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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey

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Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here. Over the past couple decades,

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Speaker 1: and perhaps especially over the past couple of years, there's

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Speaker 1: been increasing attention to and hype around plant based eating.

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Speaker 1: People may avoid or cut back on animal products for

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Speaker 1: all kinds of reasons, from ethics to religion to the

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Speaker 1: fad diet of the moment. But today we're focusing on

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Speaker 1: a different and perhaps more scientific or at least data

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Speaker 1: driven angle the environment. Production of the meat we eat

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Speaker 1: burns up a lot of natural resources. For example, according

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Speaker 1: to the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University,

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Speaker 1: it can take as much as six hundred and twenty

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Speaker 1: five gallons that's some two thou fifty liters of water

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Speaker 1: to produce a quarter pounder. When you've take into account

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Speaker 1: not just the water that cattle drink, but the irrigation

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Speaker 1: required to produce the grain and grasses that they ate.

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Speaker 1: Research by scientists shows that raising farm animals accounts for

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Speaker 1: of the world's freshwater consumption. Pound for pound, The animals

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Speaker 1: we eat require a lot more resources to grow than

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Speaker 1: the plants we eat. But when you factor in the

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Speaker 1: amount that a cow ate before it became your burger. Omnivores,

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Speaker 1: that is, those of us who consume both plant and

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Speaker 1: animal products consume more plant based food than vegetarians or vegans.

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Speaker 1: The study Patterns of Food Consumption among Vegetarians and non Vegetarians,

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Speaker 1: published in the Journal of Nutrition, surveyed eighty nine thousand

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Speaker 1: people in the US and Canada to gather data on

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Speaker 1: various dietary preferences. These subjects ranged from people who ate meat, eggs,

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Speaker 1: and dairy products to hardcore vegans who avoid any food

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Speaker 1: that comes from an animal. In between, there are lacto

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Speaker 1: oval vegetarians who consume dairy products and eat eggs, pasco

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Speaker 1: vegetarians who eat fish but no red meat or poultry,

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Speaker 1: and semi vegetarians who eat meat occasionally. The researchers tallied

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Speaker 1: up the total weight of the plant based foods that

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Speaker 1: the subjects ate every day, that is, fruits, vegetables, avocados, potatoes, grains, lagoons, soy, nuts,

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Speaker 1: and seeds. And now I'm rounding the numbers here for

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Speaker 1: audio simplicity, but they found that vegans, on average ate

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Speaker 1: about seventeen hundred grams that's sixty ounces of plant based

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Speaker 1: foods a lacto ova vegetarians and pesco vegetarians each ate

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Speaker 1: about fourteen hundred grams that's fifty ounces. Omnivores, in comparison,

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Speaker 1: ate about eleven hundred grams or forty ounces of plant

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Speaker 1: based foods, not as much on its own as the vegetarians,

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Speaker 1: but a substantial amount. However, the omnivores in the study

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Speaker 1: also ate about sixty grams or two ounces of meat

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Speaker 1: a day. That's actually a lot lower than the national

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Speaker 1: meat eating average of around two hundred and twenty five

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Speaker 1: grams or eight ounces based on US Department of Agriculture data,

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Speaker 1: but let's assume the smaller amount for now. As we

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Speaker 1: consider the amount of grain grasses consumed by the animals

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Speaker 1: that end up as meat on our plates, this gets

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Speaker 1: a little trickier to calculate, because, of course, different animals

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Speaker 1: consume different amounts of plant based food. For the article,

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Speaker 1: this episode is based on How Stuff Works. Spoke by

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Speaker 1: email with Marion Nestley, the PAULA. Goddard Professor in the

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Speaker 1: Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New

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Speaker 1: York University and author of the book Food Politics. She

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Speaker 1: said the ratio seems to be on the order of

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Speaker 1: six pounds of grain to one pound of meat. So

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Speaker 1: even that low sixty grams or two ounces of meat

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Speaker 1: represents the equivalent of an extra three hundred and sixty

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Speaker 1: grams or twelve ounces of grain based intake every day,

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Speaker 1: meaning the omnivore study participants were responsible for consuming a

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Speaker 1: bit more plants than their vegetarian counterparts. But again, remember

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Speaker 1: that's using an example at the low end of meat eating.

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Speaker 1: If you use the U s d A's daily average

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Speaker 1: of two hundred and twenty five grams or eight ounces

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Speaker 1: of meat consumption, the total soul is to round about

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Speaker 1: twenty grams or ninety ounces of plant based food. That's

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Speaker 1: way more than even vegans consume about fifty or half

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Speaker 1: again as much. So why is this significant. The amount

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Speaker 1: of plant based food that meat animals consume is mind boggling.

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Speaker 1: As Nestlie points out, roughly se of coin and soybean production,

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Speaker 1: just for example, goes to feed animals. That makes meat

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Speaker 1: production an inefficient way to glean nutrition out of the

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Speaker 1: planet's farmland. Study by University of Minnesota researchers published in

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Speaker 1: the journal Environmental Research Letters concluded that if the farmland

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Speaker 1: needed to produce animal feed. Were instead used to grow

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Speaker 1: food for human consumption, we could feed an additional four

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Speaker 1: billion people worldwide. Today's episode is based on the article

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Speaker 1: far more plants get consumed thanks to meat eaters, not

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Speaker 1: vegetarians on houseuf works dot Com, written by Patrick J. Keider.

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Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio in partnership

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Speaker 1: with how stuff works dot Com and is produced by

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Speaker 1: Tyler Clang. Four more podcasts from my heart Radio. Visit

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