Mad Cow Facts

We worry too much about overhyped threats, and ignore the things that really put us at risk

By JEFFREY KLUGER
Time
November 25, 2006

Excerpt…

It would be a lot easier to enjoy your life if there weren’t so many things trying to kill you every day. The problems start even before you’re fully awake. There’s the fall out of bed that kills 600 Americans each year. There’s the early-morning heart attack, which is 40% more common than those that strike later in the day. There’s the fatal plunge down the stairs, the bite of sausage that gets lodged in your throat, the tumble on the slippery sidewalk as you leave the house, the high-speed automotive pinball game that is your daily commute.Other dangers stalk you all day long…. Will you have a violent reaction to bad food? And what about the risks you carry with you all your life? The father and grandfather who died of coronaries in their 50s probably passed the same cardiac weakness on to you. The tendency to take chances on the highway that has twice landed you in traffic court could just as easily land you in the morgue.

Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we’d get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong. We agonize over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the U.S., but have to be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year. We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn’t) in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually.

We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones. Six Muslims traveling from a religious conference were thrown off a plane last week in Minneapolis, Minn., even as unscreened cargo continues to stream into ports on both coasts.

Shoppers still look askance at a bag of spinach for fear of E. coli bacteria while filling their carts with fat-sodden French fries and salt-crusted nachos. We put filters on faucets, install air ionizers in our homes and lather ourselves with antibacterial soap. “We used to measure contaminants down to the parts per million,” says Dan McGinn, a former Capitol Hill staff member and now a private risk consultant. “Now it’s parts per billion.”

At the same time, 20% of all adults still smoke; nearly 20% of drivers and more than 30% of backseat passengers don’t use seat belts; two-thirds of us are overweight or obese. We dash across the street against the light and build our homes in hurricane-prone areas–and when they’re demolished by a storm, we rebuild in the same spot. Sensible calculation of real-world risks is a multidimensional math problem that sometimes seems entirely beyond us. And while it may be true that it’s something we’ll never do exceptionally well, it’s almost certainly something we can learn to do better.

AN OLD BRAIN IN A NEW WORLD

Part of the problem we have with evaluating risk, scientists say, is that we’re moving through the modern world with what is, in many respects, a prehistoric brain. We may think we’ve grown accustomed to living in a predator-free environment in which most of the dangers of the wild have been driven away or fenced off, but our central nervous system—evolving at a glacial pace—hasn’t got the message.

To probe the risk-assessment mechanisms of the human mind, Joseph LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience at New York University and the author of The Emotional Brain, studies fear pathways in laboratory animals. He explains that the jumpiest part of the brain—of mouse and man—is the amygdala, a primitive, almond-shaped clump of tissue that sits just above the brainstem. When you spot potential danger—a stick in the grass that may be a snake, a shadow around a corner that could be a mugger—it’s the amygdala that reacts the most dramatically, triggering the fight-or-flight reaction that pumps adrenaline and other hormones into your bloodstream.

(more…)

von Zoe Strimpel
Financial Times - Deutschland
November 22, 2006

Excerpt…

On its own, lean meat is no longer frowned upon. The link between eating red meat and high cholesterol has been dismissed and the focus has shifted to the essential fats and vitamins red meat contains.

Red meat is the darling of the gastronomic world once more. New restaurants are flinging open their doors in celebration. Butchers are experiencing a renaissance and organic British beef farms have attained boutique status. According to the food professionals, red meat’s comeback has, ironically, much to do with the BSE crisis of the mid-1990s. Theo Randall, head chef at the River Café, says: “The BSE crisis had a lot to do with bad farming practices and feeding animals horrific steroids. Things had to shape up.”

But from a health point of view how far should we be indulging our appetites for dripping sides of beef and whole suckling pigs? This depends, of course, on just how dripping the meat is. Cooking it in butter or oil and adding sauce will increase fat levels drastically. When it comes to saturated fat, processed meat, such as sausages and the stuff of pork pies, are the worst offenders.

On its own, lean meat is no longer frowned upon. The link between eating red meat and high cholesterol has been dismissed and the focus has shifted to the generous amounts of protein, zinc, iron, selenium, essential fats and vitamins red meat contains.

The British Dietetic Association (BDA) says that up to 90g per day is fine, even beneficial. Frankie Phillips, a dietician at the BDA, is encouraged by the increase in awareness of the value of red meat, pointing out that certain segments of the population, such as teenage girls, eat too little iron and zinc.

Of the three official red meats, pork is the leanest and lamb the fattiest. Beef, however, is the most nutritious. It is the richest in iron and has the most zinc per 100g. Iron is essential to the generation of red blood cells, which transport oxygen from the lungs to the tissues and export carbon dioxide back to the lungs, and zinc is essential for a healthy immune system. In 1998, a report from the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy stated that “individuals’ consumption of red and processed meat should not increase and that higher consumers should consider a reduction”. In part, this caution hints at the risks associated with eating too much iron which can cause heart disease.

But as long as you choose your meat carefully, this new-found love is no bad thing. As Collins says: “Vegetarianism is all very well. But we have incisors. Biologically, we like meat.”

By John Mark Butterworth
Spero News - USA
November 16, 2006

Tendentious movie making at its worst (or would that be at its best?), Fast Food Nation is the kind of sophomoric nonsense you get when you turn a Berkeley teach-in into a fictional film. Made by the folks at Participant Productions, funded by an idiotarian eBay billionaire who has given us such tedious, coprolitic goodies as Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck, and North Country, this movie does have a few surprises in it. Such as — what’s Bruce Willis doing in this thing? I thought he had some adult sense.

But a number of celebrities make cameo appearances in order to demonstrate their Hollywood solidarity in this low budget, even worse than Al Gore lecture. We get Ethan Hawke, Kris Kristofferson, Patricia Arquette, Greg Kinnear, and pop tart Avril Lavigne pops up to lend her weight to the role of serious college student who will save the world from the evil, white male, corporate bad guys.

This cinematic polemic was like strolling through an anti-war demonstration and catching snippets of conversations expressing righteous indignation at the Man, man. Like, see man, the Man is raping the planet. Cutting all the trees, having their cows pooping all over the ground so we can eat their feces laden burgers that the Madison Avenue Man made us want to eat by making us conform to the uniform straightjacket world, man. And the Patriot Act. That’s really out to get us. . . . . man!

“I can’t think of anything more patriotic than violating the Patriot Act,” as one character insists his little group become eco-terrorists as they hearken back to the really lame Bless the Beasts & Children of 1971. Save the buffalo. Save the whale. Save the bovines. Don’t eat that hamburger! Free! Be free, you lovely bucolic animals!

The only businesses that aren’t depicted as essentially evil done by white men in a conspiracy to rob everyone of their money and their lives is the smuggling of illegal immigrants, and the making of Hollywood entertainment (which we recently learned is major polluter of Los Angeles).

Ostensibly, the movie is about Greg Kinnear playing an executive at Mickey’s, a McDonalds clone who investigates the problem of fecal coliform bacteria in their meat. He goes to Cody, Colorado to inspect the slaughterhouse and meat packer. Intersecting stories include Mexican illegal aliens being drawn to jobs by evil people determined to exploit them unmercifully. Then there is the girl who works at the local Mickey’s who is destined for bigger and better things because she has the good sense to take up with the local college radicals and free the beef on the hoof.

The movie loses track of what its supposed to be about and then we get the grand finale - the Kill Floor. A nice little tour of the slaughterhouse where we get to watch cows killed, skinned, hacked, disemboweled, and so forth. It’s supposed to take us back to visions of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, but it doesn’t work. It isn’t that pleasant to watch large animals butchered, but it wasn’t horrifying, and the circumstances are rather clean all in all.

I just wonder if the filmmakers would ever dare to show an abortion of a baby with the same lavish attention to gory detail as they did to the killing of a cow? To ask is to answer. We will never see that, of course. No, Hollywood loves to rub our face in all kinds of gruesome things for our edification and to teach us a lesson, but not an abortion ever. Odd, don’t you think?

Bruce Willis plays a corrupt (implied) businessman who tells Greg Kinnear not to worry about a little fecal matter. “Just cook it. That’s all you need to do.” And adds, “We all have to eat a little s**t in this world from time to time.”

But he also points out that 40,000 people die in cars every year and they haven’t stopped making them or driving them. So what’s the big deal if a little meat kills someone every now and then? He has a point, but it’s delivered so cynically that the audience is cued to hiss at the bad white guy, Snively Whiplash.

Sacramento has its share of hipper-than-thous and more-caring-than-yous, and they often show up at the screenings of lefty film fare applauding at the end to prove they’re really showing the Man just how much they haven’t been fooled by the Man, man. And America is just like they know it to be, a scam perpetrated on the dumb bourgeoisie by the high and mighty who live like kings.

How come we never get movies on real kings like the Saudis who truly lord it over creation and Hollywood moguls in private jets preaching conservation and global warming?

Sigh.

John Mark Butterworth is married and has a teenage daughter. He’s been writing for 30 years - plays, novels, essays, poetry. He also composes music - rock, classical, jazz, sacred and plays guitar and a few other instruments. He’s the author of Brightness Springs: A parable, and writes at Sunny Days in Heaven.

By Steven Milloy
FOX News
November 16, 2006

Excerpt…

“Breast cancer risk linked to red meat, study finds,” headlined the Washington Post’s front page last Tuesday. “Younger women who regularly eat red meat appear to face an increased risk for a common form of breast cancer, according to a large, well-known Harvard study of women’s health,” began the Post’s report.

The researchers studied 90,659 women aged 26-46 over 12 years. Red meat intake was assessed three times via self-administered questionnaire during those 12 years. By the end of the study period, 1021 cases of invasive breast cancer had been documented.

Contrary to the Post’s headline, however, the researchers actually reported no statistically significant correlation between red meat intake and all types of breast cancer.

Now you might think that the researchers would have stopped at that point and moved on to some other more promising health scare. Instead, they opted to dig deeper into their data. They seemingly struck health scare gold by mining an apparent statistical correlation between red meat intake and so-called “hormone receptor-positive” breast tumors – that is, tumors in which hormones like estrogen and progesterone are thought to play key roles.

The researchers reported that study subjects who consumed 10.5 or more servings per week of red meat had twice the rate of hormone receptor-positive breast cancer as study subjects who consumer 3 or fewer servings of red meat per week.

Is this result meaningful? Probably not for many of the usual criticisms that attend such human population studies, including: small study size (only 52 breast cancer cases were among the group of women with the highest red meat intake); poor data quality (no one knows with any certainty how much red meat any of these women actually consumed); weak statistics (despite the apparent magnitude of the reported 100 percent increase in risk, the result borders on statistical noise); and lack of biological plausibility (despite all sorts of speculation, no one knows with any certainty what causes breast cancer).

But there are two other compelling points to note.

First, the study results are internally inconsistent. For example, eating between 1-3 hamburgers per week was associated with increased risk for a hormone receptor-positive tumor, but eating more than 3 beef sandwiches per week was not. Bacon and hot dogs were not associated with risk for hormone-positive tumor, but other processed meats…were. That’s even odder since hot dogs are, after all, just rolled up bologna.

Next – and this is a point that I find most troublesome – is the researchers’ fear-fueling claim that hormone receptor-positive cancers are on rise.

The researchers stated in their report that hormone receptor-positive cancers increased 15 percent from 1992 to 1998 among women in the 40- to 49-year age group – a group that partially overlaps with the 26- to 46-year age group in the study. For this claimed increase, the researchers cited a January 2003 study that appeared in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. I pulled the study to confirm the citation.

The study did report that the incidence of hormone-positive tumors increased by 15 percent between 1992-1998 – at least in terms of raw numbers. However, this increase was not statistically significant. In fact, the authors of the Journal of Clinical Oncology study stated quite clearly, “the increase among 40- to 49-year olds was within the limits of chance” – meaning this apparent increase was uncertain and, essentially, a non-result.

They further went on to state that, “One could argue that the increase in hormone receptor-positive tumors we observed is simply a result of the increase in the number of tumors tested for hormone receptor status, as the majority of breast tumors are hormone receptor-positive.”

So there is no firm evidence that hormone receptor-positive cancers are on the rise and, if there has been an increase, there is a plausible explanation that has nothing to do with red meat intake. It’s too bad the Harvard researchers weren’t more accurate about the Journal of Clinical Oncology study.

Finally, the Harvard study is not the first one that has looked for a possible association between meat intake and breast cancer. There have been 29 others – 25 of which (86 percent) have not reported a statistically significant association between meat intake and breast cancer – including a July 2003 study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute by the same Harvard authors involving the same study subjects.

It’s too bad the Washington Post reporter didn’t approach the Harvard study more skeptically – it’s the kind of shoddy research that gives a black-eye to reporters who merely regurgitate researcher media releases.

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk science expert, an advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.
ACSH (American Council on Science and Health
November 15, 2006

Should women stop eating red meat to avoid or lessen the risk that they’ll develop breast cancer? Taken at face value, a new study suggests that might be a good idea — but a more careful consideration does not support this interpretation.

A report in the November 14 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/short/166/20/2253 indicates that premenopausal women who regularly consume large amounts of red meat have a 97% increased risk of hormone-positive breast cancer. Although this sounds like a frightening increase, a couple of caveats are in order. First, this increase in relative risk is borderline for the level of risk epidemiologists consider real. Anything under a doubled risk (i.e., a 100% increase) would be termed moderate or weak, although if the population at risk is very large, moderate risks could theoretically affect a large number of people.

A second reservation is the nature of the data on which these statistics are based. The women in the study didn’t actually measure the amount of food they ate. While this may not be very important for foods and beverages that are purchased in discrete quantities (e.g., a bottle of soft drink, or a fast food hamburger), red meat can be purchased and consumed in a wide variety of forms and sizes. Thus the accuracy of the data depends on how well participants can estimate the quantities of the various foods they consumed, as well as how accurate they are when they recall how often they ate or drank particular items.

The researchers from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School followed 90,659 women who were part of the Nurses’ Health Study from 1989-2003. Study subjects were, on average, thirty-six years old at the beginning of this study and thus premenopausal. Several times during the study, they completed dietary questionnaires in which they noted how often they ate 130 different foods and beverages. Every two years, the women reported whether or not they had developed breast cancer. Whether or not the tumors were hormone-sensitive was also noted (hormone-sensitive breast cancer tumors are the more common kind).

The women in the study reported 1,021 cases of breast cancer. Of these, 512 were tumors that were sensitive to both estrogen and progesterone hormones.

When the researchers examined the relationship between the occurrence of breast cancer and various dietary factors, they found a significant trend towards an increasing occurrence of the disease as the intake or red meat consumption increased — but only for the hormone-sensitive type of tumor. That is, the women who reported eating over 1.5 servings of red meat per day had a 97% increased risk of developing hormone-sensitive breast cancer than women who reported eating less than three servings per week.

So, although consumption of at least 1.5 servings of red meat per day was associated with increased risk of hormone-sensitive breast cancer in these women, these data do not prove that high red meat consumption actually caused the disease. Indeed, although the researchers statistically controlled for possibly confounding factors such as smoking, number of children, age at menarche, etc., it is still possible that other lifestyle factors also played a role.

In sum, as the authors noted, “these findings have potential public health implications…and should be evaluated further.” But until other independent research validates these results, it would be premature to recommend more drastic action than to advise moderation in consumption of red meat — as for all other dietary components. It is important for women to recognize that detection and treatment of breast cancer has advanced markedly over the past decade http://www.acsh.org/news/newsID.1210/news_detail.asp. Women should not be excessively concerned that one dietary factor or another significantly impacts their risk of developing the disease.

Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D., is Director of Nutrition at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org http://www.acsh.org/../, HealthFactsAndFears.com).