(I’m probably the last blogger to arrive at this party, but just in case you’re not already aware of it …)

I frequently receive comments and emails from vegetarians who tell me that if I’d just read The China Study by T. Colin Campbell, I’d see the error of my ways and start counseling everyone to live on a plant-based diet with as few animal foods as possible.  I usually reply that since Dr. Weston A. Price observed amazingly healthy people all over the globe –  most of whom lived on diets rich in seafood, animal fats, and animal protein — I don’t really care what The China Study says, especially since I’m not Chinese.

Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Neal Bernard also cite The China Study while exhorting their TV audiences to stop eating meats and animal fats.  Considering that I became leaner, stronger and more energetic after giving up grains and eating more animal fat (not to mention improving my blood-sugar and lipid profiles), once again, I don’t really care what The China Study says.  (And I’m increasingly convinced that Drs. Oz and Bernard are what Larry, Moe and Curly would describe as “intelligent imbeciles.”  They both, for example, seem to think hydrogenated trans fats and natural saturated fats are identical.)

I’ve read critiques of The China Study before, but a young blogger recently posted her own, and it’s a thing of beauty.  As I’ve mentioned in a few posts, my college physics professor told us, “Learn math.  Math is how you know when they’re lying to you.”  Denise Minger, who blogs about diet and nutrition from a raw-foods perspective, knows math — and that’s how she knows T. Colin Campbell is lying to us.

Okay, she’s actually too polite to call Campbell a liar.  And given her talent for number-crunching and logic, she doesn’t have to … instead, she takes the data from his own study and smacks him around with it.  She also drives home a point I frequently try to make on this blog:  associations are just that — associations.  They don’t necessarily tell us about cause and effect.

For example, Campbell cites statistics showing that people who eat green vegetables frequently have lower rates of heart disease.  His conclusion:  vegetables protect against heart disease.  Minger digs into the data and shows us that while eating vegetables frequently (especially year-round) is associated with a lower rate of heart disease, there’s no such association with simply eating a LOT of vegetables.  The difference, as she explains, is probably due to geography — the people who eat vegetables frequently live in the southern regions of China:

If green vegetables themselves were protective of heart disease, as Campbell seems to be implying, we would expect their anti-heart-disease effects to be present in both quantity of consumption and frequency of consumption. Yet the counties eating the most greens quantity-wise didn’t have any less cardiovascular disease than average. This tells us there’s probably another variable unique to the southern, humid regions in China that confers heart disease protection-but green veggies aren’t it.

Some of the hallmark variables of humid southern regions include high fish intake, low use of salt, high rice consumption (and low consumption of all other grains, especially wheat), higher meat consumption, and smaller body size (shorter height and lower weight). And as you’ll see in an upcoming post on heart disease, these southerly regions also had more intense sunlight exposure and thus more vitamin D-an important player in heart disease prevention.

Basically, Campbell’s implication that green vegetables are associated with less cardiovascular disease is misleading. More accurately, certain geographical regions have strong correlations with cardiovascular disease (or lack thereof), and year-round green vegetable consumption is simply an indicator of geography. Since only frequency and not actual quantity of greens seems protective of heart disease and stroke, it’s safe to say that greens probably aren’t the true protective factor.

That’s just one example.  She shreds several more of Campell’s leaps in logic, and uses his own data to show that some of healthiest people in China live in regions with the highest levels of meat consumption.  As other critics have pointed out, the only solid conclusion we can take away from The China Study is that rats who are fed a diet of nothing but casein (an isolated dairy protein) will become sick and die.  From this, Campbell indicts all animal products. 

I doubt the vegan true believers will read Minger’s critique, and I doubt their fat-deprived brains could comprehend it if they did.  No matter.  The next time you’re confronted by a vegan who tells you The China Study proves we should all be living on plant-based diets, send a link.  If nothing else, Minger’s logic may confuse the vegan into shutting up for awhile.

In the meantime, read Minger’s post for your own benefit.

Government nutrition guidelines, Lipitor for kids … after the two last posts, I’m afraid I may be inducing depression.  Since I need to spend tonight figuring out how Windows 7 managed to create a database connection error in my software, it seems like a good time to post something just for fun.  So here are some ads for food, drinks, and health products from a bygone era.

Ladies, this is why you need to take your vitamins.  I consider my wife a beautiful woman, but man, she’s never hotter than when she’s cleaning the house … especially when she puts on those old gray sweatpants of hers.  No vitamins, no energy, no housework, no sex appeal.

Well, that’s the downside of taking your vitamins and becoming a housework hottie:  you end up with a baby.  Thank goodness for beer.  (I’ve always thought the worst brand names for beer were Blatz and Schlitz.  They sound too much like beer’s after-effects.)

Sure, breast-feeding is better for the baby — especially after a few beers full of nourishing malt – but eventually you’ve got to wean them.  But parents, please:  don’t be stupid and give your kids Seven-Up.  If you want to hook them on sugar, give them a juice box instead.  I know juice boxes are good, because they’re available at my daughter’s school in the government-approved cafeteria.

So that baby grows up and goes to high school.  How do you ensure that she’s a happy, energetic, swingin’ teen?  Keep feeding her sugar.  Lots and lots of sugar.  High sugar consumption explains why today’s teens are in even better shape than this one.

And while your teen is at school, relax with the cigarette more doctors prefer.  (Honestly, can you believe some doctors back then were so stupid, they’d actually endorse cigarettes?!  Now they just put diabetics on high-carbohydrate diets and prescribe Lipitor to everyone whose cholesterol is over 200.)

It happens to so many of us … by the time the kids leave for college, we’re middle-aged and getting thick around the middle.  But thank goodness, it turns out sanitized tape worms will keep you slim.  They’re also easy to swallow and, as you see from the label, produce no ill effects.  (Clearly, that last claim is based on careful research conducted by Merck and Pfizer.) 

This may not seem like a health-related ad, but it is.  My wife gets up early with our girls and makes coffee, so when I wake up later, it’s just sitting there in the pot, all warm and delicious.  This makes me happy, and is thus good for my health.  On the other hand, if I ever expressed my displeasure with my wife’s coffee as shown above, I promise it would be very, very bad for my health.  Willie Nelson’s first wife once sewed him into a bedsheet while he was sleeping, then beat the daylights out of him with a broom stick.  I’d expect my wife to be at least that creative.

And finally, here’s one I think we can all agree is just as true now as it was 50 years ago.

This is so upsetting, I’m not even going to attempt to make wisecracks about it.  Pfizer has received approval in Europe to sell chewable Lipitor tablets to kids older than 10.  I’ve pasted the AP article below.

I generally think of personal-injury lawyers as the blood-sucking scum of the earth, but when the kids who take this liver poison end up with permanent muscle damage 15 years from now, I will cheer if Pfizer is successfully sued for billions of dollars.  Let the greedy scum punish the greedy scum.

Pfizer gets EU approval for kids’ cholesterol drug

TRENTON, N.J. — The European Union has approved a new chewable form of cholesterol blockbuster Lipitor for children 10 and up with high levels of bad cholesterol and triglycerides, a type of blood fat, Pfizer said Tuesday.

The approval includes children whose high blood fats are due to an inherited disease that causes extremely high cholesterol levels, familial hypercholesterolemia.

New York-based Pfizer Inc. won U.S. approval for Lipitor use in children 10 to 17 with that condition in 2002.

Lipitor is the world’s top-selling drug, with 2009 sales of about $13 billion, but its U.S. patent expires at the end of November 2011. Pfizer, the world’s biggest drugmaker, will quickly lose most Lipitor revenue once generic competition hits, so the company has been trying to boost sales where possible before then.

Pfizer said last fall that it plans to apply for a six-month extension of its patent in European countries, after doing studies of Lipitor in youngsters.

As in the United States, the European Union allows drug makers to seek an additional six months of patent protection for medications if they test them in children, who generally are excluded from the drug studies performed to win approval for a new medication.

Pfizer already won such an extension for its crucial U.S. patent on Lipitor.

For blockbuster drugs, those extensions can easily bring hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue. Normally, they are for drugs that are widely used by different age groups.

Until recently, cholesterol drugs have been primarily taken by adults with heart disease, but their use has expanded to younger patients as more obese, sedentary teenagers and adolescents develop heart disease and diabetes.

Lipitor is approved to lower risk of heart attack and stroke, but can cause dangerous muscle pain or weakness, and it cannot be taken by patients with liver problems or by nursing or pregnant women.

After enjoying myself while on vacation in Chicago, I decided to do penance by reading more of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines.  (Our house, meanwhile, imposed its own penance by developing a plumbing problem that caused the toilets to back up into the downstairs bathtub.  I’m not sure which was more nauseating:  scooping sewage from the tub, or reading the Dietary Guidelines.)

The 86-page section I just finished is titled “Energy Balance,” but could’ve been titled “Let’s Put Our Heads Together and Save The Reputation of The Carbohydrate” or perhaps “Nobody Who Blames Carbohydrates Gets Out of Here Alive.”

In a nutshell, this is what the committee concluded:

• We’re fat because we consume too many calories and don’t move around enough, period, end of story, so would everyone please shut up about macronutrient balances and just go on a low-calorie diet for Pete’s sake, and then maybe go jogging.
• We consume too many calories because we eat too much fat … uh, and sugar too.
• We eat too much fat (uh, and sugar too) because there are too many fast-food establishments and not enough grocery stores and produce markets.

For the two or three people living in civilized society who are unfamiliar with the theory that consuming more calories than you burn will make you fat, the committee generously took the phrase “consuming more calories than you burn will make you fat” and translated it into impressive-sounding Engfish:

Energy balance refers to the balance between calories consumed through eating and drinking and those calories expended through physical activity and metabolic processes. Energy consumed must equal energy expended for a person to remain at the same body weight. Overweight and obesity will result from excess calorie intake and/or inadequate physical activity. Weight loss will occur when a calorie deficit exists, which can be achieved by eating less, being more physically active, or a combination of the two.

So there you have it:  the key to losing weight is to base your diet on a theory that has less than a 2% success rate.  But hey, if you’re one of the 98% who tried to lose weight and failed, don’t feel bad.  It’s not your fault, really.  As the committee explains:

Examining shifts in the food environment over the past 40 years is helpful in understanding why Americans have difficulty meeting the U.S. Dietary Guidelines.

As someone with working tastebuds, I always assumed most people had difficulty meeting the U.S. Dietary Guidelines because they don’t like bland, low-fat, low-salt, tasteless grain-based foods.  Turns out I just didn’t have the intellectual capacity to fully grasp the many complexities involved.  You can read about those complexities in the official report if you want to give yourself a serious headache, but just to give you an idea, I copied the helpful graphic provided in the report:

Wow … and to think some people still believe in the concept of free will.  Clearly, this amazingly complex set of environmental influences can only be solved by an equally complex set of government initiatives.  The committee offers just a hint of things to come.  (Those “things,” since this is a government committee, would be regulations.)

In order to reduce the obesity epidemic, actions must be taken to improve the food environment. Policy (local, state, and national) and private-sector efforts must be made to increase the availability of nutrient-dense foods for all Americans, especially for low-income Americans, through greater access to grocery stores, produce trucks, and farmers’ markets, and greater financial incentives to purchase and prepare healthy foods. The restaurant and food industries are encouraged to offer foods in appropriate portion sizes that are low in calories, added sugars, and solid fat. Local zoning policies should be considered to reduce fast food restaurant placement near schools.

Yup, we need those regulations and financial incentives because poor people don’t have enough access to grocery stores and have too much access to fast food.  Here’s how the committee figured it out:

The presence of supermarkets in local neighborhoods and other sources of vegetables and fruits are associated with lower body mass index, especially for low-income Americans, while lack of supermarkets and long distances to supermarkets are associated with higher body mass index. Finally, limited but consistent evidence suggests that increased geographic density of fast food restaurants and convenience stores is also related to increased body mass index.

An economist would say that a lack of supermarkets is associated with a lack of community support for supermarkets, while a high concentration of fast-food restaurants is associated with strong community support for fast food.  But apparently the committee has figured out that supermarkets are avoiding low-income areas because they just don’t want the extra business.  So now we need to bribe them … or the people in the community … or … well, dangit, I don’t know, but SOMEBODY needs to be bribed, or that graphic explaining all the complexities will look exactly the same when the 2015 committee meets.

My graphic of the problem would look something like this:

The committee, empanelled by a government that spends billions of dollars subsidizing grains (and millions more subsidizing research conducted by anti-fat hysterics), heartily disagrees.  Okay, it’s impossible to express anything “heartily” in Engfish, but you get the idea.  They assure us that fat is a major culprit behind the rise in obesity.

To make the document impressively large, they included long sections discussing food production figures, adolescent screen time, who eats breakfast and who doesn’t, maternal weight during pregnancy, calorie counts of various beverages, caloric expenditure for various forms of exercise, methodologies for gathering data on all the above, etc.  I’ll skip those because they’re more boring than C-SPAN and don’t contain anything useful. 

The real story for me was how they managed to blame fat for making us fatter while exonerating carbohydrates.  To accomplish this, all they had to do was cherry-pick, ignore, or explain away the actual evidence.  Here’s a sample from the section on childhood obesity:

The relationship of dietary fat to adiposity in children has been studied more extensively than for other macronutrients, primarily because of its high energy density and palatability, both qualities likely to promote passive overconsumption of energy if not regulated (Parsons, 1999). In addition, studies suggest that fat intake induces less potent satiety signals and less compensation with respect to subsequent energy intake, compared with dietary protein or carbohydrate (Doucet, 1997; Bray, 2004), and that fat oxidation is not as highly regulated as carbohydrate utilization.

Okay, I have to interrupt the committee at this point.  Are they actually telling us that fat doesn’t provide satiety, but carbohydrates do?!  Does anyone makes jokes about how an hour after eating at a steak house, you’re hungry again?  Sometimes when I have sausage and eggs for breakfast, I forget to eat lunch.  That never, ever happened when I ate Grape-Nuts.  Even some of the most strident anti-Atkins hysterics admit people lose weight, but then explain that it’s only because all that fat is satisfying, so people eat less.  They call it a “low-calorie diet in disguise” — usually just before warning that you’ll die of a heart attack.

But back to the committee:

In metabolic studies of children, meal induced thermogenesis increased more after a high-carbohydrate meal than after a high-fat meal; and although fat oxidation increased after the high fat meal, postprandial fat storage was greater after the high fat meal compared with the high carbohydrate meal (Maffeis, 2001).

Ah, I see.  So it’s the fat that’s making our youngsters fat, while carbohydrates keep them lean.  I guess if somebody created a list of what kids actually eat, fatty foods would be at the top. 

Oh, wait … somebody did create that list.  In fact, the committee created the list.  Here, as published in their own report, are the top 10 sources of calories for males between the ages of two and 18:

1. Pizza
2. Grain-based desserts
3. Soda/energy/sports drinks
4. Chicken and chicken mixed dishes
5. Yeast breads
6. Reduced fat milk
7. Dairy desserts
8. Pasta and pasta dishes
9. Ready-to-eat cereals
10. Burgers

Here’s the same list for females between two and 18:

1. Grain-based desserts
2. Yeast breads
3. Pasta and pasta dishes
4. Pizza
5. Chicken and chicken mixed dishes
6. Soda/energy/sports drinks
7. Reduced fat milk
8. Potato/corn/other chips
9. Dairy desserts
10. Mexican mixed dishes.

Call me crazy, but that looks like a list dominated by carbohydrate-rich foods.  I wonder why the heck all that highly regulated carbohydrate utilization isn’t producing satiety and massive thermogenesis in our kids and keeping them thin.  By the way, whole milk, beef and cheese are pretty far down on the list for both genders.  Pork products were at 17 for both genders, and eggs didn’t make the top 25 in either group.

In another major section on Fat and Cholesterol (which I’ll get to in another post), the committee lists our average fat intake over the decades.  Check out these figures:

1977:
Total fat grams per day – 84.6
Fat percent of total calories – 40

1996:
Total fat grams per day – 71.4
Fat percent of total calories – 32.8

2006:
Total fat grams per day – 81.9
Fat percent of total calories – 33.6

Anyone care to read those figures and then explain to me how it’s too much fat that sparked a rise in obesity?  Were we fatter in 1977, when we ate more of the stuff?  Amazing … these people can see the evidence right in front of their academic faces, then draw conclusions that have nothing to do with it. 

Here’s an another example of explaining away results they don’t like:

One longitudinal study found no association between dietary energy density and adiposity among children who were followed annually from age 2 to 18 years (Alexy, 2005). Participants in this cohort were classified by dietary pattern into clusters based on percent energy from fat, with dietary energy density lowest at 3.7 (0.4) in the low fat cluster; 4.0 (0.4) in the medium fat intake; and highest at 4.1 (0.4) in the high fat cluster. Mean BMI during the study period differed significantly, with the highest BMI in the low fat, low dietary energy density cluster, a result the investigators suggest may have reflected under-reporting of energy intake among overweight participants, difficulty in detecting minor over-consumption of energy, and lack of power due to small sample size.

Get that?  In this study, kids who ate the diet lowest in fat had the highest BMI … but by gosh, we can dismiss this one because the investigators suggested the fat kids (and only the fat kids) didn’t report their intake accurately.  How convenient.  I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that if the low-fat group had the lowest BMI, the investigators wouldn’t have felt any need to pooh-pooh their own results.

The examples of explaining away or completely ignoring the evidence get even worse.  If you can stay awake long enough, read this paragraph carefully:

Three of the four RCTs found no association between percent energy from dietary fat and adiposity. The STRIP clinical trial, which tested the effects of a fat-modified diet from 7 months of age (Hakanen, 2006), reported less obesity among intervention girls compared with control girls at age 10 years, but no differences for boys; while at age 14 years, Niinikoski et al. (2007) found no difference in obesity between treatment groups, for either males or females. Caballero et al. (2003) reported no change in percent body fat in a 3-year school-based nutrition and physical activity intervention among 1,704 Native American children, who were age 7 years at baseline. Results showed that percent body fat and BMI did not differ by treatment group at study end. However, children in the intervention group reported lower total energy intake (1,892 vs. 2,157 kcal/d) and percent energy from total fat (31.1% vs. 33.6%) compared with the control group, and percent energy from fat was lower in the intervention school lunches compared to the control schools (28.2% vs. 32.0%).

So in several trials, kids who were put on a low-fat diet didn’t end up any leaner than the kids in the control groups.  And in the last study cited, the kids on a low-fat diet consumed less fat and fewer calories but STILL didn’t end up any leaner.  Now, if you have a functioning brain, you’d probably look at that as evidence that low-fat diets aren’t the key to making kids leaner.  But unfortunately, having a functioning brain would also disqualify you from serving on a government nutrition committee — as evidenced by their conclusion:

In summary, the combination of evidence from methodologically strong studies in the NEL and ADA reviews supports a conclusion that dietary fat and adiposity in children are positively associated.

Yes, you read that correctly.  No, it doesn’t make any sense.  I’m starting to wonder if they made the document long and boring in hopes that no one would bother to analyze it.

Since this committee was no doubt given the task of justifying the Food Pyramid, they did their best to dissuade people from attempting to lose weight by giving up grains and other subsidized carbohydrates:

There is strong and consistent evidence that when calorie intake is controlled, macronutrient proportion of the diet is not related to losing weight. A moderate body of evidence provides no data to suggest that any one macronutrient is more effective than any other for avoiding weight regain in weight reduced persons. A moderate body of evidence demonstrates that diets with less than 45 percent of calories as carbohydrates are not more successful for long-term weight loss (12 months). There is also some evidence that they may be less safe.

Hmmm, I wonder which evidence convinced them low-carbohydrate diets may be less safe?  It certainly wasn’t the study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that concluded women who ate a high-fat diet showed less progression of heart disease than women who ate a high-carb diet.  Or the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that concluded that women who followed the Atkins diet lost the most weight and had the best metabolic markers.  Or the study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that found zero association between saturated fat and heart disease or stroke.  Or about a dozen more I could name.

Well, let’s just set aside the safety issue and look at their evidence on weight loss:

Twenty studies found no difference in weight loss between diets differing in macronutrient proportion. (Arvidsson, 2004; Avenell, 2004; Benassi-Evans, 2009; Capel, 2008; de Luis, 2009; Frisch, 2009; Gordon, 2008; Jenkins, 2009; Johnston, 2006; Leidy, 2007; Lim, 2009; Lopez-Fontana, 2009; McLaughlin, 2006; Miller, 2009; Noakes, 2006; Sacks, 2009; Tay, 2008; Viguerie, 2005; Wal, 2007; White, 2007).

Thirteen studies found that lower carbohydrate diets reduced weight significantly more than low-fat or higher-carbohydrate diets (Buscemi, 2009; Halyburton, 2007; Hession, 2009; Johnstone, 2008; Keogh, 2008; Krieger, 2006; Mahon, 2007; McAuley, 2005; Nickols-Richardson, 2005; Nordmann, 2006; Rankin, 2007; Shai, 2008; Volek, 2009).

Isn’t that interesting?  First they tell us it’s fat making us fat.  Then they tell us 20 studies showed the macronutrient content makes no difference in weight loss.  And finally they tell us 13 studies showed people lost more weight on low-carbohydrate diets. Notice they didn’t cite any studies showing that low-fat diets — the type they recommend — produce more weight loss.

Interestingly, in a document full of research citations, I didn’t find a single reference to the Stanford study conducted by Dr. Chris Gardner — a vegetarian who admitted he was a bit dismayed when his own results showed that people on the Atkins diet lost the most weight and had the biggest improvements in health markers.  Somehow, a committee that brags about its efforts to review all the relevant evidence managed to skip that one.

If 20 studies showed no difference, while 13 other studies showed greater weight loss for people restricting carbohydrates, then the obvious conclusion is that low-carb diets are more effective for quite a few people.  (Heck, let’s make it 14.  I’ll throw in the Stanford study, even if they didn’t.)  But you can read the report forwards, backwards, and sideways, and you’ll never find that possibility even mentioned.

And if you were to dig into the 20 studies that showed no difference, I promise you’d find many of them used a loosey-goosey definition of “low carbohydrate.”  The committee, for example, defines it as less than 45% of calories.  That’s a common trick employed by researchers who set out to prove low-carb diets don’t work. (See this post for an example.) 

Anyone who reads the Atkins books, the Protein Power books, or any other book on low-carb diets knows you’re supposed to kick-start the fat-burning process by reducing your carbohydrate intake to 20-40 grams per day for a couple of weeks, then gradually raise it to perhaps 60-100 grams per day, depending on your reaction to carbohydrates.  At 1800 calories per day, a diet that’s 40% carbohydrates would work out to 180 grams.  Even 30% percent carbohydrates would work out to 135 grams. 

Most of the people I know who lost weight by restricting carbohydrates limited their carb intake to somewhere between 5% and 20% of total calories.  So the “low carb” diet in many of these studies wasn’t even close to what Dr. Atkins or Drs. Eades and Eades advised … it’s just lower in carbs than what the federal government recommends.

Just to make sure we didn’t miss the point, the committee tossed in this paragraph near the end:

The macronutrient distribution of a person’s diet is not the driving force behind the obesity, rather it is the overly large amount of total calories eaten coupled with very low physical activity. There is no optimal proportion of dietary fat, carbohydrate, and protein to maintain a healthy body weight, to lose weight, or to avoid weight regain after weight loss. It is the total amount of calories eaten that is essential. While weight can be reduced with diets where the macronutrient proportions vary widely, the crucial issue is not the macronutrient proportion but rather the compliance with a reduced-calorie intake.

We’re just plain eating too much, you see.  As Gary Taubes noted in Good Calories, Bad Calories, saying fat people are fat because they eat too much is about as illuminating as saying alcoholics are alcoholics because they drink too much.  It doesn’t begin to explain why.  It doesn’t even ask the question.

We eat too much because we’re too hungry.  And we’re too hungry because the federal government decided to tell us how to eat and helped turn us into a nation of carbohydrate addicts.  Isn’t it comforting to know they’re coming to save the day?

On the way home from Chicago last week, we stopped in Indiana to visit a facility that’s a combination theme park and working dairy farm.  Outside the barns and other buildings, there were play areas where kids could run, slide, climb and jump … always a bonus for parents looking for ways to get the wiggles out before resuming a long car trip.

Inside the buildings, there were areas where tourists could see cows being milked and calves being born — several are born there each day.   I know humans are one of the few species whose babies are born helpless, but it still amazes me to see calves standing up and walking around mere hours after birth.

There were also exhibits and short films designed to impress viewers with the wonders of modern milk production.   One of the exhibits featured life-sized plastic models of a woman milking a cow in a barn — a representation of the old days.  A talking animatronic rooster explained how much he misses those good old days, when he was allowed to hang out in the barn and eat bugs while the farm wife milked the family cow.

(Bugs?!  You mean chickens like to eat bugs?  Go to a health-food store these days, and most cartons of eggs will proudly announce FROM HENS FED AN ALL-VEGETARIAN DIET.  Since chickens naturally prefer bugs, it’s highly unlikely that vegetarian hens are healthier … but they’re no doubt more self-righteous.)

But, so as not to leave the audience feeling too sorry for him, the rooster then explained that when the farm wife milked a cow, the milk was only good for a day or two.  In today’s laboratory-clean environment, the milk is extracted, homogenized, pasteurized and fortified, and by gosh, it lasts for weeks.  Lovely.

For the record, I don’t believe milking machines and pasteurization are the worst things to happen to the American food supply.   We started drinking pasteurized milk long before the rise in obesity and diabetes began.  If you live in an area where you can buy raw milk from a local farmer, great.  It’s more nutritious.  But if you live in downtown Chicago and buy milk shipped from Wisconsin to your local grocery store, pasteurization may be a good idea. 

We buy cream from a local dairy farm, and they pasteurize their milk, albeit at the minimum temperature and duration allowed by law.  However — and this is what’s important, in my opinion — their cows are raised in pastures and eat grass, not corn.

That certainly isn’t the case on the dairy farm we toured.  The exhibits and films, in fact, brag about how much corn they ship in to feed the cows.  They’re proud of how their dairy business supports the Midwest’s corn farmers.  They didn’t mention supporting the producers of antibiotics and antacids.  Roughly half of all antacids produced are fed to cattle — to offset the effects of eating corn.

In the picture below, my wife and girls are learning about how important corn is to the dairy industry.  (Hey, maybe we should subsidize corn!)

These pictures are from the same exhibit, explaining what cows eat.  Add it up, and you’ll see that an American diary cow’s “nutritious” diet is mostly corn.  It’s a wonder that all those dairy farmers in New Zealand (grass-fed cows only) manage to produce any milk at all. 

After the tour, my wife and girls indulged in some fresh-from-the-farm ice cream.  I didn’t.  Good thing, too, since I was driving … within an hour after eating the ice cream, they all fell asleep in the car.

We’re back in Tennessee after spending most of the week in Chicago, where we celebrated our 10th anniversary.  On the drive home yesterday, we stopped to take a tour of a working dairy farm in Indiana as a bit of educational fun for the girls.  I’ll write about that later.  As for my own education, I learned that the three most annoying words in the English language are ROAD WORK AHEAD.

Orange cones aside, it was a fun trip for both us and the girls.  Sara and Alana went swimming every day, played tag and hide-and-seek with their cousins, rode on the “Iowa-Ashland” train line my father-in-law built around his property, and had their first experience eating burnt-marshmallow s’mores.  (In their opinion, the burnt ones taste best.)

The picture below was taken inside church where we were married.  If that fabulous woodwork looks familiar, it probably means you saw the movie Home Alone.  The director, Chris Columbus, lives next door to my wife’s parents and used the church for the scene in which Kevin finally talks to the scary old man.

My wife’s mother planned our wedding for us, since we were living in Los Angeles at the time.  Ten years later, I’m still dazzled by the memories.  At one time, my mother-in-law sang in the Chicago Metropolitan Opera (she has an amazing voice), and she called upon some friends for the wedding.  I walked into the church to hear a handful of musicians from the Chicago symphony playing, while a baritone from the opera belted out a song that gave me shivers — and it wasn’t because of wedding jitters. 

This was all a wedding-day surprise; she didn’t tell us everything she’d planned.  I remember looking around, wondering if I’d walked into the wrong wedding.  I didn’t sleep a wink the night before — every time I started to drift off, I snapped awake thinking, “Oh my god!  I’m getting married tomorrow!”  But the grandeur of the church and the music energized me, and I didn’t feel at all tired once the wedding began.

The next picture is of the girls, standing on the spot where Mommy and Daddy were married.  They are constantly demanding I tell them stories from my life, so now they have a visual to go with the wedding-day story.  (Their current favorite is the story about the floating hairball, which I recently recounted on my other blog as part of a longer post about my experiences with wasps.)

I didn’t exactly stick to a low-carb diet during the trip, but so be it.  For the night of our anniversary, I had planned to take my wife to the seafood restaurant where we had our second date.  Just one problem:  that restaurant doesn’t exist anymore.  So we ended up going to the Greek restaurant where we had our rehearsal dinner.  I’m sure it’s possible to order a low-carb meal in a Greek restaurant, but I was there to celebrate, so I enjoyed the works … lemon-egg soup, flaming cheese, spinach pie, moussaka, pastichio, lamb, stuffed grape leaves, wine, and a Greek liqueur after dinner, compliments of the house in honor of our anniversary.

As promised in an earlier post, I also indulged in a Giordano’s stuffed pizza during the trip. (If you’re going to break training for the sake of pizza, this is the one to choose.)  The picture below shows what an entire pie looks like.

People who’ve never tried a stuffed pizza often confuse it with deep dish.  It’s not the same thing.  Deep dish — even the legendary stuff from Uno’s — is “deep” because of the thick crust.  A stuffed pizza, on the other hand, consists of a thin crust on the bottom and another on the top, with a thick layer of ingredients in between, as you can see in the picture below.  It’s delicious hot with a cold beer, and even more delicious cold with a hot cup of coffee the next morning.  Skip the thick crust around the outer edge (which I do), and you’re eating way more meat and cheese than crust.

(By the way, if you ever want to try a Giordano’s stuffed pizza, they’ll make it, half-bake it, freeze it, and ship it to you.  Then you just finish baking it in your own oven.)

We don’t have a scale in the house, and I probably wouldn’t dare step on it for a few days if we did.  I enjoyed the bit of indulgence, but now it’s back to the meat, eggs, berries and vegetables.  After all, I don’t want my wife to start wondering why she married me.