Lierre Keith | How a Former Vegan Learned to Love Meat

all right peeler hackers I am joined here with Lee our Keith American writer and activist here today to talk about her book the vegetarian Meath the vegetarian myth Lee air thanks for coming on good to have you thanks for having me on yeah I appreciate you taking the time and um the vegetarian myth right off the bat pretty catchy title hit you in the face we don't have to spend too much time here but I know you weren't always the person who could write the vegetarian myth book um can you kind of set up the call for us talk about your journey a little bit to writing that book right so I was a vegan for 20 years so I have been as far into that world as really you can get and in the end the only thing that really pulled me out was that my health collapsed completely and I think for a lot of people that is the only thing that gives them out and because I had that kind of collapse I mean the thing about being a vegan is that it's not just what you eat you know it really becomes who you are so you go for this tremendous just existential crisis really about Who am I and what is the universe and why am I here and what does it mean that everything that I thought was true has led me so far astray that I have now permanently damaged myself and so you're really stuck for a year to with no answers at all about your place in anything so at that point I ended up having to look at a lot of information that I had done my best not to examine over that 20 years because my interest in things like sustainability and planetary justice had never stopped it's just I had stopped engaging with information that was contrary to my vegan ideology sure so all that information was there I just had to finally look at it so that it was it's a long and hard process for a lot of us nobody gives up being a vegan easily and at the end of it I ended up writing that book because well a couple reasons one is I wanted other very idealistic young people to understand that this was not actually going to address the problems they saw with the world and that in fact if they had bigger information they might make a different decision than going vegan and also I wanted to explain to them that they were probably gonna hurt their health and that that it could be permanent if they did it long enough so I kind of wanted to save them from what I had done to myself right but I mean my whole generation tried it I mean everybody I know tried being either a vegetarian or vegan and we all ended up coming out the other end with horror stories about you know what we had done to our bodies and there's no reason for people who are 20 to go through that we've already tried it you know didn't work so all of that was the reason that I wrote the book so I'm curious when you say like your health collapsed what were some of the health complications you noticed right so first off I ended up with really bad blood sugar issues which is very common and I would say I pretty well destroyed my insulin receptors because I did it for so long but you'll you'll find out right away that you know you the human body is really not meant to take that load of sugar every day and you know every time that you eat that kind of high carb low fat diet you're putting incredible stress on your body because it's a biological emergency you know our brains can only survive at a very narrow range of blood sugar so too high or too low and your body has to mobilize some pretty intense chemicals to deal with it and you know that includes starting with insulin but also adrenaline so you're on this constant roller coaster where your blood sugar is either too hot too high or too low so you're constantly having to eat then to get your blood sugar back up well then the whole spike starts all over again and you do wear out everything inside your body when you're doing that on a constant basis which I was so that was the first thing was I started to have these terrible um insulin crashes and I didn't know what that was I just knew that I felt like if I didn't eat I was gonna fall over dad and you know that actually is true it's a biological emergency so that was the first problem but did that feel like brain fog or what was that feeling like I get the brain fog so much but I got that horrible like hangry feeling where I was in a horrible mood angry upset wanted to cry all the time and then if I would eat I would feel better in 20 minutes but of course two hours later I was right back where I started um you know when you get shaky and sweaty and you can't figure out what's wrong you just know that you have to eat I mean your your cravings for food are just insane all the time and that's why it's because you're not keeping that blood sugar stable so problem number one I but that a lot of times we'll go we'll go away if you end up understanding what you've done and you take on some version of a low-carb diet you can at least clear that problem from your plate and my problem was I did it so long that I'm sort of stuck forever eating a very low carbohydrate level because I don't want to become insulin dependent you know as a diabetic so it's I have to be really really careful about that one yeah but the more the longer term damage I did is I ended up with degenerative disc disease in my spine so my spine is basically coming to pieces and these kinds of joint problems are very classic first of all for anybody who eats an agricultural diet so you don't see this in skeletons you know and then the from the Paleolithic Age the moment people take a bagra culture of course they shrink six inches their teeth fall out and you end up with these terrible joint and bone problems all across the archeological records so I mean just to say it very bluntly that I did not have to end up with this disease I mean I did this to myself you know and so I have a lot of physical constraints on my activity level and I will always be in pain the rest of my life I can have as much morphine as I want because it's all they can do for me is painkillers I'm there's there's no surgery that helps this I'm done I did myself an and I've gotten any number of emails from xvii just vegans and vegetarians who did the same thing they read their spines their hips their knees and now they're my age and it's bad you know and what what exactly does that with like the vegan diet or a vegetarian diet is the lack of b12 or I'm not familiar with how that happens so especially for the vegans there's the problem is twofold problem number one is that the only way you can actually absorb minerals out of your digestive tract is if there's fat dietary fat is actually what drives that process and when you're eating vegan or any kind of that you know high carb low fat diet you simply don't have enough fat to observe the minerals so even if you're eating plenty of them there's no way for them to get into your bloodstream so it's problem number one problem number two is the diet itself is actually very low in minerals there are a lot of minerals and plant foods so I mean you know the foods that we know of that are very high in minerals are of course red meat that's where you're going to get them and to go one level further the kinds of traditional food practices that we've all lost track of in the United States so it's things like bone broth which of course traditional people around the world understand as really vital to help when givers are losing yes exactly all that stuff and those are very very dense with minerals so the moment you go vegan all that's just it's not even a concept that you would eat those saying so I'm not getting any minerals I'm not I don't have any way to absorb the what minerals I am getting and then you add another problem which is you know we've all been told to eat put healthy whole grains well the problem with grains is that their seeds and they come armed with ways to keep animals from eating them right this is the plants baby this is the only way the species is going to survive and they are preloaded with ways to hurt us if we eat them to make themselves inedible to us so that they can survive right so there's a whole range of things called anti nutrients that are in every single seed you might eat and that of course includes grains there are ways to try to kind of manipulate around seeds so that they become more edible but I didn't know that as a vegan all I knew was you were supposed to eat healthy whole grains and so I ate a ton of brown rice and whole wheat and all that kind of stuff and the problem is that one of the anti nutrients that are in whole grains and beans actually block the absorption of minerals that's one of the ways that seeds fight back well so in eating all those healthy whole grains in fact man I wasn't getting any minerals at all and what few minerals I was getting in my little food stream you know all the minerals were blocked from being absorbed so that's like a one-two-three punch for no minerals and if your joints and bones and this is why so many of us ended up with these really kind of profound joint problems yeah so the demineralization of your body depleted yes minerals and that can really affect your bone bones joints yep and sheath skeletal system teeth I know a lot of ex Egan's who destroyed their teeth you know 18 months into being a vegan their teeth were falling out of their heads never had a cavity now they've got 27 cavities like I'm not exaggerating yeah you can remember as your teeth there's some ways to repair that sometimes it's too late um but in terms of joints you know joints are so poorly vascularized that once you kill them it's pretty much over and is this like your work and more people speaking out about dangers or at least kind of how to prevent the teeth falling out if people are vegetarian or vegan or is it still pretty like shameful to talk about giving up going vegan or vegetarian like you quit the club or or is it becoming more and more common to talk out against it or I dare I can answer that any way you want there are definitely people who've come out the other side who talk about all this very publicly but you have to look for them if you're inside that vegan world still you'll never find them if they are mentioned they are treated with utter contempt and there'll be some you know various web sites that will put up with a debunk on whoever and so you don't have to look any further and that's really a shame because as their health starts to decline a lot of these people don't know where to go you know they've kind of wrapped themselves up into this cult-like atmosphere and it's really hard to step outside and start looking for the alternate information and I have a lot of compassion because I was there you know for 20 years I was terrified to look outside even though I at some level you know this is not working you shouldn't feel this bad at age 25 or age 30 and so it's really hard so we were talking about physical markers you know like just you personally your bones not being healthy anymore and some other vegans or vegetarians as well what are some of the reasons to eat meat beyond just minerals or I guess the proof for trying to find the right way to word that you know like why should we eat me what are the benefits of it okay so two and a half million years ago is when the genus Homo arrived on the plains of Africa and over the next million million and a half years our cranial capacity doubled and our digestive tracts shrunk so our brains got gigantic and in fact they need 25% of our energy goes directly to your brain so this is a really energy heavy organ it needs a lot of fuel but we have short digestive tracts and that was the trade-off the only reason the fact the only way that can work is if we're eating really really nutrient-dense food okay because we we don't have you know but the capacity of say a ruminant or even an orangutan if you think about a primate like an orangutan you think of a giant barrel torso with kind of skinny arms and legs right using that big barrel is theirs because they have a completely different digestive system than we do and they can digest leaves all day long hmm and turns into the foods that they need we don't have that capacity we don't have a lot of cows have five stomachs or foursome yeah and what's interesting I mean both the orangutan and the cow example what those animals are actually doing they're not just actually digesting all that cellulose so leaves or grass or whatever they're chewing they're feeding that to the bacteria that live inside their bodies the bacteria are actually doing the digesting for them and then they are eating the bacteria so they take this elite nutrient poor substance just pure cellulose and they actually turn it into high fat high protein bacteria which is what they digest what's crazy ya know I made soup to make their own sort of hunting-gathering forming inside their own bodies and you will find these sort of correspondences of this sort of web of life no matter where you look in nature I mean we're all dependent on each other right but that's what's actually going on inside those animals and we don't have the capacity to do that we have the digestive system of a carnivore we have a very acidic stomach and that's for splitting protein you know so we don't do that fermentation we just do give me the stuff I'll break it down and absorb it and so what you find in the archaeological record is until about 10,000 years ago the very first tools we ever made were hunting tools and butchering tools the very first wooden Spears we ever made were used that we ever found we've ever been found were used to kill an elephant it was five hundred million years ago and the tools that they found are actually still coated in that animal fat and that only surrounded by the bones but they're actually there's no question what these tools were used for and of course the first art we ever made was the animals we were eating and it's hunting scenes on the caves of France and Spain and the animal bones are right there as well and also you can do chemical analysis of ancient teeth and the it's quite clear that what we were eating was ruminants that were surviving on grasses and that's from the isotope analysis which gets complicated but that's just the take-home point yes we were eating large ruminants that lived on the African savannah and that was how we got these giant brains very nutrient-dense food easy for us to assimilate with short digestive tracts and as a result our brains doubled and we became human I was reading the book sapiens have you read that one yes again my other great book and I kind of for the last I don't know four years or so I felt intimidated by all the history of human evolution and everything this is so many dates but this book puts it in a really layman's terms and kind of walks you through it and it was so fascinating but one of the things in there he was talking about was how the invent or how the power to harness fire really bumped us up to the top of the food chain yeah that we as soon as we could control that we can cook and that's a much more efficient way of getting nutrients out of food then you know eating it all raw putting it through our bodies having it digest it kind of like the orangutan now we can just get extract more nutrition and the fire was really what bumped us to the top there and it's one reason why I mean a lot of a lot of the vegetarians have an argument that our teeth don't look like dog's teeth and that's why we're not actually carnivores on what they're missing in this is the role that fire played that we probably would have teeth that look more like carnivore teeth except for two things and one is the tools we made and two is fire which is a tool but if maybe we had brains that were big enough to make these kinds of tools and so instead of growing them in our mouths you know we learned how to make them and use them with our hands and so that would be the knives the spears the arrows the butchering tools all that stuff and then fire of course made that food more digestible so we don't need the exact teeth that dogs have we also domesticated dogs I mean in the first week we did that was to help us hunt and it's a great pairing you know it worked the dogs and it worked for us and I have two dogs I can tell you it's it's a great little combo you know dogs and humans but it's worked for them as well so but that's why so yeah they have teeth like that we don't need them and that's the part that the vegetarians I think miss but to get back to your other question so because we you know evolved eating all this meat it means that there are a whole bunch of nutrients we really can only get in the quantities we need by eating meat so you can start with the protein itself protein from meat has all the amino acids you need in the exact proportions that the human body needs some not true for plant foods none of them are complete and the proteins that do exist come wrapped in cellulose because they're plants and we don't really have a mechanism to digest cellulose so even if those proteins were more complete we can't really access them well because we can't get to them and that's why it's called you know poor quality protein when you eat those kind of proteins it's you really can't get to them so it's problem number one problem number two is the fats there are fats that are only available in animal products you cannot get them in plants plants don't need them and they don't make them and that includes vitamin D it includes vitamin a good quality k2 you can get a little bit in plants but mostly you got to get it from animals and a lot of people get confused because they say well what about carrots now the thing about the vitamin A that's in carrots is that it's not in a form that humans use easily its proto bite of an a it's a it has to be converted in our bodies to the form that we actually use and there are human beings who cannot do that conversion they are missing the enzyme and the reason they're missing the enzyme is that in their history in their family history in their ancestral history there was so much vitamin A in their diets that they didn't need that enzyme anymore and evolution is very good at pruning branches the moment there was enough vitamin A that we didn't need that enzyme a whole bunch of people stopped making it why make it if you don't use it fine we drop it so if you're from an island or a coastal people like for instance you're Irish you may be one of those people who doesn't need that enzyme doesn't make that enzyme and if you don't eat actual vitamin A you can die and these people are called obligate carnivores because there's no other option for them even those of us who do have that enzyme it's not an easy conversion you have to eat about eight times as much Pro to vitamin A to convert to the amount of vitamin A that you actually need the very young and the very old often can't do it at all even if during middle age they're able to do it so vitamin A is a real problem and you know a lot of vegans won't tell you the truth about this but you need to supplement vitamin A if you're trying to eat a plant-based diet carrots will not do it so with vitamin with all the vitamin and mineral deficiencies is it enough if you do want to commit to being vegetarian or vegan can you just supplement all of those if that's really what you want to do so two problems one is that that's honestly part of the definition of an eating disorder if you think that supplements can replace food I mean if you go and read a definition you'll find that in there so you're walking on some kind of it's very it's a tightrope yeah you know it's not a particularly healthy way to approach food the other problem is that you know even if it's made in a lab it doesn't necessarily match what we find in the kinds of foods actual food that people have been eating for two and a half million years there's all kinds of interactions between you know something that you might eat and the way that those vitamins are chemically how they look it's going to be a little different than what's produced in a lab and we don't know long-term you know whether that's good enough a lot of times it's not and I just I just especially if I had children I would feel very funny I would have a lot of questions about whether or not this was actually a healthy way forward well I'll just get it in a capsule instead and hope for the best it's made in a factory it's not made in forests and prairies and in rivers and oceans like it where is there a factory in our ancestral history and why would you trust that so I don't think it's I don't think it's it's better than nothing if you're committed to that diet but I don't actually think it's a healthy way forward okay what about with the fat issue like avocados or coconut oil is that enough or do you need animal fat specifically those things are are certainly better than industrial seed oils and it may be the only fats that vegans are willing to eat that it's at least a little bit appropriate for the human template so a lot of times when confused people write to me and they're you know having a hard time with this that's one of the things I'll tell them is all right well at least for now take out all the soy you know take out this this and this and instead try to eat coconut oil every day avocados are really good for you you're willing to eat that so eat those but those products those foods do not contain vitamin A they do not contain vitamin D and they still don't have a really great omega-6 Omega 3 balance um-hmm so if they're not perfect you know it's things to think about especially if you're still kind of in vegan world but it's it's not ideal okay so talking then about like some big like with veganism there seems to be and I've never been vegan or vegetarian but I know the China Study is like the big gold standard and that's been debunked essentially but I'm still kind of confused on can you talk a little bit about the China Study and I guess why that was such a big deal and then why it mate might not be relevant right so the problem with that kind of it's really just a survey it's not even really a study is that there are so many variables that go into trying to figure out you know on a broad level what people are eating and what effect that might have on their health you can't really draw the kinds of conclusions that he drew and anybody who has any background in actual science knows that so why it is that his book got published is kind of a mystery to me I don't know why they didn't have some kind of educated readers look it over first because you just can't draw those kinds of conclusions and what were some of the conclusions that were in the house his main conclusion is if you eat any animal products at all you are going to get cancer um and this is just silly and a lot of it was based on a previous research he had done where he had rats in a laboratory or mice and he I can't remember which it was and he adjusted the various amino acids in their diets and was able to either get them to grow cancers or to stop growing cancers and this is a true fact we know that this happens with rats and mice they're very prone to cancer and you can do this by turning on and off their various amino acids but in nature you don't actually eat an amino acid I mean this doesn't really relate to how people live in the world and the kinds of foods that we eat you don't get one amino acid you get a whole complement of amino acids when you're eating any food right so this doesn't really relate to anything that anybody would ever eat except outside of a laboratory and how he can then say well because I gave them this amino acid that means you should never eat dairy or you're gonna get cancer it just doesn't even make any sense yeah and the best people are really curious about the China Study stuff the best person to look at is Denis minger am I in ger and she spent months pouring through the China study and she actually got the research volume that you can get separate from it that actually has all his numbers and she kind of redid all the calculations in the book and Colin T Colin Campbell didn't even discover what he said he did like his numbers don't even match Wow I mean it's like the whole thing just kind of falls apart that further into it you get yeah um so anyway those are just a few things about it but it really scares me that people are making major life decisions based on a book like that is it still pretty popular or has it is the most vegans you know it's kind of their Bible because it's the first thing anybody says when they're upset may is but the China study the China study okay so it's still floating out there it is it is yeah well I know one of the big reasons okay so my sister's experimenting with vegetarianism veganism she's probably early 20s now I think she's exactly 20 and she watched a few documentaries on it and you know it's all about factory farming and the dangers of it and I know that's a huge reason why a lot of people are drawn to veganism vegetarianism is because they don't want to hurt animals and I love animals do you think those two things are mutually exclusive loving animals and eating them or what's your take on the whole ethical issue here so I think factory farming is something we can all agree on that it's just horrible to keep sentient beings in those kinds of conditions and this is something really that I think vegetarians vegans animal rights people paleo traditional food people really should all be working together on and I'm happy to work with anybody on those issues because it's really horrible I mean it's one of the main reasons I went vegan as well the problem is that a lot of those people are so ideological that they won't work with anybody else on it and it's too bad because we could be getting a lot further you know if we would all work together but that aside the problem here is a lack of information and it's a grave misunderstanding about the nature of Agriculture itself so cities can't really be done in a soundbite you have to really understand what we've done to the planet by doing agriculture hmm so agriculture is the most destructive human activity that's it I mean we've skimmed the planet alive and so you have to understand what it is you take a piece of land and you clear every living thing off the land and I mean down to the bacteria right and then you plant it to human use so it's biotic cleansing so all those plants and animals now have nowhere to go because we've taken over that land and we're only growing corn or soy or wheat or whatever forgiveness and 98% of the world's old growth forests and 99% of the world's prairies have been devastated by this process there's no way you can look at that level of massive snake extinction and say this is good for animals that's problem and the answer to this is certainly not factory farming but to think that you know if you're looking at your plate and you don't see dead animals to then assume that there are no dead animals involved is a grave misapprehension about the nature of the problem it is way bigger than what's dead on your plate you have to ask what died to get this food on my plate and if you're eating agricultural foods the answer is the entire planet hmm it's not just a few individual animals it's not even just a species it's not even an entire biome it's actually the process of life itself okay vertebrate evolution has not come to a halt and it's because of Agriculture because humans had taken over all that land and there isn't enough land left now for evolution to actually continue just like with the mono cropping and the tail we're doing it on yeah yeah yeah so it's just an inherently destructive process and you know we've had ten thousand years and we've trashed the planet so the only way the only way out of this is first of all we're going to have to reduce our numbers to something sustainable and second of all we have to repair what we've destroyed and then we're going to have to take our place as members of those biotic communities once more instead of imposing ourselves across it which is what we've done by doing agriculture we need to be participants once more inside those cycles yeah I was reading that there's something like I think it's 8 million acres of lawn in the United States and that if everyone turned their lawn all eight million acres of it we could feed the entire unit United States without a farm out there I don't really want to turn my lawn into a farm but that's a cool statistic to put in perspective that when we think we need like gigantic farms to ramp up food production for everyone sometimes smaller farms can still produce a lot of food as well yeah we have as much lawn in the United States as the entire country of India has an agricultural production that's a lot it is a lot yeah that's that's a serious stat right there so what should we be eating then you know if we do want to get behind the the moral ethics of vegan vegetarian or I guess what do you eat cuz I know you're still an animal lover it's not like yeah yeah it said I hate animals all of a sudden now I'm gonna eat them it's still a big part so what is it what does your diet look like now well we have Paleolithic bodies so we need to eat Paleolithic foods that just kind of makes sense right I mean the moment that people take a bagra culture you know you can see in the archaeological record the number of diseases that take hold and anybody who's a medical anthropologist or an archaeologist can look at a bone and they'll tell you in 10 seconds whether it's from a hunter-gatherer or from an auger agriculturalists because the the boat the difference in you know the health of the bones is just so profound it's obvious immediately and that that's from like what we're talking about earlier with the demineralization and all that what we're talking I said I mean even at iron deficiency anemia would be so bad that it literally caused bone changes especially in children so yeah the lack of nth minerals the lack of the vitamins that actually put those minerals to use to build things like bone and teeth all of that just disappears overnight and then instead of animal foods the cereal grains displace that and people's health just Falls to pieces we actually have a concept that's called the diseases of civilization mmm there are no corresponding diseases of hunter-gatherers this is just an absolute disaster for human health for the planet for everything so yeah so I try to eat a paleo diet so I'm going to walk you through scenarios there's you have an acre of land and so in one scenario this is what you can do with that acre of land you can clear all the life off it just clear every last thing off it now you've got bare ground and you can plant your corn now you plant the corn so what happens in the meantime you're destroying the topsoil because it's been exposed right it's it's exposed to win terrain to sort you know to the Sun and like us when the soil is exposed it dies this is an emergency for the planet when you have exposed soil it only happens in floods or fires right we've done this on purpose it's a war against the planet so we've explored the soil it's now dying another problem is that you've planted your corn great but the roots of annuals are very shallow annual plants do not live long they live a very short time just two or three seasons they don't have time to have deep roots the deep-rooted plants or the perennial plants so the trees and the and the perennial grasses they have really really deep root structures and what that means a few very important things for the the life of this planet the first thing is that is what makes that those roots make the channels that rain uses to enter the soil so without those channels the rain just runs off oh yeah so now what should be a great big sponge for the life community is completely dry all the time it just the rain just never enters it doesn't charge the water table it doesn't fill up in the soil there's not enough and so when summer comes and things are hot and dry in a perennial system you know whether it's a forest or grassland those plants you know will draw that water back up and make it available to the other creatures with but there's nothing to do that there are no plants that can do that and there's no water there to do it from so big problem there and another you know major crisis for life on Earth is that it's only the perennials that can get down to that rock that substratum a rock break up that rock and bring those minerals up to the surface where the rest of us need them you and I cannot eat Rock right we don't go out for budget crunch on rock but that's who does that is it's the perennial roots in conjunction with a bunch of other microscopic creatures a micro rise are the bacteria they produce the acids that actually do it and in exchange for some sugar they will make those minerals available to the plants the plants bring them up and the rest of us have access to them in one way or another without that all those cycles just grind to a halt there's no access that rock so minerals and water right you can't have life without them now none of that becomes available when you have your acre of corn you're minding the soil you're taking out what few minerals are left and every year you're taking out more and more until there's none left and the entire thing just collapses so in the mean time where has all that topsoil gone well it's gone into the air as dust particles it's also runoff into whatever local waterways exists so now you've destroyed the local streams and rivers as well all the fish are gone because they've been killed by this runoff of topsoil you've basically killed everything there's nothing left and the truth about civilizations which is to look the way of life based on agriculture they last between 800 and 2,000 years they last until the soil gives out at that point there is a major collapse and this has been the pattern of every single civilization that's ever existed and that's why it's a disruptive process so you can do all that and you can get your acre of corn for a few hundred years and then you can decide hey this corn is so cheap because of all of the fertilizer that we are now making from oil and gas the fossil fuel fertilizer which has driven the price of corn below the cost of production that's what it's done now it's so cheap why don't we take that super cheap corn and we'll feed it to a cow who's living essentially in a city you don't want to submit floor in a metal building with a bunch of other crowded cows will feed her that corn will make some really cheap beef because it'll make her fat really fast and then at the end of the day we'll kill that cow and feed it to people now this meat is going to be really sick it doesn't have the right amino acid profile it doesn't have the right a make a 6 Omega 3 balance the fatty acid profile is all wrong - that cow was miserable the entire time feed it to people make them sick because it's not really right for people either what you've created is death and misery the entire way on that acre of land ok that's where we are now and what the vegans say is gosh from that cow onward is really bad well yeah that is really bad but back that up because the entire thing is crazy right and it has no future you start from the very beginning why did you kill that ecosystem right it's dead right and this is the planet now alright another scenario same acre of land you leave it alone it's got 25 different plants per square meter there are tiny little animals we can't see there is gigantic megafauna that we think are magnificent in between you have reptiles and birds and you have amphibians and everybody's living there and evolution is taking place everybody has a home right and also what you have there on that that Prairie on that grassland are some ruminants because ruminants are the only creatures that really can digest that grass and make those nutrients available again to the cycle of life you have to understand life on a grassland on a prairie it's very dry that's why it's not a forest right and in those long summer months when there is no rain what keeps the cycle of life moving is the activity of those remnants they make moisture available they keep the bacteria alive by giving them a home inside their own bodies on the surface of the soil life pretty much goes dormant if it wasn't for those ruminants it would turn into desert ok that's absolutely crucial you cannot have grasslands without ruminants so you keep that acre exactly as it is all of those creatures they are doing their part to keep the cycle of life moving to keep nutrients moving to recycle carbon water all of it nitrogen it's all moving and at the end of that same year you take a room in it you kill her you feed her to humans we have a role to play to write life as a whole continues though we eventually die as well we become part of that cycle our bodies are taken up every last piece of carbon is taken up by the next living creature in that cycle and in the end the soil eats us all so it's not like it stops with us we are part of that cycle too and that's the creature that we and then in next time we are eaten by someone else that could go on until the Sun burns out the only difference year-to-year is there's a little more topsoil which is to say life has a little more resilience mostly because of the action of those grasses in those ruminants so those are your options right you've got the death that's killing everything and you have the death that makes my life year after year is it those are the current options or maybe those like is it too late for that second option since we've already poured concrete everywhere and kind of mono crop and destroyed the prairies too late I refuse to believe that it's too late so if we took all the trash out agricultural land right now around the world in fact we don't need to do this about 80 percent of it and we restored the prairies and the grasslands that really do want to come home and also restored the remnants that need to live there that actually make those cycles happen we could in under 15 years sequester all of the carbon that's been released since the beginning of the in fact the carbon would drop to 330 parts per million now 350 is the red line right above that we are in danger and as a planet and you know it's hit 400 now so we are way above the red line but even in 15 years if we were just to repair we could do it I don't think that it's too late I think the grasses and the ruminants you know they still have a dog in this fight they really do want to come home and you know that's what they do they build soil and the building block is carbon so I don't think this is too late right now every single institution is headed in the wrong direction that's the problem what are we subsidizing in the United States the US Department of Agriculture who gets the subsidies I'll tell you who gets the subsidies it's those giant grain producers there are six corporations that essentially control the world food supply and that's what they produce is corn soy wheat rice and a ton of that goes to animals because it's so cheap it's not the natural diet of a cow we're killing these cows by doing it what we've done is we took 60 million incredibly healthy bison on the Great Plains all of them were eradicated and we are now producing instead is 40 million really sick cows it doesn't even make any sense yeah yeah it takes something like 2,400 gallons of water to feed one pound of factory farm cow or something crazy like all the water that goes into the corn it's not because she drinks that much water you know I'll drink so much water but it's because of factory farming so this is the everything like all the statistics you're gonna hear from vegetarians and vegans are true but it's only true about factory farming yeah which we can all agree is wrong right and there's a better way out there which is the way that we lived for two-and-a-half million years we were participants in those cycles we were not monsters and destroyers it's only when we took up agriculture that we became this destructive so what do you recommend like we do to help the second scenario of those two how do we get behind it how do we get involved what do you what is Lee Ayers recommendations so a number of things there's things you can do on a personal scale which are great and they will help you and then there are ways to get involved with little politically which i think is even more important personally by as much I sped pasture-raised animal products that you can from small farmers in your region and this has actually gotten easier and easier in the last decade so many people have gotten on board with this and so many new small farms have sprung up who can make a living doing this because more and more people understand how important it is so one of the best websites you can go to is called eat wild calm and it's run by a woman named Joe Robinson she's written I think two books as well about this but you can go state-by-state click on your state and look at all the different grass-based farms where you can go directly and buy food so you can get beef you can get pork you can get chicken turkey you can find raw milk you can find cheese and you can rest assured that you can go there and visit see with your own eyes how well they're doing you can ask some questions these people are very keen on talking to the public they understand how important it is and you can know that you are actually repairing the world you're repairing the water table you're repairing the rivers and streams you're building topsoil you're making a home for so many other animals that have nowhere to go birds and fish and amphibians and reptiles and the small mammals it's just everybody needs to live there and these are the people who are doing that repair and they're also making food for humans that's perfect it's I mean there's nothing better than grass-fed beef or bison for the human body it's got everything we need it's a mono food you could live on that alone if you're willing to eat some of it raw you could mmm um you absolutely could and people have so it's just a fact um anyway that's the best place to go eat wild calm and make a commitment to doing that it may mean that you have to you know take more time out of your life to get that food you may have to get a giant freezer or figure out how to you know make jerky in your backyard all of that is fun you can do all that more and more it's available in local stores as well you'll pay more for it if you don't buy it directly from the farm but it's there um even places like Whole Foods you know we'll have a whole section now that's grass-fed beef and stuff grass-fed listen and it's worth understanding why you're doing it and why it's important because I think this is the only way that we're going to repair this planet so that's what you can do personally for it politically there are a lot of really great groups that are trying to do policy changes you know on a big level and that's what's going to have to happen we have to understand foreign policy we have to understand the USDA we have to understand the stranglehold that those six corporations have on the world food supply and we're going to have to fight them so getting involved on that level a really great group that does a lot of advocacy is the Western price foundation and that's Western a price org and they have an entire legal arm of their organization that goes to bat for all of us in Washington but yeah these are these can be very technical issues it can be really boring but if we don't do it no one else is going to because right now money is winning and land animals people communities are all losing so we really have to try to understand it at whatever level and try to get involved I mean a mid-range level is getting involved in your local school like what are they eating and why why are these kids having to eat total crap and now there's been this huge push for them to eat low-fat food and it's it's just the worst direction possible children need fat in their brains you're not gonna have a healthy brain and you only get one chance to build that brain and it just breaks my heart that these kids are being forced to eat low-fat food in school it's not the right direction but why aren't they eating locally grown you know full fat milk full fat beef like that's what those kids need to get to build healthy bodies for the rest of their lives so get in there and advocate for those kids like that's a really important thing that any of us can do no matter where we live léo this was a great call out coming up on time but we have a couple closing questions the first one is looking back on this year either 2015-2016 what's been the biggest lesson you have learned gosh it's that it stumps a lot of people don't worry personally or on a more political scale can be either or just your ear the first thing that pops the mind the first thing that pops okay um that I was right to get dogs I feel like my dogs have saved my soul they are such wonderful creatures you know I don't tell you what it is every morning about the house that I live in right now has a really steep staircase up to the the second floor where my bedroom is and where my dogs sleep with me and there's it's so steep it's like a ladder Wow morning if and my dogs they look at that and they're like great no problem give me another day I'm for it and they go barreling down that ladder head first and they don't even think twice about it and if I had to face that every morning I would lay in bed and cry yeah you know what I mean like it just I can't face that ladder guy going headfirst on a ladder every morning I couldn't do it ya know they're just like let's just do it give me another day they're so excited to be alive yeah they're so excited to be alive so they're a recent thing you just got him I got my first dog a year and a half ago and then I got her brother Jamie actually almost a year ago exactly so now I have two of these wonderful beasts in my life and also their loyalty I mean beyond their optimism they're so loyal they're so smart they understand things that I do not understand about the nature of the universe and that's quite clear and it's just so great to have them around and just to have that kind of a connection that it's not about you know we they don't I mean they know about fifteen words in English and I don't know any words and dog but yet we communicate yeah and I just love that we're able to have a really profound connection with each other they adore me and I would lay down my life for them you know and one of my dogs she had a terrible thing last month and she almost died out of nowhere and I just remember that that moment when you think even if she dies it was so worth it even if I spend an extra crying for this dog it was so worth it to have that kind of love that kind of loyalty that mutual you know that we just adored each other like that it's always worth it and so love is worth it and I know that sounds so corny but if you want my life lessons the last year that's it love is always worth it it doesn't matter we know where it ends everybody dies right get sick everybody is like right death is a part of it but it's always worth it to love anyway so yeah a little more basic level what you said about the communicating with the dogs I've always found really fascinating like when you hold out your hand and they can shake and they understand that or when you say walk and they start wiggling and running around okay that's communication right there and fifteen thousand years ago we domesticated them first animals so it's yeah it's see why yeah it's crazy it is not good at so many things Liara your site is Lear Keith calm is that the best place for people to find you and your work hey and if they can't remember how to spell my name honestly if they just look up vegetarian myth on Google they will get to me because I'm air or some or some angry sites or so you will find some very horrible things about me as well look at those or not I don't care but as long as you at least go to my site and see what I'm about for real thanks so much for coming on the air this is a great show learned a lot about farming and agriculture and and mineral deficiencies and some really fascinating stuff in here so thanks you're very welcome until next time hey that was a fun one right I told you it was a interesting call I really enjoyed talking to Lee err again thank you she sent me her book like two days after this Express Mail really wanted me to have it and I've been flipping through it and just been blown away by the amalgamation of all this research in there it's a thick book it's dense twel sided it's well written chewed a phenomenal job with it so two thumbs up peeler hacks comm again go over there for our archives recipes and articles just tons and tons and tons of great content over there pay their hacks on social media I believe snapchats the one we're using the most and that's just at paleo hacks you can search by username and other announcements guys um you know to get real for a second on a serious note this paleo hacks podcast if you're still listening right now chances are Yura you're a longtime listener or someone who appreciates the show and I just wanted to really thank you from the bottom of my heart for that and we've been doing the show for three years think over a hundred episodes or something like that I started the show in college you know not knowing anything not that I know everything now but I'll have a lot more than I did when I was 19 doing the show and this nervous kid interviewing all these people he read about finally got an opportunity to talk to them and I was so ecstatic to do it and so it was a good it was a good team and um I guess I'm trying to get out I'm trying to say this has been such a long journey hundred episodes three plus years in the making I'm really proud of what we built to pay their hacks but I think it's time for a change and so the team and I at pedo hacks have decided to not produce the show any longer um we have about don't worry we have about I think eight or so episodes recorded and ready and that'll take us up until sometime in October so I'll announce and I'll probably try and do something special for the last final show working on some things in the works of like compounding the best lessons or it will be something special for the last one for sure but um you know I'm not I'm not we're both in this it's not Clark got fired or Clark quit paid Oh hacks or any of that there's no bad blood at all still talk all the time it's just time for for both of us to make a change I think they're going a different direction with content more recipes articles higher-quality everything like that and you know long-form interviews are a very niche to be perfectly honest a very niche long time consuming piece of content and with the internet changing and our attention span shrinking I think people are not consuming podcasts in the health field at least at the rates that they used to maybe three or four years ago when it peaked that's just to be brutally honest guys um so that's why if you're listening right now to these very words I appreciate you so much and if you if you wanna I'm still going to be around I'm not going away so if you want to continue this relationship if you want to continue whatever it is it's not a fan at all I'm not that hot-headed but I would love to stay in contact with you excuse me shoot me an email Clark at Clark danger calm or get on my mailing list by downloading the 11 questions change your life um Clark danger calm slash download I plan on doing a lot in this world I plan on doing great things I plan on using this and going in a great direction really inspired a couple things I got going on really excited to share them with you and I would love love love your support in that especially if you've been listening for the last three or so years but not to worry last thing all of our archives will still stay up for eternity so if you're missing the show ever at you know when October comes to the end new man where's the new episodes never fear you can go back and listen to all hundred that'll take you at the rate of one a week what two years to get through all of them again so we can be together for two more years all right that is it thank you so much for your support I'll see you next Thursday from the bottom of my heart I love you and thanks for listening till then

Channel: PaleoHacks

Views: 166,580

Keywords: Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth, Vegan diet, Paleohacks podcast, Paleo diet, Paleohacks, podcast, Lierre Keith interview, farming, activist

Id: uFm2QLLuh6I

Length: 51min 0sec (3060 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2016