The Complicated Reality of Plant-Based "Meat"
There are a few things nutrition researchers agree on: Plants are "good" for us. Processed meats are "bad." But plant-based meat alternatives...? They raise some important questions: Are plant-based meat alternatives ultra-processed foods? Are processed meats any worse than processed meat alternatives? With the rise of Impossible Meat, the Beyond Burger, and growing concerns about the climate emergency, we tackle a complicated topic: if or when meat alternatives should replace meat. With Professor Christopher Gardener from Stanford University, we get to the meat of the issue.
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Juna: Welcome back to another episode of our New Year's series. Today we are covering Pibby mas Yuna.
Eddie: You got me, Pibby Ma. Let me give it a try. Okay. Peanut butter? Yeah.
Juna: You're on the right track. Yes, you got it. We're talking about peanut butter. Avocados today. No, Eddie PBMs is actually the new acronym for plant based meat alternatives. So these are things like Beyond Meat or the Impossible Burger or soy riso.
Eddie: So, Resa, you got me there.
Juna: A soy chorizo, soy reaso. It's basically all the things that people use to replace meat. So I have to say, I find the entire, idea of plant based meat alternatives a bit of a tricky topic. On the one hand, there is all this new research coming out that says that red meat or super processed meat is not good for you right now and.
Eddie: Not there for a while yet.
Juna: Right. And these plant based meat alternatives are really branded as health products. But then on the other hand, you like, look at the back of the package and you're like, oh my gosh, this has all these ingredients. It has fillers, it has colors. So like, how could this be good for you if it's an ultra processed food?
Eddie: Basically, we're saying that a lot of them are processed or possibly even ultra processed.
Juna: So on today's episode, we're talking all things plant based meat. Are they good for you or are they not? When and how often should you be eating them? Or should you not be having them at all? I'm Juniata.
Eddie: And I'm Doctor Eddie Phillips, associate professor at Harvard Medical School.
Juna: And you're listening to food. We need to talk. The only health podcast. Not afraid to get to the meat of the issue.
Eddie: Or an alternative version.
Juna: Oh, that's so good. Welcome back to another episode. Today we are back with one of our favorite guests of all time, Professor Christopher Gardner. Thank you so much for coming back on the show.
Speaker 3: It's a thrill. Glad to be here.
Eddie: Can we actually go back into time a little bit? Because this is my frame of reference. Tell us, like the story of the veggie burger. You know, where where did that start? And is it as simple as we think? And you know, what did we learn from it? And, and then we'll get into the more processed versions.
Speaker 3: I've been following a plant based diet since 1983. I think that would make that 40 years. So I was a purchaser of Garden and Boca Burger. There were several brands out there. I don't know if you remember any other zaddy that you want to.
Eddie: Again, had one and, and then they started coming out in box stores like even Costco and Walmart and all that. Just lots of beans thrown in there. And, my, my memory is more like going to a barbecue and saying, oh, actually, I'd like the veggie burger. And then they would just torture and cook it like a regular burger until.
Juna: It it was a rock.
Eddie: Like a hockey puck, I mean, basically, but, all right. So 40 years of veggie burgers.
Juna: Didn't even know they had veggie burgers back then. Oh, yeah.
Christopher: So, you know, I went to Loma Linda one time and I've only been there once, and they have a seventh day Adventist grocery store. And I was stunned to see how much of the textured vegetable protein products, I think, got started with them. Their star was full of TVP products, right? This textured vegetable protein that went into these things, and they were. And seventh day Adventists are typically vegetarian. And so the older products, the gardening, the Boca burger, the prediction, all those things were pretty much targeting vegetarians. So, oh, there's a small group of weird radicals out there that are vegetarians, and it's not a major market, but we'll we'll be the company that provides them with something. So those were available. There were also always forever. Oh, here's a lentil burger and a black bean burger. So people in different restaurants or or different food influencer type folks that had natural ones that weren't textured, vegetable protein, that didn't have any processing. It really was just a blend of foods that were plant based. But if you really wanted to get a prepackaged one in the store, the lentils and the mushrooms and the black beans usually didn't hold together well enough to package them and sell them that way. So they have these these products made with something like textured vegetable protein. And they they weren't bad. They weren't great.
Eddie: And can you, what is textured vegetable protein actually.
Juna: Yeah. What vegetables are coming from.
Christopher: Yeah. I don't think I can describe the process. I just loved TVP was something that was often on the package. Got it. And you knew that they had extracted protein from plants, but done something with it that allowed this burger to hold together. But they they were never wildly popular. But I, I really think the important thing is that they were targeting vegetarians. That was the right that was the capture group that they were hoping to get in their market search. And the shift was when beyond and impossible in particular, we're after the meat eaters and.
Eddie: Got it.
Christopher: Okay. Their idea was okay. So there are these veggie burgers out there for vegetarians, and there's not a lot of meat eaters who are interested in those. How could we get people to eat less meat? Well, it would really have to look more like and smell like and taste like. And I can tell you, I was actually in the Beyond Meat lab when it was practically in a garage maybe a decade ago, and they were showing me around, and a Stanford professor had invited me down to to see what they were doing. And they were really in the very early phases. And I the thing that really caught me was they said, we're going to provide you with this thing. And they were all sort of, huddled around the, the grill and they were smelling the grilling of the thing. And I said, so, and I don't understand what's all the excitement. And they said, well, if it's really going to replace meat, then it needs to look like it on the grill, like it needs to start out in pink, and then get brown and it has to sell. It has to have the same sizzle sound, and it has to progress over time while you're grilling it and can be medium and rare and well done. And it they were really paying a lot of attention to the entire experience of like a.
Juna: Full savory.
Eddie: Flavor and took it to the degree that it had to bleed. So the the what is it? They had beats to it so that there's like.
Christopher: No, no, it's a soy hemoglobin.
Eddie: I was soy oh excuse me.
Juna: So I need the soy hemoglobin but.
Eddie: I didn't I didn't know that. So I had him. All right. So tell us a. Bad soy hemoglobin. And does it really look like blood?
Christopher: I don't know much about this soy hemoglobin, but that is a differentiating factor that impossible decided to take on. Now this is interesting because Pat Brown does impossible in the Stanford area. Pat was, a professor here at Stanford and Ethan Brown, no relationship is more in the LA area. And they were both the leaders in this any time you were talking about it is pretty much beyond an impossible, impossible and beyond in that same kind of sentence.
Juna: So could I ask you about, targeting the meat eaters? Now, that's really interesting point, because now we see this big shift towards not eating as much meat as, a health thing. So can we talk about what does research show about what meat is unhealthy like? I know red meat and processed meat I've heard a lot about, but do we have any evidence about like chicken or fish, or other types of meats like that? What meats do we know are not good for us, that we should actually be trying to be reducing?
Christopher: Yeah, no, that's a great question. So along the lines of health, it's usually been the red meat. And then do you include pork in that. It's very interesting for quite a few people. Pork is included in red meat. If you're doing this from an environmental perspective, pork pigs are not ruminants. So one of the deals for the environment, for the methane production is that comes from animals with a ruminant digestive system, multiple stomachs, which generates the methane which they don't fart, they burp. Got to clear up the farting.
Juna: Oh, that's such a good thing to know. Yeah, I didn't know that.
Christopher: It's pretty funny that everybody kind of assumes that they're farting methane, and in fact, they're regurgitating food in their ruminant animal system. It's really cattle and lamb that are doing this. Sheep. It's not pork. And I'll bet you you remember. How long was it ago? 20 years. Pork is the new white meat. Does anybody remember the advertisement for that? Like, I think they were trying to differentiate themselves from beef because beef was getting slammed. So there have been you know, a lot of this is public perception. So if you're talking about meat, Eddie, your question was great. What about beef versus pork versus poultry versus fish? Right there. Those are all. And do you call fish meat? Probably not. But you know, it's certainly not plants. So beef. Most of the data on harm is around the saturated fat and lack of fiber in beef. From just a physiological perspective. Pork, bacon, things like that also have saturated fat and no fiber. So for American Heart, and I'm currently the chair of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee. And they've had a long history of recommending less meat that would certainly be beef and pork, so that you would get less saturated fat and you would get fiber from something else. Poultry is not the same poultry. Again, there's also dark meat and light meat, whether it's chicken or turkey. So the lighter meat is pretty lean. It doesn't have much saturated fat, and they're loaded with protein. And they might or might not have fat. And when they do, a bunch of it is often mono in saturated fat, actually. But meat is always one of the main sources of saturated fat. And so for all the connections to LDL cholesterol, that's typically the no, no. Oh, we want to lower the LDL. Established as a cardiovascular risk factor, Americans eat too much. If you look at this sources of saturated fat, though, interestingly, the Cancer Society has a really nice overview of this, and I'd be happy to share my slides on this. The main food sources, after you've mixed things together and made meals and there's people are eating them, is actually desserts that have a lot of dairy in them. And the high fat, the high saturated fat from dairy and chicken dishes because of what the chicken is prepared with that has either cooked with a lot of butter or something else, or has some dairy in it as well. And so the Cancer Society list of foods contributing the most to saturated fat beef actually comes after the desserts and sort of the packaged processed chicken products.
Juna: So then shouldn't our main focus then if we're trying to reduce saturated fat, be on these like ultra processed foods before it gets to the meat? Or is it because there's also an environmental aspect with meat that like, we're focusing a lot on reducing it now?
Christopher: Yeah, the environmental impact is clear. And it's not just the meat, it's also the dairy.
Juna: Okay.
Christopher: A lot of it is the methane. And a lot of that is because they're ruminants and there's a lot of them belching out this methane. So from the environmental perspective that's it. So that only gets at greenhouse gases though. So in my work, my career has shifted a lot lately into thinking about, oh yes, there are environmental impacts. And as soon as it took that turn, I learned more about this concept of planetary boundaries. And while greenhouse gases probably comes to mind first, the other ones that are right behind it are land use, water use, eutrophication, and biodiversity.
Eddie: I want to just go back to an alternative, which is where we started this conversation, which would be something like a plant based meat alternative. And I love the idea that the big shift was that we're going to go after the meat eaters and try to match their palate. I'll just tell a quick story which shows that vegetarians are not the best judges. I remember very specifically in 2018 went into a bistro slash bar where everyone it's like just places reeked of beef and meat. And I ordered a veggie burger and they brought one of these products, the Impossible Burger or the Beyond Burger. I don't I don't recall that. And I took a bite into it and I called the waitress and I said, like, you screwed up. You brought me a real burger. And instead of being upset, she had this, like look of glee on her face and she said, I need to get the manager. And I was like, oh my God, what's just gone on here? And the manager comes running out from the from the back room and says, did you really think it's meat? And she had the package in front of her and she said, like, like we got you. Like, that's how good it is. That's funny. But then, you know, someone else said, well, like, you don't count like you're a vegetarian, you know, of course that's oh, of.
Juna: Course I said like two Eddie, because I don't eat meat either. And they, they gave me one too. And I was like, I think this is meat. And they were like, no, I can assure you. And I was like, no, no, no, I can assure you. And they were like, no, no, no.
Eddie: But but so between Christopher, you and I like I know.
Juna: I know really know. Yeah.
Eddie: So what I mean are people like happy with the, with the impossible and the beyond burgers. Are they like saying I could live with this.
Christopher: Well it's interesting so yeah, I mean it's in my state. I see it everywhere. I see it in all kinds of places. And I think what's happened to after this initial wave of enthusiasm for this groundbreaking thing, where they were convinced that pretty soon we won't eat meat anymore. I don't know if, in fact, I just saw a cartoon the other day where there's some little kids by a fire. Side and a father is talking to them, saying, you cannot believe this, but historically, people eat meat.
Eddie: Got it?
Christopher: I vividly remember at least three full page New York Times ads, back in the days was when I was getting a hard copy of The New York Times and it said, okay, here's these two things. One of these products is dog food, and the other product is this new plant based meat. Look at the ingredients. You can't tell the difference, can you? These are basically dog food. This is from the consumer for freedom choice something or other. They've really gone after them, especially since now there's this fascinating interest in ultra processed foods that got started by Carlos Monteiro in Brazil, where a couple countries now in their dietary guidelines are very explicit about avoiding ultra processed foods. And they say these are ultra processed. And the main reason is so the Beyond Burger uses pea protein, impossible uses soy. I've seen not the impossible lab, but I've seen the Beyond lab. They're always working on tinkering with engineers and folks that are going to apply temperatures and pressure to the Pea to extrude, if that's the right word, some of the plant proteins, and then there's some cooling and there's some formulation. They put them together and it's the same protein that was in the plants, but they somehow made it more like muscle sinewy. You get that mouthfeel because they've changed the physical presence and the the mouthfeel of the pea protein.
Eddie: They're processing the pea or the soy, but not necessarily adding. And that's a processed food is an ultra processed food.
Christopher: So where does it become ultra processed? Right. So our steel cut oats ultra processed is tofu ultra processed. And this is this is a challenge that we're having in the nutrition community and the health community across the country. Is this UPF ultra processed food thing kicks off. At what point does it shift from processed which is practical help for safety shelf life? There's there's a bunch of reasons for processing food. Oh my God, you process a banana, don't you? Who eats a banana with a peel on it? I processed the banana, I peeled it, okay, so let's not get too ridiculous here. But yeah, there is a point where it's ridiculous. Like you can't. It doesn't even resemble the original food. And Marion Nestle has an interesting rule for this. And the rule is can you find it in the grocery store? Can you go into the grocery store to aisle six and find soy protein isolate? No. Can you find tofu or soy milk? Yes. I know which aisle those are in. Like if you were trying to make something at home. Could you find all the ingredients in the store? So Beyond Meat has one particular ingredient called methyl cellulose. And it falls into the category of emulsifier stabilizer. And we also have these gums, guar gum and a whole bunch of xanthan gum that they're adding to emulsify stabilize. There's colorants, there's natural flavors. And I'm sure any of your listeners would find it easy to go to a store and find a food that has dozens of those on the ingredient list. I mean, I can even think of some whole wheat breads where, the holy bread that I buy has five ingredients. I have a slide that I made for one of my classes. It has 27 ingredients in the whole wheat bread. Quite a few of them are colorants, stabilizers, emulsifiers, and all these extra things that that have some chemical use. They create really long shelf life that allows the bread to be very inexpensive. The emulsifiers help this uniform pattern across the food. So there's lots of reasons that they add these things. But that's the other category of ultra processing is you've added a whole bunch of things to it that you can't find in a grocery store. Are these all needed? Do we really need all those emulsifiers, stabilizers, colorants, and other things? So the two domains of ultra processed foods are physically changing the characteristic of the original whole food main ingredient versus adding a lot of ingredients that may be unnecessary. I don't know if you saw that California just outlawed four of these different things like red dye number something, and a couple other things have been outlawed in California. It's going to take till 2027 before they can enforce it. But they actually just passed this. So we could go back to the burgers for these two domains.
Eddie: And we'll be right back with Professor Christopher Gardner as we tackle plant based meat alternatives. And we're back with Professor Christopher Gardner from Stanford University.
Juna: So as someone who, full disclosure, does not eat meat. So I want to say I don't have a horse in this race like I was in. I stopped eating meat when I was seven. Not for like environmental reasons or anything like that. I just thought it was really gross. And then I stopped eating it, basically. So. But I feel like a lot of my questions are going to sound like I'm very pro meat. I'm not. I'm just asking these questions because to me, it is hard to see how a Beyond Burger or an Impossible Meat burger is not ultra processed just because it looks so different from what I know it came from. And when I looked at the ingredients list, they're longer. And the argument that like, there are definitely worse ultra processed foods 1,000%, I'm sure there are. But is that a better choice than, say, like lean chicken breast is my question.
Christopher: If your question. So I got to tell you, one of my favorite sayings in nutrition is instead of what people are always asking me, you know, is this thing healthy? And my first response is, instead of what you know, they created beyond and impossible for instead of red meat and, okay, it is it's supposed to look and smell and taste and sizzle and everything like red meat. And so the fun thing that happened to me while I was reading those New York Times full page ads blasting them, was the implication was, okay, environment aside, yeah, it's probably better. Animal rights and welfare. Sure, it's better you're not killing any animals, but for health, oh my God, there's coconut fat in these things and that saturated fat. And your LDL will go up and they're high in sodium. So your blood pressure will go up and they're ultra processed. And Kevin Hall did this amazing study to show that weight goes up with ultra processed foods. So you're you'll be a metabolic mess after this. And the light bulb went off over my head like, this is my superpower. I design studies like that. So I did. We designed and published the swap meat study, the study with appetizing plant food meat eating alternative trial. I just want to tell you that that.
Eddie: Right acronym.
Christopher: Particular acronym uses so good the first letter of each word. Not like the second or third or 10th letter.
Juna: Yes. Wow. How long did that take to figure out? How long did that take to figure out? How did you do that? I don't.
Christopher: Know. Just the light bulb went off over my head at night. Full disclosure, Beyond Meat paid for this study. Yeah. So I'm an industry show for having said that. I will say I really have had horrible luck with the NIH lately doing nutrition studies. They don't seem to be very interested in funding food. Anyway, we set about this study. And let me just tell you some of the things to wrestle with. One of the things to wrestle with was how many servings a day would you use in a study like this? Once a week. That's not enough. That's all you get to eat is beyond me to red meat. 24 hours a day. No, that's too much. Okay, so it's got to be in between everything you eat. And only once a week. Once a day. Even once a day might not be enough. I mean, so one of the things I tend to do in my human intervention studies, and that's my specialty of what I do in life here at Stanford, sort of have to have be confident that you've got enough of a perturbation to what's going on in their diet, that you'll see a signal. And I imagine we have to think about how long this is going to take. So we said, all right, how about two servings a day. And that ends up being about 25% of calories. So 75% would be untouched if we really were looking at these standard cardio metabolic factors like blood pressure, cholesterol. Wait, wait aside. I know for things like LDL cholesterol and blood pressure that usually if you change your diet from one staple thing to another, most of the change happens in two weeks. For for sure, if you really wanted to be confident and not catch any flack from the reviewers ate. So we did a crossover study with 40 people and they ate Beyond Meat products, not just burgers. So they have a ground beef and they have a sausage. And at the time they had some chicken. And so it was two servings a day of one or the other. We bought those and delivered them. Okay. Now here's a next step in the question compared to McDonald's, or what kind of meat would you get? And we actually went to a San Francisco based company that specialized in grass fed, regenerative, really grow organic, you know, all the things that would be the higher quality meat, because we didn't want to get a criticism that we were doing Beyond Meat versus some low quality meat. I'll tell you a funny, good a feedback we got from a reviewer was we chose, the type of, of meat that's 80% protein and 20% fat. And so there's a leaner meat, you can go buy burgers and meat that's 95% or 90% protein. And our answer to that was, well, we looked it up. And most of America buys the standard meat that's 20% fat. And so we did this study and it's published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. And it lowered LDL cholesterol. It lowered trimethylamine oxide, which is kind of a no brainer because that the precursor to that is the carnitine and choline that you get in red meat. They lost weight on the eight weeks they were on Beyond Meat, which was a total surprise because we weren't it wasn't a weight loss study. The decrease in weight was very, very modest, almost negligible. But it was statistically significant because almost every person was 2 pounds lighter than the eight weeks they were on the Beyond Meat. So again, I don't even think the 2 pounds is clinically relevant, but it was statistically significant because it was so consistent and the blood pressure didn't change. Interestingly, yes, the ground beef and the Beyond Meat burgers are higher in sodium than raw meat or raw ground beef. But guess what our participants did when we got that for them, they salted them. So really the the salt intake was quite similar, virtually identical in the two arms of this study. And the blood pressure didn't change. So here's what I feel. My superpower was they were slamming them for these being bad for your health. But they weren't. They lowered tmao. They lowered LDL cholesterol. They lowered weight. And they did not change blood pressure. Nothing was worse on the group getting that. And immediately the feedback I got was, yeah, but don't you want them to eat the lentils and the beans? And I said, I've been trying for 30.
Juna: Years to get people to.
Christopher: Eat more lentils and beans. They're not doing it. Yes. I want them to eat lentils and beans. And maybe Beyond Meat is a gateway drug for lentils and beans. I can only hope. But yeah, the question here is instead of red meat, I am quite confident it's better for the environment and it's better for the animals. And now I'm confident in our study at that dose for that duration, for that population group, because there's many different ways you could answer this. It is metabolic cardio metabolically better. What about instead of chicken. That is a great question. That is not the one we were trying to answer because you're not. I don't think that's the choices people are going to make. Should I have the chicken or should I have the Beyond Burger? But I'll bet that is a relevant question for somebody there. Like I'm committed, I'm going to eat less red meat. I wonder if I should get chicken or beyond meat. We did not address that because we were very specifically after what if you replace the thing it was designed to replace.
Eddie: In the last few minutes? Christopher, you're you're at the cusp. You're at the cutting edge. You're the head of these panels. Help us look to the future. You know, as grossed out by eating a part of an animal. But, there are a gazillion companies that are now taking stem cells from.
Juna: Oh, my God, from.
Eddie: Meat of varieties, putting it into a bioreactor, which I believe is a fancy term for supposed to feel like it's inside the animal and they're growing meat.
Christopher: Yeah.
Juna: Why don't you need, like, fetal serum or something? What do you.
Eddie: Do? The fetal bovine serum was the first place to do it. And then some folks are saying, well, I don't want it to be derived from meat. You know, is there a are there any other cells that we could get? So they're they're messing with that and beyond. Haha. Beyond just a burger they're now adding scaffolding does not sound appetizing. So you can actually grow something that tastes like a steak and not just ground beef. Oh Lord, what's what's come in, what's what's the study you're going to do on those and what are we going to learn?
Christopher: So none of those are commercially available yet. I mean, if you look at Beyond Meat and Impossible, they were very expensive at first and the price point has come down, really, to bring it down further, they'd have to scale up more. And they don't have the market yet for the full on price point that you get from massive scaling, and maybe they'll get there. The cellular meat isn't even close to that super expensive. That volume that they're able to produce is pretty small so far, but that's what innovation and disruption is about. People are looking at this. If people you know, I really I tried that beyond and impossible and it just it's similar to meat but it's just not meat. Oh my god the cellular meat is meat. It really is the cells from an animal, but not one that was born from, the uterus of a cow. Mom. It was grown in a test tube. And so, from my animal rights perspective, I feel better. No animals were slain to do this. Except for the bovine serum. From an environmental perspective. I mean, you would. There's got to be some environmental cost to these, but clearly less than all the methane belching and all the land use and all the livestock grown for that. So it'll be a very interesting market as it grows. It's just quite a bit behind the billions and impossibles for now.
Juna: So the overall conclusion about plant based meat alternatives is what are you replacing them or what are you using them to replace in your diet. Is there a stance on like whether or not beans are lentils? I know you said that people didn't want to listen to you, but let's say like somebody is listening and they're deciding, should I get like the ground beyond, beef stuff or should I just put black beans in my dinner? Is there a way to think about which one of those is better, or do you think they're like, equal?
Christopher: Oh the beans. Yeah. No, the beans would be better. It's all good. It's got even more fiber in it.
Juna: Okay.
Christopher: Yeah. No, I'm totally up for beans that people will eat more of those. And I love some of these burgers that are a lentil burger or a black bean burger. There's some really tasty burgers like that out there. But beyond is also, got a steak now that has American Heart Association check listed approval. It is a lean steak product and I don't think people are eating it as a big slab of steak. But I know that, Stanford Dining used it recently in a Vietnamese. It is just little bits of Beyond Meat steak as part of a Vietnamese salad. And it was super tasty. And I'm sure that people didn't realize it wasn't meat because the texture, especially buried in the context of the salad, was like, oh, there's some meat in here.
Eddie: So in a way, we're coming around to, I like this idea of, you know, the Christopher Gardener instead of what? And could we just tweak our diets a little bit and an example of, it's one thing to eat a piece of steak. It's another thing to slice and little bits right into this. The salad at the Stanford dining and another like, kind of small hack is if you're choosing to use beef and you're making a burger, if you replace even a teaspoon or a tablespoon of the meat with a few beans that frankly, no one's gonna see or taste, you're still going to get some health benefits from that just by reducing your consumption, you know. So I just wanted to sort of introduce the idea of it's not all or nothing that we could evolve towards a healthier diet. Maybe it's.
Juna: Like a transition, like the the beyond stuff can help you transition to less meat or something like.
Eddie: Like Christopher was saying, like it's a gateway.
Juna: Gateway, a gateway drug. Yeah. Into eating less red meat.
Eddie: As we wrap up, other final thoughts on.
Juna: Yeah, what are your thoughts on a New Year's resolution to reduce meat consumption? How can people go about that or what's a good way to do it?
Christopher: Sure. And I think that's where it really fits in because everyone is different. Right. And so for some they could just go cold turkey and not have any turkey. That doesn't really happen for most people. Most people will make a change and they don't like it and they switch back. So in my world of nutrition is that I'm trying to encourage people to eat a healthier diet. The one that's really going to work is the one you can maintain. And if you can't maintain it, if you can't go vegan, if you can't go keto, those are not really very helpful. So some of these intermediate solutions are yeah, I replace some of my meat with beyond or impossible. That was a pretty healthy step. And I'm eating more beans. Those are both great and I'm eating more chicken and less meat. Those are all going to be different viable answers for folks. And so it's nice that we have those options and they'll keep moving forward. And it just constantly raises this issue that we have to have a lot of different tools in the tool chest to help people move in a positive direction.
Juna: Well, thank you for helping us tackle the meat of the issue. Kidding. Oh my.
Eddie: Gosh.
Juna: Thank you so much for coming back on, and I hope we can have you on again in the future, because it's always so fun talking to you.
Eddie: Thank you so much. All right.
Christopher: Thanks, Christopher. Thanks, Eddie. Thanks. You know.
Juna: Thank you so much to Christopher Gardner for once again joining us on the pod. We will link to his work on our website. If you want daily episodes all of January to help you get your new exercise habit this year, head to food. We need to talk.com/membership or click the link in our show notes. You can find me at the official Yuna on Instagram and Yuna Jada on YouTube and TikTok. You can find Eddie confused. You can find Eddie extremely confused in the studio.
Eddie: And asking instead of what? I love that.
Juna: Question. That was a really good question. Food we Need to Talk is produced by me.
Eddie: Our sound engineer is Rebecca Seidel, and we are distributed by X food.
Juna: We Need to Talk was co-created by Kerry Goldberg, George Hicks, Eddie Phillips and me.
Eddie: For any personal health questions, please consult your personal health provider. To find out more, go to food. We need to talk.com.
Juna: Thanks for listening.
