In this podcast, Peter Ballerstedt, a forage agronomist and ruminant nutritionist, challenges conventional wisdom about animal agriculture's role in human health and sustainable food production. He argues that ruminant animals, like cows, sheep, and goats, are crucial for converting inedible plant material into nutrient-dense food for humans while improving soil health and biodiversity.
Ballerstedt explains ruminants' unique digestive process, which allows them to thrive on a forage-only diet. Microorganisms in their rumen break down cellulose, converting it into fatty acids and microbial protein that the animal can absorb and use.
He believes current dietary guidelines promoting plant-based diets may be misguided, as populations consuming less than 30% of calories from animal-sourced foods face increased nutrient deficiencies. Animal foods provide essential nutrients in a highly bioavailable form.
Ballerstedt argues for increased animal-sourced food consumption across all populations to improve global health and address nutrient deficiencies. While acknowledging environmental concerns, he highlights the benefits of properly managed grazing on soil health, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration.
Looking ahead, Ballerstedt sees ruminant animal agriculture as a solution to nourishing a growing population while protecting the planet, envisioning a future where well-nourished individuals collaborate to solve global issues. His insights challenge listeners to reconsider assumptions about food production and recognize ruminants' vital role in creating a healthier, more sustainable future.
---------------------------
Connect with Peter Ballerstedt:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GrassBasedHealth
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Don_Pedro-SodFather/videos
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/grassbased
X: https://twitter.com/GrassBased
SubStack: https://ruminati.substack.com/
Website: https://grassbasedhealth.blogspot.com/
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
In this podcast, Peter Ballerstedt, a forage agronomist and ruminant nutritionist, challenges conventional wisdom about animal agriculture's role in human health and sustainable food production. He argues that ruminant animals, like cows, sheep, and goats, are crucial for converting inedible plant material into nutrient-dense food for humans while improving soil health and biodiversity.
Ballerstedt explains ruminants' unique digestive process, which allows them to thrive on a forage-only diet. Microorganisms in their rumen break down cellulose, converting it into fatty acids and microbial protein that the animal can absorb and use.
He believes current dietary guidelines promoting plant-based diets may be misguided, as populations consuming less than 30% of calories from animal-sourced foods face increased nutrient deficiencies. Animal foods provide essential nutrients in a highly bioavailable form.
Ballerstedt argues for increased animal-sourced food consumption across all populations to improve global health and address nutrient deficiencies. While acknowledging environmental concerns, he highlights the benefits of properly managed grazing on soil health, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration.
Looking ahead, Ballerstedt sees ruminant animal agriculture as a solution to nourishing a growing population while protecting the planet, envisioning a future where well-nourished individuals collaborate to solve global issues. His insights challenge listeners to reconsider assumptions about food production and recognize ruminants' vital role in creating a healthier, more sustainable future.
---------------------------
Connect with Peter Ballerstedt:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GrassBasedHealth
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Don_Pedro-SodFather/videos
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/grassbased
X: https://twitter.com/GrassBased
SubStack: https://ruminati.substack.com/
Website: https://grassbasedhealth.blogspot.com/
Chances are, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast if you didn't need to change your life and get healthier.
So take action right now. Book a call with Dr. Ovadia's team.
One small step in the right direction is all it takes to get started.
How to connect with Stay Off My Operating Table:
Twitter:
Learn more:
Theme Song : Rage Against
Written & Performed by Logan Gritton & Colin Gailey
(c) 2016 Mercury Retro Recordings
SOMOT Peter Ballerstedt
===
[00:00:28] Jack Heald: Welcome back folks. It is the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast with Dr. Philip Ovedia. I'm Jack Hield. And we are joined today by a man who's Professional work is something I didn't even know existed until I started doing the research. As I've learned, Phil from many of the guests you've found for the show, just because my first impression of, Oh God, this is going to be boring.
[00:00:54] That happens often most of the time. Really all the time I've been shocked at how interesting all of this is. So I'm really looking forward to this one. Introduce our guest. Very good. I
[00:01:06] Dr. Phillip Ovadia: can guarantee you this one isn't going to be boring. This is a guest who I've had. I've wanted to have on actually for quite a while.
[00:01:14] I've been fortunate to share the stage with him at a couple of events and have really learned a lot from him about areas that I didn't even know I needed to know about but that are really integral to our health. Very excited to have the illustrious, I'm going to say, Peter Vallistead with us today known in many circles as the sod father.
[00:01:36] And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Peter to give a little bit of his background to our audience. And I'm excited to get into this conversation.
[00:01:46] Peter Ballerstedt: I'm really glad to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you for the work that you're doing. Full disclosure. I've been given the title of Don Pedro, Sodfather of the Ruminati.
[00:01:58] Now that we've been formally introduced my background is I'm a forage agronomist and a ruminant nutritionist. I may have to come back and Define those. Yes. Okay. I'm glad you asked. Forages are those plants that are grown to be eaten by livestock. You could think of them as pasture, hay, silage, grasses, clovers, other legumes, some non leguminous forbs like, you know, amazingly enough, pine.
[00:02:29] Plantain is one that we can or even members of the brassica family, we will plant specifically for livestock. The what family? Brassicas. The cabbage family. Ah, thank you. Yeah so that's forages, agronomy those are the sciences to do with agricultural production, soils and plants so forage agronomy, that's that, ruminants are cows, sheep, goats, deer, buffalo, bison, there's a large number of these animals, they have the And The multi compartmented stomach with a population of microorganisms within the first part of that four chambered stomach, and those are the organisms that actually digest the starch sorry, the fiber, I was thinking one step ahead, the fiber in plant material.
[00:03:24] Cellulose. is plant fiber. It's glucose units linked together in one specific way, but no vertebrate animal makes cellulase. So this most abundant carbohydrate in the biosphere is not utilizable by us, but all these microbes free living. I'm going to, I'm going to stop you there. Translate that into English.
[00:03:50] Okay. Photosynthesis.
[00:03:52] Jack Heald: Assume that I don't know a whole lot of biology, science.
[00:03:59] Peter Ballerstedt: Fair enough. So photosynthesis, how plants grow, is the process of capturing the energy from sunlight and converting it into chemical energy. That process takes CO2, carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, water from the soil, produces oxygen as a byproduct, and carbohydrates, sugars, starches, okay?
[00:04:30] Those sugars get put together different ways. Glucose, specifically, gets put together one way. It makes Cellulose, fiber, you know, wood, paper, cotton. Okay, you hook it together a different way and it makes starch. Same subunits, same glucose. You're just bonding them together differently. But because of the bond that makes cellulose, needs the enzyme cellulase to break it apart.
[00:05:04] Okay. All right. But only microorganisms make cellulase. Okay.
[00:05:11] Jack Heald: And you said something about this most abundant form of carbohydrate on the planet. Yeah. Vertebrates, which I think for our purposes, we're talking about people
[00:05:22] Peter Ballerstedt: or you know, other mammals or birds or, yeah, exactly. Okay.
[00:05:29] Jack Heald: So the cellulose is, that's the plants we're talking
[00:05:33] Peter Ballerstedt: about.
[00:05:34] A large part, see plant cells have walls. I mean, sorry, you know, we, you know, animal cells don't, they have membranes. So the cells. I've never heard that. Welcome to my world. I've literally never heard that. Welcome to my world. Plant cells have walls.
[00:05:52] Jack Heald: Animal cells have membranes.
[00:05:54] Peter Ballerstedt: Yeah. Yeah. Plant cells are rigid, right?
[00:05:56] That's why I love this show. Yeah. Yeah. These microorganisms breaking down fiber then produce compounds that the cow or the sheep or what the host ruminant can then absorb. So they are this key link in the energy cycle, sunlight through plants to ruminants, then to us or other carnivores or scavengers, what have you.
[00:06:26] The ruminants are. critical links in the food supply. They're critical in all of the ecosystems in which they exist, and they exist from the Arctic through the tropics. So in desert biomes, you can find them everywhere. And not surprisingly, they're the largest group of domesticated animals that we've found a way to bring into our sphere of influence.
[00:06:55] So It's kind of tricky to domesticate a carnivore. It's almost,
[00:07:00] Dr. Phillip Ovadia: yeah, and it's almost like, you know, perhaps millions of years of evolution and or, you know, depending on your beliefs the system was created this way. and for us to try and fight that might not be the most intelligent thing to do.
[00:07:17] Peter Ballerstedt: Oh yeah, indeed. Think it was Dr. Jessica Thompson gave a presentation and she was describing the human predatory pattern. You know, the thing that makes humans unique among existing primates is we are the only existing primate that routinely kills and consumes animals larger than ourselves.
[00:07:43] Like chimps will kill other animals, but they tend to be smaller. And and then she described, you know, way back when you look at some of the Homo ancestors that were functioning as scavengers, you find long bones with marrow in them, and if the bone is intact, the marrow is protected from the environment.
[00:08:06] And so this clever little hominid came along and figured out with a rock, I can break this apart and get this really rich source of nutrition. She described it like finding a stick of butter in a landscape devoid of fat. Think about a grassland, which is where we're from long enough ago. Maybe you could find some small amount of seasonally available carbohydrate, some berries or fruit or maybe seeds from grasses or trees, nuts.
[00:08:39] But that was not a regular food supply. And so what was regularly available were the remains of kills of carnivores, and then given enough time, we developed the ability to hunt cooperatively. And so then we began consuming animal sourced products from outside the bones. So muscle, viscera. and that led to changes in us relative to other primates.
[00:09:13] All of that gets me away from my training, but it does reinforce the idea that, as I say humanity's roots are in the grasslands and our future will be there too.
[00:09:24] Dr. Phillip Ovadia: Going back to your training and your education, what,
[00:09:30] What were you intending to kind of do with this? It's obviously not a you know, you don't get too many middle school and high school students saying that they want to go into forage agronomy.
[00:09:42] What kind of led you down that pathway and what were your plans For when you completed your education.
[00:09:48] Peter Ballerstedt: I wish I could say I had a really concerted plan when I started, but that's just not the case. I grew up in suburban Philadelphia, lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania that area had already been converted from farmland to, you know, you know, housing tracts.
[00:10:04] But as I went along, I ended up through a long story in taking some agriculture classes. And that introduced me to this reality, and I was fascinated. And then I ended up taking transferring from upstate New York, University of Georgia, finished degree, I did another degree, was thinking about another project in a different at University of Kentucky.
[00:10:33] But before I got there, I was blessed enough to take a course in pasture ecology. And that completely changed what I wanted to do, and I was able to, still at University of Kentucky, work under a different professor and look at that. What I ended up doing after graduation was coming to the University of Oregon, sorry, oh my goodness, coming to Oregon State University, oh, and not that other one a little south of us no and I was the forage extension specialist there, and so I functioned in that space until 92 and left the university did some work for some other things, including a large stint at Hewlett Packard.
[00:11:20] I joke about their agronomic division, well known for their
[00:11:24] Jack Heald: work in agriculture.
[00:11:26] Peter Ballerstedt: Yeah, not. But it let me stay in this community where we were living. And so since 86, we've lived in the same house, which is kind of unique. 2011, I managed to get back into agriculture, working in the forage seed industry.
[00:11:42] And was able to do that and they allowed me to talk to metabolic health community events as well as going to beef and dairy and grassland to them about metabolic health. So I've been trying to be this bridge builder between those two primary communities of mine. I've served in the leadership of a national forage and grassland council.
[00:12:07] I'm on several international and national projects and I'm really quite interested in what needs to be done and could be done in this country, but also overseas. Because one of my lines is that humanity's existential crisis is insufficient animal source food in their diet.
[00:12:29] Jack Heald: That's not going to make you a lot of of friends in certain communities.
[00:12:34] I'm, I'd like to follow that trail, but the one I really, I think we should start with is it's not. A blindingly clear connection between ruminant, whatever the other word was that you did and metabolic health. I know there's a connection, but you, you kind of made a leap there and you got to close that gap for us.
[00:12:58] Peter Ballerstedt: How I will get to that in just a second, but I do want to share that. Way back at University of Georgia, we had this emeritus professor, he was a nutritionist, and he was trying to talk to us and saying, now what they're saying, and this would be in the like early 80s. You know, and he was saying, they don't quite have it right.
[00:13:24] And all us young people were like, Oh, what do you know? He's emeritus. He should have read. I wish I could make amends to him. He was trying to warn us in the best way that he could at the time. So what happened to me is what happens to many, right? I had a personal health experience. In 2007, I was a 51 year old balding obese pre diabetic.
[00:13:47] Today, I'm just balding. You know, it's a powerful therapeutic, but it's not a miracle. You know, it'll do many things. Can I get an amen brother? Amen. You know, that 2007, if you can think back to the landmark times, Gary, you know, good calories, bad calories was about to come out, you know, there were blogs and things online.
[00:14:15] protein power. was life plan was out, I believe. But I think I read protein power first. By this point, my wife was already five years onto this journey and she was smart enough to go, this is what I want to eat. What would you like to eat? And so I kind of fumbled around until I finally said, you know what I'm doing ain't working.
[00:14:34] What are you doing? And So that got me started. After reading Good Calories, Bad Calories, my initial reaction was to get mad because the industries that I was trained to serve had been unfairly, in my perspective, demonized, right? Slandered. They were the cause of all this chronic disease that we were seeing.
[00:15:01] We needed to eat less of the products of ruminant animal agriculture, full fat dairy, meat And then of course, there's the environmental question that comes in. I started in 2010 to just kind of talk about what I was learning about the metabolic health message. And I was also starting to show up at some of these events, and as I say, stalk some of the speakers at metabolic health conferences.
[00:15:28] I remember going to one in 2010. Seattle, which is five hours away from me. It was a joint meeting of the Nutrition Metabolism Society and the American Society of Bariatric Physicians. So I got to meet Eric Westman for the first time. You know, Michael Eads was there. I got to see Gary Taubes in person.
[00:15:49] I think I met Finney there, Steve Finney there. There were a bunch of others that that I met, including Adele Height, And that's a story we could talk about. And I, so I had been out of agriculture for a long time and they had this thing where they wanted you to identify yourself by name, location, specialty, if you got up to the mic to ask questions.
[00:16:13] The first dude up was somebody who had two talks and he shouldn't have had one by my perspective. He's just a, bad presenter and then his topic was impediments to better drugs for weight loss. Okay, I'm not a, I'm not a pharmacist. I'm not a human health, but he didn't do a good job. So he gets done and there's time for questions and I look and there's a I'm just going to put my microphone just right over there at the end of my table and nobody's at it.
[00:16:41] And I'm going like, okay. So I get up and play Stump the Speaker, which I hadn't done for years. And played with him for a few times, a little while. And what happened as a result of that was, and I identified myself as a forage agronomist. Which went over about as well as it did when we started. And that led to a series of questions throughout the rest of this three day conference, where I had these wonderful conversations with people.
[00:17:12] And that showed me that I knew things from my training that people in the medical realm would like to know. And so I've been trying to do that ever since. So it sounds like there
[00:17:25] Jack Heald: was a bit of kismet there. It was just the right background and the right moment all coming
[00:17:32] Peter Ballerstedt: together.
[00:17:34] Dr. Phillip Ovadia: And I can certainly attest that as little as nutrition comes up in medical school, forage agronomy is even lower on that list of what doesn't get taught in medical school, but probably should these days.
[00:17:48] You know, the magic ruminant animal which is now how I refer to them. And many of the ranchers that I have spoken to and I may have even heard you say this as well. But many of the ranchers identify themselves as grass farmers and their job is basically to grow good grass.
[00:18:10] For these ruminant animals to work their magic on or grasses, I should say, forage in general. So talk to us a little bit about, you know, what it is about the grass, the soil, the whole kind of ecosystem that then translates into the benefits that humans are going to get then from eating those ruminant animals.
[00:18:32] Peter Ballerstedt: Wow. Okay. The vast majority of what has been turned into agricultural land now, worldwide, was grassland to begin with. So think the, you know, Corn Belt, think Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, that was tall grass prairie. It had been in place for millennia, You had large herds of migratory animals. You had people who were managing those animals on the grasslands.
[00:19:05] The sod was so thick they built homes out of it. The sod was so thick that the plows they had wouldn't work. They had to invent an oven. a steel plow, an iron plow that would cut. And they said the sound of it cutting the roots made a sound like the ripping of cloth. And that's what protected this resource of topsoil.
[00:19:31] And top, you know, soil is that, you know, most precious thin layer between bare rock and air that allows all life on earth, let's at least say terrestrial life, although I think we could make a case for aquatic life as well, enables it, right? Because That's where we have nutrient cycling. That's where we have water being held.
[00:19:56] So plants then can colonize that space. So grasses, you know, we tend to have perennials. So these are plants that live for multiple years as opposed to annuals that only live one season. So they. tend to establish and live for long periods of time. Over these millennia, these communities of plants evolve, and so plants adapt to the environment that they're in, and they can withstand drought, or periodic fire, or this grazing pressure.
[00:20:29] In any case, we're still taking nutrients out of the soil and CO2 from the atmosphere were forming this material that, for humans, has very little food value. But when a ruminant animal eats it, the microbes in its rumen take that high fiber food and convert the fiber into small volatile fatty acids, small chain volatile fatty acids.
[00:21:05] So if I think of, if I take grass and I dry it down, I might have three, four percent ether extract, call that crude fat, okay, and it might have a nitrogen percent somewhere in the three, maybe four percent range. It's going to have some minerals in it but mostly it's going to be this fiber. I feed it to a ruminant animal as a complete diet, and the animal then ends up digesting 70 to 80 percent of its energy coming from the fat that was produced by the microbes that were breaking down the fiber.
[00:21:57] So the microbes are making all this fat that the animal can absorb. They're also taking whatever nitrogen was in the feed, And they're building microbial protein out of it, which then in the acidic stomach, the host animal digests. And so the end result is that there are, there's no such thing as an essential amino acid in a ruminants diet.
[00:22:29] Essentially, there's no such thing as an essential fatty acid in a ruminants diet.
[00:22:36] Jack Heald: They produce it themselves.
[00:22:38] Peter Ballerstedt: Exactly. Or the microbes do and then they take it and then they build up from there. I'm just, I'm,
[00:22:44] Jack Heald: I'm my, you know, the fact that I do not have a chemistry degree is going to show itself here, but I'm kind of blown away that these microbes can produce fat out of grass.
[00:22:56] Peter Ballerstedt: Yes. That just, that's,
[00:22:58] Jack Heald: I realize intellectually, I understand it's all just chemicals down at the base, but the fact that there's organisms that can turn grass into fat and protein, that just kind of blows my mind. I
[00:23:12] Peter Ballerstedt: realize it's very obvious, but let's line those up. Human beings have essential amino acids in their diet and they have essential fatty acids in their diet.
[00:23:22] Okay. Ruminants don't. There's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate in a human's diet. A ruminant has two forms that are required for its health. It has to have both cell wall and the carbohydrates that come in cell contents. So that would be sugar and starch and related compounds. You have to have both of those for the ruminant to function properly.
[00:23:45] So here you have these two organisms that live with non competitive Essential macronutrients. I just like that. Symbiotic relationship. Almost. Yeah. You know?
[00:23:58] You, you have that taking place. You have. the reality that across the world today all of the feed that goes into feeding all of the domesticated ruminant animals. Okay. 96%, 9, 6 percent of that total is not human edible. And it's actually a little bit more than that, but we don't need to quibble.
[00:24:30] We can say 96%. Something like 40% of all of the livestock feed. See that I've heard this said 40 percent of what's fed to livestock is waste from making people food. So when we process edible crops into some food product, we produce a lot of waste. If I grow corn or I grow wheat, over half of the biomass in that crop, so the above ground crop, over half of that is not human edible.
[00:25:09] I can feed it to a ruminant, and I would argue we're better off feeding the crop to the that's a different thing. So now we've got the essential amino acids being provided in their most digestible form in their proper ratio for human health and flourishing. So we start with a product that's low in protein quality.
[00:25:37] poor protein quality. High in fiber, low in fat. We feed it through a ruminant animal, and we end up with highest quality, nutrientally speaking, foods for human use. At the same time, in various parts of the world, something like over half of the nitrogen fertilizer that's used to grow human edible crops is coming from manure.
[00:26:03] Okay, so if people want to get rid of livestock, then you've got to replace a significant amount of fertilizer. Over half of the world's farmers still depend on draft animals, you know, things to, animals to haul carts or equipment or, you know, run around in circles to power things. So if you're going to get rid of livestock, what are you going to do to replace that?
[00:26:27] Of course, we don't just get meat and milk from livestock, we get a lot of other products that are used, leather you know, pharmaceuticals, all sorts of things. It's a significant source of livelihood for like three quarters of a million of the world's poorest, are herders or pastoralists. You know, we have these animals as a source of wealth in various places.
[00:26:54] So it's generating new wealth, you know, you you're creating this from existing resources. And so if I have an animal grazing out in a field, like 90 percent of what it consumes nutrient wise ends up back on the field. So you end up with this cycling of nutrients. And then when I ship that product to somewhere else, it ends up removing less than when I crop the field.
[00:27:26] And if I just look at something like phosphorus content, for example, but other nutrients as well, I'm providing it to the consumer in the most utilizable form. So specifically for phosphorus, the vast majority of the phosphorus in seeds, nuts, and legumes is not human utilizable. Because it's in phytate.
[00:27:50] And again, we don't produce phytase, so it ends up then as, you know, an environmental pollutant in the waste system, right? Because it, so maybe as we think more holistically about food systems and sustainable societies, we ought to think about what form we're providing the nutrients. In the next 30, what, years, you know, by 2050 26 years, good lord Seventy some percent of humanity is going to live in urban areas, so we're going to be shipping food from where it's produced to where the majority of humanity lives.
[00:28:28] This might be a consideration for people to think about. So there's a whole range of interest in something that's come to be called soil health. Soil conservation has been 30s in the United States. When we had the Dust Bowl which came as the result of favoring the production of wheat in an area of shortgrass prairie that shouldn't have been plowed, but I digest.
[00:28:52] So this We're finding out that in order to protect the soil, we need to keep growing plants on that soil for as much of the year as we can. We need a variety of plants growing so we have different roots in the soil exploiting different layers. We need to limit plowing or cultivation soil disturbance, and we're finding that when we introduce grazing animals, those benefits are increased.
[00:29:27] And so we've had this pattern of specialization in North America, where we went from mixed farms to I grow corn or, you know, I'm a cattleman. So you asked about the grass farming. There's a mindset difference that people who focus on, as you said, so well. The grass is my crop, but it doesn't Oregon's different.
[00:29:55] I need to be careful. This kind of grass doesn't have a sale market value, right? And there's a story about sitting at my table. The company I used to work for, they had a tagline on hats. that said got grass question mark and one day I was sitting there doing some work and there was a knock on the door and the county sheriff was saying some dog is reported loose do you know whose dog this is and he was looking at me kind of funny and I didn't know why until I sat down and go oh wow I've got the hat on in any case we're using the animals to manage the that resource as well as to convert it into a saleable product.
[00:30:35] Which had, you know, then I have some value for that. And you know, the cow's job is to harvest, the cow's job is to provide a live, unassisted birth, you know, every year. I want her to wean a live calf, you know, that's her job. My job is to make sure she's got the resources she needs to do that. It's one way I've heard it expressed.
[00:30:59] And so the management of the grass system. requires in many cases people to step away from thinking of themselves as, I'm a cattleman, or I'm a sheep man, or I'm a dairy man. And in other countries, That has happened sort of organically because that's how their systems develop. Think of New Zealand.
[00:31:26] They're very conscious of the grass base of their industry. In this country, because we had different resources in different situations, not so much. And it is one of the things that we need to get people more aware of. So can we kind of
[00:31:42] Jack Heald: get down to to brass tacks?
[00:31:45] Peter Ballerstedt: You've given us a lot of facts
[00:31:49] Jack Heald: that I'm sure are fairly inarguable,
[00:31:53] Peter Ballerstedt: but let's
[00:31:53] Jack Heald: convert it into what does that mean for us today?
[00:31:58] What are we what is the the myths that are floating around in the atmosphere that people have just. Un, uncritically accepted is true that are blatantly false. What do we do differently? What's your
[00:32:13] Peter Ballerstedt: prescription? Okay. Yeah, several and you mentioned air. So let's hit that one first.
[00:32:19] Cows are not destroying the planet. We can come back to that. Humanity's diet is already plant based going further into a plant based diet will not improve the health of any population. I am advocating that all populations need to eat more animal sourced food, not less. High, medium, low income countries.
[00:32:45] Oh, I think it was Cordain and colleagues in 2000 surveyed existing hunter gatherer societies and said, you know, how many calories are you getting from plants? How many calories are you getting from animals? And they came up with ranges from 100 percent animal source food to a minimum of 30%.
[00:33:05] And 30 was really a tail. It was really low down there. The mean was somewhere around 70, okay, percent of calories coming from animal source food. U. S. is 29.
[00:33:19] In 2020, some Nordhagen and colleagues published a paper stating that when populations go below 30 percent of calories from animal source foods, they see multiple, rapidly increasing deficiencies in micronutrients. And then View and colleagues in 2022 said that if you're not getting at least half of your protein from animal source protein, you're probably not meeting your non-protein nutrient requirements.
[00:33:58] If you're not getting half your protein from nutrition, your protein from animal
[00:34:05] Jack Heald: sources, from animal proteins, from animal sources, you're not getting the other stuff you need from any source. Did I translate that
[00:34:14] Peter Ballerstedt: correctly? Yeah, you're not meeting your requirements for these other nutrients from that diet.
[00:34:18] No matter what else you're doing. You know, we're in this highly processed, plant heavy diet in the U. S., let alone other countries. So those are things that make me go, wow, we really need to find a way to increase the productivity and efficiency of ruminant animal agriculture globally. And it's got to look different for a number of reasons, right?
[00:34:43] And it's got to be done in a way that protects. Or even enhances the environment in which it takes place. It's not going to merely be animal science and agronomy. There's a lot of politics and other things that are involved. But people have to get that vision. Because right now there's these competing visions that say, Oh, we eat too much.
[00:35:05] You can still find people who overnutrition. I mean, they describe it that way, as opposed to thinking of it as a manifestation of metabolic illness, which is produced by malnutrition, right? And so getting people to understand this is really critical. And that's one of the things that I want to find people to help me bring that message into these.
[00:35:29] I'm thinking largely well meaning, sincere, educated groups of people that are talking this way. So let's have those conversations until we find out different. So we have to have these animal source foods. Ruminant animal production offers ecological advantages over monogastric. animal source food production.
[00:35:54] I'm not anti pork. I'm not anti chicken or poultry or fish. I'm just saying. And there was a paper recently that said if you would switch animal source food from 12 percent replacement of ruminant products, replacing monogastric products. So let's say switch out 12 percent of your pork for beef globally, you would end up with a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
[00:36:27] Plus you'd free up resources to feed half a million people. No, not half a million, half a billion. Sorry.
[00:36:38] Dr. Phillip Ovadia: The, but the macro trends are actually going in the other direction. Our consumption of monogastric animals like chicken primarily you know, has been increasing while our ruminant consumption, you know, particularly beef has been decreasing at least here in the U S over the past, you know, half century or so.
[00:37:00] Peter Ballerstedt: Sure. And there's many reasons for that, but not the least is the reason to avoid red meat, right? I mean, price is a problem. Absolutely. But and convenience is another problem, you know, but all of those are addressable, but you have to kind of get at that underlying myth, mythology that led us to think that, you know, red meat was a health hazard you know, that animal fat disease that, you know, animal protein will melt your kidneys.
[00:37:31] I don't know. But so it's important for us to look at that. We have people who look at land use and they say, ah you know, if we weren't using all this land. to raise livestock, then we could grow this much more food. There's a couple errors in that thinking. Number one is, not all land that we run livestock on is suitable for producing human edible crops.
[00:38:04] The example I use is a soccer field, and if you think of the area within the overall boundary as the land area of the world, then if you think of the agricultural land, it would only go from one goal line, it wouldn't even reach the close edge of the center circle. So significantly less than half is agricultural land.
[00:38:31] If you think of the land that's suitable for tillage, we call it arable land. That's, that would only go from the goal line to the penalty spot within that 18 yard distance. penalty area. That's how much less arable land there is than agricultural land. So arable land is agricultural land, but not all agricultural land is arable.
[00:38:56] Okay. And the, there are other things that need to be brought in, you know, for every four pounds of vegan food, they produce a pound, sorry, for, sorry, for every pound of vegan food, they produce four pounds of. Of byproducts, inedible biomass. So upcycling that through livestock is a really good idea.
[00:39:22] We have in the Nebraska area, a whole lot of corn fields get grazed by cattle in the wintertime. fall and winter. So they're using that leftover crop material as a feed resource. You have people in the southern plains grazing winter wheat pastures, and at some point saying, do I want a wheat crop or not?
[00:39:47] And if they do, then they take the animals off at a certain time. And if they don't, they just graze it until it's dead. Here in Western Oregon, we grow a lot of grass seed. And so you'll see a lot of sheep. running on the seed fields in the wintertime to keep that biomass down, the grass mowed down essentially.
[00:40:09] So now we have this integration, the multiple use of a piece of land in one season. So people too often think of this either or thing, and it's far more complicated. If we look at water greenhouse gas emissions the prop, first of all, there was a study that was released years ago that dramatically overstated.
[00:40:34] It was retracted by its own authors, but it doesn't matter. It's one of those zombie myths that's out there. And you know, it
[00:40:42] Jack Heald: a lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.
[00:40:45] Peter Ballerstedt: There you go. So one of the, I've already described the photosynthetic. cycling of carbon. So let's now plug the cow into that.
[00:40:57] So we've formed this carbohydrate from CO2. We haven't, the plants did. And some portion of that carbohydrate gets burped out as methane. Okay. That methane in the atmosphere within 10 years gets oxidized to methane. CO2. So the CO2 goes through the plant, becomes carbohydrate, goes to the cow. Methane is emitted, gets oxidized in 10 years.
[00:41:28] Now we're back to the same CO2 that went in. So what that means is if we can keep. livestock numbers constant, there is no warming contribution. Contrast that with use of fossil fuels, or extraction of them seeps from natural sources, what have you. So that, when that methane is oxidized, now you have a relatively new CO2 molecule in the atmosphere.
[00:41:59] You're building up But people aren't talking about this properly. So What I've found over time is that all of the concerns can be addressed, but that gets us back to the point where I would, you know, look to somebody from the medical field and say, if it's true that eating a diet high in animal source food can reverse or halt or whatever the appropriate description is, this constellation of metabolic illness.
[00:42:38] Which is the driver of chronic illness, which is the driver of health care, and is bankrupting the nation and the world. Okay, what's its environmental footprint? What's it, so anytime we talk about sustainability, we have to talk about economic And societal factors, as well as environmental factors, and too often the environmental just gets boiled down to just greenhouse gas emissions, right?
[00:43:15] So we only focus on that one thing out of a group, which is only one of At least three groups. So we oversimplify the conversation, but we can go and find the estimate that said that the U. S. healthcare industry is a source of significant pollution, including 10 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in the U.
[00:43:43] S. 10, 1, 0. Can be,
[00:43:45] Jack Heald: can be traced directly to the U. S. healthcare industry?
[00:43:49] Peter Ballerstedt: That was what the paper said in its estimate. Wow. Now, the EPA puts out a sources and sinks budget, and so they, they bucket things differently. So it's not going to be an apples to apples comparison, but just to give you an idea of what's going on, land use change is the bucket in which agriculture goes along with forestry that comes in somewhere in the 11 percent range of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.
[00:44:24] Okay, that's all of it. Animal agriculture is four percent, beef is two percent. Okay, so that's what the EPA says. At the same time, they estimate that already today, the land, forestry, and agriculture is sequestering an amount of carbon equal to 12 percent of the total. So it's a net. Negative already today.
[00:44:52] Jack Heald: Consumer of CO2. It, it
[00:44:55] Peter Ballerstedt: is. Yes. Yes. That's a good consumer. So that's but they're talking about sequestration. And so as they get down in the weeds, they don't talk about the biomass that stays on the surface. That's going to rot in a year or something. I mean, they tend to think a little longer term than that.
[00:45:13] So when they did the health care estimate, they said, how much food do hospitals serve? You know, how much power do they use? How much transportation is involved, et cetera, et cetera. And that's how they came up with their number. So EPA, you know, buckets, transportation and energy and industry, and they do it differently.
[00:45:36] So I want to be clear. It's not an apples to apples. The point is, that it's there, it's a significant contributor. And we don't talk about it except typically it's with the if they just eat the way the, you know, dietary guidelines recommends, then everybody be healthier. And so that would make healthcare more sustainable.
[00:45:56] Okay. I would argue that.
[00:45:58] Jack Heald: We've already, we've already,
[00:46:00] Dr. Phillip Ovadia: never actually been demonstrated to be true, but we want to believe it
[00:46:05] Peter Ballerstedt: to be true.
[00:46:06] In fact,
[00:46:07] if I read the dietary guidelines, they will say something like, for the last three editions, there's been words, something to the effect of, not intended for the treatment of disease.
[00:46:20] So this agronomist translates that to eat this way. You won't get sick, but if you get sick, don't eat this way.
[00:46:32] Okay. Somebody else did a study of the pharmaceutical industry and they said that they were a higher intensity emitter than the automotive industry with greater variation across the industry. Then the automotive. Okay. So somebody else took those figures and they did the calculations and they said at the end of their estimate, they said if the average adult American with type two diabetes could eliminate their medication use, they would lower their carbon footprint 29 percent more than if they shifted from a high meat to a vegan diet.
[00:47:11] Jack Heald: You, what, one more time. If the, if a person.
[00:47:17] Peter Ballerstedt: If the average adult American with type 2 diabetes could eliminate their medication use, let's just speculate wildly that such a thing would even be possible. Yeah. That's sarcasm, right? Okay. So if that were achieved, they would end up lowering their carbon footprint 29 to 9 percent more.
[00:47:40] than if they shifted from a high meat to a vegan diet, and they have to stay on that diet for the rest of their life. That's always the assumption in all these conversations, right? And how many people stay on a, okay so we have that observe, suggestion, and then we can think of what's, what is the societal impact of people's lives being diminished by chronic disease, shortened lifespan.
[00:48:12] shortened health span, what's the, you know, the productivity losses you know, the generational issues of, you know, dying sooner than you need to die. So all of those I think can be built into a compelling picture of we need to be providing the human population a higher quality diet, higher plane of nutrition than it's currently being offered.
[00:48:42] And we can do this. And it's, it isn't even a scientific issue. This is the part where I just start pulling out what's left of my hair. It isn't a scientific issue. It's a political issue. It's, it, there are other issues at play here, and we have to get good at playing those games. But it's not, science didn't get us here.
[00:49:06] It's hard to imagine science being the solution at this point. And many of these things, I can go to my textbooks and pull them off and chapter and verse and they're okay, you want to argue with me? Don't argue with me. Argue, you know, it's, but in any case. How's that working for you? Is the question I learned to ask, right?
[00:49:27] So if you think that you can reverse your type 2 diabetes or metabolic syndrome following a vegan diet, I am all for you. Go forth and I hope that you learn some better metrics to measure, because I'm pretty convinced we haven't been given those until relatively recently. I would be concerned if you're trying to make a little human or raise a human, I'm reasonably certain that when you get to old fart stage like me that you can't do that because we get less efficient at utilizing nutrients.
[00:49:58] So we needed even higher quality diet than say a middle aged, you know, 20 or 30 year old man would do. need. Now a woman that would be different, she needs a higher quality diet, especially if she's going to try to make little human beings. But I mean, a fifth of children of women of childbearing age in the U.
[00:50:18] S. and U. K. are anemic. 20%. If I look globally, somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of children five and under are stunted. This is not, you know, only stature, it's also brain development. And this is acknowledged to come from a lack of the essential nutrients required for proper development that are best or solely provided by animal source foods.
[00:50:46] This is a shame and this is a scandal. It also, their diet is It aligns very well with what Eat Lancet recommends as a planetary diet. So the diet that we can see from looking at country data and looking at a map, we can see that the diet they recommend is the diet associated with the highest rate of stunting and the highest rate of mortality.
[00:51:10] And that's what they're recommending for human and planetary health, except when they're challenged, they admit that neither one of those is true. Details. It's a great story. So one might
[00:51:22] Dr. Phillip Ovadia: almost come to think that maybe human health isn't their primary interest.
[00:51:29] Peter Ballerstedt: Yeah, you know, misanthrope is a word that I think you know, anti human.
[00:51:36] There, there's a long history of people who see humans as the problem. And, you know, one of the, one of the points that I, you know, imagine 9 billion human brains properly nourished, communicating and cooperating. What problems don't you think they could solve? I just I think we have a really hopeful future.
[00:52:04] And that's part of what motivates me as well. You know, when you see what it could be, and what has been demonstrated. I mean, you know, the studies where they just intervene by giving school children one egg a day. Or, oh, so here's, wHO says that the best source of essential nutrients for children 24 months to 6 months to 24 months of age is meat, eggs, dairy, seafood.
[00:52:43] That's what WHO says. Hello, Professor Noakes. UNICEF says that 60 percent of children, 6 0 percent of children, 6 months to 24 months of age do not get meat, eggs, dairy, seafood. At all. That's what they say. So And part of me says, you know, whatever the rich Europeans want to do, you know, the people that were born on third base and think they hit a triple, fine, whatever.
[00:53:15] Let's go solve some problems here, which we can do. But unfortunately, a lot of what the, you know, the third base dwellers have instituted ripples down into the lower low and middle income countries. It influences policy. It influences lending. It influences what they can do to develop their resources.
[00:53:38] It's a modern day imperialism. And I think that's a shame and a scandal as well but again, but I digest let's get back to the topic. It's,
[00:53:52] Jack Heald: it's a little frustrating that the topic of how to be healthy, how to get healthy, stay healthy, raise healthy children ends up in the realm of politics. It just it's a kind of insanity that, that drives me nuts.
[00:54:14] Peter Ballerstedt: For me, it was a short commute. I was already in the neighborhood. But how do we, so again, back to the medical message, how many people even know that diabetes is reversible or do they believe it's chronic, progressive and curable? Do they know the link between insulin resistance and heart disease?
[00:54:33] You know, all of these for me, the mental health aspect, and again, we're now way out beyond the edge of my expertise, but I just find so much hope in this idea that many other research, researchers are bringing forward. So how many people know this? We need to get that better known. And then you're left with the decision, you know.
[00:54:56] This is crude and sometimes I can't help myself, but if it comes down to it, are you telling me that you're more concerned about what might happen to the earth in 2100 than you are about dying with all the toes you were born with? Really? Because I have more value, I value your life more than you do apparently.
[00:55:22] So what can we do to help you understand that's what's going on here? You know, the idea of women struggling with infertility and that being, you know, insulin resistance. And you think about what people are willing to go through, expense and trauma and all that. And it could be diet related?
[00:55:43] Yeah. Yeah. And why is that not the first thing offered when, now I'm just an agronomist, I don't know, but I sit in audiences and I listen to stories about people who say to their patients who are of childbearing age, if you do not want to become pregnant and you're not on contraception, you should get on contraception before you start this diet.
[00:56:07] Because it happened, it reverses so quickly that people get surprised. And then there's the physician that I listened to, she grew up in Mozambique, she was educated in Canada, she went back to Mozambique, she wanted to practice, couldn't, so she opened her own clinic, she was working with women were very happy, but then she heard that there were women in the community saying, don't go to her, she'll get you pregnant.
[00:56:33] Because you had 30 some year old women who thought they were done having children, weren't necessarily upset with that idea, and found out that they weren't. Because this condition was addressed so quickly. My experience in talking to my colleagues. And the producers that I was trained to serve, and the communities I was trained to serve, they don't know this stuff.
[00:57:01] And so I'm like, why did it have to be a forage agronomist that brought you this news? You know, what's up here? I don't get it. That's something that we can push. In Las Vegas next week, I have a proposal to get people involved, but let's see what we can all do to multiply the personal experience.
[00:57:22] I mean, Doc, that's what happened for you, right? It's what, I mean, how did you first hear about therapeutic carbohydrate reduction as a. Yeah. So my
[00:57:36] Dr. Phillip Ovadia: introduction to it was through Gary Taubes. And but I have oftentimes commented you know, how much I've learned from the engineers and computer scientists.
[00:57:46] And now I'm going to add to that and the forage agronomists about, you know, heart disease that I didn't learn from my medical colleagues. So I think we certainly need to continue spreading this message. And, you know, I am encouraged, as I know you are in seeing the growth and seeing, you know, how the message has spread over, you know, the past just few years.
[00:58:13] And ultimately I, like you, believe that humanity does have the power to solve this and will solve this. And we just have to start paying attention to the obvious information that's in front of us is the way that I look at it. And the harder you, you know, the more effort that it takes from politicians and such.
[00:58:36] to convince us about the other you know, take on this, I guess you could say. The more obvious it becomes what a false, you know, argument they're putting forward. So I think you know, thanks to you know, your leadership, thanks to so many others. We are getting there and we are starting to turn the ship around and I think ultimately we're going to continue to do
[00:59:01] Peter Ballerstedt: This
[00:59:01] Jack Heald: has been I mean, I literally learned something that I can't believe I've never, ever heard before about the difference between animal cells and plant cells, but more than that, just looking at the whole issue of metabolic health from the standpoint of where these ruminants cows and such live inside this circle of life where we all dwell and how they contribute and keep, help keep us healthy and we help keep them healthy.
[00:59:33] It's been great stuff and I suspected it would be, but. Thanks for following through, Peter. Thanks for keeping me intrigued rather than bored. It's just amazing.
[00:59:46] Peter Ballerstedt: I'm so glad to have the opportunity. It's nice to spend some time. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to do that in person over some coffee sometime.
[00:59:54] And yeah, keep in touch if anyone has questions. I share. You know, I, I share references, I make introductions I'll close with one thing. There's a meat scientist. Did you know that there is such a thing as meat science? There's a meat scientist. There's porridge agronomy you know.
[01:00:13] He's at North Dakota State University. He formulated a diet for growing pigs to emulate What N. Haynes says the macronutrient composition of the U. S. diet is. The attending veterinarian stopped it early because it was inhumane.
[01:00:37] Wow. Did you hear
[01:00:39] Jack Heald: that folks? Yeah. Did you hear that? It's inhumane to feed pig,
[01:00:45] Peter Ballerstedt: excuse me, to feed pigs
[01:00:47] Jack Heald: the diet that the average American lives on. It's inhumane. Wow. All right. Let's talk about how folks can learn more.
[01:00:58] Peter Ballerstedt: All over social media. If you find another Ballersted out there, he probably can let me know.
[01:01:03] Cause I don't know about him. There's not that many of us. You can find me grass based on Twitter and on Instagram. That's one word. You can find me on Facebook by name. I also have a grass based health page. You can find ruminati. substack. com and lots of videos on YouTube. And my email is peter.
[01:01:23] Jack Heald: No. Don't give out don't give out email. Don't do that. Bad plan. Bad plan? Really bad plan. Okay.
[01:01:29] Peter Ballerstedt: We won't do that
[01:01:30] Jack Heald: then. Yeah. If people really want to find you, they can do all the other stuff and end up with the email. All right. We'll make sure all that contact information shows up in the show notes.
[01:01:40] Folks, this has been the very first ruminant agronomist we've had. And quite possibly maybe the only one in the world.
[01:01:48] Peter Ballerstedt: Oh, no, I can. No, I can introduce you to lots,
[01:01:52] Jack Heald: but also a metabolic health specialist. Yeah. Okay. Very good. Very good. Phil, close it out for us, man.
[01:02:00] Dr. Phillip Ovadia: Yeah. Thank you, Peter. And certainly look forward to again, sharing a cup of coffee and a steak with you sometime soon.
[01:02:08] And maybe we'll continue this conversation with the round two sometime in the future.
[01:02:13] Peter Ballerstedt: I would welcome that. And if I can do anything to help you alleviate people's concerns, please don't hesitate to contact me.
[01:02:22] Jack Heald: Fantastic. For Dr. Philip Ovedia and Peter Ballerstedt, this has been the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast, and we will talk to y'all next time.
[01:02:36]
[01:02:54]
[01:02:54] Jack Heald: Welcome back folks. It is the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast with Dr. Philip Ovedia. I'm Jack Hield. And we are joined today by a man who's Professional work is something I didn't even know existed until I started doing the research. As I've learned, Phil from many of the guests you've found for the show, just because my first impression of, Oh God, this is going to be boring.
[01:03:24] That happens often most of the time. Really all the time I've been shocked at how interesting all of this is. So I'm really looking forward to this one. Introduce our guest. Very good. I can guarantee you this one isn't going to be boring. This is a guest who I've had. I've wanted to have on actually for quite a while.
[01:03:43] I've been fortunate to share the stage with him at a couple of events and have really learned a lot from him about areas that I didn't even know I needed to know about but that are really integral to our health. Very excited to have the illustrious, I'm going to say, Peter Vallistead with us today known in many circles as the sod father.
[01:04:06] And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Peter to give a little bit of his background to our audience. And I'm excited to get into this conversation. I'm really glad to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you for the work that you're doing. Full disclosure. I've been given the title of Don Pedro, Sodfather of the Ruminati.
[01:04:27] Now that we've been formally introduced my background is I'm a forage agronomist and a ruminant nutritionist. I may have to come back and Define those. Yes. Okay. I'm glad you asked. Forages are those plants that are grown to be eaten by livestock. You could think of them as pasture, hay, silage, grasses, clovers, other legumes, some non leguminous forbs like, you know, amazingly enough, pine.
[01:04:58] Plantain is one that we can or even members of the brassica family, we will plant specifically for livestock. The what family? Brassicas. The cabbage family. Ah, thank you. Yeah so that's forages, agronomy those are the sciences to do with agricultural production, soils and plants so forage agronomy, that's that, ruminants are cows, sheep, goats, deer, buffalo, bison, there's a large number of these animals, they have plants, The multi compartmented stomach with a population of microorganisms within the first part of that four chambered stomach, and those are the organisms that actually digest the starch sorry, the fiber, I was thinking one step ahead, the fiber in plant material.
[01:05:53] Cellulose. is plant fiber. It's glucose units linked together in one specific way, but no vertebrate animal makes cellulase. So this most abundant carbohydrate in the biosphere is not utilizable by us, but all these microbes free living. I'm going to, I'm going to stop you there. Translate that into English.
[01:06:20] Okay. Photosynthesis. Assume that I don't know a whole lot of biology, science. Fair enough. So photosynthesis, how plants grow, is the process of capturing the energy from sunlight and converting it into chemical energy. That process takes CO2, carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, water from the soil, produces oxygen as a byproduct, and carbohydrates, sugars, starches, okay?
[01:07:00] Those sugars get put together different ways. Glucose, specifically, gets put together one way. It makes Cellulose, fiber, you know, wood, paper, cotton. Okay, you hook it together a different way and it makes starch. Same subunits, same glucose. You're just bonding them together differently. But because of the bond that makes cellulose, needs the enzyme cellulase to break it apart.
[01:07:34] Okay. All right. But only microorganisms make cellulase. Okay. And you said something about this most abundant form of carbohydrate on the planet. Yeah. Vertebrates, which I think for our purposes, we're talking about people or you know, other mammals or birds or, yeah, exactly. Okay. So the cellulose is, that's the plants we're talking about.
[01:08:03] A large part, see plant cells have walls. I mean, sorry, you know, we, you know, animal cells don't, they have membranes. So the cells. I've never heard that. Welcome to my world. I've literally never heard that. Welcome to my world. Plant cells have walls. Animal cells have membranes. Yeah. Yeah. Plant cells are rigid, right?
[01:08:26] That's why I love this show. Yeah. Yeah. These microorganisms breaking down fiber then produce compounds that the cow or the sheep or what the host ruminant can then absorb. So they are this key link in the energy cycle, sunlight through plants to ruminants, then to us or other carnivores or scavengers, what have you.
[01:08:55] The ruminants are. critical links in the food supply. They're critical in all of the ecosystems in which they exist, and they exist from the Arctic through the tropics. So in desert biomes, you can find them everywhere. And not surprisingly, they're the largest group of domesticated animals that we've found a way to bring into our sphere of influence.
[01:09:24] So It's kind of tricky to domesticate a carnivore. It's almost, yeah, and it's almost like, you know, perhaps millions of years of evolution and or, you know, depending on your beliefs the system was created this way. and for us to try and fight that might not be the most intelligent thing to do.
[01:09:46] Oh yeah, indeed. Think it was Dr. Jessica Thompson gave a presentation and she was describing the human predatory pattern. You know, the thing that makes humans unique among existing primates is we are the only existing primate that routinely kills and consumes animals larger than ourselves.
[01:10:12] Like chimps will kill other animals, but they tend to be smaller. And and then she described, you know, way back when you look at some of the Homo ancestors that were functioning as scavengers, you find long bones with marrow in them, and if the bone is intact, the marrow is protected from the environment.
[01:10:35] And so this clever little hominid came along and figured out with a rock, I can break this apart and get this really rich source of nutrition. She described it like finding a stick of butter in a landscape devoid of fat. Think about a grassland, which is where we're from long enough ago. Maybe you could find some small amount of seasonally available carbohydrate, some berries or fruit or maybe seeds from grasses or trees, nuts.
[01:11:08] But that was not a regular food supply. And so what was regularly available were the remains of kills of carnivores, and then given enough time, we developed the ability to hunt cooperatively. And so then we began consuming animal sourced products from outside the bones. So muscle, viscera. and that led to changes in us relative to other primates.
[01:11:42] All of that gets me away from my training, but it does reinforce the idea that, as I say humanity's roots are in the grasslands and our future will be there too. Going back to your training and your education, what what were you intending to kind of do with this? It's obviously not a you know, you don't get too many middle school and high school students saying that they want to go into forage agronomy.
[01:12:11] What kind of led you down that pathway and what were your plans For when you completed your education. I wish I could say I had a really concerted plan when I started, but that's just not the case. I grew up in suburban Philadelphia, lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania that area had already been converted from farmland to, you know, you know, housing tracts.
[01:12:34] But as I went along, I ended up through a long story in taking some agriculture classes. And that introduced me to this reality, and I was fascinated. And then I ended up taking transferring from upstate New York, University of Georgia, finished degree, I did another degree, was thinking about another project in a different at University of Kentucky.
[01:13:03] But before I got there, I was blessed enough to take a course in pasture ecology. And that completely changed what I wanted to do, and I was able to, still at University of Kentucky, work under a different professor and look at that. What I ended up doing after graduation was coming to the University of Oregon, sorry, oh my goodness, coming to Oregon State University, oh, and not that other one a little south of us no and I was the forage extension specialist there, and so I functioned in that space until 92 and left the university did some work for some other things, including a large stint at Hewlett Packard.
[01:13:50] I joke about their agronomic division, well known for their work in agriculture. Yeah, not. But it let me stay in this community where we were living. And so since 86, we've lived in the same house, which is kind of unique. 2011, I managed to get back into agriculture, working in the forage seed industry.
[01:14:11] And was able to do that and they allowed me to talk to metabolic health community events as well as going to beef and dairy and grassland meetings and talk to them about metabolic health. So I've been trying to be this bridge builder between those two primary communities of mine. I've served in the leadership of a national forage and grassland council.
[01:14:38] I'm on several international and national projects, and I'm really quite interested in what. To be done and can be done in this country but also overseas. Because one of my lines is that humanity's existential crisis is insufficient animal source food in their diet. That's not going to make you a lot of of friends in certain communities.
[01:15:04] I'd like to follow that trail but the one I really, I, I think we should start with is it's not A blindingly clear connection between ruminant, whatever the other word was that you did and metabolic health. I know there's a connection, but you, you kind of made a leap there and you got to close that gap for us.
[01:15:29] How I will get to that in just a second, but I do want to share that. I remember. Way back at University of Georgia, we had this emeritus professor, he was a nutritionist, and he was trying to talk to us and saying, now what they're saying, and this would be in the like early 80s. You know, and he was saying, they don't quite have it right.
[01:15:55] And all us young people were like, Oh, what do you know? He's emeritus. He should have read. I wish I could make amends to him. He was trying to warn us in the best way that he could at the time. So what happened to me is what happens to many, right? I had a personal health experience. In 2007, I was a 51 year old balding obese pre diabetic.
[01:16:18] Today, I'm just balding. You know, it's a powerful therapeutic, but it's not a miracle. You know, it'll do many things. Can I get an amen brother? Amen. You know, that 2007, if you can think back to the landmark times, Gary, you know, good calories, bad calories was about to come out. You know, there were blogs and things online protein power.
[01:16:47] was life plan was out, I believe. But I think I read protein power first. By this point, my wife was already five years onto this journey and she was smart enough to go, this is what I want to eat. What would you like to eat? And so I kind of fumbled around until I finally said, you know what I'm doing ain't working.
[01:17:05] What are you doing? And So that got me started. After reading Good Calories, Bad Calories, my initial reaction was to get mad because the industries that I was trained to serve had been unfairly, in my perspective, demonized, right? Slandered. They were the cause of all this chronic disease that we were seeing.
[01:17:32] We needed to eat less of the products of ruminant animal agriculture, full fat dairy, meat And then of course, there's the environmental question that comes in. I started in 2010 to just kind of talk about what I was learning about the metabolic health message. And I was also starting to show up at some of these events, and as I say, stalk some of the speakers at metabolic health conferences.
[01:17:58] I remember going to one in 2010. Seattle, which is five hours away from me. It was a joint meeting of the Nutrition Metabolism Society and the American Society of Bariatric Physicians. So I got to meet Eric Westman for the first time. You know, Michael Eads was there. I got to see Gary Taubes in person.
[01:18:19] I think I met Finney there, Steve Finney there. There were a bunch of others that that I met, including Adele Height, And that's a story we could talk about. And I, so I had been out of agriculture for a long time and they had this thing where they wanted you to identify yourself by name, location, specialty, if you got up to the mic to ask questions.
[01:18:43] The first dude up was somebody who had two talks and he shouldn't have had one by my perspective. He's just a, bad presenter and then his topic was impediments to better drugs for weight loss. Okay, I'm not a, I'm not a pharmacist. I'm not a human health, but he didn't do a good job. So he gets done and there's time for questions and I look and there's a I have a microphone just right over there at the end of my table and nobody's at it and I'm going like, okay.
[01:19:13] So I get up and play Stump the Speaker, which I hadn't done for years and played with him for a few times, a little while. And what happened as a result of that was, and I identified myself as a forage agronomist, which went over about as well as it did when we started. And that led to a series of questions throughout the rest of this three day conference, where I had these wonderful conversations with people.
[01:19:42] And that showed me that I knew things from my training that people in the medical realm would like to know. And so I've been trying to do that ever since. So it sounds like there was a bit of kismet there. It was just the right background and the right moment all coming together. And I can certainly attest that as little as nutrition comes up in medical school, forage agronomy is even lower on that list of what doesn't get taught in medical school, but probably should these days.
[01:20:19] You know, the magic ruminant animal which is now how I refer to them. And many of the ranchers that I have spoken to and I may have even heard you say this as well. But many of the ranchers identify themselves as grass farmers and their job is basically to grow good grass.
[01:20:40] For these ruminant animals to work their magic on or grasses, I should say, forage in general. So talk to us a little bit about, you know, what it is about the grass, the soil, the whole kind of ecosystem that then translates into the benefits that humans are going to get then from eating those ruminant animals.
[01:21:02] Wow. Okay. The vast majority of what has been turned into agricultural land now, worldwide, was grassland to begin with. So think the, you know, Corn Belt, think Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, that was tall grass prairie. It had been in place for millennia, You had large herds of migratory animals. You had people who were managing those animals on the grasslands.
[01:21:36] The sod was so thick they built homes out of it. The sod was so thick that the plows they had wouldn't work. They had to invent an oven. a steel plow, an iron plow that would cut. And they said the sound of it cutting the roots made a sound like the ripping of cloth. And that's what protected this resource of topsoil.
[01:22:02] And top, you know, soil is that, you know, most precious thin layer between bare rock and air that allows all life on earth, let's at least say terrestrial life, although I think we could make a case for aquatic life as well, enables it, right? Because That's where we have nutrient cycling. That's where we have water being held.
[01:22:26] So plants then can colonize that space. So grasses, you know, we tend to have perennials. So these are plants that live for multiple years as opposed to annuals that only live one season. So they. tend to establish and live for long periods of time. Over these millennia, these communities of plants evolve, and so plants adapt to the environment that they're in, and they can withstand drought, or periodic fire, or this grazing pressure.
[01:22:59] In any case, we're still taking nutrients out of the soil and CO2 from the atmosphere were forming this material that, for humans, has very little food value. But when a ruminant animal eats it, the microbes in its rumen take that high fiber food and convert the fiber into small volatile fatty acids, small chain volatile fatty acids.
[01:23:36] So if I think of, if I take grass and I dry it down, I might have three, four percent ether extract, call that crude fat, okay, and it might have a nitrogen percent somewhere in the three, maybe four percent range. It's going to have some minerals in it but mostly it's going to be this fiber. I feed it to a ruminant animal as a complete diet, and the animal then ends up digesting 70 to 80 percent of its energy coming from the fat that was produced by the microbes that were breaking down the fiber.
[01:24:27] So the microbes are making all this fat that the animal can absorb. They're also taking whatever nitrogen was in the feed, And they're building microbial protein out of it, which then in the acidic stomach, the host animal digests. And so the end result is that there are, there's no such thing as an essential amino acid in a ruminants diet.
[01:25:00] Essentially, there's no such thing as an essential fatty acid in a ruminants diet. They produce it themselves. Exactly. Or the microbes do and then they take it and then they build up from there. I'm just I'm my, you know, the fact that I do not have a chemistry degree is going to show itself here, but I'm kind of blown away that these microbes can produce fat out of grass.
[01:25:26] Yes. That just, that's, I realize intellectually, I understand it's all just chemicals down at the base, but the fact that there's organisms that can turn grass into fat and protein, that just kind of blows my mind. I realize it's very obvious, but let's line those up. Human beings have essential amino acids in their diet and they have essential fatty acids in their diet.
[01:25:52] Okay. Ruminants don't. There's no such thing as an essential carbohydrate in a human's diet. A ruminant has two forms that are required for its health. It has to have both cell wall and the carbohydrates that come in cell contents. So that would be sugar and starch and related compounds. You have to have both of those for the ruminant to function properly.
[01:26:15] So here you have these two organisms that live with non competitive Essential macronutrients. I just like that. Symbiotic relationship. Almost. Yeah. You know?
[01:26:28] You, you have that taking place. You have. the reality that across the world today all of the feed that goes into feeding all of the domesticated ruminant animals. Okay. 96%, 9, 6 percent of that total is not human edible. And it's actually a little bit more than that, but we don't need to quibble.
[01:27:00] We can say 96%. Something like 40% of all of the livestock feed. See that I've heard this said 40 percent of what's fed to livestock is waste from making people food. So when we process edible crops into some food product, we produce a lot of waste. If I grow corn or I grow wheat, over half of the biomass in that crop, so the above ground crop, over half of that is not human edible.
[01:27:39] I can feed it to a ruminant, and I would argue we're better off feeding the crop to the that's a different thing. So now we've got the essential amino acids being provided in their most digestible form in their proper ratio for human health and flourishing. So we start with a product that's low in protein quality.
[01:28:07] poor protein quality. High in fiber, low in fat. We feed it through a ruminant animal, and we end up with highest quality, nutrientally speaking, foods for human use. At the same time, in various parts of the world, something like over half of the nitrogen fertilizer that's used to grow human edible crops is coming from manure.
[01:28:33] Okay, so if people want to get rid of livestock, then you've got to replace a significant amount of fertilizer. Over half of the world's farmers still depend on draft animals, you know, things to, animals to haul carts or equipment or, you know, run around in circles to power things. So if you're going to get rid of livestock, what are you going to do to replace that?
[01:28:57] Of course, we don't just get meat and milk from livestock, we get a lot of other products that are used, leather you know, pharmaceuticals, all sorts of things. It's a significant source of livelihood for like three quarters of a million of the world's poorest, are herders or pastoralists. You know, we have these animals as a source of wealth in various places.
[01:29:25] So it's generating new wealth, you know, you you're creating this from existing resources. And so if I have an animal grazing out in a field, like 90 percent of what it consumes nutrient wise ends up back on the field. So you end up with this cycling of nutrients. And then when I ship that product to somewhere else, it ends up removing less than when I crop the field.
[01:29:56] And if I just look at something like phosphorus content, for example, but other nutrients as well, I'm providing it to the consumer in the most utilizable form. So specifically for phosphorus, the vast majority of the phosphorus in seeds, nuts, and legumes is not human utilizable. Because it's in phytate.
[01:30:20] And again, we don't produce phytase, so it ends up then as, you know, an environmental pollutant in the waste system, right? Because it, so maybe as we think more holistically about food systems and sustainable societies, we ought to think about what form we're providing the nutrients. In the next 30, what, years, you know, by 2050 26 years, good lord Seventy some percent of humanity is going to live in urban areas, so we're going to be shipping food from where it's produced to where the majority of humanity lives.
[01:30:58] This might be a consideration for people to think about. So there's a whole range of interest in something that's come to be called soil health. Soil conservation has been 30s in the United States. When we had the Dust Bowl which came as the result of favoring the production of wheat in an area of shortgrass prairie that shouldn't have been plowed, but I digest.
[01:31:22] So this We're finding out that in order to protect the soil, we need to keep growing plants on that soil for as much of the year as we can. We need a variety of plants growing so we have different roots in the soil exploiting different layers. We need to limit plowing or cultivation soil disturbance, and we're finding that when we introduce grazing animals, those benefits are increased.
[01:31:57] And so we've had this pattern of specialization in North America, where we went from mixed farms to I grow corn or, you know, I'm a cattleman. So you asked about the grass farming. There's a mindset difference that people who focus on, as you said, so well. The grass is my crop, but it doesn't Oregon's different.
[01:32:26] I need to be careful. This kind of grass doesn't have a sale market value, right? And there's a story about sitting at my table. The company I used to work for, they had a tagline on hats. that said got grass question mark and one day I was sitting there doing some work and there was a knock on the door and the county sheriff was saying some dog is reported loose do you know whose dog this is and he was looking at me kind of funny and I didn't know why until I sat down and go oh wow I've got the hat on in any case we're using the animals to manage the that resource as well as to convert it into a saleable product.
[01:33:05] Which had, you know, then I have some value for that. And you know, the cow's job is to harvest, the cow's job is to provide a live, unassisted birth, you know, every year. I want her to wean a live calf, you know, that's her job. My job is to make sure she's got the resources she needs to do that. It's one way I've heard it expressed.
[01:33:29] And so the management of the grass system. requires in many cases people to step away from thinking of themselves as, I'm a cattleman, or I'm a sheep man, or I'm a dairy man. And in other countries, That has happened sort of organically because that's how their systems develop. Think of New Zealand.
[01:33:56] They're very conscious of the grass base of their industry. In this country, because we had different resources in different situations, not so much. And it is one of the things that we need to get people more aware of. So can we kind of get down to to brass tacks? You've given us a lot of facts that I'm sure are fairly inarguable, but let's convert it into what does that mean for us today?
[01:34:28] What are we what is the the myths that are floating around in the atmosphere that people have just. Un, uncritically accepted is true that are blatantly false. What do we do differently? What's your prescription? Okay. Yeah, several and you mentioned air. So let's hit that one first.
[01:34:49] Cows are not destroying the planet. We can come back to that. Humanity's diet is already plant based going further into a plant based diet will not improve the health of any population. I am advocating that all populations need to eat more animal sourced food, not less. High, medium, low income countries.
[01:35:15] Oh, I think it was Cordain and colleagues in 2000 surveyed existing hunter gatherer societies and said, you know, how many calories are you getting from plants? How many calories are you getting from animals? And they came up with ranges from 100 percent animal source food to a minimum of 30%.
[01:35:35] And 30 was really a tail. It was really low down there. The mean was somewhere around 70, okay, percent of calories coming from animal source food. U. S. is 29.
[01:35:49] In 2020, some Nordhagen and colleagues published a paper stating that when populations go below 30 percent of calories from animal source foods, they see multiple, rapidly increasing deficiencies in micronutrients. And then View and colleagues in 2022 said that if you're not getting at least half of your protein from animal source protein, you're probably not meeting your non-protein nutrient requirements.
[01:36:28] If you're not getting half your protein from nutrition, your protein from animal sources, from animal proteins, from animal sources, you're not getting the other stuff you need from any source. Did I translate that correctly? Yeah, you're not meeting your requirements for these other nutrients from that diet.
[01:36:48] No matter what else you're doing. You know, we're in this highly processed, plant heavy diet in the U. S., let alone other countries. So those are things that make me go, wow, we really need to find a way to increase the productivity and efficiency of ruminant animal agriculture globally. And it's got to look different for a number of reasons, right?
[01:37:13] And it's got to be done in a way that protects. Or even enhances the environment in which it takes place. It's not going to merely be animal science and agronomy. There's a lot of politics and other things that are involved. But people have to get that vision. Because right now there's these competing visions that say, Oh, we eat too much.
[01:37:35] You can still find people who overnutrition. I mean, they describe it that way, as opposed to thinking of it as a manifestation of metabolic illness, which is produced by malnutrition, right? And so getting people to understand this is really critical. And that's one of the things that I want to find people to help me bring that message into these.
[01:37:59] I'm thinking largely well meaning, sincere, educated groups of people that are talking this way. So let's have those conversations until we find out different. So we have to have these animal source foods. Ruminant animal production offers ecological advantages over monogastric. animal source food production.
[01:38:24] I'm not anti pork. I'm not anti chicken or poultry or fish. I'm just saying. And there was a paper recently that said if you would switch animal source food from 12 percent replacement of ruminant products, replacing monogastric products. So let's say switch out 12 percent of your pork for beef globally, you would end up with a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
[01:38:57] Plus you'd free up resources to feed half a million people. No, not half a million, half a billion. Sorry. The, but the macro trends are actually going in the other direction. Our consumption of monogastric animals like chicken primarily you know, has been increasing while our ruminant consumption, you know, particularly beef has been decreasing at least here in the U S over the past, you know, half century or so.
[01:39:30] Sure. And there's many reasons for that, but not the least is the reason to avoid red meat, right? I mean, price is a problem. Absolutely. But and convenience is another problem, you know, but all of those are addressable, but you have to kind of get at that underlying myth, mythology that led us to think that, you know, red meat was a health hazard you know, that animal fat disease that, you know, animal protein will melt your kidneys.
[01:40:01] I don't know. But so it's important for us to look at that. We have people who look at land use and they say, ah you know, if we weren't using all this land. to raise livestock, then we could grow this much more food. There's a couple errors in that thinking. Number one is, not all land that we run livestock on is suitable for producing human edible crops.
[01:40:34] The example I use is a soccer field, and if you think of the area within the overall boundary as the land area of the world, then if you think of the agricultural land, it would only go from one goal line, it wouldn't even reach the close edge of the center circle. So significantly less than half is agricultural land.
[01:41:01] If you think of the land that's suitable for tillage, we call it arable land. That's, that would only go from the goal line to the penalty spot within that 18 yard distance. penalty area. That's how much less arable land there is than agricultural land. So arable land is agricultural land, but not all agricultural land is arable.
[01:41:26] Okay. And the, there are other things that need to be brought in, you know, for every four pounds of vegan food, they produce a pound, sorry, for, sorry, for every pound of vegan food, they produce four pounds of. Of byproducts, inedible biomass. So upcycling that through livestock is a really good idea.
[01:41:52] We have in the Nebraska area, a whole lot of corn fields get grazed by cattle in the wintertime. fall and winter. So they're using that leftover crop material as a feed resource. You have people in the southern plains grazing winter wheat pastures, and at some point saying, do I want a wheat crop or not?
[01:42:17] And if they do, then they take the animals off at a certain time. And if they don't, they just graze it until it's dead. Here in Western Oregon, we grow a lot of grass seed. And so you'll see a lot of sheep. running on the seed fields in the wintertime to keep that biomass down, the grass mowed down essentially.
[01:42:39] So now we have this integration, the multiple use of a piece of land in one season. So people too often think of this either or thing, and it's far more complicated. If we look at water greenhouse gas emissions the prop, first of all, there was a study that was released years ago that dramatically overstated.
[01:43:04] It was retracted by its own authors, but it doesn't matter. It's one of those zombie myths that's out there. And you know, it a lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on. There you go. So one of the, I've already described the photosynthetic. cycling of carbon. So let's now plug the cow into that.
[01:43:27] So we've formed this carbohydrate from CO2. We haven't, the plants did. And some portion of that carbohydrate gets burped out as methane. Okay. That methane in the atmosphere within 10 years gets oxidized to methane. CO2. So the CO2 goes through the plant, becomes carbohydrate, goes to the cow. Methane is emitted, gets oxidized in 10 years.
[01:43:59] Now we're back to the same CO2 that went in. So what that means is if we can keep. livestock numbers constant, there is no warming contribution. Contrast that with use of fossil fuels, or extraction of them seeps from natural sources, what have you. So that, when that methane is oxidized, now you have a relatively new CO2 molecule in the atmosphere.
[01:44:29] You're building up But people aren't talking about this properly. So What I've found over time is that all of the concerns can be addressed, but that gets us back to the point where I would, you know, look to somebody from the medical field and say, if it's true that eating a diet high in animal source food can reverse or halt or whatever the appropriate description is, this constellation of metabolic illness.
[01:45:08] Which is the driver of chronic illness, which is the driver of health care, and is bankrupting the nation and the world. Okay, what's its environmental footprint? What's it, so anytime we talk about sustainability, we have to talk about economic And societal factors, as well as environmental factors, and too often the environmental just gets boiled down to just greenhouse gas emissions, right?
[01:45:45] So we only focus on that one thing out of a group, which is only one of At least three groups. So we oversimplify the conversation, but we can go and find the estimate that said that the U. S. healthcare industry is a source of significant pollution, including 10 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in the U.
[01:46:13] S. 10, 1, 0. Can be traced directly to the U. S. healthcare industry? That was what the paper said in its estimate. Wow. Now, the EPA puts out a sources and sinks budget, and so they, they bucket things differently. So it's not going to be an apples to apples comparison, but just to give you an idea of what's going on, land use change is the bucket in which agriculture goes along with forestry that comes in somewhere in the 11 percent range of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.
[01:46:53] Okay, that's all of it. Animal agriculture is four percent, beef is two percent. Okay, so that's what the EPA says. At the same time, they estimate that already today, the land, forestry, and agriculture is sequestering an amount of carbon equal to 12 percent of the total. So it's a net. Negative already today.
[01:47:22] Consumer of CO2. It, it is. Yes. Yes. That's a good consumer. So that's but they're talking about sequestration. And so as they get down in the weeds, they don't talk about the biomass that stays on the surface. That's going to rot in a year or something. I mean, they tend to think a little longer term than that.
[01:47:43] So when they did the health care estimate, they said, how much food do hospitals serve? You know, how much power do they use? How much transportation is involved, et cetera, et cetera. And that's how they came up with their number. So EPA, you know, buckets, transportation and energy and industry, and they do it differently.
[01:48:06] So I want to be clear. It's not an apples to apples. The point is, that it's there, it's a significant contributor. And we don't talk about it except typically it's with the if they just eat the way the, you know, dietary guidelines recommends, then everybody be healthier. And so that would make healthcare more sustainable.
[01:48:26] Okay. I would argue that. We've already, never actually been demonstrated to be true, but we want to believe it to be true. In fact, if I read the dietary guidelines, they will say something like, for the last three editions, there's been words, something to the effect of, not intended for the treatment of disease.
[01:48:49] So this agronomist translates that to eat this way. You won't get sick, but if you get sick, don't eat this way.
[01:49:01] Okay. Somebody else did a study of the pharmaceutical industry and they said that they were a higher intensity emitter than the automotive industry with greater variation across the industry. Then the automotive. Okay. So somebody else took those figures and they did the calculations and they said at the end of their estimate, they said if the average adult American with type two diabetes could eliminate their medication use, they would lower their carbon footprint 29 percent more than if they shifted from a high meat to a vegan diet.
[01:49:40] You, what, one more time. If the, if a person. If the average adult American with type 2 diabetes could eliminate their medication use, let's just speculate wildly that such a thing would even be possible. Yeah. That's sarcasm, right? Okay. So if that were achieved, they would end up lowering their carbon footprint 29 to 9 percent more.
[01:50:09] than if they shifted from a high meat to a vegan diet, and they have to stay on that diet for the rest of their life. That's always the assumption in all these conversations, right? And how many people stay on a, okay so we have that observe, suggestion, and then we can think of what's, what is the societal impact of people's lives being diminished by chronic disease, shortened lifespan.
[01:50:41] shortened health span, what's the, you know, the productivity losses you know, the generational issues of, you know, dying sooner than you need to die. So all of those I think can be built into a compelling picture of we need to be providing the human population a higher quality diet, higher plane of nutrition than it's currently being offered.
[01:51:11] And we can do this. And it's, it isn't even a scientific issue. This is the part where I just start pulling out what's left of my hair. It isn't a scientific issue. It's a political issue. It's, it, there are other issues at play here, and we have to get good at playing those games. But it's not, science didn't get us here.
[01:51:35] It's hard to imagine science being the solution at this point. And many of these things, I can go to my textbooks and pull them off and chapter and verse and they're okay, you want to argue with me? Don't argue with me. Argue, you know, it's, but in any case. How's that working for you? Is the question I learned to ask, right?
[01:51:56] So if you think that you can reverse your type 2 diabetes or metabolic syndrome following a vegan diet, I am all for you. Go forth and I hope that you learn some better metrics to measure, because I'm pretty convinced we haven't been given those until relatively recently. I would be concerned if you're trying to make a little human or raise a human, I'm reasonably certain that when you get to old fart stage like me that you can't do that because we get less efficient at utilizing nutrients.
[01:52:27] So we needed even higher quality diet than say a middle aged, you know, 20 or 30 year old man would do. need. Now a woman that would be different, she needs a higher quality diet, especially if she's going to try to make little human beings. But I mean, a fifth of children of women of childbearing age in the U.
[01:52:47] S. and U. K. are anemic. 20%. If I look globally, somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of children five and under are stunted. This is not, you know, only stature, it's also brain development. And this is acknowledged to come from a lack of the essential nutrients required for proper development that are best or solely provided by animal source foods.
[01:53:15] This is a shame and this is a scandal. It also, their diet is It aligns very well with what Eat Lancet recommends as a planetary diet. So the diet that we can see from looking at country data and looking at a map, we can see that the diet they recommend is the diet associated with the highest rate of stunting and the highest rate of mortality.
[01:53:39] And that's what they're recommending for human and planetary health, except when they're challenged, they admit that neither one of those is true. Details. It's a great story. So one might almost come to think that maybe human health isn't their primary interest. Yeah, you know, misanthrope is a word that I think you know, anti human.
[01:54:05] There, there's a long history of people who see humans as the problem. And, you know, one of the, one of the points that I, you know, imagine 9 billion human brains properly nourished, communicating and cooperating. What problems don't you think they could solve? I just I think we have a really hopeful future.
[01:54:33] And that's part of what motivates me as well. You know, when you see what it could be, and what has been demonstrated. I mean, you know, the studies where they just intervene by giving school children one egg a day. Or, oh, so here's, wHO says that the best source of essential nutrients for children 24 months to 6 months to 24 months of age is meat, eggs, dairy, seafood.
[01:55:12] That's what WHO says. Hello, Professor Noakes. UNICEF says that 60 percent of children, 6 0 percent of children, 6 months to 24 months of age do not get meat, eggs, dairy, seafood. At all. That's what they say. So And part of me says, you know, whatever the rich Europeans want to do, you know, the people that were born on third base and think they hit a triple, fine, whatever.
[01:55:44] Let's go solve some problems here, which we can do. But unfortunately, a lot of what the, you know, the third base dwellers have instituted ripples down into the lower low and middle income countries. It influences policy. It influences lending. It influences what they can do to develop their resources.
[01:56:07] It's a modern day imperialism. And I think that's a shame and a scandal as well but again, but I digest let's get back to the topic. It's a little frustrating that the topic of how to be healthy, how to get healthy, stay healthy, raise healthy children ends up in the realm of politics. It just it's a kind of insanity that, that drives me nuts.
[01:56:37] For me, it was a short commute. I was already in the neighborhood. But how do we, so again, back to the medical message, how many people even know that diabetes is reversible or do they believe it's chronic, progressive and curable? Do they know the link between insulin resistance and heart disease?
[01:56:56] You know, all of these for me, the mental health aspect, and again, we're now way out beyond the edge of my expertise, but I just find so much hope in this idea that many other research, researchers are bringing forward. So how many people know this? We need to get that better known. And then you're left with the decision, you know.
[01:57:20] This is crude and sometimes I can't help myself, but if it comes down to it, are you telling me that you're more concerned about what might happen to the earth in 2100 than you are about dying with all the toes you were born with? Really? Because I have more value, I value your life more than you do apparently.
[01:57:46] So what can we do to help you understand that's what's going on here? You know, the idea of women struggling with infertility and that being, you know, insulin resistance. And you think about what people are willing to go through, expense and trauma and all that. And it could be diet related?
[01:58:07] Yeah. Yeah. And why is that not the first thing offered when, now I'm just an agronomist, I don't know, but I sit in audiences and I listen to stories about people who say to their patients who are of childbearing age, if you do not want to become pregnant and you're not on contraception, you should get on contraception before you start this diet.
[01:58:31] Because it happened, it reverses so quickly that people get surprised. And then there's the physician that I listened to, she grew up in Mozambique, she was educated in Canada, she went back to Mozambique, she wanted to practice, couldn't, so she opened her own clinic, she was working with women were very happy, but then she heard that there were women in the community saying, don't go to her, she'll get you pregnant.
[01:58:57] Because you had 30 some year old women who thought they were done having children, weren't necessarily upset with that idea, and found out that they weren't. Because this condition was addressed so quickly. My experience in talking to my colleagues. And the producers that I was trained to serve, and the communities I was trained to serve, they don't know this stuff.
[01:59:25] And so I'm like, why did it have to be a forage agronomist that brought you this news? You know, what's up here? I don't get it. That's something that we can push. In Las Vegas next week, I have a proposal to get people involved, but let's see what we can all do to multiply the per personal experience.
[01:59:46] I mean, Doc that's what happened for you. It's what, I mean, how did you first hear about therapeutic carbohydrate reduction as a. Yeah. So my introduction to it was through Gary Taubes. And but I have oftentimes commented you know, how much I've learned from the engineers and computer scientists.
[02:00:10] And now I'm going to add to that and the forage agronomists about, you know, heart disease that I didn't learn from my medical colleagues. So I think we certainly need to continue spreading this message. And, you know, I am encouraged, as I know you are in seeing the growth and seeing, you know, how the message has spread over, you know, the past just few years.
[02:00:37] And ultimately I, like you, believe that humanity does have the power to solve this and will solve this. And we just have to start paying attention to the obvious information that's in front of us is the way that I look at it. And the harder you, you know, the more effort that it takes from politicians and such.
[02:00:59] to convince us about the other you know, take on this, I guess you could say. The more obvious it becomes what a false, you know, argument they're putting forward. So I think you know, thanks to you know, your leadership, thanks to so many others. We are getting there and we are starting to turn the ship around and I think ultimately we're going to continue to do this has been I mean, I literally learned something that I can't believe I've never, ever heard before about the difference between animal cells and plant cells, but more than that, just looking at the whole issue of metabolic health from the standpoint of where these ruminants cows and such live inside this circle of life where we all dwell and how they contribute and keep, help keep us healthy and we help keep them healthy.
[02:01:57] It's been great stuff and I suspected it would be, but. Thanks for following through, Peter. Thanks for keeping me intrigued rather than bored. It's just amazing. I'm so glad to have the opportunity. It's nice to spend some time. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to do that in person over some coffee sometime.
[02:02:18] And yeah, keep in touch if anyone has questions. I share. You know, I, I share references, I make introductions I'll close with one thing. There's a meat scientist. Did you know that there is such a thing as meat science? There's a meat scientist. There's porridge agronomy you know.
[02:02:37] He's at North Dakota State University. He formulated a diet for growing pigs to emulate What N. Haynes says the macronutrient composition of the U. S. diet is. The attending veterinarian stopped it early because it was inhumane.
[02:03:01] Wow. Did you hear that folks? Yeah. Did you hear that? It's inhumane to feed pig, excuse me, to feed pigs the diet that the average American lives on. It's inhumane. Wow. All right. Let's talk about how folks can learn more. All over social media. If you find another Ballersted out there, he probably can let me know.
[02:03:26] Cause I don't know about him. There's not that many of us. You can find me grass based on Twitter and on Instagram. That's one word. You can find me on Facebook by name. I also have a grass based health page. You can find ruminati. substack. com and lots of videos on YouTube. And my email is peter.
[02:03:46] No. Don't give out don't give out email. Don't do that. Bad plan. Bad plan? Really bad plan. Okay. We won't do that then. Yeah. If people really want to find you, they can do all the other stuff and end up with the email. All right. We'll make sure all that contact information shows up in the show notes.
[02:04:03] Folks, this has been the very first ruminant agronomist we've had. And quite possibly maybe the only one in the world. Oh, no, I can. No, I can introduce you to lots, but also a metabolic health specialist. Yeah. Okay. Very good. Very good. Phil, close it out for us, man. Yeah. Thank you, Peter. And certainly look forward to again, sharing a cup of coffee and a steak with you sometime soon.
[02:04:31] And maybe we'll continue this conversation with the round two sometime in the future. I would welcome that. And if I can do anything to help you alleviate people's concerns, please don't hesitate to contact me. Fantastic. For Dr. Philip Ovedia and Peter Ballerstedt, this has been the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast, and we will talk to y'all next time.
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