How To Choose Quality Meat

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

It would be better in some way from a nutrient density standpoint to be a vegetarian that eats organ meats and shellfish than a meat eater that only eats lean cuts of meat. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

As a busy doctor with multiple jobs, I'm all about tools that make my life simpler. And since testing is something I rely on to help almost all my patients, I was really excited to learn about Rupa Health. hormones, organic acids, nutrient levels, inflammatory factors, and gut bacteria are just some of the many things I look at to find the most effective path to optimal health for my patients. But that means I'm placing orders through multiple labs, which is just an overall pain, and it also makes keeping track of results more difficult for me and my patients and other doctors. Rupa Health has totally changed that. They've made functional medicine testing simpler, and more convenient than ever so that practitioners like me can focus on helping their patients. With Rupa Health, functional medicine practitioners can access more than 2000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like Dutch, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains and more. It's 90% faster, letting you simplify the process of getting the functional tests you need and providing a noticeably better patient experience. This is really a very much needed option in the functional medicine space that I'm so excited about. You can check out a free live demo and a Q&A or create an account at rupahealth.com that R-U-P-A-Health.com People are always surprised when I tell them that even with a whole foods diet rich in plants, we can still be nutrient deficient. And addressing nutrient deficiencies is one of the lowest hanging fruits for optimizing our health and feeling better at any age. And that is why I'm a huge fan of AG1 from Athletic Greens. Since our soils are so damaged, the plants can't extract the nutrients because there's no living matter anymore. we're up against issues like chronic stress and toxicity and sleep deprivation like never before, and our bodies need some extra help getting all the right information to work properly. Now, that information comes in the form of vitamins and minerals and phytonutrients and good bacteria, all of which help ourselves remember how to efficiently tackle their important jobs. So one of the things I use every day to support my diet is AG1 from Athletic Greens. With just one scoop of AG1, I get 75 high quality vitamins, minerals, whole food source superfoods, probiotics, adaptogens, and more to support my entire body. Even with a really healthy diet, it's hard to hit the mark for all our nutrient needs, so I feel better knowing I have some extra help from AG1. Unlike other supplements and powders out there, AG1 is third party tested and made without GMO, nasty chemicals, or artificial anything. It actually tastes great, kind of like a tropical green drink. I like it on its own mixed with water, but it also works really well in most smoothies. if you're curious about trying AG1 from Athletic Greens for yourself, right now they're offering my community 10 free travel plaques with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com/hymen. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/hymen to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Now let's get back to this week's.

Episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. The question of whether or not to eat meat is always a hot topic in the nutrition and wellness space. Yet, it is an oversimplified question to a much more complex topic. In actuality, we cannot consider all meat in just one category. For instance, industrial raised animals are fed inflammatory foods, and when we eat that meat, it instigates inflammation in our own bodies. Alternatively, regenerative agriculture recognizes the essential role of grazing animals in an ecosystem to create stronger soils, healthier crops, and produce better meat. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy about why it's important to know how the animals you eat are raised. Dr. Hyman speaks with Chris Kresser on the importance of food quality. He also talks to Robb Wolf and Diana Rogers big picture about raising animals and eating meat, as well as with Nicolette Meiman about the concept of nutritional wisdom.

Let's jump in. What if we instead focused on food quality instead of food quantity? You can't talk about how healthy red meat is completely out of the context in which it's eaten.

Right.

You know, if someone's eating red meat in the context of Big Macs and fast food and hot dogs and things like that, do we really think that that's going to have the same impact as someone eating a paleo diet where two-thirds or three-quarters of their plate is vegetables and plants and then they have a, you know, a steak.

Right.

It's absolutely not the same. And yet in the research, it is, it, it shows up as the same.

And then, as I mentioned earlier, years ago they looked at vegetarians and meat eaters who shopped at health food stores.

Yeah.

Presumably ate a healthy diet in the context of having meat or no meat. And both of those groups had their risk of death reduced in half.

Yeah.

And, you know, you know, I, I, but no difference between the, there's no difference.

No, there was no difference.

And there's so many studies that, you know, you can argue on both sides, which is why they debate it so confusing, because there's epidemiology on both sides. But the randomized trials are really hard to do.

So let me, let me just address that, because that's a that's an interesting point. So the only studies that have shown a lifespan difference for vegetarians were the Seventh Day Adventist studies. Now, talk about healthy user bias. Seventh Day Adventists don't drink, they don't smoke, they're advised to eat to exercise as part of their religion. So you've got community with purpose, meaning.

Which actually, you know, there was a study that came out recently was showing if you don't have purpose, you die, right? That's right.

So they have purpose. So they are not, you cannot compare that population with people on a standard American diet eating meat, that's comparing apples to oranges. If you want to compare them, you got to compare them with another healthy reference population, which I call like nutrivores, let's say. So, like the health food study was one. There are three other studies.

I like that nutrivore. I'm a nutrivore. I'm a heat-seeking missile for nutrients in my food.

I like that. Yeah, I get nutrients from lots of different foods. So, yeah, there have been three other studies that that aside from the health food study that your Shoppers study that you're talking about, Epic was one of them. There was a study out of Germany, and I'm not remembering the fourth right now, but they all looked at people who were making healthier choices. In one, they looked at people who subscribed to health magazines and fitness magazines. So it was kind of another way of getting at the health food store.

The Scott people who subscribe to Chris Kresser's podcast.

We haven't, we don't have that yet, but I'd like to see that. And then there was a study called the 45 seven up in Australia, and they didn't select a healthy reference population, but they controlled for just about every potential confounding factor that you can imagine. And all of these studies showed exactly what the health food Shoppers study showed is that nutrivores or people who are conscious about their health live longer and, and don't have as much early death as people who are not. But there was no difference in lifespan with vegetarians and omnivores. Omnivorous nutrivores.

Right.

So it so depends on the population. so in terms of meat, you know, there's arguments around there, the meat from various studies that, one, it increases inflammation, the two, it screws up your microbiome and increases something called TMAO, which is a cause of heart attack. We, this is being studied at Cleveland Clinic with Stan Hazen, who we've had on the podcast, that it has saturated fat that's harmful, that it promotes, you know, all these harmful effects. How do you counter that?

Well, I think I just did.

Well, that's epidemiology, but like, experimentally, like the TMAO study is interesting.

And- yeah, I mean, it would take five podcasts to counter all of those. Let's just give us the reader's digest version. Because I've written a lot about each of these.

And by the way, what is the-.

What is the- yeah, the short link. Go to kresser.co/rogan. And the reason it's Rogan is because I put this all together.

Kresser.co/rogan.

R-O-G-A-N. And I should have created one slash hymen, but this came from I, as you know, I was, Joe Rogan invited me on his show to debate Dr. Joel Kahn, who is representing the vegan perspective.

And I was a vegan cardiologist.

Vegan cardiologist. And I was representing the, the Nutrivore perspective, not the eat a Big Mac perspective, but like eat healthy food that could include meat. Um, and so I go, I, I break down every single one of those arguments in excruciating detail. You can go and read those articles if you want the full and I.

Encourage people who really care about this to look at it themselves because it's.

All referenced, peer reviewed studies.

You can read the study yourself. He links to the study. You can read it yourself. You can make your own decision and he kind of guides you through how to interpret it.

Right. So, inflammation, it is again a matter of context. I'm not aware of any study that convincingly shows that eating red meat in the context of a whole foods diet with plenty of plant foods as well significantly contributes to inflammation. That research just hasn't been done.

There was once today I saw it was fascinating. It was a feedlot beef versus kangaroo meat. That was in Australia. And there's something called cytokines in your blood, which are markers of inflammation. When they eat, you know, ounce for ounce, the feedlot meat, it actually caused inflammation. When they ate the kangaroo meat, wild meat, it reduced inflammation. Exactly.

Because of the different fatty acid profiles. So that's what I mean about context. You know, someone who is getting, you know, buying pasture raised beef, for example, from a local farmer or a meat CSA, that's going to have a different impact than someone who is eating, you know, commodity CAFO beef.

And confined animal feeding operations, factory farmed beef, right?

Right.

So factory farmed beef versus grass finished beef, different animals, literally.

Yeah.

The TMAO thing I've written at least three articles about. It's a very interesting hypothesis. I think it does bear further research. But one of the most troubling aspects of it is that fish is by far the highest source of TMAO in the diet than, you know, red meat doesn't even register on the scale if you put fish next to it. And fish and seafood are consistently ranked, you know, again, this is, you know, nutritional epidemiology, but they're inversely correlated with the risk of heart disease.

It looks like they're protective. eating fish.

They're protective. So I haven't heard a reasonable explanation yet for why, how that could be the case if TMAO in the diet is problematic. The other issue is that the TMAO production of the production of TMAO from carnitine in the, in the meat, which is how it happens, is highly dependent on the state of the microbiome.

Yeah.

So again, if somebody is eating plant foods and other things that are helping their microbiome, they're going to be less likely to produce large amounts of TMAO versus someone who is eating a highly processed and refined diet, which we know is antithetical to the health of the microbiome. It's not the meat, it's what you eat with it.

I remember Stan Hazen did a study and he basically got these vegetarians or vegans and meat eaters and tested their TMAO levels. The meat eater is really at high levels. and the vegetarians are vegans. They didn't. And then he got the vegan to eat a steak, which I don't know how he did that, but that was that would be interesting. And then he measured and there was no increase in TMA levels. Yeah. So I, you know, like, you know, I don't want to have heart disease. So I'm like, I'm eating grass-fed meats and I'm like, I don't, I don't want to get in trouble. So I'm like, oh, I'm going to test my TMA level. So I went and tested it. Now you can get this test at Reputable Labs. And I was like, oh, my TMA level is low, even though he grass-fed meats. And it's because 70 to 80% of my diet is plant-rich diet.

That's right. And that's why the vegan didn't see a big increase in TMAO.

Right, exactly.

So.

I was only being partially flippant when I said I already answered it, but it is really all about context and about food quality rather than food quantity. We have to shift out of this reductionist paradigm where we're just looking at isolated nutrients and foods outside of the context that they're eaten in.

So let's talk about like feedlot versus grass-fed beef because the real cost of those foods right now don't reflect, I mean the price that you pay, the price you pay at the checkout counter doesn't reflect the true cost, right? So if you look at the cost of feedlot beef, it's enormous, right? One, it destroys the environment. The fertilizers that are grown and the pesticides and herbicides that used to grow their feed pollutes our waterways, creates dead zones, destroys biodiversity, depletes our soil, depletes our aquifers. It's one of the biggest sources of climate change. It's like a freaking disaster, plus the overuse of antibiotics causes superbugs. I mean, the literal costs are in the billions, if not trillions of dollars, the secondary costs that we don't actually pay at the checkout counter. Whereas grass-fed beef, on the other hand, restores the soil, protects our water supplies, increases biodiversity, and its cost is really should be far less. It should be a dollar a pound instead of $20 a pound and vice versa. A feedlot beef should probably be $100 a pound or $1,000 a pound. So given that aside, okay, because the cost is an issue and hopefully that's gonna change as we shift to regenerative agriculture. But the quality, let's talk about the quality of these two different animals. And does it really matter? Because if you are on a budget and you can't afford a $70 grass-fed ribeye steak, how bad is it to eat a feedlot cow versus, I mean, if you had to choose between a diet that was, let's say, a pure vegan diet or a diet that also included feedlot beef, if you couldn't afford the grass-fed beef, what's the deal?

I wouldn't do a pure vegan diet. I think there are a lot of ways that you can get. So the real question is nutrient density. And, you know, if we say we're.

Nutrivores, we're concerned with a nutrient intake. I'm gonna steal that.

That's really good. I'm gonna, I'm gonna attribute you for.

A while, and then I'm just gonna take it. Well done.

I like it.

Well, I remember Rick Warren was, he's like, he always said, you know, you hear something you like, you go, so-and-so said that, right?

And then you go, now I've covered my part.

Then you go, it's been said that. And then you go, I've always said that.

You did the CYA part. If I ever come after you, you can point to this. I attributed it to you. No, so in fairness, I first heard about this from Sarah Ballentine. I'm not sure who she heard it from, but it's around. So, Yeah, I mean, I actually have often say to my patients, it's, it would be better in some way from a nutrient density standpoint to be a vegetarian that eats organ meats and shellfish than a meat eater that only eats lean cuts of meat from a nutrient perspective. And the reason for that is that.

When you look at the liver, kidney, thymus, heart, you know, all the awful stuff.

And oysters, clams, and these shellfish, like when you look at nutrient density on a chart, and by what density refers to is the concentration of nutrients per calorie of food. The nutrient to calorie ratio.

We talked about that in my first book almost 20 years ago, the nutrient to calorie ratio.

And organ meats are at the top of the list and shellfish are very close to being at the top of the list.

Herbs and spices are up there too. Yeah, I was shocked when someone interrupted, I was shocked. I looked at a chart of nutrient levels, liver, and like all the best vegetables you could eat. And it made the vegetables look like junk food.

I was like, wow, that's amazing. And, and, you know, our ancestors knew this, like, even hunter-gatherer tribes that are studied, they'll throw the muscle meat to the dogs. They'll go right for the liver and all the other organ meats, because they somehow they knew, even without those charts, that the nutrient, most nutrient dense foods.

Were, were the organ meats. Is that what Kevin, Kevin Costner ate.

In the dance with the wolves?

Right.

Kill the buffalo and ate the liver. That's right. That's right. He wasn't chewing on a steak. so yeah, I mean most of us don't eat a lot of these foods now, but if a vegetarian or vegan comes to me and they're anemic and they have a lot of the other deficiencies that can sometimes happen on those diets and they say that they're willing to eat some animal foods but they want to restrict it as much as possible, then we'll talk about maybe just strategically adding some organ meats and shellfish into the diet. But, you know, going back to your original question, I think there are also ways that you can work in pasture-raised animal foods into your diet that don't have to be that costly. So this is like the nose to tail eating that has become, you know, in big cities there are lots of nose to tail restaurants now. We're gonna maybe go out to one a night.

We're gonna have some awful food.

Some awful food.

It's O-F-A-L. That's right.

So, you know, eating the, the more affordable cuts like the Shanks or the oxtail or the chuck roast, like those are actually very rich in collagen, which I'm sure most people have heard by now is really important. Other side of the protein equation or equation, it's good for our joints, it's good for our soft tissues. And you can go to the butcher and you can often get these cuts, even if they're pasture raised pretty affordably. So you don't have to eat the 70 ribeye to benefit.

Yeah, it's funny. A friend of mine was telling me he has this ranch called Mariposa Ranch in California and he gets, you know, he buys like a quarter of a cow. It's grass-fed and it averages about eight bucks a pound.

Yeah.

Which when you think about it, if you're serving out, serving out is four ounces, that's four servings. So it's basically $2 a serving, which.

Is half the price of a Big Mac. Totally.

Yeah.

And that's the way we have a.

Big chest freezer in our basement. Half the price of a Big Mac for grass-fed meat. That ain't bad. Absolutely. That ain't bad at all. So in terms of the other factors in terms of nutrient quality, what else is different between grass-fed and feedlot beef?

So, you know, two of the biggest differences are the fatty acid profile and the levels of vitamins and minerals. So, in terms of fatty acids and antioxidants, yeah. so the, the fatty acids, pasture raised beef will have significantly more omega-3 fats, which is the good stuff, the good stuff, EPA and DHA, that particularly the long chain omega-3s. What's one of the issues with plant-based diets is they only have the shorter chain omega-3s like alpha-linolenic acid, and those have to go through an extensive conversion process in the body to get to EPA and DHA.

All this plant-based omega-3s, you know, it's good, but it only about 10% converts.

No, actually less than one half of one percent of ALA gets converted to DHA. Oh, and that's, that's assuming you have all the nutri, enough of all the nutrients to required for those enzymes in the cycle, which a lot of vegetarians.

Or vegans can be low in.

And genetically that you can do it cuz a lot of people aren't good at it. Exactly. Some people just don't even have the enzymes for some of those conversions. So, fatty acid profile, more omega threes and, and, and then more nutrients because grass is actually pretty nutrient dense, but we as humans. can't absorb those nutrients. I don't recommend eating grass, but the cows can eat grass and turn that into nutrients that we can then access in a very bioavailable way.

Yeah.

So, so it's, it also has more CLA, which is a special fat that actually is anti-cancer, helps speed up your metabolism. It has extra levels of certain antioxidants that are really hard to get, like catalase, superoxide dismutase, things fancy words, but they're like super antioxidants.

Absolutely.

Higher levels of iron, absorbable iron, nutrients. Yeah. Yeah. So it's quite interesting. And, you know, it's also what we ate forever.

Right. Yeah.

It hasn't been like a voluntary vegan society on the planet.

What do we know of? Yeah.

As a traditional society.

I mean, that in itself doesn't mean that the vegan diet is not healthy or optimal, but when you combine that with the modern scientific evidence on nutrient values and consider things like bioavailability and then regenerative agriculture and how we could even feed the planet with everybody consuming a vegan diet versus, you know, there's so much land that can't be cultivated for plant foods and crops but could be grazed if we're doing a better job of it. So it makes sense from a lot of different perspectives.

It's true.

I mean, you know, the argument is, oh, well, you can't do that at scale. It won't produce enough cattle. it's good for a couple of hippies on the fringe or, but, you know, Alan Williams was PhD, was an incredible regenerative farmer, sixth generation Mississippi farmer, and has, you know, studied this upside and down and published a lot on this. And, and he, he said that he did the math in America. You know, we, we Slaughter about 29 million cows a year. And he said, we have enough land that's either unused or minimally used or is available through different things. Or we could convert the feed lots to the corn and soy fields that are used for feed lots into grazing, that we could produce twice, almost twice as much beef or cows as we do now. And people say, oh, well, you know.

You don't get as much meat off.

Of grass-fed cows as a feed lot cow.

Yeah.

Because you're not throwing it full of hormones and antibiotics. But even then, you still got, like, almost double the amount of cows. It's possible. And around the world, much land is not usable for crop land. Absolutely. And it's degraded land and it's land that has plants that only the cows can eat and they're like an incredible conversion factor.

Yeah, let them do their work.

And I read also fascinating, as I'm sort of researching my new book, Food Fix, that there are farmers who plant different types of forage grasses and plants that have different properties. so just as you know, a blueberry has a different phytonutrient profile than sort of broccoli, so do the plants that they forage on. And that has different qualitative effects on the meat. So it's fascinating. So you actually can get like your, you know, conversion of these phytochemicals into animal foods that can actually improve your health.

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 5% 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 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. 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.

So that's in a healthy good system, that's how it works.

Really none of that happens in a conventional row crop model. 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, 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 no, 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, it's a different view of how do we farm, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Doc, I just wanted to throw something in there really quickly, too. This concern around greenhouse gases is, is important. but folks really need a nuanced approach to this. And where this is turning into a problem, there've 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, you know, huge tracks of the ocean being barren is not good for, 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. And 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 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 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 cattle have taken over, but it's, you know, 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. 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, 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 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 if you had a meat burger.

With your plant burger, you're good.

Then you're, 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, 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 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, 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 going to 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 it's together a little bit. You're good, you're good, you can go. But 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's 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.

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

Well, the thing we tracked down, it was that it was a bit of an offhand comment at a UN meeting, and, 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, you know, since the, you know, the transition from hunter-gatherer to different forms of agriculture, it was a biodynamic system between animals and plants, and we've learned 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. So, 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 his 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 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. You know, 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, that 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 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?

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 Provenza 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 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 said, I 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, these baboons eating, licking the rocks, like licking the rocks to get minerals.

Right.

So there, 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, 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 feed lot? A couple of different things. It was corn and ground up this and that, maybe some Skittles, you know?

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, it increases biodiversity, there are health concerns that people have about eating Before I actually jump onto that, I just want to 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 has written a whole book about this. I think that humans aren't the most conscious ecological creatures and they tend to destroy ecosystems. This happened even before industrial agriculture. 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. There's this new discovery of phytochemicals in meat. What's even more interesting is that the animals modify these chemicals that they're getting from eating hundreds of different plants that all have these medicinal compounds and their metabolites are quite different. So you're almost getting in some ways upgraded phytochemicals when you eat, we generally raise grass-fed beef, which is a mind-blowing concept.

Right. No, I have to admit, you know, all these years I've been studying this and now I've been a practitioner of ranching for the last 18 years. And it was not until I read Fred Provenza's book, Nourishment, that I really thought about the question that he talks about in terms of the diversity of the pasture for the animal. Of course, I knew as a general matter it was a good idea to have diverse pastor, but he goes really specifically into the science of it and shows, to me, the most fascinating thing that he talks about in his book, Nourishment, is that they would test the blood of sheep in the morning and then they would have grad students and so forth follow around the sheep and watch what they ate. And they discovered that every single animal ate something different every day and that the foods that they selected for themselves individually for that day corresponded to what was sort of lacking in their blood work that morning. And by the evening, they would have remedied that. And he also showed that they were able to prophylactically avoid illness through the things that they were selecting dietarily and that they could treat, they could self-medicate through what they were selecting. And so he's arguing that we have an inherent nutritional wisdom, not just sheep, you know, but that humans have this.

Yeah.

The modern industrial food system has ruptured that whole connection that we would inherently have. And he talks about the irony of the fact that we now believe we need to have experts tell us what to eat, you know, because it is kind of funny.

Yeah, you know, wild elk doesn't get advice from its nutritionists, its elk nutritionist. Exactly.

And he says, you know, we all kind of accept the idea that elk have that, right? And then we might buy it that maybe sheep or cattle can figure out what they should be eating. But then we, I think it's a giant leap to think that the human has this ability too. And he says, no, it's not a giant leap. We actually have this. But the problem is right now we're stuffing ourselves, you know, from infancy, you know, from the moment we get formula, right? We're getting processed foods. We're not getting the real food as it should have, you know, as it does occur in nature. And when we do that, then our body recognizes what we need, what it contains and what we need. And we're able to manage our own nutrition. So that's, you know, that whole idea about real foods versus processed foods is it actually allows your body to do its own, you know, maintenance work to a certain degree of knowing what it needs and seeking that out. And that's where, you know, going back to why I'm eating meat again, that is part of why I'm eating meat again. I really believe my body was saying, you need meat, you know, because I was feeling hungry all the time and I was, I was, you know, craving sweets all the time. And then I started eating meat and everything starts, you know, that starts receding really dramatically.

Yeah, it's fascinating.

I love that book, Nourishment. I'm gonna have Fred back on the podcast.

I'm actually going to visit him in Montana because I'm so inspired by that guy.

And I don't have a lot of.

People who I go, wow, I really want to meet that guy. Yeah.

He's one of them.

And in the book, he talked about this fascinating experiment that they did years ago on kids. They took a bunch of orphans and.

They stuck them in a lab, which.

I don't, you couldn't do that study today, but they gave them all this weird food like organ meats and weird stuff that kids wouldn't eat, but that, you know, let them select whatever they wanted. And these kids ate all this weird stuff that we wouldn't think would be attractive to them. But because they hadn't been enculturated with what to eat and not to eat, they naturally sought out those foods which were most nutrient dense, which provided the right building blocks for them to build their robust health. And it turned out after long period of time, these kids were eating like weird organ meats and all this stuff. They actually were more robust health than all the other kids was fascinating.

And also, you know what's fascinating about the experiment as well? And I agree with you, it's not something could be done now, you know, so it's, you know, a historical anomaly. But I think it's called Clara's kids because the researcher was Clara, named Clara. But he said they, similar to that, to the ruminant animals that he studied, they did not choose the same thing day after day. They would choose different foods. And so they were naturally balanced. balancing out their own nutritional needs. And that's where it's really fascinating because we keep thinking we have to follow a food pyramid or a MyPlate or something. Somebody has to tell us how to get our nutrition. And that experiment really helps make the case that we ourselves have the ability, if we're actually exposing ourselves to real whole foods, right? And we're allowing our bodies to use their nutritional wisdom. It's absolutely fascinating.

It's something- that's the whole theory of the book, right? It's reclaiming our nutritional wisdom that we each innately have wisdom.

And I always say, listen to your body.

It's the smartest doctor in the room.

Yep, exactly.

So, those people don't connect what they eat with how they feel.

When you start to break that down.

People can begin to notice. And we know that, for example, the most flavorful foods are actually the best for us, right? We know the the biochemicals in the food provide the flavor. We know the, the, in, in the meat, for example, even the way it's raised, the flavor is dependent on the.

Quality of the food.

And that flavor goes along with health.

And that's something people don't understand.

That's what these animals are going, oh, I need my vitamin C. I'm gonna eat this plant, or I need these phytochemicals because they're going to help me with inflammation or. Yeah, my, my joints hurt, so I'm going to take this thing that's gonna help with my. They're not. not thinking that they're just naturally picking foods that are flavorful and that their body intuitively wants. And I think we've missed the boat on that.

Yeah.

And I'll tell you, my husband, Bill Niman, really is a meat expert. And he was actually raised, he's from Minneapolis and his parents had a little grocery store, Niman groceries. So he's kind of, you know, grew up in the food world. And he's always been really interested in, you know, eating quality and making delicious food as well as healthy food. And he's undergone an interesting transition in about the last decade when we started trying to move all of our animal raising to completely pasture-based. And what he noticed is that not only does he likes the flavor of the grass-based meat now, but when he eats sort of conventionally produced meat now, it really tastes bland to him. So he had kind of gotten used to that, but then when he started eating exclusively grass-based meats, he started saying, wow, I really like this. I prefer this. And the other stuff doesn't taste right anymore. So I think our taste buds have in so many ways gotten kind of dumbed down over the generations, but at the same time, we can. What I like about Fred's book too is it's kind of hopeful. You know, it says, okay, we have gotten into this place where we're used to industrial foods. and we were raised a lot of people were raised on them, but still you still have that inherent nutritional wisdom and you still can recognize the foods and the compounds that are good for you and those taste good. You know, like ripe fruit tastes good and, you know, meat that is raised on grass tastes good because it has those nutritional things that our body says, oh wow, this is good for me. I like this and it's a kind.

Of a natural process. Yeah, I just sort of had to review a book that was coming, it's coming out I think in the fall called Eat Like a Human. And it's written by an anthropologist who has been studying food and has gone around the world looking at different cultures and what they're eating.

We're talking about tribes in Africa that.

You know, mix blood and milk from the animals and drink that. You know, he explained how great he felt after he had that, even though it sounds like a weird food to us. But Yeah, because really all the ways that we've sort of processed and prepared foods have really denuded it of its nutritional qualities. And, and that's really what Regenerative, in my mind, Regenerative agriculture is about. It's about restoring not only the earth and the soils and better conditions for animals, but it's to provide way more nutrient dense food as a doctor. That's what I care about.

Now, I'm backing up to your book.

A little bit, Defending Beef, which I really think people should get a copy of. What was what is it that you learned between writing the book the first time and rewriting it the second time?

Oh, there's just so much. I mean, it's such an important topic. And you asked me at the beginning, you know, why did I want to pick it up and rewrite it? And I was invited by the publisher to do it, and I jumped at the chance because we felt, you know, that there's kind of more conversation about this even now than there was five years ago when the first book came out. and also more misunderstanding. There's kind of this oversimplified, again, this kind of simple view is beef is unhealthy food and cattle are bad for the environment. And we were seeing more and more examples around the world where beef are restoring ecological health, for example. And I think there's, I'm sure you've talked about this many times on your podcast, but there's really good research kind of reevaluating the whole connection between, the purported connection between red meat and bad health outcomes. And so I wanted to sort of take up the new research and look at that more carefully and present that. But also I specifically wanted to look at the methane question in particular because there was so much focus on that. And what I've learned is, I mean, there's so much to say about methane. As you said, there are ways to mitigate it. Good management of cattle grazing, for example, reduces methane production just by about 25% just by sort of improving grazing practices. But there are also, there's really good research showing that when you have sort of going back to talking about the insects in the ecosystems, when you have more dung beetles in a system, for example, that there's more methane that comes, there's less methane rather, that comes out of that production system. And really importantly, the whole science of it, the way it's calculated.

I don't want to be reincarnated as a dung beetle.

That doesn't sound like much to me.

You know, they're pretty cool. I mean, they're actually, they're I heard somewhere, I don't know if it's true, but I heard somewhere that scarab beetles in ancient Egypt, you know, all those scarab beetles are holding up the sun, that that's actually a dung beetle holding up a piece of dung. I don't know if it's true.

I've heard that rumor before.

Ancient Egyptians knew the importance of the dung beetle, you know. But there's a scientist at Oxford University, Dr. Miles Allen, and I don't know if you I think you've encountered his work or not, but I had read some articles that he wrote and then I heard him speak in person in England and I met him and spoke with him directly. And I talk about his work in the new edition of Defending Beef because he's one of the really important, you know, sort of voices that are saying, Hey, we've got this methane question completely wrong. And he's a methane expert. You know, he's a physicist at Oxford University and he was on the international, the intergovernmental panel on climate change. He was on their scientific advisory committee for a while. And so he's really, this is his area of expertise. He read something, he directed something called the Methane Project there at Oxford University, and he really knows the topic. And he says this whole idea of global warming potential, which is what is the way that it's always calculated when you talk about policy questions and methane, and you sort of, you say, well, this much methane equals this much global warming, and so forth. And he says that essentially the science of that is incorrect and that everybody who's working on this issue from the science side knows this, but because it was so much more sort of logistically simple that this was something that was adopted, you know, 20 years ago or whatever, and nobody wants to revise it because it has huge policy implications. So what he says is, you know, we need to revise the way we're calculating the global warming potential of methane. and when you look at the methane from cattle, it's really a minor issue globally. And he says the real issue is the fossil fuel industry. And if you really understand the science behind methane, there's no question about that, he says. And he says, in fact, that if we essentially keep this number of cattle on the globe static, if we're not increasing the global number of cattle, then it doesn't contribute to global warming at all because of the way the science actually works on this. And in the United States, we're actually reducing the number of cattle. And I talk about that in the book in a lot of detail. We've been reducing the total number of large ruminant animals on farms for a long time in the United States. And so, you know, we talk about deforestation, and it's true that's a big problem, but it's not an issue in the United States. And that's not to say there's no deforestation, but the net impact in the United States is we're reforesting the United States. And so again, this is really, you're taking concepts and you're generalizing them. And so when you look at whether the US consumer who's buying American raised beef, which is the vast majority of the beef in the United States, is about 80% is grown in the US, you could easily seek it out. if you are concerned, which you should be, you should seek out American race beef. But if you're doing that, then you know that it is not from a deforestation situation. And you also know that the total herd size in the United States, the herd of the United States, the cattle herd of the United States is not collectively contributing to the global methane problem. And in fact, there's another professor at Cornell, Dr. Robert Howarth, who heads the methane project at Cornell University. And he's done a ton of work showing that fracking is really the big problem in the United States when it comes to methane. So it's kind of a, you know, it's not that methane shouldn't be discussed at all when you talk about cattle. They do emit methane and there are lots of good ways to mitigate that from a management and an ecosystem perspective. But it's really not the giant issue that people have. I think you're right to believe.

I mean, it's my understanding that, you.

Know, 12,000 years ago, the amount of.

Methane in the atmosphere was the same.

As it is today. We had a lot more.

Well, and the ruminant. We have more ruminants, right? Yeah, there were more ruminants, wild ruminants.

Than there are domesticated ruminants today. Oh, elk, deer, antelope.

Yeah.

Caribou. All those are producing methane, and it really it's about the same. It's a short-lived greenhouse gas, not like carbon which stays there forever. And it seems like there's a lot of ways to mitigate it by, for example, what the cows eat if they're foraging on plants, for example, with high tannin levels. And it's important that it shouldn't be called grass-fed beef. It should be called grasses-fed beef or something. Because they need a lot of different plants with different properties. And the tannins, for example, in some of the plants reduce methane. Or if they're fed seaweed, they reduce methane. Or if they have a real regenerative system that there are organisms within the soil, the methanotropes that actually suck methane out of the atmosphere.

So when you put all that together and you say, well, you know, how.

Does that compare to, you know, let's say fracking? Well, that's three times as much methane is produced from that as it is from animal agriculture.

And on top of that, you know.

You'Ve got nitrogen fertilizers, which are deriving the fertilizer from an energy intensive process that requires natural gas, which is about 1 to 2% of the natural gas use in the world globally of global energy use is for making fertilizer, which is the nitrogen. But what that does is it gets turned into nitrous oxide, which is 300 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So there's a whole bunch of other stuff people aren't talking about, like the fertilizer stuff scares me way more than the methane stuff.

And that's used for plants.

That'S too. That's used for animal agriculture.

And there's some very interesting research as well that shows that essentially when you put the commercial chemical fertilizer on plants, that they begin essentially getting lazy and they no longer engage in those subterranean microscopic exchanges that they normally would with the soil. So they are no longer as able to get the nutrients that they need from the soil and they don't put as much carbon into the soil. So you have to have plants and soils functioning in the way that they're supposed to function in order to have this healthy food system, a healthy food and healthy ecosystem that we've been talking about. And so the implications of commercial fertilizer are there are a lot of downstream effects. And a lot of it is stuff that people are not thinking about when they're buying soy at the supermarket and they think they're doing the right thing.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode. One one of the best ways you can support this podcast is by leaving us a rating and review below. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.

Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter.

I'll only send it to you once.

A week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to drhyman.com/picks to sign up. That's drhyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S. and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer.

Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed.

Healthcare practitioner, and can help you make.

Changes, especially when it comes to your health.

Don't forget, there's a way to listen completely ad free. With Hyman Plus on Apple Podcasts, you can enjoy every episode without any breaks. Just open Apple Podcasts and tap try free to start your seven day free trial.