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Transcript

Kevin: So, welcome back to Nutrition for Noobs. How are you doing, Michelle?

Michelle: I'm great today, Kevin. How's your day been so far?

Kevin: So far, so good. I can't complain. And I'm kind of excited today because... drumroll...

Michelle: Yeah. Oh, I'm so excited. We have an incredible guest. Today we're joined with physician, researcher, and educator Tushar Mehta, and he's right from the GTA here in Ontario, Canada. Dr. Tushar Mehta completed medical school and residency at the University of Toronto. He currently practice emergency medicine and participates in international health projects. Formerly, he was an annual volunteer in rural India, and he's now working in Haiti with the HaitiCommunitySchool.org. He's also worked with Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which is something that really excites me. And he's a medical advisor on Project Canoe in Toronto. So along with a small team, Dr. Mehta co-founded Plant Based Data, and it's an online database that collects and organizes academic literature regarding the impact of plant and animal agriculture on health, environment, food security, and pandemics. And this year, he is also co-founder of an Institute for Future Food Systems, which will assist organizations and institutions to understand and implement food systemic changes. We'll put all that information in the show notes for you. He's so cool, Kevin. Dr. Mehta is interested in evidence and data-based approach to health, ecological issues, and global justice issues. And I know that anything that comes to data excites us here on the podcast. Totally. Dr. Mehta has also spent years analyzing and translating complex data into clear, accessible insights for healthcare professionals, policymakers, educators, and the public. His work helps to cut through confusion by showing what science actually says and doesn't say, and how our food choices influence human health and the health of the planet. So we're so honored and we're so excited to have you with us here today, Tushar. There are so many ways and places that we could take this conversation. And I know that there's a lot of great info for our noobs out there, and that you are so skilled at breaking this down into easy, understandable pieces. So thanks for joining us.

Kevin: And after all that, you can say hi.

Dr Mehta: Thank you, Michelle. Thank you, Kevin. And hello to the audience. I'm very glad to be here and discuss this super important topic. In the introduction, you covered a lot. And I think you were going to ask me a little bit about Sea Shepherd.

Michelle: I would love to, because, you know, I learned about Sea Shepherd, gosh, I think about seven years ago. It was a couple of guys that used to work for Greenpeace, right?

Dr Mehta: Yeah. Well, Paul Watson was one of the, I think, early members, maybe a co-founder of Greenpeace, which then he started after, shortly after that started Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Now the organization has gone through many changes over time, including recently. But I did a, I just did a single mission with them back in 2012, 2013, called Operation Zero Tolerance. And I was the medical officer at that time on one of the ships called the Steve Irwin. And then also a quartermaster. And I spent three months out at sea with Sea Shepherd in, you know, mainly in the Southern Ocean. The mission was to protect whales that were being hunted by a large Japanese corporation, you know, linked to the government and everything like that. And it was quite a mission, quite an adventure. But it also is part of my plant-based journey in the sense that I was already interested in all these things. But during these long, long days at sea, I spent, you know, hundreds of hours on my computer looking up articles and research. And that was the beginning of my really in-depth analysis about the science regarding plant-based diet, environment, health, and the linkages to other things as well. So that was, that was where I spent the initial time that found my, my then continuing work in this area.

Michelle: Wow. So you've seen it firsthand. You've seen the oceans, you've seen what we're doing to it.

Dr Mehta: Yes, unfortunately. So I'm an environmental educator as well. So I don't only just talk about plant-based diets and so forth. The Institute for Future Food Systems and plant-based data, those are definitely focused on plant-based diets. They do a lot of education around these things, but I'm also very interested in general environmental issues overall, as well as human rights and human justice and everything like that. And I think that people separate what happens to, let's say, animals, the environment, and humans in different compartments. And sometimes people feel that they compete against each other. But really all of these things are very, very interlinked and you can't solve problems in one area without also addressing things in other areas. Right now we're going to be talking about plant-based diet in the environment, but you'll see some points that I'll make along the way about how this also impacts humans in different ways and food security, food justice, pandemics, and things like that, and how these things are very linked. Those are just some examples.

Michelle: Wow.

Dr Mehta: Excellent.

Michelle: Yeah, it's so connected, right? Kevin and I talk about that all the time, and that's what we discover the more that we dive into topics for noobs, is that there's really no separation between when we're making our food choices, the things on our plate come from somewhere.

Kevin: And there's often a domino effect between one thing and then it impacts another and another and another.

Dr Mehta: And this is not just an issue for noobs to learn. It's also an issue for experts to learn, because most experts are focused in their particular areas of interest, and sometimes, of course, they have, or many times they have, more than one areas of interest, but still not necessarily broad enough to look at all of these things in conjunction and how they really influence each other. When we talk about environmental issues, human rights issues, food security issues, we should be very aware that we're in a unique situation that has never happened on our planet. We have over 8 billion people on the planet, okay? Probably more than 80 million people are born per year. And we, approximately every 10 to 12 years, we add another billion people to the planet. And that's what's been happening now for the past few decades. We're going to have 10 billion people by 2050. There's over a billion people, about a billion people, who are suffering very severe forms of poverty, and several hundred million people who suffer severe forms of food insecurity. And then there's about three to four billion people who are part of the global poor. Now, so the extreme global poor, it's like less than $2 per person per day that you're earning in your family, okay?

Michelle: Right.

Dr Mehta: So it's less than, some people even far less, and for moderate poverty, it's less than about $10 per person per day in your family, okay? There's people in that zone between the extreme poor and the moderate poor. There's people in that zone, that's still pretty poor. And if you're making like $15 per person per day in your family, that's still kind of poorer, right? Yeah. But it doesn't fit those categories. But if you look at the world, most of the world is actually quite poor in this day and age, right? And we here in North America and places in Europe and in certain parts of the global South as well, there's pockets and certain people who are well-to-do. But the vast majority of people actually in the world are quite poor, and people do suffer food insecurity. So let's take a look now, zoom out, okay? So we talk about human population there. Let's talk about humans and our livestock. Now, if you took all of our mammals, all the mammals on Earth, okay, there are over 6,000 species of mammals. And if you took all the wild mammals in the world, over 6,000 species, and then just put humans on the other side of the scale, okay? And all wild mammals, okay, were 6,000 different kinds. And you put humans on one other side of the scale, who do you think would weigh more?

Kevin: I would assume the animals, because you've got elephants and rhinos and pretty big mammals there.

Dr Mehta: Right, right. So, I mean, most people would be surprised, but humans themselves would far outweigh all mammals.

Kevin: Really? Wow.

Dr Mehta: By maybe like 30 times or something like that.

Kevin: Whoa.

Dr Mehta: All right?

Kevin: Oh my God.

Dr Mehta: And if you take all of our livestock, and so those are just the mammals of our livestock, which is a few cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and a few others, okay? And you put them on a scale, and you put all 6,000 plus mammals on the other side of the scale, all right? We would outweigh them, you know, the mammals on the other side of the scale would be only about 4% of the total biomass, okay?

Kevin: Wow. Wow.

Dr Mehta: Humans make about one-third of the biomass of total mammals. Our livestock makes about two-thirds of the total biomass of wild animals on Earth. And the remaining mammals make up less than 4% of the total biomass. Wow.

Michelle: Right. So that speaks to how much of the planet we take up and how many resources we're using.

Dr Mehta: How many of us there are, how much we are compared to what was natural. And if you go back 10,000 years, humans were less than 1% of all biomass. Probably less than 0.1% of all biomass.

Kevin: We were just one of the many species. We were the 6,001st species. Yeah.

Dr Mehta: Right, because there was even more species back then, and there were more, they roamed all over the Earth. So we were insignificant in terms of the biomass, but we've dominated everything on the Earth now. We talked about mammals, let's talk about birds, okay? Yeah. There's over 15,000 species of birds, okay? Now, chickens, who are just one species of bird, a bird, a species that's been created by humans. There's no chickens in the wild. We've bred them into existence by our breeding. Breeding is a form of genetic engineering, okay? And we've bred them into existence. And this one species outweighs all the other 15,000 species by three times.

Kevin: Wow.

Dr Mehta: Wow. Okay? So they vastly outnumber all other birds, okay? And in terms of their weight as well. Humans have altered about 75% of the land-based environment.

Kevin: Yeah.

Dr Mehta: Two-thirds of the oceans are very much altered by humans, okay? Maybe more than two-thirds, really. We use about three-quarters or more of all freshwater systems are diverted to our crop and our livestock use. Because that's the major use of water by humans. It's not necessarily our showers and all these things, which are significant. You know, the water we use in industry and all these things are significant. But the biggest use by far by humans is our crops and livestock systems, okay? Our crop production has increased 340% like that. The world's biomass, meaning the world's forests and wetlands and everything like that, all the mass of all the green things that grow on Earth, okay? All the green things that grow on Earth has been cut in half by humans. Because we've annihilated about half of the world's forests or more. And we drain wetlands and everything like that to turn them into pasture. And that reduces the mass of the plant life and everything that's in there, okay? Agriculture takes up almost 50% of the Earth's surface. So the biggest use of the Earth's surface, of the non-frozen Earth's surface, I should say, not just all the Earth's surface. So we're not talking about Antarctica or mountains or extreme deserts that you can't really do much with, but all the Earth's surface that's usable, where things can grow, we've taken about 40% to 50% of that, okay? So 30% to 40%, maybe closer to 40% of the Earth's surface is used for animal agriculture, okay? Now about 10% to 15%, maybe it's close to 15% now, of the Earth's land is used for crops. But it's about 7% of the Earth's land that's used for crops that we directly eat ourselves. Just crops that we grow for us to eat. So that includes apples, bananas, lettuce, carnibs, but also grains and lentils and beans and all that kind of stuff, okay?

Michelle: Did you say seven?

Dr Mehta: About 7% of the Earth's surface.

Michelle: Only seven.

Dr Mehta: That's it. Only 7%. Now most people consume a mix of plants and animal foods, right? So globally, however, even though we're using only 7% of that land for directly feeding humans, that land provides about 60% of the protein that we eat. Even considering that that 7%, there's a lot of plants that we grow there, like lettuce and all this other kind of stuff. Then there's negligible protein, okay? There's hardly any protein there. We're not growing it for protein, we're growing it because it's good for us in other ways. Aside from protein, right? It's part of our diets, apples and all kinds of things, right? That we consume, not necessarily for protein, but for all kinds of other nutritional value, right? As well as even junk food that we probably can just skip, right? So that's all incorporated in there, right?

Kevin: Right.

Dr Mehta: But 30 to 40% of the earth's land that's used for animals only provides a total of 40% of the protein that humans consume. Actually less, because even in that figure, we're not necessarily considering that, hey, a lot of the protein that people are consuming also comes from wild fish that are caught, right? So you can subtract that. So you can see it takes a lot of land, it takes a huge amount of land to produce a much smaller amount of protein when you're getting the protein from animals. So water use, I don't think I want to go too much into the details of water use, but basically, if we're consuming animals, we're going to use more water, right? So 50% of all crops are fed to animals that grow on earth, okay? Become animal feed. It may be creeping up, the number may be creeping up. These are data from older data sets from the United Nations, but there may be more as animal consumption is increasing as a percentage of people's global protein stuff, then the amount of water may be increasing as well, or the land used for crops that are fed to animals may be increasing as well, okay? So half of all crops roughly globally are fed to animals. So that's all the irrigation or everything like that is then used in this less efficient way, right? And also pastures and places like that also divert rivers and streams or use irrigation in those pasture systems as well that divert water. Plus, the major source of water pollution comes from runoff from this agriculture and then goes into waterways and so forth. So animal agriculture disproportionately pollutes water systems as well in terms of per unit of protein, let's say, okay? The global fishing vastly wipes out much of the biomass of fishes and biodiversity of fishes and ecosystems of the ocean do get wiped out and completely altered. And you get then changes in different types of species. But you have instead of this rich biodiverse ocean with so many different incredible species interacting in so many ways, we're going to wipe it out and turn it into something with far less biodiversity and far less life in it as well. Our fish consumption right now is probably about roughly a trillion fish taken from the ocean per year. That amounts to about 30,000 fish per second.

Kevin: Wow.

Dr Mehta: And it's the single biggest cause of wiping out fish populations, reducing fish populations to a very low, much lower level. Also farmed fish is not eco-friendly because they're wiping out wild fish that people don't want to eat, grinding them and feeding them to the farmed fish.

Michelle: All the bycatch. Yeah.

Dr Mehta: All kinds of stuff. Bycatch were even intentionally fished for grinding up as well. And so all kinds of fish removed from the ocean that are wild fish, but then also taking a lot of land-based protein and then feeding it to the fish as well. Animal agriculture, considering all the land it uses, all the impact on the oceans and everything like that, is probably the single biggest cause of biodiversity loss globally.

Kevin: Really?

Dr Mehta: More than just climate change alone. It's a major cause of climate change as well, but in and of itself, it's a bigger cause of biodiversity loss simply because it's using all this land, simply because it's wiping out the oceans in these ways. Not the oceans, but wiping out so much of the life in the ocean. And there are all kinds of things that multiply this, okay? I'm not just saying animal agriculture alone is the problem. Combined with our massive growth in population are all kinds of ways in which we fragment the land, which includes farming and grazing, but also road building and all other kinds of things that humans do across the land, everywhere in the world. The material economy, how much materials we produce, pollutants of all kinds that we produce, climate change, urban design, transportation, all these things together are severely degrading the earth. But of all these things, animal agriculture is probably the single biggest cause. So let's talk about the next thing, which is called feed conversion ratios. This is a very critical thing to understand because, you see, I have a baby right now. I was a little late because of our baby. We feed our baby, right? We all know that we have kids. We grow. We feed our kid. But if we feed our kid every day, let's say 100 grams of food, and so in a week, that's 700 grams, and then it's going to be a few kilograms. They're not just gaining a few kilograms as you feed them a few kilograms of food. We use most of the protein and energy in there for all kinds of metabolic purposes. A small amount of that is then incorporated into our body as our body grows. It's not like you feed 100 grams of protein, and then I get 100 grams of protein bigger. No. Most of the protein is used for all kinds of processes, and a small amount is then incorporated into a growing person. Or if you're not already an adult, then if you're working out, you're gaining some muscle mass. But if you're not working out, your muscle mass will shrink too. There's a stability there, right? So there's something called a feed conversion ratio. How much calories do you eat for how much calories do you incorporate into your body as carbohydrates and fats? And how much protein do you eat? And how much of that is converted into your body as well? Now, for animals, the most efficient animal of all are chickens. Those are the most efficient because we've bred them to grow so fast and so huge, right? Over generations, especially in the last few decades, we've just really taken breeding to the science. And we can, under the right conditions, we can have a chicken fed three kilograms, three to four kilograms, probably most of the time, four kilograms of protein to incorporate one kilogram of protein into their flesh, into their final flesh that somebody can consume. Okay, so it takes roughly a four to one ratio. Now, pigs under factory farming conditions, most intense factory farm because it's six to eight kilograms of plant protein consumed gives you one kilogram of pig flesh. Okay, it's 10 to 18 kilograms for cows, cattle. Okay, like, let's say beef cattle, maybe even more if they're more free ranged and grass they are the less efficient they will be. But when you're feeding them high concentrated feeds of grains and soy and all those kinds of things and different kinds of silage that are very high quality, then you can get this kind of feed conversion ratio. For dairy, it's about a three to four kilograms in for one kilogram out. Again, ideal conditions with highly bred animals. Same with eggs. The most efficient farmed fish, again, about a similar ratio, three to four kilograms for one kilogram out. And people talk about insects as being some magic ecological thing. But some of the best research shows when you grow insects en masse, they act like an organism, okay? You have to give them high quality feeds. They're also burning calories, moving around, doing all kinds of stuff. And it takes about three to four kilograms of protein in to get one kilogram of protein out.

Kevin: Wow. It's all the free range insects we've got.

Dr Mehta: Now, what is the consequence of this feed conversion ratio? Right. Okay, what does that mean? What does that mean? So we're growing literally billions of animals per year. And it means that you need more land, more water, more soil, more pesticides, more fertilizers, more of everything in order to be able to derive animal protein as opposed to plant protein. So if I grow a bunch of soybeans and there's a kilogram of protein there, we've grown a kilogram of protein, and I've consumed a kilogram of protein. Now, of course, you're making different stuff out of it. You might make tofu or soy milk. You might have some protein losses here and there along the way, right? But generally speaking, I grow a kilogram of protein.

Kevin: It's closer to one to one.

Dr Mehta: A kilogram or almost a kilogram of protein is what I can consume. And it takes that much land and water and everything. Okay. But for animal consumption, you have to grow four kilograms of protein at the most efficient, right, to get the one kilogram protein back. So you're using way more of the Earth's land and everything like that. Okay. And exactly the irrigation and all the things that I mentioned, the water, the soil, the pesticides, antibiotics. So we're taking vastly more land and vastly more nature and water and everything like that to grow animal protein. The most efficient being those certain farmed fish, certain chickens and certain other things that are the most efficient, but then the pigs and cattle and everything like that are vastly inefficient. They take exponentially more land.

Michelle: So that's when you're saying the food conversion ratio is not good.

Dr Mehta: Right. Right. We need efficient foods.

Kevin: Yeah. Because you're using so much land for a much smaller proportion of the protein that we're ingesting.

Dr Mehta: Land, water, all the things that we're using, right? All kinds of things. And that brings us to what we really, really want to do. The solutions here.

Michelle: Yes. Yes. Lift us back up, Patricia.

Dr Mehta: The Solutions International is to gravitate and go far more, increase vastly our percentage of plant-based protein foods. Okay. Vastly increase our plant-based protein foods. Okay. And vastly decrease our animal agriculture derived foods. And that will reduce so much land use, water use, biodiversity loss, ongoing greenhouse gases, and allow for rewilding. Let's say theoretically people drastically reduced animal agriculture and switched to plant-based foods. Okay. You'd have one, you'd have a huge drop in methane production. Now methane causes a lot of intense warming. It's far more intense as a warming agent than carbon dioxide. Methane is about 30% of global warming, they are estimating. And maybe 30 to 40% like animal agriculture is the biggest source of methane, bigger than fossil fuels actually in terms of methane that's going in the atmosphere. Let's say people stopped eating all these cattle, which are producing all this methane. You'd have a huge, methane goes out of the atmosphere very quickly. Okay. Within eight to 10 years, most of that methane would be gone. And it would have a very rapid cooling impact on the environment because CO2 takes a lot more time to remove from the atmosphere. But secondly is this, you'd have all this land that would suddenly, you'd be able to grow all of human food and human protein on a much, much, much smaller parcel of land. And so we'd have all this land that's been used for pastures and other things like that, or land that is dedicated to grow crops as animal feed. We can convert that to crops for human feed, right? There's one good study showing that if people switch from animal based agriculture to plant based agriculture, like hypothetically overnight, let's say somebody made that, people made that switch. All right. Just using existing farmland that is used to grow crops, switching that over to grow food for humans could feed an extra 4 billion people, just like that.

Michelle: Yeah, that's crazy.

Dr Mehta: Now there's limitations. Now I'm just going to say that's in terms of calories. Okay. That doesn't mean you're growing all the different tomatoes and vegetables and all the different kinds of things that humans also need concurrently, right? It's mainly focused on calories, but I'm fairly confident that you grow the right things and you'll concurrently grow the right amount of protein as well. But you have to do further analysis to see what mix of crops would be used to provide high quality nutrition, right? Because it's not just a matter of calories, right? But you can grow so much more food on a much smaller amount of land and that promotes global food security. So when we're feeding 10 billion people, people who are richer countries and eating a higher percentage of animal products are occupying a large amount of land that could otherwise be available to help people in the global south, you know, the 4 billion or more people who are somewhat impoverished and face varying degrees of food insecurity to help get enough food for people, as well as the new humans who are coming.

Michelle: You know, there's an infographic, or I don't know if you call it that, that I love that Plantrition Project has on their website called Food Math, and it speaks to it in a picture. It speaks to what you just spoke about. It says that if everybody on the planet continued to eat a standard American diet, or if everyone on the planet did eat a standard American diet, we would need two to three earths worth of agricultural land. But if everyone on the planet switched to a whole food plant-based diet, there would be more than enough for everyone to eat, and there would be 5 billion football fields worth of land that could be returned to forests because of that efficiency.

Dr Mehta: That's right. We can reduce, we can vastly reduce the land that we use and allow it to be rewilded, which would help solve climate problems, biodiversity, water loss, and so forth. So all that saved land, you know, rewild that land. Don't turn it into a plantation for lumber or something like that. Rewild it. Rewild it as close as we can. Sometimes we just leave it. Sometimes it needs help to reintroduce species. There's different things. Sometimes you can't get it always right. Much of Europe was deforested for animal agriculture. You don't even know what, in many cases, the original forests were, right? So there's ways of trying to find out as much as possible about what the original ecosystems were and take attempts to spread and regrow something that is as close as possible towards the natural ecosystems, whether it's wetlands, natural grasslands, because pastures are not natural grasslands, and forests of different kinds, and rewild it and allow biodiversity to come back. That is the solution here. What happens concurrently is we can increase food security because we can grow far more food on a smaller amount of land. We can increase food justice. We can increase human rights if this is done right, okay? It's not just displace people who are right now involved in animal agriculture who may be subsistence farmers or part of the global poor or farming in these areas. No. We have to find ways of helping people adapt to new livelihoods, better livelihoods, stay on the land in a way that is good for them while increasing their well-being, okay? So this has to be done in a just way, not in some kind of draconian way. And so the human rights and human dignity and human respect has to be incorporated in this process, and it can be, right? But we can feed more people. We can restore nature much and reduce or even suck back so much carbon out of the atmosphere as well, right? So there's a lot that can be done, and it should be done properly, of course, okay? And that is in a nutshell. So we should increase our use of pulses. So what are the things we want to eat? We want to eat pulses. Pulses means beans and lentils and those kinds of things, right? So soybeans being one of the most efficient forms of protein, it's fantastic. It's so good for health. There's so much bad press that soy gets, but it's actually so healthy, right? The bad press comes from the animal agriculture.

Michelle: I know. I continuously have to try to correct people on their perceptions of soy, constantly.

Dr Mehta: You could just do an episode on soy, right? And how ecological it is and how good for it is. But it reduces breast and prostate cancer, reduces breast and prostate cancer by about maybe 20, 30% a year. It's just a regular consumer, two, three servings a day, right? For free.

Michelle: Simple.

Dr Mehta: And it reduces cholesterol. It has other nutritional benefits too. We're not going to get into all that stuff, but that in itself is huge, right? It has one-tenth the greenhouse gas emissions of let's say chicken or one-one-hundredth of beef. It fixes nitrogen, brings nitrogen into the ground. All pulses do. All pulses bring nitrogen into the ground. They help fertilize cells and fertilize other plants. There's something called intercropping where you grow soy or lentils one year. The next year you grow a different crop that uses the nitrogen that was brought in from the pulses. And then you grow the pulses again, or you grow them in rows side by side. So then the pulses fertilize the crops that are right beside them. There's different ways of doing that. Permaculture-ish. Exactly. There's many different variations of permaculture. And these are traditions that have actually been done for years around the world. It's not like some new thing. We can certainly improve on it in some ways. The Three Sisters, we bring that back. That's a beautiful example of just what I'm talking about right there. So we want to increase our whole grains, our pulses, our fruits and vegetables. The Canada Food Guide is great in this respect. And the Eat Lancet Planetary Health Guide is even better. So I highly encourage people to look at the Eat Lancet Planetary Food Guide. It's beautiful in this respect. These are not vegan. They do have some amount of animal products in there. But for nutrition, environment and food security, they're more plant-based. In terms of plant-based proteins, some fantastic things have come along the way. Soy milk, I promote to everybody. Soy milk is super ecological compared to dairy milk, and it's more nutritious. It reduces these cancer rates, as I mentioned, for prostate and breast. That's great in and of itself. It's one of the cheapest organic foods you can buy. Organic food is usually pretty expensive, but soy milk is one of the exceptions. Organic soy is actually not that expensive. Unfortunately, soy milk is more expensive than dairy milk for various reasons and subsidies and all that stuff. But still, it's...

Michelle: Yeah. If you actually paid for the milk what the milk actually cost, it wouldn't be, right?

Dr Mehta: Right, right. And they could probably package soy in the same milk bags that they give you for milk bags, right? That would also reduce the price as well.

Michelle: I know. Those Tetra Paks really aren't as good as everybody thinks they are either.

Dr Mehta: And Tetra Paks, I'm completely against Tetra Paks. I don't want food packaged in Tetra Paks, okay? Tetra Paks, we'll come to packaging in a sec, all right? Because we're going to talk about the plant foods and which plant foods are not good as well, okay? I don't want to miss out on that because I don't want to say all plant foods are equally good. I also want to talk about the plant foods that have harm to the environment, so we should also mention that too, okay? So healthy plant-based foods can go a long way, all right? And we want to focus on plant proteins. Some of the things, nuances to mention, like Eat Lancet, Canada Food Guide, those are fantastic. Okay, processed foods, right? When we talk about plant-based meats, some of them are actually good, okay? Now that's a whole different topic which I'm not going to get into, but when the animal agriculture industry and all these advertisements are saying that all these plant-based meats are bad for you, that is not true. The newest version of the Beyond Burger compared to the first version of the Beyond Burger is actually really good, all right? And it really depends on how much saturated fat, how much sodium, fiber, is it fortified, okay? And those are the main factors in the packaging. Those are my five sort of main criteria for do I like plant-based meat or not, okay? And yes, they may have more ingredients, but if it's fortification, like B12 and some vitamins and stuff like that, that's okay, right? That's good. If you're adding lots of saturated fats, coconut oil, palm oil, those are not good, right? We don't want that. So we don't want the saturated fat. But if you're using polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fats, and maintaining some of the fiber in there and having a Beyond Burger like that, it's fortified, that's fantastic. And there's other plant-based meats that are like that too. And they're probably good for you. When they did all this research on processed foods, I mean, there's Twinkies, there's orange juice, there's soy milk, there's Beyond Burger, there's lollipops, and there's ramen noodles. These are all there. But the most damaging ones for health when they delineate it are sugar-sweetened beverages, right? So pops and sodas and stuff like that, and processed meats.

Michelle: Exactly.

Dr Mehta: A lot of the processed foods that are actually bad for us are processed meats.

Michelle: Oh, the processed meats shouldn't even be in the equation at all. They should just do away with them.

Dr Mehta: And that includes bacon, that includes chicken nuggets, and that includes all kinds of meats that people don't even realize are processed, these different cold cuts that people have. All the group ones, yeah. That's right. Those are carcinogens, and they have the high health. And when they did the research, they weren't really including plant-based meats in the research. It was less than 1% of all the foods were plant-based meats, or less than 0.1%, if I'm not mistaken, were included. So they're not even looked at. But there's other articles that look at the health properties of plant-based meats, and showing that some of them are actually pretty good. What my general rule is, is for every 10 grams of protein, we don't want more than 200 milligrams of sodium. So that's the general ratio. 10 grams of protein, try not to go over 200 milligrams of sodium. A little bit over if it's 210, 220, not a big deal. But if it's 300, 400, 500 milligrams of sodium for 10 grams of protein, that's not good. Yeah. Okay. So the sodium, we don't want palm oil and coconut oil. If there's a little bit of saturated fat, a little bit of coconut oil, maybe okay. Saturated fat should be low.

Michelle: Yes.

Dr Mehta: And we want fortification like B12 and all those things to be in there. If there's some fiber in there, that's great too. But fiber, we should also be getting from other foods. You shouldn't just be eating plant-based meats all the time. I'm just saying if somebody wants to include some of that, that's cool.

Michelle: Yeah, I agree. We just did an episode on that, and we're totally on the same page. And actually, I love some of the anecdotes that you've added to that, because that's one of the things I'm aware of is that beyond Impossible, those companies, they're constantly, constantly changing the recipes. The industry at large is actually interested in this as being one of the potential solutions to move us in the right direction, because animal agriculture knows that they're problematic. And in fact, it's all the same companies that are often buying the plant protein companies trying to get into the market share.

Dr Mehta: Right. But they're also conflicted. And then they're trying to then downplay those companies too when they weren't successful or they didn't market it right. But at the same time, they're maybe owning some shares in it. And at the same time, they're causing misinformation. They're trying to figure out what their profit formula is going to be. Is it going to be more of this? Or do we just slam these products and then go gung-ho on more meat products? What's going to make them the most money, right?

Michelle: Yeah, because they're the most interested in their shareholder. They're not really the most interested in the planet.

Dr Mehta: They're there to make a huge amount of money. And that's why I don't like to take information from industry. And that includes, I don't like to take information from the plant-based industry itself as well. For certain technical things, you can just get like, okay, well, okay, how much of this each ingredient did you use? So how much soy did you use? How much of this did you use? The raw inputs of the ingredients and then what's in there, that you see how much protein, that stuff. Yeah, that stuff I'll trust. But in terms of the health effects of these things, it should be non-industry people that are generally doing the research. There are exceptions. There are exceptions where animal agriculture has funded a study and it was actually a study that was worth looking at. You have to look at the methodology ultimately in how the study was done. So funding often perverts what the scientists do. Okay. But not in every case.

Michelle: Either consciously or unconsciously, right?

Dr Mehta: Yeah. Yeah. But not in every case. And there's sometimes there's some of these researchers that they're not taking big money. They're just getting little bits and bobs of funding from here and there. And some of the researchers at U of T, for example, right? They just take a little bit of bits and bobs of money from different sources that includes all kinds of industry and non-meat industry and all kinds of stuff like that. And they're not big money people, right? Some of these can be okay. So the most important thing is the methodology, but oftentimes the funding biases methodology. So you have to very much analyze what methodology of any study was done, how it was done when it comes to environmental nutrition or anything like that. Now, I digress. So which plant foods can be harmful to the environment? All right. Okay. If we're over consuming oil, oil takes a lot of resources to produce. So we should not over consume oil, oily foods and junk food oil, like palm oil and a lot of coconut oil and stuff like that. We just don't need to consume that. We need to consume less oil anyway. So just don't consume it. It has a high impact and we just consume less.

Michelle: Correct.

Dr Mehta: Avocados coming from Mexico have a very, very high environmental impact.

Michelle: Okay.

Dr Mehta: We should know that. There's a human rights issues and environmental issues with avocados coming from Mexico, wiping out these forests that species like the monarch, butterfly and other species depend on. A very niche ecosystem that has been destroyed for avocado plantations, gangsters and mafia type people controlling a lot of this.

Michelle: Yeah. I've heard the cartels control most of the avocado industry now.

Dr Mehta: And killing activists who are protecting the forest and so forth. So there are certain... If you're buying mangoes that flown over from Indiana airplane, that has a higher carbon footprint than beef. So if you're flying your stuff on an airplane, that's not good. And the food packaging and food waste has to be monitored as well. The food packing and food waste, regardless of whether it's for plant or animal foods, is a horrendous impact to the environment. And we have to look at that. And of that thing, tetrapaks are amongst the worst. So I generally refuse to buy anything in tetrapak. The milk boxes I buy are... I soak soy milk. It's my favorite one. It's not a tetrapak, but it's still bad. If I can find something else besides a milk carton, then I would love to reduce that as well. And to be determined if we can find other alternatives.

Michelle: That's why you're a fan of going back to the old milk bag then, huh?

Dr Mehta: Milk bag would be less impact. Or if you have a refillable bottle that you bring it there and they refill it for you.

Michelle: The old milk man, I would love that. The soy milk man.

Dr Mehta: That would be good too. Now we have to look at the climate change impact of this guy coming around, the soy milk man, but that would be a good thing, right? Where you bring something to the... You bring an aluminum thing or a steel thing, you go there...

Michelle: To one of the zero waste places, yeah. Refill your own.

Dr Mehta: You plug it into the machine and it heats it up and sterilizes it, throws in the soy milk, puts in the lid, and then you take that back. It's not as pretty, but that'd be a great thing to have. There's other ways of doing it besides using disposables. And that's going to be so important in the future.

Michelle: So the average consumer who can't do all of that, we should buy the cartons that are not the tetrapaks. Okay.

Dr Mehta: The non-tetrapak version. That's the best we can do, like living in Southern Ontario right now, right?

Michelle: Okay.

Dr Mehta: Don't buy the Tetra Pak. Buy the milk carton of the soy milk is better, okay? Because I know some people go to Costco and buy these Tetra Paks. No, no good. No bueno. Okay. Next thing. Okay. The chocolates. Chocolate. Most chocolate coming from East Africa has severe human rights violations, okay? So let's look at, there's something called the Chocolate List by the Food Empowerment Project. Food Empowerment Project. And there's another organization that looks at the human rights in chocolate and other foods. Very important. A lot of banana production also abuses workers and so forth, right? And even in Canada, there are farms where we employ foreign labor, where these people's human rights and dignity are not respected. And that occurs for plant farming, but especially occurs even worse in animal farming, actually.

Michelle: Wow.

Dr Mehta: But it's in both of these issues, right? And so plant farming and animal farming have human rights issues and workers issues, and that's important across the board. The violations that happen, however, in the meat industry and dairy industry are generally bigger and more...

Michelle: Egregious.

Dr Mehta: Right? Considering the things that happen in the slaughterhouses, but I don't want to... But they also occur in the plant world too, and that needs to be looked at as well.

Michelle: Yeah.

Dr Mehta: Yeah. So I think we've covered most of the topics there. I can go on to say that in addition to the benefits from... Oh, the other ecological benefits that I haven't spoken about as much are these vast viruses that are generated in animal agriculture. As we mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, that most of the animals on Earth, the greatest biomass is really our farmed animals. And that's becoming true in the ocean now as these fish farms expand. Whether it's fish farms, chicken farms, cattle farms, all these things, these animals packed in close together. Also are, I should mention, the wet markets and those kinds of places, and also bushmeat hunting in various places, causes various pandemics to occur, generates new viruses in these confined animals that are packed together and so forth, and new variations of viruses. Okay? I have a podcast on that as well. You can find it on Plant Based Data or maybe the link will be transferred to IFFS pretty soon. And we can look at the resources around that as well that we have in terms of the research articles and so forth, right? But these pandemics go to humans, but they're also wiping out many populations of wild animals worldwide, because we generate the viruses through our human activity of livestock. And then these other animals transmit it to each other, and then they go across the world with migrating birds and other animals and so forth, and transmit to other animal populations around the world as well. And all kinds of animals, even in Antarctica and places like that, are getting infected.

Michelle: Yeah. That's a topic I would love to dive into on another episode, because I don't think a lot of people don't realize that zoonotic disease is really the origin.

Dr Mehta: The prime source is animal agriculture.

Michelle: Of every pandemic. I mean, Michael Greger did a great lecture on that, as I believe that was his focus before he became the nutritionfacts.org guy.

Dr Mehta: That was his area of focus before that, before he got into all this plant-based diet stuff. But not necessarily every pandemic, but all the pandemics I know. So that includes pandemics in ancient history as well, like including things like smallpox and measles, which have wiped out millions and millions of people over the centuries and become scourges on the earth, right? And even right now, there's a bad flu virus going on around, you might have heard about it. It's a mismatch between the vaccine and the flu virus. And it's going around, it's already infecting people in our hospital and can make them quite sick that I've already seen as a physician. And this influenza A, all these subtypes of influenza A, basically every year come from animal agriculture into the world and infect other animals and infect humans, okay? So that is pretty much a disease every year that comes from animal agriculture and nobody even knows about it. Influenza B on the other hand is mainly just a human disease, okay? Just circulates around humans, okay? And that's it. But that's generally not the dangerous one. It's all the variants of influenza A that come from animals. Those are the dangerous variants over the years and over the decades as well, and in the future.

Michelle: So Tushar, I know my carnivore family members would ask, hearing that piece of information, I understand the agricultural impacts and the systemic impacts that causes that, but are you at more risk by actually eating the meat?

Dr Mehta: In most cases, I don't think so. I think that handling the meat, you can get the antibiotic resistance is another problem. You're more likely to get exposed to antibiotic resistant type of bacterias that cause urine infections and other problems too. And it's an area where we need way more research to look at human diseases and antibiotic resistance and how much of that is coming from the animals that people are consuming and sold in the supermarket, right? And we know that there's a lot of animal... Most antibiotics in the world are used for animal agriculture, okay? In North America, it's 80%, but the numbers could actually be vastly more because there's probably a vast amount of animal antibiotics that are used in places in the global South that people don't really track how much is being actually used in animals, right? It's not like in all these places in India. When I was in India in villages working in places like that, I would see farmers that would just go, my cow's a bit sick, they just go get a big needle and they give a big shot of antibiotics, right? I don't know if anybody's tracking all these antibiotics that are being given to animals and how much and so forth, but this is just pretty normal practice.

Michelle: Yeah. How could you?

Dr Mehta: It's very hard to track all these things. So there could be a lot of... And there's a lot of black market and off-market things, people want to bypass regulations on how much antibiotics and which antibiotics can be used when and where, right? So globally, we may also underestimate the amount of antibiotics that go towards animals because human use is very well-tracked by industry, but the animal use will not be as well-tracked, okay? And the industry is also going to try and hide that as well because they know it doesn't make them look good too, right? As they try to hide other things. So you may be more exposed to antibiotic resistance and different kinds of bacterias, but even us shopping, if you're plant-based, shopping in these places, touching surfaces, as you're checking out and stuff like that, we're going to get some exposure too, right? So there's definitely exposures and then you get exposed to each other as well, right? We all get exposed to everybody else in society and share some of these bacterias. But those are problems. And COVID also was something where a lot of people who got infected with COVID were people who worked slaughterhouses and meatpacking places where COVID was transmitted through these chains and people got sick and people died who were working in these situations.

Michelle: It was devastating.

Dr Mehta: And COVID was another example of something that comes from the form of animal agriculture, wet markets. Of course, there's these conspiracy theories. The Chinese government created this stuff, but the lab there was pretty transparent in terms of the type of viruses they were studying there. And the genetics of those viruses were very different than the genetics that were infecting people and were found in the wet market.

Michelle: So completely different.

Dr Mehta: Yeah, very different. Very different. Yes. Very different genetics of the coronaviruses that they happened to be studying in the Wuhan lab compared to the ones that were then infecting people, right? And that's been pretty well documented in the studies. But let's say even secretly, if the Chinese government was studying some bad types of viruses in that lab, it required the wet market to have further mutations and then get into humans.

Michelle: Right.

Dr Mehta: Right. So even in the worst case scenario, if the conspiracy theory was true and these guys were studying versions of the virus that could infect people, they might have been studying it for good purposes just to help people and help medicine, or they could have been doing it for bad purposes. But it still took that virus to get into a wet market, have further mutations going through animals there, to then cause a type of coronavirus that was bad for people and caused a global pandemic. So even in the worst case scenario, it still required the wet market still played a role in infecting people.

Michelle: That's still the mechanism, regardless of what the motivation was. Yeah. Yeah.

Dr Mehta: It's still part of the mechanism. Still part of the mechanism. But it probably wasn't anything nefarious done in that lab, in the Wuhan lab, that happened to be in the same city. But the problem is that there's wet markets all over the place and there are other types of viruses often that infect people locally as well.

Michelle: So Tushar, what I've heard you say over the course of this rich conversation is that the same diet that happens to be the healthiest for humans is also the same diet that is potentially an answer that's going to get us to 2050 and be able to support 10 billion people and be the healthiest for the planet.

Dr Mehta: That is essentially what I'm saying, with a couple of small caveats. And that is that I'm not saying exclusively vegan here, right? Strictly speaking from the health point of view, it's kind of matching what the Eat Lancet diet has said. It's minimal animal consumption, right? And a majority of a whole food plant-based diet from all these different sources. And, you know, making sure that we get our B12 and a couple of other things like that. A couple of other fortifications would be good in there, okay? And that applies even... Listen, if people are eating animal foods, I don't want them to say, oh, you guys have to fortify your food. No, the B12 that you're consuming is mostly coming from fortification that's just fed to the animals, okay? So that's the same either way, you know? And there's fortifications that happen in animal foods as well. But if you're completely plant-based, that is going to be, I think, most ecological. Although there's maybe some slight increased land and water for certain types of foods or something like that. But I mean, these are things at the margin, right? And so a very Eat Lancet type of diet, and that could be vegan or it could be a little bit of animal products as well. But there are some extra advantages, which we haven't really discussed here, of a plant-based diet just for animals themselves, let's say, right? But even excluding that, it's an Eat Lancet type of diet, okay? And I think that that's a great thing to review. And not all plant-based foods, remember the packaging junk food, junk food has no nutritional purpose. So it has an environmental impact, but no nutritional purpose. So minimizing junk food, even if it's plant-based, is still a very good thing to do, right? And we reviewed some of the bad plant-based foods for the environment as well. So those caveats that we want to put in there, throwing the human rights and all that stuff and the dignity and rights and economic security of people who are making transition, who are working in animal. There's a lot of people around the world who work in some kind of industry related to animal agriculture, right? So we have to think of what can those people do economically as well in the transition. Those are very important questions as part of this as well.

Michelle: It's a very, as a girl that grew up in farming community, it's a very important question because the solution isn't about robbing somebody of their livelihood, all right? We have to find workable solutions that are going to move us forward, but we can't keep turning around and looking back because that hasn't worked for us.

Dr Mehta: And certainly there's going to be a lot of work in the plant-based food industries, right? In terms of local farming things, as well as in terms of various levels of small, medium and large industry as well. And we don't want the whole industry. Here's another thing. I wouldn't want... There's going to be some big industry, sure. There's going to be some big industry, but I wouldn't want it all to be dominated by big industry. Okay? There should be small and medium and local food production and businesses and livelihoods as well. So we don't want to see a plant-based world all dominated by big industry either.

Michelle: Yeah. I don't think it's realistic for us to look that way either. I mean, that's definitely very much the philosophy that we have here. I happen to be, by my choice, I happen to be a whole food plant-based primarily vegan. And I wouldn't say that I do it 100% because I don't freak out if somebody makes a birthday cake and it's got some egg in it. So I wouldn't even say that I'm even 100%. And if I want something, I will try it when I'm traveling and I will eat it and whatnot. But we're all about being real here. That's my tagline is that we have to be real. And when we're real, there's going to be a certain amount of animal-based foods that are probably going to exist in the majority of people's diets and that's okay. There's no data that says a person has to be 100%. You would agree as the data guy?

Dr Mehta: Nutrition-wise, if somebody's eating a small amount of animal products versus being completely plant-based, it's not going to make a difference. Otherwise their diet is equally good. So that's not going to make a difference in terms of their health. Maybe some differences to the environment, but largely you're there if you're that close already. We're on target if we're largely that close. And yeah, the only thing is, to animals it may make a difference, but that's a different story, which I don't think we really include in these discussions, generally speaking.

Michelle: Yeah. I just love how you framed everything up and I love your compassion. You brought in all the elements of justice and cultural sensitivity, but the real hard facts about where we're at and the realities of the implications of when we're making that food choice on our plate, it's not just what we're ingesting into our body, it's what is the bigger picture? And is there another why in there for us about being brave, making other choices, doing those harder dietary conversions, not just about ourselves, but about what are we contributing as we build a planet or destroy a planet for our children and our grandchildren and the generations to come and all of the animal species and diversity of the plants on this beautiful place.

Dr Mehta: And to go from darkness to light, the other thing is that the process of doing this has got to be fun. There's so much beautiful, amazing, tasty, wonderful, awesome food that we can eat, and that includes all the unprocessed stuff, but also some of the processed bits and stuff like that. I love having some of these Beyond Search sausages or whatever it is in Just Egg.

Michelle: Oh, I love them.

Dr Mehta: Once in a while. I don't want to eat it every day, but some here and there, right? Or I get a protein powder after a workout, like everybody's doing it. That's not a big deal. That's not a big deal. And so you can have all the elements of a fantastic life, fantastic food, fun and joyful and beautiful, and have it good for people, planet, and health as well. It could be a win-win-win-win-win situation. That's something to find comfort in, but it just does require work. It does require work, but we should make that work for it.

Michelle: Okay, I'm going to give you just a couple of rapid fire questions here, just for fun at the end here. What is the most overhyped nutrition claim to you?

Dr Mehta: Yeah, I guess some of these claims that come from the meat industry. I don't know. I just saw one posted on one of my WhatsApp groups promoting that three-fourths of breastfed babies are low in iron, and we should introduce complementary foods that contain beef in them for babies.

Michelle: Oh my gosh. That's new.

Dr Mehta: There's one. You know what I mean? I'm just like, it makes you kind of scared of breastfeeding your kid. Maybe we should be promoting that mom should have a healthy diet and have enough iron. That's going to help.

Michelle: Right.

Dr Mehta: And they don't cover the fact that feeding dairy milk to your kid actually is an iron deficient diet, and so a lot of kids who end up drinking too much milk have low iron. There's a lot of nuances to this. It doesn't mean kids can't drink dairy milk once they're one year old, but there's all kinds of stuff. Grass-fed beef consumption, I think there's no really good data that maybe grass-fed beef is going to be better than other types of beef because it has higher omega-3s or a few other things, different fat profiles, something like that, but we haven't done proper research on the long-term implications of eating that and what are the differences in cancer rates or cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and all that kind of stuff, based on standard consumption levels of North America or whatever it is. We've never done those studies. I think that one of the big overhyped things are that plant-based meats are bad or that all processed foods are bad, therefore you shouldn't eat plant-based meats, when it's really some of the biggest defenders of processed foods are actually the processed meats. That's where the data shows you're getting the biggest problems from, but the alternatives to processed meats, if you eat red meat, it's not getting that great either. Certainly, white meat and fish are certainly improvements, but definitely poultry consumption has certain consequences as well, where you could have advantage for plant-based protein. Some of those are health parameters, but there's also the discreditation of plant-based meats that is also overhyped. Again, depends on which plant-based meat though, right?

Michelle: Fair. Good answer. What's your favorite meal that checks all of the evidence boxes?

Dr Mehta: Geez, there's so many. I'll give you two meals. One, because I have a whole grain cereal and I put a whole bunch of flat seeds and hemp seeds and some sliced banana maybe, organic ones, because the non-organic ones, they treat the farmer's workers better. There's better standards for the workers with organic bananas compared to the non-organic bananas. That's my reason for using the organic bananas, by the way, not because of nutrition. And soy milk and so forth. That's a big hearty breakfast that I love to eat. Or a whole grain toast with peanut butter. I love that. And it's with non-sweetened peanut butter, the natural peanut butter. You have to mix it up like that. I love that.

Michelle: Or almond butter. How do you think about almond butter?

Dr Mehta: Yeah, almond butter is great too. It's so tasty. Peanut butter is more sustainable, I think, than almond butter. The unsustainability claims of almonds are somewhat overhyped because dairy in California uses more water compared to almonds. But the industry wants to tell you almonds are bad. But the dairy industry there uses more water than the almond industry. So they should be concurrently talking about that if they're really on point. Peanut butter is even more sustainable and it's a great food. And so I go for a peanut butter on whole grain toast. It's a fantastic one. Another thing that you should know is the pasta that has lentils in it. The lentil-based pasta, right? It's like double the protein in the pasta.

Michelle: Oh, I'm glad to hear that because that's the one that we have.

Dr Mehta: Yeah, yeah. And there's ones that are also like a combination of a grain and lentil. And I think they have a better texture. But they're still super high in protein.

Michelle: And I think we have chickpea pasta too. We have lentil pasta and chickpea pasta. Yeah.

Dr Mehta: Yeah, there's chickpea ones. Those ones, the high-protein pasta can just get a little bit more soggy. And they can be a little bit less al dente, right? So the one with grain and lentil combined, I find has the best texture. But all those are good.

Michelle: Well, like you said, this has to be fun. We're not here to take people's joy out of food. We're here to add joy and feel good about what you're eating.

Dr Mehta: Exactly. So that's another one. And then, of course, there's all kinds of Mexican and Indian and Chinese food that we eat that checks all the boxes. But that'll take me another podcast, like...

Michelle: That's perfect.

Dr Mehta: ...two hours to describe all this stuff.

Michelle: No worries. Oh, no, thank you. Well, thank you so much. Now it's time for us to wrap this up with our famous dad joke at the end. And Kevin, you're kind enough to let me do the dad joke today.

Kevin: Of course. I don't mind mixing it up a bit. Change is good.

Michelle: Climate disasters are part of the climate change problem. So I've got a couple of climate jokes here for you. What did one tornado say to the other tornado? Let's twist again, like we did last summer. Ha ha. Oh, bad, right? I'm stretching it as a dad joke. And what did the hurricane say to the other hurricane? I have my eye on you.

Dr Mehta: That's a better one. Thank you so much. And hope this is useful to your audience.

Michelle: Oh, well, thank you. We're going to put all some of this great information, the links that you've given us in the show notes. And yeah, we just can't thank you enough. And thank you for the work that you're doing. And thank you for sharing all of this with the world and making it available. It's so important and so impressive. We have a couple taglines that we sign off with. And I don't know if you have a tagline or something that you say. But mine is to be real, everyone.

Kevin: And mine is to eat your greens.

Michelle: What would yours be, Tushar?

Dr Mehta: Enjoy life while being compassionate, I guess.

Michelle: I love it. I love it. Thank you so much.

Dr Mehta: And seek the truth.

Michelle: Seek truth. That's what I say that all the time. I love that. All right. Thanks so much, my friend.

Dr Mehta: OK.

Kevin: This has been Nutrition for Noobs. We hope you're a bit more enlightened about how your fantastic and complicated body works with the food you put into it. If you have a question or a topic you'd like Michelle to discuss, drop us a line at n4noobs at gmail.com. That's the letter N, the number 4, N-O-O-B-S at gmail.com. If you haven't already, you can subscribe to the podcast on whatever your favourite platform might be. Also, please consider leaving a review or telling your friends. That's the best way to spread the word. We'll see you next time with another interesting topic.