Let’s start with the nutritional facts, hopefully old news for most people:

Agriculture Department data show that cheese is a major reason the average American diet contains too much saturated fat.

Saturated fats are link to a range of health problems, especially heart and cardiovascular diseases.

The industry’s problem started with a public effort to eat more healthy, in a way:

Urged on by government warnings about saturated fat, Americans have been moving toward low-fat milk for decades, leaving a surplus of whole milk and milk fat. Yet the government, through Dairy Management, is engaged in an effort to find ways to get dairy back into Americans’ diets, primarily through cheese.

Americans now eat an average of 33 pounds of cheese a year, nearly triple the 1970 rate. Cheese has become the largest source of saturated fat; an ounce of many cheeses contains as much saturated fat as a glass of whole milk.

It would be a waste to throw that fat away, too, wouldn’t it? If you wanna have fat-free milk, why not go for tasty milk alternatives like soy, rice or oat milk? Just a brief vegan intermezzo.

Now the really interesting and shocking part is the relation between pro-cheese campaigns and health-food campaigns:

Dairy Management runs the largest of 18 Agriculture Department programs that market beef, pork, potatoes and other commodities. Their budgets are largely paid by levies imposed on farmers, but Dairy Management, which reported expenditures of $136 million last year, also received $5.3 million that year from the Agriculture Department to promote dairy sales overseas.

By comparison, the department’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, which promotes healthy diets, has a total budget of $6.5 million.

So the total spending ratio is about 20 to 1, and the government spends about the same amount of money on promoting cheese alone (there 17 more similar programs) as it does on eating healthy. Somehow I have the feeling that small-government proponents in the Republican party would still worry more about the healthy food part, labeling it a government intrusion into American’s kitchens.

The story falls into complete absurdity when science enters the field, and the double credibility of scientific and government backing promote what turns out as something closer to lies than mistakes:

“Great news for dieters,” Dairy Management said in an advertisement in People magazine in 2005. “Clinical studies show that people on a reduced-calorie diet who consume three servings of milk, cheese or yogurt each day can lose significantly more weight and more body fat than those who just cut calories.”

With milk consumption in decline, Dairy Management had hit on a fresh marketing strategy with its weight-loss campaign.

When the campaign began in 2003, a Dairy Management official said it was inspired by newly relaxed federal rules on health claims and the ensuing “rapid growth of ‘better for you’ products.”

True, there had been a study backing that claim at the time. But evidence was soon mounting it was false. And was suppressed and ignored:

One such study was conducted by Jean Harvey-Berino, chairwoman of the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Vermont. “I think they felt they had a lot riding on it,” she said of the weight loss claim, “and felt it was a cash cow if it worked out.”

“I’m a big promoter of dairy,” she added, noting that her research was also paid for by Dairy Management.

But by 2004, her study had found no evidence of weight loss. She said Dairy Management took the news poorly, threatening to audit her work. She said she was astonished when the organization pressed on with its ad campaign.

“I thought they were crazy, and that eventually somebody would catch up with them,” she said.

Her study was published in 2005, and at scientific meetings she heard from other researchers who also failed to confirm Dr. Zemel’s work, including Dr. Jack A. Yanovski, an obesity unit chief at the National Institutes of Health.

But in late 2006, Dairy Management was still citing the weight-loss claim in urging the Agriculture Department not to cut the amount of cheese in federal food assistance programs. “The available data provide strong support for a beneficial effect of increased dairy foods on body weight and body composition,” two organization officials wrote, making no mention of Dr. Harvey-Berino’s findings.

Having dismissed the weight-loss claim in 2005, the federal nutrition advisory committee this summer again found the underlying science “not convincing.”

This specific campaign has been halted, but the general direction has not changed:

Meanwhile, Dairy Management, which allotted $12.4 million for nutrition research in 2008, has moved on to finance studies on promising opportunities, including the promotion of chocolate milk as a sports recovery drink and the use of cheese to entice children into eating healthy foods like string beans.

At the same time the organization works with corporations to increase the usage of cheese, and boasts with its successes:

And unlike with its advertising campaigns, Dairy Management and the Agriculture Department could point to specific results with these projects. The “Summer of Cheese” promotion it developed with Pizza Hut in 2002 generated the use of 102 million additional pounds of cheese, the department reported to Congress.

Sad for health. Sad for animals. Sad for science. Sad for democracy.

Wir müssen die Art ändern, wie wir darüber reden. Bisher haben wir so darüber geredet, dass es nur eine Alternative zu geben schien: Man darf kein Fleisch mehr essen. Aber es gibt eine Menge Menschen, die sich nicht vorstellen können, Vegetarier zu werden. Und ich verstehe das. Zum Beispiel weiß ich, dass es unendlich viele hungrige Kinder auf der Welt gibt, denen man mit Spenden helfen könnte; trotzdem kaufe ich weiter überflüssige Konsumgüter, statt zu spenden. Das ist zwar scheinheilig – aber scheinheilig zu sein ist eben auch menschlich. Die Frage ist: Können wir es besser machen als bisher?

Das schmerzt, aber ich sehe es auch so: Die absolute moralische Reinheit gibt es einfach nicht. Und ich glaube, es ist einer der größten Gefahren des Veganismus, zu denken, man könne doch irgendwie leben, ohne Leid zu verursachen, und sei es auf eine recht passive und indirekte Weise. Ungefähr so, als käme jemand auf die Idee, man müsse die Bergpredigt einfach wörtlich leben, und alles sei gut.

Und dann finde ich sehr gut, wie er einerseits auf pragmatische Lösungen für die aktuell drängende Situation pocht, und andererseits für einen grundlegenden philosophischen Diskurs offen bleibt.

Ob wir es grundsätzlich in Ordnung finden, Fleisch zu essen, ist eine beinah hypothetische Frage angesichts der Tatsache, dass 99 Prozent unseres Fleisches aus Massentierhaltung stammen, in der die Tiere auf eine Weise dahinvegetieren, die viele von uns verwerflich finden. Wenn Sie mich also fragen, ob ich das Töten von Tieren falsch oder richtig finde, wüsste ich nicht mal genau, was antworten. Was ich aber genau weiß, ist, dass es falsch ist, was wir derzeit machen.

Auch seine Aussagen zum Thema Veganismus finde ich erstaunlich ehrlich:

ZEIT: Wenn es Ihnen nicht um die grundsätzliche Frage des Tiertötens geht, sondern um die Massentierhaltung, warum plädiert Ihr Buch dann nur für Vegetarismus und nicht gleich für Veganismus? Das tierquälerische System der Aufzucht, Haltung und Schlachtung ist schließlich dasselbe, ob für Fleisch, Eier oder Milch.

Foer: Es ist dasselbe. Allerdings war ich bei Beginn meiner Arbeit mit vielen Themen wie Milchwirtschaft und Legehennenhaltung nicht vertraut; ich kam eigentlich erst dahin, als ich mich schon mitten im Buch befand, und dann hätte ich ein ganz neues Feld aufmachen müssen. Das wäre ja fast ein zweites Buch.

Zum Abschluss ein kleiner Dialog, den ich auch schon oft mit Fleischessern hatte. Und selbst etwas ganz ähnliches zu sagen pflege:

Ein Freund von mir hat gesagt, ich würde ja gern mit dem Fleischessen aufhören, aber wenn meine Großmutter mich einlädt, gibt es immer Roastbeef, das esse ich so gern. Ich hab ihm gesagt: Dann iss das Roastbeef! Aber iss kein Fleisch mehr in Restaurants oder bei McDonald’s. Darauf antworten manche: Aber das ist doch scheinheilig. – Okay, dann sei eben scheinheilig! Das Ziel ist ja nicht, ethisch rein zu sein, sondern die Welt besser zu machen.

Ermutigend und traurig zugleich.

PS: Wer wie ich nicht das ganze Buch lesen möchte, dem sei ein NYTimes-Magazin-Artikel ans Herz gelegt, den man glaube ich durchaus als Zusammenfassung verstehen kann.

Ein NYTimes Op-Ed vom März beschäftigt sich mit Antibiotika-resistenten Bakterienstämmen. Zum einen ist das mal wieder eine Gesundheitsbedrohung, die all die gehypten Erreger in den Schatten stellt — z.B. sterben anscheinend jährlich 18.000 Amerikaner an MRSA, mehr als an AIDS.

Zur Entstehung des Problems tragen Ärzte bei, die zu leichtfertig Antibiotika verschreiben. Aber vor allem die Massentierhaltung:

A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists found that in the United States, 70 percent of antibiotics are used to feed healthy livestock, with 14 percent more used to treat sick livestock. Only about 16 percent are used to treat humans and their pets, the study found.

Die resistenten Erreger an Tieren stehen in regem Gentausch mit für Menschen gefährlichen Mikroben. Es wäre natürlich möglich, mindestens der präventiven Verwendung von Antibiotika in der Tierhaltung politisch einen Riegel vorzuschieben. Ein entsprechender Vorstoß in Amerika ist aber an den Lobbyisten gescheitert, und nicht mal die Obama-Regierung traut sich ran.

Zum Abschluss kann ich mir ein weiteres Zitat nicht verkneifen, weil es so schön weltuntergangsmäßig klingt:

“We are seeing infections caused by Acinetobacter and special bacteria called KPC Klebsiella that are literally resistant to every antibiotic that is F.D.A. approved,” Dr. Spellberg said. “These are untreatable infections. This is the first time since 1936, the year that sulfa hit the market in the U.S., that we have had this problem.”

The Infectious Diseases Society of America, an organization of doctors and scientists, has been bellowing alarms. It fears that we could slip back to a world in which we’re defenseless against bacterial diseases.

Da geht sie hin, die Illusion von einer sicheren Welt.

Das Erfreuliche ist dabei: Die radikale (vegane) Protestbewegung schafft es auf relativ positive Weise in die Presse. Und es gibt starke Gegenbewegungen auch aus der Mitte der lokalen Bürgerschaft. Ungünstige Vernetzungen in der Politik werden deutlich — der Mann der niedersächsischen Landwirtschaftsministerin besitzt Deutschlands zweitgrößte Putenbrüterei.

Alles in allem zeigt das für mich einen positiven Trend in Deutschland an. Und mindestens in Bezug auf Hühnerfleisch sieht es im internationalen Vergleich auch schon gut aus: 10,7 Kilo wurden 2009 im Durchschnitt verzehrt, der EU-Schnitt sind 17,1, in Brasilien und den USA (?!) sind es über 40 Kilo… Es gibt viel zu tun, aber es ist auch schon viel getan.

PS: Die subversive Seite der Berichterstattung kann man auf Blogsport verfolgen

Jetzt tritt dazu vielleicht noch Vitamin D, wie die NYTimes berichtet — und zwar unabhängig von der Ernährungsweise:

Most people in the modern world have lifestyles that prevent them from acquiring the levels of vitamin D that evolution intended us to have. The sun’s ultraviolet-B rays absorbed through the skin are the body’s main source of this nutrient. Early humans evolved near the equator, where sun exposure is intense year round, and minimally clothed people spent most of the day outdoors.

In Nahrungsmitteln ist das Vitamin anscheinend praktisch nicht zu finden. Und ein Mangel wird mit Krebs, Kardiovaskulären Erkrankungen und Diabetes in Verbindung gebracht:

Such low levels could account for the high incidence of several chronic diseases in this country, Dr. Holick maintains. For example, he said, in the Northeast, where sun exposure is reduced and vitamin D levels consequently are lower, cancer rates are higher than in the South. Likewise, rates of high blood pressure, heart disease, and prostate cancer are higher among dark-skinned Americans than among whites.

The rising incidence of Type 1 diabetes may be due, in part, to the current practice of protecting the young from sun exposure. When newborn infants in Finland were given 2,000 international units a day, Type 1 diabetes fell by 88 percent, Dr. Holick said.

Beruhigend, dass das Vitamin in meinen Veganer-Tabletten auch schon drin ist. Und zeigt mal wieder, wie schön etwas sein kann, das in unserer Welt selten geworden ist: Sich für wichtige Entscheidungen auf einen Experten zu verlassen, und nicht über alles selbst Bescheid wissen zu müssen.

Es gibt ausgefeilte Immunreaktionen bis hin zu Lockstoffen, die die Fressfeinde der eigenen Fressfeinde herbeilocken. Es gibt freundliche und feindselige Interaktion mit anderen Pflanzen der Umgebung, eigener und anderer Spezies. Und alles passiert sehr schnell — was bei Pflanzen heißt: teilweise in unter einer halben Stunde. Faszinierend.

Hier mal ein Vorschlag zum Einstieg: Vegane Buletten …

Der erste interessante Punkt ist der Unterschied zwischen dem Altern selbst und Krankheiten, die im Alter zunehmen:

Instead, Calerie is investigating how (and if) a spartan diet affects the aging process and its associated diseases. To the Calerie researchers, these are quite distinct. The aging process, which researchers sometimes call “primary” or “intrinsic” aging, refers to the damage that ordinarily accumulates in our cells as we grow older, a natural condition that seems to have limited the maximal lifespan of humans to 120 years. Diseases that accompany the aging process — often called “secondary aging” — are those afflictions increasingly prevalent in the elderly, like cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Überraschend auch, dass körperliche Betätigung trotz aller unbestrittenen gesundheitsförderlichen Eigenschaften nicht so starke Effekte zu haben scheint wie die Kalorienreduktion:

In a study on rats, he compared animals that were lean because of exercise with those that were equally lean from calorie restriction. “Both had an increase in average life span,” Fontana said, but only calorie restriction was able to slow down aging and increase maximal life span. That suggested that “leanness” was not in and of itself determining the rate of aging. “Speaking of humans,” Fontana added, “if you are lean because you are exercising, of course you are doing good, because you’re preventing types of diabetes, some kinds of cardiovascular disease and maybe some types of cancers. But the data suggest that calorie restriction is more powerful. And the people on C.R. are more powerfully protected from diseases than the exercisers.”

Das macht Sinn vor dem Hintergrund der (natürlich evolutionären) Erklärungsansätze, die auch klar machen, warum man tatsächlich in den untergewichtigen Bereich gehen muss, um die vollen Vorteile zu erfahren:

The effects of calorie restriction may simply be an evolutionary legacy, “a metabolic, hormonal and molecular adaptation” to a world of sparse resources, as Luigi Fontana, one doctor in charge of the Washington University trial who also holds a position at the National Institute of Health in Italy, described it to me. By slowing aging and increasing resistance to disease during periods of food scarcity, the adaptive responses to fewer calories increased the odds that animals and humans that lived short lives might survive until they could reproduce. In laboratory settings, calorie restriction seems to “work” — that is, it seems to influence primary and secondary aging — when the diet of an animal of normal weight is curtailed by a significant percentage. The degree of calorie restriction can’t exceed 50 percent, which is when laboratory animals begin to die. Until that point, however, the more severe the calorie-restriction regimen, the greater the health benefit — a lifespan 50 percent again as long in studies on mice and rats. These results might not apply to the overweight. As Fontana told me, moving a heavyset person’s body-mass index from, say, 35 to 29 might increase his longevity by reducing the risk for diseases like diabetes. Yet it is not “triggering the anti-aging pathways” that have been observed at the cellular and molecular levels in animals of normal weight when placed on a calorie-restricted diet.

Zusammen mit weniger kontrollierten Beobachtungen an Mitgliedern von Niedrig-Kalorien-Vereinen (was es alles gibt!) und über längere Zeiträume ähnliche Ergebnisse bringen ist das in ziemlich starker Punkt. Bleibt die Frage, wie praktikabel das alles ist. Und auch hier eine Überraschung: Mehr als gedacht. Nicht einmal die beteiligten Forscher selbst erwarten, dass viele der Versuchsteilnehmer die reduzierte Diät weitermachen. Diesen scheint es aber mehrheitlich sehr gut zu gefallen:

As it happened, I ran into several participants in St. Louis who were in the homestretch. None planned on an ice-cream binge. Instead, they told me, they would continue with their diets while looking forward to estimating, rather than counting, their calories. “I’ll probably do that for a week or two,” Josh McMichael told me. About a month later, in late September, I sent McMichael a note to see how he was faring. He gained eight pounds in the weeks after finishing, he said, but later shed most of that weight. “I tried the new massive burgers from Burger King,” he said. “Twice. Wasn’t worth the side effects.”

Then he added: “I think I’ve gotten over things like that. For the most part.”

Da überrascht es mich wenig, dass die Zusammenstellung der Nahrung, die eine solche Reduktion der Kalorien bei gleichzeitigem Wohlbefinden möglich macht, ziemlich genau das ist, was ich ohnehin gerne esse:

Subjects willing to re-engineer their eating habits appear to have an easier time on the diet. When I asked Susan Roberts, who runs the Tufts study, if there was a danger in Americans trying calorie restriction on their own, without a dedicated team of medical experts offering advice, she suggested that there are built-in safety mechanisms. Roberts said she didn’t think anyone would be successful by reducing portion size. “If you don’t change your diet to a high-satiety diet, you will be hungry, and you will fail,” she told me. A high-satiety diet, she said, was bound to be a healthful diet with a lot of vegetables, fruits and insoluble fiber — the kind found in some breakfast cereals, like Fiber One — that her research indicates has a unique effect in helping calorie-restriction subjects feel fuller, probably because they activate certain receptors in the lower intestine.

Eating fatty food appears to take an almost immediate toll on both short-term memory and exercise performance, according to new research on rats and people.

Other studies have suggested that long-term consumption of a high-fat diet is associated with weight gain, heart disease and declines in cognitive function. But the new research shows how indulging in fatty foods over the course of a few days can affect the brain and body long before the extra pounds show up.

Ratten verschlechtern sich in bereits gelernten Aufgaben, die Gedächtnisleistung erfordern, innerhalb weniger Tage, und auch die körperliche Leistungsfähigkeit geht um ein Drittel (!) zurück.

“We expected to see changes, but maybe not so dramatic and not in such a short space of time,’’ said Andrew Murray, the study’s lead author and a lecturer in physiology at Cambridge University in Britain. “It was really striking how quickly these effects happened.’’

Although the human data aren’t yet published, the researchers have also performed similar studies of high-fat diets in healthy young men who then performed exercise and cognitive tests. Dr. Murray said he is still reviewing the data, but the short-term effect of a fatty diet on humans appears to be similar to that found in the rat studies.

Ein weiterer Grund, den Anteil an Pflanzen in der Nahrung zu erhöhen … Vermutlich war selbst die fettreichste Ernährung unserer evolutionären Vorfahren weit entfernt vom durchschnittlichen zeitgenössischen Speiseplan.

Die Gründe für die starken und schnellen Effekte sind noch spekulativ:

It’s not clear why fatty foods would cause a short-term decline in cognitive function. One theory is that a high-fat diet can trigger insulin resistance, which means the body becomes less efficient at using the glucose, or blood sugar, so important to brain function.

Fatty foods appear to have a short-term effect on exercise performance because the body reacts to high fat content in the blood by releasing certain proteins that essentially make the metabolism less efficient. “It’s thought to be a protective mechanism to get rid of excess fat,’’ Dr. Murray said. “But it was making muscles less efficient at using oxygen and fuel to make the energy needed to run.’’