support your local vegan

Scientific American reports on research showing that a diet high in saturated fat causes the brain to become resistant to leptin and insulin, hormones that let us know when our need for food has been fulfilled.

The research in question was done on rats, and it's always tricky to extrapolate such work to humans; and there are serious ethical issues with killing rats to find our why humans become such pigs when they eat cows. But the phenomenon in question is expected to apply to humans as well.

The researchers also performed in vitro experiments where they directly observed palmitic acid (a common saturated fatty acid) inhibiting the signaling of nerve cells exposed to insulin.

On the other hand, oleic acid, a monounsaturated fatty acid, did not produce this result.

What evolutionary mechanism might produce such a result, that too much fat in the system actually tells the body to increase rather than decrease food uptake? Here's what one leptin expert quoted in the SciAm article says:

Eating "local" is a trendy thing these days, with hipsters making much of going to the farmers' market and "Locavore" bumper stickers all over the place. And certainly, all else being equal, it's more energy efficient and gives fresher produce to choose apples from an orchard within 100 miles than to buy apples shipped over from New Zealand.

But, as is often the case, when we look more closely we see that all other things are not necessarily equal.

First off, food coming from far away will tend to use highly efficient rail transport, or moderately efficient tractor-trailers, while your local farmer is probably delivering his goods in a panel van or pickup truck.

The difference is enormous. I got curious, so I ran some rough numbers.

As you may have heard in those CSX ads, rail can move one ton of cargo 436 miles on a gallon of fuel; that works out to moving a pound of food (or other stuff) 872,000 miles on one gallon of fuel. A typical tractor-trailer might haul 50,000 pounds at 5 mpg: that's one pound moved 250,000 miles on one gallon. Now consider a panel truck that gets 20 mpg, carrying a two tons of food: it moves one pound only 80,000 miles on one gallon. (Pretend the panel truck runs on diesel, but since these are back-of-the-envelope calculations it doesn't really matter.)

The tractor-trailer and the panel truck both have to make empty return runs, while the train picks up new cargo for the next leg of its loop; so we should half the numbers for both types of truck.

Rail: 872,000 pound-miles per gallon.
Tractor-trailer: 125,000 pound-miles per gallon.
Panel truck: 40,000 pound-miles per gallon.

That means that, for the same amount of fuel it takes a small farmer to move food 100 miles in their truck, rail transport might move that same food over 2,000 miles! Of course, it has to be moved to and from the train depot, but this illustrates the issue: it's quite possible for food coming from far away to use the same or less energy to transport, than "local" food.

(Of course the most local food is what you garden or forage yourself; there's no transportation cost when I walk out front and pick a few leaves of kale, and I'm thinking of trying some experiments with the plantain that's taking over the yard...)

So in terms of transportation efficiency, local food may not be a big win, or indeed a win at all. But more than that, transportation is a small piece of agricultural energy usage, as this WorldWatch article explains. Final delivery from producer or processor to the point of sale accounts for only 4 percent of the U.S. food system's greenhouse gas emissions; add in "upstream" miles and transport of things like fertilizer, pesticides, and animal feed, and transport still only accounts for about 11 percent of the food system's greenhouse gas emissions.

80 to 90% of greenhouse gas emissions from the food system come from agricultural production. So reducing those is far more important than reducing transport emissions. And how can we shift to more efficient food production? You know what I'm going to say: plant-based diets.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has estimated that 18 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock, a bigger share than the total of all transport. Livestock account for about 20 percent of the total terrestrial animal biomass. Grazing occupies a stunning 26 percent of the Earth's land area, while about a third of all arable land is devoted to feed crops for livestock.

Two interesting "undercover" videos came my way today. The first is from activist group Mercy For Animals, and shows workers at an Ohio dairy farm abusing cows and young calves, including stabbing cows in the face, legs and stomach with pitchforks, and kicking injured "downed" cows -- abuse carried out and encouraged by the farm's owner.

Does this represent every dairy farm? Of course not. Most make at least some effort to be humane.

(Though there's a sharp limit on how humane you can be in the production of milk in industrial quantities, since you have to keep the dairy cows giving birth to keep the milk flowing; those calves mostly end up as beef and veal, and there's no retirement plan for old dairy cows once they are no longer economically viable milk producers. The natural life span of a cow is 15 to 20 years, but a typical dairy cow (conventional or organic) only lives four to six years before she's slaughtered and ends up as sausages and pet food. Still, I believe the level of cruelty seen in this video would sicken most dairy farmers.)

Not everyone likes the fact that cruelties like this get exposed. Some in the industries that profit from animal abuse would like to "shoot the messenger". Thus, the second animal-abuse related video -- or, supposed animal-abuse related video -- that came my way today: a claimed exposé of the Humane Society of the United States's (HSUS) Duchess Horse Sanctuary, by a group called the Center for Consumer Freedom.

Now, I've sent money to HSUS before, so I was anxious to see if my donations were being misused. What did I see in this exposé? Horses being beaten? Starving, diseased animals? No. I saw some horses in a muddy field, with captions that suggest that this is the entirety of the sanctuary. I've camped out in fields that were almost as bad after enough rain. (Squishwood!)

In point of fact, the Duchess Sanctuary is an 1,120-acre facillity; a video that shows that that an area of perhaps a half an acre is muddy on some day in February (a fairly rainy month in the Eugene, Oregon area, is not exactly damning.

So, I asked myself, what's up with this "Center for Consumer Freedom"? And with a little Google-fu, I had my unsurprising answer: shills. The "Center for Consumer Freedom", the group behind this video, is an front group for the restaurant, meat, alcohol, and tobacco industries, who's primary strategy is to "shoot the messenger" and attempt to discredit any groups -- such as the HSUS -- that criticize these industries.

According to SourceWatch:

The Daily Mail reports that British police secretly investigated the backgrounds of 47,000 flyers last year, people who were singled out for attention by a 1.2 billion pound "terrorist detector" system. The system has never led to the arrest of a terrorist, and is now used to target "sex offenders and football hooligans". One of its red flags for potential terrorists: ordering a vegetarian meal.

The New York Times profiles champion ultramarathoner Scott Jurek, who runs on the order of 140 miles a week training for races that are often 100 miles or more, sometimes through deserts or frozen wastelands or up and down mountains. Jurek is a vegan, consuming 5,000 to 8,000 calories of plant-based nutrition a day.

And Jurek is not alone as an elite vegan endurance athlete. There's Rich Roll, one of Men’s Fitness Magazine's 2009 “25 Fittest Guys in the World”, is a top Ultraman competitor. Ultraman is a "double Ironman" three day triathlon, with a 6.2 mile ocean swim followed by a 90 mile cross-country cycling race, a 170 mile cycling race, and then on the final day a 52 mile double marathon.

Or there's Brendan Brazier, a professional Ironman triathlete and two-time Canadian 50km Ultra Marathon Champion.

Or Ruth Heidrich, vegan for 24 years, holder of three world fitness records in her age group, six-time Ironman triathlon finisher, and holder of more than 900 gold medals for distances ranging from 100 meters dashes to ultramarathons, who credits going vegan with sending her breast cancer into remission. (This is certainly a controversial claim, and I am not suggesting that anyone discontinue medical treatment.)

If you think that a vegan diet can't give you the energy you need, I suggest you talk to these folks -- if you can catch them!

Two tough guys to add to your list of vegan athletes:

• Mac Danzig, lightweight MMA fighter, with a UFC record of 20 wins, 7 losses, and 1 draw. He's former lightweight champion for the King of the Cage and Gladiator Challenge MMA organizations, Extreme Challenge Trials 2001 U.S. MMA National Champion, and winner of the The Ultimate Fighter 6. Danzig's website describes him as a "vegan, naturalist, animal lover and serious photographer."
• Keith Holmes, former WBC middleweight champion, says being vegan "helped me to eat healthy" and "helps me get my wind quicker between rounds." Holmes held the title from March 1996 to May 1998, and again from April 1999 to April 2001. Holmes's lifetime record to date: 41 wins -- 25 by knockout -- 5 losses, no draws. Holmes media kit describes him as a "devout vegan". While his most recent bout was last year -- at the age of 40 -- these days he's devoting a lot of his energy to community work in his native DC and to music, with an album coming out this year.

So for those who want to argue that vegans are a bunch of wimps and that you need to eat animal flesh to be strong, I invite you to contact these gentlemen.

A week or so ago, I found myself in a conversation about the nature of mental health diagnosis. I've always found it interesting how no one is "hysterical" any more -- if you read books on psychology from a few decades ago, there's a great deal of discussion about that condition, where as it seems that now it's almost never discussed. I've always taken that as an indicator of how at least part of the concept of "mental illness" is a social construction.

However, I stumbled across this abstract of a paper in the journal Social Science & Medicine, which notes "Experimental and clinical studies of nonhumans and humans reveal somatic and behavioral effects of hypervitaminosis A which closely parallel many of the symptoms reported for Western patients diagnosed as hysterical and Inuit sufferers of pibloktoq ['arctic hysteria']. Eskimo nutrition provides abundant sources of vitamin A and lays the probable basis in some individuals for hypervitaminosis A through ingestion of livers, kidneys, and fat of arctic fish and mammals, where the vitamin often is stored in poisonous quantities." [emphasis added. -tms]

Excessive vitamin A is well known to be toxic, and can result in birth defects, liver abnormalities, and CNS disorders. There's also some evidence linking excessive intake with osteoporosis, but the picture is not clear.

Advocates of eating animal flesh often ask me, "Well, what if the animal is raised and slaughtered humanely?" Besides that fact that the notion of "humane slaughter" is at odds with the physiological reality of concussing, electrocuting, slashing open the veins of, and/or decapitating an animal, the idea that one can be "humane" while killing for profit is self-contradictory.

I stumbled across a perfect illustration of this today in an article about Joel Salatin, an advocate for local production of flesh foods who's gotten somewhat famous after being featured in Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and in the documentaries Food, Inc. and Fresh:

“If we continue to look at these beautiful turkeys the way we do, just as a protoplasmic mass that can be put into any food product,” he says, “it won’t be long until we look at people, and especially people from other cultures, the same way.”

Walking away from the turkeys, a reporter and the film crew in tow, he says, almost casually, “This is the first time in human history where people can have no real connection, or relationship, with their natural ecology.”

It’s an observation that hits like a thunderbolt. The reason a trip to a real farm can be so jarring is that it challenges the way we are used to confronting our food, which typically involves walking past rows of brightly packaged jars and boxes— often featuring faces of cartoon characters— or hovering over displays of neatly packaged meats, without ever thinking about how they got there.

“It must be sad when it comes time to slaughter them,” says Boston-based film producer Paul Dewey, who was clearly moved by Salatin’s speech about his beautiful turkeys.

“Nooooo, that’s payday,” says Salatin. “Are you sad when you get a bonus?”

It is sad indeed if we look at sentient beings as "just as a protoplasmic mass that can be put into any food product". But it is no less sad if we look at them as a "payday"!

Salatin mentions the influence that how we think about animals has on how we think about people, but doesn't follow through. If killing turkeys isn't sad but "payday", what does this prepare us to do about exploiting humans when profit is involved?

Consider the words of Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, who became a vegetarian while imprisoned in Dachau: "I think that men will be killed and tortured as long as animals are killed and tortured. So long there will be wars too. Because killing must be trained and perfected on smaller objects, morally and technically."

It makes no difference to the turkeys whether their dead bodies are roasted whole or processed into paste, even less than it matters to me whether my corpse will be buried or cremated. Respect for the corpse is a very poor substitute for respect for the being. Both I and the turkeys would rather live out our natural lives -- nothing that fails to respect that, regardless of how we might be killed or what happens to the corpse afterward, is humane.

(Good site about the "humane myth" here.)

Until fairly recently, it was generally thought that the use of grains for food was a Neolithic innovation, that we only started eating grain after we started farming. But around 2004, analysis of a 23,000 year old site in Israel showed that the inhabitants were eating wheat and barley, as well as small-grained grasses -- and even suggested that they were baking grain-flour dough back that far. That makes breaking bread an ancient tradition indeed.

Now comes evidence suggesting (but by no means proving) that human use of grains for food may go back as far as 105,000 years:

Two years ago, Mercader and colleagues excavated a cave in Mozambique called Ngalue. They uncovered an assortment of stone tools in a layer of sediment deposited on the cave floor 42,000 to 105,000 years ago. The tools can't be directly dated, but Mercader presumes that the ones buried deepest in the layer are at least 100,000 years old. Other researchers had identified tubers as an important food source during the Stone Age, so Mercader decided to check for starch residue on 70 stone tools from the cave, including scrapers, grinders, points, flakes, and drills.

About 80% of the tools had ample starchy residue, Mercader reports today in Science. The starches came from the African wine palm, the false banana, pigeon peas, wild oranges, and the African potato. But the vast majority--89%--came from sorghum, a grass that is still a dietary staple in many parts of Africa.

According to Mercader, the findings suggest that people living in Ngalue routinely brought starchy plants, including sorghum, to their cave. He doesn't have definitive evidence that they ate the grass but says it seems likely. "Why would you be bringing sorghum into the cave unless you are doing something with it?" he asks. "The simplest explanation is that it would be a food item."

You hopefully know that Atkins-style, low-carb fad diets have been widely criticized by every major scientific and health organization. The American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the American Dietetic Association, the American Medical Association, the American Kidney Fund, and the Mayo Clinic are among those who have condemned low-carb, high-protein diets rich in animal products as useless for long-term weight control and dangerous in their health effects.

But I've not found a single page that lays it all out nearly as well as this one at atkinsexposed.org. The Atkins Corporation Legal Department sent Michael Greger, the physician behind atkinsexposed.org, an intimidating letter in an attempt to silence his criticism. Instead of folding, though, he engages in a point-by-point refutation of the Atkins Corporation's claims, demonstrating not only the scientific evidence of the diet's ineffectiveness and dangers but the fraudulent means by which it was promoted.

There is no "miracle weight-loss diet", folks. The reason this country is so damned fat is because our caloric intake increased by 24.5 percent between 1970 and 2000 (and I'm sure it's only gone up since then), while we sit on our asses more. We've got to eat less and exercise; trying to treat obesity by shifting calories between macronutrients is re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

If you, or someone you love, is among those who have been flim-flammed by the low-carb fad, you must read this page.