Humanely Raised Animals Are Healthier To Eat

I’m a localtarian when it comes to eating meat, which makes me one of those weasely douchebags who drives a Prius, recycles, composts, puts spiders outside and sends his extra shoes to African children. And I’ll live with that label if it means that some animals have better lives because, well, I’ve met a lot of animals and I’m pretty sure they care about having a nice lifestyle as much as people do.

I’m not preachy about it, since we must draw the line at douchebaggery somewhere, but I do champion the fact that animals existing in better conditions are healthier to eat than those that live in the abhorrent squalor forced upon those in America’s Big Meat industry. So I’m pretty pissed off at a PR campaign from the egg industry on a study showing no nutritional difference between the eggs of chickens raised humanely vs. those raised in the poulet version of Devil’s Island. Mainly because the study didn’t show that. It showed the opposite.

next up, a study stating the chickens in this picture are perfectly happy.


I guess when you’ve got lawyers as powerful as Big Meat you don’t let pesky science stand in your way. Fund a study that doesn’t yield the results you want? Fuck it. Just issue a press release to the major wires stating it did. Who’s going to care as long as you’re paying, right?

The Fitness Nerd, that’s who! Big props to Denis, who went the extra mile to scrutinize the science. Not that he needed dig that deep in order to begin finding flaws . The Nerd reports,

So many things wrong here. First off, it's a lie. So much of a lie, in fact, that the release itself admits it 5 paragraphs later when it explains "β-carotene levels were higher in the range eggs, which... may have contributed to the darker colored yolks observed in these eggs during the study."

Huh? How do "no nutritional difference" and "β-carotene levels were higher" mesh? The study indicates vitamin A levels in both types of eggs were the same, yet β-carotene can be converted into Vitamin A in our body, so technically, the body gets more A from the free-range eggs.

But he read the entire study, on principle, and found more problems. So either read his entire post or just believe my anecdotal logic—now based on Big Meat’s own science—which concludes that animals that eat healthy, exercise, breath fresh air and aren’t subjected to Frankenstein-esqe experiments and filled with more drugs than Mr. Olympia are healthier to eat. In turn I promise not to get mad when you call me a douchebag because, in my mind anyway, it’s a lot better than being an asshole like all those wankers at Big Meat. Now excuse me while I ride my fixie to the local farm to make sure they’re letting the chickens get enough exercise.

Sad Cow Disease

A man is usually more careful of his money than of his principles.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

I don’t eat animal products unless I know how the animal was raised and two somewhat terrifying recent reports suggest that neither should you. I try not to get all preachy about lifestyle. I believe that people should spend their short amount of time on earth doing things that make them happy. But the more I learn about the big food industry the more I’m convinced that they’re not in the shiny happy people business. Well, shiny maybe.

First, as reported at The Real Fitness Nerd, “The Center for a Liveable Future came out with this report recently illuminating us to the fact that 80% of all antibiotics sold in the US are used on farm animals, not so much to cure them of a sinus infection or a slight case of the clap, but to help facilitate rapid growth. From their blog:

Antibiotics, one of the world’s greatest medical discoveries, are slowly losing their effectiveness in fighting bacterial infections and the massive use of the drugs in food animals may be the biggest culprit. The growing threat of antibiotic resistance is largely due to the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in both people and animals, which leads to an increase in “super-bacteria”. However, people use a much smaller portion of antibiotics sold in this country compared to the amount set aside for food animals. In fact, according to new data just released by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), of the antibiotics sold in 2009 for both people and food animals almost 80% were reserved for livestock and poultry. A huge portion of those antibiotics were never intended to fight bacterial infections, rather producers most likely administered them in continuous low-dosages through feed or water to increase the speed at which their animals grew. And that has many public health experts and scientists troubled.

Creepy on so many different levels.”

Creepy indeed, and that’s the lighter half of it. In a story from the San Francisco Chronicle titled The Most Important Disease You Probably Never Heard Of, David Barash links the massive rise in Crohn’s disease in people to poor animal raising practices by the meat industry.

Welcome to Johne’s (“yo-knees”), the most important disease that you probably never heard of. It is a serious, debilitating and sometimes fatal illness of cattle, goats, and sheep (among other animals), which the livestock and dairy industry is desperate to keep out of the public consciousness, despite the fact that it costs industrial agriculture many millions of dollars every year.

The reason for such industry reticence is that Johne’s disease in livestock is very similar – and possibly even identical – to Crohn’s disease in people, which currently afflicts an estimated 500,000 sufferers in North America alone, causing severe ulcerations of the gastrointestinal tract, immense pain, and loss of appetite and weight, often requiring surgical removal of the damaged bowel. And the big, dirty secret of today’s industrial dairy and meat producers is that animals suffering from flagrant Johne’s disease currently provide milk and meat directly to the American consumer.

Of course, in the web of artificial life that is big food these topics are related. Is it any wonder that this new crop of artificially large livestock is being targeted by an illness causing their bodies to waste away? Methinks not so much. The article then delves into an interesting history of trial and error with antibiotics where we tout what goes well and bury what doesn’t. It’s all very scientific until:

This is itself an extraordinary fact, worth repeating and emphasizing: Cattle suffering from a severe bacterial infection related to tuberculosis and leprosy, characterized by pussy, intestinal ulcers and overall body wasting, and which may be literally identical to a pathogen that causes a devastating illness in genetically susceptible people, are – right now, as you read this – routinely being slaughtered, and their infected meat introduced into the food stream.

Wait! What?! No wonder he felt the need to write it twice. I don’t think you need to be a PETA activist to show a little animal compassion in this case. And regardless of the poor animals, I'm sure the cast of Jackass would enthusiastically choose a vomit omelet over a Whopper made from Johne’s-riddled livestock.

In an old western Paul Newman plays Hud, a despicable character; the black sheep son of a well-to-do rancher who is trying, unsuccessfully, to teach him to run the family business. In one scene the herd is infected with deadly hoof and mouth disease. Upon hearing they needed to be destroyed before they infect anyone else’s cattle Hud says, “They look ok to me. Can’t we sell them quickly before they look sick?” His father stares at him, almost unbelievably, with a look that conveys a lost cause as this human, surely now, is beyond the possibility of salvation says, “Son, you are an unprincipled man.” Hud kills his father and takes over the business. Given the situation as it stands, I think I may have been watching a documentary.

Asian Awesomeness

Friday’s are psyche day so, instead of continuing with people behaving badly week, I’m going to take on a bad subject, junk food, but flip the theme to people behaving super awesomely. Today I present the Snackmaster 2000.

I read Eric Gutoski’s piece when it was first published and, unfortunately, that magazine no longer exists and all that’s left is the original text. But that is plenty. Comments on yesterday’s McRib post made it clear that I needed to take on something called the “Junk Food Diet” that is, apparently, some kind of sham. But as I began my research I stumbled upon this old article where some guys decided it would be cool to taste as many Asian snack foods as they could round up or, as their subtitle puts it: “We sampled $50 worth of Asian Snack foods so you wouldn't have to.”

For those of you whom are unaware of the challenge Asian snacks can present, let me just say that this was an incredible sacrifice for humanity. My brother, who lived in Japan for seven years, says “most Japanese are convinced that the entire snack food industry is some kind of inside joke designed to see what they can trick people into eating.” And Japan might have the least offensive snacks in Asia. For example:

Item Name: Prepared Poly Fish
Country of Origin: China
Fish Based: Hell yes!
Inscrutability Quotient: Quite suspicious
Looks Like: Sesame fish cracker
Tastes Like: Satan's wrath
Fear Factor: This terrorized our minds.
Research Comments: Gaze not into the abyss, lest the abyss gaze into thee. Nothing could prepare you for prepared poly fish. Stay away.

Without further ado, I submit the entire review. Drum roll please...

Snackmaster 2000
We sampled $50 worth of Asian Snack foods so you wouldn't have to.
by Eric Gutoski

Not convinced yet? Consider the closing remarks.

Most of the things we ate were god awful. All of us got sick, some of us worse than others. Through these shared hardships, friendships were damaged, probably irreparably. But friendships come and go. The saddest thing is that as Ambassadors of Snack, we ultimately failed. We had set out to achieve greater cultural understanding, peace and harmony through snack. In the end, we merely confirmed whatever snack prejudices we already secretly held.

The Curious Case of McRib & Men’s Health

“As much as I love ribs there is one part that I hate: the ribs,” jokes Stephen Colbert while lambasting one of the more curious eating phenomenons’s in US history. Apparently in some areas folks have lined up around the block for this odd food item that more resembles something you’d see in one of those old toy ovens that served plastic food than, well, anything that we might eat that comes from nature.

How McDonald’s gets people to buy this is a marvel, but to make it into bad behavior week you’ve got to do more than peddle a suspect product. So today’s example of people behaving badly goes to Men’s Health magazine for their article titled:

McRib’s Return: Go Ahead, Have One

I might let this slide if this were, say, Smoke Signals or Gourmet (though I’m sure their editors wouldn’t), or pretty anything down at the corner newsstand. But Men’s Health, seriously?! They—which I say because the piece has no author—even take an uppity tone with The View’s Joy Behar for panning it,

Joy Behar makes a big point about the McRib having a lot of fat. Really? The first rule of fat loss is to not overeat, and a 500-calorie sandwich isn’t a waist-expanding indulgence, no matter how many of its calories come from fat.

Um, really?! How many readers does this magazine have? This is their editorial staff‘s “first rule of fat loss”. Let me borrow a phrase from my buddy Jack LaLanne about charlatans, “these people should be in jail.”

Not overeating is not a rule of fat loss. It’s a concept that has a few hooks on it, namely that you need to make a nutrient swap. Using their example you’d be well off on a diet of gummy candies and Diet Coke just so long as you didn’t overeat. I submit that you’d be dead within a month.

Our society is fat because we eat too many calories and too few nutrients. The first rule of weight loss (fat loss is a silly term—the goal is body composition change that comes from lifestyle) is the change the nutrient ratios of the foods you eat so that you get more nutrients per calorie. Dropping calories without assessing the nutrients that you are consuming will lead to nutrient deficiencies and other assorted health problems.

With this in mind, let’s have a look at the health costs of the McRib:

First off, we don’t really know what this food is. As Colbert points out, it’s not a rib. It smells and tastes like ribs but McDonald’s artificially flavors all of their foods to taste like anything it wants, in this case an actual pork rib that’s been cooked on a BBQ. Fast food chemists could make newspaper taste like ribs, too. Unlike natural foods, the way fast food tastes has absolutely no relationship to what is in the actual food.

If you’ve read any number of books on the subject you will know that animal raising practices of the fast food companies is abysmal. Dennis Miller once had a routine where he said something like, “39 cents for a burger. That’s less than what it costs to feed my dog. What’s in that stuff?” And, sure enough, many dog food companies have better animal raising practices than McDonald’s. All you know for sure is that it’s pork of some kind, and it’s most likely along the lines of pork by-products.

Labeling practices are lobbied heavily by, well, everyone but the meat industry draws a lot of water in this area. Independent studies all show that organically raised animals have a higher nutrient ratio than those that are mass produced but labels, by law (or lobbyists) can’t reflect this. Still we see that about half the McRib calories come from fat. Given that it includes a high calorie bun and condiments, which contain very little fat, we know that the meat contains an absurdly high ratio of saturated fat to protein.

So the small amount of nutritional information that we know is already bad, which doesn’t factor in that you’re eating an animal that is basically a toxin waste bin by the time it’s slaughtered. These animals are raised on mass amounts of antibiotics to keep it living in horrendous conditions, fed basically junk foods, and injected with any number of hormones to increase the size of various body parts and speed at which it grows.

Then you must add the rest of the ingredients, most of which are “convenience” foods that are fortified (with a few lobbied-for vitamins) by-products of genetically modified soy and corn production. These processed foods are bleached, so they all of their natural vitamins, minerals, enzymes, bacteria, and other phytonutrients that are essential for life to the point where, basically, you’d do better nutritionally to dumpster dive for 500 calories because it at least might have picked up some living matter.

The bottom line is that the McRib is 500 calories, with 22 grams (88 calories) of protein. The remaining 420 calories are void of anything helpful for your body. Eating foods like this is exactly why we have an obesity epidemic and, as a nutritionist, this is exactly the kind of thing that I recommend cutting out of your diet as step one. That something calling itself “Men’s Health” is recommending it should be a crime, and is certainly reason to gain entry into the people behaving badly club.

White Coat Syndrome

“Drug companies say they hire the most-respected doctors in their fields for the critical task of teaching about the benefits and risks of their drugs,” begins an article at Pro Publica that is the highlight of the second installment of bad behavior week.

“But an investigation by ProPublica uncovered hundreds of doctors on company payrolls who had been accused of professional misconduct, were disciplined by state boards or lacked credentials as researchers or specialists.”



Maybe I was a cynical little kid but I can clearly remember the first time I saw a TV doctor pitching a medical product. He was that guy from the show Emergency and, even though I was a little kid, I turned to my sister and said, “That’s guy’s not a real doctor. Who would believe this?” But as the years rolled by my wide-eyed wonder turned to pure cynicism as someone in a white coat would inevitably turn up whenever something of perceived medicinal value was being peddled on the telie. Apparently, if one donned a white coat they were immediately exalted as experts in, well, whatever happened to be the subject matter at hand—you know, like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island.

But then something weird happened. These hucksters stopped looking like Kelly Lynch in Road House and began to resemble the people I’d see down at the medical clinic. Were REAL doctors actually doing ads for products ranging from cold medicines, to gum, to cigarettes? And, if so, why? I’d always thought doctors made enough money that if you wanted an appointment on Thursday you needed to secure an early tee time.



As it turns out, not surprisingly given they are human, not all doctors are good at their jobs. But instead of failure leading to finding a new career path that better suits them, doctors can now parlay their vocational failure into sometimes even more lucrative: careers as spokespeople.

A review of physician licensing records in the 15 most-populous states and three others found sanctions against more than 250 speakers, including some of the highest paid. Their misconduct included inappropriately prescribing drugs, providing poor care or having sex with patients. Some of the doctors had even lost their licenses.

Yes, today’s bad behavior post is about doctors, but the real people behaving badly are those who are doing the hiring; in this case the Pharmaceutical companies. Perhaps instead of revoking their medical licenses the AMA should forbid bad doctors from wearing white coats in public.

In the case of Big Pharma, I suppose it’s easier to coerce a disgraced doctor to pitch your product, especially if it’s for something that’s ethically on the fence.

For example,

In 2001, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ordered [2] Pennsylvania doctor James I. McMillen to stop “false or misleading” promotions of the painkiller Celebrex, saying he minimized risks and touted it for unapproved uses.

Still, three other leading drug makers paid the rheumatologist $224,163 over 18 months to deliver talks to other physicians about their drugs.

A little ethically shady, to be sure, but hardly cause for some high scale investigative reporting. However, some Pharma’s source from grayer areas, apparently the darker the better:

And in Georgia, a state appeals court in 2004 upheld [3] a hospital’s decision to kick Dr. Donald Ray Taylor off its staff. The anesthesiologist had admitted giving young female patients rectal and vaginal exams without documenting why. He’d also been accused of exposing women’s breasts during medical procedures. When confronted by a hospital official, Taylor said, “Maybe I am a pervert, I honestly don’t know,” according to the appellate court ruling.

Last year, Taylor was Cephalon's third-highest-paid speaker out of more than 900. He received $142,050 in 2009 and another $52,400 through June.

The article, part one of a series, then goes into depth about some of the seediness in the industry, including active recruiting of non-qualified doctors to “educate” or, in reality, pitch their products.

“It’s sort of like American Idol,” said sociologist Susan Chimonas, who studies doctor-pharma relationships at the Institute on Medicine as a Profession in New York City.

“Nobody will have necessarily heard of you before — but after you’ve been around the country speaking 100 times a year, people will begin to know your name and think, ‘This guy is important.’ It creates an opinion leader who wasn’t necessarily an expert before.”

And it’s all, of course, in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

"The pressure is enormous. The investment in these drugs is massive,” said Dr. David A. Kessler, who formerly served as both FDA commissioner and dean of the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. “Are any of us surprised they’re trying to maximize their markets in almost any way they can?”

Can you blame them? Um, yes. You can. At least by nominating them people who behave badly for the day.


pic: egregious "pain don't hurt" road house shot. how can you not love a doc whose white coat covers her mini skirt, who digs ass-kicking zen bouncers, and monster trucks? god bless america. i thought you'd be bigger.

Extra Cheesy Behavior

In celebration of national people behaving badly week I’ll be posting examples of compromised human performance this week. I can think of no better place to start than with a good old fashioned American conspiracy. As Denis Faye said over at the Fitness Nerd, “Never mind JFK's assassination, or Iran-Contra, or the fake moon landing. The mainstream media has actually uncovered a giant, government cheese conspiracy. Best news day ever.”



More Faye, “ The New York Times absolutely ripped the USDA a new one this weekend with this report on, get this, an organization quietly funded by the United States government that exists entirely for the promotion of dairy, particularly cheese.”

Apparently, this is correct. The government agency WE pay to watch of backs is in bed with the folks who peddle cheese, you know the stuff that according to the USDA we should limit to less than 10 percent of our daily calories. Yet this same USDA worked with Domino’s Pizza to aid flagging sales by coming up with a campaign for extra-cheesy pizza that gives you most of your USDA limit of sat fat in a single slice. It worked, so not only did we pay for USDA to talk us into eating more cheese, we paid for Domino’s to make less healthy food (bet you didn’t think this was possible), and we’re paying on the back end as our society’s health fails.

Americans now eat an average of 33 pounds of cheese a year, nearly triple the 1970 rate. Cheese has become the largest source of saturated fat; an ounce of many cheeses contains as much saturated fat as a glass of whole milk.

It gets more insidious, as Faye so nerdily put it,

“The organization, which goes by the super-awesome, Robocopesque moniker Dairy Management Inc (funded by the USDA), worked with Domino's Pizza to help with foundering sales. The solution? More cheese! The chain followed Omni Consumer Products, I mean Dairy Management Inc's advice, packing 2/3's the RDA for saturated fat into each slice. Sales exploded.”

The example is no one off. The Times also uncovered a falsified Dairy campaign that ran for four years,

In one instance, Dairy Management spent millions of dollars on research to support a national advertising campaign promoting the notion that people could lose weight by consuming more dairy products, records and interviews show. The campaign went on for four years, ending in 2007, even though other researchers — one paid by Dairy Management itself — found no such weight-loss benefits.

This one I know about, and wrote about years ago, because I worked with one of the researched who told me how they had skewed the research. No surprise it couldn’t be replicated, even by the dairy industry. Since this is basically Denis’ post I’ll let him sum it up.

"Busted!

It's a long news article, but it's well worth the read. The hypocrisy is just absurd. I understand that the USDA is a slave to many masters, including the farming lobby and, apparently, crappy fast food chains, but really? More cheese? Come on, guys. Grow a pair."

What's Colorless and Tasteless And Smells Like . . . Money?

My friend Josh just sent me this under the title, "Awesome".
I would say it's unbelievable but you've heard that from me before. I've been writing about bottled water for quite a few years now. Here's an article from last summer:

http://www.beachbody.com/product/newsletters/271.do

And I'm not alone. But instead of helping the issue it seems to still be growing. Some water is selling for a million times its tap price. Ugh.

Along these lines, I recommend the movie Idiocracy. This is the story of a guy who gets sent to a future, where humanity has dumbed itself down to the point where they're dying off because they water their crops with something like Gatorade, which is happening because they corporation had just bought the FDA so it could increase its profits. It's pretty over the top but, the way we're going, the only unbelievable thing in the film is that it takes place 500 years in the future. At the rate we're going this will happen in our lifetime. Sheesh.

Here's the link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/29/AR2008062901872.html?hpid=topnews

Trust Your Local Pharmaceutical Company

I really see no need for comment. More fun from Big Pharma, courtesy of Dr. Jay Rowen, MD.

Inventing a Disease

You've got to admire the chutzpah of the marketers at pharmaceutical giant Glaxo-SmithKline PLC. They've figured out how to increase sales for one of their most popular drugs by more than $300 million a year. All they had to do was invent a disease for it to treat.

The name of the drug is Requip. It works by regulating the brain chemical dopamine, which is responsible for controlling body movements. It's effective enough that it has become the drug of choice for doctors treating patients with Parkinson's disease.

Then someone at Glaxo had an "ah-ha!" moment. There are millions more people who suffer from leg twitches at night than Parkinson's. What if Requip became the drug of choice for them? Only problem was, "leg twitches" isn't a disease. So HMOs and insurance companies won't pay for prescriptions to treat it.

The wizards at Glaxo decided on a three-step campaign to change all that. First, they spent millions of dollars to educate the medical profession about a new disease. But not "leg twitches." No, "restless leg syndrome" sounds much more serious. And "syndrome" is almost the same thing as "disease," isn't it? Glaxo's ads in medical journals started carrying the tagline, "GlaxoSmithKline: A Leader in RLS Research."

Next, Glaxo hired dozens of "sleep-disorder specialists" to go around the country, pitching local doctors about the seriousness of RLS and the wonders Requip could work in treating it. They invited the docs to lavish meals at country clubs and four-star restaurants, with Glaxo picking up the tab. They attended by the hundreds.

Finally, Glaxo spent millions more on TV ads aimed directly at consumers, to tell them that their pain has a name - and a drug to help treat it. Before you could say "gimme some of them pills," Glaxo's sales of Requip increased by more than $300 million a year. As they say, that ain't hay.

But before you rush off to your doctor and ask him to prescribe a bottle or two of Requip for you, here's a suggestion from one of my favorite health writers. Dr. Robert Rowen, editor of Second Opinion newsletter (www.secondopinionnewsletter.com), says if you're bothered by leg twitches at night, chances are you're suffering from a potassium deficiency.

He suggests eating a banana or two before you go to bed. Or get a bottle of potassium supplements from your local health food store. You could solve your problem without spending a fortune … or taking a fancy new drug with who-knows-what side effects.