Weekend viewing: Civil Eats’ Infographic on Meat
I love Civil Eats’ Infographic explaining the global meat situation. Here’s how it begins. Click on the link to see the rest of it. Definitely worth a look.
I love Civil Eats’ Infographic explaining the global meat situation. Here’s how it begins. Click on the link to see the rest of it. Definitely worth a look.
Katy has a terrific show on Heritage Radio that I’ve been on several times and I was happy to do a blurb for her new book:
Katy Keiffer has produced a thorough and well researched analysis of everything that’s wrong with industrial meat production. Her book is worth reading for its focus on animal welfare, antibiotic resistance, and worker safety, but even more for its critique of the effects of animal feed production on international trade and land grabs. This book is for everyone who cares about how meat-eating affects our planet.
Global Meat News is another one of those industry newsletters I follow closely. It’s been tracking what’s been happening with meat in Brazil. This is a great place to find out about this quickly.
The USDA has just issued a report on trends in per capita food availability from 1970 to 2014.
Here’s my favorite figure:
The inner ring represents calories from those food groups in 1970. The outer ring includes data from 2014.
The bottom line: calories from all food groups increased, fats and oils and the meat group most of all, dairy and fruits and vegetables the least.
The sugar data are also interesting:
Total sugars (blue) peaked at about 1999 in parallel with high fructose corn syrup (orange). Table sugar, sucrose, has been flat since the 1980s (green).
Eat your veggies!
Marta Zaraska. Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat. Basic Books, 2016.
If this were just another diatribe against meat-eating, I would not have bothered to read it but this book is much more interesting than that. The Polish-Canadian journalist Marta Zaraska describes herself as a “sloppy vegetarian,” someone who doesn’t eat much meat but
can’t seem to completely let go of meat either. There is something in it—in its cultural, historic, and social appeal, or maybe in its chemical composition—that keeps luring me back.
And that’s what this book is about: the cultural, historic, and social (and maybe even the chemical) appeal of eating meat. Zaraska identifies the reasons—the hooks—of this appeal, linked as they are to genetics, culture, history, and the politics of the meat industry and government.
Although Zaraska clearly thinks eating less meat would be good for health, animal welfare, and the environment, that’s not really the book’s goal. Instead, it’s to understand why most people don’t want to be vegetarian, let alone vegan, and why even small steps in that direction are worth taking.
What’s impressive about this book is the friendliness, human understanding, and charm of its writing, and the global scope of the interviews on which it draws (full disclosure: it briefly quotes my work).
A couple of scientific points didn’t ring right (beans do have methionine, just not as much as is needed), and I’m not sure that mock meats, meat substitutes, and edible insects will satisfy the “hooks” she describes so well, but these are minor quibbles.
Thanks to a reader for sending these items from a journal that I don’t usually come across. These bring the casually collected total since last March to 145 studies favorable to the sponsor versus 12 that are not.
Consuming the daily recommended amounts of dairy products would reduce the prevalence of inadequate micronutrient intakes in the United States: diet modeling study based on NHANES 2007–2010. Erin E Quann, Victor L Fulgoni III and Nancy Auestad. Nutrition Journal 2015; 14:90 DOI: 10.1186/s12937-015-0057-5
Association of lunch meat consumption with nutrient intake, diet quality and health risk factors in U.S. children and adults: NHANES 2007–201Sanjiv Agarwal, Victor L. Fulgoni III and Eric P. Berg. Nutrition Journal. 2015;14:128. DOI: 10.1186/s12937-015-011f8-9
A review and meta-analysis of prospective studies of red and processed meat, meat cooking methods, heme iron, heterocyclic amines and prostate cancer. Lauren C. Bylsma and Dominik D. Alexander. Nutrition Journal. 2015;14:125. DOI: 10.1186/s12937-015-0111-3
Are restrictive guidelines for added sugars science based? Jennifer Erickson and Joanne Slavin. Nutrition Journal. 2015;14:124. DOI: 10.1186/s12937-015-0114-0
Cow’s milk-based beverage consumption in 1- to 4-year-olds and allergic manifestations: an RCT. M. V. Pontes, T. C. M. Ribeiro, H. Ribeiro, A. P. de Mattos, I. R. Almeida, V. M. Leal, G. N. Cabral, S. Stolz, W. Zhuang and D. M. F. Scalabrin. Nutrition Journal. 2016;15:19. DOI: 10.1186/s12937-016-0138-0
Whole grain consumption trends and associations with body weight measures in the United States: results from the cross sectional National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2001–2012. Ann M. Albertson, Marla Reicks, Nandan Joshi and Carolyn K. Gugger. Nutrition Journal 2016;15:8. DOI: 10.1186/s12937-016-0126-4
The World Health Organization has issued a statement of clarification of the significance of its International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) report on the increased risk for colorectal cancer from eating processed and red meat (see my post on this).
The latest IARC review does not ask people to stop eating processed meats but indicates that reducing consumption of these products can reduce the risk of colorectal cancer.
Got that?
The New York Times explains the meaning of this increased risk. To understand it, you need to know the risk of colorectal cancer among people who never eat processed or red meat.
The main problem with the public health messages put out by the W.H.O. is that the agency did a poor job of explaining what its risk-ranking system really means…it’s based only on the strength of the overall research, not on the actual danger of a specific product…Even the most strident anti-meat crusader knows that eating bacon is not as risky as smoking or asbestos exposure. Smoking raises a person’s lifetime risk of developing lung cancer by a staggering 2,500 percent. Meanwhile, two daily strips of bacon, based on the associations identified by the W.H.O., would translate to about a 6 percent lifetime risk for colon cancer, up from the 5 percent risk for people who don’t enjoy bacon or other processed meats.
My interpretation: Can processed and red meats be included in healthful diets? Yes, of course. But for many reasons, people and the planet would be healthier if these foods were consumed in smaller portions, less often.
Yesterday, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) issued a warning about the carcinogenic potential of processed and red meat. This, as you might expect, caused a media flurry. CNN News asked me for a written comment. They titled it “The other benefit to eating less red meat.” Here’s what I wrote:
The just-released report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer judging processed meat as clearly carcinogenic and red meat as probably carcinogenic has caused consternation among meat producers and consumers.
Meat producers do not like the “eat less meat” message. Consumers do not want to give up their bacon and hamburgers — delicious and also icons of the American way of life.
But these judgments should come as no surprise to anyone. Eating less processed and red meat has been accepted dietary advice since Ancel and Margaret Keys wrote their diet book for heart disease prevention, “Eat Well and Stay Well,” in 1959. Their advice: “restrict saturated fats, the fats in beef, pork, lamb, sausages …” They aimed this advice at reducing saturated fat to prevent heart disease. Federal committees and agencies have continued issuing such heart-disease advice to the present day.
Cancer entered the picture in the 1970s, when scientists began to link red meat — beef, pork, lamb — to the risk of cancers of the colon and rectum. Even after several decades of research, they had a hard time deciding whether the culprit in meat was fat, saturated fat, protein, carcinogens induced when meat is cooked to high temperatures or some other component.
In the mid-1990s, dietary guidelines committees advised eating lean meats and limiting intake of processed meats, still because of their high fat content. By the late 1990s, cancer experts said that red meat “probably” increases the risk of colorectal cancers, and “possibly” increases the risk of cancers of the pancreas, breast, prostate and kidney. The IARC report, based on more recent evidence, makes even stronger recommendations and favors carcinogens as the causative factors.
To put this in context: For decades, the meat industry’s big public relations problem has been that vegetarians are demonstrably healthier than meat eaters. People who do not eat red meat havemuch less of a chance of developing heart disease and bowel cancers than the average American.
More recently, the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) found diets “higher in red/processed meats…” to be associated with a greater risk of colorectal cancer, and it recommended dietary patterns and low in red and/or processed meats, but higher in vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, lean meats/seafood and low-fat dairy — largely, but not necessarily exclusively, plant-based.
This is good advice for anyone.
Eating less red and processed meats has two benefits: a reduced risk for certain forms of cancer,and a reduced effect on climate change.
The DGAC deemed eating less red meat to be exceptionally beneficial to the environment as well as to human health. The IARC report strengthens the health component of the recommendation. The secretaries of USDA and Health and Human Services, however, have refused to allow environmental concerns to be considered in the 2015 dietary guidelines.
I mention the dispute over environmental “sustainability” in the dietary guidelines because largely plant-based diets are appropriate for all kinds of health concerns — obesity, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease and now, especially, colorectal cancer — as well as environmental concerns.
By eating less red and processed meats, you promote both your own health and that of the planet.
At issue then is how much red and processed meat is compatible with good health. The IARC commission ducked that question, although it cites evidence that as little as 100 grams (a quarter pound) of red meat a day, and half that much of processed meats, increases cancer risk by 15% to 20%.
Will an occasional hamburger or piece of bacon raise your risk that much? I don’t think so. But the evidence reviewed by IARC strongly suggests that if you do eat meat, eat less when you do, don’t eat meat every day, save processed meats for rare treats and be sure to eat plenty of vegetables.
Fortunately, this advice leaves plenty of room for delicious meals — just with meat taking up much less room on the plate.
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