Asymmetrical Information

I've lost 35 pounds since leaving my cubicle-bound equity research job in August. I don't belong to a gym, nor am I cutting back too much on sweets and baked goods. Biking season was soon over, and I walk around town at no extraordinary lengths. The reason why I lost weight? Exactly what you're doing here. My ex-girlfriend (as of last week) is a vegetarian, and while I did not convert to her dietary habits, I took in a lot less meat than I used to over the three month period that we were dating. We baked quite a bit, and were not afraid to indulge on chocolates, pies, etc, so we weren't starving or anything. It's amazing how much of a difference the reduction of meat intake makes. Good luck.

Jane, like you, I was a genetic Pick 6 lottery winner. I could eat anything in just about any amount without gaining weight. (I hovered between 6% and 10% body fat, depending on how much exercise I was getting.) Something happened when I turned 35. The metabolic rate slowed down and now I can put on weight jogging past a donut shop -- no stopping to sample, honest!

From observation and persona experiance, when it comes to diet the most important variable is the individual doing the eating. What works for one many not work for another. And, what used to work in our youth may not work as we age.

economic insight on this site is great. nutriontal/dietary commentary isn't.

How about addressing government level policy that affect the eating habits of the county such as nutrition labels, certification programs, and mandatory regulations? That seems a much better approach for a community like this.

Common Sense. The tonic for diet plans.

To: john doe

You rely upon the government-required info to decide what you eat? Furthermore, you suggest that Jane devote site space toward this endeavor, presumably in the interest of her public viewers?

You have already lost the war, pal. You belong to the Empire.

Go with it. They will give you everything you need. I don't think Jane needs to give you anything extra.

Cheers,

I think I would weigh about 40 pound less if I never had the munchies....but those are just a side effect of something that is worth a lot more to me than a thin waist line.

Anyway, I'm not buying into the no meat thing. Our bodies need protien and there's no better place to find some of that than in a dead cow or calf. I want to eat something that had parents. Yum Yum! The real devils are the carbohydrates that the body turns to sugars, which include breads, high starch vegetables like potatoes and rice.

Has anyone read the book the Zone, he makes some convincing scientific arguments in there for a high protien diet.

"The real devils are the carbohydrates that the body turns to sugars, which include breads, high starch vegetables like potatoes and rice."

Well, yes and no. It is true that "poverty foods" high in starches and sugars lead to obesity and diabetes - just ask the American Indians and white trash everywhere - but some are better than others. Whole wheat and brown rice, for example, are better balanced foods. Real potatoes, as opposed to gringo potatoes (Idaho), have higher and better balanced nutrition. Corn and corn oil are evil.

Another consideration is the environmental damage caused by growing field and row crops. It degrades soil, wastes water, emits green house gasses and diminishes biodiversity as well as being chemical and energy dependent junkies. Opponents of livestock attribute these damages to livestock diets when they are fed grains, but this is a fallacy, a characteristic of the bad diets we foist on livestock. Ruminants (cloven hooves, cheweth the cud) eat grass and are sickened by grain. It screws up their digestion, blood chemistry and makes them fat. Poultry are omnivores, like people, and thrive best on a mixed diet of bugs (the early bird gets the worm) and some low fat seeds, such as grass seed. Pigs are omnivores too and like poultry eat a lot of insects but also thrive on nuts and tubers (root hog or die).

The planet would be healthier if people grew less crops and got a greater percentage of their nutrition from pastured ruminants, poultry and hogs. Pastures produce more biomass, with more diversity than other land uses. A movement to return crop lands to pasture would heal the land but it is only a short term activity. It won't be that long before we just synthesize food and none of us will eat anything that has ever lived. Then we'll just let the old carnivores, wolves and lions, eat the pastured livestock.

Back40, that might well be true for the folks who got to eat, but for the rest of the people who ran out of land trying to support grass fed ruminants, it would kinda suck.

To Dan Dickinson:

I'm just saying that the policy and the mass scale aspect of the nutrition issue would be a lot more interesting and better suited to the writer's abilities than specific food suggestions and diet plans.

For example, I've heard very convincing arguments that Trans fat content should be reported on nutrition labels. Such policy has the potential to reduce the amounts of harmful fats used in foods on a large scale. I find ideas like this interesting and this site usually excels at providing insightful pros+cons to such ideas.

I've heard a million recommended diets and Megan's sounds no different. There's definitely a sound basis to it but I can't imagine that many will correctly understand it, follow it, and benefit from it. For one, I doubt most people can practically eat greens at every meal (most people eat cereal or the like for breakfast). More importantly, there's much better nutrition and dietary information around.

"Back40, that might well be true for the folks who got to eat, but for the rest of the people who ran out of land trying to support grass fed ruminants, it would kinda suck."

Hi 'Jane',

It is estimated that 70% of the grain grown in the US is fed to animals. If true, estimates vary, then nearly 3/4 of the land used for field crops could be converted to pasture with no loss of crops for humans. The question, in purely human economic terms, is can that land produce more human food growing crops for a vegan world or in growing livestock for an omnivorous world. There are other considerations than economics, environment, religion, ethics, health etc. are also considerations, but one issue at a time seems proper for a short post in a blog.

Pastures produce more biomass, more quickly, for longer periods than cropped land. The reason this is usually overlooked and undervalued is that the biomass produced is not generally edible by humans. Humans have inefficient digestive systems and require 'hot' foods that are extraordinarily rich and easily digestible. They are top predators in the food chain. They eat the seed but not the plant, the fruit but not the leaves etc.

Other animals can eat this biomass, and humans can eat those animals. The pastures, their predators (such as ruminants and rodents etc.), and the predators of those predators (wolves, people, mosquitos etc.) coevolved to use this biomass repeatedly, circularly, where all consume and are in turn consumed. They even consume one anothers wastes. Up to a point, the more they eat the more there is to eat since they feed one another. The limit is sometimes expressed in terms of limiting resources such as sunlight, heat, water or necessary minerals. We don't know this limit but feel certain that it exists with known metabolic pathways.

Once land is cropped, plowed and converted to monoculture, that food web is destroyed and the majority of life it contains is killed. Total productivity is a tiny fraction of uncropped land. In human economic terms much of this loss is an externality, not measured or valued. There are other considerations than economics, environment, religion, ethics, health etc. are also considerations, but one issue at a time seems proper for a short post in a blog. It can perhaps be understood as the difference between a robust market economy and a planned economy. Or perhaps it can be understood like a living thing, a tree for example, which dies when its bark is removed. Most life exists in a thin layer on the planet, like bark.

Researchers have done studies about land use in various places attempting to measure the human population that can be supported by a given geography. It varies, of course, with climate and other factors, but for much of the land used to grow field and row crops in the world more people can be supported by livestock agriculture than cropping. Most people can't, or won't, live on meat alone nor should they in any sensible economic model. It would be wasteful. If nothing else they can ferment milk and get stoned as well as benefiting from the good work of fungi and bacteria. Perennial crops such as nuts, berries, olives and grapes comfortably coexist with livestock agriculture. Harvesting some of the livestock forage, such as wheat, keeping the grain for pasta, and returning the rest of the plant to the livestock, makes sense too. A mediterranean diet can be efficient, healthful and delicious. And we get wine.

One study often referenced was done by Wes Jackson at The Land Institute in Kansas. He found that more native Americans lived there as hunter/gatherers than Europeans do now. The land was healthier, life was more diverse, ecosystems were more resilient and big winds did not result in dust storms. Big rain did not result in erosion. Drought was even thwarted. Fire was irrelevant.

We can't live in that Kansas of old now, we live settled lives and natter to one another with keyboards. We fence the prairie, put out the fires to protect our homes, and haul the food thousands of miles to confined animal feeding operations (aka cities). What we can do is understand how natural systems work productively and simulate those conditions. Bison can't roam the prairie with the seasons, consuming and trampling everything in their path, and then moving on to leave time for recovery and subsequent banquets. But we can rotate smaller herds about the landscape, confining them with cheap, light weight, battery powered, portable electric fences and so simulate normal herd behavior. The benefit of this is a significant increase in biomass production and a return to the productivity of past times for that land.

We can even rotate land use from cropping (gotta have some pasta) back to pasture to heal. We can rediscover the productive measures used for eons by agriculturists to increase total biomass production and so food for humans. Heavy metal industrial approaches to cropping use energy, chemicals and mass production techniques to reduce human energy in food production at the expense of total productivity. It was good economics at the time since the externalities were neither measured nor valued. We still have trouble with this. Technology now allows us to keep human effort low but be more precise, adaptable and so increase land productivity as well as labor productivity. Information technology is a major part of this. The ability to sense conditions remotely and actuate self managed machines (bots) allows us to respond to local conditions in variable ways, as if a skilled agriculturist was on the spot. A lot of folks are doing this now, perhaps it will catch on.

My view, as I said before, is that food production in two or three decades will become a factory task. Food will be fabricated by biological or nanotechnological 'beings'. At that point the land will be returned to less industrial life forms and used for their purposes. It makes some sense to begin the conversion now since it is adequately productive and will more quickly revert when abandoned.

Umm, Back40, my family are dairy farmers, so I feel I have some insight on this.

First of all, pasturage is only usable 6 months or so out of the year in the normal farm states. The rest of the time, the cattle have to be supported by cropping.

Second of all, I don't know where you got those figures, but they're wacky. 40 acres can take a herd through 6 months of pure feeding, plus the rest of the year of mixed feed. 40 acres of pasturage won't take a similar sized herd through the summer. I suspect you've stumbled on numbers from an interest group. Call any of the dairy associations and they'll be happy to tell you how much land it takes to support a cow on pasturage vs. grain.

A part of the system perhaps overlooked is the idea of migration. It's hard for animals to live on snow alone. When we confine them to such an environment then they too may need to get some of their food from grocery stores. OTOH snowy land is not producing any corn either.

But, grazed animals can eat 'standing hay', dormant grasses beneath snow. It is low in protein and so harder to digest. The metabolic cost of digestion can exceed the nutrient value, especially when more body heat is needed to withstand cold. This is obvious when you think about it since ruminants survive winter without humans. The old and weak often choose that time to expire. Wolves (and people) need to eat in winter too since they can't hibernate like bears.

Natural dairies deal with this issue by becoming seasonal. This is the traditional, pre-industrial way. A lactating dairy cow requires at least twice as much food as a dry cow so they stop milking and dry the cows up in winter. If cows have been well cared for during lactation they carry back fat into the winter. They eat less and lose some weight recycling their fat. There are limits of course. The economic necessity to carry enough condition into the breeding season, and gestate all winter so as to freshen in early spring, means that the cows need not only to survive but lose only a little weight in winter.

The excess fluid milk produced in warm seasons is cultured to make cheese, yogurt and such. Excess fats are churned to produce butter. Some animals are culled from the herd for burgers. The economics are workable as well as the biology. It's not easy since our economy is geared towards industrial approaches and specialization. Heavy metal agriculture trades land productivity for labor productivity. When our concern is total productivity, considering all externalities, it pencils.

To make it pencil the grower must be aware of natural cycles and exploit them. Grasses have a burst of growth in spring and have less growth in drier, warmer months. The character of their 'flesh' also changes as they mature. To get taller they have to get stiffer, more of their mass is indigestible (except for fungi) woody material with less nutritional value. When tall enough, old enough and well rooted they become sexual and switch from vegetative production to seed production. Then they die or go dormant. However, if they are grazed or cut before getting old and stiff, they repeat the process, producing lush young growth. It keeps them youthful and nutritious. Grazing grass repeatedly, periodically during the season with adequate regeneration time between harvest increases total production. It also makes them healthier, thicker on the ground, more competitive with other plant species that can't regenerate this way (such as shrubs and trees) and supports a greater diversity of species both above and below ground such as worms, beetles, fungi and bacteria.

Even confinement dairy people know this since they carefully monitor their hay fields for maturity and take repeated cuttings when the hay has some growth but before it gets too tall or flowery. Skilled graziers able to produce bumper crops of grass as well as meat and milk sometimes call themselves 'grass farmers' since so much of their work involves caring for pastures. To optimally match grazing to grass growth the stocking rate must vary. Migrating herds follow the weather, gorging on new growth while moving toward warming lands. Variable stocking rate can be simulated by cutting grasses. Every home owner with a lawn knows this. Cutting grass makes it grow again. Leaving the clippings (or dung) on the lawn fertilizes it. When the grass is removed from the sward and kept as silage, baleage or hay it can be saved for less productive periods, such as winter. This still returns the nutrients to the sward but dislocated in time rather than space.

In summary, when the stocking rate is high enough to consume the spring flush and keep the grasses vegetative and productive it is too high for less productive seasons. Rotating the herd from paddock to paddock, simulating migration, and cutting the excess to store it for later consumption allows a stocking rate matched to the total productivity of the sward.

The natural cycles of grass and animals can be matched to increase productivity beyond what can be achieved by cropping. The economics are difficult since there are so many market distortions such as grain subsidy (and water, fuel and transport etc.) and so many externalities not now measured or valued. As a consequence we see considerable mixing of methods. Graziers will often buy cheap, subsidized forages and grains to supplement their animals and increase their stocking rate beyond what their pastures can support. It makes money. Milk typically has a higher price in winter than spring and so dairies are tempted to abandon seasonal production, feed stored forages grown elsewhere and bank the profits. The economics works because of market distortions. Eliminating subsidies would result in industry changes. Consider New Zealand.

Back40's numbers are definitely wacky. If they weren't simply made up, I suspect they come from somewhere that compared tons of cleaned grain to the total biomass of pasturage - roots, leaves, and stems. If you counted the straw in the output of the typical American grain field, I suspect you'd get more tonnage than most pasturage. Cattle don't eat straw, but neither do they eat the entire grass plant, and much of the hay just comes out the other end. (I've mucked out enough stalls to know.) What counts is the calories and protein that can be assimilated, and grain cultivation (with fertilizers. pesticides, and tillage to give your highly bred seeds a head start over the weeds), is much better in that respect than pasturage.

However, at least in this country there is a lot of land that is not under cultivation. Hillsides too steep to plow safely. Places where the soil is too thin or the rainfall to scarce to grow anything but wild grasses. And many, many places which are cultivable, but not productive enough to compete with farmers that can spread government-subsidized irrigation water over the desert. Most of the land where I live (Michigan north of US 10) isn't being used for much except hunting, fishing, and 40-acre back yards for residents that work in factories or the tourist industry. (It's growing trees, but in most cases they are jack pines or poplar - species that usually fall over before they're big enough for lumber, and don't even make decent firewood.)

So, we could put cows to pasture out on those steep hillsides, mow the uncultivated flats for hay instead of letting them grow up in weed trees, and raise the cows mostly on grass without cutting into the cultivated land. Feed them just enough grain that they'll bring themselves into the feed trough once a day, and you get very good-tasting beef, in a healthier ecological relationship. (My dad did raise cows this way - but it was a hobby for him, paid for by his job as Professor of Biology.)

Raising cows on pasture costs more, as compared to feedlots that are practically beef factories. Someone has to go around the pastures, repairing fences and checking on the cows. Haying (necessary for the winter) takes about as much labor as harvesting grain. You've got to shift the cows around the different pastures, and into the barn in winter. The cows may take 3 years to reach full size instead of 2. So with the economics prevailing in America (expensive labor and cheap grain), you get the lowest cost beef by shoving thousands of cows into stalls too small to turn around in and feeding them as concentrated a diet as their systems can handle.

"The most important diet advice ever is this: don't go on any diet plan that you can't live with for the rest of your life."

Yep, a diet is not just for losing weight. The thing is to balance input with output - if you like to eat a lot, you had best also exercise a lot. Unfortunately, most "diet" programs are for losing weight, preferably in a hurry.

Just as a small matter of interest, I am allergic to greens. A single pea during a meal induces projectile - well, never mind, I just can't eat anything greener than celery and not much of that.

As someone who has had a weight problem his whole life, I would like to remind all of those who seem to have an easy time losing weight or remaining thin that for many of us, it's just not easy. I seem to have an unfortunate combination of a very efficient storage-oriented metabolism and very little self-control when it comes to eating. "Eat less" is simple and sounds good (and works) but is NOT easy. I have been working to cut calories out of my diet using various tricks to make it easier (drinking diet instead of regular colas, for example), but as someone who doesn't have a lot of time to make home-cooked meals, it's difficult to find prepared foods that aren't stuffed full of bad things (that taste good). I'm also working on exercising more, but I don't have a lot of time for that, either. I don't wake up gracefully, so morning exercise is not practical (and I have a 2 year old to get ready for school). If I workout during lunch, I'll be sweaty all afternoon (not practical in an office environment where I interact with customers). At night, I have the 2 year old again. When the 2 year old goes to bed, I have some time and do some exercise, but if I workout too hard right before bed, I can't sleep.

So I'm still waiting for the metabolism altering drug or therapy that will give me that ability to eat and stay thin that some people just have. In the meantime, I'll do what I can and smack any thin person who says, "Why don't you just eat less and exercise more?"

Bolie IV

I am a student of environmental science. I need a table on limits of heavy metal intake in food by human being.
This is to create awareness on intake of food contaminated with heavy metals and there side effects.

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