Weekend link-o-rama
I’ve got about a hundred (93 to be exact) tabs up on my Firefox browser, many of which are filled with articles about which I would like to post. But these articles either keep getting displaced by something more timely or more blogworthy or even more substantive. Many are interesting, but not worth an entire long post. So, I decided to do one of those sort of potpourri linkfest things like so many bloggers do and be able to close a bunch of these tabs. Plus it gives me a chance to indulge in my interest in the political situation without having to devote an entire post to it.
First and foremost, I want to link to the latest post in MD’s blog. When I posted earlier about our meals in Mexico, I mentioned this great Andalusian gazpacho recipe she had. A bunch of people asked for it, so she put it up.
Richard Feinman sent me a link to an annoying Mayo Clinic nutrition blog by a couple of ignorant dietitians. Reading stuff like this that is written with such certainty always makes me think of a couple of lines from Shakespeare’s’ Measure for Measure:
Man, proud man!
Dress’d in a little brief authority:
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d.
These women are oblivious to the fact that the studies upon which they base their idiotic ramblings are worthless as proof of the nonsense they spout. The first considers a diet with 45 percent of calories as a low-carb diet. Oh, really? The second is an observational study, and, as such, totally useless for proving causality. Yet, in their words, these studies
caused a couple of “aha” moments
for them. I suppose they could have meant, “aha, we’re really clueless.”
I read a nice little summary in the journal Hepatology of a study published in Nature Medicine. The study looked at chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA) and aging. As we age, we tend to accumulate protein debris in our cells. Over time this accumulation interfers with the proper functioning of the cell and is thought to be one of the components of aging and cellular sensescence. Organelles within the cell called lysosomes are charged with the responsibility of basically chewing up (auto-phagy: self eating) these junk proteins to keep the cell free of garbage, allowing it to do its job. Chaperones are proteins that bind to junk proteins and move them into the lysosomes for degradation. Researchers developed transgenic mice that had the ability to make more of the chaperone proteins than normal mice, giving them the ability to increase the degradation of junk protein. Their study showed that increasing the CMA in these mice resulted in lower accumulation of junk protein, better ability to deal with protein damage, and improved organ function. The reason I like this paper so much is that it confirms what I wrote in one of my favorite posts from the past about ketosis doing the same thing. Maybe you don’t have to be a transgenic mouse to get the benefits of cleaner cells; maybe just staying in ketosis more of the time will do the job, too.
Politics alert! POLITICS ALERT! POLITICS ALERT! For those of you who chastise me for daring to bring politics into what is at heart a nutritional blog, beware: politics to follow. If you want to avoid reading about anything to do with politics and get back to the nutrition stuff, skip on down until the politics alert has been removed.
Here is one from the Karma-is-wonderful department. By now everyone knows that Tom Daschle got the rug pulled out from beneath him in his attempt to become the secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration because of his failure to pay over $100,000 in taxes. And everyone knows that former Senator Daschle didn’t pay taxes on the car and driver he was provided as part of one of his lobbying efforts. (One wonders what kind of car would run up enough imputed income to result in over $100,000 in taxes.) But what many people might not know is that Mr. Daschle, in his days as a Senator from South Dakota, ran ads showing that he drove an old car while working in Washington for the folks back home. The irony is so sweet.
While we’re at it, you might enjoy this cartoonist’s ideas on how we can afford the stimulus package being argued in Congress. Now we can add one more with Solis. We really can begin to refill the coffers if this keeps up.
An insightful article in the Economist from a few weeks ago got me thinking. This piece was talking about the government in the UK, but it could be applied to any government anywhere when faced with a crisis. Governments all follow these two rules:
First, eschew all blame.
Second, do something.
I’ve never seen our own government here in the US not follow these rules. For example, let’s look at the subprime mortgage situation that has gotten us into our current bad way. When the house of cards began to fall, what did the government do? Pointed fingers at everyone but itself. It eschewed all blame. It was the fault of all the independent mortgage lenders making shaky loans; it was greed on Wall Street; it was Bernard Madoff. And on and on and on.
And what did our government then do, after all the finger pointing? It did something. It passed an emergency stimulus bill to the tune of $700 billion to keep all of these people from losing their homes and to keep the economy from cratering as a result. As near as I can tell, I have about 5,000 people who read this blog every day. And those 5,000 people know a lot of other people. In fact, I would imagine that, on average, each of these 5,000 people probably knows or knows of at least 50 people, which means that all of us together know around 250,000 people. Of all these people, some are bound to be in financial trouble and are behind on their mortgages. So I ask you this, has anyone reading this blog learned of anyone he/she personally knows getting mortgage help from this $700 billion? I didn’t think so.
So the government pointed fingers and did something. We know that whatever it did, didn’t really help the individual people who were hurting during this mess. It helped Wall Street guys get their bonuses, and it helped management of troubled banks get their health insurance premiums covered, and it redecorated a few offices, so maybe the do-something part of the equation actually helped some individuals (though not the ones it was sold to us to help). But what about the blame? Wasn’t it Wall Street greed and independent mortgage brokers? As Will Rogers used to say, “All I know is what I read in the newspapers.” I’m kind of the same way, but I like to think I’m a little bit of a critical reader. The single best and most comprehensive piece I’ve read yet on the current financial debacle was written several months ago in The Spectator, published in London, and my favorite weekly magazine. The author of this article musters the data to show that it is the government itself that is at fault. And if you don’t believe the author, here is a piece written in the New York Times on September 30, 1999 when the seeds for this subprime meltdown were sown, discussing the potential problems that could come to pass. Sadly, they did.
On the global warming front, here is part of an email I received today from an outraged friend of mine in the UK. This friend is a famous author who hobnobs with everyone who is anyone in the UK. Name withheld mainly because it’s too late at night there for me to be asking for permission.
Tonight I sat watching television which I don`t do a huge amount of. We have been snowed in for 4 days and tonight it is minus 8. I watched a hapless man from a council lamenting that they had run out of salt and grit so the county`s roads would be death traps. Asked why their stocks were so low, he said because they had all been led to believe we would never have winters like this again because of GW. so they spent the money on recycling and ‘Climate Change initiatives’ instead. ‘And I have to say,’ this brave man ended ‘I think we`ve all been badly conned.’ Ten minutes later the US Vice President Biden appeared on my screen – what a pleased-with-himself guy he is. In Munich, and he said to me that the USA was now wanting dialogue with Iran and Pakistan and Russian and…. and that this will be an initiative that will work … well I am glad he is so cocky about it. He then said ‘we have far more to fear from global warming than we have from international terrorism.’ What the hell planet is this guy ON? It`ll take a 9/ll and the entire mad middle east to explode in their faces for the truth to dawn….. meanwhile, does it not occur to them that most of Western Europe has been trying to engage these countries in dialogue for the last 10 years – and that meanwhile, weekly, a terrorist plot is detected and defused by our counter-intelligence and anti-terrorist police … He looked so smug I wanted to throw something at him.
Okay. Politics over. The all clear whistle has sounded. It’s safe to go back into the water.
One of my readers sent me this great link to an article in the journal Archeology about the diet of the Roman gladiators.
It appears that far from being the cut and shredded specimens of masculinity that we see portrayed in films, the real gladiators were fat. Why? Because body fat protected them from injury. It provided a kind of a built-in shield. And how did the gladiators make themselves fat? According to researchers on the subject, gladiators ate a lot of simple carbohydrates and not much animal protein. I can already see Dean Ornish’s next book: The Gladiator Diet.
You’ve all read my whines and rants about the sorry press coverage of scientific studies. Apparently I’m not the only one who feels this way. Here is a writer from the prestigious British Medical Journal bitching about the same thing.
Says he:
Every day one of our national newspapers publishes a piece reporting on “scientific research” and nearly every day the report is misleading, inaccurate, shows poor understanding of science and scientific research methods, and irritates the hell out of many a hardworking researcher. Often the original research is crap too. Millions of innocent people are misdirected and confused as new and often harmful myths are started.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Last week an article appeared in the Los Angeles Times about intermittent fasting. I’ve gone through quite an evolution myself on this subject, going from pro to not so pro back to pro with some reservations. I’m planning a post within the next couple of weeks on the subject, specifically about one of the papers mention in this LA Times article.
A pretty good review article on the treatment of obesity appeared in Nature Clinical Practice Gastroenterology & Hepatology (free full text and pdf) last December. (See, my tabs have been up for a long time) This article provides an overview of all the different diets available for the treatment of obesity. And, what makes it nice, is that not only does it not ridicule or give the low-carb diet short shrift as most mainstream journals do, it actually seems to imply that the low-carb diet works the best. Slowly but surely we’re making progress.
Last but not least, lets end with a death-defying bit of daredevilry. Watch this guy jump this motorcycle both ways. I like to push the envelope risk-wise sometimes, but you couldn’t get me to do this for all the money in the world. Bravo!
Dr Mikes response to Tad’s Feb 9 comment follows:
“The idea that meat eating contributes to GW enables the liberal/vegan wing of humanity to tie all their fantasies up into one religion.
The conversation you related sounds pretty typical of those between someone who is hanging on to a specious belief for idiological reasons and someone asking hard questions based on the real data. I’ve been in a few of these conversations myself with hardcore vegans and rabid low-fatters.”
Dr. Mike’s response begins to reminds me of the talking heads on FOX that need to villify and namecall their opposition to raise a sympathetic following of like minded angry people.
Of course there is a reasonable question to answer about our planet: If we could shift all six plus billion of us humans to Dr Mikes 50gram carbohydrate per day recommendation (which I live by). If we could do this could the planet support it? You don’t have to skewer a lesser class of people out there to make your point (don’t ya just love Rush). Do you really think the planet can support this human population?
If the agricultural revolution of 10,000 years ago led to massive production of carbohydrates to support a huge human population increase and this has led to large changes in the ecology and possibly climate then, yes, meat eating may be a problem to our depletion of available sources if used to reduce carbohydrate consumption. So what’s the solution? 1. We could be quiet and let the USDA convince everyone else (except us in the know) of the need to eat 70% calories as carbohydrates. 2. Mount an aggressive solar system colonization program by convincing people to live in the outerworld a la Blade Runner. 3. Expend an enormous amount of resources to manage, increase and protect the worlds resources to support a healthy ecology. You have any other suggestions?
Number 2 has some benefits. To colonize space you would have to solve all the ecological problems that the planet is facing, would have quicker results than number 3 and have long term payoff for earth. Let’s not just focus of GW. You miss too much other data. If it were not for all the other human wrought destruction of our planet the (possible) climate changes could probably be handled.
An apropo article which just appeared in New Scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16573-lowmeat-diet-could-slash-cost-of-climate-change-action.html
Short version: meat aminals make methane. Methane bad. Thus eating meat is bad for the environment.
Obvious questions (the relevance of which is conditioned on the hypothesis that human activity has a significant effect on the environment):
1) How much methane is produced by 100% pastured animals vs. grain-fed?
2) What is the size of the carbon sink created by pastured animals (animals eat grass and other plants, stimulating growth).
3) What quantity of greenhouse gases are produced by grain-fed vegetarians?
Question (3) leads me to the following hypothesis: Eating high-fiber foods causes intestinal bacteria to produce greenhouse gases. Therefore a high-fiber diet is bad for the environment.
See? Pseudo-logic can be fun for everybody!
It’s funny in that some conservative politician – George Bush, maybe? – made the statement that more damage was being done to the ozone layer by cow farts than by automobiles and was ridiculed for it. Now it has become part of the standard propaganda fare for GWers.
Here’s the problem with these newconcept cars. If you’re single and have no family, they’re fine. But how can even a small family go anywhere together in one of these? How would they be able to fit father, mother, baby in car seat, and all the accessories you need in one of these:
http://behindthewheelnews.toyota.com/?id=154&cid=E5-EB-D0-4B-E3-DB-2E-D5-A6-89-F4-42-38-E6-CE-CC&mid=0A-67-51-F7-12-DC-EC-3D-63-31-69-6A-E0-E1-CC-B5&fname=Kathy&siteid=em_200902_RLA_btw_gen_segF&url=feature_text
(Sorry for the long link; I’m not sure how to embed it.)
Meanwhile, today on the BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7878374.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7878680.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7880555.stm
If no-one can see the connection then we’re all doomed
I love the paragraph near the start of the first article, titled “Why saturated sat is sad for you:”
That’s it. An entire article on why saturated fats are bad, and that’s the only actual statement of why they’re bad, and it is issued with no proof or documentation whatsoever. And this after Gary Taubes has written an entire book showing how there has never been an actual study showing saturated fat to be bad. It beggars belief.
Lets not make this a GW blog. The most real possibility is a loss of credibility on the part of all participating. Not useful.
Agreed. I spent a bunch of time writing that particular post and had a lot of interesting information in it, and all anyone wants to comment on is a line in an email I got from someone else. No mention of the Gladiator Diet, which I found fascinating. Nor much mention of the ketones as antiaging substances, which I also found incredibly interesting. I can now see why political blogs have such high readership. People love to engage about politics, which is all opinion. The Gladiator Diet isn’t – it was a scientific analysis of the diets of gladiators. I would think that would be much more thought provoking than an email from one of my friends in the UK.
Falsifiability of a hypothesis is an oversimplification, I think. Belief in a hypothesis is built up from a combination of supporting hypotheses and observations. Thus we factor in the belief in the supporting hypotheses as well. No hypothesis can be proven absolutely false; absolute beliefs are pathological in scientific inference, because they do not allow you to update your beliefs, i.e. 0 times anything is still 0.
For example, suppose I make the following hypothesis: “All swans are white.” One might argue that this hypothesis is easily falsified by observing a black swan, but this is conditioned on some hidden assumptions. Observation of a black swan actually presents us with some other hypotheses, e.g. that somebody spray-painted the swan black. The belief in our original hypothesis is conditioned in our belief in these other hypotheses, which in turn are modified by further testing. So, a priori we admit the possibility that the black swan was in fact painted; our belief in that hypothesis is updated by testing for paint, and so correspondingly is the belief in the original white swan hypothesis. We may not find paint, but of course there could be other explanations, like somebody gave the swan a pill that turned it black, etc.
At some point the a priori belief in these other ad hoc hypotheses becomes sufficiently low that we feel safe in ignoring them. We tend to think of the original hypothesis as absolutely false, but really we simply have a very low belief in that hypothesis along with conditioning ad hoc hypotheses.
The aether theory provides a nice example of this process. For a detailed description you can see my blog post and links therein:
http://sparkofreason.blogspot.com/2008/04/cognitive-dissonance-and-scientific.html
The short version is that physicists one thought that the universe was permeated by “aether”, a substance with some rather magical properties that served as the medium in which electromagnetic waves propagated. The aether theory was never “falsified”. Various tests were done to demonstrate its existence, all of which showed bupkus to a high degree of precision. Scientists happily came up with increasingly bizarre ad hoc hypotheses to explain these results. Aether theory ultimately faded away due to a combination of factors. One was Einstein’s development of Special Relativity, which provided a mathematically and conceptually simpler model. Combine that with the ever dwindling plausibility of ad hoc hypotheses supporting the aether theory, the fact that there was never really any reason to believe it in the first place, along with the gradual die-off of aether theory’s proponents, and its demise seems inevitable. But note that it was never actually disproved, just displaced.
I suspect the situation with global warming is rather similar. One of the comments above pointed out that we can’t even predict the weather beyond a few days. Global warming is a far FAR more complex situation to predict, due to the long time scales involved and the large uncertainties in how various factors interact. Thus when considering the hypothesis “Human activities are causing significant climate changes” our belief must be very small, if only because there are so many other hypotheses which could equally well explain the observed climate variations.
And that hypothesis isn’t even the relevant in this case, because it is entirely about the past, and thus doesn’t affect our future decisions. The relevant hypothesis is “Changes in human activity can reverse the global warming trend.” Belief in that hypothesis is necessarily smaller; the first hypothesis is at least supported by correlation between mean global temperatures and human population growth, industrialization, etc. (and even this is weak, being just observed correlation). The second hypothesis has almost no evidential support.
People argue that the potential downside of not reversing climate change is essentially infinite, so we should throw infinite resources at this problem regardless of the probability that anything we do will have the desired effect. Is it any wonder there’s so much scientific “consensus”? Not only do we have the usual sociological phenomena at work (see “Aether Theory” above), but impetus to tap into a never-ending source of funding. There are big downsides to other potential global catastrophes, such as meteor strikes, massive volcanic eruptions, etc. Why don’t these get the same treatment as global warming? I think the answer is that people recognize we have a limited ability to change the outcomes in these cases: if Yellowstone is going to blow, there’s probably not much we can do about it. The current situation with global warming is founded upon pseudo-logic, stemming from bogus reasoning: mean temperature increase is correlated with human activity, thus changes in human activity can effect a reversal in the current trend.
The artificially inflated belief in this scenario causes tremendous tunnel vision. We need to be considering broader options. For instance, given the hypothesis that humans cannot reverse the warming trend, what actions should we be taking now to maximize chances for future survival? Rather than focusing all of our energy on just reduction of greenhouse gases, what about figuring something that would be useful in the likely event that the trend is not reversible by humans? After all, we know Earth’s climate has undergone major changes in the past. Shouldn’t we be thinking about things like where our food is going to come from in the event that the current trend continues? This strikes me as having considerably greater value for humanity. Alas, it doesn’t make for sexy press. Fear-mongering is much more powerful than rationality for generating funding.
Very nice, Dave. Thanks for taking the time to write it.
@Dave: I think you are misunderstanding falsifiability (or else I’m misunderstanding your post). In science falsifiability means simply that *if* something is false, then that can be proven through observation or experiment.
Your (or rather Popper’s) example of the white swans is an example of naive falsification, which is really hard to make stick for universal statements (like all swans are white).
Falsification in the scientific sense deals instead with the whole theory – in the broadest sense we say that a theory needs to make predictions that can be observed to be true or false. Not finding any false predictions doesn’t mean that the theory is right, just acceptable for the time being.
This is why some in my world argue that cosmology isn’t really a hard science, since it makes no falsifiable predictions. (That is changing, but hopefully you see the point). It is also why I’d argue that epidemiology isn’t a real science, but that’s a horse of a different color.
@ Dave: “1) How much methane is produced by 100% pastured animals vs. grain-fed?
2) What is the size of the carbon sink created by pastured animals (animals eat grass and other plants, stimulating growth).”
Great questions, Dave. According to one SciAm article I’ve read (admittedly Scientific American in NOT the greatest source), grass-fed cows produce about half the methane that grain-fed cows do. There are approximately 100 million head of cattle in the US. I don’t know what the carbon sink of re-growing grass is vs. the current corn situation.
Funny, though, that there was no methane “problem” when 60-100 million bison roamed the earth. And bison are bigger than cows.
@Sam: thanks for your opinion on realclimate.org. I’ve always wondered how much stock to put in that site.
Hi Ben. I don’t think it’s fair to define “real science” in terms of falsifiability. Science is ultimately about drawing inferences about hypotheses from information. For instance, that cosmology makes no “falsifiable predictions” doesn’t mean we can’t assess our level of belief in the theory. It does mean that it is more difficult to assemble and evaluate supporting evidence, as it tends to be indirect.
Falsifiable hypotheses are just a subset of all hypotheses, those which make predictions for which we can perform experiments which provide significant direct information about the hypothesis. So, for example, I might posit that feeding mice 50% calories from fructose will lead to weight gain. I can do this experiment in a highly controlled fashion, and thus have very high confidence in the results. Correspondingly my belief in the hypothesis is updated one way or another by a large amount. For cosmology, our experiments tend to test only isolated aspects of the theory, often are observational/indirect (e.g. trying to measure the cosomological constant) rather than controlled, and must be interpreted within the context of other theories with varying levels of evidential support themselves. Such an experiment tends to update our beliefs rather less than the highly controlled variety.
So there is no black-and-white distinction between those theories which are falsifiable and those which are not. Rather we have a continuum, described by the degree to which experiments can update our belief in those theories. Again,there is no such thing as true falsifiability, as you can never be absolutely sure of anything in science. Absolute truth is a strictly logical construct.
See the work of Jaynes on Probability Theory for deeper discussion.
Oh, and Dave, I guess the corn sink would need to be offset (aaahah!! offset!!!! why oh why did I pick that word!?) by carbon released from tilling the soil. My guess is that the sink from corn is a lot larger than that from grass but I honestly don’t know. It’s just based on the biomass produced per acre, but comparing that to native prairie is difficult, I think. Maybe it has been done. I’m guessing there is more biomass in corn than native prairie.
The numbers would be interesting, but why we are worrying about agricultural practices and their effect on global warming, when it is what humans have done for millenia, is very disturbing to me. If people are really that worried about the effect of their food, etc. on global warming, the only true solution is to kill themselves. I fear that is where we are going to end up to “save the planet”: http://www.fa-rm.org/blog/2008/12/epa-tyranny-cow-fart-tax-coming-your.html
On a lighter note. All you people who are losing weight are just shedding that carbon into the environment where it will harm the Earth. You should instead be sequestering it in your bodies by eating more and more sugar and getting fat. Plus if you gain weight and die of diabetic-related complications, you’ll reduce the human footprint on the Earth.
Even that comes at a cost, I suppose. All that carbon in our bodies would be released through decomposition when we die. What, oh what, are the poor little environmentalists to do?
OK, Doc, after writing far too many comments on global warming, I do have a comment on your Gladiator diet, and some questions.
I saw this article a few months ago because my fiance gets Archaeology, and should have mentioned it to you. In any case, I find it very interesting, and possibly telling, that the gladiators were not only eating carbs but a specific type: grains and legumes. Which both have lectins that could potentially affect leptin resistance. What about other cultures that eat carbohydrate in very high amounts to the exclusion of almost everything else? Do they get fat?
We know sugar is bad, but this leads me to wonder whether all carbohydrate is really implicated in modern diseases. There is one group that might help us out but I don’t know enough about them. The Irish. We know that the Irish ate a heck of a lot of potatoes. It would be fascinating to know whether this population from 1600s to the mid 1800s was exempt from other western diseases of civilization that we believe are caused by carbohydrate. Until the potato famine, the Irish were almost completely dependent upon potatoes. It would be fascinating if there was some study of health at that time period. My guess is that they would have done poorly if they did not have any source of animal protein or fat, but I wonder if there is any evidence of diabetes, heart disease, etc. at that time. There probably is not, but anecdotal reports might be helpful.
Not only did the average Irish family of six consume 250 lbs. potatoes weekly, the population doubled from 1800 to 1845. Because the climate was so remarkable for growing potatoes, people were able to be fairly leisurely and abandon other food production — and married earlier, had larger families, and were able to nurse more newborns. That means an average of 6 lbs. potatoes per person per day. Of course, although potatoes are starchy they have a fair amount of complete protein, too, unlike other vegetables. That’s around 2500 calories, with 63 grams of protein if one just eats potatoes. !! That starts to make potatoes sound pretty good.
When corn was imported from America to aid in alleviating the famine, the Irish rejected it, even though they were starving. Apparently their digestive systems were very conditioned to potatoes. We know they relied on them heavily. In light of this, it would be fascinating to discover more about Irish health at that time. Were they fat? Did they get heart disease? What about diabetes?
(The book where I get this information is “Magical Mushrooms, Mischievous Molds” by George Hudler. (It’s discussing the potato famine caused by the infamous Phytophthora infestans.) He cites his sources for this historical information in the back of the book.)
Potatoes lack some toxins found in grains and legumes. In light of this, it would be fascinating to know more about he body composition and health of the Irish just prior to the potato famine — especially since controlled dietary experiments are difficult to carry out as you’ve mentioned before. It might give us a basis for the types of experiments that Taubes calls for at the end of his book.
Believe it or not, I actually have the Hudler book, but I can’t find it. I can’t imagine eating 6 lbs of potatoes per day, especially if that’s the average across the population. It would mean that since children and smaller women ate less, that a normal sized male would eat 8-10 lbs per day, and I find that stretching it. The potatoes do contain some protein, but I can’t imagine them not being eaten along with at least (this being Ireland, after all) some butter, which would add a little more protein. But, having said all this, I really don’t know because I haven’t read anything at all on this era of Irish history, especially not on Irish nutritional history. I’ll have to amend that gap in my learning. Thanks for the inspiration.
@Dave: I don’t think we are far off on our opinions – thanks for responding.
@Monica: The ability of a system to serve as a carbon sink is based more on the amount of biomass *below* the surface. Native prairie grass has a much deeper root system than corn or wheat, and it is a perennial instead of an annual (although some work is being done on developing perennial wheat). Corn has a very poor root system – perhaps the worst of the grain crops.
Also remember that biomass sinks are short-term. Microbial consumption of dead plant matter will release the carbon back into the atmosphere (I have a paper from Sweden, I think, on that around here somewhere). The long-term cycle involves the weathering of silica rock and plate tectonics, probably a bit to complex for a food blog
We went to dinner with a family a year or so ago. After a couple of drinks, the guy starts in on politics. We somehow end up on globabl warming. He was absolutely convinced it was real, while I was not so sure. But after a couple more drinks, I knew he was wack. He started his argument with the earth is going to fry and 30 minutes later tried to convince me that our children would freeze to death. I don’t know, but when you try to make a scientific argument with passion and scare tactics, you lose credibility.
Oh, and by the way, heights really bother me. REALLY bother me. I was a little on edge with the motorcycle vid.
Keep it up,
Brian
“Funny, though, that there was no methane “problem” when 60-100 million bison roamed the earth. And bison are bigger than cows.”
I was thinking the same thing as Monica about the bison. American bison are infinitely more adapted to the Great Plains of North America ecology than the cattle, or the wheat cropping beginning in the 19th century that started the Dustbowl storms of the 1930s.
But are bison really bigger than cows? I buy a half bison twice a year, but it comes cut and wrapped so I can’t say with certainty the original size of the animal in comparison. One half bison cut and wrapped fits a side-by-side freezer compartment. My rancher tells me that is half the space a half side of beef needs. But the final bison product is quite lean (too lean actually, so I often add home-rendered lard), so perhaps that accounts for some of the reduced yield.
Bison weigh between 1000 and 2200 lbs and the average steer weighs between 1000 and 1500 lbs. The shoulders of bison are enormous, but the hindquarters are about the same – maybe even a little smaller – than a steers.
Hi Dr. Mike,
Let’s look at this GW thing in a different way.
During cold periods, crops often don’t ripen, the amount of viable cropland
diminishes, animals die, travel becomes difficult, glaciers grow, life gets a lot harder.
Think of everything you ever read or saw in films about the horrors and suffering
from the 1300s to the 19th centuries.
During warm periods, however, crops and animals flourish, glaciers retreat,
cropland increases, life gets easier and a lot more fun. OK, so maybe people
on the coasts will have to move to higher ground, but, that’s do-able.
So, if the globe IS warming, let’s EMBRACE IT. Put on your shorts and flip-flops,
pour some agreeable wine, and sit outdoors to watch the sunset (or stars or
the moon or whatever).
Enjoy it thoroughly. Because the COLD will return, eventually.
I think this article goes well with the GW debate here.
http://news.bostonherald.com/news/national/general/view/2009_02_15_Former_astronaut_speaks_out_on_global_warming/srvc=home&position=recent
You wouldn’t believe how many comments on that Mayo Clinic blog have been deleted (mine included) Even so they got a good and justified beating which the censorship has failed to eliminate.
Next we must march on Joslin, the poor guy must be spinning in his grave at some of their current advice.
Like the ADA they appear to have reduced their recommended carbs from 60% to 40%, still toxic but less toxic for Type 2 (and IMNSHO many nondiabetics) but one of their endos reputedly told a patient that her A1c in the fives was “far too low” and demanded that she eat enough carbs to put it up to 7
If you want local cultured grass-fed butter, you can make your own cultured butter from local cream.
http://www.whatgeekseat.com/wordpress/2007/07/26/cultured-butterenormous-flavor-and-no-fuss/
There are also a number of other links on the web to make sweet or sour local butter.
I guess I’m having a hard time understanding why adding so much carbon to the carbon cycle is not considered a problem by some people. I know, I know, we have volcanoes that go off. They would go off with or without us. But without us nobody is digging up coal and burning it, nor are they pumping up petroleum and refining and burning that, nor are forests being decimated in such huge numbers. (Yeah, sometimes we grow them back. Which still doesn’t do much for biodiversity–a new forest ecosystem is not an old-growth forest ecosystem, but that’s a different subject so never mind. About the best you can say about, say, tree farms vis-ŕ-vis global warming is young trees still in their height-attainment phase eat up more CO2 than old trees do. And that’s when we bother replacing the ones we cut down.)
Even if someone can establish that we aren’t really trapping more solar radiation by adding to the carbon cycle–the latter of which, by the way, I learned about in eighth grade and maybe that was a hoax too, but as I haven’t seen libertarians or conservatives bad-mouthing it, maybe not–can you explain to me how all the pollution and waste caused by coal and oil consumption are good things? Because I’m not seeing it. It’s interesting that in the 1300s, Edward I of England assigned the death penalty to anyone caught burning coal. If he only knew. The reasons he gave at the time sound quaint today but weren’t too far off from what coal was demonstrably doing to the landscape and to the population. About the best thing it did, besides keep people from freezing to death in winter, was save the bare remnants of Britain’s forests. But only just.
And we never should have used petroleum to power the internal combustion engine. We should have saved it for plastics, and then only for some applications. It has turned out to cause more trouble than it has solved. Even when you don’t consider global warming at all.
If you read personal finance writers, particularly the ones who aren’t selling anything but their books by way of their writing, you’ll see it emphasized over and over that ecology and economy go hand-in-hand; if it saves you money, it’s probably being a lot less damaging to the environment too. Now I’m no saint about this, I simply recognize it as a valid hypothesis, one with lots of evidence to back it up.
What’s wrong with spending money when you get it? Everything, if you’re in a money economy. You have to spend some, but an economy based on consumption is inherently unsustainable *even when you do not account for ecological issues.* Sooner or later you must save money as well, or you will have nothing when you cease to earn money.
I mean, y’all libertarians tell poor folks exactly this when they apply for welfare. Tsk, tsk, you say… why aren’t poor folks more economically responsible? Why, indeed. And if you’d quit spending money like it was going out of style and set yourself up for financial independence early, you could free up your job for someone else to come along who needs it more, and then maybe fewer people would need welfare and we wouldn’t need an expansionist economy either. Y’know. It’s one of those things.
Just throwing some ideas out there. It must be human nature or at least strongly encouraged in the dominant culture to hold fast to dogma til it screams. But it’s not doing us any favors, whether you’re talking about diet, health, money, or the economy.
I didn’t vote for Obama but as long as we insist upon perpetuating large nation-states for whatever reason I can’t fathom, sooner or later the government has to step in. It’s that or large corporations, and I’ve seen enough of what they do when given free enough rein to be willing to take another eight years of George W. Bush rather than live in an Avantis-run fiefdom. And that’s saying a lot, because I hate the b—–d, and I don’t hate many people.