

Welcome to Salty Talk. This is a special edition of Healthy Rebellion Radio. Each week on Salty Talk Robb will do a deep dive into current health and performance news, mixed with an occasional Salty conversation with movers and shakers in the world of research, performance, health, and longevity.

For the full the video presentation of this episode and to be a part of the conversation, join us in The Healthy Rebellion online community.

WARNING: These episodes may get “salty” with the occasional expletive.

In this latest episode of Salty Talk of The Healthy Rebellion Radio I address two critically important things:

1. Exposing the highly unethical things some of the biggest vegan movers and shakers are up to

2. The obvious collusion between some elements of academia and the socio-political phenomena that is modern veganism

Kettle & Fire makes the first USDA approved, shelf stable bone broth made with grass fed AND finished beef bones and organic pasture raised chicken bones. They are committed to making healthy food accessible to as many people as possible. Check them out at http://kettleandfire.com/saltytalk and use code SALTYTALK for 15% off.





SHOW NOTES

Backlash Over Meat Dietary Recommendations Raises Questions About Corporate Ties to Nutrition Scientists

Meat’s Bad for You! No, It’s Not! How Experts See Different Things in the Data

HPO podcast Prof. Gordon Guyatt

Texas A&M chancellor fires back at Harvard over criticism of controversial beef study

What’s the beef with red meat?

Dr. Dan Pardi leaves True Health Initiative

The veganism boom does more for food company profits than the planet

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Transcript:

Download transcript here (PDF)

Nicki: Welcome to the Healthy Rebellion Radio. This is an episode of Salty Talk. A deep dive into popular and relevant health and performance news pieces, mixed with the occasional salty conversation with movers and shakers in the world and research, performance, health and longevity. Healthy Rebellion Radio Salty Talk episodes are brought to you by Drink LMNT. The only electrolyte drink mix that’s salty enough to make a difference in how you look, feel and perform. We co-founded this company to fill a void in the hydration space. We needed an electrolyte drink that actually met the sodium needs of active people, low carb, keto and carnivore adherence, without any of the sugar colors and fillers found in popular commercial products. Health rebels, this is Salty Talk.

Nicki: Now the thing our attorney advises. The contents of this show are for entertainment and educational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical advice. Please consult licensed and credentialed functional medicine practitioner before embarking on any health, dietary or fitness change. Given that this is Salty Talk, you should expect the occasional expletive.

Nicki: Welcome folks to another episode of Salty Talk special edition of the Healthy Rebellion Radio. Hubbs.

Robb: Wife.

Nicki: You’re looking at me like…

Robb: I’m just impressed with her intros. It’s nice to not have to do that every single time.

Nicki: Yeah.

Robb: The beginning is the toughest thing whether it’s a book or a podcast or whatever, just getting it launched.

Nicki: Just got to open the door, say something.

Robb: It’s like letting the horse out of the barn door or something.

Nicki: What’s new?

Robb: Not too much, just navigating COVID the best I can.

Nicki: Navigating COVID. We are slightly frustrated with the app options for shopping lists during COVID, and… Well this was pre-COVID too, but one spouse goes to the grocery store to do the shopping and the other spouse likes to update the list and yes, this is first world problems stuff, but we were big fans of Wunderlist.

Robb: Wunderlist was pretty awesome. We used it for shopping, for planning trips, for birthdays, all kinds of stuff. Then Microsoft bought Wunderlist and similar to Skype, it went from being something that was useful and enjoyable to something that sucks.

Nicki: We’re trying a lot of other options out there. People keep throwing out different things.

Robb: Todoist.

Nicki: Todoist.

Robb: And To-Do.

Nicki: I tried one called Remember The Milk, but they all have like lots of extra fluffy features that are… we don’t need.

Robb: Wunderlist was cool because it was literally just a list sharing deal. It was super minimalist, and you there’s cool shit like Monday and Basecamp and all kinds of other stuff for organizing other things. But when you want to-

Nicki: When you want to make a list, and you want to just type something in and push enter and be-

Robb: –And have it sync.

Nicki: And sync to another person. Yeah, anyway, we’re totally going off the rails here but this has been a little bit of our frustrations…

Robb: This shows what the insanity that COVID can push people to. That we’re freaking the fuck out over this so…

Nicki: All right, let’s move on to… What’s our topic today hubbs?

Robb: Topic today is I’m calling it meat backlash. There were some really fascinating news pieces actually several months ago now looking at some of the key players in how do I say this the mainstream nutrition circles, the very vegan centric nutrition circles. Dr. David Katz, Dr. William Willett. Both, I believe, of Harvard. Willett is definitely from Harvard. Members of this thing called the True Health Initiative, which sounds great but is basically Orwellian newspeak for veganism or nada. There was a right recent paper that suggested that eating meat was not dangerous to health, not particularly injurious to the environment, and it is shocking the lengths that these people went to try to get this information suppressed. It included effectively, what falls under the designation of domestic terrorism, like using paid bots to blow up the inbox of researchers that were involved with either the publication or the formation of these papers, or what have you.

Robb: An amazing amount of chicanery and questionable shit as has gone on with this. It’s interesting timing, because we’re looking now within this COVID perspective at the pretty rough state of our populace at large. In the United States in particular, we have a lot of people that are metabolically unhealthy and this is part of the reason why this situation is so dire. I will say that prior to COVID there were all kinds of really quaint things like, “Oh man meat in a lab is going to save the world,” and, animal husbandry is the driver of climate change. Now we’ve got a little bit of rear view mirror within this situation of shutting down most of transportation. All of a sudden carbon dioxide levels are dropping, even though cows are still burping and farting, and do all the stuff that they typically do.

Robb: In fact, it’s exposing… and again, we’ve had this discussion in the past where I’m hesitant to say the lies. But that’s apparently what floats these days, because having any attempt at nuance or like, “Well, this seems to be the best support of the data, it just doesn’t really fucking hold water anymore.” It’s lies, it’s bullshit or at a minimum, it’s misguided individuals possibly with good intention but who are horribly ill informed and are pushing agendas ranging from our food system to dietary guidelines that are really flawed. And not just flawed, what we’re seeing here is that some really bad stuff went down, and these people behaved in ways that got them kicked off of say like the right to receive academic preprints for scientific journals, because they did not follow the guidelines that these institutions lay down for them.

Robb: They operate with impunity, they act as if their position, this kind of vegan centric position is so fucking righteous that the rules don’t apply to them. I just hope that we can start looking at this for what it is. There are all kinds of challenges and problems on the meat production side of this story. I totally acknowledge that. That we are working And against those things as well. But when you present the only solution as planet of the vegans, and that ends up being wrong for health, wrong for environmental reasons, and then it is so wrong that you need to lie cheat and steal to get this idea forward, then there might be some problems with that.

Nicki: Just might be. I find it apropos that I’m wearing my… it’s not the cow it’s the how-

Robb: Indeed.

Nicki: … t-shirt, the seared cow t-shirt today. Let’s jump in to the episode.

Robb: Cool. Hey rebels hope you all are doing well. There’s been an interesting news piece or news pieces that popped up around, oh man like it’s a complex thing as all this stuff is I guess, but just the dietary guidelines. You know how these things are constantly seemingly evolving. Although I can’t say that it really goes any specific direction. one day we have a study that says that meat’s gonna kill you, and the next day, we have a study that says that it’s not. But January 15th, in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, there was a paper released that was a commentary on a whole host of events around dietary recommendations related to meat. The title of this one was Backlash Over Meat Dietary Recommendations Raises Questions About Corporate Ties to Nutrition Scientists, and this was written by Rita Rubin. It’s a pretty fascinating story, and I meant to jump in and start talking about this straight out, but the story has grown and evolved, and it has some pretty interesting twists and turns.

Robb: It’s kind of the… Man how would you say it? The battle lines in the planet of the vegan wars that are currently occurring. That may sound like a dramatic way to say this, but when you look at the efforts that are being made to alter the trajectory of our food production systems, the way that school lunch programs are handled, and a lot of these things or messes, like they’re not great as it is. But the push here is that a movement towards planet of the vegans, which I don’t have any other way to say that. Like they call it plant based, which I think is a smarmy misdirection. The reality is these folks are pushing for a vegan based diet. Plant based can mean a lot of different things. When these people say plant based they’re not saying paleo with 60% of your calories, 70% of your calories coming from root, shoots, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds.

Robb: What they’re saying is that any amount of animal product consumption at all will shorten your life, and it makes you morally inferior, and it’s going to destroy the planet. People will say that there’s consensus on this. There may be consensus within certain circles, but as we’ll see with this, consensus is really slippery topic or term to be used. Within scientific circles, I think that it’s a very rare circumstances, like when you’re talking about gravity, and physics and some things like that, like we have some pretty good consensus positions. We have remarkable ability to create predictive models and then input some data and then make a prediction based off the input of data about where the system is going to go. Nutrition is pretty far afield from that. It is not remotely similar.

Robb: So anyway, I’m going to read some of the pieces that appeared both in this JAMA article, and there’s a few other articles that I’m going to be pulling from. I’m going to read some of the direct quotes and material from the pieces and then put in a little… hopefully a little bit of color commentary here and there. But from this piece, it’s almost unheard of for medical journals to get blowback for studies before the data are published. But that’s what happened to the Annals of Internal Medicine last fall. As editors were about to post several studies showing that the evidence linking red meat consumption to cardiovascular disease and cancer is too weak to recommend that adults eat less of it.

Robb: This was… Yeah, well I’ll just keep plowing forward, it gets interesting. Annals editor in chief Christine Laine, MD NPH saw her inbox flooded with roughly 2000 emails, most bored the same message apparently generated by a bot in a half hour. Laine’s inbox had to be shut down she said. Not only was the volume unprecedented in her decade at the helm of the respected journal, the tone of the emails was particularly caustic. This is a quote from lane. “We’ve published a lot on firearm injury prevention,” Laine said. “The response from the NRA, the National Rifle Association was less vitriolic than the response from the True Health Initiative.” We’re going to be hearing a lot about the True Health Initiative, and it’s not dissimilar from the PCRM. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

Robb: They’ve picked a really piffy acronym that seems to provide some moral and intellectual high ground, but we’ll see how these folks conduct themselves as we go along. The True Health Initiative is a nonprofit funded and headed by David Katz, MD. The group’s website describes its work as quote, fighting fake facts and combating the false doubts to create a world free of preventable diseases. Using the time honored evidence base fundamentals of lifestyle and medicine, sounds pretty good. I probably wouldn’t argue with any of that at the surface at the mechanistic level of what they would actually recommend doing. There’s probably a pretty good divergence.

Robb: But the article goes on Walter Willett MD, Dr. Frank Hu MD of Harvard nutrition researchers who are among the top names in their field serve on the True Health Initiative Council of directors. If you’ve followed the nutrition game at all for any length of time, Walter Willett has been super influential in pushing these low fat, high carb dietary guidelines, and over the course of time, has become more and more, I guess, vegan leaning, vegan slanted. We see how this intellectual spiritual orientation plays out in the behavior and methods used to push their agenda. Kate Willett and Hu took the rare step of contacting Laine about retracting the studies prior to their publication, she recalled in an interview with JAMA. “Perhaps that’s not surprising. Some of the researchers have built their careers on nutritional epidemiology.” Laine said. “I can understand it’s upsetting when the limitations of your work are uncovered and discussed in the open.”

Robb: What’s being alluded to here is the fact that huge swaths of what occurs in nutrition potentially, I wouldn’t say all of it, but maybe 90% of what is done in nutritional research other than basic molecular biology activity, largely boils down to these epidemiology based studies, retrospective studies and whatnot. It’s not that these things are completely worthless but they are being held up as a quality of data that they simply don’t meet the sole quality and we’ll explore that here in a little bit. They’re held up as if they are of a quality of data that can suggest causative causality within certain situations and that’s simply not the case. Subsequent news coverage, criticize the methodology used in the meat papers, and raise the specter that some of the authors had financial ties to the beef industry, representing previously undisclosed conflicts of interest.

Robb: But what has for the most part been overlooked is that Katz in the True Health Initiative and many of its council members have numerous industry ties themselves. The difference is that their ties are primarily with companies and organizations that stand to profit if people eat less red meat and eat more plant based diet. Unlike the beef industry, these entities are surrounded by an aura of health and wellness, although that isn’t necessarily evidence based, and there was an emphasis in that not mine. The Annals published five systematic reviews for the included results from randomized clinical trials RCTs and observational studies examining the relationship between red meat and health, and a fifth that looked at health related values and preferences about eating meat. Based on the reviews, the author’s produced a guideline that concluded adults needn’t change their meat eating habits.

Robb: These folks got in and really took the best data that we have, which are randomized control trials, and looked at that for, is there any signal in the noise suggesting that meat consumption is deleterious to health both for cardiovascular events and cancer? They also included some of the more observational studies, and the net result was that if there is a signal there, it is so weak and so tenuous that they couldn’t in good faith, make a solid recommendation, really to reduce meat consumption. And then the company editorial co-authors Aaron Carroll MD and Daphne Doherty, PhD, wrote that the guideline is, quote, “sure to be controversial, but it is based on the most comprehensive review of the evidence to date.”

Robb: This is an interesting point. This stuff is always up for debate and consideration and whatnot. But these folks are making a claim that this is the most comprehensive data to date and very thorough analysis, and it didn’t go the way that the True Health Initiative, the vegan centric agenda wants. It’s interesting the tactics that they use to address this. Instead of handling it in a legitimate scientific forum, it’s pretty interesting the methodology that they used. Carol, a regular JAMA contributor who directs the Indiana University School of Medicine Center for Pediatric and Adolescent Comparative Effectiveness Research, also wrote in The New York Times about the difficulties involved in conducting high quality nutrition research. This is pretty similar to a lot of what’s been done. We’re going to hear from Dr. Ioannidis here in a little bit, some of his thoughts around this stuff.

Robb: But he basically has made the point that nutritional research is in desperate need of a revamp and a reorientation. In the show notes I’ll have links to the various articles that I’m using, but this is a piece from Aaron Carroll who did contributions in New York Times. Meat’s Bad for You! No, It’s Not! How Experts See Different Things in the Data. As the latest controversy over new research illustrates nutrition science can be open to interpretation. A study in the International Journal of cancer in 2012, found that men smoking More than 30 cigarettes a day had a 10,250% increased risk for developing squamous cell carcinoma. That’s pretty huge. An increase of 18% relative risk of 1.18 per process, meat consumption is not the same. This is what is really interesting. In general, if we don’t see an association above at least two, but more like five, it’s generally assumed to be noise.

Robb: But yet, in these association studies claiming that red meat increases cancer rates, or that eating an egg is as bad as smoking, we’re talking about, after a torturous fiddling with the data in food frequency questionnaires that have been recognized to have more error than data, that a tiny association emerges, and it’s being compared a 0.18% association and that’s relative risk, not absolute risk. The absolute risk in this story is actually about 1%. Where this 18% comes from, is that as a background experience or process within the United States and most westernized cultures, there’s about a 5% rate of colon cancer within these populations. What the claim was, was that if you ate processed meat every day of your life, that your likelihood of developing colon cancer went to 6%. Now, again, this is… I can’t emphasize this enough. That’s maybe scary on the one hand, but when you really look at the way that that data is arrived at, its dubious whether there is anything at all there.

Robb: But even that aside, what’s being conflated is that this 0.18% “risk increase”, and I do risk increase in quotations is somehow analogous to a 10,250% increase as we would see with smoking. Even though the research generally performed in and around smoking specifically tobacco use is still observational, the association is so strong that the causality piece becomes all but certain. This is being put forward similarly with meat, and the numbers and the methodology are just not remotely the same but they are sold as if they are the same. Taking a piece from Dr. Garth Gate Davis, pretty popular vegan doctor. He was commenting on the… In this instance, he was commenting on the Chris Kresser, James Wilks Game Changers piece. But something that these folks do, Garth Davis and Joel Khan in particular, but other folks, they really hang their hat on this thing called the multivariate analysis.

Robb: But I’ll do… read a little piece from here. “He,” and Garth Davis is referring to Chris Kresser, “also doesn’t seem to understand what a multivariate regression analysis is. When you do these studies, you control for factors that could influence the study. You want to look at heart disease, but weight is an independent correlate of heart disease. You control for this making sure that both meat eaters and vegetarians are the same weight, and it goes on.” These guys claim emphatically that the multivariate analysis is just as good as a randomized control trial. As far as I can tell these vegan centric doc’s are the only people in the scientific world that would make a claim that a multivariate analysis is just as good as a randomized controlled trial. But this is absolutely what these folks do.

Robb: I was searching for a piece where Diana Rodgers and Joel Khan, we’re going back and forth. Man, he was just going on and on and on about the multivariate analysis, and you guys are idiots, and this thing is such a powerful tool. In certain situations like engineering, and we’re looking at say, like the failure characteristics of cement mix A versus cement mix B, multivariate analysis can be really valuable, but when we’re talking about the types of systems around nutrition research where again, these food frequency questionnaires that are fraught with problems, they are not remotely the same. It’s a laudable attempt at getting a normalization in these stories, but it’s not remotely the same thing as a randomized control trial.

Robb: On the Human Performance Outliers Podcast, this is the one that Zach Bitter and Dr. Shawn Baker run. Their Episode 179. They had Professor Gordon Guyatt, MD, Master of Science on the show. It was a brilliant show, and a really interesting one. Gordon Guyatt is generally attributed to developing the term evidence based medicine. He is the guy that developed evidence based medicine. If you’ve listened to podcasts recently, you will hear me rail against the evidence based medicine crowd. It’s because the way that many people approach this, they will themselves say, if there’s no randomized control trial, then there’s no data, which sounds like I’m talking out of both sides of my face here, and perhaps I am.

Robb: He was very critical of the way that evidence based medicine has developed anything to… it’s kind of gone into a dead end and he’s making some recommendations around changing that. But then Dr. Baker asked him point blank, “What are your thoughts on these multivariate analyses? Are they as good as randomized control trials?” And his answer was essentially that that is absolutely ridiculous. Nobody credible would make a claim that a multivariate analysis is as good as a randomized control trial. This is largely what the plant based vegan centric model hangs their hats on. My cynical self will go out on a limb and say that’s because the information is so easily manipulated from the data collection to the inclusion exclusion criteria. The things that are done there are as egregious as what happens in various drug trials.

Robb: Like when, let’s say a new blood pressure medication is being trialed. In the beginning of that trial people who have adverse events to the medication are oftentimes jettisoned, and so when they look at the total adverse effects of a given drug at the end of the trial, it doesn’t look all that bad. But that’s because they excluded the people who actually had the worst results, and to a degree that the potential pharmacological benefit is dubious at that point. But there’s some very dubious things that are done within this multivariate analysis story. Anyway, back to this original JAMA piece. The guidelines lead author Bradley Johnston is a co-founder and director of Nutrarex, an independent group that says it uses its members expertise and clinical issues nutrition, public health, and evidence based medicine to produce nutritional guidelines that aren’t hampered by conflicts of interest.

Robb: Besides systematic reviews about the relationship between dietary patterns and food, and nutrients and health outcomes. Nutrarex said it considers patient and community values attitudes and preferences in its guideline recommendations. In the Annals, paper, Nutrarex members and their co-authors wrote that they sought to bring scientific rigor to current meat intake guidelines, based mostly on observational studies that don’t establish cause and effect relationships. This Nutrarex outfit is if you’re familiar with like Cochrane Reviews, it’s a little bit similar to that. Where they’re trying to get in and really have some independent thinking applied to a particular topic. Johnson, an associate professor with Texas A&M University’s Nutrition and Food Sciences Department and his co-authors use the grade system. Grading of recommendations, assessment, development and evaluations approach to assess the quality of evidence in which they base their guidelines.

Robb: Just as a sideline here, this is a methodology that’s frequently used within the pharmaceutical research paradigm. This is interestingly… I don’t know if maligned is the right word, but criticized by the vegan centric folks because they themselves admit that nutritional interventions don’t produce the same type of data that pharmaceutical interventions do. It’s much easier to control and do a double blinded process in a pill or a potion than it is in diet. But that in and of itself, is kind of interesting, where they don’t like the grade process applied to their data, because their data sucks. But anyway, back to the paper. The grading framework considers evidence from randomized control trials to be the highest quality and observational data to be of lower quality because of residual confounding.

Robb: Now again, there’s a caveat within that. If the association is 10,250%, as it is the case with smoking and squamous cell carcinoma, then we can start assigning some causality there. But short of numbers like that, then this stuff is really dubious. A panel of 14 individuals from seven countries voted on the final guideline recommendations, and three dissented. The author’s who noted that the recommendations were weak and based on low certainty evidence found no statistically significant link between meat consumption and risk of heart disease, diabetes, or cancer in a dozen randomized control trials that it enrolled 54,000 participants. Pretty big number, the data was weak, largely did not support the ascertain that the meat consumption accelerates exacerbates heart disease, diabetes or cancer.

Robb: Katz and other True Health Initiative members have criticized the author’s use of grade, because unlike pharmaceutical research, so much nutrition research is observational, and so little involves randomized control trials. Katz says, “We can’t randomly assign people to diet for decades,” Katz told JAMA. Even if we could, we couldn’t blind them to what they’re eating. Everything about nutritional epidemiology cries out for the use of other methods besides grade.” Well of course it does, because if we really apply rigorous standards in this story, what we are left with and this was something that was a takeaway from the Human Performance Outliers podcast with the doctor that coined the term evidence based medicine. He said that the government and nutritional entities should not be in the business of making any recommendations at all.

Robb: This based off just the simple fact that the data is so weak, and so prone to manipulation that the government really shouldn’t be in this game at all. You could maybe make a case that they would be involved to the degree that we prevent nutritional deficiencies and whatnot even though that whole thing gets slippery. Although if you focus exclusively on nutritional deficiency characteristics, then meat inclusive diet starts looking really valuable. But of course Katz and the other folks within this vegan centric world hate something like grade because it takes their gold standard material and methodology, these multivariate analyses and assigns it a relevance that is just barely north of a comment on Twitter. It’s very, very low quality information in this process.

Robb: The problem said Harvard Medical School obesity specialist David Ludwig, is that the science is not that good. The average research study in nutrition is just lower quality. In a recent JAMA viewpoint, Ludwig and his co-authors wrote that compared with pharmaceutical research, dietary studies are far more challenging in terms of consistency, quality control, confounding and interpretation which makes translating those findings into public policy exceedingly difficult. Instead of coming up with tools to give more weight to observational studies in the guideline development, nutrition scientists need to rethink how they design studies.

Robb: John Ioannidis MD, of Stanford University School of Medicine said the field needs radical reform. What’s being alluded to here is that folks like Katz, and Walter Willett, and this whole cast of characters, they’re trying to develop methodologies that take an acknowledged inferior scientific data processing system, this multivariate analysis and the retrospective study process, and they’re trying to create this mystical system that makes it as good as a randomized control trial. This is because this is the only way that they can produce something that looks passingly like credible information. If we are really left with just the randomized control trial piece, which are generally shortened duration, whatnot, and so not conclusive, but when we start comparing these things, and we look at people eating meat versus not eating meat, and controlling for calories and all that type of stuff, we just don’t see all the boogie men that these folks claim exists there.

Robb: But if they are able to manipulate the story such that they can have both scientists and the media and the public at large believe that their data is as good as a randomized control trial, that meat as dangerous as smoking, then they’ve pretty much won the fight. And they’re doing a damn good job of it up until pretty recently. There is a section called Katz’s questionable ethics, demands to retract the Annals paper before they were… I really want you to pay… I was mentioning the morality and ethics around this stuff. Check out what these people are doing. Academia in theory is supposed to be this really rigorous, highly moral ethical group of people, but check out the following. Demands to retract the Annals papers before they were published suggest that the journals embargo policy had been violated.

Robb: Embargoes prohibit reporters and press officers at the author’s institutions from circulating articles before they’re published. Breaking an embargo is a serious breach. An article on the True Health Initiative website states that the organization had obtained the meat article five days before they were scheduled to be published online. Laine said Katz was on the Annals animal’s press release list because he writes a weekly column for the New Haven Register, a Connecticut newspaper. Katz said he circulated only the press release that’s in the public domain, but not the embargoed articles among the True Health Initiative colleagues. Telling them that the guideline looks like it’s going to be a serious problem for us.

Robb: “Actually, embargoes apply to press releases as well as the articles themselves,” said Angela Collom’s, the Annals media relations manager. “The Annals and many other journals post releases to the website run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that restricts access to members of the media who agree to embargo policies. Those channels are not public domain,” Collom said. “Because Katz shared the press release,” she added, “the Annals dropped him from the list of journalists eligible to receive embargoed releases or articles.” This is just a massive… Man I’m just at a loss for even describing this. These folks broke every rule imaginable. As we’re going to see they did some stuff that really differs from domestic terrorism only in degree not really kind, in trying to affect the outcome of this process.

Robb: These are the folks that are winning the nutrition war battle right now. Are people who wantonly ignore the rules that are set down around the release of materials like this. Four days before the articles were published Katz and 11 through Health Initiative members THI members sent Laine a letter asking her to preemptively retract publication of these papers, pending further review by your office. The signatories included THI council members Hi ad Willet, Neal Barnard who’s a pretty well known vegan doctor, President of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Former US Surgeon General Richard Carmona, David Jenkins, and the list goes on and on. Dariush Mozaffarian, Dean of the Freedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.

Robb: It’s really frightening that this group, which includes people like Walter Willett, and Frank Hu at the Harvard School of Public Health, which happens to be my alma mater were aware of this and assisting it. Not only did Katz initiate a breach of conduct that is pretty egregious, and he’s been removed from receiving materials prior to release now because of this activity. But people who have absolutely illustrious careers, the height of academia, were all complicit in this process. Nobody stepped in and said, “Hey, whether we like what these folks have to say or not, this is neither not really legal, it’s not ethical.” And not a single person stepped in and did anything appropriate here, which is ironic when you think about the yammering that comes out of the vegan centric community about ethics and, empathy and, morality, that this is the way that folks conduct themselves. It’s pretty remarkable.

Robb: Hours before the meat articles were posted in the embargo lifted Bernards PCRM went so far as to petition the Federal Trade committee, to quote “Correct false statements regarding consumption of red and processed meat released by the Annals of Internal Medicine.” They’re basically trying to get these folks blocked from even releasing this material. But the FTC describes its role as protecting consumers and promoting competition in the marketplace. It’s unclear what authority or interest it would have in this case. But this was like this fascinating Hail Mary attempt to bring in a legal recourse to shut this thing down, which again, shows these folks are crafty. They’re really smart. They’re super well funded. They’re well organized. They make “our” and I put our in very much air quotes. It seems like the paleo ancestral health, low carb, even just like let’s say ethical omnivore meat eating scene, we’re all typically at each other’s throats, nobody can fucking get along. Everybody’s got their own shtick. People are generally more interested in selfies and twerking than they are in, like addressing big topic items.

Robb: This is part of the reason why this vegan topic is so hard to battle because they have a one stop shop for “truth”. You will be morally ethically health, environmentally superior if you adopt this way of doing things. Whereas over in say, like the ancestral health, low carb world, people bicker over whether or not 30 or 50 grams of carbohydrate constitutes a ketogenic diet, and it’s just ridiculous.

Robb: Now, folks, a quick word from our episode sponsor.

Nicki: This episode of Salty Talk is sponsored by Kettle & Fire. Kettle & Fire makes the first USDA approved shelf stable bone broth made with grass fed and finished beef bones and organic pasture raised chicken bones. Not only is Kettle & Fire bone broth quick and convenient, it’s keto and paleo friendly, whole 30 approved non-GMO and comes in many delicious sippable flavors. Rob you just made a shrimp soup the other day using some of the coconut curry and lime bone broth and it was yummy.

Robb: It’s amazing, like it’s good restaurant quality doing that. I just had some wild caught shrimp that I grabbed from HEB and put a half a pound to that with one of the 16 ounce containers of the coconut lime curry, which has a decent amount of coconut fat in it, and so like I added some salt to it and that was it. Like that was all that I needed to add to it. If you want to throw some veggies in there, that’s great. I was in a hurry so it was just kind of protein fat and salt was what I needed at that moment and it was delish.

Nicki: The broth is just so easy for these quick throw together meals. Like you can take whatever leftover protein you have, heat up some broth on the stove, throw it in there, if you’re a veggie person, throw in some veggies and voila, in like 10 minutes you’ve got a tasty awesome meal.

Robb: We generally do three meals a day, seven days a week, sometimes two sometimes some snacks, but generally breakfast lunch dinner is crazy schedule, madness. But out of that 21 meals I would say probably seven to 10 include some form of Kettle & Fire bone broth in it either as like the base or to round out the flavor or what have you, so we use it a lot.

Nicki: Yeah, yep. You can check out Kettle & Fire by going to kettleandfire.com/saltytalk. If you use code Salty Talk, you’ll get 15% off your order. Let’s dig back into today’s episode on the meat backlash.

Robb: Another salvo came during a recent one day preventative cardiology conference where half the presentations were on plant based diets. During his keynote address, Willet showed a slide entitled disinformation, that faulted several organizations and individuals. The sensationalist media, specifically The Annals animals and longtime New York Times science writer, Gina Kolata. Who wrote that the newspapers first story about the meat papers, big beef specifically Texas A&M and nutrition scientists, Patrick Stover, PhD, vice chancellor at the school and a coauthor of the Nutrarex Meat Consumption Guidelines, and evidence based academics, namely Nutrarex and Gordon Guyatt, Chair of the panel that wrote the meat consumption guidelines. Gordon Guyatt, again, is the guy that coined the term evidence based medicine.

Robb: This is from Willett, I believe, yes. “It was part of my talk, addressing the confusion that the public gets from the media about diet and health,” Willet said. “In an email to JAMA, some of this relates to the triangle of decision formation that is feeding into this. The same strategies being used to discredit science on sugar, soda consumption, climate change, air pollution and other environmental hazards.” Guyatt a distinguished professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario led the development 30 years ago of the concept of evidence based medicine as I’ve mentioned. In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Company a few days after the meet article were posted, Guyatt called the response to them, “Completely predictable and hysterical.” Not sure what more to say on that.

Robb: Steven Novella, MD, founder and executive editor of the Science Based Medicine website and longtime critic of Katz. Was more pointed in his assessment, and if you want to check out Steven Novella, he’s an interesting cat. I doubt that he would really like paleo or much of anything that we’re up to. Might be able to get some buy in with him but he’s very sharp dude. Man, he has eviscerated folks like Katz in the past. From Novella… It’s a total hit job. Novella, a Yale neurologist told JAMA, they have a certain number of go to strategies in order to dismiss any scientific findings they don’t like. One such strategy he said is to launch accusations of tenuous conflicts of interest, which is what these folks did with the chancellor of Texas A&M’s program, which he was also a contributor to the Nutrarex guidelines.

Robb: On that topic of conflicts of interests, it seems like everybody has them. I mean, this almost becomes a wash in a way, because it’s… There was a lot of detailing of both Katz and other people in this story, and I pulled that from this discussion or diatribe or whatever this thing is, because it basically made the case that for a long time, Katz was anti-AIG, and then he got a grant from the AIG foundation. Then he had several pro AIG pieces that he released. I don’t know that that… If I want to be, I don’t know misty eyed naive, I could say, well, they started researching the topic and they discovered something in it changed their mind. It’s probably more likely that the folks receiving money for something, have a vested interest in producing favorable outcomes, because then they’re likely to get more money.

Robb: But the main thing is like, yeah, there’s a lot of shady stuff that goes on and I have no doubt that they’re shady stuff on the meat consumption side just like in soy and vegan based stuff. But this stuff gets interesting, so yeah, there’s definitely conflicts of interest aplenty, but there’s some interesting stuff here. Annals editor in chief Christine Laine MD closed with, “The sad thing is that the important messages have been lost. Trustworthy guidelines used to depend on who were the organizations or people they come from. Today though the public should know we don’t have great information on diet. We shouldn’t make people scared, they’re going to have a heart attack or colon cancer if they eat red meat.”

Robb: If this is the best data that we have, maybe this will change, maybe we will discover data that actually paints meat consumption in an unfavorable light. But at present, this is the best data we have and it just doesn’t support this narrative. This is exactly what the vegan backed agenda is promoting. They’re using a fear based tactic around this. A piece from Texas A&M’s… This is from Livestock News. Most people probably don’t subscribe to that, but Texas A&M’s chancellor calls on Harvard to look into faculty’s beef science ethics. From this piece one of the hottest topics around clearly is just red meat consumption, its impact on the environment, livestock themselves. It’s a really hot topic right now and a incendiary topic. It’s difficult to even have a conversation around this stuff.

Robb: There’s a lot of people weighing in on this and there’s just more and or less reputable information on, and I know it’s a lot to sort through, but let me back up on this. I’ll just motor forward. Sorry, guys, this is a… There’s just a lot of material in here, I’m trying to think of how to dump this for you so that it’s valuable and doesn’t get boring. But from this Texas A&M piece, one organization in the discussion the True Health Initiative claiming to fight fake fats and combat false doubts. THI actions have raised red flags recently, have drawn the ire of Texas A&M system Chancellor John Sharp, who sent a letter to Harvard University President Lawrence S. Bacow, over the ethics of how two Harvard professors were conducting themselves.

Robb: Last fall, The Annals of Internal Medicine was set to publish several studies showing that that evidence linking red meat consumption with cardiovascular disease and cancer is too weak to recommend that adults eat less of it. Sharp claims in the letter to Harvard that THI and Harvard faculty, Dr. Walter Willett and Frank Hu, spearheaded a campaign against the editor in chief of the Annals of Internal Medicine, flooding your inbox with more than 2000 caustic messages, most apparently from bots, pressuring her to retract the scientific studies from planned publication. Here’s my thoughts I’m reading from that article, but these are my thoughts. This type of activity again differs from domestic terrorism in degree, not kind. This is ridiculous activity on the part of a an organization that’s supposed to be claiming some like moral high ground on any topic.

Robb: From the chancellor, Dr. Sharpe to Dr. Bacow, the President of Harvard, “I write to you to inform you of the dismay over recent actions by Harvard faculty, Dr. Walter Willett and Frank Hu and their associates, Dr. David Katz and the True Health Initiative. Their actions as described in a recent JAMA article,” this is the one that I’m reading, “are unethical distort the result of important scientific research and in our opinion, are false and harmful to Texas A&M University and its faculty. These are serious matters that undermine the values espoused by your institution and must be corrected immediately. I trust you were surprised as I was after reading the JAMA article, and asked that you take a look at the outrageous actions by the THI. JAMA found that THI and several of its council members, including Harvard faculty, Dr. Willett and Doctor Hu mischaracterized scientific research and falsely accused Texas A&M scientists of selling out to meet industry interests.

Robb: According to JAMA THI not only broken journal embargo policy but apparently used automated bots to flood the email inbox of editor in chief of the Annals of Internal Medicine. Several of your faculty are involved as council members or advisors of THI and collaborated with THI in their efforts to discredit scientific evidence that runs contrary to their ideology. I can assure you that Texas A&M’s research is driven by science period. In addition to my concern about JAMA findings, I’m attaching an illustration Dr. Willett presented at a cardiology conference to attack a distinguished Texas A&M professor and the university itself is being influenced by industry. This unsubstantiated claim has been independently rejected and shown to be false in the JAMA article.”

Robb: I have a image of this not very big but it’s the disinformation triangle on its sensationalist media on one side, big beef represented by Texas A&M, Patrick Stover, and then evidence based academics. They’re slamming the people like the coiner of the term evidence based medicine. “At this time, we have no hard basis to show that these actions against Texas A&M and its faculty are endorsed or condoned by your institution, I hope that we can work together to resolve this problem. Such resolution should include a serious assessment by Harvard of its affiliation with THI, and a comprehensive ethical review into any Harvard faculty involved with THI. Several scientists have severed ties with THI because of the issues discussed in this letter. Texas A&M applauds the stand taken by these scientists encourages Harvard to show the same courage.

Robb: Texas A&M asked that Harvard join us for a purely scientific approach to nutrition for the sake of public health and public trust and reject the politics and unethical actions of THI that have sought to discredit science and interfere with the scientific process. Sincerely, John Sharp Chancellor.” The response from Harvard and this was published in the Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Medical School, What’s the beef with red meat? Recent studies suggested that eating red or processed meats won’t necessarily harm your health. What is the truth? This is just a doubling down on everything that the THI has been about. There was no acknowledgement of the breach of ethical standards, about the lack of moral judgment on the part of Katz, Willet and Hu. Again, it was just a complete doubling down of where these folks are. There was absolutely no shift in position. No Mia culpa, “Gee whiz, yeah, we could do better on this.”

Robb: Which is funny because it’s reminiscent of our current state of the world within politics and everybody else. Like, nobody can be wrong, nobody can grow, nobody can change your mind. When you get into a situation like that, balkanization and fractionalization occur, and really nasty things are a consequence of that. But that’s a topic for a different day. But folks are absolutely finally getting this stuff. Good friend of mine, Dan Pardi, he’s the founder of Human OS. Brilliant guy, great dude. But he’s been on the, I guess, advisory board with the True Health Initiative and both myself and Diana Rogers have held his feet to the fire a little bit. I will make the case that he likely felt like his presence there could provide some degree of balance to the perspective that the THI was bringing to bear on that story. But there was a Twitter exchange from Dan talking about this whole story, which he says, “This is one of several reasons why I left the highly unethical True Health Initiative.” It’s citing the Texas A&M calls on Harvard to look into beef science misdoings.

Robb: “On numerous occasions, the True Health Initiative claimed all of its members agreed with the anti-meat agenda. Privately I protested to their leadership that the here statements misrepresent the membership and I encourage them to actually survey the opinions of the members before speaking for them. I was told that the board was empowered to make such statements without inquiring with the membership, and then I was told that if I didn’t like it, I could leave, so I did.” In the end did, and props to him for doing that. I think that anybody that wants to be taken seriously within the academic setting really needs to question in a future interface with people like Katz Hu, Willet, THI et al. Now this is an interesting piece. It was written by Marin Somerset Webb, and it’s… The title is Veganism Boom Does More For Food Company Profits Than The Planet, and I don’t actually remember nor document where this is.

Robb: But this is something you can track down on the line, and it’s a really beautifully written piece. It covers everything from ethics, to sustainability to health, and it’s really… it’s solid, so I’m going to pull some thoughts from this piece that she did. “UK bakery chain Gregg’s was offering free samples of its vegan sausage roll to early morning punters this week. A friend picking up coffee declined the offer. “It didn’t seem right.” He said. He is not with the zeitgeist on this one. The number of people in the UK identifying as vegan or vegetarian is rising. The rolls are a best seller, and the moral high ground increasingly seems to be held by those with plant based diets. Joining them we are told we can save our health and the planet at the same time. Will we? The truth is that the jury is still out on this one.

Robb: Take the environment, it isn’t a certainty that a vast increase in plant based diets would solve all of our environmental problems. The carbon cost of industrial cropping is huge by some estimates up to 20% of the world’s CO2 output is a direct result of plowing. That’s actually way larger than what it really is, but that’s okay. Not all methods of animal rearing are equal. Grain fed animals grazed in raised in desertified feedlots are environmentally harmful. But any farmer will tell you and I’m married to one that pasture base ruminants can help store carbon in and preserve the quality of your vital topsoil. That’s just a funny aside that people that actually do this stuff have a pretty good sense of what the truth is here. But anyway, it also isn’t clear that a vegan diet is the most healthy one for most people.

Robb: There’s a growing body of research pointing out that mixed diets could well be better than plant based diets, particularly if those plant based diets high in both carbohydrates and heavily processed food. Note the success of some researchers have had in reversing type two diabetes using high protein, high fat animal based diets. Finally, the idea that veganism is de facto kind to animals, needs a little challenge. Factory farming is horrible and there’s little excuse for the often exposed cruelty of slaughterhouse processes. But just how kind it is to eat only plants rather depends on which animals you care most about. If it’s just cows, sheep and chickens fine. If it is all living creatures, things get a bit more complicated.

Robb: The huge volumes of pesticides used in most arable farming, or not good news for the many small animals and insects that would thrive on and nurture farms should they have the luck to survive the plow? Think worms, lizards, rabbits, spiders, mice, snake slugs, beetles and others and insects. There’s no getting away from the fact that when it comes to eating vegan, vegetarian or omnivore we’re all involved in killing. If you care about each individual living thing, you should perhaps eat nothing but one and a half organic pasture fed cows a year. I’m assuming a 2000 calorie a day diet.” This is actually a really fascinating insight. There’s a paper that has made this case largely it’s Springer link. I’ll put it in the show notes but it relates to the least harm principle, it makes this case which is pretty interesting.

Robb: We make a similar case in Sacred Cow. Rather than risk being complicit in the deaths of a great many more than one and a half spiders in the course of living off grains. Tricky, isn’t it? This is not just that anything is settled morally, philosophically or even environmentally in either direction. It isn’t. All these arguments have been made for decades and all are hard to quantify. But it’s impossible to be clear that more vegans equals an unadulterated good for animals, people or the planet. But there’s one group for whom the trend towards veganism is definitely a good thing. Processed food manufacturers and retailers. The past few years have produced something of a backlash against processed food. We are all a bit worried about our sugar intake, we understand more about how food with a high glycemic load might create insulin resistance, and we are increasingly suspicious of the low fat product industry, given that the more low fat food we eat, the fatter we seem to get.

Robb: What better time then for the industry to find itself with a whole new market into which to sell factory made process food. One that gloriously is more ideologically and identity driven than any other. This is a marketing greenwash opportunity to beat all others. Create a good vegan product and not only can you virtue signal about it relentlessly, but you can charge a feel good premium to in my local supermarket Kellogg’s is selling a vegan granola, Nestle’s Shreddie cereal comes with a green “forever vegan banner” across the top of the packet. In the meat aisle, you can get the Beyond Meat burger, a fully plant based hamburger that bleeds. Finest British beef steak burgers cost £6 pounds per kilogram, the fake burger which is made mostly of pea protein cost £21 pounds per kilogram. How’s that for premium pricing?

Robb: There is no reason why food companies shouldn’t respond to demand. But those who are turning vegan in an effort to save the world might bear in mind that most these process package and shipped products are likely to do more for food company profits than for the planet or your health. The proof of that is in the pudding for grapes. Thanks in part to the second success of its vegan sausage rolls, the company reported for 14% rise in sales in the first six weeks of the year. That might benefit shareholders but is it doing any real good for the rest of us?”

Robb: That’s what I got on this for now. I know it was a big rangy piece. Give me some feedback, if y’all like these things. I had originally intended to just jump in and look at that initial JAMA piece but like I said, as the days and weeks went by, more and more started coming to light on this topic. I think it’s just a fascinating story arc. I think that we’re in a time where it is critical that we are able to have a good discussion about topics, whether it’s politics or environment, or health or what have you. I think probably I might be singing to the choir a little bit, because if you guys are still listening at all, if you’re still subscribed and still following what I’m up to what Nicki and I are doing what everybody is doing with the Healthy Rebellion, you’re probably bought in on this, but it’s something that we need to bring back into culture.

Robb: I feel like we’re at a very precarious point in history on a lot of different topics, and this ability to just simply have a discussion. I would say find common ground. But honestly, in the last 22 years of doing this stuff, I’ve had many a run in with vegans. I would say that I have generally tried to do the find common ground shtick. Where this story is now is that these folks want to alter the very legality of being able to produce animal products, to say nothing of consuming them. This is in their mind, effectively a winner take all game, and it’s not even a game, it’s a religious mission. While we’re having informed discussions and being open to different viewpoints and topics, I would though encourage folks to just noodle on the potentiality that we’re facing an adversary that views our… and I’ll put our in kind of quotation marks.

Robb: I think it gets a little bit creepy to speak for whole movements. But I’ll do that for a moment here. But our way of living in which if you believe in regenerative agriculture and husbandry, the health properties of a animal inclusive diet, they view us as subhuman, effectively. That we are so dumb, that we can’t even see that we’re destroying the planet and we just don’t care. We’re so addicted to the bloodlust of meat that we will sacrifice the future of our children. This is the way that these folks are looking at us. To that degree, there is no middle ground, there is no reaching across the aisle. What is necessary then is that we unite and we form a rebellion of our own be that health, or food, or health and food and governance and whatever. Because if we don’t take that control, somebody will absolutely take it for us. I don’t want that to sound like overly like 1776 Declaration of Independence, but the there’s a little bit of a vein of truth to that.

Robb: I don’t think that people really look at it that way. I alluded to this during this main body of whatever the hell this thing is, this podcast. But within the ancestral health ethical omnivore scene, and it’s so interesting even particularly within the regenerative agriculture scene itself, there’s this elitism, where people will look down their noses at anyone consuming any factory produce meat, but yet we want the poor to be able to eat better food, which is a major disadvantage that these folks have just the basic nutrition piece. There is so much pissing, and moaning, and backbiting, and infighting in these areas. It’s a divide and conquer process where we are not remotely on a united front. Then it makes it easy for entities like the True Health Initiative and Walter Willett, and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, and PETA that is a largely united front.

Robb: They’ve got a airtight message, soup to nuts epistemology. Even those guys generally don’t like the raw vegans because they’re so crazy. But that aside, folks are better funded, better organized, have a sexy elevator pitch story about how you can be morally, health and environmentally superior by adopting a vegan diet. We have nothing like that we have nuance and we have individuality. We have an acknowledgement of regional food systems and the sovereignty of ancient food systems that have served people for thousands of years. All of that is in the crosshairs of this new planet of the vegan initiative. In anyway, give me some feedback on this. Let me know what you think. Take care and hope to see you over at the Healthy Rebellion.

Nicki: All right, that’s a wrap for this episode.

Robb: What do you think wife?

Nicki: Gosh, it can get ugly. These sort of like us versus them, vegan versus meat, it’s kind of an ugly thing.

Robb: It is and we’re in a circumstance in the world at large but in the US in particular, where we’re at each other’s throats on virtually every topic. I did an unpacking of the 5G causes Coronavirus thing in a separate episode, and I’m still getting some backlash from that where people are like, “You’re a shill for big telecom” and…

Nicki: Which is so funny.

Robb: Which is so incredible yeah.

Nicki: All those telecom checks that keep rolling in.

Robb: Fucking Verizon still dings me every month, so I’m not really too clear on that. But, and again, it’s not to say… Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m totally wrong. But there’s… For so many of these things, there is absolutely no win for me. Like just for people that are skeptical about whatever. A great question to ask is, what is the win for someone to spin whatever particular yarn? The fact that there are people at all ends of the spectrum, I guess you can say, “Well, this is the group that I want to be my tribe.” And so you cater to them. But I don’t know if people remember, but we are the folks that both Facebook and Google took a sufficiently distasteful look at our work, and made us disappear, made it difficult to find our work.

Robb: We’re squarely ensconced in that like pseudoscience outside the mainstream deal, so why the fuck would I tackle any of these things in a way that… Why not just go full bore into that, whole hog? The thing is I do my level best to understand the science that we’re dealing with and look at the data, whether it’s super concrete or more speculative, and then try to lay out a reasonable approach to that. But I have to say this has not been… There’s been an asymmetric war fought on the part of people pushing a vegan agenda, and I will not say plant based because that’s a mealy mouth bullshit way of circumventing this stuff. A million different things can be plant based. There’s only one vegan diet and that is, in fact, the thing that’s being put forward. It’s being put forward as the optimum for human nutrition, for the environment, and the most ethical way to eat.

Robb: It really looks like that is wrong on all three counts. Like not a little wrong, like grand mal wrong. Then we’re left with like, “Okay, how do we unpack that?” But I will say that historically I’ve tried to be a build bridges find commonality and I’m done with that. I’m in circle the wagons, find interlocking grids of fire, and if motherfuckers lob a grenade over mine, I’m going to lob a grenade stuffed inside the body of something that’s got like plague in it and lob it back over their side. It really is unfortunately coming down to this thing where we have to pick a side, and we have to decide what are we going to support, what are we going to put our thoughts and our money, and our bandwidth into. I wish that it was different because this stuff just feeds into you.

Nicki: Well and there are a lot of folks who are like, “I don’t… I can respect where you’re coming from, and I can respect from where the vegans are coming from, and can’t we all get along,” and there are people with that mindset-

Robb: Which is wonderful.

Nicki: … and some of them can. But the majority…

Robb: The thing that I would point out though, is that the folks pushing this vegan agenda wanted such that if you think that animal husbandry is an important part of a sustainable food system, if you feel that animal products are an important feature of the human diet, they do not want you to be able to live your life as you choose. They are actively working to make it illegal or extremely difficult for you to do that. These high minded notions of “Can’t we all get along?” That’s great. Out of the 22 years, I’ve been doing this I would say, 20 of those years I’ve really tried to find common ground. Although I’ve had innumerable brush skirmishes with vegans on the interwebs, like when I’m in interviews, when I’m talking to somebody I really have worked to find common ground, but I’m at the end of my tether on that.

Robb: When people are actively trying to…

Nicki: Remove options from other people.

Robb: Yes. Then there’s a problem.

Nicki: We’re seeing these in schools and school lunch programs, and education that is being disseminated at schools.

Robb: This is the interesting thing. Meat eaters are not going in and saying, “Everybody must eat meat.” But yet, it’s like, “You want to be vegetarian, great, here’s a vegetarian option. I’ll charge you a little extra for it and make even more money because the food quality is low and so-

Nicki: Better margins.

Robb: … win, win, win for me.” Yeah, but the flip side is not true. The vegans are wanting to… like trying to enact these crazy things where like a vegan neighbor of someone complains to the homeowners association that-

Nicki: The other person’s barbecuing.

Robb: … the other person is barbecuing. If you want to start creating what has all the great makings for a legit Civil War, you’re doing God’s work doing that. If that’s the outcome you want, then you’re doing that, because people are not just going to fucking roll over. People are not just going to take this stuff like they have for a long time. But the people who are willing to find that common ground once you paint them into a corner, you’ve got serious fucking problems on your hands, and they’re getting close to bringing a lot of us to that point.

Nicki: A little bit of a rambling close there.

Robb: Yeah, the after show was as long in rambling as the main show. But it’s a really important topic. If you have had your health improved from ancestral eating, if your business is tied to in some way-

Nicki: Paleo, keto, low carb carnivore.

Robb: … paleo keto, low carb, then you need to wake up and pay attention to this and support… Now again, be critical. If you think I’m full of shit, great. Find somebody that you feel like articulates your position or get in and look at the things I’m putting forward and improve on it. I hate being wrong and the best way I can unfuck myself from being wrong, is if somebody tells me, “Hey Rob, I think you got this thing wrong, and then I can improve my position.” But currently, I’m one of the only people tackling all of this stuff. I would love more support and help on this. But I will throw out there that if your life livelihood or ideology is tied into ancestral health, the notion that animal centric food systems are vital to a sustainable food future, then you need to get in and start fighting and supporting this stuff, because the vegans have been bludgeoning us so far.

Robb: Neither academia or Hollywood or the media are on our side. None of them are. I think that there’s a lot of good intention from these folks, but it is woefully misguided and it’s becoming… It’s hitting a dangerous pitch at this point. Had this process been able to go on another 10 years, and then COVID hit, it could have been an entirely different story.

Nicki: Well with the upcoming release of both the Sacred Cow book and the film, we’ll definitely be sharing more information on how you all can support both of those projects and help spread the word if this way of eating and animal regenerative agriculture are a part of the way that you believe we should move in the future.

Robb: Yeah.

Nicki: Thank you again for listening. Share this episode, please. And…

Robb: Lots of opportunity to share this one because it addresses a ton of the common fallacies put forward by the vegan camp, and it also exposes a ton of the major players as doing incredibly unethical stuff, so… yeah, yeah.

Nicki: We’ll leave it at that.

Robb: We’ll leave it at that.

Nicki: Please check out our show sponsor Kettle & Fire go to kettleandfire.com/saltytalk and use code Salty Talk for 15% off your order. Please subscribe, leave us a review and wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Robb: And come join us in the rebellion.

Nicki: We’ll see you next time.

Robb: Bye.

Nicki: Bye. As always Salty Talk episodes are brought to you by Drink LMNT. The only electrolyte drink mix that’s salty enough to make a difference in how you look, feel and perform. Get salty at drinklmnt.com.