Rich Roll & Dr. Matthew Nagra - 2 Vegans Spreading Dangerous Misinformation @Rich Roll

Watch on YouTube · 2025-07-04 · 32 min

0:00 Hello, I'm going to be reviewing a podcast today. Rich Roll did a podcast with Dr. Matthew Nagra. Both of them follow a vegan diet.

[video] 0:10 What you see as the current most onerous or malevolent misconception that's out there that our algorithm overlords.

0:19 By the way, Rich Roll is only 58 years old. If you told me that he's 80, I would believe it. And yes, to be fair, it is the beard. If it wasn't for the beard, he would still not look 58. He looks too old. But I wouldn't even blame the vegan diet for it so much. Even if he is a true vegan, he exercises incredibly much. That's really what ages you more than anything. It's just extreme chronic stress.

[video] 0:48 are favoring at the moment? There's a number that I could list up there and I could change this order any day. So I won't say that this is number one, but the one that seems to permeate all diet camps, you can take whole foods plant-based, you can take carnivore, you can take animal-based or whatever. They pretty much all agree on this idea that seed oils are toxic and that they're going to kill us, cause cancer.

1:06 while seeds themselves are toxic, then obviously if you get the oil out of the seeds, and you usually use hexane and all kinds of toxic chemicals to extract the oils anyway, but even if you wouldn't,

[video] 1:24 how can you get the non-toxic oil out of toxic seeds it doesn't make any sense answer and so on but i mean that's the one case where i'd say they're pretty much all wrong based on the current evidence base i think the evidence is very strong and actually quite compelling for the inclusion of seed oils to lower things like cardiovascular risk and improve

1:45 Include seed oils to lower your risk for cardiovascular disease. Include them. Oh man, this guy is funny. The guy has to smile himself, come on.

[video] 2:04 It's being bandied about pretty rigorously on the internet. And it also is controversial within the plant-based community. There are the whole food plant-based OGs, the Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn strain of whole food plant-based who are rigorously kind of anti-oil.

2:22 McDougal, he passed away already, and over 90% of the OGs quit already anyway.

[video] 2:30 Yeah, so there's different arguments presented by different diet camps, like the plant-based community will talk more about the oil's effects on artery function, and maybe we can get to that in a moment, but I think the main argument that's brought up, or one of the main two arguments that's brought up, is that we see this trend through the 80s and into the 90s, where seed oil consumption was increasing in America, and

2:53 As I've said before a million times, but just in case you haven't heard it before, the first reported heart attack in a US hospital was around 100 years ago. And that's important because why didn't people get heart attacks before that? We used to eat tons of meat, you can't blame meat and cholesterol and whatever they tried to blame for it. Clearly, it was something new that we started consuming. And seeing as the plaque in the arteries for the most part really is made out of seed oils, margarine especially,

[video] 3:28 why do we need to talk about it as if it's some kind of mystery still it's already clear what's causing it for the most part well seed oils are the problem but there's a serious issue with drawing outside that kind of conclusion here so that's what we call an ecological association you're just taking two variables tracking them over time and ultimately

3:47 That's basically what every vegan study is about. We're similar to that. It's all epidemiology, it's all you looking at links and correlations, trying to somehow link this disease to this diet, to this food. That's it? If anything then? This actually sounds better than most of the fake vegan studies.

[video] 4:11 What do you mean? We live way shorter lives than ever before. We have the shortest lifespan in history now. Why would you get sick if you live longer?

4:32 What?

[video] 4:32 If most people aren't even making it to those ages initially, then we aren't going to have.

4:36 Yeah, or what if people lived way longer without any disease? You're saying as if naturally a human being lives and then they get sick, right? As if eventually your arteries get clogged up anyway. or you get a stroke or a heart attack or whatever, diabetes, because it comes with age. As if nature programmed you to get these diseases eventually. How does that make sense to you? Then every animal in nature would get these diseases eventually. But none of them do get any of them. Think about it. They live to their full age and they don't have clogged arteries, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, blah blah blah.

5:24 Jesus man, just think.

[video] 5:26 As many heart attacks, right? So that's one possible issue. Another one is that we are now treating risk factors earlier on for say other diseases that might end up leading you to living to that point where there's a cardiovascular event. At the same time, we can look at cross-country comparisons of like smoking, for example, and longevity. And we see that per capita cigarette consumption is associated with longevity. It's the same type of correlation, but the issue there is that, yeah, countries where there's more cigarette consumption, they're also more affluent. There's other factors that are leading to a better life. So we need to look at studies that actually adjust for those other variables and sort of level the playing field.

6:00 he's just trying to talk himself out of it i'm not even saying that that kind of a study should be taken seriously but if the seed oil consumption rises and then the cases of atherosclerosis also rise heart attack strokes and so on then uh it doesn't mean that that's what's causing it but when you find out that the plaque in the arteries is made out of seed oils margarine especially Do we really need to still see it as a mystery? Could it be something else? Yeah, smoking, alcohol, that's all bad, but come on. Is that a mystery anymore?

[video] 6:45 Pointing to Coca-Cola and saying that water is detrimental because it's the main ingredient in Coca-Cola. Or the cola ingredient as opposed to, yeah. So in the context of ultra processed foods, there are seed oils, but there's also refined grains and salt and sugar and all these other kind of,

6:59 additives and what they all eat tons of sugar their diets are based on sugar they use salt they eat grains all the time processed or not what is the real difference it's still seeds so you're eating all of that anyway as a vegan you actually just described a vegan diet They have no argument for it, both of them. Just look at him. That's it. Really? I could have made this a 10 second video. I'm going to be reviewing Richroll. Look at him. Old looking guy. Thanks for watching. That's it really.

[video] 7:38 The culture has really shifted quite a bit. I mean, you know, I don't know, six or eight years ago, there was this, you know, real rise in interest in plant based nutrition. And we were seeing, you know, all these new food products come on the market and plant based restaurants and, you know, even today.

7:52 yeah and that's when i started making the vegans epitome of malnourishment series overall probably millions of people saw them and it really made a lot of people quit

8:08 I definitely put a dent into the movement at the very least. And I'm glad about it. And that's why people quit because over 90% of the vegans from back in the day deleted their channels. or just disappeared, but still kept up the channel or remove the videos, but kept the channel. I am in the future going to make a video about this and show you what happened to all of them.

[video] 8:37 Now, of course, most restaurants have plant based options, et cetera. But there has been a precipitous sort of decline in enthusiasm in recent years, the culture has shifted. And it is very much about butter is back right now. This seems to be kind of the predominant paradigm. And within that, we've seen this very strange, you know, kind of celebration of beef tallow, right? Like, we all saw RFK, I can't remember what fast food chain restaurant, you know, like, they've now they're now going to make their fries with with beef tallow, like, like, let's put matters to rest.

9:07 Yeah, and you would save millions of people from getting strokes and heart attacks. That's great.

9:33 Not on beef tallow, that's true. It is a cooked fat, rendered fat, but we've been eating animal fat since the beginning of time. Since the beginning.

9:52 That's it. What else do you need? If the first heart attack was a hundred years ago, and we always hated before, then what else do you need? It's the best so-called study ever done. It's our life as humans.

[video] 10:06 and outcomes. So someone could throw their hands up and say, hey, we don't know. We don't know if it's necessarily harmful. But we can draw conclusions based on our prior knowledge. We know that saturated animal fats raise LDL cholesterol levels. We know that they ultimately lead to cardiovascular events, especially with that rise in LDL cholesterol levels. And if we were to replace something that has been shown

10:22 Yeah, but he's talking about correlations again. Useless, debunked, fake science.

[video] 10:29 ...going to do the opposite with those foods, chances are it's going to be worse for us. Now, am I going to say that having ultra-processed foods with beef tallow, especially hyper-palatable ultra-processed foods with beef tallow is going to be significantly worse than having hyper-palatable ultra-processed foods with vegetable oils? Probably not, because there's a lot of other factors that are going to be the same between them. I mean, if you're going to a Steak and Shake or a McDonald's or whatever... whether it's beef tallow or seed oils, I don't think is going to make the biggest impact. But if anything, I think we can expect it to be even worse.

10:59 It is going to make the biggest impact. What even worse? We'll see what he will say. But really, the seed oils are the biggest problem in fast food restaurants besides eating seeds themselves, those processed grains. That's what the bun in the burger is made out of. They even put seed oils the buns nowadays and even in bread and pasteurized milk has seed oils see those are everywhere when you look at the labels and these seeds come from the canola plant for example literally a flower this flower has super toxic bitter seeds and then they use these machines all kinds of toxic chemicals as I said before to get the oil out of the bitter toxic seeds and And then they destroy the smell of it, which is why you won't even smell how poisonous it is anymore. And then they add it to all the garbage food that you're eating as a sort of filler.

11:57 And then you have no idea that you're eating bitter, toxic seed oils.

[video] 12:04 One of the underappreciated aspects of these plant-based meats and just processed foods in general is that we can reformulate them, right? You can't just do that with a cow overnight. That's many generations of select...

12:13 Yeah, that's a good thing that you cannot change it. It's just the way the meat is. And if he's going to say that we bred these animals, that's true, but it doesn't change the meat itself. Maybe the ratios of fat and muscle and whatever you're eating, if it's a steak, okay, but it's still just meat and fat. The ratios may be different if the animal gets different food because of that also, but it's still just an animal. Whether it's bred or not doesn't make a difference.

[video] 12:49 ... breeding and everything. So when you see companies like Beyond Meat or even Impossible Foods, now they have light versions of their products that are like lower in saturated fat. They're modifying these foods to actually be healthier. Now we have data on the older products showing that they're already healthier than the alternative. And with the SWAT meat trial, they compared Beyond Meat to even organic and grass-fed meat products and the Beyond Meat fared better.

13:08 so what in what way what are you talking about man beyond meat is completely artificial full of toxic ingredients those fake meats have canola oil and whatnot in there How can it be better than what you are made out of yourself?

[video] 13:37 There were, I believe, eight nutrients that they listed as falling short. And this was a very recent paper that came out. So that's to tackle the whole carnivore is the most nutrient dense. I mean, I haven't seen a single iteration of a carnivore diet that meets all nutritional needs yet. And I've analyzed a few people's what I eat in a day and haven't seen anything.

13:51 Oh yes. And actually I saw one of them. I didn't watch it fully yet. I'm going to watch it fully now with you.

[video] 13:57 I'm going to show you what I eat in a day on my vegan diet. A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed a carnivore diet and he didn't do very well. Failing to hit the target for 10 important vitamins and minerals.

14:06 Okay. B1 the target. How? Cause he cooked away the B vitamins. How did you measure that exactly? What's the source?

14:22 Vitamin C, that may even be understandable, especially if you eat cooked meat. Okay, I'll give him that. Not if you eat raw meat and raw organs such as raw liver, raw spleen, you're getting real vitamin C, DHAA, not the fake plant vitamin C. So not a problem with raw meat, maybe a problem with cooked carnivore, fake carnivore, yeah. Okay, maybe even if you're not eating organs and enough fat, but you won't even see oftentimes K2 mentioned. What does he mean by vitamin K or K1? Because K1 you don't need. It's only found in plants. You would need to convert it to K2. Who knows? But assuming that he means K2, what's the problem? It's an all-animal fat.

15:14 It depends on what sources he's using. Vitamin D, it's an all animal fat, the highest source is brain. No problem. If you're eating overcooked muscle meat, maybe. I wouldn't even disagree with him necessarily. Who knows what his source is? The minerals, all animals are full of minerals. You are an animal yourself. Eating animals gives you all of the minerals. There's no problems. It gives you everything.

15:43 If you believe that you have everything inside of you, you should believe the same about the animals that you're eating. So you cannot actually list any nutrients that you would be missing by eating animals, because everything is inside of animals. So who knows what he even really means.

[video] 15:58 And I had people like vtrain1987 here saying I would do even worse, as if that would fix the potential...

16:03 Yeah, because plants don't have over 15 micronutrients.

[video] 16:06 ...efficiencies in a carnivore diet. But here you go with a pretty typical day in the life. I typically start my day with coffee or tea, and I'll sip on that while I'm making my oatmeal, which is loaded with berries, flax seeds, and some protein. I'll then take my B12 and vitamin D, head to work, and grab a soy matcha latte on one...

16:20 Oh my God, man, soy matcha latte, because he has no energy at all. You do know that you're completely disproving your diet by drinking coffee and matcha because you're adrenalizing your body all day because you have no energy. If you eat raw meat, maybe not a cooked carnivore diet, that may be true, i've never tried that people don't seem that healthy on it they seem healthier than most people but they have their own problems i think a lot of the fake carnivores do drink coffee whatever the case vegans drink a lot more of it my breaks and when i get home i'll have a late lunch which is often a tofu sandwich on a whole oh my god man that actually looks uh repulsive bread with veggies avocado and a sauce Oh yeah. Green toxic leaves. Really disgusting. Fuck.

[video] 17:14 And later I'll have an apple before hitting the gym, which I do on most days. And one of my favorite dinners is legume-based pasta with veggies, tomato sauce, and nutritional...

17:21 Nutritional yeast to give it a cheesy flavor. This guy is never going to last. This will be just another vegan who will disappear without saying anything. Yeah, he's using, what's the website, chronometer or something? That doesn't even give you the actual amounts of nutrients in meat and fat. When you put fat in, you get almost nothing. Even though the fat is full of fat-soluble vitamins. And how do you get vitamin A from plants when there's only beta-carotene, which you cannot even convert? Yeah, it's a nonsense video.

[video] 18:00 With just under 2,900 calories and a whopping 8 grams of omega-3 fats while exceeding every single vitamin and mineral. Yeah, it's severe malnutrition, this guy is never gonna last, he already looks unwell So in this debate I had with Anthony Chafee, I actually, I did this thought experiment, I'm gonna do it with you in a moment Where I sort of challenged that notion, and he did not want to answer my question, he dodged it eight times, we counted it

18:23 I saw the debate, not the full debate, but parts of it a while ago, and I do remember that part.

[video] 18:30 And that's because it really, I think, pokes a hole in this ideology. So let's say that there's two diets. There's diet A and diet B. A provides most of the nutrients you need, but you might need to supplement one or two things, but it leads to a long and healthy life, lower risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, lower risk of frailty and older age. And then there's diet B. Diet B provides all of the essential nutrients you need. You don't need to supplement anything, but it leads to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, higher risk of frailty and older age. Which one would you choose? Of course, A. Yeah, so he didn't want to answer that.

18:57 Yeah, and if it was so, I would also choose A. OK, I need to use supplements, assuming that supplements work, which they don't. They are all toxic and synthetic. I would, of course, then choose option A, because I would be healthier. But the problem is that it's the opposite way. The one that provides all of the nutrients is actually what you're naturally supposed to eat, as in other animals. And you're actually way healthier. And the diet where you need to supplement because you're malnourished, deficient, is the one that will make you sick? That's the problem here.

[video] 19:33 And the reason is because it tells me that what you care about are the health outcomes. To you, the deciding factor between following a diet or not following a diet...

19:42 Yeah, absolutely. If it was healthier to eat broccoli and spinach, I would do it myself. The thing is that flowers and green leaves taste horrible because they are unhealthy for you. Because your body is telling you that it's not even food. It's toxic. And that's why you become sick. That's the thing. You're basically saying, eat a counterintuitive diet. But it will make you healthier because some epidemiology study paper says so, which it doesn't even. And even if you would have some that says that, it wouldn't be actually a long-term study looking at what happens to humans when they eat such a diet. We don't even have that. Veganism overall is a very recent diet.

[video] 20:34 It's not whether or not you need to supplement, it's whether or not you get good results at the end of the day. So if a vegan diet with appropriate supplementation like B12 obviously, if it leads to good long-term health outcomes, then who cares if you need to take one supplement or whatever a day or maybe take a multivitamin.

20:48 Yeah, absolutely, I would agree with him, if it wouldn't lead to the opposite results.

21:08 carnivores fake carnivores are on electrolytes exactly because they cooked muscle meat almost only and that's why they need electrolytes and that's why they salt their food because they are so mineral deficient that they crave salt which actually makes the problem even worse and that's why you salt more and more and you're only getting sodium chloride which is toxic to your body especially in such amounts anyway such unnatural amounts getting them from a rock we don't have that in our blood or anywhere in our bodies and they just get sicker and sicker they dry out their skin and get more mineral electrolyte imbalances. Yeah, that's what's going on, of course, because it's fake food, it's fake liquids. If anything, drink blood, raw milk, fruit juices.

[video] 22:00 Optimizing their nutrition through strategic supplementation. It's a thing. So it's not really relevant in my mind. And sure, take a B12 supplement, but maybe take a vitamin D supplement and a multivitamin and all these things. We all have...

22:17 Their logic is basically we always used to be sick and now we live longer and are healthier. The truth is the opposite, of course. And that's why taking supplements and eating a fake diet where you're deficient is fine because we are doing better and we can do better. Meaning that nature is bad. It's wrong.

[video] 22:39 and uh we can create our own diets and we can be better than nature that's their overall point which is completely wrong because there's no way around nature was there anything else that came up in your debate with Chaffee oh man uh there was a lot there oh there was a couple times this was this was kind of brutal I um there were times where he'd cite research and I'd ask him very basic details about his own research that he's citing and he wouldn't know like I'd say how did they track meat intake or What were the results for this or whatever and he wouldn't really know any of it and that was really an example of somebody who's sort of Maybe reading an abstract or cherry-picking a result and wanting to showcase it but not really looking at the research in depth And I've seen that a lot with with his content I'm trying to think he came up with the appeal to nature a lot, you know, so appealing to all historically human really he did hmm respect

23:28 fake online respect, I don't know the guy, but still, good. Because it's the best, most valid appeal out of all, appealing to nature. Because it always works, because it's always right. Because everything natural is good for you and everything unnatural... is bad or neutral sometimes. Something can be made, such as a tool, it can just be neutral. You can't really call it bad or good. It can be useful, I suppose. When we talk about food and health, everything natural is good and everything unnatural is bad.

[video] 24:01 They ate meat, so that should be good for us, or, I mean, there's a lot of things that are natural that aren't good for us.

24:10 Yeah, what? Name one thing.

[video] 24:14 A lot of, whether it's natural plants or certain animals, there's exposure to a lot of heavy metals that are naturally derived, I mean, just because something's natural.

24:21 What do you mean? Heavy metal exposure from what? Where do you find toxic heavy metals in natural food? What is he talking about? Name one thing that's natural and bad for us. Come on. Yeah, I'll be waiting forever because... It doesn't exist.

[video] 24:40 Doesn't mean it's good.

24:43 Also, the look in his eyes, he just knows that he's lying and just saying dumb stuff.

[video] 24:49 To be incredibly resilient and able to eat many, many different things. So what we used to eat isn't necessarily determinative of what we should eat when we have the option to choose. Yeah, I absolutely agree. And we have so much research now around what makes up a healthy dietary pattern that we can make really good informed decisions regarding those outcomes versus relying on, well, historically we've done this, so I should...

25:09 Yeah, okay, that's it.

25:12 As always, when it comes to this topic, they can't make a point.

[video] 25:16 We're now seeing even some of the OG influencers making adaptations to their diet. I mean, how famously Paul Saladino now eats fruit and honey and I guess a couple other things or whatever. So it's like he went from, you know, exclusively, like his whole thing was like nose to tail. And now he's adapted and we'll see where that goes. I don't know who's still hanging on tooth and nail, but you probably know better than I do. There's a couple. There's a couple like Sean Baker, Anthony Chafee. There are a couple that I can think of who are apparently strict. But then, yeah, there's Paul. Sean's got like a really high hemoglobin A1C. He did. You know, you would think like, oh, that would come from eating processed food and sugar. But like when you're eating, you're seeing like the consequence of a very high saturated fat diet on his type two diabetes risk. Yeah. And I believe he had low testosterone on that earlier test. Which is really weird, right? Like he would...

25:59 But both Paul and Sean exercise like crazy until they are all red and wrinkly. Paul also goes to the sea a lot. He's exposed to salt water, which also dries out your skin.

[video] 26:18 Think like, well, testosterone is one thing that's going to take care of itself if you're going to eat this way. Well, funny enough.

26:23 Yeah, but if you exercise all the time, you use it up. He exercises like crazy. Back when I used to watch his videos, nothing against the guy. Overall, I like what he's promoting compared to most people. He just talked but exercised at the same time. It was just constantly him exercising, being all red and inflamed from the exercise. That's how I remember him.

[video] 26:47 When Paul Saladino was on Carnivore, he posted his blood test results. And if you pause the screen, you see that his estrogen was actually elevated above the range. He didn't even talk about it. He skipped right past that when he was reviewing his blood work, but it's in there. What does that tell you? I don't know if it says much about the diet or something else that they're doing, but it's just interesting that you're seeing these people who are always fear-mongering over soy and estrogen and whatnot. You're seeing that their hormones are a bit off, and they aren't providing any explanations around that or attempting to, and they're just kind of glazing over it. I just thought it was really interesting that that was still in the video, and maybe he didn't catch that it was there, but it was on his blood work. But yeah, I mean, a lot of people have fallen off. There's Paul, there's Frank Tufano, there's...

27:23 a youtube channel 50 plus beauty recently had a stroke while on the carnivore diet uh a number of other people there's the carnival yeah somebody just commented about her recently on my video but she did high intensity exercise

27:39 And I think somebody commented also that she took the you-know-what. I don't know if that's true. Maybe not. The exercise alone could do that. I said this already in other videos, but I'm not going to be surprised at all if Sean Baker one day has a heart attack. or a stroke even, probably more so a heart attack or heart failure, something like that. Some problems, maybe he already has some problems. And everybody is going to be blaming the meat, even though he exercises like crazy. You really need to look at exercise first. Is the human being exposed to chronic stress, which is what exercise is by definition, extreme stress? Because if that's the case, how can you blame the diet? You can, but it doesn't have that much of an impact. Exercise is way worse than a bad diet.

[video] 28:35 By the way, I mean as far as the risk for heart issues go. Except if you're eating super many seed oils.

28:48 But typically, if you eat a balanced diet, exercise is going to do way more damage.

[video] 28:53 ...or something like that of his LAD, so like the widowmaker artery. And he was freaking out. And I'm not going to say that, you know, their time on the carnivore diet, because it may have been a matter of a couple of years, is what led to that. you know, it's still a problem that occurred while on the carnivore diet, and you'll often see these same people cite anecdotes of something even subjectively improving while on a carnivore diet and claiming that it was definitely the carnivore diet, whereas, well, why don't you ever highlight these negative issues that come up? And there's a lot of them.

29:20 That's interesting that he said that at the end, because a subscriber of mine once wisely commented that When a vegan sees any improvements in their health, then they will say that it's the vegan diet. However, when a vegan experiences any health problems, they never blame the diet. Think about it. That's how it really is. It doesn't matter what happens health-wise, it's never the diet. You see any improvements? My knee pain isn't as strong anymore? It's a diet. Oh yeah, I need to stick to the diet. Whatever it is, it's always the diet. You lose weight, you start stressing yourself, exercising, and because of the stress you eat up your own body fat? No, no. It's the vegan diet. That's really what's helping me lose the weight.

30:16 It's just the really deep denial with these people as you can see ritual as I said looks really old for his age and yes as I said to be fair it really is the beard probably Not for the most part, but it's a big part of it. If you would shave off the beard, you still have the insane wrinkles from the diet and from the extreme exercise. And I don't know how old the doctor is. He definitely looks unwell. He just doesn't look healthy. He looks tired and I'm sure that he's going to quit. All vegans quit anyway.

30:53 whether they quit by themselves or nature forces them to quit if you get what i'm saying one of the two has to happen because they can never continue or they become chickens cheating vegans there's plenty of those also out there because um many just have an ego or they just cannot admit it for the animals they eat their Usually not meat, but cheese and eggs behind the scenes, but they still keep promoting it for the animals. There's plenty of those also out there. And I've even done ex-vegan interviews where some of them admitted that they were faking being vegan at the end.

31:39 You can imagine that the people who are making money from veganism, such as Rich Roll himself partly, that they also, of course, have a reason to lie about it, purely business-wise, if they are selling you stuff, especially supplements. Oh, there's for sure people like that out there. I've talked to them. There's...

32:02 For sure, fake vegans out there selling you supplements, even t-shirts and whatnot, who eat animal foods on the side, because that's how they survive. At the end of the day, you care about your own survival, about your family, and you will do anything for them to survive and that's how we do it in this man-made slave system which is why it's no surprise that people go as far as lying about their diet just to sell you supplements which will make you sick but they don't care about that anyway it's about their own survival in the first place it's not even about the animals so much anyway it's virtual signaling for the most part to appear as a virtuous uh moral human being, religious brainwashed human being. That's all that it means. Thanks for watching.