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episode #124

Why I Decided to Start Eating Meat

February 17, 2022 in Podcast

Intro

This week I discuss my journey from eating mainly veggies and fish to eating mainly meat, nose-to-tail. I started implementing grass-fed, grass-finished meat into my diet to help get a better, more complete protein along with many other reasons I discuss in today's episode. I also touch on the role that antinutrients play in plant foods, what are the most bioavailable proteins to eat, what vitamins and minerals you could be missing by eating only plants, and the importance that animal fats play in our diet. Enjoy the show! If you love the Get Lean Eat Clean Podcast, we’d love for you to subscribe, rate, and give a review on iTunes. Until next time!

0 (1s): Hello, and welcome to the get lean and eat clean podcast. My name is Brian grin. I'm a certified health coach, trainer and author. And this podcast is for middle-aged men and women looking to optimize their health and get their bodies back to what it once was 10 to 15 years ago. I will give you simple, actionable items to get long-term sustainable results. Thanks for listening and enjoy the show. All right, welcome to the get lean eat clean podcast. My name is Brian grin. I hope you had a great weekend and hope you listened to my interview with Tim James. 0 (42s): Definitely some cool tips to take, to help, you know, build a healthy lifestyle. One of them is the simple act of just chewing your food or making sure that obviously you're getting the correct water. He mentioned like a purified structured water, and there's some purifiers out there that you could definitely get if you wanted to upgrade what you were taking in, but definitely some great tips. And it was interesting that he talked about how he sort of went from a meat and fish eater to a vegetarian. And I'm actually ironically going to talk about how I went sort of the other way and was a while pescatarian for awhile and meeting just fish and veggies. 0 (1m 25s): And mainly like I remember I used to make a big salad with veggie burgers, tried to find good quality veggie burger, cause there's not too many on the market. A lot of them have what's called vegetable oils in, and those are just things you want to avoid. If you listen to some of the podcasts, we talk about that, you know, canola, Safar, safflower, GrapeSEED, those types of oils. You want to avoid those. And those are in a lot of vegetable oil veggie burgers. So keep an eye on that. If you do have veggie burgers from time to time. So yeah, I wanted to talk about what made me start to get into eating nose, to tail meat. 0 (2m 11s): Oregon's things like that. Actually last night I had liver and it really was a game changer. I actually started it beginning of COVID. So this was 2020 March. And really just ease my way back into it a lot for a lot of reasons, I stopped eating meat with the humane issues and obviously I love animals and, but I justified it in the fact that no, this is something as a, you know, at a, at a core that humans we've been eating for, you know, three over 3 million years. And as long as I get the meat that is sustainable, you know, raised humanely and the animals are grown roaming and they're not in just conventional feedlots. 0 (3m 3s): This was, this is what I look for when I get my meat or poultry biodata I don't really eat chicken. That's not really my thing. And I'm not a huge fan of it. If you listen to my interview with Dr. Ben Beekman chicken is definitely overeaten. There's a lot of omega sixes in there, and it's really tough to find quality chicken and really chicken is just protein, which can be fine, but you definitely want to have protein with some fat. And that's why I prefer, like, if I'm going to have something, you know, like a ribeye or something like that, occasionally mixing it up between lean meats and fattier meats. But anyways, the bottom line is whatever you're eating. 0 (3m 44s): I'm not trying to be dogmatic about it. I'm just going to tell you my reasoning behind going to meet. And one of them was getting more protein and getting a better quality protein, cause a lot of vegan proteins out there they're missing a lot of amino acids and things like that that can play a role in helping you build muscle, which was a goal of mine. So I guess it depends on your goals and things like that. If you're, if you've eaten the standard American diet of red sugar and junk foods and you decide to go and become a vegetarian, you're going to definitely have, it's going to make an impact. You're going to it's, it's going to play a great role in changing your health. 0 (4m 26s): But I don't know if in the long haul being a vegetarian, you might find that you might be lacking in some nutrients. And I'm going to talk about that today and you know, there's ways to get around it. You can definitely supplement. So that's for you. Go, go for it. I'm going to talk about some of those today. I mean, a lot of the big arguments and what sort of got me into meat and nose to tail was Dr. Paul Stella Dino's book, which I have right here, actually carnival code. I remember reading that a couple of years ago and it just sort of clicked for me and it made a lot of sense. 0 (5m 7s): And one of the main things he talked about was, you know, these anti-nutrients that are, you know, these are natural compounds that are found in plants, but what, what, what these anti-nutrients protect plants from bacterial infections. And they protect plants from being eaten by predators because plants can't run. So this is like a self-defense fence Magennis mechanism. And these are things like oxalates, lectins, phytic acid, I mean, academia, there's a whole whole list of them. And you know, some people don't react so well when they have these anti-nutrients and back in the hunter gatherer days, a lot of times they would soak or sprout or ferment vegetables to make them more tolerable to eat. 0 (5m 51s): But I truly believe that, you know, our predecessors ate some plant foods, but these were more eaten as like survival foods rather than components of their diets that provided unique nutrients. So, you know, I believe that, you know, the human metabolism really thrives off fat and thrives off protein to, to grow and to build muscle. And to just last, as long as you can, because we all know, you know, obviously lack of muscle and bone mass and people get what's called sarcopenia over time. 0 (6m 31s): And so we want to try to avoid that. So these anti-nutrients also oxalates is another one th that oxalates, if you've, if you've heard of them, it's again, it's a defense weapon against predators that plants have, and it's very high in tumeric, spinach, rhubarb, almonds. And I will just say another book that I love, if you want to read a little bit more about this is I had around the podcast, Dr. Judy Choi, and I'm going to have her back on again. And she, her book, which I have right here, it's called the carnival cure. I love this. I find myself going back to this book a ton. So hopefully I'll get her back on. 0 (7m 12s): But if you want to listen to that episode and I'll dive a little bit more deep, a little deeper into carnival eating, and maybe this could be something, if, you know, maybe if skin conditions or you have got gut issues, and you find that when you're eating, eating plants that they're causing issues. Now some will argue that maybe if the cleanup everything, your gut, and, you know, as Tim James mentioned, if you're, if you're having trouble digesting plants, maybe it's a gut issue, not the fact that the plants have these anti-nutrients and that could play a role. You mentioned something which I'm going to get done, just like a colon hydrotherapy, where they actually, he mentioned it in the podcast and I did it a while back, but I'm going to do one tomorrow. 0 (7m 58s): So I'll report back on how that goes, where they put it, that gentle stream, you know, into your body and into your anal gland, if I want to say, and, and, you know, get out fecal matter matter. And it's, it's, it's a gentle process, but I'll be doing that tomorrow. So I'll let you know how that goes again. But I think people who overdo, like let's just say that green smoothie that they've had. I know Brad currents talks a lot about that. He used to have this green smoothie with kale and almonds and almond milk, and you know, where you're just getting this inflow of oxalates every day. You actually produce it yourself. 0 (8m 38s): You produce about 10 to 30 milligrams of oxalates per day. But when you're having this smoothie, you're probably getting about 200 times that. And just imagine that doing that every day. So 75% of kidney stones are made from calcium oxalate. So yeah, you want to be careful with that. If you're overdoing it with these tumor spinach, I'm in smoothie every morning, it's it's, it might not play a good role in your health. And then it gets back to one of the things that I was looking into when I was getting into meat was, you know, the, the traditional grain fed meat would you want to, I personally try to avoid as much as possible and go with grass fed grass, finished meat. 0 (9m 25s): There's so many great companies out there that you can order from and just keep it in your freezer. Because grass fed meat has been shown to have higher levels of vitamin C E a co Q 10 and lower amounts of pesticides like glyphosate and atrazine, dioxins, and mold toxins. So to me, grass fed is the clear winner. And it's definitely worth the money. I don't spend a ton of money on a lot of things, but I do like to spend it on food, because if I'm putting into my body, I want to make sure it's from a quality source. And then you run into, you know, if you're, if you're, if you're not eating, if you're not getting protein from animal sources, quality animal sources, you get run into like, if you have a lot of soy and tofu, and let's just say, Pinto beans, the hormones of estrogen can play a role, and you definitely want to avoid that. 0 (10m 22s): So you don't want to overdo it with the soy and the tofu, which is, you know, obviously soy protein and then Pinto beans and white bread and peanuts and things like that. So keep an eye on that. If, if, if, if that's become an intricate role in your diet, you just want to be careful with that hormone. You want too much estrogen. And then, you know, people make the argument regarding the, the environment factor, as far as you know, it's bad for the environment, as far as animals, animals, these feed lots and things like this. But I actually learned this through the carnival cure that one almond, well, let's just say this water using the production of meat is much lower than water use to grow nuts. 0 (11m 4s): And people don't realize this. And this was just one example that I pulled from the book carnival cure, but what almond requires the only 1.1 gallons of water. So I can't imagine how much water is used, especially in California, which is where we get most of our almonds to supply for, you know, the country and the world. And then there's the, the question about what vitamins and minerals am I going to be getting from, excuse me, from eating meat and vitamin a is a big one. And that can be found in animal foods, the retinol vitamin a, you know, people say, well, you can get that from, from maybe some, some things like sweet potatoes, but sweet potatoes. 0 (11m 50s): It's in the form of better beta carotene. You would need to have a lot of them like a P almost a pound of sweet potatoes to get what you would want as far as vitamin a is concerned. All right, I'm losing my voice. Now we're back. Vitamin B12 is another big one. So if you are, if you are not eating meat, you know, you might want to have a good quality. B-complex another one was creating, you know, we do. And then creating is something we produce one gram per day, but it's really, that's really not enough for optimal performance. And they found that it could be linked to optimal foreigns, not only for our muscles, but for our brain, creating supplementation had a significant positive effect on both working memory and intelligence intelligence for both tasks that require speed of processing. 0 (12m 37s): So creating is one of these things that's been highly researched, and whether you're immediate or not, this is something I think you should supplement with a quality creating, especially if you're lifting weights. Also carnitine carnitine is another one that you can find mainly in animal foods. And this helps us use our fat stores for energy. So we talk a lot about that using fat for fuel in the form of ketones. So you definitely want carnitine, Colins and other one deficiencies of Coleen associated with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. There's been, you know, neuro, neuro degenerative diseases and heart disease. And so you definitely want Coleen. 0 (13m 19s): You can get Coleen from egg yolks, liver and kidney. It isn't broccoli, but you would need to eat a ton. I won't swear on this. You'd have to eat a ton more than a pound to get the right amount. That's a lot. So carnosine's another one. This is a molecule. That's an, that axes and data just, it died. Dodginess add to ax, excuse me, much like glutathione. So we can have small amounts from our diet, but this helps carnosine actually helps reduce the form of advanced glycation end products. And this is something that can, you can get from eating processed foods, or even showering your meats too much. 0 (13m 60s): And they can cause inflammation so carnosine can help counteract what's called AGS. And then Turing is another valuable nutrient found in animal foods that can also help reduce AGS, which has been linked to inflammation and aging quicker. So those are just some of the benefits that you can get from that, you know, you can get from eating animal foods. And lastly protein, which I talked about protein and fat are big ones, right? Those are new macronutrients that, you know, you want to fuel the body with protein. It's not only how much protein you get the food, but it's how bioavailable the protein is. And that's sort of where I, I think I fell short when I was just eating mainly vegetarian and some fish is, I just felt like I wasn't getting enough protein for the amount of activity I was doing. 0 (14m 49s): And obviously we want to avoid things like osteoporosis. We want to maintain muscle mass, which is critical also for insulin sensitivity throughout our life. So also as you age, we need more protein because our body is less able to digest and absorb protein, right? So you need more than you think, as you get older beef, egg, even pork, I'm not a pork eater and fish are some of the higher bioavailability of protein that you can get from foods. And then, you know, you can get protein from rice, kidney, beans, peas, and tofu. But like I said, you just gotta be careful. First of all, you're not, you're not going to have the high bioavailability of those. 0 (15m 29s): So you're not going to get what's necessarily on the label per se. And then you have things like tofu, which, you know, you sort of want to, like I mentioned with the estrogens, want to avoid so, so soy protein as much as possible. So also too, is the amino acid part of it as well. You know, vegan proteins effectively don't stimulate muscle growth and repair due to one of them, you know, acids is lower, leucine Loosing is high and eggs. And so that is one of the amino acids that helps with muscle protein synthesis and there's other essential immuno acids that you get from meats. 0 (16m 10s): And you can not get from a lot of vegan proteins. So you just gotta be careful about that. And then fat, which I mentioned trying to combat, you know, like Ben Beekman said, he said, we're really, if you look at most natural proteins out there, they come with fat other than mainly chicken. So try to get a little fat with your protein helps with satiation with your meals. And it's, it's a really a preferred fuel source from our brain. Considering our brain is 60% fat. So all cells require proper, all cells require fat for proper structure and functioning. Also the brain needs fat soluble, vitamins, and cholesterol for cognitive function, memory, and proper nerve function. 0 (16m 54s): So don't be afraid of those saturated fats, those healthy fats that you can get, you know, also get them from avocado. Again, if you're not going to have meat, could probably get them from avocado, maybe some coconut oil, you know, we can cook in that, but I always say you want to cook and ghee or butter. And if you're going to use olive oil, maybe drizzle that on to, on to foods. So yes, that was some of the reasons why I wanted to get into adding in some animal proteins into my diet. And it really did help me in the gym and also make sure that I wasn't deficient in vitamin D 12, excuse me, vitamin B12 and creatine and Coleen. 0 (17m 35s): And some of the other things that I mentioned already today. So anyways, those are my reasonings. If you have yours, or if you want to stick to what you're doing and if working, go for it, and if you're eating the standard American diet with a lot of processed food, whether you go vegetarian pescatarian, or let's just say carnival Rish, that it's going to be a big step up and you're going to see a major impact in your health. So find what works for you and stick with it. And I hope this maybe was informative and helped you understand what got me into eating nose to tail. So thanks so much for listening and enjoy the rest of your day. And I will talk to you at the end of the week with another interview. 0 (18m 16s): Thanks so much. Thanks for listening to the get lean clean podcast. I understand there are millions of other podcasts out there and you've chosen to listen to mine. And I appreciate that. Check out the show notes@briangrin.com for everything that was mentioned in this episode, feel free to subscribe to the podcast and share it with a friend or family member. That's looking to get their body back to what it once was. Thanks again, and have a great day.

This week I discuss my journey from eating mainly veggies and fish to eating mainly meat, nose-to-tail. I started implementing grass-fed, grass-finished meat into my diet to help get a better, more complete protein along with many other reasons I discuss in today's episode. I also touch on the role that antinutrients play in plant foods, what are the most bioavailable proteins to eat, what vitamins and minerals you could be missing by eating only plants, and the importance that animal fats play in our diet.

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