protein that your body absorbs is far superior it's it's a you're talking about a completely different thing This is known science You can get as many amino acids From plant based proteins But you need to eat a higher quantity Yeah

Right That's what's important It's not the overall grams of protein It's the quality of the protein What's the amino acid of the profile of the protein And how does your body absorb it Again this does not mean Like I'm a giant fan of hemp protein i eat that stuff all the time it's great it's just you can't say that protein

grams are equal to protein grams because they're they're not no but it's even worse than that jamie pull up slide four if you can there's i made some graphics here because um it's sometimes easier to understand when you're looking at a picture. So for the peanut butter sandwich thing, it was like there's the same amount of protein in a peanut butter sandwich as there is in three ounces of beef. So I looked up the data, of course. So three ounces of 90% lean ground beef has 24 grams of protein. You get two slices of wheat bread. We'll give them the benefit of the doubt that it's whole wheat and not white bread. That's five grams. One tablespoon of peanut

butter is four grams. So you'd have to have five tablespoons of peanut butter in that sandwich to equal three ounces of beef. That's a third of a cup of peanut butter. That's a lot of fucking peanut butter. You ever made a peanut butter sandwich with a third cup of peanut butter? I probably have, but I'm a glutton. I'm a legit glutton. I've probably done that many times. And that's 600 calories versus 200 calories from the ground beef. Just for the same amount of protein.

Just quantity. We're not even getting into quality yet. I'm going to get into that in a second, but we're just talking about quantity of protein. But I think they were saying peanut butter sandwich and a cup of lentils, right? Wasn't it the combined no i think they said three or or a cup of lentils or was it or yeah so um but the reality is it probably would plus a couple of lentils yeah then as you pointed out it's all about protein quality and this as you said you said, this is an established science,

firmly established science. They look at this, especially like in third world countries where protein deficiency is common. So they try to figure out how to address that. What are the highest quality proteins that we can feed these people to bring them up to where they should be in terms of protein intake. So the most recent scale that's used is called the DIAS, digestible indispensable amino acid score. So it ranks proteins according to two main categories. One is the amino acid profile. And as you mentioned, when it comes to protein quality, it's not just does the protein have every amino acid? You know, this is what's a little disingenuous about the film. They said every plant protein has every amino acid. Well, yeah, nobody disagrees with that, but does it have

enough of each of them? That's the key question. What's the quantity? What's the profile? So the DS looks at amino acid profile, but then it also looks at bioavailability. A protein is not worth much if you can't actually digest and absorb it. So it's a complex algorithm that combines all those things and that ranks the proteins on a scale. So the DS for beef, rare beef, is 1.39. It's among the highest scores on the whole scale. The DS for egg is 1.13. For peanut butter, it's 0.45. And for wheat, it's 0.2. Those are among the lowest proteins that have been measured on the scale. So even if the quantity was the same,

the effect on your body, particularly on things like muscle protein synthesis, which is of concern for athletes, is not even in the same ballpark. And when they're talking about the USRDA, they're talking about how much the United States recommended daily allowances. Isn't that just to be healthy? Not even healthy, but to be alive is more accurate. It's the amount that's required to avoid malnutrition, technically. I know that.

Yeah. Right? So, I'm, you know, why don't they know that? I'm not doing any documentaries on food. Why don't they know? That seems like, so to use that as a reference point, to use that as like, look, you can get this. That's plenty. That's crazy.

Well, that's a common argument in the vegan community. And they, you know, I don't know whether it's because they they really don't understand the science behind it or because they do and they're just you know it's being kind of exaggerated to suit the their claim i can't know that you know this is what i think it is honestly there's a lot of vegan influencers and there's a lot of people that make youtube videos and people who produce things like this and then the other folks just parrot what they say. Right. So instead of reading the actual studies and talking to objective researchers who have

gone over the evidence and disputed the claims that are in these films, like a debunking of one of these films will get way less views than the actual film itself. That's just how it goes nobody's going to watch and so especially the people that are already convinced for them it's like excellent i knew jesus was real now i've got the proof you know i mean it's really like that it becomes yeah the the ideology becomes so strong it becomes like a religion and look i've been accused of it from doing it from a meat perspective and i understand i understand that you would think that if you had an opposing vegan or vegetarian perspective i i totally understand but man you know we saw for that with the joel kahn discussion and you see it almost every time

someone who's actually informed has a conversation with one of these influencers. Like, they're not being 100% accurate, objective, or even honest in a lot of cases. Yeah, I mean, there's a great Leon Festinger quote, I don't know if you've heard it. A man with conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him the facts and figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.

The best argument, in my opinion, is this factory farming is disgusting and that the cruelty of treating animals like a commodity and serving them up for slaughter in these horrific conditions, these factory farming conditions, and these horrible pens that we've all seen. That's the argument for veganism. I agree. But when we're talking about performance and health, this is where it just gets very frustrating for me.

Because if you want to make an argument that you should probably follow a more complicated diet, more complicated meaning that it's more difficult for you to acquire in some cities, you have to be a little bit more careful about getting supplementation with vitamin B12 and essential amino acids. You've got to be a little bit more careful about getting supplementation with vitamin b12 and uh and essential amino acids you got to be a little bit more careful if you want to maintain a healthy robust life it's possible to do that but it's a little more complicated and if

you want to say i want to live like that because the way i feel about eating animals it makes me feel terrible i don't want to have any part of that and i found out that i can not have a part of that and i can live my life. That's great. But that's not what they're saying. No. And there's a lot of problems with that argument, too. I want to come back and spend some time on that.

We can do it right now before we move on because it is. We just covered it. All right. So I want to go back to the RDA. I don't want to forget that because that's super important. Yeah. So where to start with that? So first of all, you know, the idea that plant-based agriculture doesn't kill animals is just false. I mean, there have been studies that show that particularly monocropping type of plant agriculture kills far more animals than are killed in, you know, from eating cows, for example. Insects,

rodents, you know, mice, birds, fish, all, you know, killed in the process of industrial agriculture. And so that presents an ethical dilemma, really. If you are saying I'm a vegan because I don't want my food choices to involve killing animals is killing, you know, a whole bunch of small non-mammal animals better than killing mammals? Or what about killing more small animals than one cow? You know, is that ethically, does size matter? Does it, you know, where do you draw the line between an animal that is like sentient enough or cute enough maybe to not be killed versus let me clarify what you're saying too you're saying more animals per meal so you like if you want to have a meal out of wheat

you're most likely more animals are going to die than if you want. It's like if you have a hundred meat wheels, wheat meals, rather a hundred meals with wheat in them, you're probably killing more animals. And if you have a hundred meals with cows in them, because that's like a cow. Yeah. I don't know the answer to that question. I just, I'm comparing kind of the whole process, you know, like eating animals versus eating plants. And I don't know if that per meal comparison has ever been done. But I'm just saying that that's an interesting ethical question. Let me give you their argument for that. They say that most of these monocrops are to feed animals. Yeah, that is a problem. I mean, I fully where i agree with this film is that conventional livestock practices are harmful right but what they're saying is that you're saying that eating

a vegan diet and all these monocrops that these monocrops are killing all these small animals they're saying no these monocrops most of them actually exist to feed livestock that's that's not true i mean if if you follow this through, I mean, especially when you start talking about like fake meat and some, you know, they're all, what are those based on? Soils. They're industrial crops. They're not, you know, grown on the family farm. These are industrial GMO monocrops. Massive, massive fields.

On a massive scale. These are industrial GMO monocrops. Massive, massive fields. On a massive scale. There was a great study published in the journal PNAS in 2017, and it was specifically addressing this claim of would removing animal products from our diet have saved the world, basically? Would it reduce greenhouse gases? Would it improve our nutrition? Basically, would it reduce greenhouse gases?

Would it improve our nutrition? Basically, they found that it would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2.6%, but our intake of carbohydrates, total calories would go way up, and the incidence of nutrient deficiencies would go way up. And they did the math and found that without animal products, domestic supplies of calcium, EPA, and DHA, which are the long-chain omega-3 fats, retinol, and B12 were, quote, insufficient to meet the requirements of the U.S. population. So translation, everybody would have to be supplementing with those nutrients if everyone went on a vegan diet. went on a vegan diet. And they went on to say that basically there's already a surplus of calories in the diet of 145%. If we removed animal products entirely, that would go up to 230%. So because the volume of calories in food that would be required to meet

basic nutrient and protein needs would be that much higher. So, you know, there's a lot of downstream consequences that I don't think have been fully thought through. Even if a plant-based diet might work for one person, does it, will it scale? You know, if you, if you take that to the full level of like everyone eating a plant-based diet, which is the argument that is being made, does it really work from a nutritional perspective from an from an environmental perspective and even from an ethical perspective the environment the environmental perspective is legitimate they both cause environmental damage both animal agricultural and plant agriculture there's industrial practices cause environmental damage.

And if you want to feed 320 million people, you're not going to do it through organic farms. You're going to have to, I mean, you can grow food in your neighborhood. I mean, if you live in a small town, you guys can have a co-op. You can have food in your backyard that you can grow. But if you're living in a city like Los Angeles, it's highly likely your food is not coming from that city itself. So that means it has to be grown.

And if you're going to grow food for 20 million people you need a giant chunk of land if you need that giant chunk of land even if everybody's eating vegan that means wildlife is going to be displaced the the area where you're growing crops it's going to be a monocrop culture you're not going to have all these plants living together like they do in the wild that's just not how you grow food for 20 million people in a very specific area. You just don't do that. Yeah, I know you had Joel Salatin on the show a while back, and Alan Savory talked a lot about this, that one of the biggest issues right now is soil, soil erosion.

Soil is eroding. The FAO has said we only have about 60 harvests left if soil continues to degrade at the rate that it's going. And so one of the arguments for regenerative, holistically managed livestock is that that can actually help regenerate healthy soils. And some, like Joel Salatin or Alan Sabry, would argue that that's the only way we're going to be able to feed the world because only about 60 about 60 percent of available land is not suitable for cropping even if we decided hey let's just plant soy and corn and you know plant plants everywhere we couldn't because it's too rocky or hilly or the soil's not adequate to to do that but it could be used for livestock there's a thing that they keep saying that you brought up slightly.

You touched on it a little bit earlier. The thing is that greenhouse gases, and they were talking about the greenhouse gases from meat, and it's just a fake number. I mean, it's over the top. It's over the top not true. The specific number is 9% for all agriculture, all agriculture, including growing crops. The vast majority of all of our greenhouse gas issues are coming from transportation and from industry. This is undisputable. So this is where I wonder, too, about whether it's – is this disingenuous?

Are they not aware of what's happening here or is this disingenuous? Are they not aware of what's happening here, or is it disingenuous? So here's the thing. Here's what they did, Joe. So the specific number in the film, they say greenhouse gas emissions from Cal are 15%, and they compared that to 14% for all of transportation. But the problem with that is that they're using the full life cycle analysis for livestock.

So that means, you know, the carbon needed for feed, for transport, for processing the cattle, not just emissions, not just methane burps from the cattle. Whereas for transportation, they're only looking at what we're called direct tailpipe emissions, just the emissions that come out of the tailpipe. They're not looking at the carbon needed to manufacture the vehicle, the cars, the buses, the airplanes, the inputs for making the fuel, the fuel production and distribution, the final use of the fuel. That life cycle analysis for transportation hasn't been done just because it's enormously complex and it would be a phenomenally big number. The EPA has estimated that something around 80% of the greenhouse gas emissions comes from industry, basically fossil fuel. So it's not an apples to apples comparison. They're doing the full life cycle for livestock versus just the direct emissions for transportation.

Well, if we look at just the direct for both, it's 5% for livestock globally and 14% for transportation. But in the U.S., it's only 3.9% for livestock because we have more efficient practices here versus 14% for transportation. So not even in the same ballpark. And it's, it just, it's, yeah, I mean, they can just say that in the film. Most people will hear that nod their head because they've heard those numbers before, but the devil is always in the details. Well, what's going on is what, what you see in a lot of these videos is where only one person gets to talk, right? One person who has a specific agenda gets to cherry pick the data and distort it

and then put it on the film. And you can accuse us of doing that right now because both of us are clearly on the same page. And I would be happy to have James come in with you afterwards. But we decided. We did it with Joel. Yes. Well, James is way more reasonable than Joel and not slimy. So I'd be happy to do that. And I think that when it's all said and done,

I would just like people to be informed. And everyone is going to have their own ideological bias. Everyone's going to have their own preference. But to make poorly informed decisions, or that's being kind. To be more blunt, deceptive information forming your decisions and having health consequences because of that, to me, pisses me off and freaks me out. Yeah. Because it's not, the health aspects are not being represented accurately.

Yeah. It particularly bothers me when kids are involved oh there's another there was a case recently where um i was gonna tweet it but i was like god damn it i can't even tweet it's so sad where a child had died from malnutrition yeah because the parents were feeding it a vegan diet and all the other kids look like they were starving to death too and then the you know social workers came in and it's a goddamn nightmare and you don't hear i mean if you hear about that from people that are starving their kids on a regular diet they're

just either extremely poor or they're monsters and they're treating their kid terribly these people don't seem like they're bad people no that's what the scariest believe in what they're doing they're trying to do the right thing that's the scariest scariest part about it. Yeah. Is that you're seeing that this diet, again, you can do it correctly, but it's fucking complicated. It's hard. Yeah. Just one more thing on the greenhouse gas question. All the numbers I just gave you were from conventional methods, like basically CAFO beef. like basically CAFO beef.

When they have looked at regenerative, holistically managed livestock, they've found that it can either be carbon neutral or even a carbon sink. So there's a guy who's written some papers on this, Richard Teague, and in his 2018 paper, which again you can find on my website, thecressor.co slash gamechangers, he found that these larger, more complex, holistically managed sites can sequester between three to four and even up to seven tons of carbon per hectare per year. So these holistically managed beef operations are actually removing carbon from the atmosphere. How does that work? How are they doing that?

This is a little out of my wheelhouse, but it's part of the whole methane cycle, the natural biogenic cycle. And the difference, and this is important to understand, is the difference between transportation, which is basically taking out fossil fuels that have not been part of that natural cycle for millions of years and then just emitting them into the atmosphere. With the carbon, the biogenic carbon cycle, you have methane, you know, cows are burping out methane. Methane goes up into the atmosphere and then via hydroxyl oxidation, it's converted into CO2 and water vapor. then the plants take in co2 and then via photosynthesis they convert it into food basically and then the cows eat the food and the whole cycle

keeps going and this is this is a natural cycle this is not something you have to use equipment to this is a natural cycle so it just has to be a certain amount of plant life in in their area and so the way that i mean like joel salatin for example from polyface farms and and savory institute they basically educate farmers on how to rotate their livestock again this is not my area of expertise but rather than just having the cattle stay in the same place the whole time, like in a feedlot, they're moving the cattle around, the cattle are, are pooping. Then they bring the chickens to where that was, you know, where the cattle were and they, they move it around in a way, again, that I don't fully understand, but the effect of this is that the amount of carbon that is sequestered from the atmosphere is greater than the amount of CO2 that is emitted. And these life cycle analyses have been done and published in the literature.

It's true that right now that type of holistically managed livestock is not very common. But that doesn't mean that it's not what we should be doing and and you know this is the thing like with the film i agree with the problem that they you know the premise which is that the feedlot beef production is a nightmare you know it can be bad for the environment and we have to do something about it where we disagree is what the solution is yeah you know they go to a plant-based diet or fake meat or lab meat. I go to regenerative, holistically managed livestock. Okay.

So this animal, the regenerative livestock production, doing it in this method, is that sufficient to feed everyone? The production? I mean, how much land do you need to do something like this so i i knew you're going to ask that question and i talked to savory institute about this and a few other people and basically one response is it's the only way we're going to feed everybody because as i mentioned there are only 60 harvests left because of soil degradation so continually you know trying to scale up industrial plant agriculture with soy and corn and and all of these kinds of crops is going to further degrade the soil and at some point we're not going to have any soil left that's an important factor right

we should talk about this that you need compost and you need fertilizer and you need something that replenishes the soil and doing these large-scale monoculture crops when you have these enormous areas they're just depleting right they're just pulling and then they have to add you can't make something from nothing that's the thing we're not just we're not choosing We're not choosing between one really good alternative and one terrible alternative. That's not a choice, like you were saying before the show. That's not even a choice. You just do. You just obviously do the right thing.

We're choosing. It's like on the one hand, if we try to scale up plant agriculture in an environment where, according to the FAO, our soils are in only, quote, fair, poor, or very poor condition, and we only have 60 harvests left due to rapidly deteriorating soil due to erosion and nutrient depletion, then we desperately need new methods of restoring healthy soil. And if we can do that with regenerative, holistically managed livestock, which has been shown in the scientific literature to be possible,

then that may be the only way we can feed everybody. So we would need to almost have a reversal, if that was the case, and have more animal agriculture than plant agriculture. But not the way it's being done now. Right, it would have to be, so they would have to be like Joel Salatin set up. Yeah.

So we need three things to happen. One would be, we'd need to return all the croplands that are being used to feed livestock and feed lots right now to grassland. And number two, we'd need to put all unused land, like the rocky h hilly soil or land that can't be used for plant agriculture into production with animals. And number three, farmers and ranchers would need to adopt regenerative practices.

So I'm not saying this is an enormous undertaking. We're talking, but so is feeding the world with plant-based agriculture like whichever direction we go we're talking about you know really uh systemic change that needs to happen in a big way what percent that this would have you'd have to have all of the meat be grass-fed meat because they would be eating what they naturally eat now what is the percentage of grass-fed meat in this country currently? I don't know for sure. I think the number I read was something like two or 3%, so very low. Very small. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Many, many people prefer grain-fed meat. They like it fatty and sloppy. I mean, that's what it is, right? A lot of people like that.

Well, what's interesting, and I didn't even know this until a few years ago, even feedlot meat is mostly grass-fed. It's just what happens in the last 5% or 10% of the process. So it's like 90% grass-fed, and then it's grain-finished. And that grain-finishing gives it the marbling that is what you're talking about. It makes the animal sick. I mean, that's really, they're not supposed to eat that. Really, that's what it is.

And we've gotten addicted to animals eating things they're not supposed to eat and the way their flesh comes out. Yeah. I mean, a lot of that is they are eating things like soy cakes, you know, which is a byproduct of soybean oil production. Soybean oil consumption has grown like a thousand fold in the past 120 years. It's now the, the, the number one edible oil that we eat. Cause if you go into the supermarket and you look at any food label, it's soybean oil, soybean oil, soybean oil. So the oil is valuable. And then they take the cakes that are left over from the oil production process and feed them to cows. And so and so yeah they're eating stuff that they wouldn't normally have eaten in that scenario

yeah so both scenarios as you said are almost insane the feeding everyone and then also like what do we do with the animals if we're gonna stop eating meat like let's let's say if this entire country stops eating meat what do we do with the animals? We give them birth control, make them die of old age? Do they go extinct? If they don't go extinct, who houses them? Who feeds them? What do we do with them?

We never eat them. How do we kill all the wild pigs? I mean, another question is what do we do with the feed, the things that we're feeding the animals? If that stuff decomposes, it releases carbon into the atmosphere as well. But at least when you feed it to animals, you're taking food that is inedible to humans. Like I'm not going to eat soy cakes. And I think you are. Grass, fobs, corn stalks, leftover grains after you make whiskey and other types of alcohol, you feed those to cattle. They upcycle that into highly nutrient dense

and bioavailable protein. What James said a number of times in the film was cattle or animals are just the middleman. I'm like, exactly. They're really amazing middleman. And they take food that is inedible to humans and turn it into super nutrient dense food that we can, that we can digest and absorb.

I mean, thank you. Yeah, this, I mean, it's just, it's so confusing when a film like this gets made because so many people get up in arms

and so many people get influenced by it and so many people think that this is the way to go. My take on a lot of this is there's a lot of people that have kind of fashioned their careers out of this ideology, whether they believe it or not. The thing is like, we can go down that road of, we can say, okay, so this film was made by James, you know, James Cameron was one of the filmmakers. He also is the owner of Verdient Foods, which is a pea protein company.

And he said that he has the goal of it becoming the biggest organic pea protein company in the, in the world. He's invested $140 million into it. His wife, Susie Cameron, is founding a chain of vegan schools. And so, you know, from one perspective, that's conflict of interest. You know, this is an agenda-driven film. It's not a dispassionate, objective look, you know, scientific look at the vegan diet. But, you know, I mean, you can make that argument about just about anyone at this point like is it that surprising that a vegan film has a bunch of vegan medical experts in it is it

surprising that those experts invest in what they believe in and that they write books about it i don't think so you know but but it's important to know that and to not confuse a film like that with a scientific work. And that's my problem with this is the, what is it? The American College of Lifestyle Medicine. I have to look this up. One of these organizations is offering CEUs to doctors who watch this film and complete a quiz. That's absolutely ridiculous. This has not been pure. This is not peer reviewed science. This is not something that doctors should be getting CEUs for. What is a CEU? Continuing education units. So like basically doctors have to do, any medical professional has to do a certain amount of continuing education. You know, generally you go to like an accredited seminar or class or whatever. And that's how you do it. But they're actually

offering those for people who, doctors who watch this film and complete a short quiz. And yeah, that's freaky. So I don't know if we talked about this on the con show or one of the previous one. Yeah, it was American College of Lifestyle Medicine. Well, they were founded by Seventh-day Adventists at Loma Linda University. The Seventh-day Adventist Church, do you know about this? They're vegetarians. Yeah. So it was one of the founders was Ellen White, and she taught that meat was a toxic substance

and that flesh should be avoided because it increases our carnal urges. Holla. So it was a moral religious thing at first. should be avoided because it increases our carnal urges. Holla. It was a moral religious thing at first. And then one of the other, an early Adventist church member, Lena Cooper, she co-founded the American Dietetic Association, which is still to this day one of our major dietetics organizations. And she wrote textbooks that were used in dietetic and nursing programs all around the world for 30 years.

So we have this weird meshing that goes back to like the early 20th century between religion and science. Do the Seventh-day Adventists have better health overall in general? They do. Are they like one of those blue zone people? But the argument is often made that that's related to diet. have better health overall in general they do they like one of those blue zone people but the argument is often made that that's related to diet well it could be that it's it's related to you know part of their creed is to eat healthy whole foods but they're also don't smoke they

don't drink they're they're advised to exercise so it's kind of like the dean orner studies where you know you put together all these interventions that one of which is a low-fat diet and then you say that the benefit was because of the low-fat diet what you're what you're referring to is the study that showed that and this is what vegans like to say that vegan diet is the and joel loves to use this one a vegan diet is the only diet that's ever been shown in a study to reverse heart disease yeah but what this study actually shows is these people had terrible diets. They smoked and they drank. And then they put them on a vegan diet,

no smoking, no drinking, and exercise. And what do you know? Their health improved. But it's not like we have a corresponding diet where they did the exact same thing and gave them an omnivorous diet with grass-fed bison meat and then showed a similar set of tests and showed a decline or showed a better

performance by the vegan diet. You have all of these factors that are compiled together. Quitting drinking, quitting smoking, quit eating shit food, eating a vegan diet, and exercise. And stress reduction and community support, all of which we know have an impact on heart disease. That is the study. So when they say that a vegan diet is the only diet that's ever been shown to clinically

reduce heart disease, that's not really true. Disingenuous. And the other thing about that study is that in the baseline characteristics of the control group versus the experimental group were totally different. The experimental group weighed 34 pounds more than the control group. So they had more, you know, they were more overweight, they had more weight to lose, you know. They were less healthy. I mean, that study would be thrown out today like you can't study what you were studying this was 1998 yeah well this was the problem when

conversing with joel about this and by the way the reason why i had him on i know people think i'm biased and i am like i'm biased this is this my perspective is that you're correct and that all these other you know mark sisson and rob wolf and all these other folks i think they're correct an omnivorous die is the way to go but i had him on to try to pursue this path of objectivity to try to give him an opportunity to express what what's incorrect about what you're saying and it didn't work out for him and i mean by everybody's account that i saw that he lost that debate so you i mean you you brought up a point which I think is the crux of this whole thing like where the context is KFC, McDonald's, you know, cheese doodles, Coca-Cola, the whole standard American diet is the same as a diet that includes meat that's completely whole foods based. You know, like the way you eat, the way I eat, you know, lots of vegetables, fresh, you know, nuts, seeds, starchy tubers, whatever. Vegetables, fresh nuts, seeds, starchy tubers, whatever.

If you ask 100 people on the street, my guess is 100% would say those are obviously different. Yes. But the way that research treats them is they're the same. Exactly the same. They're exactly the same. Because the correlating factor, the main factor is meat. Yeah. That's what they factor in. They don't control for any of those other things.

It's ridiculous. Now, that's changing. So there have been studies that have been done over the past few years that are looking more at diet quality rather than just the quantity of specific food ingredients or foods like meat. And what those studies are universally saying is that quality is what makes the difference. Yes. So, a great example, we talked about this with Joel, are the studies on looking at omnivorous versus vegetarian and vegan diets and lifespan. But instead of just looking at the general population that eats meat, they tried to find ways to like, at least choose a slightly healthier omnivorous

population. So there was one, the health food shoppers study, where they only looked at people who shopped at health food stores thinking, okay, these people are at least thinking about it a little bit. It's still not controlling for all the factors, but they're saying, let's look at people who shop at a place like Whole Foods and then let's compare lifespan between vegetarians and vegans and omnivores. Well, guess what? Both groups live a lot longer than the general population, but there was no difference in lifespan between people who ate meat and vegetarians and vegans. The premise is that meat is poison. And so when you add meat to these studies, that people with meat, well, they're eating poison.

And the people without meat, look, no poison. I mean, this is, but what about all the other shit? This is what's so crazy about it. Like, how can you have a study where you don't take into account how many people drink or smoke yeah and you just add the meat it's it's insanity it's that's the healthy user bias and i mean this this is the the problem and what makes my job so difficult is like people have heard that meat is bad for 50 what 60 years you know So someone can say meat is bad. That's three words.

And for me to unpack that, I have to talk about healthy user bias. I have to talk about problems with data collection and food frequency questionnaires. I have to talk about relative versus absolute risk. You know, I mean, people are just like, what? Well, that's the problem with any of this data. And it's one of the beautiful things about being able to talk about it on a podcast with a moron like me is at least you're getting a conversation where people are going to ask questions like, what the fuck is he saying? So I get to ask you that and then people get to hear it. This is a very strange time when it comes to information because so much of it is available but almost too much.

And then when you realize, when you start trying to study nutrition there is so much to learn there's so many factors and there's so many biases well where i like i listened to your interview with matt tybee and and you know the point i was thinking about it because you were talking about it politically how we're just living in echo chambers now yeah so you go on social media, you're Republican, you're only going to see stuff about that, that caters to your view. And the algorithms are even optimized for that because they know that you'll click on that more and that will lead to more ad dollars. So, but it's similar with nutrition. So, you know, if you're vegan, you go on YouTube, you're going to see a ton of vegan videos and vegan perspectives, same with your Facebook feed, etc.

And to be fair, it's the same for, you know, people who are into keto or low carb or carnivore or whatever they're into. It's the same thing. So you're just getting this reinforcing confirmation bias, you know, supporting access to information. That is a weird thing about social media algorithms, whether it's YouTube algorithms or Facebook or any of these things, is that they're giving you what you want to information. That is a weird thing about social media algorithms, whether it's YouTube algorithms or Facebook or any of these things, is that they're giving you what you want to see, which you would say, oh, great, well, that's what I want to see. But the problem is, like, there's

so many counter-arguments, especially when you're talking about nutrition science. There's so many discussions on both sides of the fence and it seems like both sides are preaching to the choir yeah well you know i mean we're biased as you said uh my story is a lot of people know is i was vegan and and somebody said on one of the videos you are the

most vegan sounding non-vegan ever. Well, I mean, yeah, I was a vegan. I was vegetarian. I was a raw food vegan. I was a macrobiotic vegan. I have a lot of friends who are vegan. I have patients that are vegan. I have nothing against vegans. And I totally get the reasons that people become vegan.

But I, like many others and my patients in my community, my health was harmed by that. And now, I mean, How was your health harmed? Can you explain to people? Yeah. I mean, I, I, I lost weight and as you can see, I don't have a lot to lose to begin with. I, my digestion got really screwed up. I got depressed. I'd never been depressed. Like I've never been a person who gets depressed. I felt anxious. I know, it just was clearly not working for me. And again, that's not to say it can't work for some people. Do you think the cause of depression

had something to do with the diet because of the lack of cholesterol? B12. Hormones. Iron. Yeah, for sure. But, you know, now, like, I mean, it's funny too. I don't actually, I make a point of not reading comments usually, but occasionally

I come across them on Twitter or something. A comedian told me. So that's why I thought it was hilarious. So, uh, you know, people are like, Oh, he's such a, you know, he's going to get on there and just low carb, low carb. That's total. Like, I don't, I'm not a low carb guy. I never have been.

In fact, I'm in trouble with the low carb community because, total. Like I don't, I'm not a low carb guy. I never have been. I, in fact, I'm in trouble with the low carb community because you know, I, I push back. I don't think it's right for everybody. I don't think it's right for performance. Yeah. I don't see any evidence that for elite athletic performers, that it's the way to go. And, uh, I don't know anyone that's an elite athletic performer that follows those diets. Maybe endurance, endurance runners. I was going to say and zach flies in the face of all this stuff and you know if you want to include someone like that guy that ran the appalachian trail in 48 days or whatever he did yeah i mean which is no small feat for sure but i mean zach bitter ran 20 – he ran a 100-mile race in 11 hours and 40 minutes, which is 40-something minutes, which is fucking bananas.

And then kept running, I think, after that. Well, he's a savage. All he eats, he eats ribeyes. Yeah. That's what that guy eats. The main – I mean, he talked about it. The main food in his diet is ribeye steaks. Yeah, he's mostly keto.

So, yeah, I yeah i mean anyways my point was just like i'm i try i'm not super dogmatic i'm just like i i'm interested in what works for the most people essentially and you know as you mentioned scott jurick a belgian dentist shattered his record by five days a couple years ago and that guy was eating like snickers and tons of crap so i'm i'm not saying that he shattered his record by five days yeah oh jesus i'm not saying i'm not saying that's what you should do but i'm saying there's more to athletic performance than food i guess that's not really deceptive because he did break the record when he broke it he did break it yeah he broke it he's a phenomenal it. Yeah, he broke it. He's a phenomenal athlete.

I don't want to take that away from him. And then like Michael Phelps. Guy eats pizza. Guy eats 12,000 calories of sugar, French toast, pizza. Usain Bolt in the Beijing Olympics when he shattered those records, he ate over 1,000 chicken nuggets, I think somebody calculated. So, I know. There's more to it than diet.

I think when you're at that level of performance, you are burning off such an insane amount of calories. You're working so hard. You can kind of almost eat anything. When you're in that mode. Yes. This is obviously not comparable, but when we did Sober October last year and we had this fitness challenge

I was doing cardio No joke Minimum five hours a day Sometimes six and seven It was insane And I was eating everything Boxes of cookies Bottles of soda

Probably lost weight too Yeah I did Well not really Because I lifted a lot of weights too Yeah I kind of maintained Maybe I lost a couple of pounds But I was drinking

Like giant Like Cokes Like a I was drinking like Cream, like Cokes. Like I was drinking like a cream soda. I never drink that shit. Yeah. But it's like my body wanted sugar. It's like, give me some sugar. You just did seven hours on a fucking elliptical machine, you asshole.

And it was so ridiculous. But those guys are working out even harder than that. So imagine like what Phelps. If you need 12,000 calories, you're not getting it with paleo and you're not getting it with vegan diet. That's important. That's important. So let's rewind a little bit to the protein, the RDA.

Yes, RDA protein. That's super important. Yeah. So 0.8 grams per kilogram of protein per day is the RDA. And again, that's just the basic minimum. That's not the amount that's needed for optimal health and performance. That's just the absolute basics for avoiding malnutrition. However, even that number now, that's based on outdated nitrogen balance studies for determining the RDA. And there's a newer method called the Indicator Immunoacid Oxidation Technique or IAAO. And this suggests

that the RDA should be 1.2 grams per kilogram. And again, just the basic minimum, bare minimum, not optimal. So it's now gone up from 0.8 to 1.2. And if you use that number, if you pull up slide eight, Jamie, that's only enough for an adult that weighs less than 130 pounds. Really? So the, sorry, you know how he said, and James said in the study, the average vegetarian gets 71 grams a day, which is not only, you know, the RDA, but 70% more. That's using the 0.8 number. That's using the 0.8 number. But if you use 1.2 grams per kilogram per day, then a lot of people are going to be protein deficient on a vegetarian diet.

And we're not, again, not talking about optimal amount for athletes. We're just talking about the RDA basic bare minimum. And when you say vegetarian, you should say vegan, correct? Because you're not talking about egg protein. You can get... No, this study was vegetarian. They weren't referring to vegans. So you could get egg protein yeah you could use eggs dairy and dairy right eggs are far superior in terms of their amino acid profile than vegetables yeah so for vegans it would be different i taught i brought up eggs to a friend of mine i was saying this really

recently why don't you try eggs and uh they they looked at me like I was talking to them about poison. Yeah. Like there's plenty of people that are vegan or vegetarian, and you bring up eggs to them, and they look at you like, why would I eat an egg? Yeah. So that's, you know, 1.2 is the RDA if you use this newer method. But for athletes, James, to his credit,

does acknowledge in the film that athletes need more protein than regular non-athlete people. But he doesn't say how much more. So, again, if you use these IAO methods, they've used this newer technique to look at athletes. And they found that the range is somewhere between 1.4 to 2.7 grams per kilogram. So we're now way higher than that 0.8 number. And just for people who aren't familiar with kilograms, let's say we take the median number there, 2.1 grams per kilogram per day. Well, anyone who's ever been in the bodybuilding,

weightlifting community will recognize this. That's one pound of protein per pound of body weight a day. Yes. Which has been the common recommendation in that community for one gram of protein sorry one gram of protein one pound no that's a lot no imagine one gram and in fact even arnold in the movie says i weighed 250 pounds i used to eat 250 grams of protein you know like that's that's the recommendation and it turns out that's the recommendation. That's the standard in the bodybuilding community. And it turns out that's actually based on science, you know. So a 200-pound athlete would need 200 grams of protein a day.

And, Jamie, if you pull up slide 10, this is what you'd have to eat on a vegan diet to get that amount of protein. And, again, we're just talking about quantity. We're not talking about quality. So 200-pound athlete, that's me. I weigh 200 pounds. So show me what I'd have to eat. I weigh 200-pound athlete. That's me. I weigh 200 pounds. 200-pound athlete.

So you would need to eat three cups of cooked lentils, three cups of chickpeas, two cups of quinoa, three ounces of almonds, three slices of silken tofu, and 10 tablespoons of peanut butter. That's the whole day? That's the day. I could fuck that up in a day. Yeah, you could. But the problem is the DIA score for all of those,

like the bioavailability and amino acid profile would be horrible compared to meat, eggs, dairy. So what would I have to do? Because I know they've done this study. There was a study that I'd read or had heard about, I should say, where they compared rice protein to whey protein, and they found that at a certain level of grams, like whatever it was, they had an equal effect.

Is it lutein? Leucine. Leucine. The muscle protein synthesis. They had an equal effect. I should give credit to the video that I was watching. This gentleman, I was watching his video today dr. Ryan Lowry and that they were saying that what that means is that correct me if I'm wrong

what it is is when you get it once you hit a certain level of leucine it's a point of diminishing returns and there's no there's no added benefit to having more leucine in your diet so if you hit whatever is, I think it was 48 grams or something like that. When you have 48 grams of this and 48 grams of that, you put the two of them together, it's essentially the same effect. Well, I'm not sure about that. But, I mean, leucine is very important for anabolic signaling and muscle protein synthesis. It's the essential amino acid that's thought to be the most important for that,

and it's low in plant proteins. And the other issue with plant proteins that you have is that they have limiting amino acids. So these are amino acids that actually interfere with muscle protein synthesis because the levels are so low in that food. So, lysine is a limiting amino acid in grains like wheat and rice. Maybe that's, there was leucine and lysine discussion maybe there. And then methionine and cysteine are limiting in legumes like soy. So, Jamie, on slide six, I made a chart comparing the amino acid

profile in beef to several different plant proteins like white beans, soybeans, peas, and rice. What you can see there is beef is higher in every single amino acid than every plant protein that's compared there with the exception of soy beans are slightly higher in tryptophan than beef. Look at leucine. So beef, it's 2.23 versus 0.58 for white beans, 1.3 for soy. Soy is higher in leucine than any other plant protein, which is why it's often used and then like 0.3 for peas and 0.01 for rice if you get to a certain number or a certain level of all these so if you ate enough food that you would pass a certain marker would would it be possible to have the same effect by eating cooked peas or soybeans it is possible for sure so i with that. You have to eat an enormous

amount of that, as you can see, because of the levels. And this is why a lot of vegan bodybuilders and athletes end up using protein powders, because you can get to those amounts easier by using the powders. And you can also blend like a, you know, 70% pea with 30% rice to get the right amino acid ratio easier with powders. So like Patrick Baboumian is a good example of that. You know, did you see the video that Bobby Geist made? No. So there's actually a video. Oh, is that the one that you sent me? Yes, I did see that. There's a video that Patrick made himself of his own diet on what he eats on a daily basis. And it turns out to be a boatload of protein powder and just shakes with all kinds of powders and supplements and things like that. So, yeah, we can go through it.

So, he starts with a bunch of different supplements in the morning, multivitamin, nutritional yeast, zinc, glucosamine, magnesium, calcium, B12, and iron. Then he has a protein shake with soy protein powder, creatine, and beta-alanine, which probably is because he's aware of the research showing lower levels of muscle creatine and carnosine in vegans. Beta-alanine and creatine would address that. Then he has a post-workout smoothie with soy or pea protein powder, glutamine, beta-alanine, creatine would address that. Then he has a post-workout smoothie with soy or pea protein powder, glutamine, beta-alanine, creatine, and dried greens. And then his first solid meal of the day is fried falafel, French fries, soy sausage, fried peppers, and tomatoes.

And then he has some more protein shakes and smoothies throughout the day. So I don't know. That doesn't strike me as a super healthy way to eat. What, what do you, what problem do you have with that? Well, first of all, I think we should primarily get nutrients from food whenever we can. I'm not against supplementation. I think there's a role for it, of course, like, you know, especially with things like vitamin D that you might not be able to get enough of from food or therapeutic supplementation if you're dealing with a health problem. But eating a diet that is not sufficient in the amount of nutrients that you need

and then using supplements to address that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Well, in his situation, he's got a very unique situation that he's a strength athlete. That's all he's doing is trying to lift really, really heavy things. So he needs to maintain a certain amount of bulk. He needs to have an enormous amount of protein. Yeah, an enormous amount of protein. He has to be – he's very heavy. And that sport is also – that's a steroid sport.

I mean it's just one of those sports where it's like bodybuilding. Pretty much everybody. It's a steroid sport. So you're just one of those sports where it's like bodybuilding pretty much everybody's steroid sport um so you're eating massive amounts of quantities you're taking chemicals yeah it might not be the healthiest thing but it's also like just the sport itself might not be the healthiest thing i mean you've seen them carry people on the he was doing that in the film yeah that that's not good for your back yeah that's fucking crazy yeah but it works for what he's trying to do obviously it's working for what he's trying to do there's no dispute in that see what he's doing is almost like the intelligent way if you want to be vegan and do

what he's trying to do right i don't know if he could eat just vegetables and pull that off he couldn't but that's kind of the point there are a lot of other strongmen that do. Like Robert Oberst. That you had on the show. Yeah, he just eats meat and rice. Right. That guy eats pounds and pounds of beef and rice. Simple, accessible form of carbohydrate and a lot of protein.

And it's an unfair comparison. And Oberst talked about him on the podcast before. He's much larger. A lot of the strongmen are huge. Like the guy who played Gregor in Game of Thrones, right? Yes. He's one of them. He's like 6'8 or 9".

Yeah, he's enormous. He's 10 pounds or something. And Patrick is not. He's not nearly that size. He's 5'6 or 5'7 or something. So the comparison between him and a guy like Oberst in those legit top- the food chain strongest man in the world competitions it's not it's not a totally different weight class he's robert is

enormous he's so much bigger yeah but the problem is in the film they don't make that distinction and they try to pretend that this guy is one of the strongest men in the world he's not he's very strong no doubt and he definitely has broken some records and some competitions and you know and you know i have different weight classes and different but you're not talking about a guy who wins those you know magnus von magnuson fucking competitions where they're carrying trucks and shit well i mean i guess my my point too was like is it the best example of how an athlete can thrive on a plant-based whole foods diet?

I think it is though, because for him, for his size, to be a guy who's 5'7 and is carrying that fucking enormous amount of weight, he's obviously doing something that's very impressive and he's doing it while he's on this vegan diet. And again, I mean, just discounting all the illegal supplementation because i don't think it is illegal in that sport it's kind of you kind of have to do it if you want to get that big but if you want to do it and do it as a vegan he is showing you that it's possible so in that sense i defend what he's doing because i think that he like that's the only way in that but this is a

very sport specific area of performance. He's just talking about lifting insanely heavy shit. And he's doing that and thriving on a vegan diet. Yeah. No doubt, you know, enormously strong and he's succeeding. I would argue that he might do even better if he was eating, you know, nutrient dense, more nutrient dense food. And he might need to take fewer supplements and drink less powder. Yeah, but I think from his perspective, it's an ethical thing.

I'm more like a whole foods person, and that's where I'm coming from. Another problem that I had in the film, especially in relations to sport, is the Nate Diaz-Conor McGregor comparison. First of all, Nate Diaz is not a vegan. Nate Diaz eats fish, McGregor comparison. First of all, Nate Diaz is not a vegan. Nate Diaz eats fish and he eats eggs. And he does try to follow a whole food vegan diet

I think during camp. So I would have to talk to him about that. I know he's done interviews talking about that. But I've definitely seen him eat fish. I watched him on the Anthony Bourdain television show and he was eating fish. I know he's eating eggs. He doesn't eat land animals.

I think what he does is avoids red meat. Well, fish and eggs take care of it because fish is actually higher often than meat in terms of protein, ounce for ounce. It's also very high in collagen, which is super important for recovery and repair and explains lack of collagen, probably explains why a lot of vegan athletes get injured which we can talk about more later and then eggs as you know are super you know they're really high on the diaz score scale they're bioavailable lots of other nutrients so here's another problem with that whole comparison first of all um nate diaz is a fantastic fighter he's he's a long time mixed martial arts veteran he's outstanding in all areas he is a fantastic fighter. He's a long-time mixed martial arts veteran.

He's outstanding in all areas. He has a fantastic submission game. His brother, Nick Diaz, is one of the best in the world. He's also outstanding in all. And his brother, Nick, I believe is vegan. He's probably a better example because, you know, even though Nick hasn't beaten some of the top flight fighters in a few years, back when he was in Strikeforce, he was top of the food chain. I mean, he's an elite fighter for sure.

I'm not sure if he was vegan back then. I'd have to ask him. But the point being that Nate is an exceptionally skilled athlete, and he was coming into that fight on extremely short notice. So he was most likely following his off-camp diet, which is eggs and eating fish and things along those lines. And I think he said he was partying in Mexico. So who knows what the fuck he was doing.

It was like 11 days out. They call him, and they set up this fight. I forget how many days out it was, but it was a very, very short amount of time. Conor was preparing for a 155-pound fight against Rafael Dos Anjos. 155 pound fight against Rafael Dos Anjos so he was reducing his caloric intake dropping his weight down to try to make this 155 pound weight class

it's a big cut for him so when you do that you are in anticipation that the person you're fighting is also doing that so you both kind of agree that you're going to be in a certain weakened state when you actually weigh in at 155 pounds so is that like two weight classes below

his normal let me let me keep going so he's this is that was the first and only time well except the rematch with nate was the only time that he's fought at 170 so they made a decision to fight at 170 instead of 155 because nate did not have time to reduce his calories and cut the weight and it takes a long time it's a slow process of nate is a big fella he walks around probably over 200 pounds easy and he drops weight and he didn't want to drop that much weight he's a big guy man he's big and long um and connor was dropping his weight down to 155 so he's 10 days out and he just starts packing on food eating as much food as he can not only that but stylistically, Nate's a nightmare for him. Nate has a fucking evil submission game.

He's tough as nails. His endurance is always fantastic because offseason, he's always doing triathlons, and he's always doing endurance sports. I mean, he's in phenomenal shape. And his jiu-jitsu is, like, many levels better than Conor's. I mean, he's a legit top-of-the-food-chain MMA black belt in jiu-jitsu. So they have this fight. Conor gets tired.

Nate beats him up, gets him on the ground, submits him, and they're saying this is a victory for veganism. What they don't say is five months later they fought and Conor beat him. They fought again. They fought. This time they had a full training camp. Conor prepared, and it was a very close fight i should say um you could have vote you could have scored it either way i mean it's it was a really close fight razor's thin but the fact remains connor beat him in the rematch so i mean they leave this out of the narrative like oh my

god the vegans are dominating look vegan dominated but he's you know this is a last minute fight connor goes up and wait nate diaz you know steps in and and takes care of business and wins the fight it speaks more to how good nate diaz is than a vegan diet right and it doesn't take into account that four months later or five months later whatever it was he loses and he's not vegan yes it's not you know i mean there's there are he follows it sometimes there are a few other examples like that in the film where you catch a certain window of it, but they don't show what happens afterwards. We talked about the vegan honeymoon.

So Brian Jennings, the boxer, they talked about he went vegan in the end of 2013. He was 17 and 0 before he was vegan, and he's 7 and 4 after that. So you can't say that that's because he transitioned to a vegan diet but you can't also say nor nor can you say that veganism improved his performance right i mean it objectively he's gotten worse since then well the argument against that would be that he's moving up into the upper echelons of the heavyweight

division and it's filled with killers like any combat sport and that as he got in many fighters don't make it to get in and he lost to um wasn't one of the klitschko's yes i think he lost to vladimir i think he lost to vladimir klitschko in a decision and he handled himself very well it was a very good fight for him he looked real good but yeah i mean that that upper alone you get to these andy ruiz dionte wilder i mean killers yeah it's like not most people that get up into that division they start losing he's a good example too of this um principle of context being everything because he said in the film my early years growing up in philly the only thing we knew was spinach in a can,

collard greens and Popeyes, KFC, everybody frying chicken. I grew up not even knowing about half these other vegetables. Asparagus to me just came out like five years ago. So, you know, clearly- Again, vegan honeymoon. Yeah. Going from like a crappy standard American diet to a whole foods diet, I don't doubt that someone's going to feel better but what do you felt better like you said eating some grass-fed bison and some eggs along with all of those plants that's the question yes that is the question and this is the real purpose my real purpose for getting involved in these fucking discussions over and over and over again i want

people to understand that this there's nuance to this yeah there's and then there's also biological variability there's some people that are they they can get along on certain diets easier there's some people that have a horrible time with seafood there's some people that have a horrible time with certain grains i mean this is we are all different we come from an enormous planet where your ancestors developed and your genes developed in different parts of the world. We're all different. But what we know about nutrition, it is so important that we are honest about what we know. This is what the problem I have with a lot of these documentaries.

They're not honest about what they know they're only giving you little snippets and cherry picking data and doing things like the study that showed that the vegan diet can clinically reverse heart disease these you're using all this deception pretending that the the gladiators chose to eat gruel like this is how we're gonna kick ass we're just gonna eat barley the fuck out of here this is nonsense here. This is nonsense. And they know it's nonsense. Either they know it's nonsense or they just fucking slap some blinders on their head and just plow straight ahead and ignore anything that conflicts with any of these thoughts that they're expressing. I mean, there's so many examples of this in the film. One was this lettuce has more antioxidants than salmon or eggs. Well, so what? I mean, we're not saying don't eat lettuce,

right? I mean, I've always argued that the optimal diet includes both plants and animal foods, and there's reasons for that. Plants contain some nutrients that animal foods don't, and animal foods contain nutrients that plants don't. You've been very consistent about this. Eat both of them, right? An orange has more vitamin C Than a beefsteak That's just how it goes. But we could just easily say A serving of salmon has 716

Times more selenium than Lettuce and provides 100% Of the RDA of B12 where lettuce Provides 0% but I'm not going to Say that because that's ridiculous. I'm not trying To get people not to eat lettuce You so you're not on team well that and there's another thing that's going on right now these carnivore folks which i find fascinating because they are as ideologically driven as vegans we have the anti-vegans it's like we have antifa and then

we have the alt-right now we have the carnivores and we have the vegans. And both of them dig their fucking heels in the sand. And both of them are committed to thinking that their side is the only way to go. And Rhonda Patrick has talked about this many, many times when people start discussing negative aspects of eating foods, particularly plants, because of stressors. foods uh particularly plants because of stressors and she's like no there's actually an effect where your body's reacting to them that's beneficial much like when you get in a sauna your body reacts to the heat it's actually beneficial for your health hormesis yes and that's like that's how exercise works right you lift a weight until you can't lift it anymore your muscle tissue breaks down and it rebuilds stronger the next time. So these folks that are talking about don't eat vegetables

because vegetables give you these things that are bad for your body like okay are you sure? I mean there's a lot of work to be done here folks. There's a lot of fucking research to be read into and there's a lot of conversations you have to have with people far more educated than you in the subjects. I think

often as humans we have a hard time differentiating between like our own experience and what works for us and then larger, bigger picture. So take someone who has a severe autoimmune disease, they go on carnivore, their symptoms disappear. That's pretty compelling. You know, it's really understandable why they would be like passionate about that and why they would want to continue that approach. But again, said before we're not always choosing between one great alternative and one terrible alternative it is interesting to me though that one thing that we have been lied to about is that you need vegetables because these you don't need it just much like you know

with the rda you need a certain amount to not starve to death you don't necessarily need vegetables there's a whole community of people out there that's thriving and not eating a single piece of vegetable yeah it's really interesting the problem is we just don't know what happens long term there so i got my eye on sean baker i'm not saying and look i want to be clear it might be fine it seems like it is i don't know i'm just saying we don't know so you're you're introducing an element of uncertainty because whether you look at it from an if you look at it from an anthropological perspective every group of people we've ever studied in human history has eaten both plants and animals in different proportions what about the comanches one of the things I was reading about the Comanches or was I watching

listening rather to this audio book what is it called Summer Moon Empire of the Summer Moon it's amazing I'm recommending it too much I gotta shut the fuck up

about it but one of the things they talk about is that the Comanches ate very little berries or fruits or vegetables they mostly just ate buffalo

well the Inuit also ate very little especially during the winter. But they went to great lengths to trade for plant foods, and in the summer they ate more plant foods. So the proportions vary. You know, the Maasai, for example, they eat milk, meat, blood, and they eat some plant foods. But then you have other groups that ate more plant foods.

There was a study, ethnographic study of hunter-gatherer cultures done, 230 roughly cultures studied, and they found that on average, hunter-gatherers got about 70% of their calories from animal foods and about 30% from plant foods. So that's percent of calorie. That's not looking at a plate because animal foods are more calorie dense. So it still might be two thirds of the plate is plants and one third is animal foods if they use plates. But that's the rough percentage. But it would vary, you know, from place to place. We don't know of any group that exclusively and by choice, not from living in a marginal environment like the Arctic, but by choice, ate only animal foods for a long period of time. And a lot of the research that we have,

the clinical research suggests that plants have some useful nutrients, especially some fibers that can feed the beneficial gut bacteria. There are studies showing that extremely low carb diets can have some maybe not great effects on the gut flora. So again, it could be fine, but we just don't know. And so there's, you're adding an element of uncertainty there. That's all I'm saying. So there could be a carnivore honeymoon, as it were, just like you're talking about the vegan honeymoon and that there could, so your contention, and this is my belief as well, is that most human beings fare better on an omnivorous diet. With both plants and animal foods.

Yes. And what proportion of plants and animal foods will depend on all the factors that you mentioned, genes, epigenetics, health status, geography, whatever else is going on. But for some people, that might just be a small amount of animal foods. It might be Nate Diaz, some fish and some fish and some eggs and then the rest, you know, plant-based diet. For other people, it might be a lot more animal foods. That's where I think the individual variation comes in. Right. And I'm sure most of these athletes that are following a vegan diet, like you were talking about earlier with Patrick, they're taking protein powders. So they're allowing themselves to get a

large dose of protein to fulfill their requirements simply and easily in a shake form rather than having to wolf down, you know, four or five bowls of some vegetable. And if they're not, they're probably not doing that well. So we have like all these stories of NFL and NBA athletes that went vegan and then stopped because they were not able to maintain their weight or they got injured and they weren't able to recover. In the show notes for this, I have like many, many examples of pretty high level NBA and NFL athletes.

Well, just read off of you. Cam Newton is one of them, right? Cam Newton is the most recent one. So he went vegan in February, had the worst season of his career. He had minus two yards on five carries in the first two games, and he rushed for more than 30 yards, 33 yards a game only once in his last nine starts. How Cam Newton's vegan diet may be hurting Panthers quarterback play and injury recovery. What is this on? What website is this? This is his notes. Oh, it's your notes, but it's from a website. It's from a website. Yeah, there's references. And then he developed a Liz Frank injury in his foot. That's a broken foot, right? It's a broken foot and really hard to recover from.

And some people think, you know, certainly could be career ending. I mean, if you lose 10, 20 pounds, that's a big deal for a high-level athlete because the studies have shown that that can interfere with muscle protein synthesis. It can also increase inflammation and make recovery more difficult. So, but the other thing is if they're not eating the protein powders, they're not taking collagen, for example, a vegan source of collagen. Collagen is critical for muscle recovery and repair. And it's hard to, you know, you can make some collagen, but I think a lot of people on a plant-based diet, if they're high-level athletes and they're not really getting collagen coming in,

it's going to be difficult. When Travis Barker was in a plane crash, he was like severely burned, and they were having a hard time getting him to heal, and he started eating meat in him to heal and he started eating meat in order to heal because he's a vegan he's yeah i mean he owns um what's it called crossroads in a really amazing vegan restaurant in in la and he talked about on the podcast he was just wolfing down beef jerky just yeah trying to eat meat to in order to get his body to heal that couldn't have gone over well with the vegan well i mean he was just being honest i mean travis travis is super super honest he's just saying like but he chooses

to not eat meat other than that he just did it to recover and then once he recovered he went back to his normal vegan diet so you have um jokovic who's best tennis player of all time probably he when he first went dairy free and gluten free he he would you know was number one in the world he went vegan ranking dropped 22 which is the lowest he'd been since he was a teenager and then he started adding fish back into his diet um and you know back back up to number one uh you have um damian Lillard from NBA. He went vegan for five months, but then he added animal protein back to slide 35. Jamie, he said, I did it, but I started to lose a little bit too much weight with all

the games and practices and all that. I had to balance it out. So now I've been mixing it up a little more, having vegan meals and still mixing it up with other stuff. So it sounds kind of similar to Nate, you know, mostly vegan, but adding some animal foods back in there. You had Tony Gonzalez, Hall of Fame, tight end, went vegan. And then three weeks later, there was an article about this.

It's in the show notes. The 100-pound dumbbells he used to easily throw around felt like lead weights, the article says. I was scared out of my mind, Gonzalez said. He had lost 10 pounds. He ended up adding small amounts of animal protein back to his diet. You got Gerald McCoy, NFL. He said, quote, the explosiveness wasn't sustainable because I didn't have that extra oomph that I needed because of the lack of the type of protein I was taking in. So I just added a little bit of animal protein back in my diet and it's given me that

oomph back. Now, again, we're talking about elite athletes with very specific nutritional requirements because they're asking a tremendous amount of their body. Huge. I mean, these guys could probably need like 4,000 to 5,000 calories a day to function well. And of that, you know, if they weigh 250 or 275, they need 250 to 275 grams of protein and it should be high in leucine for muscle protein synthesis, and it should be bioavailable, you know, all that. And so in comparison to the average person, the average person who followed their diet probably wouldn't see any detrimental effect for a long time because they're not requiring their body to do these incredible things. I don't know.

It varies. I mean, I've had patients who went vegan and within two months they were in really dire straits and I've had, and there are people who go vegan and they're fine for their whole life. Hormones are a big one, right? And why is that? Everything, you know, micronutrients really run the show. I mean, of course, the macronutrients, protein, fat, carbohydrates are important. And as I said

before, you know, if you're 100, if you're 200 pounds, the average American weight is male is 200 pounds. And so if they're in a vegetarian, they're consuming the average number of grams of protein, that's less than the updated RDA. We looked at that on that slide. So I would argue that even for the average person, protein could be a problem, both quantity and quality. Most people are getting plenty of carbohydrates and enough fat, so that's not an issue.

Then it comes down to micronutrients. So think B12. That's the thing that came up in the film a number of times. So we should talk about that a little bit because there was some actually just, you know, factually inaccurate information about B12 that I want to correct. James said B12 is not made by animals. It's made by bacteria that these animals consume in the soil and water. Before industrial farming, farm animals and humans could get B12 by eating traces of dirt on plant foods or by drinking water from rivers or streams. But now because of pesticides and antibiotics and chlorine that kill the bacteria, this vitamin even farm animals...

That produces this vitamin. Yeah, that produces this vitamin, even farm animals have That produces this vitamin. Yeah, that produces this vitamin. Even farm animals have to be given B12 supplements. That's just all false. That's all just factually wrong. So first of all, B12 is made by bacteria, but animals don't get it from consuming soil and water. The B12 is made by bacteria in their gut.

So in ruminants like cows, in the rumen, which is a chamber in the stomach, the bacteria convert cobalt that they get from grass that they eat into cobalamin, which is B12. And then they are foregut fermenters. So they can absorb the B12 the bacteria produce in their intestines and utilize that themselves. So primates, including humans, also have bacteria that make B12, but we're hindgut fermenters, so we cannot absorb the B12 that our own gut bacteria make. Well, that's not exactly true. Chimps and gorillas can, but that's only because they eat their own poo. So that is one potential strategy for meeting your B12. I hope you didn't just put that out there.

You can be coprophagic. We will find ethical poo eaters. The whole community now of ethical poo eaters is now a new subreddit. So we cannot get B12 from our own gut bacteria. And if there is any B12 in soil, it's only from manure, you know, that's come from animals. There's also zero evidence that B12 is fed to cattle. And there's no evidence that humans have ever been able to meet their B12 needs from just eating soil and water. If you pull up slide 56, Jamie, Jack Norris, who's a vegan dietician, you know,

we don't agree on a lot of things, but I appreciate his rigor with the science. He has a big article on B12 on this website, and he says, the suggestion that humans have ever relied on unclean organic produce for vitamin b12 doesn't have any reliable evidence at this time so the i just i don't know where to go with these that claim because it's just it's demonstrably false even from the perspective of a vegan registered dietitian yes yeah i don't know why he said that either but um i just think that that's something he probably heard and he was probably having a conversation with someone and they told him that and he just repeated it. I mean, it's one of those things. Or maybe one of the doctors on the show brought that up.

People repeat a lot of these things and then they become dogma. So here's the other thing. The second part of that claim was up to 39% of people tested including meat eaters are low on B12. As a result, best way for humans to get enough B12, whether they eat animal foods or not, is simply to take a supplement. He didn't provide a reference for that, so it's hard to check that. But again, this contradicts mounds of evidence on B12 deficiency. So there's four stages of B12 deficiency. I don't want to go too far in the weeds here,

but basically serum B12, which is the marker that's usually used, only goes down in the fourth and final stage of B12 deficiency. There are other markers that will go out of range earlier that are more sensitive and detect those earlier stages. So the most sensitive marker is holotranscobalamin or HOLOTC. So in a study in 2013, this is slide 58, Jamie, they compared B12 depletion according to holotranscobalamin levels in vegetarians, vegans, and omnivores.

And you can see the results here. Only 11% of omnivores had B12 depletion, 77% of vegetarians, and 92% of vegans. That's a pretty big difference. That's a big difference. That's a big difference. And B12 is responsible for energy. I mean, that's one of the reasons why when people are feeling sick, they get a B12 shot. Well, it's also required for the myelin sheath in our nerves.

B12 deficiency can cause serious and even irreversible neurological damage. A lot of the harm that comes that happens with kids on a vegan diet comes from B12 deficiency can decrease fluid intelligence. It can cause neurological damage that's not reversible even after they start eating meat again. Maybe that's what's going on with them in this information. Maybe they have legitimate neurological damage. Is that possible? It's possible. One more if I can on it because I'm just passionate about this because it's super important. Slide 59.

So homocysteine is a marker that is also more sensitive than serum B12. It's a sticky inflammatory protein that's associated with heart disease and dementia. So, 9 out of 10 comparisons that looked at B12 levels or homocysteine levels in vegetarians and omnivores found higher homocysteine levels in vegans and vegetarians. Higher means worse, and it means more B12 deficient. And in fact, the studies, they said the prevalence of hyperhomocysteemia, which is high homocysteine levels reflecting low B12, among vegetarians may actually be higher than among non-vegetarians already diagnosed with heart disease. So this is kind of a big deal. It's like the B12 issue is serious. And even folks

like Jack Norris, to their credit, do acknowledge it and strongly recommend that people who are on a vegan diet supplement so if people watch this film you know i'm glad to hear james saying that that you know vegetarians and vegans should supplement i don't think omnivores need to usually but you can watch that film and get the idea that that b12 you know is maybe not that big of a deal right it's a big deal um a lot of the film was reenactments as well you know like is maybe not that big of a deal. Right. It's a big deal. A lot of the film was reenactments as well. You know, like when James was sitting there with the knee braces on, that was not after his surgery.

I thought he was vegan in like 2011 or 12 or something. I know, but when he's in the film, when they're filming him, he's sitting there doing his research. I don't think they filmed him while it was happening back in 2012 i mean this is like one of the things that i thought was well done about the film was that they took someone james yes on the kind of the journey of starting as an omnivore and then you know having this real these realizations and turning into a vegan but the problem was that journey happened long before the film was made exactly so that was a little disingenuous well that's why i'm saying he's sitting there with

those knee braces on and he's going over his research and just happen to have a camera crew there while he's learning how to heal himself i'm like hey man i know what you're doing i don't know i mean that's a narrative device it's good filmmaking even the rope thing even the rope thing i mean i'm watching him do the rope thing at the end like oh boy i'm done you did an hour bro if you did an hour you'd be fucking drenched with sweat and you'd be exhausted you wouldn't you they sprayed you or something like but it's fine i believe you really did that i don't believe he's a liar but like yeah i mean he like he said he's clearly clearly an amazing athlete and ripped and super capable. And this was an agenda-driven film.

It was meant to persuade and convince people. Well, that's why it's weird because that's clearly acting. You're recreating these moments. Right, but it's marketed as a documentary. Because he's talking about it having just happened right marketed as a documentary because he's talking about it having just happened right after he switched over to a vegan diet all of a sudden he could do an hour on the battle ropes and then they're filming them yeah i'm like come on man there's no fucking camera crew where that happened you're redoing this yeah you think i mean i get it

this is how you show the footage you put it out there and it makes it like a little bit better for people to swallow and get you know and i like the scenes of him doing the self-defense demonstrations because you get to see he truly is a fantastic martial artist he really does know his stuff absolutely there's a lot of great aspects to that i like i said i like that guy a lot but there's a lot of fuckery in this movie, man. So, I mean, a couple of the most ridiculous things from the movie. Can we get to boners? We can get to boners. Go ahead. Take a look.

Slide 64. You probably remember this morning. This was the guy who's like in Africa. He was a former Special Forces sniper, I think. And he says, this whole fantasy we need to eat meat to get our protein it's actually bullshit i mean look at a gorilla gorilla will fuck you up in two seconds what does a gorilla eat uh i just do the same things these big gray things out here that we're trying to protect elephant and rhino yeah well that's just it's a nonsensical argument you know what will

fuck you up even faster than the gorilla a human who has a gun that eats mcdonald's and kfc i'm serious what is a gun it's a tool how did we develop tools because we started eating meat and fish and we came down out of the trees and we weren't spending more than half of our waking hours eating leaves and low calorie fruits you know we don't like comparing our digestive like what we should eat with a gorilla is just asinine. That's a problem because they bring that up all the time. They say we have the same digestive gut tract as an herbivore. That's just not true.

Also just objectively false. Yes. You know, the large, for a gorilla, the largest volume of their digestive tract is in their large intestine, which is ideal for breaking down tough foods, you know, fiber, seeds, and those kinds of plant foods. Whereas in humans, the largest volume of our digestive tract is in the small intestine, which is better for absorbing nutrient-dense bioavailable foods like meat and cooked foods, cooked tubers and things like that. like that. You know, a gorilla, in order to get the amount of protein that gets them strong and ripped, they eat 40 to 60 pounds of food a day and they're eating for more than half of their waking hours. So it's really, you know, that's just not comparable at all to compare us to primates like gorillas. We also have different genes. It's the same thing when they're talking

about oxes, like strong as an ox. There's a myostatin issue, right? The genes are programmed to carry more muscle. So yeah, that's Patrick Baboumi. And he says, people ask me, how did you get strong as an ox without eating meat? And have you ever seen an ox eating meat? Well, I say, have you ever seen a human with six different stomachs standing in a field eating you know grass for 14 hours a day right that's ridiculous it's not it's like i to me those those damage the credibility of the movie because it's just sound bites that sound cute like people who yeah you ever seen an ox eat that eat what a gorilla eats that's what i do i know but i mean i just yeah right it just to me though that's like the quality of the argument being made.

It really does. There's no one there like you to dispute it. That's the problem. You know, that's why I bring you aboard. I mean, and then there was the anthropologist woman. You remember that scene in the end where she, that's where I really started to roll my eyes because she was making the arguments that humans have always followed a plant-based diet. Did you remember that part?

Silly. Okay. So we're going to start with that. So, I mean, we've got isotope studies that show that humans have been eating meat for at least two and a half million years. And if you go back even before we were really actually human, there's a lot of evidence now that our chimp ancestors were also eating vertebrates. And one of the biggest shocks for people has been the observation that chimps hunt and

they kill other monkeys and other animals and eat them. I mean, it kind of blew apart like this whole idea of primates only being, um, you know, eating plants. And if that happened, if an animal evolves complex behavior like hunting or tool use in order to eat certain food, it means that food has a lot of value or else that behavior wouldn't have evolved. But then we have bone collagen studies. Let me see if I can find this slide, Jamie. So that's 47 and 48. So these are bone collagen isotope studies are much more accurate than some of the previous methods that were used. And the the earliest hominids that were studied with these were Neanderthals. So there's three studies

that have been done in Neanderthal groups ranging from 130,000 to 28,000 years ago. And then they compared those isotope levels with contemporary species. And they found that Neanderthals were similar to top-level carnivores. So they all derived the vast majority of their protein from animal sources likely to be large herbivores. And then on the next slide, 48. Why does it have, hold on a on the next slide 48 why does it have hold on a second back up why does it have a pterodactyl flying in the background why are they bullshitting us does those fucking things live 60 fucking million years before that's so stupid you know there's a limit to what stock photography can i know but all you have to do is snip that part out you asshole why do you have a guy walking on two feet with a fucking piece of meat on a stick of meat yeah that's so stupid and he's obviously not a neanderthal too the skull is

yeah the skull's the wrong shape right yeah so that's double crazy so that's a homo sapien which is only 500 000 years ago stock photo well let's talk about homo sapien so so there were there were on the next slide there are there are two stable isotope bone collagen studies that have been done with modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens. And the first group was 13,000 years ago in southern England. And the second group was 30,000 to 40,000 years ago in La Gravette, which is in France. And they also found that they were carnivores, mostly large herbivores, but the French group consumed a more diverse mix of protein, including seafood. So the fossil record clearly, clearly indicates that humans were eating,

you know, humans and Neanderthals, you know, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, all of our hominid ancestors were eating a lot of meat. And she wasn't using any evidence to cite this either, was she? were eating a lot of meat. And she wasn't using any evidence to cite this either, was she? She was using that lame anatomical argument that we have relatively flat molars like herbivores do, and we don't have claws, and we don't have sharp canine teeth. But guess what? We've got forks.

We've got knives. And we've got fire. We've got fire to cook our food. Yeah, and we had fire for a long fucking time. We have these adaptations that make those anatomical uh uh characteristics that a lion or you know or a carnivorous animal has unnecessary for us i mean that's that's just like anthropology 101 right i i don't so they just found someone who's vegan who's also an anthropologist one anthropologist and then they rewrite the whole history of you know animal food consumption among

hominids yeah and the argument that human beings over two million years ago the doubling of the human brain size corresponds with the the learning how to hunt consuming the appearance of tool marks on bones corresponded directly with the doubling of brain volume the reduction in our gut volume which indicates a move to a more nutrient-dense diet, the increase in the volume of our small intestine relative to our large intestine, and then what's called the gracilization of our jaw, which means our teeth and jaw became less robust. And that's thought to be an adaptation to more digestible, nutrient-dense, bioavailable food, where we're not like chewing cud or yes you know chewing on leaves or low calorie fruit like a gorilla is all day and this argument about nutrient density this is why

this that that term is very important because people always want to use that for plant-based foods nutrient-dense plant-based foods meat is far more nutrient dense per calorie per ounce, poor amino acid profile. With essential nutrients. Yeah. So it's essential meaning nutrients that we can't manufacture on our own and that we, and then we absolutely need organ meats are actually at the top of the list in terms of,

you know, in terms of nutrient density, organ meats and shellfish take the cake. Then you have herbs and spices are actually pretty high too. And then you have other, you know, muscle meats, eggs, all those things. Foods like grains and legumes tend to be towards the bottom of the list, you know, with vegetables in the middle. Right, but that sounds good.

Nutrient-dense plant-based food sounds good. It sounds like you're doing the right thing. And this is like where this lingo is coming from. I mean, this is where I argue that plants do belong because plants do have certain nutrients, phytonutrients, fibers, and things that actually don't feed us, but feed our gut flora that I do think are important. Even though they're not considered essential like vitamin B12 or vitamin D or know uh vitamin d or something like that i do think they're still important and they play a role but what i'm talking about is the difference between caveman altering its diet or the modern or ancient man altering their diet and this doubling of the

human brain size corresponding with consuming more nutrient-dense foods what that means is meat yeah absolutely meat fish and fish first as we saw with some of the modern humans who were living in coastal regions. But these more bioavailable nutrient-dense foods, definitely. Now, what other silliness? So this is the anthropology argument that just doesn't seem to fit any of the state-of-the-art science. Doesn't fit. Yeah, it completely contradicts. So then there was the whole section that you probably remember about chicken and fish causing cancer, dairy products causing cancer.

They started to just, it really kind of went from just like, you can do well on a plant-based diet as an athlete to like animal products are horrible and are going to kill you, which was a big leap. So, um, they had one study, uh, James Wilkes says, you know, research funded by the national cancer Institute found that vegetarians who had one or more servings per week of white meat, like chicken and fish more than tripled their risk of colon cancer. Well, that's scary. You know, I don't want to triple my risk of colon cancer. But again, if you look at the totality of the research, slide 42, Jamie, 2017, a meta-analysis of 16 prospective studies with almost two and a half million participants found no increase in cancer risk from consuming fish or poultry. And then you have a statement from the American Cancer Institute itself saying,

as for other animal products, organizations that do comprehensive evidence reviews to make dietary recommendations currently do not recommend against poultry like chicken, turkey, ground or fresh, fish, or dairy. So where's that coming from then? One study that looked at Seventh-day Adventists who added some of those foods back into their diet this is a perfect example of healthy user bias because seventh day adventists are not supposed to eat meat so if you have a seventh day adventist who's bucking the

trend who's rebelling and eating meat then what else are they doing that is also not healthy and not following the dictates of that healthy lifestyle? So that was a small- They didn't take that into consideration? No. They didn't ask them whether they're drinking or- That was a six-year study in the Seventh-day Adventist cohort from 1976 to 1982. And it was what I call them SDA rebels. They're supposed to eat vegetarian, but they add meat. So what else are they doing that's confounding them? And the reason why this is relevant is this is the only study that we know of that does show a correlation between. There might be other individual studies that do,

but this is why we have these large reviews that look at, you know, this one looked at 16 studies with two and a half million participants and found no association. And then that's why you have groups like the American Cancer Institute who say, you know, they make this recommendation. Well, I mean, people are up in arms at the most recent recommendation that people have been told to avoid red meat. Oh, yeah. And then they said, well, actually, there's no risk at all eating red meat. We're taking that off of the list of foods to avoid.

And everybody went apeshit. They just went apeshit. Let's talk about that. For lack of a better term. Yeah, they did. They freaked out. Because it conflicts with the dogma. Absolutely.

And this was a five-paper review. So it wasn't just one paper. It was five papers all in one review. It was millions of participants. They reviewed all of the available literature on red meat and its relationship with any disease, heart disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes. It was dozens of studies following people for up to 35 years. And millions, again, millions of participants. They looked at randomized

controlled trials. They looked at observational cohort studies. They looked at all kinds of outcomes, total mortality, cardiovascular, cancer, et cetera. And they found, quote, only low or very low certainty evidence that red meat causes any kind of disease. red meat causes any kind of disease. And then in the editorial, in the annals, which is what it was published, Annals of Internal Medicine, the journal was published in, they said, quote, this is slide 19, Jamie. Over and over again, they, the authors, stressed that even if the results were statistically significant, their certainty was low, and the absolute differences seen were small and potentially confounded, meaning could have been that they were smoking more or drinking more or not exercising or whatever. The editorial also said, this is sure to be controversial, but it's based on the most comprehensive review of the evidence to date.

Because that review is inclusive, those who seek to dispute it will be hard pressed to find appropriate evidence with which to build an argument unless you have a nice documentary yeah and you can just put in whatever fucking evidence you want to ignore it yeah yeah um the the really frustrating thing for people is also recommend process it's unprocessed and processed so the the dog might always been well just stay away from processed meat and you can avoid it. Yeah, because some studies showed no difference with fresh, but some difference with processed red meat. You know, I think you could make a stronger argument that too much processed meat might be harmful because of things like nitroso compounds that are formed, et cetera. But even then, you have to consider context.

Most people are eating hot dogs with buns and French fries and big gulps. It's probably a different effect than having bacon a couple times a week with your whole foods diet or having some salami and nuts. Not the same as eating fake processed meat all the time and one of the things that's weird about this whole conversation is it's it's there's a battleground so like a volley gets thrown out there like this like boom it's okay to eat red meat and you see the other side scrambling to refute the evidence and and then fire back with all these epidemiology studies that show that red meat can kill you and red meat's causing you to age quicker red meat kills your boners and red meat does this and does that and it's like it's it's where there's

a religious war going on it's the same weird thing we were talking about earlier now when you have some kind of political event or some event that happens it gets spun you know If you go watch CNN, it's going to get spun one way. If you go watch Fox, it's going to get spun the other way. It's the same event, but you have these totally different interpretations. Yeah. What else was a bummer? Well, you want to talk about the boners? Sure.

Let's talk about the boners. I found that to be entirely hilarious, ruthlessly unscientific. And like the whole thing with the guy saying, you know, I'm going to eat what a gorilla eats. I mean, they're showing this guy who's protecting rhinos who are being slaughtered for their horns. Like, what does that have anything to do with eating meat? Yeah, they're morally equating that with eating a hamburger. Well, what they're doing is pretty obvious what they were doing yes even though they didn't say that that's what they were doing they're attaching themselves to uh an indisputable cause yeah you know i mean everybody wants people to stop shooting rhinos for their horns everyone

does if you don't you're an asshole don't eat meat what how'd you get that in there you guys snuck that in there what What the fuck did you do? Yeah. Yeah, so for those who haven't seen the film, the boner experiment, if we're going to call it that, is Aaron Spitz, who's a urologist, and he puts penis rings on a bunch of NFL players, and then he measures the effects of different meals on their

erections, both the circumference, I guess, the size of the erection, the duration, the intensity of the erections. So he feeds the players burritos with meat in them, and then he feeds them the same burrito with like a plant protein. I'm not sure what it was, tempeh or something like that. with like a plant protein. I'm not sure what it was, tempeh or something like that. And then he claims- I think it was beans. Was it beans? Okay, maybe.

And then he claims that the athletes who ate the pure plant burritos had 500% more frequent erections and also increased strength of erections. So what can we conclude from this experiment? Absolutely nothing. Because it was just an experiment that was made up and

done in a film it was not peer-reviewed there was no it's not scientific at all you know that's the whole scientific well here's how it could have been scientific right if they did it in different orders so they put the the the penis band on the dudes one night they had to meet whatever the fuck they had to meet you know i think it was steak burritos and then the next night they put the penis bands on them again and they have them eat beans and so they say you got more erections did you guys jerk off in between them did you guys have sex did you get used to having the penis band on when you slept with it the first time did it bother you did it the first time? Did it bother you? Did it interrupt your sleep? The second time, were you more comfortable with it? Did you guys try to reverse it? One day, the first day on a different group of people, give them the band and make them

eat a vegetarian diet. Then the next day, give them the band on the second day and make the meat steak. Did you switch that up? You can ask any number of questions and that's the whole point. Of science. That's why we have science. that's why we have science that's why we have a process of peer review that's why we have reproducibility meaning even if one group comes up with one finding it's not really worth much until somebody else reproduces that something like 90 90 or more of findings scientific findings are not reproduced you know that's that means that we can't trust them so i would like to know if they were asked to not engage in sexual intercourse or masturbation during that time period,

because that would make sense that they were getting more erections and more full erections the next day, especially the young guys that are savages out there playing football. I went to look at research. Is there any peer-reviewed research that shows that plant-based diets are better for erectile function and lower the risk of erectile dysfunction couldn't find anything i did find studies one study of a mediterranean diet which includes animal some animal products reduced erectile dysfunction relative to a low fat diet which maybe might have fewer animal products so that kind of contradicts it perhaps. There were studies that showed that like diet quality is more, is important. So Western diet and high in processed foods led to erectile dysfunction, diet rich in flavonoid containing foods, which would be

fruits and vegetables reduced erectile dysfunction. But none of that says it has anything to do with meat, just says like, don't eat a junk food diet if you don't want erectile dysfunction. Yeah, it's just deceptive. Totally. But, you know, it does show that those guys did get more hard-ons under that circumstance. But as you said, what does that mean? What does it mean and can we even trust it? I mean, frankly, given some of the other stuff in the film.

Right. Can you trust it? Can you trust that? I mean, who's given some of the other stuff in the film. Right. Can you trust it? Can you trust that? I mean, who's to say? Right. There was another thing that was deceptive or at least it confused people. That's when they made them eat a bean burrito and they checked their blood. The cloudy blood.

Yeah. The cloudy blood. The cloudy blood experiment. Okay. I was just sitting there shaking my head going, what in the are you doing this has nothing to do with health so again not a peer-reviewed experiment something that was or controlled study in any way just something that they did in the film um so yeah they fed the burritos you know with meat without meat they measured their blood afterwards big surprise if the people who ate meat, which has more fat and more saturated

fat had cloudier blood. Well, that's normal. That's just naturally what you would expect from the process of eating feet. You will temporarily have more fat in your blood. It has nothing to do with health. So what is the big question? It might actually be better for you. Might be better for you. And so then I went and I thought, okay, well, what does the peer-reviewed research show about animal protein and endothelial function? Because their claim was that eating the animal protein reduces your endothelial function and increases inflammation. So there was one study that a lot of the – there are a couple studies that show a low carb diet impairs

endothelial function, but they tend to be short term, like four weeks. I look for longer term studies. There was a 2009 study that followed subjects for 12 weeks and they found the low carb diet actually improved endothelial function, whereas a low fat diet decreased it. And then there was a 2007 study that followed subjects for a year and there was no change in endothelial function, whereas a low-fat diet decreased it. And then there was a 2007 study that followed subjects for a year, and there was no change in endothelial function on a low-carb diet. We actually, there's strong evidence that high blood sugar and insulin resistance impair endothelial function. So, you know, a low-carb diet that would lower your blood sugar and improve insulin resistance would be expected to improve it from that perspective. So again, when you look at the actual science, the actual

peer-reviewed research, you don't see that relationship that they're talking about. They didn't even, I mean, when they're showing it to you, it's just scare tactics. They're not, they're not talking about what that means. What persuasive, you know, people see it and they're like, oh my God, the blood is cloud. Even the football players who were in the experiment, they were like oh wow i'm not gonna eat my kfc or popeyes anymore and i'm like well you probably shouldn't but it's not for that reason right you know saturated fat is the demon right that keeps getting addressed explain why saturated fat is not only healthy but probably necessary well i don't know that it's necessary, but I would say that,

you know... I should say cholesterol is necessary. Yeah. Well, cholesterol is necessary, and our body makes it too. Actually, most of the cholesterol that we have in our body, we manufacture. It doesn't come from the diet. About 30% comes from the diet. About 70% we make. The exact ratio varies depending on the person. And, you know, some people are hyper-responders of dietary cholesterol, so they'll absorb more from food. But it's, you know, it plays a vital role in the body. There's a genetic disease called Smith-Lemley-Opitz syndrome,

which results in severe cholesterol deficiency, and it's fatal. So you die with not enough cholesterol. I'm not, however, one of these people on the other end of the spectrum that thinks, hey, if your cholesterol is 450, don't worry. No problem. There's, you know, like, you know, just write it off. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. And it's biological variable. It's variable. Yeah. And, and, you know, you can get, I, and I see this, you know, I've been working with patients for over 10 years. I test every single person that comes through the door with a full lipid panel. And I have people who are doing keto, super low carb

diets who have totally optimal, normal cholesterol. And then I have people who go from eating, you know, a low, moderate fat diet to like a high fat keto or low carb diet. And their LDL-P goes up to 2,500 or 3,000 and their LDL cholesterol goes up to 300. So, yeah, I mean, what I can, I think what, stepping back a little bit, as we talked about this with Joel, but cholesterol for decades, it was the boogeyman. It was like that led to like egg white omelets and boneless, skinless chicken breast and bagels with nothing on them when I was growing up. And now even the- Margarine.

Margarine. Margarine. Oh, my God. I can't believe it's not butter. Yeah. I thought it was better than butter. Hilarious. Which like rats won't even eat if you leave it out in the garage.

Really? Yeah. Really? Yeah. So... Rats eat batteries. They won't eat margarine? That's what I've heard.

I've never done this experiment. You need to do an experiment. You should do it. Otherwise, we're pushing out disinformation as well. Propaganda. Go ahead. So, yeah, you know, the U.S. quietly actually removed the limitation of dietary cholesterol. They used to limit it to 300 milligrams.

Now they don't have that anymore because the evidence didn't justify having that in the dietary guidelines. We were the last industrialized country to do that. Every other company country had done that years ago. Right. But because you know, the, how entrenched that was in our country. And I think, you know, they don't want to lose credibility. It's like they've been saying not to do something for so long, then to turn around and say, actually, right. There's no evidence to support that it's it's it's

you lose face and when people talk about saturated fat and they talk about it as being only a meat or animal diet issue one thing that i always like to bring up is avocados yeah there's a certain amount of unsaturated fat and saturated fat every Every food has all three fats in some proportion. So you have saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated. And dairy products are actually the only category of foods that consistently have more saturated fat than any other type of fat. Pork, for example, often has more monounsaturated fat than saturated. And even sometimes, even sometimes lean beef. And what's really interesting about that is that studies consistently show that full-fat dairy, which would be like the highest saturated fat class of foods, is associated with reduced risk of heart disease, reduced risk of diabetes, reduced weight, and all kinds of other improvements.

Full-fat dairy is? Full-fat dairy. Now, is this raw dairy, like raw milk? They don't – they're not differentiating like that in the studies. Just any full-fat dairy. Why do you think so many people are lactose intolerant then? Because that's an issue, and I think I seem to have it a little bit, and my 9-year-old daughter definitely has it.

Well, so it wasn't until – before 11,000 years, 12,000 years ago, we didn't raise animals for dairy. So there was no need that we only had to digest lactose while we were breastfeeding. So like in a hunter-gatherer culture, as soon as you stop breastfeeding, you no longer had the need to digest lactose. And so our bodies are efficient. We stop producing lactase, which is the enzyme to break down lactose and for the rest of our adult life. But then about 12,000 years ago, we started, you know, somebody figured out, hey, let's drink some milk from that ruminant animal over there. And dairy products help people avoid starvation, and there was a good source of hydration and nutrients.

And so that mutation started to spread. And now it's about one-third of the world has lactase persistence, which means they can digest lactose all the way into adulthood, and two-thirds don't. And it depends a lot on your ancestry. So two-thirds people are lactose intolerant to some extent. In the world. Wow, that's interesting.

So the people who tend to be lactose tolerant are people of European, particularly Northern European descent. Like lactase tolerance or lactase persistence approaches like 97% in Scandinavia. So Denmark, Norway, Sweden, they can almost all digest milk. And then East Africans, so you have like the Maasai, you know, people who've been raising cattle for a long time tend to have those, that capability, whereas like in Asia, other parts of Africa, and other parts of the world, not as much. What difference, if any, does it make when it's not homogenized and pasteurized in terms of your digestion? Because for me, I don't have a problem with raw milk. Raw milk seems to be easy

for me. Yeah, I think there is a difference. I mean, it contains enzymes in it that help you break down the lactose. So that can make a difference. But I mean, just, I would love to see research that further differentiates the health benefits of dairy according to whether it's organic or whether it's homogenized or not and all that. But even just talking about dairy as a whole category, I mean, you had Dr. Walter Willett in there saying there's evidence of high consumption of proteins from dairy is related to higher risk of prostate cancer. The chain of cancer causation seems pretty clear. But if you bring up slide 44, Jamie, there was a 2019 study, largest review of dairy ever been done before. It was 153 meta-analyses that they reviewed. So not just

individual studies, they reviewed 153 studies that were also reviewing other studies. And 84% of the meta-analyses on dairy showed either no association or an inverse association between dairy and cancer. Meaning when it's inverse, it means people who ate more dairy had lower rates of cancer. So I just, it's frustrating, you know, to see someone make a claim like that. And then you go and you look at the full totality of the research and you see a just exhaustive study like this with 153 meta-analyses. And 84% are showing no relationship or a beneficial effect of dairy on cancer. Why wasn't that mentioned in the film? Well, it's consistent with the way the message is being distributed through the entire film it's it's a propaganda movie i mean that's essentially what

it is yeah yeah so it's like reefer madness for meat i mean it really is yeah yeah so it's kind of crazy it is crazy i mean there's there's there's the the thing that's hard i mean and this was true with with joel's like that was three and a half hour plus debate. I don't know how long we've been going now. And we've even barely scratched the surface of like what we could say about the movie. Yeah. And it's frustrating because the movie, these kinds of movies leverage this rhetorical effect called the illusory truth effect which is basically if you repeat something enough times it starts to sound true yes and politicians

are great at this trump is actually a master at this um so you know meat is bad meat is bad meat is bad meat is bad we've heard that so many times that someone can get on, make a film and just include one little tidbit of information and say meat is bad. And it seems like, Oh, that's true. But then to break that down, we're here for two and a half hours and we're just getting started.

Yeah. That's the trouble. Yeah. That is the trouble. And it's not nearly as visually enticing. It's just you and me sitting here talking. Well, where's the pretty girls running track

and everybody laughing and having a good time eating falafels. Where are the, you know, there's how many vegan documentaries that have been made? Like a lot. What the Health, Cowspiracy, this one. How many, you know, pro-regenerative agriculture,

holistically managed, healthy, nutrient-dense meat movies can you think of? I can't think of any. Yeah. So there's one coming, fortunately. It's called Sacred Cow. It's coming out next year. Rob Wolf is involved in that.

I was interviewed by it. It's made Diana Rogers, who's a registered dietitian, is making it. She's also a regenerative farmer. So it's a very interesting perspective, is making it. She's also a regenerative farmer. So it's a very interesting perspective, having someone who knows the nutrition side and who's also actually using those kind of regenerative, holistically managed practices on her own farm. But it's not, James Cameron's not behind it.

It's not going to have Arnold in it. You know Arnold's eating a steak right now. That motherfucker, he's full of shit He just wanted to do James Cameron's like Look we're doing the Terminator I really want you to be a part of this I'll do it

I'm in I'm in Only vegetables from now on His steak was just bullshit I shouldn't have eaten it I want to catch that motherfucker Fog of the chow With that little chip on green

Just hacking at. Look at him. I mean, this steak is so big. The thing is, he didn't become Mr. Universe by eating, drinking soy protein shakes. Well, I mean, again, he's eating steroids. That's what he's eating. That's what he was eating. But he was eating also 250 pounds of beef

protein a day you know not quite that much but grams 250 grams not you know he wasn't he wasn't um eating you know five cups of lentils no to do that so that's the other thing too you have to recognize with this movie like a lot of the people who who amazing athletes who they didn't start out vegan. They weren't born, you know, to vegan parents and then were vegan growing up. And then, you know, had all these amazing records and performance. They built their strength or their agility or their speed or whatever on a diet with animal products. And then at some point they became vegan and, you know, maybe their performance continued and they continue to do well, like Scott Jurek or Dottie Bausch, or maybe they had the vegan honeymoon

where they did well for a while and then they declined, or maybe they just declined like some of the NBA and NFL athletes we talked about. But this is a critical point because there are key developmental periods when we're kids and also in utero that like if you're not getting the nutrition you need then, it's going to carry through to your whole life. Yes. And so it's like, what did your parents eat? What did your mom eat when she was breastfeeding you? What did you eat as a young kid?

So we follow that whole argument through. If everyone becomes plant-based, it's going to have a huge intergenerational impact on performance. It's not like people who built their strength in performance eating meat and then they go vegan and they do okay for a little while. It's like, what are the consequences of that happening to everybody? What are the consequences of growing up nutritionally deficient? Yeah, of the mom starting that way and then getting pregnant and becoming deficient during pregnancy.

And then the baby being breastfed by a mom who's nutrient deficient. And then the kid being fed a vegan diet and developing B12 deficiency, which then has irreversible has irreversible effects are there any top of the food chain world champion vegan athletes uh like the best of the best well there's no there's no vegan ufc champions there's no world champion vegan boxers that i'm aware of there's ilia ilian do you know him no he's the weight weightlifter that's i think in the same weight class as kendrick ferris who was in the film um and two-time olympic champion where i don't i don't think kendrick has won uh he's not won a gold medal

um but he was stripped of his titles because he tested positive for steroids. So once again, you know, what's happening, it's hard to say. He was pulled from the film because of that, right? Yeah. He was pulled from the, or was he in the film? I believe he was originally supposed to be in the film now that you brought this up. Yeah, that's not a good narrative for them, right? And then they had like Tim Sheaf, if I'm pronouncing his name correctly. He's like the free runner parkour guy who was going to be in the film.

And then he had this very public, I'm not vegan anymore because it was destroying my health video on YouTube. He ate a piece of salmon and had a wet dream for the first time in a decade. Okay, buddy. I mean, it was like. Poor bastard. Yeah. He was doing everything. He did a 30-day water fast.

He tried everything to stay on the vegan diet. It wasn't like, oh, it's hard. I'm going to eat salmon. I should also tell you, he thinks the earth's flat. Oh, does he? Yes. Uh-oh. Yeah.

Yeah. But that could be the vegan diet. All those years, rotten as fucking brain. Yeah. Well, one of the main guys, the anthropological argument that humans are herbivores because we don't have claws and sharp teeth. That all comes from Milton Mills, a 1987 paper from him. He's an emergency room physician. He has no training in medical anthropology or comparative anatomy or anything like this.

He is a creationist so he thinks that we were just built this way and with these teeth in the way by god so yeah that that whole why don't we this if we are a carnivorous species why don't we this how come we don't have the teeth to do that you know how come you can't just grab a squirrel and eat it i've actually heard a guy say that well hey fuck face how come you can't eat lentils you got to boil them yeah like what are you talking about man like try eating cassava without cooking it you'll die cyanide poisoning yeah it's like that argument is so stupid there's a lot of plant-based foods that are only consumed after lengthy cooking. Yeah. I mean, going back to your question, I'm sure there are high-level vegan athletes,

but the thing is a lot of the people who are commonly referred to, like the Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, they're not vegan. Yeah. Why do they have that in the film? They showed them in the film and I was like, wait a minute, they're not vegan. Because they're often, people often call them vegan. They occasionally will have periods of veganism, I guess. Do they? But they're not vegan. They eat meat. They eat animal products.

They look like meat eaters. Tom Brady is another example. Another one who looks like a meat eater. Who really does eat a lot of predominantly plant-based, I guess, but eats meat especially in the winter the williams sisters are so powerful i mean it would be a great like catch for that team right if they were vegan because like look at the athleticism that these girls have yeah but nope but it was weird they didn't say they were vegan they just showed them and so you're like oh they're the best they don't need to say it. You just show them and that's it. Well, same thing with Arnold. He's talking great about veganism.

I can't run fucky tea right now. Calving into a nice juicy ribeye. Come on, show me a picture. What is he doing? Oh, that fuck. Epic Meal Time. He did a video with them like five years ago eating an 80,000 calorie steak and egg sandwich. Jesus Christ, Arnie.

When is this? Ostrich eggs? A couple years ago. Oh, that's five years ago, bro. That's a long time ago. He could be all vegan now, I guess. I doubt it. He was doing this while they were doing the new Terminator movie.

It's a James Cameron movie. He's not stupid. Holla at your boy. And even if he is now, he wasn't then when he accomplished all of his athletic achievements. Yes, of course. Yeah. But that's where it's weird, right? It's like he did everything spectacular with meat, and now he's saying, you don't need it.

Yeah. Two years later, he's part-time vegan, he's saying in this article now. Now? Well, it's just two years after that epic mealtime thing oh it's like a picture of me in and out that's not a funny concept like how do you how are you part vegan you know i'm sure vegans would take issue with that i heard a guy arguing with someone about this once i talked about this he said i'm 90 vegetarian and this was his argument like that like vegetarian is a way to go. I'm 90% vegetarian. Yeah. Like bitch, that's 0% vegetarian.

That's right. You don't understand math. You don't understand math. It's even more ridiculous with vegan because there's a whole ethos obviously around it. I'm 90% on fire. Bitch, you're on fire. Yeah. Oh man, that doesn't make any sense.

It's so stupid. Yeah. And it's like I said before, all it takes sometimes is a little, because like organ meats and shellfish and fish and eggs are so nutrient dense, you don't have to eat a lot of them to get, to get, meet your nutrition needs. I've had this conversation with vegans too about mollusks. And I was like, you know, I've heard it argued and Sam Harris has talked to me about this, that you can actually make an ethical argument that mollusks are more primitive than plants.

And that plants actually exchange more information through mycelium, through their root structure. They actually communicate with each other. More evidence of intelligence. Yeah. Mollusks are an older creature. And they're just dumb hunks of meat you can scoop out of a container. I mean, they have no idea you're there. They have just basic movement where they clamp shut. That's it. I mean, they i mean they're not going stop no they're not trying to get away like a fish

mollusks just fucking lay there and they happen to be like i said among the most nutrient-dense foods on the planet like one serving of oysters i think will meet your need for zinc for the entire week yes that's pretty impressive that's we're talking about like yes and that's always been associated with male virility yeah i mean zinc is super important for so many different functions that's also owners they should have done that test right eat a bunch of raw oysters imagine that right eight times more than the guys who are uh eating plants with the ring around their penis yeah what else is going on with this film that drives you crazy well i mean going back to the whole environmental argument i mean that's that's another big one we didn't get a chance

to talk about that as much with joel because it would have been nine hours instead of four hours he would have yeah his way of communicating is just so frustrating it's so it's so awkward and car salesman-y so one of the most common claims is like, you know, cattle are eating all of the human food. So like, you know, corn and things that we could feed the world with. Yes. Well, the reality is 86% of what cattle eat is not edible by humans. We talked about that before. They're eating soy cakes and grass and fobs and things that we can't digest and absorb. But I think the argument would be that if you just grew the same, like use that same area to grow human food,

you could do that because we're using that area to grow cow food. Well, so you replace the feedlot beef with grasslands, and then you have naturally, you know, holistically managed cattle there, and then you take the land that we can't as i said before 60 of land you can't grow crops on so it's not it's you can't say that you can't say we can just take everywhere that we could have livestock and and plant i'm not even saying that anywhere we have monocrops where we're growing food just for feeding cows you could grow say tomatoes and that's one option but the other option is to use that land for

grasslands which could create make it a carbon sink rather than having still emissions coming from mono-industrial agriculture i understand what you're saying but i mean if i was on the other side i would argue well wouldn't it be easier to just grow human edible corn in that place instead of no no no because corn is ridiculously low in nutrient value. Or something else. Yeah. Or soy or whatever. Yeah. If you look again at this idea that animals are the middleman, yes, that's not a bad thing. That's a good thing. If you look at the conversion ratio of feed like corn, which is super nutrient poor, you know, corn is low in protein. It doesn't have many nutrients at all.

2.6 to 2.8 kilograms of corn get converted into one kilogram of beef. So even in that 14% of human edible food that livestock are eating, they're converting it to highly nutrient-dense bioavailable protein that humans can eat. And if you do the conversion with just protein instead of like by weight of food, they take 0.6 kilograms of corn or other low value protein and convert that into one kilogram of very high value nutrient-dense protein. So, you know, it's always more nuanced than the argument makes it seem. Yeah. And that, that is the point. The water is another example. So, you know, 2,400 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef is the typical claim that you hear. What you don't hear is that vast majority of water, even from feedlot beef,

94% is green water, which means it just, it's rainfall. And six, only 6% comes from, is groundwater, like from irrigation. For pasture-raised beef, it's even more significant. 97% of the water for pasture-raised beef comes just from rainfall and 3% from irrigation. of the water for pasture-raised beef comes just from rainfall and 3% from irrigation. And beef really only, if you only think about blue water, like irrigation, it requires 280 gallons of blue water per pound of beef. That might sound like a lot, but it's actually less than you need to produce a pound of avocados, almonds, walnuts, rice, or sugar. Wow. But you don't hear that.

No. In the film or in these arguments at all. And again, speaks to what you're saying. These are nuanced issues. These are nuanced issues and the devil is in the details. And so we're talking about with cow, again, we have to stress that only somewhere in the neighborhood of two to 3% of all cows are grass-fed, grass-fed. So the ones that are eating grain are consuming more water, but even then it's still less water than they're saying.

Exactly. And less than some other commonly eaten vegan foods. Especially almonds. Almonds are particularly, they're very resource heavy right absolutely yeah but sugar i mean yeah that's crazy huh yeah yeah um what else about the film um you want to talk about fake meat sure yeah a little bit yeah let's talk about covered as much in the film but it's i think it's important for someone like you that really understands it to talk about it so people get this this could be a standalone clip.

So just for people who aren't aware, there are companies like Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat that are promoting this idea of fake meat that tastes like meat. But it's made typically from soy. So Impossible Burger's main ingredients are GMO soy, coconut oil, sunflower oil, natural flavors. Beyond meat is pea protein isolate, canola oil, and refined coconut oil. So Impossible Burger has publicly criticized holistic land management or regenerative agriculture and saying, ah, it doesn't, it's not really that different. In fact, sometimes the emissions can be even more than feedlot beef. But there was a third-party lifecycle analysis, full lifecycle, so they looked at the whole process, not just methane emissions from cows burping, but the whole process at White Oak Pastures, which is a beef operation.

It's a Savory Institute hub, so they're following the Regenerative Savory Institute practices. And they found that their beef operation was a net carbon sink so again it actually sequestered carbon from the atmosphere it was not emitting carbon it was uh you know carbon not not neutral it was taking carbon out can i pause you for a second this is something i forgot to bring up earlier one um thing that solves the methane issue with cows is just to add a certain amount of seaweed to their diet. When you add a certain amount of seaweed to their diet, apparently it mitigates the methane issue. I don't know about that. See if you can find that, Jamie.

That's something that was offered up as a response to it. And I don't think it's a large amount of seaweed. I think it's a fairly small amount of seaweed in percentage to the overall diet i think the amazing thing about the regenerative agri the livestock or holistically managed beef though is it can actually restore grasslands it can restore the soil and improve the soil so you're not only producing this amazing nutrient-dense bioavailable food source you're actually improving the soil and helping to reverse this really dramatic, threatening problem that we're facing of soil erosion. Here it is.

Seaweed could help make cows burp less methane and cut their carbon footprint, LOL. A diet supplement with red algae could lessen the huge amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by cows and sheep if we can just figure out how to grow enough. So I guess that's the issue. Well the issue you have to wonder where those how that you know what what kind of energy is being used so so back to this so this this life cycle analysis at white oak pastures showed that uh this holistically managed beef actually removes carbon from the atmosphere

now this was the same company that performed a lifecycle analysis for Impossible Burger on their fake meat. And what they found in that analysis was that the fake meat was less of a greenhouse gas emitter than feedlot beef, but it was still actually an emitter. Whereas the holistically managed beef was taking carbon out of the atmosphere. It was the same company. So, you know, if we're going to give them credit for the analysis they did for Impossible Burger, we have to give them credit for the analysis that they did for White Oak Pastures. The other thing with Impossible Burger, so the primary ingredient is called soy leg hemoglobin or SLH.

So this is a bioengineered protein additive that adds meat like taste and color it does not meet the basic fda generally recognized as safe the grass designation because it's not a food or even a food ingredient and there's a document that you can get i think it came with the freedom of Information Act. It's online. I have the reference in my show notes. And in the discussion in this document with the FDA, Impossible Foods admitted that up to a quarter of its heme ingredient was composed of 46 unexpected additional proteins, some of which are unidentified and none of which were assessed for safety in a dossier. Impossible Burger put the product on the market despite admitting to the FDA privately that they haven't done adequate safety testing.

And according to these documents, quote, FDA believes that the arguments presented individually and collectively do not establish the safety of SLH, soy leg hemoglobin, for consumption, nor do they point to a general recognition of safety.

So they don't know what the fuck it does. What's in it, what it's what's in it but it doesn't mean it's bad doesn't mean it's bad just haven't done adequate safety testing to in the opinion of the fda to release this as a food product the company that did the tests on this uh impossible burger versus the regenerative what is that company again quantis international and so it's the one they're the ones who release the information for both studies both that it was the same company that did it for impossible burger and then they turned around and and did it for white oak pastures and they found impossible burger is still emitting carbon whereas white oak pastures is taking it out yeah i think that's that's a very very critical um point to make in this conversation and there's a great there was was an article criticizing fake meat by this woman, Dana Pearls, who's part of an environmental organization called Friends of the Earth.

And she says, quote, instead of investing in risky new food technologies that are potential problems masquerading as solutions, shouldn't we be investing in proven beneficial regenerative agriculture and transparent organic food that consumers are actually demanding? The only issue that they would have with this is, yes, but now you're talking about killing animals and we're absolutely morally and ethically opposed to killing animals. Yeah. I mean, we go back now to this, this 2018 paper that I mentioned earlier that examined the impact of plant agriculture on animal deaths and found 35 to 250 mouse deaths per acre. Mouse deaths? Mouse deaths. Deaths of mice. And up to 7.3 billion animals killed every year from plant agriculture. If you count birds killed by pesticides, fish deaths from fertilizer runoff, plus reptiles and amphibians poisonings

from eating toxic insects from the pesticides what's the number 7.3 billion animals killed every year in terms of life there's far more life taken by plant agriculture than there is life taken by animal agriculture even factory factory farming? Oh, yeah. We're not killing 7.3 billion cows. Right. So the question is, do we value the larger animals more? Are they worth more to us? Or even, you know, are fish and insects less significant life forms than mammals?

Are small mammals like root rodents less valuable than larger ones like cows? Is it better to kill many small animals for foods like grains and legumes, which aren't very nutrient-dense and don't meet our nutritional needs than fewer large animals that are super nutrient-dense? I mean, I'm not claiming to answer these questions, but I think they're questions that haven't been adequately raised and addressed in this ethical argument.

They haven't even been breached. And this is one that people dismiss offhandedly these are lies by meat eaters to justify their their consumption yeah but what you're saying is you know and you you could make an ethical argument that killing an animal explicitly to eat it is ethically different than animals being killed as a sort of side effect of plant agriculture i'm not saying that that's valid valid argument, but I've heard that argument. I don't think it's a valid argument because once you're aware of it, you're doing it the same. It's like the argument that I've had with people when they say that I don't kill animals,

but I eat meat, therefore it's better than what you do because I hunt. And I say, no, you're killing an animal with your credit card. You're killing an animal. You're card. It seems backwards. You're killing an animal. You're just hiring someone to do it for you. You'll still go to jail for murder if you hire someone to shoot somebody. Right. And you're more disconnected from the whole process. Yeah, it's even more bizarre.

The whole thing is very, very strange. I think that's very important, though, that you listed those numbers, that data. Because that's irrefutable. And it's one of those arguments that comes up that they just want to bury their head in the sand about. If you're buying agriculture, unless you have your own organic farm where you are 100% aware of every single aspect from seed to plucking and cooking, if you're not, if you're buying from large scale agriculture, you're a part of the death machine. Right. That's right. And you're also part of the environmental destruction machine because these huge industrial scale monocropping operations are incredibly

harmful for the environment. And if, you know, if you, if you, again, like you think of like pea protein, you know, that's an incredibly processed food. Like the amount of, you know, first of all, just growing peas at the scale you're going to need to have the world's largest pea protein company. And then all of the processing that needs to happen from taking a pea to a isolated protein powder, which involves fossil fuels and all kinds of industrial processes, that is not an environmentally friendly process. So, you know, is that better for the planet than having cows that are, you know, being raised on land that couldn't be used for growing plants or other crop production

and rotating the animals in a way that restores grasslands and improves the health of the soil that actually sequesters and removes carbon from the atmosphere. That again, like Dana Pearls was saying, makes a lot more sense. It's a proven system than like scaling up industry to make more powders. Yeah. Scaling up industry to make pea powder and killing untold numbers of rodents. And birds. And destroying natural habitats. Because if you clear a field for peas,

it doesn't have the normal natural features. You don't have the habitat for those animals anymore. I think it's so significant that you're talking about these regenerative farms, because that really is the only way you ever get the nutrients back into the soil one of the i mean there was a book that i read many years ago called dead doctors don't lie or dr joel wallach talked about the mineral depletion of uh our soil and that this is something that they've known forever that's like a slow degrading of the the nutrient density in the soil i mean if that's one of the things that keeps me up at night. Seriously, like soil and water. If we don't have soil, we don't know of any way to restore soil once it's gone.

So we have 60 years of soil left? 60 harvests left. Is that years? I don't know. A harvest is probably more than once a year, I would guess. Really? I don't know. I'm not a farmer know i'm not a farmer not a farmer either yeah um even if it is what i think it's once a year but i mean even if it is once a year yeah basically um it's still 60 years is fucking terrifying terrifying i knew an asteroid

was coming yeah i got an eight-year-old daughter yeah like that's right 68 there'd be no food cannibals running through the streets um but we'll have fake meat i don't even know if we will but we won't because you have to grow soy yeah that what will we have um and we'll have no more fish left either um what else let's see oh there's so much i just don't know how anyone's going to refute this like i said i really like james a lot we if he decides to come back and come and sit with you after hearing this and watching this, I don't know what he could say. Well, you know, you can, it's like you said,

when a new study comes out with the meat, then you get the whole group of people pointing to all that epidemiology again, saying, look, this study says meat has a higher risk of cancer. Then we have to do the whole thing again. Healthy user bias, you know, food frequency questionnaire, context. That's why it's like, oh, my God. I think we've hit most of the main points here. Anything else stand out in your mind from the – No.

Did you watch it just this morning? Oh, okay. So I'd be remiss if we don't at least touch on these. So you said before the argument against red meat has always been like cholesterol and saturated fat, right? And it was interesting in this movie, they didn't really talk about that very much. They didn't talk about cholesterol a lot. They probably forgot. They didn't forget, I'm pretty sure.

I think what they're actually acknowledging that those aren't super defensible positions at this point. And so they switched over now to the new kids on the block, which are TMAO, new 5GC, and heme iron. So there was a guy who said, let's see, Dr. Scott Stoll, that's slide 18, Jamie. So he says, in animal products, you're getting protein packaged with inflammatory molecules like new 5GC, endotoxins, and heme iron. When we consume animal products, it also changes the microbiome, bacteria that live in our gut,

and the bacterial species have been shown to promote inflammation, overgrow, and begin to produce inflammatory mediators like TMAO. So I'll briefly address each of those. But before I do that, I want to just say a word about mechanisms versus outcomes. So nutrition research can focus on outcomes, which is like number of heart attacks or number of deaths that happen in a population over a given period of time, or it can focus on mechanisms, what caused those outcomes, right? So if you use the example of red meat, they saw in these big observational studies that people who ate more red meat died more or had more heart attacks or whatever. And we know that that was because of healthy user bias.

It wasn't accurate finding, whatever. So then they start going, trying to figure out what are the mechanisms. And so initially the mechanism was saturated cholesterol, then it was saturated fat. Now those are not as defensible. So they're moving on to these new mechanisms. Well, research on mechanisms is not very convincing if the outcome isn't there. So you had that large paper that was just published, the five papers in the annals that showed very, basically no evidence that red meat is correlated with any disease. So why are we even bothering looking for all these mechanisms that explain why red meat causes disease when

we've got this exhaustive study that says that it doesn't. But let's humor them and talk about these mechanisms for a minute. So new 5GC, that's a sugar. Basically, it acts as a signaling molecule. It helps distinguish self from not self. Most mammals produce it. Humans don't. But cows do. So when we eat the cow meat, beef, or drink milk, we get some new 5GC in our tissues.

This is the theory. And then our bodies attack it in an autoimmune response. So basically the idea is that new 5GC in meat causes an autoimmune response and that increases the risk of disease. The problem is that hasn't been proven at all. A 2003 paper found that feeding people large quantities of new 5GC didn't actually increase their serum levels of new 5GC. So that's a problem. If you have studies showing that eating it doesn't actually increase it in your blood, then it doesn't really make much of a difference.

And then you have groups like the Maasai, you could not design a diet higher in new 5GC. They drink blood and milk from cows and they eat cow beef yeah and they have no you know extremely low rates of cardiovascular disease and they look great they're i mean they're ripped they're like all thin they don't look like people that have autoimmune disease and are dying early so all right so that's new 5gc then we have heme iron so this is the form of iron that's in beef and other animal products. So it is true that heme iron forms these compounds called

N-nitroso compounds and toxic aldehydes that are implicated in colon cancer. But again, context is everything. So slide 22, Jamie, studies have found that chlorophyll rich foods, Jamie, studies have found that chlorophyll-rich foods, like plants, basically, if you eat them along with iron-rich foods, that cancels out any potential harmful effect of heme iron. So this is a study right here. So that would be a great point to an omnivorous diet versus a carnivorous diet. Exactly. This is what I was talking about before, where there's a lot of clinical evidence that suggests that plants play an important role. Yes. Do I know for sure?

No, I don't. But I'm just saying this adds an element of uncertainty. So, yeah, green vegetables, red meat, and colon cancer. Chlorophyll prevents the cytotoxic and hyperproliferative effects of heme in a rat colon. There was another thing that they talked about earlier that I just remembered while you were talking they were talking about fuel and the difference between carbohydrates for fuel and protein that protein does not provide you with fuel uh fuel for muscles which is not true there's something that happens when your body eats protein that it can break it down to glycogen what is that called gluconeogenesis yes yeah so that process they just ignored in the film.

And the woman spoke about this. Who was it that spoke about it? I don't remember who spoke about it. I think it was a man, Dr. Loomis or something. So whoever it was that was speaking about it, when they were speaking about it, they were speaking about it like, well, here you go. This is just a fact. Case closed.

Yeah, case closed. Your body needs carbohydrates to convert to glycogen, and that's not true. Everyone who knows, like, if you eat too much protein on a ketogenic diet, it will knock you out of ketosis because your body will convert it. Everyone knows that. I mean, yeah. So that was a huge omission or oversimplification i mean i think you said this before and i agree with you from for people who are doing explosive types of activity like mma or or uh you know crossfit or um basketball or something like that

they're gonna typically do better with some with carbohydrate you know substantial portion of carbohydrate in their diet whereas it definitely we're seeing a pattern now of endurance athletes or endurance activities a lot of those people can thrive on a very low carb diet zach bitter is one example but he's not just thriving i mean he's killing it he's murdering it i mean he's literally a world champion at running 100 miles in under 12 hours, which is just – It's insane. That pace is bonkers. It's hard to even comprehend. Yeah.

And again, that guy's doing it on ribeyes. And he does take – he was talking about how he ups his glucose before these significant events. Yeah. He's not – I want to be clear. I've heard him talk about this. He's not full-time keto all the time. No. He knows what he's doing. He knows that this he's not full-time keto all the time he knows what

he's doing he knows that as he's approaching competition he needs more glucose replenishes glycogen stores extremely scientific approach absolutely but um it's it's not true to say that protein that you don't need protein for muscle i mean protein is all about muscle synthesis you can't do muscle protein synthesis with without protein so that was weird okay well also isn't it hasn't it been shown i think uh lane norton bio lane was talking about this in his debunking of the game changers it's actually been shown that glycogen absorption or they get more recovery that's what it was, from carbohydrates mixed with protein than even carbohydrates alone or protein alone. That's why post-workout nutrition often

is suggested that you have both protein and carbohydrates. So there's one more slide I want to show on the heme iron thing, which is 23 and 24. So this is the largest meta-analysis of heme iron studies. And again, for people not familiar with the term meta-analysis of heme iron studies. And again, for people not familiar with the term meta-analysis, it's where you look at all, you know, a bunch of different studies that have been done and you analyze them together. It's considered to be a very high quality form of evidence. So they looked at all significant studies through 2015, and they found a significant association between heme iron and disease only in the American cohorts. In the Netherlands, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, and Sweden, there was no association found.

So what does that tell us? Go to the next slide, please, Jamie. Well, if you eat heme iron in the context of a super crappy standard American diet, it's associated with cancer and a problem. But if you eat heme iron in a European diet, which is less crappy than the US, it's not. This is a perfect example, again, of context. Also, Europeans, they don't have grain-fed steak. Yeah, it's a different quality meat. But I think it's probably more likely that they're not eating that as much.

There's far less grain-fed, grain fed grain finished beef over there when you eat it it's it's really evident when you have a steak over there so tmao and then gut microbiota and i think we're done after that okay unless unless you've got more no i think we did enough um you know so tmao this is a molecule that's generated from choline bet betaine, and carnitine in the gut, biomicrobial metabolism. And some previous studies showed that taking carnitine supplements and taking choline supplements does increase your blood levels of TMAO. In omnivores, they went up by like 37 micromoles per liter and in vegetarians, 27. And that was used to argue that vegetarianism was healthier because they didn't see as big of an increase in TMAO in response to this carnitine and choline challenge.

The problem is that research has not shown that eating whole foods rather than taking supplements increases TMAO significantly, especially eating meat and eggs. There was a study in 2014 showed you needed to eat four eggs in order to raise TMAO at all. And the max rise was only three to six micromoles per liter compared to 27 or 37, which I said from supplements in some and 10 to 15 in others. And then slide 25, Jamie, this 1999 study tested the effect of 46 different foods on the urinary excretion of TMAO in six different subjects, and eggs and red meat, as you can see, are barely even registering on the scale there. even registering on the scale there. Whereas 19 of 21 types of seafood raised TMAO and halibut raised TMAO 53 times more than eggs did. So-

The number, look at that halibut graph, it's crazy. In the cod. So here you have this argument, okay, TMAO is bad. We shouldn't eat red meat and eggs because of TMAO, but halibut raises TMAO 53 times more than meat and eggs. And if you look at the research on seafood consumption, it's almost universally associated with positive outcomes, you know, lower risk of cardiovascular disease,

lower risk of death from early causes, all of the rest of it. So how do we reconcile that here with this TMAO argument? Nobody has ever explained how to reconcile that. So again, interesting mechanism, but the research is not really persuasive. It seems like it's poorly understood in their cherry picking data. The other thing is that back in the original paper by Dr. Stan Hazen about TMAO from 2013, this is slide 26, Jamie, he said the high correlation between urine and plasma levels of TMAO argues for effective urinary clearance of TMAO. So what that suggests is that even if we eat TMAO, our body clears it out pretty quickly in the diet. So if TMAO is high, it's probably because of other factors. And studies have found at least three. One is insulin resistance increases TMAO levels

via an enzyme in the liver. Well, we know that about one in three Americans probably have some form of insulin resistance. 70% are overweight, 40% are obese. So it's possible that just being an insulin resistant overweight American increases your TMAO. it's possible that just being an insulin resistant, overweight American increases your TMAO. It's got nothing to do with meat. Gut microbiota, like disrupted gut microbiome and studies have also shown that SIBO, bacterial overgrowth in the intestine, can reduce, can increase TMAO levels. A ton of people are dealing with that, we know. And then kidney disease, which of course happens in people who have diabetes. Now, 100 million Americans have either prediabetes or diabetes can also

increase TMAO. So you've got all of these factors that just have to do with, again, crappy lifestyle, being overweight, being insulin resistant, nothing to do with meat. thing to do with meat. Last point. So there was a whole section in the movie about the meat ruining your gut microbiota. And they, I think we're referencing two very low carb diet studies that did show a decrease in key species of protective bacteria and also in butyrate production. So this is also one of my questions about carnivore or super low-carb diet for a long period of time. But again, context is everything. That's not necessarily the effects of meat. That's the effects of not eating plant foods. And there was a good study, slide 27, Jamie, that really established this. So it was a 2019 study in PLOS One. So it's free, full text access. You can go look it up. Gut microbiome response to

a modern paleolithic diet in a Western lifestyle context. So they took, I think they were Italians and they had one group that was on a, they put a group of them on what's called modern paleo diet. So obviously we can't recreate the paleo diet, but just what we all talk about when we say paleo. And they found, quote, an unexpectedly high degree of biodiversity in modern paleo diet subjects, which well approximates that of traditional populations like the Inuit, Hadza, Matsis in Peru. So they found that eating a paleo diet made your gut microbiota look like a hunter-gatherer microbiota. And by paleo diet, what we mean is meats and vegetables.

Meat, non-starchy vegetables, nuts and seeds, fruits and starchy tubers like sweet potatoes. So people who ate that diet had a microbiota that resembled hunter-gatherers which have the best microbiota like studies have shown that their microbiota is what we want to have so this study shows it's not about the meat it's about what you eat with the meat which makes a difference. Yeah, because we know what feeds the microbiota. Fiber. Is there anything in this movie that they got right? To end it on a positive note?

Yeah, I mean, I think I agree with them on the problem. I think feedlot, CAFO, beef and livestock production is not the way to go. I think it can be environmentally destructive. It's just from there, where they went with the solution is not where I go. They go to plant-based vegan diet. I go to regenerative, holistically managed livestock, shifting the food production to a smaller scale or at least shifting the method production to smaller scale, or at least shifting the method of plant production so it's less industrialized,

and doing things that actually can improve soil quality and sequester carbon from the atmosphere rather than scaling up more industry and more technology. Well, I hope this acts as a guide for people that are confused by this. And I hope people recommend this because this is probably as thorough a breakdown as anybody's ever done on that documentary. And I just wish people would stop doing this. I really wish they would just follow the actual science, even if it's inconvenient to their dogma. And it's a real

problem when people don't. It really is because it's confusing for folks. And there's a lot of people who suffer health consequences because of that confusion. Well, it's a shame too. And now we've talked about this with Joel. I think actually vegans and people who are recommending what we're talking about now have a lot in common. We want better methods of food production. We care about the environment. We care about animals and animal welfare. We just reach different conclusions from looking at those problems. And we probably have more in common with the average American or person in the world who's just not even thinking about it at all, is eating processed and refined crap and doesn't care. We have much more in common with the vegans. The difference is these people, like the people that made this documentary and like Joel, they want to ignore evidence that flies in the face of what they're trying to promote.

And they do it with really frustrating and deceptive methods. And that's what I thought when I watched this film. It was hard for me to watch the whole thing. I'd watched little clips of it before and I kind of had gotten a review of it, knew what it was all about. But watching the whole thing, like sitting there going, what the fuck, man? Come on. I was on an airplane i told you this before because i knew i had to be in an environment where i couldn't just run away and turn it off and uh but i was like laughing out loud at parts and kind of like wanting to shout out the boner part the boner part the peanut butter jelly the peanut butter sandwich because i knew right off

the bat you know there were just a lot of things that were were were funny um if but sad well chris thank you for doing this and james will have you on if you really want to do this and uh he's game okay yeah i mean well after this breakdown i wonder how game he's still gonna be yeah i wonder how game i'm gonna be well you let me know, okay? Because you're the only guy for this job, I think. I'm running like seven and a half combined hours on this topic recently. Listen, you're doing the world a gigantic service.

Thank you. And I truly, truly appreciate it. Well, thank you for having me on. So please tell people one more time the website. Cressor.co slash Game Changers for all the references, bibliography, studies, and the show notes. Chris Cressor on Twitter and Instagram.

Why did I say Twitter that way? Twitter. Twitter. Twitter and Instagram as well. Same thing, right? All those places. Thank you, Chris. Really appreciate you.

Thank you. Bye, everybody.