In this episode of Functional Medicine Research, I interview Robb Wolf about his new book and documentary Sacred Cow. We had a great conversation dispelling some of the myths about meat and saturated fat as well as climate change, plant-based diets, sustainable agriculture, veganism, cattle and methane, and the ethics of eating animals.

This was a well-rounded interview packed with information that should help people make better decisions about what they eat but also become educated about the facts around meat. I highly recommend watching the Sacred Cow documentary and reading the book which goes into tremendous detail on these issues.

Full Transcript of Sacred Cow with Robb Wolf Interview

Dr. Hedberg: Well, welcome, everyone, to "Functional Medicine Research." I'm Dr. Hedberg. And I'm really looking forward to my conversation today with Robb Wolf. And Robb is a former research biochemist, and he's a two-times "New York Times," "Wall Street Journal" bestselling author of two books, "The Paleo Solution" and "Wired to Eat." And he coauthored a book with Diana Rodgers, which we'll be talking about today, called "The Sacred Cow," and that explains why well raised meat is good for us and good for the planet. Robb has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the world via his top ranked iTunes podcast, books and seminars. He's known for his direct approach and ability to distill and synthesize information to make the complicated stuff easier to understand. Robb, welcome to the show.

Robb: Doc, a huge honor to be here. Thank you.

Dr. Hedberg: Great. Yeah, I had Diana on last year. And we talked a little bit about plant-based diets and meat and things like that. And then since then, we've had the "New Sacred Cow" book that you co-authored, and the documentary, which is excellent. And so, why don't we begin by...I'd really like to focus on helping the listeners understand some of, you know, the misunderstandings and the truths and the myths about eating meat versus plants and things like that. And so why don't we start with a discussion about why meat has become a scapegoat. And I think, and you can expand on this, of course, but I think part of this probably goes to Ancel Keys' work in the 20th century, his promotion of misinformation on saturated fat. Can you take us from that point up to where we are now, and why you think meat has been getting such bad press?

Robb: Yeah, you know, it's interesting and worth noting the book covers the health, environmental, and ethical considerations of a meat or animal product-inclusive food system. You know, so the raising and the selling and the slaughter and the whole deal. And all of those points are important, and all of those points have some really interesting, historical antecedents, I guess, kind of describing why in different cultures meat would become vilified to varying degrees.

And like, food is an interesting cultural tool for defining self from non-self. Like, if we look within the Abrahamic religions, there are some very specific delineations of what is and is not allowed within, say, Judaism versus Christianity versus Islam. And we see similar things within different Buddhist traditions and whatnot, so I mean it...Or even just within Christianity itself, you have like the Seventh Day Adventists versus, you know, certain rules and followings within Catholicism, you know. And so, it's interesting that food is a powerful tool for defining self from non-self. And not infrequently it is the beginning point of creating out of accepted groups of people. Like, there's some pretty ugly historical examples of where the different food practices of one religion or one type of people start being used as a means of, kind of, ostracizing and, kind of, walling those folks off.

But we have these three different pieces that if we're really gonna do diligence on this topic that we have to address. And, you know, the Ancel Keys piece is interesting in that he was a very well-known biochemist, did some early research that suggested that fat intake, in general, and animal fat intake specifically was, kind of, a linear correlation with cardiovascular disease. And he did this around the 1950s and it was called the Seven Countries Study. One of the problems with this was that he omitted, either purposefully or unpurposely, a bunch of other data that didn't really fit this linear demarcation. Like, there were places where folks eat far less fat than, say, in westernized countries and have higher incidences of cardiovascular disease. And there are places that eat far more fat than, say, like Western Europe and the United States that have far less. And so there's really, kind of, a not great overlap there.

And it's worth noting that Keys spearheaded some really fascinating research. And one of these research projects is something that we could never ever do today, there's no IRB board that would sign off on this. And it involved a study with thousands of institutionalized mental patients who were fed, kind of, a standard diet and, you know, fairly rich and saturated fat, and then a modified diet that was enriched with, in theory, heart-healthy, polyunsaturated fats from like corn oil and safflower oil and what have you. And what's interesting is, this is as close to like a metabolic ward study as one is ever likely to have, and it had a lot of people in it. So, you know, the power there is fantastic from a statistical standpoint.

But what they found in this is that the folks that were eating the polyunsaturated fats, their cholesterol did in fact go down. But that actually correlated with increased rates of morbidity and mortality as it relates to cardiovascular disease, more stroke and heart attack. So it was completely counterintuitive to what, you know, kind of, the standard diet, heart hypothesis would put forward. And it's worth noting that this study was completed, wrapped up, and then never published, and ended up just, kind of, sitting in a basement for the better part of 40 years, until somebody found it. Not that long ago, maybe 2016, 2017, this thing was rediscovered and got a fair amount of airplay. Because it really calls into question all of the Ancel Keys' original, kind of, findings and suggestions. And it certainly flies in the face of what we're generally told to follow from the United States dietary guidelines.

So in the book, we kind of detail the work of Ancel Keys, kind of some interesting developments, kind of, socio-politically. Like, Richard Nixon was looking to get reelected and he wasn't doing so well. And he needed a loyal, conservative base that would support him. And farmers were a pretty good option in that regard. And part of his offerings for building loyalty was re-expanding the farm subsidies programs that had been largely wound down after World War Two. And with this, the subsidies program, these farmers were incentivized to just produce. It didn't really matter if we needed more corn or soybeans or wheat or what have you, we were just incentivizing that production. And so for several years, we had these huge gluts of food that we didn't know what to do with it.

And then right around this time, a process had been understood to convert corn syrups into high fructose corn syrup, and make it very, very sweet, very palatable. But it was a very expensive process. But it was right around this this early 1970s that an industrial scale, inexpensive process for converting corn into high fructose corn syrup was developed. And this was the beginning of the relationship also between what we would now, I think, call the junk food industry and the governmental food surplus, you know, kind of, scenarios. So we needed to do something with this food. This food needed a long shelf-life and, you know, these food manufacturers were all too happy to employ their food chemists in figuring out how to make this stuff both taste tasty and also kind of like a Twinkie, like have a nearly infinite shelf-life.

So, some folks present this as, kind of, like this evil cabal of people, you know, twisting moustaches to enslave the masses. And I don't buy into that stuff at all. But I do think that we are the recipients of a bunch of really dumb luck, that some decisions that were unconnected initially but became connected on the backend ended up leading us to what is our modern, industrial row crop food system, and the dietary guidelines that go along with it that support the perpetuation of basically what that row crop food system stands for.

And so, you know, it's been a 60-years-long process with that. And there's back and forth on the topic, you know, one week, high-carb diets are good for you, the next week, low-carb diets are good for you. I think the one commonality within this whole story is that highly processed foods are probably a big problem. And that also depending on the individual, higher or lower-carb diets may be more appropriate given an individual's circumstance. And you know, we are investigating topics like individualized or personalized medicine.

Like, they're finding that some people when they undergo chemotherapy, they do far, far better if the chemotherapy is administered in the morning versus the evening, and other people are the exact opposite. And so when we understand things like that, when we understand that, you know, within a population if you give, you know, a thousand people a blood pressure medication, some percentage of those people may see a 10-point reduction, and some people a 20-point reduction, and some people, you see no reduction.

We know that with pharmaceuticals, we know that with the dose response to exercise. But we still haven't applied that same latitude to dietary practices, that there may be different ways of eating that suit different people better. And that is a lot of what we attempt to unpack in the book,