Should Limits Be Placed On Bacteria Levels In Raw Milk?

Bill Marler is blogging about raw milk if you'd like to add your two cents.
He posted a link to this video of Mark McAfee, owner of Organic Pastures, defending the sale of his raw milk:

"You have no question in your mind that you are absolutely fricking on target. There's no question. There's no scientific test. There's no rationalization. There's no argument. You're fricking right."
- Mark McAfee, Owner of Organic Pastures

Organic Pastures is suing the California Department of Food and Agriculture to keep them from imposing a new standard that McAfee claims would put them out of business:
California Dairies Sue To Stop Enforcement Of Standard On Raw Milk

Do you think raw milk should meet the same bacterial standards as pasturzed milk?
________

Health Care: An Oxymoron?

Here's the thing about cancer ... Our energies are placed on either detection (expensive, profit-generating, and sometimes invasive screenings) or treatment (expensive and toxic drugs, radiation, and removal surgeries). Blasting good tissue along with cancerous tissue seems crude. Even cruder is excising whole swaths of good, usable organ. I would rather see energies placed in prevention (inexpensive, although hard to gage its effectiveness) and tumor-containing/shrinking therapies. Both of those respect the human body and its ability to heal itself. Radiation, chemotherapy, and surgery do not, or at least do less so.

The projectile path of cancer treatment (I might add heart disease treatment) in this country - this wealthy, bottom-line-oriented country - reminds me of the projectile path of food production. Both are pursued for their ability to generate income, not it seems for their ability to nurture and heal.

I realize it's idealistic of me to think that medicine and food might be produced with an eye towards health. Profit is an effective motivator, probably the best motivator in this country, in this money-centered culture. The best profit is generated when the gap between the cost to produce something, and the price this something can exact from a market, is wide. So profit, in essence, seeks to barely fulfill a need (whether that need is cancer eradication or nutrition provision) while remaining attractive enough to score big bucks.

In my mind, following cancer around someone's body with a scalpel makes as much sense as trying to feed someone with a [brightly colored and oh-so-cool] can of fizzy sweet water. They may provide an immediate fix, but they aren't going to take you where you eventually want to go. In the long run, they hamper you. Does anyone else see the silliness of this?
________The numbers in the graphic above were the result of a survey conducted by Kaiser Permanente in 1995. I wonder what today's' results would look like.

Chemotherapy Is Lucrative

Every day, a little bit of my faith blows away ...

Cancer Docs Profit From Chemotherapy Drugs
Situation begs the ethical question: Are they overprescribing?

"The significant amount of our revenue comes from the profit, if you will, that we make from selling the drugs," says Dr. Peter Eisenberg, a private physician who specializes in cancer treatment.

________

Luminaries

Our neighborhood sets out little bags of sand with candles on Christmas Eve. When the sun sets, we light the candles. If lots of people participate, when you drive down the street you feel like you're taxiing down a runway.

________Photo: Homegrown

Christmas Eve 2007 Sky Decorations

There was a full moon last night. It will be visible tonight too, and according to NASA, it will be the brightest full moon you'll see for the next 16 years:

"That's because it's the highest-riding full moon until the year 2023."
- Christmas Eve Sky Show

Not only that, but if you look next to the moon, you'll see a little red dot - that's Mars. NASA says that this Christmas Eve:

"Mars is at its closest to Earth for the next nine years."

Also, Mars right now is uniquely located directly opposite the sun, meaning it will be visible all night long, whenever the sun is set.

So tonight, look to the sky for a Yuletide Treat!
________ Thanks to the Angry Lab Rat for the heads up on tonight's moon!
That beautiful photo of the moon was taken by an amateur photographer in Foster City, California. More here.

Lazy Man's Cranberry Sauce

Guilty pleasure #114: Swiping spoonfuls of cranberry sauce from the refrigerator. To engage in guilty pleasure #114, there has to be a ready supply of cranberry sauce from which to spoon.

Ingredients:

1 cup cranberries, about
1/2 cup orange juice
1 tablespoon honey, about
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
17 grains table salt. Kidding. Sort of.

1   Bring orange juice and cranberries to a slow simmer. When the berries begin to pop, simmer about 10 minutes longer. Cover. Let cool about 20 minutes. Stir in honey, cinnamon, and salt. Process in a small food processor or hand blender until creamy. Refrigerate.

Notes:
The amounts of cranberries and orange juice are estimates. I lean towards a little less orange juice and a little more cranberry. Below is how my cranberries look as they just begin to simmer.



Frozen cranberries straight from the freezer work great.

The salt may be omitted although salt added at subthreshold amounts (below the detection level of our taste buds) physiologically enhances the taste of sweet. That means you can get away with adding less sweetener ... the brain will say "Sweet!", but the blood sugar will say "Hardly." A pinch should do it.

This recipe doesn't make much. I'm guessing it would double or triple nicely though.

To the left is how my cranberries look after they've cooled but before they've been blended. The pigment in the cranberries has bled out and masked any orange juice color.

I didn't strain out the seeds or skins (that's the lazy part), so the final product contains particulate matter. If I felt compelled to strain it, I wouldn't make it very often, and there wouldn't be much satisfying of guilty pleasure #114 going on. No honest French chef would give me a passing grade on this.

The sauce gels nicely when refrigerated. It won't match the jellying power of Ocean Spray Cranberry Sauce in a can though. That's one mighty mold.

To the right I'm trying to show that Lazy Man's Cranberry Sauce has spoon-sticking ability.

Cranberries are sour. One tablespoon of honey and any sweetness the orange juice provides do not go very far in convincing my taste buds that cranberries are a fruit. It's a bare minimum, but it does the trick. You may want to ratchet up the sweetness. (The cinnamon is another bit of taste bud foolery.)
________
Cranberries Prevent Adhesion of E. coli to Urinary Tract Cells

To the right is a photo of the cranberries I used in the recipe above, slightly frosty from the freezer.

Terri Camesano and her colleagues at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts (not more than a leap from the bogs where cranberries are grown) found that substances in cranberries, namely tannins called proanthocyanidins: ¹

• Chemically alter the surface of the cells lining the urinary tract, and the surface of the E. coli cells:

  "... making them repel like magnets with similar polarity. Measured with an atomic force microscope and converted to human scale, that repulsive force (3kT) would be enough to lift a person six feet off the ground."

• Render E. coli's attachment strands unusable:

  "... the fimbriae - tiny tendrils that normally extend from the surface of the bacteria - collapse, making it difficult for bacteria to bind to receptors on the uroepithelium."

• Prevent E. coli from aggregating into infection-boosting communities (apparently bacteria can talk to each other - that's how they meet up):

  "... cranberry juice impairs the ability of E. coli to produce biofilms, or communities of bacteria, thus inhibiting infection."

Camesano also says that, "Cranberry compounds have been linked to antiadhesion activity that benefits [other] situations," such as attachment of Helicobacter pylori to the gut wall, and attachment of Streptococcus mutans to gum surfaces."

Prevention of urinary tract infections, gastritis, ulcers, and gum disease - maybe my guilty pleasure #114 isn't so bad after all.
________ ¹ You can read about Terry Camesano's research here. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, to "Exploring a Potent Antibacterial Agent in Cranberries." She says that blueberries also contain these unique tannins.

Simple

Lavender wrote:

"You know, 150 years ago and further, sugar was not easy to come by and was rather expensive. Today, it is everywhere and in almost everything. It is offered free on tables even. Sweet things were a real treat. ... In some cultures, fruit is still considered a dessert. If I tried to tell my family that we were having oranges for dessert they would think I was kidding."

I'm struck by that last sentence. It makes me want to cook more simply, to learn to appreciate foods in their unadorned state.

Once, I attended a Christmas party (about 40 people) and didn't know what food to bring. I was running short on time and saw bags of really tiny, easy-to-peel clementines at a farmers market. I bought them, brought them, and piled them into a bowl with some napkins on the side. They were on a buffet table with other prepared dishes and desserts. About 10 minutes after people visited the buffet, the room became silent. And smelly. A strong citrus aroma rose from the laps of people peeling and pulling apart and chewing sections from their personal little clementines. It was a serendipitous, almost hallowed moment.
________Photo: Homegrown

Williams-Sonoma's Greens

Speaking of plants that serve as ornaments ...

I was flipping through a Williams-Sonoma catalog (I can't believe the number of unsolicited catalogs we get this time of year. We'll get the same catalog from the same company but with a different cover page every 3 or 4 days. Catalogers should follow the no double-dipping credo - send once and end it.) and saw this photo and gasped.

I cook with bay leaves. One little 0.16 ounce jar lasts me about 6 months. The leaves in these decorations would last me a lifetime. I wonder if the folks who order them actually cook with them.
________ Clicking the photo will take you to Williams-Sonoma's online catalog, where this garland and wreath are for purchase. Given the price I pay for my 0.16 ounce jar, I would have thought a whole garland of bay leaves would break my bank. I'm tempted to buy it, dry it, and be in the bay for years.

Surviving on Junk Food in Rural America

Lavender Blue sent me this article from Newsweek:

Junk Food County: Why many rural Americans can't get nutritious foods. The unhealthy truth about country living.

I can't stop thinking about it. It's troubling, on a number of levels.

An excerpt:

"Fannie Charles, 46, lives six miles from the nearest grocery store in rural Orangeburg County, S.C. She doesn't own a car, so she pushes a cart along the side of the highway. (There are no sidewalks.) It's difficult, since she weighs 240 pounds and suffers from asthma and type 2 diabetes. That's why she usually goes only once a month. About once a week she supplements her grocery-store purchases with pricier, less healthy food from the convenience store, just a mile and a half away."

"Ironically, people with low food security are often hungry - and fat. The reason: they binge on cheap, high-calorie foods that fill them up."

The article was based on this study which appeared in the November issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association: Food Store Types, Availability, and Cost of Foods in a Rural Environment, which summarized:

"In this rural environment, stores offering more healthful and lower-cost food selections were outnumbered by convenience stores offering lower availability of more healthful foods. Our findings underscore the challenges of shopping for healthful and inexpensive foods in rural areas."

Something is broken in this country when people who live in our nation's farm-friendliest regions are depending on convenience stores for their food, and are suffering because of it.

The Economist's lead article last week, "The End of Cheap Food" blames food policy, in part, for this shift:

"The trillions of dollars spent supporting farmers in rich countries have led to higher taxes, worse food, intensively farmed monocultures, overproduction and world prices that wreck the lives of poor farmers in the emerging markets. And for what? Despite the help, plenty of Western farmers have been beset by poverty. Increasing productivity means you need fewer farmers, which steadily drives the least efficient off the land. Even a vast subsidy cannot reverse that."

What happened to rural Americans when they were driven off the land? According to the USDA's "Understanding Rural America" they moved into service jobs such as telemarketing and retail, jobs that are low-skill, low-wage and even by USDA's estimation "face increasingly fierce global competition."

Farm Population as a Share of Total US Population

Source: USDA Amber Waves, May 2007
The Economist is right. The recent increase in food prices offers a fantastic opportunity to "wean rich farmers from subsidies and help poor ones. ... The ultimate reward: to make the world richer and fairer."

Which Results In The Lower Carbon Footprint: Local Or Trucked In?

My first reaction is that buying local food produces fewer greenhouse gases. The article below calls that into question.

The story ran in the New York Times Business section on Sunday:
If It's Fresh and Local, Is It Always Greener? (May require login.)

Here's some feedback:
If It's Fresh and Local, Is It Always Greener? (from Serious Eats)
Is Fresh And Local Always Greener? (from Treehugger)

Some excerpts:

Getting the product to the store (more trips):

"Consider strawberries. If mass producers of strawberries ship their product to Chicago by truck, the fuel cost of transporting each carton of strawberries is relatively small, since it is tucked into the back along with thousands of others.

But if a farmer sells his strawberries at local farmers’ markets in California, he ferries a much smaller amount by pickup truck to each individual market. Which one is better for the environment?"

Getting the product from the store (more trips):

"Instead of going to the grocery store once a week and stocking up, many consumers are driving for groceries several times a week, if not every day, to all sorts of different stores. I’m no exception. My wife and I shop for groceries at Costco, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, ShopRite, Starbucks, the farmers’ market and the local delicatessen."

This article was based on research from the University of California at Davis, Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program. When I googled the program, I found this article: Campbell Soup gives $250,000 to support UC Davis Agricultural Sustainability Institute.

Campbell Soup has made a few pennies selling canned tomatoes. When you consider this question posed in the NYTs' story, one that implies canned tomatoes are a greener option ...

"Are canned tomatoes a better environmental choice in the winter than fresh tomatoes from abroad? If a product that contains heavy packaging reduces the amount of food waste, is that a better choice than one that is lightly packed and spoils quicker?"

... you have to wonder what motivations drive this research. Still, the story raised some good points. "[Driving a] sport utility vehicle to the farmers' market, buying one food item, and driving home again," does seem to be fruitless, at least from a carbon footprint perspective.

Even if it turns out that buying local doesn't result in a smaller carbon footprint, there are other considerations ... food freshness and taste, the nurturing of local businesses, the regeneration of a skills market (FRE's contribution), the impact of large-scale monoculture and livestock factory farming, and the strength of community.
________ Photo of my local farmers' market: Homegrown. There are a few more here.

Changes To WIC Program

Around the time Fred Thompson proclaimed, "I don’t think that it’s the primary responsibility of the federal government to tell you what to eat.", the USDA was issuing a press release describing changes it planned to make to its food assistance program WIC.

Here's the old (currently in place) WIC food package: WIC Food Package - Maximum Monthly Allowances.

According to the USDA, "[The new] food packages are revised to add new foods including fruits, vegetables and whole grains, while amounts of some current foods are modified."

Below are some changes I saw while browsing through the USDA's new rule. It's based on the 2005 Dietary Guidelines:

• The new food package attempts to reduce total fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol consumption. It plans to achieve this by reducing the monthly allowance for milk (by about 1/3), cheese, and eggs (down to 1 dozen from 2 to 2 1/2 dozen).
  
• Yogurt wasn't allowed under the old package, nor is it allowed under the new package.
  
• Allowances for juice (100% unsweetened) are reduced by about half.
  
• The new package introduces allowances for:
  
  • Soy-based beverages and tofu.
    
  • Whole grains, notably bread. Bread was not covered under the old package. It will recommend consumption of "at least 3 servings per day of whole grains to reduce the risk of coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes, to help with body weight maintenance, and to increase intake of dietary fiber."
    
  • Canned fish other than tuna (salmon and sardines).
• The current benefit averages under $40/month. The change to include fruits and vegetables will be accomplished with a voucher, $6 to $10/month, which as I understand it, is to be deducted from the allowed benefit.

More fruits and vegetables seems like a step in the right direction. It's a whole lot better than just allowing "carrots". But at the expense of eggs, juice, milk, and cheese? And that move to include whole grain bread and soy-based beverages must make all those subsidized wheat and soy farmers happy. If anything, I'd support limiting breakfast cereals.

This got me thinking ... If Thompson was in a position to see his proclamation through, I wonder how he would change the WIC program?

Here's a Reuters news summary, USDA Revises Food Program For Women And Children.________
¹ WIC is a supplemental nutrition program for low-income women (including pregnant and breastfeeding), infants and children (WIC). It funds food, nutrition education, and healthcare referrals.

Repackaging Meat

The Swedish grocery store chain, ICA, is considered one of the most trusted retail brands in Sweden. It celebrated its 90 year anniversary this year.¹

According to Wikipedia, a documentary aired on Swedish television last week that showed ICA employees:

"... relabeling out-of-date ground meat, as well as grinding down other forms of meat past their 'best before' date to make ground meat (mince)."

"... picking up out-of-date pork chops from the floor, repacking and relabeling them."

Hans Hallén, a former quality control manager for ICA, claimed that:

"Sausage meats that had become old and sticky were also repackaged after rinsing."

This makes me wonder if anything like this ever happens here. A few years ago I was in a grocery store and noticed a block of imported cheese with two 'best by' date stickers, a later dated one over an older dated one. Maybe just an accident?
________ ¹ ICA Group's Annual Report 2006 (pdf)
Thank you, Sans!

Humans Carry More Bacterial Cells than Human Ones

That's the title of this recent article in Scientific American:

Humans Carry More Bacterial Cells than Human Ones,
You are more bacteria than you are you, according to the latest body census

So, not only am I made up of more bacterial cells than Bix cells, some of my genes may be bacterial too?

"But the bacterial body has made another contribution to our humanity—genes. Soon after the Human Genome Project published its preliminary results in 2001, a group of scientists announced that a handful of human genes—the consensus today is around 40—appear to be bacterial in origin."

Talk about a symbiotic relationship. Maybe I only exist to feed my bacteria. That would explain why I crave all the foods they love.
________Photo of Bifidobacterium cells adhering to the colon wall from Microbe Wiki.

Bacteria and Blood Sugar

Something is pushing my blood sugars down and I think it's short chain fatty acids (SCFAs), at least in part.

Short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) are produced in the large intestine by the action (fermentation) of bacteria on undigested carbohydrates. SCFAs are absorbed through the colon wall. Those little fatty acids are in fact responsible for providing us with a few more calories from the food we eat. Just a few. Maybe accounting for about 10% of our total caloric intake ^{1, 2}

What Type of Carbohydrates Produce SCFAs?

Carbohydrates that fail, for whatever reason, and there are a number of reasons, to get digested and absorbed before they reach the large intestine have the potential to produce SCFAs. Two types of carbohydrates that result in the production of SCFAs are oligosaccharides and resistant starch. Neither of these are technically considered dietary fiber, although they act in similar ways.

Oligosaccharides

They're not monosaccharides, like glucose and fructose.
They're not disaccharides, like table sugar.
They're not long-chain polysaccharides like starch.

They're still a carbohydrate, and are included in the "Total Carbohydrates" line (not the Dietary Fiber line) of the Nutrition Facts label. Their chain length is slightly longer than that of a disaccharide. Because of that structural difference most of this carbohydrate escapes digestion and ends up in the colon, contributing little to post-meal glucose levels.

Sources: legumes (beans, peas) and any member of the onion/garlic family.

Resistant Starch

Resistant starch is simply starch, a polysaccharide, that resists digestion. As with oligosaccharides above, resistant starch is included in the "Total Carbohydrates" line (not the Dietary Fiber line) of the Nutrition Facts label. Almost 100% of this starch escapes digestion and ends up in the colon. It results in little or no blood glucose rise.

Sources: legumes, raw potato (but who could eat one!), green banana, cooled cooked potatoes, cooled cooked grains, cooled cooked pasta (cooling allows the heated starch to rearrange itself making it difficult for our bodies to digest), and high-amylose starch of the type found in some corn and rice. (See my post True or False: A Carb is a Carb is a Carb, for a picture of amylose starch, and for an explanation of how it resists digestion.)
________
I'm discovering many good things about these fiber-like non-fibers, so a few more posts are coming that will go into detail. Here, I'll just concentrate on the one benefit I mentioned at the start: SCFAs' ability to moderate blood glucose.

The two studies below demonstrate the phenomenon of the "second meal effect" (SME), where certain carbohydrates in a preceding meal improve glucose tolerance in subsequent meals.

1. Colonic Fermentation Of Indigestible Carbohydrates Contributes To The Second-Meal Effect (2006)

"Our results show that fermentable carbohydrates, independent of their effect on food GI, have the potential to improve postprandial responses to a second meal by decreasing NEFA competition for glucose disposal and, to a minor extent, by affecting intestinal motility."

2. Effects Of GI And Content Of Indigestible Carbohydrates Of Cereal-Based Evening Meals On Glucose Tolerance At A Subsequent Standardised Breakfast (2006)

"The reduction in blood glucose IAUC (0–120 min) at the breakfast was approximately 46%, following the evening meal with boiled barley kernels as compared with the evening meal with WWB."

Eating barley for dinner almost halved total blood glucose (area under the curve) during the 2 hours following breakfast the next day when compared to eating white bread for dinner. (There was an almost 10 mg/dl lower blood sugar at 30 and 45 minutes after breakfast.) Barley also resulted in lower blood sugars the morning after dinner meals of spaghetti or spaghetti+wheat bran.

"The improved glucose tolerance at breakfast, following an evening meal with barley kernels appeared to emanate from suppression of FFA levels, mediated by colonic fermentation of the specific indigestible carbohydrates present in this product."

Mechanism

The mediator of the second meal effect is thought to be SCFAs produced by bacteria in the colon.

The mechanism for the second meal effect is thought to be, primarily, a reduction in competition between glucose and fat uptake after a meal - resulting in improved glucose clearance and lower blood sugar.

A lesser, although demonstratable, mechanism for the SME is thought to be decreased gastric emptying.

With these two mechanisms in operation - the foods we eat hours and up to a day after a meal that produces SCFAs, even if those subsequent meals contain a lot of easily digestible (high GI) carbohydrate, will be digested more slowly, and the glucose that enters the bloodstream afterwards will be cleared faster.
________
The examples above are why I say that reducing carbohydrates is not the only way to reduce blood glucose. It's not as simple as carbs in, carbs out (to the bloodstream), at least as I'm coming to understand it. In the same vein as Taubes' claim that a calorie is not a calorie is not a calorie, it seems that a carb is not a carb is not a carb.

It's not that low-carb diets can't be used to manage blood sugar. Reducing carbohydrate-rich foods (especially highly-refined ones) and eating more fat and protein did help my BG levels. But, at least in my case, the more of certain types of carbohydrates I'm eating, the lower my blood sugars. Increasing the amount of whole grains (whole oats, whole hulled barley, whole quinoa) and beans in my diet has pushed my sugars lower than they were when I was eating mostly meat and vegetables. The real surprise for me is that I've been eating some cooled, cooked sweet potato almost daily for a few months now and my blood sugars are in the 80s afterwards.
________¹ An Obesity-Associated Gut Microbiome With Increased Capacity For Energy Harvest
² Stomach Bug Makes Food Yield More Calories
Photo of boiled hulled barley: Homegrown.

What To Eat

Talk about polarizing issues. While campaigning in South Carolina yesterday, presidential candidate Fred Thompson said:

"I don’t think that it’s the primary responsibility of the federal government to tell you what to eat."

Thompson: Don't Let The Government Tell You What To Eat

CNN paraphrased him as dismissing the idea that preventative care and wellness education should be central features of a government's health care system, e.g. "... whether you're talking about education, there's some things the federal government can't do."

The comments beneath the CNN article reveal just how divisive statements like his can be.

I would like to see Medicare and other government-sponsored health insurance programs cover at least some of the cost of gym memberships, dietitian consultations, diabetes education classes, stop-smoking programs, etc. I would like to see schools incorporate nutrition education. I think these actions have the potential to reduce healthcare costs. So I guess I disagree with Mr. Thompson.
________Thanks to Sans Fromage for the tip.