Exposing The VEGETARIAN MYTH! | Lierre Keith

if you take the ruminants out out of that grassland it will just simply turn to Desert because the nutrient cycling can't happen there's nothing to biodegrade that grass and so the dead stems just pile up around the roots of the plant and then then space opens up so there's be ground and then there's more be ground and more be ground and eventually you just simply have a desert and and nothing can survive there and there's all these efforts around the globe by people like Alan Savory to bring deserts back to green back to life using and it's actually a really simple process because the world wants to be alive and those creatures know how to do it but you need all three of them you need the grasses you need the ruminants and you need those bacteria all working together to make this happen this is true for every creature we are all dependent on the lives and deaths of everything else and that is the thing I did not know when I was a vegan but what agriculture does long way of saying it destroys all of that now you have be ground and now you can plant those animals that humans are frankly addicted to welcome to the plant-free MD podcast with Dr Anthony chaffy where we discuss diet and nutrition and how this affects health and chronic disease and show you how you can use this to optimize your health and happiness both mentally and physically hello everyone thank you for joining me for another episode of the plant-free MD podcast I'm your host Dr Anthony chaffy and today I have very special guest Lear Keith who's author of The Fantastic book The vegetarian myth and she'll be here today to talk with us about that and uh let us know her thoughts Lear thank you so much for joining us well thank you so much for having me on your show and thank you for your incredible podcast and all your lectures because I have watched pretty much everything you have ever done on YouTube and it changed my life so I I very much appreciate your work oh well thank you very much I appreciate that yeah and and I'm so honored to be on here yeah well you're you're very very welcome it's an absolute pleasure we had uh Lear on our um patreon book club we read her book over the month which was fantastic and everybody absolutely loved it and um she uh she was kind enough to come on as a as a guest and discuss it in our last um sort of discussion Round Table group so that was that was a real pleasure too so thank you again for that as well that was fun that was a nice group yeah so for people having come across your work can you please tell us a bit about yourself well I wrote a book that's called the vet Aran myth I've written other books too but that's the one that made me I'm not even going to say famous but Infamous because there's definitely people who hate me um and they hate me a lot which is fine I sort of expected that um but anyway yeah I so I spent 20 years essentially as a vegan and it wrecked my health as you might imagine I would assume most people who are watching this at least have some understanding of why animal-based foods are really necessary for human health you take them all out and then you slowly collapse and that's what happened over that 20-year period was it just things just I was half dead by the time I was done eating that way um and I had to stop and it was incredibly traumatizing and it's very very hard to stop being a vegan once you are one um it's a it's a long road back in kind of every way so everything that you thought you knew about the universe just turns out not to be true and it is a hard thing to have to put it all back together so you're sort of left in the rubble for a year or two and it was a very intense experience all around and and I really did have to um I just come to grips with the fact that I was kind of living in a very fundamentalist mindset um that I had ignored so much counter information including my own experience you know like when your own body is sort of decaying beneath you it um but yet you keep saying is that sort of cognitive dissonance I'm going to make this work no no no it can't be the diet this is the perfect diet this is the only diet this is what humans are meant to eat and it's the diet of love and peace and sustainability and all the animals you're saving and like there's no way this can be wrong so it's really hard uh when it does collapse on you which it well so um then in sort of in the aftermath of that I had to figure out well how does the world work and what is my place in the cosmos and was any of this true because it didn't work so what part of this was still true and then what of the rest of everything that I had believed turned out to be maybe not so true and it just turned out all of it was in fact not true so all of the things that I thought when I was 16 and I got converted um it just none of them panned out in the real world so um I got I sort of had a Survivor Mission at that point of I I really need to explain this to people because everywhere in my life you bump into people who are still very caught up in that worldview and I could see that they were hurting and it was clear that their lives were also not being helped by eating this diet and I got it down for like an hour or two where I could really kind of get them out of this sort of cult mentality I could I could walk them out of it more or less you know but you sort of get tired of having that conversation a thousand times and I thought I think I just need to write a book so I did um and so that's how I ended up writing the book but I really had two goals I wanted the people who care most about the planet to understand the nature of the destruction and the real problem is agriculture that's where the destruction begins so eating an agricultural diet does not do any of the things that you've been promised it will do that's the thing we have to stop doing and I also wanted the people who care the most not to hurt themselves because it's pointless and I especially wanted to reach others the teenagers the teenage girls more than anyone because I was her and I know why I was vulnerable to that message and I really want to tell those people that your values are correct the passion that you feel about the state of the planet and what is happening to animals in you know Kos on factory farms um all of that is good and and you should never let go of those values it's really the only thing that's going to get us to the world that we all want um but if you had more information you would pick a different way to actually Institute those values because a vegan diet doesn't do it so I wanted to walk everybody through that so it ended up being a book so that that's what I did yeah and they hate me for it was gonna say yeah um so H how is that that received overall um you know I got really positive reviews and of course just blood of fan mail that really never stopped I get a lot of email from people saying I went through this um yes I go back to my health um do you think this is ever going to get better um depends what it is how long you did it um so there and there's a lot of advice I can give people about that you know the things that I know uh lots of information that I can just you know send people to find different resources that they might need so that's been you know very um satisfying you know it's very emotionally satisfying to know that you can help people and I'm not even a doctor it's just look there's there's good information out here and you should know about it so that's helpful um but the hard part of course is always the hate mail and I mean I've been physically assaulted by vegans that's how much they want me to stop talking and I'm not gonna stop talking yeah oh yeah you can watch it I mean it was of course put up on YouTube within you know half an hour um yeah no they are there's there's definitely a segment of this group that is very cult-like and you know they believe in being violent and they you know have no problem um feeling like they're just allowed to shut people up if they don't I mean they have nothing really to engage with right it's just all this rage it's amydala all the time which I understand because I was there I I this the mind what happens to your brain when you eat these really lowfat high carbohydrate diet and and the the level of stuff that's missing like the problem with the vegan diet is you have the problem of excess and then you have the problem of deficiencies right so the deficiencies are really profound and the things that that does to your brain um so I get it like there's not much you can feel Beyond complete either despair like just depression all the time that sort of gray Haze everything you do there's no color left in the world or rage those are the two things that you feel and so I get it they're sort of nutritionally even stuck like their brains won't let them back into like some kind of you know just more like just a better calmer place you can't do it you know so I understand where they're coming from um I have never assaulted anyone but you know it's they talk themselves into it so then and my publisher has stopped selling the book at Book Fairs because his people kept getting assaulted by P so they oh and it's bad yeah no it's bad these are is it's why I have five giant dogs I mean it's just I it's yeah I don't it's not good you go down certain Pathways and it we know this about human beings right we we can get into all kinds of crazy States um but the nutritional part of it is is really profound when you are eating no animal fats your brain is just not going to function correctly you're not going to be able to keep a stable mood state or make good decisions so and and this is what the research shows too is you know the levels of depression and anxiety even suicide rates are higher people who eat lowfat diets a really weird one is the murder rate the people on low really low fat diet have a higher murder rate I that one is a mystery to me but that's what it says and I all right I have no idea what that what would provoke that but oh no kidding very odd but yeah suicide right I get I mean I was suicidal all the time when I was a vegan but your brain is like 80% fat and you have to eat saturated fat to have a brain that's actually going to be happy uh you're missing you're not really getting any tryptophan which and tryptophan is most of us probably know at this point is the is the like the base substance from which serotonin is made you have to have that amino acid and tryptophan is hard to come by in food generally speaking anyway and it really doesn't hardly exists in animal food oh it's in pumpkin seeds okay whatever you can't unwrap that cellulose like you're not a ruminant so really you need to be eating it um and if you don't eat it you don't you're not going to have any serotonin so I know how bad that felt I remember and I remember how I felt the moment I started eating meat it was just night and day so I all of us to say is I honestly have compassion for these people because I know how bad they feel they feel horrible all the time so I really have nothing but forgiveness in my heart because I know they're going to need me someday or somebody like me they're going to need somebody who's been through this experience and can say yeah your health is completely collapsing from this you can find a better way there you can crawl your way out of this and and I can tell you the better way now and you don't have to give up your values to do it but it is a hard year or two so that was sort of my goal but yeah yeah and I can talk more about your brain and like all the problems with the vegan diet or we can yeah talk talk about whatever you want to talk about so no that that all sounds great I mean it it it' just be great to hear all your thoughts on this um you know I I agreed that about the motivation side of things I always tell people I have nothing against vegans or vegetarians for these motivations I share those same motivations it's just we've come to different conclusions as to what the the proper course of action is and but I think it's the right MO ations you care about the plant you care about people you care about animals you care about uh People's Health I mean these are the exact same things that that I am worried about and um it's just we've just been so misled and lied to about you know what the best way to to deal with that is and um but it's the same the same motivations and that's why I think the vast majority of people who who I've Speak to as as people that you follow me on social media And subscribe to my YouTube channel they were all vegans or vegetarians at some point and they they've all sort of gone through this point where they say like okay this this isn't really what I thought it was and and then they sort of come around some people unfortunately have to go through serious health decline before they get it and um and others before that one gentleman was was commenting on one of the one of my videos and he said that he was a vegan but he was like a forager vegan so he would like go through the woods and he would like pick his own you know stems and seeds and all these sorts of things and it was kind of cool you know if you're going to do that you know that sort of makes sense that you do it that way um if you if we're saying that this is something that we should be able to to do in the wild sort of thing and then he he said he watched my plants are trying to kill you talk and he just said he's like and I got I was like why have I not got this of course I know this I go foraging and I know most of these things are going to kill me that they have all these toxins all these poisons and and it's just never clicked in before and he said as soon as he saw that it it made sense and he sort of totally switched but you know we've just been been fooled unfortunately and um you know there are a lot of people that profit greatly by oh yeah by that misinformation that goes out there but I was very interested uh and intrigued by the the lowfat diets causing a higher murder rate I had not heard that before yeah no I can send you that study I yeah have no idea they don't explain why they you know nobody has a theory about it but it just was sort of dropped into the statistics and I was like okay that's weird no idea do they pick fights more I don't have a clue yeah I don't know it's it's very gram like I don't even want to joke about it because it's horrible but like yeah what why it's like people with red cars get hit more like there's just strange things in the world like I don't know how to explain this one yeah well yeah you have to wonder you have to wonder what what's happening is this is I mean why are there so many people that are so angry and physically assaulting you physically attacking you they think that that's an acceptable thing to do and U you know is that is that part of it as well sort of this this anger that Wells up in people or as you see people that are properly nourished I mean they call that you know carnivore Zen you know people are just very totally I feel it I've never felt this calm in my life and I would have been like keto paleo whatever did that for years and it was great I mean compared to like the blood sugar and the whole you know like the moment you get real fat it's like it's all over you're never going back but still even doing that for so long and then I you know started doing carnivore two years ago and it was like within six weeks of that it was like oh wow there's like a whole another level of just happy calm like it's so calm in there I didn't even know there was something else to achieve in that regard and it's just been an amazing experience so I originally I went carnivore because I had Patric arthritis and I I had gone through all the drugs you know i' been through all the kind of lowlevel and I was looking at the biologics and I was like I so do not want to go on one of these drugs but nothing else was working and I had seen some of Mela Peterson's you know I think she's probably converted so many people because she's super famous and she's pretty and she's very you know knowledgeable and anyway I had seen a couple of her things like that's really interesting there's people who just eat meat okay I get it I know about the Inu and whatever you know the mass all the famous ones we all the Sammy all the you know the famous ones we know about I was like all right you I guess I could try that but I sort of tucked it away in the back of my head and then you know it just wasn't working anymore it's like there was no drugs left and I was gonna have to do the really bad ones and I was like you know maybe I should just that Michaela Peterson thing maybe it's just time so I did it and um you know like everybody has these stories was two months in a pain was completely gone it wasn't overnight for me some people I know it's like a week and they're better but I kept at it I was I'm going do this for three months we can reevaluate I don't have to get crazy I don't have to do it forever there's no point not to try it if it's that or a biologic so I was like all right I'll do it and I was like two months in was like just just no pain left it's just gone just gone so I was like why would I go back so um yeah so that's what got me started but I loved watching all of your videos and kenberry and a few of the others it's just been incredibly helpful to know there other people have sort of paved that path you know ahead of me so it's like okay what am I doing and why is this going to be okay like here's these like big strong guys who are like fine after 10 years I'm like all right I'll be all right I'm not gonna get scurvy that's you're gonna get scurvy I'm like I'm not gonna get scurvy yeah I'm not gonna get scurvy like it's the vitamin C I get it like it's the we're not even any carbs we don't need that much of vitamin C it's the same receptors so anyway the scy thing is always what people get upset about there's actually vitamin C in in meat we just don't need very much of it so anyway yeah hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsor at carnivore bar I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat for those times that you're out hiking road tripping or stuck at work and you want nutritious snack that is just meat fat and salt if you want it the carnivore bar is a great option so I like this product not because it's just pure meat but also because I want the carnivore Market to thrive as well and the more we support meat only products the more meat only products there will be available in the main stream so if this sounds like something you'd like to get behind check it out using my discount code Anthony to get 10% % off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25% off total all right thanks guys yeah that's it yeah I mean yeah sorry go no I don't even know where I was going go ahead no I just saying that that that does seem to be a common one that people get concerned about so what about scurvy it's just like look I've been doing this for years now like you would have had scurvy it shows up I remember I know yeah I remember thinking about that in my in my 20s when I first started this I stopped eating all plants and I was just eating meat and eggs by default and I remember thinking that I remember thinking like oh crap know do I need to eat a banana am I missing something there some nutrients that I need and I remember thinking about scurvy and I just sort of thought to myself well you know I feel good feel great and my gums aren't bleeding so I'm just gonna ride this out see what happens you know and um and so I I sort of thought about it I was like a bit like trepidacious like is this going to be it's going to work out well and I'm like well let's just see what happens and it was fine was five years of that and I never had an issue which was what made it easier for me later when I came back to it and it was just like well no hold on humans just actually are Carnivor this is kind of the animal we are and you know Dr Baker was talking about it on on Joe Rogan saying hey you can get everything you need for me and I was just like well I I did that that that's what I was doing basically I wasn't thinking about it in that fashion I wasn't thinking hey I can get everything for meat I was just thinking I'm not going to eat any plants and so and I was just like well that defaulted me into that and that's what I was doing for five years and that's a fiveyear period that I've never felt better in my entire life and I've always been trying to get back to that and I could I never could and I was just like that was it you know was the plants trying to kill you yeah yeah like he was right and and also that guy who was you said it was foraging most of what you look at in a forest like 99% of it is cellulose that's what plant bodies are we can't eat any of that you and I know we're not going to go outside and eat grass for breakfast yeah nor are we going to eat Twigs off of a bush we're not going to eat bark we know this just intuitively you know that you do not eat that for breakfast yeah and that's because it's cellulose that's the entire we cannot access any we cannot make nutrition out of that the way that AR ruminant can or like a deer can we just we can't we're not browsers we're not grazers like you said we're carnivores so it should actually be Prett obvious the only thing left at that point is like berries which is just sugar there's not really much else in a berry and you know a few like in a very young stage some little leafy green like wild green things yeah but the moment they're too big they're so bitter that like it's unbearable I tried eating like really wild dandelion not the garden kind but the ACT it's unbearable you can't make yourself do it they're so bitter um back in my vegan days like oh let's just Harvest everybody eat dandelion greens in Europe we can do that here and I went out just picked some and I was like oh my God this is not possible it is so bitter like nobody could possibly eat this and of course that's the toxins telling you you don't want this this is not for you and it's not it's not for us so yeah yeah there's a I I've spoken to other people that have gone through that progression of vegetarian vegan and their health starts to suffer say okay I'm going to go raw food vegan okay I'm going to go raw fruitarian and it's just like these yeah then we're going to do breath Aran at the end of it all yeah yeah it cross my mind I mean you go to Crazy places so how was that how was that for you did you did you progress like that because of any re reasons I was vegan from the beginning I never had a vegetarian stage I was like all in yeah and I I became a vegan in the way that um most people become vegetarian or vegan you are convinced by somebody you know so I was 16 and there was this friend of my sisters she was 14 and I think polar was 15 I think she was right between us her whole family were vegans and um this was in Massachusetts in Brooklyn and there was this famous place called The Kushi Institute which was macrobiotics um and they had actually moved to there so that they could study at the Ki so they were like all in with like all the you know the famous people of the time who were in that world so she was really into it because her whole family was into it so I had like one conversation with her and I was just utterly convinced so I was right for conversion you know I was that kind of a teenage kid where I was so angry and inflamed about the world like every time I looked outside I was like what are we doing to the planet this is horrible like any given moment there's 120 Wars going on they're all horrible like all of this just terrible stuff and there's racism and there's and there's and like it was all just like I just angry all the time uh which you should be they're terrible things right I don't want to like Pretend This is like a phase and haha you're going to grow out of it no there like these are terrible things and we should be engaged with the world are citizens we need to do things about it if we can we all want a better world I get it so that is like where I was coming from but you know as a teenager it's everything's very black and white at that age which has its gifts and it's you know its downsides so I'm glad not to be a teenager anymore but anyway she had me completely convinced so you know here's these terrible things that are happening to animals I didn't know anything about that so was like this is horrible oh yeah and there's the in the pictures we didn't have the internet back then but you know there were horrible photographs and I all the little brochures I was like this is wretched I don't want to be part of this and then look how many hungry people you're going to feed so I you know was reading to Francis Mor lape and the diet for planet and all that and it all seemed to make sense like it I didn't have any counter information that's part of the problem and I didn't even know where to look for it if I wanted it um all I found was more stuff sort of backing that up saying yeah it's terribly wasteful we feed all this grain to cattle and we should be feeding hungry people instead and like none of that actually turns out to be true and none of it actually helps starving people which I can walk you through if people don't understand that but at age 16 I didn't know any better so it all was like this beautiful package if you do this one thing you will fix all the problems also you will save your health and I was very very concerned about that and my giant dog is barking go outside baby go outside go outside outside run run run go outside so that is Duke and he weighs 160 pounds and his bark is like this Sonic Boom because he's enormous dog all my dogs are big I have great peer in these dogs but that one's the really big guy so it's outside and there's nobody home but me so out you go baby anyway so now he's run down the driveway and he can bother the neighbors um yeah so it just seemed like this complete picture and um so I was in all the way and from just from day one it was like you know within a week I was like okay that's it and I had to learn how to eat all that new food like I didn't even know what tofu was it's like what is this like what do I do with it I'm not really sure and I there was this rumor that you could sort of spread it on Bagels you cannot spread it on Bagels it doesn't spread it sort of crumbles and it tastes disgusting when it's raw so I I just I totally had to figure out what to do with that so anyway it was like this whole new world of like okay how do I cook this the rice and the beans the only good thing I can say was that back then because this was the early 80s um they didn't have all of those kind of fake meat soy analog products that are now easily available like the fake hot dogs and the fake bacon and none of that existed and I say that that's good in my case because if I had lived on those it would have been so much worse soy we could have a whole hour just on how horrifying soy is for human beings for any any animal so I didn't really eat a lot of that at first because it it honestly just didn't exist so if you were going to be a vegan back then you actually had to cook and it was mostly brown rice and some Bean or you know some kind of legume and then you know some peanut butter um and then we had oh like we had a lot of like granola kind of things like Trail Mixie sort of snacking it was just I mean constant that's all you do is eat when you're eating that diet because you feel so crappy from the blood sugar swings but um anyway at least it was like it wasn't as bad as it would have been if we had been eating highly processed soy because like I said that didn't actually exist like they didn't have soy milk in containers back then so like breakfast would be like granola like vegan granola so there's no way in it it's just like oats essentially and maybe some I don't know chocolate chips or something and then we don't laugh we would pour apple juice on it and that's what we would eat it's disgusting it's like so much sugar I cannot imagine well I didn't survive I mean I did permanent damage so that's uh that's actually what happened go ahead outside jie go ahead go play with you now all the dogs are outside so it should be no more Bing the interview um yeah so that was what we had um so I did that and then yes there comes that point where you're like wow I feel really sick and like XYZ all of this has gone wrong like this's this list of things you know over the first few years that just keep getting worse in terms of your health so then you you double down all right this is because last year I ate one piece of pizza so clearly I'm still detoxing from that little bit of cheese like the games that you play in your head with this all right we're going to double down we're going to get even and then I did the ra thing that only that didn't last long for me that food was so horrible even I could not make myself eat it uh also I was living in Massachusetts and it was freezing cold so it was just that was not going to work I did try though at least I tried so I can say at least I tried it was like I can't live on this so I just went back to regular vegan um but it did cross my mind at a certain point it was like it's still it's like you're just falling to pieces you're so exhausted you're depressed in my case I mean I can go through all the health conditions that I developed some of which are permanent um not fun like it's just you really will just wreck yourself people I promise this doesn't end well for anybody um but um yeah so then there was this moment like well what if I became a breatharian maybe that would be um the way that that that would finally cure all my problems because it's still I'm still eating and that's bad clearly so I should just learn to just breathe instead that would be like the purest like no nothing would die if I could just breathe and then you know you hear all these crazy stories and there are people in this world who will tell you yes you can achieve bre Aran and I met some of them they're like oh I'm trying to be a breth Arian um and I mean it's just anorexia is obviously all it is right but at the time there's like this glimmer like you you might be able to do this like if you're spiritually evolved enough you you could actually learn to just live on sunlight and oxygen you could like there's people who claim now never mind they all end up dead um or when they're put in an actual like laboratory setting they can't do it they get they actually start dying and then they you know they of course they were cheating the whole they we're eating food okay you cannot survive without food um so no nobody can actually do this like oh there's this guy in Tibet who lives in a cave and he's well I don't know I mean maybe you know anything's possible in the universe but I'm not that guy I mean maybe there is somebody I'll I'll I'll leave a tiny possibility maybe there is somebody who can achieve that kind of spiritual enlightenment they don't actually have to eat I don't know that I actually believe it but all right we'll just say maybe that's possible maybe maybe but none of us are him okay like we're not doing that I have a body I need to live food has to be involved but honestly your mind goes there and and when you meet people who are like I'm doing it I'm trying it and a year from now I'm not going to be eating at all you're like I don't know I mean if she can do it why can't I like you know they sort of lead the way for you into crazier and crazier worlds luckily we now have the internet and if you go and you research any of these people they either die or you know they stop like you cannot live without food and honestly that is just anorexia with a little bit of ideology so I thought about breth Arion I didn't I mean I had more sensible people in my life who were like don't do this just don't it's not possible just you got to just come back to reality here and just eat some food so that was sort of the end of that but so then I was just vegan vegan vegan and I just got sicker and sicker and everything hurt more and more like you know blah blah blah everything just keeps getting worse and then finally there's that day of just you just have to stop and the the good thing for me was that a number of my friends had already sort of been through that process including my sister and she did it for 14 years so six years longer I went and she all that time would sit me down every so often like would you just eat some fish like no it's wrong if I give up and I admit that I have to eat fish then the whole thing just collapses on you you know you have to admit then it's like okay there's nutrient we can't get in plants and I couldn't get I couldn't Grant the point because then it was all for nothing so I wouldn't do it you know until it was just absolute desperation so I know there are people out there who are going to be like me it's going to be complete and utter desperation before they're willing to re to reconsider and it's just sad and I want to reach them before it's permanent damage because it will be permanent if you keep this up too much longer yeah unfortunately I've come across some that that have gotten to that point of getting very serious damage a young young man that I um it's been some of my groups and he went from you know vegan to raw food vegan to Raw fruitarian just thinking well this is gonna help me this is gonna do it this is gonna get better and he got to the point that he was actually so neurologically damaged that he wasn't able to get out of bed he was bedridden and so he was just you know on his phone presumably in vegan forums talking about how how great it was to be vegan and and and then that's just heartbreaking when it when it hit him was the day that he woke up and he tried to pick up his phone to go on his phone and his hands wouldn't work enough to use his phone and it just it just clicked at that point he said my diet's killing me and I need need to start eating meat and so he did and he just went full flip carnivore yeah and um obviously just Revolution revolutionized his life and um he recovered neurologically and so that's great he's out of bed he's going to the gym he's getting you know physical therapy and all these sorts of things which is great um he really destroyed his kidneys though he he'd been on dialysis because of that and I mean he's in his early 30s he's on dialysis like why how are we thinking that this is this is this is a good idea yeah I got a letter once from a doctor in Germany who he's a neurologist and he was like thank you so much for your book this very beautiful formal English um I mean way better than any German I'm ever going to speak and it was just this very lovely letter but his point was he every single week he sees these vegans come into his office he didn't say every day but every week and they have either permanently damaged their eyesight or their hearing and um he can't talk sense to them and it's like just take some B12 please and they won't do it and he's like now I have your book I give them your book so you've been able to save some of them which again is you know very heartening it's like well at least I did something with my life but um no it's terrible and I I just wish we could get people to understand it's we know what the human body needs like this is not up for debate like there are nutrients you have to have or you will fall to pieces things just will stop working and then you may be in pain for the rest of your life or you may have this kind of organ damage like this poor young guy has and it it's there's no reason to do this to yourself it literally does nothing good for the world for you to hurt yourself yeah so about that um you know what are what are some of the um some of the myths that know we these people get drug you know dragged into where they think that this is this is something that is going to save the planet humans are meant to eat plants and this is not only good for us but the best thing that we can do and and all these other sorts of vegetarian myths right well I think the big one is that um meat eating is somehow destructive of the world and I mean I think we all can agree that capos are horrible and animals shouldn't be treated like that so I think we can just set that aside we all agree right so we don't need discuss that we all agree that's a bad thing um okay so what are they eating well they're eating agricultural Foods so it's mostly grains and beans um where does that food come from and this was the thing I did not know when I was a vegan because I lived in a very Urban environment I had no idea where my food came from and I had no way to like judge what I was being told to reality it just there was no crossover there I didn't know so what is agriculture well you take a piece of land you clear every living thing off it and I mean down to the bacteria eventually and then you plant it just for humans and this is the problem is that it's literally the destruction of living communities and this is what it's done around the globe is just inch by inch mile by mile agriculture has taken everything it wanted so when you're looking at there's this great quote from Richard Manning where he says a Wheatfield is the clearcut of the grass Forest that's what it is that we had vast grasslands around the world that were just it's hard to imagine the amount of life that was here even on the American continent um there are historic descriptions of you know you could sit on a rock for 4 days just in one place you could just sit there and watch a single herd of bison Thunder by for four days I can't even imagine like that many the bulk of that much megao and that's what it was like um and it's and and so the the the Bison any kind of ruminant and the grasses work together to create prairies so the reason that they are grasslands and not forests is because there's not enough water so where there's more water you're going to have trees where there's there's way less water it eventually just becomes grasslands and that's because a huge amount of the the life of grasses is underground where it's cool enough um trees don't really need that they need more moisture and they get it where there's rain the grass has figured out how to survive in much harsher environments and with a lot less moisture and that's what they did they they build underground these huge bodies that they have mostly underground um so you know the roots go down just like you know 12 15 20 feet um and Incredibly complex Roots root systems so the what the what the the action of the ruminants is that they like I'm looking outside and I live in the Redwood Forest so at the tips of all the branches of the Redwoods um it's a very bright green color and that is this year's growth so they grow outward like that and grasses don't they grow from the bottom up trees grow from the tip out and it's completely different for grasses that because of the ruminants because the ruminants come and they eat them so if they're fresh growth both from the top they would be done they would not be able to grow anymore but because they grow from the bottom up when they get eaten it act they can keep growing again they can come back right away and it actually stimulates more root root growth and the saliva of ruminants actually um there's an enzyme that encourages root growth for for the grasses so they each need each other um and of course out the other end of the ruminant becomes manure which is um you know very very good nutrients for the plants and also urine so they are nature's like mobile watering machines because these are very dry environments and they spread the nutrients around and also all this moisture um but more importantly how does the nutrient cycle work in this really dry environment and it absolutely is dependent on the ruminants because that's where the bacteria lives so what is happening inside a bison or a cow right they have this thing called a rumin they have these four chambered kind of enormous stomach things we do not have we are not shaped like a barrel think about a cow think about a gorilla they have a big barrel and they little skinny arms and legs we don't look like that people we don't look like ruminants anyway um so what's happening inside there is there's all this bacteria and so the cellulose comes in cow bites it swallows it and it comes and the bacteria can break down the cellulose those are the creatures that do that um it may look like a cow was eating but that's not really what's happening the bacteria are actually digesting that cellulose and the cow is actually eating the byproducts and then the dead bodies of the bacteria so the cow is actually eating a high-fat moderate protein diet because of the bacteria it looks like they're eating cellulose they're not they're feeding that cellulose to the bacteria so these are symbiotic relationships right this is what nature is it's literally that kind of relationship everything is interwoven like this so the cow takes the cellulose turns it into food that the cow can use um out the other end comes all these nutrients and um the bacteria alive inside that stomach outside in the world the bacteria cannot survive because it's too dry so the the ruminant is the oneand that is keeping that nutrient cycle moving by keeping the bacteria inside their bodies um without them what you have is Desert if you take the ruminants out out of that grassland it will just simply turn to Desert because the nucle nut the nutrient cycling can't happen there's nothing to biodegrade that grass and so the dead stems just pile up around the roots of the plant and then then space opens up so there's be ground and then there's more be ground and more be ground and eventually you just simply have a desert and and nothing can survive there and there's all these efforts around the globe by people like Alan Savory to bring deserts back to green back to life using remnants and it's actually a really simple process because the world wants to be alive and those creatures know how to do it but you need all three of them you need the grasses you need the remnants and you need those bacteria all working together to make this happen this is true for Every Creature we are all dependent on the lives and deaths of everything else and that is the thing I did not know when I was a vegan but what agriculture does long way of saying it destroys all of that now you have be ground and now you can plant those animals that humans are frankly addicted to I cannot find a reason in the archaeological literature or in the anthropological literature that makes any sense about why humans took up agriculture it is misery it is backbreaking work from dawn to dusk and the moment humans take up agriculture around glow there's like 14 places people started doing it in river valleys for a reason that's where the annuals are um every time humans did this you know overnight they shrink six inches and their teeth start falling out so clearly it was a disaster for our health so now you're destroying your local landbase to plant those annual crops here's the thing about annuals uh they only live a really short time and so their whole reproductive strategy is to make really big seeds that have a little coat around them and they can drop into the ground and stay there until they get their moment and their moment is a disaster so I like to use the analogy if you cut yourself you have some kind of accident whatever you cut yourself with a knife when you're chopping your steak um you might need stitches or it maybe a Band-Aid will do it but you need something to kind of hold it together and then eventually your skin knits back together and you don't need the stitches or the bandage anymore well that's what the annuals are they're the Band-Aid that holds the ecosystem together and they do that by covering the soil so that's their moment when some when the ground is cleared for some reason a fire or a flood or an earthquake you know a landslide of some kind there will be be ground and that is a disaster for the planet or for land life anyway because we are entire existence to a little bit of top soil and the fact that it rains so that's a disaster having bare soil and the planet knows it also life loves you know any kind of Niche it will fill it so of course the animals this is why they exist is every once in a while they get this moment where the ground is cleared and they don't have to compete against the perennials cuz what do the perennials have they have really deep dense roots and the animals cannot compete you know this everybody let's pretend you want to have a garden and you want to plant lettuce or carrots or wheat or corn whatever it is you want to grow and you look outside your window what do you see you probably have a lawn you got some grass what do you have to do you can't just sprinkle your seeds on the grass nothing will happen and we all know that what do you have have to do you have to dig up the turf you have to remove the grass you have to dig up that Prairie that little tiny bit of grass land outside your window has to be removed why because those seeds aren't going to sprout unless there's bare soil so that's what annuals do right in nature there are these disasters they spring to life right and they cover the soil again eventually the perennials come back and they will you know knit back together and then the annuals are gone for a while so in river valleys where there's a lot of flood you know sort of a constant state of of flooding happening you have a lot of annual annual plants and this is why agriculture always started in river valleys so that you know the Hindu the Indus Valley there you know the tiger Euphrates all all the famous ones it's always in these river valleys and that's why because there's annual plants and a few of them make seeds that are big enough that they are worth the effort for humans to harvest them why did we keep doing this what was so great about them and the only thing that I can find is that frankly they're addictive and they are they are just addictive we know this a gluten especially it's turns into this substance Glu morphine in your in your guts that's that's what will happen in your intestines um I can attest to this I know how addictive that stuff just calls my name going gluten-free was one of the best things I ever did I never think about it anymore but like the first whatever 40 years of my life it's like oh there's Bagels on the other side of town get my car and go get one I know it there's a muffin over there I can go get it um or I can make my own and if I just have it in the cupboard um but either way it's like it's gluten and it it just called my name so I when I read that theory I was like oh yes this is why we did this because nothing else makes any sense the story you're told in school is what oh we were all starving it was so hard being a hunter gatherer we had no control over our food and then this wonderful thing happened we figured out how to do Agriculture and we were never hungry again and hasn't it been great and the truth is exactly the opposite hunger does not become institutionalized until people take up agriculture there were absolutely seasonal moments of hunger you at the end of the winter everybody probably would have been hungry a little bit because the animalss were really lean they were getting kind of slim out there but eventually you know it comes back and then everybody gets to eat again so you'd see that in the archaeological record right there's those little lines in the bones and the teeth it's like all right there was a little bit of a h but you don't see evidence of famine ever in hunter gatherers like that's just not a thing until you're dependent on two crops and one of them fails um then it's over you're all you know you all starve and in agricultural societies every time it ends in collapse and the last on the cooking pots are always human cannibalism like it's so Grim that that's where it's always where it ends um and it's this is just civilizations okay civilization is what's based on agriculture it's a way of life based on cities cities are only possible because of Agriculture so when you do agriculture when you do this when you take over the land and then you plant these annual crops you will temporarily have a surplus okay you don't do that as hunter gatherers you have nowhere to put a surplus you don't need a surplus when you're hungry you just go out and get get more food you don't need to have a surplus of anything it's all there it's all just you know you can bury it in the ground and ferment it and then eat it in three months because it's more nutritious but you don't need to do it there's always food available in your you know in your region and you know seasonally what to eat and where your Camp is and all that like here in the Pacific Northwest people have permanent settlements because there was so many fish the salmon coming up the rivers so they had permanent so you see that pattern too that's fine but nobody's destroying the land and just planting it for humans right but that's the problem so they do this right you take over the land you plant the annimals you harvest them know where you're going to put them so now you've got these human settlements that are dependent on it and slowly you're wearing through your top soil because every time you do this activity there's less and less soil because the only thing that holds soil in place is those perennial crops not crops the perennial plants um acted on by the action of animals that's what build soil the moment that you clear that land it is just like us it dies under exposure so you've got the sun and the rain and the wind all beating it to death and there's no bacteria left so it just turns into dust which is literally what's happened around the world all the places where agriculture first started are just they're just dust like we've all seen pictures of Iraq you know because of the war and it's a desert right everybody just thinks of like some rocks and then some sand and maybe a few goats here and there eating the little bits of scrub that are left that was a forest people it was a forest it was so dense sunlight never touched the ground it was an oak Savannah like it's gone it's been gone for thousands of years why because people started doing agriculture so that's the problem you use up all of your land you slowly draw down your soil you've got this huge population explosion because of that temporary Surplus now what are you going to do you've got two choices you can all starve or you can conquer your neighbors and take their stuff and this is the thing about agriculture is that it makes a permanent class of Warriors possible soldiers they don't exist in hunter gatherers and I'm not saying people don't fight each other and sometimes kill each other and what like yeah humans are humans you know we're not a different kind of human we're still human I get that there are conflicts I'm not saying that like life is perfect for hunter gatherers you know I'm not like making a romance here but the point is that there's an entire class of people whose job is war and civilization makes that possible because of the Surplus also makes it inevitable because you're drawing down all your resources because you're living in a a population that requires the importation and if your neighbors don't want to give you their stuff you're going to have to go out and get it from them and that's why agricultural societies always end up militarized so now you've got this rolling sort of catastrophe across the human race of imperialism and genocide and oh yeah slavery because somebody has to do that backbreaking labor so you got to go out and Conquer your neighbors and take all their stuff their water their fish their trees because you've used up all of yours you don't have any soil left so there's no food coming in um and then of course you take the people as well and you make them do that that backbreaking labor um even in the Year by the year 1800 which we usually say is the beginning of like the Industrial Age H Team age um at that point 75% fully three quarters of the human beings alive on the planet we're living in some form of indenture surum or slavery three quarters because it's the only way for the Leisure Class to have any any Leisure is somebody else has to do the backbreaking work so it ends up with these really stratified sociey since the beginning of patriarchy it's just like nothing good has happened since then we wrecked our health we've wrecked the planet we've taken out 99% of the habitat for wild animals you can't say this is good for animals um and we destroyed our capacity to be human with each other because now we live in these terrible hierarchies um that involve you have to live behind a military barricade so here we are like we've done it and now we're wrecking the climate on top of it all and just one more thing global warming did not start with burning fossil fuel it started with the beginning of agriculture why because we blew through all the soil and what that means is that you know you too much oxygen gets in the biological activity increases really quickly and the soil structure just evaporates essentially and where does the carbon go up so rice agriculture in particular um has been horrendous for the climate but you can take you know see that sort of that hockey stick graph the famous one so year 1800 to now all the carbon we've added and that is true we did that by burning coal and then oil and gas that's all true but if you back that up like 6,000 years it's the same amount of carbon that we added so fossil fuel is an accelerant to this process absolutely in accelerant but the same amount was done just from blowing through all the all the the the fossil soil we can call it um by doing agriculture because we wrecked the soil so all of that is like this is what this is agriculture is a war against the living world and you're going to have to keep fighting it every year and that's what plows are for because the world doesn't want to be a monocrop of corn it wants to be a forest or a grassland and it keeps trying to come back like life wants to live this is the planet trying to fight back and we just keep pushing it out um and saying no we just want corn and we just want wheat so we're going to keep fighting you and all the animals that want to be there well we're just going to drive you into Extinction there's no more bison like it's all wheat and corn and soy now right um elephants couldn't survive rice agriculture they're all there were this they were the pink Asian elephants they're all gone um that's what's happened around the globe and it's it's absolutely horrifying once you start to learn about it and I could not absorb this as a vegan because I needed my diet to be the wonderful peaceful you know animal happy friendly sustainable food and it's not it's the worst thing humans have done to the planet we need to restore these ecosystems it's the only hope that we've got and we need to learn to live inside them again it's what we did for two million years this is why I am not hopeless is because for two million years we were not monsters and destroyers it's just one activity that wrecked us it's just just the one thing the agriculture just we just got to stop and in fact if you stop eating that food and starting food that actually does repair the world that repairs the soil and repairs the waterways and fills up the groundw you know the the aquifers again and makes the habitat for all those creatures to come back um it's actually not that hard and that food is actually perfect for the human template and I speak here of grass-fed beef and bison and you cannot be happier than eating that food so in fact you can take those same values and change the world into the world that we would rather have um by doing a very simple thing which is finding a grass-based farm in your area and buying all the beefer bison that you want so that's um well thank you for that was fantastic my mini lecture right yeah um so well that's one of the things too that that people say was like okay well you know let's say that that eating meat is is very good for you we should only eat that how are we going to feed 8 billion people is that possible eating it you know with just meat what do you think about that when people okay nothing that we do can feed eight billion people and that is the thing that we need to face we are on such bad overshoot that it's hard to have hope some days when I wake up um there's literally nothing the only reason we have 8 billion people is because we're eating fossil fuel so there's this thing called the H BOS process that was discovered by two chemists um they needed to make nitrogen for the war effort in Germany um and they figured out a way to take uh oil and gas as the feed stock and get usable nitrogen out of it and then that was used to make bombs isn't that lovely um and then when the war is over oh what are we going to do with these nitrogen factories well a whole other bunch of scientists around the globe were cheering this on because for God 80 years ever since nitrogen had been discovered there were a number of scientists who were like I think we have a problem which that we're going to run out of nitrogen we're clearly blowing through the top soil uh where's nitrogen going to come from well we're going to use B guano for a while but that's clearly on draw down like there's not going to be more of it there's these huge caves that are filled with wano right and they were using that to make bombs too and that's why Germany did this was because their supply was cut off um in the Atlantic so they couldn't get to it anymore and they're like how we make bombs like we got it we can do it chemically we're goingon to do this so you know anyway all these scientists were like yes this this is the this is how we're going to solve this because looking at masturvation without the nitrogen um and so this thing was created that was the Green Revolution so after World War II all of those nitrogen factories were turned over to the peace time effort and what it meant was we're going to create fertilizer that plants can use and then we're going to breed plants that really love this nitrogen stuff like really heavy doses of it we're going to pump them full of it and we're going to make them grow really short because we don't want any of that cular L stuff we just want that big fat seed head so we're going to make plants that are like as biologically to the Limit as we possibly can that are super short super big seed head you know until they basically fall over and we're going to feed all the hungry people so that worked for about a decade but you know what happens a few things happen one is that the human population quadrupled under this plan so we didn't save we didn't fix this problem we've in fact made it four times worse because now what are they all going to eat um we are absolutely on the downside of peak oil and you know people make all kinds of predictions I think that's a very bad idea we are eventually going to run out like any adult should be able to tell you that you have a substance that is finite and you're using it so whether you use it slowly or whether you use it quickly whether you don't even know exactly how much there is it doesn't matter you are eventually going to hit zero you will draw it down until you can't get any more of it or really what's going to happen is it's too expensive to pump it out anymore and it's not worth the energy that goes into it to get it out we're going to approach that at some point in the next few decades right we absolutely on that downside of that curve so what do we think we're going to eat when the oil and the gas run out because this was never a plan for the future right like the oil and the gas it's not like the big drops of oil have like a birds and Beast talk with the little drops of oil like they don't reproduce it's oil okay it's like ancient bits of sunlight plants crushed you know millions of years later we have these pools of oil underneath the surface of the planet and they are finite there aren't going to be anymore it takes millions of years for them to accumulate we we've blown through them right now take any human being around the globe test the nitrogen in their bodies half of it comes directly from from fossil fuel half of it that's what we're eating we're literally eating Oil we're literally eating oil there is no future in this so nothing we do is going to feed eight billion people okay we've used up all the nitrogen that was in the soil we've blown through all the soil there's none left we've skinned the planet alive and now we're on our way toward the end of all the fossil fuel that was sort of taking over from that sort of filling the Gap and in the meantime we've got you know this enormous population of people so they don't have a solution if they're offering you some kind of vegan you know alternative that that's not a future this it's just not we don't have enough oil and gas forever to feed these people so what then well you know I've got I've got two plans here and one is that we need to restore what we've destroyed um and we need to be very very clear about how many people the planet actually can and the good thing here is that it does not have to be like the one child policy human right horrors of China or like what they''re done in Cuba we don't need to be looking at horrendous human rights abuses to get this done um as it turns out that when you give women and girls enough power over their lives they actually choose to have fewer children naturally so and the number one thing that does that and this has honestly been studied backwards and forwards um the number one one thing that drops the birth rate around the world is simply teaching girls to read which is to say when a girl has that just that much more power over the future her own future um she will have fewer children as an adult um so it's something we should care about anyway right we should be supporting you know the rights of the least of us so girls and women around the globe need their full rights and when they have them the birth rate will drop and often quite dramatically and there have been some really interesting kind of experiments that you can look at around the globe where countries have tried this and it really does work you have to get all the institutions involved um but once they're all on board then it it has a huge impact on what people do as it turns out most couples choose to have two children that's what everybody wants when you give them enough health care and enough food and some basic security and access to birth control um they mostly will have two children which is replacement levels so that is actually where it stabilizes out that's what people would like to have um yeah there's always going to people who want the really big families and then there's going to be people who don't want any kids but it averages out to about two per couple that's replacement levels that would be fine so over the next few decades I mean if we could get somebody saying in charge of the planet um yes we would withdraw our impacts on the planet which means honestly we would have fewer children for a few Generations it would be best if we really only had one each um and then we could just go back to not having to think about it too much because we'd be living in a balance with our our the ecosystem where we lived and we did that for two million years that's the thing we knew how to do that and I'm not saying it was always super fun but everybody knew the ratio of productive adults to dependent either children or Elders that could exist in any tribe and they knew what to do if they blew past it and again I'm not saying it was fun but everybody knew what that number was and and there were sort of you know cultural mechanisms in place to keep it there because if you didn't do that everybody starved there wouldn't be enough food and everybody knew what that meant um you wouldn't be able to have healthy children then the next Generation Um wouldn't have full health because the pregnant women wouldn't get nutrient-dense food because there wouldn't be enough to go around and everybody would be hungry and that did not seem like a playing with the future because it's not so everybody knew what to do and we were able to do that for a long time as humans um we we had that pretty well figured out so it all just got blown um when people started doing agriculture because you get that Surplus and then you need the cheap labor so everybody has to have 10 children and then a whole bunch of them are going to die anyway because now you're living in really dense um populations and so all those diseases begin um you know the problem with human waste and now you're living with animals really closely so they've got the you know the viruses and the whatever that jump you know make the species jump so all of those contagious diseases come through animals into humans starting with agriculture so um yeah we really have not made the world a great place for ourselves but the point is you're not going to be able to do anything that's supports 8 billion people so we need to approach this from that sort of holistic perspective like okay we're going to heal the planet up then let the forest come back we're going to let uh the grasslands come back we're definitely going to let the the wetlands come back because it's the most a the most species dense environment on the planet but also they do an incredible job of sequestering carbon uh prairies are great too forests are not as good I'm not trashing on forests I live in one I love them but if we're talking about carbon sequestration it's the grasses have it down and the wetlands are amazing so um we need to bring them back and let them do thing nothing we do is going to get that carbon out of the sky like this crazy technological things this is not what's going to do it we just need to let life do it because they can all of those creatures know how to do this and they will get it done if we let them and then we need to start with drawing our impacts um starting with just our sheer numbers and and again we don't have to be like horrible this doesn't have to be some horrible like you know authoritarian um human rights hell we just have to support women and girls to have better lives and it will happen naturally so there is hope here people all of these are hopeful things letting life come back is an amazing thing like watching Rivers when they take down dams and how fast the salmon come back is an amazing thing to watch my own backyard like watching I have five acres of land watching this land recover has been an amazing thing um I have Eagles overhead sometimes um there are bears every single day that I see and I have heard that there are wolves like just across the border into Oregon I'm like please I want to hear a wolf before I die if one of those wolves could make it down this little there's like a green Beltway down on the river and just near my house somewhere I would love I have mountain lions here too on my land so I love having Apex bread rers here I don't know why people hate them yet they're you don't want to get eaten by one but they mostly run away when they see us like it's we're not prey I don't know why everybody's so worried once in a while all right somebody does get attacked by mountain lion but um you're so much l likely to get hit by a car get killed by a family member slip on the bathtub and hit your head I just I think the mountain lines are amazing and I'm so happy to share a piece of land with them so I let them do their thing and they and they do their thing and I do my thing so um anyway yes there is much hope here and all of it is really beautiful all of it is the things that we love right it's we have don't you love the trees and the grasses how can you not like these are our ancestors right they talk to us and they love us and they make oxygen for us and they're beautiful to look upon and it's their sound in the wind and like on every level they just are it's wonderful so I don't know why people hate it all so much it's just a mystery to me how people don't don't love the world the plants and the animals and the stars and all of it it doesn't make any sense to me we have a beautiful planet what are we doing and and like you said you know all those different things that the animals do and the ruminants do to re regenerate the land and replenish the land and bring back those grasslands bring back the natural waterways and and structure to the to the Earth you know that that's something that you can do while growing you know meat for for food as well you know the other side of it is destructive well this is destructive is is a healing to the planet as well you know so I always I always think that we can't afford not to go you know meat based or at least heavily use animals as our food that's what's going to yeah regenerate the planet whereas yeah these crops are are destroying the planet in very real ways it's just more of the same it's just more the same this is the problem for 10,000 years and it's wrecked us and it's wrecked the planet but we don't have to keep doing it that's the thing like you can understand what the problem is once you have the analysis you see it everywhere and you can try to grow your own garden which is what I did and I realized how much death was involved and it was horrifying to me as a vegan to to understand that it was it was such a struggle it was really honestly traumatizing at the time but it's reality and you have to face it so I did um as hard as it was but yes like there is a path forward but it doesn't involve what we've been doing for the last 10,000 years it definitely does not involve a vegan diet and this is really what I want the vegans to understand is like you have these beautiful values and they are precious they really are and I want you to hold on to those values but we have information here that you don't have and I'm begging you to go look at a cornfield go look at what happens in a cornfield because it's horrible there's nothing left it's the soil is gone there was 10 feet of soil across the Midwest before the C started 150 years ago and Along Came the steel plow and that was the end of it and they didn't even have fossil fuel engines that was all done with oxen and horses but the entire ecosystem was just completely leveled and you can look at photographs of the first day of the dustow what happened in South Dakota North Dakota like there were Farms that lost all and I mean all of their top soil in one day one day thousands of years of soil just blew across the continent and out onto the Atlantic Ocean they were halfway across the ocean that were covered in the dirt from South Dakota um it's horrifying what we've done to this planet and we need that soil back it's that's the only way we're going to get that carbon down is so I want the vegans to understand this you've got to understand this like your way is not the way it's just more of the same destruction please please help us regenerate we want the Bison back we need the ruminants back we need those grasses back and your food is what's destroying them not my food my food is helping them come back so you can you can be part of this repair process like we want all the humans on the I want everybody to understand this this it's we're running out of time and it it is it is fairly desperate but we it can still be done but but we have to understand where the destruction started and how to repair it and the repair happens really naturally it's life does want to live it will come back the grasses come back they do and then all the animals and there are so many Miracle stories of like how fast these animals come back I'm going to recommend a book if you haven't read it it's called Bison for the Broken Heart Buffalo for the broken heart it's what it's either bison or Buffalo no it's Buffalo for the broken heart this guy inherits a farm essentially in North Dakota and he's he actually is a writer he's an English teacher but it's like his life isn't working so he goes back to this farm and he tries to regenerate the soil he wants to regenerate it and he can see that um the beef isn't working and he doesn't know how to make it work and just sort of by accident he ends up with 16 bison um off his trailer and he has no idea what to do and then he watches their behavior and the whole book it is like you will cry like times reading this book it is so it's such a beautiful book and now you can buy his bison on you can buy his meat online like he has a whole Farm thing where you can actually buy it now because he's gotten so good at it but the stories of how the Bison repaired that land um uh it's just incredible the things they do um like they they create wallows because they have the horns right and they um they do this thing where they will put their heads down and then just like scoop out a like a hole in the ground and nobody really knows why they do it because it doesn't seem to benefit them any but they seem to know where the water is underground like where it's a little bit higher and so when they scoop it out it then fills with water you know over it may take a few days but eventually it just fills and then all this life comes back because all the little animals the little reptiles and the birds and they need to they need to drink and this provides like this little tiny you know micro like little micro environment for them where there's water um and so just like over night with the Bison doing this he he looked outside and there were birds that like nobody had seen for you know like a hundred years um because of the Buffalo wallows and again it's like why we don't know why they do this it's like they just love their community members I don't know what else to call they care about the birds they want the other creatures to come and this is how they participate in it is by helping them have water because they don't need it they don't need to drink like that they just it's not for them they're not seen drinking out of it but the other little animals are so um anyway just story after story about how the Bison repair this and he's just in Wonder of these animals so it's a beautiful book and I highly recommend that one but yes we can repair the planet it is not too late vegans and I want you to join us and also you will feel better I promise yeah yeah definitely um so one of the things I would I I wanted to to touch on before we we wrapped up was uh what you um mentioned before about um what happens to the brain sort of on vegan and what can happen go into a little bit about that because I think it's such an important Point yeah so you have neurotransmitters and um they are made out of um amuno acids and so the one that we all know about because of the SSR business is the tryptophan becomes serotonin so if you don't eat Amino some there's you know there supposed to be the essential amino acids but there's some that they consider like not really essential but honestly they're so hard to come by that they might as well call them essential um so anyway you have to have enough protein you know to provide those amino acids and the problem with the vegan diet one of the problems is that it's so low in protein that you there just aren't great sources of these and they come wrapped in cellulose we really can't access the plant proteins when we eat them they just you know we just we don't have the kind of gut that can make that stuff available to us so that's why they call it poor quality it's one of the reasons is that it's really really hard for us to actually use the protein whereas you look at something like beef or eggs and it's like basically 100% we can utilize what's there and with plants it's like we just can't get to it and we call it fiber but that's what I'm talking about it's cellulose like you don't digest it you basically just send it out the other end um and a lot of that protein just gets taken out with it because you can't get you can't get to it with with the human digestive tract so that's like the first thing that happens is you you're you're low on all these uh sort of the building blocks for your transmitters and so especially the serotonin one is key because tryptophan just isn't um there's not a lot of it like it's hard to get to you know even if you are eating a lot of meat it's one of the ones that there's just not as much of it um in sort of in the natural world and in Plants it's almost it's really hard to find um and another problem like one of the reasons that we're having this sort of epidemic of depression on top of everything else is um when you feed uh animals in the feed lots and they're getting a lot of corn corn really doesn't have any tryptophan in it and that is reflected in the animal products that come from that so the meat or the milk will be also just Laing in tryptophan so if you're eating a lot of factory farmed meat and uh you may not be getting any tryptophan even though you're eating meat because the amuno acid profile is just completely wrong for what the animals are eating and that means you're going to be depressed so um many people have found that when they a stop being a vegan or even if they eat meat if they switch to a better quality me so like the grass-fed stuff um there will be enough trp toan and you can be quite relieved of depression really quickly by simply doing that switch uh because now you have the serotonin so that's one thing another thing is um so what is a human being right uh we have uh we're a set of electrical impulses it's our nervous system but we are a watery environment so how does that work because you'd think we'd sort of short out well we don't and the reason is because our nerves are coated in fat it's we we're actually insulated like we have insulation like think about how wire has like the red or the yell you know the little plastic coating on it the insulation we have that too and that's the the myelinization right the myelination and that's fat it's made from fat um so if you don't have enough fat in your diet it's it can't it can't work that all that's going to fall apart um and that's especially necessary in your brain because you've got these little synapses so it has to Fire and it can't if you don't have that process if you if you're not able to like build that protective fatty layer on top of it all it um it's just not going to fire right so that's another problem um your brain itself is almost 80% fat and what they have found is that people who are on vegan diets vegetarian or vegan diets your brain will literally shrink and this is the famous Oxford study um your brain will just simply you will lose just the mass of your brain will just get smaller and smaller and that is a really scary thing that within just a few years you can literally lose 5% of the mass of your brain from eating one of these kinds of diets um we we need our brains and our I mean our brains are what make us human that's it's an incredible organ and it it's millions of years in the making and you can just wreck it that easily by not by not eating the a proper human diet um and then there's the B12 problem so another thing that will make your brain literally shrink is not having enough B12 uh and this is always a sticking point for the vegans especially because you know you want this to be the the diet that is the natural diet of humans therefore you should not have to take a supplement everything should be available in plants and the B12 thing was really hard for me because every time I looked into it it's like this can't be true because then we can't really be vegans naturally how would we have survived um and every time I looked into it I was like no it really is true you need B12 so then I'd be like oh I better just take some supplements so I would take a little B12 and then I would like sort of no this can't be true I don't want it to to be true reality I'm going to hit the wall again and then I would like no I don't need B12 it's a lie I can eat miso that'll take care of it I'll ferment something and I'll eat that it's just not true I mean it's that's not going to give you B12 there's no B12 that's available there's a few things that make B12 analoges and that actually makes it worse because then the receptors get the be the analog will latch on it's the same with like the estrogen the phytoestrogens they do the same thing they latch onto the receptor and then what little you do have can't actually get through so the B12 is another thing that would make your brain shrink um and then just the fat itself is so important for um just a stable mood State uh yeah your brain's going to shrink you're going to be angry you're going to be hostile you're going to cry all the time you're not going to understand why um I just remember so many times the smallest thing kicking me just I would just collapse like if I couldn't I remember like not being able to find my wallet or like my keys and I would just sit on the floor and cry I was like that is not something that should make you cry like that's an absurd thing to be crying about and it was just I was done for the day if I couldn't find my wallet it's like there's no balance left in your brain um just for just pure lack of you know fat and then the amino acids and that's what we should be eating is fat and protein that's why um and the carbohydrate is going to do something totally different to your brain so it's going to make you crazy because it's our brains really can only function in a really narrow range of blood sugar right and if it's too high or too low you will fall into a coma you can die and anyone who's diabetic can tell you this it's not pleasant um and the problem with eating these kind of high carb diets is that I mean I only ate like whole grain whole whatever I wouldn't even eat bread if there was white flour in it I wouldn't eat ketchup if there was sugar in it like no sugar no white flour no white rice I didn't e any it was everything was whole grain but you know I was super pure it could not have been a more pure diet and um it doesn't matter it's sugar this is the thing I didn't understand you put carbohydrate in your mouth by the time it's done um you this is what your intestines do they break it down into simple sugars that's how it's absorbed if it's a if it's still complex it can't be absorbed so the job of your intestines is to break things down into smaller and smaller bits until it can be absorbed so it ends up just being sugar you might as well just eat sugar it doesn't make that much difference um so you eat your vegan meal which you think is whole grain whatever wonderfulness but it's just a load of sugar so up goes this blood sugar and now you have an imer response because you're going to die if it's too high and what the emergency response is your poor pancreas has to crank out a huge hit of insulin for you and then insulin is a very blunt instrument um it pretty much grabs anything it can get a hold of and it takes it out of your bloodstream fast as it can and shoves it into mostly fat cells for storage so that at least it's not killing you by being in your bloodstream so boom and it goes and now you can't get it back out because insulin is is holding it it all shut so it doesn't kill you it all has to stay in there there but the problem is that it grabs everything um and and the interesting bit the one thing that it really can't for whatever reason it it doesn't really grab a hold of tryptophan and this is one reason why people who are depressed and people who are vegans crave sugar all the time um because in fact there's no competition out the blood brain barrier and that little bit of tryptophan that you do have can make it across uh with without a lot of things getting in the way so that's one of the reason comfort food that's what's going on for a lot of it is well you will get ahead of trip toan because nothing else is there to like to block it through the the barrier so anyway all of that happens um and now though the problem is it's such a blunt instrument that your blood sugar is too low it's grabbed way too much this is how you can see that we were not actually meant to eat these kind of crazy high carb diets um there's no fine tuning here it's All or Nothing um now your blood sugar is too low because it's all gotten shoved in destroyed and this is when you're shaking and you're crying and if you don't put something in your mouth you feel like you're going to die and by the time I was done being a vegan um I was eating every 20 minutes I mean it was just like just constant grazing and it was the blood sugar problem um you just feel horrible all the time so that will come on slowly but eventually you will get to that point where it's just grazing all day it's all you can do to just to feel like you're not going to die so you do that enough and you wear out your insulin receptors um and you will also wear out your pancreas because it just can't keep up with that load you know six seven eight times a day but in the meantime you're on this roller roll coaster all day long and um another one of the chemicals that your body releases to help with this problem is of course adrenaline so you're just on this constant oh you know how you feel when you're under like high adrenaline you're not supposed to feel that except maybe once a month when you're being chased by a lion or something like it's not supposed to be six seven eight times a day every time you eat a meal um but yeah that's what you're doing to yourself and of course the cortisol levels are going to be really high with all of that so you constantly feel under Sal and under attack um because all of your stress hormones that just go crazy from the stress that you're putting it under thinking you're doing the right thing by eating a lovely whole grain love fat diet but um you're not you're just it's just total stress so that's the other thing that just completely unbalances people is the blood sugar and I speak as one who knows it's it's a horrible horrible thing to feel day in and day out and you don't even know what's wrong you just are cranky and um in a bad mood and depressed and angry um and you just feel like crap all the time so there's a better world out here I can just you can be stable and happy and calm I promise you you don't have to feel depressed yeah well I think that's a very good good message to uh to leave people on uh Leah thank you so much for coming on it's been an absolute pleasure uh getting to to speak with you and um having you on the podcast uh where can people uh find you and follow your work well I have a website um um but it's just my name.com lear.com but I kind of say that as a joke because I have this weird name so nobody can ever find it because they don't know how to spell it the way to actually find me is really easy is just vegetarian myth because there's only one book with that title and I wrote it so if you type that in you you'll get to my website really quickly uh but if you want to spell it l i e r r e it's Pierre with an L Lear keith.com and um I'm very very bad at keeping up with my website but it is there and you will at least find some things but I I know that I'm way behind on loading things onto my website and I am very sorry it's you don't need to send me an email about it I know I'm in bad shape with that just so far behind schedule on that um but yeah and I am G to be speaking in London with the one and only Dr Anthony chaffy and Ken Barry and a bunch of other really cool people Gary TOS um there's this great conference coming up the public health collaborative in London in May and anybody who wants to come to that please come it's going to be super fun amazing speakers um I highly encourage everybody to come and say hi to all of us and tell us your stories and we will tell you ours yeah absolutely um for for people that are interested in that that's the uh weekend of May 18th 19th um yeah 17th 18th and 19th um and um I think I have me scheduled on the Sunday do you know when when you're up there as well I'm on Saturday at like 10 o'clock in the morning okay so I'm one of the the earlier ones on Saturday and I'm going to be speaking about why a vegan diet is terrible especially for children for the young people and why it's so tempting for young people to try this diet and really how to reach them first how to try to inoculate them against this because it's they're just going to wreck themselves the way I did there's not a good end the only good end is crawling out and like you don't have to do that so yeah well very good very good topic I look forward to seeing that and look forward to meeting you in person as well I know in person and everybody should come because then you can see that um honestly everybody who tries these kinds of diets it's it's an amazing array of people but everybody looks so good I don't mean like we're beautiful I just mean we look really good we look like humans are supposed to look we have the right amount of muscle the right amount of fat and a variation we're not all the same body type but we look like humans are supposed to look and it's an incredible thing in this day and age because everybody looks so sick where I live and it breaks my heart like to the point of Tears every time I go to the grocery store and I see what people look like in my town it is horrible and we can do something about this like the the it's in our hands that we're not going to get help from above it's up to all of us and we can give people a better way and really they can fix they can fix what's gone wrong in their bodies and in their lives it's it's such an easy thing to once you understand the principles to put this to use in your own life so that's my final I want to help everybody so we can do this me too all right well people want to see that then uh go to the public health collaboration uh website Instagram page be able to find tickets there I believe there's still tickets available and people can can check that out and uh there thank you so much it's been an absolute pleasure looking forward to meeting you in London hey guys thank you very much for taking the time out to listen to what I had to say if you like it then please like And subscribe to my YouTube channel and podcast and if you're on YouTube then please hit that little bell and subscribe and that'll let you know anytime I have a new video out which should be every week if not more and if you could share this with your friends that would help me get the word out and let me know that you like what I'm doing thanks again guys okay