Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - The case for better meat - With Diana Rogers

Episode Date: November 23, 2020

// R E A D Y • S E T • R E S E T This episode is all about the case for better meat. Diana Rodgers, RD, LDN is a "real food" Licensed Registered Dietitian Nutritionist living on a working organic farm in New England. She runs an active nutrition practice where she helps people with weight, metabolic, and intestinal issues recover their health through diet and lifestyle. She's also an author, host of The Sustainable Dish Podcast, and the mom of two active kids.  In this podcast, we cover: Why Americans have a complicated relationship with meat The reasons why humans need to consume meat  About the mental health challenges from eliminating meat  The problems with The China Study The diet you should eat to optimize your health   About the benefits of eating grass-fed meat  Why becoming a vegan isn't better for the environment // E P I S O D E   S P O N S O R S  Try Dry Farm Wines this holiday season with their special promotion of 3,6, or 12 bottles for a one time only purchase! Find all the supplements you need to keep yourself healthy this holiday season on revelationhealth.com. Use promo code RESETTERPODCAST for 10% off.  // R E S O U R C E S   M E N T I O N E D Sustainable Dish Sacred Cow Diana's Books Sustainable Dish Podcast Instagram  Facebook Twitter // F O L L O W Instagram | @dr.mindypelz & @theresetterpodcast Facebook | /drmindypelz & /theresetterpodcast Youtube | /drmindypelz   Please note the following medical disclaimer: By listening to this podcast you understand that this video is for educational purposes only. It is not intended to substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on as health or personal advice. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you may have regarding your health or medical condition.  

The information discussed in this episode is intended as general information only. It is not intended for one-on-one medical advice, and you should always consult your healthcare practitioner before making any changes. And if you like the content discussed in this episode, please go leave a review so that others can benefit from it as well. I am a woman on a mission that is dedicated to teaching you just how powerful your body was built to be. I like to do that by bringing you the latest science, the greatest thought leaders, and applicable steps that help you tap into your own internal healing power. The purpose of this podcast is to give you the power back and help you believe in yourself again. My name is Dr. Mindy Pels, and I want to thank you for spending part of

your day with me. Happy Monday Resetters. Welcome to episode 47 of the Resetter podcast. For those of you that don't recognize this voice, I'm Jessica, the sidekick and co-hosts to this podcast. You typically hear me at the end of the podcast episodes where Dr. Mindy and I do a debrief session. So make sure you listen all the way through to the very end so you can hear our takeaways and lessons learned that we had throughout the conversation. But this is episode 47 with Diana Rogers. And if you haven't heard of Diana, she is the co-author with Rob Wolf to the New York Times bestselling book, The Sacred Cow. She's also licensed registered dietitian nutritionist living on a working organic farm in New England.

And that farm, it's pretty awesome. That farm operates as a vegetable and meat CSA program, but it also has a strong education program with the local schools. And they sell their produce to restaurants, the local schools, and they donate all excess produce to a community meal program. It's pretty awesome. She's also the host of the Sustainable Dish podcast, Anna Mama 2, all around. bad ass woman. We are so excited to bring this episode to you today. And it's on a somewhat controversial topic, which is meat. And what's interesting about meat is it's kind of become the most polarizing food we have in our culture today. Meat is either something that can kill you or

heal you depending on how you see it. And in this conversation with Diana, we're going to go not only into that, but why Americans have a complicated relationship with meat, the reasons why she believes and what their book, Sacred Cow is about, why they believe that humans need to consume meat, the mental health challenges that people have from eliminating meat, we'll discuss the China study, we'll discuss the benefits of grass-fed versus non-grass-fed meat, and the environmental role of meat. And if this is your first episode with us, welcome. We love chatting with passionate people on this podcast that are on a mission to make this world a better place. So we do hope you enjoy. If you like this episode, some other good ones to

go back and listen to would be Dr. Bill Schindler. He's episode 36 and 37. And Brian Sanders, he was episode 24, all really good ones to reference back if you enjoy this particular podcast episode. And if you're listening from Apple or Spotify, make sure you click the subscribe button and you'll automatically be notified when new episodes launch, which is every Monday. And if you know somebody who needs to hear this episode who would resonate with this message, please share it out. You can easily share from Apple or Spotify to your social media. And just make sure you tag us in your posts so that we get to see it as well. And if you find this information from this podcast helpful, if there was a message in this episode that you resonated with,

please leave us a review. Our goal with this podcast is to give you the power back, that change the way of health care. We're here to empower you to give you information, give you thoughtful conversations. And in order to do that, in order to change the way that health is being done, we have to get the message out. And one great way to do that is to rank really, really well with iTunes and Spotify. So leave us a review. It totally helps.

And we hope you enjoy. This is what I want to dive in with you. When we go to our community and we start talking about what to eat, there has never in my 25 years of doing this, seen so much controversy around meat. The vegetarians think like you would think we're murderers if we eat meat. And then I've got people who are doing carnivore only that are healing from amazing, amazing conditions.

Yeah. But they can also sometimes be as radical as vegans. And Paul Salino doesn't help sometimes with that energy. So I'm happy to bring us. softer. We're releasing actually the film for free for one week over Thanksgiving week on my website and the whole idea behind it is like can we can we stop fighting and can we have some nuance and can we all agree that we're on the same page and maybe cattle have been unfairly vilified for what processed food and fossil fuels have done. So yeah beautiful and that's kind of our message like so we

have a group, a Facebook group of about 40,000 people that fast together once a month. And so what we do is we teach people like, okay, so you have this fasting window, but then what are you going to eat in the eating window? And that's where all the arguments, I mean, literally the vegans and the carnivores are like going at it. And I just want, like you, what you just said, I want to bring light to it. Like, where is the middle ground here? Because there's something for us all to learn. And I love to, I want to dive in with you on the environmental impact of this because now I was a vegetarian for a decade. I ended up becoming the sickest I've ever been and had to go to more meat be out of pure health. But can we start off with like why meat is vilified? You're going to love my film. I have such a

great testimonial in there from Mayor Keith. I don't know if you know who she is. Her health was wrecked. But she did it. She did vegan because she believed me too in all of it. And she's still leaves and all of that. And I'm on the board of animal welfare approved. And like I, Leerre and I become really good friends. But anyway, so you're going to really love the film. Awesome. So I'd love to let your folks know about the free screening too. If that's all right. Awesome. I could make a plug. Oh, of course. We will promote the heck out of that. And we're big fans of like Kiss the Ground. I've been telling my community to go watch that. Yeah. This is sort of like a deeper, more scientific dive. Great. Similar to what Kiss the Ground

but with less pretty celebrities and like more science. I don't know. You don't have any of these celebrities. That's all okay. We don't need the pretty celebrities. I'll have Nick Offerman. He's a celebrity. There you go.

There you go. Yeah. Yeah. No, I read Diet for New America by Tom Robbins. And I was just after that, or John Robbins, after that, I was just like, oh my God. Tim Robbins? I am going to be a vegan. Yeah.

Yeah. He was, yeah, I can't. I always get Tim, Tom, John, but he was supposed to inherit the basket and Robin's fortune was his story. And then he saw what was happening to animals. And so he became a vegan. And I was, that's what I did for 10 years because of him and because of the ethical piece. And then I got really sick. Yeah. Well, I can tell you from the farming end, I saw, I know what happens to plants when there are no animal inputs. So we can talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. Please. So let's just to bring our audience into this, what, why is meat vilified?

Why, what is going on there and how can we start to unravel the health part of that myth? Yeah, so meat is the most polarizing food we have in our culture today. And it represents so many things to human culture. It represents power, death. It's bloody. It's strong. It's very masculine. And it's kind of something you do or you don't do.

And I wrote a little bit about this in the book Sacred Cow, about how it can at the same time be something that can kill you and heal you depending on how you see it. And in Western culture, the vilification of meat really started with the Seventh-day Adventists, who believed that eating meat gave you sinful thoughts. and so that reducing or eliminating meat and alcohol and spicy foods was the way, the purest way to live your life. They're the ones who had these sanitariums in the 1800s where it was sort of like a half hotel, half spa where you would go and you would, they invented jazzercise. They had these salariums where you would do aerobic workouts.

I mean, there were really so many pieces of their lifestyle or things that we see. today is really beneficial. Lots of fresh, clean air, clean eating. And at that time, we didn't really know much about germ theory. And so people legitimately were sick when they ate meat because we didn't know that old meat would make you sick. And, you know, that's right at the time when we started leaving farms and living in more cities. And so the time between the death of the animal and when you ate it was longer. But yet we didn't realize like things like washing your hands would be good things. So it started out as a puritanical health movement. And actually even today that, so Seventh-day Adventists were the ones who started the modern-day nursing and dietetics movements. And so this bias against meat as something that's sort of impure is still with us today in our celebrity culture and also in the dietetics movement when I was studying to be a dietitian, there was definitely an anti-meat energy that was going on there. It didn't turn into an animal rights issue until Ellen White, who was the head of the Seventh-day Adventist,

she was wavering back and forth. She couldn't really stick to being a vegetarian. He was getting pretty sick. So she incorporated meat again, and she was on a tour in Australia. And a woman came up to her and said, but how can you possibly eat animals because they're so, you know, meaningful and killing them is so wrong. And she's like, oh, that's why I shouldn't. So then towards the end of her life, right around the turn of the century, is when eating meat then became something that you didn't do because it was wrong to kill animals. So that was really something that we hear a little bit more about from Eastern religions, which coincidentally, in Buddhism, reincarnation wasn't always a thing.

And actually, it was only when reincarnation became part of Buddhism that eating meat was wrong because you might be almost eating your grandmother. But before that, avoiding meat was not part of that religion. So what we have today is a culture where people are really concerned about our failing health, about the warming planet. They're rarely confused. They want that silver bullet. They want that magic goji berry that's going to give them longevity and ultimate health and an easy solution to the complex problems. Right.

So climate change is multifaceted and so is diabetes and obesity. But we want that one thing. It's so much easier to have a scapegoat, which is what meat has become. And that's almost the name that we chose for the book and the film was scapegoat. It's literally when you just pin your sins to a sacrificial being and let it go. So meat has become that in our culture. And it doesn't need to be. Humans have been eating meat for three and a half million years.

years. It's not the meat itself. That's the problem. And when we blame meat for our failing health, it allows the processed food industry to have a clean pass. And so ultra-processed foods, like the fake meat products that are out there, like all the other junk that invades the inside of our grocery stores, which is what is really the problem, you know, that gets a clean pass. So they love the anti-meat movement. And so does the fossil fuel industry. Because when we blame cow farts, for climate change, it gives the fossil fuel industry a pass. It gives a lot of industries a clean pass. And so it's very convenient for big industry to have this anti-meat movement

and all these almost evangelical anti-meat warriors that are out there infighting. When we, as part of the real food world, we should all be on the same page. We want real food. We want healthy people. We want thriving children. We want strong communities. And we want a clean planet. We can all be on the same side whether or not we choose to eat meat.

But animals are definitely part of the solution, not the problem. Yeah. And I have to say that that's what I love about how you guys set this book up. It's brilliant. And I love that you are taking the health standpoint of meat. You're looking at the environmental and the ethical. I was like, that is brilliant because it, some people, the way, I mean, I'm just saying, according to my resetters, there's like so much

finger pointing. And yet it's like, okay, let's break down what is your issue with meat here? Is it environmental? Is it ethical? Is it nutritional? And the experts that I've had on here will all say that, sure, if you want to say it's ethical, I can maybe line up with you there. But if you want to say it's better nutritional to eat plants over meat. That's where we're going to disagree. Would you say if we just took the nutritional piece, do you feel like the human body is going to thrive more on meat than a meat-based diet than a plant-based diet? Yeah, so the reason why we tackle ethics at the end of the book and, you know, weave it in throughout the film is because you can't have an intelligent ethical decision about whether or not to eat something

without understanding the nutritional and environmental ramifications of eliminating that food. And so when we look nutritionally at meat, and this is a little bit of a, like a game of whackamol, like you were saying, you know, there's the nutrition. But even when you go into, you know, meat causes cancer, meat causes heart disease, the greenhouse gases, the water footprint, you know, I mean, it's just never ending, right? And so it takes a lot of time to parse all of those out and intelligently address each one, and then we can talk about ethics because to say meat is bad to eat is a very easy thing to say,

but then to understand the ramifications of pulling meat away from growing children who need that nutrition, that's an ethical issue, right? To pull animals off the land and only use fossil fuels as fertilizer, which has its own issues, that's an ethical issue. So we really can't have an intelligent ethical discussion without first addressing whether the food is even nutritious for humans to eat in the first place. And so that's where we start with nutrition. Humans have always had animal-sourced foods

in our diets. We're omnivores. When you eliminate meat, you have to take supplements. And not everyone thrives on a meat-free diet. There's a lot of reasons why people would do badly on a meat-free diet. So, for example, vitamin A. Let's just look at vitamin A. So this is something that there is a plant-based form and animal-based form. And in every situation when there's a plant-based form and animal-based form of a nutrient, the body prefers the animal-based form. With the case of vitamin A, the plant-based version is beta-carotene, which our bodies need to convert that to retinol, vitamin A. And in almost half of all humans, we can't make that conversion easily. So there you've got 50% of all the human population that would not do well, would have a vitamin A deficiency if they

were not to get vitamin A through animal source foods. And we see that again with lots of other nutrients. B12 is something you can't get from plants. And so yes, in America and privileged portions of America, we can just go to CVS or Walgreens and get a B12. 12 supplement and an iron tablet and, you know, all the proper ratios of everything all lined up. But in a lot of places in the world, that's not a privilege that people have. And they may also live in an area where plants don't thrive and where they might not have access to soy patties and, you know, plant-based burgers and protein powders and all the things you really need in order to do well on a vegan diet.

And so I have no issue if someone personally wants to be vegan, but to then push that on people that don't have the privilege to push away nutrient-dense food, I think that actually gets into a very sketchy ethical situation. Yeah, that's actually really, really well said. I have had a woman come on to the podcast, Ali Miller, and her specialty is anti-exact. Do you know her? Yeah. So her specialty is anxiety, right?

Yep. And one of the things I remember that she said that just really stood out to me, me was she said when people come to me and they have a lot of anxiety and they're vegetarians, I tell them that they either need to be eating fish or they're going to need to take a supplement because we can't fix their anxiety without getting them to do some type of meat-based product. Would you agree with that? Totally. And I should say I really break it into plants and animals because animal flesh is animal flesh. And we like to think fish, chicken, meat, you know, just because we, and we put meat in

this category, but, you know, the body sees animal protein is animal protein. And that includes dairy products and eggs as well. So there's a big difference between a vegetarian or a pescatarian and a vegan who doesn't take any animal flesh at all. And so I do believe that people who are vegetarian vegan can do okay if they get enough animal sourced foods in their diet. It's when we eliminate all of them that we see the big major nutrient efficiencies. So more like a vegan. Right. Like when you're, yeah, when you're not like a pescatarian. Yeah. And the mental health ramifications are massive in the film that we did. I interviewed Dr. Drew Ramsey, who is a psychiatrist in New York City and a farmer on the weekends. He goes back to Indiana on the weekends

and is a farmer. And he is really big into, you know, diet and mental health and prescribed food to his patients. And absolutely. And even if we can just get a little bit of oysters or a little bit of liver in someone's diet who is generally plant-based, we see just massive improvements there. Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. So, and then on the nutritional level, what we hear a lot from our resetters is like, well, what about the China study? I'm sure you've heard this before. And what about cancer? Like, isn't it, am I supposed to go plant-based if I have a cancer diagnosis or wouldn't I go plant-based to prevent a cancer diagnosis? Yeah, it's really interesting.

So the book that I did, Sacred Cow, which is right behind me, was actually published by the same folks that did publish the China study. Oh, really? Yes. So it's been Bella and they're largely vegan publishers, but they loved our book. And one of the problems with nutritional research and with the China study in particular is that you can't take an observational study and prove cause. And you can't look at two things, like for example,

ice cream intake and shark attacks, which both are correlated with warm weather, right? That doesn't mean that eating ice cream causes a shark attack, right? But that's the same type of logic that is used in these observational studies. So you can show that people who eat meat tend to maybe be a little heavier than your typical vegetarian, or maybe they might also tend to smoke more or drink more than a typical vegetarian, but that doesn't mean that eating meat causes smoking or that eating meat causes hard disease. It means that people who have that typical lifestyle tend to also get these other issues. But when they've looked at people who've shopped at health food stores, for example, so adjusting for lifestyle, what they've seen is there's no benefit at all in eliminating

animal products. There's the same exact longevity between the folks who have similar lifestyle shopping at a health food store and whether or not they're omnivores or vegetarians. And so then when you look at people who are plant-based, and this is the other thing we've learned from interacting with the public so much, has been that there's plant-based, there's vegetarian, there's vegan, and people get very particular about how you refer to them. So let's just use plant-based, when somebody's eating a whole plant-based diet, do you feel like if they and they don't take supplements,

do you feel like they can be healthy and prevent disease in a plant-based diet only? So are you saying no animal intake at all? No animal intake at all. Okay. So it appears that they're, oh, with no supplements? No supplements. Like I'm just a vegan plant base. That's all I eat.

I don't supplement. And it's because of health and environment and ethical reasons that I do this. Okay. Well, I would argue that if you. want to optimize your health, have a plant-based diet and add meat to it. That's the best way to eat to live. Some people can tolerate more or less plants, and that's why some people have to eliminate all of them, because they are more difficult to digest than animal source foods, and that's why you see some people thriving more on a carnivore-type diet. I think the goal for everybody should be

to eat as large a variety as food that doesn't give them problems as possible. So for some folks, me, it needs to be almost totally clean with no processed foods and just, you know, chicken broth from scratch and and stuff like that. Other people, you know, you see them shopping at the regular grocery stores. They look like they're pretty healthy. And they've got just junk in their carts. And, you know, it seems like there's some people that do okay that way, too. And so there's a wide spectrum of humans, right, that will thrive on a wide variety of things. But what we've seen throughout human evolution is that the nutrients in animal sourced foods were always the most prized.

They are the most nutrient-dense things you can eat. If you're looking to optimize your health and get as many nutrients as possible with as few calories as possible, you need to be including animal-sourced foods in your diet. So I suppose there are people that are reporting that they're doing okay on a vegan diet. it seems that for most people, it's only a matter of time before their health starts to fail. I see it like a fast, like an extended fast, right? So it's like you can go without certain nutrients. Some people can go longer than others without critical nutrients.

And it really just depends on the health of your gut, on your genetic makeup, on your overall stress levels. There's so many things that contribute to how well someone would do on an extended fast. Yeah. Yeah. We call it diet variation and fasting variation, that we need to create more variation in the timing that we're eating and what we're eating. And if you look at how the body's designed when you first switch over to, let's say, a plant-based diet, yeah, there may be an uptick in your health.

You might feel better. But like you said, I really resonate with this. There's just a matter of time that that's going to stop working for you. Because I don't believe that the human body's meant to eat the same thing over and over again. I think we're meant to go in and out of different foods that we're eating and different ways, different timing of how we're eating. And also life cycles too, right? A child or an adolescent or somebody who's pregnant, I would strongly recommend they not be plant-based.

But then maybe someone who's really fit and healthy in their 20s and 30s might do better. Anyone over 40 when we start to lose muscle mass, your protein requirements go up. And the, you know, you can get 30 grams of protein from a four ounce, 200 calorie piece of steak or from 750 calories worth of beans and rice. So, you know, for those of us who aren't looking to gain a ton of weight, meat is just a more efficient way to get our nutrition and to feel satiated. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what happened to me when I switched out of being a vegan and switched right, like within weeks, I started to dropping weight. That's exactly what happens.

because people do end up creating more carbs than they need to be. But now let's go back over to like Dr. Paul Saladino and let's look at his theories. I mean, he's got over 600, you know, research studies proving that meat only and that vegetables are toxic. And I know toxicity of vegetables isn't per se your specialty. I know that you have like an organic garden and a CSA. that has me like scratching my head like how can a meat only diet be good? To me it's on the opposite end of this conversation from vegan. Yeah.

My personal opinion is that people should eat as many foods as they can that don't give them problems. I happen to be celiac so I don't eat any gluten at all. My kids eat gluten and they're fine. But they don't eat like excessive gluten. you know, we're pretty, we're pretty clean at the house. I think that, you know, some people tend to be more sensitive to lectins or to, you know, components in tomatoes and, you know, nightshade type vegetables. Again, it's all on a spectrum. I don't, I think that the carnivore diet is a really

interesting tool for clinicians to look at, especially when there's severe gut issues, right? and someone just clearly can't digest anything because their guts are so wrecked from modern foods. And so, you know, broth and meat are really easily digested, a great way to get nutrition. But I don't think that everyone should be living a carnivore-type lifestyle. I don't think that we necessarily have to fear food to that degree. And, you know, there are things like hermetic stressors, which are good for the body. And so, you know, I think a lot of people are turning to carnivore and seeing results that they like. But if you want to have a weight loss diet, I don't think, you know, or just a healthy lifestyle in general, I don't think it needs to be that extreme.

Yeah. Yeah, I did. So I've really sort of pushed the carnivore diet awake. So I was like, you know, part of my obsession is the microbiome. And I just didn't understand how carnivore could feed the microbiome. It just everything I learned it was fiber. And then I met Maria Emmerich. Do you know Maria Emmerich? She has all her books. So she has a carnivore cookback. And so she was talking about how collagen is one of the best prebiotics for your gut bacteria.

And so I was like, well, that's interesting. So what we did with our resetter group, we ended up doing a seven-day, what I called carnivore fasting, where I had everybody go 17 hours of fasting and then all they did is eat meat. And we did this for seven days. I did a stool test. So I did a pre-test and then a post-test. And all I did is eat meat for a week. And two things happened.

One, people lost weight. Joint inflammation went down. Like, it was crazy in seven days to watch how many people healed eating meat only. On my stool test, the post-test, one of the most interesting things that showed up was gliadinin and zonulin. And I hadn't eaten any wheat. So how the heck did that show up? And it's either was in like the grains, but we only do grass fed. And I want to chat about conventional versus grass fed meat with you.

Or my thought is that it was in the inner lining of my gut. And that when you go on a meat-centric diet like that, it's really a detox diet and should be done in temporary, in a temporary fashion. What are your thoughts on that? I don't think that it's in the meat. because the way a cow digest food is very different than a monogastric animal, because they have a four-chamber stomach, and it's really the bacteria and their rumin that are like breaking down the cellulose and then translating that into like fatty acids, which is what is fed to the cow. So I don't think wheat, proteins are actually making it into the meat. That's just basic like physiology kind of, you know.

Right. I'm not sure on the, you know, residual gliadin that might have been in there before, it's possible. That would be more likely, in my opinion, but I don't know. It was just crazy. Like I was like, how can this? I only ate meat for a week and now it's this showed up in my stools. So, and what do you think about the idea? Or they got the test wrong.

Well, maybe. I never even thought about that. That's possible. Yeah. That one would be on the testing end. The other thought, what do you think about the concept that it feeds your, that meat can really be a prebiotic for the microbiome. Yeah, I've never heard that before.

I mean, it could. I don't see, I don't know that they only eat carbohydrate source, you know, fiber and things like that. It's possible that they also like collagen. Yeah. I haven't looked into it as much, only because the last so many years I've been researching methane and land use and, you know, just really tax. the basics of like does meat cause cancer, does meat cause heart disease? What, you know, explaining,

how do I explain to someone who doesn't have a master's degree? Why nutritional research is wrong. Why meat is a healthy food. Why we need way more protein than the RDA, which is really important to me that we need about double the protein that the RDA is. And I go through the research of that and how they came up with the RDA, which is really kind of backwards research. And the RDA actually is set at the minimum, not the optimal level. So what we even think we should be getting as far as protein is way too low. How much protein should we be getting? Do you think? At least 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight, which is double the RDA. So I usually set most women that walk into my practice at at least 100 grams of protein per person per day. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. Okay, so now let's move into this idea of conventional versus grass fed, because this is the other thing that your book really is the first that I've seen really come out. And I told you my husband preordered it just for that specific reason. He wanted to see the science between grass fed and conventional meat. So I will be the first to say that we put our money in health and we buy grass fed only because we believe that that is the best way to be eating meat. but you don't necessarily believe that. Is that correct? Well, it's not a matter of belief. It's a matter of

what did I find when we did the research. So it's not an opinion. It's just stating the fact. So when we looked at the body of research that we have available today, there just doesn't exist any decent evidence that grass-fed beef is significantly better for health than typical beef. I think that that has to largely do with, again, the way that cattle digest their food, it's not, it's the different than a monogastric animal. So we do see really big differences in eggs, for example, from a pasteurized chicken to a typical chicken because they're monogastric. And so whatever they eat, just like humans, it sort of gets, it goes straight into our portal vein, straight into the liver.

And those molecules are absorbed directly by our blood, right? Right. In cattle, it's totally different. So cattle are eating cellulose. It goes into their body. It gets broken down by the rumin. And then the byproducts of the breakdown go into their bloodstream. So they're just basically translating whatever fiber they're getting into food.

Like fatty acid. They're basically keto cattle. Right. And so that's why we just don't see a massive difference. in grain finish versus grass finish. There is, some studies have shown twice as much omega-3 fatty acids in grass-fed, but that's not a reason to eat beef. No one should be eating beef for the omega-3s.

You eat fatty fish for omega-3s, take fish oil. Another great way to reduce your omega-6s and increase your omega-3s is just to not eat grains or ultra-processed foods and just eat more leafy vegetables and, you know, less things that have. have omega-6 in them. But if you were to, you know, consider all the fats in a steak, like a dollar bill, so you've got a hundred pennies worth of fats, right? It's got about the same amount of pennies worth of saturated fat in both. There's not much of a difference there. Mono-unsaturated fat is about the same. So then in typical beef, you might have like one pennies worth of omega-3s.

In grass-fed beef, you might have two pennies worth. So two pennies is twice as much as one penny, but it's not a lot of money. You would still need to eat eight pounds of grass-fed beef to get the omega-3 as you could get in a three-ounce piece of salmon. Wow. So that's really, I think a lot of people have really been inflating the nutritional value of grass-fed beef based on this fatty acid thing. And I think we have to look at it in the context of the human diet and not just twice as much.

It's like twice as much of what? And is that even meaningful when we look at a week's worth of food? And if someone is eating beef three times a week, is two pennies worth of beef of fatty acids from the beef versus one penny of fatty acids from the beef going to make any difference at all in their overall diet? No. But as a dietitian, I can tell them again, like, just don't eat all that bread and pasta and cookies and sugar. And instead, eat more vegetables and fatty fish.

And, you know, yes, grass-fed beef, there's great reasons to eat grass-fed beef. You're supporting better food systems. Usually it's better animal welfare, although not inherently, but usually there's a little more CLA. So that's a good thing in grass-fed beef. But really, the differences are in the fat. We see a little bit more benefit in dairy products, too, because they're a fattier end product than a steak. It's just that people, don't eat a lot of tallow and steak is a relatively low fat food. Okay. So because this is something that comes up is, well, grass fed is significantly more expensive.

Right. So when you look at like somebody who's just on a tight budget, how can we help them make meat affordable? Yeah. And so that's why this is really important to talk about because there's programs like Meatless Mondays pulling meat out of the hands of children. who, you know, in New York City, 70% of those kids are homeless or low income. There's never been a study proving that taking meat away from kids will improve health outcomes. But yeah, we think it's better.

We think it's better to just be plant-based. And for that mom that's maybe working two jobs that doesn't have access to grass-fed beef, she should still feed her kids' beef. It is still, I mean, the bottom line is meat is a nutrient-dense food. period, there are some great reasons to buy grass fed if you can access it. And would you still say if you can get something that hasn't had a lot of antibiotics and hormones pumped into it? Are we still concerned about that from a meat standpoint? I did look into the antibiotics. We don't see antibiotic residue or more E. coli or anything

on grass fed versus typical beef. Hormones, we don't see more in a steak, in a steak from a typical cow versus a steak from a grass-fed cow. Glyphosate, we're not seeing a big difference there. There likely are health benefits, but we just don't have any science to back that up. So, you know, are there, you know, flavonoids that are probably in grass-fed beef that might be meaningful to human health? Probably, maybe. But there's no studies right now showing any of that.

And again, what that means is please buy meat. Don't be scared of typical beef. But if you know a farmer or if you have a farmer's market and you can afford it and you want to make a statement, I think you should buy grass-fed beef. So I'm not endorsing the typical beef industry necessarily, but I'm also not condemning it. I think that even when cattle are finished on a feedlot, most of their life is spent on grass. A lot of people don't know that, that cattle aren't born and raised in feedlots and spend their whole lives on feedlots. typical chicken and pork industries where those animals are 100% living in industrial settings. And also, cattle finished on a feedlot, oh, if you look at their entire lifespan,

only about 10% of their diet is grain. The rest is either grass before they get to the feedlot or they're also upcycling things that we can't eat that have no other value in our food system, like the leftovers from the ethanol industry, you know, all the spent grains from that can be fed to cattle and they can turn that into protein. The holes from the pea protein industry, we can't do anything with that. It would just sit in a big pile and emit greenhouse gases if we didn't run it through a cow and turn it into protein. And so cattle actually can magically upcycle food that we can't eat and turn it into the most nutrient-dense food for humans. Oh my gosh. I love that because for our resetters, we've got people all over the world of all

different socioeconomic backgrounds. And what I love about fasting is it's free. And so you don't have to have money to do it. And I realize when we start talking about some of these foods that are healthier, it's frustrating for the person who's done a really tight budget. It's like, well, okay, well, I can't, you know, it's easier for me to eat a bowl of vegetables. It's cheaper for me to eat a bowl of vegetables than to buy meat. And we have to find a way to make that or it's cheaper for me to go to McDonald's. Like, we have to unravel that if we're going to make our country healthier. Yeah. Well, and the funny thing is in most places in the world, grain-fed beef is more expensive, and it should be more expensive. Cows eating grass should be cheaper because there's less inputs

involved. And so it's only, you know, in the U.S. with the various ag policies and crop insurance that we're able to produce crops at such a low price to feed them to cattle, to, fatten them up quickly and get them through the process. So, okay, let's dive into the regenerative agricultural piece here because this is another, I really want to unpack this because we haven't spoke much about it on my podcast. My husband is a huge protector of the environment and he's done a ton of research on this. And this summer, my sister announced that she was going vegan because it was going to be better for the planet if she and her husband stopped eating meat.

and my husband came running in with all these statistics of like, that's not true. And I realized I was in the middle of a discussion that I didn't know much about. So let's start with this idea that I'm doing something great far of the planet by being a vegan. Right. It may seem that way, and that's an easy story. For every complex problem, there's a simple and wrong solution, right? That's like I forget who said that. But it's certainly true in this case. And so, you know, another thing we like to say in the book, it's not the cow, it's the how.

So it's not the grazing animal. That's the problem. It's how it's managed. And so when we look at our industrial agriculture system, first of all, there's no food system that doesn't cause death. So, and we can talk about that more in the ethics section when we get there. But our industrial agriculture system is based on large crops of just one thing, monocrop. planted over miles and miles and miles and miles. In order to make room for a gigantic corn or soy or wheat field,

you need to annihilate whatever was there before. So whether that was a prairie or a forest or whatever, you have to wipe out all the plants and all the animals, every piece of biodiversity that was ever there to plant the one thing. And then you also have to make sure nothing else comes back. So you need herbicides, you need pesticides, kill all the weeds, which are just other plants trying to come up. You have to get rid of all the insects.

So now the birds have no plant foods to eat and no insects to eat. And with all these fossil fuel chemical inputs, you can grow one thing. So that's what our industrial food system is. It's not small organic farms with a little broccoli and a little carrots and then maybe a couple chickens over there. it is completely broken. Regenerative agriculture is a system where you have as much life as possible in one area. So that is, in order to have the healthiest ecosystem, you need the most diversity possible. So you want not just one animal, you want several types of animals.

You want lots of different types of plants growing because then if one bacteria comes and infests or a mold to infest a certain type of plant, you've got other plants that can come back. The more simple, the environment, the more susceptible it is to being destroyed, right? And so regenerative agriculture uses those principles and actually requires animals on the land in addition to plants. You can't have, there are no natural systems in the world that only have plants. Animals are part of every system. They're pooping. They're burrowing through the ground. which also allows water to get in. And so when we have cattle on the grass,

they're chomping at it, which actually then helps it grow back even stronger. The grass wants to be biologically broken down. If you don't have an animal chewing on it, it just oxidizes and dies. And then the roots can't really grow back. It doesn't have enough nutrients in the soil, you know, returned in as part of a cycle from that animal

that's really contributing to the life undergris. as well as the life above ground. So we want as many wild animals as we can. We want as many different types of animals. We want as many different types of plants as possible to have the most closed-loop system of a farm you can. When you look, and I don't know much about the farming industry, but if you look at farms right now,

do you feel like regenerative agriculture is catching on? Or do you feel like we have gotten so far off that exercise? explanation of what you just said. We've been tilling dirt and we've been spraying and like what direction are we heading when it comes to the style of farming. Before white colonists came to the United States, this was how Native Americans, I mean, it wasn't, they weren't just hunting. They were actually using techniques like this to work with nature in order to, you know, prune the forest just so so that it attracted turkeys and things like that. So, so it's, this isn't really a new concept. We have gotten really far away from that and farms have gotten

bigger and bigger and bigger. And when we lose small and medium-sized farms, we lose our small towns. And so I think a lot of us can relate to driving through small towns and seeing all the stores being boarded up. And it was really those farming, those farms that kept the towns alive. They employed people. They kept the feed store working. Once we got bigger, and more mechanized and more corporatized. There was no need for humans to be working there anymore. There was no profit going locally. It was all going to multinational corporations. And so what we can do when we bring back small and medium-sized farms, which are making a comeback, I mean, it's going to take a lot of help on the policy level and on the consumer level to get back there again.

we can't continue farming the way we're farming right now. It's like we're farming with credit cards, and we're just going deeper and deeper into debt, and we're not returning to that soil bank what it needs. And so a regenerative farming is going to happen whether we proactively try to make it happen or whether it just happens to us. It's going to happen one way or the other,

and so we need to get ahead of it a little bit if we want to still be here when regenerative agriculture comes back. when it comes back with or without us. What do you think of this idea? And they say it and kiss the ground that we only have 60 harvests left in the majority of our soils

that we're running out of time. Yeah, I did look into that quote, and it turns out that that was said by a woman that worked at the United Nations just at a conference with no backup. And unfortunately, it keeps getting repeated as if it's some kind of scientific fact, but not many people.

other than me, have really looked into like, where did this quote even come from? But I did talk to somebody at the United Nations and asked them what was going on. And they're like, that is not our official position at all. So whether or not it's 60 or some other limited number, it definitely, we do have a limited number. We don't have to like debate like what the number is. But we are turning our soil into sand. We're losing the microbiome health of the soil and we're destroying our own health in the process. And so going more plan-based is not going to fix any of that. There's no way to fix that if we just eliminate meat because meat is not the problem of industrial agriculture. It's, you know, industrial livestock production is not great. We can fix how we raise animals,

but we absolutely have to have animal inputs in order to have healthy crops as well. Yeah. And what do you think about? I had a, I was on a call the other day with a bunch of colleagues. And one of the things that we were talking about minerals, and we were talking about how mineral deficiencies show up in humans. And one thing we're seeing a lot in our fasting community is that if you're already mineral deficient, and then you fast, you become even more mineral deficient. And it's like hair falling out and brittle nails and like, I mean, the long list of issues. And so this meeting, the colleague was saying,

you need to ask your patients if they're eating food, dirt or if they're eating food from soil. And I thought that is a really interesting way to sort of acknowledge the problem that you just mentioned. That in a regenerative agriculture type situation, we are eating, we're growing nutrients and our vegetables from soil. Whereas when I walk into Safeway, which is a local supermarket here, and I buy conventional broccoli, I would think based off of what I'm learning

where I'm eating broccoli grown in dirt and not a nutrient-rich soil. Yeah, I mean, it's funny, though, the fresh produce only makes up about 3% of our overall calories and most of our minerals we get from animal-sourced foods. And so I agree with you that we're not growing vegetables in as nutrient-rich soil as we can, but it's really the intake of animal-source foods.

foods and avoiding grains, which can block mineral absorption, is really the best way to get our minerals, especially shellfish and fish, too. Like oysters off the charts for zinc, we know that zinc is really helpful for, you know, things like COVID. You're building your immune system. Nobody eats oysters anymore. No one eats fish anymore. But people do eat beef, and it's a very mineral-rich food for humans. Yeah. Do you worry about the toxins in the waters when we're eating shellfish and seafood at all? I don't eat a lot of freshwater fish. I don't worry so much about things like oysters and other filter fish. It's like liver because it is a filter. It doesn't mean it's absorbs it. It just filters it and it's actually really mineral-rich food. So I don't worry

too much about that. Yeah, that's actually a really good point. I asked Paul Saladino about liver when you're eating liver because he's such a fan of organ mate. And I said, aren't you getting the toxins? And he said, that's not how the liver works. It's got, it's a filter. So it doesn't actually hold on to the toxins. It's just filtering the toxins. So I never thought of shellfish is sort of being that same sort of filtering. That's interesting. I like that. Okay. So let's sort of bring it back to our audience because a large part of why I wanted to bring you on is so that my resetters could just grab this idea that we need to go back to quality of food. And we're fans of supplements and all of that, but I feel like your diet should be the first thing that gives you that same,

gives you enough nutrients in order to be able to allow your body to thrive. Do you feel that? Like if we had like a good mixture of meat and vegetables, we stayed off of grains and the harmful oils that we might never need a supplement in our life? It's definitely possible. And one thing we do in the end of Sickard Cow is talk about let's get rid of the emotion and just talk nutrient density. Let's just log your food in chronometer, see what you're taking in. So chronometer is awesome.

Have you ever used it? Yeah, we use carp manager, but chronometer is great as well, mostly to count macros, but yeah. Yeah, well, the great thing about chronometer is you can count micros. And so it'll show you your iron, your B12, you know, your selenium intake, your copper. So you can look at your diet and say, wow, I'm kind of low in copper. I wonder what I could eat to get more copper, things like that. So I really like chronometer for that reason.

And so we encourage people to just, you know, put everything aside, all the emotion aside, and just what do you need to eat in order to get the most amount of your nutrients from a food? And it turns out it's red meat, it's organ meats, it's fish and shellfish, and it's, you know, things like asparagus and spinach. There's a few vegetables that are like powerhouses for nutrient density. And so we list those. We list the powerhouses for nutrient density. from animal-sourced foods. And then, you know, you can come up with a little matrix if you were to take, you know, animal food, plant food,

herb, spice, and a fat, and, you know, make a little matrix. And if you didn't like that combination, you wouldn't have to eat it again for another 105 years. You know, I think it's important to kind of remove your bias and just look at humans as, you know, an animal that needs a very wide variety of nutrition inputs and how can we get that best food? Awesome. And what are your thoughts on organ meats? I struggle to eat them just because I don't like the taste of them. So I do have to lean more towards supplementation. Allie Miller taught me you could take two thirds of like ground beef and then a third of the organ and mix it together. I see the value of so many amino acids. But do you feel like we all should be experimenting with organ meats? It's really the iron that you can get from liver that even if you were to eat red meat three times a day, it's very, it's very,

unlikely that you'd be getting your even RDA for iron. And so it's, you know, liver is just so nutrient dense. I also can't stand the taste of it myself. So I will get it in a blend with ground meat or you can take desiccated liver tablets, grass-fed liver tablets, which is what I also do. Yeah. Yeah. When Paul taught me that, I was like, okay, I can do that. That can work. Yeah, but you need quite a few of them. Some people will freeze it too. They'll like chop it into little pieces and freeze it and then swallow frozen liver. I guess I could do that. I can usually do anything for health,

but that one is just like, I can't. It's really hard for me too. I think, you know, for those of it, even, I mean, the idea of eating an egg, if you didn't eat an egg growing up, like think about how gross it could seem to eat like a sunny side-up egg. Sunny, yeah, or it's running.

Yeah, yeah, that's a, and I actually, this is a really interesting question, and then I want to move on to the ethical piece. I personally love my meat, my red meat, rare, and my family makes fun of me. And I'm like, but I can taste it that way. And it seems to me, if you cook the heck out of it, I've lost some nutrients. Is there, do you lose any of those as you cook it longer? Well, for example, vitamin C is really high in liver. But when you cook anything with vitamin C, it destroys the vitamin C. So the best way I think to get vitamin C is from citrus foods and leafy parsley, actually. is, and red peppers are really high in vitamin C. So that's just one of the reasons why I think it's just a good idea. If you see your body as like a portfolio to just invest a little bit in each category and not put everything in one one bucket that has never been tested throughout time. So that's just my opinion on that. And like even with eggs, do you, if you cook it longer,

are you destroying some of the nutrients in it? You can oxidize the. fats and eggs if you overcook eggs. And so it is like if you're going to make scrambled eggs, to leave them a little on the more runny side is better or to have your yolk a little more runny is definitely better because there are some delicate fats and eggs, the polyunsaturated fats are can be damaged when you cook them at high temperatures. Right. As far as meat protein goes, they're not really going to make too much of a of a damage by cooking it longer. The minerals aren't going to be damaged. It's really some of those vitamins that could be damaged, but they're probably going to be damaged either way. So I don't know. I mean, you don't want to char it,

right, because the myard reaction, that black stuff that you get when you grill, that is carcinogenic. But that doesn't mean meat is carcinogenic. It just means the myard reaction is carcinogenic. And as far as bacteria, because a lot of people are worried about E. coli or something like that, it is a concern with ground meat. So you do technically want. to cook burgers through because, I mean, unless you really trust the source, I suppose, but the E. coli from the intestines can get on the surfaces of the meat. And when it gets ground, it can get ground into meat. And other bacteria can get ground in there. When you're looking at a steak, though, you would be cooking the edges, the outsides. And so E. coli can't get into,

like, it doesn't burrow down into like a worm or something like that. you're safe that way. Yeah, that's a bummer because I like my burgers rare. I do too. It's not as safe. That's all I'm saying. It's not a safe. I'm not guaranteeing you're going to get sick, but it's not as safe. Yeah. Okay, let's move to the ethical piece. And this is the one that gets everybody fighting, which is it's cruel to kill animals and eat them. Yeah. So this is what I brought up a little bit before is there is no food system where there's no death. Like just there is not. Whether you intended it to die or not, it's going to die. So even if you didn't want it to die, I'm telling you it's dying and you are culpable. So that just won't hold up in court if you didn't want it to

happen, right? So little critters are dying. Whole ecosystems are getting destroyed by everything we eat. all right and so the only solution we have is to make sure that the life that is giving itself up for you was raised in a good way had a low stress death and is you know contributing to ecosystem function and that's why i think you know one large ruminant you know if you're thinking about how does my diet cause the least amount of harm if a mammal is a mammal and a mouse is the same as a as a cow one cow can provide almost 500 pounds of meat. So if you had a cow grazing a pasture that was building soil health, that was attracting pollinators, that was improving the biome of the soil, increasing the water holding capacity,

making that ecosystem less susceptible to droughts, you know, all these great things that were, you know, attracting more life and building life, then that one death can feed your family for a year, right, or longer. If we're looking at our typical agriculture system, you know, so many things are sprayed on those fields, killing, you know, everything in its path, including leaching into the waterways, killing the fish, killing the bears that need to eat that fish, creating dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico, you know, even on an organic farm, there are organic pesticides. There's still death happening there.

If you eat bread, you know, what do you think happens around granaries? You think they just let the rats and mice come and eat everything? No, they're spraying like crazy to try to keep all those critters away or else we would not have any grain stores at all. They would just be eaten by rodents, you know, restaurants. I mean, so I think if you're truly looking to cause the least amount of harm, which is completely noble and honorable to do, you would source your food from a regenerative farm

and include animal source foods in your diet. How do you find a regenerative farm? If I walk into Whole Foods, there's really, I don't know what I'm getting. Visiting a farm, if you have the ability to do that, is really ideal. But I understand not everybody can do that. But checking out a farm, seeing if they're moving their animals and the animal isn't just stationary on the same patch of grass all summer long, In the film, we show the difference.

And so you can, you would, if you watch the film or read the book, you would understand what we're talking about and what to look for on a farm. It's a little tricky. There are labels coming out for regenerative meats, but even grass fed, you know, not necessarily regenerative, but it's still a better step in the right direction. Feed your family well. I still think red meat is just so important to our vitality and to, especially, you know, to growing children and pregnant and nursing women that, you know, you get the best meat you can afford to get. If you don't have a big budget, maybe it's grass-fed ground meat or organ meats

and less of the, you know, fancier steaks or something like that. But it's certainly going to give you, you know, per calorie a lot more bang for your buck than any plant-sourced foods. Okay. Yeah. You know what's interesting. Paul Saladino, I was going to tell you this in the last comment on the ethical piece. When I asked him, I said, if you were, I gave him a question of if you were sitting at a dinner table next to a vegan and the vegan said, oh my God, I can't believe you wrote a book called The Carnivore Code and you're all meat.

And you're arguing over ethics. What would you tell that vegan? And what he said was that your human existence is happening right now. You are alive right now. your ancestors ate meat. That we literally could not, the human evolution of humans could not have happened if we had not been able to eat meat. Yeah. And I think of that also goes back to the anthropology discussion that you brought up in the way beginning, that we see meat eating as something that's primitive and barbaric and too animalistic, right? And we don't want to

think of ourselves as animals, but there are certain primal pieces of us that are undeniable. How we reproduce, what we need to eat, our basic needs here on this planet are not going to change, and we can't sort of intellectualize ourselves away from that. And, you know, all life requires death. You cannot have new life without death. And so if we just think of all things as just molecules in, in cycles, we go back and then new life happens because of us. And so if you, again, just, you know, I think that we're very afraid of death. I think even in the health community, people are afraid of death. That's why longevity, give me anything that'll keep me alive the longest. Not about quality of life. It's about I need to live the longest, you know,

cheat death. Only like 30% of Americans have wills, something like that. So, wow. Yeah, we don't want to talk about death. We don't want to know what happens. We don't want to know animals died for our food. We don't want to think of ourselves as animals. And we've just, you know, really removed ourselves so much from just the natural cycles of the world. And it's really sad. Yeah, fascinating. So let's finish up with this. I've got five specific questions for you around your mission and what you're doing. My first question is, if you and I are in line a grocery store and I find out you wrote this amazing book and you have amazing programs to help people. It sounds like you have an amazing CSA. And I asked you, what was the perfect human diet?

What would you say? Plant base plus meat. Ah, interesting. You went that way. So tell me more. What is plant based plus meat mean? Eat a lot of veggies and have your meat too? Just, yeah, eat a wide variety of whole foods as diverse in colors and plants and animals as possible that you can tolerate. So for me, for me, it's a little more narrow than for other people. You know, people seem to, you know, I also try to avoid conflicts and polarization. And I'm really trying to get everyone on the same page. And so when you start with plant-based, plus meat, people seem to be able to be able to digest that a little bit better. And especially, you know, when you're talking to women who have more emotion around food than men do, I think it's really

important to honor triggers and to enter discussions from a place of sensitivity. Yeah, I love that. I love your approach. I've had some vegetarians over the years that I've coached back to health and I've asked them, could you have your vegetarian days and then you have your days that you add some meat in for your own health. And something about phrasing it that way is like you don't need to give up this identity of being a vegetarian. You just need to add some meat in some days. And it seems to work.

So I love the plant-based and with some meat. Smart. I love it. Okay, my second question, this is a deep one. When I'm listening to Robert Kennedy Jr., Zach Bush, even Kiss the Ground, there's a lot of talk about if we don't get this regenerative agricultural situation, we don't get our soils back where they need to be. We don't bring more regenerative farms in that the humans that were close to extinction.

Do you feel like we're heading towards extinction if we don't turn this around? You know, I used to very much use that scare tactic in my marketing, and I try to also avoid that now too. I think that it's not necessary. And I think we need to look at health first and how do we fix our human health? Because that's actually to me a bigger crisis right now is our failing health.

And the fact that there's so many people who are so misinformed and misled by our broken food system and with diabetes and obesity and everything. Like, let's fix that first and get a handle on our and ourselves as humans. And then we can tackle the environment. The environment is, that's a big, you know, fixing our soils. What is someone in New York City who, you know, has a job and two kids? What are they going to fix soil?

You know, like that's like another way of sort of. not actually dealing with anything. Yeah. And blaming others instead of taking it on yourself. Yeah. When I find when people are overwhelmed, they just shut down. And then there's no action. And that's not where we want people to be.

One of the things that I was this year really brought to my attention was like, why aren't we talking about why so many people are immune compromised? Can we stop arguing about masks and sheltering in place? And can we like if there's anything that, this year has taught us is that we have this immune compromised world. Why aren't we doing, what are we doing to fix that? And that has been one of my big messages. So when you say, why aren't we addressing the poor health of people, what do you think, is there one, one or two things you could say was at the root of that? I actually think that nutrition is the

biggest driver of health, period, and that access to animal source foods for people who are food and secure is also at the top of that, that eating nutrient poor foods is the problem. I mean, they taste good. They're cheap. They're accessible. They're a sign that you've made it in a lot of cultures, right, is to eat that Western-type diet. And so I'm really on a mission, you know, I'm coming up with this impact campaign out of my film to really debunk the vilification of meat to women and children and make sure that animal source foods are something that are presented as a healthy food source for women and children in particular. I love that. I love that. So, okay, my next question is also a deep one here. So you have this mission and you can see it

just in your book, you go to your Instagram, like you can tell, and we love mission-based people, like how you show up in the world. I just want to applaud you because it's inspiring. If there is one person you could sit and have a conversation with that is probably blocking your mission. That's on the other side of your mission. Who would that be and what kind of conversation would you want to have with them? And it could be a corporation that's doing this as well. I would sit down with Bill Gates. Awesome. Why? He is a major investor in plant-based proteins. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just published a paper out of India showing that, you know,

vegetarian women were healthier than meat-eating women when it wasn't adjusted for socioeconomic status, which we know that the upper-class people in India are, you know, more leaning towards Hindu and more plant-based, and the meat-eaters are the lower-class folks, the lower castes. He doesn't seem to have the right message behind why regenerative agriculture is important and why animal-source foods are critical, to human health and especially to food insecure people.

I feel like if I was just able to sit down with him, I might be able to sway him back. And I do plan on sitting down with a lot of policymakers showing them this film, getting the book in their hands, and trying to make really big policy impacts when it comes to nutrient-dense food and better agriculture systems. I just love that. I hope you get to sit down with him.

I would love to be a fly on the wall. I love that vision. Okay, let's go back. I got two more questions for you. Let's go back to Bill Schindler, who you have to meet. We're going to find a way for you guys to connect because you just have your missions are so lined up. So one of the things that he talked about is that when he butchers an animal, he brings it into his kitchen, puts it on the countertop. And he involves his children in butchering it not only from a, hey, we're going to use all parts of this animal, but from a grass. attitude place of just giving thanks to the animal and what it's going and what it's gave its life for our human health. What do you, what messaging do you feel like we need to get to across to our children and as specifically when it comes to me, like how can, as mothers are listening to this, what is the messaging that we need to change so kids can have a greater appreciation of good food? You know, it's funny, when my daughter was seven, and I have the story in my book and I'll try to tell it really fast. I have this blog post called It's Impossible to Be Vegan. And what happened was she was on a play date. We live outside of Boston in kind of like a, you know, a suburb with lots of

educated parents all trying to do the right thing. A lot of them don't eat very much meat. Anyhow, so she's on a play date. They're out by our pond and they come running back in. Oh my God. Oh, my God. it's a massacre. And so I come walking back out with them and there was a sheep that clearly a coyote like had a party with and there was just bloody wool and it was disgusting to look at. Right. And these poor girls are only seven or maybe she was 10 at the time. You know, she was 10, but still little.

And I said, okay, well, it looks like a coyote got one of our sheep and we try to protect them. but it happens sometimes. But the coyote needs to eat too. And the coyote wasn't bad for eating. It just, the coyote needs to feed its babies too. This is just what happens sometimes. And the rest of that sheep is going to go into our compost pile. And we're going to turn that into healthy soil that then is going to go on our vegetable fields and grow better kale.

Love that. And she said, wait, so can you taste the bones? And we said, no, you can't taste it, but the calcium from the bones of that sheep are actually going to go into the kale. And she's like, oh, so it's just all recycled? And we're like, yeah, she's like, you mean. So it's impossible to be vegan. And we're like, yes. So, you know, there's a book out, there's a children's book called Everybody's Somebody's Lunch.

And it talks a lot about that too, about, you know, everything is eaten and is eating. and eats and is eaten, right? That, you know, something eats a plant, but then something else eats that animal. And it's not a hierarchy necessarily. It's a circle. And everything is intertwined within the circle. And humans are just a piece.

We're not at the top of the pyramid. We're just a piece of the circle. And I think that more kids need to understand that we just have a place, that we need to, you know, have a little more humility and that we're just a piece of this. And not anymore or any less. important than everything else. Yeah, that's what I do. That's a great story. I love it.

I love it. And it's just, you know, what I'm hearing consistently from you is that we can't take things at surface level. We need to start thinking deeper about these values that we hold so true in our heart. But maybe we haven't really fully looked deep enough to understand that there is a, like you said, there's a place here where we can all coexist and appreciate all aspects of nutrition, except McDonald's perhaps. Let's, the last question, and this is what I ask everybody. So if there was one message you could get into every human's brain, like one line, couple lines, like what would that message be about, it could be about health, it could be

about life, it could be about the environment? I mean, in 50 years, I'm not going to be here, right? And so I am trying to just do the right thing with my time here. And I'm pretty passionate. I love talking to people who are just passionate about whatever they're doing. So whether that's an artist or curing a weird disease or whatever it is, like be, go for whatever you're doing with all of your positive energy. And so I happen to be really, really obsessed with making sure that people have access to nutrients

and are not being told wrong information based on sort of a quasi-religious bias because it's really harmful to our health and to our environment. But I wish there were more people that I had access to on a regular basis that had passions where they felt as fulfilled with their, the mission that they're doing as I do. Yeah, you know, I always tell my kids, my daughter's 20, my son's 18, and I always tell them the quote, and I forget who said it, that don't think about what the world needs. Think about what lights you up, because what the world needs is more people that are lit up.

And, you know, you use the word passion. It really is true. When you step into your passion, life is a whole lot more fun. You're a happier person, and everybody wins because. of that. So this was amazing. I was thinking as you were talking, so I started this carnivore discussion back in April with Maria Amric. And literally in April, I was like, carnivore, I don't know. I ate meat, but I was like anti-carnavore. Then I morphed that discussion to Paul Saladino, who you know his beliefs. Then I morphed it to Bill Schindler, who really believes in fermenting

foods and really appreciating the whole animal and going back to some more ancestral roots. And then you're the, you're sort of the final piece. I have some great conversations coming up with people about regenerative soil. And this, I love how you have accomplished that middle ground. I love the inclusiveness of your mission and your message. So thank you. This was really enjoyable. And let me know, what can we do to support you? Our resetters are passionate about health, their own health, the world's health. How can we support your movie? How can we support your book? Because I know there's a lot of people listening that would like to get on your mission. We're actually going to be releasing the film for free, November 22nd through the 30th.

So my thought there was that's Thanksgiving week. And there's a lot of tense family discussions that happen. There's also a little bit of downtime where people can take the time to watch a movie, maybe while they're traveling or while they're digesting their food. And I think that, you know, there really hasn't been a film talking about the other side of the plant-based argument. And not that my film is a rebuttal at all because we actually say in the film it seems like some people can do okay on a vegan diet. But I think that we're arguing about the wrong thing. Nick Offerman says that right in the beginning of the film. So he's the narrator.

So people might know him as Ron Swanson from. Parks and Rec. So he's a huge friend of the project. It was a passion project that took me a long time to make and I did not pay myself while I was working on it. So watch it for free. We're putting it out there. We do have, you know, after you watch the film, you'll have the ability to buy all of the interviews or a course that I made called Me Curious, where I thoughtfully walk people through the nutrition environment and ethical case for why it's okay to eat meat. and we have a lot of testimonials from ex-begans who went back to eating meat and just telling their stories in that. And we're also raising money for an impact campaign because I want to go to schools and conferences and really bring this message to everyone from animal scientists who have a hard time talking to non-scientists about what they do,

to college students who are super passionate, but maybe a little bit misled by the plant-based movement. let's just have a discussion about this in an intelligent way. So watch my film, read some of the contradictory information, and then let's have a conversation about it. And then my book is meant to be a companion to the film, so Sacred Cow. And I'm on Instagram at Sustainable Dish, and I also do nutrition consults.

So those are all the ways people can reach out and support my work. And thank you so much for having me out. appreciate it. Yeah, we'll put all the links. The movie is it like on Netflix or do we have to go to a website to see it? The free launch is right at sacred cow.com. And people can just register right there with their email address and they'll get a link to watch the film for free. And they'll be able to share that with their friends and everything. But it's only one week. And then after that, it's going to be probably starting in the new year. It'll be available on mainstream platforms and we're negotiating right now with everybody. So I don't know which one's going to have it first.

but it will be out there probably for a fee initially, you know, starting this winter. Awesome. Beautiful. Well, keep up your passion. This was incredible, Diana. I just appreciate you taking so much time and letting me kind of walk through the different thought processes that I know my resetters are having and just grateful for everything you're doing.

So we will get the movie out. We'll get the book out. And we'll keep preaching this message. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Hey, resetters. If you're feeling overwhelmed with all the information that is out there on, which is the best diet for you, which fast should you be doing, how the heck do you go about

balancing your gut microbiome, and how do you start to stabilize your blood sugar, then I want to encourage you to join me in my Reset Academy membership group. I created this group because I saw that there was such a need for you to have more guidance in bringing these incredible principles together and figuring out which diet and which fasting tool is best for you. And I really truly mean that, that we all have a personal direction that we should be pointing our health in. And that direction is unique. That path is unique to us. So here's what you'll find in my academy is that I've got courses on how to be the best fat burner possible, how to slow down the aging process, how to fast around your hormonal cycle, how to finally become

metabolically flexible. I've got recipes. I've got research. Plus, you get access to all the group resets that I've done with my community. But we didn't really stop there because your health is massively important to me. So we have live weekly workouts with me from my backyard. I put on a heck of a workout, 20 minutes of hit training workout so you can join me in the community there. We have two calls a month where you get all your health questions answered. And best of all, there is an incredible, supportive, loving, amazing community that has formed there. So we would love to have you on this journey with us. If this is of interest to you, please go to resetacademy.com and sign up, and I will see you in my Reset Academy.

Okay, resetters, so if you've been following the podcast, you know that we have been continuing this meat discussion with a lot of different experts. And it's been really fascinating, like I mentioned to Diana at the end, for me to sort of see the evolution of the way different people are thinking about meat. So if you haven't heard, there's a couple of other podcasts that we've done that I really encourage you if this topic of meat is interesting.

Please go listen to the interview I did on the anti-anxiety diet with Ali Miller, listen to the keto versus carnivore conversation I had with Maria Emmerich, go listen to Paul Saladino, listen to Bill Schindler, and then this one, and you will see that there is a complete picture here. And I actually, I liked Bill's approach with the fermented of like how you handle the toxicity. And I think I like her approach. Like she brought a whole other thoughtfulness to the discussion of me. Didn't you think?

Yeah, I thought so too. I thought she had a beautiful way of finding common ground between all different beliefs, plants versus carnivore. The other episode I would recommend is Brian Sanders. And the only reason I think Brian Sanders, the evolution or food, the food industry, I can't remember what we named it. Because her first thing that she talked about was the seventh day Adventists and how they criminalized meat. And I don't think that's what Brian talked about.

Somebody. Well, so Stephen Gundry came from Loma Linda. And I almost asked her this. But now actually I'm connecting the dots. Come to think of it. So Stephen Gundry, who wrote the plant paradox and was the one to really bring lectins to the surface. He was the one that he was in Loma Linda, a doctor. And Loma Linda has the largest amount of Seventh-day Adventists in that area. They're also a blue zone. Oh, right. And so he was a cardiologist in that area seeing the cardiac repercussions of their lifestyle

and their nutrition and was sort of what propelled his book, The Plant Paradox. Okay. And I think that was what Bill Sanders brought to us. Brian Sanders, yeah. Brian. Yeah. I was like, I was trying to find the two. I know. But I was like, oh, what she was saying reminded me of our conversation with Brian

and just how like we, how the evolution of how we got to hear and like what actually started that trajectory. And so when she talked about the Seventh-day Adventists criminalizing meat, because it's more, you know, masculine or whatever it was that she was talking about. I was like, oh, Brian kind of talked about that too. Yeah. What do you think about what she said about the China study? I'd never really heard of it. and it was an observational study. I thought that was really interesting because that's really one of the ones that vegans say,

but what about the China study? Haven't you read the China study? Yeah, I thought that was interesting. I also thought it was interesting that it's the same person that published their book. Yeah. And I think for me, somebody who goes and looks at so many studies,

what I have found is that not all studies are made equal. and you really have to dive in deep. And sometimes you grab, like in fasting, we'll grab a mouse study because that's all we have. We don't have a human study. And so just because we say there's a study on it doesn't mean that it was a good study. And I think the next evolution of science

needs to be a delineation between all these different types of studies. And because, you know, Brian Sanders has 600 different peer-reviewed studies. I can't, I'm sorry. Oh my God. I have definitely hit interview, interview overload. You're on a brain face. For anybody that's in our toxin reset program, do you know this on a brain face. That's so funny. I'm too much, too much resetter podcast name-dropping today. Paul Saladino has over 600 studies. And in his book, he talks about why he chose those studies. Jason Fung, when Jason Fung brought out obesity code, he was very clear, I'm going to show you human studies, not mouse studies. So I think there is the nuance. I keep hearing this word nuance showing up over and over again.

We need to be able to look deeper than just the headline of a nutritional habit or a nutritional theory. Or a statement. I found what she said about the, we have 60 harvests left. Oh, that was. And we all took that as fact. Yes. And she goes and digs deeper as to like, where's this fact coming from? And then it's really just a statement that was said in passing. So true. So true. It's almost like, oh my God, thank you for bringing that up. Because it's almost like social media right now. Yes. One thing I would encourage you all, if you are getting your news from social media, there are two major things you have to. look at when you start to see these headlines as you're scrolling through. And this is the same thing if you're watching the news. So one is when you look at the headline, did you actually click on the article and go to the article and read the article? I've had more people quote statements to me. And when I say, oh, where's that article? And they're like, oh, I don't know, it came through on my news feed. And they didn't even click on the article. And half the time the article is not even saying anything

reflective of the news feed. No. Or the headliner, because the headliner is meant to make you feel like you. Yes. On Facebook, so you can be triggered and you can start a conversation about an article you never read with all your friends and you started on a big argument. And then the second thing is you got to look at where the information is coming from. So what's beautiful in that statement, and I even fell into that trap.

I've been walking around like 60 Harvest, 60 Harvest. You know, good on her like for actually research. searching that and bad on me for like not going into that depth of understanding. We can't just watch a movie. We can't just look at an article. And this is what we're trying to do for our resetters is weed through all of this. And then ultimately you have to think for yourself. Yeah, for sure. And I just think it's so interesting. Like how like that that was such a good example of how many things do we do on a daily basis that we accept as truth or fact, right? Whether you can talk about it on a scientific basis or, you know, a mental basis or an emotional basis, but like how many things get said

that we just assume as fact and then that now is like our new belief system. But like then think about your belief system. How many of your beliefs are actually fact or or truth? You know what I mean? Like, oh, it's just very interesting to me. Yeah. So interesting. Okay, I have two more questions for you. One is, are you going to keep buying grass-fed meat? Oh, yeah, that's a good question. I did like what she said about, you know, when you're buying grass-fed, the chances of you buying it from a local farm or, you know, a medium to smaller-sized farm is higher. So at least likely if you're buying grass-fed, you are supporting, you're probably supporting a local farm of some sort. So yes, I think so.

Yeah. Anything, any food habits you would change based off of what you heard her say? No, no. I mean, are you going to make your burgers well done? No. Me neither. I mean, she said that and I'm like, yeah, then I get a E. coli. That's kind of where I, like, that's immediately what I said.

I'm like, it's not worth it. That's exactly what I thought. I was like, oh, well, too bad. What I was going to, what about you? Are you going to still buy grass fed or no? I think I still, I still am a big fan of supporting the farmers. which is why I like farmers market. I mean, you and I both here in California do.

Spade and Clow is where we get our vegetables from. And I know the couple that owns that. I know their passion. I know their inter-regenerative soil. So that excites me. When it comes to meat, I have to say I've been a bit of a meat snob. And I've been like, oh, grass-fed only. And I think now I might like relax a little bit on that,

especially if I go out to eat. Sometimes I won't order meat out because I don't know the quality of it. And what I learned today is it may not be as harmful as I thought it was. When I was listening to her, I was actually trying to think, I'm like, okay, because I've been a little bit like that too, especially with some of my family members that are that raised cows. And I'm like, you should be doing it X, Y and Z way. But then I thought about like what she said, that the majority of them aren't actually eating that much grain. If I think about like what my family, like family members do, they are like out on a prairie grass bed.

somewhere and they only really bring in the grain during winter time when you can't really access. But then what she said about the four stomachs too and how it goes through the stomachs and it breaks down. I guess I don't know enough about cow digiosts of systems to make an educated decision on that. The four compartments were interesting. Yeah. But I will I think release a little bit of that like that thought process that I have that what they're doing is wrong because what they're ultimately doing is amazing now that I think about all the cows. that they're out there supporting and digging into the ground. And, you know, so.

This interview made you love your family a little more, huh? I guess so. Maybe appreciate it a little bit more. Right. Okay. The other thing is, did you expect her to say Bill Gates? I had wondered. I'm not going to lie.

I wondered if that would be her person. And I don't know why, but when we wrote that question, I had a little tiny thought in my head that would be her person. I hope she talks to Bill Gates. I hope so, too. was like, Bravo. Somebody needs to talk to that man. Yeah.

Agreed. I was like, and you know what I thought is so many people in the health community are up in arms about Bill Gates, but they're up in arms because of vaccines. And if you are new to the vaccine conversation, what he's done in Africa has actually created more polio. It hasn't necessarily helped the polio situation. And there's a lot of arms and legs to that discussion. and someday we'll figure out the right person to bring on to talk about that.

Now I'm like, oh, now we have to be upset at him about plant-based living. And it's like, yeah, my gosh, what is wrong with this man? We need to, he has the, with all of that money, he has this incredible opportunity to do good in the world. And he's going off of misinformed information. I would like to think that he doesn't have a malicious heart. I'd like to think that he's just misinformed. and he hasn't thought this through at a deeper level. But that surprised me.

I did not expect her to say Bill Gates. Well, and if you think about, I'm going to also hope that he's just misinformed. And when you become as big as Bill Gates is, your access to the general public becomes, you know, like there's a big barrier between you and the general public. because I mean, his multi-billion-dollar man who has all these companies, like, so the people that he's surrounding himself with are very like-minded to him. So it's like his own echo chamber out of like the fact that he has to, I'm sure, be protected from the general public. But he's not getting other opinions or other, I don't know, I'm not saying about.

He's getting input that feeds his agenda. Right. We're all getting that, though. For sure. If you guys haven't watched Social Dilemma, if you haven't watched Kiss the Ground, I really encourage you to go watch both of those. What Social Dilemma, some of my friends and family said to me, well, why would I want to watch it? I know that I'm already in an echo chamber.

But I do think it happens to all of us. And this is why we need to be compassionate about other people's beliefs and really keep digging deeper for what feels right for us. Because it doesn't matter. We're all in echo chambers. I don't think the way that the internet and social media works right now, I think it's impossible to not be in an echo chamber. Well, absolutely. But I'm like, he's probably not even on social media.

Like, he is so far in an echo chamber that if somebody could get to him and have a conversation, I would hope that he would be open to hearing about it. Who would you want to talk to? Well, on the opposite side of it, well, I mean, the person I always want to talk to is Robert Kennedy. That's the biggest. You know, I think I want to understand and I don't know if I'd want to have a personal conversation with Trump or the Trump administration, but I want to understand this concept of like how people don't believe that the planet is at a critical point that we are going to look at profits over our planetary needs. I'm struggling with that one right now. So what I'd like to do is this is what I want to do.

I want to be in a three-way conversation with Robert Kennedy, Trump, and I'm just going to sit and take it. So you don't want to have the conversation. You just want to listen. I want to see, watch the two of them. Because there's going to be some similarities and there's going to be some opposing. And I again, what breaks my heart on so many issues is when we put profits above human health. And whether we're talking about the big pharma or we're talking. about the planet. I'm really struggling with that. And I feel like we don't have enough people that are shouting the message of human health, human health, human health. We've got the Zach Bushes, we've got, you know, Robert Kennedy, like we've got some of these gems in the world right now that are willing to stand up for their causes. But I'm struggling with this, you know, desire to create a profit over human health. It's just really hard for me to envision

that people are willing to do that. Who would you talk to? Do you know who you would talk to? I have no idea. I'm not really one to have a conversation. You want to go into the corner and read a book. No, I want to go in the corner and listen. Yeah, I mean, the Robert Kennedy and Trump,

that would be an interesting one. I think Robert Kennedy and Bill Gates would be an interesting one. Let's put Robert Kennedy, Bill Gates, and Trump together in a room, the three of them. And maybe throw Joe Biden in there. Let's just let the four of them talk it out. I think. Well, I think you can't add the presidential aspect to it. But maybe like put Zach Bush in there. Like, I would love to know what his thoughts are. Like, yeah. There's so many. Well, we are going to talk to Zach Bush. And I, and I have, I feel like I have more questions at some point. I really want to know more. I have more specific for him. Okay. But I have to ask, what do you think about her last end story about how the sheep goes into the ground, which goes into the plants? loved it. Oh my God. I loved it. Oh, it's so oh my God. I have so many thoughts on that. So for starters,

when you go to a nursery and you get fertilizer, let's just say you do that and you're a vegan and you bring that home and put it in your soils that it's made from bones from animals. It's like, okay, how did that animal? Right. It's the circle of life. How did it? That animal gave its life. It was killed. for the fertilization of your soils, for your vegetables that you are being vegan for because of the ethical part of animal killing. That's where I'm just asking us all to think different and to stop blaming. We just have to stop blaming and realize that we're just not thinking deep enough and we're not getting out of our echo chambers enough. And I think I loved what she said if you have the opportunity, like go visit the local farm. I think for some people,

They just envision that all animal farms is just like cruelty. And I think if you actually go and you visit a farm and you see like the amount of pride and love and hard work that goes into farming, that maybe like you'd have a different appreciation for like why people would eat animals. Yeah. So well said. Well said. And I think that's part of what we don't do is we don't get into each other's shoes enough.

We don't, we're not willing to think. about the other side. Right. Anyways, this was cool. Who knew? You know, when we brought Maria Emrick on, she had all these keto books, and I remember you and I discussing,

well, let's talk about the carnivore cookbook. And we're going to have to someday have a conversation again with Maria and be like, you have no idea what you started in us. Well, we will in January. We'll get to show with her again. Yeah. So I just think it would be neat to sit down and just really have it. Like, look at what we,

let me tell you all the people we've talked to since we talked to you. So it would be really cool. Absolutely. So and resetters, you guys, the movie. So when the movie comes out, we'll talk about ways that we can collaborate on that. She talked at the end about how she's willing to come back and ask questions about the movie. So just another mission-hearted person for this podcast.

I love it. And as always, give us feedback. And I hope that this enlightened you as much as we enjoyed having the discussion with her.