Policy Follies

My experience has made me skeptical. I believe that’s a requirement for scientists and “herd quitters.” After all, the opposite of skeptical is gullible.

When sustainability comes up, I’m usually left wondering who’s defined the criteria. It frequently seems that profitability isn’t part of these discussions, for example. But there’s no sustainability without profit. After all, there are easier ways than farming to not make money!

A definition I am most comfortable with describes sustainability as “ … meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” (Brundtland Report, October 1987, World Commission on Environment and Development). Human nutrition must be considered one of the present needs, but the deplorable state of our conventional wisdom regarding a “healthy diet” strongly suggests it hasn’t been accurately considered.

As I’ve learned the sordid history of how we’ve gotten into the current mess regarding diet, health and human nutrition, I’ve been struck by similarities with other current controversies, like Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Climate Change (aka “Global Warming” or “Climate Change”). Some folks are far more certain of their positions than the data warrant, it seems to me. Talk of “consensus” (a concept of little relevance to science), and crises that demand immediate action despite adequate understanding of the crises, its causes, or the impact of the proposed actions are common features.

So imagine my reaction when I came across this story: ObamaAdministration to Insert Global Warming Activism into Dietary GuidelinesMandated by Congress. Apparently, last week at a closed-door meeting, environmental activists within the U.S. government met to plan changes to the nation’s dietary guidelines to promote foods that they believe have “a smaller carbon footprint.” The good news may be that the dietary guidelines themselves are becoming increasingly discredited, so either no one will listen, or it will take down the anti-carbon activists by association. One can only hope.

For a good introduction to how we got the dietary guidelines, I recommend Denise Minger's book, Death by Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics andShady Special Interests Have Ruined Our Health. If you’d like to read a critique of the latest edition of the dietary guidelines, read my friend Adele Hite’s journal article In the face ofcontradictory evidence: report of the Dietary Guidelines for AmericansCommittee (her blog is well worth reading, too). If you’d like to learn about issues related to climate change, I recommend Anthony Watt’s blog.

Talking to the Forage Folks

After watching the video of my presentation at the 2012 Ancestral Health Symposium, Nancy remarked that it seemed like I was more nervous talking about the forage agronomy topics than I am when I deliver purely dietary presentations. I agree. It may be that I hadn't been studying the forage material for a while, so I was conscious of being certain that I actually said what I wanted to say. It could have been, too, that I was expecting that audience to be a challenging one. I was very pleased with the response, however. And I'll be giving another presentation this August in Atlanta at the 2013 Ancestral Health Symposium! 

I see my role, in part, as standing between the low carb/Primal/Paleo communities and the livestock agriculture communities. It's my hope that they can begin speaking to each other and learning from each other. I've had the opportunity to present counter-establishment dietary information at the 2012 and 2013 annual meetings of the American Forage and Grassland Council (AFGC) in Louisville and Covington, Kentucky, respectively. The presentation in Louisville was entitled “Saturated Fat and Cholesterol: Health Hazards or Vital Nutrients?” I was pleased with the response to this message and I was encouraged to submit a proposal for a symposium for 2013. While attending a joint meeting of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians and the Nutrition and Metabolism Society in Seattle in 2010, I met Ms. Adele Hite, director of the Healthy Nation Coalition. She agreed to participate in the symposium and at her suggestion, I invited Dr. James Bailes, MD. Dr. Bailes is a pediatrician from West Virginia. He uses a restricted carbohydrate dietary approach in treating childhood obesity.

Videos from this symposium are posted on vimeo.com. Our session, “Animal Products from Forage: The REAL Health Food,” was immediately after a break, so I took the opportunity to administer a “mind-set check.” It was an animated PowerPoint slide set that was projected on the screen while people drifted in. You can see it here. Once we got started, I gave a short introduction. Adele Hite spoke next, explaining that “Policy ≠ Science.” Dr. Bailes batted clean-up, demonstrating in his presentation “Childhood Obesity” the impressive and heart-warming results he’s had in more than a decade of treating children – literally changing their lives!

Once again, I was very pleased with the reception. And once again, I was asked to organize a symposium/workshop for the next AFGC annual meeting in Memphis, Tennessee. I’m very excited that Dr. Susan Duckett from Clemson University has agreed to participate, and Adele will re-join us, too! The working title is “Grass-Finished: What Do We Really Know and What Does It Really Mean?” Dr. Duckett will discuss quantitative and qualitative differences between grass-finished and concentrate-finished beef. Ms. Hite will discuss the likely impacts of these differences on human health. I will, once again, moderate and add a few comments. Kind of a thorn-among-the-roses …

Beef: The REAL Health Food

Update - Sten made me aware that the timing between the slides and the audio fails at the 31 minute mark. I am preparing a corrected version. I'll upload it as soon as I can, and re-post the link.

Update 2 - Corrected versions are posted to Vimeo and YouTube. 

I was invited to participate in the joint Maryland Cattle Industry Convention and Hay & Pasture Conference. My visit to Hagerstown was quite enjoyable. I met a number of folks and I learned a great deal.

I gave two presentations: “Optimizing Forage-Based Animal Nutrition” and “Beef: The REAL Health Food!” I meant to record both of them, but I forgot to turn on my Zoom H2 for the animal nutrition presentation. [slaps forehead]

I’ve produced a “video” of the Beef presentation. It’s a combination of an audio recording with the PowerPoint slide set.

 

Ruminant Reality

The video of my presentation at the Ancestral Health Symposium 2012 has bee posted on YouTube.

I titled the talk "The Reality of Ruminants and Liebeg's Barrel: Examining the New 'Conventional Wisdom.'" (links are to previous posts) They say that whenever you give a talk you actually give three: There's the talk you plan to give; there's the one you give; and there's the one you think you should have given. The talk I think I should have given isn't too different from the one captured by this video.

Make Believe?

Imagine you’ve got a group of men who’ve survived a heart attack. They agree to participate in a four-year-long experiment where they’re placed onto one of two diets: Diet One is a “Mediterranean Diet” high in fruits, vegetables, legumes, fish, and poultry, along with cholesterol-rich read meat and full-fat dairy products; Diet Two is the “Prudent Diet” recommended by the American Heart Association (and, not coincidently, by most physicians), focusing on restricting saturated fat intake. What result might you expect?

Turns out that the men restricting their cholesterol and saturated fat intake had a greater than 50 percent higher rate of fatal heart attacks and 70 percent more cardiac events! And the total cholesterol, LDL, and HDL levels of both groups were almost identical.

Perhaps even more interesting is that despite the fact that this research was published in Circulation * (the American Heart Association journal, no less!) over a decade ago, we’re still being told to restrict our intake of dietary cholesterol and saturated fat!

* Michel de Lorgeril, et al., “Mediterranean Diet,Traditional Risk Factors, and the Rate of Cardiovascular Complications afterMyocardial Infarction: Final Report of the Lyon Diet Heart Study.”

Cattle "Emissions"

Ancestral Health Symposium 2012 is now history. The symposium took place at the Harvard Law School August 9^th-11^th. Not a bad gig for a forage agronomist! The title of my presentation was The Reality of Ruminants and Liebeg’s Barrel: Examining the New ‘Conventional Wisdom'. All of the presentations were video taped, and will be freely available.

My title slide. Cattle mob grazing a pasture under center pivot irrigation.
Photograph by Dawn Gerrish.

One of the themes of this year’s symposium was sustainability. I don’t see that term in the simplistic way many do, in part because I remember being told by leaders of the sustainable agriculture movement that “animals have no place in sustainable ag!”

The truth is that the production of animal products from perennial forages is the sustainable agricultural system. Many, however, are concerned about the carbon dioxide and methane “emissions” from livestock in general, and cattle in particular. Some folks don’t seem to understand that a cow grazing grass can only emit carbon that was originally in grass, and that the carbon in grass has to have come from the atmosphere. So it’s a cycle not an “enrichment.” But there’s more to it than that!

Under the following assumptions:

Carbon:Nitrogen ratio = 17 and 3.4% N, giving 57.8 % C
3% of body weight daily dry matter (DM) intake; 1,000 lb cow = 30 lb DM per day
70% utilization - 30 lb DM eaten / 0.70 = 42.8 lb DM offered
Equal above and below ground DM distribution
90% of C consumed is “emitted” 

We’d see:

42.8 lb DM above ground, 42.8 lb DM below ground – 85.6 lb DM total
57.8% C in DM – 49.5 lb C total
17.3 lb C consumed
15.6 lb C emitted

Thus, for every pound of carbon “emitted” by a cow on grass, 3.2 pounds of carbon are fixed in plant roots, uneaten plant debris, or the cow herself or her calf. Even if we say that 100% of carbon she ingested is emitted (a biological impossibility!), there’d be 2.9 pounds of carbon fixed for every pound emitted! Beef cattle are carbon negative!

Someone (perhaps Todd Becker?) asked me what happens to methane in the atmosphere. A good question, and one I wasn't completely sure about. So I went looking and found the following at this site:

"In the lower part of the atmosphere, below about 10-12 km (the troposphere), the key cycles are mediated above all by the presence of what are called OH radicals — colloquially known as the atmospheric detergent. All hydrocarbon chemical species that are emitted can be eventually broken down (or oxidized) by these radicals to CO₂ and H₂O, and methane is no exception. An average molecule of CH₄ lasts around eight to nine years before it gets oxidized. This is a long time compared to most atmospheric chemicals but is fast enough so that there can be significant year-to-year variability."

Ignore the Evidence

[This is another piece I wrote for my “Taking Out the Carbage” column in Kit Pharo’s “Pharo Cattle Company Update.”]


Hilda Bruch, a young German pediatrician, moved to America and settled in New York City. She was “startled” by the number of fat children she saw – “really fat ones, not only in clinics, but on the streets and subways, and in schools.”1 Indeed, fat children in New York “were so conspicuous that other European immigrants asked Bruch about it, assuming she would have an answer. What is the matter with American children? they would ask. Why are they so bloated and blown up? Many would say they’d never seen so many children in such a state.” 1


The public health “experts” usually point their fingers at fast food, computers, TV, and even prosperity as contributing causes. But Hilda Bruch moved to New York City in 1934, “two decades before the birth of fast food franchises and a half century before supersizing and high fructose corn syrup.”1 This was during the Great Depression, an era of soup kitchens, bread lines, and twenty five percent unemployment. Sixty percent of Americans were living in poverty. Twenty five percent of children in New York City were said to be malnourished.


The observation that obesity and under-nourishment occur simultaneously in very poor populations is not limited to Bruch’s experience. This phenomenon has been repeatedly documented throughout the world. Obesity is a form of malnutrition. So how do the experts reconcile these observations with their opinions? They ignore the evidence. They have to. The evidence disproves their hypotheses. 


Makes you wonder what else they’re ignoring …


1. Taubes, G. 2011. “Why We Get Fat, and What to Do About It.” Knopf. New York, NY.