 You are listening to the world's top fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Now, in this episode, I had a great conversation with one of my favorite people in the health and fitness space, Rob Wolf. Now, we've had him on the show before. He's a super, super smart guy. And in today's episode, we talked about the environmental impact of eating meat, this whole movement to get people to stop eating meat, and he really sheds a lot of light on this. He illuminates the subject quite a bit. Again, very, very smart dude. So, you'll learn a lot about meat. Is it really bad for the environment? What are the consequences of eliminating meat and dairy from our diet? Then we got into his new company that he just started called Element. This is an electrolyte company. Now, when he sent me a box of this product months ago, I looked at it and said, oh, it's just another electrolyte powder, big deal. But then I looked a little deeper and it's very different. I tried it and I'm 100% honest. I had performance enhancement. I got better pumps in my workout. So, I asked Rob about this in the episode. Like, why am I getting better pumps? Why is my performance improving by drinking this? And what makes yours different from other electrolyte drinks? Now, because we talked about this, he's actually set up an offer for mind pump listeners. So, what you can do is you can actually get a free Element sample pack. So, here's what you do to try this out. Go to Drink, L-M-N-T, so the letters, L-M-N-T dot com forward slash mind pump. Again, that's Drink, L-M-N-T dot com forward slash mind pump. All you do is pay for shipping and you get eight packets of Element, which is an electrolyte powder, very different from any other electrolyte powder that's out there. And, you know, if you've been listening to Mind Pump, you know I don't lie. Try it. I think you'll be surprised. Actually, again, I got performance enhancement from this zero calorie supplement. Also, before the episode starts, I want to remind everybody that this month, we've put together a starter bundle of workout programs for people who are getting started in fitness, people who've taken long breaks or who haven't ever worked out before. In this bundle includes MAPS and Ebola, a great program to build muscle and boost your metabolism. We also have MAPS Prime, which helps you fix injuries or prevent injuries. We also have a nutrition guide in there, the intuitive nutrition guide to help you with your diet. And then we threw in MAPS Starter, which is the greatest program for beginners. This is the one you want to start with. Now, if you got all of these programs at retail, it would cost you over $340. But right now, in this bundle for January only, it costs you $80. So $80 to get all those programs with this bundle. Just go to mapsjanuary.com. Again, that's the word maps, M-A-P-S January.com. So, Rob, it's been a while since we've seen you. You're actually one of our favorite people to follow, though. We love the stuff that you write and say. It's interesting how controversial some of the stuff you say has become, although I don't see how it can be controversial. Since the last time we've talked, I think it's been a few years, you've done a couple big things. One is you put out a book, Sacred Cow. So I'd like to talk to you about that. And then I'd also like to talk to you about this product that you've come out with, Element T, which I have a lot of questions about. It's very, very interesting. So first off, let's start with your book. And I'd like to open with this. In fact, this believe just came out recently. It was an Oxford study that was done on the environmental impact of eating meat and dairy. And the lead author, I have his name written here, Joseph Poor, this is, quote, he said, a vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce our impact on planet Earth. And I'm assuming he's referring to our negative impact. According to this study, removing meat and dairy would cut carbon footprint. Each of our individual carbon footprint by 73%. We would reduce global farmland use by 75%. And he said in this article or the study said that meat and dairy is responsible for 60% of the greenhouse gas emissions that are produced by agriculture. So I'd like to go through some of these because I know you talk about these and you talk about beef and kind of illuminate some of these statistics or I guess you paint context around them. So let's start out with the argument that eating meat and dairy is just terrible for the environment. Yeah, and I guess a little context on this, like I had my first public debate on this topic in 2006. So it's not that like this is something brand new that I've been thinking about. I'm a biochemist by training, but I definitely am a big fan of economics and physics. I could have probably if I had just gone through the trouble of doing a class or two more, I could have had another degree in physics. So I'm a big fan of looking at things from a very holistic systems based approach. And I will throw this out there also that taking the stance that I have is a pretty good recipe for career suicide. You know, on this whole, you know, I guess contrarian perspective to to the, you know, the climate chain narrative around food, and that doesn't make me right. But it's also, I guess I would just throw out to people that I definitely haven't arrived at this stuff willy nilly. I've tried to be as good. I've honestly been tighter with the science on this than I was in my nutrition books, just because I expected so much kind of scrutiny and and a sailing and also in a way. The interesting thing about tinkering with nutrition, we can have people try something for 30 days, see how they look, feel and perform, do their blood work before and afterwards. And we can see whether or not it works for folks, but it's a it's a much more challenging proposition to alter global or even regional food systems in various ways and and really precisely predict like what what does this mean for health, what does this mean for waterways and whatnot. The book and the film of the same title cover the environmental ethical and health considerations of meat inclusive food system. And so we're covering this thing again holistically and it's generally because when these discussions happen, it's what it what I call vegan whack-a-mole like if we start talking about health, and you address the health topic. Well, then the discussion will shift to ethics and then if you address the ethics discussion well then it will shift to in the environment and so that's all the preamble on that so it as far as the actual you know claims here. There's a lot of different things that are going on so on the one hand the claim is that meat and dairy account for I believe you quoted it in that like 60 to 70% of all greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. It really depends in in how you look at that so there's different ways of kind of parsing out what does and doesn't constitute emissions in the story and part of what gets lost in all of this is that these biogenic sources the sources that come from living systems are part of a cycle. So it's very very different considering mining oil or coal out of the ground which is is you know millions of years old stored carbon and then releasing that through the process of fossil fuels versus organic systems that are releasing carbon reabsorbing carbon and it is kind of working in a cycle. And then you also have to consider the total magnitude of that slice relative to other things like transportation and we actually had a really interesting natural experiment on this at the beginning of covid where transportation was effectively shut down like the amount of driving even trucking to a significant degree ended up decreasing it for a period of time airline traffic cratered, you know, the only time that it's been that low for any period of time was immediately post 911. But this stretched out for weeks and months and what was noticed during that time the number of animals. Didn't change that was effectively stable maybe even increased over that period of time. And what we found was actually that greenhouse gas emissions dramatically decreased during that that period of time so looking at the food sector specifically and laying all blame there and suggesting that shifting exclusively what's being suggested here is that we should shift to exclusively like a row crop centric model basically, you know grains legumes and what have you which there are some challenges there but it's interesting to me that I, and I know I'm kind of bouncing all over the place the challenge with this stuff there's so many moving parts and like you want to cover everything all at once. But there was just a piece released yesterday maybe the day before suggesting that we should inoculate people with these mRNA vaccines that would make people intolerant to eating meat and dairy so that they would no longer be able to eat them. So, it's it's fascinating that we have all this type of stuff you know all these really invasive very problematic interventions that are being suggested versus addressing the real canary in the coal mine which is the transportation sector and when you get into that and we talk about this a little bit in the book but it kind of goes beyond the scope to really get into it. We should probably be looking at some things like nuclear energy we definitely should should continue develop solar energy and whatnot but those are the places that if one really wanted to address climate change that it in the greenhouse gas emission side of this. That is where the real rubber hits the road when you even though they're mentioning that the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions are large from say like animal husbandry which isn't entirely true and I will unpack that in a minute. But that's only about 3% of the total greenhouse gas emissions from our the US economy at large. So there's this massive amount of energy focused on this thing that is a rounding error compared to everything else. So it's really perplexing that that has become this this you know this focus and if all of this focus is placed in this area that really isn't going to move the needle then we're not really putting attention and energy and focus in those areas that we could actually potentially do something. Okay so let me let me clarify for a second here Rob so you're saying that the the emissions that are that come from cows and dairy make up about 3% of all of the emissions that the United States is creating and then in this study from Oxford. Switching from eating those things to pure vegan would only cut that by 70% so in other words really effectively at best we're looking at a 2% reduction and of course we're not and I'd like to get into maybe the consequences of that as well because. You know you're somebody who likes economics oftentimes we look at things isolated but we don't consider any of the downstream potential effects do I have that correct with what I said spot on. Yeah yeah spot on okay and then it gets a little bit more complex when you start really digging into. So it again this is where it's kind of interesting so when we look at cattle in particular even KFO cattle like you know the cows that end up in the in the kind of conventional feedlot system they spend 70% of their lives on grass. And even the ones that not all KFO cattle end up being finished on grain most of them are but not all of them are but that grass herbivore interaction this is what grasslands are for that it is without that that grass herbivore interaction the grasslands die and they become deserts. And there's this interesting movement of foot to rewild areas to let it go back to its natural state and let like deer or elk or what have you kind of repopulate the area. And there's no disc what's interesting about that is if you all of those animals are also greenhouse gas emitters none of those animals are as easily managed as cattle are. There's no discussion around like well how will you manage them like hunting is now kind of a taboo topic and gun ownership and all kinds of things around that. There have been some modest attempts at reintroduction of things like wolves and whatnot but then we end up with situations where you've got a largely uncontrolled population of grazing animals versus something like cattle that are actually in this kind of food system. So if we remove the cows it's not like that number of animals is gone it's going to be replaced with natural grazing animals. One would hope so because otherwise the grasslands end up getting damaged and destroyed and turned into deserts. And so this is where it's so perplexing and again it's so damn hard to like unpack this stuff because there's a there's a million different little little you know pieces and nuance to it all. And within that that claim around even the cattle generation of greenhouse gases a lot of the weight is put towards the methane emissions from cellulosic fermentation. These these cows eat grass and the main constituent is cellulose that cellulose gets broken down via bacterial action in the various stomachs within ruminants. And that interestingly doesn't produce carbohydrate it produces short chain saturated fats and so these animals are fat fueled ironically which is kind of you know an interesting aside in this whole story. But the methane that is released as part of that process gets demonized because methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide you know like a kilogram per kilogram it absorbs more heat from the sun in the atmosphere. Than what carbon dioxide does but it also has a relatively short lifespan the half life of methane in the atmosphere is about 10 years. It gets broken down into carbon dioxide and water via the action of ultraviolet radiation in the atmosphere. But one of the dangers that has occurred in this process is this focus on just limiting greenhouse gas emissions at all costs and getting people very focused on that. People have recently we've known for quite some time that say termites produce prodigious amounts of greenhouse gases. And now there are movements within ecology and conservation sectors to eradicate termites because they produce greenhouse gases. There was recently a study that was published in the journal physics looking at the amount of methane and greenhouse gas emissions from shellfish on the ocean floor. And it is enormous and one of the suggestions was to eradicate shellfish. So and one additional crazy one that's in this kind of chain of thought is that the Green Party in Sweden suggested that the moose population there should be cold because these moose eat like in another greenery and produce greenhouse gases. So there's vast swaths of people that are suggesting that we should destroy life on this planet to preserve life on this planet. And again, what's getting missed in this whole thing is that the biogenic sources of carbon specifically whether it's methane or carbon dioxide are part of a system. And this is just kind of one piece. So the carbon from those systems goes into the atmosphere and gets returned to the plants and it's part of a cycle. What really gets missed in this story is the potential for using grazing animals to actually expand grasslands. So one of the greatest challenges globally is desertification. Grasslands and marginal areas converting into desert, which all kinds of environmental havoc ensues from that. You have massive amounts of erosion. You have no water sequestration. So the water just runs off of these areas and doesn't replenish aquifers. It dramatically increases the heat signature of the areas because you have neither water nor greenery nor life in these areas, which mitigates the amount of solar energy that gets trapped at the surface level and gets re-radiated back up into the atmosphere. So a desertified area is incredibly negatively impactful on the environment at large and properly raised grazing animals can reverse desertification. In our film, we document a rancher from the Chihuahuan Desert area who has reclaimed a million acres of the Chihuahuan Desert and converted it into grassland. And it's crazy when you drive out there, you've got to drive for like five or six hours through the Chihuahuan Desert, which is just like scrub brush everywhere. And then on the horizon, you see what almost looks like a wave or something. And what it is is chest high grass. And people in this area didn't even know that this could be grassland. But like the Great Basin that goes from Reno to Salt Lake City down to Las Vegas, that used to be grassland. It got converted into desert because of overgrazing of animals. So you can overgraze an area, you can undergraze an area, but there's a dynamic balance that is met that can convert a desertified area into vibrant grasslands. What is interesting about that is there's a couple of layers to this on the optimistic side around regenerative agriculture. There are some claims that you can sequester enormous amounts of carbon in properly managed soil as a baseline and that that can kind of go on somewhat indefinitely. You can then convert desertified areas which are low in soil carbon content and again sequester carbon into those soils. And the way that this happens is carbon dioxide is pulled out of the atmosphere, becomes part of the above ground portion of the plant. So sugars are pumped below ground into the root system and it feeds bacteria and fungus that actually mine minerals out of the soil and form the carbon matrix, carbon mineral matrix that is topsoil. So this is where you can basically grow topsoil. So we have literally no other tool at our disposal to reverse desertification. And in the process of reversing desertification, again, we are retaining water in these areas. I want to say that a desertified area versus a grassland, I want to say that it's a factor of a thousand that is the difference in the amount of water that like a cubic meter of that soil can retain. So it's just an enormous amount of water. It's an enormous difference in carbon capture and Alan's savory. And then on the flip side is it some other folks say the ability to sequester carbon via grasslands ends up plateauing out after about 20 to 30 years and it kind of hits this steady state. You can't really put more carbon in. And so they kind of dismiss the notion wholesale kind of ignores the fact that we could convert a lot of desertified areas and marginal lands into grasslands and get whatever run we could get with that. So some folks claim that there's kind of almost an infinite storage capacity. Other people claim that there's a limited storage capacity, but they acknowledge that there's probably a 20 to 30 year run before all of that is maxed out. Alan's savory has made the case that even if the greenhouse gas emissions of ruminants were four or five times greater than what they are, what we believe them to be, that just the ability to reverse desertification justifies their use and would make the removal of ruminants from the food system like an absolutely ridiculous idea. And hopefully it did a half decent job of unpacking that. That's part of where like the book and the film are solid because they really go through in kind of sequential order with this stuff. But one other thought around this is just when we look at the global food production scene, there are tens of millions of women globally that because of the socioeconomic systems that they live in, they are unable to own land within their legal systems. But they are allowed to own livestock. And this is their sole means of economic support, of food production, of social status. And so while we are busy demonizing traditional food systems built around ruminant animals, interestingly, some of the greatest pushback that we're seeing around this negativity towards ruminant animals is coming from the developing world. Because for many of these people, they live in marginal areas that you don't farm these areas, like rotational grazing animals is the one consistent means of food production. And so it's interesting that a largely white, vegan, Eurocentric kind of crowd is making dictates to the rest of the world that could be antithetical to these people just continuing their traditional ways of life. Right, so hearing what you have to say and knowing what I know about topics that tend to get politicized, because look, I've been in the health and fitness space for over two decades and I've never seen, diets have always been an area of contention. You talk to anybody in fitness and they'll say, don't bring up religion politics or diet in conversation because you get arguments. But I'd never seen diets become politicized. All of a sudden, eating a vegan diet now was, you know, you could associate with maybe one political party or it was the right thing to do. We've also assigned a morality to it. More than just don't kill animals, so vegans historically didn't eat animals because they believed it to be immoral to eat animals. Well, now it's immoral to eat animals because it's bad for the world. And I've seen it become politicized and the reason why I'm saying this, Rob, is because anytime things tend to get politicized, they'll get an argument and they'll simplify it and they'll say this is the reason. And it's very simple and completely ignores just how complex the issue is that we're talking about. And essentially what you're explaining is it's way more complex. There's way more things that are being affected than just if we get rid of this, then we cut emissions this much. There's two things that I wanted to address and I'll start with the first one. Earlier at the beginning of this conversation, you had said that when animals eat the grass and then they expel their greenhouse emissions that they're not unlocking carbon that's been in the earth for millions of years referring to fossil fuels. Explain that a little bit more because from my understanding, essentially you mean what it sounds to me like is we have fossil fuels in the earth. That carbon is out of the atmosphere. It's gone. It's buried in the earth. We're not adding it to the system until we pull it out, burn it, and now it's new in the system versus eating grass, burping, farting, whatever cows do. That's the carbon that's already, or those are the emissions that have already been there. Am I correct with this? That's a really good assessment of it. And this is a point of contention. Even in the book, we make the case that we don't really know the true numbers on this, but if the more optimistic numbers around the ability for holistically managed livestock to sequester carbon underground, that is all solar energy fueled. It's run by the sun and it stabilizes grasslands. It creates complex diverse ecosystems and it provides food for humans. And also, some of that grassland is not really amenable for farming. Some of it can be used in a rotational fashion for farming, but if even the lower end of the optimism exists around the carbon sequestration potential of holistically managed livestock, management in these grasslands, this may actually be a tool to remove carbon that is coming from the transportation sector. And just to piss people off for sure, like I'm a big fan of nuclear energy as it stands today. Most of the nuclear energy people are familiar with is Fukushima and Three Mile Island. These are Gen 1 reactors. We now have Gen 4, Gen 5 reactors. And people generally who have a strong opinion about nuclear energy cannot carry on a conversation about what distinguishes a Gen 1 versus a Gen 5 reactor. They've generally never heard of this stuff called thorium, which is another nuclear energy potential product that is actually a byproduct of rare earth mining for the products that go into solar panels. Currently, this radioactive material thorium is batched up and it's super fun side buried underground and it's not used. The Chinese over the last couple of years have put over 400 PhDs into the process of trying to develop thorium based reactors. These represent amazing opportunities to really gut the transportation sector contribution to this carbon story. Everybody is very focused on solar and I dig solar. It's really, really cool, but there's a lot of issues with it, like battery storage, the relative intermittency of solar as an option. Germany shifted a huge amount of its energy infrastructure towards what they call renewables, which includes solar energy, which Germany is pretty northern latitude. It doesn't actually get a lot of sun. They've shifted away from things like coal and natural gas, but now they are burning wood imported from North America. I don't want to divert this stuff, but this is where some kind of goofy, I don't want to say goofy, but some poorly educated positions on these topics have goosed really advanced societies like the German Republic into making energy decisions, which are honestly bad for their people and bad for the planet overall. Yeah, if you brought up nuclear, if you actually look into the science and I encourage anybody watching this to just dive into the science as it stands nuclear power, especially what you're referring to these generation four and five reactors. Those by far have the greatest promise for reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. There's nothing that even comes close because member energy has to be cost effective, it has to be able to be, does it produce a lot of waste? Is it safe? Nuclear energy is extremely clean. People don't know that about new reactors. I'm glad you brought that up, but that just again that points back to this fact that it's been politicized and what makes good politics is always bad science. Here's another point to that that I want to bring up. I don't have your background in some of these things, but I am a fan of economics and I'm also a fitness and health expert. Here's what I know about nutrition. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. In my experience working with everyday people and clients, when I look at their diets and I'm trying to help them with the nutrition, one of the biggest problems that I encounter is that most of their food consists of these kind of heavily processed foods. I think it's safe to say that highly palatable, heavily processed foods probably bear the brunt of the responsibility of the obesity epidemic. They make us overeat. It's very hard to control your satiety. They're engineered to do that. That's what they're designed to do. When I look at their diets, the very little unprocessed foods that they tend to consume tend to be dairy and meat. It's like eggs, meat, dairy, and then everything else is heavily processed. I've trained lots of vegans. I have no issue with someone being a vegan, but I do know and this is just the fact that you have to be much better planned. You have to really understand nutrition at a higher level when you go on a vegan diet just to make sure you get the right amount of combinations of nutrients. It's much more complex. If I convince a huge percentage of the population that eating meat is bad and they already aren't very educated on nutrition to begin with, and they eliminate the very little unprocessed food that they eat, which might be their eggs and milk in the morning, it's going to go to heavily processed foods and a vast majority of heavily processed foods are these plant-based, you know, it's very easy to find vegan processed foods. For example, I'd say a majority of them are that and so here's my, this is where I'm going with that. In my experience, unhealthy people are less productive, less innovative, they are less happy and probably worse for the environment. Are we not considering the potential detriments of forcing or convincing all these people to not eat meat and cause nutrient deficiencies and then cause a bunch of sick people and how would that affect the world and innovation in the environment? You know, it's funny and again, this is where there's still kind of pissing matches on both sides of this. Like the more vegan centric model would say that it's meat and animal products that are the cause of type 2 diabetes as just looking at that insulin resistance, which that one is actually pretty easy to unpack and disprove. And that's why we start getting in this game of vegan whack-a-mole, but you know, game changers, cow spiracy, like we see films and media onslaught that basically says that meat is really bad for your health. But again, it's reasonably easy to dig into that and unpack it and disprove that claim. But what's interesting about all that is I'm definitely a fan of low carb diets. I don't think they're the right move for everybody. I completely agree that the real onus here is on hyper highly processed hyper palatable foods. Once you remove too many animal products out of the diet, that's kind of all that you've got left. Like people just aren't sitting down and eating whole lentils and pearl barley. And even if they do, the research has been done on this. There was a paper and I will get it to you. It looked at if you removed all animal products out of the American food system, that it would have a small to insignificant change in the real greenhouse gas emissions. It would absolutely lead to elevated rates of nutrient deficiencies and obesity and overweight would increase because people need to eat more calories with people do eat more calories when they eat less nutrient dense foods. And we did just some back of the envelope estimates on the carbon footprint and costs of diabetes related care products like all the syringes and tubing with dialysis and whatnot. It is mind boggling how crazy that is. And so it's again where folks take a very simplistic view of the problem and I wish it was that easy. Like it'd be great if it was that easy than I would promote this stuff and I would have my dirty little secret of raising animals on my own property and eat it and I would make more money and my life would be better. But it's just not the case that all that plays out. But this is something that gets really missed in this whole story. An unhealthy population is incredibly damaging to the environment because of the ecological footprint involved with dealing with the pharmaceuticals, the medical tubing, the dialysis machines and whatnot. And none of that really gets reasonably well discussed in like the mainstream media, social media, etc. Right. Not to mention again the because here's the thing and you see this with with economics oftentimes there's an argument being made for something and what we don't count is the potential the potential loss of innovation which is hard to calculate. Right. Do sick people produce less? Are they less innovative? And then on the back of that is, you know, if we're going to solve a complex problem, we need a lot of really smart, healthy, innovative people. And so it's hard to calculate just how negative an impact it would have to get people even fatter and sicker and nutrient deficient. I just read a study that showed that vegans are several times higher to suffer from things like mental disorders, likely due to nutrient deficiencies. And for people watching who don't understand how that works, you can essentially get away with only eating meat and really probably never have a nutrient deficiency because meat contains all of it. But with plants, you'd have to consume a wide variety of plants to make up nutrients. It's a single plant that'll provide you with all. So it's just it's just a numbers game. And again, we're not counting the potential loss of innovation that that might might potentially cause. It's just complex. It's very, very complicated. Yeah. And you know, like this last year was a big year of social justice topics and right rightfully so. But what an interesting piece to this is most of the things being suggested like to make meat more expensive, make it less accessible, wealthy and middle class families are going to be unaffected by this. They'll cut something somewhere else and they're still going to eat meat who will be affected by this are poorer, more marginalized populations. And there's not a ton of data on this, but there was a randomized controlled trial. Technically, it's not not randomized, but there was a very interesting trial performed in an African village setting in which these folks eat a very monochromatic diet. Like it was basically one starchy food crop. And I forget if it was like cassava or sorghum or what it was, but it made up the bulk of the food that folks ate there. They very, very little animal products. And this was performed in kids and the kids were stratified into being given more of the starchy food product that they already were getting so that they were getting a minimum caloric level. Most of these kids were arguably under eating and it had chronically been for quite some time. One group was given a meat supplement and one group was given a dairy supplement. And what was interesting was that the kids that were given the meat supplement had better academics, lower infectious disease, were taller in stature, better physical attributes, like they were better in every conceivable way. Interestingly, the group that was just given supplemental food, you know, starchy food did a little bit better than the dairy group. And that was postulated to be because dairy can actually inhibit iron absorption. So these folks tend to be in a very low iron diet environment anyway. And dairy alone as an animal product protein source can be problematic in that regard. And so, again, it's small in number. We don't have a lot of things like this. But looking at just like the New York City school system, 70% of the kids in that system are considered to be low income. 10% of them are considered to be homeless. And oftentimes the singular meal or the singular nutrition that they get at all is from the public school food program. And as bad as that food generally is, it still contains some amount of meat and animal products. And so some of these things like meatless Mondays, people will just kind of quip and say, well, what's wrong with just having a salad one day a week? And for most people, that may or may not be that big of a deal. I'm still not really comfortable with that being something that is like governmental policy being foist on everybody. The irony here is that the people that will be most negatively affected are marginalized low income groups. It is well understood that the difference in achievement and ability on so many different levels between a lower income, middle, high income children is the food quality that they experience. And there's lots and lots of other factors as well. And that food quality is a major factor. And this idea of meatless Mondays, less meat, better meat, things like that, I think that they're kind of well intentioned, but they're really slick ways of trying to reduce consumption across the board. And again, the main people that are going to be negatively impacted are the very folks that I think all of us are trying to put more CPU cycles into figuring out how to better serve them and better help them. And this is going to drive the boat in exactly the wrong direction. Yeah, I think if you're looking to the government for nutritional advice or probably, I mean, you remember the same people that said that the pizza sauce on pizza was counted as a vegetable. Yeah, I don't think that's a good place to look. You know, some people may be wondering why this is politicized. You know, one way I think one, without going too deep into this, I can't think of any patented animals that we eat. I don't think you can own a cow and it's patented, and nobody else can have that same kind of cow. But we have a lot of patented plant products. GMOs are all patented plant products, and profit-wise, the amount of money that is produced or generated from the chemicals that go along with these patented products. I mean, dwarfs from a profit-than-margin standpoint, what you would get from raising cattle, do you think that might play a role? You are literally the one person I've ever talked to who pointed out this point. And I mean, Forbes did a really fascinating piece that said that vegans are no friends of sustainability, that they're really catering to the global industrial food complex. And the point that was made there and has been made elsewhere is that they, different entities, want to run food as a software platform. You own the intellectual property, you process it and get these kind of up-sale options around it. It has a nearly infinite shelf life, or at least a very, very long shelf life relative to any type of whole, unprocessed food. And this is where things like Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger and whatnot are such the darling of kind of the Silicon Valley scene. Because my sense on all this is it's going to be exactly like Theranos. It's absolute bullshit, it is a bunch of lies, but an enormous amount of money is getting dumped into this. And so long as the players involved can keep the smoke screen going long enough to get an IPO and everybody exits, they don't care if it's really strip mining our food system and providing no real value to the world. So yeah, I mean, hats off to you. The goal here is to run food as if it was software, that the intellectual property can be owned, and this is something that we see. And it's funny, like on the GMO front, I'm at a spot where I just end up making everybody angry about GMO. Because from a productivity standpoint, I'm super unimpressed with the productivity increases that we've seen. You know, that has happened since Morgan Borlaug developing the dwarf wheat varieties and doing similar things with rice and whatnot. Just standard hybridization techniques ended up really dramatically increasing our productivity using the Haber-Bosch method to make synthetic fertilizer, which is an amazing innovation. It's arguably one of the most important innovations of the 20th century. And it's kind of got an expiration date on it because that type of synthetic fertilizer process destroys topsoil. And so that will not go on forever, you know. And so within this whole thing, getting intellectual property protected seed and fertilizer and insecticides, that's a great business model for the companies that run that. And there have been some impressive productivity increase considerations. But at present, the world produces 50% more food than what it eats. 50% of the food produced gets thrown away effectively. So even in theory, we could increase the global population by 50%. And if we just had better distribution than in theory, you could feed everybody. The problem with that is we don't need calories. We need nutrition. We need nutrient dense foods of which some of these products can play a part in it. You know, corn and rice and wheat and whatnot can play some of a part in this story. But it's also pretty clear that some amount of animal products, be that from grazing animals or sea fish or insects even, have to probably play some role in human nutrition or it's very, very difficult to tick all the boxes and make that work. And again, if the same entities that are producing prodigious amounts of industrial row crop food are also tied into our hyperpalatable junk food industry. And those folks then are tied in with government and, you know, media, social media and whatnot. I forget the exact date on this, but there was a transfer of over $600 million between GlaxoSmithKline and Google. And I forget which direction it went, like Google buying GlaxoSmithKline or GlaxoSmithKline investing in Goa. I forget which direction it went. But basically the transfer then created the situation where some business analysts made the case that Google is now effectively like a pharmaceutical company. And a big wing of that pharmaceutical angle is in this genetically modified or patentable food. Again, I don't even really care personally about the genetic modification. I don't think that people are going to grow three arms or anything like that. But I am really concerned that it can become illegal to hold your own seed. And like if genetically modified seed blows into a farmer's field and then somebody comes through and tests it and says, hey, that's patented stuff you have there. You either owe us a royalty or we're going to sue you. That's super fucked up. And it's really, really dangerous. And that happens. Yeah. And again, these companies that patent these GMOs are very powerful and massive lobbies. They have incredible influence. And again, to my knowledge, until now, right? Who knows what's going to happen in the future? We don't have patented cows or pigs that we're making. I think there are some, but it's really rare. Like there's some really rare circumstances. It definitely doesn't lend itself the same way that like 50 different varieties of like rice or something like that can have these really specific patents supplied to them. Got it. Yeah, no, great. That's a great conversation there. Now I want to move change directions to talk about this product. And, you know, I think it was a couple, a few months ago, we got a package sent here at Mime Pump Studios from you. And, you know, I looked at it and I said, oh, it's okay, it's electrolytes. And, you know, it wasn't, you know, whatever, not that, not excited. And then I looked a little deeper. I knew it was from you. And I said, well, you know, Rob knows his stuff. The guy is always impressive. So let me take a closer look. And it's interesting. So very different from any other electrolyte drink that I've ever had. And I'll go over some of the statistics or some of the notes here for the audience. So, you know, a serving of your product has 200 milligrams of potassium, a decent amount, 60 milligrams of magnesium, that's about 15% of the RDA. Here's where it's different. A thousand milligrams of sodium. Now according to the RDA, that's 45% of the sodium that they recommend, which we can get into here in a second. I've never had an electrolyte supplement with that much sodium. Now here's the interesting thing. I used it and I've never also noticed a performance enhancement from electrolytes. And I did a little digging and it's from the sodium. So let's get a little deeper into this. Number one, let's talk about the RDA for sodium. Because when you look at it, 45% of my sodium. Holy cow, if I have two of these, I can't have any more salt for the day. Like what's that all about? It's interesting. So we know that sodium plays a factor in hypertension. So in hypertension is a major factor in cardiovascular disease. The bugger about this is it's kind of a guilt by association. In general, highly processed foods tend to carry sodium with it. And highly processed foods tend to be hyper palatable. You overeat, you get insulin resistant. And then when you're insulin resistant, we tend to retain sodium. And this is where, you know, there've been so many low sodium studies looking at their effect on hypertension and they just don't change things. It'll bring like the really, really aggressive like zero sodium diets will bring blood pressure down two to five points. Like it's just not that impressive. And it's because when an individual is hyperinsulinemic, their insulin is by definition elevated, but then a hormone called aldosterone is elevated and you tend to retain whatever sodium is there. And so, you know, I think that it was kind of some good intentions thinking about like, well, hypertension is this major vector in cardiovascular disease, both stroke and heart attack. So we need to do something about that. And you do, but the irony is that what you need to do is figure out a way of eating so that you don't overeat, so that you're not hypertensive and insulin resistant. Low carb diets are a great way to do that. They're not the only way to achieve that end goal. But what we find is that when people eat in a way where they're not insulin resistant, their blood pressure tends to drop and normalize and can drop to the point where people can go from seated to standing and get kind of lightheaded. And this is where folks then need to introduce more sodium into their diet. And there was a fascinating study that looked at the sodium consumption and morbidity and mortality within type 2 diabetic heart patients. And so they were looking at the renal excretion of sodium which basically tells you how much these folks are consuming and it tracked these folks over time and looked at their morbidity and mortality. Do they get sicker? Do they die? And there was a U-shaped curve where at very low intake of sodium, 2 grams or below, morbidity and mortality was very, very high. Total morbidity and mortality got the low ebb in this sick population at about 5 grams of sodium per day. And then you had to get out to nearly 8 to 10 grams of sodium per day to be as at risk for complications, including death and illness, as at 2 grams per day. So the low ebb was 5 grams. The 2 grams was more dangerous than 8 grams in general for people. And so we were kind of noodling on that and because we do tend to work with a lot of folks in kind of the keto, low carb, paleo space, we started doing some research around that. And if somebody is prescribed a medically supervised ketogenic diet, what the dietitian will do is make sure that they get an array of electrolytes but specifically they get at least 5 grams of sodium per day. So this was kind of another benchmark there. And then we did some poking around in the more mainstream literature around athletic performance in the American Council for Sports Medicine. And this depends on the size of the athlete in a particular circumstance that they're in, but high motor athletes, warm environments, humidity, sodium demands can be as high as 7 to 10 grams per day. So we had this kind of 5 to 10 grams being this kind of bracketed area that we used to make a case that this is both safe and potentially where we see an ergogenic effect. We then looked at the diet records of about 300 people using chronometer and we looked at the calcium, magnesium, potassium, and sodium that these folks were getting from a generally whole food-based diet and eating a little bit on the lower carb side of things. And what we found is that people were totally ticking the boxes on calcium. They were a little bit deficient in magnesium, similar on potassium, like they could use a little bit of help there, but where they were really woefully deficient was the sodium. And what's interesting about that is that the kidneys, if given adequate sodium, do a pretty darn good job of sorting things out from there, but if you don't have enough sodium, it becomes really difficult for the kidneys to function properly and by extension really for your physiology to work well. Folks don't really realize, but we have more sodium in our extracellular fluids and more potassium intracellularly, and it's that sodium-potassium gradient that drives ATP production and nerve impulses and muscle contractions and what have you. And again, the more dangerous state is too low of sodium. But again, it's problematic because so many people eat these highly processed, high sodium diets in conjunction with a kind of a high insulin environment. So what we're finding, or a recommendation is if somebody's eating a pretty highly processed diet and they're getting a lot of sodium and it's kind of a high insulin load as a consequence of that, they probably don't need an element. It probably isn't a good fit unless, again, they're super high motor and they're doing a lot of physical activity. But if you've cleaned up your diet at all and you have kind of a more modest insulin load and you're active at all, there's a pretty good case to be made that this supplement, which really that is what the goal is. It should just be filling the gaps of what we should otherwise be getting from a largely whole, unprocessed diet. Yeah, what I noticed from it, and I eat a pretty good diet, very, very low in processed foods and I always salt my food because I know that the benefits of having sodium, I noticed if I don't do that, I just don't feel as good, I don't have the same. But when I used Element, I got better pumps while I was lifting. It was pretty remarkable. I also noticed that when I fast, every few months or so, I'll practice a 48-hour fast. And really, it's not any health reasons. I know there's health benefits to it, but the reason why I do it is more of a spiritual act to kind of disconnect from, or disconnect I should say from food for a couple of days just to kind of center myself or whatever. But I noticed when I do that, I have to add salt to my water or I get dizzy and I don't feel good. So when I fast, it helps quite a bit. The other benefit, of course, is it tastes good. Your element tastes good and there's no calories. You get to put these electrolytes in your drink and it tastes really good. So what's happening for the pumps? Why am I getting better pumps when I use Element before and during my workouts? So you're definitely getting more fluid volume because of the sodium. And that's a transient deal. The kidneys, again, will kind of sort that out and will reestablish homeostasis. But sodium is really critical for a pump. And this is why oftentimes when folks go to a lower carb diet, they will notice feeling kind of flat and it's kind of hard to get a pump. But even in that circumstance, if folks properly supplement with sodium, they'll get pumps pretty much on par with when they were more, you know, higher carb fed. But it's interesting aside, we saw a ton of buy-in and interest from different elements of the breastfeeding mom's community online. We just started getting tagged in these forums and the moms were like, this is what I pumped today. And then I took this element and then, you know, there was one bottle with barely anything in it and the next day was like four bottles full. And there's interesting pieces to that. The adequate sodium suppresses cortisol. So it tends to kind of drive down that adrenal response. So epinephrine tends to drop, cortisol tends to drop. It increases fluid volume. And so for these breastfeeding moms, just drinking water doesn't hydrate them because hydration means the water and the electrolyte. You have to have the electrolyte in there because it's this electrochemical gradient that is really the purpose behind the whole thing. And so just drinking more water doesn't really help with breast milk production. It can actually hurt it because they get hyperhydrated and end up with hyponatremia, low sodium. And so the body then puts the brakes on the whole process of producing breast milk, elevates cortisol and epinephrine to try to create a situation where you retain sodium via other mechanisms besides just the aldosterone. So there's a couple of different angles on that where you could see a performance improvement and then anything that is like a vascular delivery problem, whether that's breast milk production or training ends up getting improved because of the proper sodium intake. Yeah, you're blowing my mind right now because I have a newborn at home and my wife breast feeds. She eats a very unprocessed diet as well. Her blood pressure is low anyway. And since she started breastfeeding, it's really low where she gets dizzy when she stands up and she's trying to drink water. And I'm like, right now as we're talking, lights are popping off for me. I'm like, oh, I need to put some of this in her water. That'll probably make a huge difference. I also want to refer back to what you were talking about with the Guilty by Association. You know what that reminds me of? It reminds me of those early studies on coffee. Back in the day, there were studies that showed that drinking coffee could cause cancer. And we all know now that coffee is anti-cancerous. It's a fact. It's actually high in antioxidants, reduces cancer risk in particular in the liver. Very healthy for you. But back then, the studies showed that it caused cancer. The reason why is because they never separated coffee drinking from cigarette smoking. And back in those days, if you drank coffee, you smoked cigarettes. And so they didn't separate the two. So are you going to have high blood pressure and heart disease if you eat a lot of heavily processed foods? Yeah. Are they also high in sodium? Yeah. So we got to separate the two. Right. And so that makes a lot of sense. I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah. And just as an aside, like in some of these things are very anecdotal observational, but the traditional Japanese diet folks consume in the range of 10 to 12 grams of sodium a day is like their miso and soy sauce and all this stuff. And until their diet has become more westernized and more processed, they had no issues with increased rates of, they had lower rates of cardiovascular disease, less heart attack, less stroke. Blood pressures were generally lower, although they were still poo-pooed for consuming that amount of sodium. But even in this very starch and carbohydrate based diet, it was a diet and lifestyle practice that did not lend itself to insulin resistance. So that sodium intake was kind of a non-issue. It only become a bit more of an issue as the Japanese diet starts taking on more and more elements of the more western diet, which is honestly a lot more like kind of liquid sugar type options like sugary beverages and whatnot. Right. And then we start seeing more problems. Right. Now, when you're talking about, just for the audience, when you're talking about grams and you're saying things like five grams, six grams, whatever, that's 5,000 milligrams. Yes. I referred to your packet as having 1,000 milligrams, maybe one gram. One gram. One gram. In comparison, when you look at the other electrolyte drinks and stuff that are out there, how different is that between yours and theirs? It varies. There are some that I think get this story a little bit better. There are some that in my opinion go exactly the wrong direction. Like they have more potassium than sodium. And I think that that actually is very, very problematic. And it's funny because we've had people say, hey, you guys got this all backwards. Now, granted, we could be wrong, but it's a lot of work, founding a company and spinning up a formulation and getting distribution and doing all this stuff. And I'm like, hey, man, I really appreciate the insight here, but we're good. We did this for a purpose. It wasn't a mistake. We're not idiots. So it varies. There are some products out there that are pretty good. Like they really understand the importance of sodium in this story. And then there's other ones where they've got like vitamin C and zinc. And it's like this kitchen sink approach. And clearly some, in my opinion, the folks formulating those things, they didn't sit down and just start at like first principles of, hey, let's read a book on renal physiology as it relates to electrolytes and really get steeped in that because observationally, we were seeing some very cool things clinically. It's like, wow, people were dragging ass. And you know, it's funny, like in the low carb scene, there's associations with like kind of thyroid dysregulation and adrenocortical dysregulation, like HPTA axis dysregulation. When you really dig into that and you look at the role that sodium could play in that, like we started noticing that if people were having those problems inevitably they were not getting adequate sodium. And again, I love low carb diets. I don't think they're the right thing for everybody, but to the degree that people were having problems and then they properly address sodium, they didn't have problems anymore. And I'm a great example of that. Like I was having a hell of a time fueling Brazilian jujitsu on a low carb diet. Like I would have to sneak in some carbs and then I would get kind of on a carb roller coaster. And when I finally did diligence on getting adequate sodium like I have a great low end gear, like I can go hard and I can go long and so it ended up solving a lot of that stuff. So it is interesting that I think it's funny that the science is actually well established there when you pair it all away and just get down to what really does like the guidance textbook of physiology type stuff have to say on this. But then you get to what society and media and social media all say about this. And it's so contrary to what the science is there's almost been this like force field around us where people have products already, they have spun up new products and it's like they can't quite get the formula right because they just can't wrap their head around what we're doing with that which is kind of cool on the one hand but also kind of crazy on the other but it definitely was gone into with intent and a lot of research and we continue to kind of tweak and iterate but we had a really cool opportunity with this where the genesis of the company was really, initially we were just serving people online and we created this make it at home option we called it keto aid and it was basically used this much salt this much no salt which is potassium chloride and then a little bit of magnesium citrate do some lemon juice and some stevia and you've got a no carb thing and we had like half a million downloads from this thing like it was very, very popular and people reported feeling way better and their workouts and general performance but then people started tagging us on social media and they're like hey guys love the keto aid but when I was going through TSA they didn't like my three bags of white powder lol and then we were like okay maybe there's an opportunity for kind of a stick pack convenient option here because I mean we were just getting tagged on these social media things of people getting danged while traveling and so that was really the genesis for the whole idea but we identified a need and did a freemium option to meet the need it's like hey guys by hook or by crook just get enough electrolyte specifically sodium about a half million people did that and said that they really enjoyed it and so then we were able to basically vet that there was a legit you know market need in this versus just like man I wonder if this thing would be cool you know so we ended up backing into this thing in kind of an interesting way and honestly the first flavor that we had is kind of a classic citrus salt thing and we formulated it so if it sucked or died as an electrolyte it could be spun off as a margarita drink base because it tasted amazing with that so that was we figured it would either do pretty well or it would like be like a plane into a mountainside and so far knock on wood it's gone well and people really we've had a lot of loyalty around it because people get a lot of benefit from it that's hilarious anybody who anybody by the way when you were bringing up the potassium versus sodium thing anybody who you know questions that just look at the the issues that bodybuilders have had in the past and the deaths that are the results of low sodium potassium sparing deretic uses the classic I remember I think I remember what year it was 1996 I think Paul Dillett seizing up on stage and having to be carried off because because of too much potassium not enough sodium but I do want to say I do want to say this Rob you sold me on electrolytes like I honestly literally we got the box I'm like oh electrolytes are whatever big deal but because it was you I gave it a shot and I know legit notice performance enhanced enhancement from in fact we here at the studio we've been working out in the morning together and they see me every morning grab a packet put it in my water and I notice enhanced performance so you sold me and it wasn't an easy sell like I said I had preconceived notions and I was definitely sold on it thanks so much for coming on let me talk to you you're I mean you're one of my favorite people in the space I love the way you present things I love the way you you look at things from every angle you are an evidence evidence-based person and again I know this is going to sound you know whatever but I got sold on electrolytes electrolyte powders have been around forever yours actually improved my performance so I wanted to get you on to kind of talk about why it was so much more effective so I appreciate you coming on huge honor and just a huge fan of everything mind pump and I'm stoked to see you guys expanding and doing more there's just so much talent with you guys and curiosity and it's really cool to see you guys continuing to expand beyond what you've already done great work so I'm stoked to see where you guys are taking all this well thank you very much we're thinking about you know selling our programs to Bitcoin now because we're trying to move away from you know just protect ourselves a little bit but that's a joke by the way that's a joke Google I'm just kidding anyway thanks for coming on Rob I appreciate it take care I ask you is this your first maps program or did you start with maps and a ball look like what's your fitness history before this is my first okay and then my first math now were you working out a lot before maps aesthetic yeah I worked out for a while now I grew up with gymnastics and then I got into lifting heavy