Transcript: #112 Defending Beef With Nicolette Hahn Niman

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• 02:13 About Nicolette Hahn Niman
• 05:15 Raising Animals
• 09:02 Vegetarianism
• 12:17 Carbon Footprint of Food
• 22:06 Grass-fed Meat
• 25:56 Saturated Fats Do Not Increase Heart Attack
• 35:03 Cancer
• 47:09 Global Warming
• 51:38 Overhauling the Entire Food System
• 55:20 The Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today
• 59:53 Where to find Nicolette Hahn Niman

Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 podcast. My name is Wendy Myers and you can find me at myersdetox.com and you can find this video podcast on the YouTube channel, WendyLiveto110 or on the corresponding blogpost.

Today, we are interviewing Nicolette Hahn Niman of Niman Ranch, you may be familiar with that if you’re in the chiliosphere and like to eat healthy meat healthy meat. She is the author of Defending Beef and used to be an environmental attorney. And she has a lot of really interesting information about how beef is healthy for us and how beef does not cause disease and how beef does not also cause global warming or other environmental issues. She’s very, very well spoken and educated and definitely has done her homework and research. So enjoy this one, it’s a really, really good podcast.

Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or any health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. The Live to 110 podcast is for informational purposes only. So please do not attempt anything that we suggest on the show today.

Our guest, Nicolette Hahn Niman is an environmental advocate, cattle rancher and author of Defending Beef. She previously served as a senior attorney for the Water Keeper Alliance, running their campaign to reform the concentrated production of livestock and poultry. In recent year, she’s gained a national reputation as an advocate for sustainable food production and improved animal welfare. She is the author of Righteous Pork Chop from Harper Collins in 2009 and has written for numerous publications including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post and the Atlantic Online. She lives on a ranch in Northern California with her husband, Bill Niman and their two sons.

Nicolette, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Nicolette Niman: Oh, thank you for having me.

Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and how you came to be running a cattle ranch?

Nicolette Niman: Okay, well I wouldn’t say run it.

Wendy Myers: Own one.

Nicolette Niman: I’ve been told that I’m running it, but my husband would definitely object if I say, “I run it.” I have an unusual pathway that got me here. I’m from Michigan. I grew up there and was one of those kids who spent a lot of times outdoors. I just love nature and I was really interested in biology and how things work. And when I went to college, I majored in Biology and then I went to law school and became a lawyer.

I was practicing law for about seven years before I started working for environmental organizations. First, I worked for Natural Wildlife Federation and then I was hired from there by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who is an environmental attorney and the son of the late Robert F. Kennedy. He runs a group called Water Keeper Alliance. He asked me to begin working exclusively on the issue of pollution from the livestock and poultry industry because this is a huge problem all over the United States and it wasn’t really being addressed. This was back in 2000. Things are a little bit different now, but especially at that time, there was very little being done on this.

And so that actually became my fulltime job and I worked exclusively on this issue of environmental problems related to livestock and poultry production for two years. And during that work, I met Bill Niman who is the founder of a network of hundreds of traditional farmers-ranchers who have their animals mostly on grass and all of them are in very optimal environments for their welfare and environmentally.
I started using the Niman Ranch Network as a model of good livestock husbandry. And then eventually, I got to know Bill Niman, the founder, better and better and better and then we got married. About a year after I left that job in 2003, we got married and then I moved to California from New York. So that was almost 12 years ago.

Originally, I didn’t expect to get involved with the ranch itself, but then I got very involved with the ranch because I just found it really fascinating and I wanted to learn more about it. I actually never pursued an environmental law career after that point because I was so interested in the ranch and what we were doing here.

So that was 12 years ago and I’ve been working on the ranch almost fulltime. For about six years, I did it. And then for the last 6 years, we’ve had children now, so I don’t work fulltime on the ranch, but I help out a lot still. So I’m still very involved in the ranch. That gives me the first hand perspective.

Wendy Myers: I have to say, I only eat the Niman Ranch bacon. It’s really, really good because I trust the brand and I trust that I’m going to be getting healthy, sustainably raised Omega-3 rich foods. I like the brand a lot.

Nicolette Niman: Yeah, well it’s a really unique product because of the way the animals are raised. There’s a lot of meat out there that has labels that say natural or things like that, but it still doesn’t tell you anything about how the animals were actually raised.

The whole concept behind Niman Ranch is that it’s a collection of farmers and ranchers who all use a very specific set of protocols and all of the animals are raised according to those protocols. It really is all about giving the animal an opportunity to express their own behaviors and not giving them drugs and chemicals and antibiotics, not giving them hormones, whatever. Basically, they’re raised in as natural as possible a way, as much like they would in nature and then try to always ensure that they’re humanely treated all the way through their lives and at slaughter, so that the whole time, their welfare is being considered.

Now my husband is the founder of that company, but we left that company several years ago. But I still very strongly support the products because I know how good they are. I know the good work that’s going into those products.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, it just breaks my heart about these massive cattle productions or pork swine productions where the animals are just being treated so horribly and are in this tiny, little crates. I don’t want to eat that food for at so many levels because I want to vote with my dollars. I don’t want to support those kinds of ranchers that are treating animals that way. And plus that negative energy you can get by eating that food and the toxins and GMO grain, etc.

Nicolette Niman: Yeah, I think in the pig industry, there’s kind of almost a universal practice of keeping the animals continually confined indoors. They’re always indoors. They’re standing over hard surfaces. It’s either concrete or wood or in some cases, metal grating. It’s a hard surface, it’s very hard in their bodies. They never have a soft place to lie down. They don’t have any opportunity for rooting or anything they would be normally be doing in nature.

And most importantly, they’re continually standing in this really contaminated environment because they’re very crowded and they’re breathing in the fumes of their manure, which is actually gathered below the buildings and they’re breathing in those fumes all day. It’s a really problematic environment for the animals. And I think it definitely affects the quality of the meat as well, even beyond the karmic aspect of it.

And in poultry, in turkey and chickens, it’s a similar situation, extremely crowded, the animals are always kept in these very crowded buildings. They don’t have opportunities for fresh air or exercise or engaging in any normal behaviors.

And dairy is the same way. You have the animals always in barns continuously from a certain point in their lives. With dairy cows, they’re usually outdoors when they’re young animals, but once they actually start producing milk, they’re kept continually in these barns. And again they’re on hard surfaces and they don’t get opportunity for exercise.

So there are huge problems in each of these sectors that relate to the welfare of the animals.

Wendy Myers: So you now believe that eating beef from sustainably and humanely raised grass-fed cattle is actually environmentally friendly and healthy. You had no moral qualms with that, which you mentioned your book. It makes one wonder why you don’t eat meat yourself because you’re a vegetarian, correct?

Nicolette Niman: Yes. Well, people will ask me that a lot. I became a vegetarian in college, freshman year in college and largely because of a lot of the same kinds of concerns that people voice today about the treatment of the animals and their environmental conditions and so forth.

So it’s been a long time, it’s been more than 25 years that I’ve been eating a totally vegetarian diet. I’m not vegan. There’s a big difference, an incredibly important difference in my view. I’ve been eating a vegetarian diet for a long time.

And I have to say if I were now in a situation, if I were to go back in time and I had all the information I have now, I probably never would have become a vegetarian. But I have been doing it for a long time and I’m very comfortable with my diet and I haven’t had the desire to eat the meat. That’s the only real reason I can point to you why I’m not eating meat.

We have two young sons. One just turned six and the other one is 1 ½. We feed them meat. I totally want to do that. That’s not my husband trying to encourage me to do that. That was my decision. I believe that’s really healthy food especially for younger people and for older people. Those are the two times in our lives when we really need all that extra nutrition that you get from eating meat.
I can’t really explain it other than I haven’t had the desire to eat it and if I ever did, I will. Good meat.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I can see that. When you’ve lived the lifestyle for so long, it’s like, “Why change now?”

Nicolette Niman: Yeah, exactly it’s working for me. My thing is I don’t try to encourage people to eat meat and I also don’t try to encourage people not to eat meat. But my point is to inform people’s choices. My first book is called Righteous Pork Chop and I talked about all these sectors and I talked a lot about the pork industry and the poultry industry and the dairy industry.

This most recent book Defending Beef was focused on the cattle industry, the beef cattle industry. And in both of my books, I really just tried to present people with the facts about how things are being done today and what the implications are and I also tried to rebuff some of the myths that are out there. And especially now, I feel like beef has gotten a very unshare amount of criticism that is really not deserved.

And so I’m trying to clear the air about both some of the environmental issues and some of the human health issues because I have this unique background where I have worked place on environmental side and I have done first hand ranching myself. So I know this issue really well. I wanted to add my perspective to the public conversations that’s taking place about beef.

Wendy Myers: Well, let’s talk a little bit more about vegetarianism. A lot of people that become vegetarian, including myself, I was vegetarian about a couple of years, I did it because I wanted to save the planet. Can you talk about maybe why that diet, is it the best choice for those wishing to cut down on their personal carbon footprint?

Nicolette Niman: Yeah, it’s really actually frustrating to me because I am a vegetarian so I know a lot about vegetarian diet and I also have been an environmental lawyer and I’ve been working first hand on ranch, so I see all of the parts of this discussion. What I think is happening now is people have just reduced it down to this really simple idea that if you want to eat in an environmentally friendly way, you eat a vegetarian diet.

Okay, well there are lot of problems that. The first problem is just that there’s a lot of food production that takes place that is very environmentally damaging that not has nothing to do with meat. So I wrote an oped for the New York Times a couple of years ago called The Carnivore’s Dilemma and I gave the example in that of potato chips.

I mean, potato chips are one of the most environmentally intensive foods because you have to account all of the resources that go into growing the potatoes. But then potatoes are actually also stored for long periods of time generally before they’re use.

And then there’s a lot of energy that goes into the process that takes place to make it into a potato chip. So when you end up with the end product of a potato chip, it’s actually a very resource intensive food.

Now people think, if they just think meat is intensive, vegetables are not intensive, that doesn’t get into any of that kind of complexity. So that’s one point.

And then a lot of the foods that a lot of vegetarians eat especially to replace protein, they’ll eat a lot of tofu products or soy based products or other kinds of faux meat, that kind of thing, a lot of those foods are quite intensive again in terms of processing or even in terms of the production on the farm side.

But the whole food from the moment that it started as a seed and then it’s grown and maybe it’s irrigated and there’s planting, there’s plowing, there’s harvesting, there’s maybe drying, there’s transporting, and then there’s the whole creation of the processed food that you end up with, let’s say it’s a veggie burger or whatever, there are many different inputs of energy and resources along that chain.

And so, one of the most important things is just to keep that in mind that all foods have environmental footprints and that the footprint is really variable depending on where and how and if it’s raised and then how much processing takes place and even storage like I mentioned with the potatoes. A lot of the energy is actually the storage of the potatoes. People never think about that stuff. So it’s just a much more complex issue than people think.

And then secondly, this is the kind of the other half of this. When you talk about specifically about grazing animals (cattle are grazing animals), they have actually a really unique environmental role because not only can you raise them in a way that’s less resource intensive depending on how you do it, but they can actually utilize ground. They can be raised in areas where you can’t do any other food production.

I did a lot of research on that issue for both books, actually. And there’s quite a bit of research has been done on that. It’s estimated that something like three quarters of the cattle of the world are being raised in areas where you cannot raise crops at all. And in the United States, about 85% of the cattle grazing that’s taking place is being done on what they called non-tillable land, lands where you cannot grow crops.

So just right of the bat, that tells you, ”Okay, this is actually not subtracting resources from our food system. It’s adding resources from our food system.” And then I make a really detailed argument in my book, Defending Beef about when you have well managed cattle, it’s actually an environmental enhancement because you create really good grazing practices. When raising is done the right way, you actually foster the creation of soils and therefore, all of the below ground life that is so important for a sustaining all of the life above ground, all the plants and all the animals.

And you also actually enhance the soils ability to hold water. So you have a much better water cycle when you have good grazing and I’m comparing this to pretty much any other form of land use whether it’s crop production or any kind of human development of the land.

Having well managed grazing process on that land is one of the best things you can do ecologically for that land and it actually enhances grassland ecosystems. So all of the wildlife, whether you are talking about wild bees (which do as much as 40% of the pollination of human crops), even the vegetable crops and the fruits and almonds and all those things, they depend on these open areas that are being grazed by cattle for habitat. And so they actually have enhancement to vegetable and fruit crops and grain crops.

And then all of the soil organisms, the insect life, all the wildlife that you see, whether it’s snakes or whether it’s rabbits or deer or whatever, they all need the grazing animals to keep that ecosystem functioning the way it’s supposed to. For millions of years, there were large herds of grazing animals on the world’s grasslands and those are pretty much gone today. So without the domestic cattle doing that grazing, these grassland ecosystems are not going to function properly.

So this is a big argument. This is a big picture argument that I make in my book. We think of vegetables as positive or neutral environmentally, we think of meat in a negative way, but it’s way more complex. And in fact, there are environmental negatives for fruits and vegetables. There are environmental positives for the meats. It really depends on how things are being done.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I listened to a Ted Talk a little while ago. It was really revolutionary about how we need cattle grazing lands and that creating cattle grazing lands actually reclaims some desserts because there are some parts of Africa and other parts of the world that are becoming less and less arid and turning into desserts because we need these grasslands to hold the water and creates healthy soils that can grow crops, et cetera. Cattle ranching is a very important aspect of reclaiming some of these arid lands.

Nicolette Niman: Yes, that talk was done by Allan Savory who has a really interesting background. He is a wildlife ecologist by training and was working as a wildlife ecologist. He’s originally from Zimbabwe and he’s worked in various places in Africa.

But he was actually practicing as a wildlife ecologist and working for the government and they were engaged in a number of these major reductions of animals on different lands. They were actually reducing the sizes of elephant herds because there were so many elephants. It was believed that there was too much impact on the land and they were also getting cattle off of the land and he was seeing in various different places, whether it was the elephants, the wild animals, or whether it was the cattle, the domesticated animals that when you remove the animals, the conditions actually got worse.

This was four, five decades ago, but that put him on this whole pathway for his life’s work, which is to reevaluate that assumption that people have had in modern times. People have this assumption for so long that the more animals you have, the worse the environment gets. And he started to show that actually, the animals have an impact on the land that is essential for the proper functioning of the ecosystems. And so, whether it was the elephants or the cattle, he began to demonstrate that you needed those animals to have all of the various kinds of impact.

So they do a form of grazing or pruning of the vegetation by eating. The trampling is actually really important because it actually chops up the surface which allows moisture to enter into the ground and also presses the seeds into the ground and presses vegetation into the soil to get the biological action on the vegetation.

He showed how there were all these different impacts that these big animals, these big heavy animals, whether they’re elephants or cattle, they were having these impacts on the ground, which were essential for the proper functioning of those ecosystems.

So yeah, he’s someone I talked about in my book Defending Beef. I’ve met him a few times and I’m a great admirer of his work.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, and we need their poop for fertilization, right?

Nicolette Niman: Right, the poop is another important part of it, exactly. There is recycling of the vegetation through the animals’ bodies and that actually sort of helps the biological processes that all of the animals and plants depend on in those ecosystems.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, so let’s talk a little bit about grass-fed meat. You’re not suggesting people eat less meat, but you think they should be eating the right kind of meat, different meats. So can you talk a little bit about grass-fed meats, et cetera?

Nicolette Niman: Yeah, what we do on our own ranch is we raise the cattle entirely on range land and pasture. Basically, range land means that it’s an area that nothing is ever done to it except for that it may be grazed. And if you say pasture, it means it’s more cultivated. So in some cases, you may have put seeds on it or done other things like that. And so in our ranch, almost all of where the cattle are grazing is just range land and there’s a little bit of pasture as well.

But they’re basically just grazing. And what’s really interesting about grazing animals is that they can actually just harvest their own feed. You’re not bringing them any feed, you’re not growing something and bringing it to them. They’re just eating the vegetation that’s there. On our ranch, they’re eating vegetation that occurs there naturally and is irrigated naturally just from rainfall. We don’t irrigate our land at all.

And we just basically just manage their movements. So they’re in one pasture for a little while, then we move on to another pasture. We’re monitoring where they are and how much feed there is. That’s the only thing we really do as far as feeding them.

We provide them a little bit of hay for part of the year, but just a very small amount. It’s really a tiny percent of their diet, less than one percent of their diet actually.

And what that ends up doing is it has a lot of benefits for the animal and it has a lot of benefits for the food that’s produced. The animal, because it’s actually harvesting its own feed and it’s moving around naturally, it is exercising, it’s continually breathing fresh air, it’s getting the kind of food that its body has evolved to eat. And so that would keep it a healthier animal and it also just everything’s functioning properly in the animal.

So we have an extremely low rate of any kind of illness among our animals and our food. We believe it’s kind of the healthiest possible kind of food that you can produce.

There’s been a lot of research that’s actually been done to quantify the differences between a totally grass-fed beef and conventional beef. The quantification of the different minerals and fats and everything, quantitatively, there is not a gigantic difference between grass-fed beef and conventionally raised beef, but there’s a pretty consistent difference.

So in everything you look at, whether it’s the fat types, the fat ratios, whether it’s the Omega-3 content, whether it’s the vitamin E, anything you look at, iron, whatever, calcium, it’s a little bit higher and across the board with grass-fed beef. And for me, the most compelling difference is just that you know when you but grass-fed beef, you can be almost a hundred percent certain.

It’s always good to do a little research and make sure, but pretty much all of the grass-fed beef that I am aware of at least, they’re not using any hormones in raising it, they’re not feeding them any antibiotics, they’re not giving it any other sort of unusual feed ingredients that you wouldn’t want in your food chain, things that are actually pretty common in the mainstream beef industry.

You’re avoiding a lot of problematic substances and you know you’re getting a healthy animal that ate a healthy diet and that was living a healthy lifestyle. That produces healthy food. So to me that’s a really important part of the difference.

Wendy Myers: Let’s talk a little bit about the common assumption that saturated fats in meats increase heart attacks and other cardiac events. In the 2014 in the New York Times reported a meta-study that found there was no evidence between eating saturated fat and cardiac events.

Why has the medical community still not come to the consensus about this relationship between saturated fat and heart disease? I have client after client whose cardiologist told them to eat Benecol and transfats and avoid red meat, et cetera and zinc that will give people healthy veins. And we need saturated fats. They’re on every cell on our body. Can you just talk a little bit about that?

Nicolette Niman: Yeah, that whole issue of the fats. My book Defending Beef is actually about 50% about the ecological issues and then the other half of the book is pretty much about the health and nutrition side of this question because there is this huge popular belief even in the medical and public health community that red meat and beef, in general, and beef in particular is problematic for human health and especially because of the saturated fat.

So what I do is I I traced through. In my book, I traced through the history of this issue. And actually, Nina Teicholz has written a great book called The Big Fat Surprise, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, which goes into a lot of detail about why that became the popular belief and how it really wasn’t scientifically based.

Basically, there was this big rise in the middle of the 20th century. There was a pretty dramatic rise in heart disease and other chronic diseases that was starting. There were a lot of medical people around the world, epidemiologist and others that were looking for an explanation. There were several different theories that were put forward. And one of the theories was that it was because of the saturated fat in the human diet.

And in fact, there’s one study in particular that is believed that really kicked-off the whole idea and that was done by Ancel Keys and it was called the The Seven Countries Study. And that kind of led down the whole medical public health community. It’s hard to imagine that one study could have been so influential, but it really began a whole trajectory of thought and I’ve researched that seemed to show that saturated fat was the problem.

But as you mentioned, Wendy, there was this recent study. But that was one of quite a few studies that have now looked at these issues in more detail and with more understanding now. It’s now realized that actually, there are a lot of other issues that are probably much more connected to the shift in the general public health than saturated fat consumption and that saturated fat consumption might have no connection at all.

For example, Harvard School of Public Health did a big study a couple of years ago that actually separated out the types of meats that people were eating. It found there was some connection between various human health concerns and processed meats, things like deli meats and that sort of thing. There was some connection, but when you took that out – and in my own belief is that it’s probably wise to limit consumption of processed meats because we don’t know what it is, but there does seem to be a credible link there between some human health concerns and processed meats.

But when you took out the processed meats and you just had meat that was basically fresh meat, a pork chop or a steak or even a hamburger, and you try to connect that with the human health issues, there was no link at all.

And there’ve been several studies I had found that have had that exact same result. But I think that Harvard study is especially important because it’s a big study and obviously, Harvard’s School of Public Health is a very respected institution. And there’s zero connection to the meat industry. It was not a meat industry funded study, it was just a public health institution trying to get to the bottom of this issue.

So my feeling is that today, the state of the evidence is that there isn’t good evidence to conclude that saturated fat is a human health problem. What’s much more likely is that the rise that we’ve seen in chronic diseases in the second half of the 20th century is more likely to the existence of transfats, which really started to be introduced in a big way, sort of early 20th century, but especially in the middle of the 20th century. So it actually tracks pretty nicely with the rise in a lot of the chronic health problems and then the increased consumption of both sugars and processed grains.

So when you look at each of those issues, there’s a much better link actually than there is to saturated fat. We had a very dramatic increase in sugar consumption in the United States in the last 50 years and according to USDA Research, we’ve had a lot of grain-based food consumption. So that includes a lot of types of foods. That has gone up by almost 40% in the last three decades.

I always think, the problem is not your steak, the problem is your muffin, your cookie, your bagel, and actually probably your donut, your French fry. One of the leading experts that I cite in my book who’s actually the leading research for transfats in United States, Fred Kummerow (who’s still alive actually and he’s in his 90s. He did it for decades, he was doing very intensive research on transfats), he says that saturated fat, unsaturated, doesn’t make any difference. What matters is when you get it to a super high heat and that oxidizes the molecules. And so basically, he says, avoid deep fried foods, whether it’s a French fry or a deep fried mushroom. That’s going to be a much bigger health problem for you.

And he says he eats two eggs, fried and butter for breakfast every day. Here’s the guy who knows everything about fats and he thinks that eggs and butter are healthy foods. And I would agree.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, and that’s why I think it’s better to cook with saturated fats like duck fat and beef fat and things like that, bacon fat, because saturated fat don’t go rancid under high heat. And those are heated to a high degree. They’re a much more safer cooking oils than vegetable oils and things.

Nicolette Niman: Right, a lot of people nowadays are starting to believe – I talked about the rise in the chronic diseases and how it doesn’t track animal fat consumption. In fact, red meat consumption – in my book, I’d track all these statistics and I always use official government data because I don’t want to be accused of using biased information. So I just used the official numbers and I show how red meat consumption was actually pretty stable throughout the 20th century. They went up and down a little bit, but the overall number, if you look it like 1900 then compare it to 2000 and just look at that century, the red meat consumption number is about the same. It’s actually slightly lower. And then in the last few decades, beef and pork both went down quite dramatically. Beef consumption is down 22% over last three decades.

So again, people have this idea in their minds that there’s this kind of rising consumption of meat and there‘s this rising consumption of chronic diseases and actually, the data doesn’t show that at all. The data actually shows rising chronic diseases, decreased consumption of animal fats, decreased consumption in total amount of saturated fat and lower consumption of dairy fat and red meat.

The numbers don’t work. Immediately, it doesn’t make a case. And then there’s this new clinical research and epidemiological research that has really tried to sort out this data a little bit better and this idea that started in the middle of the 20th century that all these problems were due to red meat and saturated fats is not being supported by the data. So it’s all being rethought right now.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I agree. Oh, hi there, your little friend.

Nicolette Niman: It’s my son Miles. Sweetheart, I’m doing an interview right now, I can’t talk to you right now.

Wendy Myers: My daughter likes to make cameo appearances too.

Nicolette Niman: You could play outside for about another 40 minutes, okay?

Wendy Myers: And so let’s talk about cancer, there’s a lot of folks in the vegetarian world and other worlds that are saying, “Red meat’s linked to cancer.” Can you talk a little bit about that and maybe acrylamides that can be formed from really high cooking heats or charring meats, so to speak.

Nicolette Niman: Right, exactly. So again, when you look at the individual cancers and the individual foods that are being blamed for this, there’s actually not a good link for really any of the cancers. And the stronger link is between the preparations.

So especially, again, really high heats, grilling (and whether you’re grilling vegetable or you’re grilling meat), there is probably a cancer issue there. And so again, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever grill a hamburger or grill a steak, but it probably means you shouldn’t do it every day.

I think that’s something that’s also being sorted out a little bit with the information. It’s being figured out that a lot of the things that have been blamed on beef are now being discovered to be associated with common preservation or cooking techniques. So again, the nitrates, the super heating and the compounds that are formed when you do the grilling. So that’s a very important distinction.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I go to BBQ places. I’m from Texas. So when I go to get BBQ, you’d see the slab of meat that’s charred black, has been cooked for 18 hours. That’s probably not a good idea. You want your meat lightly cooked, rare steaks. You want your meat as lightly cooked as possible, with the least amount of cooking as possible.

Nicolette Niman: Yeah. And actually, my Dad, it’s funny, some of what my Dad used to do (he passed away a few years ago, but he was very health conscious) turns out to have been incorrect and some of it was right. One of the things I remember that he thought us that I now realize was absolutely right, he said when toast gets blackened, you just at least scrape that off and probably just throw that toast away.

It’s really not about the beef. It’s about that blackened part. Whether it’s toast or whether it’s your French fry or whatever, it’s probably not good. Those are foods that you just should not eat very regularly.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, and let’s talk a little bit about some of the studies that vegetarians used to vilify meat. Not you, but some other vegetarians. For me, when I decided to become vegetarian, I had read a China study and I thought, “Oh, wow! I’ve got to get these foods out of my diet. They are very, very cancer causing or not health producing.”

But some of these studies that show that meat eaters get more cancer, et cetera, they are not including the healthy user bias. These are observational studies that are not very scientifically valid. They’re just observational studies that ignore the healthy user bias where people that eat meat also tend to have a very unhealthy habits like this smoke more, they don’t exercise and they don’t eat as many vegetables. Can you talk a little bit about that and how one cannot base those observational studies and exclude from their diet based on those?

Nicolette Niman: Yeah. Well, you just hit on a really key point, which I do talk about in my book as well. Especially in the Western world, this idea that red meat is healthfully problematic, that’s been around for a long time. So what has happened is all the more modern studies of the last few decades (as you said, it’s sort of the observational studies), they’re based on data of people who were more or less health conscious.

And there’s a coupling of behaviors. There’s a grouping of behaviors. If you’re someone who’s really concerned about your health, you tend to be someone who doesn’t smoke, who’s active, who tries to get enough sleep, you’re probably not out partying all night, you’re not doing recreational drugs, you’re trying to do all the right things.

And so what’s been happening in the last few decades, because red meat has been labelled an unhealthful food, people that are health conscious tend to avoid it. So then you look at the research and they show people with low levels of red meat and having better health outcomes. So now, we have a very problematic population base to look at because we just really can’t make the distinction of what’s causing this and what are the result of other things.

What I think is important to look at because of that, because of the dynamic that now exists, I think it’s really important to look at populations where you don’t have that kind of an influence as far as the dietary choices. And that’s why I think looking at traditional populations is really important, people around the world that are eating red meat, but have not been influenced by that kind of idea and also looking at historical data.

So again, I talk in my book about the beef consumption, the red meat consumption in 1900 being actually higher levels than it is today and yet heart disease which claims 42% the deaths today, the data is not as good from those days, but it’s estimated about eight percent of deaths were caused by heart disease in 1900 even though we had higher levels of beef and animal fat consumption. All red meats total were more. Everything was greater. We consumed more lamb, we consumed more pork, we consumed more beef, and we consumed more dairy fat and more eggs, everything was higher. And yet we had a lower level of heart disease, significantly lower level.

So to me the historical data’s really important, looking at populations around the world, it gets mentioned a lot, but I think it’s really important to talk about the Messi because their whole diet is based on beef and cattle blood and milk. Pretty much everything they eat basically comes from cattle.

Wendy Myers: Sounds delicious.

Nicolette Niman: And they don’t have any problems that we have. I talk about them in my book and they’re talked about a lot. It’s kind of an anomaly, but I don’t really think they’re an anomaly. I think they’re a good example of how this explanation that so many people have accepted is really not credible.

And then people talk about the Inuit as another example because people often think, “Well, the Inuit just eat fish and they eat a lot of seafood.” But actually, the Inuit also eat a lot of red meat. They eat caribou meat, they eat seal meat, there are meat that is considered —

No, I don’t. Sweetie, I’ll be down in just a few minutes, okay? Why don’t you just rest over there or look at a book, okay? Sorry.

There’s actually quite a bit. I read in an interview of a woman who was Inuit and was talking about the traditional diet as she had heard about it from her ancestors. Today, their diet is actually quite influenced by other factors and actually they have a very high level of smoking within the Inuit community, so it’s actually hard to look at their diet today. But when you look at, again, the historical data and this information of what they have eaten historically and traditionally, they also had very low levels of heart disease and they were eating a lot of red meat and tons of saturated fat. I think it’s estimated that their diet was 70% fat. And a lot of that was saturated fat.

They don’t need eat any fruits or vegetables either. I really believe in the healthfulness of fruits and vegetables, but they are a great example of how a lot of these stuff that we’ve been told is absolutely the cornerstones of good dietary habits, these things are maybe not as clear as we’d like to believe.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, and I think bottom line, red meat is within the context of a healthy diet.

Nicolette Niman: Right.

Wendy Myers: And I personally think red meat eaters have more fun. When I was vegan, it was such a joyless diet. You can’t eat this, you can’t eat that, whatever.

Nicolette Niman: Even though I have made the decision not to eat meat myself, I actually eat a really wide diversity of foods. And one of the things I really believe in in general is just the omnivore, the importance of eating a lot of different foods and a lot of diversity.

There’s a statistic that – I think read it from my Michael Pollan, but he got it from scientists. They estimate that humans ate about 80,000 different foods over the history over the world in different populations. And so that gives you just an idea of the diversity of what people have been eating around the world and just every kind of root and every kind of plant and every kind of fungus that aren’t poisonous, and animals, plants. Humans are omnivorous. It’s really to our advantage that we do that, that we’re able to do it.

There are animals whether it’s the Koala, or the Panda, or whatever, or the mark, butterfly, that can only exist from one kind of food. And there’s a huge problem for them when the food disappears or when it get contaminated. The advantage of humans the world over – I think it’s the key to our success – is that we’ve been able to make use of so many different kinds of foods and to nourish ourselves from those.
So I think anytime a diet has a lot of exclusions, that’s probably not a good idea. I believe in excluding sugar to the greatest extent possible because I don’t actually believe that that’s something our bodies have evolved to really exist with. It’s something that is very new.

Even honey which is one of the very few forms of really concentrated sweetness that humans got historically in our diet was quite limited. It was not available very often or to very many people and very many places. It was a really special thing and you got a little tiny bit of it.

And then ripe fruits, which in most parts of the world, are only available for part of the year and for a little while. And then the rest of the time, humans and their ancestors were eating things that were not sweet at all, not even naturally sweet and there was obviously no sugar at all.

So I think it makes a lot of sense to avoid sugar as much as possible. Obviously, anything that’s chemicals or non-natural foods I think are things to be avoided. But as far as actual foods, real food items that are in their natural whole form, I think the diversity is absolutely essential.

Wendy Myers: I agree. I think people get food sensitivities and get really ill from eating the same foods every single day. A lot of people do that. They eat chicken and vegetable. They eat the same thing every single day and people can eventually get sick from doing that. Our bodies are designed to eat a diversity of foods.

Nicolette Niman: Right.

Wendy Myers: But let’s talk a little bit about the global warming aspect of eating meat. I know I felt guilty at times from eating meat and potentially that’s causing global warming. Can you talk a little bit about how raising cattle produces a lot of methane which equals greenhouse gases?

Nicolette Niman: Yeah. I actually have the very first chapter of my book – I mentioned earlier that I wrote an oped for the New York Times, which was actually on that very issue because there’s been so much talk about meat production and a connection to global warming and especially beef production.

So, I wrote this oped for the New York Times called the Carnivor’s Dilemma. And actually, that was the genesis of my whole book Defending beef. And in Defending beef, what I do is I show that, first of all, depending on the how you raise the animals, it has vastly different effects. A lot of what is been blamed on the meat industry are things that actually are not inherently part of the meat industry at all.

The number that people very often point to is a number from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. Initially, they said, 18% of global warming gases were due to livestock industry. And then they reduced it a couple of years later down to 14% although a lot of people still used the 18% number. So they say that the world over, all the livestock all together causes about 14% of global warming gases.

Well that’s a pretty big number, but actually almost half of that number comes from deforestation in the developing world. So again, these are things that are not directly related to livestock. So if you are cutting trees down to grow livestock, that’s bad. I agree. That should not be done. But that has nothing to do –

In the United States, for example, with cow, we are not importing very much beef at all. About 85% of the beef in the United States is from the United States, it’s domestic. And then we have a small amount of beef, about 15% of the beef is imported. But almost all of that comes from Australia, Canada, and Mexico. And none of those are countries that are experiencing deforestation. There’s no deforestation happening in United States either.

So again, this idea that the deforestation is something that our beef consumption in the US is contributing to is just not factually based. So when you look at the actual facts, it’s not factually based. So what I do is I go through all that in my book. Defending Beef.

And then in the United States, when you’re talking about, “Okay, is my beef contributing to climate change?”, you really have to look at the domestic numbers and those, we have the official numbers from the United States Environmental Protection Agency to use as the basis for that. And those numbers say that all agriculture in United States causes about eight percent of the global warming gases. That’s all of agriculture. Cattle production is about two percent of global warming gases.

Now two percent is not zero. It’s an important number, but it’s not what people think. People always have this crazy ideas in their mind like, “Oh, I’ve heard it, it’s like half of global warming.” It’s just not the case at all. Those are numbers that they’ve been argued by certain people, but the official numbers are totally different from that. And there are no credible scientists in the entire world that accepts those 50% numbers that some of the vegan advocacy materials will use.

So it’s about two percent of global warming gases that are attributable to all of the ruminant animals. That includes all the dairy cattle, all the beef cattle, all the bison, sheep. All that added together is about two percent. And there’s actually really good evidence showing that that can be reduced as well through good management, good land stewardship and good cattle husbandry and good animal husbandry.

So what I’m arguing in my book is that we need to improve the practices of how people are managing the animals on the land and just make sure we’re continually doing everything we can to bring down those methane emissions. But I think that the most important thing is to realize that the numbers that people have heard are just way out of the mark as far as what’s been scientifically proven.

Wendy Myers: So what do you think is something that we can do to overhaul the entire food system to ensure that we’re able to feed the planet in an ethical manner?

Nicolette Niman: Well there’s actually pretty good research. I talked about it in my first book, Righteous Pork Chop as well as in my latest book, Defending Beef. There had been analysis that have been done by really credible think tanks that have looked at, for example, could you get rid of factory farming and could you put animals back on the grass and do you do this sort of husbandry that I’m talking about to feed the world?

And there is one study a few years ago that was done in Austria, a very credible think tank there, that evaluated that specific question and found that you could actually put all the animals out in pasture and still produce the same amount of food that you produced today because you’d get rid of a lot of the crop fields where you were raising the feeds that you transport to the animals. And if you have good management, you can actually use the land in a much better way.

They also found that even if you converted entirely to organic, which has lower yields, in general, in some cases with different crops (not always, again, good management makes a difference, but you have a somewhat lower yield of organic crops), they said, ”Okay, what if you also converted everything? You got rid of the factory farms and you convert to organic,” they found that fairly modest reductions in the levels of meat in the Western world would be enough to continue to produce enough to feed the entire world.

So that’s not really true, this oversimplified idea that you have to have these factory farms to feed the world or that you’d have to have dramatic reductions in consumption. I’m actually arguing in Defending Beef that these cattle herds are really ecologically important. So in addition to the fact that they’re producing nourishing meat and milk for people, they’re actually helping the functioning of the ecosystems and they’re helping to sequester carbon in grasslands.

And so, I argue that they’re an ecological plus and they’re producing healthy food. So if you got rid of all the cattle, you would get rid of all that nourishment, all that protein, all that iron, and all that wonderful meat and milk that’s produced and you’d have an ecological deficit as a result.
What?

[male]: The hides.

Nicolette Niman: My son says, my six year old son just added that the hides are important too. Yeah. When cattle are slaughtered, every part of their body ends up being used for different things.

And so I talked about this in Defending Beef actually, that you would need to replace all the materials that are used from their bodies, whether it’s their hooves or their hides or their bones. Their bones go into fertilizers, their hides are used obviously for shoes and footballs and clothing and everything, and soccer balls, chairs.

And so it really is true, there will be an enormous loss to [inaudible 00:55:10] than just the food system if we got rid of cattle. But I just think that there’s no way it’s going to happen and then there’s no way that it should happen.

Wendy Myers: Yes, yeah, I totally agree.

Wendy Myers: I have a question that I like to ask all of my guests, what do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?

Nicolette Niman: Well, it’s so hard to generalize. I think things are quite different in different parts of the world and I’ve actually lived abroad. I spent one year living in Africa and one year in France and I’ve travelled around in Africa and in Europe. I’m not sure if I would say this is true the world over, but certainly in the Westernized world, what I have seen is that more and more of people don’t know how to cook.

And that to me is almost like a crisis. It is a crisis. Not only does it mean that you’re more and more reliant on snack foods and on processed foods and prepared food, which have been shown over and over again to have lower nutrient levels, to have more salt, more sugar, more of the bad kinds of fats, but also, you’re actually unable to provide yourself a healthful diet in an affordable way. When you know how to cook, you know how to make use of things that are in season. You know how to use the less popular cuts of meat. So you can buy really high quality food when you know how to cook and then just put it together. It doesn’t have to be something fancy. It’s just a basic technique.

So I’ve actually been saying that I think the single most important thing we could do in the US for sure is just every American should learn how to cook. I do believe it should be part of the school curriculum. I know that’s being done a little bit again. When I went through the schools, that was the standard part of the curriculum. And then I think it was viewed as old fashion and that was taken out. And so now we have this whole generation that didn’t learn how to cook from their parents because there wasn’t that much cooking going on in their homes and they didn’t learn it at school either. And so we’re kind of a handicapped as far as feeding ourselves healthy food.

And fortunately I think there’s this resurgence in interest in cooking. I think that’s a critically important part, but I think it should just be part of our educational system too.

Wendy Myers: I absolutely agree with you. It’s very difficult to be healthy if you’re not making some food at home because most restaurants do not care one lick about your health. They’re using table salt, they’re using soy bean oil, they’re using shortening and margarine, et cetera, these very cheap industrial products and adding MSG that makes it taste – but a lot of people have MSG glutamate sensitivity. You just can’t be healthy if you’re only eating at restaurants because the healthy restaurants are extremely expensive. The people, the chefs will only use the finest ingredients. it’s very expensive to go there.

So I absolutely agree with you that that’s very important. I took home economics when I was in eighth grade and we’re actually baking cookies, we weren’t baking chicken.

Nicolette Niman: Yeah, we weren’t always doing healthy food. I had the same class.

Wendy Myers: But no baking of chickens, but at least you get some idea of how to cook and we’re doing it.

Nicolette Niman: And I think there’s this movement towards having school gardens. I think just getting kids doing that kind of thing, having some connection to an understanding of how – they have a school garden at my son’s kindergarten and they had one at the preschool too. We’re kind of fortunate we live in a community where people are really interested in these ideas.

[male]: And we make apple sauce!

Nicolette Niman: And they make applesauce, okay. But they do. They do really have healthy food. I think just having this understanding of taking a whole food, growing it and then taking it and turning it into food.

And one thing I’ve realized over the years is that it doesn’t have to be fancy preparation. You can do really simple where you know just a few basic things. One of the things that I tell people a lot that don’t know very much about cooking, I tell them, “Just a few basic things.” One of the most important thing is just have fresh lemons in your kitchen, have olive oil and just about anything whether you’re going to take kale or green beans or anything, if you steam it, and put a little bit of salt, pepper, olive oil, and fresh lemon juice on it, you’re going to have a delicious food right there. It’s just so simple and it’s really helpful.

So, I think just having a few key techniques and a few key ingredients in your kitchen, those are easily something you could learn in eighth grade. You know what I mean? They’re not doing it, but they could.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, absolutely, it can be so easy. You can steam up some broccoli in four minutes. it just doesn’t take a lot of time, it really doesn’t.

Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about where they can find you and get your book.

Nicolette Niman: Yes, I’m actually mostly on Facebook and I have a Facebook page for Defending Beef. And I have my own website which is NicoletteHahnNiman.com, just a really simple website that tells more about me and links to a lot of my writings. And then our company, we now have a new company called BN Branch and that is just EatLikeitMatters.com.

Wendy Myers: Okay, great. Can you do online ordering?

Nicolette Niman: You actually can’t unfortunately. We did that for a while and it was a lot of work. It was too hard for us. But you can learn things about what we do and anybody who’s in the By Are can find where they can. And actually, we are in a few places around the country, but basically, for the most part, we’re just in the Bay Area.

Wendy Myers: Okay, well thank you so much for coming on the show. That was so informative. I love Defending Beef. I do it all the time, we have to fight the good fight.

Nicolette Niman: Yeah, thanks, thanks, Wendy. I enjoyed being with you.

Wendy Myers: And listeners, you can learn more about me at myersdetox.com, learn about all about natural healing and detoxification and the Modern Paleo diet, et cetera. And thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 podcast.