Transcript (not including intro or outro)

Ella Magers, MSW:

So Glenn, thanks so much for being here today.

Glen Merzer:

Thank you, Ella.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Yeah. Well, I want to start with your backstory. I find it super interesting given that you were an award-winning playwright and you ended up in Hollywood and that you were writing for the show Blossom. Because I was born in 1980s, so I was just early like preteens when that show came out, and I loved that show. So when I found that out, I was like, yeah, blossom Throwback. You were

Glen Merzer :

The target audience.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Yeah. Well, you got me. That was a good show. So yeah, me, I’m going to have you just kind of step in there from there. I know you met Howard Lyman. Would you fill us in on kind of that story?

Glen Merzer:

Yeah. In fact, I was a vegetarian for the time. I was 17, but it was while I was writing Blossom that I turned vegan. And the star of our show, Myam Bik eventually turned vegan too.

Ella Magers, MSW):

I know. Did you have any influence on her? I

Glen Merzer:

Don’t think I could take any credit for that. I don’t remember ever saying a word to her about it, but I’ll be to take credit if somebody wants to give me credit. And so I turned vegan when I was on Blossom because I was starting to feel some chest pains, and I had become a vegetarian at 17 because there was so much heart disease in my family. And when I became vegetarian, I had an obese aunt and uncle who were very, very concerned about my health, and they said, where are you going to get your protein? And I adlibbed from cheese. So I kept doing that from the time I was 17 to early thirties, having cheese for my protein. And then I started to feel these chest pains and I thought, oh, this is unfair. Here I am in my thirties, my genes are so bad that I’m getting chest pains in my thirties. And I guess most people would go to a cardiologist. I have a fear of doctors. So I just thought about it and I thought, well, yes, I’m a vegetarian, but I’m eating cheese now. I’m not eating meat because of the saturated fat and cholesterol. What is cheese? It’s saturated fat and cholesterol. It’s liquid meat. So I gave up cheese and I never had a pain since, and I never went to a cardiologist.

Ella Magers, MSW:

And you were so 17 when you went vegetarian, which is pretty awesome. And that was for the health. And I’ve heard you say you didn’t struggle with it at all. You meet up your mind. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I really, well,

Glen Merzer:

I ge I guess other people are different, but when I make up my mind to do something, it never even occurred to me Once I decided that I’d be vegetarian, it never even occurred to me that I would lapse and I didn’t. Why would I do that? And what happened was that morning I decided to start on the first day of summer vacation after my junior year in high school. And I got up in the morning, I had an English muffin for breakfast. My old buddy Dave called me and Dave said, I said, Dave, congratulate me. I became a vegetarian. And he said, that’s great, since when. And I said, well, since breakfast. And he laughed at me and that was what, 50 years ago. And I never had meat since then. Maybe because he laughed at me. I don’t know. But no, I never considered going back. I knew it was bad for my health. It was emotionally upsetting. I mean, think it’s morally wrong what we do to the animals, but putting morality aside, it was just emotionally upsetting to me what we do to animals. The idea that I was eating a carcass, it just didn’t make sense. And then when I looked into the science, I realized it’s killing us. So I never considered going back and I wouldn’t go back in a million years.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Love that. I love that. And I will. And we’ll get to your book, own Your Health because you tell some really great stories in that book. Where does the story of your dad saving your mother’s life? And then Yeah, that whole story, my parents, where does that fit in?

Glen Merzer:

My parents saved each other’s lives, my mother. And the point of the story is to begin to understand how to best use medical care. Because in this country, we’re obsessed about medical care. Remember when President Obama introduced Obamacare, the terrible protests and some people saying, this is going to ruin our medical care. And other people saying, this will give us medical care. And everybody was so caught up in it. The truth is, it really did help Americans financially. A lot of Americans, it lowered their costs for medical care, but it didn’t save a lot of lives. And the reason it didn’t save a lot of lives is medical care doesn’t save a lot of lives. Occasionally it does. There are times when going to the doctor will save your life. There are also times when going to the doctor will kill you because medical care is the third or fourth leading cause of death in America. So really everybody was emotionally involved with Obamacare on the issue of, will it help us help our health, help save our lives? The truth is it helped Americans financially. It may have helped some Americans get access to medical care that saved their lives. It may have helped other Americans get access to medical care that was to their detriment. Medical care is not an unmitigated good.

So the point of this story about my parents is to begin to think about when to go to the doctor. My father had a mole on his cheek that was dark and my father couldn’t stand doctors, so he never went to the doctor. One day my mother said to him that she was worried about her varicose veins and she wanted him to take her to the dermatologist. So he drove her to the dermatologist. He’s waited in the waiting room. My mother went into the office and the doctor said, what seems to be the problem, Dorothy? And she said, the problem is my husband. Will you get him in here? So the doctor went into the waiting room, brought in my father, my mother put her back against the door and said, look at that thing on his cheek. He refuses to go to the doctor.

So the doctor looked at it and said, we’re going to have to biopsy that. And it was melanoma. And they scheduled an operation and it saved his life. And then my father said to my mother, I’ll never forget this. I’ll never forget this day that you saved my life. And then they retired to Florida. They moved to Florida, and a few years later, my mother went, because my mother had heart disease, she went to see her cardiologist. My father went with her, and the cardiologist said, you have a 90% blockage of the carotid artery. Artery. You need an immediate angioplasty. I’ll schedule it for next week. And my father shouted, don’t do it, Dorothy. He’s just trying to make money. Don’t do it. He’ll kill you.

My father wasn’t always diplomatic, and my mother said, but the doctor says on, the doctor got irate and said, who are you going to listen to him? He doesn’t know anything or your doctor. And my father says, you do this. I’ll divorce you. I’m not kidding. I’ll divorce you. So my mother was in a very awkward position and she said to the doctor, I’m sorry, but I don’t want to get divorced. We just got new furniture. So she didn’t have the operation. And that was when she was about 70 years old and she lived to 98 without any heart attack. After that appointment, my father had her talk to me about diet and I, she was already getting close to being vegetarian. I got her more vegetarian and more low fat. And I think objectively when you make it to 98 without a heart attack, she didn’t need that angioplasty. I mean, she needed it if she wasn’t going to eat right, but she didn’t need it. And there’s an extreme risk to it. So that was how my father saved my mother’s life. And the lesson is go to the doctor. If you’ve got a black mole that looks, I unsymmetrical and looks, yeah, I mean dermatologists aren’t going to hurt you by doing a biopsy of a mole or something, but don’t jump into an angioplastic use diet to control diseases that are diseases caused by diet.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Yeah. And when did you start to shift from, or not shift from but or really start considering the animal argument for the compassion argument? Did that have to do with Howard Lyman?

Glen Merzer:

Maybe to a degree. I met Howard Lyman a year or two after I stopped writing for Blossom mid nineties. And I learned from Howard what it was like to run a modern animal agriculture business. He had an inherited, a fourth generation organic cattle farm, and he turned it into a modern non-organic factory farm. And he crowded the cows on a feed lot and fed them the modern feed with the antibiotics and to use pesticides prodigious, his brother died of lymphoma, and Howard himself developed a tumor on his spine and had a successful operation. And so from him, I learned something about what a modern feedlot is like. But there are many people who say, oh, I would never eat modern feedlot meat. I eat grass fed meat. I get my meat from a happy cow on a happy farm. And my message is they go to the same slaughter houses.

And from an environmental point of view, as terrible as the feedlots are, they are environmental nightmares with lagoons of manure. The grass fed is even worse because the grass fed cattle are emitting more methane for a longer period of time because they take longer to fatten before they’re slaughtered. And using the grassland is preventing us from solving the climate crisis. We need to rewild that grassland. So at least the feedlot cattle are on small plots of land comparatively. The grasslands are vast. 40% of the United States has given over to animal agriculture. Most of that is grassland. So they’re burning it into desert, they’re destroying it, and they’re preventing us from rewilding it and sequestering carbon dioxide. So to people who say, oh, I only eat regenerative meat or grass fed, you’re doing more harm than if you were eating the feedlot beef. And it’s the same product, it’s, it’s a dead animal. It’s a carcass. The idea that one is healthy and one is unhealthy is preposterous. It’s the same thing. You couldn’t tell the difference with a microscope.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Yeah. Well, I want to get into this climate discussion. The food is climate. Before we get there, just for those of listeners that aren’t familiar with Howard Lyman, let’s kind of close the loop there. So he do want, can you finish his little

Glen Merzer:

Story? Well, Howard, after he had the tumor on his spine, he kind of made a deal with the Lord when he was going in for his operation. And he said, if I live through this Lord, I’ll, I’ll try to return my land to an organic operation. And he tried, but the bankers wouldn’t let him. The bankers were given loans to the chemical industry, to the pesticide makers, and they weren’t going to help him go organic, so he wasn’t able to transform it to an organic operation. He eventually got out of farming and he became a leader and a sought after speaker in the animal rights movement and the vegan movement. So he’s alive and well living in Maine these days. And he is a great friend and a hero of mine.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Awesome. All right. So let’s talk about the climate crisis. In your book, food is Climate, and one of the things you talk about, the discrepancy between the story we’ve been told and reality when it comes to both the causes and the solutions for the climate crisis. Can you talk a little bit about this, knowing that, knowing that it’s a huge topic, obviously, and you explore it in great depth in your book, so listeners go out and get this book. It is extremely powerful. But yeah, let’s talk a little bit about that discrepancy between the stories we’ve been told and the reality.

Glen Merzer:

Well, a Al Gore and most of the leaders who have alerted us to the climate crisis have blamed the problem virtually, exclusively on the burning of fossil fuels. We have actually known for about 150 years or more, if you take carbon dioxide and you put it in a tube, it’s going to heat up more than air. So we know that greenhouse gases cause heating. But what Al Gore and the others have done is they’ve focused exclusively on the fact that we burn fossil fuels, which contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. And they refuse to look at the fact that it’s not just our use of fossil fuels.

Animal agriculture is contributing to the climate crisis in ways that dwarf what the oil industry is doing. For one thing, methane is many, many times as potent to greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. Those who are trying to skew the debate find ways to try to minimize the effect, the accounting for methane, and they say that if you view it on a hundred year time scale, it’s only 20 times worse than carbon dioxide, because over time, methane degrades into carbon dioxide and water. But when it is emitted, methane is 130 times as potent to greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide 130 times. And when it is emitted, it’s therefore heating the atmosphere at that time. And the atmosphere is like an energy grid. When it heats the ocean, the ocean retains that heat. When it heats the soil and the soil dries up, and we have a forest fire, you don’t get to say, gee, forest, if only you had waited a hundred years, you wouldn’t have gotten so hot. So the, it’s the immediate effect of methane that should be counted. It’s 130 times as potent as carbon dioxide. And certainly we should be conservative about this. We’re trying to save our planet. It behooves us to be conservative and do the conservative, and I think more realistic accounting of methane.

So methane is emitted by cows and other ruminant animals all day long. And they also emit, by the way, carbon dioxide when they breathe. Now, what the I P C C, the intergovernmental panel on climate change likes to say is, oh, we shouldn’t count the respiration of animals because that’s part of the natural cycle. Animals breathe out carbon dioxide trees, take it in. Yeah, except we only have 3 trillion trees now. We used to have 6 trillion and we now have 80 billion farmed animals. So if we get to the point where we have a trillion farmed animals and one tree, are they going to say, oh, it’s part of the natural carbon cycle. There’s nothing natural about warehouses with 30,000 chickens in them. There’s nothing natural of feedlots with 10,000 cows. The natural doesn’t apply. So if you count the respiration of all these animals, if you account for methane accurately and conservatively, and if you factor in the most important factor of all, which is called carbon opportunity cost. Now, if you factor in carbon opportunity cost, which is what if those grasslands were re rewild, we’ve taken, we’ve cut down forest and turned it into grazing land, we, we’ve, we’ve removed the capacity of the earth to heal itself. So what if we got rid of all the cows that were grazing, got rid of the grazing land?

Of course, we need to move the cows to animal sanctuaries. But the point is, if we restored the grazing land, what if we restored the grazing land and turned it back into, let it come back into forest, or at least be, have more vegetation? How much carbon dioxide could we sequester? And a paper was done, a peer reviewed paper by my friend Sila Ra, and the answer is enough that we could go back to pre-industrial age levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 280 parts per million instead of 420 where we are now. So in other words, there’s all that potential to bring back the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere through carbon sequestration. If we got a trillion more trees, we used to have 6 trillion, we’re down to 3 trillion. Even if we got back up to 4 trillion, we’d probably be okay. But there’s no place to put all those trees unless we stop grazing animals. So when you end animal agriculture, you get more, far more carbon sequestration. You stop that belching of methane, you stop the use of nitrous oxide, which is 300 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as methane for the use of fertilizer to grow the grain, to feed the cows. You don’t have the methane and the nitrous oxide from their manure. I mean, it just helps in so many ways. As stylish Ralph said, there’s nothing that doesn’t improve when you end animal agriculture. There’s nothing that doesn’t improve.

Ella Magers, MSW:

This is, yes, super fascinating. Now, I’ve heard you say a lot of what the problem is is arrogance, because we really don’t know how close we are to the tipping point sometimes. I know, for me at least, it, it’s hard to feel hopeful when there’s so many unknowns and people are so oblivious or in denial. What are your thoughts? Can you explain what you meant by this problem of arrogance?

Glen Merzer:

Well, it’s extraordinarily arrogant to take this chance with the whole world, for people to say, oh, I love to eat my meat. So I don’t care if it’s destroying the whole world. Really? Is your meat really that good? I haven’t had meat in 50 years and I haven’t had any animal products in 30, 32, 33 years, and I love my food. It’s delicious. So what’s hard about this, when I think when I hear people say, oh, it’s hard to go vegan. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Here’s what you do, you limit. Now follow me here, Ella, because for some people find this difficult. You limit yourself when you eat to eating human food. Is that really that difficult? You eat beans and peas and lentils, legumes. You eat mushrooms, you eat vegetables, you eat fruits, you eat whole grains. What is difficult about this? You could get your beans in a can.

It’s already cooked for you. Open the, can you warm it up? That’s not hard. You boil the rice or the milled or the buck weed or the oat oatmeal that’s boiling. Not, I can do that. That’s not very hard. You either you eat your vegetables raw or you put them in the steamer or you put them in a pan and you could warm them up just with water. Just water. I recommend water over oil. Just saute them in water and put in spices and seasonings. There’s nothing difficult about this. The only thing there is one thing that’s difficult, which is other people are the problem, like my aunt and uncle who made me worry about protein. Other people are the problem. You need to try to avoid other people as much as possible or bring them along, but it’s going to work and they’re having a pizza party, or your friends are having a barbecue for July 4th or whatever. It’s other people who are the problem. People are afraid to stand out from the crowd, and we’re all going to sink together. If people take that attitude, you just have to stop listening to other people and do the right thing for your health and for the planet. It really isn’t hard.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Well, it’s interesting too, thinking about there’s the individual change and then there’s the big systems, the systems that are run by money. Really, when it comes down to it, how do you feel about which is the easier one to help change? Is it the systems or the people? Do the people need to change to create, to change the systems? Or do the systems change need to change the people? How does that all fit together in your mind?

Glen Merzer:

Yeah, it, it’s clearly something where it takes its own course and it’s hard to choreographic, but I view my role as being to try to change people’s minds. If I often make the analogy to gay marriage, if even when Barack Obama ran for president, that wasn’t that long ago, 2008, he didn’t support gay marriage. And he may have supported it in his heart, but that if he said it out loud, he wouldn’t be elected. It was so unpopular, the idea that two men could get married, or two women could get married in 2008 that maybe had the support of 20% of the people or something. It was highly unpopular. And by, what was it, what year was it? Was it maybe 2 20 15 or so? It was the law of the land seven years. And it’s because people changed. People. Gay people more and more often came out as gay people had their friends, their loved ones, their family members were gay, and they realized, why can’t they marry whoever they love? So when the people changed, the system changed. And I think if people just get the message, there’s nothing hard about this, eat human food, you’re going to get healthier. You’ll save money in the long run, at least when you factor in medical bills. And who doesn’t want to be healthier and it’s better for the planet. And then if enough people do it, the industry’s going to have to follow.

Ella Magers, MSW:

I always love recommending documentaries to people. A lot of people like watching movies, right? Because conspiracy is one of the ones I often recommend to people who show interest. And that’s that documentary along with many other documentaries has gotten a lot of ridicule around the statistics, right, around discrepancies, what they see as discrepancies in statistics. How do you account for, and I know you, there are multiple explanations here, but the discrepancy in the statistics out there about how responsible animal agriculture really is for global warming and C, climate change.

Glen Merzer:

All right, let me give a little summation of the statistics on this. Yes.

First, the first statistic that really floored people was from the I P C C Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They estimated that 18% of greenhouse gases were caused by animal agriculture. So they were not looking at animal respiration, they were just looking at methane from ruminants. And they were probably looking at the energy required to, because we have to grow the grain and then transport the grain to feed it to the animals instead of our eating the grain directly. So the energy inefficiency of animal agriculture, transportation, methane, and I don’t know if there were any other significant factors that they accounted for, and they got to 18% of greenhouse gases. Well, 18% was more than all forms of combined. So that really shocked a lot of people, and it upset people in the animal agricultural industry who are the clients of the I P C C. So the I P C C said, oh, sorry, we made a mistake. It isn’t really 18%. They lowered it to 14.5% to accommodate the International Meat Secretary at one of their clients.

And then Goodland and Anhang, Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang wrote a paper for World Watch Institute, and they estimated it at 51%, and they included at least a couple new factors that the I P C C hadn’t included. They included animal respiration, and they included some accounting for carbon opportunity costs. What if we rewild some of that land? Not all of it, but some of it. And they said, wow, it comes to 51% of greenhouse gases are caused by animal agriculture. Well, my friend Sila Ra did a paper that was published in 2021 in which he said, what if we took all the land that we know was forest in the year 1800 that’s now used for animal agriculture and restored all that land to forest and accounted not just for that, but for not just for the respiration from the trees, but for the soil because the soil retains a lot of carbon, and the soil is a lot healthier when it has forest than when it’s being grazed and degraded and burned into desert.

So accounting for the above ground store sequestration in the trees and the storage of the soil on all that land, and without including animal respiration silage came up with a figure of at least 86% of greenhouse gases are cause Oh, wait, did I say 86? I said 87 at least 87% of greenhouse gases are caused by animal agriculture. And I had a conversation with silage a few months ago, and I said, stylish, there are some factors that you didn’t include because it’s very hard to get the numbers. One of them is with industrial fishing, because that’s the other thing we have to do to save the world. We have to stop industrial fishing. Well, the industrial fishing boats trawl the bottom of the ocean, and they kick up sediment and reduce the carbon capture of the ocean. What if we stopped industrial fishing and we had healthier oceans, and we were st stopped kicking up that sediment. We had healthier sea forest and healthier plankton populations. Now, nobody has the numbers on how much that could help, but if you do a rough, an estimate on that, and also silage didn’t include animal respiration. And I said, what if you included animal respiration and you did an estimate for what healthy sea forests and healthy phytoplankton populations might do?

What percentage you’re already at 87%? What percentage do you think it would be if you included those factors? And sly said, it might be like 120%, something like that. And I laughed, how could it be more than a hundred percent more animal agriculture responsible for more than a hundred percent of greenhouse gases? I laugh. Siah says, no, it can be, because remember, when we talk about greenhouse gases, we’re talking about how much we contribute per year into the atmosphere, but we need to pull down more than that. If we’re ever going to have what’s called draw down, it would be like a budget surplus. If you said, take the budget and you say, can we ever give it a balanced budget? Well, not only can you get a balanced budget, you could get a budget surplus if you do things. So this would be like a budget surplus and animal agriculture may well be responsible for get this, let me be the first to say it in public on your show, 120% of greenhouse gases, if you included all the factors.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Wow.

Glen Merzer:

So to focus just on energy efficiency and miles per gallon of our cars and the oil industry, it’s missing the points. Those I’m all in favor of energy efficiency. I have my old friend Dave, who called me when I had the English muffin. He works in that field. It’s a great field. We need energy efficiency, but it’s not going to reverse the climate crisis with smart thermostats.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Yeah. Okay. Well, and let’s talk about the oceans a little more, just the very interesting fact about whale poop. Could you tell us about whale poop?

Glen Merzer:

Yeah, the whale poop actually helps feed the phytoplankton and the phytoplankton actually seed clouds. So again, it’s a complex web of life, and there there’s an arrogance to interfering with it when we don’t even understand how it all works. But if we left the, the whales whale population be restored, it will help the plankton population be restored, which will help the clouds be formed, which will help cool the earth. So it’s all part of a complex web of life, and we interfere with it. People eat lobsters, and they don’t know that by eating lobsters, they may be killing whales because the lobstermen set traps on the bottom of the ocean. And then there are ropes that go to buoys on the ocean surface, and the whales get caught sometimes in their ropes. So there was a story I tell in the book of a whale of a lobsterman who was swallowed, swallowed by a whale, and then he was ejected and unharmed, and I just hope he learned his lesson and he got out of that industry. But I don’t know.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Wow. So how do you personally stay positive and motivated to continue this work when the progress seems pretty slow and people, like you said, it’s so hard about making these changes, but for people it really is. There’s this hardwired, this programming that keeps people stuck in that tunnel vision and in denial, and it makes it tough sometimes. How do you stay motivated to continue this work?

Glen Merzer:

Lucky to have my friend Sila Ra. For those who don’t know Sila, she’s got an organization called climate healers.org. You could find him, find his work there and subscribe to his newsletter. I also have a newsletter on health, which is at my website, glen mercer.com. But Salish I is a brilliant engineer who understands the science of climate change better than I do, and he understands very well how grim it looks and how we’re heading to disaster. But he’s highly optimistic, and it seems odd to me how optimistic he is, but his attitude is, this is a wonderful ch time to be alive. We can save the planet. We can lead this beautiful global transformation to a vegan, non-violent world. So I don’t feel entitled to be pessimistic when I know that Sils is out there spreading his optimism and his joy. So I just let him influence me, and I try not to get down.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Love it. Are you up for a little lightning round so we can just get to know you a little bit better? Sure. Okay. Got like five questions, I believe. Which of your books do you feel like it took the least amount of effort to write that flowed the easiest,

Glen Merzer:

That flowed the well maybe own your health in that? It had a lot of personal anecdotes in it, so I was just telling my story, but what I tried to do in Own Your health is explain nutrition in a way that I hadn’t seen it explained before, so that people could understand how obvious it is that we should be eating plants, not animals there. People think of nutrition as being a controversial subject and a difficult subject. I’m not a scientist, but it’s just the easiest thing in the world to figure out. I mean, is there anybody out there saying, let’s try to cure cancer with sausages? I mean, everybody knows it. Everybody knows that it’s going to be blueberries and strawberries that are going to help you more than sausage and corn beef. This isn’t difficult. So you just follow the logic, you follow the patterns, and you realize how the food industry and the government lie to us on this stuff. And it’s outrageous. And then you realize that it’s very, very easy to eat human food, and it’s the only way forward for human health and for planetary health.

Ella Magers, MSW:

And I love how you put it in such empowering terms. We get a choice every single time we sit down to eat about what we put in our bodies and how that affects our own health and the health of animals and other people on the planet. That’s a very empowering situation we’re in. To be able to do that with our fork.

Glen Merzer:

Yeah, we have to think of food as nutrition. That’s what it’s meant for. Now, of course, it’s also pleasurable to eat, and some foods are particularly delicious, but I like eating things. This is a new change in me that I’ve cultivated in the last year. I like eating things sometimes that are bland, like buckwheat cereal. There’s nothing delicious about buckwheat cereal. Yeah, I can’t fool people. That’s not delicious. But you know, take the buckwheat cereal and then you put blueberries on it, or you put blackberries on it, you put strawberries on it, and then you pour spices on it. Spices are some of the most nutrient dense foods on the planet. I mean, spices will stop cancer. Spices will make you healthy. So you got this bland substrate that you’re eating the buckwheat cereal, and then you’re pouring these nutrients on it, and you just feel so good after eating it. You’re not getting any unnecessary fat, you’re not getting any poisons. You’re getting water, you’re getting healthy whole grains, and then you’re getting these super foods that you’re putting on.

Ella Magers, MSW:

I do know. I definitely know. I love that. I like to think. Okay, so this is just kind of a fun one. I like to think of pet peeves or things that trigger us as teachers. Just to preempt this, do you have any pet peeves that you can

Glen Merzer:

I have pet peeves.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Yeah,

Glen Merzer:

Leaf blowers.

Ella Magers, MSW:

They’re so terrible for the environment, too. I heard that they take more emissions than cars and they’re noisy.

Glen Merzer:

Yeah. I have seen guys with leaf blowers blowing the leaves from one lawn to the other, and then the next guy comes and he blows ’em back. I mean, this is not a good use of energy or time. That’s a good one. And the noise from, it’s just terrible. So leaf blowers would be one. Oh, coconut oil. Now, our people, the vegans, have a lot of companies trying to make money off us and creating vegan foods. And in the last, I’d say 3, 4, 5 years, when I go to what might be considered the vegan section of a grocery store, vegan cheeses and vegan meats and fake meats and vegan yogurts, overwhelmingly, they are using coconut oil in everything. And you look at how much saturated fat there is in, let’s say, a vegan yogurt, if it’s made with coconut oil, it’ll be seven grams of saturated fat in one little cup of, I don’t get seven grams of saturated fat in a month. These are just unhealthy vegan foods because of coconut oil. And that is a big pet peeve of mine, because I want the vegans to live healthy long lives. And the coconut oil is like a substitute for meat.

I’m very, very suspicious of coconut oil. Coconut itself has a lot of saturated fat, and I don’t know why nature did this, created this delicious food that has so much saturated fat, because almost all the other delicious foods that nature created are very, very healthy. But coconut you have to be really careful with. And coconut oil is a processed food with nothing but fat. And I wrote about this in Own Your Health. I used to have a friend who would argue with me about nutrition. He was 50 pounds overweight, and it’s always awkward to bring that up in the argument, so I wouldn’t bring that up. But he would tell me that he was very worried about me the way my obese aunt and uncle were worried about me when I became a vegetarian. He was worried that I wasn’t getting enough healthy fats. And he said that what he did is every day he had two or three tablespoons of coconut oil because it’s such a healthy fat that purifies the system and it makes you sing and hop around the room. I don’t know what he thought it did. And I tell them I didn’t think it was healthy, and we don’t argue anymore because he died of sudden cardiac arrest. So it’s just nothing healthy about a lot of saturated fat.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Thank you for that. Really important. Okay. What’s your favorite response when someone asks, where do you get your protein

Glen Merzer:

Food?

Ella Magers, MSW:

I knew you were going to say that. Yes. Plants have protein. Food has protein,

Glen Merzer:

And per calorie, you get more protein from leafy greens than from meat. So vegetables have protein. Legumes are very high in protein. There’s even a tiny bit of protein in fruit. There’s protein in mushrooms. There’s protein all over the place. The body cannot store protein. What are you going to do with all this protein? If you eat meat, you just pee it out. And one of the amino as acids in protein methionine is cancer causing in excess. So you don’t want a lot of methymine. So having a healthfully moderate protein diet is what you want to do. You don’t want, you get more protein than that. You get protein powders, then you’re just stressing your kidneys because you can’t store it. It’s a ridiculous obsession.

Ella Magers, MSW:

It is. Money again, always, yeah. Comes back to money industries. Something that was painful at the time, but looking back, you’re grateful that it happened.

Glen Merzer:

Wow. Something that was painful at the time, but looking back, I’m grateful that it happened. Well,

Ella Magers, MSW:

We can call it uncomfortable at the time if it wasn’t painful.

Glen Merzer:

Well, I think that I had a career writing in Hollywood, and there were some setbacks in my career writing either for television or for the film industry that were painful at the time. But then I just transitioned to writing books on the advocating the vegan diet, and I feel good about what I’ve been doing. Awesome. And I still write screenplays in play, so I’m still knocking my head against the wall on that.

Ella Magers, MSW:

All right. Last one. What has you feeling especially inspired right now?

Glen Merzer:

What has me feeling especially inspired right now? Well, I think the fact that the awareness of the climate crisis has reached a point where there are very few deniers left, and the majority is on the side of taking it seriously. I don’t think the majority yet knows how to do that by changing their diet. But if they were to learn and understand that the only way to reverse the climate crisis is to eat human food, I think the people would do it. Because I think people want to reverse the climate crisis. And if you think about it, even if we stopped all use of fossil fuels tomorrow, somehow all the cars overnight became electric, and all the electricity was generated by the sun, and we stopped cooking with gas and stopped warming our homes with fossil fuels. Even if that happened overnight, we’re still going to be slowly warming because of all the greenhouse gases that are created by animal agriculture. So there’s no path that way. And we’re not going to have solar airplanes anytime soon.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Well, Glenn, you’re an inspiration. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us. Where can people find you, connect with you, get your books, get Oh, your podcast. You’ve got a podcast. Tell us. Yeah. Oh, that’s right. I

Glen Merzer:

Started a podcast.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Yeah. Tell us

Glen Merzer:

The Glen Mercer Show.

Ella Magers, MSW:

Yes, the

Glen Merzer:

Glen Mercer Show podcast. Well, if you just Google the Glen Mercer Show podcast, you’ll find that I would love to have more subscribers. I just started this recently. And then I have a website, glen mercer.com, that’s Mercer with a z. And I have a newsletter that I send out a free newsletter, the own Your health newsletter. And my books can be found on Amazon Own. Your Health Food is Climate Mad Cowboy. And the books with chef aj. AJ and I have a book out are Unprocessed Cookbook, and she has a book called The Secrets to Ultimate Weight Loss.

Ella Magers, MSW :

Yes, we will put all of those in the show notes. Glenn, I appreciate you. Thank you so much for being here.

Glen Merzer:

Thank you, Ella. I enjoyed it.