The very first vegetarians became such for religious and moral reasons. In America, those religious vegetarians felt eating animals would lead to sins of the flesh. When John Harvey Kellogg invented Corn Flakes, he described it as a morning “anti-masturbatory meal.” Might explain why I’m not a cereal person.

Vegetarians continue to justify their diet with moral arguments, which like Kellogg’s breakfast cereal, have very little impact upon people. Then they tried health as a motivator, that vegetarian diets were better for you than eating red meat. Each and every one of those health arguments against eating meat has been subsequently disproven. In fact, as cow consumption has decreased, obesity in the United States has increased.

The latest moral argument has to do with global warming, that cows produce methane which leads to more global warming and it is the right and moral thing to do, so the vegetarians say, to eat fewer cows.

Today, we will tackle that debate. Does eating cow increase global warming? We will show how you raise cows may actually decrease greenhouse gases. In other words, it isn’t the cow. It is the how.

My name is Dr. Terry Simpson, and this is Culinary Medicine, where we sort out the crazy from credible about food, from its source to its effect on your body, busting myths and showing evidence where food can be medicine.

Cows are ruminants. Their stomach has four parts, unlike the human stomach that has one part. That unique cow anatomy allows a cow to digest foods that humans can’t, like grass, bush, leaves, twigs, and shrubs. Those bits go to the first part of the cows’ stomachs, where bacteria help it bring down the cellulose. And, as a byproduct of bacteria’s digestion is methane gas. After the bacteria break it down, the cow burps. Up comes what we call cud, or ruminant. The cow then chews the cud and swallows the cud into another stomach. It is the cow burp that is the source of methane, not the other end of the cow.

Methane is a greenhouse gas, meaning as methane rises in the atmosphere, it serves as a blanket over the earth. The sun heats the earth’s surface. That heat is reflected back into the atmosphere. But the earth’s infrared heat is reflected back again on the earth by gases. These gases act like a greenhouse and warm the earth just a bit more.

You’ve heard about carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas we worried about, but methane is also a greenhouse gas. The greenhouse gas effect is indisputable science and was actually first proven in 1896 by the Swedish scientist and Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius, who described how greenhouse gas influenced the climate.

Cows can increase greenhouse gas, which is why some say we should cut down on eating meat, less cows. To decrease greenhouse gases. But that, as we shall learn, is only one-half, and not the most important part, of the equation.

Russ Conser: 

We published a paper in 2016 in the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation in response to a paper that had been in Nature saying we need to cut half of the ruminant animals off of the world’s landscapes in order to save the planet. And what we did in that Journal of Soil and Water Conservation paper was demonstrate that, hey, you might be able to tweak the edges of planetary health by reducing the number of ruminants in current practices, but alternatively, if you manage those ruminants differently on landscape in a way that rebuilds soil health, you can actually turn them into a very strong net benefit to the environment.

So the thing that has been demonized as the source of great evil from an environmental perspective turns out to be one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal to create good if we manage it differently.

Terry Simpson:

That is Russ Conser, an engineer who spends time looking at the environment. He’s also chairman of an organization called Grass-Fed Exchange.

So when the study came out saying that we should eat vegetables, and as a planet-saving measure, give up meat, I thought I would ask Russ how this works.

Russ Conser:

If you kind of go into little linear silos in hallowed halls of academia and come up with numbers and put them in massive spreadsheets, it’s very plausible you can come to a conclusion, but if you lose sight of all the interrelationships between things, you’ve missed the bigger picture. One of the things I like to say is, “It’s not the cow. It’s the how.” And this isn’t a recent phenomena. It’s something we’ve been doing for thousands of years. Unintentionally, how we’ve been managing livestock on landscapes has impaired and impeded the functioning of healthy soils that allowed high-quality, nutrient-rich animal species to be produced on landscape.

As a result of that, you get all of these numbers associated with poorer use of land, increasing use of methane emissions, and they all add up to, you know, we better stop doing that. First of all, it’s probably important to say that in most cases, that how bad even that system is is significantly exaggerated. You’ll see numbers repeated, kind of urban legend or myths, between 14 and 18% of overall planetary CO2 emissions, and that leads people to jump to such conclusions that they’re significant.

The reality is those numbers are closer to 7 or 8%, even in the worst case, so the problem is probably about half as bad as people lead you to believe it is in the first place, but then what they miss, very importantly … And this is, it’s kind of in the field of like the human microbiome research. It’s things perhaps our ancestors knew, unscientifically, but our scientific world is only beginning to appreciate in the last, even 5 years, is that we can manage animals on landscapes in a way that not only make them less bad, but actually turn them into what I would say is more good.

Terry Simpson:

The other half the equation, Conser says, is the growth phase of plants that the cows eat. In order to grow, the plant takes carbon dioxide out of the air, and with sunlight and something called photosynthesis, makes more plant. The plant effectively traps carbon dioxide, and the cow eats the plant, then concentrates its nutrients. Every step of the way, the nutrients become more dense. This beautiful cycle, carbon dioxide-plant, plant to cow, cow to human, a cycle of life that starts with carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and takes it out of the atmosphere. It also happens when you mow your lawn.

Russ Conser:

But if you mow it just right, you keep it in that growth stage. Effectively, what you’re doing is capturing more solar energy in the plant itself as it’s growing, and the process of that plant growing is also cycling energy in that system, as well. So we’re doing a better job of capturing and monetizing or putting to work that solar energy. And carbon just happens to be the currency by which that happens, right? I’m sure you know that photosynthesis creates sugars by taking CO2 and water and running them through the biological process to create that sugar.

The other part, though, isn’t intuitive to a lot of people, is to appreciate that the way the plant gets nutrients, its own nutrient acquisition strategy, if you will, is that roots leak. Roots exude a heavy backbone of sugars, but also with other rich secondary compounds that send signals to the microbes in the soil that go out and that mine and cycle all these nutrients and bring them back to the plant so the plant can grow. So every time you mow the grass, the grass says, “Hey, I need more nutrients so I can grow again.” It exudes a little bit of sugar that goes out and feeds this microbial ecosystem that brings back nutrients so you can grow more grass. And in the process of managing, let’s call it mowing, or in an animal, livestock thing it would be grazing, where there’s a bunch of other benefits, you’re effectively catalyzing and stimulating this nutrient cycle.

It does lead to an accumulation of carbon in the soil, and this is where a lot of the big benefit comes, but it’s not because it’s trapped per se. It’s because it’s carbon that’s being put to work, so it’s like money that’s circulating in an economy because it’s been loaned as opposed to gold locked in Fort Knox. That carbon that builds up in the soil is participating in this nutrient economy that’s helping forage grass grow, and the participation of the animal in that ecosystem is what’s stimulating or catalyzing this benefit through this grazing and pulsing that keeps the plants growing and pumping nutrients into the soil all the time.

Terry Simpson:

Let us contrast that with a field of beans. Beans, legumes, are a great source of plant protein. So if we get rid of cows, we’d grow more beans. So what happens if we grow more beans? Is this more effective than a cow at decreasing greenhouse gas?

Russ Conser:

Once again, it’s the how. Soy doesn’t rhyme with how as well, but yeah, so when we plant fields of soybeans, where we till it up, basically what we’re doing is decomposing the carbon, and then when we spray it, we kill weeds, but we also kill microbes. We end up with a system that’s a monoculture, and it’s only seasonally present in a system. Every time I drive past a field, it’s bare soil when it’s between cropping seasons. As an energy guy, I think of it as the equivalent of a solar oil spill, if you will. It’s energy that’s falling from the sky, and it’s just spilling out over a barren landscape and not being caught by growing life.

I once did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation of, if I just took the fallow period, bare-soil period of land in the United States, there is more solar energy that would have been caught in a growing plant that is being spilled, than the combined sum total of coal, oil, and natural gas that we produce in this country every year combined. So it’s massive, massive amounts of energy that we’re failing to capture in growing life when we don’t have a plant there to catch it.

In this case, it is how the cow is raised. This means the more time a cow is raised on a pasture, the more it’s trapping carbon dioxide.

Once again, it’s not the cow, it’s the how. So depending on which steak you choose to eat, you get a different outcome. The good news here is the choices the consumers make every day are a really big powerful lever. If they want to eat meat, if they choose to eat meat that has been grown in a way that builds healthy soil, they will not only get a more nourishing and nutrient-dense product for themselves, they will in the process of having participated in that economy itself, they would have improved the environment, not impaired the environment. And that’s something that’s really hard to do if you don’t work in an ecosystem with animals, especially ruminants.

Terry Simpson:

Cows raised on grass, or pasture, and finished in a feedlot provide a net loss of carbon dioxide from the earth’s atmosphere. The second part about the equation. But what about the nutrition?

Diana Rodgers:

And I think one of the biggest problems with the EAT-Lancet report is that it is too low in protein, and the protein that they are recommending, through plants, require a lot more calories and a lot more carbohydrates. So in a 4-ounce sirloin steak, you can get about 30 grams of protein for 180 calories with no carbs. Or in 4 ounces of kidney beans, it would be 144 calories. So slightly less calories, but you’re only getting 9 grams of protein and 18 grams of carbs, but those 9 grams of protein are not the same quality as the proteins in steak.

So in order to get 30 grams of protein from beans and rice, you need to combine, you know, no plants are nutritionally adequate as far as all the amino acids … You would have to eat almost 340 calories’ worth of beans and rice and 122 grams of carbs, and it’s almost a pound of food, so you’ve got 12 ounces of rice plus 12 ounces of kidney beans, plus a cup of rice. That’s a lot of food, and that’s just what I recommend for one meal, 30 grams of protein, so try getting a hundred grams of protein throughout the whole day eating plant-based proteins. You’re going to way overdo it on your calories and carbs.

Terry Simpson:

That is-

Diana Rodgers:

My name’s Diana Rodgers. I’m a registered dietitian living outside of Boston on a working organic vegetable and pasture-raised meat farm. I have a clinical practice where I help people, mostly with their metabolic health and intestinal issues. And then I also do a lot of work in the sustainability space with food policy and trying to vindicate meat.

Terry Simpson :

Meat is not only nutrient-dense, but the protein requirements increase as you age.

Diana Rodgers:

We know that anyone over 40 can’t really build a lot of new muscle. That’s when muscle loss starts. And so falls and other problems are directly related to muscle loss in our bodies and the only way to maintain healthy muscle is to actually eat animal muscles, so I really don’t feel that a meat-free diet is nutritionally adequate. It’s just proven that it can’t be. The diet that EAT-Lancet is recommending would require a lot of supplements and is nutritionally deficient, and not everybody is a rich European that can afford fake processed and ultra processed meat products and industrial seed oils.

Terry Simpson:

So what happens if we get rid of all the animals from our diet?

Diana Rodgers:

There was a really good study published in PNAS that showed what would happen if we eliminated all animals from the food system, and not only would overall calories and carbohydrate intake increase, as well as nutrient deficiencies would increase, but our overall emissions would only go down about 2.5% if we eliminated all animals. The cost of that would be pretty huge, and what EAT-Lancet is not taking into account, that a lot of people don’t realize, is that emissions is a pretty unfair marker to just, you know, look at when you’re talking about the benefit that animals can have in our food system.

So cows don’t just emit methane. They actually can help sequester carbon. They are eating food we can’t digest, like grasses, on land we can’t farm for other purposes, so they’re on rangeland and pasture, which you can’t just crop every inch of earth’s soil with wheat and corn and rice. And so there’s a lot of reasons for that. There’s rocky terrain. There’s hilly terrain. There’s not enough water. There’s poorer soil quality. But what does do well on most of the earth’s surface that we use for food production are grazing animals, and if there aren’t grazing animals on it, the land can actually turn into a desert, and we’re seeing that all the time. There aren’t enough wild herds anymore, like we used to have, you know, buffaloes all over North America, and that’s how the bread basket got so fertile. It wasn’t because farmers were growing kale or wheat for thousands of years. It was because there were buffalo grazing and pooping on the ground.

And so we actually really need animals as part of healthy ecosystems, and farmland should be looked at as an ecosystem, and there are no monocrop soy fields in nature. But what we do see in nature are grasslands with ruminant animals on it, and a large diverse population of other animals, too. I mean, when you visit a well-managed cattle ranch or bison ranch, you see lots of different species of plants growing. You see tons of pollinators. You see lots of birds. You see healthy rivers and ponds. When I go see a monocrop corn or soy field, I’m not seeing those things. I’m just seeing acre after acre of one type of plant that’s usually heavily sprayed and creating tons of problems for the environment.

Terry Simpson:

A study saying we should give up meat or give up some meat only looks at part of the equation. Cows and other ruminants like my favorite red meat, lamb, help to sequester more greenhouse gases than they produce. Plus, those animals are more nutrient-dense than any plant. What an omnivore has that a vegan does not is the power of the marketplace. When an omnivore spends their money eating food that is pasture-raised, like grass-fed beef or my favorite, lamb, they are putting money not only into a system that is being a good steward of how the animal is raised, but they are decreasing carbon dioxide in the environment.

Vegans and vegetarians have opted out of that system.

Two final points. Methane is a greenhouse gas, breaks down over time. Carbon dioxide does not. So the trade of a lot of carbon dioxide for a bit of methane is a good trade. Second, most of the methane in our environment, in our atmosphere, does not come from ruminants like cows and sheep. Most methane comes from fossil fuels and fracking.

Did you ever go by an oil refinery? Did you see that burn-off of methane? Well, most of the methane doesn’t burn off. It escapes into the atmosphere. Fracking has increased even more methane into our atmosphere. Do the math. The number of ruminants that are consumed has gone down. Methane in the environment has increased. So has fracking. The answer? Drive more hybrids, and eat better meat.

On a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is total nonsense and 1 is great, eating pasture- raised meat for the environment is a solid 1.5.

Special thanks to Russ Conser and Diana Rodgers for lending their comments to today’s show. And of course, thanks to you for listening to this episode of Culinary Medicine with me, Dr. Terry Simpson. Here comes the doctor disclaimer: While I am a doctor, I am not your doctor. And you should always seek the advice of a trusted, licensed medical provider with experience in your particular condition or concern before taking any action.

If you are my patient, then this should be burned on the fleshy tables of your heart. Oh, and if you like this podcast, please do give us a kind review and rate us. Culinary Medicine is a part of the Your Doctor’s Orders Network, and you can find this post and references on YourDoctorsOrders.com. It is produced and distributed by our friends at Simpler Media. My executive producer is the talented and charitable @producergirl from ProducerGirl Productions. You can follow me on Twitter, where I’m @DrTerrySimpson.

I’ll be back next time, when we’ll have another conversation about food as medicine, or unveil another food con. Until next time, don’t drink the water, drink the wine.

So Evo, you know next week what we’re going to try? What is described as the best vegetarian burger. I’m buying. We will compare the Impossible Burger to a real burger and see if it’s all what it’s cowed up to be.

Evo Terra:

Yeah. I see what you did there.