Another Vegetarian Fallacy Exposed

Forty-Seven Percent of Women Genetically Incapable of Getting Adequate Vitamin A From Plants

Following ill-informed nutritionists and textbooks, vegetarians commonly claim that people can get all the vitamins they need from plants. They say that humans can get all the vitamin A they need from vegetables and fruits high in beta-carotene.

In The Garden of Eating, I pointed to research that indicated that at least 45 percent of adult men and women do not efficiently convert carotenes to vitamin A (retinol), making dietary retinol, found only in animal products, an essential nutrient for these folks [1, 2].

A new study published in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal has confirmed this. Quoting the UPI report:

"Researchers at Newcastle University in England, led by Dr. Georg Lietz, found 47 percent of volunteer group of 62 women carried a genetic variation that prevented their bodies from effectively converting beta-carotene into vitamin A."

This clearly indicates again that at least 47 percent of women have bodies adapted to animal-derived nutrition. It means that their ancestors ingested animal-source retinol so frequently that the diet selected against preservation of the genetic equipment necessary for producing the enzymes that convert carotenes to vitamin A.

If you do a search on PubMed, you will find also that a growing body of research shows that even among people who do convert carotenes to retinol, the conversion occurs inefficiently and rarely suffices to meet vitamin A requirements.

Notes:

1. Lin Y, Dueker SR, Burri BJ, Neidlinger TR, Clifford AJ. Variability of the conversion of beta-carotene to vitamin A in women measured by using a double-tracer study design. Am J Clin Nutr 2000 June;71(6):1545-54.
2. Hickenbottom SJ, Follett JR, Lin Y, Dueker SR, Burri BJ, Neidlinger TR, Clifford AJ. Variability in conversion of beta-carotene to vitamin A in men as measured by using a double-tracer study design. Am J Clin Nutr 2002 May;75(5):900-7.

Cornfield vs. Pasture

Greg asked me if its possible to grow field crops without animal input and still build soil.

Regardless of input, I know of no one who has developed a way to grow field/row crops and build soil. The best integrated systems just maintain topsoil.

These pictures illustrate why row crops always damage the soil, whereas a stocked and well-managed pasture builds soil.


Image source: Seaburst.com

When we raise crops, we expose long rows of soil. We struggle to keep these free of "weeds" whose natural job is to secure the soil. We can't stop wind and water (rain), which inevitably course through these furrows carrying soil away from the field. The roots of these crops reach shallowly, so they don't trap rainfall efficiently. If managed very intensively with manure, rotation with leguminous cover crops, and mulch with compost, at best we can replace the soil lost each time we plant with row crops.

In contrast, a pasture looks like this:

Image source: Rebelwoodsranch.com

The soil accumulates year after year because the tight root structure and full cover of grasses and "weeds" protects it from wind and water erosion. The roots themselves draw the water (rain) into the soil. The grass constantly takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, converting it into carbohydrates, stored in the root system. Ruminants are an essential part of perennial grass land ecosystems, providing many services to the grass including fertilization with nitrogen. The grass feeds the soil, the soil feeds the grass, the grass feeds the ruminants and the ruminants feed the grass.

In short, a field of row crops requires a constant battle against natural processes, and its very structure involves us in a largely unsuccessful battle to preserve the soil.

It reminds me of a passage in the Tao Te Ching (Chapter 29):

Does anyone want to take the world and do what he wants with it?
I do not see how he can succeed.
The world is a sacred vessel, which must not be tampered with or grabbed after.
To tamper with it is to spoil it, and to grasp it is to lose it.

The Vegetarian Myth Review Part 2

Political Vegetarians

Political vegetarians advocate a meat- or animal-free diet for the social good. These people believe that by eating a vegetarian diet they are increasing the amount of food available for humans, and that this is a good thing, i.e., that it will prevent starvation.

These people believe that every time you eat a steak, chicken leg, or any other animal product, you are depriving starving people of food.

These people also believe that raising animals causes global warming and causes the majority of agriculture-related pollution, and that adoption of a vegetarian diet based on grains would thus simultaneously feed the starving millions of people and create an ecological paradise.

Unfortunately, as Lierre Keith points out in The Vegetarian Myth, these people lack crucial information.

First, they don’t understand the animals. They calculate the amount of grain you must feed to, for instance, a steer, to produce a pound of beefsteak—some say 4.8 pounds—then conclude this wastes resources since we could send that grain to starving people somewhere (more on that later). In a startling non-sequitor, they then conclude that eating beef causes people to starve.

What they miss, Keith points out by quoting Rodney Heithschmidt and Jerry Stuth:

“[H]umankind has historically fostered and relied upon livestock grazing for a substantial portion of its livelihood because it is the only process capable of converting the energy in grassland vegetation into an energy source directly consumable by humans.”

In other words, as Ms. Keith notes:

“Nineteen billion metric tons of vegetation are produced by plants in grasslands and savannas, and we can’t eat them. Humans and ruminants are not naturally in competition for the same meal: This is where the political vegetarians have gone wrong.”

Put otherwise, if we stop raising and eating ruminants, we would in that be refusing to produce food for humans from grass.

Of course, cattle don’t have a natural adaptation to a diet of corn or grains in general. Ruminants display exquisite adaptation to a diet of grass, leaves, and other plant matter indigestible to humans. It doesn’t matter how many pounds of grass it takes to grow a pound of beef, because we can’t eat grass directly. The problem with our food system lies not in omnivory, but in forcing animals to eat diets to which they are not adapted.

Now let’s say we implemented the vegetarian plan. We take all the livestock off grain, and continue to raise the grain. Then we send it to the people starving wherever. Shall we pat ourselves on the back for our benevolence?

No. The moment you dump free grain into an environment of hungry people, you have destroyed the local farm economy and created an unsustainable economy.

No farmer can compete with giveaways. If you give food en masse to a population, the increase in supply and unbeatable price will drive prices down to nothing and put local farmers out of business.

As Ms. Keith puts it, “It may seem counterintuitive, but the last place to put cheap food is near chronically hungry people.” She quotes Lyle Vandyke, the former Canadian Minister of Agriculture:

“Consider a farmer in Ghana who used to be able to make a living growing rice. Several years ago, Ghana was able to feed [itself] and export their surplus. Now, it imports rice. From where? Developed countries. Why? Because it’s cheaper. Even if it costs the rice producer in the developed world much more to produce the rice, he doesn’t have to make a profit from his crop. The government pays him [subsidies] to grow it, so he can sell it more cheaply to Ghana than the farmer in Ghana can. And that farmer in Ghana? He can’t feed his family any more.”

And quoting Oxfam: “Exporters can offer US surpluses for sale at prices around half the cost of production; destroying local agriculture and creating a captive market in the process.”

On top of that, as Daniel Quinn has pointed out, if you give a population an amount of food that could not be produced in the local ecology, this will cause the population to grow to numbers unsupportable by local food production. Increasing grain production, and increasing the availability of grain for human food, will simply increase the human population.

As I wrote in The Garden of Eating:

“Vegetarians assert we should stop eating meat to increase the supply of food for humans. In the mid-1990s, U.S. livestock consumed 130 tons of grain annually, enough to feed about 400 million people. Food supply experts Russell Hopfenberg, Ph.D., of Duke University (Durham, North Carolina), and David Pimentel, Ph.D., of Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) explain why the vegetarian idea is misguided: ‘Certainly there would be even more human food available if dependence on livestock was decreased. However, because human population is a function of food availability, the resulting increase in available human food would induce a commensurate rise in population. This population increase would ultimately exacerbate the starvation and malnutrition predicament.’[1]”

Political/environmental vegetarians often make claims about the productivity of vegetarian agriculture as oppose to animal husbandry. For example, the British group Vegfam claims that a 10 acre farm can support 60 people growing soybeans, 24 people growing wheat, 10 people growing corn, and only two producing cattle. Keith responds:

“ Set aside the fact that a diet of soy, wheat, or corn will result in massive malnutrition—along with fun stuff like kwashiorkor, pellagra, retardation, blindness—and ultimately death. The figure of two [for] cattle might be true if you assume grain feeding, though I can’t make the math come out.”

She then points to Joel Salatin’s Polyface farm as a refutation of the assumptions in the Vegfam calculations. On ten acres of land, Salatin’s grass-based husbandry produces:
3000 eggs
1000 broilers
80 stewing hens
2000 pounds of beef
2500 pounds of pork
100 turkeys
50 rabbits

This would support at least 9 people for a year, and as Keith points out, “in full health,” since people can live on a diet composed solely of the foods above, whereas none of the foods proposed by Vegfam form a complete diet.

In addition, Salatin’s farm produces a few inches of topsoil per year whereas monocultures proposed by Vegfam destroy topsoil.

Keith also addresses claims that livestock consume too much water. She goes through the figures, showing that vegetarian claims don’t hold water, and more importantly, that animals don’t either:

“But most importantly, animals aren’t ever-expanding water balloons. For a steer, almost all of that water will be returned in the form of urine and feces laden with nutrients and bacteria, value-added as it were, to the land that needs it. For a dairy animal, there’s also milk.”

In other words, animals aren’t consuming and destroying water, they are part of nature’s water-flow cycle, essential to fertilization of the land. Vegetarians appear ignorant of this. I liked this passage Ms. Keith penned:

“The political vegetarians, however noble their intentions, are planning a planetary diet in compete ignorance of where food comes from. Advocates like Peter Singer and John Robbins want us to grow annual grains and no animals at all. Set aside the topsoil, water, climate, and typography [sic, I think she meant topography] problems. What is going to fertilize that grain? Peter, John: what is going to feed your food? Vegetarians, like everyone else in an urban industrial culture, have no concept that plants need to eat, that soil is alive and hungry. They seem shocked when I ask them what will feed their food. Do plants eat? Their expressions say. They don’t just … happen? There was a time when I didn’t know either, so I’m patient. But eventually the question has to be answered: fossil fuel, or manure?”

Ms. Keith addresses all of the other claims made by political vegetarians against animal husbandry, like that it uses more fuel than monoculture or causes global warming. In fact raising animals on grass is more fuel efficient than raising row crops, and monoculture of row crops has a net effect of releasing carbon into the atmosphere whereas raising ruminants on pasture has the net effect of sequestering carbon. Get a copy for your favorite political vegetarian.


Notes:

1. Hopfenberg R. Pimentel D. Human population numbers as a function of food supply. Environment, Development, and Sustainability 2001;3:1-15.

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The Vegetarian Myth Book Review

By Don Matesz


Bottom line: If you believe eating a vegetarian diet improves your moral standing, you need to read this book. If you believe that eating a vegetarian diet will solve world hunger, you need to read this book. If you believe that mass adoption of a vegetarian diet will “save the Earth” from environmental catastrophe, you need to read this book. If you believe that eating a vegetarian diet will give you health and longevity, you need to read this book.

Although Ms. Keith directs her prose to those who eat a vegetarian, particularly a vegan diet, I think everyone needs to read this book. If you believe in agriculture as a way of life, i.e. you believe that agriculture will sustain civilization, and feed people indefinitely, you need to read this book.

Ms. Keith writes from the perspective of a 20-year veteran of vegetarian and vegan dieting who has sustained irreparable damage to her body as a result. As she watched her health deteriorate under the influence of vegan dieting, and made efforts to actually grow her own food, she gradually lost faith in the holy trinity of vegetarianism:

1) Moral vegetarianism, based on the belief that a vegetarian diet reduces bloodshed.
2) Political vegetarianism, based on the belief that widespread practice of a vegetarian diet would produce a sustainable agriculture and social justice.
3) Nutritional vegetarianism, based on the belief that a vegetarian diet produces better health than an omnivorous diet.

In my view, these three legs of vegetarianism are merely logical extensions of the near universal belief in moral, political, social, and nutritional superiority of agri-culture in comparison to hunting-and-gathering culture.

Moral Vegetarians

Moral vegetarianism espouses a principle of non-violence. The advocates wish to eat without killing or stealing from any other organism. As Ms. Keith puts it, the vegetarian nearly prays:

“Let me live without harm to others. Let my life be possible without death.”

This chapter recounts Ms. Keith’s inner and outer struggles with life and death on her path to realizing that, of course, life and death are not really two opposites.

“If killing is the problem, the life of one grass-fed cow will feed me for an entire year. But a single vegan meal of plant babies—rice grains, almonds, soybeans—ground up or boiled alive, will involve hundreds of deaths. Why don’t they matter?”

Throughout this chapter, Ms. Keith shows us how her own moral understanding evolved from the juvenile ethical code of veganism to an adult understanding of how nature really works, as a result of her engaging directly in food production herself. Ms. Keith tells us how, as a vegan attempting to garden, she learned that plants need to eat animal products to thrive. Her garden would not grow without the nitrogen and minerals packed up in blood and bone. Even apple trees eat meat:

“I found one small comfort in The Apple Grower by Michael Phillips. He quotes a book called The Apple Culturist from 1871, recounting the story of an apple tree near the graves of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, and his wife Mary Sayles. The roots of the tree were found to have grown in to the graves and assumed the shape of human skeletons while ‘the graves [were] emptied of every particle of human dust. Not a trace of anything was left’”

As she developed her own garden, it attracted other animals. As she puts it, she got “locked in mortal combat with the slugs.” Eventually she had to decide whether to save the slugs or save her garden for her own needs. After much internal struggle, she settled on getting chickens and ducks to eat the slugs. She rationalized that the killing would fall on the ducks and chickens, not herself because “it was their nature, their instinct to hunt insects.” Which led her to ponder:

“Wasn’t death natural? Was it? Or wasn’t it? Which way did I want the answer to fall?

“Because if death was natural—a part of life, not an insult to life—then why was I a vegan?”

Why indeed.

Moral vegetarians believe that agriculture does no damage, that grains and legumes have no blood spilled in their fields. Ms. Keith points out that only someone who has never really understood agriculture could believe this:

“So here is an agriculture without animals, the plant-based diet that is supposed to be so life-affirming and ethically righteous. First, take a piece of land from somebody else, because the history of agriculture is the history of imperialism. Next, bulldoze or burn all the life off it: the trees, the grasses, the wetlands. That includes all creatures great and small: the bison, the grey wolves, the black terns. A tiny handful of species—mice, locusts—will manage, but the other aimals have to go. Now plant your annual monocrops. Your grains and beans will do okay at first, living off the organic matter created by the now-dead forest or prairie. But like any starving beast, the soil witll eat its reserves, until there’s nothing—no organic matter, no biological activity—left. As your yields—your food supply—begin to dwindle, you’ve got two options. Take over another piece of land and start again, or apply some fertilizer. Since the books, pleading and polemical, say that animal products are inherently oppressive and unsustainable, you can’t use manure, bone meal, or blood meal. So you supply nitrogen from fossil fuel. Do I need to add that you can’t produce this yourself, that its production is an ecological nightmare, that one day the oil and gas will run out?

“Your phosphorous will have to be made from rocks. There’s a reason for the popular image that equates hard labor in prison with chopping rocks. How will you mine it, grind it, or transport it without fossil fuel, using only human musculature and without using slavery? …Meanwhile the soil is turning to dust, clogging the rivers, blowing across the continent. In 1934, the entire eastern seaboard was covered in a thick haze of brown, the topsoil of Oklahoma plowed to cotton and wheat, drifting like an angry ghost to cover the eastern cities and further, to ships hundreds of miles out to sea, a final, fitting tribute to the extractive economies of the civilized. This is where agriculture ends: in death. The trees, the grasses, the birds and the beasts are gone, and the topsoil with them. More of the same is no solution.”

So what does she settle on as the ethical solution?

“It’s so simple, as simple, really, as my vegan morality: we need to be a part of the world to know it. And when we join, when we participate, we see that life and death can’t be separated any more than night and day. I will face what is dying to feed me and I will do my best to ensure that it is individuals—cared for, respected—not entire species; that soil—the work of our grandparents for half a billion years—is built, not destroyed; that the rivers keep their waters and their wetlands and that the oil stays in the ground. Only then can I claim the title ‘adult.’”

Ms. Keith’s struggle with to reconcile life and death is a classic example of the suffering endured in a culture based on a juvenile philosophy of dualism. Western philosophy has long suffered from dualistic thought, in which life/mind/male/action/hardness/white is good and death/body/female/rest/softness/black is bad. This has led to a culture that tries to pull nature apart at the seams, to isolate the good from the bad, to kill death and everything that resembles it because of its dimness. Think of how hard we strive to eliminate the night by powering up the lights. It is a losing battle.

Image source: Wikipedia

Chinese philosophers and scientists represented the non-dual nature of nature in the Yin-Yang symbol. Yin represents death and yang represents life. The symbol shows how they mold and feed one another; each ultimately transforming into the other. The play of yin and yang is simply the course of change. Reality moves and this movement naturally produces polar phenomena like life and death. Long ago the Chinese realized that dualistic thought is really a mental illness, a state of mind that does not accurately reflect reality. If you try to eliminate death, you will undermine life; and if you try to exaggerate life, you will also exaggerate death. It makes you crazy.

Next time I will reflect on Ms. Keith’s chapter on Political Vegetarians.

Ketogenic diets display the "metabolic advantage" and anticancer effects in mice

While browsing Pubmed for recent studies on ketogenic diets I came across Carbohydrate restriction, prostate cancer growth, and the insulin-like growth factor axis. I only read the abstract so far, because the full text costs more than I want to spend, but the abstract certainly contradicts those who say that only calories count.

The researchers put 75 Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID) mice on three different diets:

1. No-carbohydrate ketogenic diet (NCKD) providing 84% of energy as fat, 0% as carbohydrate, and 16% as protein.
2. Low-fat diet providing 12% of energy as fat, 72% as carbohydrate, and 16% as protein.
3. "Western" diet providing 40% of energy as fat, 44% as carbohydrate, and 16% as protein.

They let the low-fat dieters eat ad libitum, the others were fed using a modified-paired feeding protocol. After 24 days on the diets, all mice were injected with prostate cancer cells. When tumors approached 1000 mm, they sacrificed the animals.

RESULTS: Despite consuming equal calories, NCKD-fed mice lost weight (up to 15% body weight) relative to low-fat and Western diet-fed mice and required additional kcal to equalize body weight.

Get that? They had to feed the NCKD mice more food calories than the other mice to maintain weight.

Now according to all the "experts" who criticize Taubes, only calories count and reducing carbohydrates confers no metabolic advantage. They claim that people always misrepresent their caloric intakes and eat less than they think when eating low-carbohydrate diets. But these mice didn't fill out any questionnaires misrepresenting their caloric intakes. Their food intake was tracked. Where did those extra calories go?

Well, I would venture this: Since the mice eating the low-fat and "western" diets had high carbohydrate diets, they had higher insulin levels, so they had a higher proportion of their caloric intake going into storage (fat), while the NCKD mice had a low insulin level so their calories went into energy for both basal metabolism and activity.

Besides displaying a "metabolic advantage" (i.e. unexpected weight loss at a caloric intake that did not cause weight loss in high-carbohydrate mice), the NCKD had tumor volumes were 33% smaller than Western mice (no different from the low-fat mice). The NCKD mice also had the longest survival, followed by the low-fat mice.

So much for T.Colin Campbell's claims that high-fat dieting will promote cancer while Chinese-style low-fat dieting produces the best health and longest lifespan. He never did think to test a no- or very low- carbohydrate diet on his aflatoxin-poisoned animals.

In addition,serum insulin-like growth factor binding protein 3 measured highest and IGF-1:IGFBP-3 ratio lowest among NCKD mice.

In contrast, serum insulin and IGF-1 levels were highest in Western mice.

Not only that, "NCKD mice had significantly decreased hepatic fatty infiltration relative to the other arms."

"CONCLUSIONS: In this xenograft model, despite consuming more calories, NCKD-fed mice had significantly reduced tumor growth and prolonged survival relative to Western mice and was associated with favorable changes in serum insulin and IGF axis hormones relative to low-fat or Western diet."

It appears this team published a similar paper in the June 1, 2009 issue of Cancer Prevention Research: The Effects of Varying Dietary Carbohydrate and Fat Content on Survival in a Murine LNCaP Prostate Cancer Xenograft Model.

In this second study they fed the mice "to maintain similar average body weights among groups." This showed that you can get a mouse to maintain or even gain weight on a ketogenic diet if you make it eat enough. As I have said, no matter the source, calories do count, but the carbohydrate calories count more than fat or protein calories.

Results: NCKD mice had significantly reduced median serum insulin, insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I), IGF-I/IGF binding protein-1 ratio, and IGF-I/IGF binding protein-3 ratio compared to moderate-carbohydrate (43%) diet mice. In addition,tumore in the NCKD mice had a reduced activity of pathways associated with blocking programmed cell death (antiapoptosis), inflammation, insulin resistance, and obesity.

And this was in mice, a species not adapted to a low-carbohydrate diet. Unlike humans, mice don't have an evolutionary history of dependence on low-carbohydrate diets. The myth that low-carbohydrate or ketogenic diets destroy your health continues to crumble.