 So, I just wanted to mention that I'm a registered dietitian and I live on a working farm, so I'm very interested in the intersection between nutrition and sustainability. And I thought I'd start with just talking a little bit about what influences the U.S. food policies that we've got going on now. Basically it's all run by the USDA, so the U.S. Department of Agriculture's main charge is to promote commodity agriculture. So we've got heavy influence from the grain lobby, dairy lobby, that's why you see a glass of milk at my plate instead of a glass of water. We've also got dietitians who are having a voice in things. I can tell you that when I was going through my RD program, almost all my professors were vegetarian and not healthy. And I can get a lot of CEUs by attending vegetarian and vegan, like how to counsel your patients this way. And they're really having a very big influence in what's considered healthy. And the other thing that's going on is the whole concept of everything in moderation. So that worked great in the 30s when we were trying to get people to eat a wide variety of colors in their vegetables. And today it really does a good job at benefiting companies like Coca-Cola, because if you just say a little bit everything in moderation, then of course you're covered. And the impact is huge as far as our food policies and the trickle-down effect. So SNAP benefits, food labels, and funding for further research is all pretty much based on what comes out of the USDA. And of course this research just further enforces our established biases. So let's talk about the research that's out there as far as nutrition research. Most of it is based on food frequency questionnaires, which are proven to not work very well. People tend to lie. They tend to overly remember healthy foods and healthy habits. And then they forget, of course, that along with the burger they reported last week that they also had a large fry, a 72-ounce Coke, and a deep-fried apple pie. They tend to forget that they smoke and drink. And they tend to remember how much they exercise, even if they don't. So there's very few randomized control trials. And the ones that are out there show no benefit at all when meat is excluded. So unfortunately on the sustainability end, we also have some pretty poor methodology out there. So we've got cows and all the methane that they're excreting. And unfortunately, the science that's out there pretty much is only looking at emissions. So cow farts. But what they're not really looking at is the full life cycle of what happens when their manure goes into the soil and how beneficial that is for soil health and helping to sequester carbon. So that doesn't really make it into the picture. And I should also mention, too, that nearly all cattle are grass-fed cattle. So they start their lives out on pasture. And they're not moved to a feedlot operation until the last about six months of their life. So when you're looking at which meats are really optimal for environmental benefit, I would argue that even feedlot beef is a better choice than chicken or pork when you're looking at cattle models because those pigs and those chickens are 100% indoors. They're eating 100% grain. And dairy is a whole other thing. So I'm not talking about a dairy being a great option as well. Those cows are not really out on pasture. Also the studies looking at water. So you may have seen any number of reports coming out that it takes five million gallons of water for a pound of burgers. They're not looking at the right equations. So there's a difference between rain and what it takes to grow grass and then water that actually goes for the cows to drink. So when you actually just look at water that's used to actually produce the cows, even in a feedlot model, it's about the same as rice production. And then there's a study, that was a study out of UC Davis. And then when you're looking at grass-fed, 100% grass-fed, grass-finished cattle, it's more like a quarter of that. So when I was doing research for this presentation, I was kind of googling what the world eats. And National Geographic has this awesome interactive map. So I took a screenshot of this. And so they break it out by country. You can play around. You can click on each one of these colors and it breaks it out. Unfortunately they're lumping sugar and fat together. But you can see as a world, we're eating a lot of grain and not so many vegetables. And of our meat consumption, we're only eating about 1% of beef. So then when I clicked on the meat, I got this. So this is in about 50 years, we have seen a 0% increase in red meat consumption. We have seen nearly a 400% increase in chicken consumption. So if you look at the US and what we are spending our grocery dollars on between 1982 and 2012, we're spending half as much on meats and twice as much on processed foods and sweets. And then nutritionally, if you look at what are the major problems. So the CDC, so this is the US population with deficiencies. We can see that, guess what, red meat can actually be pretty beneficial for most of these deficiencies. And then according to the WHO, 2 billion people or 30% of the world's population are anemic. So of course in underdeveloped countries, this is frequently exacerbated by infectious disease, but certainly cutting down on our worldwide red meat consumption is not going to help the anemia issue going on across the world. So then when we try to look at sustainability within the US food policy, the problem is there's just no agreed upon standards defining sustainability. And this is just kind of an image I pulled up, but they're not comparing different methods of raising animals. There's different types of eggs out there, so it's really dangerous to be lumping things in categories like this, especially with the poor methodology as I mentioned earlier. One exciting thing that came out in the spring of this year out of the Paris Climate Talks was how much soil health really was a major player there. And so I'm encouraged by that because as some of you may know, cattle can actually help solve carbon issues and desertification issues. So as this gets a little more worldwide attention, hopefully the vilification of red meat will decrease a little bit. So one of the dangers with talking about sustainability on a global level is that context really matters. So there's different regions have different landscapes to grow different things. For example, Northern Africa, really great for growing olives, not so good for water intensive crops like lettuce. There's different nutrition needs, and there's different culturally appropriate foods, and we need to pay attention and honor that as well. So even though I'm arguing so much for large herbivores, that's not going to work everywhere. For example, in Peru, we actually have people on our farm that are dying to get back to Peru just so they can have some guinea pig. It's like the, you know, when you ask them like, what are you dying for your mom to make you as soon as you get back home, it's guinea pig. So which works great in regions that don't have a lot of electricity. So they can't store, you know, half a cow in their fridge. They need an animal that they can slaughter and eat just in that setting. Additionally, you know, in America there's animals other than herbivores that would also be really great for sustainability like rabbits. But then you got, again, the whole cultural issue with people just having a problem with eating rabbits. So a lot of studies that are looking at, you know, eating local and, you know, what makes the most sense population-wise are not really looking at the full cycle of what it costs to actually store and process food. So for example, in a British study, this one actually did look a little bit deeper. And they found that if the apples are eaten straight after production, it makes more sense to eat British apples. But they found that, you know, all the energy used to store those apples, you know, is actually more, uses more greenhouse gases than flying them in from New Zealand in the winter. So that's just, you know, what do you do, do you, should we be eating New Zealand apples in the wintertime, or should we maybe be encouraging local farmers to find other ways that are less energy-draining like dehydration or applesauce? So it's just important to, you know, not just discount things and not just look at one aspect. So globally, we are eating more and more of the same foods. And we're seeing that, you know, people are moving to cities, they're having more access to supermarkets and fast food, less time to cook and less gardening. So we have a more dependence on fewer crops, which is really dangerous. If any of you know about the banana industry, it's quite plagued right now by, you know, we've got the Cavendish banana is the banana you see in the grocery stores. And it's suffering from a disease right now, and all these companies are trying to just find a new monocrop that might be resistant to that disease, instead of maybe thinking about it a little bit differently. And maybe we should, you know, there's tens of hundreds of different types of bananas out there, maybe we should be looking at, you know, diversifying a little bit. So greater dependence on processed food, fewer crops, just a lot more dangerous. And so what we're seeing now is just a complete monoculture out there as far as agriculture, and I think it's quite dangerous to only be eating about four crops with seeds grown from about one company. So I just wanted to show an image of a more sustainable model because, you know, films like Food Inc. and a lot of other people that are talking about the dangers of industrial agriculture aren't really offering alternatives. So this is a picture of the farm where I live. And what you're seeing right now are sheep grazing rye that we've planted over our vegetable fields in the wintertime. So the rye is helping to bring more nutrition into the soil. The sheep are getting nutrition from the rye, and then they're pooping on the soil, improving the soil health. And then we've also gotten the back there, mobile chicken coops. So food culture has also become a monoculture, and it's really sad we're eating a much less diverse diet. It means pretty much corn. And we're losing small and medium-sized businesses, so, and this is, you know, we're going from something, a beautiful piece of culture to monoculture. And as people lose their ability to grow food, we can see huge problems. So that's, you know, one of the big issues that's happening in Venezuela right now is no more farms, and they can no longer afford to import the food that they were importing when oil was at a higher price, and now they're actually having forced labor onto farms to make them grow because there's just no food. So what are the other countries doing? I just thought this was really interesting. There's almost, almost every country has their own version of a food pyramid. We see this food pagoda here. We've got a Japanese spinning top here, and the Italians have a double pyramid. But you can see the influence of America worldwide. And that's one thing I just wanted to bring up to, like, what's, someone recently asked me, like, why do I care about this? You know, why not just let the vegans, you know, eat their vegan food, and I'll just eat my paleo food, and, you know, just let them alone and everything will be fine. They are having a huge impact on not only what the U.S. is eating, but also everyone's copying the U.S. So it's really important to care. And the countries and organizations that are trying to bring sustainability into their nutrition fold are doing it in quite a confusing way. So here we've got a double pyramid from the Borrilla Center for Food and the Environment. I don't know how a regular consumer would be able to make choices based on this. This is a food hourglass taken from a food pyramid, and I actually kind of like the shape of this one. They've got meat, vegetables, and eggs at the top, fruit and vegetables at the bottom. But this is a meat industry site out of Italy, which I actually really like them. But we've got industry also very, very confused. So in a statement by IKEA, here they are trying to say that, you know, we're going to provide lower carbon alternatives by chicken meatballs and vegetarian meatballs in addition to our regular meatballs. So I'm not sure where horse meat falls into this, but that's IKEA's statement. So I went around and I looked at which countries or which organizations were trying to address both nutrition and sustainability. And so I've listed them here. You can see that it's mostly European countries. We do have Australia and Brazil in here as well. They were all, you know, I wanted to come up with a really beautiful grid saying, okay, you know, this country says this, this country says this with little check marks, and it was just a huge spider web. So I was not able to do that. So I read, as I was reading through all the papers, Holland had a really interesting take on it. And basically they're acknowledging here there are hardly any guidelines that combine health and ecological perspectives. Those that do employ different reporting methods, indicators, ecological effects of scale and research scope, most of the research is directed towards primary production, like, you know, just the growing of grain without actually thinking about what do we have to do to that grain to actually make it edible. And they only found one study that calculated the effects of the entire life cycle, cradle to grave. So nearly all the countries, of course, are saying we need to eat more plant-based, which sounds great to most people, but, you know, we have to look at how heavily sprayed are these plants. Are they being eaten in season or out of season? There's incredible food waste with fresh vegetables, so that needs to be dealt with. There's the cost of cold storage. There's the processing, especially of grains. We're hearing from them that, you know, when you eat out, choose vegetarian. I also read in many of the reports that we're not eating enough carbohydrates worldwide, and we're getting too much protein. And so generally, they all pretty much agreed that we should be eating less red meat, of course, because we're eating so much more red meat than ever before. Most of them are recommending about 500 to 300 to 500 grams of meat per week, red meat per week. And as I mentioned earlier, that iron is the, iron deficiency is the greatest nutrient deficiency there is worldwide. They're saying, most of them are saying dairy is important for calcium and iodine. All of them say butter is bad, every single country, for health and for the environment. So even though dairy can be good in some situations, butter's really bad. And then there was a report, a British report that was listing, you know, the pros and cons. So they did have kind of a checklist. So there was, you know, the pros and cons of all these different ways of eating. And when it got to the red meat section, the pros of eating red meat was totally blank, the cons of eating red meat were, you know, better health, better for the environment. And then the only con of eating less meat from the environmental perspective was that we would lose our English countryside, our classic English countryside. So basically, the cattle are just ornaments and wouldn't that be so sad if we didn't have the cattle to look at. A lot of the food wheels and food pyramids that I was looking at when they are pulling in sustainability were similar to this one. This one comes out of actually New England, the New England food vision. And I just wanted to point out how much, you know, so they're saying warm climate fruits, no. But then look at the discretionary calories. So we can have 15% of our calories coming from sugar, which does not grow in New England. But we can only have three ounces of meat a day. And actually, meat grows really well in New England. So the whole grains and refined grains, we're not a very grain-rich region. So, you know, and nutritionally, this is, I would not do well on a diet like this. But I just wanted to show this because usually when they were vilified in the pyramid of vilification, sugar and alcohol came after meat. The recommendations on fish are extremely confusing. So most studies say you need to eat more fish. Oily fish is great, but we're overfishing and fishing for chemicals. We should eat more farmed fish, but farmed fishing is bad. And then as far as specific fish that you should be eating, there was no recommendations at all. It was just usually recommending out to other websites, which most of them that are looking at either the ecological impact of fish or not looking at the nutrition end or the ones that are looking at the nutrition end are not looking at the ecological end. So there's very few, there are no really good sources to look when it comes to choosing fish. But we need to be eating more chicken. And I just wanted to mention that the chicken industry, again, is just really awful. I can't even believe that this is okay. We see chicken generally as a clean meat, so when you open those cookbooks or the clean diet, they feature white meat that is not on a bone and pretty much just looks like tofu. And I don't know, maybe the perception that all that blood, all that myoglobin that they think is blood in the package is just icky or maybe it's that it's on a bone. But again, there's a lot of antibiotic use in chicken production. There's a lot of GMO grain. And also these animals will die of organ failure at five weeks if you don't kill them first. So when we're having so many health problems, I just spiritually, I just don't even think we should be eating animals that are just like walking protein sticks like this. And just a nod to these superbugs, CAFOs are the perfect breeding ground for antibiotic resistant superbugs. So again, I just don't think it's good to have a handful of companies controlling the food that we eat. One country that had actually pretty good food recommendations was Brazil. So as you're looking at this, just imagine this coming out from the USDA. So to be critical of the commercial advertisements of food products, when eating out, choose restaurants that serve freshly made dishes and avoid fast food chains. And they also talk about the social and environmental impact. So they were one of the few countries, actually they were I think the only country that actually talked about workers rights, which I'm not seeing a lot coming out from the vegetarian and vegan population. But who's harvesting that food? In the US, we've got a lot of child labor that's harvesting all this stuff. But the final one that I love is buy your food from farmers markets or grow your own. But unfortunately, when it comes to their actual implementation, they've got a bunch of plates within their guidelines and they're showing you examples of what you can have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So these are breakfast ideas and very little protein and high carb. So basically it's very complicated and I wanted to read this one out. So this is again from Holland and this is literally taken from the same paragraph. I just cut and pasted this right into here. So they're talking about a less animal based, more plant based diet containing fewer meat and dairy products and more whole grain products, legumes, vegetables, and fruit and a plant-based, plant derived meat substitutes is a win-win basically. This dietary pattern is associated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease and also has a smaller ecological impact. The next sentence. From a health perspective it is not necessary to avoid meat and dairy products nor does this appear to be necessary from an ecological perspective. So there are contraindications for a diet containing no animal products and children. Such a diet has been linked with raised risk of growth retardation in Italy. This just came out. They're trying to make it illegal to put your child on a vegan diet. And then at the end I really love that a diet entirely devoid of animal products would mean the capacity would be unused and they're talking about grazing at the European level and estimated 40 to 50% of existing livestock can be fed using only natural grasslands and food industry waste products. So a lot of these, a lot of the science that's looking at, you know, does it make more sense, you know, cows take up so much space versus, you know, cropping. What they're not considering is that actually we only have a finite amount of cropland but we have a lot more grazing land that's not being used right now and so there's a lot of land out there that can only be used for grazing. And the cropland that's out there is being used pretty heavily and also as we grow in our population human sprawl is competing with cropland. So utilizing more grazing land and then using that cropland to actually grow vegetables instead of grain for chickens and pork makes a lot more sense to me. So what roles should the USDA play? I just asked this question, you know, should we be taxing sugar? You know, a lot of people think that sounds like a great idea. A lot of my healthy friends think, yeah, just tax those people that eat sugar. The problem with that is what's next? What's the next villain? So there was a Washington Post article that came out right after Philadelphia introduced their sugar tax and the reporter was recommending that we start taxing meat. This is a really real thing that can really happen. The nutritional recommendations from an organization that is in charge of commodity grains, you know, there are so many countries that are copying our food policy and we're just relying on very poor science, fear, superstition, and money to guide us. So these are the resources and this is my final slide. That's it. Hi. It sounds like vegans have a lot of influence in the dietitian community. There's vegans who are vegan for health reasons and then there's ethical vegans. There's dumb ethical vegans who think the bigger the animal, the less we should eat it. But there's also smart ethical vegans who think beef is better than chickens because the amount of suffering per pound of meat produced is way lower for beef than for chicken or farmed fish. Do you think there's a point of leverage there where you can convince the ethical vegans that actually red meat is better? So you're talking about the theory of least harm. So I have never seen that work on a vegan personally. I don't know any vegans that would agree, I don't know any vegans that would agree that eating a large herbivore is better than eating something small. You know, at lunch we were talking about sentience, right? So should we be eating animals that don't have sentience? So should we be eating only shellfish? And I think that gets a little dangerous because that's just how we relate to animals. Everything is dying in order to feed us and so our perception of how smart something is is just only the human perception of how smart something is. So that's a tricky one. Come on. Yeah. I wanted to ask about the, I guess, just total amount of calories produced by the system. If that has any play potentially in terms of food recommendations, right, like how many calories can you produce with a given area of land relative to the number of people? Would that have an impact in terms of like why certain recommendations are being made? A lot of the bad stuff that I'm reading like wired just came out with a really irritating article about how, you know, we need to eat less red meat and they were looking at, you know, per pound lettuce only requires this much, you know, whatever. I don't know that they're looking at calories. I don't know. They're not looking, they're not asking the right questions. Yeah. I mean, is there a concern with that in terms of like feeding a certain number of people like what the best way to actually do that is? Oh yeah. So I get that every time. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah. I mean, I think that's a good question on sustainable, you know, lettuce, right. How are we going to feel the globe on lettuce? It's crunchy water. So that is a bigger question, right? And I, you know, there's just too many people. And unfortunately, grains have let us become cockroaches and, you know, it keeps people healthy just enough to like reproduce but not live well. And so that's hugely dangerous. You know, it's also a miracle that we can feed pigs and chickens grain and they can convert that to flesh that then we can eat. So that's a good thing. If it's done in a responsible way, there's just too many people. So whether you're going to try to feed them a vegetarian or vegan diet or a meat diet, you know, you know, do we want to just raise more people? I don't know what the answer is that. So I guess to keep asking follow up questions, the amount of calories that could be produced per acre of sustainable agriculture is less than the amount of calories that could be produced per acre? Well, so we need to look at the bioavailability of those calories as well, right? Sure. So you could say, well, soy, is this many calories? And so that's better than whatever. So there's that. Too many people. Yeah. You mean about the soy lent versus? Yeah. Okay. So an entire life cycle analysis would actually look at the inputs and the entire output cycle. Taking the cow from, you know, from how it's being raised all the way through, you know, slaughter and delivery to, you know, your home. I looked at the pure cost of a product like Tofurkey. And I mean, even on just a per ounce level, Tofurkey is more expensive than the average grass-fed, grass-finished beef. When then you try to factor in a product like soy lent or Tofurkey and think truly about, or even these fake meats that are coming out, right? I think people are thinking that these lab meats are like, boom, lab meat. They're not even thinking about what has to go into producing all the wheat and soy and whatever else required as raw materials for a product like soy lent or fake meat. Then you've got the processing. Then you've got, you know, the concrete structure and, you know, all that stuff needed to produce it. Tofurkey needs to be packaged and cooled. I don't even. Yeah. So Rob and I are hoping that there might be somebody out there that can help us. And I keep emailing different universities hoping that someone's already looking into this. And I do have information on grass-fed beef, but I don't have it on a product like soy lent or Tofurkey. But I just cannot imagine that one of these fake meat products, actually when you cost out everything, is a better option to nature. Peter Ballerstead, grass-based health. Hi. Hi. First of all, we need to deconstruct the whole meme about there's too many people, especially when it's one group saying there's too many of another group. That gets pretty dark pretty quick. It's a complicated issue, but most of the dry land surface of the earth is incapable of producing food that humans can use directly. And we can produce high-quality animal products through ruminants from that ground and do it in a way that not only protects but enhances the resource. So my pushback against the people saying how many calories from whatever acre is, again, we're not comparing apples. When you look at eastern Colorado, grassland, and compare it to Iowa, we're not talking about the same thing. And also, if you're doing those mob grazing techniques, you are actually using a lot of acreage because you're moving the cattle around, but it has a totally different impact. We've had a history of having the wrong conversation. And we're playing in a space that the game is rigged. And so I just want to encourage people to push back and say, first of all, plant protein and animal protein are not comparable. They're not interchangeable. We don't just get protein from meat. We get a lot of other nutrients, and they're more bioavailable than we can get them from plants. Animal fat is a lot different from plant oils, and we've heard a lot about that. So when we have this conversation, and I encourage everyone to get involved with it because I'm a geek and I kind of like it, I just think that we've been, as I say, if we are having a conversation about sustainability that doesn't consider societal factors, that doesn't consider the economic burden of chronic illness and only looks at environmentalist issues, not ecological issues, and there's a difference between those two realms, then we're not really having a conversation about sustainability. We're having a conversation about yet another belief system. And so I encourage people to kind of dig into this space and learn about the vital role that ruminants play in worldwide agriculture today and what they're going to play in the future. Thanks. Yeah, and we also use a lot of products from cattle other than meat, so insulin comes from cows. So they're lipstick. What are you going to do if there's no cows? I have no idea. I have no lipstick. Thank you. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.