 Welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. So you know you are what you eat. I bet you've heard that saying hundreds of times before but when it comes to the food we eat animals and plants we are what they eat too. So when the plants we eat aren't nourished with healthy mineral rich soil or when the meat we eat is fed a diet loaded with lectin filled grains, antibiotics and hormones it can have a huge effect on our health including on our weight and our energy levels. Well my guest today says it doesn't have to be this way. According to him there's a better way to farm that's not only good for you but it's also good for the animal and for the planet. So Dan Walter is the founder and head farmer at Pastured Steps in Midlothian Texas and he's done something few farmers have done before. He's raised one of the world's first lectin-like chickens and I've tried one and both my wife and I really love the taste. In fact we've now had two of them thank you Dan. On today's episode Dan and I are going to discuss what's wrong with conventional agriculture, why a bigger bird isn't necessarily better and what exactly is in that cheap chicken at your local supermarket. Dan it's so great to have you on the podcast. Welcome. Well thank you Dr. Gundry. It's a pleasure to be here with you. I've been looking forward to this conversation. Alright let's start with a basic question Dan. How the heck did you go from being a mechanical engineer to running a farm? My idea of engineering was planning, designing, building, testing, redesigning, building and I went to school for that and did those things and then off to my first job and after three years I found that I was sitting behind a desk just doing the designing part and I really missed the other parts of that. So I started my own business doing energy efficiency and built a net zero house while running that company and that led me in sustainability. I stumbled upon permaculture, took a permaculture course and then that led me to regenerative agriculture. So for those who don't know what is regenerative agriculture you raise the same chicken over and over again or no. Basically agriculture can either have a positive impact or a negative impact and unfortunately most of the agriculture here has a negative impact. We're depleting the soil of nutrients, we've lowered our carbon in the soil, infiltration rates are down. So regenerative agriculture has a positive effect on the soil. We're building top soil, we're increasing the water capacity, we're doing all these things that help the microbiology thrive in the soil. You brought up a great point. Soil is a great place to store carbon, right? It's a carbon sink or it should be. That's right. Our soil used to be about 8% organic matter and most of our soil in the country today has dropped less than 1%. So all that carbon has gone into the air and now we're trying to get it back into the ground. So maybe we'll get into this but where I think people need to understand that regenerative agriculture at least the way I think most most people practice it like you do uses animal waste as a part of this regenerative agriculture. Is that putting words in your mouth? No, that's exactly right. There's a lot of different ways to do regenerative agriculture but animals is by far one of the more effective ways and they cycle that carbon back into the ground. As long as your animals are out in the pasture and not in a barn somewhere, they're putting that fertility back on the ground. So this net zero house and everything is that kind of what's stoked your passion about regenerative agriculture? Well, the energy efficiency led me to sustainability and then when you get out there on the ground you found there's not enough left to sustain. You have to go beyond that. So you have to start regenerating things to get it back to where it was at one point. So did you ever have a farming background? I mean, were you in 4-H club growing up or was this all brand new to you? I always had animals. I raised ducks and chickens as a kid so there's a little bit of experience with that and then we had a home flock of chickens while I was running my other company. I just slowly started adding on these different pieces of animals and I decided to go full time with it. So you've had chickens most of your life. Where does animal welfare fit into your vision and how do you do it differently on your farm? Well, I think the key is that the animals are expressing their natural behavior. That means cows are allowed to forage for their own food out there in the pastures. They're not locked up in a barn. Pigs are not on a cement slab. They're out there in the dirt mud and then chickens. They're not cooped up in a building all day long. They're out there where they can forage. They can gather bugs and they can take dust baths in the sun. In those environments there's a lot less stress on them and they're able to thrive. It's obvious to most people but a pig rolling around in mud to me strikes me as a rather happy animal. Yeah, a pig on a cement slab is probably a very unhappy animal. So let's go start one of these questions that everybody asks. I grew up in Nebraska and had many family friends who were farmers. I learned early on that chickens were an essential part of any farm because at least in Nebraska the chickens were let out into the fields where the cows were and they would head for the cow pies and they would dig through the cow pies looking for bugs and they would spread the manure and they then came back to the coop and laid eggs. But they were an essential piece of this whole piece and I was taught from day one that chickens love bugs. They're insectivores. Is that your experience? Absolutely. That's the first thing they do is run straight for the cowpats and I tell people that and they're kind of disgusted by it but that's the way nature sanitizes the pasture and it cleans up those parasites out of them, the cow patties. It drops your fly pressure quite a bit on the cattle. What you're saying is that nature and farming the way it was designed is a pretty slick system from an engineering standpoint. Yeah, nature does it best and we work really hard to try to do it our way which is not necessarily better. What's the problem with the way most chickens are raised now? I mean isn't bigger better and faster producing better? Without ripping on other farmers too much we can go through a little illustration and just imagine you and your closest thousand buddies all lived on a building the size of a basketball court and they bring all your food in and they tell you we're not going to take anything out of this room until you guys have lived your lives. Just imagine what that environment would be like after a couple days, after a couple weeks, after a year and then they're going to feed you a diet that's high in carbohydrates. What types of things can you imagine that that environment would be like after a little while? You'd be fat and angry I would think. Yep, there'd be high levels of stress. There would be a lot of sickness going around. As soon as one person got it it would spread to everybody. You would be walking around and waist up to your knees probably. Just probably the most unhealthy environment you can imagine. And yet that actually is how most commercial chicken raising is done. Yeah probably 99.9% of all the chicken that's available in this country is raised in a facility like that. And so obviously it has been brought to a science where you can get a chicken from hatchling to ready to eat in now a matter of weeks if I'm not mistaken. I know guys doing it in five to six weeks. Those chickens grow so fast they outgrow their frames. They have trouble walking. They usually have heart problems because their organs don't develop quick enough to support their size. And we do that in the name of efficiency and cost. Yeah efficiency is the number one goal. Most farmers they get paid so little they have to turn them over as quick as possible. So what do you do at your farm better? I mean for the environment and for the bird? Well our chickens are raised in a completely different manner. We've got these portable shelters that are completely bottomless. So the chickens feed are on the ground and that's actually where the name pastured steps came from. Everybody's put steps or footprints on the ground. And then they roam around in this tractor all day long and they scratch in the dirt they eat the grass the bugs they leave their manure behind and then we move that tractor every single day. And when they're older we move them twice a day. So they're constantly getting a fresh salad bar. New bugs, new grass, new diapers to speak. And they're moving away from their manure so they're moving away from this disease and bacteria and any kind of pest pressure that might be there. So that allows us to raise them without any kind of antibiotics. Great. And we didn't get into this but my understanding is that even though it's illegal to give chickens antibiotics in fact most of them are dosed with antibiotics because there's a waiver. If the vet says I think there's a sick chicken in there you're not going to pull that guy out you're just going to give antibiotics to everybody. I think antibiotics are used frequently. Hormones are probably what's illegal more than anything else. Yeah. I think there's a withdrawal period of a few days before you harvest them where they can't have antibiotics. I don't know what that is. But it's already in the meat so oh well. Right. Okay now I've got a big question. Why in the world would you raise a lectin light chicken? I was raising chickens and I was feeding them the best organic feed that I could find and I had a farm tour and one of the customers there which was on your diet I did not know about at the time started asking me what was in the feed so I started listing off ingredients and she was like well I can't have that. I can't have that. I can't have that. I thought to myself you're not going to find chicken anywhere in the world that you can eat and come to find out that that was pretty much true. Yeah that's very true. So what was in the best you could get conventional feed? The feed contained things like corn, soy, wheat. I looked around I did find some that didn't have corn, soy and wheat but they just substitute those out with things like peanuts and peas and lectins and lentils so they're all high lectin substitutes. So what's exact so what in the heck is in your feed and what went into developing it? It started by finding the best feed we could that didn't have corn, soy, wheat of course it had those other things so we had to exchange those out for items like sorghum, millet, flax, sesame. So we kind of went through your guest list and tried to find things that a chicken would eat that they would have enough protein and getting the protein levels where they needed to be was a little more difficult but we were able to come up with something and we're still refining it to make it better. I got a question for you. Will chicken eat seaweed? I'm sure they would especially if you blend it all up and mix it in with the rest of their feed. But kelp is one of the ingredients that's used occasionally. We started this program talking about you are what you eat and you are what the thing you're eating ate but one of the things that I think we've missed in probably thinking about lectins is corn and soybeans and wheat in particular are very high in omega-6 fats and the grasses and the bugs that the chickens would normally eat are actually full of omega-3 fats and we have to have a good ratio of omega-6 to omega-3. There's nothing evil per se about omega-6 fats in fact there are some that are essential but I think one of the things we've neglected to realize is that a chicken raised your way on pasture has a totally different profile and ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 than a chicken in even fed organic corn and soybeans and grains is going to have a much higher omega-6 fat profile than they ever would have had normally and the same goes for grass fed and grass finished beef or even pork and I think we all talk about inflammation and now so much of our diet is inflammatory but I worry that we should be spending more time on the inflammatory fat in these organic chickens and cows because of what they're being fed. I've seen a couple studies they're indicating exactly what you're saying as far as omega-6 to omega-3 and that ratio also they'll have more vitamin D and vitamin A and vitamin E a couple of those other essential vitamins. Yeah there's even studies now that farm raised salmon used to be fed ground-up fish and that got too expensive so they're now being fed ground-up corn and soybeans and wheat and the salmon which is supposed to be the omega-3 powerhouse of the fish world now has a huge omega-6 profile and so I just cringe when people say well all I eat you know is organic salmon and I go well yeah but now it's it's organic omega-6 fat you're not even getting the omega-3 you thought you were eating the salmon for. Yeah there's a term that's coming out that's becoming popular and that's beyond organic so it's taking the organic standards and it's moving at one step further. Yeah and so have you so now you've been feeding this new food to your chickens and how long have you been doing that? I've raved two batches so far and I'm about to do my third batch so about a year and a half as far as electing free chickens. So how long does it take to get a full-grown electing free chicken? Well the way I do it it takes nine to ten weeks so I'm using a slower growing bird and they obviously don't grow as quick on this feed as they would on a corn soy feed and I'm using a bird that'll have a little bit more texture and more flavor to it and that slower growth adds more flavor to the meat. And so do you notice any difference in them their growth pattern their behavior? The biggest difference I've noticed is they're not as eager to attack the feed when you fill it up. They'll spend more time foraging and they will grow slower obviously which is more healthy for the bird actually. Yeah well we notice my wife is actually not a chicken fan as we know them you know even the organic chickens I think of just they're pretty doggone black and certainly not like what I grew up you know in Omaha eating and my wife when we really we don't have chicken very much because of that and my wife I talked her in you know to having your chicken and she says oh my gosh you know where'd you get this what's the deal this this is this is really good you know and I hate chicken so that's actually very high praise from from a chicken hater. Yeah so we've actually had you know a second one of your chickens so in yeah you're right these taste like you know what I was growing up in Nebraska eating which is actually how chickens were raised. Okay I think we got into this so that takes a lot longer to have a chicken raised this way and obviously it's this is more expensive to have a smaller chicken um then then that costs more. Right so is it worth it everybody wants to know? Well I think you'll find that most things that are more healthy and better for you costs more and that is determined by the feed that goes into more than anything else. My feed is nearly eight to ten times more expensive than if I were to go out and buy a conventional grain. Wow so you're I mean you're you're paying for quality ingredients right? That's right you started out the show by saying that you are what your food ate and then I would add to that by saying that your food costs what your food's food cost. Yeah that's a very good point and so if people are gonna say well yeah but that's only for really rich people and I gotta put food on the table for my family why why should we all do this? Why should we care? We mentioned regenerative agriculture um do you see kind of agriculture Armageddon soon if we don't make some change fairly quickly? Well there's a lot of farmers that have speculated that I'm not a real big global warming alarmist but you can see the trends that we pump so much carbon into the atmosphere that the weather patterns are changing to some degree and we've depleted a lot of nutrients out of our soil so it's becoming more and more difficult to grow things. We can put NPK on our soil and that'll grow things but it's lacking of nutrients so I've bought the best looking orange at the store and got home to find out that it was completely tasteless if I didn't have any nutrients at all on it. Well you're right the the for instance the vitamin C content in oranges has dropped 70% in the last 40 years. I mean it's just that you go across the board the amount of magnesium in in our vegetables in our spinach is it's just plummeted to almost unmeasurable levels now and you're right it still looks like an orange it looks like spinach but it actually has no resemblance to you know 50 years ago 100 years ago because you're right. I think it's kind of like the way your gut works I've listened to a few of your podcasts so I'm starting to learn more but from a soil biology standpoint that biology is what makes those macronutrients available to the plants so if the biology is not there you can grow a plant you can produce a fruit but it doesn't have any nutrients in it. No you're absolutely right in my next book The Energy Paradox is actually all about the the soil microbiome is essential for the plant getting nutrients through the roots and it turns out our microbiome is essential for us to absorb nutrients through our roots which is our microvilli we literally have roots and the things we swallow and the the microbiome is our soil and but the two the two are intrinsically linked we're we're we're basically a plant with roots that got up and walk and that's we have a mobile soil within us which is an interesting way to think about it. Yeah we have roots on the inside. Yeah that's exactly right our roots are inside there. All right so that is uh are other are other farmers taking notice or they go oh man Dan Dan the chicken man you know you uh you just go do that and you can starve to death. Well I'm sure if this gains traction others will follow. As of right now most farmers are busy just trying to meet the demand from the pandemic so our demand went up four times just from the pandemic so there's a lot of people looking for alternative feed sources. I mean every small farmer I know is slammed right now so I don't know if they're going to be looking for to add new products on or if they're just trying to meet the demand that they have and we'll see how things change over the next year or two. Is there is there pressure on the small farmer from big corporations that they come in and say oh you know come on we'll buy you out for X amount and you just shift over to the way we want to do it. I think all the pressure is from the consumer that's looking for alternative food source. The stores around here were out of meat for a while and they were out of eggs and everybody was calling me up asking where they can buy chicken and eggs and we were sold out for a couple months there. Are there other farmers around the country who you know are trying new ways of feeding chickens certainly you know the idea of pastured chickens is not a new concept but you're right most places that I've contacted there's still a lot of pretty lousy things in in the feed that they're giving their pastured chickens. There's kind of three levels of feed you can start with conventional feed which is going to be dosed with all kinds of sides I called it a toxic suicide so you have fungicide, herbicides, pesticides all of that and then the next level up is non-gmo and this is where most small farms land is on the non-gmo side and then the highest side is organic and then the organic obviously has a lot fewer or none maybe as of chemicals in them but most of the small farms and most of the pasture raised guys are using either non-gmo or organic. But even the non-gmo I mean what 90% of the corn growing in the United States is gmo even if it's not sprayed with Roundup. Right and most a lot of the non-gmo stuff is sprayed with various chemicals and we kind of forget that we think non-gmo is going to be chemical free and that's not the case at all. Yeah I know you're right in fact almost almost all conventional corn and soybeans now are pre-treated with Roundup as a desiccant so that harvesting is a lot easier. That's right. Yeah and people unfortunately don't know that and yeah they don't get the connection that non-gmo doesn't mean it hasn't been sprayed with Roundup or one of the other ones. That's right so if you want to avoid chemicals you need to go with an organic program. We're not certified organic but we do everything as organically as possible and then if you want these other nutrients and the things we've been talking about you need to go with a pasture raised version and if you want to try to avoid the lectins you're now at the highest bar possible as far as raising the chicken. Now I know when I sent out an Instagram about you I guess your next crop sold out rather rapidly because I guess it did and I'm actually looking at adding another batch this fall to see if we can help out some of the people that weren't able to get a chicken or two on that sale. Well let us know because we'll certainly get the word out there because like I say it's we need to support what you're doing for our community but not only for our community but we need to support you know the small farmer who's pasture raising their animals in regenerative agriculture because you know it always it always takes from the bottom up to change the world and it takes little actions not some big downward action that changes everything so you know I congratulate you and keep doing it and it sounds like your engineering degree is paying off in ways you never thought possible. That's right I get to do all those things I get to plan design build redesign build again so it's all those things I was missing I'm now doing again. Well great you know it's great having you on the podcast and you know I loved hearing about you and I loved your chicken and so does my wife so how do people find out about your farm and you know will you announce your next batch soon? Well the best thing to do is go to our website lectinlightchicken.com and then everything on there right now is sold out so you can scroll down to the bottom and subscribe to our email blast and then we'll send out emails as soon as things are available and then we'll have another pre-order sale that goes on and people can order chicken from our next batch if it sells out then we'll do it again. And you being in Texas you can raise chicken you can pass your chicken throughout the year? Well I've taken off the month of August because it's just too hot chicken start dying when it's over 100 degrees. Interesting. You have to water them down just to keep them alive because it's just so hot and then I usually avoid January and February just because freezing temperatures are difficult as well as far as keeping your water lines unfrozen yeah those sorts of things. I'm going to push this next batch probably into January so we'll see how it goes. All right well thanks for being here thanks for doing what you're doing and maybe you can convince some more farmers. So I think you ought to look at it as a chicken wine club you know you join a wine club we've got you know the next vintage coming and you get the first pick yeah so this is a chicken club. Okay great well it's certainly a different chicken then you'll find anywhere else. Yeah I completely agree with you. All right thanks a lot and we really appreciate you and what you're doing. Thank you it's been a pleasure. Okay it's time for our audience question Ole Wernersen on YouTube asks olive oil has a large amount of mono unsaturated fat as well as saturated fat and has a bad omega-6 to 3 ratio so how is olive oil a health oil? That's a great question I've had the pleasure of meeting with the minister of olive oil in Italy in the past and one of the things that I've learned through the years that he backs up is that the mono unsaturated fat in olive oil which is oleic acid is not the wonderful marvelous save-your-life oil that some people make it out to be it's merely a mono unsaturated fat it's the same mono unsaturated fat for instance in avocados most of macadamia nut oil is mono unsaturated fat most of even other not so good oils for you have a high mono unsaturated fat that I won't mention well I will canola oil but what's important is not the omega-3 fats which are almost non-existent not the omega-6 fats which are almost non-existent but the polyphenol content of the olive oil and it's the polyphenols that actually give the health benefit to olive oil so the more you think of olive oil as a delivery device for polyphenols the more you begin to appreciate its benefit and the more you find olive oils that are bitter more bitter more better and we actually judge olive oils by their cough factor if when you first taste the olive oil it gets you coughing that actually is the polyphenol content so you really want an olive oil with a huge polyphenol content and nuvo olive oil the first pressing of olive oil in general has the highest of the polyphenol content so don't be don't be scared or sucked in by well there's mono unsaturated fats and saturated fats it's the highest polyphenol oil there is for instance polyphenol content of an olive oil is 10 times higher than in coconut oil there actually are polyphenols in coconut oil but olive oil just blows everything else away so that great question though okay time for the review of the week this week's review comes from d marie cal on itunes who gave us a far five star review and wrote i learned something new every time i listened to dr gendry thank you keep doing what you do i've never felt better than i do now because of you well thanks for the kind words and the review you know each time you rate and review us on itunes it helps us reach a larger audience so we can continue our mission of transforming everyone's health all across the globe and i'm dr gendry and i'm always looking out for you we'll see you next week and thanks for your kind comments before you go i just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on itunes google play stitcher or wherever you get your podcast because i'm dr gendry and i'm always looking out for you