Why Eating Fake Meat Won't Solve Our Climate Problem

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

So whether you eat animals or not, you need animals to solve our global food problem, to solve our global climate problem, and to solve our global health problems. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Mark. I'm sitting here just having a given talk in Big Sur about my new book, Food Fix, which I'm so excited about how to save our health, our economy, our communities, and our planet one bite at a time. And it's really, I think, the culmination of my life's work, the most important book I've ever written, about how the food system connects to everything that matters. It connects to, obviously, the chronic disease that is caused by the processed food we eat. The ultra-processed food we eat kills 11 million people a year. That's a lot of people. Six out of 10 Americans have a chronic disease. It's bankrupting our nation. One third of Medicare dollars is spent on diabetes. Medicare is one third of our entire federal budget rising fast and we're going to be out of money in the Medicare Trust Fund by 2026. A lot of economic issues, social justice issues, poverty, violence, mental illness, ADD, behavioral issues, all are connected to what people eat and the quality of the food or the lack of quality. And then there's all the environmental climate issues, right? We've got the loss of biodiversity of species, we've lost half of our animal species, 90% of our edible plant species, 75% of pollinators, all a big deal if you want to grow food for humans. And of course, climate change. Most people don't realize that our food system is the number one cause of climate change end to end, including deforestation, factory farming of animals, soil erosion, refrigeration, transport of food, food waste, packaging, processing, all that. requires huge amounts of energy and releases lots of greenhouse gases. Fertilizer is one of the worst, actually. It's about 10% of all global greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizer, which uses fracking natural gas, which you probably didn't know, which I didn't know. And so basically we have all these issues and food is the cause and food is the cure. So I'm extremely hopeful 'cause there's so much leverage and possibility. And I wanna talk to you about one of the most important solutions to fixing our food system, fixing our health, fixing our climate, and revitalizing communities, and even protecting the environment. So let's just talk about this for a minute. So first of all, I think most people think that in order to save the planet, we have to all become vegan, that factory farming animals is the worst thing on the planet. And it is true. It is true. Factory farming animals should be banned. It's not good for humans, not good for the planet, not good for the climate, not good for the animals. So no argument there. But that doesn't mean we should all become vegan because as it turns out, in order to fix the food system, to produce nutrient-dense, incredible food that's grown in a way that's good for the land and good for the farmers requires an incredibly new powerful solution called regenerative agriculture. And it's a way of growing food that produces better food, that's more nutrient dense, it's higher quality, that makes more money for the farmers, that draws down carbon from the environment, actually restores soils that actually are the biggest carbon sink we've ever seen on the planet, bigger than rainforests, right? So, they go, it's a rainforest of prairies. And when you put the organic matter back in the soil, it can hold about 27,000 gallons per acre for every 1% organic matter, which will solve the problem of droughts and floods, because traditional soils, which have become dirt, which is very different than soil, actually cause the water just to run through or to not be held in the soil. And then of course, if you're growing a regenerative farm, you're increasing biodiversity, you're increasing the natural animal species, the pollinator species, the incredible complexity of nutrients, nutrient extracting microbes in the soil and nutrients that draw down carbon in the soil. So you've got so much life on a regenerative farm as opposed to this barren monocrop corn and soy fields. So we have a solution and it's amazing the food that gets produced is better and it's a win-win-win for everybody. But we don't have a system that does that. Now, the question that is on people's minds is, should I just eat Impossible Burgers? and these plant-based meats and should I give up meat? Because if cows and cow farts and cow burps and all the methane they produce and all the factory farming animals is one of the biggest cause of climate change, apparently accounting for up to 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions, then why don't we all just become vegan? It makes sense, right? Well, actually, it's not true because if you don't use animals, In the lifecycle of a regenerative farm, you can't build soil. See, the way you build soil is the way we build soil in this country and globally was through the use of animals. So what am I talking about? Well, we used to have up to 60 to 80 feet of topsoil in some areas in the Midwest. How was that created? By the 60 million buffalo running around, digging in the dirt, disturbing the soil a little bit. eating the grass all the way down, not over grazing, peeing and pooping, fertilizing the land, putting their saliva on the plants which makes them grow more. It's a beautiful ecosystem cycle that actually generated all this soil that requires animals. So whether you eat animals or not, you need animals to solve our global food problem, to solve our global climate problem, and to solve our global health problems. So we can't do it without the animals integrated into a robust ecosystem. And that's really the whole point of this, is you need a robust ecosystem. And it's amazing, you know, we think about soil, the way we grow food now is extractive. We till the soil, we have soil erosion, we basically have lost a third of our topsoil over the last 150 years, and we're projected to lose all of it within 60 years according to the UN. So that's a scary thing, no soil, no food, no humans. We gotta fix it. And then the regenerative strategies, which is things like cover crops, crop rotations, not tilling the soil, using animals in what we call adaptive multipaddock grazing or holistic management. These techniques actually help to rebuild soil. There's a guy in North Dakota, who was a farmer, Gabe Brown, and he basically almost went out of business because he had hail storms and droughts and floods and all the rest, and 5,000 acres in monocrop cultures of soy and corn. And he decided to regenerate agriculture. And then over a number of years, he was able to build 29 inches of topsoil, which is crazy, 'cause traditionally you build topsoil by nature only maybe three, I think, I don't know, three centimeters, three inches in a thousand years. So it's really not very much you can do by nature, but it takes time. This is actually an accelerated regeneration process. And he produces better quality food. and he's got more climate resilience. His farm is resilient to droughts and floods and other insults from nature because it's so diversified and because the soil's so rich and because the organic matter holds the water and he produces more food, better food, and he makes 20 times the profit of his neighbors. So regenerative agriculture can be done at scale and people say, well, the cow still release the methane and it's still bad for the environment. Well, there's been a lot of studies done on this. In fact, When you look at end to end in the cycle, there's this marine carbon project that's been done looking at regenerative agriculture. They actually produce 170% net benefit. In other words, they reduce carbon emissions by 170% and sequester carbon in the soil. Because when you use photosynthesis, it's basically nature's technology that's been around for millions of years. It's the biggest carbon capture technology. It basically takes carbon dioxide out of the air, puts it in the plants down in the soil. And whereas, you know, if you use conventional methods, you literally contribute to massive carbon emissions through the conventional ways of growing food. So if you take land that's marginal, that's unusable, or that has been degraded, you can actually produce more cows than we do now. People say, well, it's not scalable, it's for the elite. Well, the truth is, according to Alan Williams, if you use U.S. conservation land that's not being used, degraded lands, some of the corn and soy monocrop fields, you could produce about 50 to 20 million cows a year for consumption compared to now 29 million. So we really do have a tremendous capacity to scale regenerative agriculture and the meat that's produced from that is far better for you. It's obviously no antibiotics, no hormones. It doesn't actually contribute to climate change. It actually helps reverse climate change and it is more nutrient dense, has more omega-3 fats, more antioxidants, more vitamins, minerals. it's good for you, it's good for the planet, it's good for the animals, and it's much more humane, it's their natural way of grazing and living, and they're not in big feedlot pens and living miserable lives. So I think there's a lot of benefit to this. It also creates, you know, the whole water issue. People say, well, you know, it takes 1,800 gallons of water to have one pound of meat. Well, that's, it depends on how you define water. In traditional feedlots, it's a lot of irrigation water. It's a lot of what we call blue water, which is essentially using aquifers and rivers and lakes to irrigate, which it depletes our freshwater resources. But if you use actually the, what they call green water, which is rainwater, rainwater rains on the grasses, grows the grasses, goes in lakes, rivers, the cows drink it. So it's very little water actually is used. So there's a lot of misinformation about cows. And as my friend Nicollet Naiman once said, it's not the cow, it's the how. It's how we raise them, it's how they're farmed. And of course, then there's the health consequences. I think if we look at the health consequences, you know, we can debate all day, there's arguments about this ad nauseam. Unfortunately, you know, when you look at most of it, it's ideological, it's not scientific. And the science really doesn't come out compellingly showing that meat is bad. Even we know they're eating factory farmed meat. So if you take people who are eating more regenerative meat, it's probably even better for them. And, you know, when you look at large studies that have shown harm, it's because the people who are eating meat were unhealthy. They didn't take care of themselves. They were eating meat at a time when everybody was told that meat was bad for you. So when they ate meat, it was, you know, in the context of an unhealthy lifestyle. They smoked more, they drank more, they ate more processed food, more sugar, less fruits and veggies, didn't take their vitamins, didn't exercise, and weighed more and ate 800 calories more a day. Of course, they had more heart disease and cancer. So it wasn't the meat, it was all the rest of the stuff. And other studies, for example, where they looked at 11, 000 people who shopped in health food stores who were either vegetarian or who ate meat. The truth is that they both had their risk of death reduced in half because if you're eating, you know, we're generally raising meat in small amounts in the context of a whole foods plant rich diet, it's very different than if you're eating the American processed diet and looking at your risk. So I think, you know, it's a longer conversation. I've written a lot about it in my book, Food, what the Heck Should I Eat? and Eat That Get Thin. So you can kind of read that there. But there's a real need whether we eat meat or not, whether vegan or vegetarian, we have to incorporate animals into the life cycle of our agricultural process. And we need to support regenerative farmers to do this. We need policy change. I'm creating a food fix campaign that's designed to create grassroots movement to change the food system, to change all these issues and to also change policy. I mean, right now we need massive policy shifts. to actually move the agricultural system. And I think I have hope because, you know, we see so many good things happening. There's a company called Farmland LP that's an investment company that's invested in conventional farms and converted them to regenerative farms. And they make a huge amount of money going from single digit profits to 40, 50% profit. Their first fund made a 67% return, added $21 million of ecosystem benefit. Versus the conventional farm, which basically took out $8 million of ecosystem services, and meaning, soil erosion, water use, pesticide, chemicals, all that stuff, we damage the environment. And so there's a value or cost to that. And regenerative agriculture works. And there's a lot of cool stuff happening in this space. There's so many people innovating. And I think, you know, you see people like the Impossible Burger, which, you know, it sounds like a good idea. We want plant-based meats. We want to unload the planet from the, you know, the factory farming of animals 100%. But we have to be careful because, you know, there's 47 novel proteins. It's a highly processed food. It's GMO corn, which is sprayed with glyphosate. Turns out there's 110 times as much glyphosate in there than is needed in animal studies to destroy your gut microbiome, which you need. And also it's been linked to cancer and many other things. It also has grown in a way that destroys the soil, that erodes, causes soil erosion. It's really a big deal. So we need to stop that and we need to think about how do we actually, if we're going to grow plant-based how do we create them for more whole foods? How do we create them in ways that actually regenerate the land and the soil? It turns out from Qantas, a life cycle analysis company, they looked at Impossible Burger and they looked at a regenerative ranch and farm and they found that for every one, while the Impossible Burger was better than a factory farm burger, for every one Impossible Burger you added three and a half kilos of carbon to the environment. And for every grass-fed regeneratively raised burger, you took out three and a half kilos of carbon, which means, you know, while it was less, the Impossible Burger added to climate change, whereas the regenerative burger reversed it. That's the point. We can draw down, if you look at the soil data, you know, we've lost a lot of soil. And yet it's probably added about 30% of the total carbon emissions over the course of our farming history. to climate change. So of all the carbon in the environment, the 415 parts per billion, 30% of that came from the soil loss of organic matter. And when you look at regenerative agriculture, it can draw that down and it can actually lead to the restoration. And some estimate that within 30 years, if we did this at scale, we could draw down at least a third of all the carbon that's in the environment, some say more. And the UN basically said if we took the 5 million degraded hectares of land around the world and just took 2 million of them and create a regenerative ag, which would cost about $300 billion. That's about 60 days of the global military spend or about the annual revenue of Chile, the GDP of Chile. We could literally halt climate change by 10 to 20 years and actually give us time to innovate more solutions. So what you eat is super important. I encourage everybody to think about quality of their diet, where the food comes from, choosing regenerative food when possible, talking to their senators and congressmen about this, being activists in their local communities, supporting those farmers who are doing the right thing, join their community supported agriculture, go to the farmers markets, grow your own community garden, you know, start to create a regenerative plot of land on your land, you know, make compost, build a garden in your backyard, or have a little even the windowsill of plants, that could make a big difference. so I'm super excited about this book, Food Fix. You can go to foodfixbook.com, foodfixbook.com, and you can learn more about the book. You can watch the video I've got free there on five steps to heal your planet and heal yourself, which is what we all need. And I think we have to sort of avoid the simplistic arguments of, you know, vegan, meat eaters, and so forth. We need a different way of thinking about the food system. and I spent two plus years researching this book. I think it's the most important thing I've ever done. I think it's really hopefully going to change the way we think about food, change the conversation, and change our policies and our approach to how we do things. So I want you to check it out and help me join in fixing the food system. You can go to foodfixbook.com and learn more and stay tuned for more information about the book. We'll be sharing more a lot about it over the next few weeks as the book's coming out on February 25th. food fix in and you're going to be part of the movement. I know it because you all care about this, I care about it, we have to work together and do this as a global movement. So we'll see you next time and I hope to talk soon.

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