Latest / Common Sense Health / Meat Consumption and the Planet: What They Don't Want You To Know
Transcript
- Stephen Thomas BSc. Hons: Hello, I was recently interviewed by a journalist at the Financial Times about the rise in the popularity in the carnivore way of eating. Things like how can I justify promoting an all-meat diet when livestock farming is supposedly destroying the planet? And I thought that was a fair question and I wanted to answer answer it honestly. But here's the first thing we should ask. It's not how bad is meat for the planet, it is how is this meat actually raised? Because there's a world of difference between an animal that spent its entire life in a factory farm, you know, in a concrete pen eating grain it was never designed to eat, and an animal that spent its life out on a pasture, doing what ruminants have done for millions of years. Now I have major concerns about industrial farming, and honestly, so does a huge portion of the carnivore community. That's why so many of us are Passionate advocates for regenerative agriculture because well-managed grazing cattle don't just exist on the land, they actually improve it. They stimulate the soil biology, they restore degraded grasslands and they draw carbon back down into the ground. In other words, done properly, animals can be part of a climate solution. They're not the problem. Now, if somebody says a meat-based diet uses too much water compared to a plant-based one, I'd generally point out that these figures are often wildly misleading. They include what's called green water, which is simply the rainfall that would fall on that pasture, whether the cows were there or not. You don't drink rain that falls on a hillside in Yorkshire, and and neither do the cows' critics. You know, it's it just rains. And here's something else that gets overlooked. A massive proportion of the world's agricultural land is what's called marginal land. It's simply too rocky or too arid or too hilly to grow crops for human consumption. You cannot turn that landscape into dinner, but a grazing animal can turn it into some of the most bioavailable nutrition on earth. And it does so for free, all by itself. You know, of course the conversation usually then gets around to methane. And I do understand why. Nobody enjoys the flatulent jokes at dinner parties as much as me, but Methane from livestock is fundamentally different from the carbon coming out of a car exhaust. It's a biogenic cyclic cyclic process. The methane breaks down into carbon dioxide within ten to twelve years, and that carbon is then reabsorbed by the plants and the animals eat it through their photosynthesis. It's a loop, it's a cycle. It's the methane cycle. It's been running ever since before humans ever walked to the earth. Now Fossil fuels, by contrast, are pumping ancient carbon out of the ground and into the atmosphere, carbon that's been locked away for millions of years. So that's a different discussion. You know, that is a one-way trip, isn't it? Comparing the two is like comparing a leaky bucket in a closed bathroom with one pouring fresh water in from the outside. But I also want to zoom out because we tend to critique the environmental footprint of meat while ignoring the cost of the alternatives. I mean monocropped grains and ultra-processed plant foods come with their own enormous toil. I mean chemical fertilizers, pesticides, stripped soils, and millions of shipping miles to get a a heavily refined product onto a supermarket shelf. And there's a certain irony in the system that ships peas across an ocean to pulp them into a snack bar and call it progress. Now, speaking of plant foods, here's a statistic that usually does raise a few eyebrows. And I want to be clear, I'm not making this up, it comes straight from the CDC's own researchers. When the CDC analysed over a decade of American foodborne outbreak data, covering an estimated 9.6 million foodborne illnesses every year, they found that almost half, 46%, n came not from meat, but from produce, from fruit, nuts, and vegetables. And here's the number that stopped me in my tracks, actually. Leafy greens alone, you know, your innocent-looking lettuce and spinach. We're responsible for an estimated 2.2 million illnesses every single year. That was the top cause, leafy greens. That's more illnesses than any other single food in the entire study. Not poultry, not beef, not factory farmed anything. Lettuce beat everything. Now, to be fair, and I always am, the picture shifts slightly when you look at deaths rather than illnesses. Poultry tops that particular table. Largely down to listeria in ready to eat deli meats. But the reason produce dominates the illness figures so heavily is quite a simple one. We often eat it raw. There's no cooking step, no kill step between the field and your fork. A steak has to be cooked. A bag of salad goes straight in the bowl, so the next time somebody warns you that an animal based diet is somehow more dangerous than grazing the produce aisle, you might gently remind them that the salad bar is Is doing rather more damage than the ribeye. There's no kill step between the field and the salad bag. And this brings me to my real point, and I'll be honest, it's a heel I stand on every time. While the scientists continue to debate the precise carbon maths of different farming models, and that can be genuinely quite complicated, what is not up for debate is the human health crisis in front of our eyes. We cannot call any food system sustainable if it's leaving people chronically sick. Dependent on medication and reliant on processed food products that read more like a chemistry set than a meal. In my other role as a specialist practitioner in obesity and diabetes, I've seen this first hand. I've now collected over a thousand success stories from people eating keto or carnivore or low carb even, and they're not anecdotes about weight loss alone. They're people reversing severe autoimmune conditions where plant foods simply didn't suit them. There are folks who have unraveled decades of type 2 diabetes and metabolic dysfunction. And there are people who've resolved debilitating gut conditions like Crohn's or severe IBS. Conditions that had stolen years of their lives. So when you've seen that many human beings genuinely transform, it changes how you look at everything, including the humble cow standing in a field doing carbon sequestation. One by Fight a time. So yes, I said that word wrong. I completely agree that we need to fix our food production systems. Irreverence about the planet helps nobody. But I'd argue the fix isn't planting more mono crops on land that can't support them and praising the label on a cereal box. It's farming the way nature intended, with grazing animals, restoring the land as they feed us. Sustainability and human health were never two separate arguments. They're the same field. And we need to stop pretending we can plough one and expect the other to thrive. And while we're on the subject of labels and how animals are treated, some some people sometimes ask me about halal meat. And I think there's a lot of confusion out there. So let me keep this one simple. Halal just means permissible in Arabic. For meat it boils down to a few essentials. The animal must be alive at the moment of slaughter, a swift single cut is made by a trained hand, the blood is drained and a blessing is spoken. It's very similar in a way to kosher, but anyway, s it's the same sort of ancient instinct. Respect the animal, waste nothing, do it quickly, do it properly. Now, here's the part that surprises most people. UK law requires that all animals are stunned before slaughter, with a small exemption for religious slaughter. But the overwhelming majority of halal meat in Britain, which is around eighty eight percent, actually comes from animals that were stunned first. And many Muslims are perfectly content with that, provided the stun is reversible. And that word reversible matters because it means the animal isn't dead before the cut. It's still alive when the slaughter happens. So it ticks the halal box while sparing the animal unnecessary suffering. Now that figure has improved markedly in just a couple of years and it's heading in exactly the right direction. And I want to be really, really clear about where I stand here. I'm not for animal suffering. Full stop. Nobody in this conversation should be. But my honest view is that we must stop the obsession over the last two minutes of a farm animal's life when completely ignoring the first 18 months. The real welfare scandal isn't the small minority of non stun slaughter, it's the factory farm. An animal raised indoors, on concrete, fed grain. It was never designed to eat, let's be honest. And never seeing daylight, no certification sticker in the world makes that a good life. Whatever the method at the end, what actually matters for welfare is how the animal lives. The pasture, sunshine, behaving like a cow. And yes, how it dies. In my view, the gold standard is a grass fed, regenerative system where the animal both lives well and dies well. Get that right, and everything else, the environment, human health, and ethics, they tend to follow. So there you go. That's all I really wanted to say. I think that's been about eight minutes. I hope that was enjoyable. If you did like that, there is more details that I could go into. If you'd like that, then please comment down below. I'm not a political animal really. I just want to talk about human health and that's the biggest thing for me. And you know, when we're looking at numbers, I I quite like that. So the CDC's report, I think I'll put a link down in the description if you want to see all that stuff about the fact that Levy Green's Cause 2.2 million illnesses in a year. Anyway, if you liked it, don't forget to subscribe, hit the notify notification bell if you'd like to be reminded of when my next video comes out. If you want to comment, that is great too. if you want to share, then I'd really appreciate that. And I will see you on the next one. I'll be back.