Do You Need Milk? How About The USDA?

A pretty good article on milk came from the NY Times last week, that probably ended up hurting the credibility of the USDA as much as it did milk’s. Our government’s food police, as I’ve pointed out before, are the veritable Keystone Cops when it comes to overseeing the nation’s health. But you probably knew that, so let’s get into the scam over milk’s place in your diet.

Mark Bittman’s blog post titled Got Milk? You Don’t Need It, begins by informing us,

“Americans were encouraged not only by the lobbying group called the American Dairy Association but by parents, doctors and teachers to drink four 8-ounce glasses of milk, ‘nature’s perfect food,’ every day. That’s two pounds! We don’t consume two pounds a day of anything else; even our per capita soda consumption is 'only' a pound a day."

He then proceeds down the sordid history of milk recommendations while citing some interesting nutritional facts such as “Sugar — in the form of lactose — contributes about 55 percent of skim milk’s calories, giving it ounce for ounce the same calorie load as soda.”

The post then moves into storytelling, with his own history of growing up with an upset stomach that never really went away until he gave up milk. This anecdote is common. I’ve long ago given up keeping track of those I’ve worked with who’ve seen their health improve sans milk.

Then he comes back to our government, quoting the book Milk that explains how difficult it’s become to make money selling it, “The exceptions are the very largest dairy farms, factory operations with anything from 10,000 to 30,000 cows, which can exploit the system, and the few small farmers who can opt out of it and sell directly to an assured market, and who can afford the luxury of treating the animals decently.”

In fact, if you follow health news you’ve heard that it’s even worse, the FDA has actually targeted small dairy farms and collectives very aggressively over the last few years, spending millions of dollars trying to shut down the dairy farms that actually care about your health.

He closes, most appropriately, with the lobbying scam about milk, schools and osteoporosis, adding, “In fact, the rate of fractures is highest in milk-drinking countries, and it turns out that the keys to bone strength are lifelong exercise and vitamin D, which you can get from sunshine...”

“...The federal government not only supports the milk industry by spending more money on dairy than any other item in the school lunch program, but by contributing free propaganda as well as subsidies amounting to well over $4 billion in the last 10 years.”

It’s all pretty thorough and damning to an industry that’s continues to take well-deserved hits lately. He doesn’t get into the nefarious world of pasteurization, which has both ruined the would-be nutritional value of milk (it’s not really nature’s food anymore, much less “perfect”) as well as making it easy for Big Dairy to dominate the industry by using abhorrent animal raising and health practices, but it makes sense to keep the story targeted and there’s plenty of ammo.


As for the USDA, well, before you put any stock in any of their guidelines consider this line.

“To its credit, it now counts soy milk as ‘dairy.’”

Which, to me, confirms the USDA has no credit. How does soy count as dairy? The only similarity they share is a strong lobby. A soy bean is a legume. A cow is, well, a cow. Lumping the two together makes about as much sense as calling a French fry a vegetable. And who in their right mind would ever do that? Oh, wait...

Batter-coated french fries now a fresh vegetable on USDA list

I’ll shut up now.

The Great American Nutrient Heist

The final prep before my race has me attempting to shed the last vestiges of extra weight from my body while eating enough to recover from both training and the injuries sustained in a couple of crashes. The key to making that happen is nutrient efficiency, which means that I want to get as many nutrients as possible from each calorie I consume.

This strategy is the opposite of how Americans are taught to eat by the food industry. In an attempt to sell calories as cheaply as possible, Big Food peddles calorie dense, but nutrient deficient, processed vittles whenever they can. Pretty much anything you find in the center of a supermarket (i.e. most of it) fits the bill. From cereals to juices to bread, whenever you see words on a label like enriched or fortified you’re likely evaluating junk food in one form or another.

Most things in boxes or bags are so far from a natural state that there’s hardly any nutrients left in them. Everything we eat has macronutrients (protein, carbs, fat) so Big Food makes sure that this features prominently on the label. But macronutrients only give you a big picture of a food’s energy, not its nutritional content, which comes in the form of micro and phytonutrients. These, in most processed foods, are practically non-existent. So in order for you not to notice these foods get “fortified” or “enriched” with whatever the makers can source on the cheap. Marketers then turn these into “essential vitamins minerals” or something else that sounds catchy, even though they’re almost never added with any forethought about what your body might need to function well. The result is that much of America now must consume more and more calories in order to sustain their body’s nutrient requirements. And you know where this leads; to eating more calories than required to maintain a healthy weight.

“We’re fat because we’re gluttons,” was a comment on one of my recent posts. This is hard to argue. But we’re also being made to eat more than we need by a food industry that won’t feed us nutrient dense calories. Sure, they are also guilty off using additives that make us hungry, as well as crave more of the slop they’re shucking, but they’re doing something even more insidious; filing us up with calories they won’t allow our bodies to function properly. This puts us in a Catch-22, where we feel the need to eat more because we’re lacking nutrients, yet the more we eat the worse we feel.

And this entire scenario was set-up by Big Food. It’s impossible to eat this way naturally. Humans are omnivores, meaning that plants and animals, for the most part, are loaded with everything we need to exist. Natural foods don’t just contain “8 essential” vitamins but often hundreds of different things that our bodies can use—-check out this melon article to see what’s in these fruits often called “mainly sugar” by the uninformed. Granted, poor animal raising and farming practices are chipping away at this, too, but it’s still a lot tougher to make a living organism devoid of nutrition than it is to add nutrients to something that’s been so processed that it begins at zero.

So when I find myself in a situation where I need to lose weight and add nutrition at the same time, I start by eliminating stuff in bags and boxes and making veggies and fruits the cornerstone of my diet. Vegetables are the most nutrient dense food on the planet. And due to their calorie to fiber ratio you can’t over eat them. Fruits, too, are almost perfect and can really only be overindulged when dried or juiced. I then add legumes, nuts, and seeds for their energy and fatty acids and, voila, any extra weight melts away. Five days of this and I’m down to fighting weight, provided I’m in the ballpark when I begin.

My one exception is Shakeology, but it’s formulated in exactly the opposite way of convenience food; to maximize nutrient density. In fact, in a way it’s the foundation of my diet because I’m very busy and it’s the quickest and easiest way to make sure I’ve got all the nutritional bases covered in one fell swoop.

Sadly, my omission includes cans and bottles. As healthy as studies show drinkers are there’s no way to justify it as part of this strategy. As much as it may help your lifestyle it’s simply not a nutritionally dense food. Last night I set a personal record; making it through two episodes of Mad Men with nary a cocktail, or even a beer. And this, of course, is mental training. It’s another important aspect of race prep, but a topic for another time.

The USDA’s Pyramid Scheme

I haven’t ranted in a while but figure all this nonsense about the USDA’s food pyramid, um, plate is a good time to get back in the game. Apparently, at least according to a lot of media sources, making a rational change from pyramid to plate (since, ya know, we eat off of plates) is going to put the kibosh on the obesity epidemic. And while I applaud the USDA’s logic I’m offended by their ignorance. We aren’t fat because we can’t covert tiers on a pyramid into portions on a plate. We’re fat because our diets consist mainly of things that don’t appear in their guidelines at all.

Let’s have a look at the revolutionary My Plate, shall we?

Hmm, we’ve got a plate segmented into fruits, grains, protein, veggies, a small side of dairy and a pretty girl eating an apple. How quaint. Never mind that you don’t need any meat, grains, or dairy in your diet or that it lacks nuts, seeds, legumes, and an entire macronutrient group because that’s minutia compared to my point. For a level-headed examination of “My Plate” here’s a link to Denis Faye’s less vitriolic prose. What I’d like to know is where are the sections for soda, chips, beer, fast food, and the hot case down at your local AM/PM mini mart? Because, from what I’ve seen, this should make up most of My Plate, assuming that when they say “My” they mean “American”.

I don’t know who it was who decided our problem was that we couldn’t figure out how to insert a triangle into a circle. As a professional observer I’d say it has a lot more to do with people’s notion that a French fry is a vegetable and Cherry Coke is a fruit. We find our protein at places where the same ardent watchdog, the USDA, states “ meat” only need contain 40% actual meat and god knows what else. We get our fill of dairy on “2 Large Pizzas for $5” night and our grains come from various bags of processed –to-the-point-they-might-as-well-be-sugar swill at convenience shops. We are fat, quite simply, because we eat a lot of crap. If our diets actually consisted of nothing but the foods on My Plate we’d be a lot healthier, no matter how much we ate of any of them.

Look, I’m all for more nutrition education. We need it. Badly. I’ve had clients state they were allergic to water, were advised by their doctor to drink more soda, and challenged me as to what point they could stop exercising—seriously, the exact line was “... you can’t tell me Steve Edwards and Tony Horton still have to exercise to look like that!” So I’m all for education; I just don’t think a government agency beholden to the corporate influence of Big Food should be the ones teaching us.

Vacationing From Meat At Taco Bell

Things have been a little heady here at TSD lately so let’s lighten them with a little fast food fun. I suppose, if fast food were a staple of your diet, this might bring the wrong kind of yuck but, c’mon, if you’ve bothered to tune in here for very long these places can’t still be on the menu, right?

As we should all know by now, the names of fast food items are merely marketing titles. They have nothing to do with what’s actually in the food. These restaurants flavor their food to taste like anything they want so words like “beef”, “chicken”, and “ice cream” are merely suggestions they are making for what could be pretty much anything, from corn and soy by products to sand.

Still, last week’s headlines news that Taco Bell’s “beef” didn’t meet the USDA’s minimum requirement of 40% beef in its ingredients seems to shock some people. Never mind the question as to why the USDA’s requirement for beef is only 40%, today’s topic is—as was the popular McRib post a couple of months ago—is what the hell is in fast food?

For our answer, we turn to Stephen Colbert, who gives us one of the more inspired comedic sketches in memory. My hope is that you’re all in position to laugh instead of being worried about your diet.

The embed codes won't load so click here to see the video. Genius.

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."

The American Foodsaw Massacre

What if the scariest horror movie you’ve ever seen was taking place in your local market with everyday shoppers as hapless victims? Well I’m no conspiracy theorist but the case against genetically modified (GMO) foods is starting to look downright bone chilling. And even if monster movies rarely affect me I can’t help but start squirming in my seat at how this story is unfolding.

The results of Pusztai’s work were supposed to become the required testing protocols for all of Europe. But when he fed supposedly harmless GM potatoes to rats, things didn’t go as planned.

Within just 10 days, the animals developed potentially pre-cancerous cell growth, smaller brains, livers, and testicles, partially atrophied livers, and damaged immune systems. Moreover, the cause was almost certainly side effects from the process of genetic engineering itself. In other words, the GM foods on the market, which are created from the same process, might have similar affects on humans.

Yesterday Mercola published an article on veiled science surrounding GMO foods by Jeffery Smith, executive director of The Institute of Responsible Technology. Smith is no fan is the industry, having penned two books on the subject, Seeds of Deception and Genetic Roulette, so one may take his views as biased. But it pretty straightforward science that he’s presented and, let’s face it, the anecdotal evidence supporting GMO foods is not good. As they’ve become a more established part of what we eat we’ve gotten fatter, less healthy, and our estimated life span has decreased for the first time in modern history, all in spite of massive improvements in medical technology.

Irina Ermakova, a senior scientist at the Russian National Academy of Sciences, was shocked to discover that more than half of the baby rats in her experiment died within three weeks. She had fed the mothers GM soy flour purchased at a supermarket. The babies from mothers fed natural non-GMO soy, however, only suffered a 10% death rate. She repeated her experiment three times with similar results.

Dr. Ermakova reported her preliminary findings at a conference in October 2005, asking the scientific community to replicate her study. Instead, she was attacked and vilified. Her boss told her to stop doing anymore GM food research. Samples were stolen from her lab, and a paper was even set fire on her desk. One of her colleagues tried to comfort her by saying, “Maybe the GM soy will solve the overpopulation problem.”

To conjecture further, I believe it’s possible that GMOs are, eventually, going to become linked to the myriad of food allergies that have sprung up in the past generation. Take the recent case against gluten, for instance, where an Italian study showed examples of elderly people showing no signs of gluten sensitivity a decade ago (after eating pasta their entire lives) suddenly changing. Gluten is the latest rage but we’ve seen similar patterns with peanuts and soy (legumes), as well as many nuts, prior. Since the science used to support these diseases is often shaky (gluten labeling is not government regulated), it seems possible, perhaps even likely, that it’s because we’re barking up the wrong tree. Since GMOs were able to be patented in the 1970s food allergy numbers have skyrocketed so fast we don’t even have proper stats on them.

Epidemiologist Judy Carman used to investigate outbreaks of disease for a state government in Australia. She knows that health problems associated with GM foods might be impossible to track or take decades to discover. Moreover, the superficial, short-term animal feeding studies usually do not evaluate “biochemistry, immunology, tissue pathology, gut function, liver function, and kidney function” and are too short to test for cancer or reproductive or child health.

So who, you might ask, is the axe-wielding psychopath responsible for all this? As you well know this dude is hard to find. He wears a mask and hides out in (genetically modified) corn fields so dense you can’t even hear his chain saw idling. But as the plot thickens more and more evidence leads to a popular clique of characters.

When Ohio State University plant ecologist Allison Snow discovered problematic side effects in GM sunflowers, Pioneer Hi-Bred International and Dow AgroSciences blocked further research by withholding GM seeds and genes.

After Marc Lappé and Britt Bailey found significant reductions in cancer-fighting isoflavones in Monsanto’s GM soybeans, the seed seller, Hartz, told them they could no longer provide samples.

Research by a plant geneticist at a leading US university was also thwarted when two companies refused him GM corn. In fact, almost no independent studies are conducted that might find problems. According to a scathing opinion piece in an August 2009 Scientific American,

“Agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers ... Only studies that the seed companies have approved ever see the light of a peer-reviewed journal.”

For example, if there was any negatives surrounding GMO production why wouldn’t it show up on foods labels? Only someone very popular would be able to stop this and Monsanto, and perhaps his good friend Dow, are pretty much the homecoming king and queen around here. Not only has Monsanto been able to keep GMO off of labels in the USA, it’s currently trying to force the European Union to eliminate it as well. If these things were ok, we must wonder, why wouldn’t they want us knowing about them? But then we find out Monsanto won’t serve GMO foods to their own executives. Lacking the charm to get us to drink their Kool-aid on our own, they’re trying to force it down our throats.

Good thing the movie’s not over. This rag-tag group of survivors has one, last, desperate plan. Unlike in a zombie armageddon, we have a choice over whether or not to have our brains eaten. As Dr. Mercola says “Together we CAN get GMOs banned from the US. Europe was able to do it over a decade ago without any government assistance. All they did was educate the consumers, and that was enough pressure on the food industry to drop their ploys.
If we band together as an effective army we will be able to do this. Please understand that the VAST majority of people in the US do not want GM foods, so this is an EASY battle to win. All we have to do is a bit of organizational work.”

So bust out your best evil-empire fightin' artillery and lock and load, or just click here for Smith’s Non GMO shopping guide. Remember the bad guys don’t always have to win.

Make Them Eat Cake!

With all the debates, er, squabbles, around health care you might get the impression that the public actually understands the difference between a capitalistic and socialistic state (and how we are neither). But, today I offer an example of how it doesn’t really matter how we label ourselves, it's the corporations that run our country.

TSD isn't turning political, this is a nutrition issue. The major food companies in the US have “issued a warning that we could ‘virtually run out of sugar’.’ I have no problem with this yet; it’s is perfectly reasonable thing to do. The problem lies in that they’ve followed this with a threat, telling the government to relax tariffs on foreign sugar or else they’ll raise food prices and fire thousands of US workers.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125011957488227095.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

What they’ve done is, essentially, held the government hostage. Of course they’re going to give in, but how is this good for our country? Last time I checked, we have an unemployment problem and sugar is the main ingredient responsible for an obesity epidemic that’s the root of all of these health care fisticuffs. This will hurt both national issues.

One of the main debates in the food industry is how to get sugar out of foods. The companies who’ve levied this threat, Kraft, General Mills, Hershey et al, are those who are sneaking sugar into places where no sugars have gone before. Apparently they want to continue this practice and aren’t about to take no for an answer, even if it’s beyond what the market can bear. Capitalism, bah! This is an oligarchy.

Peruse the food aisles at your local market and you’ll find sugar, as expected, in nearly every cookie, cake, and other dessert item. But you’ll also find it in bread, crackers, “natural” juices and cereals, salad dressings, condiments, sauces, soups, processed fruits and veggies, dairy products, even meat. Yes, meat... now who would want sugar in their meat?

The answer is the food companies, who regularly sneak sweet items into non-sweet foods so that we develop a palate to crave un-naturally sweet foods. As such, instead of craving an apple for dessert we’ve learned to crave the junk they want us to buy, like an apple pie--and even then, unless it’s made with apples with added sugar, it won’t do so we heap on ice cream because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to want, doubling corporate profits, along with our waistlines and health care costs.

And, hey, I am not making an argument for big government. They don’t exactly do a bang-up job with their antiquated administrative systems. But at least they’re beholden to the voter somewhat, and not a tiny group of overly rich investors who funnel their money into off-shore tax havens until they have enough to buy their own tropical island. But whether the issue is health care, food and drug safety, or Wall Street, at some point we need to create a system that at least allows the agencies the public creates to do their jobs.