What Types And How Much Protein Do You Need?

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

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And now let's get back to this week's episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy Podcast. Protein has become the emotionally charged macronutrient that no one wants to talk about. But protein deserves our careful attention because it's an essential nutrient for a healthy body. Protein provides us with the building blocks of life, helping us make muscle, connective tissue, hair, blood, enzymes, neurotransmitters, and more. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy on science-based data on how meat production affects the climate, how much protein we need in a day, the difference between plant and animal proteins, and more. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon about protein science for longevity and preventing disease, with Dr. Stéphane Van Vliet about the difference in nutritional quality between feedlot meat and wild or pasture-raised, and with Dr. Don Layman about how to go about getting the right protein and enough.

Of it if you're vegan.

Let's dive in.

We're getting all these mixed messages.

One, we should be eating less meat, eating more plant proteins, or two, we should be eating more protein as we age. So we're in this incredible, conflicted, confusing environment around protein. So what should we be eating? How much should we be eating? And what type should we be eating?

Okay, this is a no-tall order that we need to discuss.

This is what people wanna know.

Let's take one step back. The information overload comes from kind of the mouse with the microphone. So you have small groups of individuals that are making a lot of noise.

You mean the computer mouse.

You have extreme groups. So you have anti-animal groups, you have PETA, you have vegan groups, vegetarian groups that are Just in one aspect, making a lot of claims, putting a lot of money, I think PETA spent $15 million on advertising. Then you have big cereal companies, Kellogg's, I think that was around a billion dollars in advertising. So you have these groups that are regulated by the FTC. And then on the other side, you have the egg council and the cattlemen and the farmers who are under the guise of the USDA. Yeah. So you have these two kind of regulating bodies and two opposing groups, one which has much more money than, say, the dairy council or the egg council. That in and of itself skews the conversation. And that is something really important to be aware of.

We're getting a lot of propaganda, but not a lot of science is what you're saying.

We are, you know, we have big pharma. We have these groups that are allowed to say certain things that maybe this will lower cholesterol, eat oats, it will lower cholesterol. It will have these certain health benefits. And then you've got egg, dairy, beef, who are not allowed to make any similar claims. We do have a lot of propaganda and bad science that is very agenda driven.

Yeah.

And that creates an environment of confusion.

Yeah, like the Atlanta commission, which was like, we should eat like three ounces of meat a week, maybe, or.

So we know, so let's talk about the RDA. So the current RDA, which is- It's.

The recommended dietary allowance.

Correct. And that was based on studies that we know were flawed, right? Those were based on nitrogen-based studies of 18-year-olds that we wanted to, or they wanted to provide an amount which would stop disease per, you know, it's baseline for disease.

It's the minimum amount you need so you don't get sick.

It's not how much you need to be healthy. Correct. So we came up, or they came up with a number, not me, way before my time, unless my Botox is that good, not having any lately. The RDA is 0.8 grams per kilogram, and that spans from anyone ages 18 and beyond, 18, 50, 60, 80. Okay? That is the minimum amount. There is 30 years of data to support that the minimum amount is not adequate. We know that as you age, you need double the RDA. For body composition, you're looking at double the RDA.

You mean for building more muscle?

For anything in obesity, we know that the higher your diet is in protein, while calories are controlled, the more lean muscle mass you can maintain. And we spoke, when we started talking about this, we talked about why muscle was so important. And this obesity epidemic isn't quite an obesity epidemic. It is really An epidemic of poor muscle mass, low muscle mass, obesogenic sarcopenia, loss and destruction of tissue. We are largely domesticated. So what's happened is we have- Hey.

What do you mean we're largely domesticated?

We ride in cars. We're not doing physical movement. We are eating in a way that is not supporting our current existence. And actually red meat consumption has gone down by 29% since 1975.

But chicken's gone up.

Chicken has gone up. Dairy has gone down.

Yeah.

The concept that we are eating too much protein, the average American eats between 60 and 90 grams. Women are around maybe a little bit above 60 grams and men are around 90 grams. So that's the average American. Heart disease? Alzheimer's, obesity, hypertension, all of these comorbidities and diseases are on the rise. Protein is not the problem. Protein's never been the problem. Protein is the defining nutrient for a high quality diet.

So you've been studying protein science in a way that I don't think many people have. You say there's 30 years of research that kind of contradicts a lot of the perspectives that people have. It does. And shows the importance of protein for longevity, for health, for preventing disease. And yet at the same time, we're hearing that if we eat meat, it's gonna kill us. That there's this huge sort of media push around eat less meat, eat less meat for health, eat less meat to save the planet. It's a problem. So how do you reconcile those two things? And you mentioned, you know, that there are extreme groups that are pushing this, but it's not just extreme groups. There was a major report in EAT Lancet, in Lancet, about the need to actually reduce our global meat consumption, that there isn't enough land and agriculture to support this for growing population of the world. And in my mind, I also believe that we do need the right kinds of protein in the right ways, but it's hard for me to reconcile these two things. So how do you explain that?

I'm really glad you brought that up. Now, the 30 years of research clearly isn't my own. I'm not that old. I have been, though, trained by some of the best people. And one of them in particular, my mentor, Dr. Donald Layman, who is a professor emeritus at University of Illinois, has published multiple studies and is certainly one of the world leading experts. And we have these discussions over coffee all the time. And you do bring up a very good point, especially when it comes to greenhouse gas and sustainability. Let's look at the US. The US, and this is from the EPA. Some of the data is from the EPA. The US contributes 15% to greenhouse gas. 15%.

From?

Out of the entire world, right? That we contribute 15%.

Total from everything.

From everything. That includes transportation, agriculture, land waste, all of that. Our contribution in the United States is 15%. Out of that 15%, Nine percent is agriculture. I'm going somewhere with this. So out of the entire world, we are 15%. Out of that 15%, 9% is agriculture. Out of that 9%, 5% around 5%, 4.6% is fruits and vegetables, what it's taking to grow and decompose and that 4.5%. Cattle and dairy, 3.6% out of all.

Of... And that's feedlot stuff. That's not regenerative ag.

It is, it's everything. The greenhouse gas, so for greenhouse gas, all of cattle, all of dairy contributes 3.6%. So, if you were to say go meatless Monday, and let's say we were gonna cut that in half, you still have to have some protein, you can't become protein deficient. So let's say we reduce, kill all, you know, we eliminate all the cows and we're now at 3.6%. We cut that in half. What is that, 1.3%?

That's in America though.

That's in America.

Globally there's a lot of meat being grown.

So, I mean, Yes, and we should discuss that, but I can tell you in America that if you also look at that 9% of agriculture, you have a component that comes from waste and a component that comes from overfeeding. So we are in an obese, obesogenic environment. 10% is of this contributing factor to greenhouse gas is waste and overeating. So overeating is one point- Food waste.

We waste 40% of our food, right?

So we're wasting and we contribute, so out of that number, that 9%, we're contributing one third of that, just that 9%, one third is food waste, another 10% is overeating. So while the discussion is somehow targeted on cattle, which make cattle and dairy, which make up 3.6%, That is not the big target for our 15%. We have electricity, transportation, transportation, I think 29%, electricity, another 30%. So all of everything outside of that 9% is largely controllable by us. When you look at the number, and this is not for the world, but this is for the US, If we wiped out all of the United States and all of the cattle and everything, our contribution to sustainability, climate change is 15%. That is very small.

Yeah. Well, it's significant, but it's, yeah.

In the whole scheme of everything, it is...

But globally, it said that, you know, our agricultural system as a whole is responsible for a third to half of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Our global system, the world, you mean.

The world, yeah. And that includes everything.

And 50% of that is natural. So we have wetlands and termites and rainforests and things that 50% of all greenhouse gas is naturally produced. Climate change is certainly happening.

However.

There is a natural aspect to some of these things. We live on a green planet. If we didn't, we'd be in Mars. Greenhouse gas is, you know, it's kind of like that all or nothing thinking that this concept of turnover and natural ecological processes are all bad. That's not necessarily true. I mean, we are certainly contributing 49% of the meat.

So what you're saying is pretty radical.

You're saying that our meat production and animal production is not a big contributor.

No.

Even though a lot of data seems to contradict that.

But what data? If you look at the EPA and if you really look at the contributing factors, Donald Layman wrote a great paper on sustainability less than a year ago about this topic. You really tease out all the numbers, just like the whole protein controversy. It doesn't hold up. A lot of the discussion about how protein causes cancer, how protein is bad for you, it's all epidemiological based data.

Yeah, so let's talk about that. So the first issue is, is it a big factor in climate change? What about feedlot versus regenerative ag? Because it's not just the feedlots, it's all the corn, the soy we grow, the rainforest we cut down, the soil erosion. All that's true.

All that is a big huge issue.

So it's not just the cows themselves, it's what we do to grow the cows. All of that is absolutely true. And regenerative ag arguably will draw down carbon, which means grazing grazing cattle, but you can't grow as many cattle on grazing and rangelands as you can in feedlots.

So, the volume of meat that we.

Need to produce to have 90 grams or 12 ounces per person per day globally is a lot of meat. And even if it was the healthy thing on the planet, how is that sustainable?

I think it's a great question and I certainly don't have the answer. I think we should control what we can control and see if we can't regulate those things otherwise, really decrease our transportation, eat locally, stop shipping our foods, which all of these things are having a great impact on greenhouse gas and climate change and impacting the globe. Why not do that first rather than sacrifice our health? We know excess calories are bad. We know excess carbohydrates are bad. We know this drives insulin. We know insulin drives cancer. So you have these really big glaring things that can be fixed. Why go right for meat? Why don't we clean up our end? Let's eat local. We don't need to be getting avocados from Mexico.

That's true.

I don't need to have kiwis from New Zealand. I'm going to eat local. I'm not going to maybe fly as much or I'll use public transportation. And also the other thing with cows is we use their leather and all kinds of other things. So we're not just talking about meat. In addition, if we want to talk about cattle, cattles are upcyclers. They're upcyclers of food. So for every one gram of poor quality protein, for every, I'm sorry, it's for every 0.6 grams of poor quality protein, which we know with a deficient in amino acids, plants, those kinds of things, they make one gram of high quality protein. So why not, again, I mean, I feel very passionately about this because we are completely misled. So we should take care of the fundamental things that we can handle while maintaining our health. And probably ultimately the health is going to be a blend of plant and animal. But rather than just attack this one small area, let's do the things that we know. Stop overeating, stop wasting your food, and stop traveling and stop eating stuff from a different country when you live in Manhattan.

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So that brings up the other issue and you sort of mentioned it in what you just said, which is quality of protein. Not all proteins created equally yet, you know, the argument that is being made is that we should eat more plant-based proteins. We should eat more rice and beans. And what's wrong with that as a.

Way of getting your protein? That's a great question. Well, if you're 20, you could probably manage that. But with rice and beans comes carbohydrates and excess calories. Let's just take quinoa. And actually, remember I was up at Lenox a couple of years ago and I did a talk about the protein perspective for the crew and I, and I had a chart that broke down what plants you would have to eat to match a chicken breast.

Okay, let's get into it.

Okay.

For one chicken breast, one small chicken breast, maybe four ounces, you would need about six cups of quinoa to equal that about amino acid profile. Plant protein and animal protein are not created equal. It would be wonderful if people wanted to eat plants and could sustain a healthy metabolism. If you are, so you've got one chicken breast, it's 150 grams, and now you've eaten Quinoa, six cups or so, which is a lot, maybe four to six cups. Now you've eaten 600 calories to try to get that amino acid profile at one time. It's not that clearly is not sustainable. Rice and beans, that is not a sustainable way for a population that is aging. And when I say aging, I mean anyone over the age of 20. Yeah, well, it's interesting.

There's a movie coming out called Game Changers. You might have heard about it by James Cameron. Where he documents the power of vegan diets for athletic performance and shows world class Olympic athletes being vegans and actually having massive muscle amounts.

And do you know there, that's a great point. You know why that is, why that can happen? Muscle is stimulated two ways. Number one, resistance exercise or exercise.

Yeah.

And number two, dietary protein. If you grossly reduce one of those things, which in that crew was dietary protein, their exercise balances that out.

So you can be a vegan as long as you hit the gym five days a week for an hour.

At least, like a crazy person. Yeah. And then we also have to think about there is a percentage of the population that can do well being vegan. But the NHANES data, which is a huge data set, that's the best that we have, it's the survey data, shows that actually vegans and vegetarians are one half of 1%.

Of the population.

Of the population. This is a very small group of people that can maintain and do well. Plant protein and animal protein are totally different. They have different levels of amino acids. Animal protein has the building blocks required for muscle tissue. not to mention bioavailable zinc B12.

So you say also that leucine, you talk about leucine as one of the key amino acids that is needed to produce muscle. It's sort of the rate limiting amino acid, meaning if you don't have enough.

Of that, you can't make- you- stimulate that pathway, the protein kinase pathway, which is mTOR. And there's been a lot of talk, a lot of discussion around mTOR about how this is a cancer, this is a key component in cancer, and that's why you shouldn't eat protein because you're going to stimulate mTOR.

Right.

Well, mTOR is also stimulated by exercise. It's also stimulated in all other tissues, pancreas, heart, all these other tissues, largely by insulin. Carbohydrates are the problem, not protein. mTOR signaling, which is a, it allows our body to nutrient sense, has been maintained since the beginning of time. Growth is not a bad thing. Growing bigger, growing stronger, growing bone, growing muscle, growth is not a problem. And when you think about cancer, cancer is a disease of the genome.

Yeah.

Right? And it is an inability to then begin to repair and regulate. There is not something that is actually protein is not causing the cancer. Now, if you have cancer, Certainly you push that mTOR pathway, that can be a bad thing. And that's perhaps where a ketogenic diet comes in. But the concept that upregulating a pathway, which has been beneficial throughout creation, is completely erroneous. Let's talk about risk ratios, relative risk. Can I just throw that out there? Yeah, well this is part of the.

Story around meat because it seemed like.

Every week there's a new study that.

Comes out, says meat's going to kill you if you eat more meat, it's going to be a problem. There was one just last week. you know, how do we interpret those as scientists, lay people, eaters?

So hard. So hard. I will tell you that really finding good scientists that you trust are key. There was a big paper that came out that linked IGF to animal protein.

And.

You know, aging all of this stuff.

And there is- IGF is a growth factor that comes from often eating carbs and sugar, also stimulated by protein, that actually has been linked to cancer and other things.

Right.

So this article in Cell came out and it really talked about how people should have 30 to 40 grams of protein a day, which is a protein deficiency essentially. It's now below the RDA. The leading scientists in the world wrote a letter to the editor that went through all the flaws of the paper and how it was hand selected data, how it was very unethical, and they had statisticians, and it was signed by the top world leading experts who have dedicated their life to studying this, who are not agenda driven, they are not funded by meat, they're not funded by these boards, but they really truly care.

National Cattlemen's Association.

It never got published. It never got published because one of the One of the researchers was an editor of the journal. And I've posted that on my website. It's available, this letter to the authors. It's like censorship, scientific censorship. It's exactly like scientific censorship. So it becomes very difficult to get the- Counter the argument. Counter the argument. And listen, everybody wants to talk about protein or they want to talk about cancer and IGF-1.

So why are those studies not true then?

If all these studies come out that show the- But they're not all the studies. If then if you go and you look back back at the research, it doesn't hold up. So now you have the mouse with the microphone.

So why doesn't it hold up?

So let's talk about relative risk. Let's talk about relative risk. Relative risk is what is your risk of doing this thing and getting this disease? And it is a standard of- so.

If you eat eggs, what's your risk of getting heart disease?

So this is the standard of looking at good data. When you look at the relative risk of smoking, and cancer, that's 12.

Or 20.

Right.

In order for something to be considered a risk, it needs to be above two. And this is something that has been in the scientific literature for, since it's been around.

So in other words, if a study comes out and the ratio or the risk ratio is less than two, which in other words you could say is 200% increase, right? then it's kind of meaningless.

It's meaningless.

Right.

So then if you go, so now we know that cancer and smoking is a 12. And by the way, when we talk about cancer, you know, there's lung cancer, number one, and that the mortality hasn't changed. We haven't been able to really do much in that area in the last 60 years. And then you have the other cancers. You've got prostate, breast, colon, which are all have links to obesity.

Right?

And that is very clear if you look at the Cancer, you know, National Cancer Association, any of these journals. Anyway, so if you go back, so when we say cancer blanketly, I mean, we really have to be, what are we talking about? So we go back to the risk ratio. The risk ratio over and over and over again of protein and cancer, guess what it is?

0.1.

1.1 to maybe 1.3. This is the data. There has never been anything that has ever come out to show that the risk ratio is higher than that.

So in other words, instead of 12, it's 0.12 or 0.3.

It's 0.1. It's 0.1 has to be two to be significant.

Yeah.

That is where people have to understand there can be- so when they say.

Your risk goes up by 30%, what that means is it goes from, you know, from one to 1.3, not 12.

No, it's still, it's not relevant.

Right, so it becomes a talking point. The media says meat kills, but it's actually not even relevant.

It's irrelevant. So you have these small studies that are hand-picked, NHANES data, epidemiologic, which we know is poor at best.

So it never proves anything, by the way, just for people who aren't familiar with science, there's two kinds of main studies. One is an experiment where you take 10,000 people and you feed them steak every day for 20 years, and the other group, you feed them rice and beans for 20 years and you see what happens. That study is never going to happen.

Never going to happen.

It's billions and billions of dollars. It's too difficult to implement. People eat whatever they want. So they look at big populations. They follow these people for 20 years. Every maybe five or six, 10 years, they give them a food questionnaire and say, what'd you eat last week?

Right.

And then they try to correlate it with different outcomes. and they try to control for variables, but it's very difficult to do that. And then that means that when you look at these questionnaires, first of all, these have been invalidated by a lot of science that they're not really accurate, that people over-report good stuff, they under-report bad stuff, depending on what the meme of the day is. If meat is bad, then people aren't going to say they eat as much. Or maybe if they're healthy, they may not eat as much. So, if they're healthy users, it's this effect where if you're conscious about your health and you exercise and you eat great and you don't smoke and you hear that meat's bad for you, you're going to avoid meat because you don't want to get sick, even if that's not true. So it looks like they eat less meat and they get less heart disease or cancer, but it's actually not because of that.

It's a... It doesn't and like you said, it doesn't account for other things like total caloric intake. It doesn't account for obesity, smoking, drug intake, drinking.

They try to control these factors, but.

One of the biggest studies on meat that I reviewed in my book Eat Fat, Get Thin and Food, what the Heck Should I Eat? was the NIH ARP study, which is National Institute of Health and what is it, the ARP, the elderly thing, which I try to avoid when I get.

There, throw it in the garbage when.

I get there, thanks for me, 'cause I'm over 50. They said it was half a million people and they found that there was a significant increased risk of all these.

Diseases, cancer, heart disease and everything.

With people who ate more meat. But when you actually looked at these people in the studies, the ones who ate more meat ate 800 more calories a day or more overweight, smoked more, drank more, didn't exercise, ate less fruits and vegetables, more sugar, processed food, didn't take their vitamins. Of course they had more disease. It wasn't because of the meat.

It was because of all this other stuff. I remember one study I saw, and I mentioned this a few times on the podcast, that was in Australia where they fed people either kangaroo meat or feedlot meat. Cause in, in Australia, you can buy like wild kangaroo meat in the grocery store. I guess they have a lot of kangaroos. And, and they found profoundly different, profiles of inflammation in the group that, ate the feedlot meat. They had more inflammation than the ones who had the kangaroo meat, even though we're eating gram per gram, the same amount of protein. So I don't, I don't think it's insignificant. And I think, you know, in Sardinia, obviously, in the Korea and many of the blue zones, there are many, many variables, but that, you know, they're eating you know, lots of dairy products that come from these animals or having meat that comes from these animals. And I think that the quality of those nutrients are quite different. You know, like the, there's a very famous Spanish pig, the black-footed pig, which is raised in oak forests and all they eat is acorns. And the fatty acid profiles, their effect on our lipids are quite different. even the way you process meat and milk are very important. So I think we're going to learn more and more about this. I think you're one of the leading researchers and thinkers about this. I encourage everybody to check out your work and we're going to post to all the scientific papers we've talked about so far in the podcast. But I want to dig into another one. I want to talk about not just the human health benefits, but the broader context of agroecological practices or regenerative farming or whatever you want to call it, and how those really are important too. So you're getting kind of We're gonna get into that in a minute, but I wanna talk about this study that you did looking at the bison. It's kind of surprising because you looked at over 1,500 metabolites through very sophisticated analysis and found quite significant differences. This isn't looking at an Impossible Burger versus a cow burger that's pasture raised. This is basically meat for meat. It's grass-fed versus feedlot. And so what did you find and tell us about that study?

Yeah, so that study on bison was very interesting. So that was work that we did with the Turner Ranches and what was particularly nice about that work is that it was a very controlled study and doing it on a commercial farm. So that was the nice part about it. So the bison, they were raised on McGinley Ranch in Nebraska in the Foothills. So it's a very biodiverse landscape and then the Bison are born there and they do all the cow-calfing there. And then the animals were raised up until about 24 months. So they were always on pasture for 24 months. And then for 140 days or so, the animals were just run through a chute. If they walked left, they walked back into the pasture. If they walked right, they walked into a feedlot, essentially. So, So it was randomized. And then the animals were finished for 140 days. We got the meat, the strip steaks, and we analyzed those for metabolomics analysis to look at, okay, does this alter the nutritional profile? And what is really nice about the metabolomics analysis, Marcus, remember that I said earlier that not all nutrients are metabolites, but all metabolites tell us something about metabolism, right? So, studying this, a bison is a mammal just like you and I are. And you can find a lot of parallels between the metabolic health of a bison and a human, this pathway. So let's talk a little bit later on the metabolic health of the animal, because that I can say something pretty definitively about. But if we looked at the nutritional profile, we found that the phytochemicals were about three times higher in the animals that stayed on pasture for 140 days. One important thing to note though is that the Turner ranches, they yes, finish the animals in a feedlot. At least half of their operation is that. But their feedlot is not your typical feedlot because the animals there, they have more space, they're in loose confinement, so they have about four times more space than typical. and normally animals are fed a total mixed ration. It means that everyone gets the same thing. It's like a military ration or a ration in prison, right? You can't choose. But what the animals got, they could choose from hay, alfalfa hay, meadow hay, which was the hay from the pasture, or corn. And they could choose that in sort of a buffet style. So they could regulate how much they eat.

A buffalo buffet.

A Buffalo Buffet, yes, I mean it's and surprising Mark is that they went for the corn quite a bit, like about half of their intake came from corn, but corn to an animal is kind of like candy, right? Yeah, of course. If we go to the buffet, we also, if we have a bunch of ultra processed foods and peas, then we might select, even though the peas are better for us, we might select the french fries to a large extent. But we did find differences, so three times more fiber count on the grass-fed animal, animals. Also, a few B vitamins such as vitamin B5 and B6 that we know are in grains were actually higher in the fedlot finished animals. Vitamin B3 was a little bit higher in the grass-fed animals because we know fresh forages provide those precursors. But what was particularly interesting, if we look at an omega 6 to 3 ratio, so omega 3s are Right, fatty acids that we know have various health benefits. This ratio of omega 6 to 3 tells us something typically about the nutritional quality of the animal source foods or the healthfulness. I think it's a solid, relatively solid biomarker of that.

Yeah.

So closer to- and what was the difference? Was it like a significant difference or was there some slight difference?

It was a significant difference, but it was slight. So the feedlot bison had an omega six to three ratio of about four. The pasture finished bison had an omega six to three ratio of about one and a half. So it contained more omega threes. And typically those are amongst the best ratios that you see.

Yeah, so from four to one to one and a half to one, that's pretty significant.

Yeah, so from four indeed. But here's the sort of the bigger picture of that. We've also tested a lot of grass-fed beef, about 60 to 100 farms. The average in the grass-fed beef industry is three. So the bison were only one point worse than that. And I would still consider an omega 6 to 3 ratio of 4 to 1, which was in the feedlot bison to be very good, because we know that probably our historical intakes in humans was about 4 to 1, 5 to 1. And so, and feedlot beef typically has a Omega 63 ratio of like 12 to 1.

12 to 1. Wow. So basically, basically feedlot cow eating corn and grains is 12 to 1 Omega 63. That's significant.

Yeah.

So, so the Bison, the feedlot Bison, while they were different from the pasture raised Bison, if you look at it in the bigger picture, they still had a very favorable Omega 63 ratio. And the difference were also not as large as we sometimes find with feedlot beef and pasture raised beef. But we are finishing up the study or following up a study with multiple arms because even in the bison industry, total mixed ration feeding is more common. So the turners, the way they finish in their feedlot, it's a little bit different from what the rest of the industry does. So I could imagine my hypothesis will be for the next study that if we feed the bison total mixed ration, that the difference is going to be bigger.

You mean, so that the way the Turner Ranch does it is better?

Yeah.

Indeed. I would argue that what they do is it results in a better nutritional profile than what would typically happen in a feedlot.

And can you talk about the phytochemicals? Because I think that's really important. And are these meaningful levels of phytochemicals that are in the grass fed as opposed to the feedlot?

Bison.

Yeah, I, I do think they are meaningful, Mark, for it, for this reason. This is that I, I do want to say, of course, a carrot is going to be a way better source of beta carotene than grass-fed bison is. But we do find certain compounds like catechins, ferulic acid, which are major polyphenols, hyporic acid. in relatively high quality. So we, for instance, did some comparisons also looking at, well, let's say if we have catechins that are in green tea, for instance, which we think are part of the health benefits of green tea. If you study that in milk from very biodiverse animals, then about a cup of milk, and a cup of green tea, I must say this, the green tea that's at the lower end of the spectrum, they can start approaching each other. So, wait, wait, you just said that.

Basically if animals are eating the right plants, they can have as high levels of these protective phytochemicals we find in green tea called catechins as green tea itself. That's a big statement. That's a big statement.

In the worst green tea. In the worst green tea. Well, it's a big statement. That's why I try to bring it carefully. but because we know that probably the overall phytochemical ratio of green tea, I think is going to be a lot higher. But certain individual compounds can be found in meaningful amounts. That's my point here. But as I said, that's amazing.

Yeah.

So, but eating, you know, curcumin from onions is probably better, it's a better source of curcumin than maybe the grass-fed beef. But the point is that it is a way of further increasing the overall.

Phytochemical riches of our diet. You said something really interesting before, sorry to interrupt, but you said that there are certain compounds that we can't get from plants because our bodies can't process them that we do get from animals. And we're still learning what those do and how beneficial they are. But it's very likely that there are compounds that are in meat, for example, that are eating a wide variety of plants from animals that are eating a wide variety of plants that actually have higher levels of compounds that we, or levels of compounds we can't actually get from plants.

Yeah, I think that's the best way to describe it. Best way to summarize it, Marcus, is that some of these compounds that we know certain terpenes that we may not per se get in our diet that are found maybe like sage brush and things that we do not consume. Then, yeah, we see those appearing. So I think that that's the key part is that, okay, we can get certain unique compounds and the compounds that we are getting in terms of certain phytochemicals, eating it as part of pasture raised meat is a further way of increasing it, right? One analogy I like to use, Marcus, is that zinc from animal sourced foods, yes, they're more bioavailable, they're higher, in zinc animal source foods, but plants can still make a meaningful contribution to our overall intake of things like zinc and iron, right? And if we think of it as the reverse with phytochemicals, of course plant sources are gonna be our primary source of phytochemicals, but animal source foods can add additional phytochemicals that we get to the plants, plus likely add a few unique ones. And I think that's the key message.

That'S quite amazing. And, and, and what you were doing was comparing kind of bison to bison, not like grass-fed bison and pastured bison to feedlot cows, which may even have a much bigger difference, right?

Yeah, indeed. I mean, we, we've done comparisons also similar analysis on the bison and as we do on the cattle. So while you know, they weren't in Nebraska per se raised, right? The cattle, but yeah we can do some, if we do similar analysis you can do some qualitative comparisons and some rough comparisons and yeah what we do see is that you have pasture-raised bison here which is probably similar as the best pasture-raised beef. Then you had the Turner Ranches feedlot bison that kind of falls in the middle and then you had the feedlot finished beef that was probably the least nutrient density in these phytochemicals. But I also want to say this, Marc, is that we're painting with broad strokes here, right? Feedlot beef isn't feedlot beef isn't feedlot beef. Even amongst the feedlot beef industry, we find a three-fold difference. I mean, if you feed potato peels or almond hulls, we know those are rich in phytochemicals, these byproducts. So they can increase the amount of phytochemical richness even in the feedlot. And we're doing some work yeah, we're doing some work right now with chicken, for instance, where they feed a small amount of like, great pumpkins or alfalfa, and that does make a difference.

So, yeah, that's true. Although, I remember reading about this big truck that kind of had an accident on a major highway. It was filled with expired Skittles and they were on their way to feed the Skittles to cows. Okay, well, those are colorful, but they're not exactly phytochemicals. that's pretty funny. So I did notice something, this is a little geeky and I just want to bring it up because I sort of noticed it. There's a fatty acid called C15 and it's kind of emerging as a really important fatty acid. It comes from animal fat, it's a saturated fat from dairy and animals and it seems to be higher in grass-fed beef and C15 has all sorts of health benefits. If people are wanting to learn more about it, they can go to discover C15, the number 15, discoverc15.com and learn more and read about the science of this. But it's quite interesting. And I thought, wow, it seemed to be meaningfully more in the grass-fed bison, pasture-fed bison than the others. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

So C15 is a dietary R-chain fatty acid that was mainly studied in the context of milk, but it also appears in ruminant meat, same friends with CLA, which has been studied in, in dairy and, and is, is another fatty acid with potential help promoting compounds. So, yeah, we found higher amounts of those. I think it was about two-fold higher by head. So we found higher amounts of C15 related, we think, to the forages. In the next study, we'll also be testing all the forages for the fatty acid profiles. And one other thing that we found, Marcus, very interesting, is that we think of saturated fat as sort of this category that is all encompassing, right? And we think saturated fat is bad for us and it will be a long nuanced discussion which maybe we won't get into. But it's a little bit more gray than that, I'd say. But then usually a question I have is that, well, what type of saturated fat, fatty acid, individual fatty acids are we talking about? Because we know certain compounds are associated with or more neutral for our risk of heart disease and some of them might even be protective, which are the long saturated fatty acids. So this is behenic acid, erucic acid, no no decanoic acid. So basically C20 and up. But C15 also seems to have some potential health benefits. But we know that people with higher amounts of these in their diet or circulating in their blood, that's associated with a decreased risk of heart disease. And I think this is also what was yeah. A key finding of our paper, and I think it's not as recognized as much, is that you improve the saturated fatty acid profile, too, even though the total amount of saturated fat between the two products is the same.

It's interesting. Yeah. You mentioned in your paper that the sort of the cardiac risk may be different because, you know, we think of all meat as being bad for your heart, which is not actually true. But, but in the grass-fed meat, you had higher levels of we call fatty acid. glycerol or fatty acid, which are actually metabolites that are reduced in grass-fed meat compared to feedlot meat. So, that actually is a little technical, but it's a beneficial fatty acid profile of the meat that actually is more protective than a feedlot meat for your heart.

Yeah, on paper it certainly is more protective. And, one thing we could say was certainly protective to the bison because while we do not know exactly what the effect was on the metabolic health of the human yet until we finish our nutritional studies, but what I can say, I feel comfortable in saying is that yeah, the pasture-raised bison look metabolically healthier. To use an analogy, Mark, is that the pasture-raised bison, they kind of look like a human cyclist or an endurance runner. and the feedlot bison, they look more like a maybe a sedentary person that doesn't walk as much and maybe their diet is also not as good. And this is in comparison to each other. It's not to say that the feedlot bison is unhealthy for you, but if we compare the two on a relative scale to each other, then yes, the pasture-raised bison, they have a better athletic phenotype. they rely on mitochondrial metabolism instead of glycolysis. They also had lower amounts of advanced glycation end products, so 4-HNE is a compound that has been very well studied, and it is associated with a whole host of ailments, right? It's one of the reasons why red meat is considered a potential carcinogen.

Hmm.

Hmm.

And we know these AGEs and ALEs, these advanced glycation and lipoxidation end products, they're related to glycation sugars, and they're related to lipid peroxidation, so oxidation of lipids. So if we look at, for instance, the glycation, if an animal has a worsened glucose metabolic health, just like we see in humans that potentially have pre-diabetes, for instance, These glycation end products, they are related to the glycations of the sugar. So if the animal has more sugars in its body and does a poorer job of metabolizing them, we start to produce more of these glycated end products. So we can already see that this is animal health, the animal's healthier, but we also know that we are then exposed to lower quantities of these things in meat that we think are bad for us.

That'S incredible. I, I want to break that down because it was a lot. I, I understood it because this is what I've been studying my whole life. I don't know if anybody else got it, but basically what you're saying is that these feedlot bison that are eating grain are pre-diabetic and they have more inflammation in their system. They have poor metabolism. They have more oxidative stress. They have, like, toxins like this for any, which, which is this. this derivative of basically the oxidative stress byproduct. They also have higher levels of what you called advanced glycation end products or AGEs or ages, which drive inflammation. It's what you see more in diabetics, why you get cataracts and heart disease and all kinds of stuff. So basically the animals eating the kind of diet that most of the meat in this country is fed basically grain fed feedlot meat are very poor in poor metabolic health. The question that comes up on my mind is what happens when we eat a diabetic buffalo or a diabetic cow? You know, does that affect us? And I think what you're saying is it does.

It could. I'm not 100% sure. I mean, the two things, the animal doesn't get it's rare to see diabetes in Bison and cows. I also don't know what the sliding scale is here, Marcus, because we know.

Yeah, I'm kind of being very generic, but, right.

Yeah, it's generic.

It's good.

But because we don't know, we don't have hard kind of, okay, here is when an animal has prediabetes or something like that, right? We don't know that. What would be interesting is to, and I kind of want to do this in a study, and I am not sure what the, you know, we know across mammalian species. And this is something I've been pondering for a while and I think we just have to do it. What if we take blood or muscle from people that we know have diabetes or pre are pre-diabetic and what if we take it from runners, endurance strength athletes? What is the difference? Are they threefold more metabolically healthy? Are they fourfold more metabolically healthy? And then do the same thing from fed out animals and pasture raised animals because then we can get a feel for what it means on a scale because it could just be that if you have on the other end of the spectrum you have diabetes and the other end of the spectrum you have like great metabolic health, that the feedlot animals are still pretty good, right? And that's then I don't know yet at the moment.

Yeah, but it's just an intuitive level. It seems intuitively it seems to make sense that if you're eating an animal that's not that healthy, it's gonna affect your health. Can we get adequate protein being vegan, and especially as we age. And two, how do we deal with this basically seemingly contradictory idea that we should inhibit mTOR to extend our life, but we need muscle to be more as we age to be healthy? So help us with that.

So, wow, unlocking a lot of different things there. Okay, so the vegan story. Yeah, you can be perfectly healthy as a vegan, but it's tough. Basically, what we know is that to be equal, you have to eat more total protein and more total calories. So your gorillas are stuffing themselves. Basically, the solution to that is they better be physically active. And so being a vegan at 25 or 35 works a whole lot better than being a vegan at 65 or 75. Now you have both physical activity and metabolic rates going down and it's hard to eat enough to get to it. You know, my comment earlier that 65, you know, 40% of women over 65 don't get enough protein just to be equal. And being a vegan doesn't make that better. So, you know, I think there's an age issue in it. My problem with vegans is when they sort of take a moral superiority approach to it. I just have no tolerance for that. You know, if you want to do it for a personal reason, if you want to do it for some metabolic reason, cardiovascular disease, you've got really high LDLs or something, I'm okay with that, high fiber, okay, I'm okay with that. Is it metabolically better? I don't think so. I think that a balance of animal foods, in the United, one of the things you have to look at it is not only can it be done, the issue is can people do it? And in the United States, most people have nowhere near the food knowledge or the food skills to pull that off. in the United States, we get 70% of our calories from plant-based foods now, only 30% from animal-based foods. Of that 70%, 51% comes from added sugars, oils, and hydrogenated fats, and another 33% comes from refined grains. So of the 70%, 80% have no nutritional value. They're just crappy calories. And if you look at the 30% of the calories coming from animal foods, basically we're getting 65% of our protein, 100% of calcium, vitamin D, B12, and over 60% of iron, zinc, selenium, B6, niacin. So the question is, if we take calories out of that animal fraction, what are we going to eat? are we going to eat broccoli and brussels sprouts and green beans? Are we going to eat bread and, you know, candy bars and donuts and french fries? I mean, that's what Americans eat.

Yeah.

Right now, of our plant-based protein in the US and worldwide, 80% of the protein comes from wheat, which is absolutely lousy protein source.

So wheat as a flour. particularly not even as whole wheat, right? Whole grain, whole wheat or whole grain. I mean, most people don't eat wheat berries. They eat either whole wheat flour or white flour, which isn't that different.

Sure. Like I just said, you know, 50, you know, 33% of it comes from refined grains, you know, et cetera. So, so a lot of it is from, but anyway, the point is, People aren't eating beans and lentils. They're eating, they're eating french fries and bread.

But let's say, Don, let's say they work. Because, you know, let's just take, like, you want to, let's say 30 grams of protein. Right. In chicken, let's say it's four ounces, which has about 270 calories. If you want, let's say beans, let's say black beans, that's two cups of black beans to get 30 grams of protein. We can talk about protein quality. That's 450 calories. So, if you want to have 30 grams of protein, that's fine. If you want to have 120 grams, that's four times that. That's like, you know, 800 calories from protein versus like thousands of calories. And if you took brown rice, you have to have 24 cups of brown rice a day, which has 1200 calories times six. I don't know how good a math, but that's like 20,000 calories a day to get enough protein from brown rice.

Right.

So 100% agree. My first point was that if you're going to be vegetarian or vegan, you're going to have to have more total protein because the quality is down and more total calories to your point right now. I mean, the average beans, black beans, for example, are between three or four to one carbohydrate to protein. So if I want a diet with 100 grams of protein, by definition, I'm going to have to have 350 grams of carbohydrate. which we already said most people can't metabolize, you know, it's just too many calories. So, you know, it's much harder. It can be done. It's much easier.

How could you do it really? Because if you're eating, you know, let's.

Say- the bottom line is that almost all vegetarians reduce their protein intake. The average, all of the studies say that the average protein intake for vegetarians is in the mid 60s. Okay, the average adult intake in the United States is women are around 70 and men are around 90. So they're reducing their protein intake, they're reducing their protein quality. When you're young, you can kind of get away with it. When you're older and you're stressed with sarcopenia, not so much. Okay, when we talk about protein quality.

Because you know, people say, oh, you have beans and grains, you combine them, it's great. You know, you can get full protein and that's fine. But, you know, just doing the math, if brown rice, six cups of brown rice has, you know, six cups has 30 grams of protein, you multiply that four, that's 120 grams, that's 31,000 calories, not to mention how many carbohydrate grams are in there. And then when you add protein, you know, the 450 grams of protein, I mean, sorry, 30 grams of protein and two cups of beans, that's 450 calories times four to get 120 grams, that's 1800 calories. so, you know, you're gonna be eating so many extra calories with also carbohydrate. Unless my, my conclusion, unless you actually have pulverized concentrated protein powders that are made from plants and add extra leucine and branching amino acids on top of it, it's gonna be very hard to do this. And I, and I've met these guys who are bodybuilders, who are vegans, and they eat jacked up plant proteins. powders, not food.

I think, yeah, again, the, the, the national surveys, the NHANES data and others all say that average vegetarians are in the low 60s protein per day. So if you're going to try and get to 120 grams, to your point, you're going to have to have isolated purified proteins. You can't do it with eating food because you're just going to get too many calories.

So, so people who are vegan, vegetarian. And by the way, I was a vegan vegetarian for like 10 years or more, actually, when I was younger. So I, I get this and I understand why. And there's the, and, and there's three real issues, Health, environmental and moral and moral, I can argue with. Health is more complicated. And, you know, I think environmental is very nuanced in terms of regenerative agriculture, and we can talk about that. But I think, I think I sort of want to get into the protein quality. Because I read Diet for a Small Planet, and if you combine protein from beans and grains, you get complete protein and you don't have to worry. And yet the thing that you talk about, which is really unique and that I learned from Gabrielle Lyon, my friend who was your student, was that leucine is a rate-limiting amino acid in protein synthesis. And in English, that means if you don't have enough of this particularly amino acid, you can't turn on the switch. like flipping a switch to turn on your engine to build muscle unless you have that amount. And typically plant proteins are very low in this particular amino acid, leucine and other branched chain amino acids. So can you help us understand.

That.

Concept and what do we do about it?

Yeah.

So there are nine essential amino acids. and interestingly, they're not all equally essential. The ones that show up most in diets, you mentioned leucine, the other two are lysine and methionine. All grains are very low in rice, Etc. All grains are very low in lysine and all legumes, beans are very low in methionine, and they're both pretty low in leucine. And so you'll see advertisements that say, well, this plant protein contains all the essential amino acids. Well, every protein contains all the essential amino acids, but they're not in the right proportions. The thing I always like to say is that plants have proteins for the sake of the plants. They're building roots and leaves and flowers and seeds, which are pretty different than brains and hearts and livers and muscles.

Yeah.

You know, your comment about animals, we have evolved to use animals to correct that balance for us, particularly ruminant animals. They have the ability to take plants and basically convert those back into amino acid balances that are correct for humans.

And they eat all day. They eat all day and they eat enormous amounts of food.

So those are the essential amino acids that are missing. What we know and what my lab discovered is that when you're young, as I mentioned earlier, the protein synthesis, particularly in muscle, is driven by hormones. But after you stop growing into your 30s, now it's driven by diet quality and by exercise. and diet quality, the body for reasons that I love to think about has learned to recognize leucine. I started studying these branched chain amino acids back in graduate school. I was fascinated by them. There were some early studies, some great researchers that showed that leucine could stimulate protein synthesis in certain kinds of muscle, diaphragm and things like that back in those days. and Al Harper at Wisconsin and some others had also shown that leucine is not metabolized in the liver, where all other amino acids are metabolized in the gut and the liver. Leucine, the branched-chain amino acids, leucine, valine, isoleucine aren't. And so they end up going from the diet, the gut, into the bloodstream, basically in the exact percentage that you ate them. so muscle now can see the diet. Muscle is getting a dose of how to, what, what did that meal look like by the amount of leucine that shows up? And for reasons we don't really know, it learned to sense that as a trigger for protein synthesis through a mechanism we now know as mTOR. What my lab discovered was that this leucine signal triggered the initiation process of protein synthesis. and the last 20 years, hundreds of labs have looked at that process. But we know that as an adult, not so much as a child, but as an adult, the amount of leucine at a meal is an absolute key to maintaining your muscle health, maintaining your muscle protein synthesis. And so that's a key part of diet. And to your point, all plants are relatively low in leucine. and so quinoa, for example, to use whey protein at a meal, you can eat 20, 23 grams of whey protein, about 120 calories, and stimulate muscle protein synthesis, where quinoa, it takes something like 50 grams of protein and 100, you know, 2000 calories to make the same effect. you know, you just can't- so almost.

20 times the amount of calories to get the same amount of leucine.

And so, you know, again, quinoa has leucine in it, but it's at such a low amount and the nutrient density is so low, the relationship to calories is so low that you can't eat enough of it.

Yeah, this is such a radical idea that you're talking about, Dr. Layman, because you would get so much pushback from the vegan community that this is true. And yet this is just basic science. This is not controversial. This is not in any way challenging the decades of research that you've done and others have done to prove that this basic biology of building muscle requires this particular amino acid leucine at a particular amount per meal, which is about two and a half grams.

And, and, and people will say, well, you know, if you do the right complementary proteins, if I take my wheat and I combine it with corn and I combine it with pea and I do this and I process, I can make a balance and absolutely you can do it. All of the, the vegans who understand this process now to the point we made earlier are almost all using supplements. They're using protein powders. Yeah, you just can't do it with just pure natural foods. You have to do some sort of processed powder to get to it. Otherwise, you're going to end up in the low 60s that, you know, you just can't eat enough food to get to that protein level.

And the amino acid supplements that people will get or at a leucine, they can be gotten from plant proteins, right? You don't have to get them from animal protein. So if you want to be strictly vegan, can you synthesize them in the lab from plant components? and then add them to a protein powder or, or where is it coming.

From is what I'm asking? Okay, so, so I was talking about protein powders where you're isolating a protein from P, you know, a whole protein and, you know, it's 70% pure or something. Amino acids, the primary source of amino acids is yeast. Okay. So they're, so it's, they're grown in yeast environments and then they're isolated from that.

Okay, so it's, it's a, it's a, it's not a plant, but it's, it's some kind of, okay, I got it. All right. So, so, so ethically it's okay. And if you're committed to being vegan, you just have to understand that you can't get around the science of needing this amount of leucine per meal to activate muscle synthesis and especially important as you're older. So you have to either take these additional supplements or take the extra protein powders with extra leucine. And I know there's, for example, vegan protein powders. that are jacked up, I call them jacked up where they add branched amino acids and they add leucine to supplement. And those can be very effective. So I'm not saying you have to eat meat. I'm just saying you have to get real about the science of muscle. Otherwise you're gonna end up having poor.

Metabolic health, aging faster, lower hormones, more inflammation, and all the things we see with aging. Yeah, I mean, if you go back in history, in the 1980s, we got a recommendation for plant-based diets. It was called the Food Guide Pyramid. you mentioned it earlier. And people responded to that and they decreased dairy consumption, egg consumption, and beef consumption by 35% in each category, and they increased grain consumption by 40%, and we got epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and no change in heart disease at all. So, the issue is, can you create a healthy plant-based diet? Well, you can, But you can also create a very unhealthy plant-based diet. And that's what most Americans have done.

Yeah.

That's my problem. You know, if people say, you know, do we need a more plant-based diet? I say we need a diet with better plants.

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