Good Meat is Dead Meat (Not Meat That Was Never Alive)

PETA has announced that it's offering a $1 million reward to "the first scientist to produce and bring to market in vitro meat."

According to PETA, test tube meat would be super-awesome because it'd "mimic flesh and could be cooked and eaten" without hurting any animals. Of course, only the unwashed meat-addicted hordes would need to eat the stuff:

[H]umans don't need to eat meat at all -- vegetarians are less likely to get heart disease, diabetes, or various types of cancer or become obese than meat-eaters are -- and a terrific array of vegetarian mock meats already exist. But as many people continue to refuse to kick their meat addictions, PETA is willing to help them gain access to flesh...

(Wrong, wrong, wrong. But I digress.)

I can't wait to supplement my "terrific array" of Tofurky patties and Quorn chunks with a big, juicy slab of lab-generated, vat-grown, 100% processed "meat." I mean, who could resist a steak that looks this appetizing?

Who's with me?

What About Dairy?

"OH MY GAWD -- YOU STILL EAT DAIRY?!? WTF?!? HOW DARE YOU CALL YOURSELVES "PALEO"! CAVEMEN DIDN'T DRINK COW'S MILK, YOU BLASPHEMERS! [*HYSTERICAL SOBBING*]"

I'm exaggerating (a little). But we've gotten a couple of testy emails from hyper-orthodox Paleo readers who check out M's site and freak out over the trace amounts of dairy that remain in our diets. To them, I have this to say:

Please chill out.

It's been a long time since I last wrote at length about milk. And in that time, our dairy consumption has dramatically decreased. Cutting out grains and added sugar already meant getting rid of many of our favorite dairy-delivery vehicles, like breakfast cereals, pizza, grilled cheese sandwiches, frozen yogurt and ice cream. We stopped buying big tubs of fresh mozzerella di bufala, and I no longer devour huge plates of cheese. I don't drink milk (and haven't since I was a kid), and I take my coffee black. And M managed to abstain from dairy altogether during her month on the Whole30.

But we do still eat a small amount of dairy from time to time, including pastured butter, ghee, and a bit of cheese and full-fat Greek yogurt. Frankly, this is a personal choice. We're not saying that you ought to follow our example, or that cow juice is super-awesome for you. We're continuing to learn from others about the physiological effects of the stuff, and it's very possible that one day, we'll decide to eliminate all dairy from our diet. But given that we continue to receive questions about why bovine dairy still pops up in M's recipes, I thought I'd explain our current thinking behind the decision not to go cold-turkey.

In a nutshell:

• We don't care that cavepeople didn't drink cow's milk.
• There are proposed mechanisms that suggest that cow dairy is bad for you.
• But there's still a lack of consensus -- even within Paleo circles -- about whether full-fat dairy actually poses health risks to folks without leaky gut or other autoimmune issues.
• Plus, on the whole, there may actually be a net benefit to eating some high-quality, full-fat dairy.
• Still, to be on the safe side, we've cut out most dairy -- but we've made room for certain exceptions.

Let's take these one by one (after the jump)...

Jocks: Brainier Than You Think

Elite athletes aren't just fitter than the rest of us -- certain parts of their brains are likely bigger than ours, too. As Wired reports, "[j]ust like the muscles of the body, [athletes'] brains operate as finely tuned machines: Increasing evidence supports the idea that there are measurable differences in the size not only of their biceps but certain areas of their brains."

[I]n one of the brain areas studied, the researchers found that the number of years each athlete competed as a diver nearly predicted how thick the subject’s brain would be. If the results of this small study hold, there may be some biological truth to the adage, “practice makes perfect.” It’s as if each year of sports experience becomes neatly folded as a new layer of neurons atop previously mastered skills, physical knowledge, and competition know-how that have already been crammed into the brain.

[Source]

Small Balls

According to British researcher Sam Shuster, bodybuilders have abnormally small balls.

What explains this shrinkage of the bodybuilder’s balls? Since it is unlikely that only men with small balls undertake bodybuilding, we have to assume that small balls are causally related to this activity. Could these crypto-orchids be an adverse consequence of the pathological amount of exercise necessary to produce the vast amount of muscle? Is there a functionally inverse relationship between testicle size and muscle mass? Did Delilah find more to Sampson than was made public? It is well known that extreme exercise affects the endocrine system: for example, it explains the small breasts of ice-skaters2 [see “Ice Skaters Have Small Breasts,” in this issue of AIR] and ballet dancers. But, of course, ingestion of male hormones, a not entirely unknown practice amongst sportspeople, turns off the secretion of pituitary trophins, leading to testicular shrinkage.

In other words, it's gotta be the steroids, right?

(Source: Neatorama)

Little Hercules

According to the New York Times, kids who train with weights won't damage their growth plates. They won't end up being shorter as a result, nor will they suffer "lack of testosterone" or experience "a variety of safety issues." In fact,

a major new review just published in Pediatrics, together with a growing body of other scientific reports, suggest that, in fact, weight training can be not only safe for young people, it can also be beneficial, even essential.

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to turn my kids into Giuliano Stroe.

(Source: New York Times)

Stop With The Egg Whites

The New Yorker's food issue is out this week, and it features a lengthy piece about April Broomfield, the chef/owner of NYC's The Spotted Pig and The Breslin -- both of which are awesome for meat-lovin' Paleo eaters like me. Last month, M and I hit The Breslin for brunch, and ordered two full English breakfast plates, piled high with porky goodness, and with no beans or toast to spoil the fun.

We clearly did not do an adequate job of educating one of our brunch companions about the place, though. And as I mentioned in a previous post, he's not on the Paleo train. After scouring the menu in vain for something -- anything! -- that the USDA Food Pyramid and conventional dietary wisdom would smile upon, he asked our server whether the vegetable frittata could be made with egg whites. "No," she replied.

Of course, the server's intent wasn't to steer him towards better health. Chances are, she subscribes to the same beliefs that most people hold about the dangers of egg yolks and saturated fats and everything else on The Breslin's menu. I seriously doubt she's read Gary Taubes.

But you know who has? Director/producer/screenwriter/novelist Nora Ephron. She most certainly would not have asked for fucking egg whites.

Ephron was being interviewed by Michael Krazny on NPR's "Forum" this morning. I know next to nothing about Nora Ephron, other than that she wrote "When Harry Met Sally" or something, so I was only half-listening -- until Krazny gently chided her about her position on eggs and cholesterol. My ears perked up.

"Eating the cholesterol in eggs doesn't raise your blood cholesterol!" she countered. Krasny shot back that the Mayo Clinic says she's wrong. She stuck to her guns. And she happens to be right.

Here's what I dug up from an old HuffPo blog post of Ephron's on the subject:

[D]ietary cholesterol has nothing whatsoever to do with your cholesterol count. This is another thing I've known all my life, which is why you will not find me lying on my deathbed regretting not having eaten enough chopped liver. Let me explain this: you can eat all sorts of things that are high in dietary cholesterol (like lobster and cheese and eggs) and they have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on your cholesterol count. NONE. WHATSOEVER. DID YOU HEAR ME? I'm sorry to have to resort to capital letters, but what is wrong with you people?

Which brings me to the point of this piece: the egg-white omelette. I have friends who eat egg-white omelettes. Every time I'm forced to watch them eat egg-white omelettes, I feel bad for them. In the first place, egg-white omelettes are tasteless. In the second place, the people who eat them think they are doing something virtuous when they are instead merely misinformed. Sometimes I try to explain that what they're doing makes no sense, but they pay no attention to me because they have all been told to avoid dietary cholesterol by their doctors. 

According to yesterday's New York Times, the doctors are not deliberately misinforming their patients; instead, they're participants in something known as an informational cascade, which turns out to be a fabulous expression for something that everyone thinks must be true because so many reputable people say it is. In this case, of course, it's not an informational cascade but a misinformational cascade, and as a result, way too many people I know have been brainwashed into thinking that whole-egg omelettes are bad for you.

So this is my moment to say what's been in my heart for years: it's time to put a halt to the egg-white omelette.

Hear, hear.

David H. Freedman wrote in this month's Atlantic about how the health studies you hear about on the news are almost universally fraught with error and bias -- and then the information cascade takes over and we go flying off the cliff with all the other lemmings. So what happens when another study comes out and draws the opposite conclusion -- which, by the way, happens ALL THE TIME?

Too late. We're already in freefall -- and we didn't even get to enjoy the frittata with the awesomely delicious egg yolks.

Meat: So Calming

According to researchers at McGill University, "seeing meat makes people significantly less aggressive."

Frank Kachanoff, who studies evolution at the university’s department of psychology, had initially thought the presence of meat would provoke bloodlust, believing the response would have helped our primate ancestors hunt. But in fact, his research showed the reverse is true.

So whenever your blood pressure starts rising, stop, count to ten, and think of this incredibly soothing image:

(Photos: Splorp, Paul Keller)

Is Meat Bad For You?

This post is going to be slightly long and geeky. If you have a short attention span or just stumbled here looking for a cheap laugh, feel free to skip this one and proceed directly to the video of the farting yoga lady.

But if you'd like to know why I'm calling bullshit on the recent hype over an epidemiological study "proving" that meat-eating is bad for low-carb dieters, read on.