Advertisement Tricks

I am leaving for NYC today to help my best friend pick out a wedding dress at Kleinfeld's with the rest of her bridesmaids, and then I will be staying next week for work.  But I thought I'd at least write a post before leaving even though things with me have been beyond busy.

Shopping for fresh, healthy food in a grocery store can be challenging.  I am disgusted by all the advertisement tricks companies use, and probably more upset by the fact that people fall for them.  For example, "free-range" could easily mean that the chickens are allowed a short exposure to sun everyday, or that there is a small window in the coop hardly allowing any sunshine.  "Omega-3" could just mean that there is a trace amount naturally occurring or added, but it might not be the proven beneficial types, DHA and EPA.  "USDA Organic" is almost meaningless to me, too.  It seems that, to be organic, certain pesticides are forbidden (among other criteria), but the producer can use other pesticides that aren't on the forbidden list.  What makes matters worse is that these pesticides may be in even higher concentrations than the forbidden ones because they are less effective, and less is known about their toxicity and health effects.  One of my favorite tricks is when companies write on a package "30% Less Fat!"  Consumers think that this means they have re-vamped the formula to have less fat, when sometimes they are just comparing their product to a competitor's.  This is true with York Peppermint Patties.  They have "70% Less Fat" than your average candy bar.  Sometimes, it is true that the product was reformulated to have less fat, but this is often at the expense of added sugar, which could be way worse.

Anyway, I came across this label at Tops the other day, and I had to snap an image:

It may be difficult to read, but the label is trying to convince you that grape seed oil (high polyunsaturated fat, bad oil) is healthier than olive oil (high monounsaturated fat, good oil).  They show that grape seed oil has way more polyunsaturated fats (the purple bar), way more Omega 6 fatty acids (the yellow bar), and even way more vitamin E (the green bar).  Ick!!  If you were an uninformed consumer, this would probably convince you, and you should refer to my previous post on seed oils.  But I will give a re-cap here of why seed oils, such as this grape seed one, are one of your worst enemies.  Polyunsaturated fats are absolutely terrible for you to cook with.  The heat oxidizes the polyunsaturated fats with ease, creating free radicals that then in turn create more free radicals that damage any tissue it comes into contact with, especially including your arteries.  Omega 6 fatty acids are superfluous in seed oils, as this label shows, but that is a huge problem in the US today.  The average American omega 6 to omega 3 ratio has increased dramatically in the past 100 years due to these seed oils, and the consequences aren't good.  High omega-6 increases inflammation, which can start entire cascades of inflammation.  The last thing the label claims is higher vitamin E, which I can't say here is a bad thing, and so at least you have that.  Your arteries may become inflamed and damaged by disrupting the endothelial layer, which in turn will trigger factors to clot the damage.  Then, down the line, a clot may fall off and be released into your circulation and stop blood flow to an area of your brain or heart... but at least you will have higher vitamin E.


Become an informed shopper!

Stealth Compost

Recently I’ve thought up this experiment that I think would be interesting.  If all of us were required to carry around all the trash we created throughout the day in trash bags, would we produce less garbage?  I think most people aren’t even aware of how much they throw away in a day.  Ever since leaving undergrad, I have been more conscious of the hideous volume of trash I create.  It was kind of hard to fathom actually; last year I was living alone and still taking out full trash bags to the dumpster way more often than I’d like to admit.

At the University of Pittsburgh, the options for recycling were quite limited as far as I could tell.  Sure, there was a nice bin on each floor of the engineering building with different slots for paper, plastic, and trash, but I will never forget the time I saw a janitor emptying all of the contents into the same dumpster.  Ugh.  I mostly gave up on bothering to recycle on campus after that.

Now, living in Ithaca, I can recycle my cardboard boxes, magazines, newspapers, glass, plastics...  Also, NY state has a great incentive for recycling.  When you buy beer bottles they actually charge you per bottle, but you can get the cash back when you take them to the grocery store to recycle.  People respond to incentives - that’s the Freaknomics authors’ catch phrase.

As Alex and I eat more and more fresh foods, the amount of waste we produce in the forms of vegetable peelings and egg shells has increased dramatically.  Every time I threw out vegetable scraps, I just kept thinking about them decaying in a landfill, probably taking 100 times longer than it would if I just buried it in a hole in the ground, especially if there were no access to air and moisture.  (Over-exaggeration? I think not! Wikipedia says it could be forever) My parents never composted, but I vaguely remember my grandparents collecting scraps for their compost, and so I at least knew the basics.  It seemed like the logical next step in my “Operation: Less Garbage” phase, but there was a problem: don’t you need a yard to keep the compost?  Thanks to the 7th Annual Compost Fair held by Cornell University Cooperative Extension, I now know that the answer to that is NO!  I wasn’t ready to handle the worm bin, common among the green city folk, but I learned about a beautiful thing called a Stealth Compost, which is possible to do in an apartment with a porch area (and some “access” to dried leaves, hay, branches, etc).

Basically, it’s a regular layered compost bin with a bunch of holes for aeration, set inside a larger bin lined with wet newspaper, saw dust, branches, etc, with the lid ajar.

Here is the smaller one with Swiss cheese holes, courtesy of Alex and his Awesome Wedding Registry Tools:

Here is how I prepped the bin with moist newspaper:

Here is the whole contraption:

 
I am very, very new to composting and am still learning.  Any tips would be greatly appreciated.  Most of what I know I found from some helpful websites (1, 2).  The basic idea for this type of composting is layering greens and browns and letting the microbes take care of the rest.  Greens are food scraps chopped up small (vegetable peelings, fruit cores, egg shells, coffee grounds, etc - NOT any meat scraps) and browns are the dry stuff (sawdust, moist newspaper strips, dried leaves, hay, etc).  You need to alternate layers, making sure that each brown layer completely covers the green layer, which will help control any smells.  I have also been reading about troubleshooting, where you can learn if it needs more moisture, thicker brown layers, etc.

I haven’t quite figured out what I do about not being able to sift or stir the compost as one normally would in a yard.  The neat handout I got at the fair didn’t indicate that it was necessary.  Perhaps it will just take longer for the microbes to do their magic?  Also, I haven’t quite figured out what to do with the finished product - right now we are planning to dump it in the woods.  If anyone knows someone in the area who wants some awesome, nutrient rich soil, let me know!  I cannot wait until I have a garden to use it myself.

Raw Milk from a Local Farm, Part II

The second step in our journey from pasteurized, homogenized skim milk to organic, raw milk from a local farm was the transition from generic brand whole milk found in the grocery store to unpasteurized raw milk.  Yes, this was quite a leap.  I was violently skeptical at first (ask Alex).  The thing is, people drank unpasteurized, non-homogenized milk for centuries, and so we wanted to dig deeper to find out when and why the switch happened.  The story I knew involved a clever Louis Pastuer who basically saved humanity by zapping out all the horrible crap present in milk that was making everyone sick.

From our research, we found there was more to the story.  It turns out, the war of 1812 blocked off America’s access to British whiskey, and so grain distilleries started popping up all over.  Cows were fed the slop grain leftover from fermentation, a struggle in itself since the cows didn’t want to eat it.  Combined with crowded, unsanitary conditions, the slop did not provide the proper nutrients for the cows to fight and prevent disease, which was inevitably spread to their milk (a,b).  “Swill milk,” as it was called, increased infant mortality and sickness from milk in general as it became common practice.  Cow owners found two separate solutions: pasteurize the milk, or feed the cows better food in more sanitary environments.  These two separate methods competed for years, until eventually pasteurization won out.  Another instance of treating the symptoms instead of solving the root of the problem... There are some great articles from The New York Times that show the back and forth banter between the two schools of thought (4,5,6).  I understand how, the way most cows are housed and fed today, that pasteurization is completely needed for your average jug of milk at Wegman's.  However, if cows are given the proper diet and kept in clean conditions, pasteurization to me seems completely unnecessary and may compromise many of the good qualities of milk, including probiotics, nutrients, etc.  This truly makes me wonder how healthy the grain-based diets milking cows are overwhelmingly fed across this nation… but more on that in a later post. 

Performing a literature search on the benefits of raw milk is extremely difficult.  As with many controversial and anti-mainstream research topics, I think the sorts of studies that want to show that raw milk is better than pasteurized milk are either not funded, or prevented from being published.  After all, the milk industry has a huge presence and probably a gigantic influence over this sort of thing.  I’m seeing more and more how many research groups and funding sources have a strict “agenda.”  From a logics standpoint, it’s quite easy for me to believe that raw milk is inherently healthier.  After all, that is what we raise our newborns on, although its source is human.  But, the data *are* out there.  Raw milk in history has been used as a medicine to treat a variety of disease (7).  For example, children fed raw milk showed increased resistance to tuberculosis and less tooth decay (8,9).  There is concern that raw milk may be a lovely incubator for bacteria to grow, but it appears both cow and human milk can inhibit the growth of certain bacteria, including B. diphtheria, B. coli, and streptococci.  But, when heated, as is done in pasteurization, the milk grew the bacteria like wildfire, as the pro-biotics were destroyed (10).  Pretty ironically, the "pro-biotic" yogurt you may buy has added back into it the same pro-biotics that are first zapped out out during pastuerization, although the additions are probably more homogeneous.  In terms of nutritional benefit, raw milk from grass-fed, outdoor cows yields higher calcium and vitamin A levels (8).  Pasteurized milk compared to raw milk had a 38% reduction in vitamin B complex and up to a 50% reduction in vitamin C (11, 12).  Heat disrupts the micelle systems present in the fatty parts of milk that house vitamins, enzymes, etc, making them extremely difficult to be absorbed.  Also, if you know something about protein structure (primary structure, secondary structure, etc), you will easily believe that heat denatures proteins in milk, screwing with their structure and therefore interfering with their function (13).  If you want to read websites that discuss in depth the nutritional benefits of raw milk in non-journal-article-technical form, try here, here, or here.

If you took a glance at the references, you will see most are very old, which is truly depressing.  In contrast, I am sure it’s simple to find recent articles addressing the health problems associated with consuming raw milk.  Here is one, for instance (14).  I do understand the value of pasteurizing milk from a treat-the-symptoms point of view.  If bacteria and viruses are found in milk, it’s easy and effective to zap it out.  However, I believe we are truly missing out on the amazing nutritional properties of milk by doing so.  And I agree, it would be very difficult to trust a label that claimed to have raw milk procured under sanitary conditions from healthy cows.  There is a delicate balance here.  Do we treat the symptoms by pasteurizing the milk, removing much of its nutrition, to mass produce a cheap, safe product?  Or, do we treat the disease, and start taking care of the facilities and animals to provide us a quality, nourishing product that may have a higher price tag?

References:

4) Brewery stock farms: too much like the swill milk dairies.  The New York Times. Oct 25, 1884.

5) Swill milk destroyed. The New York Times.  May 1, 1887.

6) Bad Milk.  The New York Times. April 30, 1874.

7) Crewe, J., 1929. Raw milk cures many diseases. Certified Milk Magazine, January:3-6.

8) Krauss, W. E., Erb, J.H. and Washburn, R. G., Studies on the nutritive value of milk II. "The effect of pasteurization on some of the nutritive properties of milk," Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 518, page 11, January, 1933.

9) The Lancet, page 1142, May 8, 1937

10) Dold, H., Wizaman, E., and Kleiner, C., Z. Hyt. Inf., "Antiseptic in milk," The Drug and Cosmetic Industry, 43,1:109, July, 1938.

11) Lewis, L.R., The relation of the vitamins to obstetrics, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 29.5:759. May, 1935.

12) Jordan, E.O., A Textbook of General Bacteriology, Twelfth Edition, Revised, page 691, W. B. Saunders Co., 1938.

13) Shanahan C and Shanahan L.  Deep Nutrition: Why your genes need traditional food. Big Box Books, 2008.

14) Oliver SP, Boor KJ, Murphy SC, Murinda SE. Food safety hazards associated with consumption of raw milk. Foodborne Pathog Dis. 2009 Sep;6(7):793-806.

Raw Milk from a Local Farm, Part I

Milk is an amazing food.  Babies can grow from 19in and 6.75lbs at birth to 26in and nearly 16lbs around 6 months of age when sustained on nothing but breast milk (based on 50^th percentile averages).   That’s a 37% increase in height and a whopping 137% increase in weight.  That’s crazy!  Clearly, a women’s unpasteurized, non-homogenized breast milk is ridiculously nourishing.  Can the same be said for skim milk found in our local grocery store?  In the past 3 months or so, we have made the transition from pasteurized, homogenized skim milk to organic, raw milk from pasture-raised cows on a local farm.  

The first step was transitioning from skim to whole milk.  I’ve been reading about the benefits of the fat profile in whole milk as opposed to reduced fat or skim milk ever since my older brother switched.  The fat portions in milk are what contain vitamins A, E, K, and D, known as fat-soluble vitamins.  Since skim milk contains less than 0.5% fat, the vitamin content is severely reduced, which is why they are supplemented more heavily than whole milk.  Great solution, right?  Yeah, except that fat-soluble vitamins need fat present to be properly absorbed and to yield decent bioavailability (1,2,3).  By drinking whole milk instead of skim milk, you are probably absorbing and making better use of the nutrients that are naturally occurring in the fat portions of the milk, and maybe even better use of the added nutrients as well.  (I know some are probably concerned about the “high” saturated fat content in whole milk, but hopefully in a later post I will have time to discuss further why saturated fat is not the cause of heart disease and is actually great for your body.)  Because I have been drinking skim milk since as long as I can remember, the hardest part about this first step was adjusting to the fuller taste.  By first switching to 2% for awhile and then onto whole milk, it only took a couple weeks.

In the next post, I'll cover the much more complex topic of unpasteurized vs. pasteurized milk.  For now, I'll just share how we obtained the raw milk.  In NY state, it is illegal to sell unpasteurized milk in grocery stores, but farmers can sell their cows’ raw milk directly to consumers.  Alex and I ventured to Scheffler Farm in Groton, NY, an organic farm that sells raw organic milk from pasture-fed cows, organic eggs from free range chickens, and all types of organic, grass-fed beef cuts and organ meats.  Eileen gave us a tour of the entire farm, located a convenient 15 minutes from our apartment.  We saw where the cows and chickens grazed, where and how the cows were milked, how the milking equipment was sanitized after each use, how the milk was cooled and stored… it was awesome!  What factory farm would allow that kind of open access for consumers to see how their food is obtained?  Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals, would convince you how resistant factory farms are to visitors.  Visiting Scheffler Farm and talking with Eileen kind of made me want to work towards owning a cow or two and having some chickens in the future.  We bought a gallon of milk in glass mason jars and a dozen fresh eggs, which we saw her collect directly from the coop.

Here is our fresh milk:

What better way to try out raw milk for the first time than with homemade chocolate chip cookies?

To me, surpsingly the taste was very similar to whole milk we've bought in the grocery store.  The pricetag is a little hefty, at $6 a gallon.  However, we are going to start picking up more each Tuesday, and using it to make our yogurt as well.  In the conversion from milk to yogurt, no volume is lost.  Because organic yogurt can run higher than $6 a gallon in the grocery store, this helps even out the cost for us, although we would buy it regardless!

References:

1) Pinotti L, Baldi A. Lipophilic microconstituents of milk.  Adv Exp Med Biol. 2008;606:109-25.

2) Lodge JK, Hall WL, Jeanes YM, Proteggente AR. Physiological factors influencing vitamin E biokinetics.

Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2004 Dec;1031:60-73.

3) Jeanes YM, Hall WL, Ellard S, Lee E, Lodge JK. The absorption of vitamin E is influenced by the amount of fat in a meal and the food matrix. Br J Nutr. 2004 Oct;92(4):575-9.

Oils and Fats and Heart Disease, Oh My

Last night, Alex and I were driving back to NY after being home for Mother’s Day and my sister-in-law’s bridal shower, and as usual, I had quite a difficult time choosing a snack from the gas station.  I didn’t want anything full of sugar, or with hydrogenated oils, or with refined grains.  I spent about 5 minutes perusing the aisles, skimming ingredient lists of potato chip bags.  When I make potato chips at home, these are my ingredients: potatoes, butter, Cajun seasoning.  The. End.  Well, I checked about every bag of chips I could find.  Not a single one was made with butter, and I couldn’t even find one made with olive oil.  Finally, I settled on buying Utz All Natural “Dirty” Jalapeño-flavored chips.   Here is the list of ingredients: potatoes, peanut oil or a blend of peanut oil and canola, corn, safflower or sunflower oil, salt, dextrose, potato starch, jalapeno pepper powder, natural flavors, dehydrated onion corn starch, dehydrated garlic, citric acid, extractive of paprika, spice extractive.  I need to start packing my own snacks for car trips…

What kind of cooking oil do you buy?  I'm assuming you use oil to cook with; after all, the USDA has told us to replace solid fats with liquid fats whenever possible, and I can't recall the last time I saw someone cook with lard or butter in a pan... at least not without feeling horribly guilty about it.  My grandmother was always dispensing health information to us on “good” vs. “bad” oils, which foods had antioxidants, which foods would prevent heart attacks, etc.  She would cut out little articles from the paper and mail them to my mom, folded up with a little note or with important parts of the article underlined.  She swore that canola oil was one of the "good oils.”  What’s the story with all these oils?

Most seed and vegetable oils (safflower, corn, soybean, canola, sunflower, grapeseed, cottonseed) are a very new addition to the American diet because the techniques required to produce them were not possible before industrialization.  I learned from Whole Health Source that extracting oil from substances such as safflower, corn, soybean, and canola, is a difficult and harsh process, as opposed to extracting oil from palm fruit, olives, or coconuts.  This is why, when I buy olives from the olive bar at Wegman's, the oil surrounding them is plentiful.  In contrast, I don't think I've ever heard someone describe corn or soybeans as "oily," at least not in the same sense as they would olives.  So it’s not too hard to believe that getting oil from these foods is pretty unnatural and difficult.

Since everyone began avoiding saturated fats, the demand for alternatives increased, and so a variety of industrial oils were born.  In today’s world, they are ubiquitous.  However, when there is a dramatic shift in a population's diet, we need to look at the health impact, and it doesn’t look good.  The main reason I am so against these oils is their high omega-6 content, mostly as linoleic acid (LA).  To briefly get into a very complex subject, omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids are both important to our diet.  They are involved in a number of mechanisms, but maintaining a proper ratio and perhaps a proper overall amount of each is crucial.  The proposed ideal ratio is still a little controversial and can vary, but I’ve heard around 3:1 or 2:1 omega-6 to omega-3.  Currently, some Americans have ratios of 20:1 or higher due to the high consumption of corn and soybean oil in our country.  What makes matters worse is that we heat these oils when we cook.  Through cooking, polyunsaturated fats like the omega-6’s found in seed oils can be transformed into trans fats (which I hope by now everyone knows, believes, and agrees will kill you).  In addition, they are a billion times more easily oxidized than monounsaturated fats (olive oil) and saturated fats (animal fat).  The oxidation process introduces free radicals, and these compounds are explosive.  Free radicals, as anyone who has taken organic chemistry knows, begin this huge chain of reactions to introduce more free radicals in what is known as a free radical cascade.  Inflammation increases, and the free radicals begin damaging cell membranes, chromosomes, etc.  Eventually, the endothelial cells lining your blood vessels are damaged and lose their elastic properties.  Enter heart disease.  There is an entire chapter on this topic in my current favorite book, Deep Nutrition by Catherine Shanahan, MD, and Luke Shanahan.  As the authors state, “Nature doesn’t make bad fat, factories do.” Amen!

A recent article, "Changes in consumption of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids in the United States during the 20th century" by Blasbalg et al, brings to light the impact of replacing animal fat and butter with industrial oils.  Here is the conclusion of the paper, verbatim: "The apparent increased consumption of LA, which was primarily from soybean oil, has likely decreased tissue concentrations of EPA and DHA during the 20th century."  (FYI: LA is linoleic acid, an omega-6 fatty acid found in industrial oils; EPA and DHA are the omega-3 fatty acids thought to have great health benefits.)  Basically, we're getting less omega-3's and more omega-6's than ever.  It's interesting because this increase in omega-6 fatty acid consumption coincides quite nicely with the 20th century epidemics of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and type II diabetes in our country.  However, correlation does NOT automatically equal causation.  We must be very careful before making that leap...

Over the past 100 years, these diseases have risen to epidemic levels in the United States.  So, through all my reading, I've tried to take a step back to examine what has changed between then and now.  Diet?  Exercise?  Stress?  I could see any of these as possible contributors.  Some studies suggest that we might actually be exercising more now than we were 100 years ago, so I'm not quite buying that as the major contributor.  Stress is a definite possibility, but let's hope that's not the real cause since we all just can't quit our jobs to get rid of stress.  To me, the logic is simple.  When we ate different stuff, we didn't die of heart disease and obesity.  You are what you eat.  Therefore, I want to try and eat more like our ancestors did.  One of the biggest changes in diet from then until now is the introduction of industrial oils, and so in our home we're doing our best to revert back to old fashioned butter and animal fat.  It's quite challenging, though, because these oils are EVERYWHERE.  When I’m in the grocery store, they pop up in basically every processed product on the shelf, including soups, chips, granola bars, cake mixes, bread, frozen pizzas, packaged gravy, cookies…  Slowly, we have been eliminating these products from our diet completely.  The results?  Fresher foods requiring more prep time, and higher grocery bills.  But isn’t your health worth it?

Where it all began

I remember being a child, eating Cheerios with fat-free milk for breakfast, reading a quote on the box: "Research suggests that a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease." Even at a young age, I thought to myself, Wow, could that statement be any more non-committal?  Research suggests? Do they actually know anything?  So...this diet may reduce the risk?  How convincing! (not!)

A couple years ago, my older brother began reading Whole Health Source, a blog about ancestral nutrition and health that challenges the common perceptions about Which Foods Are Good For You.  Is saturated fat really bad for you?  Do whole grains really have health benefits?  What's the deal with all the industrial seed and vegetable oils - are they healthier than lard and butter?  How did the modern diseases of obesity, type II diabetes, and cardiovascular disease arise if we supposedly now know more than ever about how to eat healthy?  I think the two most convincing and motivating items pertaining to this in the blog are 1) He discusses cultures who have what would be considered a "bad" diet by American standards, including the Kitavans, and how the prevalence of cardiovascular disease and stroke is non-existent in these cultures, and 2) the peer-reviewed studies that support the hypothesis that saturated fat and cholesterol lead to cardiovascular disease have gross misinterpretations of data and/or lack of a suitable control group (1,2).

Skeptical?  If I haven't lost you yet, thanks for keeping an open mind!  This blog, as the title suggests, dares to dig deeper.  I no longer just accept the food pyramid issued by the USDA.  Over the past couple years, my diet continues to evolve the deeper I dig.  After all, you are what you eat, and what you eat affects the development of your children, from inside the womb to throughout their entire childhood.  As a biomedical engineering graduate student, health/disease problems and solutions are never far from my mind, and I hope to organize my thoughts on a number of [perhaps politically incorrect] topics.  Feel free to share your thoughts and/or challenge anything you read in the comments section (intelligently and respectfully, please).