Why Vegan Diets May Not Be Good For Your Health with Jayne Buxton

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

If you eat meat in the context of an overall healthy diet, you will see no risk to health. In fact, you'll see benefits because of the nutritional element.

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Welcome to Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's Pharmacy the NFA place for conversations that matter. And if you ever wondered if being vegan will save your life and fix the planet, then this podcast might be an important one for you to listen to because it's going to challenge some of our notions that being vegan will save us and the planet. And it's with a journalist and an author, a British Canadian woman, Jane Buxton, who's written a number of books, but has been doing intensive research on this topic of whether or not we should all be eating only plants and whether being vegan is the solution for everything. This book she wrote just came out. We are going to talk about it today called the Great Plant-Based Con: Challenges the Dominant Narrative and gets us thinking about what's really true and what the science says versus what our beliefs are. So welcome, Jane.

Hi. Thank you for having me.

Of course. Well, you wrote this book, which is very provocative. The title itself is called the Great Plant-Based Con, which I think will upset a lot of people. I think we've come to really understand as a culture that eating more plants and less meat is better for us and the planet and climate. But you challenge that notion and you talk about really these basic premises that have informed a lot of policy, that have informed a lot of people's beliefs, behavior, and you question whether it is actually good for us or not to follow this narrative that veganism is going to save us. And you answer a number of really important questions in your book. Is a plant-based diet better for your health? Yes or no? Will it save the planet? Yes or no? Who's actually advocating for it and why? And how should we so thank you for writing this book. I know a lot of the people who are in the book, they're like a cast of characters who've been working on these issues for years. Many of them have been on my podcast like Fred Provenza and David Ludwig and many others. So, let's just sort of start out with the question of how did this idea that being vegan or eating only plants was the best way to eat for our health? and the best way to eat to avert climate disaster and save the planet. How did that happen? It seems like it's just like overnight. And we have like 2% of the population that's vegan in America. And I don't know what it is in the rest of the world, but it's not a lot of people. But how did this become the dominant narrative?

I think the dominant, when it became dominant was when the argument became what I like to think of as a three-legged stool. So, When the argument was about exclusively animal welfare, which it used to be for animal rights activists and vegans, it traditionally is because they just don't want harm to animals. But that argument didn't get a huge amount of traction in and of itself. Once the arguments in favor of the diet for planetary health reasons got added in, and that was the second leg of the stool. And then a lot of the research was corralled around health and that was the third leg of the stool. You have this almost impenetrable, really steady, sturdy argument because if you challenge it on one leg, the other ones would always hold it up. So there was always somewhere where people could go to say, ah, but, you know, did you know about the saturated fat in meat, for example, would be a health argument thrown out. Or if you threw it, they could challenge it on any level. So that's why it's had this dominance. But I think the other reason is what you alluded to in your introduction, which is there are a whole bunch of forces or organizations and groups of people who benefit from this, the uptake of plant-based diet. And because there's so much for them to gain, they'll jump up and support that three-legged argument as it were, with all their might and all their money, because there's a lot to gain. Yeah.

And so who are those people who are gaining from this? Because the average person who wants to be vegan thinks it's good for their health. They want to maybe not harm animals. I think maybe help to reduce carbon emissions from methane cows and factory farming, which is reasonable. But who's kind of behind this? Is there a number of organizations or people or like, you know, why did this happen? Because I think we think that, you know, big food and big ag, you know, are going to be hurt by this. But in your perspective in the book, you seem to challenge that notion that actually they benefit from the world becoming vegan. How does that work?

I think certain parts of big food and big ag and big pharma will definitely benefit. and I think if you added up the industry might and the size of big pharma, big food, big ag altogether in its entirety, all the biggest companies in the world in those industries, they far outweigh the meat industry. So in terms of sheer dollar power, they far outweigh it. But the point is, so big food, for instance, you know, this is just a gift. this whole vegan revolution is a gift to them because it gives them the opportunity, because it gives them another excuse to formulate products, highly processed food products that they can now sell to the public under the banner of green and vegan, green for the planet, vegan healthy for you. They, and you know, I've worked with large corporations before. For 15 years, I was a management consultant. I was advising companies on growth and profit strategies. They're pretty simple beings, corporations. So they're chasing growth and profit at all times. And this is a great way to generate growth and profit. Add new marketing lines. They're highly profitable because you charge more. It's well known that these vegan processed foods are more expensive than their counterparts in meat and dairy and vegetables. fresh food. So, you know, that that's to me, that's a no brainer. It's it that is the driving force now. Are there some within those big food corporations that truly believe that this is better for the planet? Maybe, maybe they do. And they're certainly going to latch on to that idea. That is also a gift to them. That argument gives them a green light.

And you know, there's also some big companies that are pushing this narrative of like Impossible Foods, which I've had some relationship through various interactions with the CEO Pat Brown, who's a Stanford physician, very smart guy who developed this product. And I think you see it everywhere. I see it on menus at Burger King and restaurants. It's really quite pervasive now as this health food. And his view is we should eliminate all animal products from the planet and we should not have any animal agriculture, which I think could have disastrous consequences. And I'd love you to explain that. And there's other large sort of efforts to sort of stake a claim that being vegan is the healthiest way to live through movies like Game Changers, which is a very powerful movie, very well done, very convincing, especially if you don't have any experience on the science end of it. So can you talk about what the problems with our those two kind of big movements are around pushing a plant-based narrative.

It's interesting that you mentioned game changes. I'll go to that first because it was actually that movie was the tipping point for me in deciding to write the book. Because previous to that, around about 2019, I had noticed that the messaging in favor of plant-based was getting ever stronger. I also noticed that a lot of the facts which were being used to support it were wrong. and I thought, well, if those are wrong, there might be others that are wrong. So that's when I started to do my research. And I didn't know what I was gonna do with the research. It was maybe initially for me, my family, maybe some articles. And then game changers came out and I thought, this is really dangerous now, because so many young people on the back of that movie decided to try veganism. They decided it was the best way. They were persuaded by the evidence but it was really non-evidence. If you go through it piece by piece, it's really not evidence. And I thought, okay, we need a book on this. We need somebody to speak out loud and clear in definitive terms about this not being the answer. So Game Changes was a big tipping point for sure.

What were the problems with that movie? Because it seems so convincing, right?

It does seem so convincing. well, there's a fellow. I don't know if.

I wanted to be vegan after watching that movie.

Well, there's a fellow who's done a comprehensive analysis of every single study in the film. His name is Tim Rees. I don't know if you've heard of him or had him on your podcast.

Yes.

He's a very, very bright nutritionist, and he wrote a three-parter which dissected every piece of evidence and. And proved. that none of that evidence actually argued in favor of a plants only diet being better for our health. There were certainly some studies which showed that there were some benefits from some plants. And who doesn't believe that? We all know that. We all know that plants have nutrients and antioxidants and polyphenols and all of those things. But it was this notion that it's only plants, only plants will save you. that he proved was absolutely wrong. But, you know, he's very astute and anyone who read that dissection, which I include part of in my book, I wanted to include the whole thing because I thought it was so brilliant. Anyone who's read that will be questioning the value of game changers. But, you know, there are other organizations who have adopted it wholesale. So the American College of Lifestyle Medicine has given it a big thumbs up and provides it as a course for credits for medical professionals in North America, which is pretty frightening actually, that a film of that quality or that low quality should be considered educational material for medical professionals.

Yeah, it is concerning. I mean, you know, I think James Cameron is an extraordinary filmmaker. He was behind the the movie, and he did Titanic and many other powerful movies. So the film was beautifully done and it was kind of based on a lot of distorted information. And I don't think people realize, but I think James Cameron is a huge investor in pea protein and other kind of conflict of interest issues. So there's a lot of conflict there. I say, even with Pat Brown and Impossible Foods, he's trying to build this company, which I understand. But it turns out that, you know, this is a highly processed food that actually does fare better in terms of emission reductions compared to factory farming, but not better than regenerative agriculture. And I think this is just where all the nuances get lost. And I think it's just like meat bad, vegetables good, you know, meat bad, vegetables good. And it's this overarching narrative, but it's not being taken up everywhere. And it's interesting that we, in certain countries that that are maybe a little bit different in their approach have banned or outlawed or made illegal feeding children a vegan diet and actually threaten to put parents in jail when they do it. And I think that's important to unpack because that's a pretty strong set of laws or regulations around kids and protecting kids. So why have these countries done that and what can we learn from that?

I have a couple of hypotheses about why it's different in Europe, continental Europe, than it would be in America, Australia, for instance. One of those would be that the, how do I put this, the influence of the Seventh Day Adventist dominated narrative is less strong in those countries than it is in America and Australasia. So, and we all know that the Seventh-day Adventists have forever since they founded the church in 1863 have favored a meat-free diet. They've built corporations and a whole empire based on producing products that are meat-free analogs and whatnot. They're very big believers in a high carbohydrate diet and they have used their influence through dietetic organizations in North America. And that has fed all the way through to the dietary guidelines and what dietary guidelines exist in America, spillover into the UK. And so hence we have this very strong narrative running through American policy, British policy to a certain extent. Now, the Europeans are more independent of that. The other thing about the Europeans is if you look at processed food consumption in those countries, it ranges around 10 to 20% of their diet versus 50 to 60 in places like the UK, the US and Canada. So by definition, processed food companies have less power in those countries. Less power to influence dietary policy, less power to look out for their own interests, you know, in selling these kinds of foods and selling grain-based foods, which is what most processed food is. So I think those two things have, may have something to do with it. And then there'll be something about the European mentality, you know, the kind of independent spirit which somebody in Italy might feel in control of their ancestral diets and the, and the kind of strong eating cultures, food cultures that exist.

But, I mean, Jane, isn't, isn't, isn't it because the, you know, the vegan diet is, is dangerous for kids in that that they're seeing harm and there's evidence that eating a vegan diet as a child is actually bad for you. It's not just because they have a sort of a belief about it. They wouldn't make it illegal or put parents in jail for serving a salad.

Absolutely, I wasn't clear about that. The evidence is there, but it's also there for Americans and Australians and the Brits, right? So what the Europeans are doing is looking at that evidence. and saying, yes, we take that seriously and we're going to legislate against it. We're gonna recommend against the consumption of that diet. Whereas the same evidence, the same number of kids have died, the newspapers rather in these other countries like America and the UK have reported on these deaths of children from vegan diets and the dangers, but there are other forces stopping us from taking on board that information. So excuses are given, excuses are given for that, you know, the parents weren't doing it properly, et cetera.

So how does, you know, on the one hand, excluding animal products harm our health? And let's get into why vegan diets actually may be really nutritionally problematic. And as a doctor, I don't see this as a purely academic perspective, I have actually treated hundreds and thousands of people, well, thousands of thousands of people, many, many, many vegans and have done extensive blood work and testing on them. In fact, I just sort of had an interesting father-son comparison where the father was about 50 and the son was in his early 20s and the son was vegan, the father wasn't. And they did massive nutritional testing with me and the son. was significantly nutritional deficient omega-3 fats and vitamin D and vitamin A and iron and zinc and and really was was so deficient in some of these key nutrients. And when we did their biological age testing based on DNA methylation, the and telomere analysis, the son was older than the father. The father was biologically 35 and the son was biologically like 45, even though he was 20. and I was like, holy mackerel. You know, when you need to write.

This case study up, you need to definitely write this. I mean, I see this all the time.

I just see this all the time. So I, I know people want to be vegan, and, and they try to be vegan and try to do it healthy, and, and they're not necessarily junk food vegans, and they're still struggling. And initially they get, they get a burst of energy. They feel better. Problems get health problems improve. But, but of course, you know, if it depends. on what you're swapping out. If you're eating a processed diet full of sugar and junk food and you switch to eating only healthy plant foods, then yeah, of course you're going to feel better. But over time, things start to change. Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.

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Of the Doctor's Pharmacy. So can you talk about this sort of one, why animal foods and getting rid of them are problematic and what the benefits are, and two, why just being strictly vegan can be really harmful?

Well, you know, your story and your experience says you know a lot more about this than I do. So I don't need to tell you any of this, but for your listeners and for our conversation, One of the primary ways I think that vegan diets are suboptimal, and I do mean vegan as opposed to just plant-rich diets, so I'm talking about plants-only diets, definitely. They are lacking in a range of key nutrients. B12 is the most obvious. Vitamin D is hard to get. Vitamin A is very hard to get. DHA, EPA, which are essential brain nutrients. Zinc is hard to get, iron, you know, you could list, as long as my arm, the list would be, of nutrients that are impossible or difficult to get. Now, a vegan answer to that is, well, we can supplement, and indeed you can supplement, but we all know that supplements do not deliver the same nutrients in the same manner and cannot be, the uptake in the body is not the same as it is when a nutrient is part of a food matrix. So that is to me not the solution. And the B12 supplementation thing is also very interesting. So we have a doctor scientist over here called Professor Tim Spector who I'm sure you know and you've probably met him at numerous conferences. He had a B12 deficiency which he tried to cure in every way he possibly could and he took supplements And then he injected the supplements and he couldn't get his B12 levels up. And the only way he could get them up was to eat a small amount of meat. And I think he said even just once a month, he wanted to eat them, he ate the meat, and he suddenly raised his B12 levels. So this conveys the difficulty of relying on a supplementary strategy. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of people who were persuaded to go vegan are relying on that supplementary strategy and it's going to fail them. I think the other thing which people really rarely think about is that there's a deficiency element in the vegan diet, but there's also an excess of some things. So there are plant toxins which consumed in small amounts are not going to do anyone any harm. Oxalates, phytic acid, lectins, for instance, vegetable oils. If you eat these in small amounts, you'll probably be fine. If you're relying on those foods such as spinach smoothies, which are really oxalate rich, for instance, you've got a high likelihood of getting kidney stones and also having a calcium deficiency, right? You know this. So, I think we're so used to seeing plants as completely benign that we forget that there are very unbenign elements to them, which if you're only eating plants, you can obviously get more of those. So I think that's another way in which the vegan diet surprises people and maybe is a less healthy diet than they expected. I think also the protein question is important. And I know you did an Instagram post on that yesterday. I saw that, or maybe it was the day before, about the difficulty of getting leucine from plant foods. And leucine is one of those amino acids which is difficult to get. In fact, the whole essential amino acid profile is difficult to get from plant foods. And so those foods have to be combined incredibly carefully. you have to eat exactly the right amount within the right time period and the right combination in order to get your amino acid profile. And in case listeners wonder, well, why is that important? Why is it important to have that full spectrum of amino acids? It's because the protein and the amino acids can't be synthesized in the body unless they're all there in the right amounts. And therefore you're not getting the benefit of the protein, therefore you get a protein deficiency. so that protein is something maybe we take for granted because we're used to thinking that we have it in abundance and we've got it all sussed. But, and because people talk so casually about plant proteins being just as good and they really are not just as good. They're not complete and they're not as bioavailable. And that's a fact, right?

Yeah, I think it's not an accepted fact by much of the nutritional world. Unfortunately, I think when you look at the, the theories, and I think I, you know, I was a vegetarian for over 10 years, you know, based on the diet for a new planet, a.

Really important book by Francis LaFleur, wasn't it? Was that it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Francis LaFleur. Yeah. That was in the 70s, and it was very convincing. And if you combined, you know, beans and grains, you would get complete protein and it was plenty. And I think that that belief is pretty hardcore in most of the nutritional world. And I think the movies like Game Changers and what the health and others have really convinced a lot of people that they can do great. Now, I, I'm just, I think I want to say up front, I have no objection to anybody being vegan. I don't think I have a moral judgment about it. But I think as a doctor and someone who really deeply understands the science and has looked at it for decades and has treated thousands of patients on all sorts of varied diets, testing them for everything you can possibly imagine, I do see that there are challenges with people who stay on long-term vegan diets in terms of muscle mass, in terms of nutritional adequacies and overall health. So initially people feel better, but I think there's a there's a downside in long-term vegan diets for people if they're not really careful. And they need to, for example, supplement with jacked up amino acids with the right nutrients. And it's, you know, it's doable, but it's, it's not easy, especially in our culture, where it's, it's not easy to get high quality, nutrient dense plant foods. So that's a problem. People often chips and soda. I mean, I was with a guy recently who was a vegetarian. He's like, I don't want to kill animals. I'm like, okay, that's fair. By the way, though, you know, you're, you're seven billion animals killed every year just through vegetables, growing vegetables through animal agriculture is destroying your habitats. 50 of birds are dead. We killed rabbits and mice and all kinds of animals when we, when we are farming. It's just part of the fact of Life, of actually growing food, part of eating. So you can't get away from it. And it, yeah, it is the life of a rabbit. Any less than the life of a cow. I don't think so. But that's, maybe you can debate that. I think the, the, but the actual challenge I see for people is that they're, they're not able to sort of kind of navigate through this massive information, misinformation, what's true, what's not true, who, what does the science actually say? So, so take us a little bit through the science around this. I think you've written a lot about in your book and why we have kind of come to believe that animal foods are bad and how they're actually not and how they actually may be really critically important for our health.

Well, the nutrients angle is one that we've just covered. That's why a good mix of animal foods and plant foods together will provide you the best insurance policy against a nutrient deficiency is the way I think of it. And you have think about your diet a lot less when you've got all those foods in it. You don't have to do the combining and the adding up and the counting and the supplementing. So that's one side of it. The other argument, which is often used, I think, to damn a meat inclusive diet, an animal and dairy inclusive diet, is the saturated fat argument. And this goes back a very long way to the 1950s when it was first mooted that saturated fat would cause cholesterol to rise, which would lead to coronary heart disease. And there was a whole, you know, because of the urgency to solve the heart attack problem, which was then quite big in the United States at the time with President Eisenhower and men of a certain age having heart attacks, they rushed into the guidelines committees at the time, the McGovern committee, rushed into endorsing that view that saturated fat is a problem and they rushed into endorsing the low-fat route to health. Now, even at the time that Keys was doing his research, there were other researchers, as you know, you know, Hilleboe and Yerushalmy, whose name I can never pronounce, but I hope I did that justice, who provided evidence that actually there wasn't a very strong correlation or association between saturated fat intake and heart attacks and coronary heart disease. And subsequently, years and years worth of studies, whether you're talking about the Sydney Heart Study or the Minnesota Coronary Study or the more recent PURE studies, The Cochrane Reviews of which there have been four, none of them have found a very strong causal relationship between saturated fat intake and heart disease. So we have all this data and yet it doesn't get traction. It gets traction in the scientific papers, it gets traction amongst a certain part of the scientific community, but you will still read in the newspapers every single day, oh, this food is better for you because it has less saturated fat. as if that's a benefit and a bonus and everything else. So this is one of the reasons why it's so hard to make headway on the omnivore diet is healthy kind of idea, because people will always come back to the, oh, what about the saturated fat? What about the cholesterol? So I think that that's one very, very big driver. But there's also, I think, there's something which I'll call the epidemiology industry, which seems to have risen up.

Yeah, let's talk about that.

And it is always, I would say it's mostly slanted towards producing outcomes which favor plant foods. It's quite rare to see something that is slanted the other way. Now, that could be, and I suspect it is partly to do with funding coming from plant-based food companies and processed food companies towards universities and then into the researchers. And it's also partly about a zeitgeist and a sort of group think, which is, ah, you know, everybody knows that plant-based is best. So let's keep doing research that's going to prove that it's best. It seems that group think can take over the research community, can't it? But I go through many studies in the book where the top line might indeed indicate some advantage to, say, longevity or cancer reduction from eating a vegan diet or a more vegan diet. But when you dig below the surface, you invariably find some very, very weak data. I have yet to see any papers where the data, where the hazard ratios, so the associations are anything more than 1.2, 1.3 at most across the board. And we need to remember that.

Hazard ratio, I don't think hazard ratio.

So that would be, let's say, very simply put, if you eat carrots for the rest of your life, and then if you eat meat, The hazard ratio would be if we found that eating meat versus carrots gives you a 1.1 times greater chance of dying young, say. So that 1.1 is the hazard ratio. But it's a relatively small... You have.

A 10% increased risk of dying from eating carrots, basically.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. When that's played out again and again and again, those tiny hazard ratios are taken for granted as being definitive and they're really not. And there's a very interesting and I think a very skilled scientist, Dr. David Kleinfeld, who has explained that anything below two, really any hazard ratio below two, i.e. 100% increased risk is something where you really cannot make any causal links. And he would not advise that.

Yeah, this is an important thing to think about because when you look at a population, there are a lot of factors that can interfere with the results. And the studies around meat that I looked at, and I've written a lot about this and I really did not want to do something for my own health, for my patients that was going to harm them. So I felt that incumbent upon myself to actually sit and read the research on meat. So I literally locked myself in a room for a week with pulled every top paper, every paper written. It was substantial on me and health and plant-based diets. And I looked at it carefully and I was like, wow, you know, really there's, there's really a lot of epidemiological evidence that it could be bad. But then when you look at the characteristics of the people who are eating meat in those studies, they were also eating, you know, soda and fries and junk food and not exercising, and they were more overweight. They didn't eat fruits and vegetables. They didn't take vitamins. so was it the meat or was it not? And I think I talked about this in the podcast before, but there was one really interesting study where they looked at meat eaters and vegetarians who shopped at health food stores, meaning that they likely were eating an overall healthier diet, including meat. And there was both no, no increase in, obviously, mortality, but both had the same reduction in death and disease because they were both eating real food. So I thought that was really fascinating to me, and I think In your book, you quote really a number of key scientists, Fred Provenza, Stephen Ben Villet, who've done some really interesting work about the benefits of eating meat in your diet and the sort of mythology around the epidemiology of this. So, can you talk more about why we have such a powerful negative view based on these meat studies and what other studies have shown that kind of disprove the idea that meat is bad. Because there's a lot of people who can point to so many studies rather. It's guys like, you know, Dr. Gregor, Michael Gregor, who's super vocal about this, has written, you know, the how not to die book, which I think everybody's just got and looking. There's such powerful narratives and they quote all the science and They seem so convincing and it seems so pro-right if you read it, of course, like in watching Game Changers, you want to be a vegan. What does the science actually share with us about what it says and why it's so flawed and why we need to reconsider this narrative?

Well, I think that the best summary of that science was contained in the paper that came out in 2019 by the Annals of Internal Medicine, five papers actually, which looked at all of the science together over many, many decades. And that paper was written and sponsored by, you know, and participated in by Gordon Guyatt, who's the sort of guru of evidence-based medicine. So it had some good, good people involved in that. And they came to the conclusion that looking at all of the evidence, it was insufficient and not of high enough quality to draw any conclusions about the impact of me dating on health and that there was therefore no reason to recommend against it.

And this is a Cochrane database analysis you're talking about?

No, this was by the using the grade system and it came out of McMaster University. So it was Guyatt and it was the Annals of Internal Medicine and it caused a big uproar. And you'll probably remember that.

Yeah, there was a lot of criticism of that.

Yeah, there was indeed. But because of the people doing it, I have, you know, sometimes you have to, you have to look at where you're going to put your trust. And I think that that was it. They used a good methodology, a very strong methodology, and they could not find anything against meat intake. Now, the other The other study which people often use as evidence that meat eating is bad for you is the WHO study from 2015, which purported to have studied 800 individual studies and come up with the conclusion that processed meat in particular was a risk for cancer and that red meat was probably a risk for cancer. But when you actually analyze what they did, and a number of people have done this, including Dr. Pleurfeld, who served on that committee, they didn't study 800 studies at all. They whittled it down to 18 studies, most of which were epidemiological and had very low hazard ratios. And even with that WHO study, the ratios are 1.1, 1.18. They, this is tiny. You cannot, and they're all associational, not causational. So, you know, you cannot infer a causal link from that. And I think contrary to that, the, you know, the study you cite, which I read about in your book, Food Fix, about the health food stores, is very powerful that if you eat meat in the context of an overall healthy diet, you will see no risk to health. In fact, you'll see benefits because of the nutritional element.

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think it's like what you eat it with. I think that's the problem. I think we think, you know, we're talking about a diet. It's really the whole spectrum of the diet. My diet is mostly plants, but I do eat animal foods and they are a key part of my diet. And, I've noticed as I've shifted towards a sort of less starchy foods, actually less grains and beans, which I used to eat only. I've gotten much healthier. My strength has increased, my muscle mass has increased, my cognitive function has improved, my digestion has improved. I mean, there's so many aspects of my health that have changed. And it's not just obviously my own experience, but this is as a doctor treating, you know, thousands of patients, seeing what happens when you start to improve. people's quality of their diet and get them off a lot of the foods that they're eating that could be problematic for them. And I think the, you know, there's a lot of research looking at what, what you eat meat with and when you include other foods that are harmful, it actually makes it far worse. And there's also evidence that if you actually eat meat that's cooked with, for example, spices and cooked in certain ways, for example, and I think in Morocco they eat a lot of meat, but they, they have tons of spices, which are these phytochemicals chemicals can actually deal with maybe some of the potential effects of it that, you know, may be purported to be a problem. Also, the quality of the meat is it the same meeting Fred Provenza talks about eating a feedlot meat the same as eating a grass-fed or regeneratively raised animal food? And I think maybe we can speak to that a little bit. It's not what, not all meats the same. And so I think you and I both agree that we should eliminate factory farming from the planet. It's bad for the animals. It's bad for us. It's bad for the planet. But that doesn't mean that I mean, that eating meat at the right type of meat is necessarily bad for you.

No, that's exactly right. And you're right, Fred Provenza and Stefan van Vliet, who you also mentioned, have done research showing that the phytochemicals.

In.

Meat that has been raised on a diverse pasture and managed in the correct way, those phytochemicals can be very significant, even sometimes matching the phytochemicals in the plants themselves that we eat. So there are those benefits from well-raised meat aside from the very important benefit of... well, there are two other benefits to eating that kind of meat. One is it's better for the animals, you know, so if you care about animal welfare, it's better for them. But it's also better for the environment because if you're raising cattle on that kind of pasture and if you're managing them in a very specific way, managed grazing, you can also be drawing carbon out of the sky, you can be contributing to environmental health instead of environmental degradation. So loads of good reasons to eat meat that's been well raised. and I think that Stefan did a study also comparing the plant-based meat versus well-raised grass-fed meat, and he found that 90% difference in what he called metabolites, which are the minute nutrients that we don't even think about or talk about most of the time. a 90% difference between those two products. So there clearly isn't, you know, there's a lot of benefit from eating well-raised meat and plant-based meats are not going to give you that same level of nutrients.

Yeah, I mean, your book is quite impressive, Jane. I think the amount of research you've done, the dissecting of all the controversy that sort of talking about the way in which this sort of dominant narrative about veganism has taken over our culture or, you know, the average person will think, yeah, of course, I may not want to be vegan, but it's definitely the healthier way to go. And, you know, it's, it's based on a very shaky Foundation. But you're right. You know, if you've got those three legs of the stool, whether it's planetary health, human health, animal welfare, you know, you take anyone away, it's, it's hard to sort of argue with it. Right. But it's, it's, to me, it's just sort of striking how powerful this narrative has become in the culture, in medicine, with nutritionists. I was speaking to a Harvard scientist, one of the sort of smartest guys in the world, and he's an expert in genetics, longevity. And I said, what do you recommend for longevity? He said, well, you know, a vegan diet. I'm like, wow. I think that was just sort of striking to me that that even the smartest people are so captured with this narrative.

So on that, I was going to bring that up because we've had something come out in our paper just this week. It's called, I think it's called Food for Longevity Calculator. So it's a new calculator which has been generated to allow people to plug their numbers in and decide how much longer they can live by eating certain foods. Now, the recommendations as part of that calculator recommend zero red meat, okay? Then it turns out that that calculator, the whole system, all of the science on which it's based, came from the Global Burden of Disease, which is the GBD report, which comes out every few years. Now, you dig a little deeper and you realize that the Global Burden of Disease recently and you'll be very aware of this I'm sure, reported that eating any red meat was, I think they upped the risk factor for death by 36 times over their previous report with no explanation. So a bunch of scientists challenged this. One of them is Frederic Leroux, you probably are familiar with him, there were about six or seven others who challenged the authors of this GBD report, and finally got the admission that the red meat numbers were not reliable and not entirely evidence-based. So you think, okay, well, who cares? Who's listening to the GBD? Who's using it? Well, it's used everywhere. It's used everywhere to develop policy. It's used everywhere to develop these kind of calculators that then go into our own times newspaper and everybody reads them and says, okay, I won't eat any red meat. This is how it happens. You get bad studies which people do not reveal that it's not revealed widely enough, just how bad they are, and they get folded in and used, and before you know it, you have like an unstoppable train, which is what we have right now. It feels like it's an unstoppable train.

It really does. So how do we counter this? I mean, your book is sort of an attempt to do this, but you know, you've got these big reports in Lancet, for example, they eat Lancet, which I think, you know, was good in many ways because it brought up the connection between the environment and our food system. But it was flawed in also many ways. And, and, you know, I kind of analyzed it. I was like, wow, the recommendations are we should all be eating plants and eliminating meat. And then if you read the fine print in the study, it says, except if and it lists a whole bunch of people who just should not be doing this, including the elderly, the young, people who are sick, pregnant women, chronic illness and so forth, pregnant women. And so you're talking about probably 75% of the population who it's not good for. So it's such an internal contradiction. And then the thing I was sort of struck by was how much the food industry was behind this EAT Lancet Commission report. And, you know, a good friend of mine was really involved with this. who I highly respect and who's a really brilliant physician. And we've talked about some of the challenges of this, but one of the recommendations was we use much more nitrogen fertilizer to grow more plants in the developing world. Tell us, why is this a problem and why did this sort of study get it not quite right?

Well, you said it. It got some things right, but it got so much wrong. I mean, the nitrogen and the fertilizer recommendation is just one tiny bit of it. But even that, you have to trace that back to who is supporting Eat Lancet, right? So there's this group of companies called Fresh, and there's about 30, 40 companies. They're all the big names in Big Ag and pharma and Big Food, and they are supporting the Eat recommendations. Now, why might they be? Well, Big Ag is definitely gonna love that nitrogen recommendation and the fact that we need to rely on fertilizer. And Bill Gates has said the same thing. His book has a chapter on how we need to expand the use of chemical fertilizers around the world. So these, it's no surprise why these companies are supporting this. But what is happening is that there's a new, there's a revolution going on I would say in parallel to that. So you have all these sort of great big recommendations coming out of these well-funded policy advisory groups, whether it be EAT Lancet, whether it be the WHO, whether it be the World Economic Forum, they all sort of partner together and work together and they all have the same, they're singing from the same song sheet. and they might be saying we need to increase food production by using more nitrogen. Okay, below that running alongside it in parallel is the regenerative agriculture movement which with very little help is proving that nitrogen when it's used in excess has ruined our soils, has ruined 40% of our soils in the world already. So they're completely degraded and we can't even grow anything on them. there comes a point where nitrogen cannot be taken up. Only 10 to 30% of nitrogen is taken up at any one point anyway by plants. So regenerative farmers know this. So they're using a different method, which is regenerative farming, and we can go into what that means, to build soil health, which then stores more carbon. stores more water so it acts as a drought mitigation mechanism and increases the nutrients in the food. Now, regenerative agriculture does not use external inputs. The whole point of it is it's using the soil microorganisms themselves and the interaction, the sort of plant microorganism bridge, which is what Christine Jones calls it, so we're using that to build soil health and to store carbon. But that's really bad news to your average agribusiness. It's really bad news because if too many farmers get wind of that, if that becomes the revolution, then their business is on the way out and on the way down. So it's clear to me that's why they're never going to support it. Why would they? Why would they? So when you said how are we going to move change forward? I don't think it will be by working with those organizations. I think it will be by working in parallel at a ground, a grassroots level. And I think that is true of both health and human health and planetary health. I was having a conversation with some farmers and some nutritionists the other day about this and all of us were in agreement with the fact that trying to change these sort of outputs of these big organizations is not going to work. You just have to keep working and proving that there's a better way and farmers are doing that. So are low-carb enthusiasts working to reverse diabetes and things like that. They're working despite the recommendations from governing bodies, policy bodies, right? They're working a lot below them and in parallel to them, which is a kind of, in a way that's a.

Bit depressing, but, you know, so, so part, so we've covered a lot of the health issues and your book is really a treasure trove of the science and it's quite detailed and, and I think you've done a lot of the hard work of take an honest look at what the science says, but it doesn't say, you know, why the overarching mythology around plant-based diets being the answer to everything is flawed. The real question then becomes, you know, what about the effects on climate? And what about the argument that, you know, animals are driving so much of climate change and animal agriculture is so destructive and why we need to eliminate it? you know, for example, Pat Brown's narrative and, and then talk about why it's so important to actually include animals as part of our agricultural system for planetary health. So it's kind of the opposite is true. And just, and, and you, you know, you quote Rus Khansra, who said, it's not the cow, it's the how. How do, how do, I mean, how do we raise animals? And what impact does that have on their health, on the quality of the meat and the quality of the soil and the health of the planet and climate. So can you kind of weave us through that story a little bit? I think it's an important thing because we basically go cow farts and methane is bad and we need to eliminate that.

Yeah, exactly. I think it's important to recognize that this story around the emissions and the detrimental effect of cows on the environment has been marked by some very big flaws. One of those flaws is that emissions from livestock are exaggerated routinely. So, you know, I think you mentioned earlier a documentary Cowspiracy, which first put forward the idea that cows are responsible for 51% of methane, of all emissions rather. Now, that has been proven to be false. And it's been proven that actually the real accepted number, the FAO number, is 14 and a half percent for livestock. And there's even a problem with that, which I'm going to go into in a second. But the cowspiracy number persists in the Public's imagination. Last year, some students were protesting on campus here about the serving of meat in, in University cafeterias, and they had this 51% all over their placards. so it clearly has stuck. And this is why people will throw that argument out and say, oh, of course we have to get rid of the cows. Well, yeah, if cows were really responsible for 51%, we better get rid of them. But, but they're not. The other thing you have to recognize about that 14 and a half percent number, which is the accepted FAO number, is that it penalizes livestock in a way because it's a complete life cycle number. that means it takes into account everything that goes into raising that cow and getting that meat to the plate. The food that's fed to the cow, the way it's raised, then slaughter practices and distribution, etc. Now, you compare that to the transport number. The transport number is not a life cycle number. The transport number, which at the moment is 14% globally, is just a tailpipe emissions number. The same is true of the number for air travel.

Right?

So there are, and actually most of the sectors do not have a life cycle calculation. So suddenly we've penalized livestock farming because we're calculating everything whereas everybody else gets a little bit let off the hook. do you see what I mean? So these are the ways that these numbers are exaggerated. There's another way that the exaggeration comes into play and that is with the use of the metrics to measure methane, the impact of methane. So current metrics is something called, the current metric is something called GWP 100, which estimates the climate changing effect of different gases according to an equivalent in CO2. Now, what that has done is it's overestimated the methane, the effect of methane from livestock people feel. And so Professor Miles Allen, University of Oxford, has argued repeatedly and others have as well for the use of a different metric called GWP*, which would take, which would more accurately measure the impact of the methane. So all of these ways lead to a kind of overestimation of the benefit of getting rid of livestock. And because they're all used repeatedly and because nobody digs into these numbers, that story persists. And really all you have to do is look at the basic emissions numbers for a country like the US or the UK. Industrialized countries, right? So here in the UK, dairy cows and beef cattle and sheep, so all ruminants of any kind, are responsible for about 7% of our emissions. Seven, very similar number in the US. It's even less in the US, I believe. Now you compare that to the total emissions that are generated by energy use, transportation, commercial organizations, and domestic use, which is over 80%. And you think, well, why are we going for the 7% instead of the 80%?

Yeah.

Right. Right.

Why are we focused on just cows and not fossil fuels?

Right? Yeah. And Miles Allen again, highly respected scientists, has said, you know, getting rid of the methane from livestock will have very, very little effect on global warming. Very, very little. What we have to do is address the warming from fossil fuels. And if we don't do that, he said, pretty much nothing else matters. That's quite definitive. I think that's a very powerful statement from the scientists who's serving on the IPCC, you know. So that's the kind of why do we think cows are so bad? And incidentally, you know, the methane argument is dragged up again and again. Yes, cows emit methane, but so does everything. Everything emits methane, including wetlands, which emit 20% of all methane. And yet somehow- Rice cultivation is about 6%. So we never hear, or I've never heard anyone say, yeah, we need to drain all the wetlands, get rid of the beavers, and then we'll get our methane count down. We don't hear that, do we?

Or stop eating rice, which produces methane. Stop eating rice, because rice is kind.

Of, I think it's probably vacuous, right?

And interestingly, when you look at regenerative agriculture, you actually can help reduce methane by having methanotropes in the soil, by actually changing the diet of the animals, by having a more varied diet, by, you know, feeding cow seaweed, for example, is a solution to methane production. And, and also the other thing that doesn't get recognized is the, the role of nitrogen fertilizers in their production of methane. It might be not obvious for people, but if we look at the production of fertilizers, which is a huge industry, counting for about 2% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

Yeah, I thought it was even higher, but yeah, you're right.

Most of it comes from fracking. Fracking actually is a very challenging form of extracting energy from the ground because it produces a lot of methane leaks in methane. And so, when you look at the methane produced by fracking, it's three times that produced by animal agriculture. and that, I mean, just the methane for producing the nitrogen fertilizer. So it's, it's, and then the fertilizer is used to grow more plants. So you've got this kind of web of complicated relationships between, you know, the soil and nitrogen and greenhouse gas emissions and, you know, nitrogen, nitrous oxide, when it's applied to the soil, creates 300 times as much greenhouse gas emissions as, as carbon dioxide. So it's really, It's really problematic and I think we don't look at the whole story and your book really takes us through the whole story and it's easy to get sound bites or have fun movies or little headlines here and there. But, I think the challenges and nuances get lost and the subtleties get lost in the argument of what we should be doing. And, I think clearly you want to come to a more balanced view, which is kind of why I wrote the book, the Pegan Diet, which is to make a sort of a joke about this sort of polarization of meat or not meat or plants or not plants. So, I think in your book you do sort of come up with a summary of what you think would be a healthier diet. Let's sort of close with your thinking about what actually your conclusions are from having looked at all the data and come up with a way of thinking about eating that's good for us, good for the planet.

Yeah, I think it would start with real just basing a diet on real food. So let's start there. You know, real food, food that's recognized that you can recognize as food that doesn't have a ton of ingredients, it doesn't come in a packet. So that would be number one. So eat real food, reduce your consumption of ultra processed food for nutritional reasons as well as reasons to do with the environment. You know, I think people just people may not realize that when you look at the food footprint for the average person in the UK, for instance, if you added up the footprint of all the junk food, the sweets, the rice, the empty carbs, the stuff that really doesn't provide you with very much, and the food waste, that's almost as much as the footprint of meat and dairy. And yet meat and dairy is nutritious food, which you know, can benefit our health. So I would advise people to do that. I would advise them to really wage a war on food waste, which I think if you're buying high quality produce and meat, you would. If you, if you value that food, you're going to eat it. You're going to not let it go bad in your fridge and throw it away. And as far as the meat and dairy element of it, I think people really need to choose the highest welfare, highest standard that they can possibly afford, because what we should be doing as consumers is moving our production system towards a high quality, less factory farmed, better, more regenerative system. And we have the power as consumers to help that along. Now, admittedly, we can't do it all. And I think governments and legislation have to play some sort of role in helping to shape that environment. And I think they could do a lot more to get rid of the mass-produced factory-farmed chicken, for instance. There are rules that could be made to stop that. But we can play our part as consumers. So I think it's about being a really conscious consumer, always conscious. Why am I buying that food? What is it going to give me nutritionally? Is it real? How far did it come to me? Is it raised in a way that will benefit the soil rather than harm the soil? and try and ask yourself those questions.

Such an important conversation. I don't think we're going to get to the bottom of all of it in one podcast, but I do think, you know, reading your book is a really important thing for people to do to look at a different perspective than the dominant narrative. I've written a number of books about this as well. I just sort of challenge some of our thinking. And I think also it's more to say that it's very individual. Some people thrive eating mostly vegan diet. Other people don't. Some people do well with more meat, some people don't. So, I think it's really individual and that's really what functional medicine is about as a personalized approach to thinking about how we eat. So, there isn't a one-size-fits-all approach, but I think your principles of eating real food, of getting rid of the junk and eating less starch and sugar and eating higher quality food, nutrient-dense food is so important. So, I think this debate's obviously going to continue. It is. It's sort of unfortunate It's such a dominant belief that's been promulgated in society around the benefits of a purely vegan diet. Because I think there's so many flaws in that argument. And again, I'm not opposed to people who want to be vegan. I've had many patients who want to be vegan, but it's often challenging. And I saw really one patient who was very overweight in his 60s, really sort of struggling with his health. and he was a committed vegan and really had deep belief that no harm should come to animals at all and in the production of food and that it was murder to kill animals. And I think there's a moral argument you can make there. But I said, well, is it okay to kill yourself? And he goes, well, that's something I hadn't thought of. I think you are a human, an animal. Is it okay to kill yourself? by doing this. And I think that it got him thinking and I think people should really look at what works for them and what doesn't work for them.

That's a good point that human welfare is as important as animal welfare and we need to keep that in mind for sure. Yeah.

Well, Jane, thank you for your work. Thank you for being on the podcast. This obviously conversation will continue if anybody listening who wants to learn more, they should check out Jane's book, the Great Plant-Based Con, why Eating Plants Only Diet Won't Improve youe Health or Save the Planet, which is a very provocative title. To the library where you get books. If you like this podcast, please share with your friends and family. I'll leave a comment on how you learned about what works for you. Have you gone vegan? What is it done? Have you been a carnivore? Maybe that's helped you. I think we'd love to hear from you. subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and we'll see you next week on the doctor's Pharmacy.

Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's picks. It's my weekly newsletter, and in it I share my favorite stuff, from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to drhyman.com/picks to sign up. That's drhyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S. and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer.

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