Jonathan and Joané 0:03
Hi, I’m Joané Hart and I’m Jonathan Hart. This is The Hart of Health, a show where we focus mainly on health and self-optimisation. Here, we like to talk about our experiences and knowledge when it comes to health and biohacking. Hope you enjoy the show.
Joané 0:34
Hey, everyone. On today’s podcast, we are going to discuss some myths about meat.
Jonathan 0:42
Yep, you’ve probably heard most of them. Maybe we will bring up some that you’ve never heard. But if you have any myths about meat, hopefully, we can give you some clarification on if the myths are true. Or if they’re false.
Joané 1:00
Yeah. And we also want to be clear: this is part one because the list was way too long. So we thought it would be best to split it into two podcasts. So, part two is coming. A lot of myths out there… It was quite fun to research. Okay, can I start with myth number one? Yes. Meat rots in your colon.
Jonathan 1:24
Yeah, this is one that I’ve heard plenty of times.
Joané 1:28
Yeah. The first time I heard it was when I was like nine in primary school… a long time ago.
Jonathan 1:37
I wonder who started this?
Joané 1:39
Wasn’t it in a movie or something?
Jonathan 1:41
Yeah. But I bet you It started somewhere before that movie, and it made its way in there.
Joané 1:46
Yeah. And I don’t know why, but that is the thing that stuck with people. And I just think if that were true, more people would end up at the doctor’s office because of meat rotting in their colons.
Jonathan 2:01
Exactly. I mean, if you know how you make biltong. So, biltong is like beef jerky, dried meat in America. So it’s dried meat. What you do is dip the meat into vinegar. And then you hang it up to dry and it doesn’t rot. So you literally dip it in acid. What do you think happens in your stomach?
Joané 2:26
Yeah, because hydrochloric acid is one of the strongest acids.
Jonathan 2:31
Yeah, exactly. So it’s very difficult for it to rot after being dipped in that. But yeah, the myth, the myth persists.
Joané 2:41
Yeah, for some unfortunate reason. And that’s the thing. Meat is basically protein and fat which your body can break down and knows exactly what to do with it. The protein gets broken down into amino acids, your body can turn the fat into energy. It knows what to do with the meat. It’s not some foreign food that is made in a factory and shouldn’t really be called food. It’s something that, you know, humans have eaten for 1000s and 1000s of years, do you really think we would have done it for this long if it was rotting inside our stomachs? Exactly.
Jonathan 3:19
I mean, even herbivores. I’ve seen cows and deer and those things, eating meat, and it’s not an issue. So, you know, it doesn’t really make any sense as soon as you start doing a little bit more research into it. But I mean, our pancreas creates pepsin. And pepsin is very good at breaking up meat and turning it into amino acids. So it’s really weird to think that your body produces an enzyme that breaks up meat really easily.
Joané 3:57
Yes.
Jonathan 3:58
For it to then even end up in your gut. I know it’s gross to think about but have you ever seen a piece of meat in the toilet after you’ve gone to the toilet? Have you seen corn before? Like if you’ve eaten corn? Can you see that? Oh, right. Yes, you will see it in the toilet bowl. (Seeds) Yes, exactly. So those things don’t digest. The meat digests very, very well.
Joané 4:31
Yes. And I mean, the body can’t digest fibre, like it’s just a bulking agent. And so a lot of people run with “meat rots in your colon and you should stick to a plant-based diet.” The thing that your body actually struggles to digest and absorb is fibre.
Jonathan 4:53
Yeah, it’s impossible. That’s why it comes out pretty much the same way it went in.
Joané 4:57
Yeah. The more fibre you eat, the more you’ll go to the bathroom. But that’s just not very good. A lot of people will say: “Oh, it’s so healthy, I’m going to the bathroom five times a day.” But it just all that means is you’ve got a lot of bulking agent in your diet, and that’s forcing you to go… not that it’s a better thing. If you eat more meat that doesn’t have all that fibre, you just wouldn’t have that need.
Jonathan 5:23
Exactly. So, I suppose that is also kind of a myth: that you need fibre. But we’re not going to be addressing that one.
Joané 5:34
Fibre also ferments in your digestive system. And that can make you very bloated. I know a lot of vegans fart a lot. Yep, something to mention. And yeah, you can do an experiment for yourself, where if you have a lot more fibre in your diet, do you feel like something is rotting inside you and causing gas and bloating? And then, okay, what happens when you eat a lot of meat and no fibre? It could be an interesting experiment.
Jonathan 6:04
Yeah, there was a guy who almost died from taking too many fibre supplements.
Joané 6:08
Oh, yeah.
Jonathan 6:11
Yeah, if you just YouTube “guy who almost died from too many fibre supplements”, it’s pretty scary.
Joané 6:18
Well, yeah, he drank too much of one liquid. Well, it turns into a gel. And I think it was psyllium husk or something like that. He drank it, and the thing is, once it’s absorbed water, if you add more water, it’s not gonna absorb more. So it ended up just sitting there in his stomach. He’s got it in his gut. Yeah, you need to be careful with that. And drinking more water didn’t help. He needed an operation for it. (Yep) Okay, can we move on to the next? (Yes) Meat is high in saturated fat and cholesterol. That’s true. But the myth is that that is why it’s bad for you.
Jonathan 6:59
Yep. I feel like this brings us to the first explanation that’s going to be very similar to all the other explanations for why these myths exist.
Joané 7:07
Yeah.
Jonathan 7:09
It’s, you know, it’s a correlation. So people will see: “Oh, people who ate a lot of saturated fat, and cholesterol in their diets, had more heart attacks, had more diabetes had more, all of these things that they point to like strokes and plenty of other examples like obesity. But that is just looking at the correlation, in order to actually tell if that’s the thing causing the problem, you need to have a more rigorous scientific study done before you can actually draw any conclusions. You can just say: “Oh, there’s a correlation.” And especially when it comes to diet, it’s very complicated. And a food questionnaire is not going to cut it. And that’s where a lot of these correlations come from. They ask people: “Oh, how much of this did you eat? How much did you have? And then I’ll see like: “Oh, the people that said that they eat a lot of red meat or cholesterol, saturated fat had more of these issues.” But those studies in Japan don’t show the same thing.
Joané 8:16
Yeah, there are studies where people who eat more red meat are healthier.
Jonathan 8:20
Yes. Their correlations show that the more saturated fat you eat, and the more red meat you eat, the healthier you are. But they have a different culture. And in their culture, it’s seen as like, you’re more wealthy and powerful if you’re able to eat a lot of red meat and saturated fat. Like they want the wagyu beef, you know. They want that marbled fat. So, they want meat that’s got extra saturated fat, like more than the average. And yes, probably wealth goes into part of it. You know, being wealthy probably helps your health outcomes. But the fact is that they’re eating a lot of red meat and saturated fat. And they’re not getting the same correlation, where you see in countries where they’re being told “no, saturated fat is bad, and you need to reduce it.”
Joané 9:11
Yeah, like there are a lot of countries where people eat a lot of saturated fat, just think of France. And you know, people talk about the French paradox. “We don’t understand why the French are so healthy, they eat so much saturated fat.” Well, maybe that’s why. So people always say: “oh, they’re healthy, regardless of their saturated fat intake”, but maybe I think that’s a big reason why they’re healthier in general.
Jonathan 9:37
Yeah, exactly. So, you will look at a Western study of people who believe that they need to eat less saturated fat to be healthy. And you’ll see that when they do that, they tend to be healthier, but isn’t that just because the person is taking the cultural advice of eating less saturated fat. If so, they’re also doing other things, like exercising, and not smoking, and not drinking. And like there are too many factors. And especially when it comes to food. So, people want to blame the meat. But I think it’s what else you eat. And that’s why these, you know, food questionnaire studies don’t really cut the mustard is because it’s really complicated. And you can’t just isolate one food component out very easily, unless you have populations that specifically either eat one type of food or not.
Joané 10:34
Yeah. And it’s nice if you can convince people and (just being sarcastic) that saturated fat is bad for you, because then they’ll buy all of your seed oils and eat the polyunsaturated fat instead.
Jonathan 10:50
Yeah, and then you also have a market for low-fat alternatives and all this. I mean, there was no such thing as a low-fat alternative back in the day. You know, it was like, “Oh, can I have my steak?” Cool.”Oh, can I have my yogurt? Can I have my cheese? Can I have my milk?” Like, it was all very simple.
Joané 11:07
You didn’t have skim milk?
Jonathan 11:08
Yeah, you didn’t have low-fat options in anything.
Joané 11:11
Yeah, I think margarine is one of the worst things to happen to the world.
Jonathan 11:15
Yeah, I think that was a terrible idea. Yeah, we’ve invented that.
Joané 11:18
Yeah, just eat real butter. Eat red meat. You don’t need to be worried about saturated fat and cholesterol. And what I think is funny is a lot of people say: “Oh, don’t eat red meat, it is bad for you.” But then those people are telling everyone: “eat coconut oil” And you know, coconut oil is like pure saturated fat.
Jonathan 11:42
So, the same with avocado oil and olive oil. They have saturated fat in them.
Joané 11:46
Yeah. So, you know, people who are plant-based advocates will try to warn people against saturated-fat-heavy meat, but then they’re eating a lot of coconut oil and loading up on avocado oil and olive oil. And I just think it’s hilarious.
Jonathan 12:07
Yeah. And I mean, who said that cholesterol is now not a nutrient of concern anymore?
Joané 12:14
I was wondering about that earlier.
Jonathan 12:18
So yeah, I mean, I suppose eggs contain more than cholesterol. But you know, having cholesterol in your diet doesn’t seem to have much of an impact on your blood cholesterol levels. So they really debunked that one.
Joané 12:35
Egg white omelettes are just sad.
Jonathan 12:37
Yeah, and I mean, people say: “oh, but if you eat a lot of saturated fat in your diet, you’re going to increase your cholesterol levels, and the cholesterol is bad.” But then again, to the same explanation, it’s a correlation, not causation. And cholesterol is now being used as like a proxy marker for all these negative outcomes. They’ll be like: “Oh, you know, because your cholesterol was high, this happened”… where we can’t actually prove it that thoroughly because we don’t have the correct studies to prove it.
Joané 13:14
Yeah. You need cholesterol and saturated fat to make hormones. And, you know, I heard I think Miley Cyrus talk about when she didn’t get enough cholesterol and her sex drive tanked. And then as soon as she got her cholesterol levels back up, that improved a lot, which I found very interesting, even though I’ve always known that cholesterol is important for that, and saturated fat. It was very cool to just hear somebody talk about it, especially somebody who has promoted a plant-based lifestyle, and, you know, maybe didn’t get enough cholesterol because of that.
Jonathan 13:56
Yeah. So my question to someone who believes that having high cholesterol levels is bad for you is: “Why is it so important for your hormonal and you know, health” Like, if you go cholesterol free and fat-free, you’re not going to do very well. So, why is something that’s so good for us bad for us? You know, that’s always my question. You know, it’s like, it’s such a vital thing. Why would it be so bad for us?
Joané 14:31
And isn’t cholesterol very important for your immune health for helping to protect you against like infections and diseases?
Jonathan 14:39
Yeah, that’s why there seems to be a correlation. I’m not now saying that it’s causation. But there seems to be a correlation between high cholesterol levels and longevity because the people who get an infection and have high cholesterol levels don’t seem to get affected negatively because cholesterol is an important part of your immune response. Obviously, we can go into more detail with that another time, but you can look it up if you’re really questioning that cholesterol is a really important part of your immune system. And so, people with higher amounts seem to be able to push off the infection that kills them longer into the future.
Joané 15:25
Okay, that was brilliant. On to the next myth: meat is unnecessary for health. I’ve heard a lot of people say that you don’t need to eat meat. Do you get all the nutrients you need from plants? But what about vitamin b12? What about creatine, carnosine and carnitine. And then other fat-soluble vitamins like pure vitamin A. Not beta carotene that has to convert to vitamin A. I’m talking about vitamin: A the good stuff?
Jonathan 15:58
Taurine… Yes, there’s just a very long list of things that you’ll be missing out on.
Joané 16:05
Yeah, and vegetarians and vegans often are deficient in these nutrients.
Jonathan 16:12
Yeah, I suppose you could maybe, one day in the future, be able to sort of recreate meat in a supplement regime? But you also don’t know how well you absorb things from a supplement. Oh, yeah. And it’s like, what form is it in? Like, how bioavailable is it?
Joané 16:34
Same with plant foods. The nutrients and animal foods are more bioavailable than the nutrients in plant foods, it’s easier for your body to break down and absorb.
Jonathan 16:45
Yeah, show me a study on pigs, where you feed the one lot of pigs just plant foods and supplements, and the other lot of pigs, a nice balanced pig diet with meat and all the things thrown in and show me that it’s better. Like, you know, at least have some kind of evidence. Yeah. Not just, you know, correlations and sort of beliefs and opinions. I want to see more hard evidence before I’d be like “okay, yeah, meat is unnecessary”, Maybe one day, but right now, I think meat is very necessary.
Joané 17:33
And in a lot of plant foods, you get anti-nutrients, like phytates and lectins, that make it hard for you to absorb certain nutrients. So yes, you might have a food that contains iron, but then the phytates in the food make it hard for you to absorb that iron. So it’s just hard to break down, there are compounds in these plants that are making it even harder for you to absorb these nutrients.
Jonathan 18:01
And that makes sense from an evolutionary point, because the plants require these precious minerals and macronutrients for themselves. And so, by containing it, then they become a target for being eaten. So it advantages the plant to be able to find a way to defend themselves from being as appetizing. So I mean, like, if you have a plant that has zero defence and a ton of carbs in it, everyone’s going to be munching on that plant all day. And I mean, especially if you get the bonus of all the iron in it, you get all the calcium in it, you get all the magnesium in it… But if a plant discovers a chemical that makes it very difficult for you to absorb that calcium, absorb that magnesium, absorb that you know, iron, whatever it is, then it’s going to become a lot less appetitizing. And it’s going to become, you know, a catch 22 situation where you’re like: “Okay, well, the plant does contain these things, but it makes it very difficult for me to absorb them.” So you know, eventually, it’s almost like it’s like an evolutionary war. And the herbivores are way far ahead of us when it comes to digesting plants. And where we have not really been playing their game long enough to be able to keep up with the herbivores, ve’ve been eating meat for millions of yours. So yes, that makes it makes it hard for us.
Joané 19:34
Yeah. Have we done “you should prioritize lean meat”?. Okay, that’s our next myth.
Jonathan 19:42
Yeah, that kind of falls in with the, you know, the “meat is high in saturated fat.”
Joané 19:47
Yes. But also like for people, if people recommend a weight loss diet, they’ll say: “Go with lean meat, go with chicken breasts, and cut the fat off of your meat because you’ll save calories.” That way, it’s all about the calories, but you’re completely forgetting that you need that fat for your health. And you’ll have a lean piece of meat with a salad, but the fat can actually help you absorb the nutrients in your salad.
Jonathan 20:21
Yes, and people don’t seem to realize this, but fat contains vitamins, fat-soluble vitamins,
Joané 20:30
Like vitamin E,
Jonathan 20:31
Exactly. So the fat actually contains things that are important. It’s not just fat. Fat is very good at absorbing things. I mean, people use it as a method of extracting all sorts of things. So why don’t people realize that there’s a lot of important things contained in the fat? And we know this because if you completely cut out fat, you will start starving no matter how much protein and carbs you eat. If you can actually cut down your fat consumption to nothing, your days are numbered.
Joané 21:11
Yes. Yeah, that’s the whole rabbit starvation idea.
Jonathan 21:15
Yeah, the rabbit trappers, who could basically eat as many rabbits as they wanted to, still ended up looking like they’re about to starve to death now, and we’re almost starving to death. So the problem with the rabbits was that the rabbits didn’t contain a lot of fat. They were very lean, very lean source of protein. But the people still got gaunt and skinny and looked like, you know, someone who went through a concentration camp. So yeah, fat is super important. Don’t cut it off from your meat.
Joané 21:57
Tom Bilyeu tells this story, where he wanted to be really lean because he wanted a six-pack. And he ate lean meats and vegetables, pretty much only that for a very long time. And his personality changed. He became more obsessed with food. And then his wife confronted him and said “You’re almost like a different person now, you need to change your diet.” and then he increased his fat intake and then everything was much better.
Jonathan 22:27
Yeah, well, I mean, if you’re on a low-fat diet, chances are your testosterone is going to take a dip. Because, as we discussed earlier, it’s very important for your hormonal health. So, you know, deprive a man of testosterone and he could become a very different person.
Joané 22:46
And people become obsessed with food. You know, I think a lot of people develop eating disorders and binge eating disorders when they go on a diet, but that’s often a very low saturated fat diet. And a lot of bodybuilders, people who you know, enter figure competitions, and after that competition is over, they start bingeing. And not just the bodybuilding category. It’s like people in all the categories in the figure competition. Then afterwards, they just start bingeing. And they did all this work for months and months to look the way they did. And then within a month after the show, they gained like 30 pounds or more. And I’ve heard people say they never struggled with binge eating, until they went on their first diet, until they went on this thing. And I think your body becomes so deprived, especially when you’re on a low-fat diet, that it almost like forces you to eat more by giving you this overwhelming urge to binge because it’s starving and wants fat.
Jonathan 23:54
Yeah, it’s like, once you start that process of starvation, your body kinda already knows. “Oh, wait… we know things have been very consistent for a few weeks. So we’ve been consistently getting food, so there’s a lot of food in this environment (consistently for a long period of time), so we don’t really need to worry so much. But then you go through that first starvation and then your body’s like “okay, whoa, shit. There was suddenly a lot less for us. So now, maybe we should prioritize storing a bit more energy for in case another lean time comes”… and then you rebound. You know, and you go on the next diet and it says “okay, now we’ve got another starvation period”. So it starts reinforcing that. Yeah, we need to store for the lean times. If you, you know, kind of force your body into starvation mode, like what those bodybuilders do where they go down to ridiculously low body fat percentages. And I do think, you know, it’s not great for your body if you want to keep a lot of weight off in the long term.
Joané 25:10
Yes. Well, that leads us to the next myth, which is: “meat makes you fat.” So that’s also because meat is generally higher in saturated fat. And people are often scared that eating fat will make you fat. And then also, meat is more calorie-dense than plant foods. But you get a lot more nutrients, it’s a lot more satiating. So if you eat more meat, you might end up eating less food. Like, I think the most amount of food that I’ve seen people pile on their plates was at this yoga festival where they only serve vegan food. And there are a lot of vegans there. And they just ate mountains of food, where I could eat a steak, that’s half of the volume, and be more satiated than the people who just like eat a big bowl of plants.
Jonathan 26:06
Yeah, I mean, I remember that I used to just eat like peanut butter and honey sandwiches when I was hungry,
Joané 26:18
And you ate cereal for breakfast.
Jonathan 26:21
And so I was always hungry. I was never like: “I’m satisfied”. The only time I was satisfied is if I had a steak, or you know, like a more meaty portion of pork or chicken or, you know, if I just had the peanut butter sandwiches, I could eat as much as peanut butter sandwiches as I wanted. I could eat like a whole loaf of bread, made into peanut butter sandwiches. And like, in an hour’s time, be like, I can eat more. You know, it really did not have that ability to satisfy my appetite. Yeah, and it just became ridiculous. Like how much I had to eat to feel satisfied. Well, now I can have some meat and fat and then I’m good. Yeah, I’m not going like “I could really eat”. And it’s like, I’ve started noticing that hunger started becoming a matter of time and a pattern and less like “Oh, my stomach’s empty”
Joané 27:24
Or your blood sugar dropped.
Jonathan 27:26
So it’d be like: “Oh, I normally have food at this time of day”, I would then get hungry. And so, it’s almost like my body has got on a schedule. And it wasn’t like I was constantly hungry and just waiting for the next meal. And yeah, when I was eating the peanut butter sandwiches, I just felt like I always needed to eat. But yeah, I feel like fat can make you fat. If it’s the wrong fat.
Joané 27:53
Yes, like, high linoleic acid, polyunsaturated fat, but you weren’t getting a lot of meat, except if it’s like factory-farmed pork and chicken that have higher amounts of polyunsaturated fat. And then, like I said, not as much as a lot of plant foods and like seed oils. But yeah, you can be cautious of that.
Jonathan 28:18
Yeah. So it’s a difficult one because it says: “does meat make you fat?” kind of thing. So it’s like: “what meat?” So if you get pasture-raised pork that has a low linoleic acid content, no, it probably won’t help make you fat.
Joané 28:39
But linoleic acid signals your fat cells to grow.
Jonathan 28:43
While yeah, it kind of forces your fat cells to not divide. And then they become dysfunctional because they inflate to levels where they start leaking triglycerides into your blood and causing inflammation and it’s a whole mess.
Joané 28:59
And it signals to your body that winter is coming and then your body wants to prepare for the colder months and store more fat.
Jonathan 29:07
Yeah, generally in our past, if you know you, you’re about to go through some lean times, you’d be gathering some seeds and some nuts. And so, it’s almost like our bodies took that as a cue that “Oh, you’re eating more nuts and seeds. Now that must mean that there’s not much around to hunt. So let’s start, you know, packing stuff away just in case.” And, yeah, there is a very complex way of explaining going all the way down to the electron transport chain, which everyone did in biology, but have completely forgotten about now. But it’s the basics of our entire metabolism. And there’s a proton thread on Reddit, where they talk about all these things in very great detail of like, exactly how the proton pumps in the mitochondrial membranes work. And the lead leg acid. So the Omega 6 PUFA polyunsaturated fatty acid affects your metabolism at the level of the mitochondria. And stearic acid seems to do the opposite. Where do you get stearic acid from animals? From their fat? So, yeah, generally, big animals have fat that contains stearic acid. And so it’s like: if you’re getting stearic acid from a big animal, guess what that means? There’s probably more food coming. So now’s a good time to increase the metabolism and start, you know, regenerating your muscle tissue and all those things. So stearic acid seems to help increase the metabolism. So if you’re getting fat with stearic acid, it might actually help you lose fat, because it will make your body more willing to let go of the stores because it thinks: “Oh, we’ve got a lot of food available. And lean times are not here.”
Joané 31:09
Wasn’t there that study that said stearic acid could help you lose visceral fat? Which is the fat that surrounds your organs? I really like that one.
Jonathan 31:17
Yeah, it did that in rats.
Joané 31:21
Well, we also already kind of touched on this. And then the last myth we’re going to discuss in part one, is: It doesn’t matter what the animals that you eat, eat.
Jonathan 31:32
Yes, we did touch on this in the last point. And I don’t know why people don’t believe that what the animal eats affects what you eat from it.
Joané 31:44
Yeah. So like, if you have pigs and chicken and you feed them a lot of corn and soy, and you don’t let them like eat things like worms and stuff that they’re supposed to eat, they end up with more linoleic acid in their fat. And that can cause inflammation and can make you gain weight. Like I, personally, have felt the most inflamed in my life and swollen and also, I gained weight the quickest, when I had a lot of pork and a lot of chicken. And then last year in October, I cut that out. I cut out nuts, I cut out pork, I cut out chicken because I wanted to see what a low linoleic acid, higher stearic acid diet would do for me. And I actually started to lose weight, when I think I was struggling for two, three years to lose weight before that and to lose fat. And it was just amazing. And yeah, we did a carnivore month in the first time in 2018. And during that month, because pork and chicken are cheaper options, I actually gained a lot of weight in such a short amount of time. It was the quickest that I gained weight on what was supposed to be a healthy diet. But then, obviously, we learned about linoleic acid and stearic acid. And once I made that change, everything got better. And you’ve even commented like you’ve noticed that I start to see results quicker when I have more butter.
Jonathan 33:22
Yes. It’s, it’s actually quite simple to prove that what your animals eat matters. Because you can specifically get, in our country at least you can get corn-fed beef and you can see a difference in the actual fat. So what you see is you can just measure with your eyes the colour of the fat changes based on what the animal eats. And I’ve heard stories on Joe Rogan where they will shoot bears that are in blackberry or blueberry season, and then their actual fat becomes purple, like those berries, and has a sweeter taste to it. So it’s like obviously, the things you are ingesting is becoming part of your body. So it’s having an influence on it. And so, things like corn and soy do contain a lot of linoleic acid. And when you have a monogastric animal, like a pig or chicken, they bioaccumulate that linoleic acid, where a ruminant animal like a cow or sheep or a goat doesn’t because they’ve got the ability to, you know, absorb the linoleic acid but not accumulate it. So that’s why, even if you’re getting a corn-fed cow, it probably has 1% or 2% more linoleic acid, than the grass-fed cow. But it’s nothing compared to the extra 20% to 30% more a chicken or a pig could have if it eats a high linoleic diet.
Joané 35:18
It’s very interesting. And there are people who have severe health problems, autoimmune problems, where they’re fine if they eat grass-fed meat, but the moment they eat grain-fed meat, they get like an inflammation flare-up. So a lot of people won’t notice a difference necessarily. But that just proved to me that, yes, there’s definitely a difference.
Jonathan 35:42
Yeah, there’s definitely a difference. But the point really is that there’s less of a difference when it comes to ruminant animals, and more of a difference when it comes to monogastric animals. So it’d be very interesting to take that person and feed them a pig who’s eating wild like it didn’t even get any food, like it was shot out in the wild, and it was eating wild things, versus a pig that has been stuck only eating corn and soy its whole life. Like you can actually test these things. So it’s not like we’re just guessing. There have been people who tested the makeup of the fat of the animals with different diets. So you can see, oh, yeah, they tested these pigs’ fat, and it had a lot of linoleic acid in it. And tested a wild pig, and it had like very little linoleic acid in it. So it’s, it’s very obvious that what the animal eats, matters and what you eat, matters.
Joané 36:44
And you can see that in eggs too. So if you buy eggs that you know are from eggs that were just kept indoors and didn’t get to roam, it turns out yellow like you get these yellow yolks. But if you had like a true free-range chicken, not a chicken that they say is free-range, but it only spends like a small percentage of the time outside, then you get these orange yolks because they’re more nutrient-dense.
Jonathan 37:12
Yeah, so you can even do this if you have chickens or you get chicken. So let’s say you want to do your own small experiment, get two egg-laying chickens, feed the one like insects, and a more, you know, natural diet with worms and all sorts of bugs and grubs. And you can even probably give it some meat. I’ve seen chickens eat mice, lizards and all those things, and give the other one corn and seeds and compare the eggs. Compare the eggs you can get, you can maybe even get like two chickens from the same like brood or hatch, you know, and so that they are as close to the same chicken as possible and feed them different diets and see what turns up in the eggs.
Joané 37:59
I mean, it’s not something that we consume as like, you know, adults or after the age after infancy. But if you look at breast milk, if the mother is getting a nutrient-dense diet and she’s eating a lot of calories, the milk is supposed to be like a golden colour. But then if the mom isn’t getting enough nutrition, if she’s not consuming enough calories, it will be more white. So they always say to moms to use the colour of your breast milk as an indicator of whether you’re getting enough nutrients or not. And you know, humans are animals, and you can directly see the result of that.
Jonathan 38:40
Yeah, so if you’re breastfeeding, or know someone who’s breastfeeding, you can do that experiment too. But yeah, I hope we’ve been able to shed some light on a few of the myths out there about meat. Obviously, you know, you can check up on all the things we’ve said, but I’m very confident in all the things we said and I’m pretty sure that these myths are definitely myths for a reason.
Joané 39:12
We’re Mythbusters
Jonathan 39:13
Yeah, we’re busting some myths. But yeah, there’s always going to be controversy around these subjects. And a lot of people are saying it’s this way, not that way. But that’s why I always try to, like, bring things down to a simple level (as simple as I can). And then like, you know, work your way from there and make a decision on: is this good advice? So yeah, hope you enjoyed this one and look for part two.
Joané 39:48
Yeah. Thank you for listening. Until next week. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
