Why All Meat Is Not Created Equal

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

You can't talk about how healthy red meat is completely out of the context in which it's eaten. Right. You know, if someone's eating red meat in the context of Big Macs and fast food and hot dogs and things like that, do we really think that that's going to have the same impact as someone eating a paleo diet where two thirds or three quarters of their plate is vegetables and plants?

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Episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. hi, I'm Kaya Perowwitz, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy. The question of whether or not eating meat is good for our health has become incredibly controversial. But as with all other foods, focusing on quality more than quantity is the key to creating good health. Yet this is a focus missing from many big dietary studies. Dr. Hyman recently discussed this topic as well as how grass-fed beef is different from conventionally raised beef with functional medicine practitioner Chris Kresser.

We'Re so obsessed with food quantity and the quantity of macronutrients and the quantity of specific foods like red meat or saturated fat or cholesterol. It comes from our reductionist paradigm and you're a functional medicine guy. I'm a functional medicine guy. We understand the importance of looking at things from a systems approach. So what if we instead focused on food quality instead of food quantity? You can't talk about how healthy red meat is completely out of the context in which it's beaten.

Right.

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

Right.

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

It, it shows up as the same. And then, if you're probably, I said years ago, they looked at vegetarians and meat eaters who shopped at health food stores.

Yeah.

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

And, you know, I- But no difference between the two.

There's no difference. No, there was no difference.

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

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

Meaning, which actually, you know, there was a study that came out recently was showing if you don't have purpose, you die, right?

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

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

I like that.

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

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

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

Right.

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

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

And by the way, what is the short link?

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

Kresser.co/rogan.

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

And he's a cardiologist.

Vegan cardiologist. And I was representing the Nutrivore perspective. Not the Eat a Big Mac perspective, but like eat healthy food that could include meat. And inflammation, it is again, a matter of context. I'm not aware of any study that convincingly shows that eating red meat in the context of a whole foods diet with plenty of plant foods as well significantly contributes to inflammation. that research just hasn't been done.

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

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

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

Right.

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

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

It looks like they're protective. eating fish.

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

Yeah.

So again, if somebody is eating plant foods and other things that are helping their microbiome, they're gonna be less likely to produce large amounts of T-A-M-O versus someone who is eating a highly processed and refined diet, which we know is antithetical to the health of the microbiome. Not to me, it's what you eat with it, right?

So let's talk about like feedlot versus grass-fed beef. Cause, I mean, if you had to choose between like a diet that was, let's say, you know, a pure vegan diet. or a diet that also included feedlot beef, if you couldn't afford the grass-fed beef.

What's the deal? I wouldn't do a pure vegan diet. I think there are a lot of ways that you can get, so the real question is nutrient density. If a vegetarian or vegan comes to me and they're anemic and they have a lot of the other deficiencies that can sometimes happen on those diets, and they say that they're willing to eat some animal foods, but they want to restrict it as much as possible, then we'll talk about maybe just strategically adding some organ meats and shellfish into the diet. But, you know, going back to your original question, I think there are also ways that you can work in pasture raised animal foods into your diet that don't have to be that costly. So this is like the nose to tail eating that has become, you know, in big cities there are lots of nose to tail restaurants now, you know, eating the more affordable cuts like the shanks or the oxtail. or the chuck roast, like those are actually very rich in collagen, which I'm sure most people have heard by now is really important other side of the protein equation or equation. It's good for our joints, it's good for our soft tissues. And you can go to the butcher and you can often get these cuts, even if they're pasture raised pretty affordably.

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

Yeah.

Phytonutrients or phytochemicals are the compounds from plants that form their defense and communication systems. They serve an important purpose for plants, but what's really cool is that they boost our biology as well. They do this in a range of ways, from boosting detoxification to decreasing inflammation. Dr. Hyman recently dove into this topic with his guest, Fred Provenza. In their conversation, they discuss why what our meat eats can make such a difference when it comes to our health. they also discuss how and what we eat with our meat influence its effects on us.

So, one, there's the phytochemicals and protective compounds in animal products that eat a certain almost natural diet of wild plants. And two, there's the cultural habits of certain cultures that actually introduce various compounds in the cooking of meat so that it diminishes any adverse effects. For example, in Morocco, they have much lower rates of cancer and it's all the spices they use. The Masai, who eat only meat and milk, use 28 spices in their meat cooking and 12 spices in their milk. How does that impact the effects on human health? And should we be having a big array of spices that we consume? And personally, I have a giant spice drawer that's literally this big and I literally, it's huge, probably like three, four feet across by two feet deep, and it's completely full, and I use it all the time. So how does that impact what happens to human health and the meat and some of the adverse effects?

Absolutely the case, what you're talking about. And that's, that's such a fascinating area to, to think about. So we think about process. We often think about meat in general as being not good for our health, not good for the health of climate, as we've been saying. and then we think of processed meat as even worse, right? You have all these carcinogenic kind of compounds that are in there to nitrates, nitrites and so forth. And then here's this study comes out of Morocco, this case controlled study where they're taking people recently diagnosed with colorectal or colon rectal cancer, and then they're comparing them with people that are not and looking at diet and lifestyle kinds of things. And what They reviewed many, many factors and considered many factors in their analysis related to lifestyle and then of course to diet. But one of the really important finding was that there was a strong inverse association between processed meat and colorectal and colon cancer in that.

Wow.

Which kind of blows your mind.

Meaning the more processed meat you ate, the lower your risk of cancer.

Right, right. How does that make sense?

But then they said, okay, but look, they don't process meat the way that we process meat in Western countries, but they're starting to do that and they're seeing an increase then in these cancer. And they're saying historically, what? They use olive oil, they use this diverse array of herbs and spices, and that that's probably very, very important. They have the association there that's strong and highly significant. and then they're trying to think from a mechanistic standpoint, why could that be the case? And they're talking about these rich array of herbs and spices and all their anti-carcinogenic, immunomodulatory and on and on kind of responses and saying that's probably playing a really important role in this. And then that winds us back. In that review paper we did, we were trying to, it's a hypothesis paper, right? We're really waving our arms and trying to pull together circumstantial evidence to say this is worth studying. and one of the ways we did that was to say, look, when herbs and spices are added to meat, it counters these effects. And there's a literature on that. Why do I like drinking red wine with meat? And polyphenols in that red wine are counting alleged adverse effects in the meat. And I like that combination. And I think he's saying, you know, this is a good combination of cells and organ systems is how I would view it are feeding back to say, this is a good combination of things. to do.

And so, and the science on that, just to stop you for a sec, is really interesting because there's something called malondialdehyde, which is a marker of oxidative stress or, you know, basically oxidation, which is what hurts people and causes aging. And you can reduce by having meat with red wine. You can reduce that malondialdehyde or MDA by 75%. And also, I think the other thing people don't realize is that when we're, when we're looking at the typical American diet, people are eating meat with lots of junk, with lots of starch and sugar. They're not eating meat as part of a diet that's full of an array of vegetables and fruit and phytochemicals and herbs and spices, which totally changes its impact on our health. So a lot of the studies we have are epidemiological studies, and they're not so reliable because they don't really distinguish these factors. And they look at, you know, meat as an independent factor and not considering what you ate the meat with. And my favorite study is when When I looked at meat eaters and vegetarians who shopped at health food stores, meaning they both probably had a better quality diet, their risk of death for both groups reduced in half. And it was the same because of what they were eating with the meat or not.

Absolutely the case and beautifully said, Mark, by the way, that's it. And that's where earlier when I was saying, you know, when we launch into some of these clinical trials, assuming we can get some funding to do that, I think the basal diet becomes very, very important in terms of looking at the response. If you're on a highly processed Western diet, that's setting you up. That's a certain kind of basal diet, right? That generalizes across so much that's happening not only in our country but now worldwide, versus a really wholesome diet. You can expect two totally different kinds of responses. That's just fundamental to the whole works as far as I'm concerned.

While there is no question that factory farming should be illegal, there are good scientific, environmental, and health-minded reasons to eat high-quality, grass-fed, sustainably raised meat as part of an overall healthy diet. Not only is meat the single best source of protein, it also provides us with many important minerals and vitamins. And though plant foods contain many of these nutrients as well, they are more bioavailable in meat. This being said, Dr. Hyman still recommends that the majority of your plate be made up of plants. He uses the term conda meat or a small amount of meat that is added to meals that are mostly vegetables. If you'd like to learn more about anything you heard today, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Chris Kresser and Fred Provenza. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it and leaving us a review below.

Thanks for tuning in.

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

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