Ep 12: The Truth About USDA Organic, Grass-fed & Cage-free w/ Expert Eugene Trufkin

Show notes in order of appearance:

• Last Oh Shit moment for Eugene Trufkin.
• Eugene talks about growing up on an off-the-grid farm in Ukraine
• Eugene’s wake up moment about the truth about food and farming
• Grass-fed and grain-fed
• It’s impossible to find healthy food
• Omega 6 Vs Omega 3 ratios in grass-fed vs grain-fed meat
• Omega 6:3 ratios and their relationship to cancer, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases
• Competition for farmers to produce up to demand
• How meat and vegetable distribution works between large scale companies like Tyson, the grocery stores and its relationship to farmer demands
• How this relationship affects the food you’re eating
• Is organic truly expensive?
• Why switching to a clean food diet actually fills you up more and helps you lose weight/fat
• Eggs: the truth about organic, cage-free, and pasture-raised
• 1955: Factory Farming
• Possible solutions for sustainable farming
• How to be a conscious ester and consumer. 
• Consumer resources

Check out Eugene Trufkin’s book Anti-factory Farm Shopping Guide, visit Trufkin Athletics and find Eugene on Instagram. 

Connect with Sebastian on Instagram

SebastianNaum.com

Below is a transcript of the video podcast created by Seb’s Robot buddy, Zekton. He tends to make mistakes so please forgive him if you find errors or some funky sounding sentences. For the real deal, watch the video or click on your favorite audio Podcast platform above! Enjoy!

Sebastian Naum (00:00:09):
What’s up fam today. I’ve got an extremely knowledgeable and passionate human. His name is Eugene trucking. Eugene is a Czech Institute, certified holistic health coach who specializes in fat loss and operates truck and athletics.com. He’s also the author of the book and tie factory farming, shopping guide. The man can teach you how to get six pack abs, but that’s not what we discussed in today’s podcast. Eugene grew up in an off the grid farm before moving to America. After years of thinking he was eating quote unquote healthy Eugene went on a journey to find out the truth about farming practices in America. We get into the truth about grass fed cage-free and USDA organics. Honestly, guys, this episode taught me a lot about things I thought I already knew in regards to food and farming practices. We don’t just explore the problems though that are out there. We also discuss possible solutions from an everyday consumer standpoint, and we also get into the challenge of being a conscious business owner in the farming industry. I guarantee some of this stuff will blow your mind and you’ll get some really, really valuable nuggets from this episode, guys. Enjoy

Sebastian Naum + Eugene Trufkin (00:01:17):
What’s up Eugene. Welcome to the show. My man. Hey Sebastian,

Eugene Trufkin (00:01:21):
Thank you for having me on

Sebastian Naum (00:01:23):
Right on brother. Right on for those of you who don’t know. I mean, you do not have actually known each other for a long time, like 20 years, uh, since high school. So yeah,

Eugene Trufkin (00:01:32):
80% of it just through Facebook posts, you know? Yeah. We knew each other through high school, but then we kind of went our separate ways, uh, after that. So

Sebastian Naum (00:01:41):
That’s right. A lot of people, I feel like it’s like normal nowadays, like, Oh, you knew each other a long time ago. And then you kind of like continue to, like, you still know about their lives because of social media. So it’s kind of weird, but it’s also, that’s the cool part about social media too, and kind of how I’ve gotten to learn a lot about, um, a lot of these awesome things that you’re doing and we’re going to be talking about on the show, but before we get into that, I like to ask everyone that’s on my show. What was your last, Oh, moment. What’s the first thing that comes to mind.

Eugene Trufkin (00:02:09):
Yeah. So I guess given that like a little bit of thought, I guess it actually ties into my most recent one that I can remember off the top of my head. Uh, it ties actually well into the topic we’ll be talking about today. Uh, so it was probably like four years ago. And for listeners that don’t know, I actually grew up on an, um, on an off-grid biodynamic farm in Ukraine. And I know that sounds fancy, but for, for your listeners, what that means is basically for the most part, what they have a mental image of what they, uh, when they think of farming. So they see like open pastures with many different animals, a variety of different crops and kind of like a small family, uh, kind of living on this farm self-sustaining itself through, through the food that they produced. Uh, and basically when I, uh, kind of moved to the U S and I went to the grocery for the first time, I thought like, basically, like everyone was producing food at that grocery store.

Eugene Trufkin (00:03:05):
Like the way we produce that on our off grid, biodynamic farm. So without like synthetic biocides, uh, beta agonists, steroids, antibiotics, genetically modified ingredients, uh, synthetic fertilizers, whatever the laundry list is like very long with synthetic inputs that are used in industrial agriculture these days. And I didn’t even bother to question it like at all. I just thought like, I’m like, man, look how much look how great the U S economy is. I mean, I can go to Costco and buy 50 eggs that are raised on pasture and like super organic. And it’s only like a dollar 50. I didn’t even know that anyone farmed any other way or what factory farming or industrial agriculture was. I just thought everyone did it the same exact way we did it on that off-grid farm. And basically like that OSHA movement was, uh, like maybe four years ago I was on YouTube and I ran into a video titled nutrition, the dirt facts.

Eugene Trufkin (00:04:03):
And it was hosted by a, by a very prominent, very well-known holistic health expert, uh, Paul check, or it was presented by him, but, uh, rather, and, uh, he basically outlined the stark difference between like factory farming or industrial agriculture and like biodynamic farming. He compared it to biodynamic farming. And, um, I think he compared it to like Rudolf Steiner’s version of biodynamic farm, which isn’t exactly what we did on the off-grid farm I grew up in, but it’s like roughly the same and there’s a lot of overlap. And basically at that point I was like, I kind of woke up from the matrix, like quote, unquote, the matrix. And um, that point I was like, Oh man, there’s like a dramatic difference between, uh, you know, that food for the majority of, uh, for the majority of time that food I purchased, like at Costco versus like the way we grew it on that, uh, on that biodynamic farm. And honestly, at that point, that’s when it all like, became like very, very confusing. So just to give the listener like a quick ideas, um, like

Sebastian Naum (00:05:09):
Where you go on, I want to clarify too. So they off-grid like, it’s typically, it’s like a, for a way of saying like all I’m going off the grid. Right. If people just use that phrase, but when you’re talking off grid farm, you literally mean off, like there was like no electricity, correct?

Eugene Trufkin (00:05:26):
Yeah. So I guess like a good image of, it’s not quite like an Amish community, but kind of like how Amish communities live in the States. So it’s very kind of traditional, like very minimalist and like almost like an anti-technology to a certain yeah,

Sebastian Naum (00:05:40):
Got it. Got it. And then biodynamic, just to like recap that again, that’s basically like traditional farming, how people picture traditional farming of, you know, different kinds of vegetables, different animals, et cetera. Right.

Eugene Trufkin (00:05:51):
That’s basically how, how farming existed before the advent of industrial agriculture or like mass agriculture in general. Yeah. Um, so, so yeah, that’s, that’s basically where, where all the confusion began. And for the most part, like most people don’t care about their health in the U S or maybe the world world as well. You’ve traveled a lot and you kind of see obesity and disease pretty much anywhere you go these days, it’s not limited to just the us. Right. But for the people that even do care, like I know you’re like more health conscious than the average person. I’m more health conscious than the average person it’s still like, especially in the States has become like almost impossible to source like high quality food. And, um,

Sebastian Naum (00:06:35):
So let me stop you there. Right. So why is it almost impossible? Right. I’m thinking, okay, well, I go to whole foods and I buy my organic vegetables and I buy organic this and that. And then I get grass fed, uh, you know, meats and I get pasture raised eggs and things like that. Right. So am I being lied to, am I not really getting healthy foods? Or like, that’s kind of as best as I can do and I just won’t really get the ideal type of food. Can you kind of dig into that a little bit more?

Eugene Trufkin (00:07:02):
Yeah. So you touched on a few different topics there. So it’s kind of going to like the grass fed label that one’s very popular. You’ll hear that in a lot of health circles, like, Oh, eat grass, fed meat, beat by grass fed grass finished, or 100% grass fed beef. You hear this all the time. Uh, but let’s kind of break down what that label even means. So let’s say you go to the grocery store, you see this grass fed label, you purchased the product thinking you’re purchasing like a superior, a superior food group that has like a good nutritional profile. Doesn’t have like a lot of exposure to various industrial chemicals or synthetic biocides, whatever. So let’s kind of break down, let’s break down what that label means basically for your listeners. Like all cattle are grass fed. You can’t feed cattle, grain its entire life.

Eugene Trufkin (00:07:49):
And have it live for like any longer than like eight months on grain. It was just like collapsed to the ground and die. So all cattle are grass fed. So when you see the grass fed label claim, it really doesn’t, it doesn’t say anything out of the ordinary because all cattle are grass fed, all cattle, start their life on pasture. And basically, I mean, it varies from operation operation, but they can spend like 80% of their life on pasture, eating grass. Other various forage may be being supplemented with alfalfa or like some other stuff. And pretty much like 98% of them are sent to kind of like a feedlot towards the finishing phase. So the last few months of their life, just to kind of help fatten them up quite a bit because it is a pound per pound industry. So the more pounds they get on the animal, the more they’ll be able to sell it for.

Eugene Trufkin (00:08:35):
And just some people are more used to the, to the grain finished beef, because that’s what they kind of grew up on where grass-finished beef tends to be like more firmer, less fat, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, so when you hear grass fed, it really doesn’t say anything out of the ordinary. You know, like a lot of times cattle are grass fed, but then grain finished. But then they leave out that grain finished part and some people would be like, well, what’s the big deal about finishing, finishing them on grain. It’s just food. What’s the big deal. So first of all, cattle are like herbivore. So their natural diet is that of like grass and basically other forage for the most part grass. That’s what they’re supposed to be eating naturally when you feed them like a tremendous amount of grains, which they do towards the finishing phase for a couple of months, it does like a couple of things.

Eugene Trufkin (00:09:24):
So one noticeable thing is basically it offsets the Omega three to Omega six ratio. So typically like I volunteered at a legit grass fed operation in, um, the Foothill ranch area, uh, five bar beef.com and they did a meta analysis on their beef. And the Omega three to Omega six ratio came in at like 1.7, five omega-3 to like one Omega six. And for your listeners that don’t know in short Omega six is like a pro-inflammatory too much of it will cause a lot of disease in your body will make it three is like an anti-inflammatory. So it helps dye down. The inflammation helps and obviously decrease all the diseases associated with chronic inflammation. So when you feed them, uh, like a tremendous amount of grain, what happens like with grain finished cattle is you get a ratio of like one or may get three to like eight to 10, Omega six, versus like for example, at five bar beef, you get 1.7, five omega-3 to one Omega six. So completely different ratio. If you’re, and if your listeners look up inflammation, theory of disease, they’ll see like 99% of disease just rises from low grade chronic inflammation, which happens obviously from a variety of sources, you know, like working too many hours, not having a good sleep schedule, having financial stress, low grade, chronic stress, et cetera, et cetera. But one of the biggest variables, it comes from diet from having a pro-inflammatory diet.

Sebastian Naum + Eugene Trufkin (00:10:54):
So there’s the low grade chronic stress is going to be not high amounts of stress. So just as simply as, as it is said, it’s low amounts of stress, but over long periods of time, it basically is building up. Correct?

Eugene Trufkin (00:11:06):
Yeah. So, I mean, in short, this is kind of like a little bit of a perpendicular transition in topics here, but in short, um, there’s a really good book on this, uh, called why zebras don’t get ulcers and it’s a stress physiologists. I forgot the name of it, but it’s like a Polish last name. Uh, but basically the human central nervous system has evolved to, for example, um, you go out with your tribe, you hunt a mammoth, you know, it’s like extremely stressful, but maybe for like a few minutes until that shuffle is finished, you know, the mammoth dies and then basically nothing happens for months on it. You know, you might go fishing occasionally you might hang out with your life, your tribe, you might exactly. And, uh, that’s the type of stress that your central nervous system has actually evolved to deal with.

Eugene Trufkin (00:11:52):
And isn’t that stressful for it to deal with, but the type of stress your central nervous system isn’t evolved to deal with is basically low grade chronic stress. So this is stuff we’ll say, like, you constantly hear this in, uh, in conversations like, Oh, you know, you shouldn’t worry about that. It’s so small. True. It might be small like sitting in traffic, for instance, it might bite me small or, you know, working those extended longer hours in a sedentary environment might be small stressors. They’re not like being, not like you’re being held at gunpoint or, uh, in some, you don’t have any food or any of that where she kind of tends to be a major stressor, but don’t really ever happen. But those low grade chronic stresses is actually what is actually very stressful and detrimental to the immune system. Okay. And it also increases your inflammation quite a bit when you’re exposed to it.

Eugene Trufkin (00:12:43):
I mean, look at the average American they’re working like 50 plus hours a week, have financial stress have, uh, like marital stress, et cetera, you know, have like a lot of demands put on them, have to sit in traffic. What, especially being in LA have to sit in traffic two blocks. It’s like an hour drive. You know, people honking at you, people running around, then you got to do that again. You’ve got to do that like every single day of the year. And that kind of like really wears down the body and it causes like a lot of inflammation in the body, but going back, it could also be caused through diet. So once again, this person is going to the grocery store. They’re trusting that label. You know, they’re thinking, okay, I’m getting a superior product, but because the grassfed label isn’t regulated by anyone like literally as a rancher, I could just fill out a piece of paperwork saying, I’m, grassfed turn it in.

Eugene Trufkin (00:13:34):
And that’s it. There’s no, yeah, there’s no onsite inspection. That’s like me saying like, well, I graduated from Stanford. Okay. You just have to take my word for it. You know, there’s no way to check. There’s no way to verify. I’m just a medical doctor from Stanford. And you’re like, Oh, okay. And that’s basically how the grassfed label works in the U S there’s there, there are some regulations to sell cattle into the grass fed program as you know, small, small babies. But then after that, there’s like no oversight, no onsite inspections, nothing. And the way the industry works, especially if, um, if a rancher is producing meat for a supermarket, the supermarket needs a steady supply because that’s what the customers demand. You know, when you go to the supermarket, you expect to see like beef every day. You know what I mean? But

Eugene Trufkin (00:14:21):
If you’re like, um, if you’re at a legit

Eugene Trufkin (00:14:24):
Like grass fed operation, I mean, the supply varies depending on the season, you know, like how much grass the gurus some years are bad. Some years there isn’t that much grass and that’s going to greatly affect the amount of pounds you could produce for the supermarket. Now, obviously the supermarket isn’t going to be too happy if you’re shorting them on the pounds and are able to supply the quantities they need. So the rancher obviously wants to keep these contracts to very, very, very competitive international marketplace. So they’re competing against other countries as well. Uh, they’re just incentivized to kind of cut corners and you need like one to gain one pound of meat on a legit grassfed cattle. You need like 150 pounds of grass. That’s converted into one pound of meat, but you can kind of supplement probably 20 or 30 pounds of grain to get the same conversion ratio and grain. You can obviously purchase grass. Obviously you can purchase crass, pellets and stuff, but that’s where it progressed. There’s only so much of it that grows on the ground. If it’s slow season, you can kind of see you’ve been in the business world for awhile. You can kind of see how they’re incentivized to cut corners from time to time. Yeah. And then, um, sometimes people would say, well, Eugene, my package, doesn’t say grassfed, it says grass fed and grass finished. So that’s definitely legit. And you hear this like very often,

Sebastian Naum (00:15:40):
If you’re looking at labels, then first of all, like, you know, this is, and I consider myself someone who’s fairly educated in the food they eat, but kind of blowing my mind there by just saying that, just saying the grass fed isn’t highly regulated. I was under the impression that it was, but then again, I just never really knew. And it didn’t really do my research in it. So I’m glad your, you know, educated me on that. And I’m sure that just about everybody who’s listening, most people that’s the first time I heard of it. So what is the label to look for then? It’s grass fed grass finished. Yeah.

Eugene Trufkin (00:16:11):
Well, that’s tricky too. So once again, I can be a rancher. I could feed my cattle grass for about eight months, put them on grain for four months, finish them on grass for a week. And I’m still like, I’m not lying to you. It is grass fed and grass finished, but I totally totally forgot to leave out that middle part. And then once again, no one is, there’s no onsite inspections to our third body, third party certification bodies, which we’ll talk about later because I don’t want to be just complaining, which anyone can do. I’m going to provide like very easy solutions in the podcast as well, right? That even an executive with 50 or 60 hours of work per week can implement in a very realistic manner, but to make, but to make it the, just the grassfed claim, even more complicated, actually the us gets 90% of its grass fed beef from overseas.

Eugene Trufkin (00:17:00):
You know, it could come from Australia, which is kind of, okay. It could come from Brazil, which is probably not too okay. Could come from Mexico, could come from wherever you don’t know, because what happens is like if you see product of the USA label, what that legally actually means is I could DIA processor import carcasses from Mexico, process them in Santa Monica, California into packages and legally label it product of the USA. Although the cattle were raised slaughtered in Mexico and just the carcasses were transported here and processed here. So it didn’t used to be this way, maybe like seven years ago, it used to be product for the USA, grown, harvested, and processed in the USA, which is what that label should mean, which is what common sense would say. But then obviously these big meat Packers, they went and lobbied Congress and they changed the rules.

Eugene Trufkin (00:17:55):
And now it’s like probably whenever you see product video, say that’s a dead giveaway that it’s not from the U S you know, so yeah. And then, yeah, it gets even like you can buy 100% grass fed beef, literally doesn’t mean anything. Actually, that happened to me. I was buying it’s at 100% grass fed beef in a supermarket for like two years. And then I decided to call the company one day and ask them like, Oh, you know, about their food production practices. And they’re like, yeah, we send them to a feed lot. And we feed them like grasped pellets in a feed lot towards the end, which won’t necessarily change the nutritional composition. I don’t think depending on how those grass pellets were produced, but if they’re produced and there’s some kind of preservative in there, like intoxicating is very common to use in fish pellets, they use some kind of preservative that builds up quite a bit in the fat content of the, of the cow, because remember you need 150 pounds roughly of these grass pellets to convert into one pound of edible, like flesh on the cow.

Eugene Trufkin (00:18:52):
So you can imagine the, uh, the biomagnification that happens in that food group. So you can see, it’s kind of like I’m asking for something simple, like something simple, like I just want grassfed beef. And literally how complicated just that subject alone, uh, has become. And we just touched on the, the, you know, what kind of food they’re fed, but also you have to take into consideration the, uh, when you put an animal in a confined situation, which is what’s going to happen in any grain fed operation. There are like very few cases where they bring bins of grains out to pasture and the cattle just eat from there. But for the most part, 99% of cattle are sent to a feedlot. And when they’re in a feed lot, and I was introduced to this topic by, uh, Terry Cochon, the author of the Wildatarian diet, I don’t even know like anything about M a amyloids before running into this subject.

Eugene Trufkin (00:19:47):
But when you, when you take an animal and put it in a feedlot, this could be from pigs, chickens, cattle, and even farmed fish, anything that’s in a concentrated environment, you basically have three things that happen that cause the animal to be chronically inflamed. So one, you have confinement. So obviously their shoulders shoulder, that’s very stressful for the animal, uh, too well, even when their shoulders shoulder is stressful for the animal, especially with the cattle topic. I mean, they’re also importing various different types of catalysts into this pen from different ranches. Then they have like all these unknown other cattle that they have to kind of like sort out, plus it’s like a very confined, stressful environment. Uh, then you have a tremendous amount of bacteria buildup as well. So they’re not rotated onto fresh pastures, just kind of sitting in this pen or this warehouse with hens, for example.

Eugene Trufkin (00:20:41):
And there’s a lot of fecal matter. So there’s a lot of bacteria build up from various cattle as well. This causes a lot of inflammation. And then also actually ironically, the vaccines they’re are given cross inflammation in the animal. Also when the animal is so chronically inflamed from these three variables, the liver produces just too much serum, amyloid, a proteins, which are totally okay. And like small amounts, they’re soluble. They get processed by the body and it’s fine. But when chronically exposed to this low grade chronic stress, the liver starts producing too much serum, amyloid, a proteins. And some of those break up into amyloid proteins, which are not soluble. And they begin to form this plaque around the various organ tissues of the animal, as well as to a smaller extent, the muscle tissues. Well, and I haven’t been able to conclusively find any human feeding studies, but there are plenty of mice feeding studies@pubmed.gov that show that mice fed AAM Lloyds also develop a amyloidosis their body.

Eugene Trufkin (00:21:43):
You know, it could be on one organ or it could be systemic on multiple organs and muscle tissue and the symptoms could vary. It could be something as extreme as Alzheimer’s, which is like very debilitating type two diabetes, gut issues, joint pain among the mother, uh, among, uh, other like a variety of other, other health issues that you could be exposed to. So, so you have that, that issue as well. And you’re just remember, it’s like this person just wanted healthy, like natural meat, what they think of their natural meat. They’re thinking like a cattle just out in the pasture, eating grass, not exposed to any chemicals. That’s what they think when they’re thinking of grass fed label claims. And most likely that’s probably not what you’re going to get. So, and that’s just what that, I mean, this is across the board with every single type of food group you’ll find,

Sebastian Naum (00:22:34):
Hey guys, I just want to remind you that you can get more content like this@sebastiannom.com. That’s a bastion N a U m.com. And you can also get a ton of other marketing resources from myself and my agencies ranging from SEO to social media, influencer, marketing, branding, animation, web development, and more again, that’s Sebastian nom.com. Thank you. And enjoy the rest of the show.

Sebastian Naum (00:22:56):
I was going to say before, you know, before we try to jump into like solutions and potential, not necessarily solutions, but just a best practices, like why this is even a thing from a business standpoint and how that could be improved and as consumers, what we can do. So before we get into that, why don’t we just complain a little bit more? So she said complain, right. Um, how does this let’s, you know, kind of summarize how that’s the case with eggs, for example, is that very similar in the sense with eggs, for, you know, chickens and you’re looking at, I, you know, when I found out about pasture raised eggs, as opposed to just cage-free understanding that there’s like all these regulations where cage free just means to get a ladder of a cage for X amount of time. And they go right back into those types of scenarios that you were saying where there’s animals on top of each other. There’s fecal matter. There’s all these kinds of things that are happening, right? So the pasture raised label helps with that. Correct. For example, in the, in the case of eggs.

Eugene Trufkin (00:23:51):
Yeah. So this topic alone could be like a five-hour conversation, but I’m going to try to break. I’m

Sebastian Naum + Eugene Trufkin (00:23:55):
Going to try to break it down, slow it down.

Eugene Trufkin (00:23:58):
I’m going to try to, I’m going to try to break it down just quick. And this is, um, this is actually how my journey began. I just wanted healthy eggs and four years later, I’m still looking for that stuff. Maybe, maybe you’re someone, one of your listeners can help like email me some, some information, but basically that part is pretty confusing. You have a few, few things going on. So few different distinct operations and then many operations in between those operations. So you have the no label. You see no label on the cartridge, definitely want to stay with that. Stay away from that. You see a cage-free definitely want to stay away from that. Uh, you see free range, even free range. Organic. I’d say you definitely want to stay away from that in my opinion. Cause free range, organic is probably the best you’re going to find in most grocery stores.

Eugene Trufkin (00:24:46):
And what that simply means, um, is simply like you have a huge warehouse, you have a couple thousand hens in this warehouse and then you have a small little concrete patio where they have access to the outdoors, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they actually go outdoors and you’ll see it in the label. They’re not lying to you in the label. They say access to the outdoors. They don’t say they are outdoors, which are different phrases, you know? So they’re not lying to you. And, uh, usually what happens if you ever visit any of these operations? Uh, you’ll have like 50 chickens outside and then probably the rest of the 99% of them never even venture outside because typically it’s like a very small little opening. And because these hens tend to be like very young, especially the meat chickens, uh, there are two distinct categories.

Eugene Trufkin (00:25:32):
There’s like meat, chickens, and an egg lane has as well, which are then turned into meat, chickens at the end of their production period because they’re so young, they see like a lot of light coming into this small opening. They’re kind of afraid of it. And they typically just stay inside with all their friends and they don’t even venture outside. And what happens is, uh, when you don’t take the animals to the food, like you’re not rotating them onto to fresh pasture, you have to bring the food to the animals. And what’s since 80% of the cost of like an egg operation is going to be the food you feed the animal. Uh, it’s Mo the, the farmer is incentivized to use nothing but corn and soy for the most part because it’s subsidized by the taxpayer. So once again, you have a taxpayer paying for the function of a private enterprise, which then that private enterprise sells the product back to the taxpayer. So it’s kind of tricky. And we’ll talk about like why organic tends to be a little bit more expensive, at least at the supermarket level. And it’s because a lot of these subsidies do exist and we’ll break that down in a lot of detail. And, uh,

Sebastian Naum (00:26:39):
Essentially mean in this case, what is organic when it comes to eggs? Is it organic for the most part?

Eugene Trufkin (00:26:47):
For the most part literally means they’re just fed organic corn and soy. And that’s like, literally it could be like a confined situation, like a factory farmed environment where they’re funding just organic corn and soy. But even that’s a little bit tricky because 50% of the grains fed to the animals are actually imported from super, super corrupt countries like Ukraine or Turkey and nothing against Ukraine. I’m obviously from there, you know, but just facts are facts. And like what happens is the corruption is at the broker level, not the farmer level. So the farmer would raise the grains through synthetic biocides, like glyphosate, for example, very common one, uh, very common herbicide use. Uh, the paperwork would be switched around at the broker level at the shipyard and import it as organic grains into the U S and then fed that grain to the organic system in the U S meat production system.

Eugene Trufkin (00:27:41):
So I’d say like, even when you’re dealing with grain produced meat, uh, even when you see organic, there’s still a very high chance that it’s actually not even organic green. So you’re getting, you’re getting that, uh, synthetic trace amounts of various synthetic biocides that happened to be used in that specific crop production system. So, um, so that’s literally, that’s literally what it means that you still run into all the same problems. Chickens are omnivores, they’re fed, uh, they should be eating worms, bugs, insects as vegetables, fruit, but when you feed them like excessive amounts of grain, all you’re really doing is just shooting up the Omega six in relation to Omega three, which is the exact same problem we covered in cattle production as well. So, um, so it all says pollination. Yeah. And then also, I mean, there’s a dramatic difference between the nutritional value of pasture raised eggs versus, uh, versus these confined operations.

Eugene Trufkin (00:28:40):
So like Joel salads, and he’s probably the most famous farmer like in the world. Um, he had his, uh, pasture raised eggs tested against the typical conventionally farmed eggs at some like lab in Portland got maybe in like 2013 and they showed, I forgot the exact numbers, but they showed in some, uh, various new sheets. There’s like 900% more of like a specific micronutrient or like 300% more Omega three. It’s not like just like little bit more. I mean, it’s dramatically, dramatically different in terms of the nutritional quality, quality and get. And especially if people are, and I’m like a fat loss coach. And when I transitioned people onto sourcing high quality meats, vegetables, et cetera, et cetera, they automatically right off the bat eat about 40% less calories during the day and feel fuller because the nutritional density is so much higher. See have a lot of, a lot of nutritional density, a lot of volume as well.

Eugene Trufkin (00:29:37):
So it fills up your stomach quite a bit, but the calorie intake is like very low overall. And in fact, like even with 200 pound males, if you convert them to actually like legit pasture raise meat, like legit non starchy vegetables from good sourced farms, it’s very tough for them to even eat 1600 calories a day. Like very, very, really, very, very hard. Yeah. Even if they’re working out like three or four days a week, maybe if they do that for like a few months, then their calorie intake will pick up. But when I initially transitioned like a office worker to transitioning from like, usually eating out with their coworkers for lunch, which is like fast food junk for the most part to actually sourcing high quality pasture-raised meats fed is species Pacific diet. That’s very important. Sourcing, high quality fruits and vegetables. Uh, yeah. I mean, at the beginning of the first few months, they can’t even eat more than 1600, 1700 calories. Yeah.

Sebastian Naum (00:30:35):
That’s super interesting. That’s really, really interesting. But what was the percentage you use? You’re saying if they’re eating the right things, you’re looking at like 40% less.

Eugene Trufkin (00:30:44):
Yeah. You probably need like 30 to 40% less calories in your daily, daily intake. So

Sebastian Naum (00:30:50):
Jumping you into this path of fat loss essentially.

Eugene Trufkin (00:30:53):
Yeah. Because obviously you establish that caloric deficit and you don’t have any inflammatory foods in your diet and your sourcing is very good. So those are the three, three pillars for any fat loss, successful fat loss journey and just right. Just to optimize your health in general. But yeah, it’s like, it’s also cheaper because the people actually eat less. Uh, and then also, I mean, in regards to the price, some people, they always kind of come up to me and they’re like, well, you know, I don’t buy that stuff because it’s more expensive. And I hear that usually from people that never actually have done the hard math on it, they just go off like general propaganda and they just presume this to be the case.

Sebastian Naum (00:31:29):
Literally that was my next question to you. It was, Hey, you know, people say that all the time, I don’t buy organic or I don’t buy this or that because it’s more expensive. I just can’t afford to do it. And I, I don’t, I get to say, I go, well, you know, I eat all these extra, you know, organic and pasture-raised and grass fed all these things because I’m grateful that I can afford it. I’ll say something like that. For example, I’m in a way I’m also perpetuating that thought the concept of it being too expensive. So break that down for us.

Eugene Trufkin (00:31:57):
Yeah. So I’ll break it down at the trench level, the ground level where everyone can understand, and then we’ll, we’ll take it to like a higher level topic, which is kind of like a global problem. Right? Uh, basically I went to sprouts farmers market. You’re familiar with that chain. Probably they have a bunch of LA, uh, but basically it’s like a higher cycle, roughly higher end organic supermarket that has like a bunch of organic stuff. And then a bunch of factory farm stuff as well. And basically a standardized a 2000 calorie diet for the same amount of like protein carbs fats for the factory farm guide. And then the USDA organic certified diet, and basically for a factory farm in 2000 calorie a day diet, it costs $7 and 70 cents per day. Hmm. And then for a USDA certified organic supermarket level, organic diet, it costs $12 and 20 cents per day.

Eugene Trufkin (00:32:47):
Okay. So right there, I mean, some people would point that out. Well, Eugene, I told you it’s more expensive. It’s $5, clearly $5 a day, more expensive. Okay. Well, let’s look at the average Americans expenses. Okay. When you look at their books, you look at their finances and you take a fine comb through it. You’ll see that the average American spends about seven to $15,000 a year on non-essential expenses. This includes Netflix subscriptions buying random apps on their phone. Although most people aren’t executive level business owners. For some reason, they need the most expensive up-to-date smartphone, which is like a thousand dollars or whatever. And then how many ever more dollars per month, uh, going out to eat with coworkers, all alcohol, all these things, man. So they have enough money to spend on that and not complain about it, but they don’t have. So remember that was seven to 15,000 a year.

Eugene Trufkin (00:33:40):
That’s what the average American spends on those non-essential expenses. That’s literally bringing them zero, zero value to their life. It’s just hindering their health. It’s hurting their appearance. It’s not making them feel good. It’s adding no value to their life. They’re supporting companies that are also adding no value to the world in general. And then, and then, so comparing that seven to 15,000. So remember the USDA organic supermarket level, organic diet costs about 3.7 K per month, per year. Okay. So they can’t afford $3,700 a year, but they could afford 7,000 a year or two, 15,000 a year on all this non-essential BS purchases. You know, they could afford that. Also, when you take into consideration, the average American, according to Nepali checks spends about five to 7,000 a year on medical expenses related to poor lifestyle and nutrition choices. Okay. So when you take that in consideration, the seven to 15,000 spent on non essential expenses and the five to 7,000 spent on medical expenses, like, what are you talking about? You don’t have the money, you have the money you’re already spending the money and you’re spending far more money. In most cases. There’s some people that legitimately don’t have that difference. Correct. But for the majority of people, they do have that difference and they’re just not spending it consciously enough propaganda paradigms. And then just going with that, you know?

Sebastian Naum (00:35:09):
Yeah. So, I mean, it was essentially what I’m hearing at the, at the end of the day, it’s the bottom line is it’s choices because somebody may say, Hey look. So when you say Eugene looked like this, non-essential, you know, uh, movies that I went to see or Netflix, or, you know, the beers that I had with my buddy, someone’s going to say, Hey, they actually did brought me. They did bring me value because I enjoyed that. And that was part of my entertainment. And that’s fine. That’s, you know, they didn’t bring them nutritional value or value to their body or health, but it maybe brought them entertainment value, and that’s on them to make the choice. But the bottom line is, Hey, you can still afford this really good diet. That’s the bottom line. And at the end of the day, it’s a choice. It’s a very small amount of people that literally are only spending this money on food. And they can’t make that extra little bump to spend it on food, essentially.

Eugene Trufkin (00:35:55):
That’s, that’s all I’m saying. If you look at their books, because they’re saying they don’t have the money, correct. What I’m saying is they do have the money is just spent on wisely in my opinion. So, and everyone has their own core values about how money should be spent. But anyways, the point is they do have the money, another global issue, and this kind of ties well into the theme of your podcast is the U S basically operates on a, um, on a vertically integrated farming system. So the factory farm model was actually invented by two guys from America, two business guys from America in 1955, John and Don Tyson, they basically invented the factory farm model. And there’s a really good book called the meat racket by Christopher Leonard that outlines their business practice. Uh, farming is kind of just the background theme. It moreover talks, it’s called the meat racket for purpose, you know, because it talks about just how schemey these two guys were in putting basically every farmer in America, like every small farmer in America, out of business, uh, in exchange for supplying the U S with like super low quality food.

Eugene Trufkin (00:36:57):
Uh, and basically, um, how vertical integration works or the factory farm model works is like, let’s say you’re a chicken farmer. So we talked about chicken eggs, uh, or let’s just say, you’re a meat chicken farmer. Okay. And I come to you on like Tyson foods, which is a huge meat Packers, huge corporation. Uh, at one point they’re the biggest meat packer in the entire world. And I come to you and I’m like, well, Sebastian, I’m going to bring these 20,000 hens on the first of every month. And I just want you to raise them to my standards. That’s all I want you to do. So if I say, you need to give them these antibiotics, that’s what you need to do. If I say, you need to feed them a non species, Pacific diet of just GMO grains, that’s what you need to do. Uh, keep them indoors. If I say that, that’s what you’re going to do. So basically you’re just like an employee at that point, but you’re like an independent contractor. Right. And, uh, then how would say like,

Sebastian Naum (00:37:54):
And sorry to interrupt you. But basically at that point, the deal is too sweet for me, is that farmer right? Because otherwise, either I’m not going to get that demand, right. I’m not either not going to get to use my farm or like my prices won’t be competitive enough to where I kind of don’t have a choice, but to do that, is that kinda how it goes down?

Eugene Trufkin (00:38:11):
Well, you always have a choice. You have a choice of just staying, like small-scale as guide. But yeah, the advantage of working with a huge corporation is like, I have all the grocery store contracts, you know, I have all the veterinarians, I have the multimillion dollar slaughter facilities. I have the trucks and the logistics, literally everything’s planned out. All you have to do is just grow these, these hens and very tempting and incentivizing for you, obviously, because you’re like, well, I just lost all my responsibility, which I wasn’t even that good at doing anyways. I wasn’t good at the marketing thing. I wasn’t good at legal stuff. I wasn’t good at the contracts, et cetera. So perfect. I’ll just get a check in the mail every two months when they come pick up their hands and that’s that. Yeah. They’ll, they’ll agree. And there’ll be like, Tyson foods would be like, well, okay, it’s a deal, but your facility is way too small to house the amount of production we want to do.

Eugene Trufkin (00:39:05):
So we’re going to require you to go to a bank and take out like a $400,000 bank loan. And remember like the average farmers making like maybe 50, 60,000 a year. Okay. So keep that in mind. So 400,000 is like a tremendous amount of money for probably most people, but especially like someone making 50, 60,000 a year. And, uh, there’ll be like, well, it’s so, uh, you’re going to go to that bank and I know you have bad credit or whatever, but they’re going to give you the loan anyways, because we’re sending your way. And the bank is totally okay with this because these farmer assisted loans, they’re subsidized by the taxpayer. So if the farmer goes out of business, what happens is the bank sells off the property of the farmer in any assets on that property, to the corporation. That’s how all this consolidation actually happened.

Eugene Trufkin (00:39:56):
And the difference of what they can’t collect, they get from the taxpayer. So you can see it’s like a win-win for the bank. They get to collect interest while the farmer is in business. And if they go out of business, I really don’t care. I’m going to get my money back anyways. And then the difference of what I can’t get back directly from him, I will be able to get back from the taxpayer. So when you see, when you go into the grocery store and you see like beef for like $4, that factory farm beef and the organic beef for like seven bucks, the difference really is in those subsidies because remember, 80% of the cost of the production is grain, which is subsidized by the taxpayer. Then these bank bailout loans, which is subsidized by the taxpayer. So when you think you’re actually paying like four bucks, really you’re paying like six bucks, it’s just the two bucks. There’s like prepaid, you know, you like prepaid for that item, but you don’t really see that. So when you combine like all those like kind of subsidy programs with the non-essential expenses, with the amount the person is spending on their medical expenses, that all of a sudden becomes like a no brainer of like, what’s more affordable, you know?

Sebastian Naum (00:40:59):
Yeah. The whole medical expenses is something that nobody really thinks about, or you kinda like, you don’t really calculate that, but it’s true. You know, and that’s, that’s assuming that the small, that, that amount of medical expenses is actually even providing a solution to your health.

Eugene Trufkin (00:41:15):
I mean, most of the time you’re never going to get anywhere with just pharmaceutical drugs, just like masking symptoms, just to have them get worse and worse year after year. Yeah. It’s not. Yeah, exactly. Like you said, it’s not even like, uh, providing a solution. Yeah. That would be one thing if it actually cured you or something, but it literally does like almost nothing 95% of the time except make the problem worse because you never got to the etiology or change the belief system that led you to all those problems to begin with.

Sebastian Naum (00:41:43):
Sure. No. Yeah, absolutely. So Eugene, we’ve covered a lot and I know that you can go on forever about a lot of this stuff, but I want to kind of transition a little bit into you. You wrote a book called, um, anti factory farm shopping, the shopping guide. Right. So if you were to, and I encourage anybody out there to go ahead and go out and buy this book, you clearly, you can see it. You’ve done a lot of research, very passionate about this. So give us some tips on, you know, what it is that we can go out and buy. And I, and I also do want to ask you is from a farming standpoint, right? If we’re kind of tying back to, you know, also the subject of the podcast about conscious profits that about conscious business, right? It sounds like it’s very difficult for a farmer to not fall into this path of, you know, not having these, you know, uh, more traditional ways of farming that are going to be better for our health, ultimately, because it’s hard for them to scale. So why don’t we, and whatever you want to answer or lead with first in terms of either the conscious business on the farmer’s side and, and, or, um, you know, the, the, the anti factory farming. Um, sure.

Eugene Trufkin (00:42:48):
Yeah. So, um, I forgot the name of the author, but it’s a teaming with microbes Jeff something. Uh, but basically he gave a really good example in the book of like, if you look at the earth as an Apple and you shave off like 70% of that Apple, that’s the ocean. So obviously you’re not going to be farming anything there. Right. And if you shave off like 15% of the Apple, that’s basically landmass that can’t be used for farming. You can’t kind of grow anything on that plan. And then the remaining, like, uh, the remaining percentage of basically a large percentage of those is like metropolitan areas like Los Angeles that are grown on very fertile land. So obviously you’re not going to be growing large farms. They have, I see like urban farms popping up here and they’re very small scale. It’s like very, very small.

Eugene Trufkin (00:43:36):
So you’re not going to be farming there. So basically you’re left with like eight, five to 8% of the Earth’s surface mass that is able to be farmed for food. And that percentage is quickly depleting by quickly, quickly depleted, just because of these industrial agricultural models, all this grain, any type of grain is grown in a monoculture. You know, like a lot of vegetarians for example, are like, Oh, I’m saving the planet by not eating meat. Well, the thing is it’s like, what are they, what are they eating for their main source of calories? They’re eating lentils beans, uh, various grains, Brown rice, whatever wild rice, how are all those crops grown? They’re grown in monocultures, what’s depleting the earth. Uh, what’s depleting the earth of farmable land monocultures, not like animals, not sustainable, like animal agriculture. They can go to on pub med.gov better and find like a single study that shows like animals grown a biodynamic manner.

Eugene Trufkin (00:44:33):
Sorry, animals grown in a biodynamic manner actually like hurt the land or deplete the land of nutrients. They, if anything, like add regenerative value to the land. Uh, so you’re, you’re going to have to change soon anyways around because basically the F the world’s going to be like at our food pretty soon. Uh, possibly, maybe even to the end of our lifetime, you know, when we’re like 70 or 80. So it’s not even like that far away, not even that like, kind of hypothetical, very real problem. Um, that’s why a lot of these companies like Memphis meats, they’re creating like fake meat. That’s in a laboratory, you know, like fake food, cause they’re like, well, we’ll be out of real food soon, but then you’re stuck with obviously, like, who knows what they’re making that food out of, you know? And actually most of the time they’re making it out of grains, they’re just condensing the grains and turning it into kind of like pseudo meat products, which is making that cycle even worse, you know, because it’s a lot of this grain and crop production, that’s actually just showing, destroying the earth. So, um, I don’t know if that answers it. I kind of forgot exactly what the question,

Sebastian Naum (00:45:41):
I mean, well, I’m glad that you brought it. I mean, I’m glad you brought this up. And so essentially, how can a farmer, how can, you know, how can you have a conscious business when it’s it’s it sounds like it’s so difficult to actually have and run a conscious business. If you have a farm, whether it is, you know, you’re producing eggs, meat, chicken, whatever that is, right. Is there a, is there a real solution to this? Do you see an opportunity for someone who has makes a living in this to actually do it in a conscious manner? That’s gonna be good for the environment and good for the humans that are eating the food they’re producing.

Eugene Trufkin (00:46:17):
Yeah. Like I volunteered on a bunch of regenerative, kind of quote-unquote agriculture, regenerative agriculture is a famous, fancy way of saying like, just let nature do what it would do if you weren’t around anyways. Uh, with just like some management practice here, but basically like that happened. Yeah. happy-hens.com. They actually sell eggs and like whole foods in your area. Uh they’re like, according to soy free pasture-raised egg operation, I volunteered there to learn about the hubs husbandry practices of pasture-raised eggs. Uh, five bar beef.com is pretty much like wild beef. I mean, he, uh, he’s been doing it for 40 years. He started his, uh, uh, herd since like 30 years ago. And basically he let the ones just leaves them there and the ones that die out end up dying out and the ones that are strong enough to survive in that environment end up living in reproducing to produce cattle that survive in that environment vaccine free. He doesn’t clip his bulls. So that testosterone content and the meat is higher. Doesn’t, de-horn the cattle either. They’re on pasture 24, literally 24 seven,

Sebastian Naum (00:47:23):
Nick, uh, you know, is a business like this realistic in terms of, you know, scale. Cause that’s, that’s part of the issue that you were saying earlier. It’s like, is it really scalable?

Eugene Trufkin (00:47:36):
Yeah. We’ll look at it. Look at it this way. I mean, basically before, in terms of like, are you asking scalable in terms of, are we able to produce that amount of goods to feed a population? Is that what you’re asking? Yeah, correct. So look at it this way. It’s very, very simple. These are like rough numbers, of course. Uh, but before the 18 hundreds, there used to be like estimated 80 to 60 million bison that are roaming America, uh, before obviously, um, it was colonized and then a lot of those hurts were killed for various reasons to get rid of the Indians, just for sports, for industry, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, but basically if you just, and they say they’re sustained on the land. In fact, the land was far more fertile than it is today with those bison around. And look, if you bring those back, like literally there’s zero farming involved.

Eugene Trufkin (00:48:26):
You just let them do what they do anyways. And you basically killed like half of them every year. That would pretty much give every single American today, like vaccine free antibiotic free high quality meats. That’s fed a species specific diet that’s wild game, which is the apex of meat production that would give them about, uh, like 59 pounds of meat per year. Like every single American, every single American. And then for one 15th of an acre and, um, many Americans have one 15th of an acre to farm their own crops. You can grow for a family of three, about 350 pounds of vegetables per year. One 15th of an acre. One acre will grow you about 17,000. Wow. Uh, so that’s writing your, so will it feed every single person just by those two methods? No. Will feed a large bulk majority of people and release pressure from the agricultural system.

Eugene Trufkin (00:49:22):
Yes, it would. And then if you throw in, uh, a variety of these regenerative farming practices, like biodynamic farming, you know, that run as businesses as supplying food, you can see it’s like, it’s very doable. It’s more of like a policy problem. The us trying to the U S government putting a lot of strides and efforts on getting the U S male to leave the farming lifestyle and get into more white collar work, being lawyers, engineers, all this stuff to help boost the GDP of the country instead of being tied down into working the land or working with the animals. Um, so that’s, it’s more of like a policy issue than like, Oh, is it possible or not possible? Okay.

Sebastian Naum (00:50:02):
And so a lot of times when I think about this stuff, and like you said, it’s a policy issue and it’s also as consumers, we drive also what’s going on, right? Because if you go out and you buy the really crappy, cheap eggs, and you buy the really meat, you are feeding right. That business. And so the grocery store wants more demand for that cheap product, that product. And then they go to who then goes to that small time farmer and then forces them to go into this type of right. Uh, you know, let’s say unsustainable practice or practices that are not going to be great for the environment or for, for your health. So as consumers, we can do our part, right. Because the more, the better things we consume, the better it will be for us. And it will also help those, you know, um, conscious businesses thrive more, those sustainable farming practices thrive more. Right. So, um, give us a little bit of advice about how can we, you know, practical advice of like, okay, what can I, you know, what can, I mean, you, you actually, you, you dropped a cool, a good name for meat. Uh, you said, happy hands for eggs. I can’t remember the name that you said for meat, but like just in general, maybe outside of like one or two businesses, like how do we shop more consciously in order to help improve those businesses and right. And drive more conscious business in the farming industry?

Eugene Trufkin (00:51:20):
Yeah. So doing what I did in volunteering at a ranch is not realistic for like 99.9% of people. Uh, so what’s realistic as they can visit a website called American grassfed.org, they can go to the bottom of the website. It’s this simple go to the bottom of the website, click on the interactive map and then boom, click on your state. You have a variety of pasture, like legit pasture-raised operations that have actually been onsite inspected by American grassfed. So remember, there’s no inspection process. Like I mentioned to you to actually go there to inspect the ranch, uh, and they have, uh, they basically hold the right to also do a, uh, a random audit as well. So just randomly show up at your ranch as well. So they can order from there, for example, you order before Tuesday, they ship it out on Tuesday, you get it to your door on Thursday, I’ll just recommend, uh, it’s like a $10 fee for the shipping, which some people would argue about. But then look, how much time it’s taken you to get in your car, drive to the grocery store, sit in traffic, get in the parking lot, get out of the parking lot, go walk around, stand in line with like people that are super slow and then having to pay for your food. You know, you’re like waste your whole day doing one grocery store run, which I’m pretty sure it’s worth more than $10 for most people. So you could buy

Sebastian Naum (00:52:37):
A good amount and then breeze. That’s

Eugene Trufkin (00:52:39):
What I was just going to say. Uh, so I buy like three to four weeks worth at a time. I haven’t gone to the grocery store in forever. I honestly don’t even have a car and I’m still able to get all my food. So I don’t even have a car. Um, I’m able to order all this food and actually much higher quality food than you’ll probably find even at whole foods. Right.

Sebastian Naum (00:52:57):
And we’re listening to, it’s not because Eugene can’t afford a car it’s because he, it’s a, it’s a choice that he, that he makes some sure. Right?

Eugene Trufkin (00:53:03):
Yeah. I just, I just didn’t see it as an S like, I have my gym here. I have my steam room here at the place I work remotely, which I love doing. And I just, I don’t need a car. And, uh, it helps save a lot of money. I don’t like cars. I don’t like fixing cars or having to deal with like annoyance of cars. So it’s like, um, you’ll be surprised, man, just ditching your car or getting car per family unit saves you thousands a year. You know, it’s like, do you really need two cars? Especially with people like a lot of people working remotely. Now I highly doubt it. You know?

Sebastian Naum (00:53:35):
And also in most cities, it’s, it’s fairly easy to make that change. Unfortunately, LA has pretty bad public transportation, but that’s a whole different issue we don’t need to get into. But yes. Um, but in general to tie it back though, so American grassfed door.org, that’s a great way. A great there

Eugene Trufkin (00:53:53):
Bar beef, obviously they don’t use, I volunteered there. Frank Fitzpatrick, he’s like a legend in the beef industry. He helped accelerate my learning curve with the grass fed beef. Uh, he doesn’t use any vaccines, no medicines, no antibiotics, no beta agonists. Doesn’t spray anything on the ground where the cattle roam they’re outside, they don’t get clipped. They don’t get de-horned like nothing. You know, this is like literally like wild meat.

Sebastian Naum (00:54:18):
What about veggies? What are we looking for on veggies, Eugene?

Eugene Trufkin (00:54:21):
Um, that’s like a, that’s like a multiple hour topic. Uh sure.

Sebastian Naum (00:54:25):
But if I’m just asking you right now, Eugene, I’m going to the store this afternoon. What, what am I looking for in veggies? Is it just if I, if I’m, am I good with certified organic for the most part?

Eugene Trufkin (00:54:36):
No, you’re not because the U S is the only country that allows hydroponics to be certified as U S D organic. Okay. So most of the tomatoes, celery, blueberries, um, bell peppers that you find at the grocery store, even at whole foods, in my opinion, from my experience are grown hydroponically. So that’s, that’s a very long conversation, but basically they don’t even use any soil. It’s grown in like a bucket and some like matrix looking place. Uh, you know, how the matrix, you know, when Neil woke up and then you see all these pods, it’s kind of like that, you know, it looks kind of like that. They sometimes do them outside as well in pods as well. And basically they have like an IV drip of nutrients and they take the soil out of the equation. The soil in short is what brings all the nutrient value to the plant.

Eugene Trufkin (00:55:23):
I mean, it took the earth 5 billion years of extremely complicated evolution to form the soil composition needed to form the crops you see today. And these kinds of wise guys think they’re like, they know better. And they’re like, Oh, we’re just going to eliminate that whole process because we know more than 5 billion years of selective evolution. And then also 12 billion years of the universe evolving to form the solar system necessary to form the sun, to form the planet. I definitely know better than that. And I’m just going to do it that way. So it’s on, it’s on the consumers, consumers end, you know, uh, my friend [inaudible] would say it’s best to presume guilty until proven innocent with anything that’s health-related. So you look at, you look at, um, Hunter gatherers. How did the homosapien live for 190,000, if it’s 200,000 year existence, and how did that the other 28 human species that died out before the homosapien came around live?

Eugene Trufkin (00:56:22):
Do you know, they didn’t have vaccines, they didn’t have medical insurance. They didn’t have personal trainers, nutritionists, life coaches, spiritual gurus. They didn’t have a Bally’s membership. And they’re like all jacked. I mean, they’re like, you know, and they lived, once you take out child mortality, they lived to like 50 or 60, you know, in, in health, you know, they died at like the peak of their, their, their health. Basically these days, you barely, like, I was a fat loss lecture at army reserve centers. And I’ll speak into the master Sergeant at one point, he said like the average us soldier can’t even do 20 pushups. You know? So even the average soldier is probably between the ages of 18 to 22, for example, you know, so people in the prime of their health, in like a civilized society with their medical insurance, with their vaccines, with their 401ks, with their Equinox, memberships still can’t do anything.

Eugene Trufkin (00:57:20):
You know, meanwhile, this like Hunter gatherer that was like, didn’t have, didn’t even know how to read. Didn’t even have schooling. You know, it’s like Jack dude and like living and thriving in full health and able to hunt like mammoth. So like a spear doesn’t even need like a hundred rifle, you know? So you can clearly see there is something like systemically wrong in this system and a good book that covers it as, um, civilized to death by Christopher Ry, uh, Christopher Ryan. Yeah, a great book. I love his podcast personally. I like his podcast interview more than his book. I don’t want to sound insulting. I love his book too, but the way he presents the, the information on podcasts is, is very interesting. And, uh, I liked his kind of like vantage point that he, uh, that he presents. So,

Sebastian Naum (00:58:03):
So the question I asked you triggered your answer and explaining, you know, in terms of USDA organic, when it comes to vegetables and not even using soil, which is really what brings the nutrients to the plants and, and you know, to the vegetables and fruits that we eat. So how the heck do we choose our veggies and fruits? When we go to the grocery store, what do you recommend or how to, how to get the best type of, uh, produce, what do you recommend

Eugene Trufkin (00:58:31):
You could, uh, you could take up like wild crop forging, like in Irvine. I know you’re familiar with the Irvine area. There’s a bunch of like dandelion leaves, dandelion leaves, for example, have like far more superior nutritional profile to even spinach. I probably, you get like hundreds of percentage, more of various phytonutrients from dandelion leaves, which are completely for free and probably grow in your backyard than you would from buying spinach at the grocery store. It’s problem with crops at the grocery store is first they’re picked before they’re ripen. The ripening process is what brings them nutritional value to the crop. So that way they can kind of ripe in, in the store. Then the transportation time, you know, by the time you buy it, it sits in your refrigerator, on the counter for another few days, by the time you eat it, it’s like two weeks, three weeks old, you know?

Eugene Trufkin (00:59:19):
And just like with an animal know, once it dies, the nutritional value of that animal starts going down lower and lower. The second the heartbeat starts racing. It’s the same thing. Once you pull it from its root system, you know, the nutritional value of their crop gets lower and lower. And if you consider that the nutrition of the crop has already been bred out through selective breeding through centuries and centuries. Like for example, um, like a carrot started as a white root in Afghanistan. Uh, hundreds of years later, it made its way to India where it became purple hundreds of years later, it made its way to China where it became red. Hundreds of years later, it made its way to Turkey where it became yellow. And then hundreds of years later, it made its way to like leave Denmark or Norway where it became orange.

Eugene Trufkin (01:00:02):
Wow. The carrot is orange. But through that entire selective breeding, what happened is like basically the anti-science and content of the carrot just disappeared. So you have like almost no anthocyanins and an orange carrot probably have like 900% more in a purple carrot. You could find purple carrots these days, but most people don’t even know, like carrots originated basically as a purple carriage. And this has happened with like every single crop. So once again, you see, all I want is like healthy food and you can see how extremely complicated it’s become to find that healthy food, a quick website, they can check out as farm fresh to you. I think that’s your best bet, something of that sort. And basically they’re local farms that deliver to seasonally produced organically produced crops. That’s your best bet outside of just learning how to hunt for the best, best solution, just eat wild game, wild fish, wild crops will never be obese. You’ll eliminate various disorders of every sort. Uh, but if you can’t do that, then check out those websites that I mentioned, you know, American grassfed.org. My book has a whole bunch of more resources as well. Uh, farm-fresh two u.com eat, uh, eat wild.com is a great website. Um, there are, there are sources, but it’s just, it’s very under the radar.

Sebastian Naum (01:01:21):
Yeah, it’s fine. It’s not easy. I think when we started talking in the beginning of the podcast and, you know, we want to provide solutions, it’s not simple, but it’s just not a simple problem. It’s not a simple issue. We’ve gotten ourselves. Humanity has gotten itself into these predicaments when it comes to health and the foods and the things that we eat, you know, so it’s not simple for people out there, but there are solutions. And, and, you know, I appreciate you bringing up some of these, some of these great solutions and it’s an ongoing, you know, it’s an ongoing issue. And, um, I hope that I, from what I’m hearing from you too, some of the things that I’m reading and seeing out there, um, we are going in the right direction with, in, in some aspect, at least, you know what we did, you know, seven years ago or whatever, at least we’re still we’re having some of that awareness. We’re just now starting to have some more of awareness about it on a more, you know, on a small scale level to where people are. Actually, a lot of people are like starting to wake up to this, right to that that had this awakening. So, um, you know, I love that you brought a lot of these things up and, um, how about, uh, where can people buy your book by the way,

Eugene Trufkin (01:02:30):
Uh, two huge corporations, Walmart, Hey, Neil had to plug into the matrix too, you know, Amazon Walmart, and then my book as well. So, or my a website as well.

Sebastian Naum (01:02:46):
That’s great. That’s great. No, I love that. And then what is your website? Eugene, tell us,

Eugene Trufkin (01:02:50):
Uh, Tuftin athletics.com

Sebastian Naum (01:02:53):
Sounds good. And then your book is anti factory farm shopping guide, and you can find that on Amazon. Where can people follow you on, are you on Instagram or social media? Eugene and people can follow you at

Eugene Trufkin (01:03:02):
Yeah, I’m on all that stuff. Like they could just Google my name, Eugene Truscott, and then I’m sure they’ll have listed all that.

Sebastian Naum (01:03:09):
Yes. The links on there. Well, so thank you so much for being on you really. You brought a lot of, a lot of just, honestly, you kind of blew my mind on some stuff. Some of the things you bring up or sometimes a bit disappointing, cause you’re like. I thought I was doing it right, man. And like you realize you’re not doing it right, but I’d rather be educated on that. You know? And so one final thing I want to ask you is it’s challenging to be a conscious leader in general. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, whether it isn’t a corporation, whether it is that you’re running a farm or whatever that may be, but through your experiences in your world, what are two traits that you believe that a conscious leader must embody?

Eugene Trufkin (01:03:53):
Um, Hmm. You just gotta be true to your own core values, man. Just start with that as the foundation, you know, like know who you are and then don’t yourself and be like, be that person data. And, um, I think that sets the foundation that’s one and two. So I think in order to be like a sustaining leader, you have to, first of all, know who you are to get into the right field, to get yourself surrounded by the people, you know, you work well with. Uh, and then you kind of build off that, you know, I think that’s the base and just knowing your core values and then kind of being true to that. Not kind of, uh, you know, chasing as Willinsky would say your false core and full of self kind of thing.

Sebastian Naum (01:04:32):
I love that, man. Well, you’re definitely a conscious leader yourself. So keep being you, thank you so much for being on Eugene.