When "Smart" Isn't

Between man made, industrially produced #%&$ and butter, who in the heck would choose #%&$?

Just say no.

Fake Health Food

I have eaten this product before, and like it.  It makes a great snack, and I loved the idea that I was enjoying something that was providing nutrients I wanted.  Then I read the label (mistake?!).

The label revealed I was oogling farm raised atlantic salmon, with the pink color added. 

That means it is fed the same corn or soy based "food" that most cattle are fed, and thus, it doesn't have the awesome omega-3s that wild caught fish accumulate from a natural diet/life cycle. 

It claims to have omega-3s, but chances are that is only added, perhaps via flax seeds or some other short chain omega 3 product.  In other words, it's nothing I need.

This is how it goes - if one is just starting a carb restriction voyage, this food would be a great choice.  But as I move towards better choices over time, it's just OK to eat food like this; it adds little but it doesn't hurt anything, either.

The industrial food chain delivers high quanities of food with marginal nutritional value at a ridiculously low cost (measured against time spent to obtain it) - and high quantities of so called food that is unsafe in almost any dosage.  Moving from one end of that spectrum to the other is significant.

HFCS - Trust the Science

SNL HFCS Commercial

You will laugh, go see it.

Smug (but Hopefully Instructive)

http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-nutrition-duck-fat-20110320,0,3917224.story

For a game of "spot the inaccurate assumptions", this is a target rich environment (HT:  @dreades):

Love fries but hate the thought of artery-clogging fried food?

**Eating a ton of fried potatoes?  Bad (unless it's an occasional indulgence to remind you of how crappy you feel when overeating carbs and junk oils).  Especially if they are fried in transfats or hydrogenated fats or peanut oil.  My bet?  If you eat your fries, fried in beef tallow, your cholesterol numbers will improve compared to any of the oils that are commonly used now.

A growing number of gourmet restaurants and foodies see a solution to this conundrum in an unlikely source — duck fat. They consider it a healthy alternative to frying foods in pork fat, beef fat or even butter. Duck fat is high in beneficial unsaturated fats, and its chemical composition is closer to olive oil than to butter, they say.

**The evidence that monounsaturated fats are "beneficial" is thin, but there's no reason to believe they are harmful.  They are certainly a better choice than the highly oxidizable frankenfats made from corn and seed oils.  Given the evidence to support the conjecture that saturated fats are harmful is paper thin AT BEST, this whole paragraph is essentially nonsense.

But some experts say health claims about the fat are overstated. Though duck fat is among the healthiest of animal fats, it's still a significant source of saturated fats, said Dr. Freny Mody, director of cardiology for the Greater Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Healthcare System.

**It's confusing to talk about food this way - food is either a good source of fuel or one that causes injury.  There's no fat that generates 'health.'  Humans need fat to achieve health, that's what we are made for.  But eating the right food reveals the natural birthright of human health - and eating neolithic junk degrades health.  Again - if you manage your carb intake and eat butter and other saturated fats, your health markers will be superior to those poor uninformed folks carefully avoiding fat but pounding down 300 grams of carbs daily.

Duck fat's popularity has surged in part because consumers are seeking all-natural, locally sourced alternatives to commercially produced items, said Melissa Abbott, culinary insights director with the Hartman Group, a Seattle-area market research firm. Compared with, say, margarine, duck fat has a single, minimally processed ingredient: fat taken from ducks. It's available from local butchers and at farmers markets, though a few national retailers sell it as well.

**And oh by the way, duck fat is also not a neolithic monster like margarine!  Does anyone seriously think that margarine, invented in a laboratory, is a superior form of nutrition?

Abbott said the fat had also gained some cachet thanks to the so-called French paradox — the observation that the French are thinner and have a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease than Americans despite enjoying a diet loaded in fat. The paradox has stumped researchers for decades, though some theories chalk it up to a number of characteristics of the French diet — including small portions, lots of red wine, and, of course, the consumption of duck fat.

**It's funny in retrospect to consider "the French paradox".  If you assume that eating fat is bad for your heart, and then observe that people who eat more fat have less heart disease, you have a "paradox."  Well, actually you have a bunch of people who, ignoring the fact that they don't know what they think they do, sound truly stupid writing paragraphs like the one above.  The paradox is that after nearly forty years of trying to prove that saturated fat is bad for you, they won't give up that bit of conjecture. 

That belief is based on its composition of saturated and unsaturated fats. According to the National Nutrient Database maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, duck fat contains 62% unsaturated fat and 33% saturated fat.

**My guess is that some of the saturated duck fat is stearic acid, which is converted to oleic acid, the monounsaturated fat in olive oil, early in the digestion process - which is the same reason these people should be championing steak if they think oleic acid is so 'healthy.'  More here.

Saturated fats raise blood cholesterol and increase the risk of heart disease, said Dr. Karol Watson, co-director of the UCLA Cholesterol and Lipid Management Center.  At 33%, duck fat's saturated fat content isn't terribly low, she points out. In fact, it's on par with chicken fat (about 30% saturated fat) and pork fat (39% saturated fat). All three are better than butter, which is about 51% saturated fat.

**Dr. Karol Watson could not back up her assertions for love or money.  That is simply unproved, and when considering the facts, darned near ludicrous.  Yet, many believe.  Amen.  Saturated fats raise both LDL and HDL, making total cholesterol higher.  But not even the "corelation-ists" view total cholesterol as a convincing forecaster of heart disease - HDL to total, though also poor, is much better than total alone as a predictor.  HDL to total improves when you eat saturated fat.  That's right - Dr. Watson is in reverso world.

Proponents of duck fat prefer to highlight its unsaturated fat content. Studies have linked unsaturated fats — including both monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats — to lower blood cholesterol levels. Dutch researchers who reviewed 60 studies of the effects of dietary fat intake found that replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats reduced levels of bad cholesterol and raised levels of good cholesterol, which in turn decreased the incidence of coronary artery disease by 18% to 44%. Their findings were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 2003.

**Ah yes, a report on the observational studies is obligatory.  While it is true that eating monounsaturated fats lowers cholesterol, every intervention study, and the massive Framingham, failed to show that high fat diets or saturated fat cause heart disease.  That's why the French Paradox isn't paradoxical.  

Duck fat enthusiasts are particularly keen on its levels of a monounsaturated fat called oleic acid, which olive oil has in abundance. Some research indicates oleic acid may be behind the beneficial effects of the Mediterranean diet. Many large studies have indicated that the Mediterranean diet — in which olive oil is the predominant source of fat — can lower the risk of heart disease, cancer and other diseases of aging.

**Most reports of the so called Mediterranean diet are just hooey.  It hardly exists as it is reported to exist.

But although 40% of duck fat is oleic acid, its content doesn't quite compare with that of olive oil, which is 71% oleic acid, according to a 2007 analysis by University of Wisconsin researchers published in the Journal of Food Quality.  And just because duck fat contains oleic acid — or even a decent amount of unsaturated fats in general — that doesn't override the fact that one-third of duck fat is unhealthy saturated fat, Watson said.  And both saturated and unsaturated fats get incorporated into cell walls, where they affect the elasticity of the vascular system, Watson added. That's why the American Heart Assn. stresses that unsaturated fats are beneficial only when they take the place of saturated fat in the diet, Mody said.

**It's nearly a 100% bet that if you what the AHA says not to do, you'll be healthier for it.  And again, apparently the good doctor doesn't know that stearic acid become oleic acid upon ingestion, which might explain why saturated fats have never been proven to cause heart disease.

All in all, she said, cooking with duck fat may be preferable to cooking with butter, pork fat or beef fat (which contains 50% saturated fat). But it's still nowhere near as healthful as cooking with olive oil or other vegetable oils, such as safflower oil and canola oil. According to the USDA, olive oil contains less than 14% saturated fat, while canola and safflower oil contain less than 8%.

**If you cook with these "healthful oils", safflower and canola (ever wonder why they don't just market 'canola' oil as rape seed oil?) which were never seen on the face of the earth prior to about 1940, you'll get what you deserve.  Pastured butter on the other hand was consumed in ample quantities by very healthy populations and there's simply no reason to avoid real butter - mass produced butter from the industrial food chain, though it must be viewed with the same skepticism as the meat and dairy from the industrial food chain, is still a quantum of goodness above the dwarf mutant wheat, sugar, and seed oil derived frankenfoods most of us have been raised on.

I beg your forgiveness dear reader for giving in to the impulse to sound smug.  Exasperation gets the best of me from time to time.

Time To Read Up On Grass

Grass Based Health looks to be a very interesting blog, and reminds me of Pollan's description of Polyface Farms in "The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals", which is a magnificent read.

I was struck, reading Pollan's telling of the story of grass, by how significantly different grass fed husbandry is, and how significantly different grassfed animal food quality is compared to the industrially produced food you and I procure at the record low (point of sale) costs we're accustomed to.

The short version as Pollan and folks like Joel Salatin (Salatin calls himself a "grass farmer", but makes his living selling the animals his spectacularly healthy grass feeds) tell it:
-Industrially produced cattle are finished/fattened on industrially produced corn which is so full of oil based fertilizer, that each cow has about a half barrel of oil in it.  I don't know if the one half barrel accounts for the oil burned in the planting, weeding, harvesting, milling, and transporting the corn, or in the butchering, packaging and transporting the beef to you and to me.  I think the half barrel is just an accounting of the amount of amonium nitrate used to grow the cow to market weight.
-The food quality of a cow fed on oil fed corn is significantly different, most notably, in the content of the omega six fatty acids at the cellular level.  In short - we didn't evolve to eat THAT kind of cow.
-The costs of the animal are distributed due to multiple government interventions in the agricultural industry; the price you pay at the counter distracts you from the price you pay in taxes and other market distorting interventions of the USDA.  The other prices you pay, but don't see, result from:
1.  Over-fertilization of corn with ammonium nitrate, which ends up in creeks, rivers and the Gulf of Mexico, which is probably not good (but I don't know how bad it truly is)
2.  Rivers of bovine waste created in the feedlots where cattle, which are ruminants made to live on grass (which very few mammals can live on, but fortunately for us apex predators, cattle thrive on), are fed corn.  Ruminants fed a corn diet get sick, and fat, and require lots of interested stuff mixed with their feed (antibiotics and surfactants) so they can survive the unnatural diet. 
-Interesting chain of events follows.  All of the USDA's rules about butchering meat are built around the idea of butchering sick cows en masse.  If you feed a cow grass, and kill it in your back yard, there are entire classes of disease it doesn't have a risk of getting - like e coli, which could be eliminated from our food supply by letting all cattle live on grass alone for five days before they are butchered.  But don't try and kill a cow in your back yard and sell it, because the USDA doesn't like that; they want you to take it to an industrial processing facility with the sick cows, where the carcass can be gazed at by inspectors.  Yes, the USDA - how this happened is sad to consider - can tell you who you can or cannot buy dead cows from, presumably because the passionate, caring and very intelligent, not to mention incredibly well informed, bureaucrats at the USDA have your best interests at heart and unquestionably know better than you do what you should or should not eat and with whom you should conduct business.
-I won't even delve into the bizarre and dark relationships between the USDA, independent farmers, and the agribusiness conglomerates - Lierre Keith and Pollan paint the picture well, and it may even be true, probably is, and if so, certainly validates the Frankenstein creations that result when business and government start scratching each other's backs.
-For those of you who believe in the anthropogenic global warming myths, grass farmers like to point out that while industrial food production of both plants and animals is a massive contributor to carbon emissions, grass farming and grass farmed animals are a huge carbon sponge, effectively sequestering carbon by creating massive quantities of top soil.
-85% of the caloric quantity of the food our industrial food system produces comes from corn and other grain sources (with soybeans thrown in for good measure).  It's better to choke down your grains as beef than as grains, but it still isn't what I would call optimal.  That's why I now view the deer I kill as the best food in our house, whereas I used to look at it like second rate meat that was hard to cook and tasted funny.

So I wonder about the massive experiment we are conducting on ourselves - can we be healthy on non-grassfed animals as our food, and at what dosages?  Joel Salatin says he grows hundreds of cows, turkeys, rabbits, chickens, pigs, and chicken eggs annually with no irrigation, no fertilizer, and virtually no commercial feed.  Would it be possible to transform our food system into grass based production systems which are as self sustaining as Polyface?  Salatin says the only reason the grass based production method does not beat the current costs of the industrial food chain is USDA rules, designed to protect us from the many hazards of industrial production of foods, unnecessarily raise the cost of bringing grass fed animals to market.  Aside from the quality and cost issues, industrial production methods are arguable unsustainable, especially as regards non-animal products, because they are dependent upon oil fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation (irrigation brings soil salinization and is therefore unsustainable - although there are some efforts to breed new varieties of salt resistant plants, thank goodness). 

I'm dreaming of the grass revolution.  Providing food via the current industrial food system to 300 million Americans, much less 6+ billion the world over, seems like one huge house of cards, let's hope the breeze through the window doesn't kick up.
(edited 3 March 2011)

What's Wrong With Our Food System?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7Id9caYw-Y&hd=1 

What is wrong with our food system?  Mostly, the fact that we demand crappy cheap food that isn't good for us!  This video is based on good information with a bad interpretation.  If we're ever going to be able to get high quality, nutritous food for rich and poor, we'll need the same greed and capitalism that drives the industrial food system to bring us what we're asking for now.

Watch the vid, this kid nails his speech!  Even though I don't take the editorializing too seriously, I agree that the  industrial food chain we currently feed a nation with is sub-optimal for health and/or environmental sustainability.  I hope that Joel Salatin's model may be reproduced many times over.

I don't think any of the needed changes will happen any time soon.