Thoughts About Dry January, Our One-Minute Cooking Tip, An Interview With Nicolette Niman, Sumo Oranges, Sri Lanken Curry & More!

Cocktail to me is a whole different game. It is. You at that point. Now listen, Bruce has this theory, wait before Bruce is gonna say something, but I wanna say Bruce has. Thing. He always says that no amount of fruit juice can cover up the taste of bad alcohol

Let's say you paid a dollar 50 for that bottle of beer, okay? A night that's 365 times a dollar 50. Well, I don't have the calculator right in my hand, but that's upwards of 400 $8,500 right there just for one. Bottle of beer. So now if you drink a bottle of wine a night, or if you have other cocktails, drinking can be expensive. So I do see the benefit of saving some money as well as getting some better sleep.

So there's an initial lowering of blood pressure and then there's a spike, uh, several hours later. You might know this if you've drunk a little too much and wake up in the middle of the night with your heart racing. It's that problem of the blood pressure is. Up because you're coming kind of on the backside of the alcohol intake, and of course there are improvements with insulin resistance, weight loss, sleep. I mean, listen,

What should I do with all this Tito's vodka? So she puts it in a spray bottle and she's cleaning her counters with it. She gimme a braid. She miss her plants with it, but then as she's missing it, she's licking the air and then she a braid at the very end. She looks at the camera and she says, oh, Martha needs a martini.

And I find, and I know this is very silly and you're going to think I'm insane, but I find it's really. Interesting to say out aloud, not just in your head aloud, I'm having a drink. Every time you have a drink, it reminds you, even if you know, okay, like let's say I pour myself a bourbon and then I want a little more to say out loud, I'm having a drink on that second poor actually helps me reduce the poor.

And it actually helps me kind of pull back and think, wait, do I really need another drink? Be conscious, yeah. Of your drinking.

Don't just go back into the kitchen and pour another glass of wine. Think about it. I, I talk about this all the time with Bruce and it's, uh, it was one last thing. I talk about this all the time with Bruce and it kind of amazed me when I was a kid growing up. Now I realize that I was born before the crust of the earth hardened, and I realize I'm ancient, but when I was a kid growing up on television, People didn't drink.

I mean, you know, the, the Cleavers sat down and they drank ugh, milk with dinner.

Home from whatever they're doing. The detective, whoever it is, walks in and instantly pours, pours a glass of wine. Mm-hmm. and there's an open bottle of wine on the counter and everybody's just pouring it, pouring and pouring up, pouring it, walking around with this glass of wine. And first of all, I think it's a very lazy actorly tick because it gives the actor something to do with their hands. But secondly, it makes this idea that somehow you have to walk in and have a drink.

And again, no. Now you will see it all the time. I just wanna say, you're welcome again. I'm a guy who likes a bottle of wine, so it's not that I'm opposed to any of this, it's just that I'm kind of curious about how it became, so what Wine industry reps sold Hollywood on the idea.

As we've said a million times, we are unsupported so that we can see exactly what we want about wine representatives in Hollywood or the American Heart Association or the New York Times. We don't have to watch our mouths, which is really nice. Up next, our one minute cooking.

You could take a piece of puff pastry and shove it in the waffle iron, and just make a crispy, crunchy dessert. You can even make eggs. You don't have to take out a pan. You scramble on egg. You heat up your waffle iron, you pour it into the waffle iron, you close it.

Up next Bruce's interview with our friend Nicolette Neiman, who we met years ago when we were writing a goat book, and she's the author of Defending Beef, which is now out in a revised edition. Bruce has got a great interview with Nicolete.

Rid of beef and cattle and then we don't have to worry about the, you know, the problems associated with them anymore. The problem with that approach, and I might have actually thought that was not such a bad idea, you know, when I started all of this 20 years ago.

But the more I've learned, the more I've worked on it and the more I have lived and been part of a ranch and gotten to know many ranching and farming people around the world, the more I have come to believe very fervently that the grazing animals play a unique, and I would even say, Indispensable ecological role. So they, we really need to have them on the landscape.

And beef is not just delicious and wonderful food, but it's also extremely nourishing and it's the kind of food that we need more of. There needs to be, More real food, more deeply nourishing food, you know, fewer processed foods, fewer chemicals in our food system. And I think, and we've kind of moved our diet in the wrong direction, in the industrialized parts of the world at least. And so it's, it's a very important subject and one that I think we've just gotten it so wrong.

You know, energy bars, all the things that people are eating more and more of now, you know, more and more processed foods. So beef kind of is, is this really important food in terms of its nourishment and the nutrients that it provides and the quality of the nutrients it provides, but also the arguments against it are basically wrong. We had this idea that kind of emerged in the middle of the 20th century from.

Certain scientific research that was being done and certain things that were being said in the, you know, sort of the public health arena and the medical arena, that heart disease, and especially heart attacks and heart disease, all the problems related to heart health, but also other health problems were increasingly believed to be linked to saturated fat. Mm-hmm. and maybe other aspects of red meat, but there was a lot of focus on saturated fat.

We've also, of course, heard a lot about cholesterol in the second half of the 20th century, and things like eggs, you know, in addition to red meat, those were all foods that we began to believe. Increasingly because of things that were coming out in the mainstream media. Mm-hmm. were bad for us, even though these were foods that had been eaten by humans, you know, literally kind of since time immemorial.

So there was a dramatic sort of rise in heart attacks and other sort of diet related diseases in the mid 20th century. So they were looking, you know, people were looking at the public health community in the medical community for explanations. And O. One thing that actually really surprised me, I didn't know this until I did the research for this book.

There were actually a number of competing theories that were kind of emerging from medical and public health experts, and the idea that this was really attributed to saturated fat was kind of one idea. Mm-hmm. and there were other ideas, one of them being the idea that the rise in processed foods, and especially the addition of sugar and the greater percentage of diet that's. From sugar. Mm-hmm.

was another one of the competing theories, and the thing that really surprised Main Rain Research was to find that the idea of saturated fat actually being the culprit and then primary problem in the modern diet was kind of, it kind of won the day from a number of. Kind of reason that are really not scientific That's not to say there was no scientific basis for it, but the reason that that argument became the prevailing paradigm are not based on science.

And so what's been happening in the last couple of decades is there's been a really serious reexamination of how that idea came to. you know, sort of be so widely accepted. There's been a lot of reexamination of the initial studies and the subsequent studies, and even though there seemed to be some, some suggestion in the research for a long time. That's saturated fat and cholesterol were contributing to di re related diseases.

I believe that the consensus has shifted pretty dramatically and that there's a pretty widespread acceptance now, especially among younger practitioners, w people that are, you know, in their seventies and eighties that practiced medicine or public health for a long time under these idea. Are not necessarily ready to give those up.

But there's a lot of evidence that now suggests that when you have saturated fat that's basically non oxidized and it's not in processed foods and it's just basically whole real foods, things like butter and eggs and fat that's found in whole pieces of meat, that there's nothing inherently unhealthy about those foods.

And in fact, there's a whole line of diet studies and, and writing that suggests that they're actually an essential component in the diet, partly because they add to how satiated we feel when we eat, and so they help prevent overeating. And so when, when all this has been sort of reexamined, I, and I go through it in a lot of detail in the book in terms of the specific studies, but that's kind of a summary of what's happened on that side of the question.

He was a prominent, very well-respected medical researcher who became increasingly persuaded that sort of processed foods in a particular sugar. It was the primary culprit in the rise in a lot of diet related diseases, and what ended up happening to him is, Amazing. It's really reminiscent of the initial attempts to try to regulate tobacco.

There was a very deliberate attempt to discredit him, and the sugar industry itself got very well organized and they tried to marginalize him personally and to try to prevent his research from being discussed and. Tried to get him uninvited from conferences and in fact they did succeed in this to a large degree and tried to prevent publishing of his work.

So there's been a lot about that lately that's been written and, and people like Robert Lustig, U S F, who are trying to expose the danger of sugar are are talking a lot about his work and the fact that he was kind of a pioneer in this, but his voice was basically, You know, squelched based on the money and the power behind the sugar lobby and the industry, just as early attempts to, you know, expose the danger of tobacco. Very same kind of playbook.

And then you had, on the other hand, keys who wrote this very famous seven countries study, which seemed to show that in those countries where people ate the most saturated fat, There was the most heart disease. So it was like a really simple idea of correlating these two things.

There's been a tremendous amount of research and analysis of that initial work and subsequent works in the last couple of decades showing that there really isn't a very strong connection, and in fact that, that he had actually begun with a much larger body. data from 22 countries and he deliberately pared it down to seven countries, because he wanted to show a strong correlation. And if you included all of those countries, there would've been almost no correlation at all.

Wow. And so the subsequent, you know, analysis, sort of epidemiological research and also the clinical work that's been done for decades now, trying to show this link is pretty. Pretty weak. And in fact, there's a lot of counter research now and some of the, I think most, most important research is some of the studies that have shown, if you take out the processed meats mm-hmm.

so things like, let's say deli meats and bacon and ham, even though those things are delicious, you know, many of those things have a lot of added ingredients. And of course there's a lengthy process that happens to those meats and their preparation and so, take those out. Cause very few meat studies do that. Hmm. Uh, when you do that, the, the correlation between meat and any diet related diseases entirely vanishes.

So to me, that kind of thing is extremely compelling in suggesting that we've really gone down a, you know, the wrong path altogether in the way we've looked at this issue from a health standpoint.

Just more saturated fat and that we're having a rise in all these diet related diseases, and also this correlates to lots more of these farm animals on the landscape and kind of causing all this environmental damage.

Hmm. Well, the reason that it's so important to just look at the raw data is that that story in and of itself, it's kind of a house of cards because when you look at the numbers of cattle, for example, on the land, it's slightly higher today than it was, let's say a hundred years ago, but not much. And the reason for that is because even though we're producing a lot more meat, and we're producing a lot more milk today, you know, as a nation, but the reason the numbers are not.

Dramatically greater in terms of the actual numbers of cattle and inventory is because the numbers of dairy cattle have gone down dramatically. The reason for that is increased production per animal, and I actually have some real concerns about the, you know, how far that's been pushed. Yeah. But that's just the reality of it. There have, there are far fewer dairy cattle. Today in the land and there were a hundred years ago because each individual animal produces about six times more milk.

So a great deal. More milk. Again, I'm I'm not a big fan of that. You know that breeding to that extreme and I have real concerns about that. But we are in fact, Having a lot fewer dairy cattle because of that. And then the number of beef cattle in the, in the United States has increased, but not as much as people think. So it's, so if you add up all the cattle together in the United States, it's slightly more, I think it's something like 20% more total.

So it's a lot smaller of an increase than people tend to think. And when you actually look at all of the farm animals together, so if you include sheep, goats, bison, pig, And except for poultry, because those are small animals that are, you know, kept in buildings and they are raised in huge numbers. The numbers of poultry have increased dramatically in the last, you know, century or especially the last half, half century.

But the, if you added all the sort of large farm animals that people believe have a large ecological impact, The numbers have actually declined. So because, and that's because the numbers of sheep have gone way down. I mentioned the number of dairy cows have gone way down. We also have fewer mules, oxen, horses, you know, all these animals that used to be used for work on farms and still are in other parts of the world, but not that much in the us.

So if you think of sort of like the mass of farm animals on the landscape in the. that has actually declined. Hmm. So these are just really important facts for people to think about when they're talking about this issue. And then similarly, on the dietary side, we see that there was kind of a peak of red meat consumption in the mid 20th century, but that's actually been going down for quite some time. And the total number of eggs that people eat is lower.

The total amount of saturated fat that people eat from animals is down about 20% over a century, Rico, you know, so all of these numbers show. Sort of popular myth that, you know, we are eating more animals, we're raising more animals, we're getting sicker. It's just not true. So that, you know, you can just start right out by saying, forget those ideas. They're wrong,

or, you know, we've deemphasized it, we've sort of pushed it to the side of the plate. We've told people again and again, you know, Pasta to me is a good example. If you're eating a lot of pasta and you're putting, you know, like, and I used to do this myself when I was a vegetarian, you'd put a big pile of pasta on the plate and then like a little bit of sauce, you know? And what I've realized is if you have a good.

Healthy meat sauce that you've made with beef, for example, and you are going to eat, you know, spaghetti with meat sauce, You're probably gonna have a healthier, more satiating, more nourishing meal if you have a relatively small portion of past and a lot of meat sauce on top of it. And I've actually done that exact transition in my own diet. But what we've done as a nation is we've told people, and this has kind of happened throughout the westernized world that we.

Shouldn't eat very much meat and that we should be eating a lot of grains. And these other, you know, things like bread, you know, filler foods, bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, and we, and we've eaten a lot more of that. So our total carbohydrate consumption has gone up. Our total processed food consumption has gone up. Our consumption of animal fats and red meat and eggs has gone down.

So I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that we're eating more to try to feel full and to feel fully nourished because we're also eating. Again, foods like rice and pasta are fairly low in terms of how much nourishment per calorie is provided, so you don't end up feeling full satiated, and you also don't end up feeling nourished. So your body is sort of. Continuing to signal you that you need to eat more. And so you do.

And when you look at how many calories per person that we're eating in the United States right now per day, it is hundreds of calories higher than it was 50 years ago. So I think all of this stuff is related and you know, this whole idea that we've been telling people for so long, they should eat less meat. It's really misguided and it has had some very serious downstream effects on our.

So I had this idea from really early on that if you were trying to be healthy, you know you were going to eat real food and make as much of it yourself as possible. But they did kind of get caught up in, as so many people did in the 1970s and this idea that. fat was bad for you. And I remember this idea being talked about a lot in my household that we shouldn't eat too much fat and we shouldn't, you know, just have butter as a treat on Sundays. You know, kinda thing.

and, and I actually kinda remember, you know, the margarine coming into the house and my parents kinda saying, okay, so usually you should eat the margarine on Sundays. You can eat the butter. You know, so they were like really focused on all this stuff and by the time I reached college, I started to feel. Probably if I wanted to be a good environmental steward and also eat the healthiest diet, I should eat very little or no meat.

So you sort of fast forward, I kind of stuck with that for, you know, a decade or so, and then I started working for Bobby Kennedy Jr. In New York as an environmental lawyer. He asked me to work on the issue of meat production and concentrated animal production as an environmental issue and water quality issue. So it's, at first it's kind of reinforcing my beliefs that, you know, oh yeah, from, you know, meat is better for the environment, basically. To summarize it briefly and then.

Just a couple months into the project, I realized, wow, it's so different depending on how you're doing it. It's, I was going to just beautiful farms like Paul Willis's farm in Iowa, which was one of the first ones that I visited and I was seeing. You know how his animals were le leading good lives. He was, he had a very ecologically vibrant farm.

He's done this huge prairie restoration and, you know, he raises all these different kinds of heirloom tomatoes in his gardens and, and it's a place that, you know, the, the neighbors. Are thrilled is there, you know? Yeah. And then in contrast to that, I was going to um, sort of the worst kind of factory farm operations in North Carolina and Missouri and seeing these, you know, very depressing kind of metal buildings or these huge waste lagoons out back, you know?

No, you know, no good thing was happening in terms of. You know, the, the water quality was getting, you know, affected by it in a negative way. Odors were being caused, the neighbors were outraged, you know, so it, it, it just couldn't have been more of a contrast. Right. Um, and so I started feeling like, you know, we need to make this distinction. And the work that I was doing was trying to do that, but I stuck with my vegetarian diet for a long time.

And when I married Bill Nyman, You know, c e o and founder of Naiman Ranch and Rancher, and, you know, someone who really was living and breathing with cattle and, and meat, and people thought I would re-exam my diet, but I, I was more and more convinced that animals were important in the food system, but it wasn't affecting my own personal. Feelings about what I wanted to eat. Mm-hmm. And over time that shifted very gradually because we had children.

I wanted to raise them as omnivores because of how I've always believed that meat is healthy food, especially for people that are growing and developing and, and then when I reached age 50, that's when I decided, you know, I need to make sure that what I am eating is really supporting vibrant health. It's not just good enough to. maintain, you know, I need to mm-hmm.

my, I knew for, you know, from lots of different things, personal experience and observations, as well as lots of reading that my, I knew my bones and I knew my muscles were gonna begin to be challenged, that I was gonna be hard to maintain those things and that I was gonna be getting. You know, heavier in terms of my weight if, if I didn't, you know, really watch what I ate and be really careful, which I'd never been a problem, you know, going up, you know, up to that point in my life.

So I started re-examining what I was eating and I felt that meat actually would be an invaluable component, invaluable part of my diet if I wanted to have. The best nutrition. And then when I started to eat meat again, which is about three years ago now, I was very surprised how much I enjoyed it right away. like, like it was like, this is delicious.

Why was I not eating this all these years And I'm really, really glad I've reintroduced it into my diet because I feel like it's a delicious satiating food and I'm really surprised how much I'm enjoying cooking. The foods that I grew up with. Mm-hmm. things that my mother used to make.

Things like goulash that she with beef, goulash that she used to make, which is so delicious and I didn't eat it for 30 years and now I'm eating it again, preparing it for my boys and passing on that tradition to them. So, It's been very satisfying and really happy I decided to do it.

And then of course, Bruce just rips the audio off. The Zoom. Yep. And uses that. It's very easy, but still, and nonetheless, they're always so grandly informative. Okay. Our final traditional segment on the podcast cooking with Bruce and Mark, what's making us happy in food this week? You go first.

So I got a. Big bag of Sumos and they're making me happy.