Why Plants Are the TRUE Source of Everything We Eat

0:03Darin Olien:Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien, a podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all. Get ready to start living your super life.

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2:51Are you ready? Are you hooked in? Are you holding on? Because I'm going to dive into something. I'm going to talk about something that maybe you've never heard of in this way before. I'm going to talk about plants. One reason why I eat plants. And potentially, they're the source of everything. Let me explain. I want you to think about the last meal you ate. Whatever it was. A handful of almonds. A bowl of rice and beans. A plate of eggs. a burger, a smoothie, grilled chicken, whatever it is. Now, I want you to ask yourself a question that almost nobody asks. Where did the nutrients in that meal actually come from?

3:39Not the restaurant, not the grocery store, not even the farm. I mean, at the fundamental level, before any of it manifested as the food where did the energy the amino acids the minerals the vitamins the essential fats all of it where did it begin and you maybe have some of those things sorted out but i want to tell you where it was all of it a leaf a blade of grass a single photosynthetic cell floating in the ocean? The answer every single time, no exceptions, your food came from a plant. Welcome to the Solo Super Life podcast with me, Darren O 'Lean. And today, we're going to dive deep all the way down to the literal origin of life on this planet to answer the question that keeps people asking me all the time, why do I eat plants?

4:50Why do I eat plant-based? I'm going to tell you one reason. Many parts to this, my story, this is one part that I had an awareness of a long time ago. so why does it work what how does how does eating plants work what what does that look like how can i possibly be strong healthy unstoppable functional by by just eating plants for over 20 years how is that possible is it just me i'm special hell no the answer isn't just sitting in philosophy it isn't just sitting in ethics though all of those things do matter and they certainly mean something to me the answer is more pure than that it's hard and it's peer-reviewed It's peer-reviewed science.

5:48And once you understand it, it changes everything about how you look at your plate. So let's freaking go. So here's a statement I want you to literally sit with, not skim over. I want you to sit with this. Virtually all organic material on this earth has been produced by cells that convert energy from the sun into energy-containing macromolecules. I know, maybe get a little science-y. Just hold on here. It's going to all make sense. That process is called photosynthesis. You've heard about it. You've heard about it in grade school. And those cells, plants, algae, cyanobacteria, are the foundation of every food chain on the planet.

6:44Cells get nutrients from their environment. But where do those nutrients come from? Virtually all organic material on Earth has been produced by cells that convert energy from the sun into energy-containing macromolecules. This process is called photosynthesis. It's essential to the global carbon cycle. And the organisms that conduct photosynthesis represent the lowest level in most food chains. That's from nature. Read that again. Virtually all organic material on earth. Not most, not a lot, virtually all of it. This is not a plant-based diet talking point. This is basic fundamental biology. It is the first thing you learn in any ecology class.

7:42Photosynthetic organisms, plants, algae, cyanobacteria are the main primary producers. They are the only living things on earth that can take sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water and convert them into organic matter, into glucose, proteins, fats, vitamins. You know where I'm going here. Everything else, every animal, every fungus, Every bacterium that requires organic nutrition is ultimately consuming what photosynthetic organisms created first. The NIH puts it this way. Photosynthesis is the ultimate source of all humankind's food and oxygen. It sustains virtually all of life on the planet. It is the biochemical process that sustains biosphere as the basis for the food chain.

8:52And Britannica adds that photosynthesis, this single process, is the way in which virtually all energy in the biosphere becomes available to living things. I will make this point and you will get it. Believe me. if photosynthesis ceased to exist there would soon be little food or other organic material on earth that would be it we would be over most organisms would absolutely vanish and disappear and our land and us i want to take a quick detour into a little history a deep history because understanding how old this system is helps you understand how fundamental it is to life, to you. We're not talking about recent evolutionary development.

9:48We're talking about something in the billions of years. So photosynthesis first evolved in bacteria somewhere between 3.3 and 3.8 billion years ago. So think about that. Photosynthesis is not a recent trick of evolution. It is among the oldest biological process on Earth. And in billions of years before any animal existed, photosynthesis, photosynthetic organisms were the entire basis of life. The true OGs of life. Converting photons into energy. They were doing all that work. They were building all of the organic matter. You are organic matter. Then came the great oxidation event. About 2.4 billion years ago, cyanobacteria, photosynthetic bacteria, began pumping oxygen into our atmosphere at scale.

10:59This was the single most transformative biological event in history, in the history of our planet. The oxygen levels in our atmosphere rose and complex multicellular life started to pop up, started to evolve. We owe our existence to photosynthesis. Literally, the oxygen in the air that you breathe right now. You can thank a photosynthetic organism for it. So people think that most of photosynthesis is coming from the Amazon. Well, that's not true. And we're going to get into that. But the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute puts it beautifully. Every time you breathe in, one of your lungs is basically filled full of oxygen from the rainforest.

11:59And the other lung is filled full of phytoplankton from our oceans. So when I talk about plants being the source of everything, I really mean it. Your food, your air, your life. This system has been operating for billions and billions of years. so now i want to give you an argument that changed how i think about food when i was on this journey this is not emotional this is not energetically um a pushing or this isn't emotional this is thermodynamic so there's an interesting rule it's called the 10 rule so they call the law of trophic energy transfer and it is hang with me here this will make sense and it is one of the most well-established principles in all of biology so here's how it works when energy moves from one trophic level to the next and i'll explain what that is from like plants to animals from like herbivores to carnivores, you know, a cow to a human or a antelope to a tiger, whatever that is, only 10 % of the energy is transferred.

13:28The other 90 % is lost as heat through metabolism, movement, and respiration. So the conversion of the once energy transferring to another, in this case, species, you lose over 90 % of the energy. The efficiency with which energy or biomass is transferred from one trophic level to the next is called the ecological efficiency. Consumers at every level convert an average of only 10 % of the chemical energy in their food to their own organic tissue. So every time you eat, you're only converting a very small amount of that energy it's lost so let me walk you through what this actually means for your food plants start this is important plants start with a hundred percent of the available solar energy that was captured through the photosynthesis a cow eats those plants the cow transfers only 10 percent into its tissues into the energy from the energy into its tissues a human then eats that cow that only is taking 10 percent from the 100 the human captures about 10 of what the cow had which is only 1 from the origin of the energy that was from the plant get that we've gone from 100 energy in the plant to converting the origin of the energy through the cow and only getting ultimately 1 % of the energy.

15:26It's inefficient, right? Now I want to be clear. This is an argument of efficiency, not a health argument yet. I'll get into that. Humans are adaptable. We can extract nutrients from multiple levels. That's part of our incredible adaptability. Does adaptability mean health? No. But what it illustrates is powerful. Is that when you eat a plant, you are accessing the nutrition at its origin. the conversion of photosynthesis at 100 % of the energy the nutrition that is the origin of the nutrients and of the energy when you eat an animal you are accessing nutrition that has already been filtered processed, diluted and metabolized through another organism's body that energy is lost the animal didn't create the nutrients let me say that again the animal did not create the nutrients it got them from the plant it used 90 of it for its own needs stored the rest you're buying used goods i'd rather go to the manufacturer when you The human diet is derived from plant material, University of Michigan.

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18:48Darin Olien:Go to www.manavitality.com. That's M-A-N-N-A vitality.com. Use the code DARREN20 and you get 20 % off your order. This isn't about health. It's about living in harmony with your greatest and highest potential. Even the Libra texts in its standard biology curriculum makes the economic connection explicit. It costs about a penny to produce a thousand calories of, let's say, yeah, non-GMO corn and soybeans, but approximately 19 cents to produce the equivalent in beef calories. Much of this difference is due to the low net production efficiency of nutrients that are ending up in cattle. You are literally paying financially and nutritionally a premium to get second-hand energy that started in a plant.

19:54Anyway, let's dig in a little deeper. Here is the argument I use most often when people tell me I can't get enough protein from plants. And I've used it for 20 years. Plants synthesize about 21 proteinogenic amino acids. The building blocks of every protein in every living thing on earth. Animals, humans, you need all of them. We can only synthesize 11 of the 20 essential amino acids ourselves. For the other nine, the essential amino acids, we depend completely on what we eat. And ultimately, all of those essential amino acids trace back to plants. They have to. In contrast to humans and animals, plants synthesize all 21.

20:59All amino acids themselves. These nutritionally essential amino acids must be taken up from the diet. And by far the greatest share is derived from plants. They are the origins of all the amino acids. again animals are synthesizing converting the the energy the nutrients from the plants plants have it all so let me say that again in plain language the amino acids you get from eating a chicken breast the chicken did not make those from scratch the chicken got them from plants i know what you're saying i can't convert all those you know i can't i can't eat grass and convert it i'm not telling you to eat grass i'm going to tell you to eat a wide variety of plants and nuts and seeds and plants eat a variety of them the cow built them from grass of course and grain it ate the amino acids in salmon where those come from they also came from phytoplankton from algae those are the origins plants are the original manufacturers animals are the distributors so they distribute they're accumulating that which originated from plants get it and like any supply chain every time the product changes hands every time it changes from you eating a fish the conversion loss of energy and nutrients goes down 90 percent you lose energy transfer not to mention it's dead it's you know the whole other host of things there's something called the embo reports published in nature press articulates this beautifully it notes that humans can only synthesize 11 of the 20 amino acids and must get the rest from food but it also makes the deeper observation that the microbiome connection running from the soil to the plants to the gut is a also a continuous chain Root and gut microbiome synthesize additional essential amino acids and vitamins, and the plant and the gut microbes are best understood as connected systems.

23:48And there's another layer to this I find completely fascinating. the reason beans are such a good source of dietary protein because they are nitrogen fixers legumes partner with ribosomes or ribozoa bacteria basically in their root nodules to fix atmospheric nitrogen pulling nitrogen out of the atmosphere amazing which the plant then uses to build amino acids and proteins this is why lentils chickpeas black beans are protein powerhouses the nitrogen that became the protein in that lentil came directly from the air again conversion directly and then it's fixed by the bacteria living in the root of the plant when people tell me there's no protein in plants i just smile because there is nothing else that creates protein not animals not you not me it starts in a plant every time I want to take you underground for a second because when I talk about plants as the source of everything I don't just mean the visible plant I mean the entire living system around and within the plant especially the soil microbiome the soil as you know now it's alive It's not dirt, it's alive.

25:43I mean, literally. One teaspoon of healthy soil contains more microbes than there are humans on the face of this earth. Bacteria, fungi, nematodes, protozoa. An entire civilization operating at the microscopic level. And their entire purpose, from the plant's perspective, is to make nutrients available. The same holds true for the plant riosphere, the critical part below ground. Roots are immersed in the soil microbiome that provides plants with important nutrients. It protects from diseases, pathogens, all of that stuff. that connection they describe from soil microbiome to the plant to the human gut is one big connection it's one of the most profound things i've ever read blew blew me away as i've been digging into this research about this stuff when you eat a fresh vegetable you are not just eating the plant you're interacting with its ecosystem the microbes living on it and in it the plant becomes and supports your gut microbiome the soil is connected to your digestion and what do those soil microbes do among many things they synthesize more vitamins they break down organic matter to release minerals fix nitrogens solu make soluble the phosphates they produce secondary metabolites they modulate your own damn immune system the plant is essentially outsourcing much more of the nutrient acquisition to those microbiological partners it's incredible whether you follow that or not it's incredible this is why i care so much about the soil and regenerative agriculture because it's connected to us damn it we need to get this the nutrient density of a plant is not just a function of of genetics it's a function of a living community in the soil around it, in the soil, the microbes in us.

28:20And this is also why the idea that you need to eat animals to get complete nutrition is such a misunderstanding of the system. The system that creates nutrition is a plant microbe. It's a plant-microbe partnership. Animals are downstream participants. Sometimes useful concentrators of nutrients, but not the origin of those nutrients. A little story, as I was spending 15 plus years of my life running around the planet, the unfair advantage that i have as a result of that was i was seeing tasting researching being taught things about some of the most nutrient-dense foods in the world and all i wanted to do is get those nutrients to people and it happened through supplements it happened through baruka nuts it happened through shakeology these things that i helped to develop because I was seeing the nutrient value in food going, wow, that's the source of all of it.

29:43So I'm not deprived if I don't eat meat or eggs or fish, not at all, because I'm going to the source of all nutrients. So let's talk a little bit about vitamins and minerals, because this is another area where the popular narrative is backwards. Vitamins, which is one notable exception, are synthesized either by plants or by microorganisms. Vitamin C is made by plants. B vitamins like thiamine, riboflavin, B6, folate, made by plants and microbes. Vitamin K made by plants, vitamin E made by plants, beta carotene, the precursor to vitamin A made by plants. Vitamin D is synthesized in response to sunlight, going back to the photon conversion, and can be shown up in plants too, mostly in the fungal kingdom when exposed to those photons.

30:50One exception. One, vitamin B12, but we're learning more about it. It's not made by animals either. It's made by microorganisms. Bacteria synthesize B12. When animals have adequate B12, it's because they've consumed microorganisms either directly or through dirty water and food. That is not cleaned of all of the microbes. The B12 in meat comes from the microorganisms in the animal's gut and environment. Not from the animal itself. The animal walking around in dirt is the thing that got exposed to B12. And got converted into its tissue. So to be clear, vitamin B12 is one of the legitimate nutritional considerations for plant-based eaters.

32:02It's real for sure. You should supplement if you're not eating dirty food, basically. And you can easily fortify. If you eat fully plant-based, get tested every once in a while, it takes nothing. Very little exposure to B12 to get enough. but let's not pretend this means animals are somehow the ultimate source of human nutrition the animal is itself dependent on microorganisms for its own b12 the origin is microbial not animal for the b12 that's my point to this whole thing what about minerals iron calcium zinc magnesium potassium selenium these are elements in the charts these are elements they come from the earth from soil plants absorb them through their roots concentrate them in their tissue and make them biologically available from rock to plants to make them available the iron in beef got into the cow's body through plants the cow ate which got it from the soil the calcium in dairy got it got it into the cow through the calcium rich plants get it now i want to make an honest point here some minerals have lower bioavailability from plant sources due to the presence of things like oxalates or whatever they can bind to some of those things compounds and plant cell walls that can bind to certain minerals and reduce their absorption this is real soaking sprouting sprouting company shout out to the sprouting company you can sprout like crazy get fresh bioavailable nutrients you can ferment And cooking can create a conversion of some, reducing the anti-nutrients.

34:16And here's my approach. Eat a whole wide variety of whole, well-prepared whole food plants and get your nutrients tested every once in a while. And then knowing those numbers are great. I want to take a moment to talk about something that most people never talk about. And that's phytoplankton. Phytoplankton is the microscopic photosynthetic organism that makes up 50 to 70 % of the oxygen on the planet. Again, plants are the OGs. That's it. This is the most powerful thing. if you get this if you understand plants are the source and they bioreact concentrations in animal tissue the conversion of energy goes down the more you get try to get your nutrients that are not from the source so i've been eating whole food plant-based for nearly two decades i've traveled to 30 40 countries i've worked with indigenous communities who have eaten this way for generations i've formulated these supplements i've studied a bit of biochemistry i have an exercise phys and nutrition background i've watched traditional healers i've trained with and for and alongside elite athletes i go to the source i eliminate the middleman The middleman for me is animals.

35:58I also don't want to kill something if I don't have to. And I don't have to. I can thrive from the OG, the plants. This is not mystical. It's what science says. Photosynthetic organisms are the origin of organic matter on the earth. This is it. You get it? I hope so. every food choice you make is the decision about how close to the primary source you want to be this doesn't mean you have to be plant-based like me it means for every meal you can move at least one level closer eat more plants reduce the amount of middlemen uh flesh of another being lower that amount increase your plants increase your diversity increase your connection to the source of all of it and that's plants thanks for tuning in i know this was a ride like and subscribe because there's information that you heard that you've never heard before and i'm here for you peace