Some harsh facts for chicken eaters, like me.

Have you ever been to a children's science museum, where the children get to see chicks hatching from eggs? At these educational facilities, we teach our children about the innocence and beauty of the baby chicks. In addition to looking at them hatch, I like to eat chickens and their eggs. I always have. But this article and the undercover video that follows have really put me in a moral quandary.

An animal rights group publicized a video Tuesday showing unwanted chicks being tossed alive into a grinder at an Iowa plant and accused egg hatcheries of being "perhaps the cruelest industry" in the world.
I promote this ghastly system whenever I eat the chickens and eggs sold at most grocery stores in the U.S. There's no way around it. Perhaps one solution is to open up chicken factories to school groups, so that the children and their families can learn about the process leading up to that admittedly delicious meal of chicken strips. Then, we can make more informed decisions at the grocery store.

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Fat and salt and sugar and fat and salt and . . .

Amy Goodman recently interviewed David Kessler, who used to be Commissioner of the FDA under Bush I and Bill Clinton. He has really turned up the heat on the unhealthy food industry, and it is a huge industry. It's repeat clients also frequent hospitals in droves, as reported by DemocracyNow:

[A] new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that the direct medical costs of obesity total about $147 billion a year. That amounts to nine percent of all US medical costs. It’s also over $50 billion more than the annual spending on cancer.

The problem is that we have these innate and insatiable cravings for salt and sugar and fat. Fat and sugar, fat and salt, fat, sugar, and salt stimulate us to eat more and more. Does the food industry understand the inputs? Absolutely. They understand that fat, sugar and salt stimulate us, and they understand the outputs. They understand we keep on coming back for more and more, as Kessler explains:

Have they understood the neuroscience? Have they understood how fat and sugar work? I don’t think so. But we now have that science. But what’s important is the fact that they have figured out—they’ve learned it experientially—what works, and they construct food to stimulate us to eat more . . .

What has the food industry done? They’ve taken fat, sugar and salt, they’ve put it on every corner. They’ve made it available 24/7. They’ve made it socially acceptable to eat at any time. They’ve added the emotional gloss of advertising. Look at an ad; you’ll love it, you’ll want it. They’ve made food into entertainment. We’re living, in fact, in a food carnival.

But how much fat, sugar and salt can you possibly pump into food? More than you can imagine. Kessler explains the formula:

So, take an appetizer in a modern American restaurant. Take buffalo wings. What are they? You take the fatty part of the chicken, fried usually in the manufacturing plant first. That loads about 30, 40 percent fat. Fry it again in the kitchen of the restaurant. That loads more fat. That red spicy sauce? What is it? Fat and sugar. That white creamy sauce on the side? Fat and salt. What are we eating? Fat on fat on fat on fat on sugar on fat and salt.

But aren't the obese people the real problem? Why blame the terribly unhealthy food industry (Did you like this framing of the question)? Yes, people need to get disciplined about the way they eat. No doubt. But when 2/3 of American adults are overweight, it's time to assume that the artery-clogging food manufacturers of American are immorally creating an environment ubiquitously filled with toxic supersized portions. In short, I fully support new Congressional legislation would provide up to $10 billion a year for a prevention and public health investment fund that would include a focus on curbing obesity. See this related post on the effect of growing portion sizes.

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What to make of eating 68 hotdogs in 10 minutes

I watched this video with amazement. The winner of this year's Fourth of July hotdog eating contest ate 68 hotdogs (and buns) in 10 minutes. Notice, then, the post-contest interview, where winner Joey Chestnut smiles and talks in spurts. But I kept wondering whether he was about to vomit. After all, he just ate 68 hotdogs (and 68 buns) in 10 minutes. That's about 16,500 calories of meat and 5,300 calories in hotdog buns. If Joey retained all that food in his stomach (which I doubt, but maybe I'm wrong), he gained about seven pounds in ten minutes (since every 3,000 intake is the equivalent to a pound in weight gain). If you can set aside your concerns about the contestants' health, you can appreciate that what happens in these contests is no doubt remarkable. Athleticism? Why not? That's what it seems like in this post-contest interview:

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Credit where credit is due

I've criticized President Obama for not keeping his campaign pledges to end the faith-based initiative and restore transparency to government, but when he does something right, I'll give him credit where credit is due. So, it's good to see him taking this unapologetically progressive stance on an issue where some reason is badly needed - the precautionary use of antibiotics in animals raised on factory farms:

The Obama administration announced Monday that it would seek to ban many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans. ...In written testimony to the House Rules Committee, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, said feeding antibiotics to healthy chickens, pigs and cattle — done to encourage rapid growth — should cease. And Dr. Sharfstein said farmers should no longer be able to use antibiotics in animals without the supervision of a veterinarian.
Feeding massive doses of antibiotics to farm animals enables them to live in crowded, unsanitary and often inhumane conditions. It also encourages the evolution of antibiotic resistance to the dangerous bacteria that inevitably live inside them, and when those bacteria spread through the food chain to humans, the result is outbreaks of virulent, drug-resistant diseases. Having recently seen the movie Food, Inc., it's easy for me to appreciate how serious a threat this is. Antibiotic use, like fossil fuels, have promoted a dangerously unsustainable way of life in our culture. This first attempt may or may not make it past the powerful corporate food lobby - but kudos to the Obama administration for bringing it into the national consciousness in a bold way.

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Why are we getting so fat?

Why are we getting so fat? Elizabeth Kolbert answers that question in many ways in her article, "XXXL" in the New Yorker. Her answers come from the several new books on obesity that she reviews in her article. Here are some of her observations: - We have evolved a "taste for foods that are high in calories and easy to digest; just as it is natural for gorillas to love leaves, it is natural for people to love funnel cakes." Image by Willie Lunchmeat at Flickr (creative commons) -The only place pre-modern humans had to store energy "was on themselves. Body fat is energy-rich and at the same time lightweight" and "a person with a genetic knack for storing fat would have had a competitive advantage." It is too easy to eat high calorie food in the modern U.S. “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa,” Power and Schulkin write. “We now live in Candyland.” Or, consider David Kessler's approach, that are the victims of "eatertainment":

In “The End of Overeating” (Rodale; $25.95), David A. Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, takes a somewhat darker view of the situation. It’s not that sweet and oily foods have become less expensive; it’s that they’ve been reëngineered.

-There's bigger problems. We eat too much because we are oblivious to how much we are eating:

Brian Wansink’s “Mindless Eating” (2006). They have no idea how much they want to eat or, once they have eaten, how much they’ve consumed. Instead, they rely on external cues, like portion size, to tell them when to stop. The result is that as French-fry bags get bigger, so, too, do French-fry eaters.

-Kolbert points out that bagels have grown by 210 calories over the past couple of decades:

For someone who is in the habit of eating a bagel a day, these extra calories translate into a weight gain of more than a pound a month.

Who is gaining the most weight? "Those living just above the poverty level." What are the documented medical risks for being obese?

Type 2 diabetes, coronary disease, hypertension, various kinds of cancers—including colorectal and endometrial—gallstones, and osteoarthritis are just some of the conditions that have been linked to excess weight.

Kolbert's article is an excellent review of much recent research focusing on the causes of obesity and potential solutions.

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