Nutritionist epidemiologist Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health recently released the study “Red Meat Consumption Linked to Increased Risk of Total, Cardiovascular, and Cancer Mortality.” In the press release announcing the conclusions of the study lead author An Pan said, “Our study adds more evidence to the health risks of eating high amounts of red meat, which has been associated with type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers in other studies.”

Before we analyze the study it’s fair to say that nutrition studies on humans are very difficult to do because we don’t clone people and put them in lab cages, and using prisoners or mental hospital patients whose food intake can be carefully controlled and recorded is considered unethical. So the alternative used in this study–people choose what they will eat and record what they ate some time after they ate it–are suspect from the start. Did people record what they did eat or what they should have eaten? Here’s an article on the inaccuracy of self-reporting.

Now let’s look at the study itself. The researchers looked at 22 years of data from 37,698 men from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study and 28 years of data from 83,644 women in the Nurses’ Health Study. All subjects were free of cardiovascular disease and cancer when they entered their respective studies. Diets were assessed through questionnaires every four years.

This is not all bad. Both men and women were in the study. Good science. They were disease free at the outset. GS. There were large numbers of subjects in the study. GS. Data were collected for many years. GS. But questionnaires every four years? VBS.

Next, the researchers interpret their Very Bad Data. They look at the deaths from heart disease and cancer and, amazingly, draw this conclusion: Regular consumption of red meat, particularly processed red meat, was associated with increased mortality risk. ‘Was associated with’—that’s the tricky phrase. Any scientist knows that correlation does not mean causation. A Good Scientist would have looked at other possible explanations. Did the meat eaters who died live unhealthy lifestyles—consuming a lot of carbohydrates, being overweight, drinking, smoking, failing to exercise? VBS.

But they do identify one of the flaws in their own study. “Red meat, especially processed meat, contains ingredients that have been linked to increased risk of…cardiovascular disease and cancer. These include heme iron, saturated fat, sodium, nitrites, and certain carcinogens that are formed during cooking.”

So did the researchers do a follow-up study where they eliminated the sat fat, sodium, and nitrites in subjects’ diets and disallow cooking over high heat that could have contributed to disease? No. Did they distinguish between the quality of meat from a cow that happily lived its entire live on a South Dakota prairie getting exercise and eating its natural food from a cow that spent its last months knee-deep in manure, pumped full of antibiotics and growth hormones, and fed corn that causes acidosis for which the cow was given big doses of baking soda, a cow that was barely alive when slaughtered? No. Can we trust the conclusions of these researchers? You decide.

Harvest of the Month is a nutrition education program designed to introduce elementary students to fruits and vegetables. The program can be implemented in a variety of ways within schools and in after-school and summer camp programs. The program is designed to promote a different fruit or vegetable each month, using a prepared 20-minute lesson/presentation. The lessons provide information about the nutritional value of a specific food, how and where it is grown, and how it can be prepared. The lesson is followed by students taste testing the HOM item.

This program has been implemented by elementary classroom teachers, physical education teachers, parents, community health professional, and Teens as Teachers. Recipes and shopping tips are sent home to encourage families to try the items at home. The school cafeteria can support the lesson by offering the monthly harvest item on the school lunch menu. Community grocery stores also have been a great partner by promoting Harvest of the Month items in their stores.

There will be three opportunities for South Dakotans to receive training in the Harvest of the Month program: June 5-6 in Sioux Falls, June 12-13 in Rapid City, and August 7-8 in Pierre. The training will include HOM implementation as well as gardening techniques and resources. This training is provided through a partnership of the following organizations: Team Nutrition & Coordinated School Health in the Department of Education, SD Discovery Center, SD Extension, and the US Department of Health Office of Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Schools may apply for funds to send two staff members to the training. Additional funding will be available for implementing the program.

For more information click here or call Mary Kirk at (605) 773-4718.

Heart disease patient in intensive care unit

When I was a kid, polio was the scariest disease. A lot of children got it, and those who survived—after time spent in an iron lung–were often paralyzed for life. No one knew how it was transmitted (the local swimming pool?) and there was no cure. My friend Ben spent much of his life sitting in a wheelchair watching the rest of us play.

There were other diseases as well—chicken pox, scarlet fever, mumps, TB, whooping cough, the German measles, and the ‘red’ measles. We all experienced some of them and luckily survived. Then antibiotics came along and were successful in curing the bacterial diseases and immunizations were developed for the viral diseases. So for many Americans these diseases have been brought under control.

Now we have a whole new set of feared diseases: diabetes, obesity, hypertension, cancer, heart disease, autism, insulin resistance, allergies, Alzheimer’s, asthma, atherosclerosis, liver disease, COPD (formerly emphysema), gluten intolerance, Crohn’s disease, osteoporosis, stroke, depression, drug addiction—the list goes on. These are known as the ‘diseases of civilization’ because they are caused not by bacteria or viruses but by the tens of thousands of man-made chemicals we’re exposed to, by the highly processed food we consume, by our sedentary lifestyles, by our use of drugs legal and illegal, and by the stresses of living in a man-made world where we compete for resources, status, and power.

Our genetic inheritance sets us up for these diseases. We are genetically programmed to like meat, fat, and sweet foods. During our evolutionary history meat and fat gave us the calories we needed to survive, and fruit was a ‘safe’ food without the toxins found in most plant leaves, roots, and seeds. And our taste buds haven’t changed. But the availability and processing of food has.

Today the cheapest, tastiest, most addictive foods are made from sugar, fat, grains, chemicals, and salt, and we eat a lot of them. Way too much. We’re programmed to do that. Our ancestors ate a lot of food when it was available and lived off their own fat when times were tough. Fat storage was a survival strategy. But for those surrounded by food year round, that is no longer the case.

We are also programmed to save energy. This, again, goes back to the times when food was in short supply. So today we’d rather watch TV than clean the bathroom, weed the garden, or fix the roof. We love our cars and trucks and airplanes and can get where we want to go with minimum physical effort.

To reverse our trending towards these lifestyle diseases is not easy. We are working against our evolutionary heritage, the abundance of affordable food available to us everywhere we go, and all the ‘labor saving’ devices that allow us to sit most of the day.

But we do have tools that work in our favor. We are attracted to bright colors, to a variety of fresh foods, and to fruit. At local farmers markets we can choose the beautifully shaped colorful veggies and fruits that keep us healthy and are a pleasure to consume. Information on those markets will be coming soon.

Probiotics are getting a lot of press these days, and fermentation classes in the Black Hills are attracting sizable crowds. So what are they and why do we care?

The word ‘probiotic’ is a hybrid, with the ‘pro’ coming from the Latin word meaning ‘for’ and the ‘bio’ part from the Greek word for life. So probiotics are in some way pro life. But how?

To understand where we are going here, it’s necessary to think about gut flora, those bacteria, fungi, protozoa, and viruses living in the guts of animals. We humans have ten times the number of gut flora as we have cells in our bodies—100 trillion at last count.

Russian scientist Ilya Metchnikoff in the early part of the 20^th Century wondered about the role of these organisms in human health, and his work eventually led to the worldwide probiotic craze. Despite the interest, little is known about these tiny creatures who reside within us. That’s because there are so many of them, they interact with one another in complex ways, and most are anaerobic so cannot be grown in a petri dish. In 2008 the National Institutes of Health created the Human Microbiome Project in an attempt to get a grip on this important population.

Babies are born without gut flora, and it’s possible to live without them, but their role in human health is becoming more widely appreciated every day. We now know that the right organisms and the right balance of them contribute to healthy digestion and protect against infection and disease. Some carbohydrates, for example, can only be digested by bacteria. The ‘right’ gut flora can digest carcinogens and help prevent allergies and other autoimmune diseases. Certain bacteria produce needed biotin and vitamin K. The common pathogen Clostridium, which causes severe intestinal distress, can be held in check by ‘friendly’ gut flora.

Next question: How do we invite, feed, and keep the ‘right’ gut flora? A Nobel Prize is awaiting the team that answers that question. Meanwhile, we can use the knowledge collected by our ancestors, who didn’t even know about microbes but knew how to feed them all the same. They created fermented foods–sauerkraut, yogurt, kefir, tempeh, tofu, miso, kimchi—done to preserve perishable foods for consumption in harder times. The microbes in those foods contribute to their long shelf life and are the probiotics of today.

Which microbes actually improve health? How many are needed? What are the side effects of too many or the wrong kind? A lot of studies remain to be done. Stay tuned.

You thought pink slime ground beef was bad. What about Prozac in chicken?

Determining what drugs an industrial animal might be fed is a tricky business. The corporations of Big Ag hide behind their right to “proprietary information” and won’t tell, not wanting consumers to know. But researchers at Johns Hopkins University got smart and started testing industrial chicken feathers to see what the birds that lived inside those feathers might have ingested.

We’ve known for years that carcinogenic arsenic is in chicken feed, and Maryland is about to ban that substance in feed. When researchers tested the feathers looking for other unhealthy substances, here’s what they found:

• Prozac, Benadryl, and Tylenol used to reduce the stress of living in a little cage in a barn with tens of thousands of other birds with the lights on all night and breathing ammonia-laden air
• Caffeine to keep the chickens awake so they eat more and grow faster
• Antibiotics to keep them alive in conditions that would otherwise be fatal

For more on this story click here and here. For more on the oppressive conditions, click here.

Meanwhile, consumers do have alternatives. By shopping locally we can meet the growers, and maybe even visit their farms and see for ourselves the conditions under which chickens live. Clearly, the chickens in the photo, living happily in Cathie Draine’s yard in Black Hawk, have no need for Prozac.