#154 - Robb Wolf: The Debate on Artificial vs. Natural Meat

So the number one question that people have asked me for the last 30 years, and I don't care if it's a celebrity or someone on Instagram or one of the readers of my books, is, what should I eat, Jorge? People are confused. And in today's modern world, it's not our fault. There are over 70,000 things at a grocery store, and the confusion factor is crazy. And with celebrities like Kim Kardashian telling you to seek Beyond Meat, which is synthetic, or, you know, businessmen like Bill Gates now investing billions of dollars into Impossible Meat, you know, now there are more options. And protein, in my opinion, if you wanna have zero hunger, is probably the most satiating way to break fast. Whether you fast or not, it doesn't matter. But now the question is, do we eat synthetic meat, plant-based meat, or do we eat real meat? So on today's show, we're gonna sit down with probably the leading expert on this topic. His name is Robb Wolf. He's the author of a book called The Sacred Cow. And today's interview is provocative. I mean, if you've seen Kim Kardashian recently, she's been promoting Beyond Meat as their taste expert, and she is a very intelligent woman, beautiful woman, beautiful. And you guys know I was on Revenge Body with her sister Khloe Kardashian, and I know they're a force for good out there. But when certain people endorse something, we can get confused. And the question is, is a synthetic meat healthy for us? You know, is it what our ancestors did? We obviously know the answer to that— it isn't. So today's show, we go deep, we find out about ancestral health, we understand the science of what our species was really designed to eat and how these modern foods can be an option. But are they an option that is actually better for our health? And the biggest question out there, and I think it's the most important social question out there, is it better for the planet? All that on today's show. Hi, my name is Jorge Cruise, but I'm also known as the Zero Hunger Guy. I'm a celebrity fitness trainer and a multiple New York Times bestselling diet author with 12 million fans. You may have seen my work with Oprah Winfrey, Khloe Kardashian, Kelly Clarkson, or even Steve Harvey. My career started because I was a addicted to sugar, carbs, salty snacks, and stress, and experts told me to simply count calories to get control. They were wrong. My passion to get radical control over both physical and emotional health has led me to find science-proven shortcuts that help my clients drop 25 belly inches or even more fast and permanently, and I know I can help you too. Welcome to the Zero Hunger Revolution. All right, so before we get started with today's show with Robb Wolf, I wanna give a special thanks to our sponsors. A big shout out to Primal Kitchen for supporting the Zero Hunger Guide podcast for the last couple of years. They're giving all of us a free lemon chipotle mayo. It's absolutely delicious. It's made with avocado oil, which is anti-inflammatory, and you can put a dollop of it on your steak, chicken, or fish. It's absolutely delicious. Check it out at primalkitchen.com/jorgecruise to get your free jar of lemon chipotle mayo. It's awesome. Uh, and then we're also brought to you by Zero Hunger Water. Now, Zero Hunger Water, you guys know, is the way I turn off hunger. And we have just launched a brand new email club that I want to invite you to. And basically every week we send out an email with the latest in hydration and knowing that if you want to quench your hunger, turning off false hunger and cravings is critical. And electrolytes are the key to this. And Zero Hunger is really a shift. It's a revolution in how we can quell hunger. And I want you to join us. It's going to change your life.

Check it out at zerohungerwater.com.

Sign in. Sign up for the club. It's totally free and you'll learn a lot about the science of appetite control.

It's super good.

All right, with that said, uh, let's get started with today's show. A big thank you to Robb Wolf for being on the show. And really, guys, go into this with an open mind. And if you're a vegan, if you're plant-based, we're not going to poo-poo the plant-based world at all because there's a place for plants in our diet. There really is. And many of us can survive on that. But the question is, what will cause us to thrive. And what Robb Wolf is going to share with us is an ancestral blueprint based on millions of years and what our species, the human species, did to survive and thrive. And I think it's going to be an eye-opening discussion, and I hope you share this with your loved ones. So let's get started right now.

We're talking to Robb Wolf. We love Robb Wolf. He's been on the podcast so many times, I've lost count. But today we're talking about something really timely in the news and This is this idea of plant-based meat, what some people call synthetic meat. And Beyond Meat recently brought on a new spokesperson, probably one of the most famous women on earth, Kim Kardashian. And when I saw this, I reached out to Rob literally the day I saw it. And I said, Rob, let's talk about this because this is so timely. He's the author of a book called The Case for Better Meat: Sacred Cow, which is brilliant. It's also documentary. Rob, please say hi to everyone.

Hi everyone. Hope you all are doing well.

Rob, I feel like your passion— remind everyone how you got into health because I feel like you, like me, got into this out of necessity, right, Rob? Yeah.

Yeah. 23 years ago, I was very sick. Ulcerative colitis, bad enough that I was facing a bowel resection, which basically they go in and trim out parts of the real estate that you really would rather not have removed. And at the time I was eating a high carb, low fat vegan diet. And I think that a vegan diet can work wonderfully for some people. For me, it didn't. I have celiac disease, which is an autoimmune gluten reactivity. And I just, I don't do that well with a lot of carbs, a lot of fiber. I'm not 100% carnivore, but over time I've grown in that direction and I've found a lot of success with that. I went on to co-found the first and fourth CrossFit affiliate gyms in the world and ended up working for CrossFit for a number of years. If people like CrossFit, they think that's cool. If they hate CrossFit, then I'm kind of like the guy that spread herpes on a college campus by helping to promote all that stuff. But I've worked with people. I was on the Naval Special Warfare Resiliency Committee for about 8 years where I went and spoke to the Navy SEALs, their, the special boat teams, and then also their families about sleep and food and circadian biology and whatnot. And I've worked with Olympic athletes, but really the people that I bonded with the most are people like me, folks that had really complex gut and autoimmune issues. They ran the gamut of standard medical interventions and they were maybe helped a little bit, but they were still sick. Ultimately, they still had a lot of problems and those are really my people. I think that there's lots of ways to lose weight. I think there's lots of ways to get skinny, but when you get these really complex gut and autoimmune diseases, I think that one's options are very limited. And interestingly, what I find to be particularly effective there is this kind of ketogenic, lower carb, maybe carnivore-ish type approach. And I've found nothing in the world superior to that, to the tune that I've actually made some challenges with some of the prominent vegan doctors out there that also work in the same space, that we would take 100 people and we would gut and autoimmune conditions. They treat them, I treat them, and whichever one of us wins, the other one closes up shop, disappears off the internet, can't do health and wellness ever again. Basically like a Gracie UFC challenge. And nobody has taken me— nobody's taken me up on that yet. So I'm pretty confident that this is a really effective way of doing things, but I always use it as a beginning place. It's not a religious doctrine for me. It's of like playing darts. I think that this kind of ancestral health model, it'll get most people about 85% to the bullseye, and then we'll need to figure out what we need to do to get each individual person to that bullseye.

I love that. And you mentioned a word there that maybe we can play with ancestral health.

Yeah.

I feel like I've been blessed and it was the gift of COVID I don't know why that as much as I was doing the podcast beforehand, I was doing it in Malibu back in the day. And have people come out to Malibu, Mark Sisson, all this kind of stuff, Brooke Burke. And it was fun, but because of Zoom, and now we've got this kind of technology where the quality's even better, it feels like you're right there. And now we've— I've spoken to everyone. Dr. Paul Salad, incredible book, The Carnivore Code, right? Sisson wrote the introduction to. Mark's dear friend, love Mark, and he's the creator of Primal Kitchen. And I love avocados, and he's made mayo and salad dressings from that. And now, He is the one that told me about this ancestral way of being, because he wrote these books, the Primal Methods and all that. He's known as the godfather, I think the godfather of that revolution. You're really the science behind all that. Take us down memory lane. Take us back a couple hundred thousand years as a species, because I think if we look at anthropology and we look at what we did as a species, is this where a lot of the logic comes from? Because when I talk to whether it's a celebrity You know, I worked with Khloe Kardashian on Revenge Body and I love Kim Kardashian. I think they're great, but I feel like they're very intelligent people out there, even people like Bill Gates that maybe forgot this part of just putting together 1 and 1 equaling 2. Because if you were to share a few minutes of our species, it makes sense that our bodies are designed based on— I know Mark Sisson says you can go back up to 2 million years and we kind of have a similar diet up until maybe 10,000 or so years ago. Take us through what happened then, but take us back to what we were doing because as a species, as a race of humans, it seems that our bodies have adapted for a way of eating that you just said is very simple. And I think that's your argument in The Sacred Cow to some degree. It's just following this ancestral blueprint, shall we call it, or take it away. Yeah.

Yeah. It's something that is oftentimes more accessible for people. Interestingly, when talking about species-appropriate nutrition is actually not talking about humans first. So I live in Montana and we have grizzly bears here and we have a Yellowstone National Park. And there are prominent signs whenever you go into these parks and natural areas, don't feed the animals. And there's multiple reasons for this. One of the reasons is that they don't want these huge powerful animals to become used to obtaining food from humans because then they associate humans with food and then the humans may become food. And every once in a while somebody, yes, somebody gets So that's a big deal. But another deeper part of this is that when humans feed these animals non-appropriate food, these animals get sick. These animals develop type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease and all kinds of different problems. We see this a lot in zoos. Like my daughters watch a lot of these zoo pro— Secrets of the Zoo, where they— it's like a veterinary show where they look at the way that animals are managed.. And I had my girls write into the producers of the show and ask them why, given that all these animals have all these digestive issues and all these different health issues, why don't they try to feed them a more species-appropriate diet? We actually got a really thoughtful response and that they're actually moving that direction over time because many people have written in and said, hey, you're feeding these chimpanzees biscuits that have like wheat and sugar and all that stuff. And maybe once in a while You could do that, but you're giving it to them every day, and clearly this isn't part of their ancestral diet. And this makes sense for folks when we talk about it in terms of like bears and chimpanzees and elephants and stuff like that. And we see examples very quickly in these like vet— veterinary, like, reality shows when they change the diet of an animal to a more species-appropriate diet, magical things happen for the animal's health. With people though, it's weird. Folks are like, I don't know what humans are supposed to eat. And humans over the course of at least a couple of million years have evolved as hunter-gatherers. And depending on where on the planet and what resources are there, some hunter-gatherer groups ate prodigious amounts of meat. Others ate larger amounts of plants depending on what time of the year and what location. People who lived closer to the equator, or there tended to be more plant material available. All year round, folks that migrated closer to the poles where there's more seasonal variation, like the Inuit or around the Arctic Circle, very little plant material. And what— but the one interesting thing that seems to emerge out of that is when these folks ate a largely whole, minimally processed diet, an ancestral diet that was appropriate to the location that they were in, very little in the way of what we would consider modern degenerative disease. They weren't overweight, they weren't diabetic, they didn't that have gut and autoimmune issues. And then as these folks started to incorporate westernized foods, sugars, refined flours, seed oils, all that type of stuff, we saw a shift in their health. And what's confusing about this is in the online world, it boils down to like high carb versus low carb usually. And it's that the high carb camp is usually vegan and the lower carb camp is carnivore-esque, or at least meat inclusive. And I think that really misses the mark. I think that In general, humans should be able to exist on a really wide variety of foods. I think that some people like myself, if you get some funky gut issues and health issues, then you may end up getting more along one track versus another and end up doing much better on a lower carb side of things. But I think that getting into the diet wars is actually a distraction. The big story here is that if we focus on minimally processed whole foods, And then pay attention to how do we look, how do we feel, how do we perform when we eat a particular way. We can figure out how to steer things in the direction that we need, but we start with that kind of minimally processed diet with an eye towards the way that, that our species evolved. And what goes along with that is strong community, being outside and getting sun on our skin and good circadian entrainment so that we're living in synchrony with the light-dark cycles. Some thought about our gut microbiome. And the importance of the bacteria that live in us and on us. Those things all go into this kind of ancestral health model.

It's incredible. And the thing that happened only— what I know, the debates, I've heard some people say 7,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago. I watched the Marvel Comics movie, The Eternals. Did you ever see that show with Jolie where they came from space and they taught us all these things? And that was about 7,000 years ago and they taught us agriculture. And that's just a movie, obviously, but somehow there is an overlay approximately. Is that about right, Rob? Tell us what happened. Something happened less than 10,000 or so years ago, right? Where we started to not be nomads and we started to plant seeds in the ground. But up until then, we were, as you said, hunters. And I've heard gatherers. They say we gathered. The debate is what did we gather? And I've heard people say it was more like toads and crickets and newts, more animals still. Creeps, not so much berries. Berries. I've never seen a berry grow that I could eat anywhere. Like I walk around San Diego, LA, New York. There aren't any berries I'd eat. I don't know what I would gather. Hunt, I get. I've seen animals I could, when I lived in Malibu, there were deer in the backyard. So things like that. I get that. And obviously they could attack you or scratch you, but once you get them, you can eat them and it's safe, I think. What was that transition? Take us at that point because then I always, I love Dr. James D. Nicolantonio. He talks about how only 100 or so years ago we invented the next thing, which was the refrigerator, which then allowed us to do a whole other way of living. Because before, if we were eating protein, we added salt. And I know we love salt, you and I. But take us back 10,000. Tell us about a little bit with meat and salt, right? Because we had to preserve it. And then 100 years ago, this thing called the refrigerator. And then I think our history class is complete because then let's talk about Kim Kardashian. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah.

Kim is the, the end of history. Yeah. Yeah. At least 15,000 years ago, all humans on the planet were living as foragers, as hunter-gatherers.

Say that one more time. That's a profound statement, please.

Yeah. There's very little debate that at least 15,000 years ago, all humans on the planet lived as hunter-gatherers, or we would call them. And again, I think that depending on where on the planet people are or were, their diet would be made up of different things. And some of the early descriptions of the gathering part— and this comes from more like Paul Saladino— where a lot of what was gathered was actually small animals, wood, newts, and turtles and different things like that. It was always assumed to be plant material, but that's not necessarily the case. And this is some of the updating that science always goes through. But somewhere around 10,000 years ago, in at least 3 places, a transition began to occur. And it was the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, somewhere in the middle areas of China, and then also in the Americas, in, in Central and South America, the Proto-Incan and Mayan civilizations. People started shifting away from exclusively a hunter-gatherer foraging type of existence and started moving into an agricultural existence where we would really rely strongly on a few kind of starchy crops. Like in the Americas, it was more corn and potato type crops. In China, it was more of a rice-based and to some degree sorghum, although the sorghum was much more prominent in kind of Africa and the Middle East, but Africa and the Middle East, it was more wheat, rye, sorghum, those types of cereal grains.

Yeah.

But there was a massive transition that occurred and people ceased to move around for the most part. And we also had mixed into this pastoralists, like if people get into biblical type reading and understanding, then you had hunter-gatherers. You also had pastoralists who are people who move animals around. So they're not in one place. Uh, they're not, they are eating the animals, but they're not going out hunting the animals. They're actually stewarding the animals. And so sheep and goats and cattle and all that type of stuff. So important to mention that pastoralists are a piece of that.

15,000 years ago, Rob, just remind us that the time—

Pastoralism probably started about the time that agriculture did. And I'm, I'm not a huge expert on that stuff, but probably more like that 7,000 to 10,000 years ago that we started seeing both pastoralists and agriculturalists. And somebody listening will be an expert on that and they'll set us straight as to the, uh, there you go, the real dates. But those are the rough demarcations. Ah, and one thing that's important to mention is that every time someone puts a date and draws a line in the sand with the date, they're like, there were only hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago. Then we find a site where people are processing grains or, or legumes or something that's 18,000 years old. So those dates keep getting pushed back. But yeah, by and large, the artifacts that we find and the evidence that we see is that for the most part, people were hunter-gatherers, foragers up until about 10,000 years ago. And then we started seeing a transition, like in North America. Other than the Pueblo Indians that were in the desert Southwest, like most of North America was still largely in that hunter-gatherer forager kind of experience up until maybe a couple of hundred years ago. And there's some exceptions, like Chickasaw had developed some pretty sophisticated— Chickasaw, Choctaw had developed some pretty sophisticated agriculture. The Three Sisters, the corn, the beans, and squash all grown together because They provide complete protein, they help renutrify the soil, but they were also still in that transitional period of hunters and gatherers and whatnot. But the, the big, the change from hunting and gathering to agriculture was a massive change. And we see some definite, I guess, artifacts of that in the archaeological record. People got shorter, people had many more dental issues, the infant mortality rates appeared to skyrocket by comparison to hunter-gatherers. And that was largely our situation up until pretty recently in history. Like the average lifespan had dropped. Within hunter-gatherers, the, if you neglected high infant mortality rate, they were about as likely to live into their 70s as we are in modern times. Like pretty, pretty remarkable health, but a very high infant mortality rate. That actually got worse during agriculture. So this is worth mentioning. People will say, well, if hunter-gatherers only lived this long, why would I want to eat that way? When they— when folks developed agricultural practices, it actually lost about another 10 years. Like in the Roman era, the average lifespan was like in the 20s. So it was a very short period of time because of the low quality of the food, people living on top of each other without The benefit of antibiotics and modern medicine and understanding that if you pee and poo in your water, that it's going to kill you and your neighbors and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Those were all huge transitions, but it's worth arguing, and you alluded to this, the last 100 years have really seen the most rapid change that we've ever experienced in our history.

Does it start with the refrigerator? Would you agree? Possibly? Possibly.

I don't know that it, that was a big piece of it because, but we started refining food en masse. We had huge amounts of grains that we started processing in ways that we had never really processed. We started getting huge amounts of seed oils. We started getting large amounts of sugar. And like around the 1940s, 1950s is where all this stuff really started taking off. A bunch of the innovation that occurred during World War II And prior to World War II, there's this thing called the Haber-Bosch process, which is a method of taking a lot of energy from burning fossil fuels and then taking nitrogen out of the atmosphere and making ammonia, which can be used as fertilizer, which is fantastic for growing food, or you can make bombs and ammunition with it, which was part of the reason why it was developed during wartime. And then after wartime, we're sitting on this ability to make huge amounts of ammonia. And prior to that, people would go go and mine different islands that were built out of bird droppings over millions of years. So guano from bats and birds and whatnot were mined to be used for both ammunition explosives be, and, and also as fertilizer. But when we figured out this Haber-Bosch process, we were able to manufacture nitrogen fertilizer and nitrogen-based explosives in, in a way that we had never been able to do before. And that was a beginning of this massive industrialization of our food system. This, began a shift that around 2007, nobody knows the exact date on this, but somewhere around 2007 at a global level, more people began dying from chronic degenerative diseases of affluence than were dying from deficiency diseases like starvation and malaria, infectious disease throughout all of history prior to that, that rough date of around 2007. Malnutrition, undernutrition, and disease, infectious disease were the number one killers of humans on the planet. But somewhere around that time, we reached this point where the human diet had gotten sufficiently bad. And also as a planet, as a people on this planet, we have become sufficiently wealthy that we can feed ourselves in such a way that people get sick enough to die, not from infectious disease, not from malnutrition, but from overnutrition. And that really, it's the refined sugars, the refined flours, the, when one walks into a supermarket, an average supermarket has something like 55,000 different food-like items in it. And the vast majority of it is this highly processed, long shelf life stuff that doesn't remotely look like anything that our grandparents would even know what to make sense of. It's like our grandparents, it's like ketchup, mayonnaise, maybe hot sauce, and it, that's about it. Yeah. Whereas now we, there's this product now, what's called a power law. And a power law is where highly intense things happen very infrequently and then less intense things happen in a longer kind of curve. And there's all kinds of things in the natural world that follow a power law. But when, several decades ago, looked at the way that addiction occurs with things like cocaine and whatnot. If you put— so there's a whole— all kinds of interesting stuff with this. If you have animals, particularly mice, that are in an enriched environment, they have a lot of interesting stuff going on, they don't get addicted to cocaine in the water. They have more meaning in their life, right? Yeah, yeah, they have more meaning in their life. If they're in an environment in which they're cognitively not stimulated, then it's very easy to get addicted. But if you really want to addict them, You don't have a consistent amount of cocaine in the water. You have a little bit, sometimes a lot other times, and you randomize it. And then each time the mouse goes back to the water, it's, ooh, is this a big one or a little one this time? And that anticipatory piece is what really drives this. And this is where we're at the modern apex of the industrialization of our food system, where we have these food scientists that really understand our evolutionary biology. Like all of this stuff is informed by an understanding of ancestral health of our hunter-gatherer past.

That's why they're doing it.

But they're using it in a way to make a shitload of money off of us because, and we're being honest here, right, Rob?

We're really being honest that they're, they know what we know, but they're using it. I don't wanna say this is like Star Wars, but like it's the dark side.

It is. So he, here's a funny thing. Here's kind, it's funny, but in a gallows humor sort of way. When I wrote this letter to the folks about the Doritos Roulette and I asked them about the power law deal. I didn't expect to get a response back at all, but it was only 2 days later and this very nice woman wrote me back and she's like, hey Rob, first I've gotta tell you, all of the scientists here are huge fans of yours. They love your work. And I was like, oh wow. And then she went on to say, yeah, it definitely does follow a power law and everything. These folks who work for these giant companies that, that's a freedom, they're writing you.

Yeah.

Yeah. So the people who are producing this junk food, these engineered foods, really understand the neuroregulation of appetite. They really understand what causes us to overeat and why that is, why our current food environment is so different from the environment that we evolved in and why that could really be a challenge going forward. They understand this at a really high sophisticated level. And then most doctors, most dietitians, most gatekeepers that are supposed to protect us and our health have no idea what we're talking about. Like they mentioning the neuroregulation of appetite or ancestral health, or they'll just, oh, that's a fad diet. That's this, that's that. So the people who are profiteering from this stuff really understand this material at a super high level. And then the people who are supposed to be protecting us, protecting our health, don't understand this material at all. It's like it doesn't exist.

Yeah. That, that would traditionally be nutritionists. Who are these protectors out there? Because I feel like you're leading—

doctors, dietitians as well.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I feel like you're part of that, but I know you're more, you're not the traditional nutritionist, right, Rob? You're, you don't think of yourself as that, do you? Or do you? Maybe.

No.

In a, in the post-COVID world, most of what I talk about is fake news. Is conspiracy theories. It's not— there's plenty of randomized control trials that I can pull that support what my backing is for this, but it's definitely not within the accepted mainstream dogma. It's what are we told to do? Eat less, move more. And this is something that I'll give a hat tip to CrossFit for. There was a movement maybe about 6 years ago, 8 years ago, it might have been even a little bit longer, but the exercise as medicine movement, which was basically this idea that the government was gonna pay for a personal trainer for everybody who's overweight, which sounds good on the surface, but the details, the devil is in the details. The thing was, is that this was all gonna be sponsored by Coca-Cola, basically. And Coca-Cola, within the, uh, exercise as medicine story, You were allowed to drink up to 6 sweetened beverages per day was okay. You just needed to offset that with an appropriate amount of exercise. But I don't know what it would be.

This is crazy.

It would be illegal. It would be illegal for a dietitian or a trainer to mention that maybe those 6 sweetened Beverages that you're drinking could be problematic for your health. Unfortunately, all of that stuff got scuttled, but this is— there's a bunch of stuff that I could think about with that, but we'll both get canceled if I talk about that too much. But it's— this is some of the stuff that we're— on the one hand is, oh, a personal trainer for everybody. It sounds great. Maybe. And particularly problematic.

Coke, basically.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so this was turning into the— there's this process called regulatory capture where industry has captured elements of the government in such a way that, that they get to do whatever they want to do. And it's, again, it brings up these topics of like capitalism and socialism and things that get people really angry and difficult to talk about at a high level. But th— this is stuff that is happening within the food system. And I know you wanted to talk about like Kim Kardashian, like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat and all this type of stuff. Yeah.

It's, can we dive into that, Rob? Because I wanna show everyone, this is what's on Kim K's And I love her. I love their family. I've met them.

She's a wonderful person. Yeah.

They're incredible, caring people. Kris Jenner. I've worked with all of them. They're phenomenal people. I love them. And I know I've never met Bill Gates, but I know he's a very smart man. And I'm saying he and Kim are very much in this. There's a new type of synthetic processed plant now. And now it's protein. But here, I'll show everyone a clip of this. Yeah, yeah.

So much of the mission of Beyond Meat that I've stepped in to help with my greatest asset, my taste. This plant-based meat is not only amazingly delicious, but it's also better for you and better for the planet. It's a simple change that makes a really big difference. Oh, wow. And now that I'm Beyond Meat's chief taste consultant, There's never been a better time to go beyond. I believe so much in the mission.

All right. So Beyond Meat, that's what Kim Kardashian's talking about. There's the other meat that Bill Gates talks about. Tell us, what are these meats, Rob? And the honest truth is I heard what she says. It's better for the planet. It's better for us. I'll let you take it from there.

And that all would be awesome if it was true. And that's where if you're concerned about climate change, Let me try to use an analogy here. If we were, if each of us was a neurosurgeon, we're going to perform brain surgery on someone and the person is going to live or die based off of our success. You know, how good we are at doing this stuff. How likely are we to do this properly if we put on some goggles that turn the world upside down? And backwards. So each time I move my right hand to the right, it looks like it's going to the left, and my left hand to the left. So it basically spins our worldview. It, it, like our likelihood of success is completely very unlikely there. I'm gonna suggest here, and I'm, I'll try to build a case for it. I, I don't want people to believe me just because you and I are friends and we get along well and we, we do a decent horse and pony show, but I just wanna suggest that maybe these very smart, very wealthy, very influential people might have this wrong. Bill Gates might have this wrong. Kim Kardashian might have this wrong. And I'm gonna try to support that without character assassinating them or doing anything like that. Let's just deal with some facts. But these meat alternatives fall into a couple of different categories. One category is basically taking the products of industrial row crop production. Making grains, making legume like beans, basically growing.

So what this, this meat is made out of, it's made out of, go ahead.

Corn, soy protein, soy oil. If you look at the ingredients, I should pull up the ingredients here, but it, it's a, it's super impressive.

People are thinking these are carbs, they're not proteins. How do they make it protein?

So we can pull protein outta corn. We can pull protein outta soybeans, like soy protein isolate. Sometimes people will, like vegan bodybuilders will use that type of stuff. So we Any plant, particularly something like a soybean, will have protein. It'll have carbs and it'll have fat. So just the soybean is maybe a good one to look at. We can pull the soybean oil out of that, which can be used for cooking and can be used as a food additive. It can be hydrogenated, which isn't good for it, which improves the shelf life. We have the soy protein, which can be again used in a variety of ways. Sometimes people do— tofu is made out of soy protein. That is basically making a cheese out of a soy milk is effectively the way that happens. And then we've got some carbohydrate that is part of the soybean. So you can build a lot of different interesting stuff out of protein, carbs, and fat. That's what all of our food is made from. And this is one of the supposed promises of something like a very legume-based diet is it's got some protein, it's got some carbs, it's got some fat. And I do think for a lot of people that could be part of a decent, ancestrally informed diet. I think you can overdo that and it can be problematic for a lot of people. And historically, folks have eaten legumes, they soak them for a day or two, rinse the water off, allow them to sprout, and then they eat them. This does all kinds of interesting stuff. It helps to break down some of the anti-nutrients that are in the legumes that can cause gut and autoimmune issues. It begins breaking down the proteins. It helps break down the carbohydrates. And so traditional cultures that have eaten a lot of legumes like beans and lentils, they traditionally have soaked and sprouted those. And in the modern era, we don't do that at all with these types of foods. Even grains traditionally were soaked and sprouted for the most part. So things like Ezekiel bread and, oh gosh, the sourdough bread is an example where it's fermentation is allowed to occur and that helps to break down some of the gluten and all that type of stuff. So, there's all these traditional methods. This is where like the paleo diet concept is great, but there are traditional methods of using these grains and legumes that I think really improve the nutritional value of them and can make them more accessible to a lot of people. But these Impossible Foods, Impossible Burger, Beyond Burger, Beyond Meat, Beyond Meat, they're built out of extracting protein, carbohydrate, fat, and different chemicals out of plant materials to make these foods. And when you look at the constituents that are in there, it's soybean oil, soy protein, and some highly processed materials. And even within the dietetics community, when you look at what is in there, there's some questions about, is this actually healthy? Because it's highly processed food. What these things are missing are essential fats, iron, zinc, Magnesium, potassium, the things that we would actually get from animal product foods and also to some degree plant product foods. But the, there's a bunch of nutrition there that just doesn't exist. So when Kim says this is better for you, that's really dubious because it's lacking a bunch of the nutrition that we would get from real meat. When she says this is better for the planet, there's been a life cycle analysis comparing Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat type things with say like the White Oak Pastures grass-fed beef. And at the end of the day, when you pasture raise animals, it is a net carbon sink. It pulls more carbon out of the atmosphere and puts it in the soil than you produce in the, in that whole process. And what was really interesting is it was the same company, and this was Impossible Foods, I believe, that was comparing with White Oak Pastures. But to carbon offset eating one Impossible Burger, you needed to eat one White Oak Pastures grass-fed beef. And it, it was a wash because it was like the White Oak Pastures sequestered like 4, 4 units of carbon and the, the Impossible Burger released 4 units of carbon and eating both of 'em was basically a, a wash. Something that's important to mention here is that it's well understood that this industrial row crop food system process that is used to make Beyond Burger and Impossible Foods and whatnot. We know that has an expiration date on it. That is destroying the topsoil of our farmlands. We need a regenerative practice that includes animals and plants being used in synchrony. It's very— again, all of our great-grandparents probably lived on a farm that did something like this where they used both plants and animals, but It's well understood that these things produce more carbon footprint than pastured meat. They damage the topsoil. So the claim that it's better for the environment is really not accurate. And it, these companies have been taken to task on this point, but they still are allowed to make this claim. In this time where people are very concerned about social justice topics and whatnot, and it absolutely rightfully so, these Impossible Foods, Beyond Burger type items are portrayed as some sort of a better alternative to meat. But the interesting thing is that both of the Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger, when you buy like a 1-pound container of it, it is twice as expensive as grass-fed pastured meat. A, a poor family, someone living at the margins, like how is— people will oftentimes say meat's too expensive for people to eat, but this Impossible Foods is twice as expensive as just pastured meat. And I would argue that it's not sustainable the way that they claim. It's not remotely healthy the way that they claim. Like, some animal feeding studies have been done where they feed animals exclusively the stuff and the animals get sick and ultimately would end up dying because they're not getting full nutrition from these products. And again, if people wanna drop this in as part of their overall diet and they just like them or they wanna do it, that's great. But I just wouldn't— the claim that this is better for you is inaccurate. Like, it's just, I don't know how to mince words with that. It's inaccurate. It is not more nutritious for people to eat these synthetic meat options versus real meat, and it's not better for the environment. And this has been independently verified in what's called a life cycle analysis. But just as a quick aside, Bill Gates is now the largest owner of single owner of farmland in the United States. Wow. And that farmland that he owns is perfectly positioned for producing the raw materials that go into these synthetic meat products. And what's, and that's what he's doing with this land, Rob. That's absolutely what he's doing with this land. Such a, and it's been a dark story.

I wanna say this is so dark side. I feel like, I know you have a rebellion, you lead literally a health rebellion, right? I'm definitely on board with all this as I feel. And I'm not, I look at Bill Gates and I know when you were on Joe Rogan recently, and Joe Rogan has said this various times, I don't think just with you about Bill Gates. He gets in a rant. Have you seen him rant about to take advice from someone like Bill Gates? Very smart guy, but not a very fit guy. I don't think he could do any CrossFit. This poor man looked— I don't want to say he's overweight and obese, but he's definitely not. He has belly fat.

If Bill Gates was driving his own car and it slid off the road and he had to scramble up an embankment to save his own life, Yes. Not super likely it's gonna work for him. He's not a, yeah. Yeah. He'd be in a pickle.

Now Kim Kardashian, she looks great. I know she works out. Yeah. I know her trainer. She does well. And I saw her eat a little meat sometimes, even though she's vegan and she makes fun of herself. I saw a new episode on Hulu and I love their show. And I know she's such an advocate and such an intelligent woman. I feel like if she was right here and we're saying, hey Kim, Hey, we love you. We know you're so smart. What would we tell her right now, Rob? Just if you had a minute in her ear, if you had a little bug in her ear or Bill Gates, what would we tell these incredibly intelligent people?

One, I wouldn't try to tell them anything first. I would want to ask them, what do you feel like is the most compelling piece here? Is it the ethics piece, like the ethics of raising and eating animals? And what are the moving parts of that? Are you most concerned about issues around climate change, like methane release and animals? I would really try to understand what their primary concerns are, because then we could go back and say, okay, on this methane topic, the methane that is released from animal husbandry, from growing animals, is a tiny fraction of what's released in producing fossil fuels. And there, there was a great study that looked at if we removed removed all animal husbandry from the United States and we only ate plants. You can't forget that raising these row crops, raising the legumes, raising the corn also releases methane and greenhouse gases. So it's not like it, no one talks, they present it as is. No one talks. Yeah. Nobody talks about that.

But it would be, why do I feel like you mentioned it possibly in this book and in your documentary?

We possibly mentioned that in there. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so it's an important thing. So if we removed removed all animals from the equation of food production in the United States, it would reduce our carbon footprint in total less than 2%. Like it's barely a dent in things. And then it's important to understand that the methane and the carbon dioxide released by these animals, it's part of a cycle. So when an animal eats grass, when a cow eats grass, that grass is made of carbon. That it pulled out of the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide to build the plant. And then the cow eats that, and as part of the breakdown of that plant, some of it gets released as methane because of the bacterial fermentation of the, the cellulose that's part of the plant, and that goes back into the atmosphere. And methane is a potent greenhouse gas, but it only has about a 10-year half-life in the atmosphere when ultraviolet radiation hits that methane. It tends to split into carbon dioxide and water, and then it becomes part of a cycle.

Yeah.

Peat bogs produce huge amounts of methane. Shellfish produce huge amounts of methane. Termites produce huge amounts of methane. And I think that people have gotten what I and my co-author Diana Rogers are calling carbon tunnel vision. They get so focused just on the carbon release and the methane release that we forget that there's all these other bigger issues at play there. So if I had to cheat, if I had to ask you, Yeah.

If I had an hour with him, I know a lot of people have that heart where the earth is in trouble currently. It's not like we're making it better or worse. It's just bad right now. And so they want, I know they want to help. I think that's why Bill Gates does it. I think, I think, I hope.

I think he's super jazzed on making a lot of money. And he might, he might, here's a funny thing. And this is just a quick aside, but Bill Gates, there's a great soundbite piece where he's talking about how he started investing in vaccines and vaccine research about 15 years ago. And he said that was the best investment. He's made more money off of vaccine investment than he's made off of software. And now he is a very, shall we say, he's an entrepreneur and I don't begrudge him that, but it's, he knows. So, they want to run food as intellectual property, like software.

Wow.

And so, things like Impossible Burger. Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat, you can own the IP of that stuff and you can run it up in, in publicly traded format and potentially make huge amounts of money. What is interesting so far is that they've been unable to make those things a financial success despite huge amounts of money, huge investments of effort, because at the end of the day, that stuff is still massively processed and requires a huge amount of inputs to produce it. Again, And these things cost twice as much per pound as like your grass-finished pastured meat. So it's, there's some, there's something missing there. But if I had an hour with Kim Kardashian, I would spend at least 31 minutes asking her questions. Oh, what are your thoughts here? What are you thinking? And then I would ask, are you open to exploring some alternative ways of looking and thinking about this? And I can support it with with data and facts and whatnot.

If there was one study we would give Kim Kardashian, one research study that I'm sure you've mentioned or is mentioned and highlighted in here, is there one that everyone should read? We could put in the show notes that you could share. What's a quintessential, even call it—

so a good one would be the White Oak Pastures Life Cycle Analysis where it compares, I believe, impossible.

And tell everyone this is because I know what this is, but tell them what this name is.

Yeah. A life cycle analysis is where they look at every single input. So let's talk about a pencil really quick. There's this great—

tell them what White Oak Pastures is too, Rob, the White Pastures.

So White Oak Pastures is the regenerative ranching operation in Georgia that has been really well studied looking at their carbon footprint. Basically everything that they do has been looked at the tractors they use, the composting. It's a couple of million dollars for every life cycle analysis. It's a very expensive process, but they try to look at every conceivable thing that you could think of that goes into this whole process. And they compared and contrasted the production of a pound of grass-fed meat at White Oak Pastures versus a pound of— I believe it was Impossible Burger, but it might have been Beyond Burger. I forget which one it was. But they compared and contrasted them. And the white oak pastures removes more carbon out of the atmosphere than it releases, whereas the Beyond Burger releases more carbon into the environment than it is sequestered in that process. So when they claim that it's sustainable, that's completely false. That is a lie. Like that is just scientifically inaccurate. And that's a good spot to at least, if people are listening to this, they're like, I don't know, Rob's this balding middle-aged weirdo that has a tick and you know what? Fine, fine. All that stuff is reasonable.

Why do I know you have a flat stomach and shall we even call it a sick—

okay. Good liposuction. There's always an excuse. There's always, but all I would throw out there is—

Looking good.

Yeah. But all I would throw out there is that if you have questions about this stuff, if you really are concerned about climate change and the environment and everything, which all of us should be, then if you have this one crack in the story, The white oak pasture meat puts more carbon underground than it releases. The Impossible Burger releases far more carbon than it sequesters.

Game over. Yeah.

At least that should open the door to questioning everything like that. That should be a credible enough thing to, because again, if we are trying to perform brain surgery on the planet to save it, to save its life, to save our own life.

I mean, in theory, yeah.

We can't do it with oven mitts on. We can't do it with funny funhouse goggles that make everything backwards. What we're being told right now is that the Impossible Burger is healthier for us and that it's better for the environment. And I can easily show that is factually incorrect, that it's a lie, or, and I don't wanna, I don't wanna say lie. It's inaccurate. And we can show that it's inaccurate. Inaccurate. And if that is inaccurate, then what else potentially is inaccurate about the story? And I just want to encourage people, if you like me, if you like my work, that's great, but don't believe me based off of that. Go and dig into the material and assess it for yourself.

Yeah.

And will you send that to us, Rob? And we'll include it in the show notes.

Absolutely.

Please. The White Oak. It's called the White Oak.

Pastures.

The White Oak Pastures. Yep.

And then it's, and then the, and was a study.

It's a life cycle analysis. Perfect.

All right. We'll have that, guys, at zerohungerguy.com. Let's do this. Let's end with the solution. Things are messy, obviously, but I think the message is what the heck do we eat? And I remember you simplified this maybe in our first podcast we did. Remember you talked to me about a ribeye? If there was one food that is a perfect food, take it away, Rob, because I don't know if you still believe the ribeye is the perfect food, but I buy them in bulk at Costco. And then remember, You also are the guy that taught me or shared with us on the show here that as much as grass-fed is nice and better for the earth, possibly, that because it can be a little more money than the non-grass-fed. I know at Costco it's a couple bucks, $10 more bucks, but is that critical or not? But tell us what the ideal food is. And I hate to say it's the ribeye, but is it still considered one of your best foods?

Ribeye is a tough one to improve on because it has enough fat that you, you could, the fat protein ratio is perfect such that you could just eat that and eat nothing else. And we have examples of people.

That's what I do.

90% of the time.

Isn't that crazy?

Yeah. Yeah. And they taste amazing.

Yeah.

We have people that have, have done basically what I call one-cut carnivore, which is eating a ribeye for 30 years. There's a, oh gosh, what's her name? There's, oh gosh, what's her name? Just super good looking, great shape.

I tell everyone when you eat that kind of food, the protein, the fat, I do OMAD, the acronym one meal a day. We've talked about that many a times. It gives you the ability to have, I mean, as we call the show, Zero Hunger Guy, really quells hunger. You would agree, Rob?

Yep. Yep. Absolutely. So that, that lower carb, some intermittent fasting, it just is magic for reducing hunger, for getting in that zero hunger state. Eventually, you get hungry. You haven't eaten for a day. You'll be like, "Oh, I'm hungry." But the thing is that you're not Meltdown McGillicuddy. You're not shaking. You're not about ready to go into a rage. You're kind of like, "Okay. Yeah, I'm ready to eat and I'll be happy when I eat." But it's very different than being hangry where you are a threat to yourself and the people around you. And that's the way I was the first 27 years of my life. I was just in a constant carb roller coaster. I was usually coming off of a carb high and then bottoming out. And when I would bottom out, it was terrible. And so this is where the higher protein, higher fat, intermittent fasting, zero hunger approach, doing zero hunger water to get your electrolytes all buttoned up and everything. Like, it just, it's the closest damn thing to magic that there is in the nutritional world. There's a lot of hokum, more protein, better fat, and for some people they get by with a few more carbs and they still are satiated. Like, my wife is Italian. She can eat a little bit more carbs and still be fine with that. I'm not. And so I don't because I want to, I want zero hunger in my life. So I do still think that, that, that ribeye is a fascinating, like ideal model. If you only had one food that you could take with you on a spaceship or something, that might be it. Right. That might be the one. Yeah. Ribeye might be the one. And then you're on that.

People are scared of the fat and all that, but tell them why it's good for our bodies, the collagen. It's just the perfect food. And I think people know at this stage of the life of them following what we've been talking about. Out that fat makes you healthy. Fat doesn't make you fat if it's not a vegetable seed oil, Rob.

Yeah.

Vegetable seed oils are inflammatory, but healthy animal fats, including even maybe butter, put a little butter on that ribeye and a little salt.

Yeah.

And are we smiling? Are we smiling, Rob? Right?

Yeah. Yeah. You know what's funny about that is in research circles, say if they're feeding animals a high-fat diet, cornmeal with sugar mixed with hydrogenated soybean oil, and they put it into a pellet to feed these animals. It's the most processed food you could possibly imagine. And when we look at most of the high-fat foods that folks eat, they're not— it's not a ribeye. It's like a Hot Pocket or taquitos or something. It's junk carbs. With junk fat, with a bunch of spices. It's the Dorito roulette thing. It's this hyperpalatable mix of foods. And so this is where just saying like high carb, high fat, it, it's a little bit of a mythnomer. It's easy to turn it into religious doctrine and drive stuff off the rails.

But, and if we ended on this, what are people missing in this argument, Rob? I know we're running outta time, but if there's anything people are missing in this, I hate to call it the food wars, but it seems like to save the planet for better health, there's a war going on. Yeah. There's the, I don't wanna say the dark side and then like the healthy rebellion, but there's this war, very Star Wars-like, dark and light. But what are people missing in this?

Maybe it's more Harry Potter and Voldemort or something like that. It's pretty, pretty, pretty powerful. But yeah, my perspective on this, and I really think it's both an emotional perspective, but I think I could support this scientifically also. Is what folks are missing is that this is a struggle between industrialized globalist food policy and practices like Bill Gates, BlackRock, Monsanto. There's basically 6 companies in the world that produce about 95% of the calories that humanity eats. And these folks are trying to expand their reach and expand their control over the food. What I'm advocating for is a decentralized kind of libertarian-esque approach to food. I think people in Ecuador and Peru should have very different food practices and food systems than people in Montreal. And it's not that we don't have international trade. Like, I'm, I'm not that person that thinks that it's necessarily bad that we import avocados from Mexico and stuff like that. I think that stuff is fantastic. But I do think that we're in this struggle where meat is being vilified. All of these, this is why we called the book Sacred Cow, that it's this, it's just thrown out there that meat is the cause of poor health, that it's the cause of climate change, that it's unethical to eat it. All this stuff is laid on it and it may be entirely wrong. The, all those claims and it, it's being used to gain further control over our food system.

System.

And we talked a fair amount about that. And what a wonderful way to wrap and package the expansion of industrial row crop food system by getting one of the most beautiful influential women in the world, Kim Kardashian, to get in and become the, the chief taste officer for this product. And you give her stamp of approval on this, like it, it's a genius move. Maybe it's not the good move for the planet. Maybe it's not the good move for everybody writ large in this story. And so I think that is a, we get so embroiled in carb ver— high carb versus low carb, vegan versus carnivore and all this stuff. And to some degree, it's a little bit of a distraction because the real issue here isn't how people choose to feed themselves. It's them having the ability to choose. What to feed themselves. And it's moving in a direction, especially with— and again, I don't want to drive this thing off of a cliff, but some of these social credit score things that were thrown around COVID and whatnot, it's been suggested that as part of your social credit score, your bank account would be tied to this stuff. And you go to the store to buy your ribeye and it says, I'm sorry, comrade, but your allotment of meat is met for the month. You need to have some Impossible Burger instead, and you won't be allowed to buy this thing. That's where they're going with this stuff. And I have some real qualms about that.

That is—

this isn't conspiracy theory. Like, there's, there's World Economic Forum video where folks suggest that this is what we need to do to be able to get on top of climate change. And I think that is not the way that you tackle climate change at all. And it certainly doesn't strike me as a way that would honor the individual beliefs of each culture and each person around the world. This is homogenizing the whole world to exist in one particular way.

And if people wanna find out more about The Sacred Cow, it's an incredible book. Tell them about the film briefly and where it's visible. Where can people watch this? Tonight, which I'm gonna suggest you get the book, but watch the film. It's a documentary. Tell them about it briefly and where they can get it.

Rob, sacredcow.info is where they can get the general information. I think that there are some download options from there, but I think it's on Prime, like most places that distribute documentary, you can get it through there.

Yeah. Yeah. Perfect. No, and it's an incredible film and I think I'm so thrilled that you did that. I know so many people support this, and I think our health, both for the earth and ourselves, is— we're all sick right now. We're all so sick. And I feel like we all, I hope, have that intention and there's a healthy way to do it. And I feel like you've given us a blueprint, if you will, to do that. And I'm just, I feel so grateful to what you do, Rob, because your work is so heartfelt and you really, are articulate at sharing, I think, point of view that needs to be shared as often as possible. I wish we could talk about this every week. I feel like it has to be done every day. And I'm so grateful that we had this conversation because I feel like people, we need to hear this. I know this, but hearing it even myself right now, I feel like I've been eating a little less ribeyes and I'm like, I'm going back to my ribeyes. I love my ribeyes. They're so good. People, I have a really good friend of mine that I haven't seen from since since college and we've been spending a lot of time. She's going through a breakup and I've gone through my divorce and we've been hanging out a lot and she thinks I'm nuts. She's like, why are you eating so much healthy? This, or this, this ribeye, this, this high fat food. You think it's healthy? I didn't give her the book yet. I'm gonna get her the book.

I think I'm gonna watch the movie first. That's an easy one.

Watch the film on Amazon Prime, wherever they're out there. Tell people about your website where people can get ahold of you, Rob, and your social. And thank you so much, for an incredible conversation.

Huge honor. I always love hanging out with you. Thank you. Wolf.com is the main clearinghouse. We have our podcast, the Healthy Rebellion Radio, that I do each week with my wife, and she is definitely my better two-thirds. Folks usually enjoy listening to her too.

I love it. I thank you so much, Rob, and just take good care, and I can't wait to see you soon, hopefully in person soon. I have a feeling we're gonna do it, Rob.

I'm gonna rope you to come up and spend some time in Montana. Maybe you'll stay. So yeah, I'm excited.

You have a good— show us that shirt. You're not wearing it by accident.

Oh yeah. Yeah. So these are some good friends of mine who run a grass-fed meat operation here and they bought Texas Longhorns, moved them up into Montana. And so now they're Montana Longhorns, but it's a fascinating operation. They put these animals into an area that had been massively overgrazed. And was really damaged and they've used regenerative grazing practices and the 3-year transition in this area is just jaw-dropping. Like it's amazing what, how healing this has been to this area that had been poorly managed. Because you can overgraze an area, you can also undergraze an area, but properly applied regenerative practices could create a food system that could still be here 10,000 years from now. Like it is long-term sustainable. And yeah, yeah.

All right. Thank you, Rob. You're a rock star. Keep it up, guys. Get the movie, get the book, Sacred Cow, everywhere. All right, guys. Thanks, Rob.

Thanks. Take care.

All right. Today's episode is complete, guys. Thank you so much for listening. And I want to ask you to please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts. And please leave a review on Apple as well. Give it 5 stars if you if you think the show has helped you in some way to transform your thinking. I hope it has. And more importantly, share your comments, your review of what today's episode did for your thinking and what you got out of it, because I think that is how we spread this. And for me, this is a revolution. This is not a podcast. This is a way of life. And I hope to transform over a million lives in the next couple years, and I need your help. So please become part of the Zero Hunger Revolution. Emotion by leaving that review on Apple Podcasts and subscribing today. Thanks so much.

Have a great one.

Peace and purpose, and I'll see you on the next episode.