THE SCIENCE Of How The Body HEALS ITSELF With Food! | Mark Hyman & Fred Provenza

Diverse mixtures of plant species literally create homes, grocery stores, and pharmacies for these creatures below ground. It's not his meat good or bad. The more diverse the diet, the more diverse the microbiome is going to be.

The relationship between plants, animals, and humans, the plants are part of this profound ecological network. that includes the soil microbiome, which they depend on to get their nutrition.

That's right.

And they provide medicine and food and nutrients for the animals, which then in turn provide food and medicine for us.

Right.

And we also eat the plants, which provide the same benefits. But our diet's been so depleted because of our ignorance of these phytochemicals and ignorance of their benefit. And the way we've actually developed our agricultural system has done absolutely everything to deplete phytonutrients, our breeding and our growing practices. So can you talk about what have we done around plant breeding, not just GMO, but plant breeding, and also about our way of growing food that's really depleted these phytochemicals that are soul life giving?

Yeah, absolutely the case. Let's go back to this notion of secondary compounds and how that evolved with plant physiologists and biochemists as they came to appreciate the many roles that they play and that they aren't just waste products of plant metabolism, but there's a cost involved in making these compounds. There's pathways within the plants that plants use to create the compounds, and we came to understand that there's a cost involved in that. if you are an agronomist, and this is not in any way derogatory to that, but if you're an agronomist thinking about growth and how do we get more production of fruits and vegetables, produce those sorts of things, and you don't understand the roles that these compounds are playing, then it's a natural thing to select against them because you can get more growth. You're not plants not allocated to production of these compounds anymore. It's all going into growth. And so we've really accented growth at the expense of phytochemical riches in our selection programs in the varieties that we selected for.

So basically breeding for plants to have more productive value, more yield, more starch.

That's right. With the focus on energy, protein, starch, like you said. Yeah.

But we bred out, as a consequence, all these beneficial phytochemicals.

That's right. and we've done the same thing for livestock. When we were starting some of the studies we did on, we were asked by the Ag Experiment Station during the last years of my career to do a pasture project. They really wanted the ideas that we were doing with plants and animals on extensive conditions to focus on what we're talking about. And we said, okay, we wanna plant diverse mixtures of plants and we want them to be phytochemically rich. And we had a devil of a time to find it because we've done that for forages, and we've done to the point where many of the forages are so high in nitrogen or protein that it's toxic to animals. You know, everything's a toxin, right? Parasolysis, everything's a toxin. It all depends on the dose. Dose makes the poison. And so the feedback that we might get into here, these metabolic feedbacks are telling animals it's too much. And so they're limiting their intake because we've selected for such high concentrations. of the primary compounds, the energy, the protein and those sorts of things. So we've kind of screwed ourselves. We have, we have and not realize, you know, when we were doing the studies, and you mentioned this earlier, of looking at food selection by wild animals and domestic animals too, but, you know, we would find that three to five to seven plants made up the bulk of the diet, just as you said. But then there's another 50-75 and nobody paid much attention to the 50 to 75 because that's not what we were thinking in terms of animals need energy and protein to grow and they need some minerals and that's all that counts. The secondary compounds, nobody's thinking about that. But now when I think back on that, I think, you know, that those 50 to 75 and when you watch them, I used to be really like a physicist in the sense of physics. if you understand that you can predict and control it all. And so I used to be out there watching these animals forage. It's like, there's no way you're ever going to bite of this, bite of that. All these different things.

But you follow a cow around all day?

Right. Or a sheep or a goat. Or when we had students in the classroom field, we just follow and just watch them. Just watch them for half an hour or the chickens over here in our coop. And you start to think, you know how? And then you, watch different ones and you realize no two of them are selecting the same thing. They're all doing something.

So there's personalized nutrition and personalized movement for themselves. There's no one size fits all diet for a cow or a goat or a sheep or chicken.

Absolutely.

It's like your own personal medicine.

Human medicine, right? It is. And so these ideas start to go out of your head that we're not, it's not about predicting, it's about understanding the processes. How do the processes work? And then that relates to every every creature. So, but then what I, you know, as I've reflected over the years, I've just come to think, you know, it's that 50 to 75 that's just as important as the three to five to seven in terms of enabling animals to, to self-medicate both prophylactically, that is to say, preventatively, if they're exposing the cells and organ systems in their bodies to this diverse array of these phytochemicals, then you know, an errant cell maybe can forage in the capillaries on some kind of some phytochemical that it needs to prevent it from going haywire, right? We know those kind of things. The seven hallmarks of cancer, these phytochemicals can counter all of those, right? That's happening at that cellular level.

Even to the degree that the animals will seek out plants that are anti-parasitic containing tannins, for example, which is a phytochemical. If they have a parasite, they're like, oh, I went to my doctor and and he told me I have a parasite, I gotta eat this plant. No, they're just like somehow intuitively know what to eat.

Yeah, that's absolutely the case. And a little bit of learning from mother helps them along the way. That's pretty amazing about mother teaching as a start, you know, in the womb, but then as they're born and they start to follow mom around and what she eats and what she doesn't eat is really, it helps them to get a start in life. And then they aren't just, Going back to this individuality, they aren't just a perfect copy of mom. They're individuals, right? They're different. But what's key is that mom helps them to get started. Those flavors of foods that she's eating, they get into the amniotic fluid. We know that young animal that's had that kind of experience already knows the flavors of foods in the environment that mom's eating from.

Yeah, and that shapes their preferences future. Like for fear, if you're a human infant in utero and your mom's eating fast food all day and processed food, that's going to sensitize you to that food and that's what you're going to want. And that's why we see women who are eating crappy diets for overweight, obese, diabetic, their kids also develop all these problems.

Absolutely the case. And so you've really got two strikes against you from the minute you're born, right? I mean, it's and we know that genes are being expressed, all these sorts of things. And so really start out with metabolic syndrome, huh? I'm thinking, you know, you think of, I think of ladies that I know who have changed their diets over, over the years. And I think of their children that were born when they were on much more wholesome diet. And nowadays, as adults, they're thin, they're trim, they look really good, and then when the diet went to ultra processed, really not so healthy foods. Those poor kids are obese, they're fighting it lifelong. And I have no doubt that started in utero. And it started as a function of how mom changed her diet over time. Mom used to be on eating whole some foods. She got hooked on the ultra processed foods and it just...

They lost the nutritional wisdom as humans. We lost that. Right. So getting back to the question of.

How.

Our breeding practices have changed the phytochemical richness of food, that seems pretty clear what we're breeding for, which is energy and protein and basically just not things that are these powerful phytochemical compounds. But also let's talk about the agricultural processes that have destroyed the microbiome of the soil and the impact of that on phytochemical riches. Because I think people often think that the nutrients in the soil have been depleted. But it turns out that actually the soil's fine from a nutrient point of view, from the minerals and the chemicals in the soil. We've damaged the soil through our agricultural practices in ways that have reduced the organic matter, the life in the soil, sort of dirt which is dead. and that prevents the plants from extracting the nutrients. Can you talk about the relation between the fungi, the bacteria, the plants in the soil, and how that changes the phytochemical richness of the plant?

Absolutely. The case goes back to a comment I made earlier that diverse mixtures of plant species literally create homes, grocery stores, and pharmacies for these creatures below ground. And I think some of the most interesting research nowadays by plant ecologists is showing that when you have no plants at all, it's just an incredibly harsh environment. How can the microbiome live when it has no plants to help sustain it? The plants are fixing soluble carbohydrates, they're fixing energy, in process of photosynthesis, and they're feeding the microbiome below ground. And then the microbiome in turn is helping to feed to turn those nutrients that the plants need. They're helping the plants to get those nutrients. So it's a symbiotic relationship. It's an amazing relationship. And some of the work I think that's fascinating is showing that as you go from a monoculture, which typically how we plant our crops to more diverse mixtures, you're creating more homes for a more extensive microbiome in the soil, which is the same thing that happens in us, right? If we eat a diverse array of foods, of wholesome foods, a variety of different plant species and fruits and meats as well, we create a more diverse microbiome in our gut. So it's absolutely analogous. that's very true. And you know, ruminant nutritionists, people who study these room. So cattle, sheep, goats, elk, deer, they're what's called ruminants. They're kind of a walking compost heap. Yeah, a walking fermentation vat. But ruminant nutritionists, I mean, the microbiome is really an important and hot topic now, right? In human nutrition, no question. It's a hot topic. But ruminant nutritionists have been studying the microbiome for 70 years.

I know, Fred, Fred, I actually, how I got into nutrition was I was at Cornell, living in a house with a PhD student nutrition who was studying the microbiome of ruminants. They didn't call it the microbiome back then. It was a role of fiber. And he's the one who gave me that book, Nutrition Against Disease by Roger.

Williams that got me thinking about this back in college. And it's so funny you mentioned that because yeah, they studied the the microbiome. Peter van Zoon, did you know Peter and all his graduate students? They were doing so much work along those lines. And so, you know, and they were appreciating the importance of changes in the diet. When you change the diet, you're going to change the microbiome. That's, you know, the change the microbiome. And then ecologists were also very interested in that and making the point that the more diverse the diet of the animal, the more diverse the microbiome is going to be. So it just lines up from the soil through the animals, right, through to us, right. And the plants are benefiting from that as well. More diverse microbiomes help all those plants. It's amazing work, but it all links back to health, right, to the doctor's pharmacy. And Feed is medicine for livestock and wild animals. Food is medicine for us.

But it's- you- just said something that like that light bulb went on in my head, something I'd never really considered. And I'm just gonna unpack it because it was so rich and you covered it really quickly. So, I thought that, you know, the microbiome of the soil was important for the plants. But the microbiome of the soil is also determined by the plants.

Yes.

And the plants, the plants in a symbiotic relationship with the soil put stuff in the soil that feeds the microbiome and the more diversity of plants. Now think about these massive millions of acres of monoculture, what that does to the soil, right? If you have hundreds of different species of plants on rangeland or farmland, that's putting information in the soil that feeds the silvery medicine for the microbiome of the soil. And then the microbiome in turn helps the plants by extracting compounds from the soil that it couldn't otherwise extract. So we're seeing two phenomena here. One is over the last 50 years, we've seen a dramatic reduction in mineral and nutrient content in plants. Even the future broccoli today, it's not as nutritious as it was 50 years ago. Okay. They're up to 50% lower levels of minerals and also a 10 to 50% reduction in phytochemicals. And it's all because we've disrupted this natural relationship between plants and soil.

Yes. And we didn't understand, right? I mean, when people started into all this, nobody understood. And the silos that we live in, right, that we were talking about last night. So you have these ecologists that are going down this path and learning about all these things we're talking about. You have agronomists that are thinking, we yield, yield, yield. And now those worlds are coming together. How we're starting to say, look, we did this. Nobody's to blame. It was just good intentions, but we need to have a think. And then these phytochemicals going back to the soil microbiome, their health, their health promoting for all those bacteria and, and mycorrhizae and all, it's, they're, it's so symbiotic and so health promoting all the way across the board. And you can't, you can't extract one frame from the other. They're intimately interrelated and we're interrelated with all that, right? And we've forgotten that that's so fundamental to our health. We really need to wake up to that, right? And that appreciation of how beautiful and amazing it is for one thing and then how important it is fundamental for our health.

Totally. And the phytochemicals that are in these plants that have been grown in ways that feed the microbiome of the soil, that increase their nutrient density, that increase their phytochemical richness, have profound effects for our health and they're profound effects for the animals. So I'm a doctor. You're sort of a Rangeland Behavioral ecologist, right? We're studying different things. It seems like how could they come ecological doctor? But it's, yeah, but really when you look at it, it's exactly what's happening in human health and animal health. So we're seeing the need for massive inputs to animals to keep them growing and healthy from feed lots using supportive nutritional support, antibiotics, certain kinds of feed. And they're not that healthy. Whereas if you take a grass-fed, fully grass-fed finished animal or wild animal, they're eating foods all the time that are treating their bodies with medicine. That's right. And they're less likely to get sick. They don't need as much support. And so the costs are way less to raise grass-fed regenerative beef than it is to feed a lot of animals. And people think, oh, it's more expensive. Turns out it's not more expensive. It turns out they gain weight in the right way. And what was fascinating to me reading your book was that some of these papers was that it was shocking to me that they could eat far less and gain the same weight. This is just asking me because we eat a nutrient replete diet, our bodies know what to do.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely the case. The whole notion of the nutritional wisdom of the body of everything from the bacteria in the soil through to the plants themselves through to the livestock and on us as well. I want to go back to a point too. It's about our reliance on fossil fuels and that all these inputs that plants did naturally, now we have to make up with herbicides to protect plants and monocultures, glyphosate and all the downstream effects of glyphosate. Plants did that naturally. They produced their own herbicides and we.

Didn'T and they're called phytochemicals. Right.

And they're called phytochemicals. Then insecticides to protect plants from, from the insect world. Well, that's what plants did. That's what they also phytochemicals. Fertilizers. We've been talking about this symbiosis below ground. When we got rid of that, then we've got to do the fertilizer.

Well, there's cost to every one of those things. And then, like you said, and then a lot of plants, if you have.

A risk of plants, they put nitrogen.

Into the soil so you don't have to put it in.

Right, absolutely. Nitrogen fixing plants. So, we shot ourselves in the foot and then there's this huge cost that we've talked about. When you take into consideration- I just.

Something occurred to me, sorry to interrupt, but it's not a premium, it's just that the reason we need GMO foods is because we've depleted the plant's natural ability to protect, defend itself by the breeding we've done. That's the idea. That stands for yield and protein energy. And then, wait a minute, these are all getting eaten and they're not thriving and they're getting sick and we need to give them all these drugs to keep them healthy, which is kind of silly because naturally these phytochemicals are the plant's defense mechanisms. They prevent them from needing radiation. They help treat different problems that they have with their own health. They help communicate with other plants of dangers.

They have all these incredible benefits, right? yeah. And that's the supreme irony is now we're trying to genetically engineer back into plants all the things that they originally had, you know, so it puts the emphasis as we were talking on programs. And there are some in this country that are really trying to think about phytochemical richness and how do we get that back into, into the production system in, in really viable ways so that when you go to the grocery store and you pick up the lettuce or the kale or the tomato or whatever it is, and you pick something that's phytochemically rich and you take a bite of that and every cell in your body saying, hey, this is wonderful, rather.

Than, you know, eating broccoli from the store, even it's organic broccoli from, you know, a great store. If I go and pick it in my garden and eat it, I'm like, wow, what's that? So if I eat asparagus that I buy in the store, if I eat.

Asparagus that I go pick in my garden, I'm like, that tastes so different. Absolutely. Tastes so different. so that's where we would encourage everyone to, you know, growing gardens, getting yourself, getting your hands in. And I talk to a lot of people anymore who haven't done that historically, but they listen to these kind of things and they start doing that. And they say, you know, it's a spiritual kind of thing in the one sense that it connects you back with, with our being kind of. But then the, the rewards of eating, like you say, it's, it's wonderful how we make it fresh and you bring it in and you eat it. And then to realize what we're talking about, some of this science that's been dug into, that it actually is very, very healthy for you and all these phytochemicals that were, you know, I'll say a word to, over my career, I was so involved with natural product, scanning ecologists and learning all these different compounds, all of them, jillions of them. And I don't worry about that anymore, Mark, for two reasons. One, my memory doesn't hold these things anymore, I'll be honest. but two, you realize it's so complex. I mean, plants will produce tens to hundreds, even thousands of these. Starbar will produce 5,000 of them. So I think we can become bogged down if we try to think about, you know, well, does it have resveratrol or does it have phenolics of this sort or what? Not to say they're, but if you just appreciate that it's that phytochemical richness, that's really what matters. And then the miracle is that the level of the cells and organ systems in your body, your cells and body know what to do with all that. That's incredible, you know? And you're never going to study that in a reductional sense.

No, it's so complex, right? Because you're literally eating thousands of compounds, not just protein, fat, carbs, fiber, vitamins, minerals, all these other compounds. And your body knows what to do with them. They regulate all these tricky functions. It's what I do in functional medicine when I treat patients using food as medicine. I tell people to have green tea, which helps get rid of heavy metals, or have them have broccoli, which increases their detox capacity with the phytochelatins, the phytochelatins and sulforaphane, or whether I'm having them eat proanthocyanidins from berries to increase their anti-inflammatory N-acetyl cysteine capacity. So, I'm thinking all the time about how do I use these, but it really never occurred to me these deep interrelationship between the plants, animals, and the soil that are driving the phytochemical richness. And so your work has really explained how that all works and why we've gotten so screwed up. So essentially, we bred plants to remove these compounds, and then we have to use all these agrochemical and industrial inputs to compensate for that. And two, we built an agricultural system, a legacy of the Green Revolution, that ended up damaging the soil in ways that we never even understood and turned it from soil to dirt. And you wrote in a paper you recently read that the Green Revolution helped feed billions of people. but had many unintended consequences, including loss of land and social changes in the culture because of how it affected the farmers and which displacement of land and poverty for countless small farmers. And in India, you know, suicide rates are really high among farmers, even in this country. Loss of biodiversity, which we're talking about, and food quality, the degradation of the land from soil erosion and loss of minerals in the soil, adverse effects from synthetic fertilizers on our soil organisms. So, when you put nitrogen on the soil, it kills the bugs in there. And pollution from fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides in the overall environment and more salt in the soil from irrigation and dependence on fossil fuels. So it really created a system that has so many inputs and so many changes in destructive and destructive problems that happened to the ecosystem that we've sort of stopped living in an ecological way that supportive and sustainable. And we're now calling regenerative, which is how do we regenerate ecosystems? How do we regenerate soil? How do we regenerate the phytochemicals in plants? How do we regenerate human health? Those are all the things that people care about. And yet we've developed the agricultural system that produces a lot of food that makes people sick and kills people. I mean, the one fact around COVID that's just staggering to me is that 63% of hospitalizations for COVID can be linked back to poor diet. The poor diet that caused diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and so forth that led to the hospitalizations. That should get everybody stopping in their tracks and going, wait a minute, if we are so susceptible to pandemic because of our diet, and we've not only seen that in deaths and sickness, but also the loss of food security, nutrition security in so many communities during the pandemic, we've sort of got to get back on track here.

Yes, and that, and as everything we're saying, it relates to all the organisms in the system, right? As you get rid of the phytochemical diversity and diversity of different plant species, that makes all the wild and domestic animals more susceptible to diseases as well. We're seeing it in a pandemic. It's become very real for humans, but that's the same kind of thing that happens in wild and domestic animals as well.

And it's just not just an animal agriculture, plant agriculture. Even if you're a vegetarian or vegan and you're eating plants and if they're grown even in organic ways, they can be using killing methods in the soil. They can be doing things that actually decrease biodiversity. And it's not necessarily going to solve the problem. If you're looking large monocrops of soybeans or the new plant-based meats, you've got GMO soy going in huge monocrop cultures that are destroying the ecosystem. we're pouring billions of pounds of, you know, millions, I don't know, billions or millions of pounds of glyphosate that's on soil, which is destroying the cell, soil microbiome, which destroys our microbiome. And we're, we're ending up having these, these food products that aren't what they were. And our health is really degraded as a result. Yeah.

You know, glyphosate was originally developed as a, as a antibiotic, right? Is to kill bacteria.

I thought it was to kill, to clean out the lead pipes and they put it in the pipes and the runoff from the pipes, they found all the plants died around where the runoff was out of the pipes.

Yeah, that's part of the history of that whole thing. That's right. It wasn't deliberate, right? I mean, it was an unintended consequence observation and turned it into the end of the herbicide it is today.

Yeah, it's crazy. So, as a doctor, I understand and as a functional medicine doctor, I understand the power of food as medicine and the power of phytochemicals and phytonutrients in plants to actually activate our health and address both the treatment and prevention of disease. That's so clear to me. And, your work has really highlighted how we lost our ability to be in right relationship with the land and with animals that will lead to more of these phytochemicals being in our diet, including not only in plants but in animals. And we'll talk about phytochemicals and meat in a little bit. What really strikes me from your work is how we really lost our natural wisdom of what to eat. And one of the studies that you wrote about in your book, Nourishment, which everybody should get a copy of, is this study that was done in the 20s by a woman, I think in Canada, who took kids from an orphanage. And I don't think you could get this through an ethics committee today, but she took these kids from an orphanage and she fed them an array of foods. She offered them these foods so they could naturally select what their bodies wanted. And these kids would eat stuff that you wouldn't even think they would. For example, a dinner might be orange juice and liver and some weird thing and brains. And so talk about the study, what was learned from it, and how as humans living in a world with a disconnection from our food supply and a disconnection from the kinds of foods that helped us maintain our nutritional wisdom, how it's led to all this chronic disease. So this study really informs a lot of the thinking about why we are all so sick and overweight.

Yes. Clara Davis was the scientist who did the studies. She was in Chicago and I would have loved to have met Clara. I have to say she was a petite little lady and so much on the same page. she obviously had this belief in the nutritional wisdom of the body, but wanted to, wanted to study that and see what happens. So she had 15 children that were given up for adoption or put in an orphanage, and she ran the study over a six-year period, and they had 34 different foods that were offered seasonally. Some of the things, like you mentioned, and And then they simply recorded what each child ate, meal in, meal out, day in, day out. Can you imagine that amount of data?

They just gotta pick whatever they wanted.

Yeah, the kids could pick whatever they wanted. And they had pediatricians that were involved in that study and they wrote papers about it and they said they'd never seen a healthier group of kids ever in their careers. And the kids did things and this was interesting.

So there's no nutritionist telling them what to do. No dietary guidelines getting in the way. no nutrition facts labels with all the right stuff that kids should eat for breakfast.

And Clara made it clear. She told the people that were helping on the study, you're not to give any indication to those children of something to eat. You put it on that, put it in front of them. And it was interesting when they first started, started this study, they said the kids sampled everything. Everything went into their, into their mouth, the napkins, the silverware, the, you know, anything that was on but given a little bit of time, each child would figure out what worked for its body. And I just love this because she said, no two children ever selected the same combination of foods and no child ever selected the same foods from day to day. But they all selected diets that met their needs. And they knew when some of the kids would come in with deficiency, symptoms, they paid particular attention to what they would select, you know, and, and they would select things that they needed.

So their vitamin A deficient, they'll go for the liver.

That's right. That's absolutely the case. Or if they come in with rickets, they're gonna go for vitamin B. Yeah. So they documented all of that. And it's just amazing to think. And we were talking about that. We did studies like that with livestock. with sheep and cattle, where we'd give them choices of foods or no choice at all, these rations that are fed in feedlots, these what are called total mixed rations, where they're designed for the average animal and you try to make uniform groups of animals in terms of age and sex and so forth. And then you formulate a ration, you grind it and mix it up. So one group would get that, in our study, the other group was simply offered the choice of the ingredients. And it was amazing to compare what they did. And that's where, going back to the point that you made, the animals that were given a choice actually ate less food.

But gained the same weight.

But yeah, they gained weight just as readily. They finished, you know, when people talk about finishing and you slaughter them, and we did that, and you look at their carcass characteristics, they were the same. But it cost less. It was efficient. more efficient. It costs less if you're thinking in just in an economic sense, because they ate less food. Here's the most.

I put out a buffet for them instead of giving them a set meal. That's absolutely. And then they got to pick what.

They actually needed for their health. And they did exactly what Claire Davis kids did, too. No two animals ever selected the same combination of foods, and they varied it from day to day to day, you know, and we understand a lot how that works. We don't need to go into the details, but it was, it's amazing. And one of the most amazing things to me, so you can look at different characteristics, but one thing that nutritionists like to look at is protein to energy ratio in the diet. And that varies a lot as a function of need. And so for the total mixed ration, there's a set protein to energy ratio, right? It's set by what that ration is. And when we looked at protein to energy ratio for the individual animals, Given choice, they were all over the place. Some were really high, some were really low. They were, but when we averaged all those animals, they were exactly where the nutritionists had formulated the recipe. But there, no, none of them were that. Do you know, there was no animal, average animal.

They had their own intelligence.

Yes.

Even a cow. Yeah. It's not to say a wild elk or buffalo.

That's right. That's right. It was still, they had not lost that. They and that's a key point because when we started our work 45 years ago, there was the notion among ruminant nutritionists that wild animals must still have this nutritional wisdom in their bodies. Otherwise, how could they be surviving? But domestic animals had lost it as a result of 10, 000 years of domestication and selection. And our work just shows in the 300 papers we published over and over again, it hasn't been lost. But it's the choices that you give them and are you giving them wholesome choices that allow that risk to no different from a human, right? If you're raised on an ultra processed diet, then that's your choices. It's not going to work out well for you, right? But if you have all these wholesome choices and they're grown under the kind of conditions we're talking about, then that wisdom can be expressed. And the amazing thing is you don't even have to think about it.

It's not so... That's right. That's amazing. We've lost all that. And we've gotten in a world where we are over consuming ultra processed foods in ways that make us the most obese nation in the world and are staggeringly undernourished, even though we're overfed.

Overfed and undernourished.

We have significant increase in deficiencies in this culture. Forget about phytochemicals. So, I think probably 99.9% of Americans are deficient phytochemicals because I think less than 9% eat the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables. that there's a minimum, like five cups is minimum, five servings, which is basically two and a half cups. I would say people should eat more like eight or nine cups of fruits and vegetables a day.

Right, right.

So we've lost that and these compounds we're not getting and we don't know we need, but we're so deficient in our diet and the cravings we have and the overeating we do, often is an attempt to try to replace those nutrients that we're not getting from our food. And one of the studies by Kevin Hall and some others was fascinating to me. You talked about it, which is that when given an unlimited amount of ultra processed food to eat or a whole food to eat, that the people who ate the whole foods felt satisfied on far less food.

They ate 500 calories less a day.

Now, that is massive amount of calories. If you were 100 calories off for 20 years, you're gonna gain 20 or 30 pounds. So 100 calories, let's say 3,500 calories, right?

Right, right, right.

Which is basically a week of the calorie excess would be equivalent to a pound of weight gain a week.

Yeah.

Excess food. So that's why we're so overweight because we're looking for love in all the wrong places. We're looking for nutrients in nutrient-depleted food, forget about phytochemicals. Like the whole idea of phytochemicals regulating our appetite and our desire for food was something I just, you know, didn't fully understand until I read your book. And the thing that struck me was some of the experiments you did where you help explain how flavor and nutrient needs and the animals feeding the hive are all related. So they will find the foods that they need and will eat enough of those to meet their needs and then they'll go eat something else. They won't eat too much or too little. They have this natural intelligence and that flavor is associated with these phytochemicals. Something most people understand. When you eat like a wild strawberry, it's an explosion of flavor in your mouth, even though it's the size of a pea.

Yes.

If you eat a big fat strawberry, you buy in the grocery store, it tastes like cardboard, you know, and there's no real flavor there. And Dan Barber has done a lot of work around this as a chef and created a company called Row 7 Foods where he's hybridizing plants, not GMO, but just breeding plants for flavor. He's not thinking about phytochemicals. I'm thinking as a doctor about the phytochemicals because the phytochemicals are what give the plant flavor. So that whole relationship between plants, animal and humans and their dietary preferences and plants and animals is something most people don't understand. So can you explain the way in which these flavor feedback loops help regulate animals feeding behavior and how it might inform as humans what we should be eating and how we need to reclaim and list our own nutritional wisdom.

That. That's so important. And that, that was, that was something that really blew my mind. I wish there's a way that we can, could make these come alive for people there to realize that liking for flavor is being mediated by these metabolic feedbacks, hormones, neurotransmitters, peptides, all those things are, those signals are coming from cells and organ systems as a function of their need. And so that's changing liking as a function of need. And when you're eating wholesome foods, then that's going to be in sync with what your body needs. It can, that system can be hijacked.

Yeah.

We looked at a little video last night. I showed you a sheep, and one group of sheep had been when they, when they ate a really a straw, which is not, not a nutritious food at all, we, we would Put either water in one group of sheep directly into their stomach or an energy, a blast of energy. And the sheep that got the blast of energy, they love that straw, right?

That's what- Can you give them a little maple syrup or- yeah, right.

That's what the food industry is doing with the refined carbohydrates. You get a flavor and you follow that with a blast of energy and you immediately form a really strong preference.

So Zoe, stop there. So basically what you're saying is you take straw, which is like, eating processed food, right?

Cardboard, no nutrients.

You add sugar on it and they go, oh, sugar, that's good. I want energy. And they eat the straw even though it has no nutrition. Which is what we do as humans. We eat ultra-processed food, fast food, which has no real nutritional value, but it has tons of energy. So they add sugar and all these flavorings to it in order for us to start craving it. So we associate the Lucin energy with the flavor. Flavor of the fruit. But it's actually kind of mismatched.

It is. And what we were showing is that it's that feedback. And the way you do that is to give the flavor of straw. So we would make maple flavored or apple flavored or whatever it is. And you've got this straw that's worthless. You have to emphasize that it's not nutritionally anything, but when you follow the ingestion of that straw, with nutrients in the gut, put the nutrients directly in the gut, that's the cells work. You know, those nutrients are getting absorbed and cells are not just saying, oh, this is great. And it's feeding back to make you.

Say, oh, I love maple flavored straw or I love- and it's not even.

The taste because you're not letting go, you're not giving the maple flavored straw in their stomach. That's right. That's the, to try to get that through and then to realize, you know, none of this is conscious as we were talking. Nobody thinks about which enzymes to release to digest the food they're eating. And it's the same thing with these feedbacks. It's happening automatically. Yeah. And that's where if you're eating wholesome foods, it works. The system is solid as it can be. But if you get on the ultra process, it gets hijacked. And the food, people in the food industry have really learned how to do that well. And then to put not, you know, not wholesome herbs and spices, let's say, as a flavoring agent, it's all these. 600 million pounds a year or whatever. Artificial flavorings.

600 million pounds of artificial flavorings are added to our food every year. That's frightening.

Yeah, it's, it's, and it's caused this.

Disconnect between our natural inclinations to eat foods that nourish us with our, with our ability to sort of pick those foods and, and we tend to eat foods that are associated with these artificial flavors because they've scientifically figured out how to hijack our brain chemistry and our hormones and our metabolism. And so we tend to crave all the wrong stuff.

Rather than the phytochemicals we've been talking about, we use artificial flavoring agents. And so we're not getting, just as you were saying earlier, all those things that our bodies evolved with over the years and that regulate all systems inside our body. We're not getting that.

Yeah, and these animals seem to have profound ability to sense what's going on, not necessarily through even taste, although the flavor plays a role. It's even the levels of these metabolites of plants in their bloodstream can regulate their eating behavior. So, you talked in the book, for example, about eating sagebrush. For example, elk in the winter eat sagebrush. which is not the greatest food, but it has nutritional values in the winter when they can't get other stuff. It has high levels of these things called terpenes, which are potentially toxic to these animals. They will stop eating when their levels of the blood of these terpenes gets to a certain level and they'll go eat something else.

Yes.

But you kind of hijacked that to a study, studying this process where you infused the terpenes into their blood, so they never even kind of, it wasn't like they were tasting it and eating it. It was like their body knew immediately that it was time to stop eating that.

Yeah, and if the guests in the audience can just picture, so there's an animal that's there eating. We were working with sheep on those studies and it's eating its meal and we're slowly, slowly infusing terpenes into the bloodstream to look at detoxification and elimination processes. And when we reach a level, that's enough for, for the particular animal. They'll just lie down and stop eating. So we would stop infusing at that point. But it's, the animal is associating the food that it's eating with the feedback signals. They're so in tune with that. It, it's amazing, actually, when you start to watch it, if you can picture it, and it just changes, absolutely changes your views of, of nutritional wisdom of the body, how that's working and.

So basically we've gotten this predicament of a food system that's producing food in a way that depletes the plants of the phytochemicals and the nutrients that it's needed to feed animals and humans in a way to destroy the soil microbiome in a way that has hijacked our own ability to know what's good for us or not good for us because our innate nutritional wisdom has been hijacked by these industrial chemicals and starch and sugar and food that has completely disconnected us from our ability to have any nutritional wisdom. And for anybody listening, you know, if you've ever done a detox or an elimination diet where you get rid of all the junk, all the processors, even like my 10-day detox diet, you'll very quickly start to reclaim your natural wisdom. You start to crave the things that are good for you. Like, I don't crave starch or sugar or processed food. In fact, I can walk by the candy aisle and it just looks like a rock to me. I'm like, why would I eat that? It doesn't even look like food or a muffin or something. It's like I was at a coffee shop today in Montana and it was getting some coffee. Although, coffee is the richest source of phytochemicals in the American diet, which is not a good thing, by the way, because you just drink coffee and don't eat flashes, but they had this like sugar cookie and this banana bread and lemon bread. And it was like, oh, I want that. But I was like, no, I actually don't. Like, I looked at it, it sounded good, but then I looked at it, I was like, no, that doesn't look like edible to me anymore. And I think I used to eat wanting that stuff. I think if we can kind of reclaim our own bodies, it doesn't take.

Long to do that. No, that's right. And I have a story for you. When Sue and I really, many years ago, got moving more and more in this direction of getting all of that out of our diet, we decided, look, that stuff's really hard to resist when you're on it, right? I mean, you don't have a lot of their hopes. You start to stop. Yeah, you're hooked and sugar can be addicting and all those things. So the place to stop is at the grocery store. It doesn't go into the basket. It does not go into the basket because you don't get it home. But I love to tea-soup. And I was in the store a while back. And so we'll go down the aisle where all that stuff is. I grabbed this huge old cake and stuff. And this older lady was watching me. And she knew what I was. And I put that and I put a couple of these and then she came back to the basket. And it was just so fun to watch the old lady. and says, get that out of here, you know, the elderly. But it's a key point though, you know, you can't surround yourself with that stuff and think that you've got the quote willpower to avoid it. It's in your house. And so at Christmas time, when we get really, you know, gifts from other people.

Yeah, it's bad.

And we, yeah, and we hate that we, we accept them nicely, but Sue throws them away. She just says, because, you know, it's.

I don't, I don't want to give them a food bank because, you know, it's like, you know, other people that.

No, you don't. It's, it's not. So, you know, that's one of the, the things that, that we did anyway, was to say, you got to get on wholesome foods and let your body start to, to tell you what, what you need from day to day. I'm like Claire Davis's kids, you know, and sometimes they say, eat this or eat that or eat something. I don't want it today. My body doesn't want it. Okay. I don't need, don't need that particular thing today. My body's not I'm not telling you that.

Well, one of the things that so struck me from your book was the discussion of the intelligence of your cells and organs that's beyond your brain. And how those cells and organs are constantly sampling their environment and deciding what they need or don't need and regulating your behavior. It's almost like a decentralized brain. I don't, I just, it blew my mind. And one of the stories you tell to illustrate that is a woman who had a, I think a liver transplant, a heart transplant, heart and lung transplant. Heart and lung. And she was a pretty healthy year before, and all of a sudden she's like wanting KFC and wanting junk food and was so confused. So tell us about that story and implications around how our cells and organs are also intelligent and how that works.

It blows your mind because it'll make you stop to think, who is this person I call me, actually? It'll really make you stop to think that when you realize how all these cells and organ systems are interacting to influence all that you do. So the book A Change of Heart by Claire Sylvia, it's an old book now, but it's so worth reading because so here's this 40 year old woman, one of the first people ever to get heart and lung transplant. And so doctors, no, no one understood much that what would happen. And I remember one part in there related to what you were saying, where she was saying, man, I'm just, I'm a different person now that I've got these heart and lungs. It wasn't only food. It was a whole bunch. So it's centered on this quest to try to find out where did these organs come from?

It's like football.

Yeah, exactly. Where did these organs come from? And the book is telling of this story and she finds out it's a young man named Tim that was in the late teens, was killed in a motorcycle accident and that's the heart and lungs she got. And so she's telling these doctors about all this stuff and I remember one, the doctor said, the heart's just a damn pump. And she said, no, it's not just a damn pump. You don't know. It's not in your body. You don't. It's. You're not experiencing what I'm experiencing. Yeah. And the lungs aren't just a way to get air into your body. And then the part, you know, so she's. Since she was one of the first people to do that, there was great interest. And the Press was there about the time she's getting ready to be released from the hospital. One of the reporters asked her if you could have anything you want right now. to eat, what would you like? And she said, actually, I'd like a beer. And she said, the minute she said that, she wanted to take the words back for two reasons. One, it was a flippant response, but two, I don't even like beer, she said. And so that got her started thinking about this whole deal. And then, like you say, it just went on and on, things that she never liked before, green peppers and on and on. KFC, she came to like. And so her dietary habits broadened out. She didn't quit liking the things that she once liked. She still liked those, but they broadened out. And then she's asking the family, Tim's family, what did Tim like to eat? You know, and they're saying, oh, he just loved KFC. And she said, Chicken McNuggets. She said, first time she could drive, her car nearly steered off the road.

When she went by. But how do you kind of reconcile that with the promise of reclaiming our nutritional wisdom? Because if the programming of our cells and organs is so intense by the processed food industry that it survives death, you literally give someone else your heart and lungs if you die. And you also give them your all your bad habits.

Right, right.

How do you want to do that?

Yeah, I think like you say, I think you you have to really, you have to radically change what you're doing.

She has to retrain the new heart and lungs.

You have to retrain them. This isn't, and you know, I know people that I visit with quite a lot that were really born, you know, raised on ultra processed foods and those sort of things. And it's a lifelong battle for them. They tell me, you know, I still struggle with that. And we just talk about, well, you just can't, I guess it's like alcohol. If once you're an alcoholic, you just leave that stuff alone, right? And you, you put wholesome things into your diet that you're right, but it lets you know the deep level, right? The deep, deep level at which, which all of this is happening. And then the, the amazing level. Well, there's far more, there's far more after speeding up to the central nervous system than, like, it's all the same nerves growing from the central nervous system down to the body. They're so huge. Many, many times.

Yeah.

Many, many more times ascending. and then descending, right, in terms of neurons.

So basically, your cells and your organs are all talking to your brain and giving information to them about what to do or not to do, what to.

Crave and what to want. Absolutely right. So if you look at the taste system, nerves for taste converge with nerves from throughout, like the vagus and so forth, those nerves right here in the brainstem, and then they synapse and relay throughout the central nervous system. They converge with for smell and so forth and so on. So yeah, we know we understand a good deal about the basic anatomy and physiology of those systems. And now we're learning that the microbiome is also sending signals, right? I mean, that's the- you-'re not eating.

Only what you crave. You're eating what your microbiome craves. Right.

Well, it's like the whole thing has got to be fed, right? It's got to feed itself. And so, and the part that makes me a little bit sad is the, the microbiome, and it's important. Absolutely. It's, it's getting so much press and people are saying, well, the microbiome is sending these signals to the central nervous system, but there never gets a word said about all these other organ systems, cells and organ systems. They're doing the same thing. Yeah, everything has to be fed and the brain has certain needs and the lungs and the liver and, and they're all all. It's a democracy, I guess you would say, how they're all feeding into. Yeah. And that's where it's humbling, too, for me. And then you think, so an animal eats a meal, tens of thousands of compounds, and these feedbacks are mediating all of that to meet needs. And I think you realize at that point that we can study up to a degree, and then it just points you in a direction, right? That. That. either come to appreciate that all that's going on and that, you know, this diversity that we're talking about of wholesome foods is what matters. And then you figure that complexity, the body knows. And the more we understand it, and it helps us to appreciate that, right? But then there's a humility for me at this point where you say, it's incredible. It's incredibly complex. And, and sometimes in our reductionist approach, and I did this for years. You know, we, we went down that path. What compound is causing what? What's wrong? Yeah. And no, it's not how it, it works. So, I mean, we learned from that, but, but I've back so far away from that. It's about the richness of all that, the combinations. And I've heard you talk about it, Mark, and really appreciate it, you know, so you could say, well, meat's bad. Meat's bad for you. I mean, epidemiological kind of work, but it or something we learned really early on is that you've got to think about all the other things that are in the diet, right? Yeah. And how they're, how they're synergizing with one another or in good ways or in bad ways to, to influence. It's not as meat, good or bad. It's, it's the whole diet. Right.

It's like what you eat in combination with it. It's, right. You eat fries and a burger and a milkshake. It's different than eating a, you know, regeneratively grass-fed beef with tons of spices and marinated it with lots of phytochemically rich vegetables and plants. It's a totally different experience in your body.

Yeah, absolutely is. And when you get into that and get on that, it's a very rewarding experience. You feel satisfied and you don't have to eat a lot. We had a meal last night and we had a little bit. I just had a half a piece of meat and I'm satisfied, you know? And you have all the greens that we had and the broccoli and the and so forth.

Well, you know, essentially, you know, summarize what you're saying, essentially, you know, sort of what I sort of tried to get to in the Pegan diet, was a set of principles that are universal that we can agree on, that we should all be eating whole foods, that we shouldn't eat processed foods, that we should eat phytochemically rich foods, that we should eat foods with basically a wide variety and diversity of foods to include all these different compounds that we need for our health. And it doesn't mean you have to be rigid or fixed, and there's a lot of ways to achieve that. but this whole kind of competition or adversarial relationship between vegans and meat-eaters, it sort of doesn't make sense. I want to sort of dive into something that I think is a little bit controversial, but it kind of blew my mind when I read it in your book, that plants have 20 senses. The plants communicate with each other through these phytochemicals, through messengers that they send through mycorrhizal fungi. So then they might be getting chomped on by a caterpillar, but they might send a message to their neighbor plants, hey guy, you want to ramp up the production of this phytochemical that the caterpillars don't like because I'm getting eaten, you know, or how they sense everything around them. So the question, you know, sort of arises, you know, are, where does consciousness begin and what is a sentient being? And are plants sentient? Are they are they exhibiting behaviors and communication that makes us rethink their value? Because, you know, this is that kind of, well, if you want to be ethical, you should only eat plants. Well, I'm not so sure, you know, because forget the idea that you're just growing plants, you're going to kill animals through farming techniques that destroy habitats and kill rabbits and birds and. we've lost 50% of our bird species for agriculture. That's for sure happening. And forget the fact that with organic agriculture, you need to use animal products to grow food like plants, right? You need compost or manure, you need bone meal and fertilizer, you need various kinds of nutrients that you get from oyster shells. There's a lot of animal products that are used in organic vegetable agriculture. So forget that. Just the idea that these plants actually might have consciousness. was a really novel idea for me. And you kind of unpack that.

Yeah, that's amazing. That's amazing kind of research that the plant physiologists are doing. And, you know, there was a book written many, many years ago, the Secret Life of Plants. And it was really talking about these kind of ideas, but it got highly, highly criticized back in the days because there was no science. behind all this stuff. Well, now there's top-notch world-class physiologists and ecologists have been studying all these 20 different senses and books have come out about plant intelligence and behavior.

And they can't walk, but they do.

A lot of cool stuff. And if you think about it, you know, if you're confined to one space, you probably have to be even more clever, right? I mean, you can't get up and run away. you've got to figure out. And these phytochemicals that we've been talking about become the language of the plant, right? They're the language. They're the ways that they communicate. And so a caterpillar is starting to eat you and you produce volatiles that send a signal to the other plants. Oh, boy, Charlie's getting eaten over there. I think I'm gonna up my. And they do that literally. I'm joking, laughing a little bit, but they're doing that, you know, and so. it starts to, it starts when you read about the different senses of plants and they have kind of nervous system too. It works more slowly than ours do, but some of the neurotransmitters we have, they have some of that. Yeah, and it's slow, but it works on plant time as to what they need to do. And yeah, they can say they can.

Share nutrients, they can do all kinds of things.

They do. And they help one another out, right?

I mean, hey, Jimmy, I need some vitamin C. Can you give me some?

It's true. Yes. And it's being documented that they do those sorts of things. And in ecology, I think it's where ecologists went down, maybe not so good track. Historically, it was all about competition. Dog eat dog world. Everything's competing, competing, competing. And we're thinking all these synergies and how plants might be helping one another, helping their offspring, sharing resources with one another. It's amazing to get into that. And then you can think about, well, are they clever or not? You know, anybody that's taken classes in biochemistry, and some people take to that more readily than others.

Yeah.

A lot of people think it's pretty tough. Yeah.

Biochemistry is probably the most important subject in medical school. We all basically didn't pay attention to it, ignored and learned for the exam and then we forgot about it.

Right, right. And, you know, so, but, so biochemists are, are the ones creating all these, these genetically modified plants and so forth and so on. But plants routinely outwit, outwit these clever biochemists. Yeah. Agro, agro, agro people. And the example I'd use, there's over 500 herbicide resistant plants. you make an herbicide and the plants are going to figure out how to get around it. You know, it's just like antibiotic resistance in, in humans and in my stuff. You put a single compound, right. Rather than diverse mixtures of phytochemicals, you focus on one compound. And that's, that's easy for these over 500 herbicide resistant plants. They just go down the list. Yeah. So, so who's clever and who's not? Yeah.

Right. I mean, so if there's this. plant intelligence. It makes you think about, well, what should we eat? Do we have water or air or rocks? If you really want to be ethical and not kill or injure anything with consciousness or sentience, what should we be eating?

You could be like a Jane that you don't eat anything, even a plant, till the fruit falls from the tree and so forth. But I think another way to think about that, and for me, it's to realize this real irony that for anything to live, something gets consumed, right? It's a transformation.

Your sentence in the beginning of your book was so great. It says, the universe is a restaurant consuming itself. I'm like, what a great line. And you can't get out of this predicament of having to consume, kill, eat life. That's right. And so then does vegan have an impact on that? Well, I don't know. I think there's a lot of questions that I have about that. Forget the health complications or implications. Forget the environmental stuff. Just, just from an ethical point of view, like, what does all that mean?

And I think, start to, start to think about that. That that's the way it is on this planet. That that is it, this horrible thing that life lives on life, huh? And, and then to think, well, how do you do that with respect? And how that all, everything is sacred, whether it's a plant or an animal. There was a guy came here a year ago, he was working on our pump here in the yard, and we were having this kind of conversation, and I knew where he was gonna go. He said, you, see that plant over there? I don't even wanna harm that plant. And it's, I laughed 'cause I said, I'm the same way. I mean, it's all sacred. I'm sure we do. I mean, that's part of being here. But you can put yourself in a respect for all of that and a sacredness, right? That it's all sacred. And then you start to think that you're part of all that too. And so whether it's an animal that you're eating or a plant or whatever, it's, and it's about the whole system and how do we make ethical systems that consider all that? And then the craziness of it that, but it's happening at all levels in the universe, right? At the center of every galaxy is a black hole. that's consuming the galaxy. So the whole thing is, yeah, it's off.

They can't get away from death. No, and if we look at it.

As transformation, you know, depending on your belief system, but if you- We're going.

To become food for the plants. We're going to be food for the animals. They're going to be food for us. It's like this virtuous cycle. That's right, absolutely. And then with respect and honor and integrity, very different. And that's why, you know, I think this whole movement towards regenerative agriculture also includes the idea of animal welfare. includes the idea of putting animals in an environment that is their natural habitat where they have the least touches, the least inputs. I visit a regender branch in Maui. It was fascinating. They just let the cows go. They didn't, they didn't do anything. You know, they, they all lived in their natural family groups. They, they grazed on what they needed. They didn't give them supplemental anything. They just like had this incredible environment. And they were, I mean, they were super, super happy and maybe they liked being killed. I don't think they must to kill. But still, it was an interesting thing to see how they thrived, how they didn't need all these agrochemical inputs, how they didn't need all these medicines from veterinarians to make them survive like antibiotics. They were able to actually thrive in this environment by being in their natural habitat. So, the regeneration.

Then, if a person realizes too, just to pick up on a point that you made, that when you do that with animals, and if you allow the animals to be in their family groups and the huge role that mother plays that we alluded to earlier in terms of her osprey learning what and what not to eat, where and where not to go, what's a predator, what's not a predator. I have a friend in Tas, in Tasmania, who has moved in her sheep operation toward extended families, letting them, and when she describes that and talks about the calm that's come over those and house. It just lets you realize that's the natural, and we've broken all that down too. We used to live in extended families, so forth.

That's funny because loneliness, depression, isolation, and.

The roles grandparents played. If you were fortunate to have grandparents, and just how calming and influencing, I mean, your parents are all hyper trying to make a living raise the brats that they've got. But the grandparents, you know, they just, and you start to think, well, that extended family and then in the native peoples around the world about the knowledge of the older people and the females and their knowledge of how to forage and all these things, it takes on a real, beauty, huh? It's an amazing thing. And we broke all that down. So it's no wonder in livestock, nobody even thinks about that. But people are starting to think about that and to think about what's it mean for an animal to, quote, know the range. And that if they're born and raised there with mother, they've learned all these things. Plus all this epigenetics, you know, that this expression of genes that changes form and function. We used to study that. How do organ systems change in terms of their form? How do they change in terms of their function as a result of that? And all that's making them locally adapted, which cuts costs again, right? They're able to live in the environment where without all the fossil fuel inputs.

That's so true. And so I want to sort of change tactics a little bit and talk about the ways in which animals have been found who are living in more natural habitats, foraging on dozens, hundreds of plants, have profoundly different characteristics than feedlot meat. We were chatting a little earlier, we were chatting earlier about the kangaroo study in Australia, where they basically fed people kangaroo meat or feedlot meat, and then they crossed over and fed the same people the opposite, and they watched what happened. And when they ate kangaroo meat, all the inflammatory markers went down in their body. when they ate the feedlot meat, same amount, ounce per ounce, all the inflammatory markers went up. So, it really kind of speaks to not is meat good or bad, but what meat? Is a wild elk different than a grass-fed, generically raised cow, different than a feedlot cow, for example? And, a lot of the work you've done is really sort of novel in that we never knew that these grass-fed animals forging on this wide variety of plants had these phytochemical compounds in them. So we're talking about plants having phytochemicals, but now, work by you and Stephen Bamlet at Duke, who I think is coming to Utah State, is kind of blowing up our ideas about where to get these phytochemicals. And there may be some of these phytochemicals that are in meat or dairy that are at as high levels as you find in the plant foods, which is sort of striking. And then what the implications of that for our health, because we always focus on, you know, is there more omega-3s in grass-fed beef? Maybe there's more minerals, more antioxidants and whether so that, but now we're finding these phytochemicals in the meat as a, as a reasonable source of plant nutrients, which is kind of wild. So can you talk about the work? Because there's a paper that you wrote called Health Promoting Phytonutrients Are Higher in Grass-Fed Meat and Milk. And, and I want to get sort of segue from that into the implication for our metabolism of these, these chemicals. So talk about the science behind the idea that, and we talked a little of this on our last podcast, but just to update people, where are we at with our science of these phytochemicals and the implications of these and how do they get there?

Yeah, it's such a good point that you raise. And I think anyone, and I, I know a lot of people don't, don't actually hunt or gather their own food, but it, when I was growing up, we did a lot of hunting of of our own food. And you come to realize that the flavors really change as a function of the season of the year that you shoot an animal, where the animal's foraging. And so you have, people have had the personal experience of that.

Well, tell us your grouse story. Because before you get into the grouse story, so what's fascinating about plants is different times of the day, at different seasons, they produce different compounds that have different effects on the animals. And then in the Tibetan tradition, if you're a doctor, you have to study Tibetan herbal medicine. And part of that is going into the Himalayas and foraging and harvesting different plants that are turned into medicine. But they know that at different seasons, different time of the year, they're going to be different benefits from a particular plant. And the same way the animals know that, the plants do that. And, and, and, and talk about the grouse story that you shared about your hunting grouse and what you learned from and what that informed in you about how to think about what's in these plants and how it affects the quality of the meat. That's right.

It's so critical to underscore, so I'm going to say it again, that the plants are so dynamic. They're responding minute to minute, day to day, to their environment. And so we're changing concentrations of these compounds. And the phytochemicals and the nutrients as well are varying. So morning versus afternoon, and animals are in tune with that. They're in tune with that. And then seasonally, all these things are changing. And so the grouse story then is, you know, in the fall of the year, in the, in the mountains around Logan, it's beautiful time of the year, actually. Picture the Maples all in these beautiful, different colors and the aspens. And you're up there. It's brisk fall morning, and, and you're, you're hunting these grouse. And in the early fall, they're foraging on berries and leaves and a variety of different foods. And the meat takes on a really wonderful flavor as a function of that. Later in the fall, it's like strawberry.

Or blueberry or flavored meat.

Yeah, if I was a food taster, I could really describe, but it's fabulous.

It's fabulous.

And yeah, and so we used to love to hunt the grouse, but as it goes into the late fall and and so forth. They move into these pine trees, and the grouse are very good at figuring out which pine trees are the best for them nutritionally. But they're eating these pine needles, and those needles are flavoring the meat. The pine, the needles are high in terpenes, and they give a beautiful hint of terpene to the meat.

It's like a pine flavored Yes, it is. It's a very flavored grass.

Yes, it is. And it's not overwhelming. It's amazing. But that gets you realizing that this is real. And then, you know, I knew the chemistry, all the different terpenes in these. Well, you know, if you were to.

Analyze that meat, you're going to find terpenes in there.

That's it. So it's not only what you eat, it's whatever you're eating. It's what you're eating. And then, as you're saying, is to realize that these phytochemicals become a really important part of that. And, yeah, it goes back to the flavor and all that we were talking about and how it flavors them.

And so, so the, the phytochemicals in meat are new Discovery, aren't they?

They are.

And, and, and you're finding that they have significant impact on human health.

Yes. Well, So we wrote the review that you're talking about, and I think that's where Stefan was able to really convince himself. We wrote an earlier paper, Stefan was not, I didn't know Stefan at that time, but is grass-fed meat and dairy better for human and environmental health? And we were making the point that grass-fed isn't grass-fed, isn't grass-fed. That was a key point that we were making, that it's gonna depend on.

The mixture of things in the diet. We were marshaling together the evidence for that. Because you could have a monocrop grass field, it's grass-fed beef, but it's not the same as having a wide variety of plants that they can eat.

That's right. And we have a colleague in New Zealand, Pablo Gregorini. He and his graduate students are going after that. There's some amazing, and Stefan's involved in this amazing kind of thing. If you put them on a monoculture, you're going to get one kind of phytochemical and biochemical characteristics of the meat. But if you put them on this really diverse diet, it's going to change that. And so where we are in the studies right now, there's three steps that we want to go through. First is simply to quantify are there differences between plant-based meat alternatives versus animals that are in feedlot versus animals that are on a monoculture pasture versus animals that are on really diverse pastures. And we're doing this work really in New Zealand, we're doing it here in the U.S. gonna have studies going. So that's one part. And we're using metabolomics as, as a way to do that. And people don't have to, it's just a sophisticated way that you can look at the huge array of different compounds that, and you can track it from the soil to the plant diversity, to the animals, through to us even.

So that's, it's like a biochemical snapshot of different products, meats, whatever, based on, you know, what they're eating and it's different.

That's right. That's right. And so that's the first phase. The next phase that we want to get into, you mentioned the kangaroo versus the, the cattle study. What's amazing is that's the only study that's been done like that. Yeah.

Yeah. Human study.

That's incredible. So that's where we want to go next, then, is to run a lot of trials with humans, these crossover, as you say, where we feed people meat and dairy.

Yeah.

That's coming from different, different sources. And then we want to go into a little bit longer term clinical trials to try to, you know, we know these compounds are getting in, in, in there. So we're going to look at oxidative stress and inflammation of those. Yeah, those kind of things is, that's right. Those wheat profiles. And Stefan's, as you mentioned, going to Utah State University, and they've got great facilities there. So he's going to be running and.

Gunning on all of this. This is all about the information in food and how different it is. Yeah, the quality of the food matters. You know, I remember a study was done in England about milk and these raw milk versus Smart Balance milk. Profoundly different effects on your cholesterol and lipids or the myoglobin. Really bad for you in the Raw milk actually was metabolically good for you.

I was telling you last night, our dog, when we get the milk from the goats, that's fresh milk from the goats, he loves it. He'll drink it right down. But you offer him organic milk, and I'm not meaning to be negative on organic, but he does not interested in that. And then there again, it's like we talk too about cattle and deer, when they have a choice in the field, between GM crops and non-GM crops. They strongly prefer the non-GMO crops to the GM crops. So then you think, well, is our dog Henry trying to sell us something about the milk? Are these wild domestic animals trying to tell us something about these crops? They're in sync with that. And then, you know, this Sirulena, who did a whole bunch of studies of these these things and talking about all the downsides of the GM and the glyphosate combinations. He did some fabulous work or two years studies. They were lab-based but he was showing all the adverse effects on organs and organ systems and cancer rates of cancer. And, you know, he published that paper and then it was retracted from the journal, which is that stunning to have that happen. And it was that labor is corporate terrorism, some of what. So, you know, there's a lot of pressure, right?

I mean, yeah, it's fascinating. And I think one of the things that really struck me looking at work was the, the way in which these, you know, phytochemicals end up in the meat and end up in human biology and have different properties for anti-inflammatory properties, antioxidant properties. But most of the data that we have on meat and all the studies get quoted about meat being bad for you are based on feedlot meat. They're not based on regeneratively raised organic meat or wild meat feeding on, you know, 100 different species of plants and having phytochemically rich diets and phytochemically rich meat and having different properties. It doesn't even, then it doesn't even go into the next level, which I want to talk about in a minute, which is how you prepare the meat. Is it mixed with spices and herbs and things? It's prepared by, you know, charcoal grilling at high temperatures or slow cooked or all these things have an impact. And so when you say, oh, meat is bad for you, here's the evidence, the data, it's complicated.

It's complicated. And what makes me sad nowadays is to see that they're really big agendas that drive some of these things, right? And so the nuance that we're trying to really emphasize here, that matters. That matters a lot. That nuance just gets deleted from it all, right? It's one size fit all. And the agenda is that are being-.

We all want simple answers, but it's not simple.

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. A lot of money to be made in all of this, right? I have a friend in England who's got a book coming out, the Great Plant-Based Con, Jane Buxton. And, you know, it's a great book. It's a great book. And she's just pointing out how much money, Follow the Money, is one of the chapters in the book.

It's a plant-based con.

The Great Plant-Based Con. Wow, tell us about that. Yeah, well, it's about, you know, it's about all this that we're talking about in terms of plant-based meats. And, but I read many of the chapters. I haven't read the whole book. She asked me to review different chapters, but the one on Follow the Money just struck me so much. And some of that people may be aware of, but there's so much that goes on to that. Follow the money that when you read it, it's like, oh, yeah, this makes perfect sense. And, and why is such and such and so and so?

I won't say names.

Yeah.

There are a lot of billionaires who invest right.

Why are they doing that? And what's the agenda that's being pushed? And yeah, the same with the region in terms of climate and climate change, you know, so much pushed that all that meets bad for climate, right? Bad for the environment. Well, it can be, but it doesn't have to be either. That's a whole other topic. But, you know, depending on the diets that the animals have, and tannins that you've mentioned, they can help to reduce methane emissions in, in room and so you don't have to do, like, cargo and put a mask on them that absorbs the methane. You could think about how to raise them in ways that, that does that in that Nature's.

Yeah.

Image, you know, well, you know, really.

All you're talking about is how do we get back to being, living, growing food, raising animals in an ecological way that mirrors natural principles that helps restore balance of health in the system. That's what functional medicine is. That's what I do with people. I try to figure out how to restore their natural ecological balance. I don't give them substances to alter that balance. I give them either things that are going to promote the health of that system or remove the things that are impeding it. And, and so from an agricultural perspective, from a food system perspective, from a medical perspective, it's so important to think about ecological principles as we start to sort of look at the future of our food system. Because without doing that, we are screwed. We are, I mean, we've covered this on this podcast many times, but we are screwed. And, I mean, to recap, you know, we've lost one third of our topsoil. We've depleted so much of our freshwater water resources. We were chatting about, for example, like need here is at 36% of capacity. Hasn't been that way since 12, 100 years, you know, of water. You know, now it's illegal to grow grass. And I don't mean pot, I mean grass in the Vatic, water depletion. We've lost 90 of our biodiversity. We have massive nitrogen runoff into the rivers and streams. It causes dead zones and kills in just in the Gulf of Mexico, 200, 000 metric tons of fish every year. We are producing food that's making people sick using this. approach to growing food. And we're, you know, driving probably a third to half of greenhouse gas emissions from our agricultural system through fossil fuel inputs, through loss of soil and organic matter, which is the carbon sort of holding sink in the soil. So the implications are huge for, for what, what we, we're doing in the way we're growing food in our food system. And, and yet, you know, the beauty of this conversation is that by applying ecological principles, we can turn that around.

That's right.

In a very short time that it can be, you know, nature, when allowed to do its thing, is way smarter than humans and much quicker at actually mitigating, reversing and healing the damage that humans have created.

That's right. And it gives a hope then, right? It gives a hope. And, and each one of us can involved. I like to point this out all the time. Not everyone can be a farmer. What? Less than two percent of the population's.

Farms used to be 50.

That's right. But we each can be. If we look out the window here and we look at in this yard, we've got some, we've got some grass that people would grow. But mostly what we've got around here are the native plants, the diverse mixtures of, of native plants. And then we're growing vegetable, herbal. medicinal garden. So we can each be farmers and we can cut back on the amount of water we need by simply growing the native plants and then coming to appreciate all the beautiful little wildflowers that will grow naturally in your yard and the grasses. And until you, when you do, if you ever do tune into that and start to look at them, you see the beauty and you start to you appreciate, you know, in each season, all these beautiful little right now, all these, the june grass, the needling thread grass, the poas, all these are blooming. And then you have the larkspur, the local week, and they're the cowboys Delight.

And it, it's amazing. Yeah.

You, I'm trying to say that, but you can get hooked on that and you can come to. It's amazing, you know, and then you think everything we're talking about, that diversity is creating. life below ground. It's creating life above ground. And so we can each, you don't have to, we don't have to feel hopeless. Right. We can, and we don't have to say, well, it's just up to the regenerative Farmers. We can say, we can each be that. And as we were talking, I stopped.

Mowing my lawn, and I'm like, this is incredible. These grasses are growing, wild flowers, beans.

Are coming back, birds are coming back. I'm like, whoa. The life off comes. The life off. And then, yeah. And I appreciate that. I am a part of this. I'm a part of the solution. You don't have to feel hopeless in that sense. And yeah, it's a spiritual thing, I think, really. We're linked to that in really important ways.

What is our place in the world and how do we be in the right relationship to our place in the world through our relationship to what we eat, which is the thing that every day we do.

That's right.

And every day we have an opportunity to impact not only our own health and well-being, but what's happening to climate change, to the environment. Yeah, and by choosing different foods. And, you know, regenerative agriculture is only 1% of agriculture, but if we create policies and shifts that we're working on through the Food Fix campaign to actually drive the change, hopefully we'll start to see the shift.

Well, absolutely the case. And then each day we can give thanks to the plants and animals who grace this plant. and who daily give their lives to sustain our lives, not through meals prepared with love in a way one could say, huh? Yeah. And it becomes then killing isn't killing, huh? Yeah. Whether it's a plant or an animal, it becomes more than that, huh?

Yeah, it's so much more. So I also want to dive into a little bit of a different tack, talking about a study that just come out that I found really fascinating and it is about plant-based meats and grass-fed meats. And the study was entitled Impossible to Go Beyond Beef: Nutriomics Comparison. And in this study, we did a metabolomic analysis of the plant-based meats and grass-fed meat. And what were the different compounds that were in each and what were the implications for our health? And it's not sort of black and white, but it's very interesting food for thought because the compounds, even though they look the same on a nutrition facts label, so let's say the Impossible Burger has been designed to, on the nutrition facts label, kind of marry what a steak would be or a hamburger would be, right? It would be the same amount of protein, fat and all that other stuff. nutrients maybe because they can add it all in because it's a science project, right? So they can kind of dial up and dial down whatever they want. And yet, even though it may look and taste like meat, even though it has the same nutrition facts label, it's profoundly different in its informational qualities. So the information in food, the instructions that they're giving to your biology, quite different and have big implications for our health. and they're not equivalent. So to say Impossible Meat or Beyond Beef or whatever burger or whatever, well, replace meat, it's a fallacy. They're different things. Even though they're mimics of each other, right? It's not the same thing. And so this paper that is looking at the metabolomic analysis looked at all these different compounds in each of these things and they were quite different. So can you talk about what you learned from that? study and then that was just a study of the compounds themselves. The next step of the study's research agenda that you're talking about, and I can't wait till this comes out, is what happens when you eat it? If you eat Impossible Burger or you eat a grass-fed beef, what happens to your biology? Not just what happens with a fed lot beef or grass-fed beef, but what happens to your biology with that? I can't wait to see that. But talk about the different compounds that are not on the nutrition facts label, that are in plant-based meat versus grass-fed beef and what the implications are for our health.

Yeah, that's what's really revelatory about the whole thing.

And.

Earlier we were talking about the number of compounds and how much they differ than what we could say simply that there's 90% difference, right? So they're quite different. The nutrition fact label would lead you to think, oh yeah, that they're really similar. but they're not. They're not at all.

And so 90% difference in the compounds.

Yes.

And when you think that these compounds are information, they're instructions that are telling your biology, your genes, your hormones, your metabolism, your brain chemistry, everything, what to do.

That's right. That's exactly right. That's the key point. And so they're huge differences. We found that. As you say, where we really want to go with this is to actually feel to people and then look at oxidative stress, inflammation, those kind of things and compare the two. And we made a point in the paper, too, you know, that was one point. These are quite different. They're not the same thing. So don't think that they are. We also made the point, though, that as we've been making, that plants have many kinds of compounds that are vital for our health. And so does meat. And so we're not trying to say, you know, you shouldn't eat plants or you shouldn't eat meat, but we're saying.

You know, they complement one another. Well, carnivores say plants are toxic and vegans say animals are toxic. Right.

But the truth is somewhere in the middle. So we tried to stay and deliberately very, we had long talks about this, that to try to stay in the middle on that. But then to one of the things that that's a concern to me, I'll have to say is, you know, we were talking quite a lot about ultra processed foods and you take and take all these different ingredients and you put them together and blah, blah, blah, and you take a soybean or a pea or whatever it is, and you grind it and process it to death. Um, it's not a whole, to me, it's another, it's another ultra processed food. I really, I really worry about that. and we know we're ultra processed. Do we need one more ultra processed foods? Or should we be, and that's what we want to get into in the clinical trials, going back to Kevin Hall's. Well, how much of that do you eat each day? If that's your, you know, if that's fundamental, just like Kevin did, basically tried to match them for nutrients, but then one spread in ultra processed form, the other's in wholesome form. And as you were saying, people ate 500 more calories per person per day. And they gained what? they, over the two weeks they were on the diet, it was a crossover again, two weeks you're on it, you're putting on weight. And so that's, that's really my concern. And then it's a more fundamental concern. I think we always think we're more clever than nature, right? That we, we could, we can, we can do, we can Silicon Valley this stuff, right? We can, we, we know and we don't know where the complexity is. incredible. I mean, each time we get into trouble, when we start to, to move into the more technological kind of approach to this, rather than, than thinking about natural processes and how does nature work and how can we farm and ranch and grow food in, in her image.

Yeah. And it was interesting. You looked at so many, like, dozens of different compounds in each of these, and, and what was so interesting was that there were, for for example, in the meat, there was creatine, hydroxyproline, anserine, glucosamine, and cysteine, which are only found in beef and have profound effects on our biology. They're immunomodulatory, they're anti-inflammatory, they have been associated if you don't eat them with harm to your body, maybe heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, kidney, liver, muscle, connective tissue dysfunction. If you're not getting these things, because they're essential for our bodies to use to make things we need. For example, cystamine produces the glutathione molecule in our body, which is so important for detoxification. Creatine and anserine are important for older adults so they don't get dementia. And then I could go on and on about this, but the plants also had compounds that the beef didn't have. It had phenols and tocopherols and phytosterols, which are also really helpful and they're antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, they may protect against cancer. and so, you know, what do we do? Like, the key is, is, again, coming back to diversity and, and a wide, complex diet and the idea that ecosystems do better. And our body is an ecosystem. I'm an ecosystem doctor. That's what functional medicine is. Our bodies do better with complexity. Simplicity is bad. Right. The more complexity in your biology, the better you are. If you monocrop cornfield and there's a corn beetle. Sorry, it's gone. If you have thousands of plants growing in that ecosystem, one plant dies, it probably won't have a big impact. And that's what we're really struggling with in our diet is this model diet. When you think about 60% of our diet comes from three plants, basically corn, wheat, and soy, and 90% comes from 12 plants. And the plants that we're eating are not the right plants to start with, right? They don't contain tons of phytochemicals from eating white flour that probably has zero phytochemicals versus, for example, Himalayan tartary buckwheat flour, which has 132 phytochemicals because that plant was grown in adverse conditions. And the phytochemicals and the richness that you talk about is depending on how the plant is grown. And plants make more phytochemicals when they're more stressed, right? They make way more. And so a wild plant has more than a organic plant that has more than a commercial rate.

That's right. That's absolutely the case. And that's where when you get into fertilizing and irrigating, you're accenting from, from many of those compounds, accenting growth at the expense of phytochemical richness. You should say everything you said just, just in that last.

Yeah, that's perfect, Mark.

I mean, it's a great summary of the whole. of the whole conundrum that we get ourselves into.

What's really interesting too about this study with the metabolites of the meat versus the fake meat were that in each of these foods, there were compounds that you wouldn't get in the other food, but also that help protect you against the effects of the other foods. For example, the phenolic compounds in the plants help protect against any oxidative inflammatory effects of the meat. And the animal foods help take up nutrients from the plants that you're eating. So it's sort of this complex symbiotic relationship.

The complementarity.

Yeah.

Now that we're talking about and getting back to wholesome foods and a variety of those foods in the diet, and then each individual to let their body influence what they want, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's so powerful.

It's so the whole feedback system. And I think, you know, we're in a crisis, a global crisis of food, not just the food insecurity, not just, you know, the obesity and chronic disease that comes from that, but the way the food system has disrupted these natural biological ecological principles at every level of our society. And they're, it's creating massive havoc. I wrote a lot about this in food fixed. But the food system itself is producing food that kills people, makes them sick, that destroys the soil, that damages the environment, that it kind of removes a lot of the beneficial compounds from our food. And unless we really take this seriously, we're not going to be able to kind of survive much longer, seems to me.

No, and all that feeds into this sixth mass extinction that we're participating in, huh? And agriculture played a really big role in that too, for the reasons that we said and where we started out, you know, diverse mixtures of plants create homes, grocery stores and pharmacies for lots of different creatures. So starting to think about as regen people are, how do you create diversity? And that diversity can be at different scales, but you know, how you do that to create really diverse environments.

Yeah, everybody's talking about regenerative agriculture these days. Even President Biden mentioned cover crops in his talk. And for those listening, what is regenerative agriculture? It's being defined with a set of principles, which are crop rotation, so you don't grow the same thing on land, which can cause depletion of nutrients. Cover crops, so never leaving the soil bare so that it can erode. Leaving roots in the soil, which is actually what really feeds the microbiome. And the microbiome of the soil is 50%, as you said, bacteria. They need to eat, and that's what they eat. You need to integrate animals. So you really can't have regenerative agriculture without animals providing their part of the ecosystem services.

Animal manure is plant food, right? And food for the microbiomes and all that.

And their saliva makes the plants grow more when they eat and chew them down. their hooves aerate the soil, their urine has nitrogen which fertilizes the soil, they don't need as much water, the animals, they don't, it doesn't require pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, all those inputs go down. And so you end up with this beautiful sort of regenerative system. And also the other principle is that it's context specific. So once you grow in Arizona, it's different when you grow in North Dakota, then you grow in Iowa, then you grow in Saskatchewan. And that's really important. These are foundational principles that if we follow, which are ecological principles, it's really mimicking nature, we can start to reclaim the denuded degraded land and reclaim our health. That's been a consequence of these unintended policies that really led to the destruction we see today. That's right.

And if we move from farm ground, which very critically important to the more, the rangeland kind of, you know, the more extensive landscape. I think a key point, and the whole reason I early on got involved in this, is that if they're managed properly, domestic animals can be ecological doctors, seriously, of regenerating landscapes. They, they can. That book that you mentioned, the Art and Science of Shepherding, and what the Shepherds do, the Shepherds learning from from the flock, the flock learning from the shepherds and moving them around landscapes so that you build up diversity on landscapes. It's powerful and it, you know, when it just, well, all animals lose degraded.

Landscapes and they can't overgrazing has led to massive desertification, but it's the wrong kind of grazing. Do you want to know my secret for living a long and happy and healthy life? Well, all I have to do is check out my weekly newsletter, Mark's Picks, where I share my favorite tips for health, longevity, well-being, and lots more. Check it out and the link below.

It's like the meat isn't meat, isn't meat.

And grass grazing.

Grass grazing.

Yeah.

And grazing isn't grazing, isn't grazing. And certainly there are cases still today where overgrazing is occurring, many of them. But you know, that's where we are. Farmers and ranchers, we all need to get our act together on that too, right? That's...

So, Fred, you're 70. You've been studying this stuff for probably 50 years, starting with goats and shrubs and doing the hard science. You've traveled all around the world and the country, working with ranchers and farmers, talking about these principles. with your Behave program from Utah State, which really was profound because it linked up scientists and real-life situations with farmers and ranchers to help inform them about what was going on. Looking from your perspective, what do you see happening in the future with all this? Are we going to be able to figure this out? Are you hopeful? Are you just like, let's just float down the river and I'm going to have fun while I can?

You know, with all, all that's happening nowadays. And it depends on the day for me, ecologically, economically, socially, it's really, it's tough time. It's scary times, right? And so I would say for me, I'm not necessarily optimistic, but I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful for all the reasons that we're talking about. Right. And it's true. Trying to, to make all of us aware and then all of us doing things. All of us not just saying, well, what can I do? You know, everyone can be a farmer, right? We can all be farmers. We can all think about where we spend our dollars because that influences food systems. Right. And this work, a key point, I think, Mark, of the work on the metabolomics and the, the trials with people and so forth, if we show as we've argued, as we see in this paper, and then in the literature reviews, there's good evidence. But if we can show that there really are benefits to Human Health from the way that we're raising animals, that that becomes so important for the consumer then, because, because it links the consumer back with all these things that we're talking about, right? With my health and the food that I'm eating. is linked to linked with from soil to plant diversity, to the health of the animals. And there's studies that are starting to be done where they're showing that if they're on a monoculture, not just in feedlot where we know there's so many downsides, but if they're on a monoculture versus more diverse mixtures, people are looking at immune responses and physiological and nutritional.

They're saying they're healthier. They're better, you know, it's better for the whole system. Oh, totally, including us. totally true. Well, thank you, Fred. You know, I, I'm, I'm left with a little bit of Hope because nature is so freaking smart and it's so quick to regenerate and heal itself. And, and if you haven't watched this movie, I encourage everybody listening to watch this movie by David Attenborough. I think it's on Netflix about planet Earth. It's his latest thing. He did it 95 years old, and it looks at the arc of his life and the degradation, the environment and. the loss of species and the destruction of the Earth and how massive that's been over the last 70 or 80 years he's been doing this work. And then at the end, he shows himself in Chernobyl, which was completely decimated and radioactive. But life is coming back because all the humans left. We saw that with COVID We saw with COVID people staying at home, basically the Earth started to regenerate very quickly. Reefs were coming back and plant diversity is coming back and mangrove fields are improving. So it was really fascinating to see how even with COVID in a short period of time, when we take the pressure off, that it can reclaim itself. So I would be very disheartened if we didn't understand these principles that you're talking about, that we didn't understand these ecological principles, that we weren't as far ahead as we are in understanding the.

Science behind how to do this? Yeah.

Because we didn't even know this, like, a couple of decades ago. We were just, you know, let's do organic, whatever. We didn't really understand the concepts that now are basically in the, in the field. And, and if we can start to apply these in scale, nature will reclaim itself. And I feel very hopeful. And I, I've seen the same with people. You take someone who's had, you know, 50 years of eating like crap, who's diabetic, heart failure, kidneys failing, liver failing, high blood pressure. and the list goes on. And in three days they can get off their insulin, in three months they can get off their medications, in a year they can lose 116 pounds and reverse every single one of these diseases. It's taking them 50 years to accumulate. So it's amazing how if we just listen to the natural intelligence of our biology and the biology of nature, that we can reclaim our health and reclaim the health of the Earth.

Because you don't need a doctor's prescription for health, which what you need to.

Do is to make that part of.

Your life in a natural way.

Well, if we can get food reimbursed by healthcare, it's a game changer. I'm actually working on that at Cleveland Clinic with the food pharmacy, which is the idea of actually paying for food for people instead of drugs to get.

Them healthy reverse disease. And then.