Transcript: #16 The Vegetarian Myth with Lierre Keith

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• 11:39 The China Study
• 15:14 Is the Vegan diet a Way to Prevent Disease?
• 20:31 Plants Eat Animals
• 24:13 Factory Farmed Meats
• 29:12 Grains
• 40:17 Soy
• 49:31 Health Issues in Being on a Diet.
• 52:43 Can You be Healthy on a Vegan Diet?
• 56:58 Can Vegetarians be Healthy?
• 59:32 Difference Between Factory Farmed and Grass Fed Meat
• 78:02 The Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today

Wendy Myers: Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the Liveto110 podcast. Today I’m going to be interviewing Lierre Keith. I’m very, very excited about the show. I’ve been anticipating her coming on the show for a while because I myself used to be a vegetarian. And when I read her book it completely changed my life and I changed my diet because I realized that a lot of the ideas I had about vegetarianism were not in fact correct.

We’re broadcasting live from Malibu California. Before we get started I have to do a little disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition. The Liveto110 podcast is solely informational in nature and is not intended to diagnose, cure or heal any disease. So please consult your health care practitioner before attempting any treatment I or a guest suggest on the show.

Please go check out my website myersdetox.com™. I started this site to educate you about Paleo nutrition and the importance of detoxing from heavy metals and industrial chemicals that are the major underlying cause of disease and how to treat your health conditions naturally without medication. And if you like what you hear today in today’s show, please give the Liveto110 podcast a nice review and rating in iTunes. This is going to help me get my message to people around the world to get my word out on health. I would appreciate it so much.

So let’s get on with the show. I wanted to tell you my short ordeal with a vegetarian and vegan diet. I was vegetarian for 18 months and then took the plunge with a vegan diet for six months. And after I read in the China Study, that was it. It gave me the concrete proof I needed to go vegan and stop eating all animal products including meat and dairy. And after a couple of years I began having very subtle problems. I was experiencing brain fog and mental instability.

I was actually going into rages here and there. I was having depression and fatigue and I hadn’t slept well in years. And luckily I was fortunate enough to seek help with my doctor when I began sensing that something wasn’t quite right with my body. But frankly I saw my doctor when I started having trouble losing weight because little did I know that my vegan diet killed my thyroid, which killed my metabolism. And you know my doctor ran all the tests, but she didn’t really know or didn’t tell me that my diet was the issue.

But luckily I happened to be reading Natasha Campbell-McBride’s Gut and Psychology Syndrome at the same time I got my test results and there was a chapter in the book on the nutrient deficiencies suffered when you’re on a vegetarian diet. I was literally reading my test results. And at that moment it dawned on me that my diet was causing my health problems. But I was still hesitant. I needed more proof because all the research I’d read that the vegetarian diet was healthy was programmed in my brain. Dr. Campbell-McBride’s book kept referring to Lierre Keith’s book The Vegetarian Myth. And I cannot even tell you how thankful I am that I read this book because it gave me a very clear message backed by real research that I needed to hear that the vegan diet does not promote health as it claims. I’m so excited to have the author of this book that saved my health on the show.

Wendy Myers:Good afternoon, Lierre. How are you?

Lierre Keith: Hi.

Wendy Myers: Hi. How are you doing?

Lierre Keith: I’m good how are you?

Wendy Myers: I’m so glad you’re here. So first, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and what inspired you to write The Vegetarian Myth?

Lierre Keith: Well I was a vegan for almost 20 years. I started when I was 16 and as you might guess my health failed catastrophically. And I think the two reasons I wrote the book; one is that I really want to save the next generation of idealistic people from doing this to themselves because it’s pointless. And I also want the people who care the most about animals and about the planet to understand that a vegan diet is not the best embodiment of those values. We think it is because we don’t have complete information but when you add more information into the package you start to realize that the problems are way bigger and the solutions are also very different than simply eating a plant-based diet. So those were sort of my two biggest motivations in writing the book.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. It’s really just amazingly written and it’s hard to make arguments against what you’re saying because you say it’s so eloquently and so clearly. What was your light bulb moment when you stopped being Vegan?

Lierre Keith: Well honestly the light bulb moment was the very last day of my vegan life. Most of my friends are also vegetarian or vegan. I mean it was just what you did if you were any kind of environmentalist or a feminist or whatever activist. You know everybody was a vegetarian and we’re all trying to be vegan as well and I was more successful than everybody else in my friendship circle. I mean I was the one who is known for being really hardcore. And they say that because all of my friends one by one fell away. They all started developing health problems, some of them sooner rather than later, some of us really stuck it out.

So I had watched any number of people in my life already tell me that they had to eat meat or they felt incredibly sick in various ways and I didn’t believe them frankly. It was too hard to believe them. It meant that everything that I had built this whole a ideology on and really an identity around being vegan and it was almost impossible to hear my friends say, “I just feel too sick eating this way and I feel dramatically better when I eat ‘fill in the blank.'” So I was the last one in my friendship circle to really give it up. And it helped having seen other people already go through it. But I sort’ve knew it was coming, I knew eventually it was going to have to be me, you know it’s really hard to face that when you have built your identity around these whole set of ideas in this whole way of life.

So the very last day of my vegan life, I went to see a Qigong healer – it’s a form of traditional Chinese medicine and he told the point blank that if I kept doing this and I was going to die and I knew he was right. I knew that I just could not go on with the level of pain and exhaustion that I was dealing with. So it was really hard. This is not an easy moment for anybody. You know there’s a lot of people out there who say, “Oh you’re just doing this because you like the taste of meat” or something. I thought it was just some kind of preference and it wasn’t, it was an incredibly dramatic thing to have to learn to eat meat again but the results were instantaneous in my case.

So I knew he was right and I was glad that he told me the truth. And in my case I really had to hear it from somebody who I really respected and who had more knowledge and more status than I did. I couldn’t hear it from my peers, it wasn’t enough. But when this 70 year old Qigong healer who has been doing this his whole life basically took one look at me and said you’re going to kill yourself – that was the moment when I was finally able to hear and know he was right. I mean that had already been building up, I had the feeling that that’s where I was headed for when I went in that day. But it was still a really, really hard moment. And I cried a lot and he was incredibly compassionate toward me, but it had to be done. So I’m dramatically healthier now than I was in 1999 and I’m very very grateful that I listened to his advice. So, that was the end, it’s a very hard day for everyone and there are plenty of people who send me e-mail every week who are at exactly that moment in their lives and I try to give them that same compassion and care because I know how hard it is to take that first bite when you haven’t done it for 5 or 10 or 15 years. It’s a really hard thing to get over once you’ve built up all this resistance to it, it’s really a hard thing. It’s not just diet. It’s like everything. So anyway, that’s where it was.

Wendy Myers: What health problems did you suffer when you were vegan?

Lierre Keith: Well after about two years of being a vegan my spine started to fall apart, I have degenerative disc disease. People’s spines don’t fall apart for no reason when they’re 18. It was a complete anomaly. None of the doctors could figure out what the hell was wrong with me or why this was happening. And when you look at my MRI they assume that I was in some kind of horrible car accident or that I had a skydiving accident – that’s what it looks like, that’s how bad it is. And the pain was just extraordinary. So there was that, that nobody can’t explain. I stopped menstruating, which off course is very common among women who are either vegan or eat other kinds of low fat diets.

The hypoglycemia just got worse and worse and worse. I also developed an autoimmune disease. I have Hashimoto’s which was not diagnosed for years and years. But that clearly has a link to both soy and wheat consumption. So I didn’t do myself any favors with that. Then I had that set of usual low grade stuff that a lot of vegans get; that horrible dry skin, the dry hair, the tremendous exhaustion, freezing cold all the time, I mean all of that is all part of Hashimoto’s as well but it’s sort of comes as a package. And then the terrible depression and anxiety stuff that just got worse and worse. And it wasn’t until I got out of the vegan world and started to really investigate more about nutrition that all of that fell into place. And I realized what I had done to myself and that some of that was going to be permanent. Some things did get better. I mean some of this cleared up right away but some of it I will live with forever. So, that’s just the price you pay for doing crazy idealistic things when you’re a teenager.

Wendy Myers: Many vegetarians claim that gorillas are big and strong yet eat only plants. What are your thoughts on this concept, which is a very common argument for the vegetarian diet?

Lierre Keith: Well gorillas have a completely different digestive system than we do. So yeah, they are big and strong. So are elephants but we can’t eat cellulose and turn it into usable fat and protein, they can. So if I have the digestion of a gorilla, sure I can eat bark and leaves but I’m not. So you’ll starve on that diet, you’ll kill yourself. You cannot extract nutrition from it because our digestive system is completely different. I mean our digestive system looks much more like the wolf than it ever will a gorilla.

Wendy Myers: And I have to say I really credit your book with is snapping me out of my vegan haze and rethinking so many dietary lies I’d been fed within the vegan community and by the China study. What are your thoughts on the China study?

Lierre Keith: The China Study, right. The best takedown of the China study is actually Denise Minger and I cannot possibly do the kind of job on the China study that she did. And I would highly recommend everybody go see her work on these pages and pages. I mean she spent three months just reading the China study and figuring out all kinds of things that were wrong with it.

So some of the big problems of the China study, I’ll try to be very brief. You know one kind of problem with this kind of study is that they take these broad populations and then you try to reduce the variables to one thing and it really can’t be done. So for instance, you’d say there’s some kind of causality between the fact that these people have less kidney cancer and what do you know they eat this or this or this. And there’s no way that you can make a causal argument between this one thing and their diet and of the fact that they have cancer. And so those kinds of studies are kind of useless. They can sort of point you in some broad directions but in order to draw any kind of conclusion from that, you’d have to isolate every single one of those variables and then actually do a study on a laboratory setting. And the China study is mostly that kind of broad based silliness that does not actually tell us anything useful about the variables at work and what they may or may not produce in actual human beings. So that’s like sort of, it’s been broad stretched, what’s going on.

But he also does some real slight of hand stuff. Like there’s this whole thing if you feed rats certain proteins [casein] then they may or may not get cancer. And you know the point is that those proteins don’t ever exist in isolation in nature. So you’re taking basically a highly industrialized extract of food [casein only] and feeding them to rats and then seeing if it causes cancer. We already know that’s going to cause cancer – that doesn’t exist in nature. Like, why would that make a healthy rat? So he’s not really proving anything that we don’t already know, because that’s never going to happen in the real world, right? We don’t eat isolated proteins, isolated amino acids in nature, we eat whole foods of whatever it is we eat; whether it’s meat or whether it’s plants. It comes with a whole cohort of different amino acids. So he’s testing something that’s never going to happen. So that’s like another big problem with it.

And you know overall, the China study was not a proven study for that reason. None of this is actually is how science is done. And a lot of people read it as if that’s true, but they don’t understand what science is, how an experiment is actually set up and then what you may or may not draw from it. They think that because there may be some correlations made, that’s somehow causality and it’s simply isn’t true. That’s not how it works in science. So I would really recommend that people do a little more reading into the China Study and all of its problems and really try to understand what the scientific method is and how science is actually done. Because you will see that Campbell doesn’t really stack up to any of that.

Wendy Myers: Yeah, I don’t mean to keep harping about it but whenever I talk to someone that’s vegetarian or vegan, their go-to argument is always the China study. But it’s been refuted by scientists that aren’t even in the nutrition world. It’s just refuted on bad science grounds. And the basis of my conversion to veganism was to save my health. So I could prevent all the dreaded diseases from which our country suffers. And do you think the Vegan diet is the way to prevent disease as the China study claims?

Lierre Keith: No. Very firmly no. The problem with the vegan diet is that, well there’s two problems. One is that, there are some substances that are going to get too many of those things and there’s the deficiencies. There’s some nutritional substances you need that you’re never going to get or never going to get enough of. So you’ve got excess and then you’ve got a deficiency and neither of those are going to meet the needs of the human template. So I can get into specifics if you want, but just broadly speaking that’s the problem with the vegan diet. You’ve got excess and you’ve got a deficiency both.

Wendy Myers: And it really saddens me that the top selling books on Amazon are books promoting the vegan diet by Joel Furman, Neil Bernard, John Robbins, and others. Why do you think the Vegan diet has become so popular? I mean it’s such a joyless diet and there’s so many restrictions. There’s so many things you can’t eat yet people are somehow drawn to this way of eating. Why do you think this is and are these books just playing on people’s fears of avoiding disease?

Lierre Keith: I think part of it is the disease factor. I’m speaking for myself. One of the main reasons I did it was because I felt, once I learned about factory farming it was really horrifying and I didn’t want anything to do with this and I didn’t know there were any other options. Also, being 16 years old and living in the suburbs I didn’t actually have any options. I mean I had no way to get to a real farm or to grow my own food. So all I knew was if you’re eating animal products, you’re eating a pile of torture. And that is generally thought if you’re eating factory farming and I think that’s everybody no matter what side you’re on. I think that’s one conclusion we can at least all agree that factory farming is really horrible and we need to stop it. And so that at least I think we can set aside – yes that’s true.

So then the question becomes, “What else is it that we are trying to avoid or trying to promote?” And for me the animal cruelty thing was huge but also just death. You know I thought that there was a way for my life to exist without the deaths of such creatures. And it seemed really obvious to me that when I looked on my dinner plate, there was either a dead thing or there was a pile of insensate salads essentially. So animals mattered and plants didn’t and that was the line I was going to draw. So if that was really the question, if the suffering of sentient beings was the problem that it seemed the really simple way to do that was simply to eat plants instead.

And there’s a few problems with this. The first one being that agriculture is the most destructive thing that people have done to the planet. I mean literally the number one thing. So there’s no way you can look at the history of this and say wiping out 98% of an animal’s habitat is somehow animal friendly. I mean that’s absurd. I didn’t know that at the time. So all I knew was that is there something dead on your plate? It’s not till you dig a little deeper and try to figure out how is my food actually produced, what is the cost to the planet? And you start to question agriculture – that’s when you start to get to the deeper answers because it’s way bigger than what it looks like when it’s on your plate.

And the other problem with this, even setting aside the agriculture problem is that plants are extremely sentient. They are intelligent, they communicate, they help each other, they work in communities. They communicate in a slightly different way than we do but they are very much alive and very much participating and in fact we are alive to them. I mean they are the ones who create oxygen for us, right? We’d be dead in what, 6 minutes without oxygen? And that’s one of the things they do for us. They also have a whole bunch of other functions in terms of keeping the planet alive, keeping all the different cycles going; the nitrogen cycle and the water cycle and all of that.

We are very dependent on plants. But if you don’t know that, then the simple answer is, “Oh if I want to stay away from death and suffering I shouldn’t eat animals.” So that what was I did when I was 16 and to me it very much matched the psychology that adolescents tend to have which is that very black and white thinking. And I think the gift with adolescents is that incredible moral vigor, it mattered to me so intensely not to participate in factory farming once I found out about it. And that’s commendable, that’s not the problem.

The problem is not the underlying ethics here, the underlying value system. The problem is that there’s much bigger information that we need to incorporate before we make these decisions. So I think one of the reasons that these books are so big is because I think a lot of people care about what’s happening to animals and to the planet and they’ve been told this is the simplest solution. That’s not the solution that we need. I mean I think it’s good that at least people are trying to think about food and human entitlement in a more political way. So that’s the good part of this. The part is that they’ve been led astray completely and they’re not helping the planet at all and they are definitely going to damage their health long-term.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. You know I was really shocked when I read in your book that you’re actually killing animals even if you only eat plants. It was just so brilliant. Can you explain what you mean by this statement?

Lierre Keith: Well there’s two different levels here. The first is that, and I discovered this being a gardener – that I could not have healthy soil without adding animal products. The soil just wears out, there’s no nitrogen, all the minerals – they call it mining a soil, because you’re sucking all the minerals out and there’s no way to replace them without adding animal products. And so you know I could go to the feed store, to the garden store and buy something that says “Organic Soil Amendment” and not read the label. But I’m not that kind of person, so of course I read the labels. And what you’re adding back is of course blood meal and bone meal – it’s dead animals, because that what plants eat. And there’s not actually any way out of the cycle.

And that was the hardest part for me and at the end what I had to accept was there were two kinds of death. There was no death free option for me to be alive; I was going to be dependent on death no matter what. And so the first option was I could be part of that cycle of life. So life become death become life becomes death and we are all eating each other in the end. And I could be a willful and conscious part of that process and do it the best way that I knew how. Or I could be part of the death that’s killing everything and my conclusion on that was that that was agriculture. That this process of taking over an entire ecosystems, destroying every living thing and then planting it for human needs alone, creating those vast mono crops of wheat and corn and soy and whatever – that is the most destructive thing people have done to the planet and that is not a death free option.

There are not just dead animals, but entire species dead inside that food. And so that was the decision that I had to come to later – which death I was going to participate in and I chose the one that was the cycle because at least life gets to continue. But that’s what it meant, when I was just trying to grow vegetables, I had to understand that those plants wanted animal products. There was no way to keep the soil healthy without it – so manure, blood, bone. Whatever forms it came in, that was what had to be added ultimately to keep the plants healthy. And then you can extend that out to all of nature and see that it’s always that kind of cycle – where the plants are eaten by animals and then the animals eat each other and ultimately, the soil eats everyone and recycles every last molecule of carbon in my body, in your body, all of it is on loan and all of it will become incorporated into another living creature at some point.

In fact the thing that’s really fascinating is that every single rock on the planet consists of molecules that were once part of living creatures and every single molecule right now that’s in a living creature will once again become rock at some point and then get recycled back into being alive. So the rock itself, like the structure of the planet itself is part of this process. Life just did not exist in this tiny little green slice of the surface of the planet, it’s the planet as a whole. It’s either alive or it’s not. And we are very lucky our planet is alive, but we need to understand how long the cycles are and what’s involved because once again there’s no death free option. It’s always just a process of recycling. So either we do it well or we do it poorly. But there’s not actually any way out.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. I love that – plants eat animals as well. It’s so brilliant, I just love it. So one thing I think that people are overlooking in the studies supporting vegetarianism is that they are using factory farmed meats that are fed GMO grains. What is the flaw in vilifying all meat based on studies like this?

Lierre Keith: Well the real flaw is that cows are not meant to eat corn. And if you feed them corn even if it’s organic corn, they’re going to get sick. You know they have four different stomachs and the rumen has to be at a neutral Ph and that’s because they depend on bacteria. So what’s actually happening inside a cow is really interesting, because the cow eats the grass, but she doesn’t actually eat the grass. She’s feeding that grass to the bacteria inside her body. The bacteria are the ones that can actually break down the grass and then she eats the bacteria. So it’s this really brilliant thing where she takes very, very poor quality cellulose, gets inside her body by chewing and swallowing and then the bacteria then break it down and what she gets out of it is really high quality protein and fat from those bacteria that she’s then going to eat. And are you going to say that one of these is exploiting the other? Well I suppose you could try to say it as a top down power relation, but honestly it’s symbiotic. The bacteria get a good home, they get carried around the safe environment of the cow, the cow gets fed – everybody has their moment. They are all also going to die at the end of the day sooner or later, so the bacteria will feed the cow, then the cow will die and feed the grass, then the grass will feed another cow and some more bacteria. This is what I mean about that cycle. So they’re all dependent on each other. And you know as long as nothing disturbs that, it could go on for another 10 million years.

The problem is that when you put corn inside that cow instead, now her rumen is way too acid because they’re not meant to eat corn – corn is not grass. It’s very different. So it’s way too acid and with that acid environment a lot of the bacteria die because they need the neutral environment. So instead you get problems like e-coli because that’s one of the bacteria that can survive that high acid environment. So the cows are really sick that they actually end up with holes in their stomach from the high acid, which means they get blood poisoning. Pretty much every single cow that goes to slaughter out of a feed lot has liver damage. Some of it is quite extreme, which means that of course they’re whole system has gone toxic. They can only survive 60 days, maybe 90 days in a feed lot because they are so sickened by it. So that’s what you’re eating if you’re eating factory farmed meat, they’re really sick animals. And so the problem with using factory farmed meat as the baseline for health studies is that it’s really sick stuff.

So number one, you’ve got all the terrible toxins that are floating around but it also changes the amino acid profile of the meat and it completely changes the fatty acid profile of the meat. So it changes into substances that we’ve never eaten before. We’ve never eaten that kind of amino acid profile. For instance it’s very low in tryptophan and anybody who deals with depression – tryptophan is the precursor to serotonin. This is I think one of the reasons that we have this epidemic of depression right now across the United States is because of this factory farming. Feeding them the corn, corn is very low in tryptophan. And if you feed cows corn, their meat will be very low in tryptophan and then you eat it and you think you’re going to feel happy, but you’re not getting enough tryptophan. So there is no way for your brain to produce the serotonin that it needs without that building block of tryptophan. So that’s just one example of what happens to people who eat factory farmed meat. You’re not getting the amino acids that you need, you’re not getting the fatty acids, and for the fatty acids of course – it’s the omega 3, omega 6 balance. So you want me to get more technical on that, but feeding them corn believe me, throws this way off and this is responsible for everything from Alzheimer’s, to asthma, to arthritis – it’s too high omega 6’s have been an absolute public health disaster in this country and one of the main reasons of course is this grain feeding of cow.

So to use that as a baseline for this study isn’t really honest. I mean if you want proof that factory farming produces disease in people, sure we can all agree to that. But that’s not the only kind of meat that’s out there. In fact it’s the worst possible thing and on every level I think the most caring people are against it. So we’re not really proving anything we don’t already know.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. I’m hoping one day we’ll have some studies comparing factory farmed meats and grass fed organic meat. There are almost no studies on grass fed meat. There’s one study I found about the Amish. They’ve got much lower cancer rate and disease rates in than the general population.

Wendy Myers: But let’s talk about the vegan diet a little bit. When someone’s vegan, there’s nothing left to eat except for vegetables, fruits, nuts, and grains. And what is the problem with eating so many grains in the diet?

Lierre Keith: Well there are few problems. Number one is that, I mean you can call it complex carbohydrate if you want. But it’s really just a pile of sugar. Every single one of those so-called complex carbohydrates has to be broken down in your gut, and it will be absorbed as simple sugars because it’s only the simplest molecules that are going to make it through the barrier of your intestines and so it has to be really small. So your body breaks it down. So meal after meal after meal you’re eating a pile of sugar and you’re going to wear out your insulin receptors. And this is one of the main complaints that a lot of us who are sort of recovering vegetarians and vegans have is that we destroyed our insulin receptors. We were on our way to diabetes and some of us made it all the way there. And that’s what happens when you eat that much carbohydrate day after day after day.

The human body was never designed to handle that load of sugar, so you’re going to wear it down. Eating that much sugar means that your pancreas has to produce a whole lot of insulin every time you eat a meal. And then the insulin locks on to what’s called the insulin receptors – the surface of each cell and then tries to get that sugar out of your bloodstream as fast as it can and shove it into the cells as fast as it can. The reason being especially your brain can only function at a very small range of blood sugar. If it’s too much or too little, you can literally die, as any diabetic knows. So it’s an emergency situation over and over, and it’s three of four times a day you’re doing this to yourself. So you got this insulin rush, then your body works as fast as it can to grab the sugar out of your bloodstream, throw it into the cells as fast as it can and then for a lot of us, we get a blood sugar crash because it’s a very, very blunt mechanism. It is not a finely tuned mechanism. Now you’ve got too low blood sugar and now you’ve got hypoglycemia and you feel like you’re going to die unless you put some more food in your mouth.

By the time I was done being a vegan, I had to eat pretty much every 30 minutes not to feel like I was just going to fall over from the hypoglycemia. And this is what will happen to you, if you keep on with the diet that’s based on carbohydrate. Now the excess insulin also creates all kinds of other problems. One of them being inflammation around the body. And this is why there’s a concept of metabolic syndrome or syndrome X. There’s a whole constellation of problems that people get from eating these diets that demand high insulin. So that’s heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and then of course center of the body obesity – the belly fat. That is all created by this high insulin diet, high carbohydrate diet. And so it all comes with the picture and so that’s like the main thing that’s in excess.

You’ve got a couple of other excess problems; one being the high omega 6’s. On a vegan diet there really aren’t any good sources of omega 3’s and you need both. Human beings cannot produce either, we need to eat both somehow in our diet, but they need to be in a certain ratio. And there’s some debate about whether that ratio is 2:1, is 1:1. Anyway it’s something fairly low, but if all you’re eating is grain fed meat, your omega 6’s are going to be like 20:1. I mean it’s completely out of balance. And that will just wreak havoc especially on brain, on your ability to keep a stable mood state, it creates inflammation everywhere. Omega 6’s are responsible for inflammation and omega 3’s are responsible for calming inflammation. And you need some inflammation in your body. I mean you need some to breakdown dead cells, to repair infections and damage, all that kind of stuff – you’re going to need some inflammation, but you don’t need too much. That’s the problem.

So that’s why the omega 3’s and omega 6’s have to be in balance. Plants have a lot of omega 6’s. So when you’re eating a grain based diet, that’s what you’ve got – there’s way too many omega 6’s. So you’re going to have all this inflammatory problem all over your body. Your joints are going to ache; you’re going to have weird pain that nobody can explain. I think a lot of the people who come back with diagnoses that are not terribly specific, that’s really what’s going on. It’s just frankly too high omega 6’s in their diets. And if they were to eat a more Palaeolithic diet, especially with grass based animal products, a lot of them find that it’s immediately relieved – the pain is immediately relieved. And I certainly found that to be true and it doesn’t take much for me from falling off the wagon to start to feel that level of pain again. So for some of us it’s very direct. I mean if you do enough damage, you don’t have a lot of leeway for this. So that’s the problem if there are too many.

Now you’ve got on the other side of the vegan diet – the things you cannot get. So cholesterol – cholesterol has been horribly demonized over the last 20 or 30 years and there’s really no reason for it. It’s an incredibly life-giving substance. Every cell in your body requires cholesterol. It’s like the balloon, the basic structure of every cell is made out of cholesterol. So without cholesterol, you would literally be a liquid pile on the floor in about 5 seconds.

Wendy Myers: And your brain is 25% cholesterol.

Lierre Keith: Yeah more than that. Yeah, you need cholesterol for just about everything. The surfactant of the lungs, the very top layer of your lungs – you have to have saturated fat, you have to have some cholesterol for that to function because that’s what it’s made out off. If you don’t have enough, then you cannot do correct air exchanges. And this I think is one of the reasons that we have this tremendous epidemic of asthma among children. And you’ve seen this over and over again. I know this is just anecdotal, but when children with asthma stop eating this grain based diet and switch to appropriate animal products as the base of their diet, the asthma is gone in a week or two. I’ve seen it with adults as well. And neither people who had been on inhalers for 20 years, and within 6 weeks of eating a more appropriate human diet, they can throw away their medication forever and it’s absolutely miraculous.

Also problems with the skin like eczema – that as well can clear up almost overnight by simply eating enough cholesterol. So cholesterol is also the mother hormone – all of your hormones in your body are made from cholesterol. That’s the basic building block, and that includes all your sex hormones. It’s all your hormones. So you’re not going to have the reproductive function that you might wish to have, you’re certainly not going to have a sex drive eating those low fat plant-based Vegan type diets. It’s just there’s no way for your body to produce appropriate sex hormones. And that is why so many vegan women myself included, end up with amenorrhea where we simply stop having regular fertility cycles. That didn’t take long for me, that was like 3 weeks of eating appropriate food.

In my story, it was like I almost never menstruated for that 20 years that I was a vegan. And so then I went back to eating a more appropriate diet. Within 3 weeks, I got my period and I haven’t missed one since. So in my case it could not have been more, I mean it was just absolutely direct. The evidence could not have been more profound. And it was really scary to me to think what I had done to myself. That was 20 years of this, like that’s a lot of damage.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. They conveniently don’t mention this in the vegan books.

Lierre Keith: No they don’t and a lot of women end up heartbroken. My sister had to have hysterectomy because she was a vegan as well, did the same kind of damage, ended up with endometriosis and a lot of it was the soy as well which we can talk about. But you know she ended up having an organ removed because it was so bad, there was nothing else they could do for her. So that’s not fun, nobody wants to lose an organ. But this was the path down which you are treading if you decide to pursue this diet long term.

So that’s the cholesterol, then there are some fat soluble vitamins. Again we cannot make these vitamins, they’re essential because we have to eat them. So vitamin D, vitamin A, vitamin E, vitamin K2 – you can’t get them from plants. Plants don’t need them and they don’t produce them. You’ve got to eat them. And without those vitamins your health will just degrade and degrade and degrade. You are on biological drawdown. Your body will cannibalize itself in search of those vitamins. And it will limp along as best it can but you’re going to have health problems and eventually those problems will be permanent and that is the warning. I mean my life can really stand as a morality tale essentially to what will happen if you pursue this long term because that’s what happened to me.

And then also there’s minerals, you’re just not getting enough minerals, and that’s one reason that my discs fell apart in my spine which is simply the lack of minerals. And even if you are getting high minerals from somewhere somehow, you’re taking some kind of supplement, the problem with the grains, I mean it’s hard for a lot of people to accept this but plants don’t really want to be eaten either. And they have all kinds of ways to fight back. Now they don’t have teeth and claws the way animals do and they can’t run the way animals do, but what they’ve done is they’ve become incredibly good at chemical warfare, and that’s how they fight back. So one of the substances that seeds in particular produce is called phytic acid or phytates. So when you consume them what happens is the phytates bind with all the minerals in your digestive tract and just carry them out of your body. So the plants way of saying, “You can eat meat if you want, but you’re going to get sick and die ultimately and you’re not going to have healthy offspring. So we’re putting an end to this the best way that we can.” And so that’s what phytates do. So if you’re eating this wonderful whole grain diet, you don’t realize what you’re doing, but you’re ingesting a whole bunch of anti-nutrients like phytates and you’re draining the minerals from your body every time you eat. And again we’re not told this, we’re just told to eat how many servings – 50,000 servings of grain every day or whatever the hell the pyramid says. You know way too many of these things.

There are ways around it. You can try to pre-treat those grains so that they’re a little more edible, but these are traditional sort of food ways that we have completely lost in this country. So if you’re just eating whole wheat or whole rice or brown rice or whatever just straight out of the bag, again you’re not doing yourself any favors. And it’s highly recommend looking into this further before you continue eating those kinds of things.

Wendy Myers: Well let’s talk about a little bit. Soy is definitely a big part of most vegan’s diet. Because we’ve been told by the food industry for over a decade that soy is healthy, so many people believe that this is in fact true. So what are your thoughts on soy?

Lierre Keith: It is very cynical what the marketers did with soy. There was actually an internal memo that you can find online that was released to the public. And you’ve got these marketers saying, “Look, if we can position soy as somehow connected to an upper middle class healthy green lifestyle, people will buy it.” Because up to that point, soy was kind of a joke. I mean I remember in the 70’s all the jokes about whether or not there was soy in McDonald’s hamburgers or Burger King or whatever that it was considered part of the food, it was considered barely edible that only people who are unintelligent or didn’t have a choice would eat it. And they were able to turn that around using millions of dollars of marketing by buying ads in magazines like Yoga Journal or New Age journal. The kinds of places where green groovy people would see these ads of healthy buoyant people riding their bikes and having beautiful middle class houses or whatever and they were able to send it as a lifestyle – that soy meant all of that and it meant green, it meant healthy and it meant wonderful, good, peaceful things. So everybody fell for it, the way that marketing works, you know it’s very manipulative stuff. So they were able to reposition soy as that. So now everybody believes that it cures heart disease and it won’t cause cancer and it helps you with this and all these different health claims.

One by one all of those health claims had been disproved and for instance, the American Heart Association took away its original endorsement as something that was heart healthy because it just didn’t hold up in the laboratory. And places like the Cancer Lab at Cornell had come out very strongly and said, “If you have a history of breast cancer in your family, do not ever eat this stuff.” Other researchers had said things like, “These are drugs, not food. I would never feed my children soy.” So there’s a few problems with soy. One is the phytoestrogen content. So phytoestrogens look like estrogens but they’re not quite estrogens. So they look and act like estrogens that they will lock onto the estrogen receptors in your body. So they’re taking the place of real estrogen and your body can’t use it quite the same way. So you’re going to have the sort of cascading ill effect from not having the actual building blocks that you need to do all the functions that estrogen does. And this is one of the reasons why again women who eat a lot of soy and men as well, end up having all kinds of reproductive issues – it’s the phytoestrogens.

If you are feeding formula to an infant, that hormone load is equivalent to 4 birth control pills a day. And nobody in their right mind is going to put their infant child on 4 birth control pills a day. But if you’re feeding your child soy that is what you are doing. And I hope the parents who are listening, I mean I hate to scare you, but I hope you’re a getting a chill down the back of your neck because it’s horrible what’s happening to children out there. We have this absolute epidemic of precocious puberty in girls particularly and this is one of the reasons – is because the amount of soy that is in just everyday foods and then you add to that the soy milk that has been sold to us as something healthy. And people are bringing this home instead of real milk, even juice would be better frankly than soy because of the phytoestrogen content. And so you’ve got these little girls at age 5, 6, 7 entering puberty. It’s horrible what it does to their bodies; it’s a lifetime of suffering. And it’s particularly true for African-American girls. It’s way higher rates of precocious puberty. And one of the reasons is if you’re an African-American woman who’s on food stamps or food assistance, you cannot buy anything but soy for your baby. They won’t let you buy milk-based formula; you have to have soy without a doctor’s note. And so by default, a lot of these women have been forced into it and they may not even know what the problems are or they may know, but they don’t really have a choice. I mean when you’re poor, you’re stuck. And that’s one of the reasons it’s particularly high amongst African-American girls. This is an experiment they’re doing on the most poor and the most vulnerable in this country and we need to be horrified by this. And this is an experiment that the soy industry is doing on our public health and they’re just paying the price. Do I hope that people really got this ‘cause it’s horrible, it’s just horrible what’s happening out there. So you got the phytoestrogens – all right we got that one.

A couple of more problems with soy; one is that soy is a known goitrogen. It does terrible things to your thyroid and of course I sit here with my Hashimoto’s disease thinking about all the soy that I’ve eaten as a vegan and look what I did, I ended it up with the autoimmune disease of the thyroid. You will also notice that Hashimoto is a Japanese name and we’re always told, “Oh in Asia they eat so much soy and aren’t they healthy?” First of all it’s a lie; they don’t eat all that much soy, maybe 2 tablespoons a day. They don’t eat it as a protein replacement. That’s for sure. Number two, yeah they have tremendous thyroid problems in Asia where they eat soy and that’s why Hashimoto is a Japanese name and that’s the disease that I’ve got. So again don’t let the marketers sell you on this one. It’s not true. When they eat soy in Japan, it’s heavily fermented and that’s for good reasons. When you ferment it you actually do take out some of the anti-nutrients that are in soy and then it’s eaten with fish broth. And fish broth will do two things; it will replace some of the minerals that the soy is dragging out of your body and it will also contain iodine which will help support the thyroid. So that is sort of insurance against the damage that the soy is doing.

Now how it is that traditional people figured all this out without microscopes? I don’t know. But it’s pretty amazing that the only way they eat soy is with kind of the antidote to soy. And that’s how it’s eaten and then they might put a little bit of tofu on top as a garnish, but they don’t sit and eat this protein replacement, highly industrialized products as a meal as we are being encouraged to do. So that’s the thyroid thing. And then again we get to the anti-nutrients. Soy has a pile of anti-nutrients in them. So it has trypsin inhibitors. The trypsin is a digestive enzyme that you need. This is why when a lot of people eat soy, they end up with extreme intestinal distress and I mean up to and including like bloody stools and bloody diarrhea. And they don’t know what’s going on, they don’t know why. And I’ve seen this over and over as well even some of my intimates have had problems with this. They take the soy milk out of their diet and within 2 days it’s cleared up entirely. This was one of the big mysteries they’ve gone to the doctor for over and over. Big mystery – barium, swallowed the barium, do the big test. What is this bloody diarrhea, where is this coming from? And then it’s the soy all along. So that’s the trypsin and then you also have again the high phytic acid content. So it’s really hard to get enough minerals if you’re eating soy, especially zinc. You’ll be at risk for all kinds of problems body and brain, so soy is really not an appropriate food for humans. It’s not really an appropriate food for any animals. They’ve seen the same problems with lab animals; they’ve seen some of the same problems with farm animals. I would just leave soy alone entirely.

Wendy Myers: Yeah and definitely I’ve had problems with my own daughter when I was vegetarian. I was eating lots of tofu and I started feeding it to my baby who was about 1 year old. She started eating more solid food and I started feeding it to her every day. I gave her a little pile of tofu chunks sometimes twice a day. During that time from one year to two years old, she did not progress developmentally. She was not progressing in her speech because soy causes manganese toxicity. Young children and babies don’t have the blood-brain barrier to keep manganese out of their brain and it causes toxicity. There’s a big problem having developmental delays and lower IQ’s because of soy consumption.

Lierre Keith: It’s the real problem, yeah.

Wendy Myers: And so my daughter now has to be in the special school to get her caught up partly because of soy and I intuitively know that. And definitely one thing is certain, by the time you feel or experience nutrient deficiencies on these diets, they’re typically quite severe. And even then many vegans, and vegetarians for that matter, they still cling to their diet and even go to their doctor and try figure out why they’re having health issues but never question their diet. And the problem is most doctors don’t know anything about nutrition and won’t attribute health problems to being vegan – that’s if the doctor even ask their patient about the diet at all. I know several people that have so many health issues and undergo test after test that refuse to think that being a vegetarian or being in diet is the root of their health issues. What do you think about this?

Lierre Keith: It’s absolutely true what you’re saying. I think the average doctor gets 20 minutes of nutritional training in med school which obviously is nowhere near adequate. I mean it’s a joke, I don’t even know why they bother. So you’re going to go to the doctor, you’re going to present these problems. I mean I couldn’t even count how many doctors I had been to when I was a vegan. Not a single one of them ever asked me about my diet. So the people in charge of the profession don’t even know it’s a problem, so that’s number one. And then number two, when you take on these diets, it’s so ideological, it’s so intense. But it’s almost impossible to consider that the diet itself might not work. I know how hard it was for me to have to face that. It was again one of the hardest things I ever did and as my sister said, “Well you wanted God to be a just God and it seems like it just worked.” It seems like it’s the answer to so many problems. So when your health starts to fail, it’s like how can this be possible? How can this peaceful, wonderful, non-violent, animal-loving, earth-saving, the second coming diet actually produce ill health, actually produce damage? This can’t be true, because if it’s true, everything collapses and I hate the universe. That’s pretty much what I was left with and it’s really hard to face reality, right? So yes this is the problem and it’s one of the reasons that I hope people can pry their ideology a little bit loose from the rational part of their brain and just try to open up a little to bigger information. Because when you do that, when you start to research the bigger information, you’re going to find all the people whose health has collapsed on this diet. And bit by bit you can start to understand your specific health problems, what caused it. The answers are really all there, I don’t think there are any mysteries left. Everything that I did to myself was ultimately explained when I learned more about nutrition. So I think that it takes a lot of research and I know most people are short on time. But if you’re doing this to yourself and to your children, I think that it’s well worth putting some more time in – clearly you care about your health. It’s worth asking those deeper questions and not getting stuck in any particular ideological box while you do that research because otherwise it’s just confirmation bias – we all do it. We look for the answers that we want and it will keep us comfortable with our vegan diet but if your health is starting to fail, it’s not going to work.

Wendy Myers: When I post a blog post about meat on Facebook, I get all the vegetarians on an uproar and I hear so many people claim, they’re commenting on my post that they’ve been on a vegan diet for 10 or 15 years and they’re glowing with health. But I just have a hard time buying it because it just goes against our human physiology and our nutrient requirements like you said. But do you think there are outliers that can experience optimum health on a vegan diet or are they just merely surviving?

Lierre Keith: Yeah. I think there’s a few things going on. One is that they’re on drawdown. So their bodies were built on appropriate animal products, they were not born vegan, they had solid bodies because their mothers ate meat and dairy and eggs and they were said those things as children and now they’re drawing down and that can last a good long time. If you give the body enough calories, it will limp along for a good long time. It will do the best that it can, but they’re on drawdown. And eventually the rubber will hit the road, it might be in 5 years, it might be in 10 years. But it can’t be done, there’s too many nutrients missing. So that’s one thing.

Another thing is that some of them are lying. Pretty much everybody cheats – especially the vegans. The vegetarians, not so much because they’re not so desperate for fat on the vegetarian diet. You’re at least getting some appropriate fat – some eggs, some vitamin D and all that. So you’re not as desperate, but as a vegan, I can guarantee you, you’re starving every day and you feel it and you don’t know what the problem is. And every once in a while you’ll fall off in either a piece of cheese or you eat your mother’s whatever – macaroni and cheese. And oh my god, do you feel better for half an hour and then you feel like a terrible person, right? Because I’ve done this terrible thing, I repressed the poor cows and on top of that I enjoyed it. What the hell is wrong with me? And this is I mean the dark night of the soul, I can’t tell you how many nights I spent just unable to understand what was wrong with me – why had I done that and then why did it make me feel so good? To the point where I knew eventually I would do it again. But it flew into the face of everything I thought I believed. So it doesn’t make any sense, the cognitive dissonance is so extreme when you’re a vegan for that reason. And I am somebody who, compared to most vegans, I cheated very little. I mean I had a willpower that was almost a force of nature on its own. So I would go years without any kind of slip. But that’s not true for most vegans. And when I did slip, it was almost impossible to stop because my god, your brain is so hungry. And it’s like just the animal wants to live. Like your brain, your biology is like desperate for more and that level of hunger it’s almost indescribable because you don’t look like you’re starving, it’s not like you just walked out of a concentration camp. So where is this hunger, where is it coming from? And it’s not emotional, I mean when you’re experiencing it, you know that’s it’s not an emotional craving, it is just absolutely physical. But there’s no explanation for it in the vegan world. I mean, now I know I was starving. I needed that fat. But at that time, it’s just complete mystery; you don’t know where it comes from, why it’s happening to you. All you know is that you feel dramatically better after eating the cheese or whatever it was you slipped on and then the next day you make another solid resolution that you’re never going to do it again and you might go a few months or a few years, but eventually you do it again.

And it’s this terrible body-punishing, body-hating kind of cycle too, which really places it into all the eating disorder stuff. And it’s very sort of puritanical just hatred for our physical embodiment and for pleasure in food and for caring for our bodies. All of that gets wrapped up in there. So it gets very confusing for a lot of us particularly for women living in the beauty standard that’s just absolutely anorexic and how much the female body is hated in this culture. And so many of us are recovering from eating disorders. So all of that it just becomes it’s really complicated, very confusing myth especially at 3:00 AM when you just eaten 2 tablespoons of sour cream and feel better and don’t know why. But anyway those people are not telling the truth and they will keep saying I feel great, I feel great until the very last day that they stopped feeling great, because that’s what I did. So I know. I know where their brains are at and I know the kind of ideological senses that they’ve put up. But I have a tremendous amount of compassion because I know what is happening inside their bodies and it’s just a matter of time.

Wendy Myers: Do you think that vegetarians can be healthy?

Lierre Keith: I think they’ve got a better shot at it, but again it’s still way too much carbohydrate and not good quality protein. And you know you need that protein – every cell in your body is built from protein from those amino acids. So you’re going to fall apart in so many ways when you just don’t have good basic protein three times a day; your mood, your muscles, your bones. Just everything isn’t going to work well – your immune system, it’s going to fall apart bit by bit. You can last longer as a vegetarian than you ever will as a vegan, but I think at the end of the day you just have to face facts. And the thing about being a vegetarian too, which is why I never did it is that it doesn’t even make any sense, because in order to get the milk from the cow, you have to have a calf over here and where that calf ends is you know – as a hamburger.

Just do the math on it. A cow cannot have a calf every year and be sustainable on a farm, you’re going to run out of the space and that’s part of the cycle of a farm, especially the males are totally excess. So they’re slaughtered and they’re eaten and that’s where you get meat from and that’s just part of life on a farm. It’s the same with the chickens, you don’t need all those roosters, so they’re put in a stew pot and that’s how it goes, there’s the extras. So you’re not going to get eggs without having dead chickens and you’re not going to have milk without having some hamburger along with it. You can pretend and just eat the milk and the eggs and not know how a farm operates, but I think you’re better off facing the facts and realizing that there is meat at the end of it whether you eat it or not.

And so if you think it through ethically, it doesn’t really hold and that’s why I was never actually a vegetarian. I went right to vegan because I didn’t see the point of being vegetarian. So you know not only is it not helping your health but, there’s not really any fewer animal deaths involved in eating that way. So yeah I don’t think the vegetarians… I mean they will last longer than the vegans but I really don’t think in the end that it holds together.

Wendy Myers: Yeah. I think by the time they get to being a lifetime vegetarian and turn 50 or 60; they will attribute all their health issues to just getting older.

Lierre Keith: Yeah.

Wendy Myers: Let’s talk a little bit about the planet. You know many vegetarians defend their diet claiming that raising animals for meat consumption is destroying the environment, but I think many don’t understand the distinction between factory farms and grass fed farms. So can you explain this a little bit?

Lierre Keith: Sure and again the underlying values here are not an issue. So compassion and justice and you know anything that questions human entitlement and that the level of destruction of this culture – all that’s good. And I think we can all sign up for that, that it’s not the issue here. The issue is how best to embody those values. And again I think we can all agree that factory farming is just horrible in every level and we all need to do what we can to stop it. I don’t think that in fact you making your specific personal consumer choices really has much impact. And so I think that’s one of the limitations of vegan and vegetarianism is that they really do see that this is the best strategy – is simply to withdraw personally from this horror, but I don’t actually think that’s effective.

But setting that all aside, OK so you can take a piece of land that’s maybe got 12, 15, 20 inches of rainfall, you can do a few things on that land. You can take that land, you can clear every living thing off it, I mean down to the bacteria – the plants, the animals, everybody, reptiles, birds, small mammals, all the plants, all the grasses that grow there. Now you got bare soil that’s baking in the sun. You can plant your annual mono crop of choice, so corn or wheat or soy and then you can take bushels of that that you’ve just grown and feed it to a cow that’s living in misery on the cement floor inside a sealed building and at the end of that cycle you will have some very sick meat from a very unhappy animal and all of that traces back to a dead piece of ground. OK and all of it of course have to be produced by fossil fuel. The only way that you’re going to grow that year after year is by applying essentially oil and gas to make the nitrogen fertilizer. So that’s the factory farming model.

You can take the cow out of it and simply eat the wheat or the soy or whatever on your own as humans. The problem is that plant was still destroyed. So the plants and the animals were still removed, the bacteria is still dead. So the ground, literally the soil, is going to pieces every year that you do this because it’s exposed. It has to be exposed to plant those giant seeds to get the wheat or the corn out of it. And every time you do that process, every time you put a plough to the soil, you’re destroying the soil. You’re degrading it. The only thing that protects and builds soil are perennial polycultures, so ultimately either forest or prairies and that is nature’s model. You have animals integrated into either grasslands or forest – savannahs or wetlands or whatever, but you know basically forest or grasslands. So when you destroy all that, what you are destroying is not just that entire ecosystem of plants or trees or grasses, what you’re also destroying is the soil itself and soil is the basis of life on earth. So this is not a plan with the future and in fact we have skinned the planet alive. We’ve come to the end now, by now 1950 the major grain growing regions of the world were completely out of soil and what we have eaten ever since is oil and gas from the so-called green revolution. So the scientists figured out how to make usable nitrogen using a very energy intensive process out of the feed stocks of gas and oil and they produce nitrogen every year and that is what you are eating if you are eating grain – you’re eating oil on a stalk.

I don’t see what is better about feeding it humans rather than feeding it to cows, I mean it’s the same process in the end and it’s just as destructive that the entire ecosystem has been destroyed and the only thing that’s keeping it going at this point is more fossil fuel. So to me, that’s why this is a deeper question than just factory farming, it’s agriculture itself which is inherently destructive and it’s essentially carnivorous and it’s eaten the planet alive. I mean there’s no more soil left and 98% of all the grass forest are gone, 99% of the world’s grasslands are gone and they happen to go straight for agriculture. Let’s be quite clear, they’ve been completely eviscerated, so that human beings – and it’s just a very small number of humans. I mean agriculture started in seven places around the globe but it’s marched its way around. So now the entire world has been turned into – as much as the land surfaces possible – has been turned into these annual monocrops. So that’s the problem to me. It’s that ultimately, that’s the baseline destruction that we’re looking at and that’s what’s going to have to stop if this planet has any help. So you have that 1 acre of land, you can destroy it in that way, you can grow a bunch of monocrops for a short period of time until the soil completely collapses and you can either feed it to humans or the cows. That doesn’t matter – the destruction is the same. Take that same acre of land and let’s do something else with it, let’s leave it in the grasses that would like to grow there. Let’s leave it in that complete biotic community that nature naturally produces. Now you’ve got a cow eating grass. Well first of all, there’s a whole bunch of other creatures that can live there too. You’ve got ground dwelling birds, you’ve got small mammals, you’ve got even some larger mammals. If you do it correctly, you can even have some predators. You’ve got reptiles, snakes whatever, whoever is there, they get to live there. Not only that, but because you’ve got perennial grasses they’ve got this very deep root system. The water table will stay intact because of the roots – the water, the rainfall that falls will actually be absorbed into the ground. There’s like little tiny channels that the roots make so that water can actually go down, it will restore the water table and then when it’s needed these deeply rooted perennials will pull the water back up and keep the entire community alive by doing that and part of that community would be these ruminants, this cow, the bison, whoever it is that lives there – and then she eats the grass, feeds it to her bacteria. On grasslands in particular, ruminants are absolutely crucial because they’re dry in the summer and all biological activity stops, there’s not enough moisture. What keeps this nutrient cycling is the fact that inside that ruminant – the cow or the bison, there’s bacteria and they do that basic work of life, they break down that cellulose, send it up the other end and now life can continue because there’s moisture and there’s nutrients. That’s like the miracle of ruminants on grasslands – they keep it moving when there isn’t enough moisture.

So here you’ve got that same acre of ground, you’ve got life that continues season after season after season, you could come back in 10,000 years, the only thing different would be more topsoil which is to say more life. And our role in that is we’re apex predators, so like wolves and bears and eagles – we eat the animals that eat the cellulose. We cannot eat cellulose directly, but the bison can and the cows can and then our role is to eat them and keep their numbers in check and then ultimately somebody eats us and we get returned to the soil as well. And that is how we lived for our first 4 million years on this planet. We didn’t destroy it; it’s only in the last 10,000 years that we’ve become these monsters. And the basic activity that turned us monstrous was agriculture because it’s the destruction of the planet. So that’s a lot to throw on your listeners, but if people are interested in understanding this deeper level, there are a lot of great resources out there. I would highly recommend Richard Manning’s work for instance, his book Against the Grain, another book is called Grasslands and it’s about exactly this – how agriculture has destroyed the world, what agriculture is. They’ve got to understand this if they’re going to understand what the destruction actually consists of and then what we’re going to do about it. Because if our planet has any hope, we’re going to have to repair what we destroyed and that means at the end of the day we’re going to have to give up agriculture. And that is a hard thing to say without people looking at you like you’re crazy but it could be done and I’m not actually sure we have a choice. It’s really the only way we’re going to get the carbon out of the air and back sequestered into the ground – it’s through repairing the grasslands. So it’s really the only help our planet has.

Wendy Myers: And that’s the topic of your new book isn’t it? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Lierre Keith: Yeah. Prairies are amazing places. Most of the biological activity actually happens underground where we can’t see it and it’s just steaming with life under there. So the surface of it may look like it’s gone dormant because there’s not a lot of rainfall, but underneath there’s all this stuff still going on. And the plants are so deeply rooted that they can survive these long periods without rainfall. And that’s the difference between a prairie and a forest – the forest has more rain, so you get trees. But when the rain dries up you get savannah, so there’s a little bit of a tree and then you finally get into the real prairies and that’s when there’s just simply isn’t enough rainfall. And we already discussed how the ruminants play a very crucial role in keeping life moving.

But my real take-on point was repairing the grasslands is that if we were to take even 75% of the world’s destroyed grasslands and let’s be clear – they’ve been destroyed by agriculture OK. But if we we’re to let them come back, let the grasslands come back, which is what had happened if we simply got out of the way. It would only take about 15 years but we could sequester all of the carbon that’s been released since the beginning of the industrial age. And that’s an amazing thing. I mean you got all kinds of whacko scientists trying to figure out technological solutions to global warming and evolving – sequestering carbon in deep caves under the earth and God knows what kind of industrial disasters are waiting to happen with that, but we don’t need to do any of that, all we need to do is repair what we’ve destroyed and the grasses will do it for us. And the reason they’ll do it for us is because grasses are really good at one thing and that is building soil – it’s what they do. And the building block of that soil is carbon. So if we just let them come home again, OK they’ve been removed from their homes. Let’s be clear that agriculture is a war against the living world, but if we just let them come back, they will start doing their job again – which is to sequester carbon to build soil and that’s all that will take – 15 years.

In fact if we could restore to prairie all of the trashed out agricultural land essentially east of the Mississippi, within a year the United States could be sequestering carbon instead of emitting it. And that’s with everybody still driving their SUVs from here to hell. It doesn’t take long – that’s what grasses do, they’re amazing creatures. That’s really their best talent, it’s creating topsoil. That’s why I’m writing the book that I’m writing, it’s because I really want the people who care the most to understand what the damage is and what our best option is for restoring it. And this is actually not hard, we don’t need a lot of technology, we just need ruminants and grass and it’s not too late to reverse this.

Wendy Myers: What is the title of your new book?

Lierre Keith: Well I’m calling it a Prairie Manifesto, but I don’t know that’s just a working title.

Wendy Myers: OK. What about the book that you wrote prior to that that you co-authored?

Lierre Keith: Oh, Deep Green Resistance?

Wendy Myers: Yes. Yes.

Lierre Keith: Yeah. So I co-authored that with Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay. We are trying to explain to a broader audience what’s gone wrong and then some solutions about what we might do. Because as we see it the planet is in crisis and I think anyone who’s even got half an eye open can see how bad things are. Everyday 200 species go extinct, that’s pretty bad and if you let yourself open to the horror of that – I mean those 200 species they’re your kin, I mean they’re your brothers and sisters – it’s all those animals, all those plants. They’re all part of that web of life and it’s so stupid because even if you don’t care about them for their own sake, we need them. I mean I can’t make oxygen to breath, only plants can do that for us. You know there’s all these biological functions that keep this planet and we’re just the icing on the cake. I mean we’re not needed in any way, we’re not producers and we’re not degraders, we’re just consumers. And without them it’s all over and that’s what we’re destroying every single day. So yeah, the planet has reached a crisis and there are tipping points that are being reached as we speak. So just for instance, as the polar icecaps melt, more and more of the land is exposed and what that means is ice is very reflective of sunlight. So a lot of the sun – the warmth that hits the ice bounces back into space. But the moment that you have patches of grounds exposed, it absorbs, the dark ground absorbs the heat from the sun and that means that it’s even hotter now at the poles. Which means that even more ice melts, which means even more dark ground is exposed which means that it’s hotter still. And these are these terrible cycles now around the world that biologically the planet is now on, where it’s just going to keep accelerating worse and worse and worse.

So we want people to try to absorb the horror of this because I think a lot of us are still in denial. And I think we’re in denial because it’s really scary and it’s overwhelming and as individuals we don’t really know what we can do. OK so that’s number one.

And then number two, what are the political systems? What are the human arrangements that have brought us to this brink? You know there are scientists that are debating whether by the year 2050 half of the mammals may be extinct on this planet – that’s in my lifetime. I mean half the mammals; elephants, polar bears, who are we talking about? Can we really picture a world without them? It just makes you want to lie down and weep. And there are some scientists debating whether by the year 2100 whether the planet is going to support life at all, it may simply be too hot. I mean climate change may be on such a runaway at this point that if we don’t do something soon, it may reach that – they talk about Venus as the hallmark here that we’re going to end up. Somewhere in that range where it’s just simply too hot for life to continue. There may be some thermophylic bacteria at the bottom of the ocean dents that can survive that, but I’m not going to call that a victory.

Anyways, so what are the political arrangements that have brought us to this brink? And one of them is this arrangement called civilization. And that is simply people living in concentrations high enough that they need the importation of resources – so it’s cities. So if you think about a city, the food, the water, the energy have got to come to come from somewhere else and that’s because the city has used up its own resources, right? So there’s nowhere to grow food, there’s nowhere to hunt and gather, there’s no trees left, the water has to be piped in from somewhere. And what that means is that they have to go out and get it, nobody else is going to willingly give up their land or their water or their soil or their trees. So this is why agricultural societies end up militarized, it’s because it’s drawdown – they’re always using up their trees and their water and their soil and then they have to go out and get it, bring it back, which means they need soldiers. So this is the pattern around the world for the last 10,000 years. You’ve got this bloated power center, you can think of ancient Rome – that’s an image that everybody can conjure up and of course they concrete the whole region. Why did they that? Because Rome couldn’t support itself, because they were living in concentrations that were too high. And prior to Rome you have the ancient Egyptians, you have the Venusians, the Mesopotamians – the pattern is the same, you’ve got that power center and it’s surrounded by concrete colonies and then the whole thing collapses. So that’s what’s been going on for 10,000 years and it’s spread around the world now. It used to be that civilizations last as long as our topsoil because that’s ultimately what it all depends on – it’s that agricultural activity. So anywhere from 800 to 2,000 years but eventually they collapse. So we managed to extend this by figuring out how to use fossil fuel, but the day’s going to come when that oil and gas is simply too expensive to extract and then where we’ll be? It’s going to be the same problem all over again.

So we try to lay that out and explain it in ways that people can understand. I know that’s a lot to kind of pack into a short interview. Anyway, so we go through a lot of that, the different sort of overlapping systems of power that have created a great deal of injustice on the planet, human rights abuses as well as those kinds of environmental destruction and then we put forward what we think some solutions would be. None of them are easy though, there’s not any way that we’re going to consume our way out of this, so the idea that you might buy this instead of that is not really going to be adequate to face the level of crisis and the level of institutional change that has to happen. But ultimately I hope that people will get politically involved because it’s really the only hope we have – it’s to take back a real democracy; so economic democracy, political democracy – all of these, we’re going to have to redo all of it. I think the thing is in order to save the planet; we also have to save human rights. I mean that’s the positive part of this – it’s that the only way any of this is going to happen is if we actually start to value the things we should value, like justice, like sustainability. So it’s not just completely grim but it is going to take some work, that’s for sure. And all of the institutions right now that are in charge of our planet are all headed in the wrong direction. They’re all just condensing power and wealth on the top of the pyramid and extracting it from the rest of us and from the rest of the planet. Gosh that was kind of a long answer, but that’s what the book is about.

Wendy Myers: No. I love it, I love it. It’s so well thought of, it’s such amazing information. I just have one more question to ask. And I want to is start asking this question to everyone that I interview. What do you think is the most pressing health issue on our world today?

Lierre Keith: I would have to say global warming, because 400,000 people have already died from it and if anything kills every living being, that’s what it’s going to be. So if you care about anything, any living creature; children, dog, horse, garden, whatever it is you love – it’s under assault. And right now that is the biggest looming catastrophe that’s coming down the pike. So yeah, I mean health in terms of life or death, it would have to be global warming.

Wendy Myers: Yeah I agree, absolutely. So where can someone find more info about you and what you’re doing, what are you up to?

Lierre Keith: The easy answer is go to my website, but the reason that’s kind of a joke is because I have strange name. So you have to know how to spell my name. So Lierrekeith.com is my website. But if you just type in Vegetarian Myth which is the title of my book you’ll find me. There’s only one person who wrote a book called that. So it might be easier just to – if you can’t remember, if you’re driving your car and you just can’t remember – Vegetarian Myth, you will find me. Yeah you can go to my website and you can look at my books and you can listen to interviews and see me on YouTube and all that kind of good stuff. That’s probably the simplest thing.

Wendy Myers: You have a pretty rigorous speaking schedule too.

Lierre Keith: I often do. I was gone for weeks and weeks this summer and it got really exhausting, but I don’t really have anything big set up now for a few months which is good so I could just be home for a while.

Wendy Myers: Lierre, thank you so much for being on the show. I can’t wait to read your new book and it sounds really, really compelling. And I just want to thank you for the important work that you’re doing ‘cause I know it’s an uphill battle and I know that you deal with a lot of mudslinging to get your message out there. So thank you for fighting this battle to inform people about how to truly take control of their health and save the planet. Thank you so much.

Lierre Keith: You’re really welcome and I want to thank you back because it’s a lot of work putting out a podcast. And it’s kind of thankless, it’s not like you’re getting paid, people like you do this incredible work, just because you care and without you, I wouldn’t have a platform to speak. So I really appreciate what you’re doing and I’m also really sorry to hear about your child’s health problems and I just wish you all the best in finding help and hoping that she’s able to recover.

Wendy Myers: Well thank you. She’s doing really, really well. I’m confident she’ll be better. I’m just thankful I just wasn’t vegan when I was pregnant – I was eating meat, liver and eggs and caviar and all kinds of healthy things so she’s healthy enough.

Lierre Keith: Very good.

Wendy Myers: Thank you so much for being on the show and I definitely would love to have you on again as a guest. It’s amazing. Thank you.

Lierre Keith: Thank you, Wendy. Bye.

Wendy Myers: OK. And thank you all listeners out there for tuning in to Live to 110 podcast. Please go leave a review on iTunes if you enjoyed what you heard today. it’s going to increase my visibility on iTunes and I’d really appreciate it so much if you could go do that. Take 2 seconds and help me increase my visibility on iTunes. Thank you so much.