What To Eat For Your Own Health & The Planet's, From Mark Hyman, MD

Eggs were bad, then they were good, and now they are bad again. Fat was bad, now it's good, but controversy exists about whether to cut saturated fat or increase refined plant-based oils. Some science shows that meat is bad and increases the risk of heart disease, cancer, and death; other science reports that meat is benign, even healthy and necessary for optimal nutrition. 

On the one side is the regenerative agriculture movement, which suggests that animals are part of the natural biological cycle necessary to create sustainable ecosystems, that animals must be integrated into farms to regenerate soil, enabling it to store massive amounts of carbon and water. These practices can reduce the need for factory-farmed meat and its overuse of antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, and farming practices that deplete the soil and can be done at scale more profitably than feedlots. With 40% of agricultural lands suited only for grazing, this seems like a good idea. Even if you wanted to grow vegetables or grains on them, you can't.

According to Nicolette Hahn Niman, a vegetarian regenerative rancher, the problem is not the cow but the how. Feedlot beef, hogs, and chickens—or regenerative farms that include animals as an essential part of ecosystem restoration? 

Others suggest that eating meat will destroy our health and that cattle are the equivalent of the atomic bomb in terms of the destructive capacity for the climate and inhumane treatment of animals. That a meatless diet is the only way to save our health and the planet. That animal products should not be part of a healthy diet. That vegan and vegetarian diets prevent disease and prolong life.

Compared to our standard processed diet, plant-based diets are better. This does not automatically mean that diets of whole foods including sustainable, regeneratively raised animal foods are bad. Data on both vegetarian and meat-based diets are primarily studies of large populations. Some studies show no difference between omnivorous diets and vegetarian or vegan diets. Some show that vegetarian diets are healthier. Some show that diets with animal protein and fat are healthier than diets high in cereal grains. No wonder people (including doctors and even many scientists) are confused. 

The types of studies we need haven't been done. We have to rely on basic science, smaller clinical trials, and the totality of all the data. A large, long-term randomized controlled study of a whole-foods-based regenerative diet that includes animals or one that is vegan has not been done and is very difficult to do. It would take decades, billions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of study participants who strictly follow a specified eating protocol. Can you see why this hasn't and can't be done? Just to study a few hundred people over a few months while strictly controlling their diets can cost tens of millions of dollars and still may not be able to predict long-term outcomes.

What plants? What meat? Industrial soy, no. Vegetables from a regenerative farm, yes. Factory-farmed steak, no. Regeneratively raised steak, yes.