It’s Not Just What You Eat – How Food Quality Shapes Metabolism and Long-Term Health | Nutrition | E118

Our hormones are tanking, our fertility is tanking. Obesity and like, being overweight is the norm. Chronic disease is on the rise. We are dying younger. Right? It's not working. And food is medicine. The food that we eat every single day is one of the biggest levers in determining our health outcome. So the food system and all the changes that we've made, we're now seeing the consequences of it today.

Welcome back. Once again, I am super excited to be here with Ashley Armstrong. She has an amazing story, so we're just going to hop into it. As far as what she does, she's a pharma engineer, which is kind of an interesting combination of things. So after a brief introduction, we'll kind of hop in today's conversation. Ashley Armstrong has a PhD in mechanical engineering, but traded her career in research for life on the farm. She's now the co founder of Nourished Food Club and Angel Acres Low PUFA Eggs. She focuses on producing food you can trust through regenerative agriculture, which we're going to talk about. Super, super exciting. Ashley is passionate about metabolic health, fatty acids farming and livestock feed. And all of you who've followed me know that these are passions of mine as well. And now, and on top all these interactions, how this actually shapes our health. She also co hosts the podcast Rooted in Resilience with her sister Sarah, where they explore the connection between real food, lifestyle habits, exercise, to restore metabolic health. So, Ashley, welcome to our podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. It's really fun to talk to people who have similar interests, especially with doctors who get the concept that food is medicine. So I'm looking forward to this combo.

Cool, cool. So one of the things as I was kind of looking at your stuff because I actually got introduced to you by a patient who probably is watching this or listening to this right now, who actually, you know, we give a food food sourcing guide to patients when they come see us. And she of course did all of her own research and brought in some of Yalls eggs. And I kind of looked at it. I was like, this is kind of interesting. So started looking into your story and it's really interesting. You started as a PhD in engineering and then had your own story about your own illness. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Audience might not know you about how you went from being a female in the engineering world, which is like unique niche in and of itself, right? So now you're, you know, providing food for people literally across the country.

So back in high school, like, I loved Math and physics. And so a logical step for me in undergrad was engineering, but nothing really ever got me super excited about it. I kind of was doing what a lot of my peers wanted me to do and just putting in the work day after day, just thinking, you know, one day, I'll just get a great job after this, right? And, gosh, did that start to really build up over time? And just, like, this is taking up so much of my time. I'm super tired all the time, and I don't even really enjoy this. What am I doing? And then on top of that, not knowing about food sourcing or food quality and just kind of doing the best that I could at the time and really being influenced by, you know, fat is bad, whole grain everything, red meat is bad, cholesterol, avoid, you know, this. The standard mainstream health guidelines, swap your butter for margarine, things like that. So was doing the best what I thought was healthy at the time. And I was eating not great food that wasn't sourced well. I was eating a lot of polyunsaturated fats, PUFAs, missing out on valuable nutrients, not eating enough calories, and overworking myself. And so at some point, the body lets you know that something's wrong, right? The body keeps going core. And so that showed up as, like, hormonal issues and autoimmune, like, conditions with really bad Raynaud's, cold hands and feet, very bad gut problems. Was pooping every, like, three to five days. Super tired at a young age. And it just was like, this is not normal. This is not normal. So the only solution that doctors were giving me was like, oh, just birth control pills and maybe some autoimmune prescription meds that you'll just be on for the rest of your life that'll help you manage your symptoms. And thankfully, my mom was like, nope, not gonna do that. So that just was the reason for going down health rabbit holes, as we all like to say, right? Because these aren't. This is not mainstream information. And I honestly think that a big part of returning health to our country is undoing decades of misinformation that we've all been told. So returning back, honestly to, like, what our great, great grandmas used to do and relearning how to cook food from scratch, knowing where our food comes from, eating more traditional ancestral foods, eating enough for my needs. And once I started to do that, I actually started to get better energy levels. And I think that it was that that helped me finally realize what my true passion was, rather than just Chasing something that someone else wanted me to do. I, I finally had the energy to tune into what actually made me excited, what actually got me happy, and that was food sourcing, food production. And so in grad school I made the decision, hey, once I finish my PhD, I'm actually going to become a farmer and dive into this food production passion head on. That was the most uncomfortable conversation I've ever had with my grad school advisors. Hey, I'm not going to be a professor, I'm actually going to be a farmer. So that's kind of what started it all and started a farm from scratch. Got really into regenerative agriculture, what livestock eat and how that changes the final food product that you then consume and growing more through partnering with other small farmers to give them a market and be able to provide more healthy food for others throughout the country.

I think it's so cool that you've used this store, your passion to actually plugging with other people to make their stuff available across the country. That's kind of, you're magnifying what you learned. But one thing that's interesting, like you went from the PhD, the farm thing. I've had multiple patients come see me, engineers. One was actually an engineer at a local chemical company with really bad inflammatory bowel disease. He got better and now his family lives on a farm outside of Richmond, which is where I'm at, in central Virginia. And he's basically a farmer producing pigs, cows, all this stuff for some on patients now. But it was like his journey. And he actually left a pretty good paying job to do this, which is, it's. There's more people doing this than you think actually.

Yeah. At the end of the day, you, life is short. And when you realize that there are opportunities where you can spend more time outside doing things that you enjoy doing, balancing like what you're paid versus your day to day. I think more and more people are kind of opening up to that now. And I think that farming is a great option to get people back outside, back out in nature and return to what our great great grandmas. And honestly, like if you flashback 150 years ago, 200 years ago, most people's days were centered around food production. Like hey, we need to harvest, we need to prepare, we need to cook food, we need to preserve. And now food is like an afterthought. It's an inconvenience, it's, let's just get things as quickly and cheaply as possible. And that's clearly having consequences.

What's interesting how Many cultures revolve around the table, revolve around food acquisition. And one thing you talked about was decades of misinformation. One of the things I'm really big into is ancestral health. What are people doing in ancient cultures around the world? Not all cultures got it right, but there are some that got some really brilliant stuff going on. Could you talk about that misinformation about the whole margarine butter like fats bad for you? Because I think people still just don't get that actually healthy fats are good for your brain. That actually young developing brains need healthy fats. That you know, these plast literally plasticized petroleum products that we, we semi solidify in margarine are actually doing that to ourselves. Could you talk about some of this misinformation just to give us a T? We can't do all that here. But just a tasting of some of the misinformation that's still kind of sort of accepted today, even though the science has proven it to be horrible.

So dairy has been consumed for over 7,000 years. Like this is well documented now in like various archeological research. And dairy is one of the best sources of saturated fat. The fatty acid composition of dairy is very high in saturated fats, specifically stearic acid and other health promoting metabolism supporting saturated fats. And it's naturally very low in polyunsaturated fat, PUFAs. We've been consuming it for 7,000 years. And then now all of a sudden, 100 years ago, we've just decided, no, it's bad, we know better. And PUFAs, polyunsaturated fats are actually healthier for us. And these, these saturated fats that we've consumed for generations are now all of a sudden bad. Well, if you kind of look at government subsidies, the history of agriculture, it kind of makes sense. So government subsidies were put in place after World War II because we had these huge manufacturing plants that were made to build ammunition and various chemical warfare like things that we needed for the war, right? And so then boom, war is done. What do we do with all of this that we spent so much money on? Insert green revolution and like really the big push and explosion of industrial agriculture where we started to mass produce things like corporate corn and soy to maximize quantity of our food. And that had its consequences with, you know, minimizing quality of our food. And then now we started to over produce things, right? We're over producing corn and soy through these government subsidies. Okay, what can we do with them? Right? And that led to this massive Explosion of having access to very cheap seed oils and vegetable oils which are labeled as, quote, heart healthy. Well, these never existed in people's diets before really the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, like before then, seed oils were not a part of our diet. And now all of a sudden we're being told, no, no, these are healthier, these are, quote, heart healthy. And we're just going to ignore thousands of years of what our ancestors were consuming. It's this whole concept that humans think that they're smarter than mother Nature. Like this whole lab made meat. Oh, we can, we can replicate what whole food meat is. We know better. No, we don't. We will never know. We will never know better than mother Nature. So I think that that's kind of the misinformation that we've been told is that heart healthy polyunsaturated fats are better for us and like traditional animal fats that we've consumed for generations are bad for us. And if you dive into the research and the meta analyses that they use, there's actually so, so much flawed reasoning and logic in those meta analyses. Paul Saladino, Dr. Paul Saladino has a great YouTube video where he goes through all of the meta analyses that people still rely on to say that PUFAs are, are heart healthy and saturated fat is bad for us. There's, there's a lot of flaws in the research. And so the, the most important thing for people to understand is we've been consuming these fats for generations and that the sacrifice science that is used to promote heart healthy pufas is flawed and outdated and we just haven't caught up to that, even though the updated research is there.

So a couple things on what you said. One is, you know, I see a lot of patients with autism, Pandas, pans, adhd, and those kids to date, they almost all have low cholesterol numbers. When I do their evaluation, the question is, why would a 6, 8, 10 year old kid have low cholesterol? And it kind of goes back to, you know, a lot of dietary stuff. And it's interesting now something like 30% of all Americans now have a C15 deficiency, which is a saturated fat. The best source of it is actually dairy and it's associated with dementia and dolphins. And it's like, why, why does 30% of America have a deficiency in this? It's because we removed that fat from our diets from like 40 some years. So I think people just don't understand. And in my medicine, my field, I actually do a thing called Lipid medicine where you use phosphatidylcholine, we use certain types of fats to literally repair the brain. And so it's almost like I'm on the mindset I'm going back and replacing what people's diets have removed that was there maybe you know, a hundred plus years ago. And it's just kind of insane that I'm having to reverse stuff that our food experts, so to speak, in the past have told us is okay to do, and now realizing it's not the best idea.

Actually, there's actually really fascinating research out there about how the fatty acid composition of mother's breast milk has drastically changed over the last 50 years. Years. And so if babies are getting different types of fats in the food that they're consuming from day one in mother's breast milk, during such a critical adolescent development period, of course there are consequences to this, right? And so what a mother eats and the fatty acid composition inside of her directly changes the fatty acid composition of her breast milk that she feeds to her children. Like, wow, right? How crazy scary, but also empowering is that because as a mother, you, by being careful with what food you're consuming, you can change the types of fats that you're delivering to your baby. And that's just a message that no one is really talking about. And then on top of that, there's the whole, you know, baby formula conversation. It's. It's a difficult conversation because I understand that there are some mothers that have to rely on it. But you can't sit there and pretend that baby formula that is very high in polyunsaturated fat, PUFAs, because it contains like soybean oil and seed oil. You can't just think that that's going to yield the same result as like mother's breast milk that has more of a natural fatty acid composition of what was given for generations and centuries. So I think that the fatty acid composition of our food, and what I mean by that is the amount of saturated polyunsaturated and monounsaturated, so that you'll never going to have one or the other. It's always a mix. There has been a drastic change in the fatty acid composition of our food. And as a result, there is a drastic change of the fatty acid composition inside of us that impacts our metabolism, our gut health, our energy production, how easy it is to maintain or lose weight. And we're seeing the consequences, like day in and day out, like our food composition, our food system, what we're eating. It's not working. Our hormones are tanking. Our fertility is tanking. Obesity and like, being overweight is the norm. Chronic disease is on the rise. We are dying younger, right? It's not working. And food is medicine. The food that we eat every single day is one of the biggest levers in determining our health outcomes. So the food system and all the changes that we've made, we're now seeing the consequences of it today. Have you ever lost trust in your own body or in the doctors who were supposed to help you heal? It happens to millions of people who are stuck in the cycle of prescriptions, tests, and more questions than answers. That's why Dr. Aaron Hartman wrote his new book, Uncurable. As a physician and a parent, he's lived through the pain of being told there's nothing more we can do. But instead of accepting that, he built a new path, one that combines traditional and functional medicine to uncover what's really driving illness. Uncurable is more than a book. It's a roadmap to help you find the root causes your doctor might have missed, reactivate your body's natural healing systems, and finally believe in what's possible again. If you've lost hope or trust in the system, this book will help you take back control. Go to UncurableBook.com and grab your copy along with Dr. Hartman's free resources to help you start your healing journey today.

I love what you said about empowering, because one of the things that I talk to people is getting educated like this, learning this stuff. It's not to scare you. It's to empower you to get the information to actually make the changes that will change your. The trajectory of your family's health. And one of the things that got my wife and I down this was when we adopted our son when he was six months old. Horrible eczema, horrible asthma. And she made homemade formula for him using in Virginia contraband, illegal raw milk, and some other things. Right? But it's amazing. Within a month, his skin was mostly cleared up and his wheezing was gone, like two months. And it was just. She made homemade formulas. So there's ways to do it. It's just people need to be empowered to know how to go about that. I do want to switch gears a little bit because you are, you know, farmer. I think farmer ash is your handle or something like that. So I want to talk about, you know, I want, you know, regenerative farming versus a cafo. Like, what is a kfo? Because, you know, I Don't think people opt. Lot of people quite grasp what a contained animal feeding operation or CAFO is and what is regenerative agriculture and how is it better than our current model?

So the industrial food system, it's not the farmer's fault, it's the system. The system is designed to encourage a concept called go big or go home. So farmers are rewarded based on quantity, not quality. And so if you kind of take a step back like, wow, that would probably really change how someone runs a farm, right? If you are rewarded for maximizing quantity as opposed to quality. So over these last a hundred years, we've seen this transition from pasture based farms, small farms, pasture based, diverse, right? So they've got multiple different animals, like for example, pigs and cows or pigs and chickens, to now transitioning towards CAFOs cut confined animal feeding operations. And basically what this means is like a farm really specializes in one thing and they try to push that farm to max capacity by stuffing it into a building. And there are certainly advantages there because you separate yourself from mother nature. You can tightly control the temperature and various conditions inside, but it's so far removed from nature that if any sort of bacteria creeps in, boom. The whole system gets, everyone gets sick. And you're, you saw that with the bird flu, the avian flu, where like something like 20 million plus birds were just killed because we are raising animals so disconnected from nature that whenever any sort of bacteria species pops up, the whole system fails. So with confinement animal seeding operations, it basically allows people to raise so many more animals in such a tight area to maximize quantity. And we've seen a 64% reduction in the total number of farms since 1950. But our food quantity has gone up. And so that means that there are more bigger farms and less smaller farms. And that's coming at a cost because when you are a big farm that is fighting mother nature and it requires chemicals to be able to do that, Mother nature runs on biology when we fight against her. We're trying to use chemistry to fight against biology. And we're never going to win, right? We're never going to win. And we're seeing this more and more as like more herbicides are starting to fail. So we've got to start developing the next chemical. This is a very good business model for big agriculture because they now have continuous chemicals that they need to develop over time. As you know, biology adapts. So confinement animal feeding operations, it's just so different than how we used to raise animals out, out on pasture. It's stuffed In a building, there's often antibiotics in the daily drinking water. It requires chemical, like chemicals to fight off pests like rodents and things like that and flies, and also requires like heavily medicated animals. So they rely a lot on pharmaceuticals like vaccines, antibiotics, hormones. And it's just further distancing us from mother Nature. And it's coming at the cost of the quality of our food, the level of toxins that we're exposed to, pesticide exposure, and ultimately it's damaging rural communities as well because this model isn't working well for farmers. More than half of us farmers right now have to have an off the farm job to pay the bill. So imagine as a listener, imagine you, your current job didn't pay you enough for your like what you do day to day. So you now have to get another job or another job. And it's just not sustainable in the long term. So the conventional food system is changing the fatty acid composition of our food based on what animals are eating. It's increasing our pesticide exposure and it's lowering the nutrient quality of our day to day food.

Yeah, and it's really interesting, people don't realize with like chickens for example, the ammonia level so high and there's big things that they, the baby chickens actually would die from the ammonia exposure. So they have to use aluminash to negate the effect of ammonia. So basically now you're exposing all these little chickens to this aluminum ash stuff and it's like you take that, multiply it by a hundred. There's so many examples of how it's just bad for the animals and ultimately affects the people's health. So what is the difference between that and what's regenerative agriculture like? Okay, you talked about the contained animal. Feeding operations are confined. So what's, how's regenerative agriculture different?

So it kind of goes back to what you were talking about, how in your practice you're kind of rebuilding what we should have had. Right. And so with agriculture there's kind of two sides to the coin. There's degenerative and regenerative and then there's sustainable in the middle. So with degenerative, we are damaging soil health. We are lowering the total amount of topsoil and nutrients that we have. And with degenerative agriculture, which is much of the industrial food system, industrial agriculture, quote, conventional agriculture, that completely relies on chemicals, right? Because you basically got this blank slate of dead soil, dirt. And so you have to use heavy chemicals to grow in that type of medium. Then you've Got sustainable agriculture and that's sustaining what we have. Unfortunately, we aren't at the luxury to sustain anymore because we've been relying so much on degenerative agriculture throughout the country. We at some point are going to run out of nutrient rich topsoil because we're just degrading it year after year. Then there's regenerative agriculture. And this is farming in a way that gives mother Nature the tools that it can return life and function to things that should be there, like natural carbon cycles, natural water cycles, microbial action to access all the micronutrients in the soil, create living, breathing soil microbiomes. It's kind of like your gut microbiome in the degenerative model. You taking an antibiotic every day and you're just nuking all the gut, the wonderful gut bugs. Right? With regenerative agriculture, we're supporting and fostering those microbes. We're not killing them, we're not destroying them, we're not using chemicals. Instead, we're returning back to more ancestral farming practices where working with the principles of mother Nature and allowing us to continuously build topsoil, continuously build like really nutrient rich, microbe rich soil that we rely on to produce over 90% of our food. So it really comes down to like living breathing topsoil because we, that's what we need to grow food. Degenerative is kind of degrading topsoil, getting rid of the microbes and requiring more and more chemicals. With regenerative agriculture, we're supporting a better soil microbiome. We're building topsoil so that future generations have this topsoil to produce food with.

Yeah, I like with Joel Salton, he basically says something similar where he's like, you, you know, I, on my farm here, I'm raising grass, I'm making grass fescue, which requires soil, the byproduct of these beautiful steer that make rib eyes and all this yummy stuff. But you really are, it does come down to the soil health and the healthy soil. And the chemicals acidify the soil, they leach out the minerals and ultimately you get dead soil. And then all of a sudden you have to use chemical stuff to keep the animals going. And it just, it's a nasty cycle that unfortunately our current system is kind of, kind of stuck in. So one thing you said before is like, you know, one farm produces one thing. So it sounds like one farm can't do it all. So how is what you're doing different? Because obviously you're not just helping source like cows or what are you doing that enables people to have access to the variety that we want, but doing it in a regenerative, sustainable way.

Yeah. One farm can't do it all. And I think that that's what I tried doing right at our farm back in 2021. You know, we put dairy, goats, lamb, meat, birds, layer birds, pigs. There wasn't enough hours in the day. I was crying most days, having mental breakdowns. And so we're returning back to the whole cooperative community mindset. Right. And that's how things used to be done. Food cooperatives used to be very common. I'm very obsessed with reading like 1800, early 1900 agriculture books and kind of learning how they used to produce food. And we. It was very much like a working together. And so rather than pushing each farm to its absolute max capacity, pushing animals in confinement buildings getting bigger and bigger and bigger, instead let's increase supply slowly by adding more small farms into our network. And so with Nourish Food Club, we take care of all of the annoying parts of farming, which is marketing and sales and website and distribution and things that hurt your head, but they're necessary to get customers the, the food product, right? And then providing that guaranteed market to our dedicated farm partners so that, that way they can focus on being the best farm. They don't have to worry about not selling their product. They don't have to worry about where to take their products to market. We take care of that. Hey, if you guys follow our strict guidelines in our standard operating procedure, we will take care of you guys and give you that market. So we are very picky with who we work with. And we onboard them, we audit them, we visit them, and we teach them regenerative agriculture practices. These are requirements. This is what you're allowed to do. This is what, what you're not allowed to do. And my, my big goal is like, let's bring small farms back. Right? And that, that requires consumer support. But also it does require some sort of system to help give these small farmers like the market. Because as a farmer, you can't do it all. You wear multiple hats. It's hard. Taking care of the animals, taking care of the land, taking care of yourself, sales, distribution, customer support, it's a lot. And so I kind of recognize that that's like a really big pain point for a lot of farms. So that's what we're doing with Nourish Food Club. I am one of the farm partners at our farm, but we're just one of many. And so increasing Supply by adding more small farms where each farm has, you know, one to three items that they do and they do well, and they don't push their farm beyond capacity. And hopefully this is like a model that we can continue to grow. Others can build and develop over the country. And it would be more this cooperative style where the consumer joins the cooperative, they gain access to all these foods, and farmers work together to make sure that that supply is steady.

Is it like a membership thing where people sign up and, like, do a membership thing? Okay. Because that people don't realize, I think, that in Virginia, it's a big deal. Like, again, it's illegal to buy raw milk here. And so the only way I can get it is I buy a cow share, I become a member of. There's also a local place where I get some, like, greens and things like that, and you have to become a member of it. And so I think people don't realize that in order to get really good quality food, you have to get around a lot of regulation. And one of the ways you get around that is actually becoming a member of something that then allows you to have access directly to the farmers, which our current system really, once you'd have access to stores that have distributors that then hook up 20 levels down to some distant farm somewhere that your chicken now is going to China, getting processed and coming back. It's just. It's kind of crazy how hard it.

Or it's like 100 dairy farms. All of their milk is added to this one big tank, and that tank is driven like five states over to a big pasteurization plant. And there's. It's madness, right? It's this go big or go home mindset. And it's so opposite of what we were designed to eat.

And with what you're doing is the farms that you all are partnering with, are they all local to where you're out there? Are they across your state or are they across different state lines? How's that work with what you're doing?

Yeah, so we're only two years in, so relatively new. We've got farmers in our area here, and then we also have a hub in Kansas. And the reason being there is. Well, it's a great group of people there, but that's where our livestock seed ingredients are grown through our regenerative row crop farmers over there. I think that when people think of regenerative agriculture, they often think of just animals. But regenerative agriculture is so much more. It's produce, it's grains, it's Livestock feed ingredients, like you can produce any food in a degenerative or regenerative manner. And so we've got some regenerative row crop farmers that, you know, they do cover crop, no till and multi species planting. And they produce the feed ingredients that our chickens, pigs, dairy goats, leafirds eat. And so we've got a hub in Kansas and a hub here in Michigan. So it's local to those two hubs.

One of the ways I think about when I talk, when I talk to patients about this kind of concept, it's like people go to Europe and like, the food's so amazing. I feel so great. I eat all the pizza I want in Italy and I feel fine and you know, and like, and, but it's like the products are coming within 100 miles of that location. They're coming from local farms like in France. It's like if you're one side of the road, the product name changes because it's a different region. And like they're really super strict about it. So it's really like you're trying to create a model where you can get kind of that European small farm, local cuisine access, but you're trying to do it across an entire country, which is a pretty big, pretty big goal, I guess.

I think that food distribution like has been a thing that we have used and I know it's not the most ideal, but one thing to kind of reflect on is that convenience wins. Regardless of what you're talking about, when it comes to human behavior, convenience wins. It's the reality. We've all been Amazon, whether we like to say it or not. We've all been Amazon because it is so convenient.

Yeah.

So my personal opinion is if I want Nourish Food Club to be around in 5, 10, 15 years and be able to support our small farmers, we've got to catch up with the convenience and the shipping and the delivery because that's what the next generation just expects. They were born into that. Right. And so if like the next generation is our future and it is the future, it will determine the future of our food system. And so basically my goal with Nourish Food Club is how can we give access to traditional, farm fresh, old fashioned food but with the convenience of modern delivery? And it's a challenge, we're learning every day. But I think that that is a big wake up call to a lot of people in the regenerative ag space. Like if we don't do these things, we're going to lose, we're going to.

Lose well, how many people are utilizing all sort resources right now for ordering food for their families or whatnot? Do you have a number or an idea?

We're in like the low thousands and it's definitely our customer base. Amazing. They, a lot of them have been with us since the beginning and they're like, we're literally. This is the thing that I'm trying to tell your audience and others is as a consumer, people feel like they don't really like have a role in these things. No, you absolutely do. Who you choose to buy your food from. You're literally changing the food system with us. Like, that's very empowering and cool. And no one is perfect. Right. Do not expect all of your food to be perfectly sourced. That's not the goal and that's probably not realistic. But what is one item that you can start with, right? Whether that's cheese, your beef, eggs, milk. Like choose one item, know where it's coming from and try to support a regenerative farmer for that and start there, make that a habit, make that easy, and then assess where you're getting your other items. And so I don't want to scale extremely big because then that like disconnects us from the farmer and our customers. But there's a lot of logistics and shipping that it's very expensive. Like FedEx costs boxes, dry ice, it's very, very costly. And so we're trying to figure those things out. And the more that we can streamline our distribution, the lower our costs are going to be. And I do want to get there because I want our costs to be a little bit lower, more approachable, so that we can be at least cost competitive with some of the, you know, more central options.

Yeah. And I'm in Virginia. Remind me which state you're in.

I'm in southwest Michigan.

Michigan, yeah. And I had a patient getting eggs from y' all and it was interesting. I was like, I was like, they can ship those without breaking them. So I was kind of fascinated by the fact that you could actually get them without breaking them. So it's pretty cool. I want to respect your time here. So I want to go through a quick lightning round, ask a couple quick questions that actually got off some of your posts and things like that that I kind of thought was interesting. What is yak and what's yak?

Meet Yak is a ruminant animal. And so again, a ruminant animal is they have this complex four chamber stomach with a rumen where they can convert plant matter that we cannot Utilize as humans plant matter, and they can convert that into nutrient rich meat and milk. It's amazing if they were meant to be together. Pasture grasses and ruminants create nutrient density for us. So yak is like an old fashioned heritage, more like game species, animal. If you're by a computer, look up like yak, and they're really beautiful looking animals. And it's basically kind of like they take longer to finish than cows. So they take three years to finish. But they are a little bit more of like an old fashioned ruminant. Ruminant animal. So it's like a, I would say a mix of like elk and beef. It's got like a slight sweet taste. I really like it. And it's definitely leaner than beef.

Cool. You did one of your things somewhere you talked about nature's multivitamin was meat, which I thought was fascinating because I have so many people who, you know, anyway, I won't go in that, but explain to us, what do you mean by meat is nature's multivitamin?

So many people think of vitamin minerals and they also, they think of supplements, right? They think of a supplement bottle. Well, two years ago, supplements didn't exist. And we've been, we've been alive this long and we've relied on food as our medicine, food as our source of nutrients. And so when I say like nature's multivitamin, beef and animal products contain a lot of our essential vitamins in the most ideal ratios and the most bioavailable forms. And so people don't think that meat and animal products are like nutrient rich. Well, go plug that into chronometer and look at how many B vitamins you get from 4 ounces of ground beef. And so I think it's just goes into that, you know, decades of misinformation of meat is bad for us. Well, beef is very rich in very essential vitamins and minerals that we need.

Yeah, cheese. What is wrong with American cheese? Or I want to differentiate American cheese versus cheese from America because American cheese. Is American cheese a cheese, maybe I should say like that.

But we don't know if it's extruded or what it's made out of. So cheese has also been impacted by this go big or go home mindset. And in the early 1990s, Pfizer actually created a. An ingredient that is genetic, that is derived from genetic modification. And it's to try to replicate a process that we've used for thousands of years. So the animal rumen contains, like, there are more microbes in a teaspoon of rumen fluid than there are humans on this planet. Just like reflect on that. Insane. So there's so many amazing compounds inside of a rumen stomach, but the animal rennet is an ingredient that's required to make cheese. Rennet. This whole concept of rennet and it essentially just curdles milk so that you can make cheese. Well, Pfizer decided to make their own version of rennet made in a lab. And it's derived from genetic modification of various yeasts and microbes and things like that. And turns out a lot of people can react negatively to it. It there's some like allergenicity concerns with this lab made rennet called FPC made by Pfizer. And over 90% of cheese in the US is made using this FPC. And you see, you know, cheese was a staple in our diets and now cheese and dairy intolerance is on the rise. Right, what's going on here? Is it the dairy or is it what we've done to the dairy? So there's the rennet source that's used to make cheese, but then also a lot of the milk that is used to make cheese is from dairy cows in CAFOs confinement animal feeding operations where they're fed GMO greens, pesticide lace greens, and a lot of them are A1 cows. So we've consumed A2 dairy for centuries. And A1 is a relatively recent addition to our food system. And it's essentially a variant in the type of casein that is in milk. And so some people react negatively to A one casein, but can digest A two casein just fine. So you know, cheese is a superfood, but you should probably try to source it. Well, because of the rennet concern, you know what, what the cows are fed in the confinement buildings that gets transferred into the cheese. And Then also the A1 versus A2 and 100% grass fed or pasture raised animals are going to be eating a wide variety of phytonutrients and various compounds that then are directly put into the cheese. You're going to get more vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients from well sourced cheese as well.

Yeah, that is intriguing and fascinating. I love that. Um, I was not familiar with the rennet. That's a new, new data point for me because I'll cheat because you buy cheese and it'll say rennet and then. But it's, I guess fpc. Actually you should. I need to look in that a little deeper cause that's new information for me.

Yep. I highly suggest buying cheese that's made using animal rennet. I've seen it for myself. I digest cheese better and I've seen it for hundreds of others. They can finally digest cheese again because of the rennet source.

That's interesting. Actually. I want to respect your time. This is a great conversation, a lot of fascinating stuff. If people want to learn more about you, the nurse club or just follow, you know, learn more about using general how can people do that?

Well, if you go to nourishfoodclub.com, i've got a ton of blog posts, recipes, information on there if they want to learn about fatty acids, PUFAs, the health impacts there to help undo this decades of misinformation. There's a lot on there and that also links to all of our social channels. So you can follow us on YouTube @Nourish Food Club. I do some deep dives into problems on the food system and so I've got longer form videos and short form videos on our Nourish Food Club YouTube channel and then we're also on Instagram as well.

Sounds great. Well, so thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you spending with us today and we'll talk to you by later on our next exciting topic with our next guest. Take care and we'll talk to you soon.

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