Taking the mile high view of conservative economic concepts. 

Government BAD, private economy GOOD.  That’s the underlying philosophy of conservative Republicans and a majority of so-called Tea Partiers.  Rule no. 1.  It’s loosely based upon the Chicago school of economics, but has morphed into something almost no real economist recognizes as a coherent philosophy.  Even Adam Smith would disagree with much of it.  Never mind Keynes.  But in politics, as in bad journalism, the rule is never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Deficits are always BAD.  Again that’s the Republican/Tea Party point of view.  Balanced budgets are normally advisable.   But in a recession, deficits happen.  This is where government spending can ‘prime the pump’ to help spur recovery.  Otherwise, the private economy takes longer to recover, or can even get more sick.  Even conservative economists understand the deficit issue, although they disagree somewhat with what types of deficit spending helps the most.

If only government would just stay out of the way and let private corporations do what they think is best.  Another ‘morph’ of the Chicago school philosophy with which even members of that school won’t always agree.  From Love Canal to the BP disaster, to the financial collapse of two years ago, it’s painfully obvious to all but the ultra right wing of the Republican Party that this is bad advice and worse policy.  The truth is that failure to sensibly regulate the banking industry turned a garden variety housing bubble into the worst recession since the Great Depression. 

Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security — all wasteful socialist systems that should be done away with as soon as possible.  Again, a right wing fantasy, totally at odds with historical reality.  All of these programs have benefited millions upon millions of American who would otherwise be impoverished.   Can they be more efficient?  Sure.  Should they be eliminated?  Even right wing  Republicans dare not make such a claim.  If they did it would be the political death knell for the Republicans.  Besides, there’s those inconvenient Europeans with socialist health care systems that provide better health care results for half the money.  The right’s response:  That simply cannot be.  See rule No. 1 about government always BAD and private business always GOOD.

World trade is always good for everyone.  The more trade the more good.  Economists of all stripes are taking another, less sanguine, look at this belief.  Balanced trade is being allowed into the public arena once again, as it was always allowed until the Chicago school rose to ascendancy in economics.  Entire industries and their often well paying jobs have been shipped overseas.  It was heralded as a good thing.  Not so much anymore, as the American economy became 70% consumption.  Industries shipped overseas, in the meantime, have gone through several iterations of innovation (durable goods a prime example) and what was once an American strength has turned into a serious weakness.

The dearth of capital investment domestically, caused by this economic philosophy, created severe economic dislocation in America.  And it still continues.  The resulting trade deficits act like a leak in the economic tire.  Money pumped into the local economy goes overseas through the trade deficit ‘leak.’

Ironically, foreign competitors use good old fashioned mercantilism with capital controls and currency manipulation to beat the pants off domestic industry, which exercises the only option they have left — they invest overseas, not in America.  This wrongheaded economic belief has made America the prime time chump of the global economy.

Yet it still persists.  Amazing stupidity.

We don’t have an energy problem at all.  We just need to “drill baby drill” and we’ll have all the cheap energy we could want.  Forever.  Again, a philosophy looking for some justification.  Every developed or developing country on the planet disagrees with this attitude.  Seriously.  Every damn one of them disagrees.   Of all the head scratching ideas the right has, this one takes the cake.

I call this industry ‘Big Fossil.’  It’s an industry that receives billions of dollars in annual subsidies.  Billions.  The right won’t even consider doing away with the subsidies!  The right has fought every effort to reduce the stupendous amount of pollution, and damage, this industry creates every day.  The costs of fighting this pollution adds additional billions annually.

It’s like the smog encrusted Los Angeles of the 1970s never existed!  Young people in Los Angeles today probably don’t even realize that their city was at one time enveloped in dangerous clouds of fossil burning smoke from industry, utilities and inefficient automobiles.   The right fought change then (and thankfully lost) just as they fight it now.

And don’t forget that pesky rule no. 1:  Government BAD, private business GOOD.  Always and forever.

Same for Industrial Agriculture.  Another subsidized industry to the tune of $4-$7 billion.  This subsidy, for corn primarily (coupled with a tariff protecting domestic sugar) has transformed farming in America.  Small farms were almost made extinct.  Food diversity disappeared under the onslaught of subsidized corn.  Where there were thousands of meat processing plants 40 years ago less than 10 super processors produce more than 90 percent of the protein Americans consume.  

We’ve become an agriculture mono culture.  And such cultures have never survived in history.  Plus, to add insult to injury, the food produced approaches toxicity.  And overuse of the artificial fertilizers these mega farms need to exist, has resulted in huge ‘dead zones’ in the Gulf of Mexico where the nitrogen runoff has lowered oxygen levels below that which can sustain marine life.

Still, as with Big Fossil, Industrial Ag is protected by the Republican right wing.  Socialism for their patrons is fine, apparently.  In these two cases one must ignore rule no. 1.  Which the right wing has no problem doing, it appears.

On and on.  Mythical beliefs of how the world actually operates.  When these same beliefs run afoul of patron industries, discard them and hope no one’s looking too closely. 

It’s tough to persuade someone when their livelihood depends upon not being persuaded.

As America’s Industrial Ag. megalith continues to pump out lousy food and toxic chemicals into our bodies, the natural response to use local farming is growing like there’s no tomorrow.

From a USA Today news article here.

“The “local” movement — buying and eating food produced locally rather than shipped from thousands of miles away — has been gaining steam with the steady growth of farmers markets and a phenomenon called community-supported agriculture. CSA members purchase shares of a farmer’s crop for the season. The government doesn’t track the numbers, but Local Harvest, a nationwide directory of small farms, farmers markets and other local food sources, estimates that tens of thousands of American families belong to CSAs, and supply trails demand. The number registered with Local Harvest alone indicates how quickly CSAs have multiplied over the past decade: The directory’s listing has increased from 374 farms in 2000 to 3,660 today.”

Additionally, the Farmer’s Market phenomenon where urban areas set up local farm bazaars, normally once a week, is also growing.  From the USDA this:

In 1900 diabetes was rare.  A doctor could spend an entire career and not come across diabetes.

A century later in the US there are 24 million people with diabetes and another 56 million or so who are pre-diabetic.  Americans spend an estimated $116 billion annually treating diabetes.   Although it’s not currently believed that diabetes is infectious, the startling rise in the number of people with it has risen to the levels normally associated with pandemics.   Houston, we have a problem.

There are two basic types of diabetes.  Type 1, called juvenile diabetes, commonly shows up in young people and happens suddenly.  One day you seem to be fine, the next day you’re thirsty and peeing all the time and you go to the doctor and find out you have Type 1 diabetes.  And you have it for life.

Type 1 is labeled as an auto-immune disease.  Your body suddenly decides pancreas cells that manufacture insulin are bad and attacks them.  Human beings can’t survive without insulin.  Diet and insulin regimes are used to control the problem, but to date there’s no real “cure.”

Type 2 usually appears later in life, is associated strongly with being overweight but unlike Type 1, Type 2, if identified early, can be slowed or even reversed by lifestyle and diet changes.

While there are important distinctions between Type 1 and Type 2, there are themes common to both.

Take the environment.  Not just the flora and fauna around us, but our personal environments.

Compare the lifestyle we lived for the hundred thousand years, or so, before we started farming. For most of our existence, we’ve been hunter gatherers.  Back then we exercised regularly, what with having to run around to hunt and gather.  That means we were outside more than we are today.  It means babies were fed their mother’s milk.  And it means we ate food unpolluted by man made artificial fertilizers, pesticides, anti-biotics and growth hormones.  

So let’s visit this list of differences and see if they might be, as the police are fond of saying, “persons of interest” in a crime.

Take the exercise and outdoor exposure we got as hunter gatherers and compare it with our existence today.  Many of us spend the vast majority of our day indoors under artificial light.  Low Vitamin D levels are strongly associated with diabetes.  Exposure to natural sunlight is what creates Vitamin D in humans. Someone who lives in Maine is more likely to have diabetes than someone living in Florida.  Globally, diabetes is found at much higher levels in northern, temperate climes compared to those found in equatorial regions.

People who regularly exercise burn off more calories and tend to have more muscle than those who don’t.   Type 2 diabetes is strongly associated with being overweight and physical inactivity.  Measure your waist size at your belly button level.  If it is equal to half or more of your height (in other words you’ve got a “pooch”) your chances of developing Type 2 increases dramatically.

Consider our diets today versus the diet we had when we spent time outdoors hunting and gathering.  Back then there were no processed foods and very little sugar and salt added.  No Dunkin Donuts or Cheetos or processed foods of any kind back then.  Processed foods invariably are packed with sugar and sugar creates huge spikes in insulin levels.  They are also packed with fats, many of these fats long identified as being unhealthy.  What they don’t have is fiber and fiber is known to be necessary for good health.

Back then there were no man made fertilizers in the food we ate.  No man made growth hormones.  No man made pesticides to ingest.  For more than a hundred thousand years of our evolution as humans, we didn’t eat any of these things.  And genetically, we’re still the same humans today as we were then.

So who do we take a good hard look at, other than ourselves, for consuming all this stuff our bodies never had to deal with until very, very recently?  Who are the enablers?  The “people of interest?”

That would be government, by its policies, and the food industry.  Our government, as just one example, spends anywhere from $4-$7 billion per year subsidizing corn.  As a result of that we have corn coming out the whazoo.  Problem is, corn is starchy and high in sugar.  There are many, many other vegetables far more healthy for us than corn.

But corn it is, our government has decided.  With the subsidy it’s cheap and in America as elsewhere price is everything.  So our cattle are fed corn instead of what cattle are supposed to eat, which is grass.  That makes them fat and unhealthy.  But cheap.  So we Americans consume cheap beef that’s unhealthy for us because corn is cheap because the government has decided it should be thus.  And it’s not just the fat.  We end up feeding the cattle growth hormones so we can slaughter them earlier.  And we end up pumping them full of anti-biotics because we force them to eat corn, which makes them sick.   And we have slaughterhouse factories where these poor beasts live, literally, shoulder to shoulder hock deep in their own excrement until the day they are marched to their slaughter.

If you want some more about corn (including the massive use of high fructose corn syrup in just about everything you can find on your supermarket shelves) and how its subsidy has warped our farm system and our food supply, you can type in “corn subsidies” in the web search box to your right.

Interestingly, young people who grow larger, faster, are statistically more likely to develop Type 1 disease.  One can only wonder if there’s a connection to all the hormones we now eat (chicken also get hormones because, just like cattle, we can fatten them up quicker that way) and rapid growth among some young adults.  They are getting a good dose of growth hormones because of what they eat. 

Another concern is that our environments, paradoxically, may be too clean.  This, some think, may cause our immune systems to weaken.  Also, mother’s milk contains plenty of immune enhancing ingredients.  So breast feed your kids and when they’re old enough, make sure they get a lot of outdoor exercise and nibble a few mud pies.  And while you’re breast feeding them, lay off the packaged foods and industrial ag produced meats.  If you must eat meat, buy pasture fed beef, free range chicken and wild caught fish.  What the mother eats gets pumped into the baby, whether it’s still attached to the umbilical cord or the mother’s teat to feed.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of cows, let’s consider dairy.  Don’t do dairy.  It’s thought that infant baby formula using milk tinkers with the child’s developing immune system.  And a number of nutritional experts recommend everyone reduce their dairy intake.   If you want to see previous posts about the problem with cows and dairy, just type ”dairy” in the search box.

If you want a quick article listing the five suspects in creating our diabetes pandemic, you can go here.  If you want a book length discussion of the diabetic pandemic, read Dan Hurley’s “Diabetes Rising: How A Rare Disease Became A Modern Pandemic, And What To Do About It.”

And if you want to start eating healthier, both for yourself and for your children, know beforehand it’s going to be tough to do in America.  Almost everything on your local supermarket shelf is supercharged with high fructose corn syrup and fat and contains pesticide residues both inside and out.  And all the meats are laced with fat, growth hormones, and anti-biotics.

Fast food eating is definitely out.  You might as well take up smoking and heavy drinking instead. 

If you have a health food supermarket nearby, such as Whole Foods or Trader Joes, you’re halfway home.  But you still need to more carefully plan your meals, and for most of us who’ve grown up the past 40 years or so, that’s a lifestyle change all by itself.

And get some outdoor excercise, particularly if you live in a northern clime where clouds are more common than sun.

The good news is that if you even do half of this, your chances of developing Type 2 are lessened dramatically.  And if you’re pre-diabetic, you can actually reverse the development.

Finally, contact your Congressperson and tell them to end the corn subsidy.  Subsidize healthy foods instead.

Economics professor Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, observes that our economy has become too dependent on “paper entrepreneurs” as opposed to “product entrepreneurs.”  We need both, Reich admits, but we’ve become unbalanced.

A new idea?  Hardly.  Reich made his observations 30 years ago.

“Paper entrepreneurs — trained in law, finance, accountancy — manipulate complex systems of rules and numbers. They innovate by using the systems in novel ways: establishing joint ventures, consortiums, holding companies, mutual funds; finding companies to acquire, “white knights” to be acquired by, commodity futures to invest in, tax shelters to hide in; engaging in proxy fights, tender offers, antitrust suits, stock splits, spinoffs, divestitures; buying and selling notes, bonds, convertible debentures, sinking-fund debentures; obtaining government subsidies, loan guarantees, tax breaks, contracts, licenses, quottas, price supports, bailouts; going private, going public, going bankrupt.

Product entrepreneurs — engineers, inventors, production managers, marketers, owners of small businesses — produce goods and services people want. They innovate by creating better products at less cost……

If we are to increase the economic pie, we will need to redress the balance of entrepreneurial effort. Which strategies will stimulate more paper, and which more product?”

Good question.  How do we re-balance?

Finance regulatory reform is a help.  Wall Street represents one of those “paper entrepreneurs.”  It grew exponentially, so much so that it went from about 7% of national Gross Domestic Product to a high of more than 20% of GDP just prior to its collapse in 2007.  Regulatory diligence, as opposed to laissez faire “look the other way” non-regulation, will pull back this particular imbalance.  It should, because this lopsided growth of what is a service provider, is a perfect example of malinvestment.

Health care reform is another example.  It too has grown exponentially and a great percentage of this growth has come, not in product innovation (there has been some of that, certainly), but in the “paper entrepreneur” part of the health care system:  In the service and administrative part as opposed to the part that actually delivers the service.   Like finance on steroids, health administrative and legal cost growth is another perfect example of malinvestment.

Rethinking what “fair trade” means.  Taking a tougher negotiating position with our trading partners would help immensely.  Warren Buffett likes the idea of having “import certificates” where partners could import to us only up to what they buy from us.   Whether this is a practical idea or not, the underlying attitude is that we should not be running huge foreign account deficits.  We’re learning that one negative impact of running those deficits moves our “product entrepreneurs” overseas.  And that aggravates the imbalance Reich describes.

Target tax cuts and subsidies to industries offering future, productive, growth.  Even a blind man can see where we’re all headed here.  We need to transfer more of our power needs to the sustainable, clean energy industries.  Obama’s $50 million matching grant to Celgard in North Carolina is an excellent example.  Celgard makes membranes for lithium ion batteries, a critical component for our transition to hybrid, and eventually all electric transportation.  This industry is already starting to explode and Obama has a goal of the US supplying 40% of these batteries worldwide in two years.  That’s an example of supporting “product entrepreneurs.”

Keeping America’s auto industry alive in the meantime, is another effort to support “product entrepreneurs.”  Chrysler and General Motors were forced to go through bankruptcy, assisted by the taxpayer, and are now producing competitive products worldwide.   American made cars and trucks running on American made lithium ion batteries are two related and worthwhile goals. 

There are many such examples of what needs to be done to redress the malinvestment made the past 30 years.  Here’s another.  We subsidize corn to the tune of between $4 billion to $7 billion annually.  It’s been marvelously successful at producing cheap corn, and as a result of the corn being fed to cattle, hogs and chickens, it has produced cheap meat protein in abundance.  Problem is this has crowded out many, many diversified farms.  Fewer people work in agriculture than did before.  A less diverse product selection is another negative result.  And finally, the product itself is turning out to be unhealthy for Americans.  It is severely damaging the nutritional value of our diets.

So subsidize healthy food instead.  If the effect of corn subsidies is any example, subsidizing healthy foods should be a boon to the entire nation.  And food definitely isn’t “paper entrepreneur.”  It’s all product.

Energy transformation.  Environmental transformation.  Transportation transformation.  Industrial agriculture transformation.  The simple truth is that targeted tax breaks and/or subsidies can help produce “product entrepreneurs” all over the country.  And produce billions in private industry profits along the way.

Who can complain about that?  Apparently Republicans can.

It seems like almost overnight America found itself fat and diabetic.  In earlier posts Beezer has argued that a main driver in this fat phenomenon, if not The main driver, is the industrialization of our food industry.

With the help of $4 billion in annual government subsidies, industrial agriculture has quickly and fairly quietly, destroyed the diversity of our food supply.  We now eat primarily corn or soy based food instead of enjoying a healthier, more diverse diet. 

To make a long story short, we subsidize corn to make it cheaper than it would otherwise be, and as a result corn and corn byproducts now dominate our grocery shelves, including the meat counter.  This policy is one of the root causes of why our diet is coming apart at the seams.  We’re being forced to eat a narrowing group of real foods and our health is the main victim. 

Now along comes more damning information about how our narrowed diet is the main driver in our headlong plunge to fat and sicknesses of all kinds.  We are what we eat, and what we’re eating is terrible.

Critical to health is a good balance between Omega 3 and Omega 6 fatty acids.  Unfortunately for Americans, our industrial ag food machine is supplying lots of Omega 6 and far too little Omega 3.

In an article in Prevention Magazine, science writer Susan Allport explains why we need more Omega 3 and why our diets contain too little of this vital nutrient. 

“Our Collective Omega-3 Deficiency…
Every once in a while, a discovery comes along that changes everything about the way we see the world. In the early 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus had such a moment when he discovered that Earth was not the center of the universe. Our new understanding of essential fats is that kind of discovery, and I was lucky enough, as a science writer, to make a small-yet-key contribution. While researching a book on omega-3s, I realized that the essential fats–the omega-3s and their close cousins, the omega-6s–change with the seasons. It might sound like a small idea, but it may soon fundamentally change the way you think about food.

First, let’s start with omega-3s, what I’ll call the spring fats. These are likely the most abundant fats in the world, but they don’t originate in fish, as many believe. Rather, they are found in the green leaves of plants. Fish are full of omega-3s because they eat phytoplankton (the microscopic green plants of the ocean) and seaweed. In plants, these special fatty acids help turn sunlight into sugars, the basis of life on Earth. The spring fats speed up metabolism. They are fats that animals (humans included) use to get ready for times of activity, like the mating season. They’re found in the highest concentrations in all the most active tissues: brains, eyes, hearts, the tails of sperm–the flight muscles of hummingbirds. Because fish have so many of these fats in their diets, they can be active in cold, dark waters. These fats protect our brains from neurological disorders and enable our hearts to beat billions of times without incident. But they are vanishing from our diet, and you’ll soon understand why.

…And Our Omega-6 Surplus
Next up are the omega-6s, what I’ll call the fall fats. They originate in plants as well, but in the seeds of plants rather than the leaves. The fall fats are simply storage fats for plants. Animals require both–omega-3s and omega-6s–in their diets and their tissues. But omega-6s are slower and stiffer than omega-3s. Plus, they promote blood clotting and inflammation, the underlying causes of many diseases, including heart disease and arthritis. Omega-3s, on the other hand, promote blood flow and very little inflammation, which may prevent things like heart disease. The proper mix of these two fats helps create tissue with the right amount of blood flow and inflammation. But because they’re in constant competition to enter our cells, if your diet consists of too many omega-6s, your body will be deficient in omega-3s. And that is what’s been happening to us as we’ve been eating more and more seed fats in the form of soybean, corn, and other vegetable oils.

Since 1909, according to the USDA, Americans have more than doubled their daily intake of omega-6s–from about 7 grams to around 18. One hundred years ago, heart disease was much less common in this country. Over the past century, though, heart disease has risen in tandem with our increasing intake of these seed fats, or omega-6s, according to the American Heart Association (AHA). So have neurological disorders like Lisa’s, as well as depression, arthritis, obesity, insulin resistance, and many cancers. While other dietary factors such as increased consumption of calories, trans fats, and sugar undoubtedly contributed, our essential fatty acid imbalance is a key player in most of these illnesses.

Over the same time period, omega-3s began disappearing from our food supply. Cows used to be raised on grass and other greens, producing meat, milk, and cheese with much higher concentrations of omega-3s. These were the animal products that our grandparents and great-grandparents grew up on, before industrial feedlots replaced family farms. Now these livestock are fed corn and soy, and their tissues are swamped with omega-6s. Chickens, too, used to eat grass and grass-eating bugs. Those chickens produced eggs and meat that were high in omega-3s, but now they’re fed full of omega-6-rich fall fats.

We are now eating a diet that is supposed to fatten us up for winter, when weather is harsh and calories are scarce. But today food is never scarce for the average American. The base of our food supply has shifted from leaves to seeds, and this simple change means our bodies are storing more fat, leading to obesity and all its associated diseases.”

How We Got Here
This is all too simple to be true, you might say. But arriving at this understanding was anything but simple. In the 1930s, the first family of essential fats was discovered and mapped by George and Mildred Burr at the University of Minnesota. These were the omega-6s. It was another 40 years before omega-3s were also found to be essential, by a researcher at Hormel named Ralph Holman. A great deal happened to our food supply in those decades. Due to farm subsidies, the acres of soybeans, for example, grown in the United States exploded from about 4 million to 70 million. Oil processors like Archer Daniels Midland mastered the process of extracting oil from these and other seeds, and vegetable seed oils–thought to be healthy–began to dominate our food supply as they were added to the foods that make up the center aisles of the grocery store.

At the same time, food chemists discovered that rancidity in packaged foods was caused by the oxidation of some minor but pesky fats: omega-3s. Scientists extended the shelf life of processed foods such as cookies, chips, cakes, breads, and spreads by removing omega-3s–a nutrient that no one thought mattered. Health agencies, like the AHA, and the US government also promoted omega-6s, because seed oils are low in saturated fat and free of cholesterol. So omega-6 oils, such as corn and soybean, they thought, were good for the heart.

Scientists have known since the early 1970s, however, that omega-6s also promote blood clotting and inflammation, two immediate and direct causes of heart disease. But because omega-6s were essential, doctors thought you had to take the good with the bad. By the time they learned that omega-3s protect our hearts and fight inflammation, omega-6s were already the foundation of our modern food supply.

Then, in the 1980s, epidemiological studies published in prestigious journals like the New England Journal of Medicine showed that fish-eating populations in Greenland and Japan are much less prone to heart disease. Omega-3s became associated with fish (rather than with green leaves), and that became the method recommended by such organizations as the AHA for us to obtain our omega-3s. The only problem is that eating more fish isn’t a sustainable solution, as many of the world’s fisheries are at the brink of collapse, according to a major study recently published in Science. Literally, there aren’t enough fish in the world’s oceans….”

It is probably no coincidence, I realized, as I researched my book The Queen of Fats, that leaves are the most metabolically active tissues in plants, and brains and eyes are the most metabolically active tissues in animals: They are both full of omega-3 fats. Omega-3s speed up the activity of cells.

It is no coincidence, I realized, that omega-6s are simply a storage fat for plants. Both omega-6s and omega-3s play many vital, essential roles in animals, as I cannot emphasize enough. But in plants, the only role of omega-6s is to serve as a storage fat. Omega-6s are also the main polyunsaturated fat in the storage fat of animals: white adipose tissue–the belly fat of every overweight American.

It is no coincidence that hibernating animals such as the yellow-bellied marmot of Colorado do not go into hibernation when their diet is full of omega-3s, as it is in the spring and summer. Their diet must change to one rich in omega-6 seeds before these animals will slow down for the winter.

It is no coincidence that animals that migrate long distances–like the semipalmated sandpiper, which flies from Nova Scotia to South America–fill up on omega-3s for their long journey. These birds know what human athletes are just starting to learn: High omega-3 concentrations in muscle membranes lead to improved performance.

So it is no coincidence that as America shifted its diet–from one based on green leaves to one based on seeds–we became fatter and fatter and sicker and sicker. Our hibernation diet is exposing us to epidemics of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and brain disorders. Even infants, according to the Child and Family Research Institute of the University of British Columbia, are getting fatter–long before they could ever be accused of overeating–when they are fed formulas high in omega-6s. Sure, America’s seed-based foods are remarkably cheap, but we spend the lowest percentage of our income on food and more on health care than any other country in the world.

Since publishing The Queen of Fats, I’ve continued to comb the literature for studies that shed light on the role that the essential fats play in nature. I came across one not too long ago in the journal Lipids about the African kudu and impala, showing that these animals also experience a shift in the amounts of omega-3s and omega-6s in their diets over the course of the rainy and dry seasons– rather than our seasons based on day length. It made me realize that these shifts are universal signals, experienced and interpreted by animals all over the planet–at least until we humans came along and devised a way of eating a diet rich in seed fats all year long.

There’s a solution to our imbalance, but change is difficult, and we must first accept that polyunsaturates–omega-3s and omega-6s–are not one big happy family; rather, they are two competing families–spring fats and fall fats– with very different effects on cells and health. Once we’ve accepted that, making the necessary dietary improvements is relatively easy.” 

Of course making the necessary dietary improvements will NOT be relatively easy.  Getting rid of our corn subsidies (and, could we actually figure out it’s better to subsidize healthy, organic foods?) will be as easy as getting rid of too big to fail (TBTF) Wall Street banks, or predatory health insurance companies.

The same folks who claim unfettered free markets are best, are the same ones who subsidize corn.  Yet the unsubsidized organic food system is the fastest growing segment of the food industry, clocking in at more than $11 billion per year and growing rapidly.  Word that we’re being fed unhealthy ”shadow” food is apparently getting around.

So fight back.  Eat your leafy greens, fish, flax seeds and if necessary Omega 3 supplements.  And every once in a while email your Congress critters and tell them to stop force feeding us all this fake, unhealthy food.  And using our tax dollars to do it!

Beezer’s written several posts critical of the way we produce our meat.  Another post pointed out lots of people have literally stopped eating the stuff and changed to a vegan or macro-biotic diet that would be much healthier.

That said, it doesn’t mean you can’t eat meat and be healthy too.  And the rap about meat being a major contributor to global warming needs some re-consideration too.

All this is explained in an October 30, 2009 New York Times article written by Nicolette Hahn Niman, a lawyer and livestock owner who’s also authored the book “Righteous Porkchop:  Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms.”

As the book title suggests, the problem is in the way America produces it’s food on the factory/manufacturing model.  Industrial Ag is the culprit.  If we returned to demanding pasture raised cattle and free range chickens and the government stopped subsidizing industrial ag in the billions of dollars annually, that is precisely what we could do. 

If only our government would let us.  Why we subsidize industrial ag instead of natural, even organic farming is beyond me.

From the NYT article.

“It’s true that food production is an important contributor to climate change. And the claim that meat (especially beef) is closely linked to global warming has received some credible backing, including by the United Nations and University of Chicago. Both institutions have issued reports that have been widely summarized as condemning meat-eating.

But that’s an overly simplistic conclusion to draw from the research. To a rancher like me, who raises cattle, goats and turkeys the traditional way (on grass), the studies show only that the prevailing methods of producing meat — that is, crowding animals together in factory farms, storing their waste in giant lagoons and cutting down forests to grow crops to feed them — cause substantial greenhouse gases. It could be, in fact, that a conscientious meat eater may have a more environmentally friendly diet than your average vegetarian.

So what is the real story of meat’s connection to global warming? Answering the question requires examining the individual greenhouse gases involved: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxides.

Carbon dioxide makes up the majority of agriculture-related greenhouse emissions. In American farming, most carbon dioxide emissions come from fuel burned to operate vehicles and equipment. World agricultural carbon emissions, on the other hand, result primarily from the clearing of woods for crop growing and livestock grazing. During the 1990s, tropical deforestation in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Sudan and other developing countries caused 15 percent to 35 percent of annual global fossil fuel emissions.

Much Brazilian deforestation is connected to soybean cultivation. As much as 70 percent of areas newly cleared for agriculture in Mato Grosso State in Brazil is being used to grow soybeans. Over half of Brazil’s soy harvest is controlled by a handful of international agribusiness companies, which ship it all over the world for animal feed and food products, causing emissions in the process.

Meat and dairy eaters need not be part of this. Many smaller, traditional farms and ranches in the United States have scant connection to carbon dioxide emissions because they keep their animals outdoors on pasture and make little use of machinery. Moreover, those farmers generally use less soy than industrial operations do, and those who do often grow their own, so there are no emissions from long-distance transport and zero chance their farms contributed to deforestation in the developing world.

In contrast to traditional farms, industrial livestock and poultry facilities keep animals in buildings with mechanized systems for feeding, lighting, sewage flushing, ventilation, heating and cooling, all of which generate emissions. These factory farms are also soy guzzlers and acquire much of their feed overseas. You can reduce your contribution to carbon dioxide emissions by avoiding industrially produced meat and dairy products.

Unfortunately for vegetarians who rely on it for protein, avoiding soy from deforested croplands may be more difficult: as the Organic Consumers Association notes, Brazilian soy is common (and unlabeled) in tofu and soymilk sold in American supermarkets.

Methane is agriculture’s second-largest greenhouse gas. Wetland rice fields alone account for as much 29 percent of the world’s human-generated methane. In animal farming, much of the methane comes from lagoons of liquefied manure at industrial facilities, which are as nauseating as they sound.

This isn’t a problem at traditional farms. “Before the 1970s, methane emissions from manure were minimal because the majority of livestock farms in the U.S. were small operations where animals deposited manure in pastures and corrals,” the Environmental Protection Agency says. The E.P.A. found that with the rapid rise of factory farms, liquefied manure systems became the norm and methane emissions skyrocketed. You can reduce your methane emissions by seeking out meat from animals raised outdoors on traditional farms.

CRITICS of meat-eating often point out that cattle are prime culprits in methane production. Fortunately, the cause of these methane emissions is understood, and their production can be reduced.

Much of the problem arises when livestock eat poor quality forages, throwing their digestive systems out of balance. Livestock nutrition experts have demonstrated that by making minor improvements in animal diets (like providing nutrient-laden salt licks) they can cut enteric methane by half. Other practices, like adding certain proteins to ruminant diets, can reduce methane production per unit of milk or meat by a factor of six, according to researchat Australia’s University of New England. Enteric methane emissions can also be substantially reduced when cattle are regularly rotated onto fresh pastures, researchers at University of Louisiana have confirmed.

Finally, livestock farming plays a role in nitrous oxide emissions, which make up around 5 percent of this country’s total greenhouse gases. More than three-quarters of farming’s nitrous oxide emissions result from manmade fertilizers. Thus, you can reduce nitrous oxide emissions by buying meat and dairy products from animals that were not fed fertilized crops — in other words, from animals raised on grass or raised organically.

In contrast to factory farming, well-managed, non-industrialized animal farming minimizes greenhouse gases and can even benefit the environment. For example, properly timed cattle grazing can increase vegetation by as much as 45 percent, North Dakota State University researchers have found. And grazing by large herbivores (including cattle) is essential for well-functioning prairie ecosystems, research at Kansas State University has determined.

Additionally, several recent studies show that pasture and grassland areas used for livestock reduce global warming by acting as carbon sinks. Converting croplands to pasture, which reduces erosion, effectively sequesters significant amounts of carbon. One analysis published in the journal Global Change Biology showed a 19 percent increase in soil carbon after land changed from cropland to pasture. What’s more, animal grazing reduces the need for the fertilizers and fuel used by farm machinery in crop cultivation, things that aggravate climate change.

Livestock grazing has other noteworthy environmental benefits as well. Compared to cropland, perennial pastures used for grazing can decrease soil erosion by 80 percent and markedly improve water quality, Minnesota’s Land Stewardship Project research has found. Even the United Nations report acknowledges, “There is growing evidence that both cattle ranching and pastoralism can have positive impacts on biodiversity.”

As the contrast between the environmental impact of traditional farming and industrial farming shows, efforts to minimize greenhouse gases need to be much more sophisticated than just making blanket condemnations of certain foods. Farming methods vary tremendously, leading to widely variable global warming contributions for every food we eat. Recent research in Sweden shows that, depending on how and where a food is produced, its carbon dioxide emissions vary by a factor of 10.

And it should also be noted that farmers bear only a portion of the blame for greenhouse gas emissions in the food system. Only about one-fifth of the food system’s energy use is farm-related, according to University of Wisconsin research. And the Soil Association in Britain estimates that only half of food’s total greenhouse impact has any connection to farms. The rest comes from processing, transportation, storage, retailing and food preparation. The seemingly innocent potato chip, for instance, turns out to be a dreadfully climate-hostile food. Foods that are minimally processed, in season and locally grown, like those available at farmers’ markets and backyard gardens, are generally the most climate-friendly.”