The Hard Facts on Animal Nutrition and Agriculture | Peter Ballerstedt, PhD

hello everybody this is uh dr anthony chafee and with me is a very special guest i'm very excited to talk to you is dr uh peter bellerstet he's a phd in forge agronomy um he has been doing quite a lot of work for years and years and years obviously in in that field with regenerative livestock and farming and he has been so good at putting out videos and and resources into the science behind livestock management and and farming and regenerative farming um peter thank you so much for for joining us thank you it's a pleasure to be with you great um so so for people that don't know of your work can you just give us a brief introduction about yourself and and what you do and the sort of work you do well i'm trained as a forage agronomist so specializing in those sciences to do with soil and crop production in agriculture forages are those plants that are eaten by livestock either directly in pasture or conserved as hay or cut and carried to animals i also have a minor in ruminant nutrition so i was trained in animal nutrition and i functioned in that space plus or minus since 1986 when i graduated with my doctorate so it's been a little while um but then starting and i currently work for a seed company so i'm still in the forage uh world i serve on national and international groups that are working in that space but starting in 2007 i had my own personal health journey where as i put it i realized i was a 51 year old balding obese pre-diabetic and so thanks to books and writers that my wife introduced me to and that then i met over the years you know i'm just balding today it's not a miracle but along the way in about 2010 i started attending some in-person events where i got to meet people like gary taubes and steve finney and eric westman and yes i know i'm name-dropping um but so i got to meet all these wonderful people there's lots more um but amazingly enough i was the only forage agronomist there it was remarkable so i quickly realized that i was learning really valuable information from them that my forage agronomy ruminant nutrition tribes ought to know about and at the same time i was convinced that i knew people and information about forage agronomy and ruminant nutrition that this metabolic community should learn about and so i've been trying to do that plus or minus for well since 2010. oh great yeah i mean and that's the thing you know what obviously i i talk about how you know the benefits of a meat-based diet or even a meat exclusive diet and getting away from different sorts of foods that contain different toxins or you know your carbohydrates and sugar that derail our metabo metabolism could put us in a hyperinsulinic state and and perpetuate various diseases um but a lot of people then say okay well that's all well and good but you know what about the environment and aren't cows destroying the world and all these sorts of things um you know and uh and and so it's been you know obviously you you do a lot of work in this uh field so one of the one of the things that i get asked all the time is well what about sustainability that's all well and good for you to eat meat but you know can we actually do this on a large scale and a lot of billions of people around the world are is that a sustainable model to to eat a lot of meat well can we afford not to why do we assume that you know a plant based which by the way is the current diet of humanity yeah the majority of humanity's calories end up coming from plant sources well what are those sugar starch any problem with that um the majority for humanity the majority of humanity's protein is supplied by plants yeah and i've spent a bit of time trying to just say plant source protein and animal source protein are not equivalent so and yet they're treated as if they are by a lot of people engaged in this sustainability space so you know animal source food is far superior in terms of nutrition than plant source food it doesn't mean that people can't eat plant source foods you know some people can many people can't some people can't and it's good that they figure that out because as you're aware there's a number of conditions that some people have that when they eliminate some or all plants or foods their health improves dramatically well okay people should know that so um i make the point that we currently have something like 800 million human beings who are calorically undernourished it's starvation it's the stuff of that should i mean we should be well beyond that it's mostly got to do with political unrest conflict you know market issues those things we can and should sort out but we've got at the same time 2.2 billion people in the world who are overweight or obese well that's every bit as much malnutrition i'm convinced as the 800 million that don't get enough calories so you know we've gone through this progress progression where we were working to eliminate caloric insufficiency for humanity yes if you're if you're starving you have one problem and you'll do anything it takes to alleviate that problem but we've progressed to a point where we need to be concerned about the quality of our diet and and unfortunately there's some conventional wisdom in the way of us understanding that so that's part of the conversation as well that given that given that we have somewhere between 20 and 25 of children globally under the age of five who are stunted yeah which is not only their stature but it's also cognitive development which is a lifelong decrement at the same time that we've got a third of women globally yesterday as we're recording this yesterday was the international day women's day forgive me for not getting the title right but a third of women globally are anemic right and all of that is due to a lack of animal source food [Music] now people will say well but if they could get the essential nutrition that they need to avoid yeah where are you going to get it from oh animal source food yeah right there's like layers of narrative in place here where people will talk about high quality nutrient dense you got to pick those things apart and at the bottom what it means is animal source food yeah yeah except for those people who define high nutrient dense as being low fat yeah there are people who don't consider fat from animal you know they don't consider that a nutrient yeah yeah yeah which of course it very much is really really so so i've i'm preparing a presentation that i need to record this week and i grabbed a graphic out of the dietary guidelines for americans 20 to 25 and by their definition vegetable oil is nutrient dense butter is not okay that unsweetened shredded wheat cereal is nutrient dense but sweetened isn't yeah that that soda is not dense but sparkling water is how many nutrients are in sparkling water i'm not exactly sure you know i'm just an agronomist you know some of these things are obviously way above me here so yeah um yeah you were talking about um obviously the protein availability in plant-based uh sources versus uh meat-based sources and one of one of the things i i've heard you speak about is the difference between you know crude protein and you know the non you know protein nitrogen that's found in plants but and and how this is actually passed off as as protein on the label and so forth can you tell us a bit about you know crude protein actually available protein sure so crude protein is a estimate of food or feed quality in animal science and animal nutrition we've used it for many many years mostly now we use it in ruminant animal nutrition not so much in swine which is a monogastric more like humans it's what we do to determine crude protein is we determine the percent nitrogen in a sample of feed or food we multiply that one number by 6.25 and that equals crude protein now that's based on the assumption that all the nitrogen that was in that sample was in protein and all that protein was 16 nitrogen so it's relatively easy to do it's relatively inexpensive and we've been doing it for over almost a century and a half so we got lots of data in some parts of the world we've got lots of data not so much in others but the problem is then that value is put on labels or in food tables they drop that crude off the front of it and they call it protein and and then people track their macros thinking that that's some meaningful value when in fact it's crude protein so what's the problem the problem is that we as monogastrics that's not a meaningful measure of food quality for us we need essential amino acids in the proper amount and they must be absorbable by us from our gut when we eat them okay that's so remember there was a thing about melanin a little while ago well melanine happens to be a nitrogen-rich compound so some people in china apparently were adding it to diluted milk to raise the protein level up the only problem is it's toxic okay great and then then some of it actually got to the u.s in pet food right again to raise the protein level okay so the the protein represented by crude protein contains true protein but it also contains what we call non-protein nitrogen right so that's where the melanin comes in it's a non-protein nitrogen source that we then multiply by 6.25 in plants it could be nitrate or any other nitrogenous non-protein material that's going to go into the estimate of what its protein content is so so that's one layer of this the other and and by the way the the swine industry has known this for about half a century now okay and has been balancing rations on an amino acid basis okay and for almost 10 years that's been the recommendation of fao that they develop that kind of a system for human nutrition right um but it it's it's not merely the presence because some of the amino acids specifically lysine actually its digestibility can be influenced by processing so we take something like cereal which is low in lysine and we make it into something brown and or crispy and we take that lysine we bind it irreversibly to carbohydrate and it's then not available to us yeah so now you you it's not just whether it's present or not it's whether we can absorb it or not and and so if we have this pool of essential amino acids that we're absorbing we're only going to be able to utilize up to the level of that limiting amino acid and we're going to oxidize the rest of them so it's it's far more complicated than most people appreciate and i appreciate that i don't always communicate it succinctly and clearly but what it you know take it back a step and it's just easier if you eat animal source food in your diet yeah and you don't have to worry about this yeah but you only have to worry about this if you're creating these diets that are well beyond the sort of species appropriate you know kind of human experience diet yeah and so yeah and that's the thing so you know we obviously have labels and says you know this is how much protein this is but you know from what you're saying you know quite clearly is that you know that number does not actually represent usable protein uh by the you know the person who's eating it so you know the you know 30 grams of protein from you know a steak or you know some sort of meat you know animal meat product is is likely going to have about 30 grams of absorbable protein whereas in plant protein it it may or may not be absorbable it may be you know lysine bound to carbohydrates and so forth so that's blocked out have other sorts of reasons why it's difficult to extract the protein from it or it may not even be protein at all it may just be nitrogen that we're just calling protein because it's easier than actually doing a proper calculation is that right that's right uh now it's it's possible that for example you can you can combine but you need information and and the combination works best when you include animal source food with your plant source food now i've spoken with researchers well established in the field who tell me that an eight-year-old boy for example physically could not consume enough rice and lentils to meet his lysine requirements just a physical limitation yeah and then what else are they getting with rice and lettuce right yeah so so all of that becomes part of the conversation but this is just one of those realities that as i said hasn't been well understood or acknowledged in the conversation yeah yeah it's sustainability yeah absolutely you know because like you like you said um you know if you're if you're not getting his proper you know protein and so forth you're not gonna be able to develop properly you're not going to be able to maintain a healthy body and and you're going to be bringing on in a lot of other sort of you know toxic elements that are in you know lentils beans rice and so forth that are going to detract from your health as well so it's not going to be as healthy you're not going to be able to extract the same nutrition and it's going to come up with another bag of problems as well um if you if you're able to sort of tell us you know you you talk about in some of your talks you might want like a ruminant revolution you want to get you know ruminant you know livestock um uh you know much more of a part of our daily lives certainly our diet um what is it that that ruminants do for the environment that that's so beneficial how does this help you know soil health and and actually help the environment help you know the the the plants as well as the animals on the world well ultimately ruminants because of the microorganisms that they foster within their pre-gastric digestive system their rumen they're a key link in the energy flow throughout the rest of the world so everything is driven by photosynthesis the conversion of co2 and water with sunlight into carbohydrate and then producing oxygen as a byproduct well the only organisms in the biosphere the entire earth that can liberate the glucose that's bound up in cellulose are these microorganisms so the the ruminant is this key link and that atom those animals can utilize a high fiber poor protein quality low fat feed resource and create from it highest quality for our nutrition protein fat and bio-available minerals and essential vitamins okay so that's pretty key then because of our agricultural systems they're capable of using a lot of our crop residue the by-products from processing so this this fee food that's being produced for us produces feed for animals no competition the ruminants are able to use what's a waste product and create again so one of my jokes is that you can't get milk from almond but you can get it from almond hulls fire oh yeah dairy cattle because in in california a great deal of feed going to those dairy animals is is almond hulls yeah okay so um there are other byproducts but that's just one and it's my poor attempt at humor so that's that's another key point uh number three is the vast majority of the earth's surface cannot produce crops for direct human utilization so this is another thing that people get confused they confuse agricultural land with arable land that is land that we can till so all arable land is agricultural land but not all agricultural land is arable so one example that i've heard is if you imagine 132nd of an apple that's the arable land surface of the world yeah and then peel the peel off that and that's what all that agricultural system depends on right that that surface that soil resource and so that gets us to the next bit uh complete the last one and that is that while that land that's not agricultural land that's not suitable for cultivation is suitable for producing forages native rangelands managed or introduced species or what have you and that can be converted in livestock products for our consumption um in it taking it then the next step whenever we till soil we're going to see a reduction in organic matter content and soil structure that's inevitable it's not to say we should never till but those are consequences of doing it and so what we're finding is we can now bring these ruminant animals into our cropping systems and we can improve soil quality we can get more food produced on the same land for the same or lower inputs plus get benefits to soil health over time so these systems are now being demonstrated they've been researched for many years a lot of what now is seemingly new to a lot of people has been researched by people who trained me and who trained the people who trained me you know it's sort of like people coming newly into the therapeutic carbohydrate reduction space without knowing about pennington right i mean there's a history to this and i'm very glad that people are finding out about it because obviously i'm excited and i think it's the most important thing in the world but we should acknowledge some of the history that came along and so that's also part of my hope is that as i introduce the human metabolic tribe to the forage and ruminant animal agriculture tribe we can get to appreciate a lot of this a lot more um you know unfortunately there's still like a billion people in the world that are dependent on burning biofuel right to cook on a lot of that's done that's not a good thing but it is an essential resource at this time just just like over half of the fertilizer that's used to produce human edible crops in the world is coming from livestock yeah most of that's coming from ruminants um you know a large number of some of the most vulnerable people in the world are pastoralists so they're raising livestock in sort of traditional ways and people entertain notions of getting rid of it and my question is what replaces it you know like half the world's farmers still depend on draft animals for their tractors jesus i did not know that no so so you know the 45 of humanity consumes less electrical power per year than a large north american refrigerator okay that's like a thousand kilowatt hours is that for is 45 of humanity gets less than that the population of india with no reliable access to electricity is larger than the entire population of the united states right yeah how much bigger is the u.s than australia yeah so you know basically 45 of humanity would like to go from where people living in chicago in 1900 were to somewhere closer to today yeah yeah okay and and so let's feed all this into the conversation about sustainability yeah yeah so that's the thing that um you know a lot of people don't don't realize you know they think that or they they get told and then they repeat that you know livestock you know eat a bunch of of the crops that we grow and that if we if we only just took those crops and gave those to people we would end world hunger we wouldn't have any of these problems um but you know that ignores the fact that the majority of this stuff isn't edible by humans it's hay and and then you know the chaff and cobs and things like that that there are waste products and that you know the waste from the cows then turn into fertilizer and that you know animals going through an ecosystem and eating down you know the different sorts of you know grasses or um you know shrubberies and so forth they they actually benefit the land more than they take away because they're they're recycling these nutrients and recycling the the nutrients in the soil and uh and actually benefiting the land uh as opposed to detracting from it um so that that's that's one of the things you know that uh not everybody understands you know when you do mono cropping and you're just you're just you know tilling a whole big field and you're and you're just growing one crop um there are a couple there are a few things that you know i know you spoke about but this this can damage the the lannister we can you know lose topsoil and so forth um and uh this this can you impact the environment and in many other ways is that something you can uh sort of enlighten us about well yes so if the soil loses structure um then water and air is less able to infiltrate into it um now not all soils inherently have the same structure the same properties so you know one size doesn't fit all but the more organic matter that a soil has the more water it can hold and the more nutrients it can hold and that means that crops grown on that soil are less susceptible to drought it means that um if if that soil in an area is more open to infiltration of water we have less runoff and so the watershed is healthier and if we have a perennial community of plants on top of that soil holding it together and protecting it it's less susceptible to erosion either by wind or water and you know we we've gone through periods of great erosion in the united states um some of them are quite famous but it's still going on um i was in one part of the country where i'm told that since the 60s they've lost 18 inches of topsoil wow on these incredibly and nobody knows they're doing this nobody intends to do this this stuff happens there's an explanation for all of it but we've got to do better that's the point and you know now that we're learning more and people are adopting these practices so those are some of the things that you could you know the one of the realities is if you dig up sod remove all the sod if you've ever done it you know that's no mean thing but get rid of all the sod so that there's no more plants there and then you water that you're going to get plants there's a lot of seed there in the soil already and it's kind of like nature's band-aid nature doesn't want you know not that anthropomorphised nature but because of the seed bank that's in the soil when that soil is exposed and then the conditions favor germination you're going to get a lot of weeds well we have to we have to suppress the existing vegetation to produce the crops that we want and you can do that in a number of ways but at the end of the day that's what you're going to do so what's happened in north america in you know the eastern part of what we think of as the plains most of that now has been converted from a tall grass prairie to commodity crops and farming's gone through a number of changes over the years and again there's explanations for that but the idea that there's a lot more of that kind of land that's available to produce the commodity crops that people think they can feed to people instead of livestock products so back to your point about feed versus food if you look at the entire domestic livestock herd i think the figure is something like 14 of the feed that goes into feeding all the domesticated livestock is potentially human edible right if you just look at ruminants it's about 94 okay and and a quarter of that is estimated to be feed grains that were not um suitable for human consumption okay and then we can argue about whether people should be consuming them just because you can doesn't mean you should so that's what we're looking at in terms of this feed to food thing i've also seen figures that say that two-thirds of the cereal crops what was it actually actually all you could take all the cereal that's fed to ruminants i believe this is the case that's only 10 of our cereal crop production yeah well so one of the scandals today is that cereals is a larger source of protein in quotes in humanity's diet than all animal source foods combined right and wheat is the single largest source of protein yeah in humanity's diet and so it's like that's where we already are and that's the problem yeah well that yeah yeah that's the thing too that you know what people don't realize is is um you know 80 percent of the of the protein available or protein in wheat is gluten and gluten is not available uh to us for uh for use as protein so eighty percent of that protein is absolutely unusable uh by humans and it also causes you know leaky gut it buys you you know causes these uh you know breaks in your in your gut lining and and uh and and you know allows lectins and other sorts of nonsense and bacteria system 80 of the phosphorus that's contained in those cereals is not available to us right yeah and and so now let's think about okay we've got this we people want to talk about circular systems but the reality is we're heading toward 2050 when i think it is that 75 or more of humanity will be living in urban areas so we're pumping nutrients from where the food is produced to where the food is going to be consumed and then the system is broken in terms of how that gets back to the land yeah so one could say or suggest wouldn't it be better if the if if the foods that those nutrients are being exported in were of the most utilizable form so that the highest percentage of what's getting exported gets absorbed well that doesn't enter into the conversation too much either and we haven't even gotten yet to the the cost the impact of chronic disease yeah yeah which is she also has a huge social economic and environmental impact yeah absolutely um so yeah so i mean from everything you're saying i mean this isn't uh this doesn't suggest that uh you know livestock and so forth reduces the food supply in any in any reasonable way whatsoever and from what it sounds like you're saying that that given these you know some edible sorts of you know grains and so forth but the majority of inedible um what we're getting back from livestock is far more than we're actually putting in yeah absolutely this the i forgot to mention it thank you for the prompt um this role of upcycling nutritional quality so you know when when you can't use it at all it's kind of hard to estimate the scale because like dividing by zero is a problem i mean we we far increase the value of the feeds that were feeding into ruminants and so even that those you know if it's unutilizable by us then okay it's infinite if it's utilizable by us it's still a significant increase yeah so you know these ruminant animals and and there's lots of them around the world and the systems look different depending on where you are but they're absolutely essential to to sustainable food systems like you cannot be serious and support sustainable food systems if you're against animal agriculture in general and ruminant animal agriculture in particular [Music] yeah i think i remember hearing you say at one point that it was more uh you got more and better uh nutrition from uh growing a field of alfalfa and feeding that to a dairy cow than you would for growing a crop of wheat in that same area um is that what you're talking about with this upcycling and just getting more out of it exactly of course except for alfalfa sprouts we can't really utilize alfalfa directly now people again and again and again look at extracting protein from alfalfa to feed to human beings and i keep saying isn't that what the cow is for yeah but okay i get it um but yes absolutely upcycling is a key part of all those advantages um and and we haven't yet talked about the byproducts that come from livestock we did talk about fertilizer and bone meal is one of those fertilizers meat and blood meal is another fertilizer that goes back in leather obviously pharmaceuticals rendering by-products all of those are key [Music] so and it's interesting because while that industry is key to the meat industry the environmental impact is all put onto the meat yeah not any portion of it and it's hard to do that kind of stuff but even there if you know we start talking about greenhouse gas emissions water use we've talked about land use but we haven't the the conversation has been so over simplified and so misrepresented that i can stand here today and say as it is today beef is almost certainly net zero now they're working to demonstrate it and but but the way to do that so there was a paper came out last spring it's so it's almost a year old now back to this crude protein digestible protein utilizable protein and little utilizable protein in this paper was defined by the amount of available lysine right if you're looking in a diet um again because if you don't have enough lysine you're not going to be able to utilize the rest of the digestible protein so it's sort of like the second choke point in in that example um if you start and you look at crude protein and they looked at diet information for like 103 countries or territories what they basically said is okay here's your target intake oh yeah that would be something else we could talk about the recommended daily allowance of 0.8 grams per kilogram body weight is a minimum and people treat it as if it's a target okay so so even at that low target i'm sorry minimum they say okay well based on crude protein look this is it looks like all these low and middle income countries are meeting protein so then you have people saying well protein isn't a nutrient of concern globally okay but if you then tease it apart and say how much of that is digestible well now you've got about half of those are below that low level and then if you look at the amount of lysine so the utilizable protein you end up with almost none of those 103 countries or territories are meeting with the and then that's before we ever talk about well should that target be higher yeah right which we have good evidence for so we we have people in this conversation space saying protein is not a nutrient of concern when it manifestly is the end result of them going through that exercise and looking at the actual utilizable protein was it cut the emissions intensity by a factor of 100 for dairy and so it then brings dairy below the emissions intensity for utilizable protein for soy beverage so so that adjustment only looking at protein brings those foodstuffs to be comparable so anything we're going to do to produce food is going to have an environmental impact let's be serious about this yeah but when we evaluate them properly okay but now wait but wait there's more because it's not only protein as important as that is that we're getting from animal source foods and so there's been other work looking at the environmental the emissions intensity to produce the shortfall micronutrients and all of the animal source foods are at the low end of emissions intensity compared to other foodstuffs the plant sources a function of their nutritional makeup oh and the last thing which i love is even in the ipcc the intergovernmental panel on climate change latest report in august they stated that the metric that they've been using to estimate warming potential from enteric methane that is the methane that comes out of the cows rumens via burps they've been overestimating that impact by a factor of three to four is that all that's all yeah and and underestimating the impact of methane from hydrocarbons gee i think now i wonder i wonder how that happened yeah well so so now that we've so but before i was saying that animal source foods when we look at the entire group of nutrients that we get from them are comparable or already but we need to now divide that by a factor of three at least yeah so it's now much less oh and by the way they haven't really been doing a good job of looking at the carbon that's sequestered in the soils [Music] under these grasslands [Music] so already when you look at the budgets in the united states put out by epa it says what is the you know carbon the emissions budget sources and sinks agriculture and forestry you know the the land use the pos we're already negative yeah today yeah do better could do better that's not the issue yeah now i can't help myself there was a paper that estimated the emissions greenhouse gas emissions from u.s health care at 10 percent of total u.s all of animal agriculture is four right beef alone is two yeah okay what are we talking about here yeah i mean so so anything that could reduce healthcare need in the united states what might that be yeah okay we'll come back to that perhaps yeah proper nutrition so again there are many pieces to this and and people have there's one wonderful graphic i just got from someone that you know imagine a circle where you've got 24 or so different items arranged around the circumference of that circle and you've got some people that are just focusing in only on greenhouse gas emissions yeah as one of those meanwhile you've got others who are saying wait a minute these other all of them are important to sustainable issues but too many people have had myopia and just looking at that one and if you just look at that one you're going to perturb some of those others in ways you don't understand comprehend aren't even looking at so again there is a paper a series of estimates that said that if if all of i should get this one because i'm going to get it wrong i know it it's so the average american with type 2 diabetes uses pharmaceuticals equal to two metric tons of co2 equivalent per year okay okay so what's that um well let's just let's just wildly speculate here that perhaps maybe someday in the future there's a way for the average type 2 diabetic to reduce or eliminate oh my goodness let's really get crazy their medication use you know like hypothetically maybe type 2 diabetes is not incurable and progressive okay sarcasm turned off yeah wildly so that amount if you then looked at all of the type 2 diabetics today that's something like a potential reduction of 50 million metric tons of co2 right okay i still don't know what that means that's equivalent to more than 10.8 million passenger car years yeah off the road yeah yeah okay that's like four percent of the registered passenger vehicles in the united states or put it another way that's more than 4.7 times the cumulative sales of all the plug-in electrical cars to date as of last december yeah but this is every year right okay so so put another way if the average type 2 if the average adult type 2 diabetic in america could eliminate their medication use they'd reduce their carbon footprint 29 more than if they went from a high meat to a vegan diet yeah now can people stay on a vegan diet no no very rarely do people maintain that i mean it just seems to be the evidence um can people stay on uh i think so so so again i understand that i'm jumping around and you know speculating wildly here but we're we're dealing with a very complex system um the the quote that i came across was something like um ecosystems are not only more complex than we think they're more complex than we can think yeah yeah i i think that's a good way of putting it you know i mean this is the entire world you know well and and yet we have people making very confident assertions about if you'd only do this than that and well but wait there's there's several points along this circle that we should and human health is one of them yeah and and by my experience we haven't given that sufficient credit yet and that's one of my missions is to get us talking more so that these conversations about sustainability can include because when sustainable health care comes up it comes with the implicit assumption sometimes explicit that if people would only eat more fiber and more whole grains and less meat that they'd be healthier yeah which is you know painly wrong you know well i'd like to see their data yeah at least yeah and i'm not convinced they have data i'm convinced that they have a nutritional epidemiology and model projections yeah and and supposition and fraud you know i mean a lot of this is is is based on the fact that you know they you know the usda you know said in 1977 that cholesterol causes heart disease saturated fat increases cholesterol therefore meat is bad therefore meat red meat and eggs are really bad and if something doesn't have fat and cholesterol therefore it's good for you which is which is where the whole idea of eating a whole bunch of you know grains and even sugar uh fruits and vegetables came from and that's that's all the proof and evidence that that they ever need even well and environmentalism was also part of that all the way back there right i mean diet for a small planet in the dietary goals oh great which was the product of that senate subcommittee so they reproduced tables they cited in the reference this book uh which by the way advocates this idea that you can combine you know complementary proteins and make complete protein and it's just not that easy um and so then that became the dietary guidelines i mean that's so it goes all the way back to that point and and we need to acknowledge that it wasn't merely the human health although obviously that was important coming on the heels of watching a u.s president have a heart attack etc etc yeah and then so this sort of ties into the fact that everyone everyone says that you know if we you're eating more uh animals and we have livestock it's just killing the environment this is causing global warming and all these sorts of things but obviously you know as you just pointed out that that's not the case you know everyone everyone worries about co2 but this has much lower co2 footprint uh than than you know crop production and if we're going to be switching to a plant-based diet anyway we're replacing meat with more crops if we grow more crops i'll have bigger carbon footprint you know i maintain that co2 is actually a good resource this is what plants breathe and it actually can can benefit as well but you know if you if that is a metric that that is of concern it's not it's not as cut and dry as they've been saying what about the the water impact this is something that everyone says you know that that you know that cows and livestock just take up so much water and so much you know resources in that regard that and that's really hurting the environment and hurting everyone else and taking away from our water supply what would you say about that a couple things one is animals perform within the water cycle just like humans do so they don't destroy water a lot of the estimates are based on looking at how much water falls on a hectare of land [Music] okay and then assuming okay so you can only produce one calf per hectare so how much meat do you get from that calf therefore all that water went into that calf right and and so obviously that's not accurate it's happened it gets cited there's a difference in water that comes out of a stream um you know falls on the ground versus water that you have to pump out of the ground from aquifers all of that there's been some really good work that looks across the united states and it's going to look different the water use in new england is going to look a lot different than the water use in arizona so but again this is all something occurring within a natural system and if we can demonstrate as i think we have that it's better for the hydrologic function of an ecosystem to have natural or grasslands perennial grasslands which require grazing you know something that's occurred in i know australia frequently but in the us if you don't graze grasslands they will burn yeah and most of these ecosystems evolved under fire and grazing and so if we take the grazing away we get the fire and if we've built up a lot of fuel then they're hotter more destructive harder to control versus those that might occur in a better managed and again this is not a simple thing you can't just blanket apply it but it's just clear that if we don't utilize these grasslands with grazing animals then we suffer consequences so the water estimates are frequently bloated sorry the greenhouse gas emissions are frequently inflated um sorry um and at the end of the day we're still going to have to eat something yeah and so most of where is that going to come from who's going to produce that where and then we can talk about trade-offs but again we too certainly in the united states we've devolved into this us and them kind of approach to things and it's just not helpful and i'm getting tired of it although i haven't fully weaned myself from it um there is no agriculture without animal agriculture yeah right so there is no you know animal there is no plant agriculture without animal agriculture yeah and and our animal agriculture systems that we have today certainly in the us they're also present in australia means that we're going to be utilizing byproducts from crop agriculture so and and then in parts of certainly in the southern great plains even producing winter wheat for example can graze that during the winter take the animals off before the seed head starts elongating up through the tiller and still get a grain crop so now we're getting both products off the same bit of land right and that's that's before we ever start thinking of silvopastoral cropping systems where maybe you know we're going to grow trees in wide-spaced rows and we'll grow soybeans in between and then when the soybeans are harvested we'll plant a forage crop as a short rotation and then graze animals on that until it's time to grow soybeans again you know one of the things that i find it interesting is what drives soybean production is not for animals it's for soybean oil yeah yeah so if you want to like impact global soybean production which is what's driving deforestation in certain parts of the world then get people to stop using soybean oil yeah well you know but then you know that that resource would have to come from somewhere else that's currently you know the soybean meal is being used in a variety of other products so it again it's it's a complicated system that we benefit from and we have the opportunity individually to choose what to eat now that doesn't exist for a large part of humanity right yeah um i once heard i i i think i got this the source second hand from um uh dr georgia eid but something like 95 of the world's vegetarians would like to not be yeah yeah yeah exactly you know it it's not a choice it's an it's it it's an essential yeah you know function of their circumstance and that gets us back to you know all of those what what what is it 56 i think that's it again i'm looking at a slide set that i'm about to deliver so i better get this um [Music] 59 of children 6 to 23 months globally are not fed eggs dairy fish or meat wow and yet those foods are accepted as the ideal food for children in that age group yeah and 59 of children globally are not getting it jesus yeah so and and then we as a species worldwide population is growing older such that by 20 i think it's 2100 something like that there won't be any more children 15 years and younger than there are today but that two billion or whatever more human beings are going to be people like myself in their 60s 70s 80s maybe even 90s we know that older human beings require a higher plane of nutrition yeah then perhaps a 20 or 30 year old man does i won't include women because of child bearing and everything else so it it we're we have had these one-size-fits-all recommendations for far too long yeah and um you know just to just sort of touch on on some of that you're talking about you know the world your worldwide malnutrition and um and the state of chronic disease um that you can have under nourishment and your people can be undernourished and not getting proper uh nutrition while still being in a caloric uh eucaloric state or even a caloric surplus um and that's uh it sounds like you know 50 what was it 59 of kids are probably in that state they're not getting proper nutrition they may be getting enough calories but they're not getting appropriate nutrition for proper development right um the phrase that i've learned is you can be undernourished but overfed right yeah and and that obesity unfortunately i i've listened to people who've done the work where they go into a community and they just supplement whatever they're eating like like they design a program to introduce poultry for egg production and and they teach people how to do this and they provide the chickens and they look at the house you know what and they can see scholastic performance differences in the children years later right yeah they make sure that this gets to one of the things they have to make sure is that the woman has permission from the how the man that's just the function of those cultures and don't you know it's like that's just the way it is you have to convince the man not to sell every egg and then some of those should go to their own children before they start right so so these are complicated things um it's not oh it's not as simple as me you know going over to my bookshelf and saying here's the forages 101 book and here's the animal nutrition and here good you've got it all sorted all done good next no we've got to uh find you know uh ways for um this to be deployable i'm looking right now um percent of 30 year old people who would die before their 70th birthday from any of cardiovascular disease cancer diabetes or chronic respiratory disease okay so that's there's a metric about that and there's a whole lot of the world right now including most of africa that's 20 percent or more of people who are currently 30 where we're going to die of what we would argue were metabolic diseases linked to hyperinsulinemia right so this is this is a huge issue when it comes to sustainable development yeah you know that that you're not having people live and at the same time i've heard that that's stunting in sub-saharan africa could be 11 of gdp drag on development so um all of this is why i say you know that that humanities existential crisis is a lack of animal source food in their diet yeah before which yeah we have evidence of that it's not model projection yeah yeah now i would totally agree with that as well you know you look at the burden of of disease throughout the world just heart disease diabetes uh you know getting into cancer autoimmune diseases um you know this is this is a huge burden uh on on people's health obviously this the people are sick for decades and decades they died decades early and this cost trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars uh to treat this i think it was dr lustig said that we spend 2.4 trillion dollars a year just treating the effects of fructose consumption sugar consumption you know with the diabetics and the heart disease and so forth that you know nine percent of americans are diabetic and they account for 75 of the medicare costs and you know and when you figure that that 40 of americans are pre-diabetic ostensibly if they don't change their ways and and likelihood is that a lot of them won't that in a decade or so you'll have 50 of of americans uh you know diabetic or close to it and what's what is that going to do to the health care costs which is you know a very big issue you know we can we can talk about which you know economic structure is best to fund a health care system i certainly have my own opinions but you know it comes down to the fact that if you are if you have trillions and trillions of dollars in excess costs you're going to bog down any system and wouldn't those resources be far better used somewhere else i mean can you imagine another two trillion dollars you know pumped into you know some other aspect of the economy i mean we'd have flying cars and you know be on the moon by now yeah i'm disappointed we don't have those yeah like like back to the future too we were we were promised um yeah going faster in the wrong direction is never the right idea no yeah right and and that seems to be all people can suggest to us and as bad as it is in high income countries we need to get people to recognize that this is not the plagues of prosperity this is not the you know western diseases whatever you know that globally more people are killed by chronic disease every year than infectious yeah right that that the majority of chronic disease deaths occur in low and middle income countries yeah that's partly a function of population right but again this is the reality and you know every 30 seconds someone in the world loses a lower limb due to diabetes now imagine that happening in a low-income country yeah yeah versus you know so all of that the as bad as the burden is in income countries now let's imagine what it is in these other parts of the world and to take it back to the environmental quote-unquote writ large myopically viewed the emissions intensity for beef in the united states is somewhere around 12 kilograms co2 equivalent per kilogram boneless beef 12 to 1. in zimbabwe it's 70. okay okay um something like 20 of the world's cattle live in sub-saharan africa and yet they haven't really been commercialized for any number of reasons right lots of cultural work lots of stuff but it's just the landscape right so or take another example i think brazil has like three times the number of cattle that we do in the us but they produce less beef oh okay so increasing productivity and efficiency there's a lot of people that just kind of twitch real hard when you talk about productivity or efficiency but those produce environmental benefits less land less water less feed less emissions yeah yeah and and so i'm not saying that we pick up what we do in the united states and we plunk it down in zimbabwe and say there problem sorted next right but there are examples of um people from livestock innovation lab at university of florida part of feed the future working with hillary out of kenya that they developed just basic dry cow treatment so from during the cows lactation cycle when she's not giving milk there's certain things that you do to okay so in nepal they're buffalo not cows yeah okay so they just developed this delivered it and they saw the mastitis rate go from like 70 to like 15 percent wow which that's animal welfare that's environmental because now you don't have to have as many animals you know rolling over that's greater profit for the for the the the dairymen that's better dairy quality food safety issues right all of those things this is stuff we know how to do yeah we just have to have people with the vision so way back at the beginning of all this you said people say we can't yeah right there's one statement that is universally true every time it's said everywhere it's said it won't work here yeah well if you've got anything to do with it you're right yeah yeah let me go talk to your neighbor who's already doing it you know it's like um so one of the reasons people think it we can't do it is because that's what they've been told and that's what they believe yeah so one of the documents that really influenced the whole dietary guidelines was by a man named paul ehrlich have you heard of him uh speculation bomb yes yeah yeah okay this dude's still around and people still listen to him he was wrong when his dang book was published okay just it just he's still wrong that ain't changed he said in the book that india had lost the race to feed its population right and that the that we should not give them food aid oh that's nice right unless they implemented some stringent population growth initiatives which got really dark right i mean it not good stuff like like uninformed sterilization of women okay yeah and funny thing is which cast of women that happened to versus others but but i digest let me get back to the point he's his book was published in 68 okay i remember that but okay india commissioned a stamp in 1968 commemorating the wheat revolution that was underway and by 1972 they were exporting cereals they had gone beyond self-sufficiency to exporting yeah now that's a big discrepancy there yeah okay and it had consequences in human lives okay so if your world view is informed by that one then you see things in a certain way meanwhile there are people doing the hard work that says no here's what's possible we just achieved it what's next yeah and and as long as people are thinking it's merely calories it's merely protein right then you'll have people looking for solutions down one way and back to the point about the the one egg a day making a significant a lot of those people those good researchers doing that work to improve human lives still are influenced by the conventional wisdom that there's there's such a thing as too much like they're demonstrating the reality of too little but they still believe that there's any reality to something called too much for human health and nutrition issues right we can deal with the environmental issue later i need people to understand that maybe even we haven't fully explored the too little yet right maybe some of that and and one of the people that i've leveraged from um talks about metabolic illness as being a subclinical kwashiorkor [Music] that that a deficit in some essential amino acids manifesting itself in some of what we're seeing in metabolic illness i don't know i'm just a forage agronomist and a ruminant nutritionist i find it interesting and of course i i do that's my you know filter and lenses and everything else but okay i i do relate the story of giving a presentation that same person that talked about subclinical kwashiorkor he related ten different studies where they looked at feeding swine sufficient and deficient lysine diets and they noticed across those 10 significantly greater subcutaneous fat significantly greater intramuscular fat marbling and significantly smaller loin eye back muscle right okay the next day i had a surgeon come to me in the morning before the whole thing kicked off and said when you showed those slides because i had done that with some pork board you know loin eye marbling score and he said i looked at my partner i said that's what i'm seeing in our patients yeah that and then he explained to me that there's a correlation between intramuscular fat in the back muscles and chronic back pain right okay yeah and now he's serving a low socioeconomic population in st louis okay who's probably eating a lot of processed cereal products in one form or another we just explained that there can be virtually in some of them essentially none of the lysine is is utilizable yeah okay what if it's lysine with this comment yeah i don't know yeah i'm just a forage agronomist so here take the information and go find some studies and see what you can do i mean what he said was he was introducing 60 000 devices to control back you know chronic pain that weren't working yeah no they don't weren't working yeah and so it's like uh what what does lysine supplementation cost oh let's skip the supplementation let's let's get them the you know let me let me connect you to the missouri cattlemen let me see what we can do about getting you know ground beef from missouri cattle into st louis to your patients yeah you know maybe there's a way to make this system work a little better yeah and just to sort of reiterate what you were saying about lysine um you're saying that that's sort of a bottleneck whereas if you're not getting enough life if you if you get sort of x amount of lysine you're you're really only utilizing absorbing um other proteins to that level as well so that that can be like a bottleneck so if you don't have enough lysine you won't be able to utilize the other other proteins uh that you're using and so even if you have all the other proteins in abundance if you only have a small amount of lysine you you can't utilize them is that right yeah that's right and and back to the swine industry they've known about this uh for a couple reasons one is economics right that if they don't have the right balance then the animals aren't as profitable as um when they are in balance the other thing is because if you're feeding excess amounts of amino acids but the utilization is limited you're going to be excreting more nitrogen yeah well that's an environmental problem yeah so now you're getting the ding on you know not good feed efficiency not good animal performance so you're not making on that and then you have the cot well now back to what we talked about with the phosphorus or with the big you know we're shipping nutrients into concentrated feeding operations for human beings we call them cities and then the nutrients that aren't utilized have to be managed somehow well maybe if we lowered the loading of that system by feeding more digestible forms of food maybe that would be a good thing or at least accounted for in the system yeah yeah exactly because all these things are going to go out as as waste so you just you know you may be taking in a lot of protein and this is again uh where people can can sort of fool themselves into thinking that they're so healthy and you know especially you know people that are interested in you know health and athletics and so forth this thing look at all this protein that i'm getting i'm getting the same amount of protein as someone who's eating meat but it may not be absorbable or digestible utilizable it's not may not be bioavailable and if you're not having enough lysine and so forth you may not even be able to use it at all and so uh and as you say you know when you're you're toasting bread or or cooking these sorts of carbohydrates that that binds that lysine um uh you know irreversibly to carbohydrates and now you you cannot utilize that at all so even if you think oh yeah i've got enough lysine do you really is it actually being is it actually being accessible and so there's another point here that it took me far too long to realize it um when we're dealing with dairy operations or well primarily dairy but also beef we really emphasize to people um you know you need to be testing every lot of hay that you purchase or put up yourself because the feed quality varies from variety to variety cut to cut field to field year to year okay and that that degree of variation can have a significant impact on ration formulation profitability milk production [Music] i'm pretty sure they don't print a new label for every batch that they run through the plant when a new batch of soybeans or wheat or whatever comes in and yes they vary they vary tremendously so so now you you have that as a confounder to the to the you know you you don't know what it is you have now there's tolerance is supposed to be around the labels but plus or minus i mean people spend a lot of time tracking things that i don't know how good the data is that they're tracking right if that makes sense um and then we get to other parts of the world where they really don't have that many samples of these different foods [Music] and so maybe there's only one sample in the database for this food that's then used to estimate what nutrient intake is from a lot of different areas around the world so it's it the part of the scandal is we've we've wasted so much so many resources time and money on this nutrition epidemiology of chronic disease narrative and taken away from doing this other really important work that needs to be done still because we haven't done it yet because we've been distracted by these other narratives and and hopefully soon and very soon we can get more well as you said if we could take two trillion dollars away from here and apply it toward what everyone in livestock agriculture understands and that is herd health begins with nutrition yeah and we give in human side it seems like we give lip service to that but we really don't because we're we're not dealing with evidence we're dealing with narrative for a lot of it yeah and and i think that's the thing you know there is a bit of an advantage as you know as maybe as as callus as it seems that you know animals when used as a product you know you can maximize your potential with that product by feeding them the right things by having them be as healthy as they can be so they can grow as large as they can and and this actually confers a benefit to you know the owner of these livestock and so forth so it's in their best interest to make sure they're healthy make sure they're getting the right nutrients and so forth and so you actually have these scientific disciplines like you you know that you're involved in uh looking at you know very very uh detailed examinations of what what these animals are eating to maximize their their health and potential whereas we're really not doing that with with human health um because you know we don't really use humans as as a product except in the medical industry as well and so that's we have a we have a sort of a backwards incentive yeah and so we have a backwards sort of incentive there where it's actually you know companies or or you know certain people would suggest that they're incentivized to keep people sick i don't know if there's any sort of intentions to do that but it certainly you know people are getting sick and they are getting sicker and this is benefiting certain industries more than others yeah i mean the way i put it is we in in plant nutrition and animal nutrition we can do a great deal to control for the variation right in plants we could have identical plants i mean we could clone them if we wanted to you know we could have an identical soil in each pot and see what happens under control conditions animals a little bit more difficult but we can still get genetically similar animals to use under control conditions there are ethics and there's reviews and there's lots of things one of my favorite stories is that a professor uh emulated a swine ration based on the nhanes data right which is what the average so quote-unquote american diet is and and they fed these swine and the attending veterinarians stopped the study early because he thought it was inhumane yeah yeah what was happening to the swine um but but so at one meeting i was saying you know it's very hard to find large groups of genetically similar human beings that you can control completely for long periods of time know exactly what you're feeding them and what they don't eat okay and then a good friend of mine spoke up from the audience and said and slaughter them at the end to determine body composition yeah yeah it's hard to get people to sign up for that yeah um and yet that's essentially a production cycle yeah in these you know western livestock production systems it gets more difficult when we have animals out grazing especially when we get onto rangeland where it's far more variable and diverse but still it you know it's not and it's it's not a bad thing that you can't do that with human beings right right that's yeah i'm cool with not being able to do that with human beings the problem comes in where people act as if they are right where they say things implying that they know with certainty right that x will lead to y and there's no way that you can know that yeah and i i think people are getting very tired of hearing people make these confident assertions that they can't know yeah and it's like what do we know what where are the holes in our information and let's let's be honest about it and and i think we'll make a lot more progress if we could get to that kind of a state yeah i think so too um well peter thank you very much i'm conscious of your of your time um but i really appreciate you coming on just to sort of reiterate you know just to touch on a few things that we talked about um you know sustainability uh is a much more complex model than just you know is is this you know can we can we grow crops or or or animals because this plays into the whole you know uh economic and medical structure of health and and well-being as well um but from also what you're saying animals really do benefit the environment they benefit the soil they benefit the air they utilize and recycle nutrients the water that they use doesn't get used up it gets recycled out you know they urinate and defecate and this actually helps the land as well so that animals can use this fertilizers and they benefit the land there's a very big difference between crude and usable protein and that's after we talk about biovale or before we even talk about bioavailability of the different protein and [Music] protein sources lysine is a is a stop gap if you don't get enough lysine you know if you have even if you have enough of the other amino acids you're not going to be making proper proteins and so those will go out in waste um and that's we're talking about your animal emissions from the from the animal industry this is actually comparable or even less than than crop agriculture and you know if you're going to switch to an animal or plant-based uh style that you're actually going to probably increase emissions and that you know a lot of these these crops that are utilized by the animals are actually waste products they would either be thrown away or have to be burned in order to get get rid of them and make way for the new crops and whereas an animal can eat them and recycle these nutrients and provide benefit and nutrition uh to people as well um and that you can't have plant agriculture without animal agriculture they go hand in hand there's symbiosis there which makes perfect sense when you think about the ecosystem and how you know all life evolved you know we evolved plants and animals will evolve together in a balance and if you don't have that balance then you're you're going to cause some serious uh disruptions in you know the ecology and health of of the world um and that there's a massive massive issue with malnutrition around the world even in places that get enough calories and even are overweight you know as you say over fed and undernourished and that is a term i heard you used um you know that this isn't a western disease or affluenza just that in the uh wealthier nations that this is just because we have excessive uh you know desires and we and we meet those but in fact that all the majority of these are hitting impoverished nations that uh have a much greater impact because as you say you know someone gets an amputation in a western country well they've got all sorts of different supports with you know medical community and you know and prosthetics and different sorts of uh tools and and resources to help them live as normal of a life as possible whereas if you're in in middle rural india and you lose a leg you're in a much different state and it's going to have a much greater impact on your life and then of course the the the the human impact that translates into a greater societal impact when you have the misdevelopment or even underdevelopment of uh of people nutritious from a nutrition standpoint they're not getting enough you know human appropriate nutrition and so like you said i think it was you said it was an 11 drag on gdp of just this under development uh of people you know intellectually and physically and so forth and so this is this has a massive impact on the world it does not cause global warming in fact it is is something that can can help the environment greatly and by taking by not you looking at this into in the into the large complex system that it is and being myopic and just looking at one detail which is something that humans will want to do you're really missing the forest for the trees because there's so much more going on here that very important you have to you have to get you know get past the surface and really dig deep and see exactly what the hell is going on here um is that is that a a decent summary uh perfect i give you i give you a hundred percent on the exam perfect yeah great was is there anything else you wanted to to touch on or um or say no i just thank you again for the opportunity um i encourage the listeners to explore there's lots of information available i try to share sources and certainly feel free to contact me i'm all over social media so i'm not hard to get in touch with and i hope someday very soon that i get to visit that fair part of the world i've only ever been to sydney so i i hear there's a whole nother part to the country yeah there's there's a little bit more to it yeah [Laughter] so i could land in sydney and drive to perth in a day right i mean that would be okay um yeah i think it would be i think it's something like 40 40 40 yeah four hours of driving uh yeah yeah so it would be like going you know from from east to west coast in the us you know straight across and uh i've done that before it's not fun i went yeah yeah no it's not good i went to arizona to maine and that was just that's a big chunk of my life i i will never get back and well yeah um great peter well so so what was the best place for people to find you and find your work and um and to see see your your stuff you can find me by name on youtube you can find me on twitter at grass-based one word also on instagram same title um there's a grass-based health page on facebook and you can reach me at peter.ballerstead gmail.com fantastic great well dr ballerstadt i really appreciate your time thank you for for coming on dr chaffee it's been my pleasure doctor doctor doctor