Great Cholesterol Lie?

[Red Baron Farms]

Well I think we need to acknowledge that evolution really does not give a whip about whether you get clogged arteries or have a heart attack in your fifties or sixties. Natural selection favors those species that breed the most successfully. It does not favor those that live the longest.

From here: Ancient people had clogged arteries, too, mummy CT scans show

I can offer my own anecdote. My own borderline high cholesterol happened after over 10 years of eating only grass fed beef, pastured pigs and free range chicken (and their eggs) that we raised ourselves. This borderline high cholesterol lowered by over 10% after a year of mostly plant based eating.

I think the flaw in your logic here is that you ask whether we can accept the idea that eating animals from CAFOs might have some effect on human health. I can accept that. However I don't believe you have shown that it has the specific effect you want to claim.

I wouldn't go quite so far as to say," evolution really does not give a whip about whether you get clogged arteries or have a heart attack in your fifties or sixties." Group selection, kin selection and altruism had an effect on human evolution as well. [1] There are advantages to knowledge, wisdom, and skill found in the old benefitting the group. But I get where you are going with it. The older non-breeding population does have less of an effect and a group probably doesn't need every member to survive into old age to pass that information knowledge and skill along, just a few.

Nor do I claim these diseases are caused ONLY by industrial food. There are many potential causes.

What I am trying to say is that the large increase in the so called "diseases of civilisation" and further the significant increase of them being found in younger ages and even children in modern times, has a significant causal relationship with industrial food, and particularly CAFOs, not just because of their having higher cholesterol but more because of the significant difference in the whole lipid balance and vitamin content. (probably a few other things too)

 

[bigred]

Why is it that most people have no problem believing eating red meat is unhealthy?

Because they are ignorant? Eating red meat is not unhealthy; only eating TOO MUCH of it...which can be said of anything else, really. Even drinking too much water can kill you (which blew me away when I found out).

But they have huge problems with accepting that eating animals that were raised in CAFOs, living in their own feces and eating diets that they clearly didn't evolve to eat has any effect on human health? Even though there are significant quantifiable differences in the product depending how it is raised.

No, there aren't, at least none you have proven as yet, hence my dismissal of such claims.

You said "show me the evidence," but you are the one with the claims - and mostly rather dramatic/extreme ones at that - so the burden of proof is on you

PS I'm not trying to side with "CAFOs" btw, but this root-of-all-evil thing is IMO just alarmist propaganda that has not been backed up. It's a classic case of trying to make one thing sounding nasty and the other all natural and organic and warm and fuzzy, therefore the latter MUST be way better. But the evidence doesn't back that.

Further, saying there are "quantifiable differences" doesn't mean anything as it's too vague. The differences I'm seeing from your links are mostly very modest, even slight, and even more so if you only eat red meat in moderation.

 

[Reality Check]

I'm not sure I've ever seen any study of clinical practice that shows the benefits of Statin therapy. Only the studies done by the pharma manufacturers.

It is fairly easy to find such non-pharma clinical studies using Google Scholar, e.g.
The benefits of statins in people without established cardiovascular disease but with cardiovascular risk factors: meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials
(from the first page of results)
I suspect though that a lot of the trials were done by pharmaceutical companies, not that this makes the results invalid.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

You said "show me the evidence," but you are the one with the claims - and mostly rather dramatic/extreme ones at that - so the burden of proof is on you

PS I'm not trying to side with "CAFOs" btw, but this root-of-all-evil thing is IMO just alarmist propaganda that has not been backed up. It's a classic case of trying to make one thing sounding nasty and the other all natural and organic and warm and fuzzy, therefore the latter MUST be way better. But the evidence doesn't back that.

Further, saying there are "quantifiable differences" doesn't mean anything as it's too vague. The differences I'm seeing from your links are mostly very modest, even slight, and even more so if you only eat red meat in moderation.

Maybe if you saw it explained from the vegetarian POV and then went back and looked at the differences between Pastured and CAFO raised in those many studies I linked to. Look for the parallels. Because the vegetarian option is a valid way to accomplish the same goal. Maybe it might provide some clarity. It's one thing to link a study or studies. Quite another when it is explained. And viewed from the vegetarian way of accomplishing that goal, you can see the same effects of the omega 3s and the n-6:n-3 ratio and the whole lipid balance and vitamin issue without obscuring the debate with bickering between animal production models.

I apologize for posting a vid with Dr. Gregor's rather annoying presentation style. But there is good content.

40 Year Vegan Dies of a Heart Attack! Why? The Omega-3 and B12 Myth with Dr. Michael Greger

 

[bigred]

Maybe if you saw it explained from the vegetarian POV and then went back and looked at the differences between Pastured and CAFO raised in those many studies I linked to.

I looked; my comments stand.

Because the vegetarian option is a valid way to accomplish the same goal.

I give up: what are you taking about? Seems to me you're doing a fair bit of goalpost moving.

without obscuring the debate with bickering between animal production models.

You'e the one who brought up animal production models, remember? So you're abandoning your claims.....that's fine, I just wish you'd say so.

That all said, I'm all for non-CAFO FYI, in case it sounds otherwise...but on the grounds of humane animal treatment (something a disgusting number of people seem to care little about IMO).

 

[Andy_Ross]

So does CAFO mean any agricultural technique you don't agree?

I see lots of 'dissing' but not much evidence, only a link to something called Mother Earth News which looks to me like a cranky site.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

I looked; my comments stand.

I give up: what are you taking about? Seems to me you're doing a fair bit of goalpost moving.

You'e the one who brought up animal production models, remember? So you're abandoning your claims.....that's fine, I just wish you'd say so.

That all said, I'm all for non-CAFO FYI, in case it sounds otherwise...but on the grounds of humane animal treatment (something a disgusting number of people seem to care little about IMO).

No. Not abandoning my claims at all. The research is clear. Why you keep missing it, I can't guess. Blinders? So maybe another vid explaining it only from the animal production side of things. Again look for the parallels to the last vid from Dr Gregor, particularly the lipid balances and vitamin content.

I apologize for posting a vid with Joel Salatin's rather annoying lack of citation content, mostly anecdotal. But there is good presentation style and the things Salatin claims are backed up by the citations I posted before from UC Chico and others I can get you if you still can't see it.



Best quote:

Only a fool would say there is no difference

Here is the testing report that was commissioned.........

Mother Earth News 2007

Our testing has found that, compared to official U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) nutrient data for commercial eggs, eggs from hens raised on pasture may contain:

• 1/3 less cholesterol
• 1/4 less saturated fat
• 2/3 more vitamin A
• 2 times more omega-3 fatty acids
• 3 times more vitamin E
• 7 times more beta carotene



Read more: http://www.motherearthnews.com/real-food/free-range-eggs-zmaz07onzgoe.aspx#ixzz3FLiPCJH4

So does CAFO mean any agricultural technique you don't agree?

I see lots of 'dissing' but not much evidence, only a link to something called Mother Earth News which looks to me like a cranky site.

CAFO means concentrated animal feeding operation. Basically piling large numbers of animals in stockyards or housing and feeding them processed grain mixtures, metabolic modifiers, and antibiotics to keep the diseases from overcrowding and unnatural diets from killing too many. CAFOs radically change the nutritional content of animal foods compared to pasture raised. The way it changes that content,ie... saturated fats, unsaturated fats, omega 3 fatty acids, the n-6:n-3 ratio, cholesterol, vitamins like B vitamin group, etc... all these changes are precisely the risk factors for heart attack....the subject of this thread. PS I posted links to over 100 scientific studies earlier. All with the paywalls removed.(thanks UC Chico) So your claim there is not enough evidence is ridiculous. There is too much evidence if anything. So much evidence it overwhelms most people's ability to comprehend. So I also posted two lectures from Youtube that radically simplifies it for laymen. (one from the vegetarian POV, and one from the animal husbandry POV) I posted both POVs because lets face it. There are two ways to avoid eating CAFO foods and their associated increased health risks. One is to become vegetarian and simply stop eating all animal food products, the other is to eat pasture raised instead.

 

[ThunderChunky]

No. Not abandoning my claims at all. The research is clear. Why you keep missing it, I can't guess. Blinders? So maybe another vid explaining it only from the animal production side of things. Again look for the parallels to the last vid from Dr Gregor, particularly the lipid balances and vitamin content.

I apologize for posting a vid with Joel Salatin's rather annoying lack of citation content, mostly anecdotal. But there is good presentation style and the things Salatin claims are backed up by the citations I posted before from UC Chico and others I can get you if you still can't see it.



Best quote:


Here is the testing report that was commissioned.........

Mother Earth News 2007

Not sure why you are posting videos from cranks, but the change in lipid profiles of the american diet due to CAFO farming is dwarfed by the contribution from increased use of soybean oil.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076650/

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Not sure why you are posting videos from cranks, but the change in lipid profiles of the american diet due to CAFO farming is dwarfed by the contribution from increased use of soybean oil.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076650/

Number one, they are not cranks. You can test it yourself. Most land grant state agricultural universities in the US can help you with that, there are certified private labs as well. Or you can do some laymen testing at home. It is so dramatic a difference it is EASY to confirm and very easily reproducible by any skeptic.

Number two You are correct. Soy oil is a huge problem as well. But keep in mind, if you are not raising soy and corn and other grains to supply and to feed animals in CAFOs, and are using that land as pasture to pasture raise animals instead, you kill two birds with one stone.

 

[DragonLady]

CAFO means concentrated animal feeding operation.

Right. The term isn't qualified by how many animals are involved or what they're being fed. It's a "CAFO" if the animals are confined for a certain number of days every year in a pen that doesn't have grass growing in it.

Basically piling large numbers of animals in stockyards or housing and feeding them processed grain mixtures, metabolic modifiers, and antibiotics to keep the diseases from overcrowding and unnatural diets from killing too many.

While I agree that is done, it's not part of the definition of a CAFO operation.

CAFOs radically change the nutritional content of animal foods compared to pasture raised.

Here's where we run into trouble. Observing something changes it. Changing an animal's diet will change the animal's chemistry, to be sure. But changing it doesn't automatically equal "makes it baaad".

We humans often change our diets radically whenever we make other changes in our lifestyles. College students living on Raman noodles, deli sandwiches and pizza are eating far differently than people eating "off the grid" and hunting or fishing for every bite -and they both tend to change their diets when they start families or move to another country or win the lottery.

But I'm not convinced any one diet is better than any other; at least in the short term (~five years).

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Here's where we run into trouble. Observing something changes it. Changing an animal's diet will change the animal's chemistry, to be sure. But changing it doesn't automatically equal "makes it baaad".

Exactly. Changing it does not automatically make it bad. That's why I linked the other citations. Links with supporting evidence that in this case those changes actually are bad. Or more precisely, changes that increase health risk factors.

 

[DragonLady]

Just taking one of your links -the article in Mother Earth News:

The chart at the end of this article shows the average nutrient content of the samples, compared with the official egg nutrient data from the USDA for “conventional” (i.e. from confined hens) eggs. The chart lists the individual results from each flock.

Ughm.... Excuse me? What kind of eggs? Does the official USDA data actually say "from confined hens"?

In the USA chickens are available in dozens of different breeds, and I'm not convinced MEN's samples were really comparable to the USDA varieties. It's a matter of comparing like to like. If the USDA tested six eggs each from 150 different breeds of chickens, they would likely come up with different results than MEN did with 6 eggs each from "14 pastured flocks" of indeterminate type. Chickens bred for eggs are different than chickens bred for meat, which are different than chickens bred for fishing lures.

We think these dramatically differing nutrient levels are most likely the result of the different diets of birds that produce these two types of eggs.

Or maybe diet has very little to do with it. Maybe they weren't comparing the same things. Backyard flocks that have been interbreeding for a few generations and have become naturalized to a very tiny microenvironment might produce differently than those raised in another microenvironment just a few blocks up the road.

It's too complicated and too much is still unknown to be able to just blame everything on modern commercial farming techniques -especially considering most of those techniques were devised and implemented to solve the kinds of problems farmers have experienced with smaller flocks for generations.

One more point (it's 3:am, and I should sleep):

Factory farm birds never even see the outdoors, let alone get to forage for their natural diet.

Their natural diet??? What "natural diet" would that be? The diet they ate in China? Whatever the Egyptians fed them in the 5th century? The table scraps many backyard flocks are given? The bugs and seeds they can dig up in their current microenvironments?

There's a LOT more to the issue than just whether or not the animals in question are able to forage their own feed versus whether it's handed over a fence into a trough.

 

[casebro]

It is fairly easy to find such non-pharma clinical studies using Google Scholar, e.g.
The benefits of statins in people without established cardiovascular disease but with cardiovascular risk factors: meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials
(from the first page of results)


I suspect though that a lot of the trials were done by pharmaceutical companies, not that this makes the results invalid.

Yeah that last part. The tip off is when the mehta studier says "side effects were rare". The pharma study subjects are pre-screened to eliminate those who have ever had muscle problems. Myopathy is so common with statins that in many cardiology practices half of their treatment time is taken up by the side effects of Statins. I had dinner with a batch of friends from the gun club, and all five of us at the table had had myopathy from statins.

What I would really like to see is a study done by some huge HMO, like Kaiser. Kaiser does push statins, and we do know their bread is buttered on the side of efficacy, but I would really like to see the true clinical numbers- lower rates of CVD, and rate of myopathy.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Just taking one of your links -the article in Mother Earth News:



Ughm.... Excuse me? What kind of eggs? Does the official USDA data actually say "from confined hens"?

In the USA chickens are available in dozens of different breeds, and I'm not convinced MEN's samples were really comparable to the USDA varieties. It's a matter of comparing like to like. If the USDA tested six eggs each from 150 different breeds of chickens, they would likely come up with different results than MEN did with 6 eggs each from "14 pastured flocks" of indeterminate type. Chickens bred for eggs are different than chickens bred for meat, which are different than chickens bred for fishing lures.



Or maybe diet has very little to do with it. Maybe they weren't comparing the same things. Backyard flocks that have been interbreeding for a few generations and have become naturalized to a very tiny microenvironment might produce differently than those raised in another microenvironment just a few blocks up the road.

It's too complicated and too much is still unknown to be able to just blame everything on modern commercial farming techniques -especially considering most of those techniques were devised and implemented to solve the kinds of problems farmers have experienced with smaller flocks for generations.

One more point (it's 3:am, and I should sleep):



Their natural diet??? What "natural diet" would that be? The diet they ate in China? Whatever the Egyptians fed them in the 5th century? The table scraps many backyard flocks are given? The bugs and seeds they can dig up in their current microenvironments?

There's a LOT more to the issue than just whether or not the animals in question are able to forage their own feed versus whether it's handed over a fence into a trough.

Now see all that is pure speculation. What an animal eats has a profound influence on lipid balance etc..... And I provided over 100 citations showing that and the effects those difference had on human risk factors. But if you want to claim breed has a greater influence (I am sure it has a very minor influence), I'll need some proof of that wild claim. Certainly in every breed of chicken or cattle I ever raised it didn't matter much what the breed was, what mattered was what the animals ate. Breeds can affect many qualities, like how much total fat and lean there is, but I have yet to see a breed that magically gave the fat content and nutrition the same qualities ie lipid balance as pasture raised.

A far as the "natural diet" quote. Where did that come from? Certainly not me. No agriculture is "natural" by definition. But there is a type of agriculture that uses biomimicry. ie... models itself on the functionality of natural biomes. One of those methods of agricultural biomimicry is raising animals on forage instead of grains in CAFOs. In fact one of the great ironies is that "omega 3 eggs" that you can buy at the supermarket, because they are raised in the industrial business model, have less omega 3's than pasture raised.! But you can't call an organic pasture raised product "omega 3 eggs" because the forage based system gets those omega 3s from insects worms etc... the chicken manages to scratch up and not from feed supplements.

As far as your last statement about it being too complicated to understand. Maybe too complicated for YOU to understand......But not even close to too complicated for human beings to understand.

Read this review, maybe that will help you understand.
A review of fatty acid profiles and antioxidant content in grass-fed and grain-fed beef

 

[bigred]

No. Not abandoning my claims at all. The research is clear. Why you keep missing it, I can't guess.

Probably has something to do with you failing to present it.

Needless to say I've stopped clicking on your links, given your track record to date, and done bothering w/these unverified claims....

 

[Red Baron Farms]

Probably has something to do with you failing to present it.

Needless to say I've stopped clicking on your links, given your track record to date, and done bothering w/these unverified claims....

Willful ignorance is not a valid skeptical argument. Or stated differently, refusal to investigate the evidence is not the same as claiming there is no evidence.

 

[Reality Check]

Yeah that last part....snipped ....

Sorry, casebro, but that sounds a bit like "Big Pharma" paranoia that pops up on the Internet. There is no real problem with pharmaceutical companies dong clinical trials of their products. Science is science no matter who does the science. There can be suspicions of confirmation bias and positive reporting but anything further needs evidence.

When the meta studier says "side effects were rare", they mean that side effects were found to be rare! As for myopathy and stains - there seems to be plenty of literature on it, e.g. Statin-Associated Myopathy
The safety of statins in clinical practice

 

[MuDPhuD]

I'm not sure I've ever seen any study of clinical practice that shows the benefits of Statin therapy.

It is fairly easy to find such non-pharma clinical studies using Google Scholar, e.g.
The benefits of statins in people without established cardiovascular disease but with cardiovascular risk factors: meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials
(from the first page of results)
I suspect though that a lot of the trials were done by pharmaceutical companies, not that this makes the results invalid.

That meta analysis includes nine large randomized controlled trials with a total of 25,000-30,000 subjects. It shows a clear benefit of statins on the incidence of coronary events.

Yeah that last part. The tip off is ...
What I would really like to see is a study done by some huge HMO, like Kaiser. Kaiser does push statins, and we do know their bread is buttered on the side of efficacy, but I would really like to see the true clinical numbers- lower rates of CVD, and rate of myopathy.

So in spite of you being completely wrong about there being any studies at all, and in fact there having been numerous large RCTs showing exactly what you don't want believe, you still don't want to believe it? Because you suspect the medical establishment of collusion with big pharma (conspiracy) in 9 very large studies of 10s of thousands of patients?
And you claim to follow the evidence??

 

[casebro]

That meta analysis includes nine large randomized controlled trials with a total of 25,000-30,000 subjects. It shows a clear benefit of statins on the incidence of coronary events.



So in spite of you being completely wrong about there being any studies at all, and in fact there having been numerous large RCTs showing exactly what you don't want believe, you still don't want to believe it? Because you suspect the medical establishment of collusion with big pharma (conspiracy) in 9 very large studies of 10s of thousands of patients?
And you claim to follow the evidence??

But all those studies were sponsored by the Statin manufacturers. Those studies are damn expensive. Who else has ever done any? And why? Show me some numbers from unbiased clinicians.

Yes, statins work. Probably minimally.

No, side effects are not rare. Except in studies done by the manufacturers.

 

[Reality Check]

But all those studies were sponsored by the Statin manufacturers. ...a bit of paranoia snipped....

casebro: Please list all of the studies and who sponsored them to support your assertion that all of them were sponsored by Statin manufacturers.
casebro: Define "not rare" .
casebro: Show that studies that are done by the manufacturers give a lesser frequency of side effects than other studies, i.e. your statistical analysis of all of these studies.