The New Meat Theory

Published Mar 19, 2019, 11:00 AM

Just how much does meat affect your health? And what about your environment? In this interview, Dr. Oz sits down with Impossible Foods founder Dr. Pat Brown, and Dr. Neal Barnard, to understand the benefits of veganism, and whether or not eating fats is causing you to gain weight.

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You would start lowering atmosphere ex to two concentrations. Like people think, oh, can we stabilize them or can we make them go up a little bit more slowly? You know, you could actually lower them and over the course of a couple of decades you could pull out of the atmosphere by just doing nothing except getting the livestock out of the picture, you could lower atmospheric concentrations. About the equipment about fifteen years loads of current emissions. Everyone. I'm Doctor Os and this is the Doctor Os podcast. Welcome everybody. I thought today we talked about the food plant revolution, how you can actually make food that's good for humans and in the environment. And in order to do that, you need to get into the nitty gritty of actually what is it about food and science that's so confusing? And I want to start off with um a discussion with two people that are very influential in this space. One of them, a physician, has got a very strong belief system around the benefits of being vegan, and arguments that he's making are ones that are embraced and quoted by many other in this space. And the other, gentleman, actually came from a whole different place he was on the faculty at Stanford, wasn't all interested in food in the beginning, but he has built something 's actually it's a meat that that's made of vegetables. And I'm talking about garden burger here. I'm talking about literally something that's made with little vegetable proteins bound together that tastes like meat. You can't tell the difference. So let's start up with Neil Barnard. Now, Neil has been on the show a bunch of times. He's a physician. UM, he's adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine that George Washington University School of Medicine, UH that you know, tons of research bodies does a lot of primary research looking at the effects that diet on diabetes and by a wait, tronic pain. He's on some groundbreaking studies on type two diabetes, which is what's going to focus on today. And you know, Neil understands the space so well and he's not afraid to mix it up. So he was not a panel that I was hosting at the Vatican with Walter will It's someone that many of you've heard of and will be on the show in the future. And the two of them got to mix it up a little bit about exactly how much of a problem fats are. And in that argument, I really wasn't sure who one. Neil basically says, you don't want any facts and you died, and Walter Willis said, we can't correlate facts with illness. But what they both agreed on there's a problem with meat and diabetes, something that I hadn't thought that much about. But I want you to hear it from Neil firsthand. You know, your presentation was spectacular today, teamed up with four other luminaries who you know a ton about food. We're trying to explain what that meant, especially under the filter of the spiritual path that many in the audience is seeking. Were at the Vatican after all. I would love for you to summarize your main arguments for why a vegan lifestyle makes a meaningful difference to your health, not just a little nudge in the right direction, but a dramatic shift as powerful as many prescription medications. Yeah. I really think it's true, and and it's started with studies where you weren't actually changing anybody's diets. You were just looking in observational studies people following their their own dietary pattern, and the people who were following vegetarian diets were slimmer and healthier than people following meat based diets. And then the people who are following the vegan diet, I mean no animal products at all, they were skinniest of all. Um, and then when you looked at diabetes, dramatically lower rates the numbers were in. There's a study called the Adventist Health Study to they study Seventh day Adventist because they're not smokers, they don't drink, but some of the differ in diet, so it gives you a great basis for comparison. Among the meat eaters, you see diabetes around eight percent of that population. Among the vegans two point nine percent something like that. So, but that's just an observational study. So my research team has brought people in they've got type two diabetes and we put the diet to the test, and I have to say, it's a works better than any other diet when it comes to getting the weight off, getting the blood sugar down, getting the cholesterol down, getting blood pressure down. Um, it just really is very very powerful. So I can understand most of listeners can as well that if you eat less fat, they get less fat. That's been an argument that's been made for decades, if not longer. But you you stunned me anyway. But the magnitude of impact on diabetes. You just brought it up again. What is the reason why eating less fat impacts on diabetes? Mostly what they could sugar. It's a completely different way of viewing the disease. And I gotta tell you, twenty years ago, I couldn't have I couldn't have said this because we didn't really have the technology. But here's what's happened. If you look inside the cells of the body, specifically the muscle cells. And why muscle cells, because that's where glucose is going your your muscles are fueled by glucos. Every movement you make, that glucos is your gasoline powering your muscles. If you got if you've got type two diabetes, you've got the glucose in the blood. It's trying to get into the muscles, but it can't get inside. And the reason is what we call insulin resistance. The the insulin hormone that's like a key to that's trying to open the door on that muscle cell to get the glucos inside. The key is in the lock, but it just won't open. That's insulin resistance. Why not. We've looked into the muscles of the body with a special technique called mr spectroscopy and we found the answer. And the answer is microscopic fat particles. I mean you can't see these. I mean they're much smaller than an individual cell um. But as they build up, then the insulin attaches to the cell. The fat stops it from being able to do any kind of signaling anymore. It's like trying to walk on a grease covered floor. You slip in your fall, so the the insulin doesn't work anymore. And so if we use a diet that has no animal fat in it, it has no animal products at all, there's no animal fat, and if we keep oils low, that drains out of the cell and suddenly the insulin can work again. So all those patients who have been saying I don't need bread, or I don't need sweet potatoes, or I don't need beans, or I don't need pasta, in our view, that wasn't really the issue. The issue was the build up of these microscopic fat particles inside the muscle cells, stopping the insulin from working. You get that fat out, the diabetes improves, and in some cases it's just gone, it goes away. You might not know the answer to this. I don't. I don't know if anybody does. But is it more important to lose weight to reduce the diabetes or reduce the fat dramatically enough to activate the mechanism you're speaking to? Fantastic question and I only know part of the answer. Um. In two thousand three, NIH funded us to do a head to head head to head test of a vegan diet versus a conventional diet, and we found that people's blood sugar control control improved dramatically on the vegan diet. And so we asked your question is why how much of it was weight loss? A lot of it was weight us. I'm going to say most of it was, probably, but not all of it. Um, So even after you accounted for the weight loss, there was something else. And I suspect that what it is is you're just not taking fat into your body anymore. And I'm talking about even a very thin person. Say, um, that person doesn't have much way to lose maybe none, but even they improve with this kind of diet, let's move past human beings to the world we live in. Part of the reason the Vatican was interested in this panel is because we have a higher obligation to protect the place where we live, not just for ourselves, but for our families, for children, other species. And that ethical dilemma that's created when we don't take care of the planet, we don't take great planet is something that has become ever more apparent. You and others in the panel felt strongly that the single biggest thing we could do to help our planet would be move away from animal sources of fat. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I think now there is really no question that our planet is changing, the environment is being degraded, and that the biggest driver of that is the way we raise food. Now, let me raise my hand and give you a mea culpa. Because my family, I come from the Midwest. My dad was in the cattle business, and his dad and his dad and his dad and I drove cattle myself to East St. Louis to slaughter. Do you have any pictures of that? By the way, I would have used this, not that I'm gonna show you I gotta tell you. But here here's the thing. For number one, UM, cows are not ordering room service. They got to eat something. And so to raise food, you're raising corn and you're raising soybeans. And it's acre after acre after When I go home to Fargo, you should see it beautiful. It's it's as far as the eye can see. Corn plants all identical, all genetically modified, and same with the soy. And to make it grow, you also need pesticides, fertilizer, um, irrigation, and so then the pesticides and fertilizer get into the streams, they get into the rivers. That's degrading the environment too. And then when you feed it to a chicken or a pig or something like that, Um, all of that pollution is accounted for then by the meat product. If you feed into a cow, you get something else. A cow is ruminate animal, unlike a chicken. And so the cow swallows the corn, and how do you say this, delicately, they bring it back up and they chew that's it. They chew it again, they bring it back up, and all the while they are belching methane. Methane is simple carbon containing molecule that is very potent as a greenhouse gas. And cows are belching up methane all the time. And that's true if it is a meat, a cow destined for meat, or a cow on a dairy. And if you put all the people on this planet on one side of a balance and all the cows on the other side, the cows outweigh us dramatically. I mean each one is as big as a sofa, and they are belching methane all day long. And so people will say, well, we need to capt smoke stacks, and you know, true, Uh, drive a smaller car, go hybrate, absolutely, But if we're not changing our diet, then what are we doing. We are destroying the rivers, the streams with all that pollution, and the greenhouse gases are continuing to go into the atmosphere. Is it too late to change? I don't know. I hope not, um, but we time is up. We do need to change. I got a lot more questions to go, but first let's take a quick break. Well, the statistic that blew my mind was that we have more cows bile mass on the planet now than all the other trades stural beings together times ten now I don't know I can invalidate that, because who's ever added up all the biomassive tradial animals. But you know, if there's any any semblance of truth to that statement, it's shocking to everybody. In fact, in the room of three hundred luminaries who sort of know this stuff. One person, one person and very back in African American woman put her hand halfway up. That was about all uh term in terms of endorsing. But I'd love to hear from you if you think that's even possible. I do think it's possible. And the difference between the United States and some other areas in the United States also in Europe, you don't see these farms anymore. Really, they're industrialized where the animals are often in enclosures. I recently visited a dairy farm in Indiana. You're not gonna see it from the highway. They got thirty two thousand cows inside there. Um, So I think it is true. Goodness. That's uh. Let's heat up to debate between you, Walt Will, and others about weight loss and dietary advice. So assuming that we got the high level stuff right, you know, don't don't drink trans fats, don't just don't don't do the things that most people agree are sabotage, simple carbar heights. And I know, like, how important is it to reduce fat intake in order to lose weight? You argue it's vital, and your own data has reflected that, others like Walter will, well known Harvard researcher, argue that doesn't seem to make as much of a difference. I keep reading studies saying basically, count nutrients, don't count calories. To break it down for us, Yeah, it's it's a huge debate right now, and we're gonna see where where where it ends up. But here's here's what my experience has shown and what our research studies have shown, is that if your goal is to help a person to either lose weight or to reverse their diabetes, that's where I'm zeroing in. Not just on the bad fat that's the butter fat or the palm oil or something like that, but I'm really zero on on all fats and even even extra virgin olive oil. You know, you know, And and the reason don't don't don't get me wrong, it's a better fat, you know, it's not gonna harm your arteries the way butter will. But all fats have nine calories packed in every single gram. That's more than carbohydrate, more than protein. It's the calorie dense food. So if a person is trying to lose weight and yet they're eating fatty foods, they're gonna have trouble. And I have good friends who will look at walnuts and almonds and olive oil, and these are foods that you'd have to say are healthy. You know, if there's a healthy fat, that's it. But you can make a person's weight loss just grind to a halt by by digging into those foods because they are so fatty. And the other thing is not are they not only are they dense in calories, but if you eat bread, you eat a loaf of bread, and eventually that can turn into body fat. But it's hard for your body to turn bread into fat. You have if you have to break down the glogose molecules to turn fat into fat really easy for the body. There's no metabolic cost to it. If you eat a little bit too much all of oil, it's like in your thighs, so very easy. Yet, Walter argued that when he looks at derawed data from other studies, the amount of fat that people it doesn't seem to coral with weight loss, perhaps because it satiates you. The best example is dairy. I'm not aware of data showing that skim milk helps you lose weight anymore than whole fat milk. Both of them might be an issue, and for you probably they are, but there's not an incremental benefit of torturing yourself a skim milk if you don't like the taste because you want to get that satiated elsewhere. Yeah, it's it's a great question. I don't know if anyone's ever really put it to the test in a good way. Milk is a really interesting one because if you take whole milk, the main nutrient in it is fat, bad fat, saturated fat. You take all that out, now I've I've got skim milk or nonfat milk. The main nutrient in non fat milk is sugar. It's lactose sugar. It's a looking a whole lot like a soda at that point, um which it I don't mean to say that that it's bad to take the fat out of the milk. I think it is, but they should take the sugar out too, and take the hormones out, and take in fact, take it all out, and you'd be left with a glass of water. We're already has always appreciate my friend, thank you. That's still Barnard. And I'll tell you at least he gets you to think differently about stuff. He's very passionate, very opinionated. This is an area of evolution. It's very difficult to study how food affects humans because you can't put humans in randomized trials. When you say, okay, this group of people only eats meat for ten years, and that group is no meat for ten years. But when you look at some of the data that he has, even if it's not based in humans, you at least have to ask the question whether the meat that we're eating is potentially called responsible for some of the diabetes that we're seeing in addition to other potential health problems. Now, with that in mind, a lot of yr sit and saying like, oh God, dr Ars took my meat away. Now I'm not gonna eat broccoli and kale the rest of my life. You know, I might live longer or maybe just seem like it, And so saying that uh brings up the possibility that we might be able to engineer meat that's different. So I want you to meet Pat Brown. Pat Brown started something called impossible meat. This is literally meat that tastes like meat, looks like meat, as hem in it, which is iron, but has no actual animal products in it. I think listen to Pat Brown. I was fascinated in our discussiones today about the numbers you've rattled off about the changes in biomass on the planet, in particular a statement that I've been thinking about since you mentioned it, which is, we have ten times were biomassive cows now that all other terrestrial beings put together, all other uh wild vertebrates UH put together. So which, if you can't sure with the audience, the dafts, pandas, crocodiles, frogs, birds, ten times more cows and what was it? Probably way more than ten times, but um I so there was a guy, uh an ecologist named Volk volklau Smill who uh, someone you probably enjoyed talking to, who did a calcul elation about five years ago and came up with a similar estimate. And I thought, okay, um, I'm not I'm not gonna believe it until I do the math myself. And so I spent uh actually was anticipating this this meeting, and kind of because I'm going off on tangent so I'm sorry, because Pope Francis UH has been quite explicit and even in his talk today about our responsibility to the creatures on Earth and so forth, I thought, Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna really do the diligence on this because I think this is something that nobody really knows and it's horrifying. And except that if they asked themselves, when was the last time the last time I drove across country, whether it was the US or Europe or Costa Rica, you name it, what animals did I see? Right? Cows, cows and cheap the occasional prairie dog or you know, squirrel or crow or something like that. But it's pretty much that. So it's kind of consistent with a body's experience. But yeah, I just thought I wanted to check it up. So I did a ton of research. I dug up a bunch of papers, uh, And there's really no systematic research, but that there's you can look at a couple of papers that look at Okay, what's the total density of vertebrates uh in the Serengetti or in Kenyan range lands, or in the Patagonian forest or uh, you know, the Canadian tundra or whatever. And I looked at, you know, dozens of these papers and did a very conservative estimate summing them all up. Uh. And that's where I got my number. Uh. And I'm actually thinking that because there's never been a paper that really uh put this all together, you know, a scientific journal that I may write up a paper about it, even though it's not original research. It's just a compilation of stuff. You also pointed out massive change that have happened as we have moved more and more towards eating cows, and you actually showed slides impairing the inefficiency of different sources of animal meat. This almost a cyclopedic. In fact, it was if I knew better, I throw away Google because I've got you next to me. Now. Was it stunned the audience. And I think it's a nice way of revisiting something we think we already know, which is making animals is expensive for society. But it also she seems to dwarf a lot of the other things we would prefer to blame, like coal fired plants and exhaust from cars. It turns out the animals that we're eating and what we do to in order to make that possible is changing the world in ways most of us never anticipated. Oh absolutely so. UM. Just categorically, the use of animals and food production technology UM is responsible for more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector. That's something I think that is, at least in certain circles, pretty well known. It's also by far the biggest user and polluter of fresh water. UM. It uses somewhere between a quarter and a third of all the fresh water on our and it occupies about half of Earth's land surface. To me, that is both the most um kind of shocking and yet true shocking number. Half. You know, you take all the land everything that's not covered by ice or water on Earth, okay uh, and tally up what fraction is being used actively being used grazing livestock or raising feet crops or livestock. It's half of all the land on Earth. It's a land area devoted to raising amals for food, bigger than North America plus South America plus Australia plus Europe. Um devoted to that growing all the time because the demand is growing. And that's land that not only previously supported uh biodiversity wildlife, but also planned biodiversity. You know, when you change, when you replace the native creatures with cattle and sheep, it not only uh you know, displaces all the other wildlife there because their compete for a very limited photosynthetic productivity. It changes the plants that grow there because different different animals, um, you know, have different grazing patterns, different patterns of walking around, and so forth. So we were trying to homogenize I mean not no one's trying to do this, but effectively, what we're doing is we're homogenizing the surface of Earth to basically be that simple ecosystem that supports you know, livestock. So there's a calculation I did, but I can point to the original scientific research that basically shows that that if you could thought experiment, snap your fingers, make the land base animal food production go away, and now just allow the vegetation that had existed on the land before it was put to that purpose to recover, you would immediately start doing something that no one even contemplates. You would start lowering atmospheric to two concentrations. Like people think, oh, can we stabilize them or can we make them go up a little bit more slowly? You know, you could actually lower them. And over the course of a couple of decades you could pull out of the atmosphere by just doing nothing except getting the livestock out of the picture. You could lower atmosphere concentrations by the equivalent about fifteen years worth of current emissions. That to me is magical and this is one of the one of the things that most motivates me. So the mission of my company is to completely replace animals in the food system. And we're dead serious both about that goal and the timeline because it's so urgent. And if we can make this happen over the next couple of decades, I think, you know, it solves so many problems. It gets rid of uh, it turns back the clock on on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. It relieves the biggest source of pressure on the fresh water supply, which is probably the biggest single source of trigger of of conflicts, and you know, regional and warfare and so forth, and the other biggest sources conflict over land. And this is So here's here's another interesting statistic which I can give you the data for. If you take all the cities on Earth, or another way of looking at if you take every structure, building, highway, road, beautiful wall um on Earth and you put them all together, they occupy a land area of about half a percent of earth surface. It's one of the area occupied by land based animal farming. UM. So people think of like, oh man, we're going to mess up with ecosystems because the cities are expanding into farmland and so forth. That is completely wrong. It's the farmland that's the problem. The cities add up to virtually nothing and um for all practical purposes, the land footprint a few andy is animal farming full stop. Does last word to come after the break? You're a professor at Stamford, would your specially um? Well, I was trained as a pediatrician um. But when I but then I did post doc um in microbiology virology, studying how the AIDS virus replicates and and that's why I started doing it at Stanford. But then, relatively early on I started when I saw that the genome was on the horizon. I started developing tools for basically being able to look at UM the expression and the behavior of all the genes and the genome at once, and UM called DNA micro ray and that UM. And then I started applying that to both kind of like fundamental biological problems related to you know, how to cells program themselves and so forth, and the diversity of cells in your body and so forth, and also cancer diagnostics UM, and a bunch of other things. I mean, I actually, UM, someone in my lab did the first study that UH comprehensively described how a newborn baby acquires it's microbiome UM. So. And the great thing was because I was at Stanford, I was supported by Howard Hughes. I could literally do anything I wanted. It was the best job in the world. You may think you have a pretty good job, and you probably have a pretty good gig, but I I could basically just get a new idea and start working on it and have the resources to do it in great colleagues and students and so forth. So that's what I gave up to take on this, you know, this mission of impossible foods and and I have no qualms about it. But but boy, I have a good good U in my Stanford career look porn to the name of the company being changed to not Impossible Foods. Pat Brown, thank you very much, thank you. That's Pat Brown here. You know, get Sky by the way, got his empty and PhD in bow chemistry at the University of Chicago. Was that Stanford, you know, developing DNA micro arrays. You know, forget about all the stuff. You'd never have to know it. But this is a true basic scientist guy. You know that the new technologies that he's making allow us to look at how genes in a genome work. I mean, what the heck is he doing making meat? Well? He looked around and realized that there was a way to make delicious, affordable meat and dairy products directly from plants. And he thought, if I could do that, it's better for the consumers, but it's especially better for the environment. And then he began to quote a bunch of facts that you all, I hope heard, that we have ten times more cow biomass than all other wild terrestrial beings put together. Think about that. That's why when you drive along on the road you see mostly cows. You know, you don't see drafts, obviously, but you don't even see horses that often were you were that, Lisa, No, not what what caught your attention because you're in that panel, Um, and you heard how passionate he was about the environment, even more so than human health. Well, yeah, it's hard to it's hard to deny the repercussions of eating a meat an animal product based diet. So so what do you what caught your attention on what Pat Brown was saying? Well, certainly the impact on the environment of eating meat and the fact that we're going to be we're already over seven billion people I think, and um, just eating meat is not sustainable, especially as the rest of the world models their diets on ours. So well, I tell you what caught my attention is, You've got a guy, Pat Brown who's a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. Right, he's gotten the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor. This is huge, brilliant. But he's a member of our most respected organizations and he's out there saying it can't go on. We don't actually have the ability to make enough meat for all the people on the planet. Literally, you couldn't do it, and it you know, leaves the lots of things that no one want's talk about, you know, pollution and energy consumption. I get all that, but here's the part that works me up. You and I and all of people listening right now. We're actually paying a lot of money to make sure that meat is cheap. That's right. If you don't know what, wake up. Meat is probably a third the price, maybe half the price that it would be it wasn't for subsidies. And it's not bad people doing bad things, but every part of the chain and the people who are making the soy or whatever, the the the couch eating, and then you have the energy to transport the product that costs money. And and then and then you know, the retail areas. Everything costs money, and it's all subsidized so it's made more affordable. And I'm saying, hey, listen, why don't we just either subsidize the vegetables as much so the broccoli is one third the price so the tobatoes, or subsidize none of it, which is where I land. Just let it, Let let business run. I think we're all Americans. We believe in competition. I'm an entrepreneurial person. Uh you know, as long as the equal playing field that everyone just earn their money. I don't want to hurt anybody's business. Just don't subsubdize people to do stuff, because you perversely influence the process. So take away this subsidies from the things that we don't really believe are good for us, or at least give equal amounts, if not more, to the foods we think are good for us. But using the Pat Brown and Neo Barnard and Walter Will and all these famous iconic figures participating in this Vatican panel on the food plant Revolution, I began to appreciate and respect much more why the Pope had pulled had pulled together these folks, Because what he's basically saying is there are opportunities for to do things that are good for humans and for the environment, and for the and the planet where which we are the custodians of and the temple of the Solar. Our body has to be protected. And so for us to ignore the opportunities to improve everything around us by making wash or food decisions is not the right thing for us to do. It's it doesn't fulfill our spiritual journey. So think about that, guys, Happy eating

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