Yippee-Kai-Yay: the research shows...

The "red meat tied to cancer" story has certainly swept the news industry. I like this story about the reaction of Saskatchewan cattle ranchers to the new study:

Ed Bothner, president of the Saskatchewan Stock Growers Association, questions those findings.

"There's societies that eat three to four times as much red meat or three to four times as much beef as we do," Bothner told CBC News. "And I can remember in my lifetime when our per capita consumption in Canada was over 100 pounds. Right now it is lower than 50, so I don't think it's the consumption of red meat, per se, that's the problem."

Joe Kleinsasser, the chairman of SaskPork, said that when he heard about the study, his first reaction was to dismiss it.

"These studies are a dime a dozen," Kleinsasser said. "One day eggs are bad for you, the next day you can't eat enough of them."

I'm sorry dude - BUT WHERE IN THE HELL are people eating three to four times more red meat than North Americans? That's goddamned ludicrous. And the other guy is priceless as well... these studies are a dime a dozen.... Yeah I know. Troll through the archives of this blog... there is NO END to the amount of research saying Whatever the f*&^k you do, don't eat red meat!

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Wow - am I the only one who completely missed this Pew Commission Report that came out in April 2008?

Pew Commission Says Industrial Scale Farm Animal Production Poses “Unacceptable” Risks to Public Health, Environment

Washington, DC - 04/29/2008 - The current industrial farm animal production (IFAP) system often poses unacceptable risks to public health, the environment and the welfare of the animals themselves, according to an extensive 2½-year examination conducted by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production (PCIFAP), in a study released today.

Commissioners have determined that the negative effects of the IFAP system are too great and the scientific evidence is too strong to ignore. Significant changes must be implemented and must start now. And while some areas of animal agriculture have recognized these threats and have taken action, it is clear that the industry has a long way to go.

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I found the Pew Commission report while scanning through the references at the end of this article:

Common Foods and Farming Methods Thought to Promote Health: What the Data Show
Primary Care: Clinics in Office Practice - Volume 35, Issue 4 (December 2008)
John Chahbazi, MD & Shelly Grow, MS

If you don't have access to the journal "Primary Care" shoot me an email (check my profile) and I'll see if I can send you a copy.

Here are some exerpts:

On how hard it is to figure out what the healthiest diets are, when our whole lifestyle is so sick

Even if the POEMs needed for evidence-based dietary counseling and farming practice recommendations are available, there is the difficulty of applying proven interventions to a population that has such a high rate of lifestyle-associated disease. This is a population that has continued to gain weight and become diabetic at ever-increasing rates in the face of improved food label reading and dietary changes as reported in Healthy People 2010. Trying for different results while maintaining the basic elements of a lifestyle that already has caused poor health could explain why only a small portion of proven dietary interventions have been shown to improve long-term health or longevity.

Quote from Diet for a New America on the benefits of adopting a vegetarian diet

“The effects on our physical health are immediate. The incidence of cancer and heart attack, the nation's biggest killers, drops precipitously. So do many other diseases now demonstrably and causally linked to consumption of animal proteins and fats, such as osteoporosis … hormonal imbalances causing miscarriages and aberrations of sexual development similarly drop away, as we cease ingesting with our meat, poultry and milk the drugs pumped into our livestock. So do the neurologic disorders and birth defects due to pesticides and other chemicals, as we begin to eat lower on the food chain where the poisons are far less concentrated … We find that the grain we previously fed to fatten livestock can now feed five times the U.S. population; so we have been able to alleviate malnutrition and hunger on a worldwide scale … We find ourselves also relieved of fear. For on a semiconscious level we knew all along that the old disparities in consumption were turning our planet into a tinder box, breeding resentments and desperations that could only eventuate in war.”

On the blood type diets like Eat Right for Your Type

Blood-type diets claiming benefits from different dietary components based on genotypes[37] are dismissed commonly as baseless theory.[38] Evidence is scarce and limited to secondary prevention. The most interesting study showed that a particular blood type in diabetics predisposed to more effective low-density lipoprotein lowering in response to increased dietary fiber.

Antibiotic Use

Cattle in 83% of United States commercial beef and dairy feedlots routinely receive antibiotics for disease prevention and to promote growth, resulting in the use of over 24 million pounds of antimicrobials annually for nontherapeutic purposes.
Many of these antimicrobials, such as tetracycline and penicillin, are important for human use. Drug-resistant bacteria and pathogens have emerged because of the widespread use of antibiotics in the animal reservoir, and these theoretically are able to be passed to people through the consumption of meat products. Health implications of antimicrobial resistance are infections that otherwise would not have occurred and increased rates of treatment failures and infection severity. An antibiotic-resistant urinary tract infection already may have been linked to this practice.

In general

This article is an overview of research on diets and nutrition, and the most common theme is this one:

For now, amelioration of unhealthy choices may be the best approach. Serial substitutions using nonanimal foods and snacks to reduce animal product consumption over time, encouragement of daily vigorous exercise, and increased consumption of organic and locally grown foods appear to be the best strategies toward that end.

End hunger by having a sirloin?

A local community group just started advertising something they're doing to raise money for a food bank - it's obvious that no vegetarians or vegans were part of this. The premise is that you have a steak dinner at a local restaurant for $20.00, and $2.00 from each meal goes to the food bank.

I couldn't help myself. I wrote the community group a nice email detailing the intimate connection between the meat-rich (particularly beef) diet and world hunger.



I came across some neat stuff while writing my email.

In the Independent Online I found The Big Question: Is changing our diet the key to resolving the global food crisis?

How does eating meat cause hunger?
Because it is a very inefficient way of producing food. It takes 8kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef, and large tracts of forest have been cleared for grazing land that might have been used to grow crops. Chicken is more efficient to produce – it takes 2kg of feed to produce 1kg of meat. To maximise food production it is best to be vegan. According to Simon Fairlie, in his magazine The Land, it would take just 3 million hectares of arable land to meet Britain's food needs, half the current total, if the population were vegan.

From WorldWatch, 2004, 17(4) pg12-19 I found a fairly devastating (for the meat industry) article with the very long title Now, it's not personal! But like it or not, meat-eating is becoming a problem for everyone on the planet.
Here's an excerpt from the article abstract:

As environmental science has advanced, it has become apparent that the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening humanity - deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities, and the spread of disease.

The WorldWatch group is biased by the way. I happen to think they're right and I agree with them, but they're the group behind Happier Meals (which you can find a free copy of if you google it) and they've been on about the meat industry for a long time now.


Here are the other links I provided in my letter to this community group, some of which you've seen before on this blog:

Wired Online - Food Riots Begin: Will you go vegetarian?

BBC - Hungry World Must Eat less meat

Guardian - Only a radical change of diet can halt looming food crises

U.N. Food & Agricultural Association: Livestock's Long Shadow

from Irish research to Vancouver newspapers

While pissing off vegans everywhere, here is a good illustration of something like the joke about how there are three types of lies (punchline being - Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics). In this case, we have the grey fuzzy gap between research, and how research gets portrayed in a newspaper.

First - the Vancouver Sun runs a story called Vegan diet tied to birth defects.

So read that, but then definitely read a follow up piece in the same newspaper called Is eating vegan while pregnant as bad as smoking and drinking? What you are particularly going to want to read are the string of comments below this piece, where pissed off vegans tear both stories to shreds.

A) All the hoopla in both stories is about women who are B12 deficient. Vegans are not necessarily B12 deficient... especially mothers who have probably read up on this and are taking their supplements.

B) The data in the study is 20 years old (which is fine) but comes from a test group in Ireland where neural tube defects are already common - i.e. this is already a fairly biased test group.

C) None of the women in the study actually identified as vegetarian or vegan - some happened to have low B12 levels... and no offense... but in Ireland in 1989 they were probably meat eaters, not veggies.

Food and sustainability

I knew that the meat-rich diet was bad for the environment, but until the last few days I didn't realize that meat production emits more greenhouse gases than the international transportation industry.

I put together some details on this for a little project at work, and thought I'd post it up here as well.



Guess what – more and more research is showing that you can more to reduce your carbon footprint by going vegetarian, than by switching from an SUV to a hybrid car.

In 2006, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization released Livestock's Long Shadow, which identified the meat industry as a greater producer of greenhouse gases than the entire international transportation industry.

New Scientist magazine agrees, stating in 2008 that a family's food consumption accounts for double the greenhouse gases as their household driving habits.

The industrialized production of meat (approximately 15 billion animals each year in the U.S. alone) is an incredibly carbon intensive process. The problem begins with the fact that it takes 7 tons of plant protein (cows in industrial farms aren't fed grass, but soy, which can be eaten by humans) to make 1 ton of meat protein – resulting in 6 tons of wasted food (and wasted farmland, fertilizer, pesticides, oil/energy, and tremendous amounts of wasted water).
Not only does the production of meat create greenhouse gases, but by replacing forests (which act as carbon sinks to soak up C02) with farmland to grow soy for the animals, the meat industry reduces the planet's natural ability to absorb greenhouse gases. As well, cows account for approximately 40% of all the methane in the atmosphere.

In a February 2009 report, Stehfest et al state that the combined problems of methane, the C02 emissions caused by the meat industry, and the elimination of carbon sinks, are so significant that a worldwide switch to a vegetarian diet (however unlikely) would achieve the equivalent of $20 trillion spent on other climate change solutions (such as carbon sequestriation).

In Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a planet under stress and a civilization in trouble (looks like a version 3.0 was just released), Lester Brown writes that at a North American level of food consumption (ie heavy on meat), the planet can support 2.5 billion people, while at the other extreme, on the more veggie Indian diet, the earth could support 10 billion people (there are 6 billion people on the planet right now, with 9 billion expected by 2050).

Apart from greenhouse gas emissions, the industrialized meat industry creates many other environmental problems, including the toxic waste lagoons caused by pig farms (which create as much waste as cities the size of Cincinnati) and the reduction of oxygen levels in water bodies like the Gulf of Mexico, which kills all sealife in these areas.

Brown, L. (2006). Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a planet under stress and a civilization in trouble. Washington: Earth Policy Institute.

Nierenber, D. (2005). Happier meals: Rethinking the global meat industry. Danvers, MA: Worldwatch Institute.

Stehfest, E. & Bouwman, L. (2009). Climate benefits of changing diet. Climatic Change, published in Online First edition, Feb. 4, 2009.

Steinfeld, H. & Gerber, P. (2006) Livestock's long shadow: Environmental issues and options. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Trivedi, B. (2008). Dinner's dirty secret: your shopping basket is spewing greenhouse gases. New Scientist, 199(2673), 28-32.
PS - looks like the online version was titled What is your dinner doing to the climate?

End of the Line

The book is sitting on my bedside table.

I can't wait to see the movie.



Pg 4
...it comes with the realization that in a single human lifetime we have inflicted a crisis on the oceans greater than any yet caused by pollution. That crisis compares with the destruction of mammoths, bison, and whales, the rape of rain forests, and the pursuit of bush meat. As a method of mass destruction, fishing with modern technology is the most destructive activity on Earth.

Pg 5
This book argues that, as a result of overfishing, we are nearing the end of the line for fish stocks and whole ecosystems in the world's oceans, and that it is time we arranged things differently.

Dolphins evolve opposable thumbs

One of my favourite George Bush lines is included here: "I believe that human beings and fish can coexist peacefully". I assume he was asked a question about overfishing, and that was his response, but out of context it sounds like most other ridiculous George Bush comments. To give Bush credit, I mentioned over here that I'm tremendously impressed by his decision to create massive marine protected zones (i.e. oceanic equivalents of National Parks).

This is tremendously important, and ties in to a post I've been meaning to write about Pescatarians. Now, to each his own and all that, but I really think that pescatarians need to read more. I assume that pescatarians are otherwise veggie only because of the animal cruelty issue, and think that fish lack the intelligence to know suffering, and therefore the pescies (this shall be my new shortform of pescatarians) feel alright about eating fish. Now the first flaw here, if we stick with animal cruelty, is that you have to believe that hyper-intelligent dolphins, and also porpoises and whales, have the intelligence to suffer, and since deep sea nets catch and slowly kill 1000 of these creatures a day - 1000 A DAY FOR GOD'S SAKE!!! (for no purpose by the way, simple bycatch of trawlers actually going after fish) - the cans of tuna you buy at the supermarket help support the torture of dolphins. Commercial fishing by the way is a phenomenally wasteful industry - how can you support a business practice where 1/3 of the fish caught get thrown back dead into the ocean because they weren't the species that the trawler was going for?

My other response to pescatarianism is that, unless you honestly and truly cannot survive without the protein from fish (which I suspect only applies to people in the third world) you are misguidedly supporting an industry which is completely f*&%king up the planet.
As far right and conservative a magazine as the Economist has published alarm-sounding special reports (see Troubled Water) about the links between overfishing, marine diversity, climate change, and our own survival as a species.
First - we've already reached a point where all commercial fish stocks could be gone by 2048. The collapse of fish populations makes it harder for the trawlers to get their quotas, so the holes in fish nets get smaller and smaller, catching younger and younger fish - meaning fish which never get the chance to reach breeding stage, thereby eliminating the ability of fish populations to recover from overfishing. Also - the desperation ship captains feel to get their quotas leads to fish nets being dragged over and over across the floors of bays and gulfs and other shallow water areas, destroying any vegetation on the seabottom (vegetation that either feeds or protects fish).

The loss of one species of fish leads to the rise of another type, and then the downfall of another (i.e. if all the sharks die, the fish that sharks ate prosper, and they eat much more of their prey, devastating that stock). The ripple effects of this lead include things like seabirds starving, and bears in B.C. unable to eat salmon.

Meanwhile, while we all know that oceans in general are massive carbon sinks (helping suck up all of our C02 emissions), to date we didn't fully understand how oceans helped us out this way. New research shows that fish excrete a type of calcium that buffers the acidification that C02 causes in the ocean. We're already pumping so much C02 into the atmosphere, and thereby into the ocean, that the skeletons of some sea creatures are dissolving.
Lose all the fish, you lose much of the ocean's carbon sink ability, you lose your elderly aunt to a respiratory problem caused by increasing levels of C02 in the atmosphere.

P.S. - you really should watch Sharkwater and learn about shark finning, and the title of this post comes from one of my favourite articles in the Onion.

P.P.S. - this and this are random but good introductions to this topic, the first for younger audiences, and the second for adults. This one is good on coral reefs and the importance of oceans as carbon sinks.

swimming in your ocean

There's no end to the sheer idiocy of the factory farm system.
After an article back in April about how C02 intensive the meat rich diet is, Discovery News now has one about the nitrogen runoff from Factory Farms destroying oxygen levels in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Now new research shows how the leftover fertilizer is contributing to an oxygen-starved dead zone where the Mississippi River drains into the Gulf of Mexico. Last summer, the zone was nearly the size of Massachusetts.

Gidon Eshel of Bard College at Simon's Rock in Massachusetts and Pamela Martin of the University of Chicago calculate that if Americans kicked their meat habit, it would prevent seven million tons of nitrogen from spilling into the gulf -- a reduction of nearly 90 percent.

"When we did the calculations, it was astonishing," Eshel said. "The main reason is we're feeding so much corn to livestock. It takes 4.5 times more cropland to do that than if you feed people a plant diet, and corn is so nitrogen-intensive."

Cutting down on nitrogen run-off is a big deal, because if it continues unchecked it could threaten shrimp and fishing industries in the gulf, said William Battaglin of the United States Geological Survey.

"Conditions have not been catastrophic to fisheries yet," he said. "The concern is that if this keeps up, you could turn the whole place into the Black Sea, with everything dead."