A reader alerted me that the Nytimes has put up the finalists for the meat ethics contest I mentioned before. Foolishly, they are allowing the readers to vote on them (the tyranny of the enthusiatic internet community). And the one that's winning currently is hilariously bad. 

My father was an ethical man. He had integrity, was honest and loathed needless cruelty. He was also a meat-eater’s meat-eater...His habit killed him in the end: the first sign of trouble came with gout, then colon cancer, heart problems and strokes, but he enjoyed meat for decades before all that "wretched bother" in a time when ethical issues were raised only by "a handful of Hindus and Grahamists."

Nevermind that those problems aren't even conclusively tied to meat and are common in even vegetarian regions of the world, but the solution they proposes is 

In vitro meat is real meat, grown from real cow, chicken, pig and fish cells, all grown in culture without the mess and misery, without pigs frozen to the sides of metal transport trucks in winter and without intensive water use, massive manure lagoons that leach into streams or antibiotics that are sprayed onto and ingested by live animals and which can no longer fight ever-stronger, drug-resistant bacteria. It comes without E. coli, campylobacter, salmonella or other health problems that are unavoidable when meat comes from animals who defecate. It comes without the need for excuses. It is ethical meat. Aside from accidental roadkill or the fish washed up dead on the shore, it is perhaps the only ethical meat.
 

Wait, so it's a really unhealthy substance that causes cancer, heart disease, strokes, and gout, so we should grow it in the lab? Sure it might not have "misery" or e. coli, but as they said, it's still meat. At least doctors like Campbell, Fuhrman, Ornish, etc. make sense when they say we should go meat-free, because they say that meat is bad for you and you just shouldn't eat it. I'd personally take lentils any day over lab-grown meat, considering that plain-protein grown in the lab is going to probably be as flavorless as textured vegetable protein (and will need additives in order to taste decent) and at least lentils have been bred for flavor. The inclusion of this essay makes the contest seem even more insincere than it already did. 

While I've been acused of doing otherwise, I did not chose to become an omnivore again because of taste. In fact, I had no idea how to cook meat and it took me several years to really get into it and like it. I LOVE hummus, falafal, sambar, dal and all kinds of veggie dishes. I was always perfectly happy eating those things, but my stomach was a wreck all the time. I still love them and have to be careful when I do eat them. In NYC I maintained an expensive addiction to Organic Avenue's raw falafal, which at least didn't seem to cause the inflammation the conventional fried falafal seems to trigger for me. 

Which essay is your favorite and why? What do you think of the contest so far? I liked the holistic ecological view of Sometimes It’s More Ethical to Eat Meat Than Vegetables. Of course mathematically, the likely winner is the vat-grown meat essay because it will get all the anti-real meat votes, whereas people without that agenda are likely to fragment amongst the somewhat similar other five.

People keep sending me The Myth of Sustainable Meat by James McWilliams. If you've followed this blog long enough you'll know I've blogged about James before. I'm also a regular commenter on his articles on the Atlantic. I've been enough of a nuisance that I've gotten his attention and he's written about me too. 

Apparently the New York Times has an issue finding qualified writers to write on this hot topic. This seem to mainly employ a cookbook author, Mark Bittman, on the subject. Here we have James McWilliams who is a historian. I must say though, that he's learned a lot since when I first started reading him. Back then he was just pretending to be an anti-locavore and hadn't come out with his main motivation, which is animal rights. He even admits that sustainable agriculture works best when using animal manure as a fertilizer. But the rest is still just a hashup of his normal shtick over and over again.

Grass-grazing cows emit considerably more methane than grain-fed cows. Pastured organic chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming. It requires 2 to 20 acres to raise a cow on grass. If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken and pigs). A tract of land just larger than France has been carved out of the Brazilian rain forest and turned over to grazing cattle. Nothing about this is sustainable.

Brazil is its own special situation, a perfect storm of inept government and corporate thievery. I don't think any sustainable agriculture advocates are saying we should get our beef from there. 

And then we have a straw man, that is the idea that we'd have to take up almost half the country to produce grass-fed meat. Not only does that use a static 10 acres per cow, which is not always true, but it just wouldn't happen. It's just not a danger that our country is going to be taken over by cows. Never mind land-use patterns, when we switch to a more expensive model of production, demand will drop. 

The chickens are a red herring. He mentions them again, saying how Joel Salatin has to use grain to produce chicken. I've written before that this model is unsustainable. It's not possible to produce truly pastured American-style chicken. But what about cattle, goats, and other ruminants? The attack on chicken is a total misdirection. 

"Sustainable" agriculture is not a monolith. There are a variety of philosophies and methods that are very different from each other. It's possible to find good and bad at every farmer's market. 

Finally, there is no avoiding the fact that the nutrient cycle is interrupted every time a farmer steps in and slaughters a perfectly healthy manure-generating animal, something that is done before animals live a quarter of their natural lives. When consumers break the nutrient cycle to eat animals, nutrients leave the system of rotationally grazed plots of land (though of course this happens with plant-based systems as well). They land in sewer systems and septic tanks (in the form of human waste) and in landfills and rendering plants (in the form of animal carcasses).

This is nonsense. The point is that the goal is to have a net positive on the pasture when you are grazing animals. Of course it's possible to do it wrong, to end up with a poor nutrient cycle, but then you are doing it wrong. And the animals reproduce so they are replaced. Some of the crop they fertilize also fix nutrients themselves. Simon Fairlie's book has an excellent chapter about this and about sustainable use of carcasses. Needless to say, humans produce waste not matter what they eat. And since I, like most Americans, don't have a septic tank, I don't think I'm contaminating one.

I would say that there are some efforts to do no-kill agriculture with animals, notably pioneered by a rich Indian family that owns a chain called Otarian, but I read about it several years ago and I don't think it ever got off the ground. 

It's overall just a silly article that I'm sure will generate a lot of page views and forwards from smug people. 

 I like to blog about a lot of fancy stuff, but in reality, it's not every day I'm making braised local grass-fed oxtails and wild caught sea bass. Life gets in the way. But that doesn't mean you have to totally lose all the benefits you would get from a top-notch diet. Over the years I've figured out how to degrade my diet gracefully. 

As I mentioned in my previous blog post on mammals, primates have an evolutionary strategy that involves fallback foods. These are resources of low-preference that are eaten when preferred foods are not available. These foods allow primates to survive when things get rough.

I have my own fallback foods. They are for when I just don't have time to go to the butcher shop. Or I've worked so long that the idea of cooking a meal from scratch and then doing dishes seems daunting. These foods have to be

• Reasonably healthy, but they don't have to be perfect
• Able to keep well
• Not require much prep or cleanup

Since I moved to Chicago and Trader Joes is a normal grocery store instead of a series of endless loopy lines like it is in NYC, my fallback diet has been based on stuff from Trader Joes. Typically smoked wild salmon, Applewood sliced roast beef, pre-cooked beets, and random cheese and fruits. A typical meal like this would be a few slices of gouda, a clementine, a few slices of roast beef, some beets, and some of the wild salmon with mustard on rice crackers. I have to say that this tastes better than typical primate fallback foods like tree bark. 

When I worked at an office last, it was next to a Fairway and often for lunch I'd just go to the deli and ask for a half pound of sliced roast beef, a half pound of cheese, and then buy some random pre-sliced fruits and vegetables. One time a coworker implied that eating a block of cheese might be a bad idea, but nothing ever happened to me. 

The next level of degradation is a little riskier. It's when you are on holiday in France. Or it's Thanksgiving. Maybe you want to eat some things that are normally not part of your diet. There are good reasons that they are not part of your diet, but there are better reasons that you want to indulge. The things I think about here is

• Determine what foods are never OK at any time. For example, if you have celiac, you are not going to be able to eat gluten ever again. That's why I advise people who have health improvements with gluten elimination to actually get screened. You can't just order a burger without a bun if you have celiac, you need to be way more careful than that.
• Determine whether or not there is a dose-response curve. For example, with people like me who have some carbohydrate malabsorption (lactose or fructose), often there is some toleration. 
• Determine whether or not you can improve your tolerance. For example, if you are intolerant to lactose, often the lactaid pills work very well. I've been experimenting with Glutenease (which I heard about from Dr. BG's Thanksgiving post) with good results, though I am worried it's just a placebo effect. If it isn't then, I think it's possibly the "Amylase Thera-blend" that is helping. Probiotics might also work. 
• There are also things that seem to degrade tolerance. At least for me, alcohol seems to definitely reduce the amount of things I can digest properly. 
• Ask yourself whether it's worth it. Over the years I've determined that I don't like most Easter candy enough. It's just not that tasty to me to be worth the breakouts and other assorted maladies. There are a lot of other things that just aren't worth it to me. I remember the last time I had Chick Fil A, which is strangely a fast food place that I have tasty memories of from my childhood in Georgia. But last time I had it, it didn't taste as good as I remembered and I felt bloated and sluggish for an entire day. Nope. However, I am going to Sweden at the end of this month and I really do think there are some things there that are worth eating. I plan on having at least one serving of Kladdkaka, a rich gooey chocolate cake, at my favorite cafe in Stockholm.

I made a silly graphic for paleohacks yesterday and weirdly, people were impressed. It was made with default Smartart in Powerpoint :)

I also recommend the Highbrow Paleo Guide to Binge Drinking.

 In my last post, I wrote about how it's impossible for epigenetic changes from very cold environments 3-4 billion years ago to have been conserved. Somehow people thought I was accusing Dr. Kruse of making up cold-adapted monkey ancestors or something. 

No, I realize he doesn't mention cold-adapted monkeys, but he also doesn't stick to bacteria living in sad cold slurries either. He also mentions ancient mammals. Dr. Kruse also has an interesting belief that all mammals “evolved in the polar environments on earth.” 

I can't find any evidence that early eutherian mammals evolved in such an environment or even a later candidate for a polar eutherian that could be a possible ancestor. They discovered the earliest known (so far) eutherian fossil last year in China, Juramaia sinensis, in a Late Jurassic formation. The climate in the area at the time was relatively warm and dry. Juramaia sinensis' teeth suggests it was an insectivore. Many other early mammal fossils have been found in Asia, but as we know, mammals went on to colonize a variety of environments and climates. 

Dr. Kruse says "mammals were ideally adapted for hibernation too, until they got too smart for their own genes sake.” It is indeed true that Juramaia sinensis and other early eutherians did hibernate. Mevolutionary biologists now consider the origin of biological changes distinct to hibernation behaviors to have originated even before the evolution of class mammalia and are displayed even in reptiles who live in very warm environments.

Why did most mammals stop hibernating then? As the excellent paper The Evolution of Endothermy and Its Diversity in Mammals and Birds says “ energy-optimization-related selection pressures, often dictated by the energetic costs of reproduction, apparently favored abandonment of the capacity for short- or long-term torpors." In most primates, it seems this abandonment was characterized by a species with a large brain and increased adaptability to a variety of foods and climates.

That's too bad, because hibernation (or even torpor, a less extreme form) would be very useful for things like organ transplantations, surgery recoveries, or long space flights. In the future, if we figure out how to do it, being able to trigger hibernation would be incredibly useful. Unforunately, the exact way to trigger hibernation is not currently known, though there are many promising candidates. Dr. Kruse however believes that the stimuli is already known: “the stimulus for hibernation in eutherian mammals and their descendants are tied to high dietary carbohydrate intake (proven fact already in science and not controversial).” If only it were that easy. A search of the scientific literature found no papers that posited that carbohydrate consumption triggers hibernation, though it is established that carbohydrate metabolism undergoes changes before and after hibernation. Scientists who propose triggering hibernation believe it would probably involve injection of chemicals produced by hibernating animals. This would be possible because many of the genes related to hibernation are still present in primates, not because we hibernate, but because they have other functions. We'd also have to figure out how to prevent brain damage, which has been a major challenge to such research since humans appear to suffer memory loss from brain changes normal to hibernating mammals.

Evolution is efficient and while genes that had interesting past uses (wouldn't it be cool if we could "reawaken" gills or the ability to lay eggs??) are often conserved in our genome, they are often expressed in radically different ways. It seems the areas that once encoded for gills, for example, are now related to the bones in the ear. As for those that don't seem to be in use now, as geneticist Paul Szauter says:

If genes are not expressed in the human genome, they do not survive intact over evolutionary time, because they accumulate mutations in the absence of selection. If there were squid genes in the human genome that could be "activated," it is likely that the accumulated mutations would result in a truncated gene product (3 of the 64 codons are "stop") with many changes in its  sequence.
 

Dr. Kruse believes that humans, like all mammals, are optimized for hibernation and that remnants of mammalian hibernation are activated in humans based on certain times of the day: "It appears 12-3 AM are the critical hours at night are where the remnants of mammalian hibernation lies for our species". This is a far cry from the current state on literature related to hibernation. The idea that remnants of hibernation occur in humans at night also goes against the definition of hibernation. An excellent paper authored by another McEwen, Dr. Bruce McEwen, has a great concise definition "Hibernation is a highly regulated physiological response to adverse environmental conditions characterized by hypothermia and drastic reductions of metabolic rate"

Re-definition and special unique definitions of terms is another of Melia’s characteristics of bad books: “ The texts of these books all continue in the same excited first-person voice. They often introduce vague, undefined or invented terms.” A good example of this is in Dr. Kruse’s PaleoFX talk, where he references “ geothermal circadian cycles.” It sounds scientific, but there are no known circadian cycles that are tied to Earth’s internal heat* and it appears Dr. Kruse invented the concept since it is found nowhere else. It is a particularly deceptive practice, made easier by the fact that many of the terms that are often mis-used by these authors, such as the species concept or even hibernation, are the subject of some academic contention. But while academics might be arguing about whether or not bears are “true hibernators,” we can be assured that no one is considering that humans are hibernating every night because that doesn’t even fit into the realm of contention or the fringes of what is considered hibernation.

The only known primate that hibernates is Cheirogaleus medius, member of suborder Strepsirrhini, which diverged from the evolutionary line that led to humans over 70 million years ago. They also store a lot of fat beforehand, so I don't know if I'd like to hibernate like them anyway. I don't think I'd look so good and I probably wouldn't get much work done.

Even if it were conserved, Dr. Kruse makes the mistake of tying hibernation to extreme cold: “Cold environments are found as mammals hibernate in normal circadian biology…….this completely reverses IR in mammals and wakes them up when conditions are better for life.” Dr. Kruse’s cold therapy involves exposure to freezing temperatures, because he thinks that is linked to hibernation in humans. Kruses asks his readers if maybe diabetes has “become thought of as a neolithic disease in humans because we we have simultaneously lost the ability to hibernate because we evolved the ability to control our environment completely?” However, there are many animals that hibernate without exposure to very cold temperatures and biologists are still debating whether or not relative cold is even needed to trigger hibernation at all. For example, the only hibernating primate, the aforementioned Cheirogaleus medius, hibernates at 30 degree celsius (86 F). And if humans had lost the ability to hibernate because we control our environment, we would find the ability in related primates who do not control their environments. But we do not. The northernmost living non-human primate, Macaca fuscata, does not show any evidence of hibernation or even torpor, even those that do not visit hot springs. Interestingly, their winter diet does include digging for roots.

Why do so few primates hibernate? Around the equator, where primates evolved, seasons operate quite differently than they do in the arctic and other regions far from the equator. Because the environments and climates of Africa are so diverse, with many micro-climates in certain regions, most primates closely related to humans have evolved to be able to adapt to scarcity regardless of Earth’s axis tilt through the reliance on “fall back foods.” Possibly because of this evolutionary strategy, there is no particular dietary pattern that consistently characterizes the seasons for primates as an order or even within species.

Even in non-primates that live in the north, a very small percentage hibernate. For example, some squirrels hibernate, some don't. Those that don't often will cache food and eat it later. Some humans are known to raid rodent caches for carbohydrates. This contrasts with Dr. Kruse’s idea of seasonal biological changes being triggered by changing to carbohydrates or one season being devoid of carbohydrates: “it appears that dietary carbohydrates, which are only present in long light cycles in the summer in cold places, induce mammals to add PUFA’s to our cells to become fluid so we can function as we hibernate.”

According to Kruse, since carbohydrate consumption is tied to hibernation in cold environments, since we don’t really hibernate now (except sort-of, at night according to Kruse), carbohydrates might not be safe to consume: “Since we no longer hibernate……..maybe you need to consider how you eat carbohydrates within the circadian controls? Maybe what you thought was safe………really is not?” The implication is that carbohydrate consumption is only “safe” for mammals in the context of nature’s “design” for hibernation. In terms of our evolutionary line, that makes little sense. The vast majority of primate species consume diets of mainly carbohydrate, with two main digestive strategies. The evidence is that ancestors of modern hominins relied on a mainly-carbohydrate diet until somewhat recently.

If Dr. Kruse’s line of reasoning is true, most primates are living out of balance with nature and have been for millions of years. Some of his followers have said that this only applies if you live in the north since there are somehow some circadian controls only in the North that are tied to carbohydrates (zero evidence provided), but then the mice and squirrels who are eating stored or underground roots are violating natures law. And the idea that if you put an individual primate in the north that it will change its underlying biology to fit the north's light cycles does not have any evidence behind it (and in fact the fact that individual humans don't adapt particularly well to northern light cycles is perhaps behind the etiology of many modern illnesses).

As I will write in my next post, some human populations (and possibly other hominin lines) have genetic adaptations to more polar light cycles, but these are recent adaptations and are not shared by all humans. And one unique thing is that humans that inhabit cold regions have a raised metabolic rate during the coldest season, not a lowered one characteristic of torpor or hibernation, which suggests adaptations more similar to those found in wolves rather than ground squirrels**. Also, I must also discuss longevity being derived rather than ancestral. But I'll leave that to the next post. 

 * Geothermal according to the OED is “ 1. Geol. Relating to or resulting from the internal heat of the earth; (of a locality or region) having hot springs, geysers, fumaroles, etc., heated by underlying magma.””

** are non-hibernating squirrels naughty "nature's law" breakers? Particularly if they are eating stored carbohydrates?