Am I on to something?

A thought just occurred to me, and I wanted to get it down quick before I went back to studying. I've been reading about a specific kind of nonparametric statistical testing, resampling, which led me to thinking about false positive and false negatives (Type I & II errors), which *somehow* made me think of food allergies (somehow I ended up at the Wiki for phenylketonuria, don't know how that one happened), and reminded me of hearing Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food recently. Any road, I feel like I can't've been the first person to think of this, but there's been much talk of growing rates of food allergies and other maladies, and various possible factors, like growing up in too-antiseptic environs and pesticides and such. Which may indeed have a part in it; but it reminds me of Pollan's simple admonition on how stay healthy, "Eat whole food, not a lot, mainly fruits and vegetables." Part of this -- the whole foods part -- is not a product placement, but rather advice to avoid processed foods (which he talks about in Omnivore's Dilemma, and possibly IDoF as well). Processed foods, besides having extra fat and salt to make up for the taste-reduction resulting from processing perfectly good food into O-shapes and for shelf life, also many times include label ingredients (Now with Vitamin C! And retsin! And Omega-3-fatty acids!!!!) that reflect today's understanding of the nutrients we need (and aren't getting). Pollan's point in respect to this was what he calls "Nutritionism" -- the idea of food as medicine, to deliver specific benefits. The problem is that we really don't understand food -- wild admixtures of chemicals they are -- and exactly how these nutrients work together. Turns out a lot of them (nutrients) don't work in their isolated forms -- or at least work better when they're in their original "delivery good," i.e. a fruit or a fish. That is, omega-3 in, say, yogurt, doesn't seem to work the same or nearly as well as omega-3 in, say, the fish it came from.

Perhaps besides from lowering their efficacy, all this separating out and dosing of processed foods with exotic and/or heavily re-processed and purified nutrient isolates, as well as all the derived flavor/color/etc. isolates, is part of the problem. That is, as part of its whole, original food given potential allergens wouldn't be recognized as such, but isolating and re-introducing them into different food contexts decreases the body's adaptive mechanisms of recognizing appropriate and not-appropriate antigens? (Or simply, perhaps, the number of spices and veggies that we're not eating as much and instead are getting in processed or nutrionized extract forms are undermining various and many yet-to-be-understood detox pathways? Cf. aflatoxin and apiaceous vegetables?)

I may be off base, or maybe onto something I'm not enunciating well. Or maybe I'm crazy like a fox... in any case, gotta go.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Veggie

Ok, not really, but I am once again going to reassert my efforts to be more vegetarian.

I love meat. I LOVE meat. Part of the hard part of giving up meat is the contented feeling it gives me -- it's one of those things where I'm near guaranteed to feel happy, if not after then at least during. And it's hard to intentionally deprive oneself of happiness, no? Indeed it is.

But reading Raj Patel's excellent blog post on meat eating I am reaffirmed in my desire to emulate him, and to fulfill really the logical implications of my personal beliefs and my research agenda in food security, both of which tell me that most of the meat produced and consumed in the US is bad for the environment, bad for public health, bad for my personal health, excessive, contributing to antiobiotic resistance, usually unnecessarily torturous to the food animal, part of the corporate over-infrastructure that I abhor, and monstrously inefficient use of water and food resources (i.e. tons of grain fed to animals each year that could go towards feeding many times the same number of people -- the grain fed to livestock in the US alone could theoretically feed 800 million people rather than, say, 1/4 to 1/8 that number, and the 100,000 Liters of water required to produce each kilogram of beef -- see work by Cornell's David Pimentel among other sources, such as Michael Pollan's relatively excellent Omnivore's Dilemma).

But on the other hand, I've wildly failed each time I've tried this. Well, perhaps not always wildly -- sometimes I only gradually failed. But perhaps I can do it this way -- no cold, er, turkey, but rather cutting at least the all-round worst offender from my diet.

Can I stop eating beef?

Well, ok, to be honest my goal is even more modest still.

Can I stop eating non-grass-fed beef? (Grass-fed beef is likely far, far far more efficient and better for you than its grain-fed industrial equivalent.) That's my first challenge. WHEN I conquer that, we'll try cutting out, well, either all beef, or perhaps rather cut out all non-free-range/sustainable chicken.

It's not much, but it's an important (re)start.