Are Cows The Cause Or Cure For Climate Change?

The big idea is that saying don't eat meat because of industrial agriculture is like saying don't wear clothes because of sweatshops.

Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman and that's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you're confused about meat and you're confused about the impact of meat on climate, on health, then this is the podcast you want to listen to because it's with two extraordinary thinkers in this space, a farmer herself, Diana Rogers, and a thought leader in the space of nutrition who has been one of my heroes and has really taught me a lot about what to eat and what not to eat. Rob Wolf is a former research biochemist. He's a two time New York Times bestselling author of Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. He's also being your reviewer for the Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism, and he's worked with the Navy Special Warfare resiliency program. He's on the board of advisors and directors of a number of different groups, and he's doing a great job educating people with his incredible movement called Healthy Rebellion with the goal of liberating 1 million people from the sick care system. Why just 1 million? Why not a billion? I don't know.

You're thinking small there, Rob. Once you get the million, then we have a proof of concept and everybody will steal it and the rest will happen. So, yeah, that's the plan.

He's also the executive producer of the film Sacred Cow, which we're going to talk about. And I'm so excited about this film, not only because I'm in it, but because it's a fabulous explanation of some of the more confusing issues around meat and why we should or shouldn't be eating meat, and if so, which meat, and where was it grown, and so on and so forth. So, the next guest we have today is Diana Rogers. She's a RD, a nutritionist, a dietitian, a real food nutritionist, and she actually is not only a nutritionist, but she lives on a working organic farm near Boston. She's an author. She runs a clinical nutrition practice. She hosts the Sustainable Dish podcast and is an advisory board member of the Animal Welfare Approved and Savory Institute. So, she's really a fantastic woman who's been courageous in putting forth a documentary and a book, Sacred Cow. the Case for Better Meat, which launches in the summer of 2020, and you can find more at SustainableDish.com and SacredCow.Info. So welcome, Diana and Rob. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you so much for having us. Okay, let's get right into it.

We have this incredible debate in this country. Recently, the New York Times was an editorial by Jonathan Safran Foer talking about how with COVID now, it's the time to end meat. We just need to stop eating all meat. It's the solution to all our problems. health problems, climate problems, human abuse of animal problems, and it's just a no-brainer. What do you say to that?

So actually, Rob and I did a pretty epic breakdown of that just the other day on his podcast, and we kind of went point by point through the whole article. But the big idea is that saying don't eat meat because of industrial agriculture is like saying, don't wear clothes because of sweatshops. So it's not really the meat's problem, it's not the cows problem, it's how they're managed. And the industrial food system itself is a mess. So is row crop-centric agriculture. And so to just pin it on all meat and not take into account the big problems that we have with the system is just a very simplistic view.

And it really ignores the potential for the regenerative side of the story too. It's not just that there's a problem there, but we might actually be jettisoning the one legit solution that we have to so many of the issues that he does raise.

Yeah, so on one hand, we have the conversation going on that climate change is driven in large part by factory farming of animals. And on the other hand, You've got the regenerative agriculture movement saying that the salvation for climate change is more animals grown in a regenerative way. So it's a complete polar opposite. And what was striking to me about that article was that I didn't disagree with him that factory farming should be abolished. It should be banned. And thank God that Corey Booker and Elizabeth Warren put in a bill in the Senate to ban factory farming by 2040. Great idea. And it's bad for the animals, it's bad for humans, it's bad for the climate and the environment. I think there's no argument there. But he completely ignored the science around how we have to deal with climate change, which is through regenerative agriculture. So we're going to break this story down into climate, which is a big environmental and climate argument against meat, health, which is another factor, and of course, animal welfare. Those are the three big boogeymen that seem to get all conflated and the solution for all of it is becoming a vegan. But is it really the solution?

We wish it was honestly, because then we could just jump on that very popular bandwagon and our lives would be much easier than what they are trying to sell this contrarian position for sure.

Yeah, so it's not so simple, right?

Now.

If you look at it, how did we come to this idea that that meat is the enemy. How did Jonathan Safran Foer, a smart guy, come to this conclusion? And where did he go wrong?

There's just so much misinformation out there. And I think what it really boils down to is we're so divorced from food production and we're so divorced from the idea that death is part of life. We don't have to deal with grandma in the backyard killing a chicken for dinner. We farm out human death. And so, We just don't want to think about it and people like to think of death as the end instead of just a point in a circle that actually has to happen in order for new life to come. And just because you're not eating animal flesh on your plate does not mean that death didn't happen. So where I live, it's an organic vegetable farm. We raise pasture-raised animals as well. But there's tons of death that happens even for organic vegetables, not let alone, you know, conventionally raised. vegetables.

What do you mean?

Well, in order to make a field for to plant crops, you have to annihilate whatever was there before. So whether it was a grassland, a prairie, a forest, I mean, vegetable fields aren't just a naturally occurring thing. So you have to get rid of the habitat of all the animals that were there before. And then even with organic agriculture, there's organically approved pesticides, and we bring in praying mantis to take care of the aphids. I mean, you know, there is death, it's just a more organic death, but it definitely happens. And so we can't escape it. And there's this thing called the principle of least harm, which, you know, really looks at all the death that happens in order for your bread to get on the table. and a typical vegan type diet. And if you really look at that and all the little mice and everything else that's killed through tractors and pesticides and everything else, one large ruminant animal that's raised in a regenerative way that's actually increasing biodiversity is a much less harm option than completely avoiding meat altogether.

Yeah, so there's birds, right? Bird populations have declined 50% in industrial agriculture and all the insects running and counting. I mean, the thing about regenerative agriculture is so interesting is that you see the resurgence of life. So while you may be killing a cow, you're getting far more wildlife, far more bird life, far more insect life. So you're actually increasing the number of living things on a farm when you do that, which is kind of fascinating and sort of contradicts our traditional view.

Yeah, oh, I was just gonna mention, Rob, that the Audubon Society is actually partnering. Were you gonna say, go ahead then?

Yeah, it's interesting. The Audubon Society, you know, kind of a beacon of environmental stewardship. They've had a long history of fairly adversarial relationship with meat production, but more recently they've seen some of the activity on savory hubs and similar farms. And what they find is literally that they're looking at the canary in the coal mine. But these birds are returning and when these birds return, it means that their basic habitat is getting re-established, their different food systems, the food networks. And so it's really heartening and this is an organization that is well-established, you know, really dot its eyes and crosses its T's. So when it, you know, kind of lends its support to something like this, there's probably something to be learned there.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, also, people who eat organic food don't realize how organic food is grown. And maybe we can talk a little bit about that. I remember I was in Brooklyn at this place called the Brooklyn Grange, which was the biggest rooftop farm in Brooklyn on top of an old Navy yard. And it was this gorgeous organic farm on the top of this roof. And it was sort of mid-summer and all the vegetables were growing. And I was taking a tour of the farm. And I'm like, so how do you take care of the soil on the roof here? What do you do? She says, well, you know, we get bone meal and we get oyster shells. I'm like, really? So I said, so your broccoli is a carnivore. And people don't understand a lot of the compost comes from factory farms, from organic farms. So there's a lot of challenges with even growing vegetables in organic way if you're not integrating animals into the system to put the nutrients back in the soil, which is what they're designed to do.

Completely, and you know, that's what we do here on the farm. And we actually, we're near Gloucester, Massachusetts, so we get fish meal leftover from the fishing industry here that would have no other use in our food system other than, you know, turning it into really nutrient dense fertilizer that we can use on the fields. And actually we have a story in our book about my 10 year old daughter witnessing a coyote ate a sheep on our farm. And I had to talk to her about that and, you know, no the coyote wasn't bad, it was just doing its job as a coyote. Cody. Unfortunately, these things happen. We try our best to protect them, but the rest of that sheep is actually gonna go and feed the kale that you're eating for dinner. And so she actually told me, oh, so it's impossible to be a vegan. So it is. I mean, I've seen some reports of this veganic agriculture using algae, but I've looked at the science with that, and there's a lot of greenhouse gas emissions associated with that. And then, you know, not everyone lives near an algae production facility, so how are you going to truck it around? It just, what we want is as closed loop system as possible, something that's, you know, has all the inputs right there as much as possible. And so if you're trying to do that, you absolutely have to have animals as part of any kind of healthy food system because, you know, out in the wild there are no animal lists ecosystems.

Interesting. So you're talking that, you know, sort of being vegan is kind of a myth.

I believe it is, yeah.

Yeah. And if you really look at the full circle of life, like they talked about the Lion King, that, you know, there is a circle of life and it involves destruction and it's inherently a destructive act. My wife freaks out because our cat goes out in the yard and we have a beautiful yard and there's chipmunks and squirrels and mice and it's always bringing home something and it just makes her nuts. And finally she's sort of just understanding that this is just what life does and it's not bad or good. You can't say that cats being bad doing what it's sort of doing because it's part of what it's evolved to do. And I think we haven't really had a human civilization that has been vegan until very recently. We have been consuming animal products since the dawn of human existence. And Rob, you talked about how you were a vegan and I was a vegetarian vegan for 10 years. And how did it work for you? You were in your 20s, I was in my 20s too, and you said your body wasn't great. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I was a California State powerlifting champion. I'm 5'9, about 170-175 pounds right now. When I was competing in powerlifting, I was about 185 pounds. pretty lean, pretty muscular. And, I shifted towards a vegetarian and then a vegan diet and continued to eat the same caloric load, but I noticed that I just started losing muscle mass and really losing weight ultimately. And, it was interesting because I had a whole host of GI problems that had kind of ramped up slowly over time and then just got worse and worse. And, by the the low ebb of my vegan experiment, I was about 130 pounds. Hair was falling out, although that process has continued.

You lost 55 pounds.

Yeah. And ultimately I discovered I had celiac disease, also some other kind of not really that tolerant to legumes and whatnot. And really honestly, I don't do super well with a really high fiber diet. Green salad is not not my friend at all, and it's taken a long time to figure all that out. But it was a really interesting experiment because I focused on whole unprocessed foods at the exclusion of animal products, tried to keep the calorie level the same, but I just to hopefully not provide a TMI moment, but things came out the same way they went in. I was just basically not digesting or absorbing much of anything.

It sounds like a gut problem.

I did massive gut problem. And, you know, celiac was a major factor in that. There was definitely some small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. I was living in Seattle at the time also, and I don't think I had seen the sun for about a year, so I suspect my vitamin D was at ricket level. So there were multiple factors there. Like if I had moved to Arizona where it was a warm, sunny environment, I might have navigated that better. Like my health is generally better in a warmer, sunnier environment. But in that circumstance, it was kind of a perfect storm of graduate school, a diet that didn't work for me and lack of sunlight, that whole circadian biology piece.

Yeah. And then you went back to eating meat and what happened?

Yeah, it was interesting. My mother had had years of different health issues and she called me one day and she said, you, know, my rheumatologist ran a bunch of studies on me and I have celiac disease and she described it to me. That was the first time I had ever heard of that. and she said that the rheumatologist said that she was reactive to grains, legumes, and dairy. And I was listening to that and being a vegan at the time, the dairy part was like, yeah, okay, obviously dairy products are problematic, but no grains, no legumes. What on earth would one eat in a situation like that? And it was just kind of a free association. And I was thinking about them, like, okay, grains and legumes, that's agriculture. What came before agriculture? And this concept popped into my head, a Paleolithic diet. Now, mind you, this was 1998. And so very early in this whole story, I went into my house, turned on the dial up, waited for the computer to dial up, and then there was a new search engine called Google. And into Google, I put the term Paleolithic diet, and I found some work by Arthur Devaney and also Lauren Cordain, who I ultimately did a research fellowship with. And Lauren had just published this paper, Cereal Grains, Humanities, Double-Edged Sword, which is really an amazing piece. And it described all of these gut issues and nutrient deficiencies associated with grain consumption. And clearly, this isn't a universality. Some people do great on these foods, but not everybody. That's right. And then if we take a little bit of a chapter from the Weston A. Price, you know, side of the the table, you know, soaking, sprouting, fermenting, all those things are clearly beneficial. But when I found this information, it made a lot of sense. And I, I mean, I was facing a bowel resection at this time. I had ulcerative colitis at the age of 26-27, and I knew enough about medicine to know that that doesn't ultimately end well, nor does it really lead to a long, healthy life. And so I reintroduced some meat in the form of some beef ribs, and I had a melon, and it was the best night of sleep that I had had in about three years, and really that would, you know, for the last 22 years, that's largely the way I've eaten.

Melon and beef ribs.

Sometimes some dark chocolate in there too, but yeah, those are the mainstays.

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Back to this week's episode.

All right, well let's dig into the climate and environmental issue a little bit more because you talk a lot about this in your book and you talk a lot about it in the movie, which is compelling. And there's a lot of data that's out there about why animals are bad for the climate environment. And I think it's estimated that about 14% of greenhouse gases, 14 and a half percent are from animal agriculture. It's estimated that our water use, 70% of our freshwater use as humans is to irrigate crops for animals to eat so we can eat them. There's a lot of data showing how it takes a lot of water to produce a pound of beef. There's data on how we are actually causing more environmental destruction and loss of biodiversity and all these things. So this is sort of the traditional view, which is why it seems so clear that we should not eat factory farmed meat. But what is the sort of bigger picture around regenerative agriculture? What is regenerative agriculture? Why is it different? And how can it scale?

Well, they're definitely All of these statistics attributed to cattle, I have to say even typical beef has been overly vilified. So the 14.5% of greenhouse gases attributed to cattle, that was done looking at a full life cycle of cattle. So, you know, birth, transportation, processing, everything it takes to get it to your plate. But then when that was compared to transportation industry, It was only the tailpipe emissions. So it wasn't a full life cycle assessment because we don't have those numbers globally for transportation. And so if you were to look at just the tailpipe or belching as it is from cattle, it's about five percent of emissions. That's methane.

You're talking about methane.

Yes, of methane compared to fossil fuels. And then when we consider that the methane from ruminant animals is part of a biological cycle. So I've got this this poster behind me here and it's in the book and on the website. But basically when the cattle breathe out methane, which is part of their digestive system, it goes into the air and then is broken into H2O, part of the water cycle, and then CO2. The CO2 is taken up by the plants, they give off O2, which is what we breathe, they take in that carbon and then leak it down to the microbes and all the fungi networks. And so they're feeding them and then these microbes and fungi are actually feeding the plant back all the nutrients it needs. The fungi are actually going and mining minerals in the rocks. And then this is kind of a long story, I guess.

Yeah. Let me just unpack that for people because it was such a beautiful thing you just described, which is that The plant extracts carbon from the environment, puts it down into the roots. That carbon feeds the microbiology of the soil, the fungi and the bacteria. Then the bacteria and fungi then in turn extract nutrients from the soil to feed the plant, which then makes the plant more nutritious and the food more nutritious.

That's in a healthy good system. How it works.

Really, none of that happens in a conventional row crop model. Like, that whole process is interrupted. There is no mining of nutrients out of the soil. There is no sequestering of carbon via the roots. So that whole process is really hijacked.

So essentially what you're saying is that modern agriculture doesn't produce living soil. So, there's none of this going on. There's maybe a few bugs in there, a little bit of fungi, but it's not meaningful and it doesn't actually allow for proper nutrition of the plants. It doesn't allow for the storage of water and carbon in the soil.

Right.

So, it's a different view of how do we farm, right? Yeah.

Doc, I just wanted to throw something in there really quickly too. This concern around greenhouse gases is important, but folks really need a nuanced approach to this and where this is turning into a problem, there have been research papers looking at the discovery that say shellfish produce enormous amounts of methane. Moose in the northern European tundra produce significant amounts of methane. This is an indication of a healthy dynamic ecosystem and people are calling on culling moose and sea floor shellfish to reduce carbon emissions. and this is where it's incredibly dangerous to get this story wrong because people are now rushing to judgment in a way that would actually reduce biodiversity and huge tracks of the ocean being barren is not good for anyone.

So yeah, killing moose doesn't seem a good solution to climate change.

Really, it's not the place to look, yeah.

Yeah. It's so powerful. I think that the methane story is interesting because you were sort of unpacking that Diana, which is that when the cows release methane, we think that's terrible. But in fact, it's probably only a third of the methane that's released from greenhouse gases, methane from landfills, from food waste, which is mostly plant food. So all the wasted vegetables and scraps you throw out, they rot in landfills and they produce methane, which is three times the amount of methane cows produce. And then there's another piece, which I'd love you to explain, which is how Maybe methane isn't such an issue if you look at a properly run regenerative farm because there's ways of capturing that methane. Can you explain that?

Right. Yeah, so that's what I was about to go to next. So when the cow chews on the grass, and we have an amazing animation in the film given by Jason Rowntree, who is a professor at Michigan State University, and he's the one doing all this cutting edge research on cattle and methane. so when the cattle chew the grass, then the roots die back as part of that process. When you take the animals then off and allow the land to rest, those roots will grow back stronger and all the dead material that's in there mixing with the bacteria and everything, that's stored carbon that is actually building new topsoil. So the Midwest is not America's breadbasket because of corn farming or kale farming, it's because there were bison there for, you know, hundreds of thousands of years, pooping on, you know, across the North America. And when you look at the number of ruminant animals we have today, our beef cattle population is actually less than the ruminants we had before we got rid of the bison. So, you know, in the 1700s when we had all the bison plus the pronghorn, prairie elk, all of those animals. We actually, we had more ruminant animals.

Than- I think it was 168 million then, and now it's about 90-something million. So yeah.

Yeah, so the cattle have taken over, but it's not really a methane issue as opposed to fossil fuels, which are mining ancient trapped carbon and methane in the Earth's core and then releasing them straight into the atmosphere. And they're not part of a cycle. There is, that's an unbalanced equation.

What'S really interesting also is that there's a cycle where bacteria, there's a certain type of bacteria called methanotrophs that suck methane on a regenerative farm out of the air and basically store it so the net net is low. And then there's all the other cool things that you can do like grow plants that have high levels of tannins that when the animals eat those plants, foraging on them, those plants on a regenerative branch, it reduces the amount of methane because of the effect of these phytochemicals on the bacteria. And then they can feed them seaweed, which people are talking about doing, which also reduces. So there's a lot of interesting strategies to mitigate of this. But the net net on a regenerative farm, is it still a contributor to climate change or is it not?

Well, so, you know, there is, fossil fuels are just, I mean, greenhouse gases are just one component of ecosystem function, right? So we have to look at what processes are contributing to the most biodiversity and the healthiest ecosystems. And so that's where, you know, when you talk about impossible foods and oh, we're, you know, better as far as our greenhouse gases, they actually did a study with White Oak Pastures grass-fed beef and found that for every impossible burger or beyond burger you ate, you needed to eat one of those grass-fed burgers from White Oak Pastures in order to offset your emissions. And, but- so, if you have a.

Meat burger with your plant burger, you're good.

Then you're carbon neutral then. Yeah, this was performed by an outfit called Qantus, which they do life cycle analyses. And, it's a remarkably complex and expensive process where they look at all the thermodynamic inputs and outputs for, you know, different scenarios like this. And, it was fascinating because Qantus did this completely separately for both the Impossible Foods and the White Oak Pastures. but, you know, had these pretty fascinating results. Yeah, compared them.

Yeah, it was interesting. Yeah, I saw the same thing. So, you know, feedlot burger definitely is worse than a Impossible Burger, but it's definitely not as good as a regenerative burger. And I think that, you know, the, there's so much we've had on our podcast about this. I had Gabe Brown on our podcast, and we've seen some really interesting characters discussing this aspect of regenerative agriculture and carbon and carbon sequestration. I think, you know, you have a great you have a great quote in your book, which is not the cow, it's the how, right? So, it's not that cows are the enemy, it's how are they raised and what is their life like for them? How is their raising those animals increase the life of the entire ecosystem on the farm, the biodiversity of plants, animals, insects, birds, mammals that are all over the place? And then, what is the quality of the food? So, well, you know, before we sort of dive into the health aspects, which I think is a big issue, because maybe we could convince people that regenerative agriculture is definitely good for the environment and climate, but people are going to still go, well, yeah, it's meat, but meat's bad for your health. So I want to come back to that. But we're talking about these practices and you address this in your book, and a lot of people will argue that, well, it sounds like a great idea, but this is a sort of a niche area. This is not scalable that we really can't feed the world using regenerative agriculture. What do you say to that?

I'm gonna pass that to Rob because he just answered that really well on the other podcast we did just the other day.

Oh, no pressure because now we'll see if I can pull it together. When you do lots of these interviews back to back, you feel like you're losing your mind because you wonder, did I actually tell this story already? And so we're together a little bit. You're good, you're good, you can go it. You know, it's interesting because it might be helpful to actually flip this around the other way and ask the question, is there any way but regenerative agriculture that we could feed a global population that's heading towards 10 billion people? And just as a null hypothesis, as a good scientist, people should at least stop and ask that question instead of rushing to judgment immediately on this. When we start unpacking all of these different pieces, Diana has already talked about one piece, which is this kind of carbon sequestration element. And implicit in that is the health of topsoil. And although there are several things that we would have loved to run with because it would have bolstered our position, there is a meme out there that says we have 60 harvests left of topsoil. Nobody knows exactly where that came from. Diana tracked it down to like a World Health Organization.

It was the UN, yeah.

Or UN, yeah.

Also, Obama before he left office commissioned a report, which was about soil, and he's estimated 80 years. So this is not just, you know, a random number.

Well, the thing we tracked down was that it was a bit of an offhand comment at a UN meeting, and it's taken on a life of its own. And when you really get in and try to find a really concrete spot, maybe it's 60 years, maybe it's 80 years, but conventional practices of raising row crops, it definitely has an end date on it. It's not something that we could go away for a thousand years, come back, and it's still functional. But this regenerative farm, this is the way that food was produced on Earth. Since the transition from hunter-gatherer to different forms of agriculture, it was a biodynamic system between animals and plants, and we've learned lots of stuff in the process of doing that. But those systems more closely mimic what an ecosystem is with that interface of plants and animals. It's a very thermodynamically efficient process. And by that, what I mean is that sun is going to fall on the earth no matter what. Are we going to have lots and lots of grass grown in that process? And then that grass consumed by herbivores and then other animals interfacing in that? Or do we try to expunge that and rely exclusively on synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which are the backbone of the industrial agriculture system? And one further piece to this is that the regenerative systems do not involve food becoming intellectual property, IP. But what has happened in this industrial row crop food system is that the stated goal is to make this like a technology model, to have this food owned as IP by supernatural organizations that are not beholden to any government.

I mean, the seed companies that own the seeds, the proprietary seeds, yeah, that farmers have to buy and it puts them on a vicious cycle. It's pretty bad. But to push a little harder on this question, you know, I get the concept of regenerative culture and I think people can understand that it's a better way of farming. But, you know, we have the land. Many people say, well, you know, we have 10 billion people coming along. How are we going to feed them all unless we do large scale agriculture? How does that work?

So we already are producing way more food than we need. There's a lot of food waste and anyone who's hungry or malnourished, that's a political problem and a distribution problem. It's not a food production problem. so that's just the first thing I wanted to say about that. But secondly, we did go through all the acreage in the US that is underutilized or not utilized. So there's CRP land that the government is restricting grazing on that could be opened up for grazing. There's a lot of private land that's not being grazed or it's being under grazed. With regenerative agriculture, even a very conservative estimate is that it increases land carrying capacity by 30%, but I'm sure you've heard from the other guests that you've had on your show that they've seen much, much higher numbers. So Joel Salatin is four to five times the county average as far as the food that he's able to produce on his land. So if we take a very conservative 30% increase, we go through all the numbers in the book. We have a whole chapter on feeding the world. we take the ethanol industry and turn that into pasture. And then some of the corn that's actually grown specifically for livestock taken out and turned into grass. We have more than enough land to grass finish all the beef cattle in the United States. And all cattle start on grass. They're either just finished on a feedlot or they're finished on grass. And so we're really just looking at Can we finish our cattle in the US on grass? And yes, we can.

And people say, well, it takes longer to raise cattle on grass, so they're going to release more methane emissions, they're going to use more water. How do you address that?

Well, yeah, I wanted to talk about water really quickly. So we already addressed the methane is really a non-issue when the animals are raised properly, right? We're actually sequestering more carbon. And when there's more carbon in the soil, it actually attracts carbon attracts H2O and so it actually will store more water in the soil when you have healthy soil. So when we have flat soil that is not covered at all and it rains, it just runs off. It runs off into our waterways and it takes all the chemicals with it from industrial chemical agriculture. Like if you picture a cornfield with just those sticks of corn but nothing actually in between that. In a regenerative system, the soil is more like a sponge. So it's less about the water you get from the air and more about the water you can actually hold in the soil. Most of the water attributed to cattle is actually green water. So it's rainwater that would fall anyway. And so it's very important to look at the methodology. We do that in nutrition science, but we have to really look at the methodology in all of these environmental studies too. so 94% of the water footprint for even typical cattle is green, is rain. 97% in grass-fed water is rain. So the blue water, the water that we actually use for irrigation from aquifers is a very, very small percentage of the water. So it's not like the cattle are just sucking these blimps that are just sucking and wasting water.

No, but they're also using the irrigation for corn and soybeans that are used for.

But that's taken into account in the water footprint. So it's still part of that 94%. So when you compare the blue water footprint, which is what we should be looking at, what is the irrigation footprint? What is the, you know, not natural rainfall, but what is the blue water footprint?

Streams, lakes, streams. Yep.

Beef is actually, even typical beef is better than rice, sugar, avocados and almonds.

Wow, incredible. I also read that in terms of the speed to growth to Market, which is one of the arguments that's used against regenerative agriculture, that it depends on what they eat. And we had Fred prevens on our podcast, who's an incredible rangeland biologist. And he said, if you get diverse grasses that have certain compounds and then phytochemicals and tannins, it actually accelerates the growth. So it's about the same amount of time, and of course, they have a much happier life. and they're less stressed and they get to do their natural thing. The other thing that's fascinating about it, and I sort of want to get into this a little bit, is the health issue. What was fascinating to me was animals learn how to seek out the nutrients they need in the plants they're eating. So if left to their own devices and there's a large enough diversity of plants, they will actually find the nutrients and the phytochemicals that they actually require for health. And you see this, you know, I was watching this thing the other night with my wife. It was a kind of like a David Attenborough nature film. I like those nature films. And it showed these baboons licking the rocks, licking the rocks to get minerals. So, animals know what to get and what they need. And these animals will literally go around and find the nutrients that they need and their flavor profile of the plants will actually drive their choices and make meat healthier and actually lead to the increases in phytochemicals and decreases in methane production and increases in growth that happen as a result of the animals having the choice of what they're eating and having diverse plants. He said, Gabe Brown said on his farm, he had over a hundred different grasses and plants that these animals were eating. and, you know, what are they getting a feedlot? A couple of different things. It was corn and ground up this and that, maybe some Skittles, you know? So. So talk to me about the, the health issues, because if, if we can do this, if the science is there, if it's scalable, if it actually helps reverse climate change, increase biodiversity, there are health concerns that people have about eating meat. And before, before I actually jump onto that, I just want to sort of come back to a point you made. about how regenerative agriculture is what we've always done. I think it's happened in pockets, but humans have been rapacious and they have overgrazed lands. They've turned many areas to desert. We've destroyed soils and civilizations. David Montgomery's written a whole book about this. So I think that humans aren't the most conscious ecological creatures and they tend to destroy ecosystems. This happened even before industrial agriculture. But I think of this as 2.0 agriculture. this is a definite upgrade and it includes concepts and ideas that mimic nature as best as possible. And that's what makes it so unique. So I think that's really important. So let's talk about the health issues. You mentioned your health a little bit. What about the idea that meat is bad for your health and that it causes cancer and heart disease and diabetes? Because if you read the literature, this is pretty much what you're gonna come away with.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different ways to go after that. We can look at it a little bit from an anthropology long view that meat has been a part of human nutrition for quite some time, somewhere between two and three million years. That's not proof in and of itself, but it's maybe an interesting direction to look. But when we really dig into nutritional science, there's a case to be made that it's just not really that well performed. It's incredibly complex, very expensive to try to sequester large groups of people in a controlled environment, put them on a very specific dietary regimen, and expect them to live their whole lives under these conditions. So we've done the best that we can and we had some real wins with epidemiology, like looking at tobacco consumption and its relationship to various types of cancer. But in that scenario, we hit it so big on that and it was so compelling. The relationship between tobacco consumption and various types of cancer depends on the types of cancer and the way the tobacco is consumed. but it may be upwards of 10,000%, the relationship there. Very, very powerful, very compelling. When we look at things like the rates of colon cancer just in the background of a standard Westernized population, it's about 5%. And then when we look at the nutritional science that's been done on this, they ask people to recall, what did you eat last month, last year? And some of these really popular studies, ask people to recall what they were eating as long as 12 years in the past. And so these things have been found to be incredibly flawed from a data collection standpoint. But even let's just say that these people had absolutely perfect recollection and they didn't lie and didn't say that they ate things that they did or, you know, vice versa.

Humans typically will over-report on things that are supposed to be good for you and under-report on things that are bad for you. So you say, how many vegetables you ate? 10. How much cake did you eat? None. You know, where it's maybe the opposite.

Exactly, yeah. Yeah. So we know that that's true, but.

Even- Humans are liars.

We are. But if we, you know, then we have this data that's really suspect right at the beginning, and then it kind of gets tortured via statistical manipulation. And at the end of the day, what we find is that the best studies that we have looking at this and colon cancer is maybe one of the best ones too, consider if one were to eat red or processed meat every day of their life, the background likelihood, the absolute likelihood of cancer goes from 5% for everybody to 6% if you eat red meat every single day of your life.

That's a 20% increase.

That's a 20% increase if you play the relative risking.

And even with that, how you spin it, right?

Yeah, yeah. So there's massive spin there, but like Dr. John Ioannidis has been pretty vocal in making the case that we shouldn't do any more nutritional science research like this because it really doesn't tell us anything. We should either step out of the game of trying to tell folks what to eat based off of really, really poor science, or we should kind of buckle down and do the type of really big, expensive studies that will finally put some of this to rest. And I don't want to get out in the weeds too far on this, but people oftentimes say, the World Health Organization categorizes meat as a class one carcinogen, just like tobacco and plutonium and whatnot. The way that they go about doing that, it's a qualitative relationship. It is not, they offer no quantitative features to it, which I find as a biochemist, I find that fascinating. So we know- so tobacco could be.

10,000% and meat could be 1% and they both get lumped in together.

Exactly, yeah. And again, this is all still based, like I asked one of the researchers, is it because protein broadly gets lumped into this as a class one carcinogen? And I said, could that be an artifact of the fact that you have to have protein to be alive? and he was like, that could in fact be possible. So, I mean, there are some really interesting statistical aberrations that can be tweaked and fiddled in that. I mean, at the end of the day, there are cultures that eat lots of animal products and very few animal products, but if they don't eat refined food products, they tend to do much better than we do.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's the problem is that most people are eating meat or whatever in the context of a very poor diet. so one of my favorite studies was, was they looked at vegetarians and meat eaters who both shopped at health food stores, meaning they were likely to actually be eating an overall Whole Foods healthy diet. And it was 11, 000 people. It was a big study. And again, it was sort of an observational study, but still, you know, you think if there was something there, you'd see it. And there was a 50 reduction in death in both groups. so just getting rid of the crap is probably the most important thing. And then, you know, you can kind of vary what you want to eat. And not everybody has to eat meat if they don't want to, but it is more challenging to get the nutrient density that you need. And it's also important to understand that, you know, we cannot, even if we eliminated all cows and animals from animal agriculture, the 40 of the land that we have for agriculture cannot be used to grow crops. It's poor quality land that can only grow grasses. That animals can upcycle into incredibly nutrient dense food that we can use and can upcycle it by taking the nutrients out of the plants and upcycling them, whether they're phytochemicals, minerals, antioxidants, omega-3 fats. I mean, I had Gabe Brown on the podcast, which just blew my mind when he talked about the levels of omega-3 fats that he was getting in the feedlot cows, the ratio of omega-6 may be up to 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20 to 1 omega-6 to omega-3s. His is about 1 to 1 in his regeneratively raised cows. So all these things play a huge role in the quality of what we're eating. So it's not only how we raise the animals that affects climate change, it's how we raise them affects the nutritional quality of the meat. so. And most of these studies, by the way, were done on feedlot meat. So they're not, not everybody's eating regeneratively raised cow that's eating a hundred species of plants that's affecting the quality of their meat and the quality of the fats in their meat. And if we did that, we'd have a different answer. So I think it's challenging. I think you're right. It's, it's a, it's a nutrition science is a mess and it's, it's challenging to do. It's part of the nature of humanity. You know, we can't lock humans. in a lab for 20 years and feed different diets to different groups and see what happens. It just ain't going to happen. So we have to sort of learn from kind of inference, from basic science, from small studies, from small clinical trials, looking at intermediate biomarkers, all that will help us. And I think, you know, as a clinician, as a doctor, it's very humbling because you can have all the ideology you want. You can believe that you should be carnivores or vegans or omnivores, whatever. and as a doctor seeing tens of thousands of patients doing all these lab tests and seeing what actually is happening and how they feel and what happens to their body, there's no simple answer. Some people thrive on a Paleo diet, others thrive on a vegan diet and vice versa. So we really have to be humble about making widespread sort of dogmatic views, the status of our nutrition advice. We have to sort of look at what is the individual need and what is going on. What is your microbiome? That affects everything. So all these things play a huge role. And I think your book, Sacred Cow, is so important. The movie is so important. I want everybody to watch it because I think it'll help you understand some of the Nuanced conversations and get out of this binary good, bad, meet, good, bad. And I think, you know, we, we have to sort of understand that we have to look at the overall context of our diet, and that's what you guys do. Such a good job that you put all the story in context because we're hearing so many different things and people are so confused. And honestly, I was super confused until I started to look at all this data and started to look at the whole story and to not think in silos, but to think in an ecosystem way.

Yeah, and we say it in the, sorry, Rob.

No, no, go for it.

In the book and in the film that we're not anti-vegan at all. we're very pro-choice when it comes to diet. We think that everyone has the right to choose whatever they think is appropriate for them. We just think that it's very dangerous to then set policy based on bad science. And there's a lot of people that seem to do okay on a vegan diet. We say it in the book and in the film. But there are also a lot of people who don't.

And.

You know, there's genetic reasons, too. Not everyone can convert beta carotene to vitamin A efficiently. It's about half the so there's a, you know, the gut biome, the health status of the gut, Rob and I both have celiac actually, and don't do well with like raw kale salads and things like that. So everyone's coming at it from a different place, but also there's a lot of people in the world that don't have the privilege to push away meat. And so we have to be respectful of people's cultures, what grows well around them. There's a lot of places in the world where women can't own land, but they can own livestock. and when we improve the nutrition status of at-risk kids, the whole GDP of these countries does better. So we just have to be very careful with this. You know, we were very pro food sovereignty.

So the answer is, let me finish this one last question. You know, you talk in your book and the title includes better meat, but we keep hearing the meme, eat less meat. But should we eat less better meat or should we just eat better meat?

Do you want to tackle that one, Rob?

Doc, that depends a little bit. Like people of means should buy the best meat that they can for a whole host of reasons. We're creating a more diversified economic base, like the middle of America that used to be built around the small family farm has disappeared. We have four food companies, two of them that are owned by foreign governments for foreign entities that handle 85-90% of our total food intake. So I think that folks of means should absolutely support local regenerative agriculture, pay that kind of affluence tax to be able to grease the engines of producing the locally necessary and the locally vital foods. Anywhere else in the world that you go, grass-fed meat is cheaper than grain-fed meat. This is entirely an artifact of the United United States, and I don't want to get too out in the weeds, but global reserve currency gives us some leverage in trading, and then we have a really massive subsidies program that creates this artificial environment. A Twinkie should not be cheaper than an apple, period. Thermodynamically, it makes no sense. There's so much energy input into that versus a fruit growing on a tree. On the one hand, Folks should definitely endeavor to eat better meat, but if you are a family living at the margins, when we look at developmental milestones, one of the greatest distinguishers of success versus what we would call failure, both academically, socially, and physically, is the nutrient density of the diet, which really just boils down to meat at the end of the day. And so, although there are challenges with the conventional food system, particularly on the meat side, for folks that are living at the margin, if we create an environment where it is both socially unacceptable and economically unviable for them to access the most nutrient-dense foods that are available, we are dooming them to multiple generations of the same plight that they're already facing now.

Yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah.

The dietary guidelines in America, are meant for healthy adults. The problem is only 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy. And the Lancet Commission made recommendations for a more plant-rich diet. And yet they also said in that same paper that the young, the elderly and the sick all need more animal protein, which when you look at the numbers, that's the majority of the world's population. So I think we just have to be smart not dogmatic. And I just so appreciate both of you. I appreciate your book, Sacred Cow. I think everybody should get a copy. It's coming out July 2020 and the Sacred Cow film, which is great. You can go to sacredcow.info to learn more about the book and the film. You can listen to Rob's podcast, the Healthy Rebellion, and you can certainly listen to Diana's work at Sustainable Dish podcast is really great. And I'm so glad to have both of you on the podcast and share about this very confusing, controversial subject. And hopefully we got a little more down to the nuggets of what's really true and what's not and what's myth and what is something we can actually take to the bank and live in a way that is more regenerative for our health and for the environment and the climate. So, thank you both for being on the podcast. If you love listening to this podcast, we'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment, share with your friends and family on social media, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.