Jun 8, 20214 min read

Stephan Van Vliet on the Cutting Edge Science Proving Meat is a Health Food

Stephan van Vliet, PhD - Peak Human Podcast

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Hello everyone! Welcome back to the Peak HUman podcast, I’m Brian Sanders and I hope everyone is doing well and eating a Sapien diet and living that Sapien lifestyle. I guess I’ll clarify what that is. Many people are already doing it without realizing it - I’m just trying to give it a name. It’s really just what seems to be the natural human diet. It’s a framework and isn’t the same for everyone and changes based on many factors such as where you live to where you are in your life or health journey. It’s based on whole foods, ancestral principles and food preparation techniques. It focuses on the best, most bioavailable, nutrient dense nutrition which is from animal foods. It incorporates the least toxic plant foods. It’s not carnivore, keto, paleo, or Whole 30 but has elements of these. I hate to have labels but none of the other dietary labels fit what I believe is a pretty basic framework for human nutrition. The lifestyle component is big as well and includes all the natural ways humans have always stayed healthy like getting outdoors and adequate sun, sleep, a form of movement, and so on.

This is such a cool episode because Dr. Van Vliet’s research is a brilliant intersection of 2 topics that should be near and dear to the hearts of everyone listening - how animals are raised affects the nutrient profile of the meat and how this in turn affects human health. He uses cutting edge science to go beyond the 3 macros, or 13 vitamins & minerals listed on nutrition labels, to up to 70,000 secondary compounds found in food. He also is working on a much-anticipated study (maybe only to me and those listening) which is randomized controlled and looks at red meat in the context of a healthy diet! How cool is that! This is what we’ve all wanted for so long. Compare eating red meat in the context of a whole foods diet compared to eating it with a bunch of processed foods that would be thought of as a Standard American Diet.

Get ready to meet your new best friend in the nutrition research field. I’m so glad Dr. Van Vliet is doing this research and that he spent a solid 90 minutes with me exploring much of it. Get ready for a good one!

Dr. Stephan van Vliet is a human nutrition scientist at the Duke School of Medicine. Dr. van Vliet earned his PhD in Kinesiology and Community Health as an ESPEN Fellow from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and received post-doctoral training at the Center for Human Nutrition in the Washington University in St Louis School of Medicine. Dr. van Vliet also holds a Masters in Nutrition Science.

At my company Nose to Tail we also raise low PUFA, high omega 3 ratio pigs. We do chicken as well. Check that out at http://nosetotail.org

We also have the primal beef which is by far our best seller. It has liver, heart, kidney, and spleen mixed into the grass finished ground beef and tastes spectacular. I keep getting reports of how people’s kids love it maybe even more than they do themselves.

Our seasonings are available with your custom box. I use them every meal actually. I always put the ranch in yogurt as a sauce but I’ll also use the fresh catch on smoked oysters, the primal on any and all meats, and a new thing I did was put the thai seasoning on baked sweet potatoes. That was something special. They are fresh ground and have no fillers or funny stuff.

I just got my new batch of biltong and droewors in. Biltong makes beef jerky a thing of the past. It’s air dried so it’s softer, uses no sugars or preservatives, has extra grass fed healthy fat on it, and of course tastes amazing. We have 5 flavors to try so try them out today at http://nosetotail.org

We also just added a custom cutting board with the Nose to Tail logo etched in. Use it as your plate or just chop up our fine meats on it. All of our boxes have free shipping options whether for the fresh meat or the other products.

For everything else we’re doing check out http://sapien.org Join the newsletter there for our weekly roundup of the best content from around the web including our own original articles and videos. That’s all at http://sapien.org

Now please enjoy this episode with my pal Brad Marshall.

Also check out our new beef tallow body care products

Biltong (South African air-dried beef specialty)

Sugar-free, freshly ground seasonings

and custom patch hats

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SHOW NOTES

[5:15] His background and education.
[8:50] Research into Metabolomics.
[17:00] A deep dive into the metabolomics of faux meat and real meat.
[23:50] Why the quality of your calories matter.
[28:30] The importance of having a healthy dietary pattern.
Cohort Profile: The 45 and Up Study
Nurses Health Study: Healthful and unhealthful plant-based diets and the risk of coronary heart disease in US adults
The Oxford Vegetarian Study: an overview
Vegetarian Dietary Patterns and Mortality in Adventist Health Study 2 | Cardiology | JAMA Internal Medicine
Lifestyle and reduced mortality among active California Mormons, 1980–2004
[40:30] His work with animal instincts and how they eat.
[42:30] How the health of soil, crops and livestock are all intertwined.
[51:10] Animal instincts on what they need to eat to be healthy.
[58:10] Animal’s special ability to eat and digest what we can not.
[1:05:00] The importance of biodiversity on a rotational grazing pasture.
[1:13:50] Is there such a thing as “the best diet”?
[1:17:30] Combining plant and animal foods to offset some of the negatives of the other.
[1:27:10] Why is it better to eat nose to tail?