Hello Health Champions.
These are plant-based meat products that look, taste and even bleed like real meat.
They're taking the world by storm and are served in a number of restaurants now.
For most people there's a fascination with how science and technology can improve our
lives and move mankind forward.
And when it comes to fake meat the one concern that most people are going to have is the
taste.
How is this going to be able to trick my taste buds, my brain into thinking that this is
the real thing.
Plant meat is also promoted for being better for the environment so how great would it
be if it could also save the planet.
And since this is a health channel, I also want to place particular emphasis on question
number three.
Is this actually good for you?
So the first question is: How does it taste?
Well frankly, I don't care, because ultimately the only opinion that's going to matter to
you, is yours.
If you don't like it you're not going to eat it, so give it a try.
One of the top brands is called impossible burger and it is made with this stuff that's
all plant-based.
Another major brand is called Beyond Burger and they put this stuff in it and we’re
going to come back to these ingredients.
Question #2.
Is this fake meat better for the planet?
Even if most people don't think much about this initially I think everyone would agree
that saving the planet would be a good thing.
Unfortunately, most meat, especially in the US, come from huge animal factory farms, and
even meat lovers could probably lose their appetite if they knew everything that goes
on there.
There is for example animal cruelty, there is unsanitary conditions, the animals are
in poor health they pump them full of antibiotics just to keep them alive, and then they pump
them full of hormones to make them grow faster.
And this is one of those uncomfortable truths that we would rather not be reminded of, because
we just love those low prices and the convenience of mass-market meat and fast food.
But if we could get meat without these animal factory farms, that would be a great thing,
and that's one of the implied promises of these plant-based burgers.
Another argument why plant-based food is better for the environment is this.
We can feed plant food directly to humans or we can feed plants to the animal and then
we eat the animal.
But when we go this second route via the animal, we have to feed them 8 calories in order to
generate 1 calorie of meat.
So that would seem pretty wasteful because we could get 8 times as much food by eating
it directly rather than feeding it to the cow.
But there's a problem with that argument because it's only wasteful because we spent tremendous
resources growing these specifically for the animals.
These are not plants that we grow for humans.
And here's the kicker: the cows aren't even supposed to eat any of the types of food that
we feed them.
So we grow them this unnatural food and we feed it to the cows and then we make the argument
that the cows are bad for the environment because they eat this food we grew them.
Cows would be totally happy just living cow lives and eating grass and then they would
actually be great for the environment.
And of course cows are supposed to eat grass and humans can't.
So are plant burgers going to be able to solve that problem?
Well, maybe a little bit.
They're not as wasteful as feeding it to the animal, but they only solve a part of the
problem, because modern farming is the bigger problem.
It's the way that we do the farming whether we raise plants or animals.
Modern farming contributes to soil destruction because we're so eager and so greedy to get
everything out of the soil that we take 50 nutrients out of the soil and we only put
back 3.
And that's enough to make things grow for a while but the soil gets more and more depleted.
We’re depleting it of minerals.
We’re depleting it of life-forms that keep it alive that make it soil: bacteria, fungi,
protozoa.
And when the soil is dead, now it leads to erosion and even desertification.
The thing that actually grows our food is called topsoil.
It's the top layer that is alive and full of nutrition that makes food for us.
And we have lost 50% of the topsoil in the world in the last hundred and fifty years.
Not because we grow plants or animals but because the way we do it.
When we first destroy the soil with unsustainable farming practices and then we feed those crops
to animals that aren't supposed to eat it, now we're committing a double crime against the
planet and against the animals.
What we really have to focus on is to raise both plants and animals inside a sustainable
ecosystem.
So when we have rain that waters the plants and microorganisms that recycle waste, and
we have the soil with the microorganism growing plants, and then these plants feed the animals
and the animals fertilize the soil.
You get the idea.
Now we have an ecosystem.
We have a system that's sustainable for thousands and thousands of years.
And here's the question you've been waiting for: Is this plant meat good for you?
And now you're going - What are you talkin’ about?
It's a plant.
Of course it's better.
Because plants today are politically correct.
We’re told all the time that eat more plants eat more plants eat more vegetables more fruits
and vegetables.
So they're politically correct. There's no argument here and meat is politically incorrect.
It has cholesterol.
So in this question it’s almost like a knee-jerk response - Duh.
Of course it's better.
It's a plant.
And it's like case closed.
Well as a clinician who doesn't just see the average case.
Most of the people I see they've been to a dozen different doctors and they have no help.
So we have to look a little bit beyond the mainstream beyond the usual perspective on
food.
And here’s a gentle man who took a look at the properties of food from a different
perspective.
This was Weston Price he was born in Canada but he practiced dentistry in Cleveland, Ohio
from 1893 to 1930.
And what he saw was a tremendous increase in caries or tooth decay in the early nineteen
hundreds and he wanted to understand why.
So he took ten years out of his life basically to travel the world and he looked at 14 different
countries on every continent to try to figure out what was the connection between food and
tooth decay but also while he was at it he looked other diseases. Degenerative disease
and health in general.
And he wanted to find cultures that were self-sustaining with food.
People that grew and hunted and picked all of their own food that had no influence from
the outside world or so-called civilization.
And what he found interestingly was that they had almost perfect teeth. He found they had
virtually no cavities and any place in Africa he studied 13 different tribes and couldn't
find a single misaligned tooth. And in a time when there was a tremendous increase around
the world in degenerative diseases like arthritis and heart disease, in these people he could
not find any. So I don't know about you but I would want to find out what were these incredible
foods?
What were these secret or magical food that they were eating?
Maybe some of the things he found that they ate could even be found in some of these plant
burgers?
Maybe it was soy protein or maybe methylcellulose?
Maybe it was yeast extract, modified food starch or maybe the secret ingredient was
soy leghemoglobin.
One of the first places he started was in the Swiss Alps in a place called Löetschental.
They had a population of about 2000 people.
They had a good infrastructure, they had schooling, education system, they had a church and they
have been living over a thousand years
they had maintained his culture at an altitude of about 5000 ft.
There were no roads there.
They had no carriages, no machinery everything was done by hand.
They carried things wherever they needed to go.
They had cows, goats and sheep and they grew rye.
So their diet consisted of rye, butter, raw milk, and cheese.
And then about once a week they also had meat.
This village had no medical doctor, no dentist, no police or no jail, because they had never
needed any.
When doctor Price started examining their teeth he had to go on average to 3 people
to find a single cavity and none of them had extensive tooth decay.
And what was also interesting was that in Switzerland at this time tuberculosis was
rampant as it was around the world, but in this village they had never had a single case.
He found that these people were very different they had different genetics, different cultural
backgrounds, different climate and among the many different tribes that he studied around
the world some were the Masai in Africa, he went to the Fiji islands in the Pacific, the outer Hebrides
off the coast of Scotland.
He went to the Aborigines, the original population of Australia, and the Maoris in New Zealand.
And everywhere he went he documented extensively. He took over 15,000 photos and everywhere he
found people with excellent health and excellent teeth.
He also found that they didn't have a whole lot in common with the foods they ate.
The foods were quite different - a wide variety of foods.
Some people lived on milk, blood and meat like the Maasai.
Other people were fisher populations they lived on fish, oats and maybe a little barley,
like the people off the coast of Scotland.
Some people ate a few local plants but it wasn't like they were either vegetarian or
carnivore.
Everyone ate a little bit of a mixed diet.
But what he found and concluded was that what they had in common was that all the food,
100%, was unprocessed, or in other words untampered with.
He also found that when families split up and move to different places their health
change. These are two Gaelic Brothers. They grew up on the Isle of Harris and the brother on the
right here he was still on the island whereas the brother on the left he had gone off to
seek his fortune in the so-called civilized world and started eating processed foods.
So after traveling for 10 years and meeting tens of thousands of people, the conclusion
of doctor Price was that it wasn't about a specific food.
That people can thrive on the variety of different foods as long as it's not processed.
Another thing I look very closely at in my clinic is allergies, because of one man's
food is another man's poison and if something causes a reaction in you, it's not a good food
for you.
Then it's causing inflammation. And things that cause immune responses and inflammation
are also tied to digestive disorders and even autoimmunity.
All of which are rampant today.
And symptoms can be aggressive or silent so a lot of people have very strong reactions
but other people can get an inflammatory reaction and not even know it.
So I believe it's very important when we compare regular meat with plant-based meat that we
keep in mind that regular meat is very, very hypoallergenic.
That it is one of the least allergenic foods we know of.
And why is the carnivore diet so popular all of a sudden?
I believe it's because a lot of people are highly allergic to a lot of foods, often times
they don't even know it, and when they eat mostly or all meat now they're avoiding a
lot of those foods that they’re sensitive to and their bodies can start healing and
reducing that inflammation.
So allergies are not going to be a problem for everybody, but you have to keep in mind
that when you opt for plant meat, you’re increasing the potential for an allergic reaction
because when you're getting the soy protein and the pea protein and the mung bean protein
and the rice protein those are much more common allergens.
And in addition to that you're also choosing something that is quite highly processed because
they're extracting these proteins from different things.
You're not eating that whole food anymore.
And the fat that we get in regular meat is actually pretty nutritious, especially if
the animal has been raised on good food, whereas the canola oil and the refined coconut oil
that you get in the plant meat are very very highly processed and basically has no nutrition
left in it.
So keeping in mind the conclusion of doctor Weston Price, that the number one problem
with food was that he was processed and then we look at this ingredient that sheer long
list by itself tells us that this is a highly processed food.
And it's so called secret ingredient in the Impossible Burger is called soy leg hemoglobin.
And the official version is that this is a natural compound that you can find in the
root of the soybean plant.
However, in the real world, the way that they get it is that they have actually genetically
modified bacteria and these genetically modified bacteria grow this soyleghemoglobin.
I don't know about you but that's a science experiment I'm not quite ready for.
One thing I like to remind people of, to bring perspective, is that no other species on the
planet has ever had processed foods.
Humans are the only ones, and of course the pets that we keep and the animals that we keep
in the zoo's, which is why they're almost as sick as we are today.
Now I have to admit I love science and technology as much as the next geek, but we have to understand
our limitations.
Biology is different from machines and electronics.
Humans still haven't been able to create life in any shape or form and honestly I'm still
anxiously waiting for the first example of something man-made that works better in the
body than something nature made.
And here is the final verdict on plant meat.
Is it good for the planet?
Well, the worst thing for the planet is the animal factories.
When we first use resources to grow food and then we waste those resources by feeding it
cruelly to animals in factories that's about as bad as it gets.
So plant meat is a whole lot better than that.
I would say it's about eight times better.
But it still isn't all that great because it's still destroying the soil.
It's not about the plants it's about how we grow them.
If we're serious about taking care of the planet, then we need to move a whole lot more
of our food production of both meat and plants into sustainable ecosystems.
And how good or how bad is it for you?
Well, I don't think it's any more dangerous than any other processed foods or fast food.
So if I was one who ate out a lot, and I ate some fast foods then I would probably choose
this fake burger quite a bit simply because the alternative is so damaging for the planet
and the animals.
If we consider the fact that the population is not all that healthy and we want to try
to get them healthier, then I would say that for the individual a fast-food burger with
real meat is going to be a step above.
Now that's not saying a whole lot considering all the chemicals and the sugar and the grain
and the artificial things that you get along with that meal.
A better alternative would be if you didn't have it as fast fast food but you cook it
at home so if you have this plant meat at home then that would be a whole lot better than
getting it in the form of fast food and the same thing holds true though with the real
meat burger I would put that slightly ahead of the fake burger because the fake burger
is more processed.
But again eating and cooking whole real food from meat and plants that were raised in a
healthy environment is always going to be in a totally different category and hopefully
we can move more and more of our food production into this category in the next few decades.
And remember that we all vote with our wallets.
If you don't buy the garbage food they're going to stop making it.
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