Eating to starve cancer

The connection between diet and cancer is hardly a new one. But some truly eye-opening and life-changing research is taking that idea to a whole new level. Basically the idea is this: cancer (and a slew of other diseases) are linked in an important way: they all involve excessive or otherwise defective angiogenesis (the process of forming new blood vessels). Thus, "curing" or preventing a number of these diseases--including many cancers--may require little more than "correcting" or controlling angiogenesis, something that has been accomplished not only through synthetic drugs, but also by including specific foods in our normal diets (see slide) (note also the connection with the discussion of "antioxidant" foods).

Listen to pioneer researcher in this field William Li as he lays out the theory and some of its implications--all in about 20 minutes!:


Another connection I'd like to see made--but that I haven't found much info on--is a possible relationship between animal protein (meat and dairy) to angiogenesis. More than a few folks (e.g. Colin Campbell in The China Study) have made pretty convincing cases connecting higher levels of animal protein consumption with the prevalence of many "diseases of civilization," including cancer. He and others go so far as to characterize animal protein as a "carcinogen" (focusing largely on aflatoxin and lab studies on the animal protein cassein). But aside from Campbell and a few others, I've been able to find little on this animal protein/cancer connection, leading me to be a bit suspicious on jumping to this conclusion.

Rather, it may well be that the connection between dietary animal protein and disease/cancer is more indirect; the more animal protein in your diet, the less "room" for anti-angiogenic foods (most of which come from plants rather than animals). This might imply that at least from a health perspective (obviously ethical/animal welfare and environmental impact issues still loom large), animal protein need not be entirely avoided to avoid the "diseases of civilization" so long as plenty of anti-angiogenic foods are consumed in the daily diet. Thus Michael Pollan's recent credo of "Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not Too Much" would be right on target.

Beyond binary meat-no meat thinking

Treehugger.com's Graham Hill gives a TED 6-minute speech on "Weekday Vegging," an attempt to move us beyond the "no meat" or "all meat" either/or thinking that often dominates discussions/thoughts on food choices.

Foer: Eating Animals...a decent read

Jonathan Safran Foer is getting plenty of attention with his recent book Eating Animals. It's definitely worth reading, although the well-read veg*n will find few new earth-shattering facts in this non-fiction foray for Foer. He is a writer writing about animal agriculture (AA), which leads to a better-reading product than an AA activist who happens to write. Extensively well-researched and using the most conservative statistics, he makes the strong and obvious indictment against AA, arguing among other things that if animal welfare is one's key concern over AA is animal welfare/suffering/cruelty, the most important AA product to give up is eggs based on the treatment of battery hens (making his "vegan-in-transition" position even more perplexing to his more strident vegan critics).

Critics of Foer's moderation score their points in terms of logical/intellectual consistency. But Foer responds (rightly) that improvement and change come in many ways for many people, and berating people for lack of 100% purity/consistency does little to make a dent in the AA Leviathon if it drives away folks who might otherwise make moderate (but meaningful) changes in their pattern of AA support/consumption.

And this is a point worth emphasizing. As supporters of the Meatless Monday campaign point out, the effect of Americans giving up meat for one day a week would be the equivalent (in terms of greenhouse gases reduced) of every American driving hybrid. I'll say that again. Every American driving a hybrid. That's fantasy-territory for green energy advocates (transitioning the entire US auto fleet to hybrid), but that could be accomplished overnight by simply foregoing meat one day a week. Of course there are other significant savings as well, including water use, gasoline consumption, etc. But the hybrid car correlation is striking. Foer gets that getting the average American to become veg*n is a stretch, but giving up meat one day a week? That's hardly revolutionary or radical.

By the way, here's an engaging reading/Q&A session with Foer in which he addresses topics from hunting to storytelling to why AA facilities are "petri dishes" for tomorrow's deadly diseases. Check it out.

A horse is a cow is a pig is a boy

So Jason Meduna has been found guilty of multiple counts of animal cruelty for his “care” of unwanted horses. From what I’ve seen this is a good result. ‘Not because he is a malicious or evil man. Meduna appears to be a well-intentioned but generally ignorant and stubborn man with a surplus of fantastic theories—character traits that if anything qualify him for a leadership post in the GOP and/or the Religious Right.

But the exhaustive (at least by the standard of “news” coverage here in Wyobraska) coverage of the “horse neglect trial” has been interesting. Is this some watershed event in Wyobraska consciousness about the treatment of non-human animals? Perhaps. But I suspect it has much more to say about the ongoing power of cowboy mythology and “culture” around here.

Cruelty from neglect does seem to legitimately pull at the public heartstrings. But with the exception of extraordinary cases like animal blood sport, other much more common and routine forms of animal cruelty are routinely ignored. Indeed they are sanctioned and trumpeted as part of our industrial food system.

Non-human animals do indeed suffer from our neglect far too often. But the majority of non-human animal suffering comes not from our neglect, but from our well-intentioned but misguided attention. Had Meduna focused his energies on meat/dairy animals raised in CAFOs, where animal treatment of virtually any kind is hidden from prying outside eyes, he would have been much better off. Cruelty from overcrowding, sickness and horrific conditions generally would have had him toasted by the local chambers of commerce (particularly in “livestock-friendly” counties like Morrill) rather than sweating over jury deliberations.

But it’s John Wayne and not Peter Singer who call the shots around here. Meduna’s conviction and sentence will be a small strike against animal cruelty. But the big picture—a picture undeniably one of large-scale non-human animal suffering—will change little.

Kentucky Fried Salmonella

Can you imagine any other product where 2/3 of the products leave the factory "unsafe" until US consumers did something to render them safe(r)? Well apparently that's apparently business as usual for the US chicken industry, as recently documented by Consumer Reports. CR tested nearly 400 whole chickens from 100 stores in 22 states and found that TWO THIRDS of the chickens had either salmonella, campylobacter or both. Tellingly, organic chickens had ZERO contamination.

Norman Lear nails it...

So the Heene family put one over on us, you and me, just plain folks and families all across the country. But CNN and MSNBC and Fox??! And those giant, senior broadcast institutions of newsworthiness, NBC, ABC and CBS, who certify legitimacy by just covering such stories with a straight face? Did any of them find a minute to wonder if their scraping of the hogwash/bullshit/celebrity-baked crap from the bottom of the news barrel and serving it up 24/7 doesn't have something to do with creating a climate that mistakes entertainment for news to an extent that it all but seduces a Richard and Mayumi Heene into believing they are -- even if what they dream up to qualify is a hoax -- entitled to their 15 minutes? I don't know, but I have some empathy for Balloon Boy's Dad.

(link here)

The Jungle, 2009 version

Upton Sinclair's 1906 muckraking novel The Jungle so thoroughly disgusted many Americans about the conditions in the US meatpacking industry that it spurred the establishment of the FDA. Fast forward 100 years and you'll find that we're still...in the jungle. Check out this recent expose from the New York Times (Woman's Shattered Life Shows Flaws in Beef Inspection). Among the highlights:

-Unlike all other food products, beef (as well as poultry and dairy) aren't subject to regulation by the FDA, but rather the USDA. The USDA's primary role and mission, of course, is to promote agriculture and meet the needs of farmers and ranchers. This amounts to a USDA fox we've placed in charge of the US consumer meat safety henhouse. “Live animals are not ‘food’ until the point of processing, which is why...the FDA does not have regulatory authority on our farms, ranches and feedlots,” said a veterinarian who recently testified before Congress on a bill that might have given the FDA more regulatory authority over the beef business.
Most hamburger you're buying is an "amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses..."

***

-There is no federal requirement for "grinders" like Cargill (who grind this "amalgam" into our hamburger) to test their "ingredients" from these slaughterhouses for E. coli or other pathogens
Hamburgers at the center of a recent meat recall that left one woman paralyzed from E. Coli were made "from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria."

***

"Using a combination of sources — a practice followed by most large producers of fresh and packaged hamburger — allowed Cargill to spend about 25 percent less than it would have for cuts of whole meat.

Those low-grade ingredients are cut from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli, industry research shows. Yet Cargill, like most meat companies, relies on its suppliers to check for the bacteria and does its own testing only after the ingredients are ground together. The United States Department of Agriculture, which allows grinders to devise their own safety plans, has encouraged them to test ingredients first as a way of increasing the chance of finding contamination.

***

Unwritten agreements between some companies appear to stand in the way of ingredient testing. Many big slaughterhouses will sell only to grinders who agree not to test their shipments for E. coli, according to officials at two large grinding companies. Slaughterhouses fear that one grinder’s discovery of E. coli will set off a recall of ingredients they sold to others."

The meat industry treats much of its practices and the ingredients in ground beef as trade secrets. While the Department of Agriculture has inspectors posted in plants and has access to production records, it also guards those secrets. Federal records released by the department through the Freedom of Information Act blacked out details of Cargill’s grinding operation that could be learned only through copies of the document obtained from other sources. Those documents illustrate the restrained approach to enforcement by a department whose missions include ensuring meat safety and promoting agriculture markets."

Federal inspectors had repeatedly found that Cargill was violating its own safety procedures in handling ground beef, but they imposed no fines or sanctions, records show. After the outbreak, the department threatened to withhold the seal of approval that declares “U.S. Inspected and Passed by the Department of Agriculture"...

***

Testing has been a point of contention since the 1994 ban on selling ground beef contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 was imposed. The department moved to require some bacterial testing of ground beef, but the industry argued that the cost would unfairly burden small producers, industry officials said. The Agriculture Department opted to carry out its own tests for E. coli, but it acknowledges that its 15,000 spot checks a year at thousands of meat plants and groceries nationwide is not meant to be comprehensive.

Many slaughterhouses and processors have voluntarily adopted testing regimes, yet they vary greatly in scope from plant to plant.

The retail giant Costco is one of the few big producers that tests trimmings for E. coli before grinding, a practice it adopted after a New York woman was sickened in 1998 by its hamburger meat, prompting a recall.

Craig Wilson, Costco’s food safety director, said the company decided it could not rely on its suppliers alone. “It’s incumbent upon us,” he said. “If you say, ‘Craig, this is what we’ve done,’ I should be able to go, ‘Cool, I believe you.’ But I’m going to check.”

Costco said it had found E. coli in foreign and domestic beef trimmings and pressured suppliers to fix the problem. But even Costco, with its huge buying power, said it had met resistance from some big slaughterhouses. “Tyson will not supply us,” Mr. Wilson said. “They don’t want us to test.”

A Tyson spokesman, Gary Mickelson, would not respond to Costco’s accusation, but said, “We do not and cannot” prohibit grinders from testing ingredients. He added that since Tyson tests samples of its trimmings, “we don’t believe secondary testing by grinders is a necessity.”

The food safety officer at American Foodservice, which grinds 365 million pounds of hamburger a year, said it stopped testing trimmings a decade ago because of resistance from slaughterhouses. “They would not sell to us,” said Timothy P. Biela, the officer. “If I test and it’s positive, I put them in a regulatory situation. One, I have to tell the government, and two, the government will trace it back to them. So we don’t do that.”

...

At the same time, the meat processing industry has resisted taking the onus on itself. An Agriculture Department survey of more than 2,000 plants taken after the Cargill outbreak showed that half of the grinders did not test their finished ground beef for E. coli; only 6 percent said they tested incoming ingredients at least four times a year.

In October 2007, the agency issued a notice recommending that processors conduct at least a few tests a year to verify the testing done by slaughterhouses. But after resistance from the industry, the department allowed suppliers to run the verification checks on their own operations.

Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an assistant administrator with the [USDA's] Food Safety and Inspection Service, said that the department could mandate testing, but that it needed to consider the impact on companies as well as consumers. “I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health,” Dr. Petersen said.

(emphasis mine).

So who is monitoring/regulating the industry for "what is best for public health"? Essentially no one, which isn't much better than Upton Sinclar's Jungle 100 years ago.

One more meat industry gem I dislodged digging around this particular issue: using carbon monoxide (yes the same carbon monoxide you buy electronic monitors to protect you from in your home) in meat food packaging to keep (make?) meat pinker and more "appetizing" for weeks longer than it ordinarily would. "Old Europe" has of course banned the procedure for years, but here in "Beef Country" USA, the FDA has not even questioned the practice. Who pioneered the CO-adding practice? Cargill, the mega-processor and grinder at the center of Times expose.

The Jungle indeed.

"You lie!"

He he...a white beefy guy named "Joe" from South Carolina calling a black man a liar... some things never change!

Can you imagine the right-ring reaction had this been a liberal calling out Dubya on one of his many whoppers!? But no doubt Glenn Beck has already wet himself several times already today, and Lou Dobbs now has a new story to milk for the next 3 weeks...

Taibbi on Obamacare

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi once again nails it with this unflinching look at how Obama once again proves a progressive disappointment and the Dems prove the old adage that getting the Dems behind any one idea is like herding cats. The GOP may be guilty of many sins, but at least they can line up and vote now and then like, well, a party.

Franz Kafka International Airport

...He wrote "LIAR" on my hand and then let me through..."


Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport