You're listening to an iHeart podcast. Let's talk about moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA, in adults with obesity.
Doesn't sound familiar?
Think about how you've been sleeping lately.
If you've had nights where you've been told you snore loudly or choke or gasp for air and then wake up feeling tired, it may be due to OSA.
In the U .S., moderate to severe OSA affects around 24 million adults.
Many are adults with obesity and most cases remain undiagnosed and untreated.
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too, and this is a good old -fashioned rootin tootin down home episode of Stuff You Should Know.
technical difficulties please stand by yeah we're a good 20 minutes late Chuck because it's about to say me it's not my fault no it's not your fault it's the computers fault not even but who cares about computers this is I mean this is probably literally the opposite of computers because we're talking about plants.
Yeah yeah I was gonna ask you, old school, Chuck.
Mm -hmm. Have you ever eaten a plant?
I love living things so I do not kill plants and eat them.
So are you a breathe -a -terian?
That's what they are right yeah.
Yeah. Where you just don't eat?
No of course I eat plants.
I you know Emily I would argue it has a plant -based diet now that I know that a plant based diet doesn't mean that you're vegan or vegetarian it just and you know as you'll see depending on the percentage of the website you look at a lot of people say like you know it really depends on how much you eat in a certain percentage like maybe eighty percent of your diet is plant based and that's easily Emily she eats vegetables constantly.
She always has like a radish in her hand.
No, but it's just her meals, like her meals she'll cook like, we try to eat the same stuff, but I don't want to sit down and eat brussels sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower for dinner.
That's a plant -based diet for sure.
Yeah, but she'll throw some chicken in there and some fish.
She's sort of pescatarian plus?
Mmm -hmm. Maybe? Yeah, pescapultritarian?
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of terms for all this stuff.
I didn't know about a third of these probably.
Yeah, they all seem to fall under the umbrella term like you said a plant -based diet so like a vegan diet is a plant -based diet, but not all plant based diets are like vegan diets.
Yeah. That kind of setup.
I had never heard of Lacto -vegetarian which basically means throw out all the rest but I'll eat dairy.
Yeah, understandable.
There's also Ovo Vegetarian.
These are terrible names by the way.
Yeah. That means that you include eggs in your vegan diet yeah not oval that would make even more sense I think no it means that you include ovum in your diet yeah but I should say it's not a vegan diet at all like you can't have any kind of animal products nope in a vegan diet not just like meat or dairy or eggs with like vegan money honey yeah we talked about fig wasps recently they won't eat figs for that reason I think some vegans that I found a lot of support behind vegans saying, like, a processed wasp part in a thing is fine.
Okay, I'll bet there's some that still won't.
Oh, sure. And then there's also lacto -ovo -vegetarian, if you're a vegetarian but you eat eggs and dairy, there's lacto -ovo -bacon -vegetarian, and then there's, what you said Emily was, pescatarian, which is… I mean, you're essentially just, you know, you're eating more vegetables than the average person at this point if you're a pescatarian, I think.
That's right. No comment on what that does to your butt.
Uh, what, if you just eat seafood?
No, if you eat nothing but broccoli and cauliflower all day long.
Oh yeah. Not just your butt, but like the wellbeing of people around you, too.
Yeah, but it's very good for you.
I'm a much healthier human than I am.
Nice. That's well, not the part that you're not as healthy, but I'm glad that she is.
Yeah, of course. One thing we should point out early on is that there's a sort of exhaustive look at how much meat people eat around the world at a certain point or kind of peppered throughout.
And just for comps purposes in the United States, we average per capita meat consumption between 123 to 150 ish kilograms depending on where you're looking.
So just kind of put that in your in the back in your back pocket when we start talking about other countries.
Yeah that that really kind of came home to me when I converted it to quarter pounders or in Europe Royale with Cheese.
It's 1 ,332 quarter pounders a year.
That means you're eating almost four quarter pounders worth of meat a day every year at a hundred and fifty one point four kilograms. If only you could do that and live.
That's called heaven, my friend.
So clearly, with those kind of numbers, the U .S. is a meat -based culture.
I mean plenty of people here do not take part in that kind of thing, obviously, but as you'll see, many cultures around the historically have plant -based diets and still have plant -based diets depending on who you ask they might say there's about 2 billion meat based eaters in the world and about 4 billion plant -based eaters yeah so I mean it's not too bad they're really holding things up because I mean if you if actually that's more than that's the majority then what you're saying the majority of the world is plant -based diet I'm saying two billion and four billion I'm not I'm not weighing in on percentages.
OK. Yeah. We'll go around the world in a minute, but let's go through history for a little bit first, OK?
Because plant -based diets, especially in the West, they're a new thing.
Maybe they came out of the new age movement in the 70s and 80s.
This is really old stuff.
In fact, you can make a really good case that plant -based diets, especially a flexitarian version, is essentially the default diet of humans.
Yeah. I mean it's in some cases, we're actually in a lot of cases, especially historically speaking, and still in some places today, it's sort of the defacto diet because that's what you have. And, you may not have the kind of money to like, go get really good meat or something like that.
So if you look back through time and you go back to say like Ireland in the 19th century, before the potato famine, they were eating tons of potatoes.
There were a lot of poor people in Ireland that were like, hey we can grow potatoes, they have some vitamins and minerals.
Maybe we can milk a cow and eat a little pickled herring.
But other than that we're eating lots and lots of potatoes.
Yeah, for sure. This is before the famine when a potato blight came.
And when the Irish immigrants really started to come en masse to the United States in the 19th century.
they were quite surprised at the abundance and availability and cheapness of meat in the United States.
And that apparently dates back to colonial times, where colonists in, well, what would become the United States were eating more meat than the average person back in England.
They were eating essentially the same amount of meat as elites back in the UK.
And that's the longstanding thing, where meat consumption throughout history, in most places, is associated with a higher status, an elite status, you're wealthier.
Because it's always been harder to come by.
Well the colonies had a lot more land, so they could grow a lot more livestock, and then hence eat a lot more meat.
Yeah, had a lot more land asterisked.
Right, well put. Yeah, everyone knows what we mean by that.
Yeah, and you know, there's, who helped us with the original version of this?
Was it Libya? No, Laura.
All right. The claw?
Dr. Claw. Dr. Claw.
She dug up a graph basically about how Italians eat and prior to, well, not that long ago, they ate what you would call the Mediterranean diet now and they just called it what we eat because that's what's around here.
Right, the diet. Yeah, exactly.
fruit, vegetables, olive oil, legumes, fish, cereals, not a ton of dairy or meat, but after, I believe after World War II, they started eating a lot more meat.
Before that, it was basically a plant -based diet because as you'll see, once again, no no no, Chuck, they're eating lots of fish.
Plant -based diet is, we're talking about meat here, fish get a pass I guess as far as plant -based diet goes.
It does not mean vegetarian or vegan.
Right and Italy followed the same trajectory that most nations do.
Once they reach a certain point of prosperity, meat consumption just starts going through the roof.
Whereas before in history, elites like individual groups of people who are well off or could afford meat, when an entire nation becomes well off enough, they start buying meat.
Meat consumption just goes up.
So after the of war, Italy followed that.
And you'll see like throughout the world, the more prosperous a nation, the higher their meat consumption is almost to a country.
Yeah, which, you know, a cynic might say, well, if every nation was prosperous, everyone would just eat tons of meat.
And it sounds cynical, but like the data sort of says what you just said.
You know, if you look at the US in the 19th century, they were roundly encouraging that people eat lots and lots of meat.
There was a cholera outbreak in 1832 and the US government said, eat more meat and drink more alcohol and lay off the fruits and vegetables, obviously because of cholera, but there was also just this idea in America early on that like you know we're well fed and we're well -bred because we eat red meat and we grow em big here in the States we're not sitting around eating rice and grains and potatoes.
Yeah and that that diet has just spread throughout the world but again it doesn't necessarily seem to mean because people are emulating the United States it just seems like the United States was following a trajectory that other countries are now right.
Yeah and look Hey, what a great time to set up where countries are now because I remember those numbers I told you about the United States.
We're going to walk you around the world everybody.
Not in the wayback machine.
What do we call this?
When we're just currently...
The go far machine.
Yeah. The go far and wide machine.
It still has that new imaginary machine smell in it.
Nice. Modern day, jump in the GoFar &Wide Machine and come with us at first to Africa.
If you look at continent wide, the stat is about 65 grams. I'm sorry, 65 kilograms of meat per capita.
Africa. I wonder about that number, because if you break it down per country, South Africa, they eat about 65 .2 kilograms compared to let's say the Democratic Republic of Congo at just over 4 kilograms. Who's eating more red meat in Africa than South Africa to make that average 65?
I don't know. One thing that I recognized from researching this is that there are so many stats that are so different in estimates that are just so different and don't understand why it's so hard to track something like meat consumption.
Like, we've got that so commoditized that, I mean, I don't understand how we can't track it.
Even for the United States!
You rattle off three different estimates for how much meat the United States eats, so who Who really knows whether any of these numbers are correct or not?
Well, no one's ever asked me how much meat I eat.
I could skew that– Oh, really?
Have you? Oh, I get that all the time.
Usually because I have a big chunk of steak in my teeth.
I mean an official study.
I know, I'm just kidding.
It's sort of weird like magic for me.
But we do know that generally speaking West African nations eat a little more meat, it's a little more meat heavy than East African nations, but even in West Africa, that's again, I mean, if the average per capita was 65 kilograms, that's like less than half the United States per capita.
Yeah. The I'm guessing from what I could tell, the United States leads the world in meat consumption.
Um, most other countries, depending on where they are, are going to eat a lot less.
But again, like you said, Africa is not some single Bonalith.
It has a bunch of different variation.
Asia's the same way.
On the whole, Asia eats far less meat compared to one another.
Some eat more, some eat less.
And you get all sorts of weird little statistical blips that come up from that.
Yeah, if you look at the top ten countries around the world with the highest rates of vegetarianism, India and Taiwan are on there, so two of the top ten are in Asia.
Japan and China, they aren't on the list the top 10 percentage vegetarian wise, but they eat a lot less meat than the US at an average per capita consumption under 75 kilograms. Yeah and Taiwan's a good example too, it has a very high percentage of vegetarians, but it also has a really high per capita meat consumption too.
So it's just basically wacky over there.
Yeah and this is another, If you look at Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
They're all under 20 kilograms. And Thailand is at like 25 and Laos at 30.
So I mean, that's way less than the 75 average in Japan and China.
Yeah. I would guess Thailand, and I'm not sure about Laos, but I would guess Thailand is wealthier than probably Myanmar or Indonesia.
I don't know about Vietnam, but I think a lot of it also has to do with the religious, like what religions are predominant there too.
Yeah, which we'll get in.
Well, actually we should take a break before we do that.
But we'll talk about India real quick because they have the highest proportion of vegetarians in the world.
Close to 40%, 38%, 39 % are vegetarian in India for obvious reasons.
And 6 .6 kilograms of meat per capita compared to as many as 150 for the U .S. Yeah, exactly.
That's very low. It is very low.
All right. We promised talk of religion because who doesn't love that?
But this is religion as it relates to diet because depending on your religion, there may be a lot of rules and restrictions on what they say you should eat because of a bunch of reasons.
it can sometimes it shows like purity sometimes it's like now it shows how dedicated and faithful you are sometimes it's like hey you get a following rules don't eat this on this day and let's see how you do with that but for whatever reason there are plenty of religions that have rules sort of surrounding meat for sure yet some of the most famous ones are kosher yeah it's a big one where you have to actually separate certain kinds of food like you separate separate meat, separate dairy.
There's also like restrictions and guidelines on how animals are slaughtered.
So, it's not particularly vegetarian by nature, keeping kosher is, but it makes you so much more mindful that a lot of people just eventually end up being vegetarian just by following a kosher diet.
There's also halal is very similar.
It has all sorts of permissions and bans and stuff like that on what animals can be eaten, but it's different in that like, there's no shellfish allowed or birds of prey, but you can eat rabbits.
But they're both similarish in that you really have to pay attention to what you're eating if you're a genuine adherent of this religious diet that's being prescribed to you.
Yeah, and if you're wondering like, well how does that affect the rate of vegetarianism in Israel?
They are second behind India.
That's not the only factor of course, But, uh, I think the highest percent percentage of veganism is in Israel too, which is, uh, yeah, that, I don't know why that surprised me, but it did.
Okay. Good noted. Um, there's I think, so this is another thing too.
Like a lot of people just end up being default vegetarians because of their religious diet.
And another good example is the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Church which we talked about in our Halle -Silassie episode I think.
They have 200 days a year that are considered fast days where you just can't eat meat but you can eat plants.
So I mean, for all intents and purposes, you're at least the majority of the year a vegetarian if you're Ethiopian Orthodox.
I wonder if 165 days a year they just party down on some steak.
What, Seventh -day Adventist. It's not a requirement to be a vegetarian but they're like, it's not a bad way to live.
They kind of endorse it.
Yeah, remember they grew out of that whole William Keith and John Kellogg movement of the 19th century.
Yeah. They endorse the movement generally, but about 36 % end up lacto -ovo vegetarians.
And then 16 % – I'm sorry, an additional 16 % eat plant -based diet with maybe a little fish, maybe a little bit of meat.
Yeah. Buddhism is very connected to vegetarianism, like a straightforward religious decree, like kosher.
Instead it's linked to non -violence, right?
So if your religion forbids violence, you can't really cut the head off of a chicken and eat it very easily.
People still do in Buddhist countries, but it's much more, or it's much less common and frequent.
And in fact, apparently in Japan from 675 to 1872, meat was essentially banned in that country because of the influence of Buddhism and Confucianism.
You got to wait on that chicken to die of natural causes.
he's just following around like a buzzard. He's not lookin' so good.
He looks a little Peekin'.
Hindi was, I love that word, by the way.
Good, I'm glad I used it.
I heard that word last night on the TV show, The Pit.
And I realized I just don't use it much. You know what I like that's similar is pekish.
I like pekish as well.
Yeah, me too. Maybe our musical duo should be Peekin' and Pekish.
Oh my God. You just won the band name contest, Chuck, for all time.
Everyone would be like, who's Pekin and who's Peckish?
Like, I think Josh is Pekin and Chuck is Peckish.
It wouldn't matter.
We can both be. It would depend on our mood on any given day.
Or perhaps we are both Pekin and Peckish.
Yeah. At all times.
We're always hungry and we're always not looking so good.
Hinduism, almost 80 % eats a plant -based diet.
But they, again, it's not required.
It's just like, hey, why don't you do this?
That kind of thing.
Heavily suggested, maybe.
Yeah, it's also, I mean, especially since the Hindu nationalist ruling party took over, the Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, they have been enforcing really strict rules that are Hindu in nature against eating meat, so much so that people have been beaten.
I think one person, at least, has been lynched for eating meat or being associated with the meat trade, specifically beef, because cows are considered sacred in Hinduism.
And also, similarly, in India, vegetarianism is linked to social status, in, basically, complete contradiction of what it's like in say the West where you know eating meat has long been associated with being an elite or having high status.
Vegetarianism is in India apparently.
All right flip -flopped it I love it.
Yeah and if you're like wow eighty percent of Hindus are vegetarian it's pretty impressive prepare for this.
Jains? These are the people who are so against hurting or killing anything, that they have little hand dust brooms that they carry with them to dust off seats before they sit down so they don't actually and accidentally kill a bug.
92 percent of them and 59 percent of Sikhs in India are all vegetarians.
And I guess eight percent of Jains are bad Jains.
I guess so. I mean like how would you show up to like the Jain meeting and show your face?
Yeah. Or show up to a Jane party with a rack of ribs.
It's probably frowned upon, I would say.
I would think so. Alright, so if—and of course I'm kidding.
No offense to any Janes out there.
No, of course not. I'm sure they'd show up and be like, natural causes.
And everybody would be like, heck yeah.
So, if you're going to eat a plant -based diet, it can look many different ways depending on what you're into.
We found some information from Harvard Health, and obviously one thing that you're gonna do is eat lots of veggies like Emily does.
They say, like, hey, fill half your plate up with veggies and vary the color.
Don't eat just like a bunch of green veggies.
Like eat veggies of all stripes and colors.
Get you some anthocyanins, why don't you?
Yeah. Also, the way—so these are like, if you want to start to get into vegetarianism, these are some easy ways to kind of slide into it.
Another one is changing the way that you think about meat.
Rather than it being the center or the star of the meal, just kind of put it to the side.
Like, it doesn't necessarily have to be, you know, a thumb -sized piece of steak.
But I mean, if it more, you know, kind of evenly resembled the grain or the greens on your plate, that would make a lot more sense.
Yeah. I'll have the creamed spinach, a side of broccoli, and a thumb of steak.
Right. It's funny. So I used thumb.
So have you ever heard that thing about a portion of meat being no bigger than the palm of your hand?
For, like, that's the healthy way to eat meat?
Yes. Uh, I don't think I've heard that, but I could see that.
So, not just that if you cup your hands that you're serving a fruit and vegetables, and then your thumb is your measure of fats like a nut butter or something like that.
There's a name for all this.
It's called the Zimbabwe Hand Jive.
I've done that dance, but I did not know that was an eating scale.
Well, so this guy in 1993, Dr. Kazim Maouji came up with this way of doing it, and it's been widely adopted, but I had no idea that's what it was called.
It's a great name. What I do, we host a lot of, especially in the spring and summertime, of people when we go to the lake, and just at our house here.
We have dinner parties, we just do a lot of that kind of stuff.
and aside from being exhausting, one thing, I'm just kidding, it's actually a lot of fun.
But one thing I do, and this goes along with how you think about meat and how much meat you have is I don't cook up like 20 chicken breast if there's 20 people there.
I cook up a bunch of whatever kind of cut of chicken or steak, sometimes I'll do a couple of meats And I will slice it all up on a big platter.
And then you can just get a portion of something rather than saying, like, here's a gigantic chicken breast on your plate that you now feel responsible for.
Right. And people seem to really like that, you know.
Like, maybe I'll have a little bit of this and a little bit of that.
And then the rest is our veggie sides.
Nice. Yeah, so that's a tip from Chuckie.
Yeah, you should just set up a carving station and ask to see each person's thumb size.
Yes. That'd save you a bunch of money.
Totally. So let's see, what else?
Oh, another good one is to choose different fats, avocados, olive oil, stuff like that, and then just cook at least one vegetarian meal per week.
Dip your toe in the pool.
Yeah. And if you start doing these kind of things, it's actually really easy to find yourself down the road, like just doing it without thinking about it.
and more and more meals throughout the week become vegetarian.
Because we'll talk in a minute about why people do this, but a lot of people stop eating as much meat for health reasons or because they want to lose weight.
And if you just kind of start, like you said, dip your toe in like this, it just becomes kind of second nature over time.
Yeah, you can get used to something like that.
And I think what you'll find if you think you need meat because it's more filling, that's just not true.
You get plenty full eating all that other stuff, so you can give it a whirl.
I do that stuff every now and then.
Whole grains at breakfast is great.
This is basically, again, what Emily does, a lot of oatmeal, buckwheat, barley, quinoa.
Eat like a horse, but not as much as a horse.
This is a big one for me, Chuck, is eating fruit for dessert.
Because I don't ever eat something, and like a meal of any kind and not think like, okay, now I have to have something sweet.
Oh really? I just can't not do it.
My brain just is wired that way.
I am too. Yeah, okay.
So if you just eat like an apple or some strawberries or something like that, it just short circuits that it does it for you.
Yeah. I have just retrained my brain to where I don't seek that.
And it's not like I was eating dessert every night.
Like the only time I literally have dessert like a dessert is kind of either if a bunch of people are out to eat and it's an occasion or maybe on vacation or something like that, but it's not like even eating out in a restaurant.
We never eat dessert like that but I have found just one square of dark chocolate scratches that itch in a nice way.
That always feels like a punishment to me.
Why, because it's just one?
Just one and it's dark chocolate.
Oh, you don't like dark chocolate?
It's fine, but it's not going to short circuit that dessert.
I had a, you know what, I used to not be into dark chocolate, but I love it now.
Yeah, good. I'm glad.
I'm glad to hear that.
I'm gonna cut the legs out from under you in a little while then.
But I don't do that every night.
But I'll still, you know, when I want that, when I find myself like, God, I gotta have the sweet thing tonight.
I'll do one square, sprinkle a couple of little dabs of sea salt on top.
And that does it for me.
My god, why don't you live in Brooklyn?
I know Because I don't have a mani store greens to obviously like leafy vegetables salads Just eat as much stuff.
Like I love a salad Emily makes, you know She grows that stuff and prepares fresh salads makes her own salad dressing.
She's gotten more into cooking she never used to do stuff like that at all, but she's That I found myself eating a lot more salad these days, right?
And then the last one is after you do all these things like eat more vegetables, eat vegetarian meal once a week, eat a salad for dinner.
This is actually the key to the whole thing, go to bed really early so that your normal breakfast will come much more quickly.
I don't eat breakfast but yeah.
That was a joke by the way.
I know, I get it but.
Okay, well thanks for the laughs support.
You want to take a break and then come back and talk about why people become vegetarian or vegan?
Sure. Okay. Well we'll be right back again.
learning stuff with Joshua and Charles stuff you should know Let's talk about moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, or OSA in adults with obesity.
Doesn't sound familiar?
Think about how you've been sleeping lately.
If you've had nights where you've been told you snore loudly or choke or gasp for air and then wake up feeling tired, it may be due to OSA.
In the US, moderate to severe OSA affects around 24 million adults.
Many are adults with obesity and most cases, remain undiagnosed and untreated.
Don't sleep on the symptoms. Learn more at don'tsleeponosa .com.
This information is provided by Lily, USA, LLC.
Okay, Chuck, I think I promised before we left that we'd talk about why people become vegetarian.
I already said health reasons, which we'll get into more in a little while, but a lot of people just do it because it's just healthier.
Like, if you want to eat healthier most people don't like double or triple down on fried chicken, like you instead start turning to plants, you know, like people just start eating more plants and it's almost intuitive.
I don't think it even has anything to do with the nutritionists set in the United States convincing people like plants are healthy, I just feel like we just intuitively know that that is healthier than eating like a steak or again, fried chicken.
Which I feel like there's a place for fried chicken.
I'm not knocking that.
No, I mean, as you know it's my favorite food and I just, you know...
I heard you. I got to pick and choose with that stuff but it's not removed from my life, thank goodness.
That's good. But you're gonna get lots of vitamins and minerals and fiber and antioxidants in your veggies.
If you eat legumes, if you're a vegetarian, you probably eat lots of legumes and chickpeas and lima beans and stuff like that, soy.
You're gonna get lots of protein, amino acids, lots of fiber and antioxidants there and also no cholesterol which is, I have cholesterol problems, genetically speaking, so and a lot of people do, so that's a good way to get your cholesterol down.
Yeah, and there's a lot of variety in just legumes alone, like rather than do you want the chicken or the fish, there's something like 20 ,000 species of legumes, and I didn't know this, I ran across this, Chuck.
There's a category of food called neglected and underutilized legumes.
The saddest legume.
They even have an acronym for NULs, right?
And there's apparently a ton of legumes that are found around the world that are known to like local cuisine that they're just waiting to be adopted to kind of make the the plant -based diet even more varied yeah I mean I ate there's 20 000 I probably have had five yeah yeah maybe more but no no no I know I know what you mean yeah I just had a night so one of the one of the ones I found was the bombara groundnut you would make a trillion dollars if instead of a mayonnaise operation, you opened a Bombardet ground nut operation in Brooklyn.
I mean you would make so much cash, dude, over night.
People just like saying groundnut.
Yeah, but that Bombardet really sells the groundnut if you ask me.
Yeah, for sure. Obviously we've mentioned the concerns with red meat.
But with beef and pork, people have been calling for years for less of that in your diet, and health practitioners and doctors, because obviously, you know, heart attack, stroke, cancer, all the things that can lead you in that direction once you eat too much red meat.
Yeah, and the medical consensus is, and remains so, that eating red meat, too much red meat is bad for you.
Like, it just leads to all sorts of negative health outcomes like stroke and heart attack, heart disease, things like that.
The problem is, despite that consensus, studies still come out fairly regularly that question that idea that say no that's not necessarily true and they usually get shouted down but it's enough that it makes you like some people question that I feel like because the medical consensus is that for now it's probably okay to kind of follow that philosophy that less meat is healthier than more meat yeah for sure another big big reason is animal welfare and just maybe your moral values as a human that is a lot of people switch over to vegetarianism or veganism because the modern factory farming system
in the United States is is a horror show.
And everybody knows this.
Some people, some people do it anyway.
But it's a big reason.
You know, like vegans are like, no, all all animals have a right to life and a right to and we're not doing it right here in the United States, so I'm not going to take part in it.
Yeah, that's a whole subcategory of veganism called ethical vegans.
And I think that they could shoulder their own episode because the whole philosophy behind it and like the way that they live their lives, it's really interesting.
And something I ran across that they counter is the idea of carnism, eating meat, not being normal.
And we just take it for normal And they question that.
They're like, who said that eating meat is normal?
And that's why people like me can feel bad when I pass a truck full of cows on their way to the slaughter on the highway.
And then still go eat like a cheeseburger that same day.
We just kind of have this idea that carnism is normal and vegans are like, no, that's not true.
So I found that fascinating.
I kind of wanted to get into it a little more.
Yeah for sure. I'm not going to tell that story.
Mindful eating is another one which is I mean it's exactly what it sounds like.
Just instead of like falling into a pattern and I'll just eat that because that's what I've always eaten or you know grab that thing that's quick in brainless to put in my mouth.
Grab it by the horns.
Yeah. To really just have a heightened awareness of what you're eating, what's going in your and every impact from your health to, to what it means to the world and to that animal just being more mindful is another reason that people will go to a plant -based diet.
Yeah I think that's how people get to that from like religious mandated diets.
Yeah and we'll put environmentalism in its own category because there's a whole section on that but that's another reason.
Okay let's pick up health outcomes.
Let's dive into that a little more.
So one of the things that people figure out pretty quickly when they become vegans in particular is that you can get really unhealthy, really quick, just eating food that qualifies as vegan food.
There's a ton of processed vegan food out there.
A lot of times, a lot of sweetener including just sugar is added and just basically eating packaged food or even French fries.
As long as they're cooked in vegetable oil, those are vegan and everyone knows that French aren't really good for you.
So there is like a whole kind of blind alley that you have to watch out for when you get into veganism.
Yeah, I'm not a vegan but it's, I can still say word of caution if you go that route that you have to be more active in meal planning because what you really wanna do is eat whole foods and eat real foods.
So if you're like, I'm gonna go vegan and just sort of buy the ultra -process stuff that is technically vegan, you're not doing yourself any health favors.
As far as your moral values are concerned, you're doing right by that, but you want good outcomes all the way around.
So just lean toward whole foods and the Mediterranean diet, which, again, people around the Mediterranean just call it eating, that has roundly been shown over the years to be one of the ideal diets that you can lean toward?
I would say the ideal diet.
I mean, as far as health outcomes go, I can't imagine how much this diet has been studied.
And result after result shows that some kinds of cancers, diabetes, cognitive decline, cardiovascular disease, these things are all lower in people who eat a Mediterranean diet, like that's just what they eat, than people who don't, especially regular meat eaters?
Yeah, for sure. As far as the end of it, we'll kind of go through a little bit about who's deficient in what, depending on what you eat.
If you're looking at protein and saturated fat, you're gonna have, obviously if you're a meat eater, you're gonna have the highest intake among anyone, and the lowest is gonna be among vegans.
That just makes a lot of sense.
If you're a vegetarian or a fish eater, you're gonna be somewhere in the middle.
And vegetarians are more likely than meat or fish eaters to have, as a result, inadequate protein intake, and vegans, even more likely to have inadequate protein intake, think more than vegetarians.
Yeah, that's a long -standing chestnut in like the, I guess, I don't want to say bodybuilding community, just people who work out like hardcore, that you can't possibly be ripped as a vegan.
And our Stuff You Should Know listener, Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein, the guitarist for The Misfits, he is just vegan to the core.
And he is totally ripped, and in fact, he has his own protein powder called a Vegan Monster Protein, where you can get ripped yourself if you want to and still be a vegan.
I think ripped vegan, that's gotta already be a band name.
Oh, yeah. Maybe that's his sideband, his folk sideband.
yeah, ribs vegan. You might have a vitamin B -12 deficiency if you are a vegan because plants don't have B -12.
I think 52 % of vegans are B -12 deficient.
7 % of vegetarians and if you're a meat eater, you have a less than 1 % chance of being B -12 deficient.
That's a big deal too.
I mean like that is a well known problem for vegans and vegetarians because B -12 is used for red blood cell production, cell wall production, nerve function, DNA production, and it's just not in plants.
It's in meat. It's in fish.
It's in dairy. So, you really have to pay attention to that and basically take B12 supplements all the time to make sure you don't become deficient because it's not good.
Yeah, for sure. Here's one thing though, and this is something that was controlled for BMI even.
If you're a vegetarian or vegan, you have a kind of a remarkably, a remarkable statistical risk, or higher risk I guess, of getting bone fracture than meat -eater.
And especially when it comes to your hips, the risk of hip fracture with vegetarians.
You have a 25 percent higher risk of fracturing your hip as a vegetarian, controlling for BMI again, and vegans, 131 percent higher chance of hip fracture.
Yeah so part of it is that B12 deficiency because B12 helps produce bone, and so bone density.
But I also wondered if vegans typically get less protein and therefore have less muscle mass on average, obviously you can get ripped as a vegan but not everyone does, if you're more susceptible to falling, like you can lose your balance more easily because you have slightly less muscle mass than a meat eater and then with, with less bone density If you do fall, you're more likely to break a bone.
Just might, I wonder.
Yeah, yeah, I did mention cancer, you know, I think we all then talk about heart attack and stroke and stuff like that by eating too much red meat.
But cancer is another factor that I sort of briefly mentioned, but if you're a vegetarian or vegan, you have a 10 to 18 % lower risk of cancer than meat -eaters, although all -cause All Cause Mortality.
That's another good band name, man.
That's three band names.
All Cause Mortality?
Still the best is Peckish and Peekid.
All Cause, see, that can't be our band name because I can't even say it at the end of the show.
All -Cause Mortality was not different, which is surprising between vegetarians and meat eaters and vegans.
Yeah, another thing that surprised me is that vegetarians have a 20 % higher risk of having a hemorrhagic stroke.
So we should say all of this data came from a 2021 analysis of this British cohort of 65 ,000 Brits that have been followed around since the 90s.
So they managed to look at 20 ,000 vegetarians.
So this is a pretty robust study.
And they found that they have a 20 % higher risk of stroke.
They couldn't determine that for vegans.
I think they only had like 2 ,500 in this cohort, but for stroke at least, they weren't able to figure out how that affects vegans, you would assume that it would be an even higher percentage for vegans.
But a hemorrhagic stroke is where blood vessels in your brain start bleeding.
Again, that would make sense because B12 helps fortify cell walls.
And I would think the lack of red blood cell production would have something to do with that too.
So, I think what we're trying to say, the upshot is it's not just like a slam dunk that you're going to be healthier or your lifetime health outcomes are automatically gonna be better, but it's still, I mean it's just, if your overall, or sorry, if your all -dash -cause mortality is going to be the same, then I don't know, I think that kinda makes an argument to eat whichever makes you feel best. Yeah.
That's just a weird stat to all of that cause yeah I don't know I can't explain it maybe someone will have some more information on that but earlier we did promise an entire section on the environmental impact of eating animals because that is that is yet another reason and you know obviously people have all kinds of reasons and it's usually a combination of all these things but we were learning just it's become plainly obvious more and more this isn't the kind of thing I think that, especially in America, people like to look at a lot in the past, but it seems like in the last 15 years or so,
people are sounding the alarm, like hey, besides ethical concerns and health and all that other stuff, raising animals to eat is kind of a, or the way we do it is a disaster for the environment.
Yeah, so there's a lot of misleading stats out there that compare the amount of kilograms of greenhouse gases emissions compared to the kilograms produced of something, right?
That doesn't make any sense because a kilogram of broccoli is a lot less as far as food being spread among people than a kilogram 2 .2 pounds of beef, right?
You can feed way more people with 2 .2 pounds of beef than you can with 2 .2 pounds of broccoli.
You can feed like one and a half people.
Exactly, at best. Yeah, but so some people have said well, let's just alter it a little bit So we'll measure the kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions for every thousand calories produced And so that makes it a lot more apples -to -apples comparison Yeah but even still when you alter it like that the numbers essentially come out the the same which is that Meat production has a much larger carbon footprint than almost any kind of plant production although there are some surprises like for example, your beloved dark chocolate has a larger carbon footprint than producing poultry or pork chuck, how
do you feel about your dark chocolate with salt on top of it now?
I didn't kill that chocolate.
You know, coffee and chocolate are two pretty notorious environmental disasters as well on the non meat side, for sure.
For sure, the reason why apparently is demand.
And there's so much demand for chocolate that the deforestation that results to create more fields for cocoa production that that just is what's giving it such a huge footprint.
And I think coffee is relatively the same.
Overall though, I found a 2019 study from sustainability, the journal, and they basically You said vegetarians have 33 % lower greenhouse gas emissions based on their diet than meat, and a vegan diet has 53 % lower greenhouse gas emissions.
It's just, that's how it goes.
Yeah. And if you're like, well I like eating some meat, the biggest offenders there are beef, lamb, and mutton.
Ugh. I thought that was weird. So, beef produces 60 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions per kilogram and a kilogram of poultry is only six.
But you compare that to a kilogram of just some English peas.
That's under one kilogram of greenhouse gas emissions produced.
So you might think that as far as water consumption goes, the plants would far outpace, like a meat diet because you got to water vegetables.
but generally there are just a few plant -based foods that have a bigger water footprint than beef.
Yeah beef is just the worst offender of all but livestock raising livestock in general apparently 1 fifth to 1 quarter of all the water used by humans goes to raising livestock which is nuts but the reason why is because not only do you need water to keep that head of cattle alive until you decide to kill it, um, you also need water to grow the grain that you feed that head of cattle.
So they're just consuming all over the place, especially as far as water is concerned.
Yeah, and just so you know, there are like zero um, sort of vegetables that outpace beef.
Th - the two that do outpace beef that I was referring to are chocolate and almonds.
Yeah, and who considers an almond a vegetable?
Come on, give it up.
Uh, and I think as far as lamb and mutton go, the two other biggest offenders in the meat category, only cashews, pistachios, and hazelnuts consume more water to produce than lamb and mutton.
Hazelnuts are so great.
Far and away the best nut.
Oh, you think not the ground nut.
I haven't had one yet.
Well, peanuts apparently are a ground nut.
I have not had the Bambara ground nut yet so I should wait and reserve judgment.
Yeah, peanuts, they grow underground right?
Yep, they're a ground nut.
We can just see Jimmy Carter holding a big thing of peanuts and roots with dirt falling off of it.
R .I .P., and God bless that, man.
That's right. The U .S. maintains about 9 billion, 9 billion livestock to get the meat that it needs, or wants, I guess, is the better way to say it, and if that grain went to humans, it'd be enough for 840 million people that have plant -based diets.
Yes, and there was another thing that I came across that I was kind of surprised by totally makes sense.
As if we, en masse, as a species, humans, essentially abandoned livestock production, beef production or meat production in favor of a plant -based diet just basically globally, the chance of communicable diseases developing would drop drastically.
Because 75 % of emerging communicable diseases are zoonotic, which means humans get them from animals.
and we make our closest contact with animals through the livestock industry.
Yeah, and petting zoos.
Yeah, I mean, as long as it wasn't grown in a lab, you can kiss communicable diseases goodbye.
Yeah, the other environmental disaster of raising livestock, and this is more and more lately, is the habitat destruction to raise all these animals.
You're talking about extinction of plant and animal species, and thousands more being threatened in the year's upcoming because of habitat destruction.
And it's also true for some kinds of agriculture.
We've talked about palm oil cultivation being a big problem for a lot of stuff, specifically orangutan populations, or at least by example.
But beef, once again, is the biggest factor.
Beef drives 41 % of tropical deforestation globally, whereas palm oil and soy, which are two offenders on the other side, are only 18 % combined.
That's all. Just 18 % of deforestation.
Yeah, but the one takeaway here is beef bad.
It's what's for dinner, and what ruined the planet.
Yeah. It's far and away leading the way in all the bad categories.
It really does. Um, so yeah, I mean, we've just kind of touched the surface, especially on the environmental impact.
There's a lot to dig into there, if that interested you.
Um, but I feel like we gave some good reasons for people to adopt a plant -based diet.
I don't know if I'm going to fully, but I'd like to think it's—I'm kind of partway there already.
Yeah. I eat more vegetables now.
I eat way less red meat than I used to.
Yeah. for just like all the reasons that we talked about.
Yeah. I've got my four quarter pounders with cheese every day in half, and I eat both halves.
Since Chuck kinda laughed at my last joke, I think everybody that means we should probably slog along to listen to mail.
That was a real laugh.
That was an oh Josh laugh.
Yeah. I know. I love those too.
All right. This from a Smithy, Because because of us actually yes Hey guys, I've always had a bit of an interest in metalworking and as of about five years ago I've had an interest in your show I'd say your show has been the longest running podcast of my life actually I Remember listening to your episode about blacksmithing four years ago And I kind of set off the domino effect of me getting really into blacksmithing as a hobby I'm Definitely one of those that like to collect hobbies and with most passing in about six months And I never pick it up again, but not true with blacksmithing I've stuck
with it since your episode came out and I'd like to say I've come a long way with it.
I've attached a few pictures of my work, which is very good by the way.
Starting with early works and all the way to the two I completed about a week ago.
I thought you might be interested in seeing how your show kicked off, one of my favorite hobbies I've ever had, so thanks for that.
And that is from Tate Avent.
And you can find Tate, just look up TaterMakes, T -A -I -T -E -R -M -A -K -E -S, and check out Tate's work.
Well, thanks a lot Tate that is awesome Congratulations on your awesome hobby and getting so good at it And we really appreciate you letting us know that we had some sort of small tiny Impact on you we love hearing that kind of thing If you want to be like Tate and let us know that we had some small tiny impact on you Please send it via email to stuff podcast at I heart radio Stuff you should know is a production of I heart radio for more podcasts my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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