Meat is Poison? The Truth About Carnivore vs. Plant-Based Diets

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1:02Meat is poison and plants defense chemicals are trying to kill you. That is the crux of the vegan versus carnivore debate. And people are having huge success being purely carnivore and people are having huge success being purely plant-based. Now, what is the truth? Where is the nuance? Let's get into the detail of these subjects about how there's more to it than meets the eye and what you get on social media. So today I have Dr. Gemma Newman, the plant-powered doctor, joining me in the podcast. She obviously doesn't eat meat, but I do. And let's try and find the common understanding between us both and give you the real story behind carnivore and vegan.

1:49Today we're tackling one of the biggest debates in nutrition and health on social media. Plant-based versus carnivore, what is going on? but I'm not really interested in the debate who's right and wrong. I'm interested in the truth and the nuance and getting into the facts of where people are right and maybe where people are wrong. So our guest Dr. Gemma Newman has been a GP for over 20 years. You're a best-selling author and you're one of the leading advocates for the plant-based movement and diet and written two books on the subject. So welcome to the podcast Gemma. Thank you Sunna. It's a real pleasure to be here with you and we've known each other for a long time probably five six years and worked together on a few bits with tonic and nutrition and you were helping me with kind of nutrition and guidance in the beginning of tonic so for me this is an interesting one because i eat meat you don't but on a personal human level we're still friends we're not arguing we're not on the other side of the debate um on social media that everything gets so polarizing but to get to the bottom of this subject can we start with from your perspective why do humans eat in general why do humans eat it's a great question and i also want to just say thanks again for the intro and for sharing what you did because i find the online world really hard and i went online so that i could share great nutritional information and help educate and bring a bit more light into what i perceived to be a very kind of polarizing world so I really don't like the kind of debates that happen online and it's so refreshing to have the opportunity to just come and chat and dig deeper into why people think the way they do why people eat the way they eat and help people come to a better place so I really appreciate that so we eat for loads of reasons don't we obviously the basic reason is survival and then on top of that we have traditions we have pleasure we have geographical location and um you know humans have adapted and survived over many many thousands of years to eat pretty much anything that they could in order to still be here standing and or in this case sitting you and i in this podcast studio yeah lots of reasons lots of reasons but there are like core biological functions right and my understanding and maybe i'm biased but my understanding of why we eat is it's actually for nutrition right we need vitamins we need minerals we need nutrition for our body to function properly to have good energy to run its immune system would you agree with that i would definitely agree we need nutrition we need good nutrition and you know i think humans have tried to adapt the best they can to a variety of different environments over the years and in the modern world we're in a position where many of us have the opportunity to be able to have quite an abundance of different kinds of nutrition so you know that's kind of conflicting in a way because we've had to evolve to sort of only eat things that were available and now we can get all sorts of things but some of those things are not necessarily as nutritious as we would want them to be especially you know when many of us are eating a diet that's very rich ultra processed foods um and there's more of us that are living with obesity and under nutrition than you could possibly imagine given how much is now available to us it's an irony right that we've got more food than ever for the first time in history we haven't had starvation or famine in the western world let's say i'm gonna say it's not everywhere not everywhere sadly but um we we have this abundance yet at the same time if you look at population level data you know still three quarters of Brits aren't getting enough nutrients or it's nine and ten if you're talking about fiber so there's lots of areas where we're just eating too much ultra processed food so I think that's probably one area we obviously agree ultra processed foods are bad they're high in calories low in nutrition yeah I agree I totally agree I think that there is nuance to that which is I think of course I'm on to yeah but yeah when the majority of the diet is composed of ultra processed foods we know from looking at population data that there is increased risk there's increased risk of obesity because it's ultra not only ultra processed but ultra palatable so of course people are going to eat more of it than they need there'll be more calories more saturated fat more salt more sugar yeah and so you know the data that we have on ultra processed foods is driven primarily by sugar sweetened beverages or basically the sugary pop drinks that we have, processed meats and high salt fat junk foods.

6:33Those are the three main groups that would drive that data. That being said, I think it's fascinating that, you know, we can't actually necessarily rely on food processing or the amount of processing to guide us on nutritional status, interestingly. And I think that's where some of the nuances missed when it comes to talking about these foods. So, you know, for example, for the average American, say, the new dietary guidelines came out recently. You know, we know that there's so many of them that are eating a lot of ultra processed foods. And then if they suddenly cut out all refined grains, they end up actually getting to nutritional deficiency because they're not getting fortified foods anymore in their diet.

7:16They're replacing them with other sort of forms of saturated fat. So I think that's so interesting that we're living in a place now where we have certain processed foods that actually contain more nutrients than people would otherwise have eaten. So things like fortified cereals, fortified plant milks, fortified breads. These are actually a really core staple of the diet for so many people, especially if they are living on the bread line. yeah well and there's a demographic thing within that or a socio-economic thing around like what are people can they afford to buy and therefore if they change it what does that mean for fortification and other things because some of those interventions are absolutely necessary and needed well yeah i mean the rates of spina bifida even pelagua things like that they don't really even exist anymore because of fortification of foods on a population level and those foods that are fortified are mostly processed foods or ultra processed foods so that's an interesting aside but so one of the things i love about you jimmy is because you've been a doctor for 20 years and you know in your clinic you started to actually not just look at drugs and go how can i help my patients eat better and live a better lifestyle and be healthier you know from foundationally from like a functional medicine point of view rather than just treating the symptoms which i think is phenomenal and well done you for doing that and being part of the nhs and doing that but in your practice what have you seen as some of the issues with people that you know are coming to you that are kind of diet related or nutrient related so in my practice the number one issue is deprivation simply not having the funds or the mental headspace to create healthy nutritious meals for themselves and their families and that is unfortunately the biggest driver that i see in my clinics and that's something that's actually really hard to fix yeah isn't it there's no easy fix well that's the economy and then we start to get into government and politics which we maybe shouldn't do you know well yeah we yeah we could do i mean this is contentious enough but you know i think that is something the social determinants of health for me are huge because i see that every day you know with my patients in clinic i work in the nhs that is what i see day in day out and people are really struggling and you know they have been actually since 2008 and i've been doing this a long time since that first financial crash and obviously before certain populations but things have got really bad and i think the use of food banks is going up people really trying to plug the gaps in their nutrition that way um it's not easy so that is the number one um and that can then lead to far more cases of things like heart disease, diabetes, insulin resistance, cancers.

10:08And the number one cause of death here in the UK, as in the US and other places where people follow you, is heart disease, number one, and cancer number two. And the cause of debility, type 2 diabetes, 80 % of people with type 2 diabetes will die of heart disease. So it's big, It's huge. And so when I'm seeing patients in clinic, I want to make sure that they are really improving their cardiometabolic risk profile. They are massively, hopefully improving their blood pressure and their lipid profile. And those are the things that I tend to work on a lot every day. Very good. I mean, it's sad that arguably the one thing all those things have in common is our food choices.

10:51right whether it's heart disease cancer diabetes like what we put in our body has a great impact on those conditions and it does it does and sometimes it doesn't feel like a choice as well sometimes for some people yeah and i've met people in the supermarket when i go out do my filming that are overweight and i've had conversations with them to try and understand it and show them the way we're trying to get people healthier what kind of conversations how does that go I'm curious. What happens when you approach someone who's obese in the supermarket? I didn't actually approach him. He kind of started the conversation with me because he saw me filming.

11:27And he was overweight. And it was a really interesting conversation. It was very clear to me with him very early on. And I didn't try and change his mind or have an argument with him in the supermarket. it but it was very clear to me early on that his view was that he was overweight because of his genes and biology and there was nothing he could do about it which for me is sad because I think I believe there is but it was highlighting the fact that this is so much broader than just hey you should do this because you should do this and this is the right way to eat there's also socioeconomic status there's also psychology there's also all these other things that contribute to getting people into these states so true i was speaking with an obesity specialist and there's this incredible graph or map that that shows you all these different intersecting um factors that lead to people living with obesity and it's huge it's complex it's challenging yes people like to make things simple and feel simple and they like to say well this is easy you know calories in versus calories out well it's it's not that simple yeah um we agree on that yeah great and it's also true that the things that we eat and the amount that we move and the amount that we sleep and the amount of stress that we hold and um you know our habits day to day do impact our body shape and size so those two things are both true yeah I think this is the common ground we'll get to I mean we have to kind of try and move this on to a bit more the vegan carnival thing but I think the interesting thing about this debate is actually we want the nuance because there is so much nuance to it and it's not as simple as one side's right the other side isn't it's there's truth in both camps that's why so many people are dogmatic about it on either side but we want to I want to at least try and find the middle ground where people can understand both perspectives and rather than arguing go how can we just at a population level help everyone be healthier I don't care if you eat meat or whether you eat plants that's up to you but if we can just help everyone be a little bit healthier live a better life live longer for their grandkids whatever it is whatever the reason that's where we everybody wins

13:57so let's get into the crux of the debate let's get into it let's get stuck in we'll start with very simply why do you believe plant-based eating or veganism whatever you want to call it is the best diet for humans nutritionally let's not get into environment and that because that's i think a whole nother debate which i don't have the answers for it's interesting you say that because do you believe that it's possible to be a healthy human on an unhealthy planet that's a good question i don't i think we are part of nature we are part of this earth this piece of rock in space that we flying around on and you need a healthy planet to have a healthy environment to have a healthy human because the air that we breathe you know is really important And it's well studied that if you live in cities, you probably shorten in your life by a couple of years based on the pollution you're breathing in from the air.

14:56Right. Versus living in the countryside. So I'm all for environment. I just, yeah, this is for me, this is a kind of more of a let's start with the nutrition. Let's try and understand from a nutrient perspective. Yeah, sure. How should humans eat? And then we can talk about the ethics at the end. Well, it wasn't ethics. That wasn't an ethical point. Attempting to separate human nutrition and wellness from environmental wellness is challenging because human actions are causing a lot of issues with the planet and keeping it healthy. And so when we are causing environmental degradation and not just carbon emissions, but eutrophication of the rivers and loss of the rainforests, loss of even in the UK, you know, we have like 4 % of ancient woodland left and the rest of its pasture land now.

15:48And it used to be huge swathes of ancient woodland. So my point is that in completely avoiding environmental topic, it's going to be a challenge because we have to look at that big picture as well. But get into nutrition. I think it's helpful to actually define what we're talking about because veganism and plant based eating is not the same thing, which is, again, something that people get confused by. and so veganism is simply a philosophy of reducing harm so on a practical level people who say that they are vegan aim to reduce harm to animals and to the planet wherever practically possible so that doesn't mean that it's always practical but that's what they're aiming to do and it doesn't just involve food that in that case it involves other decisions around you know uh things like the products that you buy to use on your skin or the products that you might buy um to to wear things like that so it's more of an ethical stance to reduce suffering as best as you can so that's a bit different from plant-based eating i think people often um enjoy plant-based eating for the health benefits without necessarily thinking about the ethical side of things and when i'm talking about the benefits of plant-based eating with my patients i certainly wouldn't say they've got to go vegan because that's an ethical stance rather than anything nutritional that being said we do know that whole foods plant-based dietary approaches and dietary patterns are really really good for our health and that is where i focus most of my advocacy.

17:37I have to share my personal views, I think, because it gives context for where I'm coming from. And I need to also understand my own personal biases. I care most about humans because I trained to be a doctor and I've been a doctor working in the NHS for over 20 years. So humans are my focus. But in deciding personally to go vegan, I wanted to widen my circle of compassion. And so that is why I make those specific choices. But I certainly wouldn't make the argument that other people would have to eat 100 % vegan in order to be more healthy. well that's a good distinction for people i think because on social media you never get that clear distinction right initially it's a 30 second snippet and someone's arguing about why everyone has to stop eating meat and then my view is that kind of very rigid dogmatic approach essentially then turns three quarters of the population off because 70 roughly 73 to 75 percent of the uk eat meat so then those people straight away are totally like whoa you know i'm not just going to change like that like that's where i come from in health education is like people don't take big jumps really or if they try to they fail after a few months like it's the small micro habits and steps that will lead to healthy change so if you want people to eat less meat that's fine but don't tell them to stop entirely if you want change i think that your one percent improvement point that you made in your book was really wise because I find in clinic that people do struggle to make big shifts unless they have a strong motivation to do so.

19:24Like a health scare or something. Like a health scare. And a health scare is usually where I have the most inroads when someone is really struggling with something and they want to try and make benefits quickly, they are far more likely to just jump all in and see how it goes. Doesn't mean that they'll necessarily be immediately successful but they'll do their best to make big changes if they're worried about their health um but the point i think probably it's worth coming back to is that it's really a nutritional science consensus that a plant predominant diet is the healthiest way to go and it's hard to conduct a debate about that because that is something that is has been shown across so many different kinds of trials, so many different kinds of data to back that up.

20:14It's a bit challenging to argue that being completely carnivore is healthier because it's like, well, I've seen the analogy online actually, which I thought was quite amusing when someone says that you're trying to play a game of chess and having a debate and you're using the pieces or you think you're using the same pieces. You think you're using all the pawns and the queen and the king, but the person on the other side of the table is actually not a person is a pigeon and they're just jumping about and they're just kind of making a mess on the chessboard and you just can't argue from the same kind of context that's how i see it because there is so much difference in that but i mean that's that's how i that's how i feel about that well that's fair and listen i have seen all the science that shows eating more plants is good for our health it's good for our gut there's tons of polyphenols, antioxidants, vitamins, minerals in vegetables, fruits and plants that I think we need.

21:10And the fiber point you made, which is so true. 90 % of us have a fiber deficiency. So for me, I think, you know, we so, so often online, we miss the main point, you know, we don't have, generally speaking, we don't have, the problem isn't like protein deficiency or loads of seed oils the problem is that we eat far too many calories and far too much saturated fat and basically i think ultra processed foods drive our over consumption of those things as well and that is where the main problems are in terms of nutrition we'll come on to some of those bits later but i want to flip it and say why do you think carnivores think their diet is the best I think I do yeah sure I mean my my understanding is based on listening so I do that in clinic a lot with my patients I try to do that with my friends and family I spend a lot of time listening less time talking on this podcast it's a bit different I'm talking loads but when I listen to other people i want to i want to understand why they think the way they do and you know when i when i look at people most people who are trying a carnival diet are doing so because they want to feel better and most people who do it at least from what i can tell from certain forums initially do feel a bit better because they're performing a very strict elimination protocol and especially if they have autoimmune issues or you know they've got a bit of bloating or a variety of health conditions they think oh you know i'm going to do this and it's going to solve my health problems and they often do it it seems to me from what i've seen out of desperation they want to make a change and they think this is going to be the thing to help them feel better and at least in the short term if you do feel better you're going to keep going with something so that's that's i think the motivation behind it and that's where I see a lot of people talking about the benefits is because it's made them feel personally better in the short term I've tried carnivore diet carnivore cards on the table and you know what I did was essentially not eat breakfast eat steak or burgers or scrambled eggs for lunch and then steak and eggs for dinner very simple diet and I can relate to what people feel because after the first couple of weeks of feeling a bit weird ropey being on the toilet a lot because your microbiome has to change and adapt to what you're eating you do have loads of energy you feel mental clarity you kind of get into a state of ketosis and you wake up in the morning at 5am feeling fresh not groggy not tired which a lot of people are used to feeling but i think there's an inherent a attractiveness to what you said which is you eliminate everything bad so obviously you're going to feel better but there's this inherent attractiveness of carnivore is this really easy for people to follow right i think partly it's just so easy just eat me it's not complicated diet plan don't have to count anything really simple you know everyone knows how to cook a steak like there's an ease element to it as well um which works for people but would you say because my perspective is i don't agree like carnivore long term is good when you've had people like Paul Saladino, who's one carnivore MD on Instagram, if you want to go check him out, he's been carnivore, written the book on it, spent five years basically being hardcore carnivore.

24:48And now he's calling it animal based and he's including squash and he's including certain vegetables. He's bringing his fruits back. And he's bringing some fruits and some root vegetables back. And he's feeling better. And he did say, he was quite open. He did say he, after a long time on carnivore, he started having some issues in the body as well but what would you say just trying to like level the playing field for people would you say carnivore could be a useful tool for a short period of time if someone's looking to strip out inflammation address an autoimmune issue and have a specific thing they need to address so it's so interesting all the things you said and there's so much i feel i would like to unpack around that and when you said about it being useful because you're cutting out everything bad I would say that I try to avoid classing foods as just bad or good and I think that when we look at carnival diet patterns what we notice is that although there's a lot of vitamins and minerals in a big slab of steak and certainly as well in eggs there is also the element of knowing that there's lots of data to show that this kind of eating pattern will increase your risk of heart disease.

26:07It really does. And so when you see your lipid profile shooting up and you know that there is a long-term risk of having a heart attack or a stroke that is far greater when you are just consuming something that's so high in saturated fat, then I would say it's not necessarily going to be a beneficial elimination diet and even for short term because it it does raise your lipid profiles even um within the first few days of eating this way especially for people who are vulnerable to to big rises and ldl cholesterol so that was one point i thought would be probably worth highlighting i think the second point as well is that it is i suppose easy to cook a slice of um you know ham or like a steak or fry an egg you know that's quite straightforward but i should imagine that for some people that would also be quite challenging to fit into day-to-day life just eating meat or eggs all the time for sure um but you know the same goes i think for eating mostly plants i mean that can also be challenging when we're in a very ultra processed world um but the point you made was even in the short term could it be beneficial and i think some people do find it beneficial but I don't feel I can recommend it based on the changes that even short-term changes can make on your lipid profile and your microbiome profile because the microbiome shifts that occur when you switch over to a fully meat-based diet and take out all the fiber are very detrimental and that can happen even with a few meals so I would feel real challenge in recommending that even for short-term use for those reasons.

27:53Okay. But, I mean, so this is my perspective, and I'm not a doctor, I'm not a scientist, but this is my, like, logical view. And it comes a bit more from evolutionary biology, right, which is typically we probably, you know, in winter would have eaten some root vegetables or whatever was available in winter, and then we might have gone hunting and found a deer and then for, like, three days just eaten deer because that's all that was available, right? So do we not have the metabolic flexibility to say, okay, well, we're going to eat meat for three months and then just go back to a more moderate diet later?

28:30Humans are pretty incredible. We have a huge range of metabolic flexibility. But I also think we're fortunate to live in a time where we don't have to rely on the slaughter of one animal that will kind of keep the community alive for weeks on end. And when we look at human biology, looking at feces from paleolithic man yeah what we see is actually that they consumed massively high fiber diet um you know we aim for about 30 grams of fiber uh now but actually they were having in excess of 80 to 100 grams of fiber in their diet back then so i think uh that the argument that we were kind of hunter gatherers and that's why it's great to eat meat all the time I think that's kind of outdated because first of all we talk about evolutionary biology we would actually eat mostly fiber and secondly you know we have opportunities to eat things that are massively high in nutrition if we are able to access that so why wouldn't we okay so flipping the question a little bit would you not say some of the success of like veganism and plant-based when people go full plant-based that where they get that initial I feel great my energy is better I feel awesome is in a way the same thing but just different ends of the spectrum in that like the carnivore people feel better after three six months and feel amazing because of all the elimination but Arguably, the plant-based person on the other side of this debate is doing exactly the same thing.

30:08They're basically just eating more plants and cutting out more ultra processed foods. Yeah, I think cutting out foods is a really important point, Sina, because when we look at dietary patterns, I'm all for talking about what do we do to get us better than where we are now? Yeah. And I think that it's helpful to look at what we replace foods with. So you're right in saying when you go whole foods plant based, you're having loads more lentils, beans, chickpeas, vegetables, fruits, whole grains, nuts and seeds, herbs and spices. is you know your body is feeling very thankful for that and you know when you go for carnivore you're having meat eggs and whatever else cheese or whatever it is and you may get diarrhea or constipation or feel a bit ropey to start with and then you know you may have some other health benefits down the line and so you think to yourself well you know surely you're doing the same thing well yes and no because with the plant-based pattern it's an elimination diet of sorts but you're also getting a lot more of the stuff that are good for your body long term and there's a lot more diversity um whereas with the elimination diet going carnivore um you are restricting your gut microbiome significantly and it's going to be very hard then to get that diversity of nutrients that will lead you to get a better microbiome without having to go through the whole effort of going back slowly slowly through all the plants especially if you had any issues with intestinal permeability that is one of the major things that people sometimes struggle with is having had either an ultra processed rich or very meat heavy diet and then trying to adapt to eating more plants and if you feel bloated or you feel strange you think oh god this can't be good for me but actually it is it's just that you're not feeling necessarily great at that time because your body is suddenly having to work with all this stuff that you weren't working with before.

32:14So it's like going to the gym and thinking you're going to lift the heaviest weights without actually gradually building up that tolerance, I suppose exercise tolerance or your gut tolerance for those things. The one having the right bacteria to digest the food you eat. There's an element of, you know, I've got my whoop band on and one of the things it tracks is actually sleep consistency. When you go to bed and when you wake up, the more consistent you are with that, the better. So there's probably an element of truth in that within the diet as well. And also with your little gut bugs, your little friends in your belly, because your lower intestine responds to the circadian rhythm as well.

32:50So you're actually making your beneficial gut bacteria thrive with consistency, even through sleep, not just through food. Yeah. Anyway, I know that's a slight aside, but... No. So then we do have to touch on, because obviously there's been a big boom on ultra-processed vegan meat alternatives. do you have a view on those i do sinner surprise surprise surprise what's your view i think that you mentioned consistency and i think that consistency is really important not just in our day-to-day habits but in our ways of thinking and in my perspective i think that it's quite easy to demonize plant-based meat alternatives as ultra processed back in the day people said that eating a fully plant-based diet was too restrictive because it was too difficult because not everybody knew how to cook beans and lentils and chickpeas and tofu and tempeh and that's too hard which i understand yeah but now the opposite argument is being made uh that veganism is all about ultra-processed foods and it's not healthy and it's almost as if you can't really win promoting plants because one way or the other people will find a reason for them to be so-called bad foods or difficult foods when it comes to plant-based meat alternatives i see them as a really useful tool because they help people make dietary shifts and what i think is quite interesting is if we take out emotions a little bit which is hard to do because we're human but if we look at objective data on things like lipid profiles weight um blood pressure is interesting because even in replacing something considered to be natural or more healthy i eat a whole foods diet that contains um a big sort of slab of meat and then you just think oh i would just replace that with a beyond burger well how is that healthier it's got all the seed oils and it's got all the processing it's not healthier interestingly if we just remove the emotional or the natural elements to that what we actually noticed from study evidence is that if you directly replace them you do see an improvement in blood pressure and lipid profiles and weight for people who replace rev meat with plant-based meat alternatives even with the extra processing which i find really interesting.

35:19I don't think that the ultra processed plant based meat alternatives are healthier than whole plant proteins. I think that there is a scale. And I think looking at the data on human health outcomes, that plant based meat alternatives are not the problem that they're made out to be. I don't think we should rely on them for our main source of nutrition. But I do think they have a place especially for people who really enjoy the taste of a burger and they want a burger but they also want to bring their blood pressure down and the lipid profiles there's objective evidence that they could do that with a plant-based meat alternative if they chose to and there's the environmental element which everybody misses because we know the environmental impact of the meat and dairy industry again that's something that is not my opinion it's one of those capital tea truths that I think people don't really like to think about.

36:16My feeling is that we have to make room for many different kinds of meat alternatives because people enjoy the taste of meat and they are very emotionally attached to meat and they don't want to give up meat. So why not have something available which helps them with that? Even if you look at the packet and there's a lot of different ingredients that you don't understand the name of doesn't necessarily mean that objectively the outcome data is worse i think this is where the ultra processed food conversation can get quite tricky because we know ultra processed foods can have negative health outcomes we know we consume too many of them that data is driven by like i said before sugar sweetened beverages processed meats and high fat high salt junk foods fortified cereals fortified grains plant-based meat alternatives plant milks they don't fall into that category and they actually can sometimes have some health benefits if depending on what they're replaced with okay well let's try and get into the nuance of this because this is where the crux of the debate gets really interesting because I have a view on it which is if you want to eat tofu tempeh you know bean burgers I'm all for it go for it beans are good healthy you can get vegetable burgers that are 60 70 80 percent vegetable right just natural peas and beans and sweet corn or whatever put in them that's what I remember vegetarian food being 20 years ago right you found it so delicious didn't you i had friends who were vegetarian and we went around the house for dinner regularly and they'd feed us bean burgers and i loved them they were great right but hopefully bring a few more bean burgers into your life maybe but but this is to me this is where the the context is important because i look at food like a bean burger with beans and vegetables in it you're getting whole foods yes it's plant-based but there's nutrients in those whole foods yes it's plant-based and there's nutrients in there whereas if you go more down the kind of ultra processed meat alternative often you're getting a single source of highly processed soya protein or whatever with then a ton of additives emulsifiers preservatives all in the mix and so from a pure nutrition point of view i think those two things are very different i always say like if you want to eat plant-based fine go for it but eat the tempeh the tofu the bean burgers try and avoid the ultra processed foods because there's less nutrition in it would you agree with that yes i would we have to look at nutrient profiles and food matrix most and when we look at nutrient profiles and food matrix there is definitely space for a little bit of meat there's definitely space for things like greek yogurt and you know things like that that are not plant-based foods uh and And I think there's space for plant-based meat alternatives too, because they do contain nutrients and the seed oils that they contain, contain polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are beneficial for health if you use them to directly replace saturated fats.

39:35And that's not an emotional opinion. That's just looking at the data. We're going to get onto cholesterol saturate fats in a minute. I've got a whole section on it. But before we do that, I want to finish this point because so to me, if we're talking scale and this is I'm not really pro vegan or pro carnival. I'm just like quite interested in health in general. But to me, if I was making a scale and this might be totally wrong, by the way, I'm not a scientist. And I don't think the other point within this is I don't think you can actually fully prove this in science because you can't lock people in a room and 100 percent control their diet.

40:09So I'm not sure we can ever prove this. But if you were ranking a scale, and this is trying to get at the nuance, I think you would put certain things in certain places. So obviously, plant-based, whole foods, actual vegetables at the top. And then a bit away from that, you would have the ultra-processed food, vegan options or meat alternatives. So they're different things, different nutrition profiles. Obviously, we can all agree whole foods are better for you than the ultra-processed version. but potentially this is my hypothesis there's nuance in between which is that actually probably whole foods plants are really healthy for us but like a steak is highly bioavailable protein lots of creatine b12 heme iron dha epa you're getting all these things from red meat so if you get and we can try and add ethics into this a little bit by saying if you get say a grass-fed organic steak from your local farm I would put that up there with the whole foods kind of alternative at the top and that it's better than plant-based but then if you had plant-based here which is like vegetables and beans and whatever would that be better than a Richmond sausage from the supermarket which is 46 % pork and nitrates and everything else then obviously the meat is worse and so i think what i'm trying to make a distinction between is even within plant-based and carnivore there's the nuance of processed and unprocessed and how things are made and how things are farmed as well which to me clearly dictates the nutrient status of the food and i would pick the most nutritious and if you look at you know the facts of gram for gram in a piece of steak there's a lot of nutrition in there yeah so i like the way you thought about it because you're looking for nutrient levels and you're trying to understand, well, what's going to give me the maximum bang for my buck, if you like?

42:11And I think that there is some benefit in doing that as well. And I would say that when we look at diet, because our emotions and our taste buds and traditions often dictate the foods that we choose to eat, I think sometimes we feel like we're probably eating more of the good stuff than we think we are. We've both talked about how there's a massive issue with fiber deficiency. And I think that when we focus our meals around meat, it's actually quite hard to meet our fiber needs in a way that we historically used to. So, you know, when there was war rations, having a ration of bacon or an egg was just maybe like a once a month thing and you had to try and work around eating more of those um sort of vegetables and things like that because you just didn't have it and interestingly heart disease existed before ultra processed foods were created i think people often forget when they when when we get so focused on ultra processed foods which are a problem we also seem to forget that heart attacks and strokes still killed people way before the processing of foods there's a reason why the rich and the royalty would die of heart attacks and strokes it's because they're eating a lot of meat heavy meals it's it's really no surprise when you look at the nutritional data that yes you're right red meat does have plenty of nutrients that you've listed but you know they also have other things that are less healthy for our bodies if we over consume them and i know that you want to touch on things like cholesterol but you know there's other carcinogens as well contained within clearly we know within processed meats and red meats a little bit too which would increase those risks a little bit so i think it's quite difficult to say that there's no increased risk to our health if we have as much steak as we like because there are health risks attached to that well but then that's where we get into the balance right yeah balanced diet and what that actually means because you know but people have so many different ideas of balance you see that's what i was coming back to the idea of thinking oh you know i've got a balanced diet you know i eat loads of vegetables then you actually look at what they've eaten and it's and it's not much right but i think it's an important point the balance thing because what i say to people is like the classic british meat and two veg wasn't far wrong maybe half your plates meat half your plates veg you can argue about the percentages of what that should be but if you're eating just real unprocessed food like my gran she lived in 96 but she ate two warm meals every single day she was a traditionalist she loved cooking she would cook a roast dinner at lunch and then have something else at dinner and yeah is that too far wrong i think that it's definitely the right direction depending on what you tend to have in your day-to-day life um whole grains are really missing from what you've described whole grains are a really important part of the conversation and i think it's very healthy to have two to four portions of whole grains a day as well as your vegetables and your fruits and your nuts and your seeds i certainly think that meat and two veg is a good way to think about food because you're thinking about keeping it natural you're thinking about veggies as being half of the plate but i also believe that it's important to add whole grains to the conversation whole grains are a real core dietary staple that do provide a lot of nutrition and interestingly every dietary guideline that's ever been produced puts whole grains at being really a really important part of the diet it's two to four portions a day is brilliant so i would say we're missing whole grains from what you described and that's very important i think looking at the data on things like red meat we it's very clear to me that we have to try to minimize it even though there are good nutrients in red meat a high red meat diet does increase the risk of diabetes heart disease and all-cause mortality so we need moderation okay so to to touch on that briefly to go back on the kind of epidemiology point around how we study this yeah is it not true that a lot of the studies that show red meat is bad uh i wouldn't class it as bad or have poor health outcomes or could be a possible class 2 carcinogen yes is it not true that a lot of those studies class red meat as a burger chips soda a pizza with pepperoni you know like there's a difference and this is what I'm trying to get at is the nuances if you did those studies where you actually lock people in a room and one group was eating red meat which is organic grass-fed steak from the local farmer and another group is eating red meat as per the study definition of burger and chips with soda pizza hot dogs sausages you name it is there not a huge difference in that and the way we study red meat has potential limitations on what it suggests.

47:46I think you're right that it's really important to acknowledge where weaknesses are in scientific study and scientists do that a lot when they're doing a research paper they will adjust for confounding factors in their research and I also think it's really important to respect nutritional epidemiology. Epidemiology is respected in every other field but for some reason people don't respect nutritional epidemiologists and the work that they do which is incredibly complex and i think that when you look at nutritional epidemiology it is very clear that red meat specifically still has risks of heart disease and cancer and type 2 diabetes and that's not just one study it's important to account for the fact that some studies would potentially bunch processed meat together with red meat.

48:36And that is a challenge because they are not the same thing. And it's important to note that the World Health Organization does class processed meat as a class one carcinogen. And smoking data, there's no randomized control trials on smoking cigarettes, but everybody kind of accepts that epidemiological data is enough to prove that smoking is linked to cancer. but for some reason people don't accept the same thing when it comes to red meat and i think it's because we're so attached to the idea of eating it we can't seem to look at the data that we have and be able to say you know this is something this is a signal well i mean look epidemiology has to be a signal it's always used as a signal normally in science too and that's that's respected by people usually only when it fits their own agenda yeah there's definitely so you know when because i've seen this online you know when you have a carnivore influencer and they say you can't trust nutrition science it's all only epidemiological data and then they'll try and scrabble around for something that would fit with their argument that's not an anecdote and they'll use it they'll try and find epidemiological data and then you look at the paper and they've misquoted it so you just think it's it's again it's the whole chessboard pigeon argument sometimes i have it all listen there's a lot of misinformation on social media and i'll be the first to admit i sometimes get stuff wrong because we're you know filming lots of videos we all do um i still do think it's a positive for health because the way we're disseminating information so much faster like we're learning a lot quicker than we ever would have 20 years ago which i think overall a good thing and if you have the debate and you allow the conversation then actually we'll all advance our learning but would you say there's potential nuance even going further into red meat that potentially the carcinogenic effect or the poor health effect of red meat isn't necessarily just down to the meat itself it's down to often the fact that we sear the steak and burn it because you could never separate that in a study if you say someone hey you eat steak you don't eat steak you're not dictating how they cook it that's a really good point suna and one of the ways that we assess carcinogenicity is through the production of heterocyclic amines which are carcinogenic compounds formed by searing and barbecuing meat so yes i agree that is one of the mechanisms that red meat can be carcinogenic there's um new 5gc is another compound within red meat that is carcinogenic as well we talked about the heterocyclic amines that are produced um i think that you could minimize the amount of those carcinogenic compounds by cooking meat slightly differently and boiling chicken is probably the one that produces the least of these compounds and i think it's worth noting that when you barbecue vegetable matter that doesn't happen so you can you can char your broccoli and it isn't carcinogenic correct really yes i thought it doesn't produce the same amount of these compounds i mean charred toast is different you would still burning your toast is bad yeah exactly but but it doesn't happen with vegetables so i think it's just an interesting point to make you're absolutely right that one of the main drivers of the carcinogenic um uh potential is the way we cook it the way for sure uh but we have to cook it because it's not healthy to eat raw meat um we're not lions and we are far more prone to infections and gut issues if we were trying to try to consume raw meat what about raw sushi everyone eats raw sushi uh everyone eats raw sushi well a lot of people do there's health risks to that too actually yeah parasites parasites exactly yeah i don't know if you've seen them up close they're pretty awful they look very good yeah parasites are a scary thing i don't that in my gut thanks but um yeah so that's a really great point that you've made and you do minimize those carcinogenic compounds by um avoiding burning the meat for sure because my favorite like go-to dish at the moment is meat based but it is venison wild caught um and then slow cooked for like eight hours with a load of veg and beans in a you know dutch oven in the oven and it's like this delicious yeah plant meat and plants and i'll just stick that on my plate and away i go that sounds so it doesn't burn it sounds tasty and that sounds nutritious and it sounds like something that would really appeal to you i'm very pleased so you wouldn't be happy for you okay i'll try well i'm trying to find the nuance in this conversation because i think so many people are confused yeah and so many people like hear different things and i think my perspective isn't right or wrong i don't know i don't and i think arguably the definition of science is a conversation a debate a discussion yes around what advancing human knowledge i agree i agree and i think this is where we get so confused because when we're just not all necessarily talking from the same page and that's where people can get very discouraged with their health yeah but i guess if we were to try and wrap up that particular part of the conversation my ultimate point would be to say yes red meat contains useful nutrients yes it matters how it's cooked and yes it matters how much of it you eat yeah and the more vegetables and the more um pulses and the more whole grains you consume with your red meat the better your gut health and risk of cancer diabetes and heart disease will be interesting because one last point on this is one of the common things you'll hear on social media of like why red meat isn't the cause of all our health issues is red meat consumption has actually gone down by about 37 over the last 50 years and some of that's made up for by eating more chicken but broadly speaking red meat consumption has gone down but our heart disease diabetes cancer everything is going the other way so what do you have a hypothesis of why that would be i do so you're absolutely right um red meat consumption has gone down chicken consumption has risen exponentially yeah uh people are not replacing their red meat with more vegetables whole grains and pulses no so uh we can clearly see that there's um more of a replacement with ultra processed foods which is we know has a a net negative impact on health so i think what is helpful when thinking about uh food patterns is what you're replacing something with so when you're replacing red meat with uh refined grains high saturated fat other foods high salt foods and junk foods you're not looking at a net gain in health you're looking at a loss and i think that's basically essentially what we're dealing with but it doesn't take away those um signals of risk from red meat it just means that people have replaced them with things that are even arguably even worse for their health yeah um as i said before people died of heart attacks and strokes way before food processing and that there's a reason for that and you can see it as well with epidemiological data you can pick up these signals as well through public health campaigns so there's a really interesting public health campaign done in Finland called the North Karelia Project where there was a huge drive to help encourage people to limit their consumption of things like red meat and obviously limit things like smoking so that they could massively reduce their risk of heart disease because people were dying left right and center of heart disease in Finland at the time it was a massive rise in heart disease after the second world war and they they really wanted to do something about it so what they did was that they they put through a massive public health campaign that people the people listened they reduced their smoking they reduced their red meat consumption and heart disease rates dropped so actually what we're looking at i mentioned the importance of heart disease as our biggest killer and yes that's true but actually heart disease rates have gone down a bit people don't realize this okay heart disease rates have reduced good news yeah it is good news um and i think that that's an interesting point to make when you're looking at population patterns and what people eat cancer rates have gone up significantly um and diabetes rates and metabolic diseases have gone up but interestingly heart disease has gone down even though it's still our biggest killer yeah but then there's also to your earlier point a lot of nuance within that around well what are these countries eating and what are they replacing it with right so if you look at a map of Europe the UK is 57 % ultra processed food Germany 48 but if you look at Italy it's like 13 % if you look at Spain it's like maybe 15 the Nordics are pretty good as well I can't remember the exact percentage but maybe in the 20s so if you go to a country like Finland and say hey eat less red meat all of a sudden they're eating more whole foods more plants more un ultra processed like real healthy food so they're going to have better health outcomes as opposed to if you did the same study potentially in the uk where then they change it to ultra processed foods to replace the red meat and then you'd have a totally different health outcome i'm not saying that's what would happen but that's kind of the theory of like why this stuff is so complicated right because you could do it in one country and have a totally different outcome yeah from another yeah it is complicated i mean the one i'm referring to from finland that was a public health campaign in the 1970s yeah so i'm talking about data from 50 years ago when it comes to public health but it's useful to mention because that happened before the boom in ultra processed foods in general yeah you mentioned about ultra processed foods in the uk and yeah you're right we have a quite similar dietary profile to the us actually when it comes to that And, you know, it is a net loss, I think, for the health of the nation.

59:19And that's something that I'm glad we're addressing with nuance today. Yeah. So, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. But looking at European and, I suppose, international populations is really helpful. Because when you compare dietary patterns across populations, there are still patterns that you see that lead to health. and I see the conversation online being quite derogatory of not only epidemiological data but also really well conducted studies on diet and nutrition that are multi-center multinational that show the same patterns and that is that a predominantly plant-based diet is the healthiest for the human populations in general.

1:00:02Would you agree that the most studied is actually probably the Mediterranean diet. Yeah, I would. The Mediterranean diet is the most studied, but that doesn't necessarily mean that indigenous diets from other cultures are not as healthy, as long as they contain lots of plants. And, you know, that happens. We look at staple foods around the world and we notice that similar patterns emerge and that is high veg, high whole grain, high pulses, regardless of what their traditions are when it comes to cooking. because obviously then but the mediterranean diet includes some meat right yeah but it's actually it's so interesting when you look at so let's let's talk about that so the predimed trial there was um quite a lot of heat online about the predimed trial but when you looked at the dietary patterns and the mediterranean patterns they were looking at replacing things with like olive oil and fish and so on uh it's actually the the veggie rich med diet that proved to be the most effective overall for reducing risk of things like stroke and heart attacks so it was a lot of veggies essentially was was the win and even stuff like you know maybe people talk about the seven country study that really bothers me when people diss that because it was so meticulously done which one ancel keys yeah he did this he did this uh study called the seven country study and you see a lot of people who are talking online about this saying oh you know he cherry-picked the data to show that you know saturated fat caused heart disease no he didn't he didn't um he only picked those seven countries because at the time when he started the study back in i think 1958 those were the only countries that had the requisite amount of data and ability to capture data prospectively that was required for the study to actually show outcomes okay so countries were not excluded because of their dietary patterns countries were only excluded because they were not doing the requisite data collection and then the data was collected so he couldn't make up outcomes before the data collection do you see what i'm saying right so countries like i'm trying to think now which countries were included um the usa was included japan yugoslavia uh italy greece basically countries that had hard outcome data yeah they had the ability to show the data that they needed for dietary patterns and hard outcome data when it came to things like heart attack risk okay those are the only reasons those countries were picked and then they collected the data right so so gary taubes has written a whole book around this around how you've but so let me like i don't know what hansel keys did gary torb says he was paid off by big sugar to point the blame at fat and whatever i don't know it was in the 50s 60s like i wasn't there i wasn't alive but what would you say about say the french data where high saturated fat content and consumption doesn't lead to increased risk of heart attack how can it be true that saturated fat's the enemy if you eat saturated fat doesn't matter from what source you're going to get a heart attack yeah there's a country that proves the exact opposite so france doesn't prove the opposite france was excluded from the seven country study because they didn't have the requisite data at the beginning for them to be included so it wasn't oh france people eat a lot of saturated fat there so we're not going to include them so there was no agenda around france not being in the seven country study i'm not saying that but now we have the data now we do yeah now we have the data and And interestingly, when we look at data from France and other countries, human biology hasn't changed.

1:03:58France isn't an anomaly. You look at the World Health Organization, MONICA project, you look at, I think that included 38 countries, including France. You've got data from EPIC cohorts. That's 10 countries, including France. and the same links are still proven in those studies between saturated fat consumption and heart disease risk. France sadly doesn't have an exemption and French people don't have an exemption from that data. Data since the seven country studies actually shows that French people have exactly the same biological risk of heart disease as everybody else in the world. But if If you look at just macro population data, they have lower heart disease than the UK and they eat way more saturated fat.

1:04:46So how does that correlate? Well, I'm not offering you a direct comparison between French and English people based on an anecdote about how much they eat. But we know from nutritional data that British people eat a lot more ultra processed foods. and french people also in general i should imagine also eat a lot of vegetables and foods from the local market that include pulses and things that are also healthy for them so snails but let's not touch on snails so i mean i i don't want to get into like anecdotes about it but when we look at population data so france is included like i said before you know the world health organization moniker project you've got the epic data like they don't have there's no difference there in those those risks looking in detail at what they eat so it's not really that france is an outlier it's just perceived to be right because i guess what i'm trying to get at is are we not missing the nuance right which to me the nuance is potentially hypothesis if you eat a high saturated fat diet and have poor metabolic health and over consume ultra processed foods real problem real proven issue if you have high saturated fat consumption from natural foods eat a low ultra processed food diet and have good metabolic health it's a totally different thing it's not the same thing like agreed it's not the same thing and yet we do have a lot of data not just mechanistic but also epidemiological, randomized controlled trials, the synthesis of different types of evidence that not only show a mechanism but also show an outcome.

1:06:37I think this is an issue that a lot of people who don't like to admit that saturated fat can contribute to heart disease have, is that they think, okay, well, maybe it's just epidemiology which doesn't count, and maybe it's just this mechanism, but that doesn't count. When you synthesize it together, you see there is a very clear pathway to increase saturated fat consumption, increasing LDL, which increases atherosclerotic plaque, which increases risk of heart disease and stroke. It's there. How much it impacts us will depend on how much we eat. And the nuance is there as well. Yes, it's not great to have a lot of refined grains.

1:07:20Yes, it's not great to have too much excess sugar. Yes, it's not great to have all of this junk food. Of course, agreed. And yes, it's great to have loads more veggies and pulses and grains and seeds and nuts. Yes, yes, yes. But don't overdo it with the meat. Fair. Because I guess where, and I'm just a guy who looks at logic, right, is, you know, your brain needs cholesterol to function properly. And it's actually a nutrient our body needs to make hormones and bile acid and other things. What I find is unhelpful is all saturated fat is bad. Don't eat saturated fat because then you're saying don't eat eggs, don't eat coconut oil, don't eat other things.

1:08:13And my argument is it's not that simple. right? If I have high cholesterol, and I play sport five times a week, and eat a whole foods diet is very different from someone who's perhaps overweight and doesn't do any exercises, completely sedentary, and eats mostly ultra processed foods. That's my point. Yeah, I think you have a much healthier body than someone who is sedentary and eats a lot of ultra processed foods and i also feel that people really get so caught up in wanting to demonize vegan approaches to eating that they forget that in still increasing saturated fat in the diet there is risk you see it all the time you know with these really fit healthy guys that are running and buffed and going to the gym and then they're on the running machine and they drop dead of a heart attack because they have been consuming a higher saturated fat diet this is the damage that's done on the inside that you can't see even if you appear healthy i think and this is this is what shocks people you know you you have men dying in their 40s of heart attacks and they're like why why has this happened to me i'm so healthy but their arteries are telling a different story that is something that really frustrates me because i have a family history of heart disease too it matters to me personally you know my granddad dropped dead of a heart attack whilst he was playing tennis he was fit he was healthy my dad dropped dead of a heart attack in his 50s and you know he he wasn't chowing down on ultra processed foods he wasn't overweight we we neglect the risks to our health from eating saturated fat because we think we're immune from having a heart attack because we're eating whole foods and i think that's something that needs to be addressed.

1:10:06What would you say about the studies that for eggs and coconut oil specifically that showed consumption of dietary saturated fat in those forms does not increase your bodily cholesterol levels? It would be interesting to look at those studies. I don't know which ones you're talking about specifically. So it's hard to come to debate without knowing that one sorry but i would say that i have read studies to show that eggs don't particularly increase dietary cholesterol in some populations of people and the ones that i've read around the issue of eggs and cholesterol interestingly cholesterol levels in the blood have only risen in those who were not eating foods high in saturated fat anyway so when you look at if you go into the detail of the egg studies that i've read at least on this topic they'll have a cohort of people who are eating more than 10 % saturated fat in their diet anyway and then they add in one or two or three or five eggs.

1:11:06Yeah, it doesn't make a difference. Exactly. It's not really making a difference. Whereas you do see rises in dietary cholesterol if someone is eating a more whole food plant-based pattern and then they suddenly add in, I'm just, I'm picking figures out of the air at the moment because I don't have the study. Yeah, no, no, it's fair. But maybe sort of four or five eggs on top of that very low dietary cholesterol diet then you may see a very slight rise but i agree with you overall the data does show that you know eggs don't move the needle much when it comes to saturated fat intake when you're already eating more than 10 saturated fat anyway interesting because yeah i think eggs are one of the healthiest foods out there potentially if you look at all the choline and all the nutrients you get in them you're getting good levels of vitamin D, omega-3, like there's really good stuff in there.

1:11:54So I look at it from a nutrition point of view and then take a view on the cholesterol side of it and go, well, it doesn't seem to affect it that much. Yeah, I think you're right. It is a good source of nutrition. And again, it comes back down to the food matrix and what you're replacing things with. Yeah, well, absolutely. And that's where the truth is always somewhere in the middle.