Organic Does Not Mean Pesticide-Free

James McWilliam's book "Just Food" is an eye opener for me. Here he discusses the myth that organic food is chemical-free food:

"This very common declaration [organic food excludes pesticides] is simply not true."

"If the risk of synthetic pesticides has been overstated by organic advocates, organic's own reliance on chemicals has been vastly understated to perpetuate a marketable image that what's going on in organic agriculture is "all natural."

"[Organic growers] might refer to [pest-control chemicals] as "botanical extracts" or "biorationals," but according to Ned Groth, a senior scientist at Consumers Union, these toxins "are not necessarily less worrisome because they are natural."

"The fact that these botanicals break down so rapidly means that they have to be applied in heavier doses and more often than synthetic compounds."

That last point appeared to be at play in this study:
Effect of Botanical Insecticides the New York Apple Pest Complex

Where the authors concluded:

"A question that arises from doing this type of research is whether the organic approach is more environmentally sound than an IPM* approach using soft chemicals. Does 6 applications of rotenone-pyrethrin have less impact on the environment than 2 Imidan applications? These questions need to be addressed if botanical insecticides are continued to be allowed in organic certifiable programs."

*Integrated Pest Management

Rotenone and pyrethrin are organic pesticides but are very toxic to honeybees as well as other non-target insects. According to McWilliams, pyrethrin is also toxic to some fish (bluegill, trout) and birds such as mallards. He notes the EPA classifies the organic pesticide pyrethrin as a "likely human carcinogen."
________Photo of aerial apple spraying in Washington State from National Geographic.

B's Oatmeal

B is today's guest cook. Here's B's Oatmeal. Says B, "It's easy to digest and filling!"

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup rolled oats (old fashioned, not instant)
  
• 1 cup water (amount depends on desired consistency)
  
• 1 banana
  
• 1/2 cup frozen berries, defrosted (or more)
  
• Salt (to taste)
  
• Cinnamon (to taste)

________
1   Mix together oats and water in microwavable bowl (preferably not plastic).

2   Microwave on high for 2 minutes.

3   Stir - Stir - Stir.

4   Microwave on high for 2 more minutes.

Note: Watch last minute since oatmeal can mound up and overflow container. Microwave for an additional minute if not hot enough.

5   Stir - Stir - Stir.

Note: If it's too thin and drippy, let sit a minute.

6   Serve with sliced banana, defrosted berries, cinnamon, and salt.

7   Print out Web Sudoku. Complete while eating.

Enjoy!
________Photo: Bix

Locavore Approach Says Little About Trade

From two books I'm reading, "Just Food," by James E. McWilliams and "Plan B 3.0," by Lester R. Brown:

"The locavore approach might do a very good job of explaining how regions naturally predisposed to produce a diverse local food supply can do so. It says very little, however, about how we might export from these areas to water stressed regions that cannot provide their own food without extensive importations of water. It says very little, in other words, about trade."
- James McWilliams, "Just Food"

And if you're not talking about trade, you're not talking about sustainability:

"Food is fast becoming a national security issue as growth in the world harvest slows and as falling water tables and rising temperatures hint at future shortages. More than 100 countries import part of the wheat they consume. Some 40 import rice. While some countries are only marginally dependent on imports, others could not survive without them.

• Iran and Egypt rely on imports for 40% of their grain supply.
  
• For Algeria, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, among others, it is 70% or more.
  
• For Israel and Yemen, over 90%.

Just six countries -- the United States, Canada, France, Australia, Argentina, and Thailand -- supply 90% of grain exports. The United States alone controls close to half of world grain exports, a larger share than Saudi Arabia does of oil."
- Lester Brown, "Plan B"

With the result:

"Countries under absolute water scarcity will have to import a substantial proportion of their cereal consumption, while those unable to finance these imports will be threatened by famine and malnutrition."
- Livestock's Long Shadow, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 2006

________

Luminaries 2009

Every year on Christmas Eve our neighborhood puts out bags of sand with lighted candles. This year the luminaries sat on 3 feet of snow. A shimmery sight!
________Photo: Bix

Marler Team's Naughty Or Nice List

While I'm posting lists, here are two from the tireless food safety crusader Bill Marler and his Food Safety News team. (I swiped their avatar too. Love those shoes.)

Food Safety News Naughty List 2009
Food Safety News Nice List 2009

There's an item on the Naughty list that bums me out:

NAUGHTY: Some raw milk, small and sustainable agriculture advocates who confused the entire food safety debate by making and circulating false claims about the bills. It really is about food safety, and is not a gigantic conspiracy by Monsanto to wipe out organic and backyard farms!

It's a small and privileged group in this country who have access to local, organic, sustainably raised food:

"According to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), less than 1% of American cropland is farmed organically. Sustainable food is also pricier than conventional food and harder to find."
- America's Food Crisis and How to Fix It, Time Magazine, August 200

Why would that group hold hostage legislation intended to improve the safety of food for the majority of people?

Millions in schools, nursing homes, hospitals, those on fixed and limited incomes, these people have no choice but to eat the 99% of food that is industrially produced. And now they have to wait on improved food safety while a privileged few seek to preserve their access to the nation's premium food.
________

Update On Healthcare: CompromiseCareTM

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) - The United States Senate today unveiled details of its health care plan, tentatively called CompromiseCare^TM:

• Under CompromiseCare^TM, people with no coverage will be allowed to keep their current plan.
  
• Medicare will be extended to 55-year-olds as soon as they turn 65.
  
• You will have access to cheap Canadian drugs if you live in Canada.
  
• States whose names contain vowels will be allowed to opt out of the plan.
  
• You get to choose which doctor you cannot afford to see.
  
• You will not have to be pre-certified to qualify for cremation.
  
• A patient will be considered "pre-existing" if he or she already exists.
  
• You'll be free to choose between medications and heating fuel.
  
• Patients can access quality health care if they can prove their name is "Lieberman."
  
• You will have access to natural remedies, such as death.

The Borowitz Report
________

The Placebo Effect of Surgery

In my recent comment...

"The human body has a spectacular ability to heal itself, when given time, clean food/water/air, and nurturing. Therapies, alternative and conventional, have an element of placebo. We think it was the chiropractor, the surgeon, the homeopathic remedy, the antibiotic that cured us. In actuality it was our body's natural healing apparatus."

I referred to surgery as having an element of placebo. It made me recall this passage from a book read long ago, "Health And Healing" by Dr. Andrew Weil. Here's an excerpt where he describes the placebo effect of surgery for angina:

"Angina pectoris had always been a medical problem until surgeons came up with operations to relieve it. One procedure that became fashionable in the 1950s was to open the chest and tie off the internal mammary artery, an artery supplying muscles of the inner chest wall. A branch of this vessel brings blood to the pericardium, the sac enclosing the heart. In theory, tying off the artery below this branch might increase blood flow to an ischemic heart. (The chest wall muscles can find alternative supplies.) Many patients reported disappearance or decrease of anginal pain on recovering from this traumatic operation.

As I explained in chapter 3, angina is notoriously responsive to placebo treatment. Might these patients have improved just because they underwent dramatic surgery? The ethics of controlled studies in this area are sticky, but eventually, a few surgeons put the procedure to a test by performing sham operations on some patients. The patients were told they were undergoing internal mammary artery ligation to bring new blood to their hearts, but, in fact, when their chests were opened, the artery was not tied off. The success rate of sham surgery in alleviating the symptoms of angina was equal to that of the real procedure, proving that this widely endorsed operation acted as a placebo treatment.

Undaunted, the surgeons next came up with a more elaborate procedure: internal mammary artery implant. They now cut the artery and inserted the cut end into a hole poked into the heart muscle, hoping it would sprout new branches to supplement the coronary arteries. Again, patients reported decreases in anginal pain. No one put this procedure to the test of comparison with sham surgery, but, since autopsy data later showed that the implanted arteries did not establish any new blood supplies in heart muscle, any success must also have been a placebo response."

Since Dr. Weil's writing, a more recent surgical intervention for angina - angioplasty with stenting (known under the umbrella term Percutaneous Coronary Intervention: PCI) - has also come into question. In a large clinical trial known as the COURAGE study, patients with chronic chest pain and "extensive coronary artery disease as seen on angiography" who received stents fared no better than those who received aspirin, statins, and/or blood-pressure-lowering drugs:

Optimal Medical Therapy with or without PCI for Stable Coronary Disease
Clinical Outcomes Utilizing Revascularization and Aggressive Drug Evaluation (COURAGE), New England Journal of Medicine, March, 2007

"Conclusions: As an initial management strategy in patients with stable coronary artery disease, PCI did not reduce the risk of death, myocardial infarction, or other major cardiovascular events when added to optimal medical therapy."

Dr. Steven Nissen, then President of the American College of Cardiology, said about these findings:¹

"It does not relieve risk of heart attack and it is only marginally better at relieving angina, so why should you go on stenting?

We should reserve it for those that just don't do well on medical therapy or if they have symptoms that are interfering with lifestyle.

What happens when you put a stent in is you're attacking one narrowing in the artery, but it's not the narrowing that's going to cause the next heart attack," he explained. "It's the plaque developing everywhere else that's going to cause the next heart attack."

The study did find that "the degree of angina relief was significantly higher in the PCI group." Pain relief counts. But are the costs, risks, and side effects (Heart Surgery Can Damage The Brain) of heart surgery to achieve that pain relief worth it? When it doesn't reduce the risk for heart attack or premature death? Well, at least there are Lifestyle Changes.
________¹ Stents Don't Prevent Heart Attack or Death;
Landmark Study Suggests Widely Used Medical Device Is No Better Than Drugs at Saving Lives

Why The Burger On TV Doesn't Look Like The Burger On Your Plate

They lie.

"So we only cook him for 20 seconds on either side, and that way he doesn't shrink. Basically, he's still raw."

E. coli everywhere ... from the toothpicks that hold the lettuce in place to the cardboard platform "for our star to sit on." Oh, the price for beauty.

Who calls a burger "him?"
________

Coconut-Carry Octopuses

From: Defensive Tool Use In A Coconut-Carrying Octopus, Current Biology, December 14, 2009:

"We repeatedly observed soft-sediment dwelling octopuses carrying around coconut shell halves, assembling them as a shelter only when needed. Whilst being carried, the shells offer no protection and place a requirement on the carrier to use a novel and cumbersome form of locomotion — 'stilt-walking'.

To date, invertebrates have generally been regarded as lacking the cognitive abilities to engage in such sophisticated behaviors.

The discovery of this octopus tiptoeing across the sea floor with its prized coconut shells suggests that even marine invertebrates engage in behaviors that we once thought the preserve of humans."

They didn't just crawl under the shells, they carried them around! That "stilt-walking" is fantastic. From an engineering point of view, it appears to be a lot of load per tentacle. Although it is underwater. Still, I can't imagine walking across the room on the tips of my fingers and toes. That coconut shell must be precious.
________Thank you, BL.

Does A High-Protein Diet Tax The Kidneys?

A study in this month's AJCN suggests it does:

Effect Of Short-Term High-Protein Compared With Normal-Protein Diets On Renal Hemodynamics And Associated Variables In Healthy Young Men, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, December 2009

"The glomerular filtration rate, filtration fraction ... blood urea nitrogen, serum uric acid, glucagon, natriuresis, urinary albumin (protein in the urine), and urea excretion increased significantly with the high-protein diet.

Conclusions: A short-term high-protein diet alters renal hemodynamics and renal excretion of uric acid, sodium, and albumin. More attention should be paid to the potential adverse renal effects of high-protein diets."

These were healthy young men with presumably healthy kidneys, kidneys designed to hold onto protein. Yet they still lost more protein when they ate a higher-protein diet.

Fortunately, people with diabetes, kidney disease, and high blood pressure (diseases that damage kidneys) get their serum creatinine and urinary protein checked regularly throughout the year. Unfortunately, many people don't know they have diabetes, kidney disease, or high blood pressure because all are silent in the early stages.

It's not a good idea to increase protein intake without undergoing kidney function tests before and throughout a period of increased protein intake.

Side Notes

Active Vitamin D
Damaged and failing kidneys produce less of a substance called calcitriol, the active form of vitamin D produced in the body. Calcitriol is made from the vitamin D we eat or make in our skin, so it can't be replaced by supplements, unless that supplement is calcitriol itself. I wrote about active vitamin D here.

Edema
One sign of early kidney damage is puffiness and swelling, called edema. Fluid accumulation occurs when protein losses increase, such as happened above. When blood has less protein it doesn't hold onto fluid as well, so blood volume decreases. The kidneys counter that low volume by retaining sodium. That can lead to fluid build-up in tissues. A unique characteristic of this kind of edema is that it "pits" or holds an indentation when poked.

Other Signs Of Early Kidney Damage:

• Frequent urination or frequent urge to urinate but it's not productive - especially at night.
  
• Colored or foamy urine.
  
• Back pain (location of kidneys).
  
• Fatigue (caused by lack of red-blood-cell forming erythropoietin which is made by the kidney).
  
• Foul or metallic taste in mouth (waste buildup).
  
• Itching and rashes (waste buildup).

High Protein
The subjects in the above study were eating a diet that included 2.4 grams of protein per kg body weight per day (2.4g/kg/d). The average intake for Americans, and the compare dose in this study, is 1.2g/kg/d. The DRI or Dietary Reference Intake is 0.8g/kg/d.

• High protein: 2.4g/kg/d for a 160 lb person works out to 173 grams protein.
  
• Average protein: 1.2g/kg/d for a 160 lb person works out to 86 grams protein.
  
• DRI/RDA: 0.8g/kg/d for a 160 lb person works out to 58 grams protein (for a 120 lb person: 43 grams).

________

Plastics Are A Problem

A big problem. To the right is Egypt's plastic problem. It's a settlement known as Garbage City on the outskirts of Cairo. (More photos here.)

Plastics and their derivatives are in our blood, everyone's blood. There's no avoiding them. Wallace Nichols PhD, writing for the Huffington Post says:¹

"Once inside us they can poison us or cause cancer, neurological damage, endometriosis and birth defects, as well as liver and kidney damage."

Nicholas Kristof, writing last week for the New York Times says:²

"Endocrine disruptors ... are often similar to estrogen and may fool the body into setting off hormonal changes. This used to be a fringe theory, but it is now being treated with great seriousness by the Endocrine Society, the professional association of hormone specialists in the United States.

These endocrine disruptors are found in everything from certain plastics to various cosmetics."

The Endocrine Society is typically conservative, that is, until this summer when they went on record with a 50-page document outlining their concern over environmental pollutants:

"There is growing interest in the possible health threat posed by endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), which are substances in our environment, food, and consumer products."
- Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals: An Endocrine Society Scientific Statement, Endocrine Reviews, June 2009

What to do? Here's one thing Kristof is doing:

"My weekend project is to go through containers in our house and toss out 3’s, 6’s and 7’s."

You might also stock the fridge with mushrooms and grapes. Or stop using hair and body products that contain parabens. Or steer clear of yards doused with pesticides and herbicides. Or, well, just type "xenoestrogens" into Google.

But managing and reducing environmental EDCs is going to take action from bigger players. I wrote in June:

"The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has the lead here. They initiated a testing program (from a 1996 Congressional go-ahead) and in April (2009) are still publishing lists of chemicals, mostly pesticide ingredients, to be screened "to determine whether certain substances may have hormonal effects."

Given the Endocrine Society's evidence-filled warning, I think we need to set a fire under the EPA's screening activities. Thirteen years seems like a long time to still be making lists. Although I can see that having reps from "agrichemical companies" and "commodity chemical companies" on the EPA's Validation Task Force might slow things down."

Here's the EPA's Endocrine Disruptor site.
________¹ Wallace J Nichols: The Plastics "Out There" and "In Here"
² Nicholas Kristof: Cancer From the Kitchen?

Mushrooms Inhibit Aromatase. That's Good.

Because aromatase makes female hormones - estrogens. And too much estrogen - whether from what we make in our bodies (men make estrogens too) or what we absorb from our environment, and truth be told we're eating, drinking, and breathing more estrogenic compounds now than at any other time in human history (sunscreens, moisturizers, pesticides, herbicides, commercially raised beef/chicken/pork, plastics) - "have been implicated in a variety of medical problems."

(See this post for background on aromatase and how bodybuilders, women at risk for breast cancer, and men as they enter middle age benefit from its inhibition. With the surge in environmental endocrine disruptors (e.g. BPA), aromatase inhibitors are becoming more important for everyone.)

Another food that can inhibit aromatase is the mushroom. Although grapes, grape seeds, and red wine also inhibit aromatase, their consumption has a downside: the alcohol in wine is implicated in breast cancer and drinking grape juice means intaking lots of sugar and associated calories.

Dr. Shiuan Chen¹ has devoted his career to aromatase, and to investigating foods that inhibit it. A few of his studies:

From early 1998:

"The phytoestrogen studies will help to determine which fruits and vegetables (those containing the appropriate phytoestrogens) should be included in the diet of postmenopausal women in order to reduce the incidence for breast cancer by inhibiting estrogen biosynthesis in breast tissue."
- Aromatase And Breast Cancer, Frontiers in Bioscience, 1998

2001:

"The present study was undertaken to screen and evaluate a number of vegetables as potential natural sources of aromatase inhibitors.
...
Using an in vitro human placental microsome aromatase assay, the white button mushroom was found to be a potent inhibitor of aromatase.
...
Of the other extracts evaluated, celery had a modest inhibitory effect. Extracts prepared from green onion, carrot, bell pepper, broccoli and spinach did not inhibit aromatase under these experimental conditions.
...
The white button, shiitake, portabello, crimini and baby button mushroom varieties demonstrated the ability to inhibit aromatase activity in an in vitro assay. The work presented here focused on the white button mushroom because it demonstrated potent inhibition and is easily available during all seasons. Furthermore, the white button mushroom is less costly than other varieties of mushrooms, making it more readily purchased by the average consumer.
...
These results suggest that diets high in mushrooms may modulate the aromatase activity and function in chemoprevention in postmenopausal women by reducing the in situ production of estrogen."
- White Button Mushroom Phytochemicals Inhibit Aromatase Activity and Breast Cancer Cell Proliferation, The Journal of Nutrition, 2001

2006:

"White button mushrooms are a potential breast cancer chemopreventive agent, as they suppress aromatase activity and estrogen biosynthesis.
...
Consumption of 100 g* of mushrooms per day would be sufficient to suppress breast tumor growth in women."
- Anti-Aromatase Activity Of Phytochemicals In White Button Mushrooms (Agaricus Bisporus), Cancer Research, 2006

* 100 g is a little over 1 cup of raw, whole, white mushrooms. One portabella cap is about 50 g. Chen also said, "the anti-aromatase effect of mushrooms remains even after they are cooked."
________
Translating science into reality, here's Mark Bittman preparing bok choi with shiitake mushrooms:


His accompanying article in the New York Times' Dining Section:
Vegetables Dressed in Chinese Robes

Don't miss 3:59 minutes: "That's a big shiitake."
________¹ Shiuan Chen PhD is Director and Professor, Division of Tumor Cell Biology, Beckman Research Institute, City of Hope, Duarte, CA
A few more of Dr. Chen's studies.
Dr. Chen answers some layman's questions.
Photo: Bix

"If People Could See How Their Food Is Produced, They Would Change How They Eat" - Michael Pollan

Here's a gem of an article, tucked away in the unlikely, biotechnology-friendly website Truth About Trade & Technology. It's a recent interview with Michael Pollan, where he says...

"I visited an industrialized potato farm in Idaho and saw how freely pesticides were used. The farmers had little patches of potatoes by their houses that were organic. They couldn't eat their field potatoes out of the ground because they had so many systemic pesticides. They had to be stored for six months to off-gas the toxins."
- Michael Pollan: Eating Is a Political Act, in Truth About Trade & Technology, November, 2008

Another:

"An "organic feedlot" should be a contradiction in terms, but it's not under the rules."

________

Cabbage Soup

Actually Brussels Sprouts Soup (BS Soup), but I use cabbage when BS aren't available. (Are BS an acquired taste?) I eat this, or some permutation of this often when the days get cold. It comes together quickly if you have leftovers. Serves 1.

3 or 4 Brussels sprouts (or cabbage)
1/4 cup diced sweet onion (Vadalia or Mayan)
1/4 cup diced leek (dark and light green mixed)
2 large mushrooms, diced (white or crimini)
1/4 cup cooked white beans (navy, great northern, or cannellini)
1/4 cup chopped, cooked (or frozen & thawed) greens (spinach, kale, or other dark green)
1 teaspoon tamari (or to taste)
1/2 teaspoon gomasio
salt to taste
pepper to taste

Clean and cube Brussels sprouts; smaller cook faster. Boil in about 2 cups water for 15-20 minutes. Add onion, leek, and mushrooms. Turn heat down and simmer for 5 minutes. Add beans and simmer another 5 minutes. Add cooked dark greens at the end and simmer for just another minute. Season with tamari and gomasio. Let sit for a few minutes so flavors blend and soup sets.

This is just vegetable soup. Any vegetables work. Just put harder root vegetables like carrots in first so they cook longer than softer ingredients like zucchini or onions.

I don't use fat. If you have time, desire, and the patience to clean another pan, you can sauté the vegetables first.

There are usually some cooked beans in my fridge. (I just soak any dry bean overnight, boil them for a few hours as soon as I get up, and store them in the fridge.) Since I make them from scratch, they have a nice thick sauce you don't get from canned beans. It gives the soup a creamy consistency without added fat.
________Photo: Bix

Barry's Back!

I'm glad Barry Estabrook is back. Estabrook wrote the "Politics of the Plate" column for Gourmet magazine - before the magazine closed last month. He's back now with his own blog: Politics of the Plate.

His latest entry talks about sludge.

San Francisco's Public Utility Commission is offering free compost to anyone who wants it - "high-quality, nutrient-rich, organic biosolids compost." Good stuff. But Barry writes:

"What the Public Utilities Commission fails to disclose, the Center for Food Safety (CFS) says, is that the popular soil amendment is made out of sewage sludge composted with wood chips or paper by-products.

According to a report released this year by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), sludge has been found to contain heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, PCBs, flame retardants, and endocrine disruptors -- pretty much anything that humans living and working in a large metropolitan area flush down their toilets or pour down their drains. The CFS claims that San Francisco’s compost contains “toxic chemicals and hazardous materials."

So hazardous that...

"A federal judge ruled in favor of farmers who sued the USDA when their cows became ill and died after eating silage grown on land upon which sludge had been applied."
- Barry Estabrook's Politics of the Plate, Sludge Fest: Center For Food Safety Vs. San Francisco. It’s A Battle That May Be Coming Soon To A City Near You

________
If human waste disposal isn't enough of a problem, Foer writes that the amount of excrement generated on industrial livestock farms is about to surpass that produced by the entire human population. And...

"There is almost no waste-treatment infrastructure for farmed animals -- no toilets, obviously, but also no sewage pipes, no one is hauling it away for treatment, and [there are] almost no federal guidelines regulating what happens to it."

What does, say, America's leading pork producer, Smithfield, do with all that excrement?

"When the football field-sized cesspools are approaching overflowing, Smithfield, like others in the industry spray the liquefied manure onto fields. Or sometimes they simply spray it straight up into the air, a geyser of shit wafting fine fecal mists that create swirling gases capable of causing severe neurological damage."
- Jonathan Safran Foer, "Eating Animals"

________Photo of manure spraying from Sustainable Table's Flickr Photostream.

Homemade Yeast - Update

This was about 2 days later (than this). There's some real leavening power now! As well as some alcohol.

I had another jar going (these are re-used jelly jars) but it formed a hairy mold on top. I fed that back to our municipal water. I don't want to rinse the raisins since I feel I may wash away yeast. But it looks like there are other things growing on raisins that I don't know about.

The raisins that formed mold were Newman's Own Organic. The raisins that gave good yeast growth were Trader Joe's Organic Thompson.
________Photo: Bix