#and then lets discuss how we can change animal agriculture to a less harmful system

[urmotherwasahamster]

so many people are reblogging that post that says like "a vegan would rather wear all plastic than leather which is part of our symbiotic relationship with cattle" without an ounce of critical thought i wish these conversations could be had with more nuance

[simonalkenmayer]

Hi Simon! I've been thinking about how fascinating it is that humans have developed such a complex moral system around livestock and animal consumption as a whole. We're still killing and eating animals on a massive scale, but we're trying to be ethical about it. It seems to me like our concern is a luxury we can afford in the modern age. I was wondering, have humans always worried about ethics with live food? Or is this new? When did you start to see vegetarians? Additionally, what about you?

That’s a keen observation you’ve made, that ethics and morality are derived from plenty.

As it pertains to husbandry and agriculture, I have some things to say. Part of our inhumane treatment of animals has to do with scale. Particularly in the US, we farm cattle at huge farms where they frolic in hit and eat food tailored to keep them disease free in their cesspit. We do it so that every American can get a hamburger whenever they want, but no one stops to think that they can eat one less hamburger and not die. It’s excess that created this problem, you see.

I often tak about something called hysteresis. That is the process of balance. A pendulum swings one way, and then swings back, until it stills. We had little, so we changed farming practices. We gained much, so now we look and say, what have we done. Then we shall swing back, but less firmly changing one thing or two, to find that balance. That is how it is in all things.

Let me say plainly that most farms are humane, but is humane all there is? What’s wrong with having healthy and happy animals? Nothing. I personally buy only free range or cage free products. These tend to be more expensive. That indicates that there is an economic disparity at play, such that a poorer person may not have the ability to buy food they consider ethical, so let’s keep that in mind.

But there’s another thing to be discussed, though I have to do it carefully. Most of modern farming came to us via the Dutch, back in the 1500’s. It was they who pioneered raised beds, greenhouses, and fertilizer. Large scale cattle farms sell their dung to fertilizer companies for use in the fields that grow staple crops. And unfortunately we are noticing a very serious problem with doing this on such a large scale, over such an extended period of time. I believe it was George Washington Carvwr who figured out that crops needed to be rotated for the soil to have nutrients, and today we extend our study of the soil into the biome of bacteria and small critters that live there. Now we know that for a plant to grow and have nutritional value, the soil must be healthy. But the problem is, our fertilizing mg techniques are actually harming that balance. So too are the methods by which we control pests. People say that the environment has about a hundred years at the current pace. This problem has about 50. Fifty years at most before farming collapse. You’ve seen that film…interstellar? The dust? That is our future if we don’t change how we do things.

But back to cattle specifically. To answer your historic question. There were no grocery stores, no meat processing plants. The limit of a farmer’s herd was his own ability to manage it. Don’t forget about feudalism and tithing. If you were a serf, your best and most, went to your land holder. You might get the rest or be allowed to sell it if they said so. Most this system as well as religion, governed meat consumption and kept it to a minimum. The liturgical calendar had very few “fleshe days”. So it was against the law to buy a meat on a day it was prohibited. You couldn’t even use “I plan to keep it for another day” as an excuse…because no refrigerators. Cattle was herded to market, killed there in an appertoire, then sold right outside. Where my old neighborhood in London was, there were massive expanses of grass and pens to hold these animals. Most people who could afford a milking animal or a horse, did not kill it. If they did, the entire animal was used. Preserving meat was a pastime. What I’m getting at, is that animal proteins, at the early stage in western society was not eaten that often or in anything like the quantity we do today. That’s one reason why you live longer now. Because of this, animals were actually treated rather well.

We knew very little about human anatomy or biology, because the church forbade dissection, but butchery was fine. So we knew about them. Some places had anti cruelty laws, but it was a different time, and the church said animals didn’t have souls. This was actually a source of some debate within religious orders. St Francis of Assisi being one who thought animals had value as creations of god. But even this debate wouldn’t stop the average person from having an animal. Difference was, the animal had to pull its own weight and be useful. Cats ate pests. Dogs hunted or herded. Both were bred to make them better, and purpose specific. They weren’t friends. They were employees. Rich people could have lap dogs, again…excess allowed them to turn the task based creature into an accessory.

Look up the timing pigs of London and read about that. There were laws about beating animals, and social ideas about causing willful harm to them. Hunting deer was illegal for a long time, because all land was owned by the gentry, and that meant the animals too.

Anyway, I hope I’ve answered you well.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

Fuck Your Red Revolution: Against Ecocide, Towards Anarchy

Let Go Of Your Tedious Slogans

"There's no ethical consumption under capitalism" is a tired meme that I wish would die. So often this slogan is used by reds to pooh-pooh those of us that strive to make life choices that aid harm-reduction in our communities and our natural environments.

Vegan diets, bicycling, dumpster diving, upcycling, guerilla gardening, permaculture, squatting, illegalism, food forestry, communes, self-sufficiency, and all the other "lifestylist" pursuits "individualist" anarchists undertake to minimize their harm on the environment are shamed and mocked by many anarcho-communists, social-ecologists, anarcho-transhumanists, syndicalists and other industry-upholding anarchists. These reds are well-versed in workerist rhetoric, and see all lifestyle choices as "a distraction" from the global proletarian revolution they see as their singular goal.

You'll hear them talk down to other anarchists who are discussing ethical ways to curtail their consumption, especially people that live off the land or otherwise limit their participation in industrial civilization; people they loudly dismiss and condemn as "primmies" or "lifestylists".

They'll tell us to stop living our lives in the pursuit of personal anarchy because "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism". In the red mind, as long as a capitalist system has been imposed on the world, there''s no point in reaching for anarchy until that system has been overthrown and replaced with their system. Regardless of how unlikely it is that this will happen in our lifetimes.

Using "no ethical consumption" to shame people for making the effort to live more conscientiously, and decrying all individual action as "counter-revolutionary" or "liberal" comes from a deeply authoritarian mindset reminiscent of toxic Maoist purges that punished people for dressing differently or having hobbies or doing anything but devote themselves 100% to destructive industrial labor and the glory of "the revolution" (almost always manifested in the form of a red state).

The red influence in anarchist discourse is unfortunately dominant in most developed parts of the world, and collectivist-minded anarchists insist every anarchist devote themselves to their pipe dream of a mass uprising to seize the factories from the capitalists and turn them over to the workers. They postulate that democratized factories will be more beneficial to workers because they'll receive a bigger piece of the industrial pie. This is true. But then they claim their ideology will "save the environment" because a worker collective won't be greedy and destructive like a capitalist board of directors. This is of course completely unfounded and blatantly ignores the history of collectivized industry and its devastating effects on the environment. The glaring reality is that industrial societies all eventually lead to ecocide, without exception.

Countless Marxist revolutions in history did so much damage to the environment that entire territories, such as the area surrounding Chernobyl, were rendered uninhabitable to humans. Babies continue to be born with birth defects today, and cancer rates in the regions devastated by socialist industry continue to be sky high.

Let's take a brief look at the former USSR's legacy of careless industrial destruction, with 3 examples.

The Ural River in Magnitogorsk, Russia is still saturated with toxic boron and chromium levels from the nearby Steel Works, poisoning the entire ecosystem and its inhabitants.

The Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest inland water body in the world was largely replaced by the newly emerged Aralkum Desert after the Soviets drained two rivers for irrigation. The sea is now just 10 percent of its original size.

Run-off from oil fields near Baku have rendered all the local water bodies biologically dead, killing off every lifeform that prospered in those ecosystems for millennia.

These are just 3 examples of devastating ecocide caused by the push for industrial growth (which is required to achieve communism according to Marx), and they of course only ever achieved more capitalism and more misery, because industrialism and the continued pursuit of menial labor will not liberate people.

Changing from a vertical to a horizontal hierarchy will benefit the industrial workers in some material ways, certainly, but the wholesale destruction of our planet will not slow down one bit just by instituting a power-shift from bosses to workers. Industrial production depends on non-stop growth, and when you tie the success of a society to industrial production, you create a recipe for disaster. Workers won't vote to scale down their industry or its environmental impact as their livelihoods depend on their industry's growth.

And they certainly won't care about anyone who isn't also an industrial worker, or preserving their foreign way of life. Indigenous people and anyone living off the land will effectively be seen by red-society as an undesirable out-group. Anyone that can't measure up to workerist standards of productivity will be seen as a strain on the industrial grind. An enemy of the red revolution.

Any "counter-revolutionary" rebel who dares stand in the way of industrial growth and the spread of industry across land and sea is effectively a liability that needs to be expunged to safeguard the revolution. This is the power of the collective. Comply or be crushed. Red or dead.

So you see, the people parroting "no ethical consumption under capitalism" at you don't actually have any intention of curbing their destructive consumption, even under communism. Even under anarcho-communism. If anything, they hope to increase their consumption by acquiring more spending power. With communism, they'll be able to consume as much as a middle-management boss does under capitalism because all workers will receive an equal share (until resources run out and their society collapses).

You cannot grow infinitely on a finite planet, and all industrial ideologies, regardless of whether they brand themselves as "libertarian" or "authoritarian" seem to ignore that simple fact because it would expose their ideology as having zero long-term viability in a world already experiencing unprecedented global collapse.

Harm Reduction is Valuable

There's always a more ethical alternative to everything. That's the whole point of anarchy, to analyze our actions and our impact on our environment and limit harm, counter authority as much as possible. Ethics isn't an all or nothing proposition - there are varying degrees of harm.

Just because some solutions aren't 100% pure and wonderful doesn't mean they're not worth doing over much more harmful alternatives. Anarchy is about subverting authority by finding more ethical solutions to every problem we come across.

Here's an example of several levels of harm reduction that can measurably make a difference. Things that stone-faced reds will no doubt decry as "lifestylist" simply because they don't succeed in immediately overthrowing capitalism and bringing on a communist utopia:

Eating vegan locally-grown pesticide-free unprocessed food is absolutely more ethical than eating imported processed meat.

Why?

Far less carbon is burned to grow / store / transport / process / store again / re-transport the food. Workers involved in "organic" agriculture aren't exposed to the much more dangerous conditions of slaughterhouses / battery farms / pesticides / ships / warehouses. Far less animal suffering and death goes into producing the food. These are real metrics.

There are of course still many downsides to for-profit agriculture including desertification, exploitation of migrant labor, and destruction of native ecosystems to plant monocultures. But it's still much better than the alternative which ensures far greater harm by every metric...

For instance, the container ships that transport imported food and industrial products burn highly-polluting "bunker fuel"; the black, tarry goo that's left over when all the higher quality fuels like petrol, diesel and kerosene have been extracted from crude oil. In 2009, confidential data was leaked showing that a single container ship produces as much pollution as 50 million cars. The ship workers will be the first to breathe in these highly concentrated fumes. Avoiding imported food goes a long way in fighting exploitation.

Buying seeds / cuttings / grafts and growing your own food in a community garden, as well as dumpster diving from outside supermarkets is more ethical than buying locally grown food from a for-profit business.

Why?

Even less carbon is burned, waste is diverted from landfills, there are no workers to exploit or endanger, there is no animal suffering and death if you use no-till methods. You control everything that goes into the soil (and ultimately your community's bodies) and can thus stave off desertification and actually improve the soil and rebuild the ecosystem.

Downsides: Native flora is displaced in favor of domesticated food crops. Land ownership feeds the state via taxes (unless you use squatted land to plant the garden). Living in a city means you'll still be consuming a lot of things you can't produce yourself in your limited space. But again, this is a measurable improvement over the previous scenario.

Moving out of the city to a rural area and living as a subsistence farmer to grow all your own food in a food forest you plant, giving away or trading your surplus. Foraging for food where it's sustainable to do so. Planting trees on every unused piece of land you see.

Why?

Erosion and desertification is effectively stopped in its tracks wherever food forests rise. The trees clean the air of carbon. Trees are by far the plants most adept at evapotranspiration, and are integral to the water-cycle all lifeforms depend on. The climate in the area is safeguarded, with increased humidity and rainfall.

Forest gardening rewilds the planet. Pre-civilized peoples made the rainforests as abundant as they are by curating them and spreading the plants they found most beneficial. If enough people planted food forests in an area, the local population could sustain themselves by hunting and foraging the way they did before civilization.

So future generations are given the invaluable gift of autonomy from the industrial system, and the knowledge and incentive to resist industry's violent encroach on their way of life.

Personal Action Doesn't Happen in a Vacuum: Working Towards a Lasting Cultural Shift

When a group of people choose to e.g. not consume cow products, that directly creates less demand for cow products. So over that group's lifetime, less forest will be bulldozed to graze the cows that they didn't eat. Less cows will be impregnated by robotic rape machines. Less veal calves will be snatched from their mothers, put in dark little boxes for a few weeks and then slaughtered so the mother keeps producing milk for the dairy industry.

Some of the people vegans interact with will be influenced by their ethical choices and way of life and be inspired to also work to minimize their harm on the ecosystem. They'll also adopt a vegan diet, and influence people in their lives to follow suit. One vegan becomes two, two become ten, ten become ten million. The cultural shift spreads far and wide, touching countless lives and changing the course of history.

So in this way, an individual action gradually becomes a collective action. People slowly emulate others after being exposed to their lifestyle and ultimately the local culture is forever changed. All cultural shifts start out with a few innovators and gradually expand to the rest of the population as others see the benefits of the new culture.

Likewise with permaculture and food forests. People start planting food forests and others take up their example and pretty soon you have thousands of acres of land that are saved from desertification and become refuges for wildlife.

There are countless places where this is demonstrable, including where I'm from (somewhere in Western Asia). Each indigenous family in these mountains has a small plot of land that we cultivate. The more people choose to use mixed forest farming methods instead of standard sprayed monocultures, the more people are influenced to follow our example. They see how successful food forests are at feeding our families and the culture gradually shifts.

There needs to be a cultural shift that precedes and guides any revolutionary movement otherwise you'll just end up replicating capitalism like Marxists have done time and time again. People who live destructive consumerist lifestyles that cause ecocide in exchange for fleeting material comforts won't be capable of shifting to ethical lifestyles just because "the revolution" happened. They'll simply replicate their destructive ways under the "new" political system and the "revolution" will have been for nothing. Capitalism will have just been given another paper mask to hide behind as it drags us deeper into the black hole of industrial apocalypse.

Fuck Your Luxury Space Communism

A single cruise ship emits as much pollution as a million cars. Cruise ships dump 1 billion gallons of sewage into the ocean every year. Knowing these facts, how can any anarchist decide to directly fund the cruise ship industry by saving up money and booking a cruise holiday?

Reds will tell you with a straight face that capitalism is to blame for the cruise industry's rampant polluting, and "after the revolution", the cruise industry would do no harm because it would be worker-managed.

In reality, a truly communist society would necessitate that cruises be free to every worker as a reward for their labor. Which means far more globe-trotting tourists and far more cruise ships in the oceans. Carbon burning and pollution would actually increase greatly.

But let's ignore that for now. We don't live in a revolutionary communist society and we will not see capitalism go away in our lifetimes. Global capitalism is more ingrained in society than ever before. Anarcho-communists are such a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of any population. Reds telling "lifestylists" to stop giving a shit about anything other than "overthrowing" capitalism, something we clearly don't have the support or firepower to do, is blatantly ridiculous.

Continuing to eat meat / processed foods / buying a new phone, games console, tablet every year / using disposable plastic bags / toilet paper / chlorine cleaning products / building poorly insulated over-sized concrete buildings / not composting your waste / salting the snow / heating a pool / planting a lawn / going on a cruise / etc / etc because "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism" actively stands in the way of positive change and directly promotes inaction / harm. It actively prevents the culture from shifting towards anarchy.

"We'll go on this cruise now and help contribute to ecocide, but it's okay because we'll consume ethically after the glorious revolution" couldn't be a more ridiculous standpoint, but it's essentially what the "no ethnical consumption under capitalism" slogan has been turned into. It's a sad state of affairs when this empty rhetoric passes for revolutionary thought in red circles.

Ethics-Based Choices Aren't "Liberal" Just Because Pompous Reds Say So

Consumption under capitalism (or socialism) isn't ethical, but that's no excuse for inaction. There's no global revolution coming to change the way we live overnight. History has shown us the impossibility of that notion - with countless "revolutionary" societies repeating all the mistakes of capitalist ones.

But we can have small local revolutionary action in the here and now that can lead the way to sustained change at a wider level. Just ask the Zapatistas and similar indigenous and anti-civ anarchist movements around the world. No one is going to tell them to throw in the towel and conform to globalist capitalist / communist industrial civilization because all consumption is somehow equal.

Anyone can make personal ethics-based choices and also organize collective action. I have no idea why so many collectivists see these pursuits as being mutually exclusive. But you'll be sorely disappointed if you thought a global collectivist revolution was something that was realistically attainable. The world is far too diverse to be molded into a uniform entity controlled by a 19th century ideology designed to serve European factory workers.

Ignore the sanctimonious blathering of boring ideologues. There's nothing "liberal" about living what you preach. You claim to oppose hierarchy? Then live your life dedicated to minimizing hierarchy wherever you can. Set an example. Face the beast head on and stand your ground until you breathe your last breath. Because what else are you going to do?

Reds! Listen up, friends. Mocking people for caring about minimizing the harm they do and for thinking long and hard about the ethical implications of their actions doesn't make you somehow more radical than them. It just makes you a smug fuck. I don't care how many marches you've waved your shiny red flag at. Being able to recite the words of a long-dead white philosopher doesn't make you special, so shut up about "lifestylism" already.

When we see exploitation and engage in direct action to fight it, that doesn't make our fight useless. We have to live in this world and people are dying in it. All around us scores of people are suffering and dying. To ignore that and do nothing because our actions to relieve that suffering won't install communism to free the sacred workers from their bosses would be fucked.

Capitalism & Communism Are Cut From the Same Exploitative Industrial Cloth

The collectivists who see no problem with oppressive constructs like industrial meat consumption will immediately discount anti-authoritarian actions that aren't wholly-focused on abolishing the capitalist class and seizing the means of production. A lot of these red-anarchists are channeling Murray Bookchin as he delivered his anti-"lifestylism" screeds late in his life. They dream of seizing the means of production and thus receive a bigger share of the spoils, so it terrifies them that green anarchists instead want to set the factories and shopping malls on fire.

Reds see dumpster divers, illegalists, vegans, sustenance farmers, bike punks, squatters, naturists, communers and other "lifestylists" as a "distraction" from their driving singular desire to replace industrial capitalism with industrial communism. They want to remove the bosses from the equation, but keep everything else almost exactly the same: Workers, factories, battery farms, globalization, ecocide... Even prisons and police in a lot of cases. They want everything industrial society has forced on the world, except this time, they swear it'll be "more egalitarian" with "direct democracy" and an equal share of the industrial pie for every worker.

These red-dyed wannabe-industrialists insist we abandon our hard-fought battles and join them in pushing (waiting) for a more egalitarian industrialism that'll give us a fairer share of the profits gained from waging war on the wilds.

They love to accuse anarchist "lifestylists" (green anarchists especially) of somehow conforming to the system... By struggling against it? Their pissy Bookchin-inspired rants accusing anti-civs of being in a "death cult" or of being "counter-revolutionary" (while they themselves embrace ecocide and mass-extinction) really makes no logical sense to me. Green anarchists like the water defenders in Canada right now are actively putting their lives on the line to fight against the march of industry, while these yuppie killjoys sit in their comfy suburban armchairs typing up walls of snark to diminish the people who prove everyday that they live and breathe anarchy.

Sure, the Bookchinites, Chomskyists and assorted anarcho-brocialists will show up at an orderly protest in their officially licensed Guy Fawkes masks, and they're always in the front row of their local union meeting, eager to read a deadly serious statement from a stack of printed A4s. But how does that give them the superiority complex to voice their disgust about "edgy lifestylists"? It should be obvious at this point that communism isn't going to save the world, yet they imagine themselves as the governors of righteousness.

Protesting is just another cog in the democracy machine. The illusion of choice. It accomplishes nothing. It certainly doesn't make you more revolutionary than an anarchist who makes the conscious choice to live as ethically as possible. People that think they've achieved something worthwhile because they've held up a pretty sign at some protest are fooling themselves. All they're doing is asking their rulers to be nicer rulers. Rulers aren't giving up their power because you made a sign. You're not better than "filthy lifestylists" because you quoted Kropotkin at your union meeting that one time.

Both protests and unions as well as ‘lifestyle choices’ have long been co-opted by the system and are not going to loosen the death-grip it has on the planet. The system has become quite adept at swallowing up all attempts at revolution and turning them into Bizarro-revolutions that can be whitewashed and monetized to further the system's growth. I don't need to remind anarchists that communism was instantly turned back into industrial capitalism every time it was attempted. The "Communist Party of China" is perhaps the most powerful upholder of capitalism in the world today per capita.

Embracing Pointed Distractions & Recognizing Ideological Greenwashing

Collectivists will often butt in when others are talking about methods of harm reduction and insist we stop talking about "pointless distractions" and instead focus on achieving their much-hyped global worker-society they promise will come if we just hold hands and march in the streets until everyone sees how awesome we are. Then the masses will all join us to overthrow the capitalists and install communist utopia, just wait and see!

A lot of reds will even claim that all discussion about ethics and social justice is elitist and classist "liberal posturing" aimed at dividing the working class. The worst of them will insist that class is the only issue we should be concerned with. To hell with feminism, post-colonialism, the environment and all other "distractions" that don't interest white male workers. Workerism and class reductionism are fond bedfellows.

Being a vegan or a dumpster diver or a forager or a squatter or a self-sufficient cave-dweller need not have anything to do with shaming other people. It's simply the way someone chooses to live their life for a multitude of reasons; a lot of them informed by ethics, but also to pursue the happiness that every human desires.

An individual anarchist's decision to live more ethically is not some kind of narcissistic circlejerk the way collectivists like to present it. All anarchists have different motivations and different ethics. We all live in this world, in this time, and we can't just pretend there's some grand global homogeneous revolution right around the corner that's going to save humanity from the rapidly approaching industrial apocalypse if only we chant loud enough and post more luxury space communism memes to our Facebook profiles.

It's especially perplexing watching reds scorn anti-civs since none of these purported "communist revolutionaries" have demonstrated any real inclination to address the industrialist disaster that has been wrought on our planet beyond farcical promises of "space-colonization", "Star Trek replicators" and "asteroid mining".

Even those rare reds who bother to give consideration to ecology in their theories continue to glorify civilization, industry and democracy as liberators. So called "social-ecologist" Bookchinites promise that the planet can be saved if we just "make more democracy!" Then we can all participate in (profit from) the industrial system with our voting power, and opt to use "ecological technologies" such as solar and wind energy to power the machines.

Never mind the Chinese sustenance farmers who have carcinogenic industrial waste dumped on their lands everyday from those solar panel factories; they're just not thinking ecologically enough. And the Ghanaians who wince when mountains of worn-out solar panels are piled up in their backyards with the rest of the West's obsolete tech are just impeding ecological progress with their divisive nitpicking! It's almost like they don't want Europeans to have two electric vehicles in every garage? So ridiculous!

When you give a majority group legitimized power over minorities, they always use it to oppress them. All power corrupts. Collectivism breeds hierarchy because the interests of the dominant group e.g. factory workers aren't the same as the interests of minority groups e.g. indigenous herders or queer folk or sex workers.

If you think your average meat-and-potatoes white male worker is going to suddenly become enlightened and compassionate towards the plight of minorities when you give him the power of direct democracy, as social ecologists and other red anarchists envision, you haven't been paying close attention to the world around you. Time and time again, voters have successfully used their vote to deny rights to migrants, sex workers, trans and gay people, and anyone they see as differing from their normative standards.

Understanding the Coercion Behind the "Collective Good"

Reds expect you to put the needs of the almighty collective above your own needs, but the collective good matters little if your individual needs are ignored by the collective.

All too often, Western reds demanding you obey the "collective good" are simply engaging in red-washed white supremacy where the "collective" just means "white working men", and the "good" just means "our profits". Putting the will of the dominant population in society before your own needs and desires is an incredulous proposition. The profits of the white working man should not be of any concern to e.g. a brown unemployed woman.

Collectivism is kind of a ludicrous concept if you really think about it. We can't paint seven-billion people that have wildly different ideas of what life should be as one unified entity because they're not one unified entity. Collectivizing them as one group; "the working class" in our minds makes no logical sense and does nothing but fuel the industrial wasteland rapidly decimating the entire globe. Why should all humans be seen as workers, why should each of us be measured by our capacity to produce industrial goods?

People from different places have different needs. Marxism deals with this by separating people into classes and telling us to only concern ourselves with the worker classes and to hell with the peasant classes and the hunter-gatherers and the pastoralist nomads and the "land-owner classes".

This "land-owner" class includes indigenous peoples living off of their ancestral lands and exploiting no one, but again and again socialists have targeted them for genocide for not fitting into their ideological framework. Then the imperialist socialists seize their land and commercialize it so they can profit. For examples, see the Kazakh famine-genocide perpetrated by the USSR because the nomadic Kazakhs resisted the rigidity of forced collectivization, or the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran and resulting famine that was orchestrated so the red Russians could take control of Iran's oil fields, or China's current ongoing land seizures across its territories and forced internment and "re-education" of a million Uighurs.

The very idea of the worker class trumping everyone else is a proven recipe for colonialism and genocide. Individuals who avoid consumerism and live deliberately; apart from the system aren't exploiting anyone, but throughout history collectivists have caused untold death and suffering trying to shape indigenous lands into their image. Collectivism is far more dangerous than "lifestylism" to anyone who would fail to fit into the collectivist's ideological dogma.

Constructing a homogeneous group; a worker collective, and telling them they're the only group that matters; the upholders of the holy revolution, and they need to purge anyone who would threaten their revolution by not falling in line with the red agenda is not something that has ever led anywhere good. Forced collectivization gave us the Soviet Kazakh genocide, the Chinese Great Leap Forward genocide, the Soviet Holodomor genocide, etc. And it ultimately gave us collectivist capitalism like we see now in China - the most ecologically destructive form of capitalism there is.

Communism and other red ideologies (including the ones purporting to be anarchist) create as big an in group / out group divide as capitalism. The power just shifts to the producers rather than the owners. And historically it's just as brutal in its treatment of the out-groups. Anyone that doesn't want to be part of the industrial system, like the Kazakh nomadic herders, is basically fucked. You dissent, you die.

The red ideologies view the entire world through a Western industrial worker-serf lens. But the whole world isn't organized like the industrial West and it's unfair to force Western values and economic systems on everyone.

Indigenous farmers in post-colonial places are treated as pariahs; 'kulaks', and massacred for having 'owned' the ancestral land they sustain themselves with under capitalist definitions. Just because the poor in industrialized capitalist nations don't own the land they work, doesn't mean the poor in other parts of the world where there is no lord-serf system in place are bad.

A garden that you and your family / tribe tend to and depend on to survive is personal property, but communism has always treated it like private property. Like growing your own food is reactionary and a threat to the "revolutionary" government. The USSR even banned people from planting gardens at home so they'd be forced to depend on the collective for food. To keep them tied to the factory assembly line.

Nomadic herders and roaming hunter-gatherers are likewise criminalized and starved out because there can be no room for people that don't submit to the industrial work system under communism. They're grouped as "individualists" and punished for resisting collectivization.

Reject Collectivism, Embrace Anarchy

Collectivism, whether it be communist, fascist or capitalist ideologically isn't something that serves my interests as an indigenous subsistence farmer and forager living in these remote mountains. Whatever industrial dogma I'm ordered to live my life by only serves to feel my heart with sorrow. I will loudly reject the idea of a collective society at every opportunity, regardless of its ideological alliance. All industry kills all life.

I'm an anarchist. Even the idea of a "society" governing my way of life makes me vomit a little. Your needs aren't my needs, I don't want to go where the collective wants to take me. My lifestyle and my ancestors' lifestyles are likely nothing like yours and we shouldn't be meshed together as a singular entity just because we're both forced to work the machines.

Setting up living, breathing alternatives to the industrial system crafts non-coercive relationships between humans, non-humans and our environments better than unionism and other workerist pursuits ever will. Workerism only further ingrains us in the system and makes us dependent on it, and then if we do manage a revolution by some miracle... We just reproduce the capitalist system again because it's all we know. Working examples of anarchy like self-sufficient food forests are far more revolutionary to me than a union or a protest march. All applications of anarchy are important, but I value anarchy that I can see and touch.

The only revolution I'm interested in is one that removes dependences on artificial structures. I want to be liberated from the system, not become the system. The collective isn't my master. The collective is really just another state, however nicely you package it.

Red anarchists - If you don't take responsibility for the harm you do, no one will. There's no rapture-like revolution coming to wipe out capitalism's sins and absolve you of any guilt for your part in it because "no ethical consumption". There's only this life you're living and your choices absolutely matter. They shape who you are and the impact you make on your environment and your culture. If you just keep doing harm and blame your actions on capitalism, you're no different than any CEO dumping toxic waste in a river in China. Harm reduction in your community is something you have direct control over. You can choose to not dump that waste. Or you can dump it and justify it to yourself by saying "it's okay because capitalism did it".

The entire "no ethical consumption" argument and similar condescending slogans parroted by half-assed socialists are just a way to justify their inaction in the face of devastating oppression.

It's become increasingly unlikely that we can stop the unraveling global mass extinction event that industry has wrought on the planet, but anarchists have never let impossible odds stand in our way before. We fight because we exist and we exist to fight. Whatever the odds.

We can either choose to take action to resist the violent system starting on an individual and on a local level, or we can live and die waiting for capitalism to magically go away worldwide while participating in it fully and thus furthering its growth and increasing its violence.

"Think Globally, Act Locally" might be a cliche, but it's really the only power we have. If we don't take action in our own neighborhood in every way we can, why even pretend to care about anarchy?

Everything we do to resist the ecocide is worthwhile. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

[xxandra33]

As a meat eater, I acknowledge the animal cruelty and problems in the industry. I would like to change how I eat eventually, but unfortunately that’s not a reality financially right now for me. But that’s a whole other discussion.

My point here is to bring some facts to people’s attention.

I believe more vegetarians and vegans need to acknowledge/learn that they are not, in fact, eating without harming animals just by not eating meat/animal by-products. Actually, there are studies that show it could make it worse. Either way, I’m not here to slam people’s dietary choices. 

Plant farmers destroy animal’s homes and run them over with big machinery. Just because you do not eat an animal directly doesn’t mean that one didn’t have to die for you to have food on your plate. Please let it be clear that I am not saying one diet is better than another. I’m trying to communicate that the way that humans have evolved to produce food is damaging both animals and plants, no matter what diet you choose.

Over-farming is another problem related to many people eating a plant-based diet - soil can only take so much before it runs out of nutrients. This leads to land that needs to be left alone for years before it can grow plants again, which in turn ends in more land being destroyed and re-purposed. Then more animals and harmed and displaced (and more trees are cut down).

The changes we need to make to end animal cruelty and to save our planet do not come from simply cutting meat and animal products from your diet. More needs to change here, and without acknowledging that, these changes will not happen.

Humans are not perfect. We damage the environment. We almost always have in some way. We need to own up to that, because without owning up, we can’t fix it. 

Our systems will never be perfect. Animals will always be affected in some way in order for us to eat. But we can do this so much better than what we are doing now. So whether vegan, vegetarian, omnivore, or whatever your diet is, we need to band together and change our farms to be less cruel, harmful, and way more sustainable. This is NOT a competition. Whether or not eating animal products is worse or better, if we don’t ALL work together, change will not happen.

Stop caring so much about how individuals eat. Let’s look at how the world farms, because in all reality here, the way we farm (both animals and plants) is the problem.

Let’s make a change. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

My favourite link (because it actually suggests a solution):

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/veganism-intensively-farmed-meat-dairy-soya-maize

Some more links:

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97836&page=1

http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2018/07/how-many-animals-killed-in-agriculture/

https://www.indy100.com/article/naturalist-says-vegans-are-responsible-for-killing-animals-7422566

[paleorecipecookbook]

RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers

In this episode, we discuss:

What’s missing from the EAT-Lancet Diet

The relationship between meat and the environment

The right way to raise livestock

Where the misunderstanding around meat and the environment comes from

Protein and the EAT-Lancet diet

The impact agriculture has on the environment

The problem with lab-grown meat and a meat tax

Diana’s upcoming docuseries, Sacred Cow

Show notes:

“Why You Should Eat Meat: My Appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience,” by Chris Kresser

“20 Ways EAT Lancet’s Global Diet Is Wrongfully Vilifying Meat,” by Diana Rodgers

“Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems”

“Why Eating Meat Is Good for You,” by Chris Kresser

“Should You EAT Lancet?” by Marty Kendall

“The EAT Lancet Diet is Nutritionally Deficient,” by Zoë Harcombe

“What Is Nutrient Density and Why Is It Important?” by Chris Kresser

Allan Savory’s TED Talk: “How to Fight Desertification and Reverse Climate Change”

“Sustainable Dish Episode 83: The Truth about Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Livestock Production with Frank Mitloehner,” by Diana Rodgers

“Sustainable Dish Episode 84: Meat as Scapegoat with Frédéric Leroy,” by Diana Rodgers

Sacred Cow, a film by Diana Rodgers

[smart_track_player url="https://ift.tt/2BTIfw6" title="RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers" artist="Chris Kresser" ] 

Chris Kresser:  Diana, thanks so much for joining me again on the podcast.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Chris Kresser:  So, we have a lot to talk about.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  This is an annual event, where there’s some big news story that comes out or study that’s published that demonizes meat and animal foods and purports to be the final nail in the coffin for anybody who's eating animal products. In fact, as you know, I just went on the Joe Rogan show, my third appearance there, to debate Dr. Joel Kahn about the merits of animal foods in the diet and eating a vegan diet. And I spent a lot of hours preparing for that and wrote a lot of articles. And the debate itself was almost four hours long, and admittedly I was a little tired out after that experience. And I just couldn't muster the energy and strength to write a rebuttal to the EAT-Lancet paper that was published. But you did, and several other people did.

And so I’d love to dive in and talk about that, as well as just stepping back a little bit and discussing some of the environmental impacts or the purported environmental impact of eating meat and what's wrong with the traditional narrative there. Because I didn't get to talk much on the Joe Rogan show about that. And then some of the difficulties of addressing this, and how I know you’ve been working on a film to try to get this message out that we’ve talked about. So why don't we just start first with the EAT-Lancet paper, since this is what's really making the rounds now and bringing this to the forefront of everybody's attention.

What’s Missing from the EAT-Lancet Diet

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, definitely. So there’s, they were really attacking red meat on a nutritional and environmental angle. So, I know your arguments on the Joe Rogan podcast were purely nutritional. I think that the main narratives are always nutrition, environment, and ethics. And ethics were kept out of the EAT-Lancet. Very long paper that took me quite a long time to read. But there's definitely a lot of misinformation in there about meat.

I mean, they’re using observational studies to basically tell us that we cannot have any processed meats at all, lumping them all together, and that we can only eat less than half an ounce of red meat per day. We can only have less than one ounce of chicken per day. But yet we can have eight teaspoons of sugar per day.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, and plenty of corn and rice and wheat. Let's talk a little bit … I think most of my listeners are pretty familiar with the nutritional arguments. I and others have written a lot about that, and most recently my … in preparation for the Rogan show, I published a whole cornerstone page with everything you need to debunk the nutritional arguments. So, that's at ChrisKresser.com/rogan, if you want to look it up.

But I just want to briefly talk about the nutrient density of this EAT-Lancet diet. Because if you just look at it from that single perspective, nutritionally you’ll see very quickly that it falls short. And our body needs micronutrients to function properly. And if a proposed diet doesn't offer those micronutrients in sufficient quantities, I think we can safely say it's not a good diet for humans to follow.

And I don’t want to spend a ton of time on this, so I’m just going to go through this really briefly, and then I want to switch over to talking more about some of the environmental issues. Because that's, I know, an area where you have a lot of expertise. And I really love what you have to say there. So, Zoë Harcombe did an analysis, and I think you had mentioned, Diana, that Marty Kendall did too. So we can talk about that. But Zoë's analysis, it’s not publicly accessible. You have to be a subscriber to see it. But I can share this part of it. She analyzed the EAT-Lancet diet using food tables and found that it was well below the RDA for several nutrients: B12, retinol, vitamin D, vitamin K2, which wasn’t even studied separately, but 71 percent of the K in the diet came from broccoli.

So we know that there's probably very little K2 in the diet. Sodium, potassium, calcium, and iron. So that's a lot of the essential nutrients that we need, and in some cases it was providing less than 20 percent of the RDA of those nutrients. So, to me, that's pretty much case closed on that basis alone. And then we can look at all the other problems that observational studies on red meat and all of that entail. And I just think it’s … there’s really nothing to be alarmed about. This study doesn't add any new evidence that meat and animal products are harmful.

Diana Rodgers:  Not at all. And another thing she didn’t mention in her paper or her review is the conversion rate of some of the vitamins, like beta-carotene to vitamin A, and almost half the population can’t make that conversion easily. And so even though on paper it my show that the vitamin A was adequate, actually not.

Despite what the EAT-Lancet paper says, meat is still a healthy addition to your diet. Check out this episode of RHR for my discussion with Diana Rodgers about what a real healthy diet looks like. #nutrition #chriskresser #wellness 

Chris Kresser:  It’s the same with all of these other nutrients. I actually wrote an article. I addressed this in my article on nutrient density you can find at the ChrisKresser.com/Rogan link. Iron, 94 percent of the iron in the EAT-Lancet diet is from plant-based forms of iron. And we know that heme iron that you get from animal products orders a magnitude better absorbed than most plant forms of iron. And the same with calcium, that is better absorbed from, in most cases, from animal products. And virtually every other nutrient, zinc, long-chain omega-3 fats, only found in animal products. So it's really, yeah, that conversion and bioavailability piece is almost never addressed in these kinds of studies.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, and you also write a lot about B12 and how these plant-based B12 analogues actually increase your need for a real B12.

Chris Kresser:  Exactly. Yeah, so, really nothing to see here from a nutritional perspective. But part of why it's making such a big splash is in addition to the highly coordinated launch campaign that is driven by celebrity, very wealthy celebrity type of people who are behind this, is the argument that not only should we avoid red meat and animal products for these nutritional reasons, but they're destroying the planet. So let’s really dive into that and unpack that from the perspective of the paper. I think you wrote an article, something like 20 reasons or 20 points against this. So we don't have to go through all of those, but let’s cover the highlights.

The Relationship between Meat and the Environment

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, well, I think the number one thing that people need to understand is that we can’t just assume that if we’re not raising animals that it will automatically free up land for more crops. So, agricultural land isn't interchangeable. Most of the agricultural land on the globe is not suited for cropping due to water availability. It’s too rocky, it’s too steep.

So, I think a lot of people, especially that haven’t traveled much, look around and just see the nice flat land and just assume that everywhere in the world is like that. I mean, picture Iceland, Norway, picture many parts of Africa, Mongolia. I mean, there’s just so many places that really will only support grazing animals and not wheat and corn and soy production. And so that’s a huge thing that we need to consider, and if we are to not graze animals on that land, not only will we lose that for food production, but the land will also desertify. Because we just don’t have those wild herds and the numbers that we used to any longer.

And ruminants are actually incredibly beneficial. Their impact on the land helps increase water holding capacity; their grazing actually stimulates new growth in a good way. So you can’t just have these fenced-off acres with nothing on it. You actually need grazing animals as part of healthy grassland ecosystems.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that's a point that is really misunderstood. I see a little bit more discussion about it certainly, at least in our realm. But I’m having kind of a hard time thinking of a mainstream article that really did justice to that point. Do you know of any?

Diana Rodgers:  Well, I've written a few blog posts on it and have talked a lot about it. I think Allan Savory does a really good job.

Chris Kresser:  Certainly.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, in his Savory Institute work that they've done and also his TED talk. But I think that's definitely the number one point that people need to understand. And it's funny because I am working on a book as well on this topic, and my publisher actually has published a ton of vegan books, and he was skeptical. And once he read my environmental argument and specifically wrapped his head around this very topic, I won him over.

Chris Kresser:  That’s amazing.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, people just, because we’re so divorced from nature, you and I have talked about this before just off-line, but that’s the number one problem is that people just have no idea how food is produced and what makes a healthy ecosystem. And a lot of the vegans will, the ones who do accept that not all land can be cropped, just want it turned over to be rewilded.

So let’s just crop everything we can possibly crop and then we’ll just rewild all the pastureland with deer or something cute. But then what are we going to do because we’ve eliminated all the predators? I mean even in the town I live in outside of Boston, we have a massive deer problem. And nobody wants hunting because they don’t want to see dead animals on their beautiful hikes around the conservation land here in my town. And if we eliminate the predators, we need to be responsible for how these populations of wild animals are managed. And so the other option, if we’re not going to hunt them, I suppose would be to bring back wolves. I don’t know how.

Chris Kresser:  I don't think that would go over well.

Diana Rodgers:  I don’t know how my waiting for the bus in my town with wolves swirling around at dawn will go over. So it quickly backs them into a very uncomfortable corner there.

Chris Kresser:  I think another thing that you point out that people don’t realize is that 90 percent of what cattle eat is, at least in a natural grazing state, not in a CAFO type of arrangement, is forage and plant leftovers that humans can’t eat.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, exactly. And even in, I mean, I’m not an advocate for feedlot beef, but I think one thing people don’t understand about even cattle that are raised on feedlots, or that are finished on feedlots rather, is that they’re not raised on feedlots.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  So 85 percent of the beef cattle in the US are actually grazing on land that can't be cropped. And even if they do end up on a feedlot, 90 percent of their total intake is non-edible food to humans. And so they're eating, for example, soybean cakes. But that’s left over from the soybean oil industry.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  They’re eating large amounts of distiller’s grains, lots of foods that would normally emit greenhouse gases and decompose anyway. Ranchers are also grazing cattle on spent wheat and cornfields. So you know that corn would just decompose and emit greenhouse gases either way. So why not run it through a ruminant gut and make protein out of it?

Chris Kresser:  And fertilizer, as you pointed out.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. I mean, it’s so much more nuanced. This is a theme that will probably come up in our conversation a lot is, and I know Robb, Robb and I commiserate about it, and I know you do as well with him. But the vegan narrative is so simple in a lot of ways and it plays into a lot of assumptions, even if they’re wrong, that you don’t really have to explain it to people. It just, people have heard things over and over again. “Meat is bad for the environment, it’s bad for us, therefore eliminate meat from your diet and the food system, and everyone will be healthier.” That’s so easy to understand.

But as Robb has pointed out many times, the counterargument is nuanced and complex. And is not quite as simple to understand and requires that you actually pay attention to some of these finer points. And I think that is one of the challenges that we face in this struggle. But it’s not incomprehensible. I mean, if you just get a few of the simple points like this, it starts to become a lot easier to understand.

Diana Rodgers:  Definitely.  And now my point was … oh, I was going to say too that there's a lot, 50 percent of the carcass of a cow is not eaten but used for other industry uses. So we've got leather, we've got insulin, we’ve got footballs, we’ve got lots of medical applications, fertilizer. So eliminating all animals from our food system, there's a great study I think I sent you this morning that was published in PNAS about what would happen if we eliminated all animals from our food system.

So the greenhouse gas emissions would only decrease by about 2 1/2 percent. But our overall caloric intake would actually go way up, and our nutrient deficiencies would go up. So we already have a problem in our culture where we’re over-consuming calories and not getting enough nutrients. So we would just be making the problem worse for about a 2 percent emission reduction.

The Right Way to Raise Livestock

Chris Kresser:  And those numbers don’t assume any improvement in how cattle are managed, right?

Diana Rodgers:  Right. That was just typical cattle.

Chris Kresser:  Right. So if we actually made improvements in how cattle are managed, do you think there could be a net sequestration of carbon?

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, definitely. So there's been some research coming out of Michigan State showing the difference between continuous grazing and what they term “adaptive multi-paddock grazing,” which is similar to Allan Savory's method, so basically when you intensively graze an area and then move the cattle off quickly.

So, this is how, for example, herds in Africa naturally move because of predator pressure, so it's much worse for the land to have, let's say if you have a 10-acre field and have 100 cattle on that land for the whole summer, as opposed to tightly bunching and moving them frequently and allowing that land to rest. Because that's when carbon gets sequestered, in the regrowth phase of the grass. And so the grass is going through photosynthesis, it’s pulling down carbon and actually exuding carbon sugars to bacteria and to fungal networks that are then passing that grass nutrient. So the fungus is actually mining rocks and getting the minerals from that and feeding it to the grass, and that's how carbon is sequestered. And that process is most effective and actually is a net carbon gain when cattle are managed in this way.

So that's why I like to say “it's not the cow, it’s the how,” because there's just many different ways of raising cattle. Just like there are many different ways of growing broccoli. We can do it in a monocrop system, or we can do it in a more rotational system where we’re integrating it with other crops. And what we need is less monocrops because that's just not how healthy ecosystems work, and farmland is not natural. Like, when you fly over the United States, all those squares you’re looking down at, that's not nature, that's man doing that.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. I know from your article, you did also a podcast with Frank Mitloehner—is that how you pronounce it? We’ll include a link to that in the show notes because I think people should listen to that. He’s an expert in greenhouse gas emissions and animal agriculture. And you guys talk a lot about what’s really going on there and why some of the typical numbers that are thrown around are not accurate. And if anyone’s interested in a deeper dive, I’d definitely recommend listening to that.

So, greenhouse gas from beef cattle represents, just as it's currently done with no improvements, like you just mentioned, is 2 percent of emissions. And by contrast, transportation is 27 percent. So, yet when I go to WeWork, which I have an office at—

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, gosh.

Chris Kresser:  You probably know this.

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, no.

Chris Kresser:  But some of my listeners might not know that WeWork is a company that has committed to this idea that eating a vegetarian diet will save the planet. And they, I think, so, I was there two days ago on Monday, and they have meatless Monday at WeWork, where they served veggie burgers in the main lounge. And then they print these cards that they post around there, around the office, that say, “If everyone was just a vegetarian for,” I can't remember, “one or two days a week, we would save 450 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.” And again, this goes back to the simplicity thing.

Most people get in the elevator, they see that and they're like, “Oh, wow, okay. I guess I should become a vegetarian.” So how does this continue? I mean, it’s not surprising that there’s a disconnect between actual science and what we see in the media. We know that from the nutrition world and everything else. But how do you think this got started? Was there a lot of misunderstanding initially which led to these numbers and then later science kind of brought more clarity? Or what do you think? How have we gotten here?

Diana Rodgers:  Well, I actually just released an amazing podcast on Tuesday of this week, so maybe you could link to that one too, with the guy from Brussels, Frédéric Leroy.

Chris Kresser:  I read some of his papers. You sent them to me awhile back before the Rogan debate.

Where the Misunderstanding around Meat and the Environment Comes From

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, he’s so fantastic. Yeah, so, his opinion is that meat is unfairly absorbing a lot of our worries about our health, our state of our health and the environment, because meat is so powerful and can absorb it. But it's unfairly the scapegoat for our stressors. So, everyone just, it's much easier for us to blame meat than it is to perhaps look at our transportation industry and be uncomfortable about that. I mean, the main funder of that EAT-Lancet paper has a private jet and transportation was never mentioned in the EAT-Lancet.

Chris Kresser:  I don’t know if this is accurate, but I read something about how just the jet trips for the reporter would have a bigger impact on the environment than the diet changes that they were talking about.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And so, in Livestock’s Long Shadow, that's when a lot of this all started. The mass information about the emissions with cattle. And unfortunately, when they did that study, what they did was they looked at all the emissions, the full lifecycle of ruminant animals. They looked at production of the feed, all the transportation, all the emissions, everything. And when they compared that to transportation, they only looked at tailpipe exhaust. So they didn't even factor in transportation, for example, in the transportation numbers.

And so when you look at the global numbers at emissions of cattle versus transportation, you're looking at apples to oranges there. So you're looking at the full lifecycle of a beef animal compared to just the tailpipe emissions from transportation. So that's not fair. And also in other countries, the percentage is a little bit higher. But that's in places where maybe transportation plays a lesser role where there are less cars per cow. And so, their relative emissions may be higher. But that's again not taking into account the fact that cattle can actually sequester carbon and many, many other factors. And so the authors of Livestock’s Long Shadow did reduce their numbers, I think, from 18 to 14 percent and did admit that their numbers were still off because of the transportation. There are no global lifecycle papers on transportation.

But yet that 18 percent, I’ve heard even 50 percent. I don't even know where that number comes from, but that, the 50 percent is the number that's often cited by this group called Green Mondays and they are the ones that have worked with Berkeley to make all of the government meetings meatless on Mondays. That organization, I’ve looked into, and they’re actually funded by an organization out of Singapore that produces plant-based pork.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  And so there’s a lot, the environment and ethics and even the nutrition argument is very convenient for large food companies to profit, because processing means profit.

Chris Kresser:  Well, let’s talk a little bit about that, and since we’re on the topic, I do want to come back to some of the other ways that an animal-based food system or food system that includes animals can actually benefit biodiversity and things like that. So yeah, follow the money. We talk about that a lot on this show. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but on the other hand, you'd be very naïve and misguided to assume that money doesn't play a big role in setting food policy and coming up with these laws. It always has.

Protein and the EAT-Lancet Diet

And it probably always will. And if you look at the EAT-Lancet diet, I think this is from Marty Kendall's analysis, you’ll find that 32 percent of calories come from rice, wheat, and corn, and 14 percent come from unsaturated oils. So these are highly processed foods.

Diana Rodgers:  Right.

Chris Kresser:  We’re not talking about corn on the cob.

Diana Rodgers:  Or wheat berries.

Chris Kresser:  Wheat berries. Or even, like, in some cases, just the whole-grain rice. We’re talking about highly processed corn and wheat and rice derivatives, and then highly processed industrial seed oils that comprise almost 50 percent of calories. And who does that benefit? This study was sponsored by a basically hit list A-team of—

Diana Rodgers:  Processed food companies.

Chris Kresser:  Global processed food companies—DuPont, PepsiCo, Dannon, Nestlé, Cargill, Kellogg's. So, like, food and agricultural companies that make their money by selling processed and refined foods. And so that's very revealing.

And then the other thing that Marty Kendall pointed out, which is directly tied to this, is that this diet, when you work out the macronutrient ratios, it ends up being low in protein and moderate in fat and carbohydrates. And there are really no foods in nature that fit that profile, or very few. You have breast milk and acorns, I think, are the two that he pointed out. And this is a recipe for, that macronutrient mix of low protein and then higher fat and carbohydrate is a recipe for highly palatable and rewarding food. So if you look at the foods that are on this list that fit that profile, there are things like chocolate milk, potato chips, French toast, waffles, ice cream, pancakes.

Diana Rodgers:  Kit-Kat.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, biscuits, Kit-Kat, Twix, chocolate chip cookies, pie crust. I mean, are you kidding me? This is the macronutrient profile that we should be following? Oh, who does not benefit? All of the companies that make these processed foods. So it's really revealing when you look at it from that perspective.

Diana Rodgers:  I know. And I think it's really irresponsible to promote a diet that's about 10 percent in protein when we have, I mean, just in America, more than 50 percent of Americans are metabolically broken and really benefit from much higher protein levels.

Chris Kresser:  Increasing their protein. And we know that of all the macronutrients, protein is the one that has the biggest impact on satiety.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  Which it will reduce the likelihood that people overeat, which many Americans are doing.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And any clinician or dietitian like yourself who's worked with people knows if they're struggling with weight, putting them on a higher-protein diet is probably the most important thing you can do. And there's even some, if you look at the studies on low-carb diets, I think probably one of the reasons, if not one of the main reasons, that they’re so effective is that they’re higher in protein.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and I have to say too, so I actually have recently been following Marty Kendall's NutrientOptimiser diet personally, just as an experiment to try to maximize my micronutrients. And I eat really well. I live on a farm. I have a lot of education in nutrient density. I have access to all these foods. It's really hard to get all your micronutrients in the day. But it's really easy to feel satiated when you have a high percentage of animal protein in your diet. So whether that's oysters, which I know I can beat his leaderboard if I just eat a ton of oysters in one day.

Chris Kresser:  That’s right. That’s right.

Diana Rodgers:  But liver, and then just regular old animal protein. Filling the rest of your diet with colorful vegetables is the way to go. But it still, I still was low, actually, believe it or not, in iron, even with all the protein I’ve been consuming on this diet.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, I’m always talking to my patients about a lot of, especially if they’re favoring like chicken and fish, and not eating shellfish or organ meats, is that some muscle meats are not that high in iron. So it’s organ meats and shellfish that are really the powerhouses from that perspective.

And this brings up another question about bioavailability, right? Because we’ve both talked about this a lot. It's not at all the case that protein from plant sources like legumes is going to be absorbed in the same way that protein is absorbed from animal foods like meat and eggs and fish and dairy products. There is something called the … there are various scoring systems that are used in the scientific literature to assess the bioavailability of protein. And no matter what scoring system you use, animal proteins come out ahead of plant proteins, and usually by a very large margin.

Diana Rodgers:  And, I mean, trying to get your protein from beans and rice, if you’re trying to do the combining in order to get the right profile of amino acids, you would, so I did the calculations. So in order to get the right amount, the same amount of protein you would get from a four-ounce steak, which is 181 calories, you’d need to eat 12 ounces of beans and a cup of rice. So that’s 638 calories and 122 grams of carbs. And you're still not getting the same beautiful profile of amino acids that you can get from this 181-calorie piece of steak.

Chris Kresser:  Right, which goes back to Marty Kendall's point where you’re basically, if you eat a low-protein diet, it’s going to be a much higher-calorie diet in most cases.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and higher carb and just setting people down to the road towards metabolic disorder.

The Impact Agriculture Has on the Environment

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. So let’s go back now. I want to finish up talking about the impact of animals in the food system. Because I think there's still some other points that are worth going into here that a lot of people may not be familiar with. So one is, we talked about how not all land is suitable for grazing. But let’s talk about maybe the flipside of that is what happens when you use a lot of land for crops like corn and rice and soy and wheat?

Diana Rodgers:  Right, I mean a lot of, and most of this is not organically grown and using animals to graze in all of that. So the large majority of our monocrops are heavily sprayed with chemicals that leave a residue on the leaves that we’re ingesting. And also completely sterilize the soil and create runoff that then ends up in the Mississippi River and creating massive dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

So there are just so many problems with monocropping the way we’re doing it today. We have created an insect apocalypse. And so we’ve lost pollinators. We’re killing fish, which in turn then kills the animals that need to be eating the fish. And so we’re annihilating biodiversity both above and below ground. And so one teaspoon of soil has more microbes in it than all of the humans on earth. And when we spray it with things like Roundup, we’re completely killing all of that. And so we've destroyed just so much of our soil and so much of it is also just blowing away and running off.

So, I mean, the Dust Bowl was a good example of that, and we’re headed for another one right now. So according to the United Nations, we have about 60 harvests left, at the rate we’re going.

Chris Kresser:  This is alarming. This is like an emergency thing on the level that's part of climate change, of course, but also on the same level as potential for water shortages. People, I don't think, are … I mean, some people are aware of it, of course, but we’re talking about some very, very serious implications here.

Diana Rodgers:  And when the soil is compacted and we’re constantly just stripping away the biodiversity of the soil, when rain comes, it just washes all the topsoil away into rivers, and that's how we get these really cloudy rivers. Because rivers in general should be clear. And in a system where we have healthy ruminants managed in a proper way, the soil acts like a sponge and can actually hold a lot more water from rain, instead of allowing it to just wash off and take the topsoil with it. My husband is so into topsoil that even we have two border collies, and they sleep in our mudroom at night. And they come in, they’re black and white, but their white parts are really dirty-looking at the end of the day.

Chris Kresser:  Brown.

Diana Rodgers:  And in the morning they’re totally white and they leave massive amounts of soil on the ground. And I literally have to sweep it up and put it in the field because that’s how into topsoil he is.

Chris Kresser:  Well, yeah, and how precious it is too.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And just nobody is looking at our farmland as a biological system. It’s been reduced to this reductionist chemical, let’s produce as many calories as possible, which is ruining our health and our land.

Chris Kresser:  Let’s talk a little bit also about how ruminants can improve biodiversity. I mean, we touched on that just briefly, but water is a big issue, and I know that cattle can improve water holding capacity of the land. And that has a whole bunch of downstream effects.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. And also too, even the worst-managed cattle on overgrazed grass is still a better system than monocrop grain. So you still, I mean, and even in a better system, you've got butterflies, you've got birds, you've got all kinds of life above ground and below ground that are teeming.

The whole goal, what people don't realize, is that we want as much life as possible. And our current system is actually making sure that we’re annihilating as much life as possible. So if we look at the extinction process that's been happening over the last 50 years, again, it's something completely alarming. I know Silent Spring came out and people were all up in arms. But the solution is not a vegetarian solution. So Diet for a Small Planet is outdated information, and what we need is more better cattle, not no cattle.

Chris Kresser:  It’s not the cow, it’s the how.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly. And not only that too, another thing I brought up is what these rich white people in Sweden were not paying attention to is that livestock are really important to the majority of people living in poverty in the world in places where, what are you going to do in Kenya where it’s super arid and the Maasai have been herding cattle forever and ever? And we’re going to tell them that they need to go grow soybeans? With what seeds? Are they going to have to go buy them from Monsanto? Where are they going to get the water to irrigate? Where are they going to get the fertilizer if they can’t have animals? So I think it’s bordering on racist to have a grain-heavy diet as a global policy for the entire world.

Chris Kresser:  But we can just make more Cheetos.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly.

Chris Kresser:  That’s probably the plan, part of the plan here. It’s really—

Diana Rodgers:  Well, to get them reliant on our aid. I mean, we’re already ruining Haiti with our rice that we’re giving to them. We’ve ruined their local economies, we’ve ruined their health. Now rice is a much higher percentage of their diet. Very few Haitians are actually growing their own food anymore. And it’s a really great way that we can control governments. I mean, that’s a whole other thing that we don’t have to get too much into. But it really makes me mad, the idea that we’re taking away people’s innate ability to be self-reliant.

Chris Kresser:  Not to mention the very clearly documented health impacts that are observed when traditional peoples adopt the Western food system.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And I have an image on my post. So, the Canadian government decided that they knew best, advising a local Inuit population that they should be eating a Mediterranean diet. Which I think is just, I mean, this one image of this igloo showing all of their nutrient-dense traditional foods in the red category and bananas and oranges and orange juice in the green category. I mean that just sums up exactly how wrong we’ve gotten our dietary advice just in this one image.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. And if those poor kids start following that diet, they’re going to become morbidly obese.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And this is seen. It’s been documented in so many different areas where traditional populations start to follow the government-sponsored diet, including Native Americans in the US.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  So, like the Pima, for example.

The Problem with Lab-Grown Meat and Meat Tax

Chris Kresser: So let's talk about some of the other proposals that are floating around that are based on this idea that meat is bad for us nutritionally and bad for the environment, which as I hope we’ve shown in this podcast, is misguided and others. But why not just make meat in a lab? Let’s say you accept that meat, animal protein is more bioavailable and so we do need meat, which some people seem to have accepted. But then why not just grow it in a lab and—

Diana Rodgers:  Reduce suffering.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, reduce suffering and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. All of that. Yeah. And of course, make billions of dollars from the companies that are successful at doing that.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and I think another thing.

Chris Kresser:  Nothing wrong with that per say, but yeah. There’s some financial motivation there perhaps.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. I’m so glad I don’t live where you live. I was actually just out there a couple days ago, and I’m, like, so happy that I’m not living there. Because that’s, like, the hotbed of all of this.

Chris Kresser:  Sure. You just have to be a hermit like me and live up on my hilltop.

Diana Rodgers:  And just go to WeWork and get mad at WeWork in the halls and elevators.

Chris Kresser:  Yep.

Diana Rodgers:  So, I mean, it’s really interesting, the lab meat thing, because I had a woman on my podcast about a year and a half ago who was a big vegan animal rights person telling me how great lab meat was. And I asked her if she knew how it was made, and she had no idea. But she was like, she’s like a really big deal animal rights activist and very vocal about how lab meat is a good solution. And interestingly, most vegans actually won't even accept it because you're using fetal bovine serum in order to make it, which is not “vegan” anyway.

But what folks aren’t realizing, number one, is that it relies on this horrible monocrop system, which is ruining our environment and a completely inefficient way of producing food on so many levels. But then the lifestyle assessments I've read are a lot based on projections because they haven't built the bioreactors yet. So they're making a lot of assumptions, but even the assumptions are so bad that the energy required in order to transform what they're using right now as the substrate.

So corn and soy, sometimes wheat, into protein, the amount of energy required for that is enormous. And when we have animals that can actually just do this on their own without having to be plugged into an outlet is really amazing. Plus, what they're not taking into consideration is the amount of antibiotics that they’ll need to prevent bacterial overgrowth because they’re growing these at just the perfect temperature for meat to grow. But of course that's also the perfect temperature for bacteria to grow as well.

Chris Kresser:  Everything else.

Diana Rodgers:  Cancerous cells, all these things. They had not figured out how to striate the meat with fats. There's a lot of input that we’re running out of that you need in order, there’s a lot of minerals that are being mined in war-torn countries that, actually the US military is, like, guarding these mines in order to get those raw materials in order to pump it into these cellular meat company facilities. So the whole system is energetically ridiculous, and it's not even causing less harm.

So that's my big argument, too, is that when you look at how many lives are lost from the loss of biodiversity, of taking a native ecosystem, plowing it up to make it into a cornfield, and then spraying it to make sure that nothing other than corn, not even mice or anything can grow there. The amount of life lost for that system versus one animal, one large ruminant animal. A cow can provide almost 500 pounds of meat. I just don't think the trade-offs are worth it at all from an ethical or environmental perspective.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, another situation where the devil is in the details, right?

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Because on the fact of it, lab meat sounds, “Hey, why not?” Like, if we can do that and we can make it taste the same … But clearly including that woman that you interviewed on your podcast, that was kind of the level that she was approaching it on, without actually looking into the details. It sounds pretty good on the surface, so why not advocate it. But then when you look into it, you find it’s a little more complicated.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. I’ve been really loving The Wizard and the Prophet, Robb sent that over to me.

Chris Kresser:  I read that just recently.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, I think he told me.

Chris Kresser:  I sent it to Robb.

Diana Rodgers:  Yes, exactly, so I’m thanking you. I’m thanking you for the chain because I have my hands on it. And I’ve been not only reading the book, but then when I’m in my car or at the gym, I’m listening to it. So it’s really fantastic, and I think that that is at the crux of what we’re dealing with right now. Do we look at this, what some would call Luddite perspective of nature through Hoyt, or … I’m sorry. What was his name? Now I’m forgetting.

Chris Kresser:  Vogt.

Diana Rodgers:  Voight. Vogt.

Chris Kresser:  Vogt. Yeah, you want to say Voight because it’s usually an i in there, but it’s V-o-g-t, so it’s Vogt, yeah.

Diana Rodgers:  Or do we look at this more wizard tech solution? And that’s just where most people are right now.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that’s the dominant cultural paradigm is we’ve gone into wizardry, for sure.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, yes.

Chris Kresser:  No question about that. Back when Silent Spring was written, I think there was more, Vogt was more in vogue. There was a little bit more concern about the wizardry and the impact it would have. And now we are 100 percent in wizardry.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. And the problem is, everyone’s just sort of hoping that more rabbits will be pulled out of the hat. But we don't know for sure.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah. I highly recommend this book. This is Charles Mann, who wrote 1491 and 1493, which, if anyone has read those books about … it totally changed our view on how the New World was discovered and colonized and what was here when those people arrived. Which is much different than what was previously believed. He’s a fantastic writer and this is I think, one of the most compelling views on where we are as a society now and what our future might hold. So highly recommend it.

Getting back to the topic, I mean, that's obviously germane and relevant here, but I want to talk about a few other proposals that are being floated around here. Which are again, if you accept what we've talked about here and in other podcasts, are off base. But the meat tax. There’s been a lot of enthusiasm for this because there’s some research that, beverage tax, soda taxes have been effective in terms of reducing consumption. So this is now something that’s being seriously proposed in the EAT-Lancet. I think that’s part of the agenda of the EAT-Lancet paper and authors and reporters.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and actually they released another paper just on Sunday night of this week that goes even more strongly into the meat tax. I think the goal is to make it basically impossible to eat meat moving forward. And effectively, I’ve looked at the models. There was a good paper that looked at what would happen, just kind of projected out, what might happen in this situation. And, actually, red meat consumption wouldn’t go down at all.

And it basically is just a poor tax is what this is. And when you look at, I actually took a picture. I had to run into a typical grocery store and pick something up one time, and I noticed the shopping cart of the person in front of me. And it was soda and donuts and whoopie pies and all stuff like that. But her deli meat and her bacon were actually the most nutrient-dense things in her cart.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, so that would be encouraging even less healthy choices in people who are of limited economic means. And you mentioned this in the beginning about the private jet people who are founding this study, and you brought it up in your article. There really is a classist kind of thing that’s happening here that’s not part of the popular narrative. Because if we really wanted to reduce carbon footprint, you pointed out a meta-analysis that suggested that doing things like avoiding one round-trip transatlantic flight, more of a car-free lifestyle, having one less child in an industrialized nation would have by far bigger impact than reducing your consumption of beef.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. Or changing your diet in any way.

Chris Kresser:  And who’s doing a lot of round-trip transatlantic flying? People who are at a certain socioeconomic level. And so, yeah, a lot of these proposals are like, “Let me continue to live my carbon-emitting lifestyle, and then let’s introduce changes that won’t effect that but actually will impact people who are poor and in a really adverse way without really me having to change anything as a privileged person.”

Diana Rodgers:  Right, and, I mean, in order to do vegan right, you kind of do need to be a celebrity or an uber-rich person that, if there is a way to do vegan, right? But, I mean, to … there’s a lot of food prep involved, there’s a lot of time involved. There’s a lot of time spent eating.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, chewing.

Diana Rodgers:  Chewing, right? Your typical person that maybe gets two 15-minute breaks a day is not going to be able to chew the food or have a staff that can make the cashew cream to make all the—

Chris Kresser:  Or buy the cashew cream for $9.49 for a half pint or whatever it is.

Diana’s Upcoming Docuseries, Sacred Cow

Diana Rodgers:  Right, right. I mean, this film project I’m working on, we’ve done a lot of filming in Indiana, rural Indiana. And I see what these folks have as options for stores on limited budgets and what they’re buying. And honestly, processed food, processed meats like sausages that are pre-cooked are a lot easier for them to eat and are honestly the most nutrient-dense thing that they're eating. Because they’re not doing a whole lot of scratch cooking. They don’t have a lot of time or energy at the end of the day. So when life is really hard and you’re working really hard, you don’t have the privilege to push away something nutrient-dense like meat.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. So let’s talk a little bit about the film. I know it's gone through a lot of iterations and there’s been some wins and some challenges. So tell me, let's start with a little bit of the idea and the inspiration behind it. Why we both feel that this is important to get out there and then maybe a little update where you’re at, what you’re needing, what would be helpful. We have a lot of folks who are listening, who I know want to be a part of this movement in some way.

And I’m often asked by people who are not necessarily in the health field, people who are not nutritionists or Functional Medicine practitioners or anything, like, “How can I help? How can I get involved? How can I use my existing skills or connections or resources to move this forward?” So let's imagine what kind of help we need or could be useful to move this forward, and who knows who’s out there listening.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. So, I was halfway through writing a book on this subject on the nutritional, environmental, and ethical case for meat when yet another vegan film came out about a year and a half ago. And I was like, “If this guy can make a movie, I can make a movie.” And so that’s kind of how it all started. I did a crowd funder that was pretty successful, and we got rolling. At the time, the project was called Kale versus Cow. And we started filming some of these nutrition stories. We hooked up with a doctor who has some amazing clinical trials and is doing really good work in a pretty rural part of the Midwest, conveniently corn country. But there's also farmers who are plowing in their corn and turning it back to grass.

So there’s some really great stories happening there. And some of the feedback I got from the title Kale versus Cow was that, “This sounds like another vegan film,” or, “It sounds like I’m against kale,” which as you know, I’m not against kale. But I think folks maybe that don't know me as well just had these misperceptions, and the name was a little bit of a hang-up for them. So we went back to the drawing board a little bit and changed the title to Sacred Cow, which I think works really nicely, also because there’s a double meaning of sacred cow. Because the vilification of beef is just so embedded in our system.

Chris Kresser:  Yes.

Diana Rodgers:  And, I mean, even when I was going through my graduate program in dietetics, red meat is not okay. It's just not, even though in biochem it's totally fine if you just look at it from an objective scientific perspective. And the project has also transformed from a feature film into a docuseries because we felt that it’s a more digestible way, literally, to get this information across, and there's also more that we wanted to cover that we didn't feel would fit into the narrative of one film.

And so we were now looking at a multipart docuseries still addressing mostly the nutritional, environmental, and ethical aspects of the reason why we need animals in our food system. I'm also very interested in sort of the anthropology of how meat became such a polarizing topic today and how people identify their whole being around how much meat they consume in their diet. The flexitarian, vegan, whatever.

Chris Kresser:  Yep.

Diana Rodgers:  And I still am working on the book. So, as you know, Robb is the coauthor on the book project I’m working on, and he’s the co-executive producer on the film project. But the funding has been a little bit of a challenge. I don’t know if people really get how important this is, and I think it’s one of the reasons why the Unitarian church is not funded well. Because it's, like, trying to extract money out of atheists is a hard thing.

When people are super-passionately committed and religiously committed like vegans, where it’s, like, their religion, they’ll passionately fund things. But then when people are kind of cool with everything and they’re eating meat and they’re like, “Yeah, got my health under control now. That’s great. And if the vegans don’t want to eat meat, fine, that’s more for me.” That’s really kind of the attitude I’m running into a little bit.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah people are less identified with it, which is good, in their way.

Diana Rodgers:  It’s good.

Chris Kresser:  But not as good when you’re trying to raise money for a movie like this.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And I think the other part of it is, I don’t know that people really perceive the threat fully yet. It’s like you just said, they’re like, “If someone wants to be vegan, fine. No skin off my back and it’s not going to hurt me. So there’s no pressing need to fund a film about this. Because who cares if someone’s a vegan.” Well, yeah, on an individual level, you might say that. Even though we could argue that you should care if someone chooses an approach that’s in many cases likely to make them nutrient deficient.

But, yes, each person, of course, has the right to choose their own approach. And I don’t go around trying to proselytize and convert vegans to eating animal foods unless they ask me what I think they should do if they come see me as a patient. But this isn't just about individual choice here. Because, as we know, we talked about the meat tax proposition, and this is going to affect food policy. It's already affected food policy in the US and around the world which then will affect schools. And what happens at schools, which influences our children and the choices that they make.

You know, my daughter is seven and a half, and she comes home with some really interesting things that she's heard from other kids and even teachers at school. And she doesn't go to a typical school, but this is, it’s everywhere. Yeah.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly. And there’s a lot of schools now eliminating meat for health, and I think a lot of parents are kind feeling a little worried about meat consumption. And so maybe they're thinking, “Well, at least they’re getting a healthy meal at school.” And so that's concerning to me because for a lot of kids this is the most nutrient-dense meal of their day. And to blame it on meat is just wrong. And I kept telling folks, this is coming and meat tax is coming.

And I, for a while, was feeling like maybe I’m just nuts and I’m making all this up. I don’t know. But then of course, it is really coming. The EAT-Lancet paper is here. Meat tax is being discussed. We’ve got, LA now is trying to force restaurants and LAX to provide, to tell private businesses to provide vegan entrees. We’ve got Berkeley with Meatless Mondays now at all city meetings.

Chris Kresser:  WeWork.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, WeWork, exactly. There’s airlines now that are eliminating red meat. And so this is coming at us from our clinicians, our universities, we’re hearing this from the World Health Organization. We’re hearing this from business, from the media. Constant films, there's more coming out this year.

I think I just sent you another one that’s on its way out that I’m pretty concerned about. Because it actually has people with MD behind their name. And nobody is pushing back and people are just taking this really lightly. And so, yeah, anything that folks can do to help me get this off the ground, I’d want to come out and feature you, Chris. And I’ve got a lot of really great experts in both the sustainability and health space that very strongly feel that red meat is important to our food system.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. And the reality is that a film or in a docuseries can make a huge impact than even a book.

Diana Rodgers:  That you can’t do with a book. I know.

Chris Kresser:  It doesn’t work. I mean, I’ve written a 400-plus page book with all the science that you need to, I think, get clear that animal food should be part of our diet in addition to plant foods. But how many people are going to read a 400-page book? Not that many. And there’s still something about film that makes it a very viral medium. It’s more accessible, a docuseries is an increasingly popular format, as you said.

It's easier to cover the wide range of topics that you need to hit on for this, and it's a format that has been used for vegan and other types of films or media. And it’s something that’s just really easy to share with. People are more likely to sit down at night and watch an episode of this than they are to read a book.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, exactly. And this is pretty dense material. But if I can just show people what a healthy ecosystem looks like and how cattle raised in the right way, what that looks like compared to a 2,000-acre field of soy being grown for lab meat, I think that those are really powerful visuals.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I agree with that a hundred percent. So if someone is listening to this and the alarm has been raised in their mind, and they’re now aware of the real risk here to our families and communities, and they want to get involved in some way, what's the best way for them to do that?

Diana Rodgers:  So I have more information, and I’m taking donations on sustainabledish.com/film. And for any better meat companies or folks that want to get involved in a bigger way, folks can just message me directly through the site. And we’re working with a few better meat companies and other large donors and foundations. But we still need to, these are expensive, and there are some inexpensive ways of making docuseries.

But in order for us to really get on the mainstream media channels like Netflix, we have to do something that's beautiful and has a high production value and isn't a $50,000 handheld camera project. And so, while the budget isn’t exorbitant, it’s certainly higher than some of the other more budget docuseries that have been coming out. And that's largely because I'm really tired of going to high schools and doing damage control when they show these vegan propaganda films. Because that's what's happening right now.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, absolutely. And will continue to happen, as you pointed out. The momentum there is only building. So we need to, I think, step up to the plate.

Diana Rodgers:  Thank you so much.

Chris Kresser:  Thank you for doing this work, Diana. I really appreciate your advocacy and passion for this, and it shows through in everything that you do. And I hope for all of you listening that this has been up maybe a bit of a wake-up call and you have a little more perspective on what's going on behind the scenes. And even less left behind, like more out in the open now, I think, more and more. Especially with this EAT-Lancet paper, and you see that science is not objective and dispassionate in many cases, but actually quite agenda driven and that there are often interests aligned behind those agendas that may not represent your interests. Like global food companies that want to sell more of their processed and refined products.

So none of us are not impacted by this in some way. And if you have children and family members who are getting exposed to all of this material, it's really important to have a counterpoint that we can offer that is well researched and really hits on the most important issues. And people can change their mind. I mean, your story that you shared with the publisher of the China study was really revealing. To his credit, to whoever that publisher editor was, to his credit. He was able to take in that information and open his mind and give this a chance. And we both, of course, know many people that that’s happened with. I have lots of patients, lots of readers and listeners who were vegan and vegetarian at one point. I was vegan and vegetarian at one point, as everybody knows who’s listened to this show for a while.

And it was through exposure to research and information like what we’re talking about on this show and what you plan to present on the film that actually changed their minds. Because I think that may also be part of the resistance in some cases, like for raising money with this film. It’s like the idea that people are just not going to change their minds. That it’s, we can’t really make an impact. But I don’t agree with that. I think we can make a huge impact and already have, and we just need to scale it up so that it can reach more people.

Diana Rodgers:  I agree.

Chris Kresser:  So sustainabledish.com/film. We will also put some of the links to the podcast and articles that we mentioned, the critiques of EAT-Lancet, Marty Kendall’s and also yours, Diana. And then if you want that big storehouse of information I put together for the Rogan show, which has articles on nutrient density and meat and the effects of meat, and carbohydrate, macronutrients, a ton of stuff, that’s at ChrisKresser.com/Rogan. So thanks, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Diana.

Diana Rodgers:  Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it, Chris. And thanks for all your support ever since I first met you.

Chris Kresser:  It's my pleasure, and I hope we can, with this podcast, move things forward a little bit more quickly and get this out there. Because it really needs to be seen. So thanks, everyone, for listening and please do continue to send in your questions to ChrisKresser.com/podcastquestion. And I’ll talk to you next time.

The post RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers appeared first on Chris Kresser.

Source: http://chriskresser.com February 26, 2019 at 05:55PM

[lejacquelope]

Read this and see to destroy Toxic Masculinity Theory right at its roots.

Toxic Masculinity theory fails on its first premise: masculinity. Masculinity is a construct. It is nothing more than a set of stereotypes associated with males, usually negative ones like domestic violence, rape and harassment. In an age where femininity is recognized as something to be defined by the individual, feminists are eager to define masculinity for men, and assign it all the worst contexts. 

Full stop. The entire toxic masculinity narrative gets beheaded by that fact alone.

But the toxic masculinity narrative fails in countless other ways, too. For instance

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Toxic_masculinity

"The pervasive idea of male-female interactions as competition, not cooperation" is listed as one example of toxic masculinity. Feminists fail spectacularly here in that male-female interactions are competitive across almost the entirety of the animal kingdom, and have been competitive since humans came down from grace or trees (depending on your theory of our origin), long before Patriarchy ever happened.

"The expectation that Real Men are strong, and that showing emotion is incompatible with being strong." - again, failure to understand the nature of animals and animal sexual reproduction. Very few animal species decline to dispose of weak males. 

"the idea that a Real Man cannot be a victim of abuse"

https://jezebel.com/294383/have-you-ever-beat-up-a-boyfriend-cause-uh-we-have

https://www.xojane.com/issues/domestic-violence-shelters-for-men

Are Jezebel or XoJane in any way an icon of Toxic Masculinity? Nope, they are feminist websites. And they mock or outright dismiss male victims of abuse.

"The myth that men are not interested in parenting" - apparently they've never heard of Caroline Norton and the "Tender Years" doctrine... ironically: Caroline Norton's complaint was women were losing custody to fathers as a result of divorce. Fathers who, feminists charge, have now, somehow, been "told by men" that they're not interested in parenting.

https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Tender+Years+Doctrine

These are all myths that power the Toxic Masculinity narrative, myths that are easily debunked by reality, often by feminists' own words and behavior.

But there are many other failings of Toxic Masculinity Theory to address.

Toxic Masculinity theory denies the existence of Toxic Femininity.

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Toxic_femininity

(Let us clarify here: Toxic Masculinity and Toxic Femininity are equally bogus concepts, but where one is asserted to exist, the other must also necessarily exist.)

For instance feminism says that women who abuse children, for instance, are not an example of "toxic femininity", they're somehow just trying to participate in supporting "the patriarchal structure". This ignores the fact that child abuse and murder by males and females alike happen throughout the animal kingdom and among male and female humans even before Patriarchy ever happened - namely, long before the Dawn of Agriculture.

Here's a fact that bears repeating, and that feminists try to downplay: females also commit heinous crimes. When a woman commits rape, domestic violence or harassment against a man, even murder, feminists don't attribute this to toxic anything. Women committing crimes against men are "one bad apple" (see the Geek Feminism Wikia above) rather than an example of "toxic femininity".

Women cheering domestic violence against men 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUna51rI_eQ

http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2741047

is entirely ignored or downplayed by feminism, and certainly not referred to as toxic femininity. There is no guilt by group association at all that is leveled at women who openly cheer women's abuse of men.

The reality is, neither Toxic Masculinity nor Toxic Femininity exist. Masculinity is no more toxic than femininity.

But it gets worse. Women who are victims of violence by other women get no sympathy, either. This is a big problem for women victims because when females are interacting with females: 

1. Females constitute the majority of cyberbullies, their victims mainly being other females.

http://www.guardchild.com/cyber-bullying-statistics/

http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/content/female-bullying.html

https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2010/09/02/girls-cyberbully-more-than-boys/

2. Rape is reported in at least one out of three lesbian relationships:

http://pandys.org/articles/lesbiandomesticviolence.html

https://www.autostraddle.com/when-women-rape-everything-were-not-talking-about-185931/

(According to the CDC, 43 percent of lesbians have experienced rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner compared to 35 percent of heterosexual women)

http://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a19495/women-raped-by-women/

3. Domestic violence between women partners is also proportionally high:

https://everydayfeminism.com/2014/11/myths-ipv-lesbian-relationships/

https://mainweb-v.musc.edu/vawprevention/lesbianrx/factsheet.shtml

http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/relationships/a37015/intimate-partner-violence-in-lesbian-relationships/

Many articles that talk about lesbian partner violence state that it's hard for women to seek help when they're a victim of this. This is because of toxic masculinity theory: feminism has framed domestic violence and harassment as a male thing, using the toxic masculinity narrative. Feminism is completely lost when trying to address women-on-women violence, which in the context of relationships happens more, proportionally speaking, than male-on-female violence. As a result there is no significant campaign to save women from violent women partners. Of course the feminist-dominated mainstream media will not speak of it at all. Again, toxic masculinity has nothing to do with this, nor does patriarchy, when feminists themselves are exerting such little effort to raise public awareness of women who are violent toward each other. There are no marches about it, no ribbons, no protests. Why? Because that would interrupt the toxic masculinity narrative, that would lead people to start wondering, is femininity any less toxic than masculinity? Feminists can't have that kind of discussion catching fire.

Toxic masculinity also does not explain the rise in crimes by women - something England has talked about, but not America:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/6402187/Violent-crime-by-women-on-the-increase.html

http://www.podology.org.uk/#/increasing-female-crime/4556339412

But there is something that does explain it: the pressures of life are weighing down on women more than ever before, making things more equal. And as a result women are losing their gourd the same way that men are, but to lesser numbers. As the society-wide "women are wonderful" effect wears off and women are treated the same way as men, their crimes will increase: which is not to say women are awful - far from it, it is to say women and men are pretty much the same. Under the same pressures they will behave the same way.

Going back to Patriarchy, we can see how equally corrupt women are to men if we look at Patriarchy's mirror twin: Matriarchy. Ancient matriarchal societies were notorious for paternity fraud. It was so rampant that no one really even cared who a child's father was, because no one even knew. This is part of why those societies collapsed.

But a few have persisted.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/31274/6-modern-societies-where-women-literally-rule

http://metro.co.uk/2013/03/05/where-women-rule-the-world-matriarchal-communities-from-albania-to-china-3525234/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/brazil/11065364/Inside-the-Brazilian-all-woman-village-desperate-for-men.html

Here are some common things you'll find in modern existing matriarchies:

1. Women own property, not men.

2. Children are known by their mother's lineage, not the father's.

3. Women decide who holds power.

4. The Chinese Mosuo have no word for "father" or "husband" and women take as many lovers as they want.

5. Pornography is on the verge of being banned in Iceland, where feminism prevails.

6. The presence of men is forbidden entirely in Alapine, Alabama and in Noiva do Cordeiro, Brazil, although the latter has begun to invite men due to the burning desire for sexual companionship. (Proof that misandry hurts women, just as misogyny hurts men.)

7. Men cannot vote in the matriarchal society of Meghalaya, India, nor can they own property.

Sound familiar? Yup, this sounds just like the male power system in its most stereotypical form, aka Patriarchy, but for women, so it's a Matriarchy.

The root argument of toxic masculinity is that sexism is based on male power structures. Benevolent sexism, another bogus narrative, also supposedly springs from this.

The obvious truth is obvious: women can and do form female power structures just as men do, and when it happens, they are just as sexist, and sometimes outright exclusionary, even if women do it more rarely because men simply leave such societies to die. The difference is that women in these matriarchal societies are not in any way looking to change, much less give up their institutionalized advantages. The Patriarchy, on the other hand, put itself out of its sad misery by giving women the right to vote (something that the knuckle-dragging neo Patriarchs of the Trump movement want to revoke).

De facto temporary matriarchies, such as all-female workplaces, can be quite harmful to women. 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldviews/2012/04/30/why-women-are-the-worst-kind-of-bullies/

Of course, feminists delude themselves that this wouldn't happen if, outside of these all-female bubbles, there wasn't a male-dominated power structure to be dragged in and blamed for these women's woes.

It never occurs to feminists that they were actually right when they said women are equal to men in character (and all other things). Humans will always act poorly around each other. The truth is men and women are both vulnerable to forming gender-based power structures (due to tribalism) which are equally sexist and corrupt. And feminism doesn't have an answer or a narrative for that.

The narrative, however is simple: our problem is not Toxic Masculinity or Toxic Femininity, but rather Toxic Humanity.

[cosimaballettithomas-blog]

Blog No. 10

This week focused on the function and role of soil in the environment as one of the most essential natural capitals on earth (Prof’s PowerPoint). While soil is renewable, the formation of a single centimeter takes hundreds of years (Miller 2012, 284). Chiefly, soil consists of rock, water, minerals, gases, nitrogen, phosphorus, and biomass (Prof’s PowerPoint). Some services provided by soil include the supplying of nutrients essential to plant growth, water purification, water storage, and carbon sequestration. Because soil is required by plants, it is also indirectly required by animals. The film Symphony of the Soil puts it perfectly: “We don’t grow plants we grow soil, and soil grows plants” (Symphony of Soil 2013). Although aphoristic, there is actually a depth of insight to this, we see farmers as people working with the earth, tilling and subduing it to produce commodities when in reality, soil does most of the work, and without it agriculture would not be possible, let alone life on earth. One really interesting part of the film was the farmer in California who describes how instantly evident the effects of switching his cattle to an organic diet were on the land, now fertilized by waste no longer contaminated by pesticides and other artificial chemicals that had literally been suffocating the grass underneath (Symphony of Soil 2013). The film furthers that “if we declared a war against the soil itself, then we [would] literally [be] committing a species level suicide.” In a sense, by ignoring climate change and going about our business as usual, we are declaring war against the earth and the soil as the building blocks of life on earth and without which we could not survive. The environmental impacts on soil caused by our unsustainable practices are copious, including top soil erosion, drought, crop failure and increased pest populations. Top soil erosion is a major issue given that it takes so long to regenerate. It is generally caused by flowing water which “carries away particles of topsoil that have been loosened by rainfall,” which is one reason why tropical rainforests have the least fertile soil out of all the biomes. Wind can also blow topsoil away largely occurring in dry, flat regions. Lastly, farming, deforestation, and overgrazing all contribute to soil erosion as they wipe out vegetation that holds soil in place (Miller 2012, 290).

Although we cannot replicate soil, we have discovered a way to produce food without it: hydroponic farming. An Environmental News Network article titled “Indoor Farming Takes Root at University of Toronto” discusses the mechanics behind hydroponic agriculture, or rather hydroculture that uses a “nutrient solution, instead of soil” (pictured below). “The water nourishes the roots, collects in a gutter and then recirculates back to a nutrient tank that feeds back into the hydroponic system” (ENN 2017). Unlike traditional commercial agriculture, which degrades soil and uses a colossal amount of water, hydroponic farming produces no waste when everything that is used is reused. Hydroponic farming can and should be employed everywhere because it can produce niche crops that cater to climate and culture. Another benefit of hydroponic farming is that it takes place inside a greenhouse thus minimizing land use. Moreover, “yields and availability are increased because crops are grown year round, regardless of weather conditions” which could help to bring many people out of poverty and in general provide healthy and nutritious food at all times (Miller 2012, 282). Moreover, hydroponic farming can occur in cities in the form of vertical farming by building greenhouses on rooftops. Another benefit is that, because greenhouse conditions are controlled, there is less risk of pests which eliminates the need for pesticides. Lastly, there is no threat of soil erosion or buildup of harmful chemicals and pesticides because neither are needed in the first place (Miller 2012, 282).

                                                                                         (Organic Authority 2017)

I think vertical farming in general, whether it be hydroponic farming or simply having a rooftop garden is becoming increasingly popular as the climate crisis persists. As discussed in Food Inc., if everyone knew where their food was coming from and how it is produced, many would be less inclined to eat it (Kenner 2009). That film was released ten years ago, and now far more people are aware that the food industry is not only cruel and inhumane to animals but is essentially poisoning people by using the cheapest ingredients available. Moreover, the unhygienic living conditions in which livestock are forced into leads to the spread of disease and ultimately affects the food that we eat. The film mentions a few, most notably salmonella and E.coli (Kenner 2009). Not to mention the huge environmental impacts of agriculture which has “the largest ecological footprint of any human activity and accounts for 25% of world greenhouse gas emissions” (Prof’s PowerPoint). I really believe that these films have been very effective in making people to want to change their diets. I actually decided to become vegetarian after seeing this film when it first came out as well as after reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals which was published around the same time. A former professor of mine, Dickson Despommier, who coined the term “vertical farming” believes that it is largely the answer to our food problems. I think this is reaching, especially considering that most of the world’s food problems exist in less developed countries largely due to overpopulation and rapid urbanization and where vertical farming simply could not produce enough food to sustain so many people. However, I think the concept is worth exploring more, not as the answer to all of our problems but as a tactic for reducing dependence on factory farming, localizing food, encouraging healthy eating, and reducing transportation from imports/exports and trips to grocery stores, especially in low income neighborhoods lacking local stores with fresh produce. It obviously would not hurt to implement vertical farming in less developed countries, and I think we should absolutely provide the materials and funding to build and operate greenhouses; however, the global food crisis is also a social and environmental crisis rooted in depleted resources (beyond soil) and unstable government systems as well as powerful corporations that support poverty by producing in those countries and refusing to raise wages. Thus, even if we built a greenhouse in every community, most people would not be able to afford to buy the fresh produce. Not to mention the revenue that is generated for less developed countries by allowing industries to produce crops and other commodities there.

In response to the Critical Thinking Question: “Is the food Americans eat really “food” anymore (from nature), but rather a man-made, industrially processed product/artifact in the Anthropocene?” I would argue that, for the most part, it isn’t (Prof’s PowerPoint). Of course there are levels to this, packaged food is obviously fake compared to fresh produce; however, just as Food Inc. explains, even something as wholesome as an apple has an entire backstory that we consumers have no conception of, we don’t know where it came from, who made it, the working conditions under which it was produced, what chemicals it was treated with, etc. I remember reading a study conducted years ago where an average American was fed a hunter gatherer diet and within a week they regained all of the healthy bacteria necessary to proper digestion which we have lost over the years as we have moved away from this lifestyle. As expounded on in “Symphony of Soil” we’ve come to associate soil with dirt and thus see it as something undesirable when in reality soil contains the necessary nutrients to literally support every form of life. Diets based solely on packaged and artificial food cannot possibly contain the necessary and inherent minerals and elements within and provided by soil. The hunter gatherer diet was rooted in a relationship between body and earth and sustained humans for ages without being any tilling, plowing, or chemical spraying. It should come as no surprise that indigestion is such a nationwide epidemic, as are other conditions such as IBS, Crohn's, and Lactose Intolerance, which I personally think is our body’s way of telling us that the only humans that are supposed to be drinking milk are infants, and even then, milk produced by their own species. The same can be said about our obsession with products like Hand Sanitizer which, although serves the purpose of killing off any harmful bacteria in the dirt and other natural surroundings consequentially kills the far more abundant bacteria necessary to immune health. 

The film Fed Up discusses obesity and the fault of the food industry for creating the epidemic by making us addicted to the chemicals it loads into our food products. The film predicts that in two decades “over 95% of all Americans will be overweight or obese” and “by 2050, 1 out of every 3 Americans will have diabetes,” and the food industry only serves to benefit from this (Fed Up 2014). In a way, the food industry and government that has failed to regulate it properly are killing Americans. And while it is the individual who makes the conscious decision to those foods, for many Americans who live in food deserts and low-income neighborhoods with little access to grocery stores and fresh produce that naturally contains essential nutrients courtesy of soil, they have no choice but to buy artificial and fast food that is inexpensive and accessible.

Word Count: 1558

Discussion Question: Do you think one can truly be an environmental advocate if they consume  meat, given that the industry consumes vast sums of water, degrades soil by overgrazing and other activities, and emits a huge percentage of greenhouse gases?

Work Cited

Van Buren, Edward. “Prof’s PowerPoint Notes.” https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzKbjVLpnX0RMjVGYUwwZlBXa28/view

Miller, Tyler G., and Scott Spoolman. "Chapter 12: Food, Soil, and Pest Management." Edited by Scott Spoolman. In Living in the Environment. 17th ed. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning, 2012.

Garcia, Deborah. “Symphony of Soil.” Amazon Video. April 22, 2013.

ENN. "Indoor Farming Takes Root at University of Toronto - Mississauga." Environmental News Network. March 16, 2017. https://www.enn.com/articles/50812-indoor-farming-takes-root-at-university-of-toronto---mississauga-.

Monaco, Emily. "Hydroponic Farming Startup Wants to Build a Vertical Farm in Every Major City on the Planet." Organic Authority. November 15, 2017. https://www.organicauthority.com/buzz-news/hydroponic-farming-startup-wants-to-build-a-vertical-farm-in-every-major-city-worldwide.

Kenner, Robert. "Food Inc." YouTube. June 09, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJDGUxqEdYY.

RADiUS. “Fed Up.” YouTube. April 09, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=69&v=aCUbvOwwfWM.

[ebenpink]

RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers https://ift.tt/2U6Eiew

In this episode, we discuss:

What’s missing from the EAT-Lancet Diet

The relationship between meat and the environment

The right way to raise livestock

Where the misunderstanding around meat and the environment comes from

Protein and the EAT-Lancet diet

The impact agriculture has on the environment

The problem with lab-grown meat and a meat tax

Diana’s upcoming docuseries, Sacred Cow

Show notes:

“Why You Should Eat Meat: My Appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience,” by Chris Kresser

“20 Ways EAT Lancet’s Global Diet Is Wrongfully Vilifying Meat,” by Diana Rodgers

“Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems”

“Why Eating Meat Is Good for You,” by Chris Kresser

“Should You EAT Lancet?” by Marty Kendall

“The EAT Lancet Diet is Nutritionally Deficient,” by Zoë Harcombe

“What Is Nutrient Density and Why Is It Important?” by Chris Kresser

Allan Savory’s TED Talk: “How to Fight Desertification and Reverse Climate Change”

“Sustainable Dish Episode 83: The Truth about Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Livestock Production with Frank Mitloehner,” by Diana Rodgers

“Sustainable Dish Episode 84: Meat as Scapegoat with Frédéric Leroy,” by Diana Rodgers

Sacred Cow, a film by Diana Rodgers

[smart_track_player url="https://ift.tt/2BTIfw6" title="RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers" artist="Chris Kresser" ] 

Chris Kresser:  Diana, thanks so much for joining me again on the podcast.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Chris Kresser:  So, we have a lot to talk about.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  This is an annual event, where there’s some big news story that comes out or study that’s published that demonizes meat and animal foods and purports to be the final nail in the coffin for anybody who's eating animal products. In fact, as you know, I just went on the Joe Rogan show, my third appearance there, to debate Dr. Joel Kahn about the merits of animal foods in the diet and eating a vegan diet. And I spent a lot of hours preparing for that and wrote a lot of articles. And the debate itself was almost four hours long, and admittedly I was a little tired out after that experience. And I just couldn't muster the energy and strength to write a rebuttal to the EAT-Lancet paper that was published. But you did, and several other people did.

And so I’d love to dive in and talk about that, as well as just stepping back a little bit and discussing some of the environmental impacts or the purported environmental impact of eating meat and what's wrong with the traditional narrative there. Because I didn't get to talk much on the Joe Rogan show about that. And then some of the difficulties of addressing this, and how I know you’ve been working on a film to try to get this message out that we’ve talked about. So why don't we just start first with the EAT-Lancet paper, since this is what's really making the rounds now and bringing this to the forefront of everybody's attention.

What’s Missing from the EAT-Lancet Diet

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, definitely. So there’s, they were really attacking red meat on a nutritional and environmental angle. So, I know your arguments on the Joe Rogan podcast were purely nutritional. I think that the main narratives are always nutrition, environment, and ethics. And ethics were kept out of the EAT-Lancet. Very long paper that took me quite a long time to read. But there's definitely a lot of misinformation in there about meat.

I mean, they’re using observational studies to basically tell us that we cannot have any processed meats at all, lumping them all together, and that we can only eat less than half an ounce of red meat per day. We can only have less than one ounce of chicken per day. But yet we can have eight teaspoons of sugar per day.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, and plenty of corn and rice and wheat. Let's talk a little bit … I think most of my listeners are pretty familiar with the nutritional arguments. I and others have written a lot about that, and most recently my … in preparation for the Rogan show, I published a whole cornerstone page with everything you need to debunk the nutritional arguments. So, that's at ChrisKresser.com/rogan, if you want to look it up.

But I just want to briefly talk about the nutrient density of this EAT-Lancet diet. Because if you just look at it from that single perspective, nutritionally you’ll see very quickly that it falls short. And our body needs micronutrients to function properly. And if a proposed diet doesn't offer those micronutrients in sufficient quantities, I think we can safely say it's not a good diet for humans to follow.

And I don’t want to spend a ton of time on this, so I’m just going to go through this really briefly, and then I want to switch over to talking more about some of the environmental issues. Because that's, I know, an area where you have a lot of expertise. And I really love what you have to say there. So, Zoë Harcombe did an analysis, and I think you had mentioned, Diana, that Marty Kendall did too. So we can talk about that. But Zoë's analysis, it’s not publicly accessible. You have to be a subscriber to see it. But I can share this part of it. She analyzed the EAT-Lancet diet using food tables and found that it was well below the RDA for several nutrients: B12, retinol, vitamin D, vitamin K2, which wasn’t even studied separately, but 71 percent of the K in the diet came from broccoli.

So we know that there's probably very little K2 in the diet. Sodium, potassium, calcium, and iron. So that's a lot of the essential nutrients that we need, and in some cases it was providing less than 20 percent of the RDA of those nutrients. So, to me, that's pretty much case closed on that basis alone. And then we can look at all the other problems that observational studies on red meat and all of that entail. And I just think it’s … there’s really nothing to be alarmed about. This study doesn't add any new evidence that meat and animal products are harmful.

Diana Rodgers:  Not at all. And another thing she didn’t mention in her paper or her review is the conversion rate of some of the vitamins, like beta-carotene to vitamin A, and almost half the population can’t make that conversion easily. And so even though on paper it my show that the vitamin A was adequate, actually not.

Despite what the EAT-Lancet paper says, meat is still a healthy addition to your diet. Check out this episode of RHR for my discussion with Diana Rodgers about what a real healthy diet looks like. #nutrition #chriskresser #wellness 

Chris Kresser:  It’s the same with all of these other nutrients. I actually wrote an article. I addressed this in my article on nutrient density you can find at the ChrisKresser.com/Rogan link. Iron, 94 percent of the iron in the EAT-Lancet diet is from plant-based forms of iron. And we know that heme iron that you get from animal products orders a magnitude better absorbed than most plant forms of iron. And the same with calcium, that is better absorbed from, in most cases, from animal products. And virtually every other nutrient, zinc, long-chain omega-3 fats, only found in animal products. So it's really, yeah, that conversion and bioavailability piece is almost never addressed in these kinds of studies.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, and you also write a lot about B12 and how these plant-based B12 analogues actually increase your need for a real B12.

Chris Kresser:  Exactly. Yeah, so, really nothing to see here from a nutritional perspective. But part of why it's making such a big splash is in addition to the highly coordinated launch campaign that is driven by celebrity, very wealthy celebrity type of people who are behind this, is the argument that not only should we avoid red meat and animal products for these nutritional reasons, but they're destroying the planet. So let’s really dive into that and unpack that from the perspective of the paper. I think you wrote an article, something like 20 reasons or 20 points against this. So we don't have to go through all of those, but let’s cover the highlights.

The Relationship between Meat and the Environment

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, well, I think the number one thing that people need to understand is that we can’t just assume that if we’re not raising animals that it will automatically free up land for more crops. So, agricultural land isn't interchangeable. Most of the agricultural land on the globe is not suited for cropping due to water availability. It’s too rocky, it’s too steep.

So, I think a lot of people, especially that haven’t traveled much, look around and just see the nice flat land and just assume that everywhere in the world is like that. I mean, picture Iceland, Norway, picture many parts of Africa, Mongolia. I mean, there’s just so many places that really will only support grazing animals and not wheat and corn and soy production. And so that’s a huge thing that we need to consider, and if we are to not graze animals on that land, not only will we lose that for food production, but the land will also desertify. Because we just don’t have those wild herds and the numbers that we used to any longer.

And ruminants are actually incredibly beneficial. Their impact on the land helps increase water holding capacity; their grazing actually stimulates new growth in a good way. So you can’t just have these fenced-off acres with nothing on it. You actually need grazing animals as part of healthy grassland ecosystems.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that's a point that is really misunderstood. I see a little bit more discussion about it certainly, at least in our realm. But I’m having kind of a hard time thinking of a mainstream article that really did justice to that point. Do you know of any?

Diana Rodgers:  Well, I've written a few blog posts on it and have talked a lot about it. I think Allan Savory does a really good job.

Chris Kresser:  Certainly.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, in his Savory Institute work that they've done and also his TED talk. But I think that's definitely the number one point that people need to understand. And it's funny because I am working on a book as well on this topic, and my publisher actually has published a ton of vegan books, and he was skeptical. And once he read my environmental argument and specifically wrapped his head around this very topic, I won him over.

Chris Kresser:  That’s amazing.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, people just, because we’re so divorced from nature, you and I have talked about this before just off-line, but that’s the number one problem is that people just have no idea how food is produced and what makes a healthy ecosystem. And a lot of the vegans will, the ones who do accept that not all land can be cropped, just want it turned over to be rewilded.

So let’s just crop everything we can possibly crop and then we’ll just rewild all the pastureland with deer or something cute. But then what are we going to do because we’ve eliminated all the predators? I mean even in the town I live in outside of Boston, we have a massive deer problem. And nobody wants hunting because they don’t want to see dead animals on their beautiful hikes around the conservation land here in my town. And if we eliminate the predators, we need to be responsible for how these populations of wild animals are managed. And so the other option, if we’re not going to hunt them, I suppose would be to bring back wolves. I don’t know how.

Chris Kresser:  I don't think that would go over well.

Diana Rodgers:  I don’t know how my waiting for the bus in my town with wolves swirling around at dawn will go over. So it quickly backs them into a very uncomfortable corner there.

Chris Kresser:  I think another thing that you point out that people don’t realize is that 90 percent of what cattle eat is, at least in a natural grazing state, not in a CAFO type of arrangement, is forage and plant leftovers that humans can’t eat.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, exactly. And even in, I mean, I’m not an advocate for feedlot beef, but I think one thing people don’t understand about even cattle that are raised on feedlots, or that are finished on feedlots rather, is that they’re not raised on feedlots.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  So 85 percent of the beef cattle in the US are actually grazing on land that can't be cropped. And even if they do end up on a feedlot, 90 percent of their total intake is non-edible food to humans. And so they're eating, for example, soybean cakes. But that’s left over from the soybean oil industry.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  They’re eating large amounts of distiller’s grains, lots of foods that would normally emit greenhouse gases and decompose anyway. Ranchers are also grazing cattle on spent wheat and cornfields. So you know that corn would just decompose and emit greenhouse gases either way. So why not run it through a ruminant gut and make protein out of it?

Chris Kresser:  And fertilizer, as you pointed out.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. I mean, it’s so much more nuanced. This is a theme that will probably come up in our conversation a lot is, and I know Robb, Robb and I commiserate about it, and I know you do as well with him. But the vegan narrative is so simple in a lot of ways and it plays into a lot of assumptions, even if they’re wrong, that you don’t really have to explain it to people. It just, people have heard things over and over again. “Meat is bad for the environment, it’s bad for us, therefore eliminate meat from your diet and the food system, and everyone will be healthier.” That’s so easy to understand.

But as Robb has pointed out many times, the counterargument is nuanced and complex. And is not quite as simple to understand and requires that you actually pay attention to some of these finer points. And I think that is one of the challenges that we face in this struggle. But it’s not incomprehensible. I mean, if you just get a few of the simple points like this, it starts to become a lot easier to understand.

Diana Rodgers:  Definitely.  And now my point was … oh, I was going to say too that there's a lot, 50 percent of the carcass of a cow is not eaten but used for other industry uses. So we've got leather, we've got insulin, we’ve got footballs, we’ve got lots of medical applications, fertilizer. So eliminating all animals from our food system, there's a great study I think I sent you this morning that was published in PNAS about what would happen if we eliminated all animals from our food system.

So the greenhouse gas emissions would only decrease by about 2 1/2 percent. But our overall caloric intake would actually go way up, and our nutrient deficiencies would go up. So we already have a problem in our culture where we’re over-consuming calories and not getting enough nutrients. So we would just be making the problem worse for about a 2 percent emission reduction.

The Right Way to Raise Livestock

Chris Kresser:  And those numbers don’t assume any improvement in how cattle are managed, right?

Diana Rodgers:  Right. That was just typical cattle.

Chris Kresser:  Right. So if we actually made improvements in how cattle are managed, do you think there could be a net sequestration of carbon?

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, definitely. So there's been some research coming out of Michigan State showing the difference between continuous grazing and what they term “adaptive multi-paddock grazing,” which is similar to Allan Savory's method, so basically when you intensively graze an area and then move the cattle off quickly.

So, this is how, for example, herds in Africa naturally move because of predator pressure, so it's much worse for the land to have, let's say if you have a 10-acre field and have 100 cattle on that land for the whole summer, as opposed to tightly bunching and moving them frequently and allowing that land to rest. Because that's when carbon gets sequestered, in the regrowth phase of the grass. And so the grass is going through photosynthesis, it’s pulling down carbon and actually exuding carbon sugars to bacteria and to fungal networks that are then passing that grass nutrient. So the fungus is actually mining rocks and getting the minerals from that and feeding it to the grass, and that's how carbon is sequestered. And that process is most effective and actually is a net carbon gain when cattle are managed in this way.

So that's why I like to say “it's not the cow, it’s the how,” because there's just many different ways of raising cattle. Just like there are many different ways of growing broccoli. We can do it in a monocrop system, or we can do it in a more rotational system where we’re integrating it with other crops. And what we need is less monocrops because that's just not how healthy ecosystems work, and farmland is not natural. Like, when you fly over the United States, all those squares you’re looking down at, that's not nature, that's man doing that.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. I know from your article, you did also a podcast with Frank Mitloehner—is that how you pronounce it? We’ll include a link to that in the show notes because I think people should listen to that. He’s an expert in greenhouse gas emissions and animal agriculture. And you guys talk a lot about what’s really going on there and why some of the typical numbers that are thrown around are not accurate. And if anyone’s interested in a deeper dive, I’d definitely recommend listening to that.

So, greenhouse gas from beef cattle represents, just as it's currently done with no improvements, like you just mentioned, is 2 percent of emissions. And by contrast, transportation is 27 percent. So, yet when I go to WeWork, which I have an office at—

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, gosh.

Chris Kresser:  You probably know this.

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, no.

Chris Kresser:  But some of my listeners might not know that WeWork is a company that has committed to this idea that eating a vegetarian diet will save the planet. And they, I think, so, I was there two days ago on Monday, and they have meatless Monday at WeWork, where they served veggie burgers in the main lounge. And then they print these cards that they post around there, around the office, that say, “If everyone was just a vegetarian for,” I can't remember, “one or two days a week, we would save 450 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.” And again, this goes back to the simplicity thing.

Most people get in the elevator, they see that and they're like, “Oh, wow, okay. I guess I should become a vegetarian.” So how does this continue? I mean, it’s not surprising that there’s a disconnect between actual science and what we see in the media. We know that from the nutrition world and everything else. But how do you think this got started? Was there a lot of misunderstanding initially which led to these numbers and then later science kind of brought more clarity? Or what do you think? How have we gotten here?

Diana Rodgers:  Well, I actually just released an amazing podcast on Tuesday of this week, so maybe you could link to that one too, with the guy from Brussels, Frédéric Leroy.

Chris Kresser:  I read some of his papers. You sent them to me awhile back before the Rogan debate.

Where the Misunderstanding around Meat and the Environment Comes From

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, he’s so fantastic. Yeah, so, his opinion is that meat is unfairly absorbing a lot of our worries about our health, our state of our health and the environment, because meat is so powerful and can absorb it. But it's unfairly the scapegoat for our stressors. So, everyone just, it's much easier for us to blame meat than it is to perhaps look at our transportation industry and be uncomfortable about that. I mean, the main funder of that EAT-Lancet paper has a private jet and transportation was never mentioned in the EAT-Lancet.

Chris Kresser:  I don’t know if this is accurate, but I read something about how just the jet trips for the reporter would have a bigger impact on the environment than the diet changes that they were talking about.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And so, in Livestock’s Long Shadow, that's when a lot of this all started. The mass information about the emissions with cattle. And unfortunately, when they did that study, what they did was they looked at all the emissions, the full lifecycle of ruminant animals. They looked at production of the feed, all the transportation, all the emissions, everything. And when they compared that to transportation, they only looked at tailpipe exhaust. So they didn't even factor in transportation, for example, in the transportation numbers.

And so when you look at the global numbers at emissions of cattle versus transportation, you're looking at apples to oranges there. So you're looking at the full lifecycle of a beef animal compared to just the tailpipe emissions from transportation. So that's not fair. And also in other countries, the percentage is a little bit higher. But that's in places where maybe transportation plays a lesser role where there are less cars per cow. And so, their relative emissions may be higher. But that's again not taking into account the fact that cattle can actually sequester carbon and many, many other factors. And so the authors of Livestock’s Long Shadow did reduce their numbers, I think, from 18 to 14 percent and did admit that their numbers were still off because of the transportation. There are no global lifecycle papers on transportation.

But yet that 18 percent, I’ve heard even 50 percent. I don't even know where that number comes from, but that, the 50 percent is the number that's often cited by this group called Green Mondays and they are the ones that have worked with Berkeley to make all of the government meetings meatless on Mondays. That organization, I’ve looked into, and they’re actually funded by an organization out of Singapore that produces plant-based pork.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  And so there’s a lot, the environment and ethics and even the nutrition argument is very convenient for large food companies to profit, because processing means profit.

Chris Kresser:  Well, let’s talk a little bit about that, and since we’re on the topic, I do want to come back to some of the other ways that an animal-based food system or food system that includes animals can actually benefit biodiversity and things like that. So yeah, follow the money. We talk about that a lot on this show. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but on the other hand, you'd be very naïve and misguided to assume that money doesn't play a big role in setting food policy and coming up with these laws. It always has.

Protein and the EAT-Lancet Diet

And it probably always will. And if you look at the EAT-Lancet diet, I think this is from Marty Kendall's analysis, you’ll find that 32 percent of calories come from rice, wheat, and corn, and 14 percent come from unsaturated oils. So these are highly processed foods.

Diana Rodgers:  Right.

Chris Kresser:  We’re not talking about corn on the cob.

Diana Rodgers:  Or wheat berries.

Chris Kresser:  Wheat berries. Or even, like, in some cases, just the whole-grain rice. We’re talking about highly processed corn and wheat and rice derivatives, and then highly processed industrial seed oils that comprise almost 50 percent of calories. And who does that benefit? This study was sponsored by a basically hit list A-team of—

Diana Rodgers:  Processed food companies.

Chris Kresser:  Global processed food companies—DuPont, PepsiCo, Dannon, Nestlé, Cargill, Kellogg's. So, like, food and agricultural companies that make their money by selling processed and refined foods. And so that's very revealing.

And then the other thing that Marty Kendall pointed out, which is directly tied to this, is that this diet, when you work out the macronutrient ratios, it ends up being low in protein and moderate in fat and carbohydrates. And there are really no foods in nature that fit that profile, or very few. You have breast milk and acorns, I think, are the two that he pointed out. And this is a recipe for, that macronutrient mix of low protein and then higher fat and carbohydrate is a recipe for highly palatable and rewarding food. So if you look at the foods that are on this list that fit that profile, there are things like chocolate milk, potato chips, French toast, waffles, ice cream, pancakes.

Diana Rodgers:  Kit-Kat.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, biscuits, Kit-Kat, Twix, chocolate chip cookies, pie crust. I mean, are you kidding me? This is the macronutrient profile that we should be following? Oh, who does not benefit? All of the companies that make these processed foods. So it's really revealing when you look at it from that perspective.

Diana Rodgers:  I know. And I think it's really irresponsible to promote a diet that's about 10 percent in protein when we have, I mean, just in America, more than 50 percent of Americans are metabolically broken and really benefit from much higher protein levels.

Chris Kresser:  Increasing their protein. And we know that of all the macronutrients, protein is the one that has the biggest impact on satiety.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  Which it will reduce the likelihood that people overeat, which many Americans are doing.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And any clinician or dietitian like yourself who's worked with people knows if they're struggling with weight, putting them on a higher-protein diet is probably the most important thing you can do. And there's even some, if you look at the studies on low-carb diets, I think probably one of the reasons, if not one of the main reasons, that they’re so effective is that they’re higher in protein.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and I have to say too, so I actually have recently been following Marty Kendall's NutrientOptimiser diet personally, just as an experiment to try to maximize my micronutrients. And I eat really well. I live on a farm. I have a lot of education in nutrient density. I have access to all these foods. It's really hard to get all your micronutrients in the day. But it's really easy to feel satiated when you have a high percentage of animal protein in your diet. So whether that's oysters, which I know I can beat his leaderboard if I just eat a ton of oysters in one day.

Chris Kresser:  That’s right. That’s right.

Diana Rodgers:  But liver, and then just regular old animal protein. Filling the rest of your diet with colorful vegetables is the way to go. But it still, I still was low, actually, believe it or not, in iron, even with all the protein I’ve been consuming on this diet.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, I’m always talking to my patients about a lot of, especially if they’re favoring like chicken and fish, and not eating shellfish or organ meats, is that some muscle meats are not that high in iron. So it’s organ meats and shellfish that are really the powerhouses from that perspective.

And this brings up another question about bioavailability, right? Because we’ve both talked about this a lot. It's not at all the case that protein from plant sources like legumes is going to be absorbed in the same way that protein is absorbed from animal foods like meat and eggs and fish and dairy products. There is something called the … there are various scoring systems that are used in the scientific literature to assess the bioavailability of protein. And no matter what scoring system you use, animal proteins come out ahead of plant proteins, and usually by a very large margin.

Diana Rodgers:  And, I mean, trying to get your protein from beans and rice, if you’re trying to do the combining in order to get the right profile of amino acids, you would, so I did the calculations. So in order to get the right amount, the same amount of protein you would get from a four-ounce steak, which is 181 calories, you’d need to eat 12 ounces of beans and a cup of rice. So that’s 638 calories and 122 grams of carbs. And you're still not getting the same beautiful profile of amino acids that you can get from this 181-calorie piece of steak.

Chris Kresser:  Right, which goes back to Marty Kendall's point where you’re basically, if you eat a low-protein diet, it’s going to be a much higher-calorie diet in most cases.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and higher carb and just setting people down to the road towards metabolic disorder.

The Impact Agriculture Has on the Environment

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. So let’s go back now. I want to finish up talking about the impact of animals in the food system. Because I think there's still some other points that are worth going into here that a lot of people may not be familiar with. So one is, we talked about how not all land is suitable for grazing. But let’s talk about maybe the flipside of that is what happens when you use a lot of land for crops like corn and rice and soy and wheat?

Diana Rodgers:  Right, I mean a lot of, and most of this is not organically grown and using animals to graze in all of that. So the large majority of our monocrops are heavily sprayed with chemicals that leave a residue on the leaves that we’re ingesting. And also completely sterilize the soil and create runoff that then ends up in the Mississippi River and creating massive dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

So there are just so many problems with monocropping the way we’re doing it today. We have created an insect apocalypse. And so we’ve lost pollinators. We’re killing fish, which in turn then kills the animals that need to be eating the fish. And so we’re annihilating biodiversity both above and below ground. And so one teaspoon of soil has more microbes in it than all of the humans on earth. And when we spray it with things like Roundup, we’re completely killing all of that. And so we've destroyed just so much of our soil and so much of it is also just blowing away and running off.

So, I mean, the Dust Bowl was a good example of that, and we’re headed for another one right now. So according to the United Nations, we have about 60 harvests left, at the rate we’re going.

Chris Kresser:  This is alarming. This is like an emergency thing on the level that's part of climate change, of course, but also on the same level as potential for water shortages. People, I don't think, are … I mean, some people are aware of it, of course, but we’re talking about some very, very serious implications here.

Diana Rodgers:  And when the soil is compacted and we’re constantly just stripping away the biodiversity of the soil, when rain comes, it just washes all the topsoil away into rivers, and that's how we get these really cloudy rivers. Because rivers in general should be clear. And in a system where we have healthy ruminants managed in a proper way, the soil acts like a sponge and can actually hold a lot more water from rain, instead of allowing it to just wash off and take the topsoil with it. My husband is so into topsoil that even we have two border collies, and they sleep in our mudroom at night. And they come in, they’re black and white, but their white parts are really dirty-looking at the end of the day.

Chris Kresser:  Brown.

Diana Rodgers:  And in the morning they’re totally white and they leave massive amounts of soil on the ground. And I literally have to sweep it up and put it in the field because that’s how into topsoil he is.

Chris Kresser:  Well, yeah, and how precious it is too.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And just nobody is looking at our farmland as a biological system. It’s been reduced to this reductionist chemical, let’s produce as many calories as possible, which is ruining our health and our land.

Chris Kresser:  Let’s talk a little bit also about how ruminants can improve biodiversity. I mean, we touched on that just briefly, but water is a big issue, and I know that cattle can improve water holding capacity of the land. And that has a whole bunch of downstream effects.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. And also too, even the worst-managed cattle on overgrazed grass is still a better system than monocrop grain. So you still, I mean, and even in a better system, you've got butterflies, you've got birds, you've got all kinds of life above ground and below ground that are teeming.

The whole goal, what people don't realize, is that we want as much life as possible. And our current system is actually making sure that we’re annihilating as much life as possible. So if we look at the extinction process that's been happening over the last 50 years, again, it's something completely alarming. I know Silent Spring came out and people were all up in arms. But the solution is not a vegetarian solution. So Diet for a Small Planet is outdated information, and what we need is more better cattle, not no cattle.

Chris Kresser:  It’s not the cow, it’s the how.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly. And not only that too, another thing I brought up is what these rich white people in Sweden were not paying attention to is that livestock are really important to the majority of people living in poverty in the world in places where, what are you going to do in Kenya where it’s super arid and the Maasai have been herding cattle forever and ever? And we’re going to tell them that they need to go grow soybeans? With what seeds? Are they going to have to go buy them from Monsanto? Where are they going to get the water to irrigate? Where are they going to get the fertilizer if they can’t have animals? So I think it’s bordering on racist to have a grain-heavy diet as a global policy for the entire world.

Chris Kresser:  But we can just make more Cheetos.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly.

Chris Kresser:  That’s probably the plan, part of the plan here. It’s really—

Diana Rodgers:  Well, to get them reliant on our aid. I mean, we’re already ruining Haiti with our rice that we’re giving to them. We’ve ruined their local economies, we’ve ruined their health. Now rice is a much higher percentage of their diet. Very few Haitians are actually growing their own food anymore. And it’s a really great way that we can control governments. I mean, that’s a whole other thing that we don’t have to get too much into. But it really makes me mad, the idea that we’re taking away people’s innate ability to be self-reliant.

Chris Kresser:  Not to mention the very clearly documented health impacts that are observed when traditional peoples adopt the Western food system.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And I have an image on my post. So, the Canadian government decided that they knew best, advising a local Inuit population that they should be eating a Mediterranean diet. Which I think is just, I mean, this one image of this igloo showing all of their nutrient-dense traditional foods in the red category and bananas and oranges and orange juice in the green category. I mean that just sums up exactly how wrong we’ve gotten our dietary advice just in this one image.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. And if those poor kids start following that diet, they’re going to become morbidly obese.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And this is seen. It’s been documented in so many different areas where traditional populations start to follow the government-sponsored diet, including Native Americans in the US.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  So, like the Pima, for example.

The Problem with Lab-Grown Meat and Meat Tax

Chris Kresser: So let's talk about some of the other proposals that are floating around that are based on this idea that meat is bad for us nutritionally and bad for the environment, which as I hope we’ve shown in this podcast, is misguided and others. But why not just make meat in a lab? Let’s say you accept that meat, animal protein is more bioavailable and so we do need meat, which some people seem to have accepted. But then why not just grow it in a lab and—

Diana Rodgers:  Reduce suffering.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, reduce suffering and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. All of that. Yeah. And of course, make billions of dollars from the companies that are successful at doing that.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and I think another thing.

Chris Kresser:  Nothing wrong with that per say, but yeah. There’s some financial motivation there perhaps.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. I’m so glad I don’t live where you live. I was actually just out there a couple days ago, and I’m, like, so happy that I’m not living there. Because that’s, like, the hotbed of all of this.

Chris Kresser:  Sure. You just have to be a hermit like me and live up on my hilltop.

Diana Rodgers:  And just go to WeWork and get mad at WeWork in the halls and elevators.

Chris Kresser:  Yep.

Diana Rodgers:  So, I mean, it’s really interesting, the lab meat thing, because I had a woman on my podcast about a year and a half ago who was a big vegan animal rights person telling me how great lab meat was. And I asked her if she knew how it was made, and she had no idea. But she was like, she’s like a really big deal animal rights activist and very vocal about how lab meat is a good solution. And interestingly, most vegans actually won't even accept it because you're using fetal bovine serum in order to make it, which is not “vegan” anyway.

But what folks aren’t realizing, number one, is that it relies on this horrible monocrop system, which is ruining our environment and a completely inefficient way of producing food on so many levels. But then the lifestyle assessments I've read are a lot based on projections because they haven't built the bioreactors yet. So they're making a lot of assumptions, but even the assumptions are so bad that the energy required in order to transform what they're using right now as the substrate.

So corn and soy, sometimes wheat, into protein, the amount of energy required for that is enormous. And when we have animals that can actually just do this on their own without having to be plugged into an outlet is really amazing. Plus, what they're not taking into consideration is the amount of antibiotics that they’ll need to prevent bacterial overgrowth because they’re growing these at just the perfect temperature for meat to grow. But of course that's also the perfect temperature for bacteria to grow as well.

Chris Kresser:  Everything else.

Diana Rodgers:  Cancerous cells, all these things. They had not figured out how to striate the meat with fats. There's a lot of input that we’re running out of that you need in order, there’s a lot of minerals that are being mined in war-torn countries that, actually the US military is, like, guarding these mines in order to get those raw materials in order to pump it into these cellular meat company facilities. So the whole system is energetically ridiculous, and it's not even causing less harm.

So that's my big argument, too, is that when you look at how many lives are lost from the loss of biodiversity, of taking a native ecosystem, plowing it up to make it into a cornfield, and then spraying it to make sure that nothing other than corn, not even mice or anything can grow there. The amount of life lost for that system versus one animal, one large ruminant animal. A cow can provide almost 500 pounds of meat. I just don't think the trade-offs are worth it at all from an ethical or environmental perspective.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, another situation where the devil is in the details, right?

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Because on the fact of it, lab meat sounds, “Hey, why not?” Like, if we can do that and we can make it taste the same … But clearly including that woman that you interviewed on your podcast, that was kind of the level that she was approaching it on, without actually looking into the details. It sounds pretty good on the surface, so why not advocate it. But then when you look into it, you find it’s a little more complicated.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. I’ve been really loving The Wizard and the Prophet, Robb sent that over to me.

Chris Kresser:  I read that just recently.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, I think he told me.

Chris Kresser:  I sent it to Robb.

Diana Rodgers:  Yes, exactly, so I’m thanking you. I’m thanking you for the chain because I have my hands on it. And I’ve been not only reading the book, but then when I’m in my car or at the gym, I’m listening to it. So it’s really fantastic, and I think that that is at the crux of what we’re dealing with right now. Do we look at this, what some would call Luddite perspective of nature through Hoyt, or … I’m sorry. What was his name? Now I’m forgetting.

Chris Kresser:  Vogt.

Diana Rodgers:  Voight. Vogt.

Chris Kresser:  Vogt. Yeah, you want to say Voight because it’s usually an i in there, but it’s V-o-g-t, so it’s Vogt, yeah.

Diana Rodgers:  Or do we look at this more wizard tech solution? And that’s just where most people are right now.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that’s the dominant cultural paradigm is we’ve gone into wizardry, for sure.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, yes.

Chris Kresser:  No question about that. Back when Silent Spring was written, I think there was more, Vogt was more in vogue. There was a little bit more concern about the wizardry and the impact it would have. And now we are 100 percent in wizardry.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. And the problem is, everyone’s just sort of hoping that more rabbits will be pulled out of the hat. But we don't know for sure.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah. I highly recommend this book. This is Charles Mann, who wrote 1491 and 1493, which, if anyone has read those books about … it totally changed our view on how the New World was discovered and colonized and what was here when those people arrived. Which is much different than what was previously believed. He’s a fantastic writer and this is I think, one of the most compelling views on where we are as a society now and what our future might hold. So highly recommend it.

Getting back to the topic, I mean, that's obviously germane and relevant here, but I want to talk about a few other proposals that are being floated around here. Which are again, if you accept what we've talked about here and in other podcasts, are off base. But the meat tax. There’s been a lot of enthusiasm for this because there’s some research that, beverage tax, soda taxes have been effective in terms of reducing consumption. So this is now something that’s being seriously proposed in the EAT-Lancet. I think that’s part of the agenda of the EAT-Lancet paper and authors and reporters.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and actually they released another paper just on Sunday night of this week that goes even more strongly into the meat tax. I think the goal is to make it basically impossible to eat meat moving forward. And effectively, I’ve looked at the models. There was a good paper that looked at what would happen, just kind of projected out, what might happen in this situation. And, actually, red meat consumption wouldn’t go down at all.

And it basically is just a poor tax is what this is. And when you look at, I actually took a picture. I had to run into a typical grocery store and pick something up one time, and I noticed the shopping cart of the person in front of me. And it was soda and donuts and whoopie pies and all stuff like that. But her deli meat and her bacon were actually the most nutrient-dense things in her cart.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, so that would be encouraging even less healthy choices in people who are of limited economic means. And you mentioned this in the beginning about the private jet people who are founding this study, and you brought it up in your article. There really is a classist kind of thing that’s happening here that’s not part of the popular narrative. Because if we really wanted to reduce carbon footprint, you pointed out a meta-analysis that suggested that doing things like avoiding one round-trip transatlantic flight, more of a car-free lifestyle, having one less child in an industrialized nation would have by far bigger impact than reducing your consumption of beef.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. Or changing your diet in any way.

Chris Kresser:  And who’s doing a lot of round-trip transatlantic flying? People who are at a certain socioeconomic level. And so, yeah, a lot of these proposals are like, “Let me continue to live my carbon-emitting lifestyle, and then let’s introduce changes that won’t effect that but actually will impact people who are poor and in a really adverse way without really me having to change anything as a privileged person.”

Diana Rodgers:  Right, and, I mean, in order to do vegan right, you kind of do need to be a celebrity or an uber-rich person that, if there is a way to do vegan, right? But, I mean, to … there’s a lot of food prep involved, there’s a lot of time involved. There’s a lot of time spent eating.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, chewing.

Diana Rodgers:  Chewing, right? Your typical person that maybe gets two 15-minute breaks a day is not going to be able to chew the food or have a staff that can make the cashew cream to make all the—

Chris Kresser:  Or buy the cashew cream for $9.49 for a half pint or whatever it is.

Diana’s Upcoming Docuseries, Sacred Cow

Diana Rodgers:  Right, right. I mean, this film project I’m working on, we’ve done a lot of filming in Indiana, rural Indiana. And I see what these folks have as options for stores on limited budgets and what they’re buying. And honestly, processed food, processed meats like sausages that are pre-cooked are a lot easier for them to eat and are honestly the most nutrient-dense thing that they're eating. Because they’re not doing a whole lot of scratch cooking. They don’t have a lot of time or energy at the end of the day. So when life is really hard and you’re working really hard, you don’t have the privilege to push away something nutrient-dense like meat.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. So let’s talk a little bit about the film. I know it's gone through a lot of iterations and there’s been some wins and some challenges. So tell me, let's start with a little bit of the idea and the inspiration behind it. Why we both feel that this is important to get out there and then maybe a little update where you’re at, what you’re needing, what would be helpful. We have a lot of folks who are listening, who I know want to be a part of this movement in some way.

And I’m often asked by people who are not necessarily in the health field, people who are not nutritionists or Functional Medicine practitioners or anything, like, “How can I help? How can I get involved? How can I use my existing skills or connections or resources to move this forward?” So let's imagine what kind of help we need or could be useful to move this forward, and who knows who’s out there listening.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. So, I was halfway through writing a book on this subject on the nutritional, environmental, and ethical case for meat when yet another vegan film came out about a year and a half ago. And I was like, “If this guy can make a movie, I can make a movie.” And so that’s kind of how it all started. I did a crowd funder that was pretty successful, and we got rolling. At the time, the project was called Kale versus Cow. And we started filming some of these nutrition stories. We hooked up with a doctor who has some amazing clinical trials and is doing really good work in a pretty rural part of the Midwest, conveniently corn country. But there's also farmers who are plowing in their corn and turning it back to grass.

So there’s some really great stories happening there. And some of the feedback I got from the title Kale versus Cow was that, “This sounds like another vegan film,” or, “It sounds like I’m against kale,” which as you know, I’m not against kale. But I think folks maybe that don't know me as well just had these misperceptions, and the name was a little bit of a hang-up for them. So we went back to the drawing board a little bit and changed the title to Sacred Cow, which I think works really nicely, also because there’s a double meaning of sacred cow. Because the vilification of beef is just so embedded in our system.

Chris Kresser:  Yes.

Diana Rodgers:  And, I mean, even when I was going through my graduate program in dietetics, red meat is not okay. It's just not, even though in biochem it's totally fine if you just look at it from an objective scientific perspective. And the project has also transformed from a feature film into a docuseries because we felt that it’s a more digestible way, literally, to get this information across, and there's also more that we wanted to cover that we didn't feel would fit into the narrative of one film.

And so we were now looking at a multipart docuseries still addressing mostly the nutritional, environmental, and ethical aspects of the reason why we need animals in our food system. I'm also very interested in sort of the anthropology of how meat became such a polarizing topic today and how people identify their whole being around how much meat they consume in their diet. The flexitarian, vegan, whatever.

Chris Kresser:  Yep.

Diana Rodgers:  And I still am working on the book. So, as you know, Robb is the coauthor on the book project I’m working on, and he’s the co-executive producer on the film project. But the funding has been a little bit of a challenge. I don’t know if people really get how important this is, and I think it’s one of the reasons why the Unitarian church is not funded well. Because it's, like, trying to extract money out of atheists is a hard thing.

When people are super-passionately committed and religiously committed like vegans, where it’s, like, their religion, they’ll passionately fund things. But then when people are kind of cool with everything and they’re eating meat and they’re like, “Yeah, got my health under control now. That’s great. And if the vegans don’t want to eat meat, fine, that’s more for me.” That’s really kind of the attitude I’m running into a little bit.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah people are less identified with it, which is good, in their way.

Diana Rodgers:  It’s good.

Chris Kresser:  But not as good when you’re trying to raise money for a movie like this.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And I think the other part of it is, I don’t know that people really perceive the threat fully yet. It’s like you just said, they’re like, “If someone wants to be vegan, fine. No skin off my back and it’s not going to hurt me. So there’s no pressing need to fund a film about this. Because who cares if someone’s a vegan.” Well, yeah, on an individual level, you might say that. Even though we could argue that you should care if someone chooses an approach that’s in many cases likely to make them nutrient deficient.

But, yes, each person, of course, has the right to choose their own approach. And I don’t go around trying to proselytize and convert vegans to eating animal foods unless they ask me what I think they should do if they come see me as a patient. But this isn't just about individual choice here. Because, as we know, we talked about the meat tax proposition, and this is going to affect food policy. It's already affected food policy in the US and around the world which then will affect schools. And what happens at schools, which influences our children and the choices that they make.

You know, my daughter is seven and a half, and she comes home with some really interesting things that she's heard from other kids and even teachers at school. And she doesn't go to a typical school, but this is, it’s everywhere. Yeah.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly. And there’s a lot of schools now eliminating meat for health, and I think a lot of parents are kind feeling a little worried about meat consumption. And so maybe they're thinking, “Well, at least they’re getting a healthy meal at school.” And so that's concerning to me because for a lot of kids this is the most nutrient-dense meal of their day. And to blame it on meat is just wrong. And I kept telling folks, this is coming and meat tax is coming.

And I, for a while, was feeling like maybe I’m just nuts and I’m making all this up. I don’t know. But then of course, it is really coming. The EAT-Lancet paper is here. Meat tax is being discussed. We’ve got, LA now is trying to force restaurants and LAX to provide, to tell private businesses to provide vegan entrees. We’ve got Berkeley with Meatless Mondays now at all city meetings.

Chris Kresser:  WeWork.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, WeWork, exactly. There’s airlines now that are eliminating red meat. And so this is coming at us from our clinicians, our universities, we’re hearing this from the World Health Organization. We’re hearing this from business, from the media. Constant films, there's more coming out this year.

I think I just sent you another one that’s on its way out that I’m pretty concerned about. Because it actually has people with MD behind their name. And nobody is pushing back and people are just taking this really lightly. And so, yeah, anything that folks can do to help me get this off the ground, I’d want to come out and feature you, Chris. And I’ve got a lot of really great experts in both the sustainability and health space that very strongly feel that red meat is important to our food system.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. And the reality is that a film or in a docuseries can make a huge impact than even a book.

Diana Rodgers:  That you can’t do with a book. I know.

Chris Kresser:  It doesn’t work. I mean, I’ve written a 400-plus page book with all the science that you need to, I think, get clear that animal food should be part of our diet in addition to plant foods. But how many people are going to read a 400-page book? Not that many. And there’s still something about film that makes it a very viral medium. It’s more accessible, a docuseries is an increasingly popular format, as you said.

It's easier to cover the wide range of topics that you need to hit on for this, and it's a format that has been used for vegan and other types of films or media. And it’s something that’s just really easy to share with. People are more likely to sit down at night and watch an episode of this than they are to read a book.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, exactly. And this is pretty dense material. But if I can just show people what a healthy ecosystem looks like and how cattle raised in the right way, what that looks like compared to a 2,000-acre field of soy being grown for lab meat, I think that those are really powerful visuals.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I agree with that a hundred percent. So if someone is listening to this and the alarm has been raised in their mind, and they’re now aware of the real risk here to our families and communities, and they want to get involved in some way, what's the best way for them to do that?

Diana Rodgers:  So I have more information, and I’m taking donations on sustainabledish.com/film. And for any better meat companies or folks that want to get involved in a bigger way, folks can just message me directly through the site. And we’re working with a few better meat companies and other large donors and foundations. But we still need to, these are expensive, and there are some inexpensive ways of making docuseries.

But in order for us to really get on the mainstream media channels like Netflix, we have to do something that's beautiful and has a high production value and isn't a $50,000 handheld camera project. And so, while the budget isn’t exorbitant, it’s certainly higher than some of the other more budget docuseries that have been coming out. And that's largely because I'm really tired of going to high schools and doing damage control when they show these vegan propaganda films. Because that's what's happening right now.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, absolutely. And will continue to happen, as you pointed out. The momentum there is only building. So we need to, I think, step up to the plate.

Diana Rodgers:  Thank you so much.

Chris Kresser:  Thank you for doing this work, Diana. I really appreciate your advocacy and passion for this, and it shows through in everything that you do. And I hope for all of you listening that this has been up maybe a bit of a wake-up call and you have a little more perspective on what's going on behind the scenes. And even less left behind, like more out in the open now, I think, more and more. Especially with this EAT-Lancet paper, and you see that science is not objective and dispassionate in many cases, but actually quite agenda driven and that there are often interests aligned behind those agendas that may not represent your interests. Like global food companies that want to sell more of their processed and refined products.

So none of us are not impacted by this in some way. And if you have children and family members who are getting exposed to all of this material, it's really important to have a counterpoint that we can offer that is well researched and really hits on the most important issues. And people can change their mind. I mean, your story that you shared with the publisher of the China study was really revealing. To his credit, to whoever that publisher editor was, to his credit. He was able to take in that information and open his mind and give this a chance. And we both, of course, know many people that that’s happened with. I have lots of patients, lots of readers and listeners who were vegan and vegetarian at one point. I was vegan and vegetarian at one point, as everybody knows who’s listened to this show for a while.

And it was through exposure to research and information like what we’re talking about on this show and what you plan to present on the film that actually changed their minds. Because I think that may also be part of the resistance in some cases, like for raising money with this film. It’s like the idea that people are just not going to change their minds. That it’s, we can’t really make an impact. But I don’t agree with that. I think we can make a huge impact and already have, and we just need to scale it up so that it can reach more people.

Diana Rodgers:  I agree.

Chris Kresser:  So sustainabledish.com/film. We will also put some of the links to the podcast and articles that we mentioned, the critiques of EAT-Lancet, Marty Kendall’s and also yours, Diana. And then if you want that big storehouse of information I put together for the Rogan show, which has articles on nutrient density and meat and the effects of meat, and carbohydrate, macronutrients, a ton of stuff, that’s at ChrisKresser.com/Rogan. So thanks, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Diana.

Diana Rodgers:  Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it, Chris. And thanks for all your support ever since I first met you.

Chris Kresser:  It's my pleasure, and I hope we can, with this podcast, move things forward a little bit more quickly and get this out there. Because it really needs to be seen. So thanks, everyone, for listening and please do continue to send in your questions to ChrisKresser.com/podcastquestion. And I’ll talk to you next time.

The post RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers appeared first on Chris Kresser.

from Chris Kresser https://ift.tt/2U8hQ4H via IFTTT https://ift.tt/2bVd07R

[howellrichard]

Eco-Friendly Vegan Leather: Everything You Need to Know

Hiya Gorgeous,

I was blown away by the response to one of my recent blog posts, What the Fast Fashion Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know. I know how passionate this community is about the environment, animals and other humans. But your overwhelming positivity, support and enthusiasm for this topic really knocked my socks off!

Your excitement also left me more determined than ever to band together to save our precious planet. When our individual contributions start to add up, we have the power to change the world.

Something else stood out to me about the fast fashion blog post: I got a lot of questions about my favorite ethical, sustainable and cruelty-free brands. Many of you wanted more specific eco-friendly shopping how-tos and tips. I’m thrilled to say that today’s post is the first in a series all about that—and we’re kicking it off with the ultimate guide to vegan leather!

What’s the problem with leather?

If you read my post about the fast fashion industry, then you’re already aware of some of the issues that come along with exploiting animals for their fur, skins, etc. Animal agriculture requires massive amounts of land, water, fuel and feed. This industry is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all of the world’s transportation systems combined, and percent of the Amazon rainforest has been cleared to make way for pastures or for growing feed crops (source).

When it comes to leather specifically, the picture doesn’t get any better. The leather tanning process is often incredibly toxic. People who work in tanneries or live near them are exposed to harmful chemicals used to process, treat and dye animal skins. This often takes place in developing countries where child labor isn’t regulated, proper waste management systems aren’t in place, and workers aren’t well-protected or paid (source).

And our innocent animal friends endure horrific conditions. They’re often confined to overcrowded indoor spaces without access to sufficient food, water or fresh air. They suffer through painful procedures without anesthesia (like castration and branding) and face countless other forms of unimaginably cruel treatment (source).

We can do better. Animals, other people and the environment do NOT need to suffer for our wardrobes. That’s where eco-friendly vegan leather alternatives come in!

What is vegan leather?

Two vegan leather alternatives you may have heard of are PVC and PU. PVC is a petrochemical product that is heavily processed from start to finish. Many companies have moved away from using it because it requires fossil fuels to produce, contains toxic chemicals like Phalates (not safe for the environment or people!) and creates an enormous amount of waste (source). If you see PVC or its derivatives on a tag, you can bet it’s not a sustainable vegan leather alternative.

What is PU leather?

PU (polyurethane) is a popular vegan leather alternative. Many brands say it’s more eco-friendly than PVC, but do a little research and you’ll find a lot of mixed opinions. Some say that PU production results in just as many toxic emissions and waste as PVC, and that calling it sustainable is simply not true (source).

PU proponents, on the other hand, say that it’s a better option than animal exploitation and overall its environmental footprint is smaller than that of leather. My team and I did a lot of research on this since we know PU is widely used by the brands we’re sharing later in this article. There’s no easy or straightforward answer, but for the most part we agree that PU does less harm than leather.

A note on conscious consumption.

That brings me to an important reminder: Products of all kinds (purses, shoes, sheets, kitchen tools, you name it!) are only as sustainable, ethical and kind as the company they come from… no matter what they’re made of. Know the brands you buy from. Learn about the materials they use, their factory standards, how they treat their workers and how they manage waste. A purse made with PU from a brand with strong environmental and social practices is very different from a similar bag from a less conscious brand.

And here’s a hint: If a brand doesn’t provide clear, specific info about how they’re protecting people, animals and the environment, proceed with caution. Companies who prioritize this stuff speak up about it. Let’s demand more transparency!

Love the environment as much as I do? Get more sustainability tips and my free Starter Kit:

A peek into the future: more sustainable vegan leather alternatives!

Some brands are creating truly innovative vegan leather options out of organic and recycled materials. They’re more eco-friendly than the standard alternatives we discussed above, but are often more expensive, harder to find and not as broadly appealing (either because they don’t mimic the leather look and feel people want, or aren’t as high-end looking). But as the demand for sustainable vegan leather grows, I suspect we’ll see these options continue to improve and become more widely available.

Here are some of the coolest, most innovative materials that stood out to me:

Piñatex: Fruit is even more awesome and versatile than I thought—this incredible vegan leather is made from pineapples! It’s beautiful, watertight and durable. Plus, the company that manufactures it has some fantastic sustainability and social practices (learn more about them here). My fave cruelty-free watch brand, Votch, has an entire  collection of piñtatex watches.

MuSkin: This vegan leather is made from another one of my favorite plants—mushrooms! More specifically, it’s made out of the cap of a parasitic, inedible variety called Phellinus ellipsoideus (source). I don’t see a whole lot of MuSkin products available yet, but I bet that’ll change soon.

Apple peel leather: You read that right! An apple a day does more than just keep the doctor away. Companies like Veggani are using industrial apple peel waste to create environmentally friendly pieces like this gorgeous crossbody bag.

Recycled materials: Recycled rubber, recycled car tires, recycled plastic… oh my! Lots of companies are repurposing materials that would otherwise sit in landfills (or the ocean, rivers, forests, etc.) by creating shoes, bags, belts, etc. out of them. Rothy’s, for example, uses plastic water bottles to make their super cute (and machine washable!) shoes.

Get the ultimate guide to eco-friendly vegan leather alternatives—the best materials, top brands and more!

18 Eco-Friendly Vegan Leather Alternatives

There are so many wonderful companies out there dedicated to making fashion a kinder, more eco-conscious business, and I’m thrilled to highlight some of them today! This list is purely for your info and to support you on your eco-friendly journey—I’m not sponsored or getting paid to promote any of these brands. 

Note: These brands use a variety of materials. There are plenty of options if you want to avoid PU!

GUNAS (maker of high-end purses, wallets and shoes) believes that just being vegan isn’t enough—they’re looking out for other humans and the environment, too. And here’s something that really sets them apart: They encourage conscious consumerism. So rather than pushing you to buy fast and often like so many of the brands we’re familiar with, they want you to take your time and make careful decisions. I love this more purposeful, minimalist approach!

Whatever the season or occasion, you’ll be able to find the perfect pair of vegan leather shoes from Bhava. I’m eyeing these strappy sandals—what color is your fave? Bhava also does a great job explaining some of the problems with leather and fast fashion, along with what they’re doing to change the face of footwear.

Svala helps protect animals in more ways than one. Not only is their line of purses and wallets cruelty-free, they also donate a portion of the profits to charities like WildAid, whose mission is to end the illegal wildlife trade. Svala also buys carbon offsets to reduce their environmental footprint and uses recycled plastic bottles to line their bags—yay!

Rafa makes beautiful, hand-crafted vegan shoes in Los Angeles, California. While they keep a few things in stock, most items are made to order. This allows the Rafa team to dedicate time and quality craftsmanship to each unique pair. Check out this short and sweet video about how (and why!) they do what they do.

This is a trend I didn’t think I’d see again—fanny packs! HFS Collective’s belt bags are designed to “free you from your baggage.” That means more hands to pet every pup you meet, carry green drinks and do other stuff you love.

I mentioned Rothy’s in last year’s eco-friendly holiday gift guide, and this is still one of my fave brands for comfy shoes that can be dressed up or down. Their pointed toe flats are the perfect versatile basic. The uppers are made of 100 percent post-consumer water bottles, and the other parts of the shoe are made of a mix of recycled, non-toxic, vegan materials. Even their shoe boxes are biodegradable!

A pair of easy-to-wear slides is a must-have for the warmer months of the year, and Indosole has totally nailed an eco-friendly option. Not only do they come in some great colors, they also give a second life to a pervasive waste product—car tires!

Noani (meaning No Animal—yes!) has vegan leather belts for everyone in your life. They use innovative eco-friendly materials like eucalyptus and apple fibers. Plus, they’re committed to maintaining safe, fair working conditions for everyone involved in creating their products.

I love how transparent VEERAH is about the materials they use to make their luxury, sustainable, vegan shoes (check out a detailed list here!). Plus, can we talk about these gorg bright blue pumps made from apple leather? Anyone who thinks eco-friendly and fashionable don’t belong in the same sentence should get a load of those!

MooShoes is a vegan leather lover’s dream. Unlike the other brands on this list, this store is a hub where you can get goodies from a variety of cruelty-free brands. Their NYC location was the first cruelty-free retail store of its kind when it opened back in 2001 and they’ve since expanded to LA. But no worries if you’re not close to either of those locations—the website is easy to use and jam-packed with shoes, bags and more that’ll satisfy all style sensibilities.

I think that Angela Roi makes some of the most beautiful cruelty-free purses out there. That said, I’d love to see them expand the info available on their site about their sustainability practices and working conditions. Transparency is where it’s at, folks!

Looking for some comfy kicks for walking the dog, running to the store and everything in between? You’ll love Native Shoes, which are cruelty-free AND easy on the planet. In fact, Native has committed to making all of their products 100 percent lifecycle managed by 2023 (learn more about what that means here).

This circular purse from Hozen is so cute! And there’s a lot more than meets the eye here—Hozen donates 10 percent of their profits to Mercy for Animals (one of my favorite orgs!) and makes their products in small batches to avoid wasteful excess stock.

Nae (stands for No Animal Exploitation—so good!) has something for everyone. These desert boots are a great wardrobe staple. And who doesn’t need a simple, everyday black belt?

One of the wardrobe essentials I’ve had trouble finding in cruelty-free form is a vegan leather moto jacket! Then I came across this piñatex stunner from Altiir. It’s certainly not cheap, but could be a worthwhile investment if you wear it a lot and keep for years to come.

Labante London makes gorgeous purses, wallets and other accessories out of recycled materials. According to their website, they’ve already saved 10 million plastic bottles from languishing in landfills! I’m a big fan of this functional, timeless wallet.

Beyond Skin has a wide range of sandals, boots, heels, flats and more available in a variety of fun prints and fabrics. They’re also really upfront about their business and sustainability practices, which means you can buy with confidence. And how about these must-have mustard sandals? Love!

Have a favorite sustainable, cruelty-free brand I didn’t mention? Shout them out in the comments below!

I want to hear from you!

What other topics would you like me to cover in this eco-friendly series (home goods, skincare/makeup, etc.)?

Peace & cruelty-free fashion,

The post Eco-Friendly Vegan Leather: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on KrisCarr.com.

[jesseneufeld]

RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers

In this episode, we discuss:

What’s missing from the EAT-Lancet Diet

The relationship between meat and the environment

The right way to raise livestock

Where the misunderstanding around meat and the environment comes from

Protein and the EAT-Lancet diet

The impact agriculture has on the environment

The problem with lab-grown meat and a meat tax

Diana’s upcoming docuseries, Sacred Cow

Show notes:

“Why You Should Eat Meat: My Appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience,” by Chris Kresser

“20 Ways EAT Lancet’s Global Diet Is Wrongfully Vilifying Meat,” by Diana Rodgers

“Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems”

“Why Eating Meat Is Good for You,” by Chris Kresser

“Should You EAT Lancet?” by Marty Kendall

“The EAT Lancet Diet is Nutritionally Deficient,” by Zoë Harcombe

“What Is Nutrient Density and Why Is It Important?” by Chris Kresser

Allan Savory’s TED Talk: “How to Fight Desertification and Reverse Climate Change”

“Sustainable Dish Episode 83: The Truth about Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Livestock Production with Frank Mitloehner,” by Diana Rodgers

“Sustainable Dish Episode 84: Meat as Scapegoat with Frédéric Leroy,” by Diana Rodgers

Sacred Cow, a film by Diana Rodgers

[smart_track_player url="https://ift.tt/2BTIfw6" title="RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers" artist="Chris Kresser" ] 

Chris Kresser:  Diana, thanks so much for joining me again on the podcast.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Chris Kresser:  So, we have a lot to talk about.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  This is an annual event, where there’s some big news story that comes out or study that’s published that demonizes meat and animal foods and purports to be the final nail in the coffin for anybody who's eating animal products. In fact, as you know, I just went on the Joe Rogan show, my third appearance there, to debate Dr. Joel Kahn about the merits of animal foods in the diet and eating a vegan diet. And I spent a lot of hours preparing for that and wrote a lot of articles. And the debate itself was almost four hours long, and admittedly I was a little tired out after that experience. And I just couldn't muster the energy and strength to write a rebuttal to the EAT-Lancet paper that was published. But you did, and several other people did.

And so I’d love to dive in and talk about that, as well as just stepping back a little bit and discussing some of the environmental impacts or the purported environmental impact of eating meat and what's wrong with the traditional narrative there. Because I didn't get to talk much on the Joe Rogan show about that. And then some of the difficulties of addressing this, and how I know you’ve been working on a film to try to get this message out that we’ve talked about. So why don't we just start first with the EAT-Lancet paper, since this is what's really making the rounds now and bringing this to the forefront of everybody's attention.

What’s Missing from the EAT-Lancet Diet

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, definitely. So there’s, they were really attacking red meat on a nutritional and environmental angle. So, I know your arguments on the Joe Rogan podcast were purely nutritional. I think that the main narratives are always nutrition, environment, and ethics. And ethics were kept out of the EAT-Lancet. Very long paper that took me quite a long time to read. But there's definitely a lot of misinformation in there about meat.

I mean, they’re using observational studies to basically tell us that we cannot have any processed meats at all, lumping them all together, and that we can only eat less than half an ounce of red meat per day. We can only have less than one ounce of chicken per day. But yet we can have eight teaspoons of sugar per day.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, and plenty of corn and rice and wheat. Let's talk a little bit … I think most of my listeners are pretty familiar with the nutritional arguments. I and others have written a lot about that, and most recently my … in preparation for the Rogan show, I published a whole cornerstone page with everything you need to debunk the nutritional arguments. So, that's at ChrisKresser.com/rogan, if you want to look it up.

But I just want to briefly talk about the nutrient density of this EAT-Lancet diet. Because if you just look at it from that single perspective, nutritionally you’ll see very quickly that it falls short. And our body needs micronutrients to function properly. And if a proposed diet doesn't offer those micronutrients in sufficient quantities, I think we can safely say it's not a good diet for humans to follow.

And I don’t want to spend a ton of time on this, so I’m just going to go through this really briefly, and then I want to switch over to talking more about some of the environmental issues. Because that's, I know, an area where you have a lot of expertise. And I really love what you have to say there. So, Zoë Harcombe did an analysis, and I think you had mentioned, Diana, that Marty Kendall did too. So we can talk about that. But Zoë's analysis, it’s not publicly accessible. You have to be a subscriber to see it. But I can share this part of it. She analyzed the EAT-Lancet diet using food tables and found that it was well below the RDA for several nutrients: B12, retinol, vitamin D, vitamin K2, which wasn’t even studied separately, but 71 percent of the K in the diet came from broccoli.

So we know that there's probably very little K2 in the diet. Sodium, potassium, calcium, and iron. So that's a lot of the essential nutrients that we need, and in some cases it was providing less than 20 percent of the RDA of those nutrients. So, to me, that's pretty much case closed on that basis alone. And then we can look at all the other problems that observational studies on red meat and all of that entail. And I just think it’s … there’s really nothing to be alarmed about. This study doesn't add any new evidence that meat and animal products are harmful.

Diana Rodgers:  Not at all. And another thing she didn’t mention in her paper or her review is the conversion rate of some of the vitamins, like beta-carotene to vitamin A, and almost half the population can’t make that conversion easily. And so even though on paper it my show that the vitamin A was adequate, actually not.

Despite what the EAT-Lancet paper says, meat is still a healthy addition to your diet. Check out this episode of RHR for my discussion with Diana Rodgers about what a real healthy diet looks like. #nutrition #chriskresser #wellness 

Chris Kresser:  It’s the same with all of these other nutrients. I actually wrote an article. I addressed this in my article on nutrient density you can find at the ChrisKresser.com/Rogan link. Iron, 94 percent of the iron in the EAT-Lancet diet is from plant-based forms of iron. And we know that heme iron that you get from animal products orders a magnitude better absorbed than most plant forms of iron. And the same with calcium, that is better absorbed from, in most cases, from animal products. And virtually every other nutrient, zinc, long-chain omega-3 fats, only found in animal products. So it's really, yeah, that conversion and bioavailability piece is almost never addressed in these kinds of studies.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, and you also write a lot about B12 and how these plant-based B12 analogues actually increase your need for a real B12.

Chris Kresser:  Exactly. Yeah, so, really nothing to see here from a nutritional perspective. But part of why it's making such a big splash is in addition to the highly coordinated launch campaign that is driven by celebrity, very wealthy celebrity type of people who are behind this, is the argument that not only should we avoid red meat and animal products for these nutritional reasons, but they're destroying the planet. So let’s really dive into that and unpack that from the perspective of the paper. I think you wrote an article, something like 20 reasons or 20 points against this. So we don't have to go through all of those, but let’s cover the highlights.

The Relationship between Meat and the Environment

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, well, I think the number one thing that people need to understand is that we can’t just assume that if we’re not raising animals that it will automatically free up land for more crops. So, agricultural land isn't interchangeable. Most of the agricultural land on the globe is not suited for cropping due to water availability. It’s too rocky, it’s too steep.

So, I think a lot of people, especially that haven’t traveled much, look around and just see the nice flat land and just assume that everywhere in the world is like that. I mean, picture Iceland, Norway, picture many parts of Africa, Mongolia. I mean, there’s just so many places that really will only support grazing animals and not wheat and corn and soy production. And so that’s a huge thing that we need to consider, and if we are to not graze animals on that land, not only will we lose that for food production, but the land will also desertify. Because we just don’t have those wild herds and the numbers that we used to any longer.

And ruminants are actually incredibly beneficial. Their impact on the land helps increase water holding capacity; their grazing actually stimulates new growth in a good way. So you can’t just have these fenced-off acres with nothing on it. You actually need grazing animals as part of healthy grassland ecosystems.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that's a point that is really misunderstood. I see a little bit more discussion about it certainly, at least in our realm. But I’m having kind of a hard time thinking of a mainstream article that really did justice to that point. Do you know of any?

Diana Rodgers:  Well, I've written a few blog posts on it and have talked a lot about it. I think Allan Savory does a really good job.

Chris Kresser:  Certainly.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, in his Savory Institute work that they've done and also his TED talk. But I think that's definitely the number one point that people need to understand. And it's funny because I am working on a book as well on this topic, and my publisher actually has published a ton of vegan books, and he was skeptical. And once he read my environmental argument and specifically wrapped his head around this very topic, I won him over.

Chris Kresser:  That’s amazing.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, people just, because we’re so divorced from nature, you and I have talked about this before just off-line, but that’s the number one problem is that people just have no idea how food is produced and what makes a healthy ecosystem. And a lot of the vegans will, the ones who do accept that not all land can be cropped, just want it turned over to be rewilded.

So let’s just crop everything we can possibly crop and then we’ll just rewild all the pastureland with deer or something cute. But then what are we going to do because we’ve eliminated all the predators? I mean even in the town I live in outside of Boston, we have a massive deer problem. And nobody wants hunting because they don’t want to see dead animals on their beautiful hikes around the conservation land here in my town. And if we eliminate the predators, we need to be responsible for how these populations of wild animals are managed. And so the other option, if we’re not going to hunt them, I suppose would be to bring back wolves. I don’t know how.

Chris Kresser:  I don't think that would go over well.

Diana Rodgers:  I don’t know how my waiting for the bus in my town with wolves swirling around at dawn will go over. So it quickly backs them into a very uncomfortable corner there.

Chris Kresser:  I think another thing that you point out that people don’t realize is that 90 percent of what cattle eat is, at least in a natural grazing state, not in a CAFO type of arrangement, is forage and plant leftovers that humans can’t eat.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, exactly. And even in, I mean, I’m not an advocate for feedlot beef, but I think one thing people don’t understand about even cattle that are raised on feedlots, or that are finished on feedlots rather, is that they’re not raised on feedlots.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  So 85 percent of the beef cattle in the US are actually grazing on land that can't be cropped. And even if they do end up on a feedlot, 90 percent of their total intake is non-edible food to humans. And so they're eating, for example, soybean cakes. But that’s left over from the soybean oil industry.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  They’re eating large amounts of distiller’s grains, lots of foods that would normally emit greenhouse gases and decompose anyway. Ranchers are also grazing cattle on spent wheat and cornfields. So you know that corn would just decompose and emit greenhouse gases either way. So why not run it through a ruminant gut and make protein out of it?

Chris Kresser:  And fertilizer, as you pointed out.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. I mean, it’s so much more nuanced. This is a theme that will probably come up in our conversation a lot is, and I know Robb, Robb and I commiserate about it, and I know you do as well with him. But the vegan narrative is so simple in a lot of ways and it plays into a lot of assumptions, even if they’re wrong, that you don’t really have to explain it to people. It just, people have heard things over and over again. “Meat is bad for the environment, it’s bad for us, therefore eliminate meat from your diet and the food system, and everyone will be healthier.” That’s so easy to understand.

But as Robb has pointed out many times, the counterargument is nuanced and complex. And is not quite as simple to understand and requires that you actually pay attention to some of these finer points. And I think that is one of the challenges that we face in this struggle. But it’s not incomprehensible. I mean, if you just get a few of the simple points like this, it starts to become a lot easier to understand.

Diana Rodgers:  Definitely.  And now my point was … oh, I was going to say too that there's a lot, 50 percent of the carcass of a cow is not eaten but used for other industry uses. So we've got leather, we've got insulin, we’ve got footballs, we’ve got lots of medical applications, fertilizer. So eliminating all animals from our food system, there's a great study I think I sent you this morning that was published in PNAS about what would happen if we eliminated all animals from our food system.

So the greenhouse gas emissions would only decrease by about 2 1/2 percent. But our overall caloric intake would actually go way up, and our nutrient deficiencies would go up. So we already have a problem in our culture where we’re over-consuming calories and not getting enough nutrients. So we would just be making the problem worse for about a 2 percent emission reduction.

The Right Way to Raise Livestock

Chris Kresser:  And those numbers don’t assume any improvement in how cattle are managed, right?

Diana Rodgers:  Right. That was just typical cattle.

Chris Kresser:  Right. So if we actually made improvements in how cattle are managed, do you think there could be a net sequestration of carbon?

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, definitely. So there's been some research coming out of Michigan State showing the difference between continuous grazing and what they term “adaptive multi-paddock grazing,” which is similar to Allan Savory's method, so basically when you intensively graze an area and then move the cattle off quickly.

So, this is how, for example, herds in Africa naturally move because of predator pressure, so it's much worse for the land to have, let's say if you have a 10-acre field and have 100 cattle on that land for the whole summer, as opposed to tightly bunching and moving them frequently and allowing that land to rest. Because that's when carbon gets sequestered, in the regrowth phase of the grass. And so the grass is going through photosynthesis, it’s pulling down carbon and actually exuding carbon sugars to bacteria and to fungal networks that are then passing that grass nutrient. So the fungus is actually mining rocks and getting the minerals from that and feeding it to the grass, and that's how carbon is sequestered. And that process is most effective and actually is a net carbon gain when cattle are managed in this way.

So that's why I like to say “it's not the cow, it’s the how,” because there's just many different ways of raising cattle. Just like there are many different ways of growing broccoli. We can do it in a monocrop system, or we can do it in a more rotational system where we’re integrating it with other crops. And what we need is less monocrops because that's just not how healthy ecosystems work, and farmland is not natural. Like, when you fly over the United States, all those squares you’re looking down at, that's not nature, that's man doing that.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. I know from your article, you did also a podcast with Frank Mitloehner—is that how you pronounce it? We’ll include a link to that in the show notes because I think people should listen to that. He’s an expert in greenhouse gas emissions and animal agriculture. And you guys talk a lot about what’s really going on there and why some of the typical numbers that are thrown around are not accurate. And if anyone’s interested in a deeper dive, I’d definitely recommend listening to that.

So, greenhouse gas from beef cattle represents, just as it's currently done with no improvements, like you just mentioned, is 2 percent of emissions. And by contrast, transportation is 27 percent. So, yet when I go to WeWork, which I have an office at—

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, gosh.

Chris Kresser:  You probably know this.

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, no.

Chris Kresser:  But some of my listeners might not know that WeWork is a company that has committed to this idea that eating a vegetarian diet will save the planet. And they, I think, so, I was there two days ago on Monday, and they have meatless Monday at WeWork, where they served veggie burgers in the main lounge. And then they print these cards that they post around there, around the office, that say, “If everyone was just a vegetarian for,” I can't remember, “one or two days a week, we would save 450 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.” And again, this goes back to the simplicity thing.

Most people get in the elevator, they see that and they're like, “Oh, wow, okay. I guess I should become a vegetarian.” So how does this continue? I mean, it’s not surprising that there’s a disconnect between actual science and what we see in the media. We know that from the nutrition world and everything else. But how do you think this got started? Was there a lot of misunderstanding initially which led to these numbers and then later science kind of brought more clarity? Or what do you think? How have we gotten here?

Diana Rodgers:  Well, I actually just released an amazing podcast on Tuesday of this week, so maybe you could link to that one too, with the guy from Brussels, Frédéric Leroy.

Chris Kresser:  I read some of his papers. You sent them to me awhile back before the Rogan debate.

Where the Misunderstanding around Meat and the Environment Comes From

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, he’s so fantastic. Yeah, so, his opinion is that meat is unfairly absorbing a lot of our worries about our health, our state of our health and the environment, because meat is so powerful and can absorb it. But it's unfairly the scapegoat for our stressors. So, everyone just, it's much easier for us to blame meat than it is to perhaps look at our transportation industry and be uncomfortable about that. I mean, the main funder of that EAT-Lancet paper has a private jet and transportation was never mentioned in the EAT-Lancet.

Chris Kresser:  I don’t know if this is accurate, but I read something about how just the jet trips for the reporter would have a bigger impact on the environment than the diet changes that they were talking about.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And so, in Livestock’s Long Shadow, that's when a lot of this all started. The mass information about the emissions with cattle. And unfortunately, when they did that study, what they did was they looked at all the emissions, the full lifecycle of ruminant animals. They looked at production of the feed, all the transportation, all the emissions, everything. And when they compared that to transportation, they only looked at tailpipe exhaust. So they didn't even factor in transportation, for example, in the transportation numbers.

And so when you look at the global numbers at emissions of cattle versus transportation, you're looking at apples to oranges there. So you're looking at the full lifecycle of a beef animal compared to just the tailpipe emissions from transportation. So that's not fair. And also in other countries, the percentage is a little bit higher. But that's in places where maybe transportation plays a lesser role where there are less cars per cow. And so, their relative emissions may be higher. But that's again not taking into account the fact that cattle can actually sequester carbon and many, many other factors. And so the authors of Livestock’s Long Shadow did reduce their numbers, I think, from 18 to 14 percent and did admit that their numbers were still off because of the transportation. There are no global lifecycle papers on transportation.

But yet that 18 percent, I’ve heard even 50 percent. I don't even know where that number comes from, but that, the 50 percent is the number that's often cited by this group called Green Mondays and they are the ones that have worked with Berkeley to make all of the government meetings meatless on Mondays. That organization, I’ve looked into, and they’re actually funded by an organization out of Singapore that produces plant-based pork.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  And so there’s a lot, the environment and ethics and even the nutrition argument is very convenient for large food companies to profit, because processing means profit.

Chris Kresser:  Well, let’s talk a little bit about that, and since we’re on the topic, I do want to come back to some of the other ways that an animal-based food system or food system that includes animals can actually benefit biodiversity and things like that. So yeah, follow the money. We talk about that a lot on this show. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but on the other hand, you'd be very naïve and misguided to assume that money doesn't play a big role in setting food policy and coming up with these laws. It always has.

Protein and the EAT-Lancet Diet

And it probably always will. And if you look at the EAT-Lancet diet, I think this is from Marty Kendall's analysis, you’ll find that 32 percent of calories come from rice, wheat, and corn, and 14 percent come from unsaturated oils. So these are highly processed foods.

Diana Rodgers:  Right.

Chris Kresser:  We’re not talking about corn on the cob.

Diana Rodgers:  Or wheat berries.

Chris Kresser:  Wheat berries. Or even, like, in some cases, just the whole-grain rice. We’re talking about highly processed corn and wheat and rice derivatives, and then highly processed industrial seed oils that comprise almost 50 percent of calories. And who does that benefit? This study was sponsored by a basically hit list A-team of—

Diana Rodgers:  Processed food companies.

Chris Kresser:  Global processed food companies—DuPont, PepsiCo, Dannon, Nestlé, Cargill, Kellogg's. So, like, food and agricultural companies that make their money by selling processed and refined foods. And so that's very revealing.

And then the other thing that Marty Kendall pointed out, which is directly tied to this, is that this diet, when you work out the macronutrient ratios, it ends up being low in protein and moderate in fat and carbohydrates. And there are really no foods in nature that fit that profile, or very few. You have breast milk and acorns, I think, are the two that he pointed out. And this is a recipe for, that macronutrient mix of low protein and then higher fat and carbohydrate is a recipe for highly palatable and rewarding food. So if you look at the foods that are on this list that fit that profile, there are things like chocolate milk, potato chips, French toast, waffles, ice cream, pancakes.

Diana Rodgers:  Kit-Kat.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, biscuits, Kit-Kat, Twix, chocolate chip cookies, pie crust. I mean, are you kidding me? This is the macronutrient profile that we should be following? Oh, who does not benefit? All of the companies that make these processed foods. So it's really revealing when you look at it from that perspective.

Diana Rodgers:  I know. And I think it's really irresponsible to promote a diet that's about 10 percent in protein when we have, I mean, just in America, more than 50 percent of Americans are metabolically broken and really benefit from much higher protein levels.

Chris Kresser:  Increasing their protein. And we know that of all the macronutrients, protein is the one that has the biggest impact on satiety.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  Which it will reduce the likelihood that people overeat, which many Americans are doing.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And any clinician or dietitian like yourself who's worked with people knows if they're struggling with weight, putting them on a higher-protein diet is probably the most important thing you can do. And there's even some, if you look at the studies on low-carb diets, I think probably one of the reasons, if not one of the main reasons, that they’re so effective is that they’re higher in protein.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and I have to say too, so I actually have recently been following Marty Kendall's NutrientOptimiser diet personally, just as an experiment to try to maximize my micronutrients. And I eat really well. I live on a farm. I have a lot of education in nutrient density. I have access to all these foods. It's really hard to get all your micronutrients in the day. But it's really easy to feel satiated when you have a high percentage of animal protein in your diet. So whether that's oysters, which I know I can beat his leaderboard if I just eat a ton of oysters in one day.

Chris Kresser:  That’s right. That’s right.

Diana Rodgers:  But liver, and then just regular old animal protein. Filling the rest of your diet with colorful vegetables is the way to go. But it still, I still was low, actually, believe it or not, in iron, even with all the protein I’ve been consuming on this diet.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, I’m always talking to my patients about a lot of, especially if they’re favoring like chicken and fish, and not eating shellfish or organ meats, is that some muscle meats are not that high in iron. So it’s organ meats and shellfish that are really the powerhouses from that perspective.

And this brings up another question about bioavailability, right? Because we’ve both talked about this a lot. It's not at all the case that protein from plant sources like legumes is going to be absorbed in the same way that protein is absorbed from animal foods like meat and eggs and fish and dairy products. There is something called the … there are various scoring systems that are used in the scientific literature to assess the bioavailability of protein. And no matter what scoring system you use, animal proteins come out ahead of plant proteins, and usually by a very large margin.

Diana Rodgers:  And, I mean, trying to get your protein from beans and rice, if you’re trying to do the combining in order to get the right profile of amino acids, you would, so I did the calculations. So in order to get the right amount, the same amount of protein you would get from a four-ounce steak, which is 181 calories, you’d need to eat 12 ounces of beans and a cup of rice. So that’s 638 calories and 122 grams of carbs. And you're still not getting the same beautiful profile of amino acids that you can get from this 181-calorie piece of steak.

Chris Kresser:  Right, which goes back to Marty Kendall's point where you’re basically, if you eat a low-protein diet, it’s going to be a much higher-calorie diet in most cases.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and higher carb and just setting people down to the road towards metabolic disorder.

The Impact Agriculture Has on the Environment

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. So let’s go back now. I want to finish up talking about the impact of animals in the food system. Because I think there's still some other points that are worth going into here that a lot of people may not be familiar with. So one is, we talked about how not all land is suitable for grazing. But let’s talk about maybe the flipside of that is what happens when you use a lot of land for crops like corn and rice and soy and wheat?

Diana Rodgers:  Right, I mean a lot of, and most of this is not organically grown and using animals to graze in all of that. So the large majority of our monocrops are heavily sprayed with chemicals that leave a residue on the leaves that we’re ingesting. And also completely sterilize the soil and create runoff that then ends up in the Mississippi River and creating massive dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

So there are just so many problems with monocropping the way we’re doing it today. We have created an insect apocalypse. And so we’ve lost pollinators. We’re killing fish, which in turn then kills the animals that need to be eating the fish. And so we’re annihilating biodiversity both above and below ground. And so one teaspoon of soil has more microbes in it than all of the humans on earth. And when we spray it with things like Roundup, we’re completely killing all of that. And so we've destroyed just so much of our soil and so much of it is also just blowing away and running off.

So, I mean, the Dust Bowl was a good example of that, and we’re headed for another one right now. So according to the United Nations, we have about 60 harvests left, at the rate we’re going.

Chris Kresser:  This is alarming. This is like an emergency thing on the level that's part of climate change, of course, but also on the same level as potential for water shortages. People, I don't think, are … I mean, some people are aware of it, of course, but we’re talking about some very, very serious implications here.

Diana Rodgers:  And when the soil is compacted and we’re constantly just stripping away the biodiversity of the soil, when rain comes, it just washes all the topsoil away into rivers, and that's how we get these really cloudy rivers. Because rivers in general should be clear. And in a system where we have healthy ruminants managed in a proper way, the soil acts like a sponge and can actually hold a lot more water from rain, instead of allowing it to just wash off and take the topsoil with it. My husband is so into topsoil that even we have two border collies, and they sleep in our mudroom at night. And they come in, they’re black and white, but their white parts are really dirty-looking at the end of the day.

Chris Kresser:  Brown.

Diana Rodgers:  And in the morning they’re totally white and they leave massive amounts of soil on the ground. And I literally have to sweep it up and put it in the field because that’s how into topsoil he is.

Chris Kresser:  Well, yeah, and how precious it is too.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And just nobody is looking at our farmland as a biological system. It’s been reduced to this reductionist chemical, let’s produce as many calories as possible, which is ruining our health and our land.

Chris Kresser:  Let’s talk a little bit also about how ruminants can improve biodiversity. I mean, we touched on that just briefly, but water is a big issue, and I know that cattle can improve water holding capacity of the land. And that has a whole bunch of downstream effects.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. And also too, even the worst-managed cattle on overgrazed grass is still a better system than monocrop grain. So you still, I mean, and even in a better system, you've got butterflies, you've got birds, you've got all kinds of life above ground and below ground that are teeming.

The whole goal, what people don't realize, is that we want as much life as possible. And our current system is actually making sure that we’re annihilating as much life as possible. So if we look at the extinction process that's been happening over the last 50 years, again, it's something completely alarming. I know Silent Spring came out and people were all up in arms. But the solution is not a vegetarian solution. So Diet for a Small Planet is outdated information, and what we need is more better cattle, not no cattle.

Chris Kresser:  It’s not the cow, it’s the how.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly. And not only that too, another thing I brought up is what these rich white people in Sweden were not paying attention to is that livestock are really important to the majority of people living in poverty in the world in places where, what are you going to do in Kenya where it’s super arid and the Maasai have been herding cattle forever and ever? And we’re going to tell them that they need to go grow soybeans? With what seeds? Are they going to have to go buy them from Monsanto? Where are they going to get the water to irrigate? Where are they going to get the fertilizer if they can’t have animals? So I think it’s bordering on racist to have a grain-heavy diet as a global policy for the entire world.

Chris Kresser:  But we can just make more Cheetos.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly.

Chris Kresser:  That’s probably the plan, part of the plan here. It’s really—

Diana Rodgers:  Well, to get them reliant on our aid. I mean, we’re already ruining Haiti with our rice that we’re giving to them. We’ve ruined their local economies, we’ve ruined their health. Now rice is a much higher percentage of their diet. Very few Haitians are actually growing their own food anymore. And it’s a really great way that we can control governments. I mean, that’s a whole other thing that we don’t have to get too much into. But it really makes me mad, the idea that we’re taking away people’s innate ability to be self-reliant.

Chris Kresser:  Not to mention the very clearly documented health impacts that are observed when traditional peoples adopt the Western food system.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And I have an image on my post. So, the Canadian government decided that they knew best, advising a local Inuit population that they should be eating a Mediterranean diet. Which I think is just, I mean, this one image of this igloo showing all of their nutrient-dense traditional foods in the red category and bananas and oranges and orange juice in the green category. I mean that just sums up exactly how wrong we’ve gotten our dietary advice just in this one image.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. And if those poor kids start following that diet, they’re going to become morbidly obese.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And this is seen. It’s been documented in so many different areas where traditional populations start to follow the government-sponsored diet, including Native Americans in the US.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  So, like the Pima, for example.

The Problem with Lab-Grown Meat and Meat Tax

Chris Kresser: So let's talk about some of the other proposals that are floating around that are based on this idea that meat is bad for us nutritionally and bad for the environment, which as I hope we’ve shown in this podcast, is misguided and others. But why not just make meat in a lab? Let’s say you accept that meat, animal protein is more bioavailable and so we do need meat, which some people seem to have accepted. But then why not just grow it in a lab and—

Diana Rodgers:  Reduce suffering.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, reduce suffering and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. All of that. Yeah. And of course, make billions of dollars from the companies that are successful at doing that.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and I think another thing.

Chris Kresser:  Nothing wrong with that per say, but yeah. There’s some financial motivation there perhaps.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. I’m so glad I don’t live where you live. I was actually just out there a couple days ago, and I’m, like, so happy that I’m not living there. Because that’s, like, the hotbed of all of this.

Chris Kresser:  Sure. You just have to be a hermit like me and live up on my hilltop.

Diana Rodgers:  And just go to WeWork and get mad at WeWork in the halls and elevators.

Chris Kresser:  Yep.

Diana Rodgers:  So, I mean, it’s really interesting, the lab meat thing, because I had a woman on my podcast about a year and a half ago who was a big vegan animal rights person telling me how great lab meat was. And I asked her if she knew how it was made, and she had no idea. But she was like, she’s like a really big deal animal rights activist and very vocal about how lab meat is a good solution. And interestingly, most vegans actually won't even accept it because you're using fetal bovine serum in order to make it, which is not “vegan” anyway.

But what folks aren’t realizing, number one, is that it relies on this horrible monocrop system, which is ruining our environment and a completely inefficient way of producing food on so many levels. But then the lifestyle assessments I've read are a lot based on projections because they haven't built the bioreactors yet. So they're making a lot of assumptions, but even the assumptions are so bad that the energy required in order to transform what they're using right now as the substrate.

So corn and soy, sometimes wheat, into protein, the amount of energy required for that is enormous. And when we have animals that can actually just do this on their own without having to be plugged into an outlet is really amazing. Plus, what they're not taking into consideration is the amount of antibiotics that they’ll need to prevent bacterial overgrowth because they’re growing these at just the perfect temperature for meat to grow. But of course that's also the perfect temperature for bacteria to grow as well.

Chris Kresser:  Everything else.

Diana Rodgers:  Cancerous cells, all these things. They had not figured out how to striate the meat with fats. There's a lot of input that we’re running out of that you need in order, there’s a lot of minerals that are being mined in war-torn countries that, actually the US military is, like, guarding these mines in order to get those raw materials in order to pump it into these cellular meat company facilities. So the whole system is energetically ridiculous, and it's not even causing less harm.

So that's my big argument, too, is that when you look at how many lives are lost from the loss of biodiversity, of taking a native ecosystem, plowing it up to make it into a cornfield, and then spraying it to make sure that nothing other than corn, not even mice or anything can grow there. The amount of life lost for that system versus one animal, one large ruminant animal. A cow can provide almost 500 pounds of meat. I just don't think the trade-offs are worth it at all from an ethical or environmental perspective.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, another situation where the devil is in the details, right?

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Because on the fact of it, lab meat sounds, “Hey, why not?” Like, if we can do that and we can make it taste the same … But clearly including that woman that you interviewed on your podcast, that was kind of the level that she was approaching it on, without actually looking into the details. It sounds pretty good on the surface, so why not advocate it. But then when you look into it, you find it’s a little more complicated.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. I’ve been really loving The Wizard and the Prophet, Robb sent that over to me.

Chris Kresser:  I read that just recently.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, I think he told me.

Chris Kresser:  I sent it to Robb.

Diana Rodgers:  Yes, exactly, so I’m thanking you. I’m thanking you for the chain because I have my hands on it. And I’ve been not only reading the book, but then when I’m in my car or at the gym, I’m listening to it. So it’s really fantastic, and I think that that is at the crux of what we’re dealing with right now. Do we look at this, what some would call Luddite perspective of nature through Hoyt, or … I’m sorry. What was his name? Now I’m forgetting.

Chris Kresser:  Vogt.

Diana Rodgers:  Voight. Vogt.

Chris Kresser:  Vogt. Yeah, you want to say Voight because it’s usually an i in there, but it’s V-o-g-t, so it’s Vogt, yeah.

Diana Rodgers:  Or do we look at this more wizard tech solution? And that’s just where most people are right now.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that’s the dominant cultural paradigm is we’ve gone into wizardry, for sure.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, yes.

Chris Kresser:  No question about that. Back when Silent Spring was written, I think there was more, Vogt was more in vogue. There was a little bit more concern about the wizardry and the impact it would have. And now we are 100 percent in wizardry.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. And the problem is, everyone’s just sort of hoping that more rabbits will be pulled out of the hat. But we don't know for sure.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah. I highly recommend this book. This is Charles Mann, who wrote 1491 and 1493, which, if anyone has read those books about … it totally changed our view on how the New World was discovered and colonized and what was here when those people arrived. Which is much different than what was previously believed. He’s a fantastic writer and this is I think, one of the most compelling views on where we are as a society now and what our future might hold. So highly recommend it.

Getting back to the topic, I mean, that's obviously germane and relevant here, but I want to talk about a few other proposals that are being floated around here. Which are again, if you accept what we've talked about here and in other podcasts, are off base. But the meat tax. There’s been a lot of enthusiasm for this because there’s some research that, beverage tax, soda taxes have been effective in terms of reducing consumption. So this is now something that’s being seriously proposed in the EAT-Lancet. I think that’s part of the agenda of the EAT-Lancet paper and authors and reporters.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and actually they released another paper just on Sunday night of this week that goes even more strongly into the meat tax. I think the goal is to make it basically impossible to eat meat moving forward. And effectively, I’ve looked at the models. There was a good paper that looked at what would happen, just kind of projected out, what might happen in this situation. And, actually, red meat consumption wouldn’t go down at all.

And it basically is just a poor tax is what this is. And when you look at, I actually took a picture. I had to run into a typical grocery store and pick something up one time, and I noticed the shopping cart of the person in front of me. And it was soda and donuts and whoopie pies and all stuff like that. But her deli meat and her bacon were actually the most nutrient-dense things in her cart.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, so that would be encouraging even less healthy choices in people who are of limited economic means. And you mentioned this in the beginning about the private jet people who are founding this study, and you brought it up in your article. There really is a classist kind of thing that’s happening here that’s not part of the popular narrative. Because if we really wanted to reduce carbon footprint, you pointed out a meta-analysis that suggested that doing things like avoiding one round-trip transatlantic flight, more of a car-free lifestyle, having one less child in an industrialized nation would have by far bigger impact than reducing your consumption of beef.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. Or changing your diet in any way.

Chris Kresser:  And who’s doing a lot of round-trip transatlantic flying? People who are at a certain socioeconomic level. And so, yeah, a lot of these proposals are like, “Let me continue to live my carbon-emitting lifestyle, and then let’s introduce changes that won’t effect that but actually will impact people who are poor and in a really adverse way without really me having to change anything as a privileged person.”

Diana Rodgers:  Right, and, I mean, in order to do vegan right, you kind of do need to be a celebrity or an uber-rich person that, if there is a way to do vegan, right? But, I mean, to … there’s a lot of food prep involved, there’s a lot of time involved. There’s a lot of time spent eating.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, chewing.

Diana Rodgers:  Chewing, right? Your typical person that maybe gets two 15-minute breaks a day is not going to be able to chew the food or have a staff that can make the cashew cream to make all the—

Chris Kresser:  Or buy the cashew cream for $9.49 for a half pint or whatever it is.

Diana’s Upcoming Docuseries, Sacred Cow

Diana Rodgers:  Right, right. I mean, this film project I’m working on, we’ve done a lot of filming in Indiana, rural Indiana. And I see what these folks have as options for stores on limited budgets and what they’re buying. And honestly, processed food, processed meats like sausages that are pre-cooked are a lot easier for them to eat and are honestly the most nutrient-dense thing that they're eating. Because they’re not doing a whole lot of scratch cooking. They don’t have a lot of time or energy at the end of the day. So when life is really hard and you’re working really hard, you don’t have the privilege to push away something nutrient-dense like meat.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. So let’s talk a little bit about the film. I know it's gone through a lot of iterations and there’s been some wins and some challenges. So tell me, let's start with a little bit of the idea and the inspiration behind it. Why we both feel that this is important to get out there and then maybe a little update where you’re at, what you’re needing, what would be helpful. We have a lot of folks who are listening, who I know want to be a part of this movement in some way.

And I’m often asked by people who are not necessarily in the health field, people who are not nutritionists or Functional Medicine practitioners or anything, like, “How can I help? How can I get involved? How can I use my existing skills or connections or resources to move this forward?” So let's imagine what kind of help we need or could be useful to move this forward, and who knows who’s out there listening.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. So, I was halfway through writing a book on this subject on the nutritional, environmental, and ethical case for meat when yet another vegan film came out about a year and a half ago. And I was like, “If this guy can make a movie, I can make a movie.” And so that’s kind of how it all started. I did a crowd funder that was pretty successful, and we got rolling. At the time, the project was called Kale versus Cow. And we started filming some of these nutrition stories. We hooked up with a doctor who has some amazing clinical trials and is doing really good work in a pretty rural part of the Midwest, conveniently corn country. But there's also farmers who are plowing in their corn and turning it back to grass.

So there’s some really great stories happening there. And some of the feedback I got from the title Kale versus Cow was that, “This sounds like another vegan film,” or, “It sounds like I’m against kale,” which as you know, I’m not against kale. But I think folks maybe that don't know me as well just had these misperceptions, and the name was a little bit of a hang-up for them. So we went back to the drawing board a little bit and changed the title to Sacred Cow, which I think works really nicely, also because there’s a double meaning of sacred cow. Because the vilification of beef is just so embedded in our system.

Chris Kresser:  Yes.

Diana Rodgers:  And, I mean, even when I was going through my graduate program in dietetics, red meat is not okay. It's just not, even though in biochem it's totally fine if you just look at it from an objective scientific perspective. And the project has also transformed from a feature film into a docuseries because we felt that it’s a more digestible way, literally, to get this information across, and there's also more that we wanted to cover that we didn't feel would fit into the narrative of one film.

And so we were now looking at a multipart docuseries still addressing mostly the nutritional, environmental, and ethical aspects of the reason why we need animals in our food system. I'm also very interested in sort of the anthropology of how meat became such a polarizing topic today and how people identify their whole being around how much meat they consume in their diet. The flexitarian, vegan, whatever.

Chris Kresser:  Yep.

Diana Rodgers:  And I still am working on the book. So, as you know, Robb is the coauthor on the book project I’m working on, and he’s the co-executive producer on the film project. But the funding has been a little bit of a challenge. I don’t know if people really get how important this is, and I think it’s one of the reasons why the Unitarian church is not funded well. Because it's, like, trying to extract money out of atheists is a hard thing.

When people are super-passionately committed and religiously committed like vegans, where it’s, like, their religion, they’ll passionately fund things. But then when people are kind of cool with everything and they’re eating meat and they’re like, “Yeah, got my health under control now. That’s great. And if the vegans don’t want to eat meat, fine, that’s more for me.” That’s really kind of the attitude I’m running into a little bit.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah people are less identified with it, which is good, in their way.

Diana Rodgers:  It’s good.

Chris Kresser:  But not as good when you’re trying to raise money for a movie like this.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And I think the other part of it is, I don’t know that people really perceive the threat fully yet. It’s like you just said, they’re like, “If someone wants to be vegan, fine. No skin off my back and it’s not going to hurt me. So there’s no pressing need to fund a film about this. Because who cares if someone’s a vegan.” Well, yeah, on an individual level, you might say that. Even though we could argue that you should care if someone chooses an approach that’s in many cases likely to make them nutrient deficient.

But, yes, each person, of course, has the right to choose their own approach. And I don’t go around trying to proselytize and convert vegans to eating animal foods unless they ask me what I think they should do if they come see me as a patient. But this isn't just about individual choice here. Because, as we know, we talked about the meat tax proposition, and this is going to affect food policy. It's already affected food policy in the US and around the world which then will affect schools. And what happens at schools, which influences our children and the choices that they make.

You know, my daughter is seven and a half, and she comes home with some really interesting things that she's heard from other kids and even teachers at school. And she doesn't go to a typical school, but this is, it’s everywhere. Yeah.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly. And there’s a lot of schools now eliminating meat for health, and I think a lot of parents are kind feeling a little worried about meat consumption. And so maybe they're thinking, “Well, at least they’re getting a healthy meal at school.” And so that's concerning to me because for a lot of kids this is the most nutrient-dense meal of their day. And to blame it on meat is just wrong. And I kept telling folks, this is coming and meat tax is coming.

And I, for a while, was feeling like maybe I’m just nuts and I’m making all this up. I don’t know. But then of course, it is really coming. The EAT-Lancet paper is here. Meat tax is being discussed. We’ve got, LA now is trying to force restaurants and LAX to provide, to tell private businesses to provide vegan entrees. We’ve got Berkeley with Meatless Mondays now at all city meetings.

Chris Kresser:  WeWork.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, WeWork, exactly. There’s airlines now that are eliminating red meat. And so this is coming at us from our clinicians, our universities, we’re hearing this from the World Health Organization. We’re hearing this from business, from the media. Constant films, there's more coming out this year.

I think I just sent you another one that’s on its way out that I’m pretty concerned about. Because it actually has people with MD behind their name. And nobody is pushing back and people are just taking this really lightly. And so, yeah, anything that folks can do to help me get this off the ground, I’d want to come out and feature you, Chris. And I’ve got a lot of really great experts in both the sustainability and health space that very strongly feel that red meat is important to our food system.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. And the reality is that a film or in a docuseries can make a huge impact than even a book.

Diana Rodgers:  That you can’t do with a book. I know.

Chris Kresser:  It doesn’t work. I mean, I’ve written a 400-plus page book with all the science that you need to, I think, get clear that animal food should be part of our diet in addition to plant foods. But how many people are going to read a 400-page book? Not that many. And there’s still something about film that makes it a very viral medium. It’s more accessible, a docuseries is an increasingly popular format, as you said.

It's easier to cover the wide range of topics that you need to hit on for this, and it's a format that has been used for vegan and other types of films or media. And it’s something that’s just really easy to share with. People are more likely to sit down at night and watch an episode of this than they are to read a book.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, exactly. And this is pretty dense material. But if I can just show people what a healthy ecosystem looks like and how cattle raised in the right way, what that looks like compared to a 2,000-acre field of soy being grown for lab meat, I think that those are really powerful visuals.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I agree with that a hundred percent. So if someone is listening to this and the alarm has been raised in their mind, and they’re now aware of the real risk here to our families and communities, and they want to get involved in some way, what's the best way for them to do that?

Diana Rodgers:  So I have more information, and I’m taking donations on sustainabledish.com/film. And for any better meat companies or folks that want to get involved in a bigger way, folks can just message me directly through the site. And we’re working with a few better meat companies and other large donors and foundations. But we still need to, these are expensive, and there are some inexpensive ways of making docuseries.

But in order for us to really get on the mainstream media channels like Netflix, we have to do something that's beautiful and has a high production value and isn't a $50,000 handheld camera project. And so, while the budget isn’t exorbitant, it’s certainly higher than some of the other more budget docuseries that have been coming out. And that's largely because I'm really tired of going to high schools and doing damage control when they show these vegan propaganda films. Because that's what's happening right now.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, absolutely. And will continue to happen, as you pointed out. The momentum there is only building. So we need to, I think, step up to the plate.

Diana Rodgers:  Thank you so much.

Chris Kresser:  Thank you for doing this work, Diana. I really appreciate your advocacy and passion for this, and it shows through in everything that you do. And I hope for all of you listening that this has been up maybe a bit of a wake-up call and you have a little more perspective on what's going on behind the scenes. And even less left behind, like more out in the open now, I think, more and more. Especially with this EAT-Lancet paper, and you see that science is not objective and dispassionate in many cases, but actually quite agenda driven and that there are often interests aligned behind those agendas that may not represent your interests. Like global food companies that want to sell more of their processed and refined products.

So none of us are not impacted by this in some way. And if you have children and family members who are getting exposed to all of this material, it's really important to have a counterpoint that we can offer that is well researched and really hits on the most important issues. And people can change their mind. I mean, your story that you shared with the publisher of the China study was really revealing. To his credit, to whoever that publisher editor was, to his credit. He was able to take in that information and open his mind and give this a chance. And we both, of course, know many people that that’s happened with. I have lots of patients, lots of readers and listeners who were vegan and vegetarian at one point. I was vegan and vegetarian at one point, as everybody knows who’s listened to this show for a while.

And it was through exposure to research and information like what we’re talking about on this show and what you plan to present on the film that actually changed their minds. Because I think that may also be part of the resistance in some cases, like for raising money with this film. It’s like the idea that people are just not going to change their minds. That it’s, we can’t really make an impact. But I don’t agree with that. I think we can make a huge impact and already have, and we just need to scale it up so that it can reach more people.

Diana Rodgers:  I agree.

Chris Kresser:  So sustainabledish.com/film. We will also put some of the links to the podcast and articles that we mentioned, the critiques of EAT-Lancet, Marty Kendall’s and also yours, Diana. And then if you want that big storehouse of information I put together for the Rogan show, which has articles on nutrient density and meat and the effects of meat, and carbohydrate, macronutrients, a ton of stuff, that’s at ChrisKresser.com/Rogan. So thanks, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Diana.

Diana Rodgers:  Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it, Chris. And thanks for all your support ever since I first met you.

Chris Kresser:  It's my pleasure, and I hope we can, with this podcast, move things forward a little bit more quickly and get this out there. Because it really needs to be seen. So thanks, everyone, for listening and please do continue to send in your questions to ChrisKresser.com/podcastquestion. And I’ll talk to you next time.

The post RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers appeared first on Chris Kresser.

RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers published first on https://drugaddictionsrehab.tumblr.com/

[edsenger]

RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers

In this episode, we discuss:

What’s missing from the EAT-Lancet Diet

The relationship between meat and the environment

The right way to raise livestock

Where the misunderstanding around meat and the environment comes from

Protein and the EAT-Lancet diet

The impact agriculture has on the environment

The problem with lab-grown meat and a meat tax

Diana’s upcoming docuseries, Sacred Cow

Show notes:

“Why You Should Eat Meat: My Appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience,” by Chris Kresser

“20 Ways EAT Lancet’s Global Diet Is Wrongfully Vilifying Meat,” by Diana Rodgers

“Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems”

“Why Eating Meat Is Good for You,” by Chris Kresser

“Should You EAT Lancet?” by Marty Kendall

“The EAT Lancet Diet is Nutritionally Deficient,” by Zoë Harcombe

“What Is Nutrient Density and Why Is It Important?” by Chris Kresser

Allan Savory’s TED Talk: “How to Fight Desertification and Reverse Climate Change”

“Sustainable Dish Episode 83: The Truth about Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Livestock Production with Frank Mitloehner,” by Diana Rodgers

“Sustainable Dish Episode 84: Meat as Scapegoat with Frédéric Leroy,” by Diana Rodgers

Sacred Cow, a film by Diana Rodgers

[smart_track_player url="https://ift.tt/2BTIfw6" title="RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers" artist="Chris Kresser" ] 

Chris Kresser:  Diana, thanks so much for joining me again on the podcast.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Chris Kresser:  So, we have a lot to talk about.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  This is an annual event, where there’s some big news story that comes out or study that’s published that demonizes meat and animal foods and purports to be the final nail in the coffin for anybody who's eating animal products. In fact, as you know, I just went on the Joe Rogan show, my third appearance there, to debate Dr. Joel Kahn about the merits of animal foods in the diet and eating a vegan diet. And I spent a lot of hours preparing for that and wrote a lot of articles. And the debate itself was almost four hours long, and admittedly I was a little tired out after that experience. And I just couldn't muster the energy and strength to write a rebuttal to the EAT-Lancet paper that was published. But you did, and several other people did.

And so I’d love to dive in and talk about that, as well as just stepping back a little bit and discussing some of the environmental impacts or the purported environmental impact of eating meat and what's wrong with the traditional narrative there. Because I didn't get to talk much on the Joe Rogan show about that. And then some of the difficulties of addressing this, and how I know you’ve been working on a film to try to get this message out that we’ve talked about. So why don't we just start first with the EAT-Lancet paper, since this is what's really making the rounds now and bringing this to the forefront of everybody's attention.

What’s Missing from the EAT-Lancet Diet

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, definitely. So there’s, they were really attacking red meat on a nutritional and environmental angle. So, I know your arguments on the Joe Rogan podcast were purely nutritional. I think that the main narratives are always nutrition, environment, and ethics. And ethics were kept out of the EAT-Lancet. Very long paper that took me quite a long time to read. But there's definitely a lot of misinformation in there about meat.

I mean, they’re using observational studies to basically tell us that we cannot have any processed meats at all, lumping them all together, and that we can only eat less than half an ounce of red meat per day. We can only have less than one ounce of chicken per day. But yet we can have eight teaspoons of sugar per day.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, and plenty of corn and rice and wheat. Let's talk a little bit … I think most of my listeners are pretty familiar with the nutritional arguments. I and others have written a lot about that, and most recently my … in preparation for the Rogan show, I published a whole cornerstone page with everything you need to debunk the nutritional arguments. So, that's at ChrisKresser.com/rogan, if you want to look it up.

But I just want to briefly talk about the nutrient density of this EAT-Lancet diet. Because if you just look at it from that single perspective, nutritionally you’ll see very quickly that it falls short. And our body needs micronutrients to function properly. And if a proposed diet doesn't offer those micronutrients in sufficient quantities, I think we can safely say it's not a good diet for humans to follow.

And I don’t want to spend a ton of time on this, so I’m just going to go through this really briefly, and then I want to switch over to talking more about some of the environmental issues. Because that's, I know, an area where you have a lot of expertise. And I really love what you have to say there. So, Zoë Harcombe did an analysis, and I think you had mentioned, Diana, that Marty Kendall did too. So we can talk about that. But Zoë's analysis, it’s not publicly accessible. You have to be a subscriber to see it. But I can share this part of it. She analyzed the EAT-Lancet diet using food tables and found that it was well below the RDA for several nutrients: B12, retinol, vitamin D, vitamin K2, which wasn’t even studied separately, but 71 percent of the K in the diet came from broccoli.

So we know that there's probably very little K2 in the diet. Sodium, potassium, calcium, and iron. So that's a lot of the essential nutrients that we need, and in some cases it was providing less than 20 percent of the RDA of those nutrients. So, to me, that's pretty much case closed on that basis alone. And then we can look at all the other problems that observational studies on red meat and all of that entail. And I just think it’s … there’s really nothing to be alarmed about. This study doesn't add any new evidence that meat and animal products are harmful.

Diana Rodgers:  Not at all. And another thing she didn’t mention in her paper or her review is the conversion rate of some of the vitamins, like beta-carotene to vitamin A, and almost half the population can’t make that conversion easily. And so even though on paper it my show that the vitamin A was adequate, actually not.

Despite what the EAT-Lancet paper says, meat is still a healthy addition to your diet. Check out this episode of RHR for my discussion with Diana Rodgers about what a real healthy diet looks like. #nutrition #chriskresser #wellness 

Chris Kresser:  It’s the same with all of these other nutrients. I actually wrote an article. I addressed this in my article on nutrient density you can find at the ChrisKresser.com/Rogan link. Iron, 94 percent of the iron in the EAT-Lancet diet is from plant-based forms of iron. And we know that heme iron that you get from animal products orders a magnitude better absorbed than most plant forms of iron. And the same with calcium, that is better absorbed from, in most cases, from animal products. And virtually every other nutrient, zinc, long-chain omega-3 fats, only found in animal products. So it's really, yeah, that conversion and bioavailability piece is almost never addressed in these kinds of studies.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, and you also write a lot about B12 and how these plant-based B12 analogues actually increase your need for a real B12.

Chris Kresser:  Exactly. Yeah, so, really nothing to see here from a nutritional perspective. But part of why it's making such a big splash is in addition to the highly coordinated launch campaign that is driven by celebrity, very wealthy celebrity type of people who are behind this, is the argument that not only should we avoid red meat and animal products for these nutritional reasons, but they're destroying the planet. So let’s really dive into that and unpack that from the perspective of the paper. I think you wrote an article, something like 20 reasons or 20 points against this. So we don't have to go through all of those, but let’s cover the highlights.

The Relationship between Meat and the Environment

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, well, I think the number one thing that people need to understand is that we can’t just assume that if we’re not raising animals that it will automatically free up land for more crops. So, agricultural land isn't interchangeable. Most of the agricultural land on the globe is not suited for cropping due to water availability. It’s too rocky, it’s too steep.

So, I think a lot of people, especially that haven’t traveled much, look around and just see the nice flat land and just assume that everywhere in the world is like that. I mean, picture Iceland, Norway, picture many parts of Africa, Mongolia. I mean, there’s just so many places that really will only support grazing animals and not wheat and corn and soy production. And so that’s a huge thing that we need to consider, and if we are to not graze animals on that land, not only will we lose that for food production, but the land will also desertify. Because we just don’t have those wild herds and the numbers that we used to any longer.

And ruminants are actually incredibly beneficial. Their impact on the land helps increase water holding capacity; their grazing actually stimulates new growth in a good way. So you can’t just have these fenced-off acres with nothing on it. You actually need grazing animals as part of healthy grassland ecosystems.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that's a point that is really misunderstood. I see a little bit more discussion about it certainly, at least in our realm. But I’m having kind of a hard time thinking of a mainstream article that really did justice to that point. Do you know of any?

Diana Rodgers:  Well, I've written a few blog posts on it and have talked a lot about it. I think Allan Savory does a really good job.

Chris Kresser:  Certainly.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, in his Savory Institute work that they've done and also his TED talk. But I think that's definitely the number one point that people need to understand. And it's funny because I am working on a book as well on this topic, and my publisher actually has published a ton of vegan books, and he was skeptical. And once he read my environmental argument and specifically wrapped his head around this very topic, I won him over.

Chris Kresser:  That’s amazing.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, people just, because we’re so divorced from nature, you and I have talked about this before just off-line, but that’s the number one problem is that people just have no idea how food is produced and what makes a healthy ecosystem. And a lot of the vegans will, the ones who do accept that not all land can be cropped, just want it turned over to be rewilded.

So let’s just crop everything we can possibly crop and then we’ll just rewild all the pastureland with deer or something cute. But then what are we going to do because we’ve eliminated all the predators? I mean even in the town I live in outside of Boston, we have a massive deer problem. And nobody wants hunting because they don’t want to see dead animals on their beautiful hikes around the conservation land here in my town. And if we eliminate the predators, we need to be responsible for how these populations of wild animals are managed. And so the other option, if we’re not going to hunt them, I suppose would be to bring back wolves. I don’t know how.

Chris Kresser:  I don't think that would go over well.

Diana Rodgers:  I don’t know how my waiting for the bus in my town with wolves swirling around at dawn will go over. So it quickly backs them into a very uncomfortable corner there.

Chris Kresser:  I think another thing that you point out that people don’t realize is that 90 percent of what cattle eat is, at least in a natural grazing state, not in a CAFO type of arrangement, is forage and plant leftovers that humans can’t eat.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, exactly. And even in, I mean, I’m not an advocate for feedlot beef, but I think one thing people don’t understand about even cattle that are raised on feedlots, or that are finished on feedlots rather, is that they’re not raised on feedlots.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  So 85 percent of the beef cattle in the US are actually grazing on land that can't be cropped. And even if they do end up on a feedlot, 90 percent of their total intake is non-edible food to humans. And so they're eating, for example, soybean cakes. But that’s left over from the soybean oil industry.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  They’re eating large amounts of distiller’s grains, lots of foods that would normally emit greenhouse gases and decompose anyway. Ranchers are also grazing cattle on spent wheat and cornfields. So you know that corn would just decompose and emit greenhouse gases either way. So why not run it through a ruminant gut and make protein out of it?

Chris Kresser:  And fertilizer, as you pointed out.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. I mean, it’s so much more nuanced. This is a theme that will probably come up in our conversation a lot is, and I know Robb, Robb and I commiserate about it, and I know you do as well with him. But the vegan narrative is so simple in a lot of ways and it plays into a lot of assumptions, even if they’re wrong, that you don’t really have to explain it to people. It just, people have heard things over and over again. “Meat is bad for the environment, it’s bad for us, therefore eliminate meat from your diet and the food system, and everyone will be healthier.” That’s so easy to understand.

But as Robb has pointed out many times, the counterargument is nuanced and complex. And is not quite as simple to understand and requires that you actually pay attention to some of these finer points. And I think that is one of the challenges that we face in this struggle. But it’s not incomprehensible. I mean, if you just get a few of the simple points like this, it starts to become a lot easier to understand.

Diana Rodgers:  Definitely.  And now my point was … oh, I was going to say too that there's a lot, 50 percent of the carcass of a cow is not eaten but used for other industry uses. So we've got leather, we've got insulin, we’ve got footballs, we’ve got lots of medical applications, fertilizer. So eliminating all animals from our food system, there's a great study I think I sent you this morning that was published in PNAS about what would happen if we eliminated all animals from our food system.

So the greenhouse gas emissions would only decrease by about 2 1/2 percent. But our overall caloric intake would actually go way up, and our nutrient deficiencies would go up. So we already have a problem in our culture where we’re over-consuming calories and not getting enough nutrients. So we would just be making the problem worse for about a 2 percent emission reduction.

The Right Way to Raise Livestock

Chris Kresser:  And those numbers don’t assume any improvement in how cattle are managed, right?

Diana Rodgers:  Right. That was just typical cattle.

Chris Kresser:  Right. So if we actually made improvements in how cattle are managed, do you think there could be a net sequestration of carbon?

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, definitely. So there's been some research coming out of Michigan State showing the difference between continuous grazing and what they term “adaptive multi-paddock grazing,” which is similar to Allan Savory's method, so basically when you intensively graze an area and then move the cattle off quickly.

So, this is how, for example, herds in Africa naturally move because of predator pressure, so it's much worse for the land to have, let's say if you have a 10-acre field and have 100 cattle on that land for the whole summer, as opposed to tightly bunching and moving them frequently and allowing that land to rest. Because that's when carbon gets sequestered, in the regrowth phase of the grass. And so the grass is going through photosynthesis, it’s pulling down carbon and actually exuding carbon sugars to bacteria and to fungal networks that are then passing that grass nutrient. So the fungus is actually mining rocks and getting the minerals from that and feeding it to the grass, and that's how carbon is sequestered. And that process is most effective and actually is a net carbon gain when cattle are managed in this way.

So that's why I like to say “it's not the cow, it’s the how,” because there's just many different ways of raising cattle. Just like there are many different ways of growing broccoli. We can do it in a monocrop system, or we can do it in a more rotational system where we’re integrating it with other crops. And what we need is less monocrops because that's just not how healthy ecosystems work, and farmland is not natural. Like, when you fly over the United States, all those squares you’re looking down at, that's not nature, that's man doing that.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. I know from your article, you did also a podcast with Frank Mitloehner—is that how you pronounce it? We’ll include a link to that in the show notes because I think people should listen to that. He’s an expert in greenhouse gas emissions and animal agriculture. And you guys talk a lot about what’s really going on there and why some of the typical numbers that are thrown around are not accurate. And if anyone’s interested in a deeper dive, I’d definitely recommend listening to that.

So, greenhouse gas from beef cattle represents, just as it's currently done with no improvements, like you just mentioned, is 2 percent of emissions. And by contrast, transportation is 27 percent. So, yet when I go to WeWork, which I have an office at—

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, gosh.

Chris Kresser:  You probably know this.

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, no.

Chris Kresser:  But some of my listeners might not know that WeWork is a company that has committed to this idea that eating a vegetarian diet will save the planet. And they, I think, so, I was there two days ago on Monday, and they have meatless Monday at WeWork, where they served veggie burgers in the main lounge. And then they print these cards that they post around there, around the office, that say, “If everyone was just a vegetarian for,” I can't remember, “one or two days a week, we would save 450 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.” And again, this goes back to the simplicity thing.

Most people get in the elevator, they see that and they're like, “Oh, wow, okay. I guess I should become a vegetarian.” So how does this continue? I mean, it’s not surprising that there’s a disconnect between actual science and what we see in the media. We know that from the nutrition world and everything else. But how do you think this got started? Was there a lot of misunderstanding initially which led to these numbers and then later science kind of brought more clarity? Or what do you think? How have we gotten here?

Diana Rodgers:  Well, I actually just released an amazing podcast on Tuesday of this week, so maybe you could link to that one too, with the guy from Brussels, Frédéric Leroy.

Chris Kresser:  I read some of his papers. You sent them to me awhile back before the Rogan debate.

Where the Misunderstanding around Meat and the Environment Comes From

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, he’s so fantastic. Yeah, so, his opinion is that meat is unfairly absorbing a lot of our worries about our health, our state of our health and the environment, because meat is so powerful and can absorb it. But it's unfairly the scapegoat for our stressors. So, everyone just, it's much easier for us to blame meat than it is to perhaps look at our transportation industry and be uncomfortable about that. I mean, the main funder of that EAT-Lancet paper has a private jet and transportation was never mentioned in the EAT-Lancet.

Chris Kresser:  I don’t know if this is accurate, but I read something about how just the jet trips for the reporter would have a bigger impact on the environment than the diet changes that they were talking about.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And so, in Livestock’s Long Shadow, that's when a lot of this all started. The mass information about the emissions with cattle. And unfortunately, when they did that study, what they did was they looked at all the emissions, the full lifecycle of ruminant animals. They looked at production of the feed, all the transportation, all the emissions, everything. And when they compared that to transportation, they only looked at tailpipe exhaust. So they didn't even factor in transportation, for example, in the transportation numbers.

And so when you look at the global numbers at emissions of cattle versus transportation, you're looking at apples to oranges there. So you're looking at the full lifecycle of a beef animal compared to just the tailpipe emissions from transportation. So that's not fair. And also in other countries, the percentage is a little bit higher. But that's in places where maybe transportation plays a lesser role where there are less cars per cow. And so, their relative emissions may be higher. But that's again not taking into account the fact that cattle can actually sequester carbon and many, many other factors. And so the authors of Livestock’s Long Shadow did reduce their numbers, I think, from 18 to 14 percent and did admit that their numbers were still off because of the transportation. There are no global lifecycle papers on transportation.

But yet that 18 percent, I’ve heard even 50 percent. I don't even know where that number comes from, but that, the 50 percent is the number that's often cited by this group called Green Mondays and they are the ones that have worked with Berkeley to make all of the government meetings meatless on Mondays. That organization, I’ve looked into, and they’re actually funded by an organization out of Singapore that produces plant-based pork.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  And so there’s a lot, the environment and ethics and even the nutrition argument is very convenient for large food companies to profit, because processing means profit.

Chris Kresser:  Well, let’s talk a little bit about that, and since we’re on the topic, I do want to come back to some of the other ways that an animal-based food system or food system that includes animals can actually benefit biodiversity and things like that. So yeah, follow the money. We talk about that a lot on this show. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but on the other hand, you'd be very naïve and misguided to assume that money doesn't play a big role in setting food policy and coming up with these laws. It always has.

Protein and the EAT-Lancet Diet

And it probably always will. And if you look at the EAT-Lancet diet, I think this is from Marty Kendall's analysis, you’ll find that 32 percent of calories come from rice, wheat, and corn, and 14 percent come from unsaturated oils. So these are highly processed foods.

Diana Rodgers:  Right.

Chris Kresser:  We’re not talking about corn on the cob.

Diana Rodgers:  Or wheat berries.

Chris Kresser:  Wheat berries. Or even, like, in some cases, just the whole-grain rice. We’re talking about highly processed corn and wheat and rice derivatives, and then highly processed industrial seed oils that comprise almost 50 percent of calories. And who does that benefit? This study was sponsored by a basically hit list A-team of—

Diana Rodgers:  Processed food companies.

Chris Kresser:  Global processed food companies—DuPont, PepsiCo, Dannon, Nestlé, Cargill, Kellogg's. So, like, food and agricultural companies that make their money by selling processed and refined foods. And so that's very revealing.

And then the other thing that Marty Kendall pointed out, which is directly tied to this, is that this diet, when you work out the macronutrient ratios, it ends up being low in protein and moderate in fat and carbohydrates. And there are really no foods in nature that fit that profile, or very few. You have breast milk and acorns, I think, are the two that he pointed out. And this is a recipe for, that macronutrient mix of low protein and then higher fat and carbohydrate is a recipe for highly palatable and rewarding food. So if you look at the foods that are on this list that fit that profile, there are things like chocolate milk, potato chips, French toast, waffles, ice cream, pancakes.

Diana Rodgers:  Kit-Kat.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, biscuits, Kit-Kat, Twix, chocolate chip cookies, pie crust. I mean, are you kidding me? This is the macronutrient profile that we should be following? Oh, who does not benefit? All of the companies that make these processed foods. So it's really revealing when you look at it from that perspective.

Diana Rodgers:  I know. And I think it's really irresponsible to promote a diet that's about 10 percent in protein when we have, I mean, just in America, more than 50 percent of Americans are metabolically broken and really benefit from much higher protein levels.

Chris Kresser:  Increasing their protein. And we know that of all the macronutrients, protein is the one that has the biggest impact on satiety.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  Which it will reduce the likelihood that people overeat, which many Americans are doing.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And any clinician or dietitian like yourself who's worked with people knows if they're struggling with weight, putting them on a higher-protein diet is probably the most important thing you can do. And there's even some, if you look at the studies on low-carb diets, I think probably one of the reasons, if not one of the main reasons, that they’re so effective is that they’re higher in protein.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and I have to say too, so I actually have recently been following Marty Kendall's NutrientOptimiser diet personally, just as an experiment to try to maximize my micronutrients. And I eat really well. I live on a farm. I have a lot of education in nutrient density. I have access to all these foods. It's really hard to get all your micronutrients in the day. But it's really easy to feel satiated when you have a high percentage of animal protein in your diet. So whether that's oysters, which I know I can beat his leaderboard if I just eat a ton of oysters in one day.

Chris Kresser:  That’s right. That’s right.

Diana Rodgers:  But liver, and then just regular old animal protein. Filling the rest of your diet with colorful vegetables is the way to go. But it still, I still was low, actually, believe it or not, in iron, even with all the protein I’ve been consuming on this diet.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, I’m always talking to my patients about a lot of, especially if they’re favoring like chicken and fish, and not eating shellfish or organ meats, is that some muscle meats are not that high in iron. So it’s organ meats and shellfish that are really the powerhouses from that perspective.

And this brings up another question about bioavailability, right? Because we’ve both talked about this a lot. It's not at all the case that protein from plant sources like legumes is going to be absorbed in the same way that protein is absorbed from animal foods like meat and eggs and fish and dairy products. There is something called the … there are various scoring systems that are used in the scientific literature to assess the bioavailability of protein. And no matter what scoring system you use, animal proteins come out ahead of plant proteins, and usually by a very large margin.

Diana Rodgers:  And, I mean, trying to get your protein from beans and rice, if you’re trying to do the combining in order to get the right profile of amino acids, you would, so I did the calculations. So in order to get the right amount, the same amount of protein you would get from a four-ounce steak, which is 181 calories, you’d need to eat 12 ounces of beans and a cup of rice. So that’s 638 calories and 122 grams of carbs. And you're still not getting the same beautiful profile of amino acids that you can get from this 181-calorie piece of steak.

Chris Kresser:  Right, which goes back to Marty Kendall's point where you’re basically, if you eat a low-protein diet, it’s going to be a much higher-calorie diet in most cases.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and higher carb and just setting people down to the road towards metabolic disorder.

The Impact Agriculture Has on the Environment

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. So let’s go back now. I want to finish up talking about the impact of animals in the food system. Because I think there's still some other points that are worth going into here that a lot of people may not be familiar with. So one is, we talked about how not all land is suitable for grazing. But let’s talk about maybe the flipside of that is what happens when you use a lot of land for crops like corn and rice and soy and wheat?

Diana Rodgers:  Right, I mean a lot of, and most of this is not organically grown and using animals to graze in all of that. So the large majority of our monocrops are heavily sprayed with chemicals that leave a residue on the leaves that we’re ingesting. And also completely sterilize the soil and create runoff that then ends up in the Mississippi River and creating massive dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

So there are just so many problems with monocropping the way we’re doing it today. We have created an insect apocalypse. And so we’ve lost pollinators. We’re killing fish, which in turn then kills the animals that need to be eating the fish. And so we’re annihilating biodiversity both above and below ground. And so one teaspoon of soil has more microbes in it than all of the humans on earth. And when we spray it with things like Roundup, we’re completely killing all of that. And so we've destroyed just so much of our soil and so much of it is also just blowing away and running off.

So, I mean, the Dust Bowl was a good example of that, and we’re headed for another one right now. So according to the United Nations, we have about 60 harvests left, at the rate we’re going.

Chris Kresser:  This is alarming. This is like an emergency thing on the level that's part of climate change, of course, but also on the same level as potential for water shortages. People, I don't think, are … I mean, some people are aware of it, of course, but we’re talking about some very, very serious implications here.

Diana Rodgers:  And when the soil is compacted and we’re constantly just stripping away the biodiversity of the soil, when rain comes, it just washes all the topsoil away into rivers, and that's how we get these really cloudy rivers. Because rivers in general should be clear. And in a system where we have healthy ruminants managed in a proper way, the soil acts like a sponge and can actually hold a lot more water from rain, instead of allowing it to just wash off and take the topsoil with it. My husband is so into topsoil that even we have two border collies, and they sleep in our mudroom at night. And they come in, they’re black and white, but their white parts are really dirty-looking at the end of the day.

Chris Kresser:  Brown.

Diana Rodgers:  And in the morning they’re totally white and they leave massive amounts of soil on the ground. And I literally have to sweep it up and put it in the field because that’s how into topsoil he is.

Chris Kresser:  Well, yeah, and how precious it is too.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And just nobody is looking at our farmland as a biological system. It’s been reduced to this reductionist chemical, let’s produce as many calories as possible, which is ruining our health and our land.

Chris Kresser:  Let’s talk a little bit also about how ruminants can improve biodiversity. I mean, we touched on that just briefly, but water is a big issue, and I know that cattle can improve water holding capacity of the land. And that has a whole bunch of downstream effects.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. And also too, even the worst-managed cattle on overgrazed grass is still a better system than monocrop grain. So you still, I mean, and even in a better system, you've got butterflies, you've got birds, you've got all kinds of life above ground and below ground that are teeming.

The whole goal, what people don't realize, is that we want as much life as possible. And our current system is actually making sure that we’re annihilating as much life as possible. So if we look at the extinction process that's been happening over the last 50 years, again, it's something completely alarming. I know Silent Spring came out and people were all up in arms. But the solution is not a vegetarian solution. So Diet for a Small Planet is outdated information, and what we need is more better cattle, not no cattle.

Chris Kresser:  It’s not the cow, it’s the how.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly. And not only that too, another thing I brought up is what these rich white people in Sweden were not paying attention to is that livestock are really important to the majority of people living in poverty in the world in places where, what are you going to do in Kenya where it’s super arid and the Maasai have been herding cattle forever and ever? And we’re going to tell them that they need to go grow soybeans? With what seeds? Are they going to have to go buy them from Monsanto? Where are they going to get the water to irrigate? Where are they going to get the fertilizer if they can’t have animals? So I think it’s bordering on racist to have a grain-heavy diet as a global policy for the entire world.

Chris Kresser:  But we can just make more Cheetos.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly.

Chris Kresser:  That’s probably the plan, part of the plan here. It’s really—

Diana Rodgers:  Well, to get them reliant on our aid. I mean, we’re already ruining Haiti with our rice that we’re giving to them. We’ve ruined their local economies, we’ve ruined their health. Now rice is a much higher percentage of their diet. Very few Haitians are actually growing their own food anymore. And it’s a really great way that we can control governments. I mean, that’s a whole other thing that we don’t have to get too much into. But it really makes me mad, the idea that we’re taking away people’s innate ability to be self-reliant.

Chris Kresser:  Not to mention the very clearly documented health impacts that are observed when traditional peoples adopt the Western food system.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And I have an image on my post. So, the Canadian government decided that they knew best, advising a local Inuit population that they should be eating a Mediterranean diet. Which I think is just, I mean, this one image of this igloo showing all of their nutrient-dense traditional foods in the red category and bananas and oranges and orange juice in the green category. I mean that just sums up exactly how wrong we’ve gotten our dietary advice just in this one image.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. And if those poor kids start following that diet, they’re going to become morbidly obese.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And this is seen. It’s been documented in so many different areas where traditional populations start to follow the government-sponsored diet, including Native Americans in the US.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  So, like the Pima, for example.

The Problem with Lab-Grown Meat and Meat Tax

Chris Kresser: So let's talk about some of the other proposals that are floating around that are based on this idea that meat is bad for us nutritionally and bad for the environment, which as I hope we’ve shown in this podcast, is misguided and others. But why not just make meat in a lab? Let’s say you accept that meat, animal protein is more bioavailable and so we do need meat, which some people seem to have accepted. But then why not just grow it in a lab and—

Diana Rodgers:  Reduce suffering.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, reduce suffering and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. All of that. Yeah. And of course, make billions of dollars from the companies that are successful at doing that.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and I think another thing.

Chris Kresser:  Nothing wrong with that per say, but yeah. There’s some financial motivation there perhaps.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. I’m so glad I don’t live where you live. I was actually just out there a couple days ago, and I’m, like, so happy that I’m not living there. Because that’s, like, the hotbed of all of this.

Chris Kresser:  Sure. You just have to be a hermit like me and live up on my hilltop.

Diana Rodgers:  And just go to WeWork and get mad at WeWork in the halls and elevators.

Chris Kresser:  Yep.

Diana Rodgers:  So, I mean, it’s really interesting, the lab meat thing, because I had a woman on my podcast about a year and a half ago who was a big vegan animal rights person telling me how great lab meat was. And I asked her if she knew how it was made, and she had no idea. But she was like, she’s like a really big deal animal rights activist and very vocal about how lab meat is a good solution. And interestingly, most vegans actually won't even accept it because you're using fetal bovine serum in order to make it, which is not “vegan” anyway.

But what folks aren’t realizing, number one, is that it relies on this horrible monocrop system, which is ruining our environment and a completely inefficient way of producing food on so many levels. But then the lifestyle assessments I've read are a lot based on projections because they haven't built the bioreactors yet. So they're making a lot of assumptions, but even the assumptions are so bad that the energy required in order to transform what they're using right now as the substrate.

So corn and soy, sometimes wheat, into protein, the amount of energy required for that is enormous. And when we have animals that can actually just do this on their own without having to be plugged into an outlet is really amazing. Plus, what they're not taking into consideration is the amount of antibiotics that they’ll need to prevent bacterial overgrowth because they’re growing these at just the perfect temperature for meat to grow. But of course that's also the perfect temperature for bacteria to grow as well.

Chris Kresser:  Everything else.

Diana Rodgers:  Cancerous cells, all these things. They had not figured out how to striate the meat with fats. There's a lot of input that we’re running out of that you need in order, there’s a lot of minerals that are being mined in war-torn countries that, actually the US military is, like, guarding these mines in order to get those raw materials in order to pump it into these cellular meat company facilities. So the whole system is energetically ridiculous, and it's not even causing less harm.

So that's my big argument, too, is that when you look at how many lives are lost from the loss of biodiversity, of taking a native ecosystem, plowing it up to make it into a cornfield, and then spraying it to make sure that nothing other than corn, not even mice or anything can grow there. The amount of life lost for that system versus one animal, one large ruminant animal. A cow can provide almost 500 pounds of meat. I just don't think the trade-offs are worth it at all from an ethical or environmental perspective.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, another situation where the devil is in the details, right?

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Because on the fact of it, lab meat sounds, “Hey, why not?” Like, if we can do that and we can make it taste the same … But clearly including that woman that you interviewed on your podcast, that was kind of the level that she was approaching it on, without actually looking into the details. It sounds pretty good on the surface, so why not advocate it. But then when you look into it, you find it’s a little more complicated.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. I’ve been really loving The Wizard and the Prophet, Robb sent that over to me.

Chris Kresser:  I read that just recently.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, I think he told me.

Chris Kresser:  I sent it to Robb.

Diana Rodgers:  Yes, exactly, so I’m thanking you. I’m thanking you for the chain because I have my hands on it. And I’ve been not only reading the book, but then when I’m in my car or at the gym, I’m listening to it. So it’s really fantastic, and I think that that is at the crux of what we’re dealing with right now. Do we look at this, what some would call Luddite perspective of nature through Hoyt, or … I’m sorry. What was his name? Now I’m forgetting.

Chris Kresser:  Vogt.

Diana Rodgers:  Voight. Vogt.

Chris Kresser:  Vogt. Yeah, you want to say Voight because it’s usually an i in there, but it’s V-o-g-t, so it’s Vogt, yeah.

Diana Rodgers:  Or do we look at this more wizard tech solution? And that’s just where most people are right now.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that’s the dominant cultural paradigm is we’ve gone into wizardry, for sure.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, yes.

Chris Kresser:  No question about that. Back when Silent Spring was written, I think there was more, Vogt was more in vogue. There was a little bit more concern about the wizardry and the impact it would have. And now we are 100 percent in wizardry.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. And the problem is, everyone’s just sort of hoping that more rabbits will be pulled out of the hat. But we don't know for sure.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah. I highly recommend this book. This is Charles Mann, who wrote 1491 and 1493, which, if anyone has read those books about … it totally changed our view on how the New World was discovered and colonized and what was here when those people arrived. Which is much different than what was previously believed. He’s a fantastic writer and this is I think, one of the most compelling views on where we are as a society now and what our future might hold. So highly recommend it.

Getting back to the topic, I mean, that's obviously germane and relevant here, but I want to talk about a few other proposals that are being floated around here. Which are again, if you accept what we've talked about here and in other podcasts, are off base. But the meat tax. There’s been a lot of enthusiasm for this because there’s some research that, beverage tax, soda taxes have been effective in terms of reducing consumption. So this is now something that’s being seriously proposed in the EAT-Lancet. I think that’s part of the agenda of the EAT-Lancet paper and authors and reporters.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and actually they released another paper just on Sunday night of this week that goes even more strongly into the meat tax. I think the goal is to make it basically impossible to eat meat moving forward. And effectively, I’ve looked at the models. There was a good paper that looked at what would happen, just kind of projected out, what might happen in this situation. And, actually, red meat consumption wouldn’t go down at all.

And it basically is just a poor tax is what this is. And when you look at, I actually took a picture. I had to run into a typical grocery store and pick something up one time, and I noticed the shopping cart of the person in front of me. And it was soda and donuts and whoopie pies and all stuff like that. But her deli meat and her bacon were actually the most nutrient-dense things in her cart.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, so that would be encouraging even less healthy choices in people who are of limited economic means. And you mentioned this in the beginning about the private jet people who are founding this study, and you brought it up in your article. There really is a classist kind of thing that’s happening here that’s not part of the popular narrative. Because if we really wanted to reduce carbon footprint, you pointed out a meta-analysis that suggested that doing things like avoiding one round-trip transatlantic flight, more of a car-free lifestyle, having one less child in an industrialized nation would have by far bigger impact than reducing your consumption of beef.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. Or changing your diet in any way.

Chris Kresser:  And who’s doing a lot of round-trip transatlantic flying? People who are at a certain socioeconomic level. And so, yeah, a lot of these proposals are like, “Let me continue to live my carbon-emitting lifestyle, and then let’s introduce changes that won’t effect that but actually will impact people who are poor and in a really adverse way without really me having to change anything as a privileged person.”

Diana Rodgers:  Right, and, I mean, in order to do vegan right, you kind of do need to be a celebrity or an uber-rich person that, if there is a way to do vegan, right? But, I mean, to … there’s a lot of food prep involved, there’s a lot of time involved. There’s a lot of time spent eating.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, chewing.

Diana Rodgers:  Chewing, right? Your typical person that maybe gets two 15-minute breaks a day is not going to be able to chew the food or have a staff that can make the cashew cream to make all the—

Chris Kresser:  Or buy the cashew cream for $9.49 for a half pint or whatever it is.

Diana’s Upcoming Docuseries, Sacred Cow

Diana Rodgers:  Right, right. I mean, this film project I’m working on, we’ve done a lot of filming in Indiana, rural Indiana. And I see what these folks have as options for stores on limited budgets and what they’re buying. And honestly, processed food, processed meats like sausages that are pre-cooked are a lot easier for them to eat and are honestly the most nutrient-dense thing that they're eating. Because they’re not doing a whole lot of scratch cooking. They don’t have a lot of time or energy at the end of the day. So when life is really hard and you’re working really hard, you don’t have the privilege to push away something nutrient-dense like meat.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. So let’s talk a little bit about the film. I know it's gone through a lot of iterations and there’s been some wins and some challenges. So tell me, let's start with a little bit of the idea and the inspiration behind it. Why we both feel that this is important to get out there and then maybe a little update where you’re at, what you’re needing, what would be helpful. We have a lot of folks who are listening, who I know want to be a part of this movement in some way.

And I’m often asked by people who are not necessarily in the health field, people who are not nutritionists or Functional Medicine practitioners or anything, like, “How can I help? How can I get involved? How can I use my existing skills or connections or resources to move this forward?” So let's imagine what kind of help we need or could be useful to move this forward, and who knows who’s out there listening.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. So, I was halfway through writing a book on this subject on the nutritional, environmental, and ethical case for meat when yet another vegan film came out about a year and a half ago. And I was like, “If this guy can make a movie, I can make a movie.” And so that’s kind of how it all started. I did a crowd funder that was pretty successful, and we got rolling. At the time, the project was called Kale versus Cow. And we started filming some of these nutrition stories. We hooked up with a doctor who has some amazing clinical trials and is doing really good work in a pretty rural part of the Midwest, conveniently corn country. But there's also farmers who are plowing in their corn and turning it back to grass.

So there’s some really great stories happening there. And some of the feedback I got from the title Kale versus Cow was that, “This sounds like another vegan film,” or, “It sounds like I’m against kale,” which as you know, I’m not against kale. But I think folks maybe that don't know me as well just had these misperceptions, and the name was a little bit of a hang-up for them. So we went back to the drawing board a little bit and changed the title to Sacred Cow, which I think works really nicely, also because there’s a double meaning of sacred cow. Because the vilification of beef is just so embedded in our system.

Chris Kresser:  Yes.

Diana Rodgers:  And, I mean, even when I was going through my graduate program in dietetics, red meat is not okay. It's just not, even though in biochem it's totally fine if you just look at it from an objective scientific perspective. And the project has also transformed from a feature film into a docuseries because we felt that it’s a more digestible way, literally, to get this information across, and there's also more that we wanted to cover that we didn't feel would fit into the narrative of one film.

And so we were now looking at a multipart docuseries still addressing mostly the nutritional, environmental, and ethical aspects of the reason why we need animals in our food system. I'm also very interested in sort of the anthropology of how meat became such a polarizing topic today and how people identify their whole being around how much meat they consume in their diet. The flexitarian, vegan, whatever.

Chris Kresser:  Yep.

Diana Rodgers:  And I still am working on the book. So, as you know, Robb is the coauthor on the book project I’m working on, and he’s the co-executive producer on the film project. But the funding has been a little bit of a challenge. I don’t know if people really get how important this is, and I think it’s one of the reasons why the Unitarian church is not funded well. Because it's, like, trying to extract money out of atheists is a hard thing.

When people are super-passionately committed and religiously committed like vegans, where it’s, like, their religion, they’ll passionately fund things. But then when people are kind of cool with everything and they’re eating meat and they’re like, “Yeah, got my health under control now. That’s great. And if the vegans don’t want to eat meat, fine, that’s more for me.” That’s really kind of the attitude I’m running into a little bit.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah people are less identified with it, which is good, in their way.

Diana Rodgers:  It’s good.

Chris Kresser:  But not as good when you’re trying to raise money for a movie like this.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And I think the other part of it is, I don’t know that people really perceive the threat fully yet. It’s like you just said, they’re like, “If someone wants to be vegan, fine. No skin off my back and it’s not going to hurt me. So there’s no pressing need to fund a film about this. Because who cares if someone’s a vegan.” Well, yeah, on an individual level, you might say that. Even though we could argue that you should care if someone chooses an approach that’s in many cases likely to make them nutrient deficient.

But, yes, each person, of course, has the right to choose their own approach. And I don’t go around trying to proselytize and convert vegans to eating animal foods unless they ask me what I think they should do if they come see me as a patient. But this isn't just about individual choice here. Because, as we know, we talked about the meat tax proposition, and this is going to affect food policy. It's already affected food policy in the US and around the world which then will affect schools. And what happens at schools, which influences our children and the choices that they make.

You know, my daughter is seven and a half, and she comes home with some really interesting things that she's heard from other kids and even teachers at school. And she doesn't go to a typical school, but this is, it’s everywhere. Yeah.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly. And there’s a lot of schools now eliminating meat for health, and I think a lot of parents are kind feeling a little worried about meat consumption. And so maybe they're thinking, “Well, at least they’re getting a healthy meal at school.” And so that's concerning to me because for a lot of kids this is the most nutrient-dense meal of their day. And to blame it on meat is just wrong. And I kept telling folks, this is coming and meat tax is coming.

And I, for a while, was feeling like maybe I’m just nuts and I’m making all this up. I don’t know. But then of course, it is really coming. The EAT-Lancet paper is here. Meat tax is being discussed. We’ve got, LA now is trying to force restaurants and LAX to provide, to tell private businesses to provide vegan entrees. We’ve got Berkeley with Meatless Mondays now at all city meetings.

Chris Kresser:  WeWork.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, WeWork, exactly. There’s airlines now that are eliminating red meat. And so this is coming at us from our clinicians, our universities, we’re hearing this from the World Health Organization. We’re hearing this from business, from the media. Constant films, there's more coming out this year.

I think I just sent you another one that’s on its way out that I’m pretty concerned about. Because it actually has people with MD behind their name. And nobody is pushing back and people are just taking this really lightly. And so, yeah, anything that folks can do to help me get this off the ground, I’d want to come out and feature you, Chris. And I’ve got a lot of really great experts in both the sustainability and health space that very strongly feel that red meat is important to our food system.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. And the reality is that a film or in a docuseries can make a huge impact than even a book.

Diana Rodgers:  That you can’t do with a book. I know.

Chris Kresser:  It doesn’t work. I mean, I’ve written a 400-plus page book with all the science that you need to, I think, get clear that animal food should be part of our diet in addition to plant foods. But how many people are going to read a 400-page book? Not that many. And there’s still something about film that makes it a very viral medium. It’s more accessible, a docuseries is an increasingly popular format, as you said.

It's easier to cover the wide range of topics that you need to hit on for this, and it's a format that has been used for vegan and other types of films or media. And it’s something that’s just really easy to share with. People are more likely to sit down at night and watch an episode of this than they are to read a book.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, exactly. And this is pretty dense material. But if I can just show people what a healthy ecosystem looks like and how cattle raised in the right way, what that looks like compared to a 2,000-acre field of soy being grown for lab meat, I think that those are really powerful visuals.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I agree with that a hundred percent. So if someone is listening to this and the alarm has been raised in their mind, and they’re now aware of the real risk here to our families and communities, and they want to get involved in some way, what's the best way for them to do that?

Diana Rodgers:  So I have more information, and I’m taking donations on sustainabledish.com/film. And for any better meat companies or folks that want to get involved in a bigger way, folks can just message me directly through the site. And we’re working with a few better meat companies and other large donors and foundations. But we still need to, these are expensive, and there are some inexpensive ways of making docuseries.

But in order for us to really get on the mainstream media channels like Netflix, we have to do something that's beautiful and has a high production value and isn't a $50,000 handheld camera project. And so, while the budget isn’t exorbitant, it’s certainly higher than some of the other more budget docuseries that have been coming out. And that's largely because I'm really tired of going to high schools and doing damage control when they show these vegan propaganda films. Because that's what's happening right now.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, absolutely. And will continue to happen, as you pointed out. The momentum there is only building. So we need to, I think, step up to the plate.

Diana Rodgers:  Thank you so much.

Chris Kresser:  Thank you for doing this work, Diana. I really appreciate your advocacy and passion for this, and it shows through in everything that you do. And I hope for all of you listening that this has been up maybe a bit of a wake-up call and you have a little more perspective on what's going on behind the scenes. And even less left behind, like more out in the open now, I think, more and more. Especially with this EAT-Lancet paper, and you see that science is not objective and dispassionate in many cases, but actually quite agenda driven and that there are often interests aligned behind those agendas that may not represent your interests. Like global food companies that want to sell more of their processed and refined products.

So none of us are not impacted by this in some way. And if you have children and family members who are getting exposed to all of this material, it's really important to have a counterpoint that we can offer that is well researched and really hits on the most important issues. And people can change their mind. I mean, your story that you shared with the publisher of the China study was really revealing. To his credit, to whoever that publisher editor was, to his credit. He was able to take in that information and open his mind and give this a chance. And we both, of course, know many people that that’s happened with. I have lots of patients, lots of readers and listeners who were vegan and vegetarian at one point. I was vegan and vegetarian at one point, as everybody knows who’s listened to this show for a while.

And it was through exposure to research and information like what we’re talking about on this show and what you plan to present on the film that actually changed their minds. Because I think that may also be part of the resistance in some cases, like for raising money with this film. It’s like the idea that people are just not going to change their minds. That it’s, we can’t really make an impact. But I don’t agree with that. I think we can make a huge impact and already have, and we just need to scale it up so that it can reach more people.

Diana Rodgers:  I agree.

Chris Kresser:  So sustainabledish.com/film. We will also put some of the links to the podcast and articles that we mentioned, the critiques of EAT-Lancet, Marty Kendall’s and also yours, Diana. And then if you want that big storehouse of information I put together for the Rogan show, which has articles on nutrient density and meat and the effects of meat, and carbohydrate, macronutrients, a ton of stuff, that’s at ChrisKresser.com/Rogan. So thanks, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Diana.

Diana Rodgers:  Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it, Chris. And thanks for all your support ever since I first met you.

Chris Kresser:  It's my pleasure, and I hope we can, with this podcast, move things forward a little bit more quickly and get this out there. Because it really needs to be seen. So thanks, everyone, for listening and please do continue to send in your questions to ChrisKresser.com/podcastquestion. And I’ll talk to you next time.

The post RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers appeared first on Chris Kresser.

RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers published first on https://brightendentalhouston.weebly.com/

[denisalvney]

RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers

In this episode, we discuss:

What’s missing from the EAT-Lancet Diet

The relationship between meat and the environment

The right way to raise livestock

Where the misunderstanding around meat and the environment comes from

Protein and the EAT-Lancet diet

The impact agriculture has on the environment

The problem with lab-grown meat and a meat tax

Diana’s upcoming docuseries, Sacred Cow

Show notes:

“Why You Should Eat Meat: My Appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience,” by Chris Kresser

“20 Ways EAT Lancet’s Global Diet Is Wrongfully Vilifying Meat,” by Diana Rodgers

“Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems”

“Why Eating Meat Is Good for You,” by Chris Kresser

“Should You EAT Lancet?” by Marty Kendall

“The EAT Lancet Diet is Nutritionally Deficient,” by Zoë Harcombe

“What Is Nutrient Density and Why Is It Important?” by Chris Kresser

Allan Savory’s TED Talk: “How to Fight Desertification and Reverse Climate Change”

“Sustainable Dish Episode 83: The Truth about Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Livestock Production with Frank Mitloehner,” by Diana Rodgers

“Sustainable Dish Episode 84: Meat as Scapegoat with Frédéric Leroy,” by Diana Rodgers

Sacred Cow, a film by Diana Rodgers

[smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/thehealthyskeptic/What_the_EAT-Lancet_Paper_Gets_Wrong_with_Diana_Rodgers.mp3" title="RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers" artist="Chris Kresser" ] 

Chris Kresser:  Diana, thanks so much for joining me again on the podcast.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Chris Kresser:  So, we have a lot to talk about.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  This is an annual event, where there’s some big news story that comes out or study that’s published that demonizes meat and animal foods and purports to be the final nail in the coffin for anybody who's eating animal products. In fact, as you know, I just went on the Joe Rogan show, my third appearance there, to debate Dr. Joel Kahn about the merits of animal foods in the diet and eating a vegan diet. And I spent a lot of hours preparing for that and wrote a lot of articles. And the debate itself was almost four hours long, and admittedly I was a little tired out after that experience. And I just couldn't muster the energy and strength to write a rebuttal to the EAT-Lancet paper that was published. But you did, and several other people did.

And so I’d love to dive in and talk about that, as well as just stepping back a little bit and discussing some of the environmental impacts or the purported environmental impact of eating meat and what's wrong with the traditional narrative there. Because I didn't get to talk much on the Joe Rogan show about that. And then some of the difficulties of addressing this, and how I know you’ve been working on a film to try to get this message out that we’ve talked about. So why don't we just start first with the EAT-Lancet paper, since this is what's really making the rounds now and bringing this to the forefront of everybody's attention.

What’s Missing from the EAT-Lancet Diet

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, definitely. So there’s, they were really attacking red meat on a nutritional and environmental angle. So, I know your arguments on the Joe Rogan podcast were purely nutritional. I think that the main narratives are always nutrition, environment, and ethics. And ethics were kept out of the EAT-Lancet. Very long paper that took me quite a long time to read. But there's definitely a lot of misinformation in there about meat.

I mean, they’re using observational studies to basically tell us that we cannot have any processed meats at all, lumping them all together, and that we can only eat less than half an ounce of red meat per day. We can only have less than one ounce of chicken per day. But yet we can have eight teaspoons of sugar per day.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, and plenty of corn and rice and wheat. Let's talk a little bit … I think most of my listeners are pretty familiar with the nutritional arguments. I and others have written a lot about that, and most recently my … in preparation for the Rogan show, I published a whole cornerstone page with everything you need to debunk the nutritional arguments. So, that's at ChrisKresser.com/rogan, if you want to look it up.

But I just want to briefly talk about the nutrient density of this EAT-Lancet diet. Because if you just look at it from that single perspective, nutritionally you’ll see very quickly that it falls short. And our body needs micronutrients to function properly. And if a proposed diet doesn't offer those micronutrients in sufficient quantities, I think we can safely say it's not a good diet for humans to follow.

And I don’t want to spend a ton of time on this, so I’m just going to go through this really briefly, and then I want to switch over to talking more about some of the environmental issues. Because that's, I know, an area where you have a lot of expertise. And I really love what you have to say there. So, Zoë Harcombe did an analysis, and I think you had mentioned, Diana, that Marty Kendall did too. So we can talk about that. But Zoë's analysis, it’s not publicly accessible. You have to be a subscriber to see it. But I can share this part of it. She analyzed the EAT-Lancet diet using food tables and found that it was well below the RDA for several nutrients: B12, retinol, vitamin D, vitamin K2, which wasn’t even studied separately, but 71 percent of the K in the diet came from broccoli.

So we know that there's probably very little K2 in the diet. Sodium, potassium, calcium, and iron. So that's a lot of the essential nutrients that we need, and in some cases it was providing less than 20 percent of the RDA of those nutrients. So, to me, that's pretty much case closed on that basis alone. And then we can look at all the other problems that observational studies on red meat and all of that entail. And I just think it’s … there’s really nothing to be alarmed about. This study doesn't add any new evidence that meat and animal products are harmful.

Diana Rodgers:  Not at all. And another thing she didn’t mention in her paper or her review is the conversion rate of some of the vitamins, like beta-carotene to vitamin A, and almost half the population can’t make that conversion easily. And so even though on paper it my show that the vitamin A was adequate, actually not.

Despite what the EAT-Lancet paper says, meat is still a healthy addition to your diet. Check out this episode of RHR for my discussion with Diana Rodgers about what a real healthy diet looks like. #nutrition #chriskresser #wellness 

Chris Kresser:  It’s the same with all of these other nutrients. I actually wrote an article. I addressed this in my article on nutrient density you can find at the ChrisKresser.com/Rogan link. Iron, 94 percent of the iron in the EAT-Lancet diet is from plant-based forms of iron. And we know that heme iron that you get from animal products orders a magnitude better absorbed than most plant forms of iron. And the same with calcium, that is better absorbed from, in most cases, from animal products. And virtually every other nutrient, zinc, long-chain omega-3 fats, only found in animal products. So it's really, yeah, that conversion and bioavailability piece is almost never addressed in these kinds of studies.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, and you also write a lot about B12 and how these plant-based B12 analogues actually increase your need for a real B12.

Chris Kresser:  Exactly. Yeah, so, really nothing to see here from a nutritional perspective. But part of why it's making such a big splash is in addition to the highly coordinated launch campaign that is driven by celebrity, very wealthy celebrity type of people who are behind this, is the argument that not only should we avoid red meat and animal products for these nutritional reasons, but they're destroying the planet. So let’s really dive into that and unpack that from the perspective of the paper. I think you wrote an article, something like 20 reasons or 20 points against this. So we don't have to go through all of those, but let’s cover the highlights.

The Relationship between Meat and the Environment

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, well, I think the number one thing that people need to understand is that we can’t just assume that if we’re not raising animals that it will automatically free up land for more crops. So, agricultural land isn't interchangeable. Most of the agricultural land on the globe is not suited for cropping due to water availability. It’s too rocky, it’s too steep.

So, I think a lot of people, especially that haven’t traveled much, look around and just see the nice flat land and just assume that everywhere in the world is like that. I mean, picture Iceland, Norway, picture many parts of Africa, Mongolia. I mean, there’s just so many places that really will only support grazing animals and not wheat and corn and soy production. And so that’s a huge thing that we need to consider, and if we are to not graze animals on that land, not only will we lose that for food production, but the land will also desertify. Because we just don’t have those wild herds and the numbers that we used to any longer.

And ruminants are actually incredibly beneficial. Their impact on the land helps increase water holding capacity; their grazing actually stimulates new growth in a good way. So you can’t just have these fenced-off acres with nothing on it. You actually need grazing animals as part of healthy grassland ecosystems.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that's a point that is really misunderstood. I see a little bit more discussion about it certainly, at least in our realm. But I’m having kind of a hard time thinking of a mainstream article that really did justice to that point. Do you know of any?

Diana Rodgers:  Well, I've written a few blog posts on it and have talked a lot about it. I think Allan Savory does a really good job.

Chris Kresser:  Certainly.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, in his Savory Institute work that they've done and also his TED talk. But I think that's definitely the number one point that people need to understand. And it's funny because I am working on a book as well on this topic, and my publisher actually has published a ton of vegan books, and he was skeptical. And once he read my environmental argument and specifically wrapped his head around this very topic, I won him over.

Chris Kresser:  That’s amazing.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, people just, because we’re so divorced from nature, you and I have talked about this before just off-line, but that’s the number one problem is that people just have no idea how food is produced and what makes a healthy ecosystem. And a lot of the vegans will, the ones who do accept that not all land can be cropped, just want it turned over to be rewilded.

So let’s just crop everything we can possibly crop and then we’ll just rewild all the pastureland with deer or something cute. But then what are we going to do because we’ve eliminated all the predators? I mean even in the town I live in outside of Boston, we have a massive deer problem. And nobody wants hunting because they don’t want to see dead animals on their beautiful hikes around the conservation land here in my town. And if we eliminate the predators, we need to be responsible for how these populations of wild animals are managed. And so the other option, if we’re not going to hunt them, I suppose would be to bring back wolves. I don’t know how.

Chris Kresser:  I don't think that would go over well.

Diana Rodgers:  I don’t know how my waiting for the bus in my town with wolves swirling around at dawn will go over. So it quickly backs them into a very uncomfortable corner there.

Chris Kresser:  I think another thing that you point out that people don’t realize is that 90 percent of what cattle eat is, at least in a natural grazing state, not in a CAFO type of arrangement, is forage and plant leftovers that humans can’t eat.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, exactly. And even in, I mean, I’m not an advocate for feedlot beef, but I think one thing people don’t understand about even cattle that are raised on feedlots, or that are finished on feedlots rather, is that they’re not raised on feedlots.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  So 85 percent of the beef cattle in the US are actually grazing on land that can't be cropped. And even if they do end up on a feedlot, 90 percent of their total intake is non-edible food to humans. And so they're eating, for example, soybean cakes. But that’s left over from the soybean oil industry.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  They’re eating large amounts of distiller’s grains, lots of foods that would normally emit greenhouse gases and decompose anyway. Ranchers are also grazing cattle on spent wheat and cornfields. So you know that corn would just decompose and emit greenhouse gases either way. So why not run it through a ruminant gut and make protein out of it?

Chris Kresser:  And fertilizer, as you pointed out.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. I mean, it’s so much more nuanced. This is a theme that will probably come up in our conversation a lot is, and I know Robb, Robb and I commiserate about it, and I know you do as well with him. But the vegan narrative is so simple in a lot of ways and it plays into a lot of assumptions, even if they’re wrong, that you don’t really have to explain it to people. It just, people have heard things over and over again. “Meat is bad for the environment, it’s bad for us, therefore eliminate meat from your diet and the food system, and everyone will be healthier.” That’s so easy to understand.

But as Robb has pointed out many times, the counterargument is nuanced and complex. And is not quite as simple to understand and requires that you actually pay attention to some of these finer points. And I think that is one of the challenges that we face in this struggle. But it’s not incomprehensible. I mean, if you just get a few of the simple points like this, it starts to become a lot easier to understand.

Diana Rodgers:  Definitely.  And now my point was … oh, I was going to say too that there's a lot, 50 percent of the carcass of a cow is not eaten but used for other industry uses. So we've got leather, we've got insulin, we’ve got footballs, we’ve got lots of medical applications, fertilizer. So eliminating all animals from our food system, there's a great study I think I sent you this morning that was published in PNAS about what would happen if we eliminated all animals from our food system.

So the greenhouse gas emissions would only decrease by about 2 1/2 percent. But our overall caloric intake would actually go way up, and our nutrient deficiencies would go up. So we already have a problem in our culture where we’re over-consuming calories and not getting enough nutrients. So we would just be making the problem worse for about a 2 percent emission reduction.

The Right Way to Raise Livestock

Chris Kresser:  And those numbers don’t assume any improvement in how cattle are managed, right?

Diana Rodgers:  Right. That was just typical cattle.

Chris Kresser:  Right. So if we actually made improvements in how cattle are managed, do you think there could be a net sequestration of carbon?

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, definitely. So there's been some research coming out of Michigan State showing the difference between continuous grazing and what they term “adaptive multi-paddock grazing,” which is similar to Allan Savory's method, so basically when you intensively graze an area and then move the cattle off quickly.

So, this is how, for example, herds in Africa naturally move because of predator pressure, so it's much worse for the land to have, let's say if you have a 10-acre field and have 100 cattle on that land for the whole summer, as opposed to tightly bunching and moving them frequently and allowing that land to rest. Because that's when carbon gets sequestered, in the regrowth phase of the grass. And so the grass is going through photosynthesis, it’s pulling down carbon and actually exuding carbon sugars to bacteria and to fungal networks that are then passing that grass nutrient. So the fungus is actually mining rocks and getting the minerals from that and feeding it to the grass, and that's how carbon is sequestered. And that process is most effective and actually is a net carbon gain when cattle are managed in this way.

So that's why I like to say “it's not the cow, it’s the how,” because there's just many different ways of raising cattle. Just like there are many different ways of growing broccoli. We can do it in a monocrop system, or we can do it in a more rotational system where we’re integrating it with other crops. And what we need is less monocrops because that's just not how healthy ecosystems work, and farmland is not natural. Like, when you fly over the United States, all those squares you’re looking down at, that's not nature, that's man doing that.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. I know from your article, you did also a podcast with Frank Mitloehner—is that how you pronounce it? We’ll include a link to that in the show notes because I think people should listen to that. He’s an expert in greenhouse gas emissions and animal agriculture. And you guys talk a lot about what’s really going on there and why some of the typical numbers that are thrown around are not accurate. And if anyone’s interested in a deeper dive, I’d definitely recommend listening to that.

So, greenhouse gas from beef cattle represents, just as it's currently done with no improvements, like you just mentioned, is 2 percent of emissions. And by contrast, transportation is 27 percent. So, yet when I go to WeWork, which I have an office at—

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, gosh.

Chris Kresser:  You probably know this.

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, no.

Chris Kresser:  But some of my listeners might not know that WeWork is a company that has committed to this idea that eating a vegetarian diet will save the planet. And they, I think, so, I was there two days ago on Monday, and they have meatless Monday at WeWork, where they served veggie burgers in the main lounge. And then they print these cards that they post around there, around the office, that say, “If everyone was just a vegetarian for,” I can't remember, “one or two days a week, we would save 450 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.” And again, this goes back to the simplicity thing.

Most people get in the elevator, they see that and they're like, “Oh, wow, okay. I guess I should become a vegetarian.” So how does this continue? I mean, it’s not surprising that there’s a disconnect between actual science and what we see in the media. We know that from the nutrition world and everything else. But how do you think this got started? Was there a lot of misunderstanding initially which led to these numbers and then later science kind of brought more clarity? Or what do you think? How have we gotten here?

Diana Rodgers:  Well, I actually just released an amazing podcast on Tuesday of this week, so maybe you could link to that one too, with the guy from Brussels, Frédéric Leroy.

Chris Kresser:  I read some of his papers. You sent them to me awhile back before the Rogan debate.

Where the Misunderstanding around Meat and the Environment Comes From

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, he’s so fantastic. Yeah, so, his opinion is that meat is unfairly absorbing a lot of our worries about our health, our state of our health and the environment, because meat is so powerful and can absorb it. But it's unfairly the scapegoat for our stressors. So, everyone just, it's much easier for us to blame meat than it is to perhaps look at our transportation industry and be uncomfortable about that. I mean, the main funder of that EAT-Lancet paper has a private jet and transportation was never mentioned in the EAT-Lancet.

Chris Kresser:  I don’t know if this is accurate, but I read something about how just the jet trips for the reporter would have a bigger impact on the environment than the diet changes that they were talking about.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And so, in Livestock’s Long Shadow, that's when a lot of this all started. The mass information about the emissions with cattle. And unfortunately, when they did that study, what they did was they looked at all the emissions, the full lifecycle of ruminant animals. They looked at production of the feed, all the transportation, all the emissions, everything. And when they compared that to transportation, they only looked at tailpipe exhaust. So they didn't even factor in transportation, for example, in the transportation numbers.

And so when you look at the global numbers at emissions of cattle versus transportation, you're looking at apples to oranges there. So you're looking at the full lifecycle of a beef animal compared to just the tailpipe emissions from transportation. So that's not fair. And also in other countries, the percentage is a little bit higher. But that's in places where maybe transportation plays a lesser role where there are less cars per cow. And so, their relative emissions may be higher. But that's again not taking into account the fact that cattle can actually sequester carbon and many, many other factors. And so the authors of Livestock’s Long Shadow did reduce their numbers, I think, from 18 to 14 percent and did admit that their numbers were still off because of the transportation. There are no global lifecycle papers on transportation.

But yet that 18 percent, I’ve heard even 50 percent. I don't even know where that number comes from, but that, the 50 percent is the number that's often cited by this group called Green Mondays and they are the ones that have worked with Berkeley to make all of the government meetings meatless on Mondays. That organization, I’ve looked into, and they’re actually funded by an organization out of Singapore that produces plant-based pork.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  And so there’s a lot, the environment and ethics and even the nutrition argument is very convenient for large food companies to profit, because processing means profit.

Chris Kresser:  Well, let’s talk a little bit about that, and since we’re on the topic, I do want to come back to some of the other ways that an animal-based food system or food system that includes animals can actually benefit biodiversity and things like that. So yeah, follow the money. We talk about that a lot on this show. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but on the other hand, you'd be very naïve and misguided to assume that money doesn't play a big role in setting food policy and coming up with these laws. It always has.

Protein and the EAT-Lancet Diet

And it probably always will. And if you look at the EAT-Lancet diet, I think this is from Marty Kendall's analysis, you’ll find that 32 percent of calories come from rice, wheat, and corn, and 14 percent come from unsaturated oils. So these are highly processed foods.

Diana Rodgers:  Right.

Chris Kresser:  We’re not talking about corn on the cob.

Diana Rodgers:  Or wheat berries.

Chris Kresser:  Wheat berries. Or even, like, in some cases, just the whole-grain rice. We’re talking about highly processed corn and wheat and rice derivatives, and then highly processed industrial seed oils that comprise almost 50 percent of calories. And who does that benefit? This study was sponsored by a basically hit list A-team of—

Diana Rodgers:  Processed food companies.

Chris Kresser:  Global processed food companies—DuPont, PepsiCo, Dannon, Nestlé, Cargill, Kellogg's. So, like, food and agricultural companies that make their money by selling processed and refined foods. And so that's very revealing.

And then the other thing that Marty Kendall pointed out, which is directly tied to this, is that this diet, when you work out the macronutrient ratios, it ends up being low in protein and moderate in fat and carbohydrates. And there are really no foods in nature that fit that profile, or very few. You have breast milk and acorns, I think, are the two that he pointed out. And this is a recipe for, that macronutrient mix of low protein and then higher fat and carbohydrate is a recipe for highly palatable and rewarding food. So if you look at the foods that are on this list that fit that profile, there are things like chocolate milk, potato chips, French toast, waffles, ice cream, pancakes.

Diana Rodgers:  Kit-Kat.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, biscuits, Kit-Kat, Twix, chocolate chip cookies, pie crust. I mean, are you kidding me? This is the macronutrient profile that we should be following? Oh, who does not benefit? All of the companies that make these processed foods. So it's really revealing when you look at it from that perspective.

Diana Rodgers:  I know. And I think it's really irresponsible to promote a diet that's about 10 percent in protein when we have, I mean, just in America, more than 50 percent of Americans are metabolically broken and really benefit from much higher protein levels.

Chris Kresser:  Increasing their protein. And we know that of all the macronutrients, protein is the one that has the biggest impact on satiety.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  Which it will reduce the likelihood that people overeat, which many Americans are doing.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And any clinician or dietitian like yourself who's worked with people knows if they're struggling with weight, putting them on a higher-protein diet is probably the most important thing you can do. And there's even some, if you look at the studies on low-carb diets, I think probably one of the reasons, if not one of the main reasons, that they’re so effective is that they’re higher in protein.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and I have to say too, so I actually have recently been following Marty Kendall's NutrientOptimiser diet personally, just as an experiment to try to maximize my micronutrients. And I eat really well. I live on a farm. I have a lot of education in nutrient density. I have access to all these foods. It's really hard to get all your micronutrients in the day. But it's really easy to feel satiated when you have a high percentage of animal protein in your diet. So whether that's oysters, which I know I can beat his leaderboard if I just eat a ton of oysters in one day.

Chris Kresser:  That’s right. That’s right.

Diana Rodgers:  But liver, and then just regular old animal protein. Filling the rest of your diet with colorful vegetables is the way to go. But it still, I still was low, actually, believe it or not, in iron, even with all the protein I’ve been consuming on this diet.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, I’m always talking to my patients about a lot of, especially if they’re favoring like chicken and fish, and not eating shellfish or organ meats, is that some muscle meats are not that high in iron. So it’s organ meats and shellfish that are really the powerhouses from that perspective.

And this brings up another question about bioavailability, right? Because we’ve both talked about this a lot. It's not at all the case that protein from plant sources like legumes is going to be absorbed in the same way that protein is absorbed from animal foods like meat and eggs and fish and dairy products. There is something called the … there are various scoring systems that are used in the scientific literature to assess the bioavailability of protein. And no matter what scoring system you use, animal proteins come out ahead of plant proteins, and usually by a very large margin.

Diana Rodgers:  And, I mean, trying to get your protein from beans and rice, if you’re trying to do the combining in order to get the right profile of amino acids, you would, so I did the calculations. So in order to get the right amount, the same amount of protein you would get from a four-ounce steak, which is 181 calories, you’d need to eat 12 ounces of beans and a cup of rice. So that’s 638 calories and 122 grams of carbs. And you're still not getting the same beautiful profile of amino acids that you can get from this 181-calorie piece of steak.

Chris Kresser:  Right, which goes back to Marty Kendall's point where you’re basically, if you eat a low-protein diet, it’s going to be a much higher-calorie diet in most cases.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and higher carb and just setting people down to the road towards metabolic disorder.

The Impact Agriculture Has on the Environment

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. So let’s go back now. I want to finish up talking about the impact of animals in the food system. Because I think there's still some other points that are worth going into here that a lot of people may not be familiar with. So one is, we talked about how not all land is suitable for grazing. But let’s talk about maybe the flipside of that is what happens when you use a lot of land for crops like corn and rice and soy and wheat?

Diana Rodgers:  Right, I mean a lot of, and most of this is not organically grown and using animals to graze in all of that. So the large majority of our monocrops are heavily sprayed with chemicals that leave a residue on the leaves that we’re ingesting. And also completely sterilize the soil and create runoff that then ends up in the Mississippi River and creating massive dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

So there are just so many problems with monocropping the way we’re doing it today. We have created an insect apocalypse. And so we’ve lost pollinators. We’re killing fish, which in turn then kills the animals that need to be eating the fish. And so we’re annihilating biodiversity both above and below ground. And so one teaspoon of soil has more microbes in it than all of the humans on earth. And when we spray it with things like Roundup, we’re completely killing all of that. And so we've destroyed just so much of our soil and so much of it is also just blowing away and running off.

So, I mean, the Dust Bowl was a good example of that, and we’re headed for another one right now. So according to the United Nations, we have about 60 harvests left, at the rate we’re going.

Chris Kresser:  This is alarming. This is like an emergency thing on the level that's part of climate change, of course, but also on the same level as potential for water shortages. People, I don't think, are … I mean, some people are aware of it, of course, but we’re talking about some very, very serious implications here.

Diana Rodgers:  And when the soil is compacted and we’re constantly just stripping away the biodiversity of the soil, when rain comes, it just washes all the topsoil away into rivers, and that's how we get these really cloudy rivers. Because rivers in general should be clear. And in a system where we have healthy ruminants managed in a proper way, the soil acts like a sponge and can actually hold a lot more water from rain, instead of allowing it to just wash off and take the topsoil with it. My husband is so into topsoil that even we have two border collies, and they sleep in our mudroom at night. And they come in, they’re black and white, but their white parts are really dirty-looking at the end of the day.

Chris Kresser:  Brown.

Diana Rodgers:  And in the morning they’re totally white and they leave massive amounts of soil on the ground. And I literally have to sweep it up and put it in the field because that’s how into topsoil he is.

Chris Kresser:  Well, yeah, and how precious it is too.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And just nobody is looking at our farmland as a biological system. It’s been reduced to this reductionist chemical, let’s produce as many calories as possible, which is ruining our health and our land.

Chris Kresser:  Let’s talk a little bit also about how ruminants can improve biodiversity. I mean, we touched on that just briefly, but water is a big issue, and I know that cattle can improve water holding capacity of the land. And that has a whole bunch of downstream effects.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. And also too, even the worst-managed cattle on overgrazed grass is still a better system than monocrop grain. So you still, I mean, and even in a better system, you've got butterflies, you've got birds, you've got all kinds of life above ground and below ground that are teeming.

The whole goal, what people don't realize, is that we want as much life as possible. And our current system is actually making sure that we’re annihilating as much life as possible. So if we look at the extinction process that's been happening over the last 50 years, again, it's something completely alarming. I know Silent Spring came out and people were all up in arms. But the solution is not a vegetarian solution. So Diet for a Small Planet is outdated information, and what we need is more better cattle, not no cattle.

Chris Kresser:  It’s not the cow, it’s the how.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly. And not only that too, another thing I brought up is what these rich white people in Sweden were not paying attention to is that livestock are really important to the majority of people living in poverty in the world in places where, what are you going to do in Kenya where it’s super arid and the Maasai have been herding cattle forever and ever? And we’re going to tell them that they need to go grow soybeans? With what seeds? Are they going to have to go buy them from Monsanto? Where are they going to get the water to irrigate? Where are they going to get the fertilizer if they can’t have animals? So I think it’s bordering on racist to have a grain-heavy diet as a global policy for the entire world.

Chris Kresser:  But we can just make more Cheetos.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly.

Chris Kresser:  That’s probably the plan, part of the plan here. It’s really—

Diana Rodgers:  Well, to get them reliant on our aid. I mean, we’re already ruining Haiti with our rice that we’re giving to them. We’ve ruined their local economies, we’ve ruined their health. Now rice is a much higher percentage of their diet. Very few Haitians are actually growing their own food anymore. And it’s a really great way that we can control governments. I mean, that’s a whole other thing that we don’t have to get too much into. But it really makes me mad, the idea that we’re taking away people’s innate ability to be self-reliant.

Chris Kresser:  Not to mention the very clearly documented health impacts that are observed when traditional peoples adopt the Western food system.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And I have an image on my post. So, the Canadian government decided that they knew best, advising a local Inuit population that they should be eating a Mediterranean diet. Which I think is just, I mean, this one image of this igloo showing all of their nutrient-dense traditional foods in the red category and bananas and oranges and orange juice in the green category. I mean that just sums up exactly how wrong we’ve gotten our dietary advice just in this one image.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. And if those poor kids start following that diet, they’re going to become morbidly obese.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And this is seen. It’s been documented in so many different areas where traditional populations start to follow the government-sponsored diet, including Native Americans in the US.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  So, like the Pima, for example.

The Problem with Lab-Grown Meat and Meat Tax

Chris Kresser: So let's talk about some of the other proposals that are floating around that are based on this idea that meat is bad for us nutritionally and bad for the environment, which as I hope we’ve shown in this podcast, is misguided and others. But why not just make meat in a lab? Let’s say you accept that meat, animal protein is more bioavailable and so we do need meat, which some people seem to have accepted. But then why not just grow it in a lab and—

Diana Rodgers:  Reduce suffering.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, reduce suffering and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. All of that. Yeah. And of course, make billions of dollars from the companies that are successful at doing that.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and I think another thing.

Chris Kresser:  Nothing wrong with that per say, but yeah. There’s some financial motivation there perhaps.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. I’m so glad I don’t live where you live. I was actually just out there a couple days ago, and I’m, like, so happy that I’m not living there. Because that’s, like, the hotbed of all of this.

Chris Kresser:  Sure. You just have to be a hermit like me and live up on my hilltop.

Diana Rodgers:  And just go to WeWork and get mad at WeWork in the halls and elevators.

Chris Kresser:  Yep.

Diana Rodgers:  So, I mean, it’s really interesting, the lab meat thing, because I had a woman on my podcast about a year and a half ago who was a big vegan animal rights person telling me how great lab meat was. And I asked her if she knew how it was made, and she had no idea. But she was like, she’s like a really big deal animal rights activist and very vocal about how lab meat is a good solution. And interestingly, most vegans actually won't even accept it because you're using fetal bovine serum in order to make it, which is not “vegan” anyway.

But what folks aren’t realizing, number one, is that it relies on this horrible monocrop system, which is ruining our environment and a completely inefficient way of producing food on so many levels. But then the lifestyle assessments I've read are a lot based on projections because they haven't built the bioreactors yet. So they're making a lot of assumptions, but even the assumptions are so bad that the energy required in order to transform what they're using right now as the substrate.

So corn and soy, sometimes wheat, into protein, the amount of energy required for that is enormous. And when we have animals that can actually just do this on their own without having to be plugged into an outlet is really amazing. Plus, what they're not taking into consideration is the amount of antibiotics that they’ll need to prevent bacterial overgrowth because they’re growing these at just the perfect temperature for meat to grow. But of course that's also the perfect temperature for bacteria to grow as well.

Chris Kresser:  Everything else.

Diana Rodgers:  Cancerous cells, all these things. They had not figured out how to striate the meat with fats. There's a lot of input that we’re running out of that you need in order, there’s a lot of minerals that are being mined in war-torn countries that, actually the US military is, like, guarding these mines in order to get those raw materials in order to pump it into these cellular meat company facilities. So the whole system is energetically ridiculous, and it's not even causing less harm.

So that's my big argument, too, is that when you look at how many lives are lost from the loss of biodiversity, of taking a native ecosystem, plowing it up to make it into a cornfield, and then spraying it to make sure that nothing other than corn, not even mice or anything can grow there. The amount of life lost for that system versus one animal, one large ruminant animal. A cow can provide almost 500 pounds of meat. I just don't think the trade-offs are worth it at all from an ethical or environmental perspective.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, another situation where the devil is in the details, right?

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Because on the fact of it, lab meat sounds, “Hey, why not?” Like, if we can do that and we can make it taste the same … But clearly including that woman that you interviewed on your podcast, that was kind of the level that she was approaching it on, without actually looking into the details. It sounds pretty good on the surface, so why not advocate it. But then when you look into it, you find it’s a little more complicated.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. I’ve been really loving The Wizard and the Prophet, Robb sent that over to me.

Chris Kresser:  I read that just recently.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, I think he told me.

Chris Kresser:  I sent it to Robb.

Diana Rodgers:  Yes, exactly, so I’m thanking you. I’m thanking you for the chain because I have my hands on it. And I’ve been not only reading the book, but then when I’m in my car or at the gym, I’m listening to it. So it’s really fantastic, and I think that that is at the crux of what we’re dealing with right now. Do we look at this, what some would call Luddite perspective of nature through Hoyt, or … I’m sorry. What was his name? Now I’m forgetting.

Chris Kresser:  Vogt.

Diana Rodgers:  Voight. Vogt.

Chris Kresser:  Vogt. Yeah, you want to say Voight because it’s usually an i in there, but it’s V-o-g-t, so it’s Vogt, yeah.

Diana Rodgers:  Or do we look at this more wizard tech solution? And that’s just where most people are right now.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that’s the dominant cultural paradigm is we’ve gone into wizardry, for sure.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, yes.

Chris Kresser:  No question about that. Back when Silent Spring was written, I think there was more, Vogt was more in vogue. There was a little bit more concern about the wizardry and the impact it would have. And now we are 100 percent in wizardry.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. And the problem is, everyone’s just sort of hoping that more rabbits will be pulled out of the hat. But we don't know for sure.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah. I highly recommend this book. This is Charles Mann, who wrote 1491 and 1493, which, if anyone has read those books about … it totally changed our view on how the New World was discovered and colonized and what was here when those people arrived. Which is much different than what was previously believed. He’s a fantastic writer and this is I think, one of the most compelling views on where we are as a society now and what our future might hold. So highly recommend it.

Getting back to the topic, I mean, that's obviously germane and relevant here, but I want to talk about a few other proposals that are being floated around here. Which are again, if you accept what we've talked about here and in other podcasts, are off base. But the meat tax. There’s been a lot of enthusiasm for this because there’s some research that, beverage tax, soda taxes have been effective in terms of reducing consumption. So this is now something that’s being seriously proposed in the EAT-Lancet. I think that’s part of the agenda of the EAT-Lancet paper and authors and reporters.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and actually they released another paper just on Sunday night of this week that goes even more strongly into the meat tax. I think the goal is to make it basically impossible to eat meat moving forward. And effectively, I’ve looked at the models. There was a good paper that looked at what would happen, just kind of projected out, what might happen in this situation. And, actually, red meat consumption wouldn’t go down at all.

And it basically is just a poor tax is what this is. And when you look at, I actually took a picture. I had to run into a typical grocery store and pick something up one time, and I noticed the shopping cart of the person in front of me. And it was soda and donuts and whoopie pies and all stuff like that. But her deli meat and her bacon were actually the most nutrient-dense things in her cart.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, so that would be encouraging even less healthy choices in people who are of limited economic means. And you mentioned this in the beginning about the private jet people who are founding this study, and you brought it up in your article. There really is a classist kind of thing that’s happening here that’s not part of the popular narrative. Because if we really wanted to reduce carbon footprint, you pointed out a meta-analysis that suggested that doing things like avoiding one round-trip transatlantic flight, more of a car-free lifestyle, having one less child in an industrialized nation would have by far bigger impact than reducing your consumption of beef.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. Or changing your diet in any way.

Chris Kresser:  And who’s doing a lot of round-trip transatlantic flying? People who are at a certain socioeconomic level. And so, yeah, a lot of these proposals are like, “Let me continue to live my carbon-emitting lifestyle, and then let’s introduce changes that won’t effect that but actually will impact people who are poor and in a really adverse way without really me having to change anything as a privileged person.”

Diana Rodgers:  Right, and, I mean, in order to do vegan right, you kind of do need to be a celebrity or an uber-rich person that, if there is a way to do vegan, right? But, I mean, to … there’s a lot of food prep involved, there’s a lot of time involved. There’s a lot of time spent eating.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, chewing.

Diana Rodgers:  Chewing, right? Your typical person that maybe gets two 15-minute breaks a day is not going to be able to chew the food or have a staff that can make the cashew cream to make all the—

Chris Kresser:  Or buy the cashew cream for $9.49 for a half pint or whatever it is.

Diana’s Upcoming Docuseries, Sacred Cow

Diana Rodgers:  Right, right. I mean, this film project I’m working on, we’ve done a lot of filming in Indiana, rural Indiana. And I see what these folks have as options for stores on limited budgets and what they’re buying. And honestly, processed food, processed meats like sausages that are pre-cooked are a lot easier for them to eat and are honestly the most nutrient-dense thing that they're eating. Because they’re not doing a whole lot of scratch cooking. They don’t have a lot of time or energy at the end of the day. So when life is really hard and you’re working really hard, you don’t have the privilege to push away something nutrient-dense like meat.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. So let’s talk a little bit about the film. I know it's gone through a lot of iterations and there’s been some wins and some challenges. So tell me, let's start with a little bit of the idea and the inspiration behind it. Why we both feel that this is important to get out there and then maybe a little update where you’re at, what you’re needing, what would be helpful. We have a lot of folks who are listening, who I know want to be a part of this movement in some way.

And I’m often asked by people who are not necessarily in the health field, people who are not nutritionists or Functional Medicine practitioners or anything, like, “How can I help? How can I get involved? How can I use my existing skills or connections or resources to move this forward?” So let's imagine what kind of help we need or could be useful to move this forward, and who knows who’s out there listening.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. So, I was halfway through writing a book on this subject on the nutritional, environmental, and ethical case for meat when yet another vegan film came out about a year and a half ago. And I was like, “If this guy can make a movie, I can make a movie.” And so that’s kind of how it all started. I did a crowd funder that was pretty successful, and we got rolling. At the time, the project was called Kale versus Cow. And we started filming some of these nutrition stories. We hooked up with a doctor who has some amazing clinical trials and is doing really good work in a pretty rural part of the Midwest, conveniently corn country. But there's also farmers who are plowing in their corn and turning it back to grass.

So there’s some really great stories happening there. And some of the feedback I got from the title Kale versus Cow was that, “This sounds like another vegan film,” or, “It sounds like I’m against kale,” which as you know, I’m not against kale. But I think folks maybe that don't know me as well just had these misperceptions, and the name was a little bit of a hang-up for them. So we went back to the drawing board a little bit and changed the title to Sacred Cow, which I think works really nicely, also because there’s a double meaning of sacred cow. Because the vilification of beef is just so embedded in our system.

Chris Kresser:  Yes.

Diana Rodgers:  And, I mean, even when I was going through my graduate program in dietetics, red meat is not okay. It's just not, even though in biochem it's totally fine if you just look at it from an objective scientific perspective. And the project has also transformed from a feature film into a docuseries because we felt that it’s a more digestible way, literally, to get this information across, and there's also more that we wanted to cover that we didn't feel would fit into the narrative of one film.

And so we were now looking at a multipart docuseries still addressing mostly the nutritional, environmental, and ethical aspects of the reason why we need animals in our food system. I'm also very interested in sort of the anthropology of how meat became such a polarizing topic today and how people identify their whole being around how much meat they consume in their diet. The flexitarian, vegan, whatever.

Chris Kresser:  Yep.

Diana Rodgers:  And I still am working on the book. So, as you know, Robb is the coauthor on the book project I’m working on, and he’s the co-executive producer on the film project. But the funding has been a little bit of a challenge. I don’t know if people really get how important this is, and I think it’s one of the reasons why the Unitarian church is not funded well. Because it's, like, trying to extract money out of atheists is a hard thing.

When people are super-passionately committed and religiously committed like vegans, where it’s, like, their religion, they’ll passionately fund things. But then when people are kind of cool with everything and they’re eating meat and they’re like, “Yeah, got my health under control now. That’s great. And if the vegans don’t want to eat meat, fine, that’s more for me.” That’s really kind of the attitude I’m running into a little bit.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah people are less identified with it, which is good, in their way.

Diana Rodgers:  It’s good.

Chris Kresser:  But not as good when you’re trying to raise money for a movie like this.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And I think the other part of it is, I don’t know that people really perceive the threat fully yet. It’s like you just said, they’re like, “If someone wants to be vegan, fine. No skin off my back and it’s not going to hurt me. So there’s no pressing need to fund a film about this. Because who cares if someone’s a vegan.” Well, yeah, on an individual level, you might say that. Even though we could argue that you should care if someone chooses an approach that’s in many cases likely to make them nutrient deficient.

But, yes, each person, of course, has the right to choose their own approach. And I don’t go around trying to proselytize and convert vegans to eating animal foods unless they ask me what I think they should do if they come see me as a patient. But this isn't just about individual choice here. Because, as we know, we talked about the meat tax proposition, and this is going to affect food policy. It's already affected food policy in the US and around the world which then will affect schools. And what happens at schools, which influences our children and the choices that they make.

You know, my daughter is seven and a half, and she comes home with some really interesting things that she's heard from other kids and even teachers at school. And she doesn't go to a typical school, but this is, it’s everywhere. Yeah.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly. And there’s a lot of schools now eliminating meat for health, and I think a lot of parents are kind feeling a little worried about meat consumption. And so maybe they're thinking, “Well, at least they’re getting a healthy meal at school.” And so that's concerning to me because for a lot of kids this is the most nutrient-dense meal of their day. And to blame it on meat is just wrong. And I kept telling folks, this is coming and meat tax is coming.

And I, for a while, was feeling like maybe I’m just nuts and I’m making all this up. I don’t know. But then of course, it is really coming. The EAT-Lancet paper is here. Meat tax is being discussed. We’ve got, LA now is trying to force restaurants and LAX to provide, to tell private businesses to provide vegan entrees. We’ve got Berkeley with Meatless Mondays now at all city meetings.

Chris Kresser:  WeWork.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, WeWork, exactly. There’s airlines now that are eliminating red meat. And so this is coming at us from our clinicians, our universities, we’re hearing this from the World Health Organization. We’re hearing this from business, from the media. Constant films, there's more coming out this year.

I think I just sent you another one that’s on its way out that I’m pretty concerned about. Because it actually has people with MD behind their name. And nobody is pushing back and people are just taking this really lightly. And so, yeah, anything that folks can do to help me get this off the ground, I’d want to come out and feature you, Chris. And I’ve got a lot of really great experts in both the sustainability and health space that very strongly feel that red meat is important to our food system.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. And the reality is that a film or in a docuseries can make a huge impact than even a book.

Diana Rodgers:  That you can’t do with a book. I know.

Chris Kresser:  It doesn’t work. I mean, I’ve written a 400-plus page book with all the science that you need to, I think, get clear that animal food should be part of our diet in addition to plant foods. But how many people are going to read a 400-page book? Not that many. And there’s still something about film that makes it a very viral medium. It’s more accessible, a docuseries is an increasingly popular format, as you said.

It's easier to cover the wide range of topics that you need to hit on for this, and it's a format that has been used for vegan and other types of films or media. And it’s something that’s just really easy to share with. People are more likely to sit down at night and watch an episode of this than they are to read a book.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, exactly. And this is pretty dense material. But if I can just show people what a healthy ecosystem looks like and how cattle raised in the right way, what that looks like compared to a 2,000-acre field of soy being grown for lab meat, I think that those are really powerful visuals.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I agree with that a hundred percent. So if someone is listening to this and the alarm has been raised in their mind, and they’re now aware of the real risk here to our families and communities, and they want to get involved in some way, what's the best way for them to do that?

Diana Rodgers:  So I have more information, and I’m taking donations on sustainabledish.com/film. And for any better meat companies or folks that want to get involved in a bigger way, folks can just message me directly through the site. And we’re working with a few better meat companies and other large donors and foundations. But we still need to, these are expensive, and there are some inexpensive ways of making docuseries.

But in order for us to really get on the mainstream media channels like Netflix, we have to do something that's beautiful and has a high production value and isn't a $50,000 handheld camera project. And so, while the budget isn’t exorbitant, it’s certainly higher than some of the other more budget docuseries that have been coming out. And that's largely because I'm really tired of going to high schools and doing damage control when they show these vegan propaganda films. Because that's what's happening right now.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, absolutely. And will continue to happen, as you pointed out. The momentum there is only building. So we need to, I think, step up to the plate.

Diana Rodgers:  Thank you so much.

Chris Kresser:  Thank you for doing this work, Diana. I really appreciate your advocacy and passion for this, and it shows through in everything that you do. And I hope for all of you listening that this has been up maybe a bit of a wake-up call and you have a little more perspective on what's going on behind the scenes. And even less left behind, like more out in the open now, I think, more and more. Especially with this EAT-Lancet paper, and you see that science is not objective and dispassionate in many cases, but actually quite agenda driven and that there are often interests aligned behind those agendas that may not represent your interests. Like global food companies that want to sell more of their processed and refined products.

So none of us are not impacted by this in some way. And if you have children and family members who are getting exposed to all of this material, it's really important to have a counterpoint that we can offer that is well researched and really hits on the most important issues. And people can change their mind. I mean, your story that you shared with the publisher of the China study was really revealing. To his credit, to whoever that publisher editor was, to his credit. He was able to take in that information and open his mind and give this a chance. And we both, of course, know many people that that’s happened with. I have lots of patients, lots of readers and listeners who were vegan and vegetarian at one point. I was vegan and vegetarian at one point, as everybody knows who’s listened to this show for a while.

And it was through exposure to research and information like what we’re talking about on this show and what you plan to present on the film that actually changed their minds. Because I think that may also be part of the resistance in some cases, like for raising money with this film. It’s like the idea that people are just not going to change their minds. That it’s, we can’t really make an impact. But I don’t agree with that. I think we can make a huge impact and already have, and we just need to scale it up so that it can reach more people.

Diana Rodgers:  I agree.

Chris Kresser:  So sustainabledish.com/film. We will also put some of the links to the podcast and articles that we mentioned, the critiques of EAT-Lancet, Marty Kendall’s and also yours, Diana. And then if you want that big storehouse of information I put together for the Rogan show, which has articles on nutrient density and meat and the effects of meat, and carbohydrate, macronutrients, a ton of stuff, that’s at ChrisKresser.com/Rogan. So thanks, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Diana.

Diana Rodgers:  Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it, Chris. And thanks for all your support ever since I first met you.

Chris Kresser:  It's my pleasure, and I hope we can, with this podcast, move things forward a little bit more quickly and get this out there. Because it really needs to be seen. So thanks, everyone, for listening and please do continue to send in your questions to ChrisKresser.com/podcastquestion. And I’ll talk to you next time.

The post RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers appeared first on Chris Kresser.

RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers published first on https://chriskresser.com

[shapesnnsizes]

RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers

In this episode, we discuss:

What’s missing from the EAT-Lancet Diet

The relationship between meat and the environment

The right way to raise livestock

Where the misunderstanding around meat and the environment comes from

Protein and the EAT-Lancet diet

The impact agriculture has on the environment

The problem with lab-grown meat and a meat tax

Diana’s upcoming docuseries, Sacred Cow

Show notes:

“Why You Should Eat Meat: My Appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience,” by Chris Kresser

“20 Ways EAT Lancet’s Global Diet Is Wrongfully Vilifying Meat,” by Diana Rodgers

“Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Systems”

“Why Eating Meat Is Good for You,” by Chris Kresser

“Should You EAT Lancet?” by Marty Kendall

“The EAT Lancet Diet is Nutritionally Deficient,” by Zoë Harcombe

“What Is Nutrient Density and Why Is It Important?” by Chris Kresser

Allan Savory’s TED Talk: “How to Fight Desertification and Reverse Climate Change”

“Sustainable Dish Episode 83: The Truth about Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Livestock Production with Frank Mitloehner,” by Diana Rodgers

“Sustainable Dish Episode 84: Meat as Scapegoat with Frédéric Leroy,” by Diana Rodgers

Sacred Cow, a film by Diana Rodgers

[smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/thehealthyskeptic/What_the_EAT-Lancet_Paper_Gets_Wrong_with_Diana_Rodgers.mp3" title="RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers" artist="Chris Kresser" ] 

Chris Kresser:  Diana, thanks so much for joining me again on the podcast.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Chris Kresser:  So, we have a lot to talk about.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  This is an annual event, where there’s some big news story that comes out or study that’s published that demonizes meat and animal foods and purports to be the final nail in the coffin for anybody who's eating animal products. In fact, as you know, I just went on the Joe Rogan show, my third appearance there, to debate Dr. Joel Kahn about the merits of animal foods in the diet and eating a vegan diet. And I spent a lot of hours preparing for that and wrote a lot of articles. And the debate itself was almost four hours long, and admittedly I was a little tired out after that experience. And I just couldn't muster the energy and strength to write a rebuttal to the EAT-Lancet paper that was published. But you did, and several other people did.

And so I’d love to dive in and talk about that, as well as just stepping back a little bit and discussing some of the environmental impacts or the purported environmental impact of eating meat and what's wrong with the traditional narrative there. Because I didn't get to talk much on the Joe Rogan show about that. And then some of the difficulties of addressing this, and how I know you’ve been working on a film to try to get this message out that we’ve talked about. So why don't we just start first with the EAT-Lancet paper, since this is what's really making the rounds now and bringing this to the forefront of everybody's attention.

What’s Missing from the EAT-Lancet Diet

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, definitely. So there’s, they were really attacking red meat on a nutritional and environmental angle. So, I know your arguments on the Joe Rogan podcast were purely nutritional. I think that the main narratives are always nutrition, environment, and ethics. And ethics were kept out of the EAT-Lancet. Very long paper that took me quite a long time to read. But there's definitely a lot of misinformation in there about meat.

I mean, they’re using observational studies to basically tell us that we cannot have any processed meats at all, lumping them all together, and that we can only eat less than half an ounce of red meat per day. We can only have less than one ounce of chicken per day. But yet we can have eight teaspoons of sugar per day.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, and plenty of corn and rice and wheat. Let's talk a little bit … I think most of my listeners are pretty familiar with the nutritional arguments. I and others have written a lot about that, and most recently my … in preparation for the Rogan show, I published a whole cornerstone page with everything you need to debunk the nutritional arguments. So, that's at ChrisKresser.com/rogan, if you want to look it up.

But I just want to briefly talk about the nutrient density of this EAT-Lancet diet. Because if you just look at it from that single perspective, nutritionally you’ll see very quickly that it falls short. And our body needs micronutrients to function properly. And if a proposed diet doesn't offer those micronutrients in sufficient quantities, I think we can safely say it's not a good diet for humans to follow.

And I don’t want to spend a ton of time on this, so I’m just going to go through this really briefly, and then I want to switch over to talking more about some of the environmental issues. Because that's, I know, an area where you have a lot of expertise. And I really love what you have to say there. So, Zoë Harcombe did an analysis, and I think you had mentioned, Diana, that Marty Kendall did too. So we can talk about that. But Zoë's analysis, it’s not publicly accessible. You have to be a subscriber to see it. But I can share this part of it. She analyzed the EAT-Lancet diet using food tables and found that it was well below the RDA for several nutrients: B12, retinol, vitamin D, vitamin K2, which wasn’t even studied separately, but 71 percent of the K in the diet came from broccoli.

So we know that there's probably very little K2 in the diet. Sodium, potassium, calcium, and iron. So that's a lot of the essential nutrients that we need, and in some cases it was providing less than 20 percent of the RDA of those nutrients. So, to me, that's pretty much case closed on that basis alone. And then we can look at all the other problems that observational studies on red meat and all of that entail. And I just think it’s … there’s really nothing to be alarmed about. This study doesn't add any new evidence that meat and animal products are harmful.

Diana Rodgers:  Not at all. And another thing she didn’t mention in her paper or her review is the conversion rate of some of the vitamins, like beta-carotene to vitamin A, and almost half the population can’t make that conversion easily. And so even though on paper it my show that the vitamin A was adequate, actually not.

Despite what the EAT-Lancet paper says, meat is still a healthy addition to your diet. Check out this episode of RHR for my discussion with Diana Rodgers about what a real healthy diet looks like. #nutrition #chriskresser #wellness 

Chris Kresser:  It’s the same with all of these other nutrients. I actually wrote an article. I addressed this in my article on nutrient density you can find at the ChrisKresser.com/Rogan link. Iron, 94 percent of the iron in the EAT-Lancet diet is from plant-based forms of iron. And we know that heme iron that you get from animal products orders a magnitude better absorbed than most plant forms of iron. And the same with calcium, that is better absorbed from, in most cases, from animal products. And virtually every other nutrient, zinc, long-chain omega-3 fats, only found in animal products. So it's really, yeah, that conversion and bioavailability piece is almost never addressed in these kinds of studies.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, and you also write a lot about B12 and how these plant-based B12 analogues actually increase your need for a real B12.

Chris Kresser:  Exactly. Yeah, so, really nothing to see here from a nutritional perspective. But part of why it's making such a big splash is in addition to the highly coordinated launch campaign that is driven by celebrity, very wealthy celebrity type of people who are behind this, is the argument that not only should we avoid red meat and animal products for these nutritional reasons, but they're destroying the planet. So let’s really dive into that and unpack that from the perspective of the paper. I think you wrote an article, something like 20 reasons or 20 points against this. So we don't have to go through all of those, but let’s cover the highlights.

The Relationship between Meat and the Environment

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, well, I think the number one thing that people need to understand is that we can’t just assume that if we’re not raising animals that it will automatically free up land for more crops. So, agricultural land isn't interchangeable. Most of the agricultural land on the globe is not suited for cropping due to water availability. It’s too rocky, it’s too steep.

So, I think a lot of people, especially that haven’t traveled much, look around and just see the nice flat land and just assume that everywhere in the world is like that. I mean, picture Iceland, Norway, picture many parts of Africa, Mongolia. I mean, there’s just so many places that really will only support grazing animals and not wheat and corn and soy production. And so that’s a huge thing that we need to consider, and if we are to not graze animals on that land, not only will we lose that for food production, but the land will also desertify. Because we just don’t have those wild herds and the numbers that we used to any longer.

And ruminants are actually incredibly beneficial. Their impact on the land helps increase water holding capacity; their grazing actually stimulates new growth in a good way. So you can’t just have these fenced-off acres with nothing on it. You actually need grazing animals as part of healthy grassland ecosystems.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that's a point that is really misunderstood. I see a little bit more discussion about it certainly, at least in our realm. But I’m having kind of a hard time thinking of a mainstream article that really did justice to that point. Do you know of any?

Diana Rodgers:  Well, I've written a few blog posts on it and have talked a lot about it. I think Allan Savory does a really good job.

Chris Kresser:  Certainly.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, in his Savory Institute work that they've done and also his TED talk. But I think that's definitely the number one point that people need to understand. And it's funny because I am working on a book as well on this topic, and my publisher actually has published a ton of vegan books, and he was skeptical. And once he read my environmental argument and specifically wrapped his head around this very topic, I won him over.

Chris Kresser:  That’s amazing.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, people just, because we’re so divorced from nature, you and I have talked about this before just off-line, but that’s the number one problem is that people just have no idea how food is produced and what makes a healthy ecosystem. And a lot of the vegans will, the ones who do accept that not all land can be cropped, just want it turned over to be rewilded.

So let’s just crop everything we can possibly crop and then we’ll just rewild all the pastureland with deer or something cute. But then what are we going to do because we’ve eliminated all the predators? I mean even in the town I live in outside of Boston, we have a massive deer problem. And nobody wants hunting because they don’t want to see dead animals on their beautiful hikes around the conservation land here in my town. And if we eliminate the predators, we need to be responsible for how these populations of wild animals are managed. And so the other option, if we’re not going to hunt them, I suppose would be to bring back wolves. I don’t know how.

Chris Kresser:  I don't think that would go over well.

Diana Rodgers:  I don’t know how my waiting for the bus in my town with wolves swirling around at dawn will go over. So it quickly backs them into a very uncomfortable corner there.

Chris Kresser:  I think another thing that you point out that people don’t realize is that 90 percent of what cattle eat is, at least in a natural grazing state, not in a CAFO type of arrangement, is forage and plant leftovers that humans can’t eat.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, exactly. And even in, I mean, I’m not an advocate for feedlot beef, but I think one thing people don’t understand about even cattle that are raised on feedlots, or that are finished on feedlots rather, is that they’re not raised on feedlots.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  So 85 percent of the beef cattle in the US are actually grazing on land that can't be cropped. And even if they do end up on a feedlot, 90 percent of their total intake is non-edible food to humans. And so they're eating, for example, soybean cakes. But that’s left over from the soybean oil industry.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  They’re eating large amounts of distiller’s grains, lots of foods that would normally emit greenhouse gases and decompose anyway. Ranchers are also grazing cattle on spent wheat and cornfields. So you know that corn would just decompose and emit greenhouse gases either way. So why not run it through a ruminant gut and make protein out of it?

Chris Kresser:  And fertilizer, as you pointed out.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. I mean, it’s so much more nuanced. This is a theme that will probably come up in our conversation a lot is, and I know Robb, Robb and I commiserate about it, and I know you do as well with him. But the vegan narrative is so simple in a lot of ways and it plays into a lot of assumptions, even if they’re wrong, that you don’t really have to explain it to people. It just, people have heard things over and over again. “Meat is bad for the environment, it’s bad for us, therefore eliminate meat from your diet and the food system, and everyone will be healthier.” That’s so easy to understand.

But as Robb has pointed out many times, the counterargument is nuanced and complex. And is not quite as simple to understand and requires that you actually pay attention to some of these finer points. And I think that is one of the challenges that we face in this struggle. But it’s not incomprehensible. I mean, if you just get a few of the simple points like this, it starts to become a lot easier to understand.

Diana Rodgers:  Definitely.  And now my point was … oh, I was going to say too that there's a lot, 50 percent of the carcass of a cow is not eaten but used for other industry uses. So we've got leather, we've got insulin, we’ve got footballs, we’ve got lots of medical applications, fertilizer. So eliminating all animals from our food system, there's a great study I think I sent you this morning that was published in PNAS about what would happen if we eliminated all animals from our food system.

So the greenhouse gas emissions would only decrease by about 2 1/2 percent. But our overall caloric intake would actually go way up, and our nutrient deficiencies would go up. So we already have a problem in our culture where we’re over-consuming calories and not getting enough nutrients. So we would just be making the problem worse for about a 2 percent emission reduction.

The Right Way to Raise Livestock

Chris Kresser:  And those numbers don’t assume any improvement in how cattle are managed, right?

Diana Rodgers:  Right. That was just typical cattle.

Chris Kresser:  Right. So if we actually made improvements in how cattle are managed, do you think there could be a net sequestration of carbon?

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, definitely. So there's been some research coming out of Michigan State showing the difference between continuous grazing and what they term “adaptive multi-paddock grazing,” which is similar to Allan Savory's method, so basically when you intensively graze an area and then move the cattle off quickly.

So, this is how, for example, herds in Africa naturally move because of predator pressure, so it's much worse for the land to have, let's say if you have a 10-acre field and have 100 cattle on that land for the whole summer, as opposed to tightly bunching and moving them frequently and allowing that land to rest. Because that's when carbon gets sequestered, in the regrowth phase of the grass. And so the grass is going through photosynthesis, it’s pulling down carbon and actually exuding carbon sugars to bacteria and to fungal networks that are then passing that grass nutrient. So the fungus is actually mining rocks and getting the minerals from that and feeding it to the grass, and that's how carbon is sequestered. And that process is most effective and actually is a net carbon gain when cattle are managed in this way.

So that's why I like to say “it's not the cow, it’s the how,” because there's just many different ways of raising cattle. Just like there are many different ways of growing broccoli. We can do it in a monocrop system, or we can do it in a more rotational system where we’re integrating it with other crops. And what we need is less monocrops because that's just not how healthy ecosystems work, and farmland is not natural. Like, when you fly over the United States, all those squares you’re looking down at, that's not nature, that's man doing that.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. I know from your article, you did also a podcast with Frank Mitloehner—is that how you pronounce it? We’ll include a link to that in the show notes because I think people should listen to that. He’s an expert in greenhouse gas emissions and animal agriculture. And you guys talk a lot about what’s really going on there and why some of the typical numbers that are thrown around are not accurate. And if anyone’s interested in a deeper dive, I’d definitely recommend listening to that.

So, greenhouse gas from beef cattle represents, just as it's currently done with no improvements, like you just mentioned, is 2 percent of emissions. And by contrast, transportation is 27 percent. So, yet when I go to WeWork, which I have an office at—

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, gosh.

Chris Kresser:  You probably know this.

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, no.

Chris Kresser:  But some of my listeners might not know that WeWork is a company that has committed to this idea that eating a vegetarian diet will save the planet. And they, I think, so, I was there two days ago on Monday, and they have meatless Monday at WeWork, where they served veggie burgers in the main lounge. And then they print these cards that they post around there, around the office, that say, “If everyone was just a vegetarian for,” I can't remember, “one or two days a week, we would save 450 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.” And again, this goes back to the simplicity thing.

Most people get in the elevator, they see that and they're like, “Oh, wow, okay. I guess I should become a vegetarian.” So how does this continue? I mean, it’s not surprising that there’s a disconnect between actual science and what we see in the media. We know that from the nutrition world and everything else. But how do you think this got started? Was there a lot of misunderstanding initially which led to these numbers and then later science kind of brought more clarity? Or what do you think? How have we gotten here?

Diana Rodgers:  Well, I actually just released an amazing podcast on Tuesday of this week, so maybe you could link to that one too, with the guy from Brussels, Frédéric Leroy.

Chris Kresser:  I read some of his papers. You sent them to me awhile back before the Rogan debate.

Where the Misunderstanding around Meat and the Environment Comes From

Diana Rodgers:  Oh, he’s so fantastic. Yeah, so, his opinion is that meat is unfairly absorbing a lot of our worries about our health, our state of our health and the environment, because meat is so powerful and can absorb it. But it's unfairly the scapegoat for our stressors. So, everyone just, it's much easier for us to blame meat than it is to perhaps look at our transportation industry and be uncomfortable about that. I mean, the main funder of that EAT-Lancet paper has a private jet and transportation was never mentioned in the EAT-Lancet.

Chris Kresser:  I don’t know if this is accurate, but I read something about how just the jet trips for the reporter would have a bigger impact on the environment than the diet changes that they were talking about.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And so, in Livestock’s Long Shadow, that's when a lot of this all started. The mass information about the emissions with cattle. And unfortunately, when they did that study, what they did was they looked at all the emissions, the full lifecycle of ruminant animals. They looked at production of the feed, all the transportation, all the emissions, everything. And when they compared that to transportation, they only looked at tailpipe exhaust. So they didn't even factor in transportation, for example, in the transportation numbers.

And so when you look at the global numbers at emissions of cattle versus transportation, you're looking at apples to oranges there. So you're looking at the full lifecycle of a beef animal compared to just the tailpipe emissions from transportation. So that's not fair. And also in other countries, the percentage is a little bit higher. But that's in places where maybe transportation plays a lesser role where there are less cars per cow. And so, their relative emissions may be higher. But that's again not taking into account the fact that cattle can actually sequester carbon and many, many other factors. And so the authors of Livestock’s Long Shadow did reduce their numbers, I think, from 18 to 14 percent and did admit that their numbers were still off because of the transportation. There are no global lifecycle papers on transportation.

But yet that 18 percent, I’ve heard even 50 percent. I don't even know where that number comes from, but that, the 50 percent is the number that's often cited by this group called Green Mondays and they are the ones that have worked with Berkeley to make all of the government meetings meatless on Mondays. That organization, I’ve looked into, and they’re actually funded by an organization out of Singapore that produces plant-based pork.

Chris Kresser:  Right.

Diana Rodgers:  And so there’s a lot, the environment and ethics and even the nutrition argument is very convenient for large food companies to profit, because processing means profit.

Chris Kresser:  Well, let’s talk a little bit about that, and since we’re on the topic, I do want to come back to some of the other ways that an animal-based food system or food system that includes animals can actually benefit biodiversity and things like that. So yeah, follow the money. We talk about that a lot on this show. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but on the other hand, you'd be very naïve and misguided to assume that money doesn't play a big role in setting food policy and coming up with these laws. It always has.

Protein and the EAT-Lancet Diet

And it probably always will. And if you look at the EAT-Lancet diet, I think this is from Marty Kendall's analysis, you’ll find that 32 percent of calories come from rice, wheat, and corn, and 14 percent come from unsaturated oils. So these are highly processed foods.

Diana Rodgers:  Right.

Chris Kresser:  We’re not talking about corn on the cob.

Diana Rodgers:  Or wheat berries.

Chris Kresser:  Wheat berries. Or even, like, in some cases, just the whole-grain rice. We’re talking about highly processed corn and wheat and rice derivatives, and then highly processed industrial seed oils that comprise almost 50 percent of calories. And who does that benefit? This study was sponsored by a basically hit list A-team of—

Diana Rodgers:  Processed food companies.

Chris Kresser:  Global processed food companies—DuPont, PepsiCo, Dannon, Nestlé, Cargill, Kellogg's. So, like, food and agricultural companies that make their money by selling processed and refined foods. And so that's very revealing.

And then the other thing that Marty Kendall pointed out, which is directly tied to this, is that this diet, when you work out the macronutrient ratios, it ends up being low in protein and moderate in fat and carbohydrates. And there are really no foods in nature that fit that profile, or very few. You have breast milk and acorns, I think, are the two that he pointed out. And this is a recipe for, that macronutrient mix of low protein and then higher fat and carbohydrate is a recipe for highly palatable and rewarding food. So if you look at the foods that are on this list that fit that profile, there are things like chocolate milk, potato chips, French toast, waffles, ice cream, pancakes.

Diana Rodgers:  Kit-Kat.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, biscuits, Kit-Kat, Twix, chocolate chip cookies, pie crust. I mean, are you kidding me? This is the macronutrient profile that we should be following? Oh, who does not benefit? All of the companies that make these processed foods. So it's really revealing when you look at it from that perspective.

Diana Rodgers:  I know. And I think it's really irresponsible to promote a diet that's about 10 percent in protein when we have, I mean, just in America, more than 50 percent of Americans are metabolically broken and really benefit from much higher protein levels.

Chris Kresser:  Increasing their protein. And we know that of all the macronutrients, protein is the one that has the biggest impact on satiety.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  Which it will reduce the likelihood that people overeat, which many Americans are doing.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And any clinician or dietitian like yourself who's worked with people knows if they're struggling with weight, putting them on a higher-protein diet is probably the most important thing you can do. And there's even some, if you look at the studies on low-carb diets, I think probably one of the reasons, if not one of the main reasons, that they’re so effective is that they’re higher in protein.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and I have to say too, so I actually have recently been following Marty Kendall's NutrientOptimiser diet personally, just as an experiment to try to maximize my micronutrients. And I eat really well. I live on a farm. I have a lot of education in nutrient density. I have access to all these foods. It's really hard to get all your micronutrients in the day. But it's really easy to feel satiated when you have a high percentage of animal protein in your diet. So whether that's oysters, which I know I can beat his leaderboard if I just eat a ton of oysters in one day.

Chris Kresser:  That’s right. That’s right.

Diana Rodgers:  But liver, and then just regular old animal protein. Filling the rest of your diet with colorful vegetables is the way to go. But it still, I still was low, actually, believe it or not, in iron, even with all the protein I’ve been consuming on this diet.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, I’m always talking to my patients about a lot of, especially if they’re favoring like chicken and fish, and not eating shellfish or organ meats, is that some muscle meats are not that high in iron. So it’s organ meats and shellfish that are really the powerhouses from that perspective.

And this brings up another question about bioavailability, right? Because we’ve both talked about this a lot. It's not at all the case that protein from plant sources like legumes is going to be absorbed in the same way that protein is absorbed from animal foods like meat and eggs and fish and dairy products. There is something called the … there are various scoring systems that are used in the scientific literature to assess the bioavailability of protein. And no matter what scoring system you use, animal proteins come out ahead of plant proteins, and usually by a very large margin.

Diana Rodgers:  And, I mean, trying to get your protein from beans and rice, if you’re trying to do the combining in order to get the right profile of amino acids, you would, so I did the calculations. So in order to get the right amount, the same amount of protein you would get from a four-ounce steak, which is 181 calories, you’d need to eat 12 ounces of beans and a cup of rice. So that’s 638 calories and 122 grams of carbs. And you're still not getting the same beautiful profile of amino acids that you can get from this 181-calorie piece of steak.

Chris Kresser:  Right, which goes back to Marty Kendall's point where you’re basically, if you eat a low-protein diet, it’s going to be a much higher-calorie diet in most cases.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and higher carb and just setting people down to the road towards metabolic disorder.

The Impact Agriculture Has on the Environment

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. So let’s go back now. I want to finish up talking about the impact of animals in the food system. Because I think there's still some other points that are worth going into here that a lot of people may not be familiar with. So one is, we talked about how not all land is suitable for grazing. But let’s talk about maybe the flipside of that is what happens when you use a lot of land for crops like corn and rice and soy and wheat?

Diana Rodgers:  Right, I mean a lot of, and most of this is not organically grown and using animals to graze in all of that. So the large majority of our monocrops are heavily sprayed with chemicals that leave a residue on the leaves that we’re ingesting. And also completely sterilize the soil and create runoff that then ends up in the Mississippi River and creating massive dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

So there are just so many problems with monocropping the way we’re doing it today. We have created an insect apocalypse. And so we’ve lost pollinators. We’re killing fish, which in turn then kills the animals that need to be eating the fish. And so we’re annihilating biodiversity both above and below ground. And so one teaspoon of soil has more microbes in it than all of the humans on earth. And when we spray it with things like Roundup, we’re completely killing all of that. And so we've destroyed just so much of our soil and so much of it is also just blowing away and running off.

So, I mean, the Dust Bowl was a good example of that, and we’re headed for another one right now. So according to the United Nations, we have about 60 harvests left, at the rate we’re going.

Chris Kresser:  This is alarming. This is like an emergency thing on the level that's part of climate change, of course, but also on the same level as potential for water shortages. People, I don't think, are … I mean, some people are aware of it, of course, but we’re talking about some very, very serious implications here.

Diana Rodgers:  And when the soil is compacted and we’re constantly just stripping away the biodiversity of the soil, when rain comes, it just washes all the topsoil away into rivers, and that's how we get these really cloudy rivers. Because rivers in general should be clear. And in a system where we have healthy ruminants managed in a proper way, the soil acts like a sponge and can actually hold a lot more water from rain, instead of allowing it to just wash off and take the topsoil with it. My husband is so into topsoil that even we have two border collies, and they sleep in our mudroom at night. And they come in, they’re black and white, but their white parts are really dirty-looking at the end of the day.

Chris Kresser:  Brown.

Diana Rodgers:  And in the morning they’re totally white and they leave massive amounts of soil on the ground. And I literally have to sweep it up and put it in the field because that’s how into topsoil he is.

Chris Kresser:  Well, yeah, and how precious it is too.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And just nobody is looking at our farmland as a biological system. It’s been reduced to this reductionist chemical, let’s produce as many calories as possible, which is ruining our health and our land.

Chris Kresser:  Let’s talk a little bit also about how ruminants can improve biodiversity. I mean, we touched on that just briefly, but water is a big issue, and I know that cattle can improve water holding capacity of the land. And that has a whole bunch of downstream effects.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. And also too, even the worst-managed cattle on overgrazed grass is still a better system than monocrop grain. So you still, I mean, and even in a better system, you've got butterflies, you've got birds, you've got all kinds of life above ground and below ground that are teeming.

The whole goal, what people don't realize, is that we want as much life as possible. And our current system is actually making sure that we’re annihilating as much life as possible. So if we look at the extinction process that's been happening over the last 50 years, again, it's something completely alarming. I know Silent Spring came out and people were all up in arms. But the solution is not a vegetarian solution. So Diet for a Small Planet is outdated information, and what we need is more better cattle, not no cattle.

Chris Kresser:  It’s not the cow, it’s the how.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly. And not only that too, another thing I brought up is what these rich white people in Sweden were not paying attention to is that livestock are really important to the majority of people living in poverty in the world in places where, what are you going to do in Kenya where it’s super arid and the Maasai have been herding cattle forever and ever? And we’re going to tell them that they need to go grow soybeans? With what seeds? Are they going to have to go buy them from Monsanto? Where are they going to get the water to irrigate? Where are they going to get the fertilizer if they can’t have animals? So I think it’s bordering on racist to have a grain-heavy diet as a global policy for the entire world.

Chris Kresser:  But we can just make more Cheetos.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly.

Chris Kresser:  That’s probably the plan, part of the plan here. It’s really—

Diana Rodgers:  Well, to get them reliant on our aid. I mean, we’re already ruining Haiti with our rice that we’re giving to them. We’ve ruined their local economies, we’ve ruined their health. Now rice is a much higher percentage of their diet. Very few Haitians are actually growing their own food anymore. And it’s a really great way that we can control governments. I mean, that’s a whole other thing that we don’t have to get too much into. But it really makes me mad, the idea that we’re taking away people’s innate ability to be self-reliant.

Chris Kresser:  Not to mention the very clearly documented health impacts that are observed when traditional peoples adopt the Western food system.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly, exactly. And I have an image on my post. So, the Canadian government decided that they knew best, advising a local Inuit population that they should be eating a Mediterranean diet. Which I think is just, I mean, this one image of this igloo showing all of their nutrient-dense traditional foods in the red category and bananas and oranges and orange juice in the green category. I mean that just sums up exactly how wrong we’ve gotten our dietary advice just in this one image.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. And if those poor kids start following that diet, they’re going to become morbidly obese.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And this is seen. It’s been documented in so many different areas where traditional populations start to follow the government-sponsored diet, including Native Americans in the US.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly.

Chris Kresser:  So, like the Pima, for example.

The Problem with Lab-Grown Meat and Meat Tax

Chris Kresser: So let's talk about some of the other proposals that are floating around that are based on this idea that meat is bad for us nutritionally and bad for the environment, which as I hope we’ve shown in this podcast, is misguided and others. But why not just make meat in a lab? Let’s say you accept that meat, animal protein is more bioavailable and so we do need meat, which some people seem to have accepted. But then why not just grow it in a lab and—

Diana Rodgers:  Reduce suffering.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, reduce suffering and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. All of that. Yeah. And of course, make billions of dollars from the companies that are successful at doing that.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and I think another thing.

Chris Kresser:  Nothing wrong with that per say, but yeah. There’s some financial motivation there perhaps.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. I’m so glad I don’t live where you live. I was actually just out there a couple days ago, and I’m, like, so happy that I’m not living there. Because that’s, like, the hotbed of all of this.

Chris Kresser:  Sure. You just have to be a hermit like me and live up on my hilltop.

Diana Rodgers:  And just go to WeWork and get mad at WeWork in the halls and elevators.

Chris Kresser:  Yep.

Diana Rodgers:  So, I mean, it’s really interesting, the lab meat thing, because I had a woman on my podcast about a year and a half ago who was a big vegan animal rights person telling me how great lab meat was. And I asked her if she knew how it was made, and she had no idea. But she was like, she’s like a really big deal animal rights activist and very vocal about how lab meat is a good solution. And interestingly, most vegans actually won't even accept it because you're using fetal bovine serum in order to make it, which is not “vegan” anyway.

But what folks aren’t realizing, number one, is that it relies on this horrible monocrop system, which is ruining our environment and a completely inefficient way of producing food on so many levels. But then the lifestyle assessments I've read are a lot based on projections because they haven't built the bioreactors yet. So they're making a lot of assumptions, but even the assumptions are so bad that the energy required in order to transform what they're using right now as the substrate.

So corn and soy, sometimes wheat, into protein, the amount of energy required for that is enormous. And when we have animals that can actually just do this on their own without having to be plugged into an outlet is really amazing. Plus, what they're not taking into consideration is the amount of antibiotics that they’ll need to prevent bacterial overgrowth because they’re growing these at just the perfect temperature for meat to grow. But of course that's also the perfect temperature for bacteria to grow as well.

Chris Kresser:  Everything else.

Diana Rodgers:  Cancerous cells, all these things. They had not figured out how to striate the meat with fats. There's a lot of input that we’re running out of that you need in order, there’s a lot of minerals that are being mined in war-torn countries that, actually the US military is, like, guarding these mines in order to get those raw materials in order to pump it into these cellular meat company facilities. So the whole system is energetically ridiculous, and it's not even causing less harm.

So that's my big argument, too, is that when you look at how many lives are lost from the loss of biodiversity, of taking a native ecosystem, plowing it up to make it into a cornfield, and then spraying it to make sure that nothing other than corn, not even mice or anything can grow there. The amount of life lost for that system versus one animal, one large ruminant animal. A cow can provide almost 500 pounds of meat. I just don't think the trade-offs are worth it at all from an ethical or environmental perspective.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, another situation where the devil is in the details, right?

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah.

Chris Kresser:  Because on the fact of it, lab meat sounds, “Hey, why not?” Like, if we can do that and we can make it taste the same … But clearly including that woman that you interviewed on your podcast, that was kind of the level that she was approaching it on, without actually looking into the details. It sounds pretty good on the surface, so why not advocate it. But then when you look into it, you find it’s a little more complicated.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. I’ve been really loving The Wizard and the Prophet, Robb sent that over to me.

Chris Kresser:  I read that just recently.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, I think he told me.

Chris Kresser:  I sent it to Robb.

Diana Rodgers:  Yes, exactly, so I’m thanking you. I’m thanking you for the chain because I have my hands on it. And I’ve been not only reading the book, but then when I’m in my car or at the gym, I’m listening to it. So it’s really fantastic, and I think that that is at the crux of what we’re dealing with right now. Do we look at this, what some would call Luddite perspective of nature through Hoyt, or … I’m sorry. What was his name? Now I’m forgetting.

Chris Kresser:  Vogt.

Diana Rodgers:  Voight. Vogt.

Chris Kresser:  Vogt. Yeah, you want to say Voight because it’s usually an i in there, but it’s V-o-g-t, so it’s Vogt, yeah.

Diana Rodgers:  Or do we look at this more wizard tech solution? And that’s just where most people are right now.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, that’s the dominant cultural paradigm is we’ve gone into wizardry, for sure.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, yes.

Chris Kresser:  No question about that. Back when Silent Spring was written, I think there was more, Vogt was more in vogue. There was a little bit more concern about the wizardry and the impact it would have. And now we are 100 percent in wizardry.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. And the problem is, everyone’s just sort of hoping that more rabbits will be pulled out of the hat. But we don't know for sure.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, yeah. I highly recommend this book. This is Charles Mann, who wrote 1491 and 1493, which, if anyone has read those books about … it totally changed our view on how the New World was discovered and colonized and what was here when those people arrived. Which is much different than what was previously believed. He’s a fantastic writer and this is I think, one of the most compelling views on where we are as a society now and what our future might hold. So highly recommend it.

Getting back to the topic, I mean, that's obviously germane and relevant here, but I want to talk about a few other proposals that are being floated around here. Which are again, if you accept what we've talked about here and in other podcasts, are off base. But the meat tax. There’s been a lot of enthusiasm for this because there’s some research that, beverage tax, soda taxes have been effective in terms of reducing consumption. So this is now something that’s being seriously proposed in the EAT-Lancet. I think that’s part of the agenda of the EAT-Lancet paper and authors and reporters.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, and actually they released another paper just on Sunday night of this week that goes even more strongly into the meat tax. I think the goal is to make it basically impossible to eat meat moving forward. And effectively, I’ve looked at the models. There was a good paper that looked at what would happen, just kind of projected out, what might happen in this situation. And, actually, red meat consumption wouldn’t go down at all.

And it basically is just a poor tax is what this is. And when you look at, I actually took a picture. I had to run into a typical grocery store and pick something up one time, and I noticed the shopping cart of the person in front of me. And it was soda and donuts and whoopie pies and all stuff like that. But her deli meat and her bacon were actually the most nutrient-dense things in her cart.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, so that would be encouraging even less healthy choices in people who are of limited economic means. And you mentioned this in the beginning about the private jet people who are founding this study, and you brought it up in your article. There really is a classist kind of thing that’s happening here that’s not part of the popular narrative. Because if we really wanted to reduce carbon footprint, you pointed out a meta-analysis that suggested that doing things like avoiding one round-trip transatlantic flight, more of a car-free lifestyle, having one less child in an industrialized nation would have by far bigger impact than reducing your consumption of beef.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. Or changing your diet in any way.

Chris Kresser:  And who’s doing a lot of round-trip transatlantic flying? People who are at a certain socioeconomic level. And so, yeah, a lot of these proposals are like, “Let me continue to live my carbon-emitting lifestyle, and then let’s introduce changes that won’t effect that but actually will impact people who are poor and in a really adverse way without really me having to change anything as a privileged person.”

Diana Rodgers:  Right, and, I mean, in order to do vegan right, you kind of do need to be a celebrity or an uber-rich person that, if there is a way to do vegan, right? But, I mean, to … there’s a lot of food prep involved, there’s a lot of time involved. There’s a lot of time spent eating.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, chewing.

Diana Rodgers:  Chewing, right? Your typical person that maybe gets two 15-minute breaks a day is not going to be able to chew the food or have a staff that can make the cashew cream to make all the—

Chris Kresser:  Or buy the cashew cream for $9.49 for a half pint or whatever it is.

Diana’s Upcoming Docuseries, Sacred Cow

Diana Rodgers:  Right, right. I mean, this film project I’m working on, we’ve done a lot of filming in Indiana, rural Indiana. And I see what these folks have as options for stores on limited budgets and what they’re buying. And honestly, processed food, processed meats like sausages that are pre-cooked are a lot easier for them to eat and are honestly the most nutrient-dense thing that they're eating. Because they’re not doing a whole lot of scratch cooking. They don’t have a lot of time or energy at the end of the day. So when life is really hard and you’re working really hard, you don’t have the privilege to push away something nutrient-dense like meat.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely. So let’s talk a little bit about the film. I know it's gone through a lot of iterations and there’s been some wins and some challenges. So tell me, let's start with a little bit of the idea and the inspiration behind it. Why we both feel that this is important to get out there and then maybe a little update where you’re at, what you’re needing, what would be helpful. We have a lot of folks who are listening, who I know want to be a part of this movement in some way.

And I’m often asked by people who are not necessarily in the health field, people who are not nutritionists or Functional Medicine practitioners or anything, like, “How can I help? How can I get involved? How can I use my existing skills or connections or resources to move this forward?” So let's imagine what kind of help we need or could be useful to move this forward, and who knows who’s out there listening.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah. So, I was halfway through writing a book on this subject on the nutritional, environmental, and ethical case for meat when yet another vegan film came out about a year and a half ago. And I was like, “If this guy can make a movie, I can make a movie.” And so that’s kind of how it all started. I did a crowd funder that was pretty successful, and we got rolling. At the time, the project was called Kale versus Cow. And we started filming some of these nutrition stories. We hooked up with a doctor who has some amazing clinical trials and is doing really good work in a pretty rural part of the Midwest, conveniently corn country. But there's also farmers who are plowing in their corn and turning it back to grass.

So there’s some really great stories happening there. And some of the feedback I got from the title Kale versus Cow was that, “This sounds like another vegan film,” or, “It sounds like I’m against kale,” which as you know, I’m not against kale. But I think folks maybe that don't know me as well just had these misperceptions, and the name was a little bit of a hang-up for them. So we went back to the drawing board a little bit and changed the title to Sacred Cow, which I think works really nicely, also because there’s a double meaning of sacred cow. Because the vilification of beef is just so embedded in our system.

Chris Kresser:  Yes.

Diana Rodgers:  And, I mean, even when I was going through my graduate program in dietetics, red meat is not okay. It's just not, even though in biochem it's totally fine if you just look at it from an objective scientific perspective. And the project has also transformed from a feature film into a docuseries because we felt that it’s a more digestible way, literally, to get this information across, and there's also more that we wanted to cover that we didn't feel would fit into the narrative of one film.

And so we were now looking at a multipart docuseries still addressing mostly the nutritional, environmental, and ethical aspects of the reason why we need animals in our food system. I'm also very interested in sort of the anthropology of how meat became such a polarizing topic today and how people identify their whole being around how much meat they consume in their diet. The flexitarian, vegan, whatever.

Chris Kresser:  Yep.

Diana Rodgers:  And I still am working on the book. So, as you know, Robb is the coauthor on the book project I’m working on, and he’s the co-executive producer on the film project. But the funding has been a little bit of a challenge. I don’t know if people really get how important this is, and I think it’s one of the reasons why the Unitarian church is not funded well. Because it's, like, trying to extract money out of atheists is a hard thing.

When people are super-passionately committed and religiously committed like vegans, where it’s, like, their religion, they’ll passionately fund things. But then when people are kind of cool with everything and they’re eating meat and they’re like, “Yeah, got my health under control now. That’s great. And if the vegans don’t want to eat meat, fine, that’s more for me.” That’s really kind of the attitude I’m running into a little bit.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah people are less identified with it, which is good, in their way.

Diana Rodgers:  It’s good.

Chris Kresser:  But not as good when you’re trying to raise money for a movie like this.

Diana Rodgers:  Right, yeah.

Chris Kresser:  And I think the other part of it is, I don’t know that people really perceive the threat fully yet. It’s like you just said, they’re like, “If someone wants to be vegan, fine. No skin off my back and it’s not going to hurt me. So there’s no pressing need to fund a film about this. Because who cares if someone’s a vegan.” Well, yeah, on an individual level, you might say that. Even though we could argue that you should care if someone chooses an approach that’s in many cases likely to make them nutrient deficient.

But, yes, each person, of course, has the right to choose their own approach. And I don’t go around trying to proselytize and convert vegans to eating animal foods unless they ask me what I think they should do if they come see me as a patient. But this isn't just about individual choice here. Because, as we know, we talked about the meat tax proposition, and this is going to affect food policy. It's already affected food policy in the US and around the world which then will affect schools. And what happens at schools, which influences our children and the choices that they make.

You know, my daughter is seven and a half, and she comes home with some really interesting things that she's heard from other kids and even teachers at school. And she doesn't go to a typical school, but this is, it’s everywhere. Yeah.

Diana Rodgers:  Exactly. And there’s a lot of schools now eliminating meat for health, and I think a lot of parents are kind feeling a little worried about meat consumption. And so maybe they're thinking, “Well, at least they’re getting a healthy meal at school.” And so that's concerning to me because for a lot of kids this is the most nutrient-dense meal of their day. And to blame it on meat is just wrong. And I kept telling folks, this is coming and meat tax is coming.

And I, for a while, was feeling like maybe I’m just nuts and I’m making all this up. I don’t know. But then of course, it is really coming. The EAT-Lancet paper is here. Meat tax is being discussed. We’ve got, LA now is trying to force restaurants and LAX to provide, to tell private businesses to provide vegan entrees. We’ve got Berkeley with Meatless Mondays now at all city meetings.

Chris Kresser:  WeWork.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, WeWork, exactly. There’s airlines now that are eliminating red meat. And so this is coming at us from our clinicians, our universities, we’re hearing this from the World Health Organization. We’re hearing this from business, from the media. Constant films, there's more coming out this year.

I think I just sent you another one that’s on its way out that I’m pretty concerned about. Because it actually has people with MD behind their name. And nobody is pushing back and people are just taking this really lightly. And so, yeah, anything that folks can do to help me get this off the ground, I’d want to come out and feature you, Chris. And I’ve got a lot of really great experts in both the sustainability and health space that very strongly feel that red meat is important to our food system.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah. And the reality is that a film or in a docuseries can make a huge impact than even a book.

Diana Rodgers:  That you can’t do with a book. I know.

Chris Kresser:  It doesn’t work. I mean, I’ve written a 400-plus page book with all the science that you need to, I think, get clear that animal food should be part of our diet in addition to plant foods. But how many people are going to read a 400-page book? Not that many. And there’s still something about film that makes it a very viral medium. It’s more accessible, a docuseries is an increasingly popular format, as you said.

It's easier to cover the wide range of topics that you need to hit on for this, and it's a format that has been used for vegan and other types of films or media. And it’s something that’s just really easy to share with. People are more likely to sit down at night and watch an episode of this than they are to read a book.

Diana Rodgers:  Yeah, exactly. And this is pretty dense material. But if I can just show people what a healthy ecosystem looks like and how cattle raised in the right way, what that looks like compared to a 2,000-acre field of soy being grown for lab meat, I think that those are really powerful visuals.

Chris Kresser:  Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I agree with that a hundred percent. So if someone is listening to this and the alarm has been raised in their mind, and they’re now aware of the real risk here to our families and communities, and they want to get involved in some way, what's the best way for them to do that?

Diana Rodgers:  So I have more information, and I’m taking donations on sustainabledish.com/film. And for any better meat companies or folks that want to get involved in a bigger way, folks can just message me directly through the site. And we’re working with a few better meat companies and other large donors and foundations. But we still need to, these are expensive, and there are some inexpensive ways of making docuseries.

But in order for us to really get on the mainstream media channels like Netflix, we have to do something that's beautiful and has a high production value and isn't a $50,000 handheld camera project. And so, while the budget isn’t exorbitant, it’s certainly higher than some of the other more budget docuseries that have been coming out. And that's largely because I'm really tired of going to high schools and doing damage control when they show these vegan propaganda films. Because that's what's happening right now.

Chris Kresser:  Yeah, absolutely. And will continue to happen, as you pointed out. The momentum there is only building. So we need to, I think, step up to the plate.

Diana Rodgers:  Thank you so much.

Chris Kresser:  Thank you for doing this work, Diana. I really appreciate your advocacy and passion for this, and it shows through in everything that you do. And I hope for all of you listening that this has been up maybe a bit of a wake-up call and you have a little more perspective on what's going on behind the scenes. And even less left behind, like more out in the open now, I think, more and more. Especially with this EAT-Lancet paper, and you see that science is not objective and dispassionate in many cases, but actually quite agenda driven and that there are often interests aligned behind those agendas that may not represent your interests. Like global food companies that want to sell more of their processed and refined products.

So none of us are not impacted by this in some way. And if you have children and family members who are getting exposed to all of this material, it's really important to have a counterpoint that we can offer that is well researched and really hits on the most important issues. And people can change their mind. I mean, your story that you shared with the publisher of the China study was really revealing. To his credit, to whoever that publisher editor was, to his credit. He was able to take in that information and open his mind and give this a chance. And we both, of course, know many people that that’s happened with. I have lots of patients, lots of readers and listeners who were vegan and vegetarian at one point. I was vegan and vegetarian at one point, as everybody knows who’s listened to this show for a while.

And it was through exposure to research and information like what we’re talking about on this show and what you plan to present on the film that actually changed their minds. Because I think that may also be part of the resistance in some cases, like for raising money with this film. It’s like the idea that people are just not going to change their minds. That it’s, we can’t really make an impact. But I don’t agree with that. I think we can make a huge impact and already have, and we just need to scale it up so that it can reach more people.

Diana Rodgers:  I agree.

Chris Kresser:  So sustainabledish.com/film. We will also put some of the links to the podcast and articles that we mentioned, the critiques of EAT-Lancet, Marty Kendall’s and also yours, Diana. And then if you want that big storehouse of information I put together for the Rogan show, which has articles on nutrient density and meat and the effects of meat, and carbohydrate, macronutrients, a ton of stuff, that’s at ChrisKresser.com/Rogan. So thanks, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Diana.

Diana Rodgers:  Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it, Chris. And thanks for all your support ever since I first met you.

Chris Kresser:  It's my pleasure, and I hope we can, with this podcast, move things forward a little bit more quickly and get this out there. Because it really needs to be seen. So thanks, everyone, for listening and please do continue to send in your questions to ChrisKresser.com/podcastquestion. And I’ll talk to you next time.

The post RHR: What the EAT-Lancet Paper Gets Wrong, with Diana Rodgers appeared first on Chris Kresser.