The Joe Rogan Experience - #1784 - Diana Rodgers & Robb Wolf

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

Diana Rodgers is a registered dietitian, nutritionist, and host of the "Sustainable Dish" podcast. Robb Wolf is a former research biochemist, author, and co-host of "The Healthy Rebellion" radio podcast, alongside his wife Nicki Violetti. They are the co-authors of "Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat,"  a companion book to the documentary of the same name

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Hello, folks. Good to see you. Good to see you. Thanks for coming. I'm glad we didn't make it snow again in Texas. You almost did.

I mean, it can snow. It might snow today. It's very possible, because it was drizzling when I left the house and it was 30 degrees. So which is not supposed to happen. It's supposed to be snow. Hopefully it won't be the snowpocalypse part two. Yeah. Last time you were supposed to come it became a complete disaster.

But it was fun. It was fun to watch people slide around and know that this city has zero infrastructure in terms of like dealing with snow. Because I grew up in Massachusetts where they know how to handle snow. Out here, they're baffled. Tell them what happened with you. Well, so my flight from Boston and my flight from Houston to Austin was canceled. So I got the last SUV.

You don't know how much I wanted to be on your show. I got the last SUV, drove through the ice storm to Austin where there was like just dead cars. You know, it was like zombie apocalypse. Got to a Marriott around the corner from here and thought, well, at least I'll be able to walk if nothing else. And my room overlooked this on-ramp,

and I just every day for a week with no running water and no bottled water watched the cars just slide up and down. And then I finally went out to Rob's house where he at least had a pool for running toilets. Flushing the toilets. But I was living on basically like white claw and canned tuna. Oh my God. This was when you were supposed to be here?

Yeah. Last year. Oh my God. I still have a can of wolf chili that she bought here. But she didn't have a can opener and she was just like, I don't know how to get into this thing. The thing is, it's if you grew up in a place that has winter,

like Massachusetts, you're like, this is nothing. Like guys, this is a normal winter day. Like, what the fuck? And it killed this place for a solid week. Well, that's why I still came, because I was like, they're overreacting. It's just one or two inches of snow.

But I didn't realize it was going to be like misting ice. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, come on. How much are trucks? Like, take care of this, guys. Get some sand. Like, is that that hard? I mean, come on, how much are trucks? Like, take care of this, guys. Get some sand. Like, is that that hard?

I mean, it happens. It does happen. I mean, the idea that you just, like, shut everything down for a year, how much does that cost? It seems like trucks are less expensive than whatever that costs. Yeah, yeah, and all the poor people that didn't know you can't heat your house with a stove. Well, worse. People use grills. Yeah.

Yeah, they used, used like barbecue grills in their house and they burnt wood and they died you know like people got sick yeah that was bad news and we were in the process of packing our house to move because we moved march 3rd up to calisbell so like all of this chaos is going on and we didn't know if like the moving truck was getting in and then diana made it to our place and then we weren't sure if she was making it out of there. Like it was, I mean, first world problems, but kind of sketchy first world problems as far as they go. It lets you know that there's a thin veneer of civilization that keeps all the food on the shelves and all the cars moving and it's not much not much to throw it off

right right you know I'm glad this is a good time to talk about your book the book is sacred cow Diana Rogers and Rob wolf it's available right now the case for better meat all I've been eating since January is meat all I've been eating is meat and and fruit that's that diet, meat, fruit, and eggs. I've never felt better. I've done this before in the past, but I never stuck with it. I would do like that carnivore month of January. I did it like two years ago.

I lost 12 pounds. I looked great. I felt great. Then I started eating spaghetti again. Shocker. I get fat. I get fat, and then my joints hurt again. That's the thing that drives me. It's the most wild rather, is my joints feel so good. Like everything feels better when I'm not eating

foods that cause inflammation. And for me, there's something, I mean, I'm not advocating this for everybody, but a meat-based diet for me is 100%, at least in a short term. I've never done it for, like, years. I know, like, Sean Baker and a few of those guys have done it for years and Paul Saladino. But for me, short term, there's nothing that's made me feel better. And I can't imagine it would fuck me up long term. I mean, I take a lot of vitamins.

I do eat a lot of fruit. My exercise is great. I feel healthy. I have plenty of energy i avoided all the diarrhea because uh when i just did all only meat i had ridiculous diarrhea like astounding it was my friend tom segura put it when he he tried it he goes this diarrhea is astounding like yes that's a good way to put it i was following that and i was like at some point there may need to be an intervention,

like somebody dropping you some Imodium or something. Yeah, that sounded rough. Well, there's something about eating a lot of fatty meat only. Your body's like, what is all this? Where's the veggies? You always eat veggies. How come there's no spaghetti here? Where's the bread?

Yeah, so as a dietician to be talking about things like this is definitely blasphemy. Blasphemy? Yeah. Yeah? I mean, I get pushed back like crazy from fellow dieticians. It's, you know. But what do they say? What's the goal, right?

Isn't the goal to feel better to look better and to perform better so if you're eating food that makes you feel better look better and perform better i mean uh i was at 205 when i started this diet now i weigh 195 and it's only been two months and i feel great like i'm not starving i I just lost weight. It just went away. I got my six-pack back. Like I feel better. My joints feel better. Like I just feel better.

Like isn't that the goal? Like the whole goal of your diet is supposed to be the vitality of your body, right? Right. And the whole goal of science should be to question your bias and seek the truth. Well, I know Sean Baker was telling me that there's a large study that's going on that Harvard's putting on for the carnivore diet. Do you know about that? They have some preliminary data on it. And I mean, it's not a randomized control trial. There's not a control group. It's a survey. And so, you know, it can be very critical of surveys. But it's interesting, like 94% of the people that did it got off of

the medications that they were on, like entirely. And it went through and detailed like some blood sugar changes, blood sugars improved dramatically for the vast majority of people. They saw lipids improve, not everybody. Some people on kind of a higher fat carnivore type diet, they see their lipids go up. We're still not sure what the total, you know, net risk is with that, but it's pretty impressive. And again, you know, people will poke holes in that, but there was a time in the 1940s, 1950s when there wasn't this thing called the Mediterranean diet. And then this guy wrote a review paper about it and nothing really happened for, I don't know, eight, 10 years, but then more people started writing about it.

More people started talking about it. Now we have randomized control trials and we have all kinds of different interventions. And we have some proof that something like a Mediterranean-type diet is probably pretty helpful for a lot of people. So when people criticize this stuff and they just dismiss it out of hand, they're like, well, there's no research on it. Okay, that's fine. But this is where things begin. And it's usually observational, you know, that, okay, there's this group of people that seem to be getting these really remarkable results. And the thing that was so interesting to me, my background was in autoimmunity and cancer research. And I got into this because of gut and

autoimmune issues. I'm the person that came up with the autoimmune paleo diet. Like I'm the person that kind of, you know, formalized that initially and it works pretty well. But when I saw what people were doing on a carnivore diet, it just blew me away. Like people who had done every other thing and they were so sick, they were crippled from gut and autoimmune issues. They would go on this modified, you know, carnivoretype diet and put their problems into remission and then have really remarkable health at the end of that. And it was a few people initially, but as it has grown, it's become this really watershed moment.

And I don't think that a carnivore diet is the first whistle stop somebody should do in dietary change. There's a lot of other shit you could do before that. But if you're really sick, I think to both of y'all's points, if you're really sick and you're trying to improve things, like it seems like a reasonable thing to use as an intervention. Just it's like playing darts and you're just trying to get closer to the bullseye and you can use that as a beginning point.

Some people add in fruit like Paul Saladino has added in more fruit and honey and stuff like that. Sean Baker is an absolute beast and he wouldn't be caught dead eating fruit, you know, and it just seems to work for him. But I think that it's a reasonable place to at least start and begin tinkering with things, and maybe you stick with it long term or maybe you modify it down the road. Well, it's got to be a function of different requirements for different people's bodies, right? Different people ask more

of their body, like a guy like you who does a lot of jujitsu, that's very physical. Some people don't. Some people, they just hike and maybe they could have a different diet. There's a lot of different things that a person needs depending upon their lifestyle. But when you talk about like a Mediterranean diet specifically, what is a Mediterranean diet? Like what's in there? That's the kind of funny thing. I mean, you've got what the literature kind of says, and then you have what people actually eat. And what folks actually eat is a lot of fatty fish, a lot of like lamb and goat. And, and they definitely eat some legumes, they eat local fruits and vegetables, a lot of olive oil, but it looks very, it's not this so like grain

centric, you know, thing that is typically portrayed in modern dietetics. So, but is there like a, is there a protocol for the Mediterranean diet? Like if someone says, I'm going on the Mediterranean diet, what do they mean? Are they eating lettuce? Do they have vegetables? Usually Mediterranean diet means emphasis on seafood, lean meat, low-fat dairy to some degree. Legumes. Legumes as kind of a preponderance for the carbs, like usually in preference to grains, although they'll have some grains in the mix too.

But that's kind of the funny thing. Vegetables? Good amount of vegetables, yeah. Okay. Olives, olive oil. So it's essentially like a primal diet. Yeah. The idea is just to cut out processed foods.

Yeah. Which is always a good step one, right? Absolutely. Yeah. But then when you look at what people in the Mediterranean actually eat, it's a made-up diet. Oh, interesting. It's not really a diet.

I mean, I've been to Spain. They eat a lot of pork. And pork is not okay on a Mediterranean diet. It's not? Why is it not okay on a Mediterranean diet. It's not? Why is it not okay? Isn't it a fatty meat? Well, fatty fish is okay, but not fatty meat. So you have what people are actually doing versus kind of what's been canonized within dietetics.

And they're really different. And also to Diana's point, like what folks are doing in Spain is reasonably different than what they're doing in Greece and Italy and whatnot. You know, just kind of a granular level. But just as an aside, the only food I think that is common to all of the blue zones is pork. But nobody ever mentions that. Really? Yeah. It's literally the only food that, you know, from Costa Rica to I guess the only one that it's not part of would be like the Seventh Day Adventist.

But yeah. Yeah, that's a weird one, right? That one is when people want to lump in all the blue zones, like they always like to use Seventh Day Adventist because they're vegetable based. Right, right. But they also no alcohol, no cigarettes and daily exercise. Yeah. Daily exercise. Right.

Yeah. And when you compare them to Mormons who have almost identical lifestyle, but they eat meat, it's same lifespan, but the Mormons are left out of the Blue Zones. Why? Because it doesn't fit. Doesn't fit the narrative. Really? Plus, they're problematic because their whole thing is a little wacky and they get to have a lot of wives, or they used to.

And then when you look at Hong Kong, they have the highest meat consumption per capita and the longest lifespans. Yeah. People don't like that one. They like to ignore that one. So socioeconomics by far beats diet when you're looking at populations for longevity. Socioeconomics do. So even someone with a poor diet but has a lot of money. So they're going to have better access to health care. Trump's a good example, right? He's probably a good example, yeah. I mean, he was 74.

He got COVID and he kicked in a few days. And he's really kind of chubby. He's super chubby. Yeah. So people with more money generally have less stress. They don't work two jobs. So there's all these confounding factors when you're looking at these social connections. Social connections helps?

In what way? How do you define? This stuff gets a little bit sketchy, but there's some research that suggests that people with inadequate social connectivity like friends, family. Like loners? Kind of loners. But, you know, they're just socially isolated. That that is as negative on health as a pack-a-day smoking habit. Now, that pack-a-day smoking habit gets thrown around a lot because people will say eating an egg is equivalent to like, you know, smoking six cigarettes or, you know, something like that.

But I think when you think about like human evolution and small group environments and stuff like that, there's something really powerful there. And it's clearly, you had Sebastian Junger on and they talk about, you know, poor communities tend to have more social connectivity and you don't see suicides within these groups and whatnot. And there's a lot going on there. But I think that that social connectivity in my mind is on par with sleep and food with regards to overall health. Like if you're really negatively impacted there, it's going to be a major piece of your overall health. And if you tick that box, you can get away with a lot of other stuff. Yeah. So I was listening to a book, Heartbreak. It's amazing. It's this new book out about a woman

that got divorced and she gets really sick and she's trying to figure out why her health declines. And she's kind of going through all the numbers and trying to seek it out and talking to all these neuroscientists and everything. But loneliness, your chance of dying early for loneliness is by far beats out cancer or autoimmune diseases, heart disease. It's loneliness. Wow. That makes sense. I mean, people make you feel good.

Like if you have good friends and you're around them and you're laughing, like how's that not good for you? Right. You know, it really should be prescribed. Right. Yeah. So exercise is critical but not the primary factor? I think it provides the quality of life.

And, you know, when we think about longevity and kind of health span versus lifespan, we want to live as well as we can as long as we can and then very short, you know, decline and then, you know, fade out. And I think that smart exercise, a base level of cardio, some resistance training, and then just doing a variety of activity, good mobility, I think that that feeds into the ability to do all the stuff that we want to do. And also like you get sick, you get injured, you get in a car accident or something. Like people, you know, if you're better shaped, you're just harder to kill. And I think that that is such a major factor. But my opinion, you could, you know, maybe agree. But I think when people tackle exercise as a calorie-burning endeavor, like you're much better time spent focusing on good quality food, very protein-centric because it tends to be satiating so you don't overeat. So you exercise so you have a kick-ass life. But if you want to lose weight, good body composition, it's really the nutrition part that addresses the bulk of that.

So the people that do exercise just for calorie burnout, the problem I usually have with that is that I don't think they enjoy it. I think they think of it as this task that one must do in order to look better or to justify a sundae, you know, justify an ice cream sundae or a bowl of spaghetti, you know, where it's like you should enjoy the results. Like you feel good. Like it's great for the body. It's a stress reliever, relieves anxiety. It's like it's so critical. If you're going through any like stressful period of your life, that is the time where you got to be like disciplined with your workouts.

You got to hit them hard. Right. It's a medicine. That's how I feel. Yeah. And sarcopenia is something. So that's age related muscle loss. That's how I feel. as you get older. And the RDA for protein is like so far below. It's set at the minimum to avoid disease. It's not the optimal amount. But even that RDA is way, way, way too low for protein.

Yeah. Well, what is the RDA for protein? So the RDA is 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. But then because Americans don't like kilograms and they don't want to do the calculations, you'll see these numbers floating around. So for women, they'll say women need 45 grams of protein and men need 55 grams of protein or something. But that's based on this ideal body weight of 125 for women and 155 for men. What do we live in the 30s? And so, 165 for men.

What, do we live in the 30s? And so, yeah. So the average weight, according to the CDC, for women is 165. And for men, it's like 195. Is that real? The average weight for women is 165? For American women. Wow. Yeah.

And so then when you go 0.8 grams per kilogram, you're way above what these RDA, you're at about double what the RDA is. But then when you look at optimal amounts, so we went through this in the book and I looked at all the research and how they came up with the RDA and, you know, we really need at least double the RDA of protein and we need it from animal source foods. There's a huge difference between animal and plant source proteins. Now that's something that vegans, their hackles get up immediately. How much real data is there that shows, like actual real world data that shows that plant-based protein is not as bioavailable as animal-based protein? I mean, that's just basic biochemistry. It's just a fact.

So what is it? Say if you have like 30 grams of broccoli protein versus 30 grams of beef protein, like what is the difference? What's happening? Oh, that's a good question. I don't know exactly how like broccoli would compare to beef. Probably a lot, a lot of mass for broccoli.

If you wanted to get 30 grams of broccoli protein, like how much broccoli would that be? A big-ass bowl for broccoli. If you wanted to get 30 grams of broccoli protein, like how much broccoli would that be? A big ass bowl of broccoli. Right. You have your, uh, the beans. I do have it for, um, yeah, in fact I have, yeah, I have it. Yeah. I have it. I don't know if, um, the, the Dropbox link that I sent came through. Um, so I've got one comparing beans to beef and I have it for protein, for vitamins and for minerals. And for farts. There's really no comparison. And the other thing is, is that it's limiting. So here we have, so we don't just need protein, we need amino acids. And so, and there's a popular meme out there comparing broccoli to steak and how you can get all your protein just from broccoli. But kidney beans are a much better source. So I went with

kidney beans. And so four ounces of steak versus four ounces of kidney beans. And when you see these plant-based memes, they will be comparing uncooked beans and they will be doing it by calorie, not by portion. Okay. Right? So we need to look at portion size. Why are they doing uncooked beans? Because there's more beans in uncooked beans. Oh, I see.

Because the water's not- It's like double. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But it's not realistic in terms of a portion of food because you'd cook them and they swell up and you just and the calories that you would need to

eat to get all right so we have only nine grams of protein from four ounces of kidney beans so in order to get the same even close to the amount of total protein you would need to eat over three times the amount of kidney beans. So, and that would be, you know, somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 and something calories of kidney beans. And then you need to have rice with it as well to balance it out. Versus 180 calories of protein from, or 180 calories from 30 grams of protein a steak. And, you know, on that like sarcopenia side, like losing muscle masses, we age and also just for athletics, isoleucine, leucine,

some of these branch chain amino acids are the really important amino acids because they stimulate anabolic signaling. And you have a threshold with that. If you don't hit a certain threshold, it doesn't turn on the anabolic signaling. So you're, you're tending to lose muscle mass there's kind of some some bro science like you need to eat every two hours or you're going to lose muscle mass it's not to that point but we do need some amount of anabolic signaling exercise specifically strength training causes that anabolic signaling and then eating a protein

rich meal that's that's rich in branched chainchain amino acids causes that signaling too. And it's not impossible to do via plant-based methods, but it's hard. It's really kind of a calculus problem to get that part, that box ticked. You need to do protein powders and stuff like that to usually get in there and make that happen. But then you also get a ton of calories comparatively. Wouldn't the simple solution be to, if you wanted to have a plant-based diet, is to eat the plant-based protein, but then substitute with exogenous amino acids? You could. If you did that. And stick more with legumes and try not to get your protein from like quinoa or peanut butter. Like nuts are a really actually horrible way to

get protein. We'll get to that in a second. But when you're making exogenous amino acids, is it possible to do that in a vegan way? Yeah. I mean, they can. What are they making them out of? Just synthetic chemistry. I mean, then it's, you know, it's other chemicals. Right. But you could make it in a completely vegan-friendly way.

Yeah. But it's chemicals, but not bad for you. Yeah. Just chemicals are a weird word, right? Right. People panic. Right. So you could, in fact, get all of your amino acids and have some sort of a plant-based

protein. Yep. Like what is the optimal plant-based protein? Is it pea protein? Is it hemp protein? Like what's the best one? I would probably say pea protein would be optimal. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But, you know're we're meant to eat things in their full form and so if you were to actually eat peas you're that's a lot of peas right and how are they extracting the pea protein i mean a lot of kitchen chemistry i mean you got to separate out the protein carbs fat and fat, and then isolate the proteins. And whether you do a hydroxylate of the proteins, like kind of pre-digest them or leave it together. Usually hydroxylates taste horrible.

So, yeah. but they want to tick the boxes of getting that anabolic signaling, preventing sarcopenia, improving body composition, that is a way that you could do it. And it would be vegan and it would give the right amount of protein, not overfeeding you potentially on the calorie side. And that could be a way to kind of thread the needle. So someone's like a vegan weightlifter. Right. And that's the way they should do it. They should have like pea protein and then substitute with supplement rather with amino acids. With especially with the branch chain amino acids.

And these are all the ones that you need. Cysteine, histidine. Leucine and isoleucine are the main ones and then valine. But the leucine is the most anabolic signaling of all of them. And so if someone wanted to do that, what would you take? What's a good – does there a good brand branch chain amino acids? When they say branch chain amino acids, does that usually contain all of these that we're seeing on this chart?

Yes, not all of them. It will be leucine, isoleucine, and valine typically. And so all those other ones, should you have all those in there? How would one supplement with a fully... If you look at all the stuff that you're getting from meat, it's crazy. There's so much more. If you wanted to get those benefits, I mean, is that what's going on when someone says that meat is not as bioavailable? Is that part of what's going on? Is that you're just not getting the same benefit from it because it doesn't have the amino acid profile? Oh, and this isn't even taking into account bioavailability. That's like a whole other

discussion. This is just the label, like the USDA nutrient database numbers, but that doesn't take into account the protein digestibility score. So let's explain it to people that are just listening. We're looking at this chart and it shows the sirloin steak on the left and the kidney beans on the right. And the amount of amino acids is, in most cases, four or five times more, if not more than that, from the steak than you're getting from the beans. The beans have similar calories, but only nine grams of protein versus 30 grams of protein for the steak. So this is what we're looking at.

And then I have this broken out also for minerals and for vitamins just to show the micronutrients that you're getting from animal source foods too, which are far superior to – so here we have vitamins. But this is just beans, right, which are not really known as primary sources have vitamins. But this is just beans, right, which are not really known as primary sources of vitamins. Oh, they're touted as the magic food. Beans for vitamins? For nutrient density. Not for vitamin A, since they have 0%. But this is kind of the cul-de-sac you get stuck into, though. Like, how do you get enough protein?

How do you not overeat? And then what type of nutrient deficiencies are you facing at the end of that? Well, it's funny that they put vitamin D because you really don't get vitamin D from food. Both of them have 0%. Like why is that on there then? It's just part of the USDA. Oh, I see. And vitamin A, it's like you only get 1% from steak.

But the big ones are vitamin B12. That's a big one. Because if you look at the big difference in B12 in kidney beans, you have 0%. B12 in steak, you have 95% of your USDA. And that's just for four ounces. This is a small portion of sirloin steak, and you're getting almost a full daily requirement of vitamin B12, which that is a big factor with people that are on a plant-based diet is getting their B12. Yeah, and iron and B12 are two of the most common nutrient deficiencies worldwide. And both of those are common in meat and not very common in plant-based stuff. Yeah. And whenever there is a nutrient in both plants and animals, our bodies prefer the animal source nutrient. Why is that? And how do we know that?

So for like example, beta carotene, which is like what makes sweet potatoes orange and carrots orange, we have to convert that to vitamin A, retinol, which is the usable form. We have to convert that to vitamin A, retinol, which is the usable form. So when we eat an animal source of vitamin A, which is in fats of animals, we're getting it directly. And there's about 45 percent of the population has a gene that makes it so they can't make that conversion efficiently. So not only do we have to convert it, but then almost half of all humans can't do it very well really and so to convert beta carotene to vitamin a and that's just one you know heme iron in animals half of the people that can't is it because of the location of their ancestors is it that's my guess uh because what we see with omega-3s is people that lived along the coast

where they were getting their omega-3s from fish lack the ability to efficiently convert plant source essential fatty acids to the ones that we actually need for our bodies to use. Very interesting. And so how would one know? How would one find out if maybe some people could digest sweet potatoes really easily? Some people can't. How do one know? Some genetic testing can ferret some of that out. But now that we have people that come from so many different backgrounds, it can be challenging. And the genetic testing isn't perfect on that. You can find that maybe you have a high likelihood of converting the carotenoids into retinol, but then some of these nutrient issues are gut related. So if your gut microbiome is deficient in some type of bacteria, you may not even get that the conversion to be able to get the beta carotene

into your body. So that's another layer to it. And it just gets really complex. Like I think you almost go the simpler way of instead of trying to get in and get super detailed on like the genetics, how do you look? How do you feel? How do you perform? Keep kind of an inventory of what you're eating. And then if we, if there are some pretty classic nutrient deficiency syndromes, you know, like dry skin and split nails and things like that for zinc deficiency as an example. And so it's almost easier to go that way versus trying to get in and then from like first principles, figure out what's your genetics and what's the perfect diet that's going to work for you. So the bioavailability, what do we know in terms of the bioavailability of the plant-based proteins versus animal-based proteins? How do we know that the body is absorbing the protein more efficiently from an animal source?

is absorbing the protein more efficiently from an animal source. I'm trying to pull up the protein bioavailability chart because there is a chart that sets it, and it's animal source proteins are always above plant source proteins. Mechanistically, what they do is they'll figure out a a given amount of protein and then they've fed that to people and then they will look at serum amino acid levels after that kind of track them over time so animal-based proteins you're going to let's say you give them 30 grams of protein and then you track over a two-hour period the branch all the amino acids that we that we see go up and then down during that.

And you can compare that to beans or broccoli. And so that is a piece of how you figure out the comparative bioavailability of one protein versus another. You see this even just with like cooked proteins versus non-cooked proteins. Like I know that there's kind of, I like eating some like steak tartare here and there and stuff like that, but there's just kind of a reality that meat that is cooked is much more bioavailable for the proteins and also the nutrients that are in it versus raw meat. That's interesting. Like what about rare? I'm not sure on that because it's still cooked some.

It's cooked on the outside it's cooked on the inside it's pretty yeah i don't i suspect that you're you know like if you were to sous vide something and slow cook it and and it's cooked thoroughly i think that it would that would probably optimize like the bioavailability of the um the whole protein yeah what about the difference between like a medium rare and a well done? Is well done less bioavailable or more? I think that well done is probably more bioavailable, but it tastes so bad that what's – I've thought about that. It's a really good question. I don't know for sure, but if you only eat a tiny piece of it because it tastes horrible, then I don't know if it's really helping you. of it because it tastes horrible, then I don't know if it's really helping you.

Because I'm always wondered, like particularly because of game meat, because wild game meat has always been touted as being much more protein rich than domestic cattle. And I eat a lot of that stuff. So I'm always wondering, like what is going on? How do they know? It's definitely lean. So I mean, you're getting a lot of protein per serving because the game meat is so incredibly lean. So when you compare it per calorie or even if you've just got, you know, four or five ounces on a scale, if you have like a ribeye, what is a ribeye?

Like 20% fat by weight? I think it's more like 45%. It's 45 by calories or is it 45% by weight? Well, so there's no carbs in meat. So all you have is protein and fat. So if you're looking for like what has more protein, like a boneless, skinless chicken breast can have more protein than a burger only because it has less fat. But it also has less nutrients overall because a lot of the like the fat soluble vitamins,

the E, A, not really D, K is all in the fat-soluble vitamins, the E, A, not really D, K, is all in the fat. So that's one of the benefits of eating at least some amount of animal fat because those fat-soluble vitamins kind of associate with that. What about the difference between a red meat and a white meat, like a chicken versus like a grass-fed steak? Beef is about 30% more nutrient-dense than chicken. Per calorie. And chicken is really high in omega-6s. Like, really high. Is that good?

No, the inflammatory fats. So, you know, a lot of people think chicken is more virtuous to eat for some reason, but it's— Virtuous? Is that— Yeah, like, you know, you'll see like everyone who has these like clean eating books that are eliminating meat but they'll still have boneless skinless chicken breast in there of course it's more like almost more like tofu of meat you know it's not on a bone it's like white and you know kind of clean looking plus chickens do a little heartless dinosaurs yeah you know people don't really

you know cows you could pet them and stuff chickens just trying to figure out if they can eat you and they will if they could oh dude yeah i used to have chickens and they pecked at my daughter's feet and my wife was like she thinks that the the the hen thinks our daughter's foot was a mouse or a worm or something oh no go, no, she's trying to eat our daughter. Like, what are you talking? She's just dumb. This is a dumb little marble-brained fuckhead who's trying to eat our kid. Like, that's how I thought about that chicken. I'm like, fuck off, you little cunt.

It's like shitty birds. So I always tell people, like, if you're in a grocery store and you don't have access to, you know, know your farmer or grass-fed beef, and you're just have access to, you know, know your farmer grass fed beef, and you're just looking at pork, chicken or beef from a nutrient density from an animal welfare and from an environmental perspective, actually, beef is going to be the better choice when you're looking at the industrial food system. That's okay. So this is where we get into the weeds, right?

food system that's okay so this is where we get into the weeds right because when you say that in any way that beef or raising beef is good for the environment in any way shape or form that's when people go nonsense the doctrine as stated up on high is that if we want to save the environment we have to eat less meat yeah I hear this from people with no evidence. I hear it from people and they spout it out and I go, what are you saying? Well, you should know already. They'll give you that. You should know already that if you're eating a lot of meat, it's bad for the environment. I'm like, how's it bad?

Tell me how it's bad. What's going on? And they'll bring up factory farming. I'm like, well, factory farming is horrible. It's horrible. Everybody says it's disgusting. But what about regenerative farming? And they're like, everybody says it's disgusting but what about regenerative farming and like well that's not sustainable that doesn't work or we don't have

the land for it right and this is where sometimes i think that we chose to do the book and film because we wanted to commit career suicide and public public self-immolation both at the same time because it's like we this thing ended up pissing everybody off because we don't – we're not totally in the like whitewashed regenerative ag camp. Like we see some laudable features to pieces of like the industrial system. And some of the meat that we brought you is from a local outfit that mainly pasture feeds their meat. But when they were in a drought situation. Some of the meat that we brought you is from a local outfit that mainly pasture feeds their meat. But when they were in a drought situation, and so they reached out to some of the local breweries, and they got a bunch of residue from the brewing process. And that's what they supplemented their animals with.

Which is some kind of barley grain? Yeah. And that's a whole other interesting thing is the bulk of the food that is given to cattle comes out of the ethanol industry. We're not stealing food from humans to do that. With chickens and pork, you kind of are allocating food that could have otherwise gone to humans. But even conventional beef spends 70 percent of its life on grass. beef spends 70% of its life on grass. And then that finishing process, oftentimes part of the finishing process, they put it in a wheat field where the wheat's been harvested, and then it eats the crop residues, and it's eating, you know, the mash from, you know, industrial or, you know, drinkable ethanol production. So there's a whole interesting nutrient upcycling story there

that just gets buried. And it's really important, and it's really valuable. It's very efficient, but it doesn't really fit into either camp. It isn't this beautific view that we would like all these grass-fed, pasture-raised stories to fit into. And it's definitely not the horrors of industrial chicken production production which is super gnarly yeah super gnarly what is drinkable ethanol beer wine you know just just the stuff because you have industrial ethanol and then you have the the stuff for but a lot for for you know beer wine spirits all that type even oatly um they got into trouble from some of their followers because the hulls from the oats were going to feed pigs. What is Oatly?

Oatly is an oat milk company. Oh, okay. I hate when they say that. Yeah. Oat milk. Oat water. That does not come out of an oat breast. Stop it.

You stop it with the milk. You know, that's not milk. That's just, you're doing weird shit with water. Right. You know, it's not milk. It's just, you're doing weird shit with water. Right. You know, it's not milk. It's oat tea. Yeah, yeah. That's good.

Yeah, call it white oat tea. Yeah. Yeah. Or almond tea. But there's a lot of leftovers from their processing. So they were feeding pigs with it, which is an awesome use of that. Right. But the vegans found out and put the kibosh on it and now they're trying to

form oat bars for humans out of this inedible fiber that exactly oh jesus and so but the you know with cattle because their ruminants, their digestive system is very different than a pig or a chicken. And a cow can actually upcycle stuff that has no other use in our food system. It's just going to sit in a pile and emit greenhouse gases anyway if we don't feed it to cows. And so they can actually eat stuff we can't eat and turn it into beef. Interesting. So that's the grain that's left over, the mash that's left over from the breweries, and that's this oat stuff.

And so the vegans got upset, and they were upset because they were bringing it to people that were giving this stuff to pigs that were going to be led to slaughter. Correct. Well, is there a way to like, I mean, it seems like it's silly to just not use it. I mean the earth uses it, right? If it does biodegrade, it's going to compost and it's going to have some sort of a function. It does. But when you're dealing with industrial levels of that, like in Brazil, there's a problem with the banana peels because the banana peels are actually pretty toxic and it's hard to figure out how to deal with those things.

Wait a minute. How are banana peels toxic when I watch so many people on TikTok make shredded pork out of banana peels? If they really get after it, they're going to have a rough day. They're going to shit themselves to death. Have you ever seen that? Yeah, I've seen that. So that's not edible, right? Like, what are they doing? They're basically, like, spicing up garbage and trying to serve it as pulled pork. Yeah. So that's not edible, right? Like, what are they doing? They're basically, like, spicing up garbage and trying to serve it as pulled pork.

Yeah. That is so weird when they do that. The Sean Baker videos where he's sitting there. If you haven't seen it, Sean Baker has a giant cutting board and literally like a machete. Yeah. And he's just slicing into beef. Then he's eating this, like, four-pound ribeye, and while he's cutting into beef,

on the other side of the screen, you see someone making, like, tofu ribs. Yeah. Yeah, here it is. Yeah. Look at him. It's some of the best performance art on the internet. Well, look at the size of that fucking knife.

I do love the size of that knife. The knife is so preposterous. Oh, and here's the banana peel. Big slices of meat. And so they're taking this banana peel and they scrape off the stuff on the inside. So he's eating pork too. And so he's eating real pork while they're eating this stuff. Well, what is in a banana peel?

I mean, is it just plant fiber? Are there any nutrients at all? I mean, technically there would be some nutrients, but what it has is the anti-predation chemicals to keep things from eating the banana. So it has these, I don't know if it's saponins. I think it's saponins. It's kind of a soap-like substance, but it will really irritate and damage the gut lining. They try to feed it to cattle, and even cattle that are really good at eating kind of squirrely things.

It will make the cattle sick. So that's just the outside though. Why doesn't the inside have those things? Even that stuff that she's scraping out has some of that in it too. But the banana itself doesn't? The banana does not. That's why fruit is doing well for you right now. So fruit wants

you to eat it because it wants you to deposit the seeds somewhere else. Right. It wants you to poo it out. And so the seeds will be fertilized and then they'll grow somewhere else. That's its whole strategy. That's the plan. Yeah. That's the thought process behind the way Paul Saladino describes his, you know, he calls himself Carnivore MD. And basically he's got a meat-based diet, but he supplements it with fruit. And this is the first time I've ever tried to do it that way. And it's so much easier to do than just eat meat. And it's great because before workouts, like today I had two bananas,

and then I worked out. I give no problem exercising, whereas when I was just eating meat, I was a little draggy when I was working out. And I love meat, but the only time in my life, like I've eaten kind of a ketogenic diet for 23 years, but there was a little bit of fruit, some vegetables, some different things in there. And the only time that I had like neurotic food desires was when I was doing like strict carnivore. And I wanted pizza and ice cream and shit that I never wanted before. I went kind of crazy, whereas loosening it up and having a little bit of fruit, a little bit of honey here and there, particularly pre- or post-workout or something,

I'm fine with that. Do you think that's – what is that process of converting the meat to sugar? Gluconeogenesis? Do you think that that's what that is? It's like your body is like cranking it up? It's an expensive process. It's a hard process to do. Yeah? Mm-hmm.

Could be that. Could have been. I was just nuts. I mean, Rob and I are already really restricted with our diets. We both have celiacs. Yeah. So like- So celiacs, you can't have any wheat. You can't have any- What is the bulk of the restrictions? What is the bulk of the restrictions? Yeah, I mean, everything on the inside of the grocery store is just completely, or even going to a taco place, and if they fried the corn tortilla on the same griddle as the flour one, I would have a reaction.

Celiac is an autoimmune gluten sensitivity, so the villi, the little finger-like things that line the gut that help absorb nutrients, those just get killed via an autoimmune reaction because the body is it's made antibodies against proteins in our body by mistakenly making them against the gluten gliadin proteins. And how many people have this and don't know about it? And how many people have this and don't know about it? I know that they think it's one in 133 people have it. Wow. It took me until I was 26 to find out that I had it. I had it my whole life. And you were just eating pizza and going off.

And being very sick. Yeah. Interesting. So there's the celiac thing, and this requires you to stay away from all glutens. Is there anything else that it requires you to stay away from? Are nuts okay, like peanuts, walnuts? I mean, I definitely feel better when I eat a diet more close to what you described. But, yeah, strictly meat was a little intense for me although you know I wanted to mention

I had a nutrition client who with compulsive overeating and so and I've sat through these they're like AA meetings but for people that are compulsive overeaters so like their reward signals just light up times a million in the rain when they encounter certain foods. Really? What is that? I mean, you know, I think some people just are prone to addiction. Is it a psychological thing or is there a thing you can track in the brain when they're overeating like this? I mean, my theory on this is that some people are just low dopamine and they may get into heroin, they may get into gambling, or they may become compulsive overeaters.

And it's just sort of how it plays out. Like some of my clients, they do all of the above. All of them. on a meeting when I was a dietetic student and they all have to identify their trigger food and then agree to not eat it and abstain from it. So sort of like an alcoholic type meeting, except for unfortunately for them, you have to eat, you can't avoid eating, you know? And it was white foods that was unanimously the trigger food for like all these people. But it still can be overwhelming to figure out what you're going to eat. And so anyway, I had a young woman who she just wanted to go carnivore.

It was just easier for her to like just give herself only that. And she lost. And she had rheumatoid arthritis that went into remission. She lost? Gosh, like 60. It's still going, actually. I think the last time I checked was 60 or 75 pounds. And her arthritis went into remission? Yes. So what do we think is happening to people's guts? Do you think that it's the plant defense

chemicals that are messing with people's guts? Do you think when it comes to, obviously not celiacs, which is an extreme version, when people do have issues with autoimmune issues that are food related, what is causing this stuff? I think there's a lot. We have now, antibiotics were developed in the 1930s, like the sulfa-based antibiotics, and it was 1950s-ish that the more penicillin-derived antibiotics started hitting. So how many generations now do we have, like, mom-to-baby, mom-to-baby, like, alterations potentially in the gut microbiome? don't express celiac disease because they have gut microbes that trim up the prolyl endopeptidase bacteria that break up the gluten proteins. Is that something someone can supplement with? Kind of, but it doesn't work that well. Like it's kind of like it will protect you from like cross-contamination a little bit.

But like you get so sick with celiac, it's something that I would be careful, you know, playing around with that. But, you know, so you've got antibiotics, you have alterations in just our environment. I think that there's gut issues, mitochondrial issues, and then changes in our food supply. So I think it's a lot of different things. Low vitamin D levels,

like the autoimmune diseases track very, very closely with latitude. You tend to see relatively little autoimmune disease near the equator, and then you see it much higher at higher latitude. So vitamin D is a big factor. So there's a lot of different things that go into it, which is a little bit of the problem of trying to figure out how to fix it, because doctors have a tendency to just say that people are crazy or it's mainly in their head because there's like this piece and that piece and the other piece. There's clearly a piece to a loss of gut barrier function. Like that's pretty well understood. Alessio Fasano, like he's a researcher mainly looking at celiac disease, but he has celiac disease as a model for autoimmune disease in general. But

there's a loss of intestinal barrier function when intact food particles can make it into the body, then the body can mount immune responses to everything. And then the flip side of this, and maybe why carnivore works so well, is if somebody eats a very simple diet, it doesn't irritate the gut, the gut can heal, and then the body is not primed to be, you know, reacting as much, doesn't mount the same immune response. And so you can kind of dial that inflammatory process down. There's also other people that think that, you know, when you live in a really clean environment and you're... Oh, yeah, the hygiene hypothesis, yeah. Yeah. So all of us have immune systems that want to be working and exercising themselves all the time. And in places

where you're more likely to have parasites or, you know, other pathogens through your food, your immune system is busy working on all that stuff and keeping you healthy. But when you are living in a place where there's just not anything for your immune system to work on, then it'll work on you and start attacking yourself. How much do you buy into this idea that plants, whether it's like kale or what have you, these plant defense chemicals that these plants emit are causing some autoimmune issues for people? For sure. They are in some people. It shouldn't really be that way, though, not to the degree that we see now.

And this is where just looking back at like the 1950s, you know, people weren't – celiac existed then, but it didn't exist to the degree it does now. You didn't see these multiple chemical sensitivities that folks have now. Plant defense mechanisms are definitely there. folks have now. Plant defense mechanisms are definitely there. I mean, part of the reason why people soak, sprout, and ferment grains and legumes is that it decreases those things. So within most traditional food cultures, there's ways of taking relatively toxic foods and making them less toxic. Like what do they do with the taro root to get the cyanide out of it? I mean, just cooking, but they will also ferment it. Oh yeah, that's a big process. Yeah. But even with corn and lime.

Yeah, corn and lime. So there's a lot of historical food systems that help deal with this stuff. But it just, you know, when you look at most traditional food systems, it took pretty good care of people. Like not everybody on the planet need to eat paleo to have really outstanding health. You know, traditional Mesoamerican food, even though it was very corn-rich, they figured out that you needed to do some things to prevent pellagra, which is this B vitamin deficiency ultimately, which was the inclusion of lime.

But there's something that's changed. The inclusion of lime? What do you mean? When you make corn tortillas traditionally, you like ferment it with lime and that breaks down some of the anti-nutrients with the corn. It makes it more digestible. Oh, I see. Yeah. So this is when they're making the tortilla itself.

Right. So what about the difference between a cooked vegetable versus a raw vegetable? Because one of the things that people love to say is like, oh, I only eat raw vegetables. And I'm like, hey, man, I don't think that's good. eat raw vegetables and i'm like hey man i don't think that's good i used to think that was good but i don't think that's good anymore you're right period i mean it's just really hard to digest them and i mean when you look back at traditional cultures pre-agriculture meat was what you ate when you could get that and then all the other stuff was what you ate when you couldn't get the meat. You just ate it to survive.

Right. Just to give you some calories. Right. Yeah. But meat is the most nutrient-dense, perfect food for humans. It just is. It's such an exhausting conversation

when you say that to people, though. Like you said, I think, you know, you're eating all that meat? Like, what about your cholesterol? What about, you're going to have a heart attack? Yeah, and it's all that meat. Like, what about your cholesterol? What about you're going to have a heart attack? Yeah. And it's working its way into policy, which is really disturbing to me as a mother. Like New York City public schools, vegan on Fridays now, in addition to Meatless Mondays.

So now you've got a school system where 70 percent of the kids are economically disadvantaged and might go home on the weekends. Like they need school lunch, right? And now you're flanking the weekends with nutrient-poor both Friday and Monday. And it's this ideologically driven thing that's based on this idea that if you eat less meat, it's better for the environment, like this thing that they say. And they also say for health purposes. Like, oh, they'll cite the China study. Like it's one fucking study.

And like no matter how much you say, like, hey, you need to read the rebuttals of the China study because they're pretty brutal. And it shows that it's a lot of biased evidence and that they really didn't do a good job of being objective about that. So there's one thing that's happening right now that's really interesting. So there's this thing called the Global Burden of Disease. And this is published by The Lancet. And it's what most global food policy is set on.

And between their report in 2017 and 2019, meat was 36 times more likely to kill you. 2019, meat was 36 times more likely to kill you. And there were some researchers, some friends of mine that pushed back. They wrote a letter to the Lancet, which was blocked. The Lancet, it sounds like, is finally going to be publishing it over the next couple days. Finally publishing this thing that says that meat is 36 more times. Oh, no, that's out. The 2019 global burden of Disease is out. And I actually had a graphic on that just to show.

So what are you saying is going to be published? So some friends of mine. On the bottle? Right, because these guys didn't provide any evidence at all as to why meat. So there's this theoretical minimum risk exposure level that, you know, is supposed to be the safe level of meat you can eat. And it went down to zero. According to these researchers, which is going to be global food policy, you can now eat zero red meat safely with no. So they said they did their own systematic review but they were they didn't

show any of the evidence any of the papers they reviewed and there aren't there's no research that's strong that's showing meat is there's only one randomized control trial if they're not showing any evidence they're not showing any papers how is is this science? Right. And so finally, the Lancet is going to publish this paper where my colleagues are questioning the results and where is the science. And the Lancet, I mean, the global burden of disease is the Lancet. So this is a really very big deal. So I don't understand. Like, what is there? I always thought that with scientific papers,

you had to cite sources and you had to. So up until about two years ago, that was pretty consistent. And then I think we've seen a loosening of standards. Here's the difference between 2017 and 2019. So you can see the top part is what we're doing in excess. And you can see that diets high in red meat used to be a very small percentage of like the cause of death globally, which is even a silly thing. But it was it used to be sodium was much higher. And now meat has gone up. Do you see this? Thirty six times more likely to be the cause of death. How is that?

In two years. So this is the study. This is, and this analysis when, when they're doing this, how are they coming to this conclusion? Right. Nobody knows.

Nobody knows. They just tell you? They're just saying it. They're just saying it. So what is their motivation? We don't really know. I mean, a little tinfoil hatty. I think that there's a powerful desire to consolidate food production globally. And this is an amazing way to do it. It's

as it is, there's I think that six or seven companies produce like 90 percent of the food that's consumed globally. But what we've seen over time is just more consolidation, more consolidation. And there's this kind of weird interface between tech and venture capital and food. There have been some interesting pieces where folks are looking at food like they want it to be operated like ip like software they want you to be able to own the intellectual property say that because bill gates is now the largest owner of farmland in the united states yeah we looked at that up once there was some sort of dispute about that but then we looked at it said he was he wants to be he owns a lot he loves the gates foundation is one of the major sponsors of this study that I was just talking about.

So it's fuckery. But the thing is he keeps saying that we've got to eat less meat and we've got to cut our consumption of meat out to be healthy. And that we're going to get used to these meat alternatives. When a guy like that says that, I'm like, are you making money because of this? Why are you saying that? And by the way, you look like shit. Like, because if you're eating those plant-based burgers or whatever the fuck you're doing, like, you're obese.

Like, a guy like that telling people about, he's got these breasts and this gut, and I'm like, this is crazy. You're one of the richest guys on earth. You have access to the best nutrients, the best, you could have an amazing trainer, you could be in phenomenal shape, and you're giving out public health advice. You're giving out health advice, and you're sick.

It's literally like a non-athlete trying to coach professionals. What the fuck are you talking about? How are you giving any health advice when you look like that your health is piss-poor I'm not a doctor but when you've got man boobs and a gut and you're walking around you have these like toothpick arms I'm like hey buddy you're not healthy there's a lot of profit to be made in in processing something into beyond burger there's a lot of profit to be made in processing something into a Beyond Burger. There's a lot of profit to be made.

But those aren't even selling anymore. Have you noticed that? Yeah. We're kind of lucky in a way. Like the consumers kind of got in and poked around that. And there was – Forbes did an interesting piece where they – there was so much interest from the vegan community around Impossible Burger and Impossible Foods. And this Forbes piece was interesting. It made the case that these people are usually very progressive and very anti-corporation.

We're like the biggest fans or promoters of this corporatization of our food system, which is kind of where all this stuff is going. They're getting duped. They really are. But, you know, on the one side, there's this story that meat will cause cancer and diabetes and all this stuff, and it's going to destroy the planet because of carbon emissions, and it's using all the water and the land. And it's a slick story.

It's an elevator pitch. It's elegant. It's, like, buttoned up air tight. And then when we start trying to unpack that, you have to dig into ecology and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. And it's not an elevator pitch. And it's a lot of work to unpack what those claims are. And then, you know, even what is the motivation to do this? Then we start getting into conspiracy theory land. It's like, well, even what is the motivation to do this? Then we start getting into conspiracy theory land. It's like, well, there are people that want to control the food system and they want to, you know,

turn food into intellectual property that they own. But that really seems to be what's going on with this. And I think they've realized consumers aren't going to just buy it in the grocery store. And by the way, it's twice as expensive.

Like Beyond Burger is twice as expensive as organic grass-fed beef per pound. Wow. But they sell it in half-pound packages right next to the pound packages. Oh, they're tricky. Hmm. But so why not just make it policy and indoctrinate these kids from kindergarten to age 12 with these messages? Like the Meatless Monday messages are all wrong. Like, they're all wrong.

What is the message? Meat is bad for your health and the environment. And they use these beautiful, simplistic infographics showing, you know, livestock takes up three quarters of the land. But, okay, but it's not talking about the types of land, you know, or that your burger used 10 bathtubs full of water. But then we're not talking about, OK, that most of the water footprint for a cow is actually in the grass. It's called green water. It's like water that's already in the environment, in rain.

Whether the cow is there or not, it's going to happen. Do we have that infographic? Yeah, I have the water one. If you want to talk about how much water a burger uses up, you better not be eating almonds. Exactly. Yeah. You better not be eating, you better shut your mouth if you're eating almonds. Right.

Those things are ridiculous. So here's the water one. And I've broken it down, land use, feed use, but this is just the water one. And so what most people don't get is that there's green waters, natural rain, and then the blue water is like when you look down on a map and see rivers and lakes. So what we're looking at, folks that are just listening, is when you look at typical beef versus grass-finished beef, it looks like there's probably like how many dots are on this?

A little different. So at the bottom I have the percentages. So it's 94% green water for typical beef and 97% green water for average. And this is average, like in Vermont, it might be different than Nevada, but. So they have it broken down to these droplets and these droplets, there's a hundred droplets on each side and two droplets from the grass-finished beef are lake streams and underground water, three droplets from the typical beef. And that's what everybody's concerned about. What people are really concerned about is the draining of the lakes and streams and

the underground water. So it's not drinking water. Right. And the rest of it, the entire graph, is natural rain, which is rain that exists, moisture that exists in vegetable matter. Yeah, and I mean it's going to fall on this land, which is land that has been grasslands for eons. And we can't use it for anything else. When people say we use all this land for cattle, that's – you know, bison are a good example. I'm good friends with the folks that own Rome Free Bison Ranch in Montana.

Bison are a good example. I'm good friends with the folks that own Rome Free Bison Ranch in Montana. They do both cattle and bison because the cattle don't go up these super steep mountains. And so they're these grassland mountains that the bison graze. And if they don't graze it, then the whole ecosystem just collapses. The ecosystem has been this plant-animal interaction for millions of years. The ecosystem has been this plant-animal interaction for millions of years. And this plant-animal interaction is based on the animals' manure, fertilizes the plants, the animals eat the plants. Dung beetles, insects, birds, you know, all this stuff.

So it's not stealing land from anything. This is what grasslands do. It's not stealing water from anything. This is the rain, sleet, and snow that falls on the grasslands. And these animals should be there because it's part of a healthy ecosystem. Like the Audubon Society in the last 10 years has been getting really involved in regenerative ag because one of the first things that they see when people start doing pasture-based meat is that the bird species come back and come back in remarkable profusion because it starts fixing. If you fix all of the ecosystem issues, then these literal canary in the coal mines end

up getting addressed and we see more bird species come back. This brings us to this whole idea of regenerative agriculture being scalable. Yeah. And is it? So I, well, first of all, 85% of the beef cattle in the U.S. right now are grazing on land we can't crop. So these. 85%. Yeah. So because cattle only spend about the last three or so months of their lives on feedlots. And so really good grazing can happen even if they do end up being finished on grain. So most cattle are not all cattle.

So they don't just eat grain from the moment they're babies. No, no. They eat grass and then when they're getting ready to slaughter them, then for how many months they eat grain? Three to four, usually about three. And then they basically get sick. It depends on the system i mean it like like this beef that i brought you today they're still out on pasture they're getting some grain i mean there's there's there's like kind of middle ground it's not like all good or all bad you know

in an area where if if he were just to let his cattle graze, cattle wouldn't have enough grass because you guys didn't get any rain in Austin. And so the cows would get sick. So they had to do something to supplement what you're saying. Yeah. And we're going to have a brewery process. If we're going to do ethanol, what are we going to do with all that stuff? We can feed it to cattle right but we're talking about scalable when something scalable and I guess we kind of glossed over the Beyond Meat

thing we probably should go back to that but is it scalable in terms of the entire population could you is there like what if everybody abandoned veganism right everybody's like, hey, I'm sick. I'm tired of this. This is not working for me. I'm going to go to some sort of sustainable agriculture way of living. Yep. Is that, without any factory farming, is that possible for the entire country?

One thing I want to bring up is that Diana went to Southeast Asia at the, can we talk about the Merck deal and all that? Yeah. Like, antibiotics. Like, I just want to throw that one out there because there's pieces of this system that went to Southeast Asia at the, can we talk about the Merck deal and all that? Like antibiotics, like I just want to throw that one out there because there's pieces of this system that cannot go on. So we use a huge amount of antibiotics in chicken and pork production because of the proximity that they, like you can't do industrial chicken without the antibiotic inputs that we have because they're

just on top of each other merck and some of these pharmaceutical companies recognize this and so historically like before the 1940s chicken and pork were a background part of the food system like pork was fed largely food scraps chickens were just kind of a background part of of farms it wasn't a main feature. I think it was Herbert Hoover that said something like a chicken in every pot is like a, you know, a campaign deal. This was the beginning of the industrialized food system. Chickens were expensive. Chickens were expensive. Yeah, it was usually beef and lamb and things like that that were

the mainstay. But we know for certain that the current industrial food system is broken at the grain production level because of the damage it does to the topsoil. And it's broken at the animal production level because of the damage that it does to our antibiotic defense, basically. Like if we lose the ability to use antibiotics because of creating antibiotic resistant bacteria, we're all screwed. And so Merck is starting to educate folks that produce beef or pork and chicken that we have to figure out sustainable ways of doing this. And it looks a lot more like Joel Salatin or White Oak Farms where you're integrating all this stuff. So when people just immediately say, well, does regenerative ag scale? We definitely

need to address that. But like the current system has an expiration date on it. We have to find something else. And in the book and the film, we don't lay out specifically, we're not trying to be futurist saying this is the way that this is going to work. But a lot of what we suggest is that food production should be done at a regional level based off the resources and like the knowledge and the culture of the people that are there. Like what happens in Nebraska should be really different than what's happening in like Venezuela or something like that. Like you have different resources, different infrastructure, different cultural values, but there should be an integration of plants and animals. And the whole thing should probably look a lot more like an early 19th century farm with like good technology inputs than just

industrial row crops is kind of the the ultimate thing that i think we take away from it does sound like he's dodging so i did go through the numbers in the book okay um and it does look like we have the land in the u.s right now to grass finish in a regenerative way all of our beef herd. Before we go on to that, and I do want to talk about that, what is causing the need for antibiotics specifically? Is it the factory setting where everyone's jammed in together? That's what it is? Yeah.

When did that start happening? 1940s. So we had the Haber-Bosch process, which made industrial ammonia for firearms and munitions. And then when we got done with that, we're like, oh, this stuff makes amazing fertilizer. And it really is amazing, but it also damages the topsoil. But it produces huge amounts of food, like in grains. It makes great fertilizer, but it destroys the topsoil at the same time? Well, it makes great fertilizer in that you can short-term, and by short-term, I mean like maybe a century, century and a half, you can produce a shitload of food.

But when we think about our planet, we want our topsoil to last forever. Like we want to come back 5,000 years from now and have this topsoil better than what it is today. So there's trade-offs. Like in the short-term, it's good from a productivity standpoint. And we started getting excess food production in a way that we could industrialize things like pork and chicken production by the inputs of grains and whatnot. And then in the 70s is when it really ramped up with chicken. And that's when people started

getting super affordable chicken because there was also, I believe it was vitamin D they realized was a nutrient that these chickens really needed in order to thrive in a factory setting. And then as soon as they figured that out, plus the antibiotics, which not only keeps them healthier, but actually disrupts their biome enough to make them gain weight. Oh, yeah, that's right. And so that those were sort of another couple of magical things. And then in relation to the fertilizer, I just want to mention with the war happening or potential war, we're also running out of fertilizer. So we have to start using animals for nutrients because there's just not enough. You have to mine potash.

And there's just that's already a limited thing, too, in addition to nitrogen. So you mean fertilizer just for monocrop agriculture? Just for growing corn and soy and all that other stuff that we grow in massive, massive quantities. So a lot of the concerns that folks have, like damage to waterways from effluent, from like CAFO beef production and chicken and all that, it's terrible. But it's also something that if we did more decentralized production, we broke this stuff up and we had cattle integrated with pork, integrated with chickens, and the effluent, their byproducts, the feces, the urine, reintegrate that into the soil. Historically, that's what we did before

the industrialization of the food system. This is what people still do in most of the developing world, is they have plant-animal interactions bringing this stuff together. There's certain economies of scale that are really cool with the current system, but it's not like a Ponzi scheme, but I mean, it's got an expiration date on it. Like we are breaking elements of our ecological system by kind of strip mining the ability to produce lots and lots of food right now. Yeah, that's one thing that I always try to say to people that are very plant-based centric thinking. I just stress on them how unhealthy for the world monocrop agriculture is. Like this completely unnatural, like you can grow food, you can grow meat in a very natural way, like the Polyface Farms model, Joel Salatin's model. But if you

want to feed the whole world with corn and grain, you've got to have these massive fields. And you're not going to grow anything else but this one thing in these massive fields. And whenever you do that, you are damaging that ground. And that's what goes into lab meat and beyond burger and impossible foods. They're not using organic products. I mean they're using 100% legit chemical ag to make their products. Well, not only this, it's like one of the most processed things you could ever eat. So all these people that want to eat healthy, plant-based, like if you want want to eat a healthy vegetarian diet, you certainly can. But if you want to eat a healthy vegetarian diet and also pretend that these processed things

that are filled with seed oils and like what exactly is in a fake meat burger? How bad are those things for you? how bad are those things for you so i mean just on a on a nutrient density level they've never i've never seen a full breakdown like they'll say total protein total fat and it'll line up kind of but like the fats coming from soybean oil not natural uh the protein is limiting in the amino acids um but we still have yet to see a full nutrient breakdown of all the junk they put in. And, of course, it's better to eat real meat. What's the main ingredients of those burgers? Pea protein is one of them.

I think soy ends up on the oil front and then also just some of the protein also. What if they mixed those burgers in with a branched-chain amino acid profile? I mean, would you do that, like have a bodybuilding Beyond Burger? You could. You'd make a lot of money. You'd make a lot of money. Yeah. But are you causing inflammation?

Are you giving people issues with the seed oils like soybean oil? That's not necessarily good for you, right? Exactly. Yeah. And you're still like for every calorie that you consume of that, you're not consuming something else. So where are you getting the vitamins, the minerals, these other things? And in a developed world, you could go to your corner store and get vitamins and do all that. But what's kind of squirrely is that because this whole story has been so tied into climate change, they're really pushing that the developing world adopt this stuff too.

And this is one interesting area that different places in the developed world have pushed back because they're like, we can't be dependent on this. Like we have these traditional food systems. And if you, if you make us dependent on the exports of like your industrial row crop food system, one, we're super dependent and two, we can't afford it. And then the third point, which Diana really detailed this well in the book, these folks don't have access to like a CVS to go get their B vitamins and their folate and their zinc and their iron and everything. And the same deficiencies that underlie a vegan diet looks shockingly similar to what people face when they're in a malnourished state in a developing country because they eat a very starch-centric, monocrop type of diet. That is typically the main deficiencies, and they largely arise from a lack of animal foods.

So when people talk about the difference between seed oils and there's other vegetable oils that are not bad for you, right? Like olive oil is not bad for you. Avocado oil is not bad for you. Why are some corn-based oils and seed-based oils, why are they bad for you? Just the ultra-processing and the ratio of omegas in them. And they're polyunsaturated. They're not really supposed to be heated. And so they're very unstable, create free radicals. So if you use them as salad dressing, are they okay? I mean, but they've already gone through the high heat process and are rancid. And they just kind of add deodorizers so that you can't smell or taste the rancidity.

Really? Yes. And then they also add coloring to make it look like a butter color. Like you notice all the oils. That's not a natural color for canola oil to be. Is it white? Like a clear rather? Oh, there's an interesting video out there on the Great Con Ola.

And it shows the process of making canola oil. Go to that, Jamie. You got that? He's got it. The Great Con Oil. Con Ola. Con-ola. Con-ola. So canola oil is-

Rape seed oil that was invented in the 40s to be an industrial lubricant. Mm. Yeah, just the name alone is problematic. So these seed oils, they're all rancid when they're stored in this way? They usually go through a very high heat process in order to extract the fat out of the seed. So just that process alone renders them rancid. And if they didn't go through that process, there's no way to get the oil out of the seed. There's cold pressed.

Okay. But then- Like olive oil, some of it's cold pressed of its cold or like grapeseed oil you might see in a health food store a cold press great is that okay but you i suppose if you were to use it on like salad dressing and not cook it it might be okay but it's still not i mean there's nothing redeemable about grapeseed oil. And I'd have to look up the omega ratio, but you're much better with avocado oil or just good olive oil. So why is avocado oil and olive oil, why are those good for you? They tend to be high in monounsaturated fat and then relatively low in the omega-6 fats.

Like none of these things have much in the short chain omega-3 fats. Some people get kind of wrapped around the axle though, like high oleic safflower oil is typically lower in omega-6s than olive oil is. So just on that omega-6, omega-3 side, like it can get a little bit squirrely, but then you have the additional piece of how was it processed? Like if it was cold extracted, then it's probably safer from like an oxidized fat perspective versus if it was heat extracted. So it does get a little bit complex and that's where like a good quality olive oil or like butter or lard or tallow or something is just generally safer for most things. Yeah. And so then we get to these fake meat burgers. And these fake meat burgers, they're using soy oil.

And then how are they making it look like meat? I mean, kitchen chemistry. I mean, some of the stuff that Sean Baker has videos of just kids doing in their – somebody made a pork roast – not a pork roast, a ham. Somebody did a ham. And I couldn't believe the stuff they put in on the front end. But when they were done and they were cutting it, like it looked like ham. So you didn't find that one.

I mean, I was super impressed. I actually commented. I'm like, it kind of I was super impressed. They actually commented on it. I'm like, it kind of gives me a little gut ache to look at that. But, I mean, the finished product. And this is somebody just doing it in their kitchen. And I thought it looked – just looking at it from a video, if they had real ham and this fake ham, I wouldn't have told. So, this is Sean Baker. Would that be on his TikTok, you think?

Probably. Yeah. Instagram or TikTok. He's become a? Probably. Yeah. Instagram or TikTok. He's become a TikTok celebrity. Yeah. How many TikTok fans does he have now? I don't know. I don't know.

A lot. It's amazing they haven't kicked him off. TikTok is ruthless with kicking people off. It's great with kids. I have two teenagers and my son follows Paul Saladino and is now also doing that diet. Really? And meanwhile, I've been- Telling him forever.

That's hilarious. That's very funny. Yeah, I see his videos constantly, which is very funny to me that this guy with a big knife eating meat has become ultra popular. But they're brutal with their censorship. TikTok just removes videos left and right.

Just call it hate speech and just yank you off. Done. Yeah. But I don't know exactly, but I mean, they're going to extract the protein, some of the fiber. They're going to extract the fats from these different things. And then you start putting it together in a kitchen chemistry format to make it look like meat. And their blood, like how are they making it? Beet juice.

Beet juice. Okay, so here it is. Oh, wow, that's interesting so this person is look at his face is he doing riding a stationary bike oh god so they're making this like weird dough with some kind of flour yeah wheat gluten wheat glue so this is gonna give celiacs a heart attack and then what is he doing he's like rolling it around and then wraps it. That looks like ham. Pretty wild.

That looks like ham. Yeah. And that's just in this person's kitchen. Vegan ham. Yeah. But it's amazing, like the process that's involved in that, like all the kneading and twisting, like when he ties it into knots. He's putting all this stuff in there. He ties it into knots.

He's putting all this stuff in there. And in the film Sacred Cow, when I have Rob and Joel Salatin talking about all the inputs that go into Beyond Burger and Impossible Burgers, I actually was able to use their own promotional footage. Just with Rob and Joel talking about how disgusting the process is and getting this, what did you call it, biological goo? Right. Just over their own promotional footage of what a miracle it is of these vats that they've, you know. Oh, we need to see that.

Is that available online? Can someone see that? The process of making a Beyond Burger? It was an Impossible Foods. It's, I can look if he can't. It was just the impossible foods, like making of impossible foods, uh, burger. Yeah. Um, and the funny thing is, is their only claim, so they can't win on nutrition.

They try to win on ethics, right? So they try to say no animal died for this. Okay. Here it is. The making of an impossible burger. Wow. It looks legit. Look at that.

It's so looks like a burger. There it is. How do they an impossible burger. Wow. It looks legit. Look at that. It so looks like a burger. There it is. How do they taste? I haven't had one. I haven't had one. Don't you think you should have one? Just to comment? No?

I could take that bullet, I guess. I feel like I should take one of the bullets. They actually put heme in it. There's another one. Oh, wait a minute. No, I did have one. I had one. My friend CK brought it to one of the shows that uh chapelle

and i were doing at stubs you know if it's one of these uh heme the magic ingredient the impossible burger it could be that one because um you can see the vats in the background and just um anyway i had one i had a burger that was in it and it just tasted like a bland burger. It was from some local place that makes some plant-based burgers and then some real burgers. So this is them getting excited

about these smash burgers that are made. Look at these guys. This is just like a real burger. Has anybody ever eaten them and go, what the fuck is this? This is not a burger. Why are you feeding me this, man? I mean, it's some great kitchen chemistry.

Yeah. Look at the fake blood, the beet juice. And then they have to get the flavor profile, right? But basically when you're eating it as a burger, then you're eating all the other stuff, the bun and there's the lettuce and the tomato and the pickle and maybe you got a little sauce on there or some ketchup. It's probably easier to get that as a reasonable facsimile. With all the other stuff.

That looks like beet juice. I drink beet juice. Should I drink beet juice? It releases nitric oxide. Like beets and beet juice are pretty legit. Really good like before training, right? Yeah. Yeah. But in limited amounts, right? Because isn't too much raw beets toxic? Yes. Yeah. The salicylates in it. Yeah. It could give you, make your kidneys fail. Too much raw beets. So every now and then have a beet juice.

I think more like an ounce or something. Yeah. It's funny that these people think that they're eating something healthy while they're eating this big ass bread bun. It's funny that these people think that they're eating something healthy while they're eating this big-ass bread bun. It's kind of funny, right? It's kind of funny, like the promotion of this as a health food, and then you see them eating this fat bread bun. They're like, hey.

So they can't really win on health. They've all given up their health claims. Have they? What was the initial health claims? You know, that it's healthier and everything. Looks good. I got to say that looks good. They'll say it's less saturated fat.

Doesn't it look good, Jamie? I mean, is the cheese healthy and all that shit too? I like cheese. I like cheese. It was probably vegan cheese too, unfortunately, right? Which is like, who knows what that is. It's a lot of whatever it is. That's a crazy burger. That's for a glutton who's also a vegan.

There's 80 stacks of patties on that sucker. But you so you're saying like their initial claims that have been. Yeah. So now when I go to their websites I don't see a lot of health claims. And I do know someone who's working on really taking those products and comparing them to meat like and breaking it out for vitamins and minerals because it's just not going to win um but now so their main claims are now um carbon less carbon right um and completely ignoring all the other ecosystem function pieces that monocropping, you know, but at least it's less.

The damaging aspects of it. Right. So like in all these, you know, United Nations Food Systems Summit, we all have to reduce our carbon. And everyone is so laser myopically focused on just carbon. And that, I think, really comes from these fake meat companies because that's the only thing that they have. Is that a valid claim that production of this fake meat is like pound for pound, a reduction of carbon emissions versus animal-based? No.

No. How so? Like even the grossest version of animal-based agriculture, factory farming? So because most of the greenhouse gases are coming from cattle, as part of their digestive system, it's methane gets emitted. And after 10 years, the methane gets broken into H2O, water, and CO2, carbon dioxide. And it goes back down into the plants, the plants release the O2 and photosynthesis, and then the carbon becomes the plant, the roots, and then it can actually store carbon in the ground. And then the cow eats the carbon. And so it's a cycle. And I actually have a graphic showing the methane cycle versus fossil fuels. So fossil fuels are mining ancient carbon from the Earth's core

and pumping it straight into the atmosphere with no... It could be part of a cycle, but it's going to be through plants and animals. Okay, so we're seeing there's a beautiful sort of chart, infographic chart that shows how the carbon from the atmosphere gets converted in the methane it's converted and so a lot of people think it's cow farts it's actually cow burps that are the big producer of methane right and then it shows the cow's carbon cycle meat and milk and how the poop and this like, to explain this without saying everything on the chart,

and even if I said it on the chart. I have all these charts at Sustainable Dish backslash Rogan, and people can just take them and share. Oh, okay, great. Sustainable Dish is your website? Yes. Okay. So the difference is when the cows are emitting this methane, we're thinking of it as just carbon.

Carbon equals bad. But the carbon that they're emitting and the way that there is a cycle, that they're eating this grass, they're belching. It goes into the air. It becomes H2O and carbon. And then the carbon goes back into the ground. It gets into the grass. They eat it again. And it goes on and on and on. And it's a normal part of what it means to be a ruminant animal

on a planet that has grass and you eat that grass. Yeah. And so in the US, in North America, we don't have more methane emitting animals than we did before we got rid of the bison and the elk and all the other natural ruminants that were already here. And so we don't have a net bigger amount of methane. We just have cows instead of bison and deer. And the crazy thing is, even if we did, it's still part of a cycle. To get to the point where the cow is emitting methane, you had to pull carbon dioxide out of the air into the plant, get sequestered in the plant until the animal eats it. But the cyclical part really,

and he had Stephen Coonan on recently. Like he talks, I think he talked a little bit about the differences between the cyclical, you know, pieces of this story versus just mining ancient carbon and releasing it. But the accounting really needs to be different because the danger that we get into, we discovered recently that shellfish produce huge amounts of methane, termites, rice patties, like there's all these biogenic methane sources

that then people start freaking out. And there was actually some scientists that were asking, should we eradicate shellfish so that we reduce their carbon footprint? And it's like they're suggesting that we reduce the amount of life on the planet so that we can protect life on the planet. Or in Sweden with the moose. Yeah, Sweden. The Green Party in Sweden wanted to kill all the moose in Sweden because they emit methane. What? Yeah. Really? Yeah.

Really? It didn't pass, but it was proposed. Oh, my God. That's so loony. This carbon tunnel vision where you get so focused on carbon release and you lose the bigger picture of all this other stuff that's going on. That is so loony. Kill all the moose because they emit carbon?

Right. Because they emit methane? Kill all the moose because they emit carbon? Right. Because they emit methane? That's what's driving these poor kids in New York to eat vegan school lunches. So who started all this nonsense? Is it Bill Gates? Bill, I'm a fan of your operating system.

I'm not all bad on you, buddy. I think you need better friends. I mean, we go into it a little bit how meat became a scapegoat. And meat is a very powerful, it's the most powerful food we eat. It's masculine. It's strength. It's bloody. Like, it represents a lot of things.

We used to have sacrificial animals um and meat is also seen as barbaric and impure and unnecessary and too masculine um and so there's this like deep weird cultural narrative that's really hard to tease out exactly where it all came from initially. I mean, we idealize vegetarian cultures as more pure than ours. And there's a really great example of that just showing, I have two graphs. One showing the ideal diets in the world and then one showing the global malnutrition. And it's interesting how the ideal diets are causing the malnutrition. But we're idealizing them because there's no harm and it's pure and it's all of that.

So I think. So how are the ideal diets causing malnutrition? Is it from a lack of. Animal source foods. 100 percent. But is it. Can they be like this has always been the big debate, right? Can you have a vegan diet and be completely healthy? Can you do it? Is there a right way to do it? Like we were talking about adding sustainable or adding amino acids,

you know, adding vitamins. Is there a way to do it? I think if someone is young and healthy already, probably was raised breastfed well and raised on enough good nutrition, there does appear to be some people that do okay on a vegan diet for a period of time. Is there a rough estimate of what percentage? I mean, no. Most vegans give it up. 85% give it up within three months. And it's usually a health event. So it's not ideal. I mean, just from a pure humans are omnivores and we need the nutrients in animal source foods.

I remember reading about this guy who was a vegan. He was a vegan for years and he finally decided to, he's having all these health problems and he ate a piece of salmon and he said it felt like he was having an orgasm. Yeah. Yeah. Like couldn't believe how good his body felt. I read that one. Like it's like.

Wow. It's sad. Like I hate being the I told you so guy. You know, like I hate, like I want people to be able, if you don't want any animals to die for your food, they're going to die anyway, unfortunately. But if you want that... Does anybody want any coffee or anything? I'm good. You're good? Because of that, you don't like... It's an uncomfortable discussion because

so many people are so ideologically connected to this idea that a vegan diet is better, more karma-free, healthier. And we're seeing – what we're seeing with younger people is that health isn't driving it. It's ideology that's driving it, right? And so they will suffer personally for their ideology. And so they're really clinging on to the carbon story and the ethics story. Well, a lot of them become these vegan influencers and then they get busted eating fish. Yeah.

Like then they get attacked by the community. I've seen that happen multiple times where people were like really suffering and they started eating meat and then people went crazy on them. Or there was that piece where if they're out drinking, they have a tendency to snack on like some burgers. Oh, that's a giant percentage of vegetarians will eat meat when they're drunk. Yeah. You know, when we set in to do the book, and this was a long time ago, we thought that we were going to tackle the ethical part of this thing first. So we cover the health, environmental, and ethical considerations of a meat-inclusive food system is kind of the big deal. But one of the things that became interesting,

Diana really kind of spearheaded the health side of the research, is that it becomes really hard to grow a human on a vegan diet. I mean, you look at moms and their nutrient needs and then passing that to the next generation, breast milk, raising kids. Like when you start trying to push this thing forward, it's really hard. People can do it, but it's. So you're talking about when a woman is pregnant? Yeah. Yeah. And there's been documented cases of pregnant.

Was it Finland? What's that? Was it Finland that they did the interview with the wealthy Finnish families that were vegan? And they had really pretty terrible nutrient deficiencies within these folks. And they're wealthy. They're educated. They're supplementing. And they weren't able to consistently pull this off. Yeah.

Yeah. We see babies. So B12 deficiency causes permanent brain damage, like irreversible, or it can. And B12 supplements, if vegans take the vegan version of the B12 supplement, it is actually an analog. It's not real B12. And your cells think it's B12. They'll absorb it, but then it actually blocks real B12. It can make your B12.

It blocks? Yeah, it's a B12 analog. It's not actually B12. It just pretends to be B12. But I thought you can get B12 from algae. It's not true B12. Really? Yeah.

12 from algae? It's not true B12. Really? Yeah. So when you're getting B12 from like blue green algae and spirulina and all that kind of stuff, like what are you? From my understanding, it's a B12 analog and not true B12. That's a, it's above my pay grade. I don't know. I think it's an isomer. I think it looks, it may be like the folate needs to be a right-hand shape and this stuff is a left-hand shape. And so it can plug in. And so is it partially effective? Is it – So there was a documented case of a vegan breastfeeding mother who was supplementing with B12 and her baby died from a B12 deficiency. And she was supplementing with B12 and her baby died from a B12 deficiency. And she was supplementing with the vegan form. This could be a rare issue with her?

Yeah, one person. But when we look at general populations, kids who don't have access to meat are much more likely to be stunted, to have delayed cognitive development, physical development, behavioral problems. And we only have one study that looked at kids with meat versus less meat. There's only one randomized control trial. Everything else is like, oh, this population ate meat and this one didn't, and these guys got more cancer. It must be the meat. You know, you can't, like, make policy on those observational studies. So this randomized control trial was in Kenya. The kids at school that got a meat snack did better than the milk group and the over-calories group.

And that's the only evidence that we have. And so there's no evidence at all that pulling meat away from children is going to result in healthier kids. Now, when you get a standard B12 supplement, like non-vegan, what is that from? I'm honestly not sure. I don't know if they extract it or if it's purely synthetic. If you get a synthetic version of B12, wouldn't that be sufficient for a vegan? Synthetic? If you get a synthetic version of B12, wouldn't that be sufficient for a vegan? I would think so, yeah.

I know that there's non-vegan forms of B12, and I don't know what it's from. Like actually, not analog, but actual B12. Mm-hmm. Okay. So when a person is doing that, what is going on in their body? Their body thinks it's B12, so it acts like it's got enough B12, and then it's just not getting it. Yeah. Chris Kresser writes about it. I'm going to pull up his study right now.

So like for – there are certain toxins that you can do competitive inhibition so that the toxin doesn't get into cells. So it's something that looks like the toxin. It binds to the receptor site. It can keep it out. But it can work both ways. So you can have that looks like the toxin. It binds to the receptor site. It can keep it out, but it can work both ways. So you can have different nutrients in our body. Like amino acids are like they call it L-lysine and L-DOPA and whatnot because they're left-hand shaped. If you were to put them together in 3D space, they could have an orientation that's either left-handed or right-handed. The right-handed amino acids, by and large, aren't biologically active.

And so there's a number of things like that within the nutrients that – I'm trying to think of another one, like DL-phenylalanine. Like people will use that for chronic pain. It's both the D and the L form. Normally, L-phenylalanine is the form that we use, but the D form of phenylalanine seems to have some interaction in the brain where it actually causes some pain reduction. But normally the D or the R form of those types of nutrients don't really work in our physiology. One of the things that you hear about a lot lately is the idea of bugs being a viable food source. is the idea of bugs being a viable food source. And that might be a way to get vegetarians or vegans to eat like a sort of a living protein source.

Because there's a lot of vegans that don't seem to give a fuck about bugs. It's really interesting. Like I lived next to an ashram when I lived in Colorado. And I was visiting this lady who lived at the ashram we were talking about something and she was spraying bug spray she was killing bugs and I was like hey what's the story supposed to be a Buddhist like you're not supposed to be killing bugs and she's like well there's's certain concessions that we have to make. We have bugs that get in our trash.

And I was like, oh my God. You're a murderer. This is mass scale slaughter of life forms. Yeah, if you look at we have to make this distinction. What is important? Is it life or is it life with fur?

Is it life that weighs more than a pound? Is it like, like people don't seem to get that upset if you kill a bug, right? You could kill a bug on you and not even dispose of the body and no one freaks out. Like if you swat a mosquito, you just basically kind of like move your hand a little bit and fuck you It's like small enough that we seem to be okay with that thing just Where's the body like where'd you put that? He's murdered a life form No one gives a shit, but if you stomped on a mouse in front of people they'd be like what the fuck is wrong with you Rob why'd you just stomp on that mouse? That's gross clean that like it gets to a certain level where we decide it's either cute enough or large enough.

And when it gets to things like a buffalo, that's large enough so that's too big to kill. But is that equivalent to an ant? Because that lady's out there spraying bugs. She's killing at least a life form. Is that one life

form that's an ant, this tiny little thing, is that as valuable to you as a big bison? And if not, why? Tell me why. And then especially if you look at how it's produced, right? Regenerative ag versus typical monocropping. Right. So if you're going to have one cow, that's almost 500 pounds of meat.

500 pounds of meat. And if that cow was raised in a way that increased total life underground and above ground and brought all these birds back and everything, that was a life that actually led to more life. Yeah. Well, if you buy corn, you're definitely responsible for some death. There's just no ifs, ands, or buts about it. If you have a monocrop field of corn, the only way they're going to keep those animals from eating the corn and to keep, you know, when they plow over the corn and they extract it, things are dying. There's just no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And then they'll say, but I didn't intend for it to die.

Eh, I don't know if that's good enough. Right. You know? I mean, if you're like shooting a gun into a crowd and you don't intend for anybody to die, but people die, I think you're still responsible for that death. Yeah, it doesn't hold up very well. You might not be looking where you're pointing the trigger, but I think that this idea of a zero-sum game, this idea of never losing any life, it's kind of crazy. And one thing that people that are proponents of plant-based diets

really hate is when you bring up plant intelligence. They really hate that. They really hate the idea that plants might not just have strategies to avoid predation, but might have real-time maneuvers that they do in terms of changing their chemicals, where it changes their flavor profile, emitting these defense chemicals, because they don't want to get eaten. And there's some sort of an intelligence that plants not just have, but they have with this symbiotic relationship to fungus under the ground and these this mushroom the mycelium and the root structures of these plants are sharing resources and they communicate and they

it's a really complex system that reeks of intelligence and we don't totally understand it but we have this thought in our head that if it doesn't move then it's okay to kill even though it's a life form but we've made this distinction that a plant life it it does not have the same feelings it doesn't cause pain it doesn't cause emotional harm it's not like us it's as removed from us as possible while still being a life form to the point where we could just eat it yeah in order to make a field for corn or soy also you have to annihilate whatever was there before like whatever forest like you're killing habitat and animals in order to make room for this monocrop to happen and then the pesticides and insecticides and all that stuff too yeah and just having that

kind of a structure where you have this one plant growing in this massive quantity is totally alien to anything that you ever find on Earth in terms of like – I mean maybe you'll find grass, like large grasslands. where the buffalo come over and eat the grass and they shit and then the bugs and the whole thing and the manure and it feeds itself. It makes sense. There's none of that going on with a monocrop soybean. Well, and it's really not a monocrop too. Like there can be dozens or hundreds of different plants in that grass ecosystem and they change throughout the season. Yeah. Good point. Yeah. And the amount of cropland that we have that can actually support that, that has healthy enough soil, rainfall or access to irrigation, is flat so that you can drive a tractor over. It's actually quite small. Now, bugs. Are bugs good for you?

For eating them? Yes. I mean, I've heard that they are. I don't think my opinion on crickets is that it's going to be a great animal feed for chickens. I don't think, or maybe a bar dare for dudes. A dare? Yeah. You're talking to the guy who used to host Fear Factor. Crickets are small potatoes compared to pig uteri.

I've eaten everything. I ate so much garbage when I was on that show. But I don't see them as like a regular. But they do have, they're a good source of B vitamins, right? I believe they're B12 rich. Like you could eat like crickets and they're, I believe they're a good source. Probably because they're animals. Grasshoppers.

Yeah. And, you know, it's a little bit even like the cultured meat though is that you still need an input to feed those critters. And I think that they could and probably should play some sort of a significant role going forward. But what is it that we're going to allocate to those critters?

Right, to grow them. What are you going to feed them with and where are you going to grow them and what kind of, how much land do you need to grow crickets? Also, cricket farms are disgusting. They are pretty nasty. Yeah, to grow them. What are you going to feed them with and where are you going to grow them and what kind of – how much land do you need to grow crickets? Also, cricket farms are disgusting. They are pretty nasty. Oh, yeah.

Why? Any picture of a cricket farm, they're like these cardboard tenement cities. Oh, I've never seen it. There's a lot of cricket poop. Yeah. And if you don't – so my daughters got really geeked out because they want to figure out some – Is this a cricket farm? These are cricket farms.

Cricket farm. So if you don't manage them, the crickets become cannibals and they eat each other. Oh, Jesus. Of course they do. Little monsters. Can you show me a video of a cricket farm? I want to see what they look like. So when I was in Mexico, we checked into this hotel and they had a bowl of cooked crickets.

And it's like a normal snack. And my girls were like, yeah, I'm not eating that. I was like, I'll eat it. I got one of my daughters to eat it. She ate a cricket. We used to get a cricket protein bar and my girls liked it. They're kind of salty. So what do you have to do to keep them from eating each other?

Just make sure they have a lot of food? Apparently it hits some population threshold, and then they'll just start killing each other. Oh, God. Nature has a built-in safe mechanism to make sure. So that's them all ground up. What is that, like a cricket cheesecake? It looks like a carrot cake. Yeah, a carrot cake, rather.

Oh, look at her. She's bold. She sticks her tongue out with the cricket on it. So these are like different kinds of cricket proteins that they've turned these things into and cricket snacks. So look at this poor guy. Why has he got a mask on? Is it because of the pandemic or just chicken smell? Probably chicken.

It's hard to tell, right? These days, like, why are they wearing masks? Is it because of the pandemic or is it because this is what they do when they work around? So these guys are working. So the chitin, the shells, like you can get an allergy to it, kind of like a shellfish allergy. So they're probably wearing it for that. Isn't it very closely related to shellfish? Yeah, I mean, if you have a shellfish allergy, you can't eat that.

Oh, I can speak to this. Because when we were on Fear Factor, we found out that if you have a shellfish allergy, you are also allergic to roaches. Yeah. We found that out by feeding people roaches. Oh, that's a nice way to find it out. Their throat seized up and the guy had to leave the show. Yeah. Yeah.

Sorry, dude. Crickets are anthropods like shrimp, crabs, and lobsters. It means they contain some of the same protein. So individuals who are allergic to shellfish may develop an allergy to crickets. Yeah, it would have been nice if the people that were running fear factor fucking asked those folks but hey it's a long time ago so um are they what's the protein and the nutrient profile of a cricket is it similar to an animal i think they're really good you know like pound per pound their conversion of feed into a basically nutrient upcycling i think is really good. You know, like pound per pound, their conversion of feed into basically nutrient upcycling,

I think is really good. It's just... Look at this. Crickets are a good source of vitamins, minerals, and fiber. In addition to protein, crickets are high in many other nutrients, including fat, calcium, potassium, zinc, magnesium, copper, folate, biotin, panthotic... How do you say that? Panathetic.

Panathetic acid and iron. One study found that the iron content of crickets was 180% higher than that of beef. But you'd have to eat a four-ounce block of cricket. You wouldn't be doing that if you were hungry? What if they're good? What if they taste good? If you have the right dipping sauce. If it's a shellfish thing, right?

Like, shellfish tastes good. Right. Everybody loves lobster, right? I mean, isn't there shellfish tastes good. Right. Everybody loves lobster, right? If they take, I mean, isn't there a way? Yeah. And, you know, I think that this is at least some of the questions that we need to ask. Like right now, 50% of the food that we produce globally isn't eaten. It basically gets landfilled. And so we could, you know, when people start asking about scalability, at a minimum, we should be better about what we do with the food that we have.

I forget the name of the outfit, but some folks in New Mexico, they have a pork operation and they've made relationships with the local grocery stores and restaurants. And basically their food that doesn't get eaten, expired food, they send it to the pigs. They autoclave it. They basically sterilize it and then they feed it to these animals. And this would have otherwise just gone into a landfill. And we could do this like everywhere. And this is part of the problem that we have is because of zoning and because of cultural things, like we could produce a lot more food in kind of a regional fashion and then be much more efficient with it. We could cut like 50% of our food is wasted right now. So what if we took 10%?

Is that just nationwide? It's kind of a global number, yeah. So what if 10% of that got allocated into cricket and mealworm and different things and we use those to produce a possibly vegan acceptable protein source or it gets used to feed the chicken so that they – there's just a lot of inefficiency there but there's also a lot of like cultural change that needs to happen to make some

of those things more acceptable. This is sort of unrelated but there was a guy who ate bad Chinese food. It was like leftover Chinese food. He had to get amputated. Yeah. His body went septic. He had to get his legs amputated, his feet amputated. The photos are absolutely horrific.

It was just some leftover food that apparently it was sitting out, maybe, something. And bacteria got in it. And he ate it. And within hours afterwards, his body was going septic. He has these lesions all over his body wait till you see this This is so crazy. I've never seen anything like this from eating food I thought if you ate bad food you just get diarrhea and you throw up and you definitely Mean I've had food poisoning. I'm sure you guys have as well right? It's gross

It's it makes you feel terrible like botulism. Did he get botulism from I can't I don't know You find it Was it like botulism? Did he get botulism from it? I can't. I don't know. Do you find it? There's a lot of stories. I was trying to find actual pictures. The New York Post one is the best because they have all the juicy photos. Because you know how the New York Post does it. Classy. Yeah.

It's classy as it gets. And like it's so crazy. Oh, no. This isn't the same one. This is – no. It's Chinese food. It's very recent. I know, but the New York Post didn't come up that way.

Just Chinese food. Google Chinese food. Oh, there's noodles. Yeah, but just Google leftover Chinese. It's a new story, bro. It's like leftover Chinese food. All of these stories are that story. It's just not the New York Post one. Oh, why were they showing a spaghetti bowl then?

That particular one went to the wrong one I don't know it's like I mean I know I have it on my phone because I sent it to somebody and didn't the New York Post one didn't pop up give me a different story one if they they took it down it's too gnarly yeah I have specifically New York Post, but it's not. All right, just try to find one. There is one. But that's not the correct one. Well, try the one right there.

Try that one. And see if it has the images. None of the other ones are having the images is the problem. I'm kind of happy about that. I was doing a lot of clicking really fast, and I wasn't finding anything with the images. I'm good. I can go to images on here.

Yeah, let's go to images images i'm sure it'll come up that's just noodles they're just showing noodles that's unfortunate all right give me a second i found it and it it was uh it was horrific this guy had like his feet were like a gross multi-colored thing and it's all of his skin and it was just from it going septic from bad food. How bad did that smell when he ate it? It might not have smelled bad. Haven't you had food poisoning? It didn't smell bad at all?

Yeah, it's true, but I haven't had amputations from it. So that's crazy. Yeah, it is. That's exactly it. So these are the photographs on admission to the hospital. Patient had a rapidly evolving, diffuse, reticular, purplish rash on the face, not shown, chest and abdomen, arms and legs. So his whole body was covered in these horrible purple lesions and barely made it.

I mean, it's really, really rough when you see it. It's horrible. And so let's go to the top of it so we can figure out what happened. Okay, it says, The patient had been well until 20 hours before this admission. This is crazy. When diffuse abdominal pain and nausea developed after he ate rice, chicken, and low-main leftovers from a restaurant meal,

multiple episodes of emesis. Is that the word? Throwing up. Emesis occurred with vomitus that was either, what are they trying to do to me here? Bilious or red brown. The abdominal pain and vomiting were followed by the development of chills, generalized weakness, progressively worsening diffuse myalgiasist my my is that right myelogist chest pain shortness of breath headache neck stiffness and blurry vision five hours before this admission

purplish discoloration of the skin developed and a friend took the patient to the emergency department of another hospital for evaluation upon arrival the emergency department of the hospital 4.5 hours before this admission, the patient reported diffuse myeloma scale of 8 to 10, indicating most severe pain. On examination, he appeared pale, anxious, and moderately distressed. He answered questions appropriately and was oriented to person, place, time, and situation. Okay, blood specimens were obtained, complete culture content, approximately 40 minutes after the patient's arrival.

During 30 minutes, tachyphena worsened and labored breathing, hypoxema, psionesis. This is a lot of fucking medical terminology here. Supplemental oxygen was administered. So he was just like fading fast, resulting in oxygen saturation of 83%. And oxygen was administered through a high-flow nasal cannula at the rate of 40 liters per minute. Wow. So this is a medical thing. This is a medical journal that's talking about this.

It never really says. They did cultures on it, but it didn't say what he came back with. He smoked two packs of cigarettes weekly. That not a lot smoked marijuana daily holla and drank two alcoholic beverages approximately two times per week wow yeah okay crazy okay no more chinese food well it's not that i think i read of another friend ate it too but but he didn't get as sick. He just had like a little stomachache, and this kid went the other way with it. Oh, wow. I think I read that.

It's not saying that in here, I don't think, but I read it initially. That dude's got bragging rights. That's all he's got left. They cut everything else off. No, the other guy. The guy that didn't get cut off. Right. The guy that also ate it but didn't really get sick.

Right. You know, when he's wheeling his friend guy that also ate it but didn't really get sick. Right. You know, when he's wheeling his friend around. Remember, I ate the same food, bro. Just tougher. Horrible. Horrible joke. So do you think that there is a future where people can have this sort of, this philosophy of having a plant-based diet is to do the least amount of harm. Now, if you had some sort of an organic back garden diet

and you lived off of your garden, that's probably the most karma-free, right? If you just want to eat plant-based foods and then you have crickets for your protein. I mean, it depends on where you live because in most of the country, you can't grow year-round, so it gets tricky and i think if we're talking about least harm and one of the things like rob was starting to say with you know everyone likes to lead with these ethics arguments i want to do least harm and so we were going to lead the book with ethics but my thinking was that you have to fully understand the nutritional implications of like pulling meat away from people who really need it and then you have to understand the environmental argument

of like what monocrop agriculture is and all that kind of stuff to then understand the ethical to have like an intelligent ethical debate you can't just say it's wrong okay so when we're talking about nutrients and we were talking about the Impossible Burger and the Beyond Burger and stuff like that, so they don't really claim that it's better for you nutritionally anymore. Not so much. I mean, there's new crazy studies coming out saying that you should limit your red meat to zero if you want to live. But those aren't, this is going to get reversed. Those are going to be exhausting though because you're going to have to talk to somebody that

have read those studies. They're going to stick in your face. Yeah. I have a friend who's overweight who's a vegan and he'll just like to claim that I'm going to have a heart attack. I'm like, bro, look at you. This is so crazy. You can't be healthy.

Whatever you're eating is not good. And I think for a healthy 25-year-old athlete or whatever, if they want to be vegan, that's fine. As a mom and a dietician, I have a big problem with disadvantaged kids, meat being pulled away from them as policy for virtue signaling. For sure. But as an athlete, when an athlete is a young, healthy athlete and they're eating a vegan diet, do you think they're leaving something on the table in terms of like the nutrition that they could be getting and the performance that they could be getting? Totally. It seems like it.

It seems like it, right? Like I don't – I'm not aware of any top of the food chain LeBron James type people that are vegans. You know, like when you look at an elite athlete, you know, Canelo Alvarez, like someone's at the very top of their game. You know, I don't really see any of them that I'm aware of that are vegans. It doesn't mean it's not possible. But, I mean, I don't know of any who's the best in their field that's a vegan. Do you know of any? Are there any soccer players that are elite?

On the hand, I don't. And, I mean, there's always this piece too of could they have been better? You know, maybe they are better being vegan. Or maybe they could have been better with kind of a mixed diet. You know, it's always a tough one. It does seem like, you know, like the Game Changers movie, like all the athletes, they kind of detailed in that thing. Everybody went retrograde after they went vegan. Like the strongman guy got injured a bunch and kind of retired. everybody went retrograde after they went vegan.

Like the strongman guy got injured a bunch and kind of retired. Like everybody that they had in there kind of – The strongman guy is a tough case because that guy is chock full of steroids. There's just no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I mean that's a steroided up business. Unless they're testing people on a regular basis, and I'm sure there's some that do get tested, when you're dealing with those guys that are just enormous human beings that are lifting the most amount of weight possible, a lot of those guys are on the juice.

Right. And that can paper over a lot of other stuff. Yeah. It's hard to say, like, what's really going on then. Right. Well, and also with these athletes, they're genetically gifted, period. Right? Well, and also with these athletes, they're genetically gifted, period.

Right. Like they can probably get away with eating a lot of fast food and be pretty a lot healthier than me, you know. So I think, you know, when you're already starting with like the ideal specimen of human. or meat for six months, it may not have the same impact as somebody who has already damaged guts or an autoimmune disease or is an older person or is a developing kid who needs, you know, to grow. There's been some football players that went vegan, right? There were like elite football players. But didn't one of them just kept getting injured after he went vegan? Yeah. Yeah.

Why would you get it? Is it lack of protein, you think? I think just globally you are consuming less nutrients, and definitely the protein piece is a big deal. And then if you aren't recovering the same way, do you track heart rate variability? Do you ever? I do when I wear that whoop strap.

Yep, yep, yep. So what's a cool insight with HRV is that if you're sleeping well and your total stress load, your allostatic load is low comparatively, then you've got more resources to put into recovery. But if you're eating a diet, whether it's junk food or what have you, that is causing some degree of stress that is not providing the fundamental building blocks, then more energy has to be allocated to get you back to square one again. So this is where like optimizing sleep and nutrition and gut health and all these things really is something that if you make money from your physicality, like it behooves one to do that because you want to put every bit of recovery, you know, juice into that process because it gets you back in. You can train harder, train more often.

So that's where I could see like the soft tissue injuries and stuff like that starting to be a problem. But it's kind of guesswork when a football player gets injured because it's kind of an injury sport. It's a sport. Yeah. You'd be really cherry picking if you said that this is why he got injured. Right. So back to this burger thing. So the burger has soybean oil, pea protein, beet juice, and what else is in there?

I think those are the main. And then what kind of malarkey are they doing to glue it all together? I mean, we saw, again, like pretty impressive stuff just with what the person did in the kitchen making the uh the ham well that was that looked nasty honestly but it looked like ham at the end you know yeah but the burger looked pretty damn good yeah with the cheese right on the top of it it was looking all greasy yeah that looked pretty good so it's soy protein concentrate coconut oil sunflower oil is good for you, right? Isn't that good for you? Yeah. Okay. So there's something good for you. Ingredient

number two is good for you. Sunflower oil, potato protein. Is that good? I don't eat, you need to eat 10 potatoes to get the protein that you can get in four ounces of beef. And just really quick on that, what do you need to do? So if they're marketing this as like a sustainability feature, how much energy goes into raising a potato, you know, a bunch of potatoes? Then you process them, extract the protein out so it can be put into that. Right. This is where, you know, like what they call a life cycle analysis and they did do that between like white oak pastures and and the impossible burger and white oak pastures ended up having a lower carbon footprint and again that's not the whole

story but there's other pieces to it i'm sorry white oak pastures in comparison to beyond burger and impossible burger so this this compared to their factories? Their burger, the process of creating. From the ground? Yeah, a life cycle is like a cradle to grave study where it's the whole. So they're following all the plants that can be converted into seed oils and all the jazz. I mean, there's probably limitations on how far back in the supply. I mean, there's probably limitations on how far back in the supply.

I know that they didn't go into some of the mined minerals that they need for, you know, all the vitamins and minerals. You know, like they didn't go that far, but pretty far. Okay. And what was the result? The white oak pastures ended up being net carbon negative. So it's pulling more out of the environment than what it's putting in throughout their whole process. And this includes the composting and the inclusion of chicken and pork. Like it's the whole operation.

Now, is this pound for pound? Like how do they do this? I believe so. It was literally like a pound per pound comparison. So a pound for pound from a regenerative farm, pound-for-pound for beef and chicken and whatever they grow, whatever animal-based protein versus this plant-based stuff that there's more carbon being emitted from the plant-based stuff and the production of it, and it's worse for the environment. Yeah, and funny, it was kind of weird, but I think it was literally the same number but the opposite direction.

it was kind of weird but I think it was literally the same number but the opposite direction it was like you had to eat one white oak pastures burger to nullify the carbon footprint of one impossible burger like it was like 4.6 or something like that yeah 3.5 or something like that it's a grass fed beef farm in Georgia

so in terms of harm to the environment that's at least from a regenerative farm, a regenerative farm like white oak pastures. And how do white oak pastures run their thing? They run it like polyphase farms. Darrington. Yeah. Now, we were talking earlier about sustainability, the ability or scalability, rather, the ability to do that for the entire country.

Is that really possible? Yeah. So I consulted some of the top experts in this area when I wrote the book, and we went through the numbers. And if we look at the underutilized grassland that we already have, so there's a lot of BLM land or forest service land that's just not being grazed. There's farmers being paid through the

CRP program to actually leave their fields fallow. So if we look at regenerative agriculture as actually being way more efficient than typical grazing, and I put that at 30% better, but most farmers will tell you. I have four times more animals on my property because my soil is so fertile and the grass is so healthy. So I did go through the numbers for the U.S. and it does look like we have the land to finish. Because remember, all cattle start on grass. So it's really just those last three months that we're looking to finish. Because remember, all cattle start on grass. So it's really just those last three months that we're looking to finish. We're looking to take them. It takes longer, but it's the three months that would be in a feedlot to then finish them on grass.

But to finish them on grass? It would take longer than three months, but we're not looking at the entire life of the cow is not spent in a feedlot. Okay. But when you're a feedlot. Okay. But when you're saying feedlot, are they feeding them hay? Are they feeding them grass? Are they feeding them grain? So at a feedlot, they're getting like a ration of corn, of mashed up corn stalks from the ethanol industry.

So they're getting like food scraps that we can't. This is the fat in the mouth. But what about pure grass fed, which is supposed to be supposed to be the most healthy, correct? Is that debatable? Yeah, it is. Actually, this is one of the things that gets us in a lot of trouble. Like we started with a bunch of assumptions. And one of the assumptions was that pastured meat is nutritionally superior to conventional meat. And we – I mean we turned over every study that you could find in this thing. And what you find is that pastured meat has a little bit more omega-3s than conventional meat. But if you're looking at just the omega-3s, you need to eat like eight pounds of meat to get as much omega-3s as what you get out of like three ounces of salmon.

So it's not the place to look for that. And pastured dairy is far more nutritious than conventional dairy. Wild-caught seafood is far more nutritious. Eggs. Eggs are far, far more nutritious. But it's this weird thing. Like it would have been so nice if just pastured meat was like nutritionally superior. We could have like had this, you know, soup to nut story on this thing.

We even hired an independent researcher, a person with a PhD in nutritional biochemistry. And we just said, hey, do a compare and contrast of conventional meat and grass-fed meat. We want to know the nutritional profile. We didn't give this person any of our information. And they arrived at exactly the same thing. But we have people really angry at us. But at the end of the day, the crazy thing is even when you're putting things like corn stalks and weird things like that into cows, they make – they're so good at upcycling nutrients that meat is just – ruminant meat is super, super nutritious. And I think that the ethical argument for grass finishing is strong.

I think the environmental argument is strong. There may be a case for like bioaccumulation, like things like glyphosate and stuff like that, but that's separate from it. And I don't think it's as compelling a thing as what most people would think, but just nutritionally, like vitamins, minerals, you know, proteins, essential fats, essential amino acids, there's just not that big of a difference. Why does it look so different? Because it's a darker red meat. It's leaner. It's definitely leaner.

So finishing on corn marbleizes it. So that's the only difference in terms of the color? It's just a lean thing? Yeah. Because I was assuming it was like a nutrient density thing. Well, it's kind of nutrient dense because it's more of the actual meat versus fat. For sure. But there is a benefit to the fat from meat as well. Yeah, fat's a nutrient too. So there's probably some benefit to a fatty piece of meat that is grain finished. Yeah. I mean,

it has more calories, so it just depends on what your goals are, but it's not bad. So it's not bad. Okay. So the omega-3s is the only big issue, but you really should get that from salmon anyway. Yeah. I mean, it's like saying an organic carrot has three times the protein. No one is eating carrots for protein. Right. Got it. Got it. So if we were doing that and you're trying to feed the entire country, how much more of an impact does the methane from the cows burping, how much more of an impact is it in terms of the amount of animals that you have to move around in terms of transportation and the fossil fuels that are emitted through that. So ironically, I'm going to Brazil next month to speak at a cattle conference. And they are actually having to go more towards feedlots because they're getting so much pressure to reduce their carbon emissions. And so when you finish a cow on a feedlot, it's faster. And so the cow is not alive as long. And so they're emitting less methane.

The cow is not alive as long. And so they're emitting less methane. So it's actually this one company, it's actually they're being pressured to go the feedlot route. And this is that carbon tunnel vision where they're missing all the other externalities that could be beneficial around the pasture process. Like you can reverse desertification. The ground holds more water. It doesn't create as much of a heat footprint, you get carbon sequestration, you have all the other ecosystem benefits. But this is where like this kind of neurotic focus on just greenhouse gas emissions, absent this bigger picture, you start making dumb decisions. And we're making decisions at a global

food policy level that are potentially going to be really injurious. Like what they're doing in that process then, and I think they're looking just at the emissions that are coming from the animals in that case, but then what about all of the infrastructure that's necessary to get the grains to feed to the animals and what's going on with that? And I think when we do these full life cycle analyses like what we do with the White Oaks farms, usually the pasture process wins, but you have to be willing to accept that that is part, all that greenhouse gas emissions is part of a cycle. That stuff that's in the atmosphere today is going to be part of a plant at some point

and then part of an animal and on and on. part of a plant at some point and, you know, then part of an animal and on and on. Hmm. Now, when you're talking about the amount of cows that you would need to feed the entire country, like what kind of a quantity of meat are we talking about per capita or per person? So right now, Americans eat about two ounces of beef per person per day and about twice that much chicken. So we're really not eating like too much meat. Everyone thinks that Americans are sitting down to a tomahawk steak every night and it's just not true. You know, we're going to get our protein from different sources. So I'm not saying we all need to be carnivores and you know then you have this other dilemma of the carrying capacity of earth for humans which gets really

dicey when you even start talking about that so we we don't talk about that but it you know do you want healthy humans or do you want human feed to just have the largest number of humans possible? Right, right. So two ounces of beef a day does not sound like a lot. No. But if you want people specifically to live on this diet like I'm living on, like if this is something that people adopt, now you're talking about many times more. Is that sustainable?

That seems like no. I don't know. Like I don't know where that carrying capacity pops in and I don't know. It's interesting, you know, how much of that could be supplemented with seafood? How much of that gets like if we start integrating like the pork and the chicken and making that all biodynamic and not as as impactful how much of that could be offloaded into like insect proteins but if everybody ate like sean baker we'd be fucked probably would be some problems probably be some problems well i mean also we're exporting all the organ meats to other countries we're not doing a very good job of of

eating those and there's a there's a flip side to this is that as a culture, we're super unhealthy. So like there was a congressional budget office study back in like 2005 that was suggesting that by like 2030, 2035, the U.S. is bankrupt from diabesity-related costs. Like we'll have more costs dealing with diabetes than what we have GDP. And I don't know what COVID has done to that whole projection and whatnot. Just diabetes? Just diabetes alone. And this isn't even looking at like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and all these other metabolically driven diseases. And if there's one thing that, although I guess it's still controversial, but there's one thing that there's at least a little bit of synergy out in the world.

People like Lane Norton and whatnot kind of sign off on this if people under eat protein they tend to overeat calories beyond that and so whether you eat higher carb or lower carb if people eat adequate protein they tend to not overeat the other stuff if you under eat protein then you tend to overeat all the other things. And this is probably the, the big driver of, of this illness. So what do we do about addressing the health and healthcare issue in all this? You know, like in some ways we can't not, we can't afford not to address this in some effective way because we have to figure out like a, a global public health food policy that's going to allow people to spontaneously reduce calorie intake or we end up with this kind

of global control of the food system and you go to buy meat and it's, you know, it's like a social credit score thing. It's like, sorry, comrade, you've already got your protein allowance for the month. And then I looked into also the, the carbon footprint of diabetes. Oh yeah. So you've got medical tubing and amputations. You've got dialysis, all the plastics involved in dialysis. I mean,

so that shouldn't that be factored into junk food? You know, if we're, if we're complaining about like methane from, I guess it has to be, if that many people are going to bankrupt the country from diabetes. Right. That's real. I had no idea that, I thought diabetes was fairly rare. Okay, here. The staggering cost of diabetes. 2.3 times greater health care costs for Americans with diabetes. $327 billion

the annual annual cost of diagnosed diabetes in America. More than 34 million Americans have diabetes. Holy shit. And that's just diagnosed right because there's so many more people on their way. More than 88 million have pre-diabetes. Oh, there we go. Shoo. So you're almost at half the population that's either pre or diabetic. That is bananas. It's a third, essentially. But that's still a lot of fucking people.

One in three is either diabetic or pre-diabetic. That's nuts. When did we found out that the obesity rate in America was like 40 percent. Right. Wasn't it something like that. If you add overweight and obese it's 70 percent. 70 percent. Wow.

See that is something that you know obviously this is anecdotal but you know Jordan Peterson was one of the first guys that I knew that got on that carnivore diet, and he lost 40-something pounds. He looks amazing. And it's just like he's completely slim and lean, and he just eats nothing but steak. There's something about eating meat where you get satisfied easier. When I'm eating meat by itself, I'll eat a steak and I'm fully satisfied. But if you give me a steak and pasta, I will eat that steak and then I'll eat the shit out of that pasta. And somehow or another, I'm still hungry.

Right. I keep digging in there. Where if it was steak, if it was another steak there, I'd stop and I'd put it in the fridge. But I can't stop eating when it's pasta or bread. Yeah, that buffet effect is interesting where if we get more food options, we will tend to eat more things. When I was on the show last time, we looked at Adam Rickman, Man vs. Food, and he did this kitchen sink Sunday challenge. I think we watched this thing, but he had to eat an eight-pound ice cream Sunday. And he's motoring through this thing. He gets maybe 15 minutes into it. And then he just starts visibly turning green and like starts gagging and he's not going to make it. And he asked the

waitress in this place to get him a giant plate of salty, crunchy French fries. And he would eat a couple of French fries and then a little bit of ice cream, a little bit of French fries. But because he was able to go back and forth and change the palate experience, his brain didn't tell him to stop. So the only way he would have thrown up, he would have failed eating that ice cream sundae without eating like 2,000 calories of French fries, which is just crazy. It's weird. Weird tricks you have to play in your brain. But there he is. Look at him.

He looks so much different now since he doesn't do that show anymore. He's all like normal sized. Right. That guy must have been killing himself. I mean, just killing himself doing that show. Eight pounds of ice cream is absolutely nuts. That is so bad for you. And it's orange sherbet at the bottom.

I mean, good God. Look at him though. It's good right now. He's getting after it. Anyway. So your body has this weird thing. If you just eat protein, like when I eat steak and eggs in the morning, I'm very satisfied. Yeah.

So we're in this horrible place where people are saying, but it's unsustainable. Yes. And so that's why we— I think we proved it is. Well, so you have to start with what is the ideal diet and how can we produce that in a sustainable way? But all the other groups are saying, look at our broken ag system. What's the most sustainable food and how can we convert that into human feed? Well, they're not even just doing that.

It seems like they're playing funny games with the numbers. Like they're not being honest about the environmental impact. They're not being honest about the nutritional footprint. They're not being honest about any of these things. They just want this ideology promoted, which is that meat is bad for the environment. Meat is bad for the environment. I mean, I see that everywhere.

And then people say it on Twitter. They say it's like it's just this like cold statement. They just say meat is bad for the environment. Meat is bad for the environment. I mean, I see that everywhere. And then people say it on Twitter. They say it's like, it's just this like cold statement. They just say meat is bad for the environment. Like what kind of meat? Like what are you saying? In what way? Like, yeah, is, are you saying like those pig farms where they leave lakes of sewage? Yup.

I'm with you. That's bad for the environment. When they have these horrific factory farm conditions where they're all packed in next to each other and they shit through the bottom of their cage because it's a grate and it goes into this this big swampy sort of lake of sewage yeah that's terrible but if you're talking about like what joel salatin does no my thing is though you're not going to get everybody to listen right when haven't had anybody listen like like and i used to work at nbr i have friends there they wouldn't touch this story yeah i know people at new york times they wouldn't well netflix was super interested in her in the film

and got like right to the 11th hour 59th minute and, and then somebody was like, oh, shit. Like, we can't sign off on this. Meanwhile, they have the most wacky documentaries that are so full of shit on so many different things. Right. On UFOs and Bigfoot and fucking, you know, the origins of currency. Netflix has got some wacky shit. So does iTunes. I went to the other day. I was at home.

I had a rare day off. So I just went through the documentary section of iTunes for a goof or Apple TV, and I was like, what kind of fucking horse shit are you people selling? And you won't sell this? What I was going to say, though, is there's certain people that are just headline readers, and that is a headline reader statement that meat is bad for the environment this is a thing it's it aligns so perfectly with so many other narratives today too so it's just also that are just headlines yeah you know and there's this really weird tendency to ignore

facts that are contrary to what you've already espoused and believed in and this is one of them and once you've already said publicly multiple times meat is bad for the environment an animal-based diet is bad plant-based diets are the only diet that reverses heart disease they like to say that one yeah so like i'm in a suburb outside of Boston. Everyone's environmentally conscious, right? They're educated. It's a mess. Poor people. Of course they don't eat meat.

None of them eat meat. They're all dying. Or they're cutting down or they're flexitarian. They're all exhausted. Yeah. Yeah, they all look like shit. That's what's weird. I mean, obviously not some of them. Yeah. Yeah. They all look like shit. That's what's weird. I mean, obviously not some of them.

Some look great. You're going to run into that vegan. It's all jacked. It's like, bro, I'm a vegan. I'm fucking healthy as shit. Okay. Touche. You're one of the rare ones.

You're a fucking unicorn, pal. But it is tough because it's such an airtight, beautiful story. You know, if you don't eat meat, you'll live forever. You'll be skinny. You'll be ethically superior. You're saving the planet. I mean, sign me up. It sounds great.

The ethically superior part. People love that one. People love that one. Because of the social media. Social media is just, it's such a great place to espouse your virtue. Right. You know, that if you can put that little plant thing next to your bio and then put your pronouns underneath that. You're off and running.

Nice. You've got a solid bio there. Jesse, we don't even have like a solid end point other than mainly we make the recommendation that as to the greatest degree possible, decentralize the food production system. And depending on where we – When you say that, what do you mean by that? So people in Nebraska should probably be doing things different than people even in Texas. And I'm not in that crew where people get all bent out of shape that like an avocado is going from Mexico to Canada during the winter. Like, I don't care about that. I do think that more of our food should probably be eaten locally. But if we produce more food locally,

we have much more efficiencies generally. And then a lot of these environmental problems, like the lakes of like steaming pig shit and stuff like that should just be worked back into the farm. We shouldn't be poisoning waterways with this stuff. They shouldn't be growing pigs that way. The pigs should be integrated into the whole system the way that we did about 100 years ago. But don't you need a vast swath of land to accomplish something like that? Not necessarily because you don't need to always do mega scale. And this is some of the stuff that we're going to have to come to terms with. Also, so like in the

UK, there was an experiment where they put in hedgerows around the regular, you know, conventional farms that they had, but the hedgerows allowed for these predatory birds and insects to have somewhere to hang out. And then they would get in and eat the bugs that would cause problems with the weed or the corn or whatever. So there was a decrease in the total amount of harvest that they had because some of the farm was allocated these hedgerows. But then the amount of insecticides and herbicides and whatnot that they had to use were dramatically decreased.

So we have to start putting what our values are. Markets are really good at optimizing things, but we're not telling... Currently, what we've asked it to optimize is make as much cheap food as possible. And we've crushed that. We've crushed it. I think it was 2006, 2007 became the first year, somewhere around there, that more humans started dying from overeating than undereating and infectious disease. Like chronic disease outstripped infectious disease and lack of food as the main cause of death. Really? That's interesting. 2007. Somewhere around that point. That's the tipping point.

It's kind of a tipping point, but it's a really important point in history. But we crushed that imperative. We produce huge amounts of calories, but now it's to the point that people are so sick that we're crippling our healthcare system and people are unhappy. What I was getting at in terms of sustainability is that if you have a pig farm that is a factory farm, pig farm, you're raising thousands of pigs on a relatively small footprint. What you need is more smaller farms with some pigs and you need not five corporations to own the supply chain. But this is a bigger problem.

What I'm saying is if you run a pig farm and you only have X amount of acres and you have thousands of pigs on that pig farm, that's the only way you're going to be able to raise the same amount of pigs on that farm. You're going to have to bring in food to them. You have to keep them contained. You fatten them up and then you kill them and you have this giant lake of their feces. This is what is the only thing that you kind you can do to have that kind of yield on a small piece of land, relatively small. If you have 100 acres and you have 10,000 pigs

in these fucking containment facilities, you're not going to recreate that on 100 acres with the Joel Salatin method, correct? If you're going to do regenerative farming, you're going to need some land. You're going to need some land, but you're also going to need to have a different supply chain. You're going to need to sell directly to consumers and not meat as a commodity. But what about meat as a commodity to a place like Burger King or Jack in the Box or what have you? They still do that. I mean, that still even happens.

Joel sells to Chipotle. Yeah. Yeah. Chipotle is a pretty good source. Chipotle has – I mean, when you get like a good beef burrito there or a beef bowl, it's pretty damn good. I mean, in a scenario like that, then I don't know how Joel handles his, but if you're selling to McDonald's, then McDonald's gets its meat from more regional source versus like this consolidated source the way that happens now. Do you anticipate a time where they'll be able to – I mean I know they are doing factory cloned meat now. Do you think that that will be scalable?

No. Like the short answer is no because it's so expensive to do it. But for now, it used to be really expensive to get a cell phone. Now they're fairly cheap. It's true, and I'm a huge fan of Moore's Law. It's a really good point. But the thing that kind of gets missed in this is that it's so expensive to run a lab. Like I actually did tissue culture.

And you have to take all the products of industrial farming, pull that out, process it. that out, process it, and then I've got protein and carbs and fat in these jars that I put into this vat and then inoculate it with meat cells. And I have to keep it the right temperature, the right humidity. I have to keep pathogens off of it. So I've got to use antibiotics. There's actually been a couple of good business pieces like Forbes and stuff like that looking at these things and some smart systems engineers looking at this. And they're like, there's just no way you're going to scale this.

And people just, they don't realize like the grasslands in the United States or even in like Eurasia and whatnot, they're just enormous. And we have these huge tracts of land, sunlight, grass, animals. It's a really efficient system versus, again, trying to pull that all under a roof like this and try to grow meat at scale. If you're on like a spaceship or something, you have a closed-loop deal, I could see something like that working. But as long as we have the sun and grasslands and whatnot,

there's still a really efficient piece of that. Now, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but as marijuana has become more legalized, people have gone outside frequently to produce it where they can because it's just cheaper. The infrastructure of that versus a greenhouse scenario tends to be pretty economically viable. So I think you run into those similar situations with the lab-grown meat and kind of butting up against the scale piece. Yeah, you'd have to talk to a real marijuana farmer. But I think there's some questions about quality and how you grow it in the soil, like the difference between the hydroponic versus growing it outside. Right.

know, like the difference between the hydroponic versus growing it outside. Right. Yeah. What other pieces of the puzzle are missing in terms of like if we're looking at beef and nutrients and we're looking at the carbon footprint, we're looking at all these different things in terms of like a viable and sustainable food source. What other pieces are we missing in this discussion? Well, I mean, one thing I was going to bring up is just with White Oak Pastures and the impact he's had on jobs and this town.

Like he's in the poorest county in the country. And as we've lost in southwestern Georgia. And to see what he has done on this property is incredible. He sells direct to consumers, and so he can get a good margin. And when he sells direct to consumers, does he have like a farmer's market type deal where they come to him? He ships? Mm-hmm.

So he does it online? Mm-hmm. Okay. farmer's market type deal where they come to him he ships so he does it online okay um so you could just like buy a side of beef a half a cow you could does it by the pounds cuts yeah but they also have restaurants that they supply too okay but what the beauty of of that and also you know some of the stuff that wendell berry talks about i don't know if you've ever heard of him but he's a there's a great documentary they did on him called Look and See. And he's an agrarian thought leader. And he just talks about how, you know, everyone from a small town, you haven't really made it in the U.S. until you've left your small town.

And nobody's like coming back and actually working in their small town and loving the land that they're from and making sure that that gigantic, nasty, polluting pig farm doesn't happen. So that's part of it. But as we've lost all these small farms, small town America has just completely dried up and now it's just big box everything. everything. And so if we're able to sort of dismantle these like four meat companies that control 80% of our meat and somehow get it back to a more balanced system where there's more regional control over the food systems, you're going to have more healthy small communities. This gets out in the weeds a little bit, but when people talk about AI supplanting jobs, it's creative jobs that are going to be the last things that go. Like even doctoring and lawyering is so kind of scripted and wrote that they, you know, they predict that being a doctor and being a lawyer could be replaced by AI stuff in the not too distant future. But this process of regenerative farming is a really creative endeavor.

Like you're problem solving constantly. And people have a tendency to relegate these farmers as just kind of like inbred idiots and they're not that smart. Like there's an enormous amount of information that they have to learn about their local situation and what they're doing. And again, constant problem solving. So this could be one of these things that revitalizes middle America and is a really long term, you know, job and employment and economic engine is having people do more of this type of work. Like there was a time when more people worked in agrarian settings and then we shifted into urban centers.

And maybe there's a case to be made that more people need to shift back into a quasi-agrarian setting, both for the employment, but also for like the quality of life and the production of our food and different things like that. Yeah. And I was just going to add to, you know, the vegan dialogue works really well for like Norwegian billionaires and Bill Gates and people that can afford it. And they've got a Whole Foods nearby where they can get their goji berries and coconut oil and all those things. But for the majority of people, they want meat.

They want to be able to eat it. And now we've got even science so corrupted that people are trying to pull it away from people. People are trying to pull it away from people. And so it's when you look at the nutritional ramifications of what happens when people have less animal source foods, it's not it's it's a social justice issue. It's an equity of food equity problem. What is what was the motivation for demonizing meat other than I mean, we know about the the studies that were done that uh the sugar industry funded that demonized saturated fat which is really when you know about those studies i believe it was in 1960s right where they were saying that saturated fat was the cause of all this heart disease and they were trying to take the blame off of sugar they they only bribed these guys with like $50,000, which is crazy because those findings, this is pre-internet obviously, that swept through the whole country and everybody's terrified of saturated fat.

People started drinking low-fat milk and low-fat this and low-fat that and everybody got fatter. It's really wild. If you look at the difference between people that lived in 1960s and 1970s versus people today, you've seen all those photos of people on the beach from the 1970s versus people today. It's crazy the difference. And some of that has to be attributable to diet. So when we're saying science has been corrupted, what happened? What's the motivation? If they know this, we know I know this.

Like I'm I'm not an expert. How the fuck do I know this? I would think that people who study food science know this, too. And they would want to get that word out like, hey, this is not real. Like that's not what the problem is, not saturated fat. The problem is not cholesterol. In fact, cholesterol is like the building blocks for a lot of hormones. And it's very important to cellular development, right? Yeah. I mean, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are one of the, from what I understand, are one of the big donors to this global burden of disease.

So you think it's a financial incentive? I mean, who benefits from meat being bad, big oil? Because now it's not an industrial problem. It's a consumer's problem. Right. Just like recycling, like you put it on the consumer. It's not the company making the plastic bottles. It's the consumer. Right. processed food industry benefits, not only because they're the ones making this junk, but also it takes the blame off all the cereals and pasta meals and all that stuff and puts it on meat. So they're winning. In the book, and I always forget what's in the book and what's in the film, but you dug into like the history of, interestingly, like Seventh-day Adventists, Like the history of, interestingly, like Seventh-day Adventists, vegetarianism, they kind of founded the dietetics profession. Oh, yeah. So it had a very strong vegetarian underpinning to it because the religious leanings of the Seventh-day Adventists. They founded dietetics?

Dietetics and nursing. Really? Mm-hmm. So a religion founded nursing? Well, like loma linda university so i mean they're they're operating within science but it definitely had this vegetarian orientation to it yeah and so why has there in the cattle industry is huge the beef industry is huge there's 95 of the planet eats meat. Isn't it something high like that? The margins are really small

though because meat is such a commodity. It's like steak is steak is steak. But Beyond Burger, their margins are amazing. But they're new. Is this an unorganization thing? Do the beef people, do they not know the

existential threat to their existence they don't really they it's weird it's weird yeah yeah they're out there shoveling shit and oblivious well because they're not part of the coastal dialogue and i think some of it too is most of the players that own the meat production they're they they own like the the grain you know the meat production they they own like the the grain you know the corn and and everything it because it's all consolidated so they're like well maybe we'll lose a little bit there but we'll make it up here and oh and they're major investors in the plant-based meat as well the meat the large meat packers just for money diversify

why not you're gonna win either way Oh criminy so when you wrote this book um did you think that there was gonna be major pushback did you think that you know you basically shored up all your arguments with with data and solid discussion I thought there was gonna be more pushback from like the vegan side of the house. And there hasn't been a huge amount. And we did – we tried to – we really – even in the point, you know, like is pastured meat nutritionally superior to – we really – like we had a discussion. I'm like, do we just lie

about this? Because it'd be great. Then like everything is consistent. But one, I think the ethics are dodgy there. And then two, it's a, you know, one vegan doctor goes through our work and he looks at it and he's like, no, there's a difference there. And if you can point out one glaring error like that, then it calls into question everything else. So we really like, whether it hurt or not, we tried to be as honest with this stuff as we could. And what we have noticed is that we kind of uniformly piss everybody off. Almost nobody comes away reading that book

and they feel just super happy and invigorated because it filled up the buckets of their preconceived notions. If you were really, really, really excited about regenerative ag, we sing the praises of that. But also we're not – we're kind of – It's not black and white. It's not totally black and white. Yeah.

Like we make the case that like there's all these other foods that could be nutrient upcycled that doesn't really fit into like the grass-fed model. So why don't we take advantage of that? So it's been interesting. Like the areas that we've had some pushback and the most aggressive pushback has actually been the really meat elitist kind of pastured meat scene because there are people out there that say

it should be grass fed meat or nothing. It's like, well, that's interesting. They're not understanding the nutritional importance and how that dialogue grass fed or nothing it's like well that's interesting they're not understanding the nutritional importance and how that dialogue grass-fed or nothing ends up with new york city schools going vegan right the grass-fed or nothing thing that sort of um the the ideology is that is that oriented in like a nutrition standpoint no why do they's... Why do they... Is it a nature thing? An environmentalist and ethical thing. Right.

Yeah. And so they cannot tolerate the idea that protein, period, is important. We don't have enough regenerative meat to feed everybody. We've got kids who, if they just got enough meat in a disadvantaged situation, they actually might have a leg up. So we should just be feeding them the meat that's available right now instead of waiting for the whole world to go grass fed. Who's responsible for making Meatless Monday and No Meat Friday in these school systems? So Meatless Monday is partially funded by Beyond Burger. Oh, God. And Johns Hopkins.

Really? Which is a very anti-meat place. Now, why are they anti-meat? I don't know if they have some kind of religious background. I mean, Harvard is also, Walter Willett is very anti-meat, and he's funded by Barilla. It's because anti-meat

equals woke, right? A lot of it, yes. Part of what the ideology is today. And then the Vegan Fridays is Mayor Adams, Mayor Eric Adams. I actually have a public letter on that. So I started an organization called the Global Food Justice Alliance where I'm trying to advocate for the inclusion of animal source foods for people. I'm trying to advocate for the inclusion of animal source foods for people. And I have a public letter out to Mayor Adams on all the points why this is a horrible idea.

Do you know he's not really vegan? He has been questioned, right? He's been caught eating fish. And he says, I have a plant-based life. Whenever he is questioned, he's like, I don't want to get into the nuance. And the vegan Friday thing is just I have a photograph actually that I sent over in the drop box of what the vegan Friday lunch looks like. It's so sad. The burrito. Oh, so sad looking. Yeah.

School lunch looks like shit already. Right. But taking meat away. And if you think about the context for these kids in New York, right, if you tell them meat is bad, they're just going to go to Subway and get a sandwich without meat on it. It's not like they're going to go get a tofu bowl somewhere. Right. And so the top foods that kids love are mac and cheese, burgers, pizza, and chicken nuggets. And I would argue the meat part of those is the best part. And so if you tell these kids meat is bad, then they're just going to pull the meat parts out and just eat the fries instead and the Coke.

When a child is growing, do they have different needs per kilogram in terms of like the amount of protein that they need? Yes. And they really, we have major problems, even in developed countries in the U.S. with iron deficiency, which is one of the major things you need for growth, for your brain and for physical growth. So the biggest pushback that you guys got was from the agriculture or from the grass-fed people? Kind of what you would call the meat elitists. We had lots of people in the pastured scene that were very gracious towards

the book and thankful and everything, but there's kind of a weird cross-section of the health influencers that say grass-fed or nothing and then also kind of the... And what are they basing that on? Because I've said that. I've said that because I read it. Because I read it that it was higher in essential

fatty acids is better for you. Yeah, So they don't like it when I say that, because then that takes part of their argument away. It's an emotional decision. It's not a logical decision. I've said that. I'm probably one of the people that released that syphilis on a college campus. And then I did something crazy. And I really thoroughly got in and vetted the science. And it was like, oh, it's not that simple. Like there's great ethical considerations for it. There are really, really sound environmental reasons. But when you just butt up against just that nutrition piece, it's just not the same compelling story on meat by itself. Again, like the dairy, eggs, seafood, huge differences there, but just not the same with meat.

And there's a lot of very large family foundations that are funding a lot of this grass fed stuff. And they, it's a very progressive platform that they're taking. And so to say that meat is healthy, period, they're taking. And so to say that meat is healthy, period, it's all of a sudden I'm on the right and not aligning with their politics. And this should be a bipartisan- Apolitical. I am totally apolitical on all this stuff, but I'm immediately tagged as a troublemaker if I say that meat is healthy. We have so many problems with that in this country where people get so dogmatic and they're so connected to their ideology that they don't even question anything

that goes outside of it. And this sort of healthy questioning and just reasoning and logic and just looking at data and looking at information and challenging your own personal assumptions, information, and challenging your own personal assumptions, it's so rare. It's so rare. I mean, maybe you get 1% or 2% of the people, I don't know what the numbers are, who look at their diet and look at their life and then look at things like this and read a book like that and go, hey, maybe I should try this. Maybe I'm too rigid with this philosophy that I've adopted that plant-based is the only thing that's good for the heart and protects the environment. You want to be a good person. This is the way to go.

You know, it's just so rare. Most people, they get something in their head and they just stick with that. And then their echo chamber that they exist in, that reinforces and supports that. And that's all they ever talk about. Yeah. And there's a, I mean, there's a lot of very large interests that are pushing the plant-based narrative. And then they have this grassroots army of ethical cheerleaders that are just backing them up for free. And then on our end, it's so complicated to be able to talk about the environmental piece. Like we have health influencers that understand the nutrition piece, but they can't really articulate all the environment. And then you throw ethics in there. And then environmental people don't fully appreciate the nutritional pieces that meat is good, period.

And so you end up with nobody really advocating for me and also there's no money in advocating for me it just it just creates the headache they've just made that idea so it's so prevalent that meat is bad for you meat is bad for your heart high cholesterol bad for the environment you're a bad person that's why we call the book Sacred Cow. Oh. Because it's just this unquestioned truth that cows are bad. And where's the documentary? It's on Amazon.

Only on Amazon? It's on iTunes and all those video on demand type things. I couldn't even give it to Netflix. They wouldn't take it? Really? They probably have some funky deal with like some vegan programming. You know, it's worth mentioning the folks that public, we were turned down from every single publisher. No publisher would take this book.

So I'm like a, I'm not a JK Rowling, but my books have done really well. I'm a – you know, more than a million copies sold of my books and everything. Like I should be able to get a book deal kind of anytime I want to do it. And nobody would sign off on this. And then the folks who did were the folks that published – The China Study. It's a vegan publisher. Yeah.

Really? Yeah. Really? And they happen to also be Stephen Coonan's publisher, too. Diversifying, sort of like the meat business. I think they're diversifying, but they also, like, they're pretty ethically driven. And even if in their team there were folks that were like, I have some real reservations about this, but this is a story that at least needs to be told. What was the rejection when you guys got rejected? It was always a different answer. That's when you know it's not really your fault. It was a different reason. I think that this is already been told. I think that this is too

complicated. I think that this isn't going to sell. And then the weird thing, and it's probably just COVID, but we would have made the New York Times list. Well, if the New York Times wanted to put us on the list. The first week we sold 7,000 copies, but Amazon only shipped 2,000. Well, we sold out the day of release. And we were all over them. And this was my third book. My other books have done very well.

So there was something really, really weird. So you think they were holding it back are you kind of seems like foil hats right I mean we really thought that this was a slam dunk yeah four years of work well let's see what we can do today let's pump this motherfucker hurt it well thank you guys for coming in here. And so the film, is there a trailer, Jamie? Yeah. Let's end with the trailer. And so let's let everybody know this book is available.

You can get it right now, right here, Sacred Cow, The Case for Better Meat, Diana Rogers and Rob Wolf right there. And here's the trailer. We'll leave you with this. And thank you, everybody. Thank you, Rob. Tell everybody how they can find you on social media. Robwolf.com.

You can find all my stuff from there. And Diana? I am at Sustainable Dish and then the Global Food Justice Alliance as well. Awesome. Thank you, guys. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. All Awesome. Thank you, guys. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. All right.

Play this, Jamie. There's a debate out there about whether or not we should be eating meat. Red meat is now worse for us in our minds than fat ever could have been because there are so many more reasons to avoid red meat, not only for your health but also now for the goodness of others, including not killing animals, and for the good of the planet. You can't blame people for being confused. They're trying to make really important moral and ethical decisions about what they should

eat and how they should live. It's easy to fall for extreme simple answers. The majority of meat produced in this country is under such abhorrent conditions. We both are making reactions to the same evil, if you will. They're just different choices of how to do it. But what if we're arguing about the wrong thing? You look at the Midwest now in the United States. It's corn and soy and corn and soy and more corn.

This massive amount of monoculture is having devastating effects on the environment. What used to be great biodiversity is gone. The agricultural revolution has been transitioned into the processed food revolution. If you want to fatten up your animals, you put them in a pen where they can't run around and get physical activity, and you feed them lots of grain. Humans are like that too. What if the very animals we're fighting about

are a key piece of fixing what's broken? The animals are gonna die, and your only choice now is to do it well. That is the only choice left. Are we gonna be the death that's killing everything, or are we gonna be the death that's part of the cycle of life, that actually makes life stronger?

Those are really our only options. Thank you.