Welcome, everyone, to the Take Control of Your Health podcast. This is Dr. Mercola bringing you the latest cutting-edge interviews to help you achieve optimal health. You can receive more information by subscribing to my free daily newsletter at Mercola.com. Thank you so much for listening. So let's get started with this week's latest program to help you.
and your family take control of your health. Welcome everyone, Dr. Mercola helping you take control of your health. And today we are joined by Ashley Armstrong, who is a pioneer. in providing healthy food, specifically healthy chicken eggs, which are an enormously important part of our diet because they carry some nutrients that are really difficult to get in other foods, almost virtually impossible, specifically choline I'm referring to. So Ashley has developed a process to make these
excellent foods available without a metabolic poison. So welcome and thank you for joining us today, Ashley. Thanks, Dr. Mercola. It's always a pleasure. I think one of my favorite topics is essentially just returning...
back to how food used to be made that's kind of all that it is right yeah yeah for sure because 150 years ago the dietary linoleic acid was naturally low so people would just go to the grocery store and their food options didn't have a bunch of linoleic acid it was in my opinion probably easier to
source food back then. And now we're kind of inundated with vegetable oils, not just from vegetable oils, like not just Pufus from vegetable oils, but also unfortunately from... animal products as well, because some animals are just vehicles for vegetable oils, which is unfortunate, but that's kind of where the agriculture industry has kind of shaped into where it is today for a number of reasons.
The statement like you are what you eat, eats has never been more true because of how much the agriculture industry has changed over the last hundred years. Yeah. advent of the American Civil War, about 1870s or so, is when they had developed the technology to extract oils from seeds. That didn't exist before then, so you're right. The average amount of linoleic acid the person consumed was about under five grams and maybe closer to two or three, depending on how many calories it took.
is probably exceeded within the first few waking hours of most people nowadays. Yep. And bacon. Those are going to be two sources that are actually really high in PUFAs. Yeah, and they're generally perceived as healthy by the population, especially those who are advocating carnivore. But they don't understand that these linoleic acid molecules are really a metabolic poison.
impair if not destroy mitochondrial function so why don't you walk us through the reason why it's not typically available or present in most animals and that would be the animals that can ferment food in their stomach and allows them to eat grass which are typically ruminant animals so why don't you mention which ones those are and why they typically don't have this problem that regular animals like chickens and hogs do
So they're in terms of like livestock, there's kind of two classifications. There's ruminant animals. So that's going to include cows, lamb, goats, deer. They have a very complex digestive system. often four stomachs. And so that's a lot of time and a lot of microbes to break their food that they consume down. And then on the other side is monogastric animals.
We are monogastric animals, single stomach animals. And for monogastric animals, the dietary fat impacts the fat in their tissues. So in like... bacon fat or egg yolks or chicken thighs. Whereas with ruminant animals, they have this process called biohydrogenation, where the microbes are able to actually convert some of their dietary PUFAs into saturated fat. So in general...
ruminant animal fats, so dairy fats or tallow or butter, those are going to be significantly lower in PUFAs. However, and this will be a topic I'm sure we'll dive into at some point today.
Mainstream is so convinced that saturated fat is bad for us, cholesterol is bad for us, and PUFAs, polyunsaturated fatty acids, are heart healthy, that we are creating these technologies to now... try to manipulate the fatty acid composition in ruminant animals as well through these things called rumen protected fats so it's
a shame what's happening in the agriculture industry and reading the scientific literature in the agriculture industry is a little bit discouraging, but that's why I think conversations like this are so important to kind of. spread more awareness and empower those that are in food production that are farmers. Farmers need to be educated why we need to go back to traditional farming styles, traditional feed programs.
So we can return the natural fatty acid profiles that mother nature created. Humans are not smarter than mother nature, and we're trying to manipulate and tweak that. So, yeah. Ruminant animals and then monogastric animals. So for pigs and for chickens, the type of fat that they eat dietarily strongly, strongly impacts the type of fat in their tissues.
Unfortunately, with the increase in corn and soy crop production, you know, those are government subsidized crops. So those are grown at mass quantities. Most of those are grown for livestock feed. Soy is very high in omega-6, very high in PUFAs, and so that forms the base of a lot of monogastric diets. And now a step further are these things called DGGs, so dry distilled grains. So back in the late 1900s, early 2000s, you know, the ethanol...
biofuel industry has really taken off. So corn is grown and the starch from corn is removed to create ethanol. Well what's left of the corn when you extract that starch is PUFAs and protein. And so a lot of this DDGs are like waste products of the ethanol industry. And that's being fed to livestock across all industries for layer birds, meat birds, hogs. and even dairy animals and um cows as well and unfortunately there are studies showing that for cat for pigs fed ddgs the fat
composition has the same amount of PUFAs as canola oil. So we're literally transforming the fatty acid profile in our agriculture system for the worst. Yeah, and it wouldn't be so much an issue if they gave it to as much an issue as they gave it to ruminant animals because they have the capacity to convert these unsaturated fats and PUFAs to saturated fats.
It really is a problem when they hit the non-ruman animals like chickens and pigs. Yeah, that's the big issue. So, you know, I think we should maybe, and this is a concern, and we don't know. What percentage at this point? Because there's no rules, there's no regulations. They just do it because they think it's good or more than likely they know there's a chance to increase their profit margin in some way. These ingredients are cheap. They are cheap.
Yeah. Yeah. A lot cheaper than the alternatives. So because. Basically, most all vertebrates require some form of fat. It's really essential for structural components, but also for burning fuel. So you've got to have it. So that's the key. It's one of the keys of...
of optimizing your health is to get the right type of fats down and composition right. And if you're leaning more towards omega-6 fat, like linoleic acid, you're going to have problems, major problems. It's one of the major reasons that we die prematurely is in excess of this fat.
And it really destroys mitochondrial function. So one of the most important things you can do is avoid it. The obvious ones are seed oils and going to restaurants, which is almost as bad as seed oils because almost everything they... cooked there is in seed oils. I mean, if you ever go to a buffet and have a breakfast buffet, almost 100% those omelets are made with seed oils.
unless you ask them otherwise and watch them use butter instead. Now, butter is an acceptable alternative. It's an animal-saturated fat. But there are some plant-based ones, and actually you're looking, one of your... strategies is to create a way that people don't have to raise their own chickens, because that's raised with a lot of problems. That's not hard to raise them, but it's hard to protect against the predators.
So unless you take specific precautions, you're going to have all your chickens killed for sure. I've had that many times happen. Yeah. So it's a lot easier to get from someone who's doing it the right way. And fortunately, you're in the process of developing. a scaled operation to provide them to many people who can have access to them. Right now, it doesn't exist. Really commercially available, low linoleic acid eggs are essentially unavailable. I mean, you do sell them, but...
You have a long waiting list to get into it. I mean, they can go on the waiting list, but who knows when they're going to be able to get some. It's probably a long time out. It's unfortunate because even...
There are farmers out there doing really great work, right? They're raising their chickens in a regenerative agriculture mindset, rotating the chickens out on pasture. Unfortunately, they're still using soy-based feed because that is just what... is business as usual right and that's the most important thing about our food system right now business as usual is just simply unacceptable and it's clearly leading to a decline in our health it's not working it's clearly not working
And so, as Dr. McCullough mentioned, we are trying to scale up our operation to make changes at a higher level, but it is extremely expensive. Expensive. Expensive. The feed options, the feed alternatives are not government subsidized. So they're automatically a lot more expensive because.
Government subsidized means like there's incentives for farmers to grow these crops. Let's say that they have a drought or they have like a ton of rain one year. For some reason, their crops don't work on their land. a subsidy back from the government. So they're more secure in producing corn and soy. It is a safer option for row crop farmers to produce that these days. It's not to the fault of the farmer at all. They're doing the best that they can to...
be able to pay the bills and stay alive. It's the system that is extremely messed up because, for example, raising an alternative to soybeans like peas or... various types of like heirloom wheat varieties, not genetically modified wheat, rye, these other options, you aren't going to be as secure as a row crop farmer in growing those. And so the options are just...
The same quantity is there's so much more corn and soy available than there are these alternative grain options for livestock feed. And so that's where the huge price difference comes into play. The feed is just simply so much more expensive. But over time, the more that consumers kind of demand these things, we can kind of level off the prices as we go on and on and raise awareness. And I think educate and empower farmers to kind of make these decisions as well. So that way.
We aren't just blindly listening to these health authorities who want to tell us that saturated fat is bad for us. It's clogging our arteries. Dietary cholesterol is killing us. And instead you should be... consuming vegetable oils to be heart healthy. It's maddening because those unfortunate health myths are propagating into... how we produce food as well. And it's negatively changing the types of dietary fat that we consume across the board. Yeah, for sure.
And it's not just that the challenge of obtaining foods, there's typically barriers put in place to thwart competition for innovative. entrepreneurs like yourself to come up and offer a better, healthy alternative for a reasonable rate, which is hard to do because of the subsidies that you mentioned. But the other barriers are these legislative...
initiatives that were designed solely to benefit the first mover advantage of the people that were initially in this industry. And the regulatory barriers they have initiated are... Enormously difficult to get through and you've encountered that. So maybe you can explain your challenge with it. Yeah. I'm sure we all know the company Bayer very well. Well, Bayer sells seeds.
And it also sells fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides. And so they kind of have a chokehold on the agriculture industry right now. So like business as usual is very profitable for Bayer. And of course, You know, on the pharmaceutical side of things, business as usual is making people sick, very profitable for pharmaceuticals. And so how things are working right now, people high up, people paying billions of dollars for lobbyists.
to keep it like this. They want to keep it like this. It's not to their favor for us to produce low linoleic acid eggs, to not use feed crops that are sprayed and doused with glyphosate and things like that. Honestly, I think that the biggest obstacle obstacle is the feed because the big feed mills are, they're so efficient in what they do that they can.
bring in massive quantities of the feed ingredients at the same time. They have that economies of scale that it's really hard to have at a single farm level, right? We're not bringing in truckload, semi-trucks of feed ingredients at a time. And so the more trucking that you have in creating your feed, that automatically raises the prices. Anyone that is involved in...
trucking knows how expensive trucking is right now. So if there's this system set in place where massive quantities of corn and soy are trucked in at like the same time and a bunch of feed is made at the same time. That's where you can cut a lot of costs. And that's a good thing. That's advantageous. But right now, I don't have enough volume to push those types of economies of scale, right?
It's just going to be more expensive as we're starting to grow and grow. But the more farmers that we bring into our partnership, I don't ever want to be like a Tyson. dictatorship like you have to do this type of thing but it's more of like a collective partnership of farmers that are empowered they're fed up with current system and they're aware of
What we feed our livestock impacts the nutrition of the final product. And so this collection of farmers that we may be located at various places around the country, but if we develop. hubs in our area and we can create those economies of scale a little bit better where trucking is a little bit more efficient bringing feed to a general hub
that's where we can kind of start to lower costs over time and can get more and more competitive with the prices at the grocery store. Yeah. So I think we should address the elephant in the room, which is the cost of the eggs. Typically, for someone who's interested in doing it commercially like you are, because of the cost of the feed and the lack of subsidies of the feed, the costs are significantly higher.
And most people aren't able to get it locally from a mill. So then you have to pay for the shipping. And the shipping, and I've done this, is typically as much as the feed. Yeah. It's as much as the feed. Sometimes even more. Yeah. You know, because you're getting bulk. bulk sizes you're not buying 10 pounds you're buying typically 50 pounds at a time yeah multiple bags for sure so that adds up pretty quickly when you're shipping we are making stuff like we are making steps
If anyone were to log on to my website right now and see what the price per egg box, they'd probably be a little bit alarmed, right? Like, oh my God. No, they wouldn't be, probably. They would be, period. I'm not making a ton of money on the eggs. You're almost producing these below cost. It's not like, oh my gosh, how could she get away with it?
I got to do this. You got to grow some eggs and charge $20 a dozen. Hey, okay. His are more expensive because the further you live away from us, the more expensive costs, the more expensive shipping costs. We are making a number. It is my goal. It is my personal goal to lower the cost significantly over time. Like that is, we are actively making steps towards that.
One thing, for example, is we're optimizing box dimensions so that we can get better shipping rates. Another thing is our feed is now going to be... We're hopefully in the next couple months going to be delivered in semi trucks with an auger arm. We've been doing feed bags or tote bags for years now, and that's so expensive. And the fact that now we can potentially have the option to a semi truck.
going to save significant costs on delivery of the feed. We are actively making steps behind the scenes. And ultimately, at the end of the day, I think one of the coolest things that can happen in This actually happened with one individual, Dr. Mercola, from our first interview a few weeks ago. I've connected with this gentleman named Greg. feed crop, row crop farmers with livestock farmers. We need people to grow our feed. I'm not, I don't have enough land to grow the crops for our livestock.
So how can we build a network of farmers where the feed is grown? We don't have to have the USDA organic certification. I think that there's a number of loopholes and barriers there. We're not going to have feed that's sprayed with pesticides. That's unacceptable on our end. So how can we have a network of row crop farmers working with livestock farmers? to produce low PUFA, low linoleic acid food grown as nature intended for these livestock farmers.
Currently working on those steps behind the scenes as well as to directly connect with the people growing the feed as well, because that's a very integral part of this, because as you mentioned in the beginning, unfortunately. Chickens and pigs, you can't just release them out on the field and say 100% grass-fed chickens. That doesn't exist. That chicken would be very unhealthy, have a very low metabolic rate.
Well, they're not just eating grass. They're going to eat some bugs too, which is fine. Right. If you live in where you do in Michigan and it's January, the ground is frozen solid. You're not going to, there's no bugs that come through. Zero. Well. Okay, so it's February 4th, and it's 50 degrees outside. Well, I said last month. Yeah, last month. When it was below zero. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah.
Chickens need like a supplemental feed to give them the energy, carbohydrates, a little bit of fat, and some extra dietary protein as well. They need those ingredients to be healthy. Whereas a cow... A cow has that complex four-chamber stomach system that can convert blades of grass into fat and protein. That's amazing. It's incredible. But chickens can't do that. Pigs can't do that.
And there's actually literature showing that for chickens fed carbs and fat, even if it's a little bit of fat, the dietary fat that they do consume gets preferentially pushed into the egg yolk. The type of dietary fat that a chicken is eating and that a pig is eating is very vital in determining the final fatty acid composition of the final products.
And determining the fatty acid composition of the mitochondria, which is where it really counts. The rubber meets the road. And in so many different ways, you know, producing metabolic water, producing carbon dioxide gas. radically improving health in just almost innumerable ways. So it's magic when it works. And the key to remember is you want low linoleic acid. So why don't you...
And egg yolks specifically, not so much the whites because they're high in tryptophan, which is a precursor to serotonin, which is a problem. Most people have too much serotonin, not too little. And the SSRIs, the drugs that are the reuptake inhibitors, tend to be Even worse, there's almost no reason to take those drugs. They should be removed from the market. Most of them have a black box warning anyway. So don't take those things. They're not good for you.
That's the unfortunate thing about a lot of the standard American diet. They think that like chicken breasts and containers of egg whites are like healthy because low fat, but they are just giving themselves so much tryptophan. And missing out on the metabolism boosting benefits of those amino acids in, you know, the skin, the connective tissue, in bone broth, things like that.
In terms of like maximal nutrients in square footage, I don't know if you can be an egg yolk. Yeah. If you take a step back, the mother nature designed the egg. to protect the yolk because the yolk is the most precious part of the egg. The shell acts as a physical barrier to protect the yolk. And then the egg whites are actually very antimicrobial, antibacterial in nature to protect the integrity of the yolk. So nature knows. We know.
Hopefully you know, the listener, that the egg yolk is a nutrient powerhouse. It has all of the nutrients needed to grow a chicken. From this little yolk, an entire chicken is grown. How beautiful is that? It's incredible. So I think the nutrients that are spotlights in an egg are definitely going to be the B vitamins. It contains a large amount of B vitamins.
All of the B vitamins are necessary cofactors in the steps to produce energy in your body. If you don't have enough of the micronutrients, if you are micronutrient deficient. your metabolism won't be able to be as strong, be as robust, because you don't have the necessary cofactors to generate ATP, and one of those being choline. So the egg yolk is...
I'm fairly certain. I think it even has more choline than liver. Is that right? Beef liver? Well, it's the density of it. You'd have to eat so much liver. You could get it in there. But you'd overdose on other nutrients like vitamin A, retinol. You would definitely consume a lot of copper, a lot of retinol, vitamin A to get equivalent amounts of choline that you can just get without.
nutrient toxicity concerns from an egg yolk so choline i think is one of the most important nutrients that a lot of people are deficient in in carbohydrate metabolism, carbohydrate oxidation. Choline is definitely a necessary step in energy production. So if you're not consuming, I think that someone should be consuming at least one egg yolk a day, truthfully.
It's more than that. One egg yolk, if that's all you're getting, you're going to be deficient in colon. You need more, actually. Okay, how many egg yolks is the mint? Well, assuming you're not getting any other dietary sources, and that's incorrect if you're taking like an amino acid protein supplement, but at least two, probably three, and then you can know you're getting it if you take four. Okay. For sure.
So the only, I happen to take six a day because, you know, I like to work out and I move a lot, you know, we walk at least five, six miles every day. Yeah. So, you know, when you. move more and exercise more you're going to have more nutrient requirements that's that's the downside of it yeah so you need to replace them yeah higher metabolic rate which is awesome also means that you kind of have a more
of a responsibility to consume higher micronutrients to support that metabolic rate. That's the beautiful thing about eggs is because it's so nutrient dense, it's not like you're just targeting, it's like a supplement with one ingredient. It's just... whole food that's loaded with the nutrition it takes is required to build the chicken from scratch okay i have a something you should try have you ever heard of honey cured egg yolk
Honey cured egg yolks. I wouldn't even know what that animal looks like. You got to try it. So you put your egg yolks in like a glass container and just submerge them in honey and let them sit in the fridge. And then the next day. they're like cured a little bit so the texture is a little bit uh it basically the yolk won't like just go run all over the place definitely try try a honey cured egg yolk
How much honey, how do you put it in? Like eight ounces, four ounces, two ounces? Just make sure the yolk is submerged. So it depends on the size. Can you reuse it? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. The honey, of course. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I want to be a little concerned with that because obviously there's this fat. Usually there's linoleic acid in most of it. Even in your eggs, there's linoleic acid. It's just not that much. It's less than a gram. It's actually probably a fifth of one gram.
200 wait no 50 gram 20 milligrams is it no did i get that right how many milligrams is there in your are your egos it's low it's at one fourth the level of a conventional I want to say it's 20 milligrams. Is it 20? 17 to 20. Yeah. So I thought it was like 20 milligrams. And just so you know, because, you know, most anyone doesn't know what the limit of it.
I said two grams to five grams initially. It should be under two. A gram is 1,000 milligrams. So if it's two grams, it's 2,000 milligrams. If it's five, it's 5,000. Yeah. It doesn't sound like a lot. Well, it sounds a lot when you make it 5,000, but if you have two walnuts, that's 5,000 milligrams of linoleic acid. People don't know that. Just nuts can be, you know, ostensibly, walnuts are health food.
Right? But they're loaded with linoleic acid. You got to be really, really careful of most all nuts. It's probably not a good idea except for macadamias, which are mostly saturated fat because why? Because they're grown in the tropics. It's a tropical nut. Almonds are not tropics. No, they're not. So because they're grown in colder climates.
The biology has to unsaturate the fats. Otherwise it will freeze. It will turn solid. And then that organism dies or that nut dies because it's frozen essentially. And that's why fish that are... way in like Arctic cold temperature waters, if they were rich in saturated fat, they wouldn't be able to move. They would be stuck. They'd be dead. Yeah, they'd be dead. Yeah, for sure. So that's why we want tropical fresh because usually over time.
they're going to have much lower polyunsaturated fats, less omega-3s and more saturated fats. Yeah. I think that the best thing that someone can do for their health is track their food on chronometer for like five days and just... truly pay attention to the amount of PUFA's polyunsaturated fatty acids in their diet. If you can push that as low as possible, I think you're going to see improvements in your health like pretty quickly. And you can't achieve that.
going out to eat at restaurants. You can't achieve that eating a ton of nuts and seeds. You can't achieve that eating conventional bacon, conventional egg yolks, conventional drumsticks and wings like that. It really... you'll have to really pay attention to the types of fat that you're eating. And it's kind of eye-opening that food sourcing actually really does matter in today's day and age because...
abundance that we have in these high PUFA, high linoleic options, it's kind of alarming and frightening. It is. Yes, indeed. And you mentioned restaurants. I mean, it's not intuitively obvious. And I'd like to share the story of that. You can almost be guaranteed not all restaurants, but virtually all restaurants would be more accurate. Almost all of them, but not all. Because some understand this and, you know, they make it.
compensations for it. But when they do, it's going to increase their costs. I mean, it costs more to cook with butter than it does with canola oil, 100%. So, you know, their margin levels decrease. So there's this... financial incentive not to do that most of the time it's just not done for the finances this just people are unaware no one very few people understand the dangers of these seed oils but they're there nevertheless i understand there are some restaurants now
There's like an app or something. Are you aware of that? I think it's called Seed Oil Scout. Seed Oil Scout? Yeah. So it identifies restaurants. It's easier now. This is a recent innovation. This is one of the benefits of technology that will help you identify. So I've never used it. I've never even seen the app, but it sounds like a useful tool.
But you can almost assume if it's not an adaptant, 100% of them are almost going to be given seed oils. And when you go in, really the only safe thing you can eat is a ruminant meat. dish because almost everything else, including the sauces that you might use, the salad dressings, they're all loaded with seed oils. And, you know, and what Ashley mentioned earlier, these ruminant protected fats, which is another.
method of saying time-released linoleic acid or time-released omega-6 fats because they put some type of coding over it. that prevents, that allows them to slide through these biohydrogenation chambers that saturates the fat so they don't get hydrogenated. And they slip there and they go in the intestine and they dump their load of polysaturated fats and they form primarily omega-6.
And you've got bad news bears. And when this is given to ruminant animals, which they're targeting now, we just don't know how much. We don't know how much, but they are targeting and their goal is to replace all the feed with these fats and make all the food equally damaging. And the only way you're going to be able to avoid that is to raise your own cattle or sheep or goats.
A lot of people do that. Not that many, but enough do it where that's a possibility. But you really, if you're not doing it yourself, you want to find someone who is doing it because you want to really know the person who's raising. the foods that you're going to eat. That would be ideal. Most of us don't rely on third-party certification agencies to do that, like the organic label or cooperatives.
in some ways like you're creating with the eggs, is that you're providing standards for the feed and the rotation of the coop over the grasses so they don't obliterate the...
supply of the healthy plants or more importantly, the bugs. So when they apply these standards and you can get assistively good, low linoleic acid egg that will nourish you, not destroy your health. For sure. Yeah. As we... build these other hubs and networks in the cooperative we're definitely going to be fatty acid testing all of the eggs from the new hubs to provide guarantee to the customer like hey yes this is a separate part of the country but
I am delivering my custom-made feed. I am educating these farmers how we should be rotating the chickens out on pasture so that they don't obliterate the egg. insect population and they can spread their manure, enrich the soil, grow better nutrient-dense pastures, which supports just the improvement and the biodiversity of mother nature in general.
doing that like fatty acid analysis testing, Dr. Mercola, imagine having like a linoleic acid meter where you could just go through the grocery store and just like measure the fatty acid things of fatty acid. like profile of various things as you're trying to shop out. So that's kind of our goal. Yeah, unfortunately, the technology is not as simple as measuring glucose, you know. Yeah. It's a lot more sophisticated. You almost have to do a HPLC, high liquid chromatography.
Yeah. To identify these fats. And then they're complex. It's not just one, you know, it's a whole battery of them. There's dozens of them. Yeah. So, but how much is this testing cost to measure the linoleic acid? Is it like 50 bucks, a hundred more? So one single test isn't that expensive, but in order to run a proper scientific experiment, you've got to have, I would say, minimum of six.
eggs, I would like to see 12 as the minimum. I think that that's a better test. So now you think about, okay, we've got 12 eggs running a test each, and maybe I think it's... close to 200 to 500 bucks each. And then you always wanna have a control. So then there's another dozen of eggs. And so when we did our test, we had three dozen eggs. We had our own dozen eggs.
And then we had eggs from a regenerative farm where the chickens were pasture raised outside, but they were still fed corn and soy. And then the third group was cage-free, whatever cage-free means, right? Pretty much just chickens raised in a confinement barn, just fed corn and soy. It can add up over time, especially the better experiment that you run and the more subjects that you include in the test. But that's my goal to do for all of the food products that we provide.
our eggs but then also all of our pork and our dairy products in nourish cooperative to provide confidence to the consumer like hey this outlet for food is low linoleic acid we're just trying to replicate what mother nature did hundreds 200 years ago and i think having that fatty acid analysis validation
can be very informative for the consumers and it can allow a consumer to be a little bit more confident in spending their dollars in various outlets. So that way they're not blinded and misinformed by various labels. Like the term organic, it doesn't matter. If a dozen eggs is organic, if those chickens are still fed organic soy, it's still going to have high linoleic acid. Organic soybeans don't have low linoleic acid. A conventional and organic soybean is the same.
understanding labels a little bit better and not buying expensive vegetarian fed chicken or things like that. And instead knowing how the animal was raised, what the animal was fed. I think that transparency, consumers deserve that. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it may be wise to explore. I could probably trigger that. alternative test. It shouldn't be, it doesn't have to be that expensive. I know you can test it in humans for a hundred dollars.
Yes, Bill Harris's test, the MEG3 index. Well, the MEG3 index doesn't test that, but there's an upgrade to it. It only costs $100. You get a pretty complete financial profile. So if they can do it on that, it's just a simple blood spot. I should be able to get the price down. It shouldn't be 200 bucks. Yeah. For sure. And I probably should talk to Bill because...
I think you can lower the price even more if the only thing you're interested in is omega-6 fat. I mean, it's nice to know the others. It gives you some valuable information, but it's not critical. The most important is linoleic acid. Well, the thing that I do know is the machine...
Used is actually really important. And I think that the machine is very expensive. And there's a lab at Michigan State University. They are like a fatty acid analysis lab. They like are one of the leaders in it. I'm I know the. lab, like the main researcher in the lab. And so I'm in contact with her about getting
a lot more tests done. We're just kind of saving up a little bit because we want to get our bacon tested, our dairy tested and stuff like that. I'm thinking you should find a better system so you can test it more frequently. I mean, you shouldn't have to pay that much for each thing. There's economies of scale.
that can kick in if you get enough people looking for it and they can ramp just like you you can produce eggs a lot cheaper if you have a lot more farmers and distribution well just for these same things for these tests it's yeah Once it's widely adopted, then the scaling radically reduces the cost. Yeah. Yeah. But it's unfortunate that that's where we're at these days.
foods that should have naturally low PUFA levels we have to go out of our way to like I have to make my own feed to ensure that it's low in linoleic acid but that's just where the agriculture system has put us yeah yeah for sure yeah so um We should. We never really dove into the cost of your eggs. Now, for me, it's like $80 because the eggs are coming from Michigan to Florida. And you might wonder, why the heck am I getting eggs from Ashley?
Well, unfortunately, it's called predators. I've had over 50 chickens and four geese killed by predators. Most recently, it was the foxes that took them out. In the previous times, it was owls, raccoons. would be other predators. There's probably another one that I'm thinking I'm forgetting. Coyotes, coyotes for sure.
There's a lot of them, even birds. Well, owl's a bird, but hawks would do it. Chickens are prey. Yeah, they're easy prey, easy. So you've got to protect them. So fences, a good fence will keep many out, but certainly not all. What is even better, and I'm very, very grateful for actually facilitating the delivery of a livestock guard dog. And if you're like me...
Four weeks ago, I never heard of that term. They're called LGDs for short, and anyone who's in the farming industry knows, especially for animals, like goats or sheep and chicken, They know these animals really well, and they've been bred for hundreds, if not thousands of years. These are very special animals. I've never, ever encountered them before.
there's a specific breed the grand or great pyrenees oh my gosh this is a spiritual dog and i just got my mind for the i've never really had a pet from a puppy before i've taken care of my mom's dog when she had to move. And she was quite old at the time. I enjoyed her, but she was small. But this dog is big. These dogs, I believe they can be some of the fiercest dogs on the planet.
They can go up to 140 pounds, and you've got two of them. They can take out a mountain lion. They can take out a panther or a cougar. Think about that. Two of these dogs taking them out. They do it. A German Shepherd is nothing. They'll take them out in a heartbeat.
I mean, you know, German shepherds would seem to be pretty fierce, but they outweigh a German shepherd quite significantly. But the beautiful magical thing about these animals is they're so calm and peaceful. They're centered. They're like chill juice. They just don't say there's like no extra noise. The only time they make a sound is when they need to. There's no hyper exuberance. There's just, it's quiet all day long.
The only time they bark is when there's a problem. And I think I've only heard, I've had the dog for two, three days. I think I only heard him bark once or twice. That's it. It's crazy. The whole day is just quiet. It's peaceful. It's amazing. So why don't you give your thoughts on these LGDs? Because, I mean, I'm so grateful for you. I always will be because this dog is just amazing. I'm actually going to get his wife, his mate.
from your litter that's coming real soon, well, maybe not real, it's about three or four months down in a row, five months, okay. How long do you need to keep them for about two months with their moms and parents? Eight weeks is fine. Yeah, yeah. And the nice thing is we'll make sure that those puppies are exposed to chickens from day one. So then that way, of course, livestock garden dogs are just special.
I love my house dogs so much, but livestock guardian dogs are just this. Wait, wait, wait. Stop there. Hold your thought. So your livestock guardian dog is not your house dog? No. Oh, different. Well, we have, cause we have 26 acres and so there's a perimeter fence and Dr. McCullough, I've got a thousand chickens out there. How many, how many do you need to guard them?
uh i think for a thousand i think that two livestock guardian dogs would be plenty even for two thousand i think that two like we have four probably a little bit too much but it's better more than not enough yeah And these animals are big. They're bigger than, I think they're larger than you. Yeah. Way more than you. Yeah. They're way more than you. Yeah. So they need food and they need real special food. They need, they're carnivores for sure. So they need meat.
Yeah. And you care. This is part of your whole problem. You're just not raising chickens. You're doing the whole deal. You're integrating it in a comprehensive way. But really the optimum type of regenerative agriculture, you're down to the predator protection because you cannot grow chickens without predator protection. Even if you have fences, it just doesn't work. They will take them out.
So you've got to feed the guardians and that can be a costly process. So you have to find inexpensive ways to feed them healthy food because if you feed them unhealthy food... It's sabotage. They're not going to serve their parole. They'll die way prematurely. You cannot have obese or diabetic livestock guardian dogs because they wouldn't protect your chickens, right? Yeah.
They've got to be fit. They've got to be agile. They've got to be thinking smart, thinking straight. Like you have to have healthy livestock guardian dogs to properly take care of your chicken flock. And I don't know if you've noticed this about Joy. Dr. McCullough's dog is named Joy. He provides endless joy. They're naturally nocturnal. And so they're going to nap and lightly sleep during the day while looking up for aerial predators. And then at night, they are on duty.
They are walking around, protecting, looking for raccoons, foxes, whatever. And so, yeah, feeding them. what they are biologically designed to eat is very important so that they can function at their best and protect the chicken. So an integral part of what we do here, and this is just something that I started.
way back in the beginning when I was like, costs are so high. How do I reduce costs in a way that doesn't sacrifice quality? And I was like, well, for some reason, the butcher shop I need. has a bunch of extra organ scraps because humans don't like organs and they've got meat scraps. So for the last two and a half years, I've gone every week to a local butcher shop, picked up.
beef, that's important, beef meat scraps and beef organs. And I have these massive trash bags and I record myself pulling these trash bags out of the back of our truck and feeding them to our chickens. And the nice thing is that the livestock guardian dogs just munch right along the chickens. So they get bones, they get calcium, they get all the connective tissue around the bones, they get the muscle meat.
They get the organs. And so that's kind of an integral part of something that I'll try to set up for all of the farmers in our network is connecting to a local butcher because there is so much food waste. Like when at a butcher shop, most people, most Americans are like, I want my ribeyes and I want my tenderloins and I want my steaks. There's so much waste in an animal that gets thrown into a landfill.
So that's kind of infuriating. So how can we utilize waste without sacrificing quality? And gosh, beef meat scraps and organ scraps, that's been a really successful thing that we've done here. It allows the chickens to get a protein boost. It allows the chickens to get a nutrient intake boost. And it really does help the livestock guardian dogs as well. So how do you coordinate the beef scraps? Because typically they come in bulk.
You're not going to buy them in one pound. And then you have to freeze them because they're not going to last that long if you don't. So how do you have someone that you assign to divide it into the appropriate sizes and then freeze them? I know my butcher well. And I think that that... is a missing element of current food production as well. Because if you take a step back, 85% of the meat that Americans eat is butchered by four companies. The huge four.
JBS, Tyson, Smithfield, and I forgot what the fourth one is. Cargill, maybe? Cargill, I think, yeah. And so that's a huge disconnect, right? So I know our butcher well, and so I... We talk every single week and I just go weekly to pick it up. So he. Oh, so you don't have to freeze it then if you get it weekly. Nope. I just, I tip him. And I also bring trash bags and it's a, it's a great relationship because he now it costs the butcher money for, um,
garbage trucks to come take these scraps to landfill. That's sinful. You know how infuriating this is? Yeah. So you're, interestingly, this is a good part of the story because you're facilitating that, reducing this waste, reducing landfill use, and... recycling it the best way possible back into the animals so that they consume that and they poop into the soil and that eliminates the need for synthetic fertilizers and all the damage that gets done from those. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So it's a beautiful cycle if you can harbor it. Unfortunately, we've perverted the whole system over the last hundred years or so. And I record myself and I post these videos on social media with the title of chickens are not vegetarians. Because Dr. Mercola, how did we become convinced that chickens are vegetarians? You go to the grocery store and you see vegetarian fed on chicken meat, chicken thighs, eggs.
Those are the ones you want to avoid for sure because they're really unhealthy, especially the dark meat, chicken thighs. Oh my gosh. How did we get to this point? All vegetarian fed means is that those chickens live in confinement barns and are fed corn and soy. That is simply what vegetarian fed means. Yeah. It sounds good. Sounds very catchy. It's a great marketing scheme, a scam, I should say. If you buy our eggs, we are certified non-vegetarian fed, non-vegetarian fed. Yeah.
Yeah. That's what you want. Yeah. So how many pounds are you getting from your butcher every week of beef scraps? Probably. 10, 25, 30, 50. I'm going to have to increase this soon because we're going to 2000 chickens in. a month and a half. So I'm going to have to go twice a week for pickups. I want to say each bag is probably 70 pounds. And so I would say anywhere from 120 to 160 pounds is every pickup.
Wow, that's a lot of food, a lot of food. And this is from like one to two cows. So imagine how much is being thrown into landfills across this country. Yeah, yeah, for sure. He actually has to use his skid steer to pick. The bags are so heavy that he uses a skid steer to dump them in the back of my truck. And then I drive the truck straight out to the field and like pull them out. It's a workout to pull them out.
Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot of meat scraps. Yeah. Wow. You know, it's surprising because a lot of these butchers have recognized that there's a market for that. some of the organs and other scraps that can be made into hot dogs or even certain types of hamburgers. But I guess a lot of them never caught on to this and just don't know that there's a market for this. Well, I honestly think that...
the conventional agriculture system, like those top four, like JBL, Cargill, they're not going to let stuff go to waste. They're going to squeeze out every penny. Right. Yeah. I think that a lot of that goes to dog food plants. Okay. And so where I think that there's a lot of waste is these smaller butcher shops that aren't at like this huge scale. And I think that that's the important connection is working with a smaller butcher that is butchering animals from.
homesteaders, regenerative farms, grass-fed and finished beef and cattle that have slightly smaller volume that a big dog food company isn't going to try to source stuff from a small butcher shop like that. Now, that's the piece of the equation that you figured out. There's just not a loophole, but a special niche that if you're aware of, you can leverage that to reduce. the fee which is a significant cost and it was one of the reasons why your rates are so much higher yeah but
You know, you've got the shipping involved. You've got the packaging. I mean, these are coming via Federal Express, you know, and you know what some of those drivers are like. And they toss it around like crazy. But it's interesting. All the eggs I've gotten from you, I don't think one was ever broke.
So you engineered a way and you are an engineer, by the way, you have a PhD in engineering, you chose to be a farmer. So that's an interesting story. Why don't you talk about that? So I think the timeline of this decision is important to think about. Because just a few years prior, I wasn't in that grade of health. I was clearly struggling with mitochondrial health, energy production. I was in a low thyroid state.
And when you are in a state like that, your body doesn't have the energy to expend. on non-essential tasks and making a choice for yourself is a very energy intensive process it requires a lot of brain power your brain uses a lot of glucose It requires a lot of energy. And so if I was not in a good state of health at that time, I don't think I would have made the same decision because your mitochondrial health will impact how much energy that your body has.
And making these types of decisions does require energy. It's very energy intensive. And so taking care of your health. will then give you more power, more flexibility, more freedom to be able to tune into what your body actually wants. Yes, I think the brain uses like 20% of the body's energy. And I forget, maybe 2% of the body weight. I don't know, some ridiculous percentage like that. But more importantly, too, especially related to the discussion is that...
One of the things that decreases cellular energy production in the mitochondria is linoleic acid, probably one of the most important parts. Other things would be estrogen and endotoxin. Those are probably the top three. The timeline with this decision, it had been about two to three years since I really tried to work on my PUFA depletion. And so I think I was, you know, in a new state of...
resaturated tissues. I had less and less PUFA in my body. My energy metabolism was improved. And yeah, I agree. You got magic and you were able to make some brave choices because you had enough energy. in your body to do that. And that's actually why I was invited to write this book with my co-author is because
I'm an expert in this, one of the top experts in the world and helping people understand how to do that. And you are a classic illustration of that principle in spades, that when your body has enough energy and you illustrated it, you demonstrated it. before and after and after you did that you got that cellular energy back you were able to make these choices you couldn't do before no matter how much you desired you did not have the fuel to make that type of choice or
even think about that choice. It was not going to happen. So this is the reason why we make these decisions to engage in eating healthy foods and avoiding toxic ones like seed oils. So health and wellness had always been like a big question mark. I tried all these different fad diets. And in graduate school, I thought that I was pursuing something that I was interested in. And that was like.
prosthetic and 3d printing and control engineering and looking back it was interesting to me but it was definitely I was I was a little bit disconnected from what I actually wanted and I instead was pursuing what my peers and other people thought was a good path for me. And I pursued it head on, but at the end of the day, I realized I actually wasn't happy and it actually wasn't what I wanted to do. And so...
Along the way, I figured out about regenerative agriculture. I volunteered at local farms. And Dr. McCullough, it was just what was keeping me up. It was... what excited me what i spent all my free time on i just got so obsessed with food production like regenerative agriculture we can grow food in a way that supports the soil health is better for humans better for the
the livestock and i just got obsessed and so in graduate school i was on my fifth year working on preparing for my final defense for my phd and i told my advisors I am going to be a farmer. I'm not going to go into academia. I'm not going to be a professor like I said I was going to, and I'm actually going to do what makes me truthfully happy and provides me endless joy.
And it was one of the scariest conversations that I've ever had because these, when you're in grad school, your advisors, like they fund you through research programs to get you through to your PhD. And like, they put so much time and energy into me. And here I am feeling like I'm going to be a failure, not going into academia, not continuing their legacy and instead going to be a farmer, which is seen as like a lowly position these days, which I think is so sad. I think that farmers.
It's like it's one of the highest position because we are in control of the health of the next generation. It's it's so backwards. And yeah, so when I finished my Ph.D., moved to a farm. started farming. Someone gave me advice of starting with layer birds because you immediately get something out of it. You get eggs, right? So you buy pullet chickens, you get eggs right away.
But at the time, I was very aware of the work of Dr. Ray Peet and linoleic acid and PUFAs. And I was looking through all the chicken feed options. And I was like, these are all garbage. Like, why would I want to give my chickens this? From that point on, I've been experimenting with different feed options, different feed ingredients, and we've kind of really finalized on a really great recipe that we've had tested for.
Fatty acid analysis, we've been able to reduce the linoleic acid PUFA concentration of our eggs significantly. Well, not significantly, 75%. That's 4X. Yeah. So four of our eggs contains the same... contains less PUFA than a cage-free egg. So if you were to eat four cage-free eggs, you would have four to five times the amount of linoleic acid than four of our eggs. It's like a pretty, yeah, pretty big difference.
Just essentially showcasing. And I hope that that's what my story and this path that we're paving, I hope it can just help encourage others. It's very expensive. And that's the unfortunate thing to pave your own path and not doing business as usual. It is a costly venture to get there. But if I can help bring others along the way with us, we can all reach an economies of scale.
where we can start to lower the cost down over time. Yeah. I want to go into the bit, but before I do, I just want to point out what you just shared. Many people are going to miss it, but I just want to emphasize what happened. In fact, I might even put it in the book. There's a good chance I might. Because you gave a perfect story of how you move from being...
Essentially, like almost everyone, just doing a job to earn money to do what you think is going to make you happy. It's almost a prescription for failure. And you went down that path because you listened. To not yourself, you listen to others. That's the common denominator. Users of others can be a spouse, parents, advisors, and they're encouraging you down a path that they think is useful that may have been useful for them, but they're thinking for you.
That doesn't work. That never works. It may wind up, but you have to listen to yourself. And you use the metric to identify happiness, or I think more accurately called joy, because joy is active where happiness is passive. And it's a fascination of mine is joy. And because it's the metric you use to see if you're making a right choice. And the book I'm writing is called The Power of Choice.
And the way that you know that you're making a choice that's correct is you look and see how joyful you are. And you just heard Ashley share a powerful illustration of this. Couldn't be more perfect, actually. And you might want to listen to it again just to see if you can pick up the pearls of what that process is like because it could change your life. It really could. So it's nice to have low linoleic acid eggs.
But that's not the wisdom she's sharing. She shared the process of how to give joy. And I think something that's important to point out, if I was to continue down the path that I was headed down, I would probably be in a very comfortable financial state right now. I would have been able to pay myself. I instead chose a path. Dr. McCullough, I haven't paid myself in four years.
I've never paid myself. But it doesn't matter. I am so happy every single day in what I do. That's what matters. I have put... Ashley's making enough money that she can't even pay herself. No, we're...
Any amount of profits that we are making is going back into the business because I care about this so much. And at the end of the day, I've recognized that for me, my sense of joy is... participating in food production and if i have a role in that and if i can change the health of our customers that to me is extremely satisfying that is where i
light up. Dr. Mercola has talked about this before. Like when you start to shake and get like vibrant about something and can't stop talking about it. Like that's where I am. This is how I know this is what I'm meant to do. Of course, at some point in this journey, I'm going to have to pay myself. And I know that that day will come hopefully sooner rather than later. But it doesn't matter at the end of the day. Exactly. Exactly.
At the end of the day, joy doesn't come from financial reward all the time. Joy comes from doing something that you are very aligned with mentally, spiritually. Success will come when you pursue that. Like good things will come when you make decisions for yourself. Yeah, because you tend.
Joy is the metric, and it will guide your choices. But typically, when you continually make choices that are useful to produce joy, you tend to get out of your mind, which is a crippling... thing to be in because it limits your access to data it has a very limited capacity compared to other sources you know like your consciousness and when you are activating joy all the time you you
drive towards consciousness, which is a synonym for, well, we'll just leave it to consciousness. But that is such a gift that you shared that. And I'm putting this in my book. Your video, this will be in the book because the book is essentially 14 chapters, nine of which are on consciousness and five which are on health.
But this will be one of the health chapters, which is going to be about linoleic acid in eggs because it's so important. It's crucial to understand this because we all should be eating these eggs. Ashley shared some of it. I just want to summarize some of the economies of scale that she alluded to and help you understand this in a way that
She doesn't have access to venture capital. She's bootstrapping this. She's not in debt. She's reinvesting the capital she's earning and growing the business. That is the way you do it. It's when you take... Debt, I mean, sometimes your debt's okay, but most of the time, that's what will ruin the company. And you lose cash flow and you lose everything. You're bankrupt. And Natalie's not going to do that. She's doing it the right way. But it's a little slower.
So one of the ways you can help her, if you believe her story, if you think that linoleic acid low eggs is a good thing to have in our country. Then you could support her. Yes, the eggs are a little high right now. That's because there's no economy of scale, but she's building towards it. She's trying, she's seeking to identify farmers who can grow these all over the country. thousands of farmers. She only has, what, dozens of farmers now, right? Dozens? Less than a dozen, yes.
We're getting there. But it's going to scale. She gets to hundreds and then thousands. And it's podcasts like this and share the word. If you know a farmer, they can go on board and they can start producing these eggs and then we can get hubs. solves the distribution problem. And when you get the distribution problem solved, the price goes down. It's theoretically possible it could go down by 50% if we have enough people doing this, the right thing. And then what happens is magic because...
The competition sees what's happening. There sees an enormous potential here. And since we have an objective barometer, you can actually measure the linoleic acid in these eggs. And anyone can do that. then you can see you can actually get healthy eggs because it will inspire other companies that may not be interested in this at all until they realize the market. And Ashley is proving the market. And you can still help support. It's kind of like what Tesla did when they launched her.
expensive sedans in 2011. And most people couldn't afford them. But because some people saw that vision and purchased the cars, they were able to have revenues to scale and they could produce the Model 3. So, you know, which is, you know, a third of the cost of the other car. So, but you can't get to that level. Ashley's not making cars. She's making chicken eggs. But the illustration is equally valid because...
The more you do of something, there's economies of scale that radically reduce the cost. So that's what we're looking for. So it's considered almost like a charitable contribution. You get a reward, you get healthy chicken eggs, which literally these eggs are not available anywhere else commercially in the United States. They just aren't. They do not exist. Now, healthy eggs do exist, but you'd have to grow them yourself.
or a farmer who's not really selling them in scale at all. Just you have to know him and understand what their process is. And that's one of the things that Ashley does is she... Helps train them. These are not necessarily chicken farmers. These are people who may be interested. They got cows or something and they want to start exploring this. And she basically holds her hands and helps them know how to do this.
That's my overview. And Ashley, you can certainly fill in the gaps that I left. Yeah, I think we do have a wait list right now. And we're slowly increasing the number of chickens in our network. But I'm not going to do it in a confinement building way. I'm going to stand. pretty flat on the ground and strict about like the way that these chickens are raised. Regenerative agriculture and mobile pasture raised is very important for me. And so a single farm.
I don't want to have more than 2000 chickens because at that point, you know, potential diseases start to come into play. You start degrading the landscape. And I don't think that that's where chickens can really be super healthy. It's ultimately going to be like hubs and more and more farmers getting involved. And so you can check out our website, Angel Acres Farm. You can just search in Google Angel Acres Farm eggs.
And there is going to be a wait list for the eggs right now, but joining the wait list, that's who's going to be first notified when more spots open up. We're adding a lot more chickens on our farm, which is really exciting and getting more farmers in our network. We also have Nourish Cooperative. And so it's a sister company of Angel Lakers. And that's where we are offering low Pufa pork, bacon, ham, pork chops, and then also low Pufa chicken meat.
dairy products and 100% grass-fed beef and lamb and things like that. So that's nourish cooperative and they're kind of sister companies. And the goal of both is... We're turning back to how food used to be produced and creating these food systems where humans can naturally consume lower levels of linoleic acid. We're trying to make it easier for humans to get...
their nutrients without increasing their PUFA intake. So we're starting both from the ground up. And like Dr. Mercola said, as we reach more economies of scale, we bring more farmers into the network. And I really like That's how we make a change. When we show these other big players in the industry like, hey, this is actually metrics that consumers care about. So either make that change or get out of the way.
That's when we can truthfully make a change, when we can start making the people high up in the agriculture system start to question, oh, maybe we were wrong about polyunsaturated fatty acids. Oh, maybe saturated fat actually isn't bad. And we can show that by consumer interest and where consumers are buying food from. Yeah, you vote with your dollar. It worked in the past and it can work in the future for sure. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the ways we got interested in non-GMOs.
We did this process over a dozen years ago. It works. It totally works. We first started getting into the opposing GMOs. 95, 99% of people had no idea what a GMO was. None. Zero. They had no clue that it was a car or something. You know? So now it's a joke. Everyone knows what it is. But once people... catch on and they understand, then change happens. It really is up to a partnership between consumers and producers.
Yes. And it doesn't exist now. They want to separate you from the producers. Exactly. It really is up to us, like working together to show the industry. what actually leads to health. Because unfortunately, when you go through the literature, and you read these livestock agriculture papers, the first line of introduction is like,
Dairy is known to be a health food, but unfortunately contains high levels of fats that are not good for humans called saturated fats. And so there's this false premise is so deeply propagated. In livestock feed, agriculture networks, we got to knock that out of there. We got to, like Dr. McCullough said, we got to start thinking for ourselves, being more in tune.
of what we actually need not what authorities are telling us and then blindly accepting what the conventional food system is giving us yeah well It's all about choice. That's what we're doing. You're offering people a choice. So hopefully you'll consider that. And, you know, you can say there's other ways to get low linoleic acid if you think about it. You could do be carnivore and choose to.
of only eat ruminum animals. And that doesn't involve eating eggs, right? You could, but it doesn't have to. And you would achieve a very low linoleic acid diet. probably less than even eating eggs, but you're not going to get the same benefits. There's very little choline. in meats. There's some in liver, but as we mentioned earlier, it's not the density you need. You can't eat enough liver to get the choline.
It's really only available in eggs. It's the magic of it. And that's not the only nutrient in eggs. It's just not a source of choline. It's probably one of the most important sources of a nutrient. But there's vitamin A. There's vitamin K2. There's... Sorry? Vitamin E. Oh, there is. Is it significant vitamin E? In pasture-raised, yeah. It's non-detectable. Wow, that is interesting. I did not know that, but it would make sense.
Vitamin K2 is really important. It's really underappreciated and probably just about nearly as important as vitamin D. And then you've got the other carotenoids. their vitamin A precursors, carotene. beta carotenoids, but the carotenoids, and there's other ones that have other nutrients independent of the cells, typically very potent antioxidants like lutein, xanthine, zeaxanthine that particularly useful for retinal health.
and other benefits too. So there's a lot of nutrients in there. There's probably a dozen or more that we never even discovered yet. Because anytime you're eating whole food, you don't have to worry about... to figuring out what specific nutrients you need to get. It's really quite simple. All you've got to do is eat whole food that's healthy and not contaminated with toxins that shouldn't be there. And believe me, seed oil is one of the
worst toxins in the world. It's probably one of the most pernicious poisons in our food supply. That's not a light statement, but it's true. Unfortunately, some of the whole foods have been manipulated so much due to the types of feed that animals are given. And so the goal with these other alternative co-ops is that the whole food options are easy for you to achieve these things. Because being a consumer in this day and age, it's hard.
Dr. McCullough, it's hard. All the labels are confusing. You don't understand. Intentionally. Intentionally. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So being at the end of the day, knowing where your food comes from, what those animals are fed. knowing the farming practices and eating whole foods. Those are like the very simple things of how to regain control of your health. Yeah.
Yeah. So why don't you tell people where they can find, you've got Angel Acres. Is that a hyphen or is it just, you just type in Angel Acres in the search engine. It'll come right up. Yeah. Just type in Angel Acres Farm. It's angel-acresfarm.com, and that's where the eggs are, working towards more of an egg cooperative. So if you are interested in...
Being a hub or a producer, you can also contact me at support at angel-acresfarm.com. And we'll include this in the description. And then our farm cooperative with all the other farm products like pork and chicken and beef and lamb and dairy cheese. That's nourish cooperative, www.nourishcooperative.com. And yeah, I'm, I'm so excited for the future. I'm so excited.
Me too. You're doing a great thing. And notice that she said there's no affiliate codes here. I'm not getting anything for promoting these eggs other than the joy and satisfaction of knowing it's the right thing to do to provide you and the country. with one of the healthiest foods possible. And I'm so grateful that Ashley has been inspired and made the choice, a really brave choice, courageous choice to do what she's doing.
And she gets to reap the benefits, not only providing you with healthy food, but experiencing joy in her own life. Yeah. Yeah, it's a great thing. It's wonderful. It's what we're supposed to do. Yes, for sure. I'm excited to meet Joy the dog one day. You will. You will. Girlfriend. Yes. He's so precious. Yeah. My goal is to mostly...
Dogs don't live to be past 20, especially bigger dogs. This is like one of the biggest dogs out there. I mean, it's not at St. Bernard or something, which is over 200, but 140 pounds is a big dog. Big dog. but when you feed them the right way and you give them sunshine, you don't give them vaccines. You've got an animal that can get maximum life expectancy. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you for everything you're doing. It's just a delight and a joy. Thanks, Dr. McCullough. Always a pleasure.