 Hi good morning. I think I've been to every AHS but one. So this is really nice to be here. Yeah So I'm Diana Rodgers. I am a registered dietitian. I also co-wrote the book Sacred Cow and Directed and produced the film Sacred Cow And so my Other producer James Connolly is here and we'll be doing a Q&A later this afternoon for the film What I'm going to be talking about today is What's going on right now with the United Nations and some of the sort of anti-meat dietary policy? That is is brewing and so for those of you who? You know think that the plant-based movement will just kind of go away. It's not going away And so I'm just going to kind of go through a little bit and give you some talking points a lot of what I'm going to say is Probably stuff that most of you are familiar with but it might help you Create arguments as you're explaining to other people why The anti-meat policies are so damaging so it's really like I try to you know take the science and Explain it to lay people in a way that Makes sense to them So of course what we're being told right now is this trifecta of evil around me causes cancer and heart disease It's bad for the environment It's unnecessary to eat it unethical to eat it and that plant-based proteins are cleaner And they're sort of a purity Implication there right so not only are they they cleaner because You know no blood, but they're also more pure to eat and so especially In towns like where I live where everyone's very educated. They're environmentally conscious Of course, they're reducing their red meat consumption. That's what you do if you're an environmental You know educated citizen here in the US or or anywhere so Unfortunately the It's it's been very sort of tagged as a as a left Agenda if you're politically, you know progressive or left-leaning then of course you don't eat meat So I tend to sometimes get tagged as right-leaning because I'm pro-meat And I don't see how that makes any sense But unfortunately, that's that's how it is and I see nothing progressive about the vegan movement So the United Nations is having the food system summit this summer They had their first meeting in Rome in July. They're having another meeting in September in New York City I'm planning a little disruptive event potentially that that might happen there So if you get on my email newsletter list and you're in the New York area, maybe you can come help me But what's happening is that the Secretary General of the United Nations has taken it upon himself to Address climate change through diet. This is like a pet project of his so He's appointed the the woman who was the sort of founder of the eat Landsat diet She's a plant-based nearly vegan billionaire in Norway who flies around on jets But then thinks the rest of the world should Reduce their meat consumption for the environment she commissioned Walter Willett of Harvard to be the main author on a paper called the eat Landsat diet it's called eat Landsat because it was published in the Landsat Journal and It is she is the head of action track too along with a few other very anti-meat groups and There are not going to be the same protocols that usually happen at the United Nations This is not going to be something that's voted on So although it's not going to be binding It's very likely that the eat Landsat diet will be endorsed officially endorsed by the secretary general of the United Nations So who cares right the thing is it's going to allow for Schools for hospitals for municipalities. We're seeing this in Berkeley right now But if you're a good environmental group organization, of course, you're going to follow the UN recommendations, so although this won't be official policy. It's actually What the United Nations says is is really trusted. They're very, you know seen as a very credible organization And I really can't believe that this radical diet is something that Is going to be endorsed by them So for those of you who are unfamiliar with eat Landsat here is an excerpt While meat is an important source of key nutrients including protein iron to be 12 excess meat consumption can harm our health and the planet, of course aim to consume no more than 98 grams of meat 203 grams of poultry and 196 grams of fish, but you can have 31 grams per day of sugar Added sugars so I translated this into the weight of blueberries So you can have one blueberries worth of red meat per person per day You can have two blueberries worth of chicken per person per day, but you can have Twice as much sugar as you can red meat on this diet. This is really radical. It's completely untested There are no papers out there showing a direct cause between red meat and disease The most common nutrient deficiencies worldwide are iron and B12 Meat is the best source of these nutrients. This is just this is just regular old science. This isn't like opinion stuff Meat is as we learned from Dr. Eads yesterday like the highest in satiety It's the lowest in calories is the most bioavailable source whenever there's a Nutrient that's found in plants and found in animal source foods. Our bodies prefer the animal source better So the most nutrient dense food for humans is animal source foods and there's benefits for Obese and malnourished so it's it's easy for me to make the argument that people in low and middle income countries deserve to eat meat to Reduce the incidence of stunting and vitamin deficiencies nutrient deficiencies but my argument is also that in America we could Benefit from eating more protein relative to the processed foods that we're eating here So in many case and many parts of the world There's little access to the supplements or the variety of plants that you would need in order to construct a Balanced vegan diet There's so many for those of you who have seen the film We did a little piece on Rwanda and showed how you know There's many places where there's just not even doctors for hundreds of miles let alone a CVS where you can run and get Your iron tablets This type of diet is also Not culturally appropriate and so I think that this is a really powerful Point to make towards the plant-based movement that this is a vegan diet is is actually quite culturally elitist Here we have globetrotting billionaire behind the campaign to save the planet accused of hypocrisy and Walter Willett Who has been accused of numerous conflicts of interest his department at Harvard is sponsored by Barilla? And 80% of the authors on the eat-landset report have a public track record of favoring the vegetarian and vegan diets over omnivorous diets There are also many chemical pharmaceutical and ultra-processed food companies who stand to make a very large profit should the UN usher in the eat-landset style of diet so So why does this matter so if this is not going to be like a binding, you know dietary policy? Here we have if you guys don't if you're interested in this and don't already follow Frederick Lowe Who was briefly in my film? I wish I had more of him But we had some tough challenges in the editing room trying to fit everybody in but He is amazing and he did this slide here on the left showing in France the Nutra score how the veggie burger got an A and Plain beef burgers got a C And also a meat tax is very likely to be something that we're looking at in the future Which is really just a poor tax We also have the Meatless Mondays campaign happening The the green and white are two of the many resources that you can download for free from the Meatless Mondays website Accusing livestock of causing more greenhouse gas Emissions than the entire transportation sector, which is not true And also decreasing your chance of getting diabetes by 15 percent, which is statistically completely insignificant They There's a Meatless Mondays program in the New York City public schools 70% of the kids that go to the New York City public schools Are low income or homeless and There's never been any studies showing that removing meat from children will benefit Anything no health outcomes. No not even environmental outcomes. There's just no evidence to support this at all And then we have here on the right healthcare without harm I About a year ago went to a presentation where they proudly announced their ability to reduce meat in hospitals and So as a as a dietitian who's worked in hospitals your protein need Goes way up as you're recovering from an illness burn victims need three times the protein. I don't see how that's possible on a plant-based diet and you know these Fake meat products are not saving the hospitals any money either. That's the thing is they're actually Oftentimes twice as expensive as even like local grass-fed meats So announcing my new project. We just launched the website yesterday the global food justice alliance so I have a collection and Aaron's here. There's I think maybe a few others who are on the advisory circle. It's backed by many academics and Medical folks who all believe in this concept of food sovereignty that people should be able to choose their own diets and that animal Source foods are really important to humans Pretty basic, but it's also incredibly radical. There's no one else really doing this right now And on the website, I have an open letter to the secretary general Urging him not to endorse the eat-landsat diet with many talking points on why I'm gonna get really noisy about this starting next week So please go visit the website and if you'd like this sign on to the letter Trying to defend meat is like a game of whack-a-mole Okay, so you explain the nutrition which is pretty straightforward the nutritional case for meat But then of course they'll say but the water and then you explain the difference between green water and blue water and how most the water In the footprint of a burger is rain And then they say well the greenhouse gases, but then it's wrong to kill beautiful animals And you know all these things and so it's really important that those of you who might have the nutrition story down Understand the environmental and the ethical Defense of why animal source foods are so important to our food system I'm sure all of you know this, but it's been proven that diet recall is a really horrible way to collect data on people They might remember that they ate a burger two weeks ago But they're very likely to forget the large fry the 72 ounce sugary beverage and the deep fried apple pie that they had with it They're also more likely to Forget that they drink in smoke And they're more likely to exaggerate how much they work out. That's just human nature when Filling out these forms so So that's just one of the reasons why the research against red meat is just so poor We don't have a lot of randomized control trials looking at meat versus the same diet without red meat in it and so these are Correlation studies. I know you know this, but you know it really People forget this and so these are kind kinds of messages that are really Moving so you go to this guy's website. It's really awesome I have the link here and you can actually find your own correlations to you can enter two data points like These completely random things and come up with your own correlations, but of course eating cheese does not Lead to dying from getting tangled in your bed sheets so Meat dairy and eggs should not be scapegoated of course for an unhealthy diet when you compare a typical vegetarian to a typical Omnivore There are things that typical vegetarians do that you know Joe American probably doesn't do You know eat fresh fruits and vegetables, which I'm not against doing You know Exercise all these things right so there's just too many variables to be able to compare a vegetarian diet to a typical standard American diet and say Oh, that's the meat In the studies where they have tried to control for it They have found that you know when you account for all the confounding factors There's no difference at all in longevity Between omnivores and vegetarians they there was one study that looked at shop shoppers of health food stores so looking at omnivores versus vegetarians no difference at all and There is really good evidence to show that as people In low and middle-income countries have more access to meet their lives are better They have healthier lives. They have longer lives This is an article from the Economist And then we have one randomized control trial that I know of that looked at meat supplements in children at school in Kenya one group got a meat supplement one group got a Dairy like a supplement snack at school One group got just extra calories And then compared that to the baseline and the kids that got the meat Improved growth with growth with cognitive Testing and with behavior So this alone should you know be evidenced to at least question why we have programs like Meatless Mondays And of course less meat means more deficiencies Especially with anemia and especially in women and children Okay, but aren't we eating too much meat in America? No, we're not so the average income are the average intake of red meat per person in America is two ounces per person per day So our meat intake has actually gone down since 1970 And I have another slide in a minute that'll that'll show you what we're eating more of but it's not where Americans Do not sit down to a 72 ounce steak Every night for dinner, but that you know, there's a perception that you know, it's gluttonous and wrong to eat meat Here's how we're spending our grocery dollar From 1982 to 2012. This was the the latest data that I had on this But I just think it's interesting. So we're spending less money on meat complaining about it more But spending twice as much on processed foods sweets And here's what we're eating more of and these graphics can be found at sacred cow info We're eating way more chicken than ever before and that's because it's become really cheap to grow bad chicken because of antibiotics and the confinement Process that we're that we're raising them in we're eating a lot more oils ultra-processed Seed oils We're eating a lot more grains and not in the form of pearl barley and whole grains there That's processed foods and we're eating more sugar But the bottom is the red that's red meat. We're eating less So is it the meat but the problem is when we're When we have people that are looking at diets versus greenhouse gas, you know mitigation potential The vegan diet always comes out ahead and that's because they're simply looking at greenhouse gas Emissions per diet. They're not looking at any other Factors that might affect ecosystem health This is really it's a strawman argument greenhouse gas emissions. I'll go into that in a little bit But that's one aspect of many different, you know, there's water use. There's land use And so when you look at just the emissions, but not the the cycle it could appear that a vegan diet is Better for the environment But of course, they're not looking at nutrient density. They're not they're usually comparing calories Per acre and not necessarily protein per acre or nutrients per acre And so there's not a lot of studies looking at nutrient density per acre or nutrient density per Emission right it's just like pounds of food And the plant-based Options are not necessarily healthier and are very expensive And not only that but when there's a new paper that just came out actually Looking at so the US Dietary Guidelines has recommendations on protein It'll say well you should eat, you know, this many eggs or this much Meat per day, but if you want to do the plant-based version, you know, here's the equivalent But when I looked at it a few years ago I was like this doesn't make any sense This isn't even equal grams of protein let alone then the bioavailability of that protein Well, they did a trial where they actually just took people and fed them You know the US Dietary Guideline of the animal source protein versus the plant source protein and found that the plant source People did way worse. So this is a new paper. It's really interesting But then anyone can just go on to a chronometer and and enter beans or meat or whatever and This science doesn't lie. So, you know, we don't need protein. We need amino acids And you can see a four ounce serving of steak versus a four ounce serving of kidney beans The steak wins and so when people are trying to advocate for the plant-based diet, what they'll do is They'll do it based on calories So like a hundred calories worth of lettuce versus a hundred calories worth of meat But a hundred calories worth of lettuce is a lot of lettuce Right, but they're they're doing it So it they're they're skewing things to make it more favorable in their category and there really are no standards on How we compare foods and their needs to be So we have four ounces in vitamins with steak versus kidney beans and This isn't even accounting for like anti-nutrients and stuff like that So you can see clearly the steak wins But this is again, there are all kinds of wild memes going around on social media showing that broccoli is a better source of Protein than steak or something like that This is a really great paper here on the left the nutritional and greenhouse gas impacts of removing animals from us agriculture They modeled what it would look like and they found that if we removed all animal source foods from the US diet Overall calories would go up Carbohydrate intake would go up and nutrient efficiencies would go up and the greenhouse gas emissions would go down by 2.6% So in a country with 70% of us over weight or obese That's not a good thing We also The environmental impacts of vegetable consumption in the UK There's when you when you live in countries where you have to import a lot of the fruits and vegetables There's a lot of food waste with that The UK is really good at growing grass really great at producing lamb and beef and You know, it's just really interesting once you kind of look at these like lifestyle Life-cycle assessments and and really you know try to take bias out of it, which is not happening right now Meat is just a really great thing to have in our food system And so I don't see how lab meats Protein pucks and all these other things are healthier. There's no proof more sustainable. There's really no proof or more ethical Here's another graphic just showing, you know a regenerative system versus an extractive system So what the plant-based protein industry is not showing you is the monocrop Extractive methods for producing all the soy or wheat or whatever mono crop they're gonna choose in order to convert that into The protein puck so it may have less emissions But it's certainly not Better as far as bio-diverse that you can see all the life, you know when you have a regenerative system Versus the loss of life that you have when you're doing real crop agriculture like that Not all land can be cropped so a lot of people don't understand this and this is the biggest takeaway This is what one me my book deal with a vegan publisher who actually published the China study He had no idea that you actually just can't crop everywhere and that most of our agriculture land is Very marginal land that can only be used for grazing Because it's either too rocky or too arid or too steep and so Grazing animals are unique in that they can upcycle food that we can't eat on land We can't crop so if we got rid of the cows, it's not like you can just grow more soy for more beyond burgers They would completely take out that and not only would it remove that but it also could I'm gonna go a little bit longer than yeah It would also just leave a gaping hole in our food system Live stock can also turn food. We can't eat into protein. So this is worldwide livestock numbers This isn't just grazing animals. Although grazing animals are Or even better at this, but this is just from the FAO worldwide numbers Showing that only 13% of what livestock are eating worldwide is grains The rest especially in the case of cattle, you know cattle can eat corn stocks from the ethanol industry they can eat spent grains from The alcohol process and so that's why I'm I'm definitely pro grass-fed meat But there's also a lot of feedlot type systems where they're doing regenerative grazing before the cattle end up on a feedlot and then these cattle when they're on a feedlot Can actually upcycle food waste that would just sit in a pile and emit greenhouse gases if we didn't turn it into protein And so as somebody who you know number one is interested in public health I want affordable meat for people and so I don't I'm not in the camp that it should be grass-fed or rice and beans I think you should just buy the best meat that you can afford and Nutritionally and I go into this into my book. There's not a massive difference between Grass-fed beef and feedlot finished beef. I know that's gonna ruffle a lot of feathers, but it's just not true Plus only 42% of the animal is Edible so we're getting so many products. Nothing is wasted But currently right now in Australia. They're burying hides because nobody wants to wear leather anymore The water footprint I'll go through this quickly Basically, the green water is rain or moisture. That's already held in the pasture like in the grass That would be there whether or not a cow was grazing it But so you can see the blue water which is would be irrigation lakes and streams competing with us for drinking water Is a very small percentage of the water footprint for cattle even a typical beef cattle carbon cycling basically this is just showing how when the cow when the cow eats the grass it Burps out methane which then it lives in the atmosphere for about 10 years and gets converted to water and CO2 The water becomes part of the water cycle the CO2 then gets picked up by the grass. So cattle are they're cycling the methane As opposed to the fossil fuel industry, which is pumping ancient Greenhouse gases up into the atmosphere and there's no cycle to that It's just purely pumping up brand new greenhouse gas emissions In the u.s. You can see that cattle are about 2% I think the latest numbers since I made this graph or you know a little bit higher than that Maybe two and a half percent, but certainly nothing compared to transportation or electricity and so those Those memes that you see on the internet the Meatless Mondays claims that cattle are worse than all of transportation the How they came up with that is basically they looked at a full life cycle assessment for cattle. So, you know producing the feed feeding the cow You know processing getting it to your home, but they don't have those numbers for transportation and So when you look at direct emissions like actual tailpipe emissions or you know the the cal farts and burps worldwide Emissions from cattle are 5% from actually from all livestock and it's 14% for transportation So there are a lot of really Good reasons why companies want meat to be vilified the fossil fuel industry benefits the stockholders of Beyond Meat benefit And it's really clever how they sell Beyond Meat in half pound packages when you go to the store And you buy meat in one pound packages because when you compare the price for You know 484 to 598 awesome pretty you know comparable maybe but when you look at it per pound. It's actually Quite pricey to buy these fake meat burgers, but I don't hear people complaining that Beyond Burger is expensive You don't hear that you hear that you know good meat is expensive. This is organic grass-fed meat at Walmart and Here are some other foods that I just priced out per pound per ounce that are more expensive than organic grass-fed Meat at Walmart including just regular old strawberries But I don't hear people saying that strawberries are elitist I hear people saying that organic grass-fed beef is elitist So dietary recommendations must consider equity ethics and food sovereignty I think this is one of our biggest opportunities when coming against People who are advocates of the plant-based diet. I have no problem if someone wants to individually choose a plant-based diet for themselves I Maybe a little bit for their family when there's kids involved because we we do have evidence that it's not ideal for children But we also have to look at food traditions the diet being culturally appropriate not everyone prefers or we're tolerate a plant-based diet Livestock is a walking piggy bank So you know in places like India where one monsoon might wipe out your entire crop Goats can tolerate a monsoon Other animals can too. There are many places where women can't own land, but they can own livestock. This is really really important Have for internationals doing some really great work in Nepal around this People should have the choice for their own food systems again the variety of plant-based foods is not available in most areas and We have to let them know that a plant-based diet is a highly privileged diet that might work really well in LA But probably not so well even in middle America if your food insecure and then of course many other parts of the world This paper is really fantastic at outlining outlining all these things Okay, so my big argument to the UN is that they absolutely must not perpetuate the scapegoating of nutrient-dense animal source foods and that People should have the right to choose this diet if they want to and these are all sort of the takeaway points from my presentation and so Many of you got the link to watch my film the book is much different than the film. It's much more detailed and Very well-cited and then the global food justice alliance is the new project that I'm working on now. I Have a question. What's the website for global food justice lands? Global food justice. Oh, perfect. Okay. We're gonna start a Q&A and we're gonna alternate one question to each side Hi, I first want to extend it a huge. Thank you. I think what you're doing is important Not just for us here, but for all of humanity really And then I just want to sneak in a little positive word for fat because I think we've spent thousands of years Domesticating animals and breeding them and choosing them specifically to yield not just protein, but calories calories As as Stephanie was explaining the energy yield that we want is really high Not just we want food systems that yield us energy and it's so sad to see By the time the meat gets to the counter where I buy it. It's been trimmed everywhere And and where does that go? I think it it's often just wasted So when we're comparing for example like the calories you can get from grain and the calories you can get from beef We're looking at the calories stripped from beef. So it's really not a fair comparison there otherwise But yes, thank you so much for your work. I'm really happy about what you're doing. Thank you Hi agreed on how important this is given the How to put this systematic Misrepresentation that you of evidence and science by the other side How are we going to address that this seems like more of a political or even in some cases a Religious argument rather than a scientific one. It definitely is We need more health professionals to understand the environmental and ethical arguments for livestock and for animal source foods And we need them to get noisy and nobody's doing that right now. Nobody's pushing back We all I think thought that you know, this is crazy and they'll never They'll never get as powerful as they have gotten and you know meat tax is ridiculous and meat tax definitely is a probability Yeah for including the food equity and sovereignty piece in there one of my goals is to teach a more immediate ancestral health to underserved communities and In the Hispanic community in particular that heritage includes raising cows many varieties of Birds and pigs and that's something that especially here in the United States. It has been completely stripped of That inclusion And our kids are not learning any of that So my question is are you aware of any initiatives that includes teaching people how to raise this? You know small varieties of animals that they can either do at home if they have just a little bit of land Or in cooperative styles like we used to do back home. I work a lot with Heifer International, which does Some of this work, but we need more groups and I'd like to learn about more groups. I'm sure there are some that are doing it So yeah, we totally need more and we need Dietitians who are more sensitive to culturally appropriate diets too. Yeah, and the the the plant-based Infiltration and this community is is huge at this point. So there's a great need. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you Thank you so much for your raising this issue I have help again for you both you for additional chapters or rewriting your adding on your second version. There's Again Acres USA the last time we went by a regenerative Agriculture of raising farm animals the term that's Google will mob grazing Solves global warming mob grazing is a carbon sequestration So what's lost I think needs to be added to counter the argument that mob grazed Regenerative grown beef actually solves global warming and it's not part of the problem and you're not making a Differentiation in your in your talk. I don't know about your book about Kefo beef versus Mob grazed regenerative grown beef. There's a world. It's it. They aren't even the same animal They talk about seed oils You eat Kefo chicken beef you're eating a cup of corn oil Which each one of those servings versus mob graze which is high on omega 3. It's actually well I do go into this in very deep Detail in the book and show examples of this in the film Unfortunately with crop subsidies and crop insurance programs supported by the government in a lot of cases It's more economical for the farmers to sell to a feedlot system Then it is for them to grass finish their cattle But they're still amazing regenerative grazing that can happen before, you know All cattle are grazed and then the last part of their life And it's not a cup of corn oil that that you're eating There's very little nutrition difference when you really analyze it. I disagree and I think maybe Acres USA has written about me and and this project and so if you just if you just care to read the book I do go into it in a lot of detail. Okay. It's glad to hear. There's a big fat difference Omega 3 versus Omega 6 actually not so much. So when you're looking at the fat in a steak if this was a pie chart The saturated mono unsaturated fat is the same in feedlot finish versus Grass-fed the omegas is a very very small sliver of the fatty acid profile in beef in general It's just not a good source of Omega 3s. So Even though in some studies you'll see twice as much or three times the Omega 3s in grass finished beef It's still like saying two pennies is twice as much money as one penny You would still need to eat eight pounds of grass-fed beef to get the same Omega 3s You can get in a three ounce piece of not all beefs created equal. So you're I'm doubting your data sources, ma'am, okay Like everybody else. I mean, thank you so much for this work. It's so critical And I come at this both my backgrounds in climate science and and now from the international health perspective And one thing that I find so striking when we talk about like who benefits from this whole misinformation campaign We talk about impossible burger and beyond beef But I'm always struck by the fact that Nobody talks about how the fossil fuel industry benefits from the complete misdirection We're talking about cal farts and meanwhile a study just came out in june that shows that epa estimates Of methane emissions from oil and gas has been underestimated by 50 to 75 percent So the idea that we're talking about cows and not talking about fracking is surreal to me putting it on the consumer instead of Right, and I think I mean that's part of it, right? Like what's the big benefit? Well, we could fight with each other instead fight with the most powerful industry that humanity has ever You know created and so I wonder if you've seen like People talking about or research about like I keep thinking this can't be Coincidental they're hot like we talk about who's putting the money into this I'm like Exxon mobile has a huge incentive and you know Dominion coal and and so on like the You know where is you know, oh, yeah, I'll become vegan pay no attention to the Natural gas industry and the oil and gas you know that 70 percent of our diet is ultra processed foods Right and and then also wealth benefits from all this process foods Well all the petroleum inputs into that field right there, you know So I wonder if you've come across any of that like you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist To know that their own gas industry is perfectly happy when we talk about cows and I haven't seen any direct evidence of that But I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, it's certainly they're benefiting hugely hugely right nobody's paying attention to fracking instead of cows Okay, it's the last question Diana Rogers is going to have a Q&A session at the end of the day. So last question really Hi, you mentioned today in the talk and I read in the book you talked about the nutrition being between grass fed and feedlot Raised cows. It's the same I was wondering if they looked at the toxins that might accumulate in the fat of Either of those groups. What did it compare of those? So it's not the same, but There's very little difference I and I guess the point of that is that Meat is a nutrient-dense food period And we shouldn't be saying just you know when we say that you should only eat grass fed that allows then beyond burger to say Well, we're cheaper So, you know use us in the schools instead of because meat is bad unless you can get this Like regenerative very rare stuff. It's like no actually If there's that mom that's working two jobs and wants to give her kids a leg up in life She should feed them steak period There are better and worse ways to do it Thank you so much and I wouldn't break