Addiction Commonality

Alcohol, Opiates, Fat and Sugar are all Addictive Substances: this blog is about that "addiction sameness".

Butter Pig Family

* A butter sculpture of a sow and her piglets

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Dr. Walter Willett on the Red Meat Debate

Harvard's Dr. Walter Willett on the red meat debate - Los Angeles Times


Five Questions: Dr. Walter Willett on red meat

The nutrition expert talks about the recent study and the public's reaction to it.

March 24, 2012|By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times

Dr. Walter Willett is chair of the nutrition department at Harvard's… (Amani Willett )
(Dr. Willet interviewed in "King Corn", a documentary about the lack of nutritional value in modern corn crops, that are mostly used for cattle feed 
and ethanol production.)

Dr. Walter Willett is the chair of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. He's also a cow's best friend.

Earlier this month, Willett and colleagues, who have studied the link between diet and health for decades, published a study that followed more than 100,000 people over more than 20 years — and found that the amount of red meat they ate was linked to a rise in risk of premature death.


The notion that red meat might not be so great for you isn't exactly new, but carnivores cried foul. Willett answered a few of the critics this week.


Can you summarize briefly what you saw here? And what's the takeaway — is it OK to eat meat or not?

We looked at total mortality. And it wasn't too surprising that we did see a linear, step-wise increase in risk of dying prematurely with higher red meat consumption.

We went another step, and we compared one serving of red meat to other major protein sources, like poultry and fish and legumes. In every instance there was an advantage to consuming something else instead of red meat.

Individuals make their choices on the basis of many factors, health outcomes being one: religious beliefs, concerns about the environment, many things. But focusing in on health, it does appear that the data are quite strong.

There's no sharp cutoff. But when you get down to maybe one serving of meat or less per week the risk gets pretty low. If you really want to go for the lowest possible, it does look like not consuming red meat at all, or a couple times a year, is where you'd want to be.



This made a lot of people pretty angry and upset. One thing they wanted to know was, are you funded by PETA or the chicken industry? Another was, are you a vegan or vegetarian? 

No, we are not funded by any of those industry sources. These studies are funded by the National Institutes of Health.

I eat poultry and I eat fish. Maybe a few times a year, I eat red meat. That certainly wasn't always my habit. I grew up in the Midwest, and I think probably I had red meat three times a day, like some of the people in the study. But I've seen the data come in.


This study relies on surveys. Maybe people don't remember what they ate.

In principle, the ideal study would take 100,000 people and randomly assign some to eating several servings of red meat a day and randomize the others to not consume red meat and then follow them for several decades. But that study, even with any amount of money, in many instances is simply not possible to do. Most people don't want to stay on any prescribed diet, particularly if they're living in an environment where other people around them are eating other things.
How about grass-fed beef? Does the way the animals are raised make a difference?

We don't know for sure. In this study we were investigating red meat as it is consumed in the United States, which is mostly lot-fed, grain-fed beef. I'm quite sure we would not have enough people consuming mostly grass-fed beef to be able to look at that on its own.

There are some differences. Omega-3 fatty acid levels are somewhat higher in the grass-fed beef. But if someone's getting other sources of omega-3 fatty acids — if they're having fish once or twice a week — the additional amount probably won't make too much difference.

The total fat may be a bit lower. But we don't see that the fat per se is really related to the risk of getting heart disease or cancer. Cholesterol is more in the lean part of the red meat, so that's going to be just as high and maybe even higher in the grass-fed animals.

I think it would be nice to be able to study grass-fed beef directly, but I think in the meantime it's reasonable to assume that the answer is probably not going to be very different from what we saw here.


We also got emails that said, "My Aunt Bertha ate meat three times a day her whole life and lived to be 95!"

Of course, yes. You can find people who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day and lived to be 100, too. Any one example doesn't make the case.

It is pretty clear that people back in the 1950s, eating all this red meat, were not living very long compared to how long we're living today. Red meat consumption has gone down; poultry has gone up. There has been a general shift in a better direction in our diets.

Red meat is not the whole picture, but the reduction probably has been a contributor to the reduction in mortality rates that we have today.

 

Fruit Fly Boozers

NEW YORK

In the Friday, March 16, 2012 issue of the journal Science, researchers say,
sexually deprived male fruit flies are driven to excessive alcohol consumption, drinking far more than comparable, sexually satisfied male flies.
Researchers propose a biological explanation for why sex-deprived flies are attracted to drinking alcohol.  

If it proves true in people, it may help scientists find new medications to fight alcoholism.
   


What’s going on here?


The researchers implicates a substance in the fly brain called NPF. 

They theorize that pleasurable activities like having sex boost the activity of brain circuits that use NPF, and that feels good. 

If a fly is denied sex, the system goes into deficit, driving the fly to seek other rewarding activities such as drinking alcohol.

If this finding translates to humans, “one can say we could now understand why a negative experience, such as a sexual rejection, could drive somebody to drink”, said Ulrike Heberlein of the University of California, San Francisco, who led the research.





 




 Note:
Fruit flies are a favorite lab animal in part because scientists have exquisite control over their biology. Here, the researchers were able to alter brain function to zero in on NPF’s role.
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Online:
Video of flies: http://bit.ly/xN2w3e
Science: http://www.sciencemag.org
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Malcolm Ritter can be followed at http://twitter.com/malcolmritter
 



Reaction to Harvard's red meat study

Link:
Reaction to Harvard's red meat study - Los Angeles Times

Critics of red meat study
March 13, 2012|By Eryn Brown, Los Angeles Times / for the Booster Shots blog

On March 12th, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health released a study that linked red meat consumption with increased risk of early death.

The report, which was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine along with the editorial “Holy Cow! What's Good For You Is Good For Our Planet” from Dr. Dean Ornish (the man who helped convince Bill Clinton to go vegan), attracted a lot of interest.



The American Meat Institute was among the first to dispute the findings.


In a statement issued Monday, the industry group criticized the Harvard study for “relying on notoriously unreliable self-reporting about what was eaten and obtuse methods to apply statistical analysis to the data.”

During an interview last week with The Times, Kaiser Permanente cancer researcher Lawrence H. Kushi — who was not involved with the Harvard study but said the work produced “important results" — acknowledged that epidemiological studies of survey data aren’t as rigorous as a blinded, randomized trial.


But since it’s really not possible to do such a study for this kind of research, large epidemiological studies are the state of the art in this discipline, Kushi said. 

 It’s “as good as you can do without randomizing people — some eating red meat, others not, and following them for 15 to 20 years,” he added.

Vegetarians loved the article about the Harvard research; die-hard carnivores — and, for that matter, some who just appreciate an occasional bite of steak — expressed dismay and  disdain.




 


 
All things in moderation.