Tag: nutrition

Raw Milk Advocates Petition Small Farmers

For decades, a small number of people have believed milk is more nutritious if it’s not pasteurized. Modern science doesn’t support that claim. And the idea of milk going right from the cow to the breakfast bowl is unthinkable for most doctors and food safety experts. But advocates are finding a new audience for their message: Small farmers trying to compete against large dairy companies. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Peter Payette reports:

Transcript

For decades a small number of people have believed milk is more nutritious if it’s
not pasteurized. Modern science doesn’t support that claim. And the idea of milk
going right from the cow to the breakfast bowl is unthinkable for most doctors and
food safety experts. But advocates are finding a new audience for their message:
Small farmers trying to compete against large dairy companies. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Peter Payette reports:


A thick white blanket of fresh snow covers Chris Halpin’s small farm in northern
Michigan. All his goats are in the barn this morning munching on hay.


“These girls in here are all in here with a billy goat and they’re all milking
right now and they’re waiting to get bred. That’s the billy there.”


Halpin hasn’t sold much milk, even though he’s been raising goats for a number of
years. He says small farmers must cut out the middleman to make a living and
he’s exploring options to sell milk products without going through a big dairy
company.


Pasteurization equipment is too expensive for his small farm. So, for the last two
years he’s sold un-pasteurized milk to a small number of people.


“The demand for raw milk is huge. Pasteurized milk is a dead product. It’s
dead. It’s heated up to temperatures that kills not only any the bacteria that
could be in the milk but it kills all the enzymes in the milk and so there’s nothing
in there that could promote the body to digest the milk.”


It’s not legal to sell the raw milk in Michigan. A few other Midwest states and
Canada also ban such sales. Health officials say that raw milk can carry food-
borne illnesses. But Halpin says his animals are clean and healthy and he has no
concerns about the safety of the milk.


“That’s not my concern at all. We have five children and my wife makes yogurt
and cheese and we drink raw milk and I have no concerns at all and I don’t have
no concerns for my own family. If I guy has concerns it seems like it’d be for his
own family.”


Food regulators say the dangers of raw milk are well documented. In 2001, for
example, an outbreak of a bacterial infection in Wisconsin sickened 19 people.
The state says 17 of them reported drinking raw milk.


And raw milk advocates have not been able to convince regulators that raw milk
has any nutritional benefit over pasteurized milk, as is often claimed.


The legislative liaison for the Michigan Department of Agriculture, Brad Deacon,
says opponents of the pasteurization requirement weren’t persuasive when his state
updated its dairy laws in 2001.


“There haven’t been any credible studies that we’ve been able to find. Our minds
are not closed on the matter. But we’ve been yet to be given any credible studies
that pasteurized milk has fewer nutrients than unpasteurized milk.”


Raw milk advocates point to older studies, mostly done in the first half of the
twentieth century. Those studies did suggest health benefits from drinking raw
milk.


And they have anecdotal stories of people overcoming health problems by
switching to a diet that includes raw dairy.


They say the scientific community’s view is entrenched and influenced by the
interests of big agribusiness and big dairies.


But with modern science against them, raw milk activists are taking their message
directly to farmers.


And they’re finding receptive and occasionally large audiences.


The President of the Weston A. Price Foundation — the national group leading the
campaign for raw milk — was recently the keynote speaker at a small farm
conference in the Midwest that attracted 600 people.


Sally Fallon told the farmers they’re up against corporations that want squeeze the
little guy out.


“For this to happen, she says the big companies must make sure all food goes
through the corporations on its way from the farm to the table.”


“The farmer who adds value by farming organically by making cheese or butter
or by simply selling directly to the consumer, he is the enemy to this system and a
whole battery of laws, health laws, licensing laws, even environmental laws, is
used against us. We need to get rid of some of these laws.”


Fallon says raw dairy products are good for the consumer and the bottom line of
the farm.


For instance, she says raw butter made from cows free roaming on fertile pasture
is “the number one health food in America.”


The farmer making this butter should get at least five dollars a pound for this
product. In Washington D.C., we’re getting ten dollars a pound for the beautiful
Amish butter. Now that kind of income will pay for lots of improvements on the
farm.”


But the plight of small farmers doesn’t change the facts, says Dr. Stephen Barrett,
a retired psychiatrist and journalist who operates the website quackwatch.org.
Barrett says small businesses are having trouble everywhere.


“One have to ask rather cynically, if a company isn’t viable in the marketplace,
they either better do something or they’re going to perish, and if doing something
means putting the public at risk, that’s not good.”


Good or not, activists will continue to push for what they see as a fundamental
right to drink and sell milk without interference from the government.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Peter Payette.

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Transgenic Soybean to Reduce Trans-Fats?

Starting in 2006, the government will require nutrition labels on food to also list trans-fats. That’s pushing companies to look at changing how they grow some crops. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Starting in 2006, the government will require nutrition labels on food to also list trans-fats.
That’s pushing companies to look at changing how they grow some crops. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:


Products containing hydrogenated soybean oil are high in trans-fats. So, Monsanto is designing a
new lower-fat, healthier soybean. Using conventional plant breeding, Monsanto will first do two
thing. One: reduce trans-fats and two: increase healthy monounsaturated fats. Shannon
Troughton is a spokesperson for Monsanto. She says a final step requires genetically altering the
soybean.


“The third phase will take biotechnology techniques and make it completely free or as free as
possilbe of saturated fats.”


Except for a more nutritious rice given to the developing world for free, this is the first time a
grain has been genetically modified for reasons other than economic gain for farmers. Monsanto
indicates the new soy oil will be in products on the grocers’ shelves in about eight years if it’s
approved by government regulators.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.

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School Connects Kids to Healthy Eating

  • Lynn Beard prepares free fruit dishes for hungry high school students. It's part of a government program to bring nutrition to schools. Photo by Rebecca Williams.

American kids are overweight. Nutritionists say one major reason is that kids are eating too much junk food, and not enough fresh produce. A government pilot program is trying to get kids to eat more locally-grown fruits and vegetables in school by giving them out for free. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams visited a school where the experiment is underway:

Transcript

American kids are overweight. Nutritionists say one major reason
is that kids are eating too much junk food, and not enough fresh
produce. A government pilot program is trying to get kids
to eat more locally-grown fruits and vegetables in school by giving them out
for free. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams
visited a school where the experiment is underway:


It’s 9 am and the halls are quiet at Everett High School, in Lansing,
Michigan. Parent volunteers are setting out bowls of bright
pink grapefruit segments on stands in the hallway.
They’re working quickly, getting ready for 1500 hungry teenagers.


(bell rings, noisy chatter swells, sneakers squeaking)


Kids slow down when they pass the fruit stand. A few kids take a bowl…
but not that many.


“Ain’t nobody want no grapefruit?”


(kids chatting)


“They’re hesitant to try it because it’s new, they’ve never tasted grapefruit
before.”


(final bell ringing under)


Lynn Beard is energetic. When she’s not handing out
fruit, she’s teaching nutrition here at the school.
As much as she talks to kids about their choices, even she can’t predict
what they’ll eat.


The hall empties. Lynn Beard sees a few stragglers.


“Sir, have you ever had grapefruit, honey, before at home? Yes,
okay.”


She pulls Brandon Washington over to the fruit stand…


“He was going to try it, and he put it back down because someone said it
was sour.” B.W. :”I was going to try it.”
“Honest reaction?”
“Honest reaction? Tastes like it needs some sugar in it.”


Even though he’s not a grapefruit fan, Washington says he likes having
the fruit and veggies here.


“Now that they got them at school, I eat it more. And that’s good,
too, because nutrition values, good for your soul, you live longer, right?”


Washington says, before he could get free fruit and vegetables during the day,
he felt hungry between meals. Many of his classmates skipped breakfast.


Lynn Beard worries about her students’ eating habits.


“English, math, social studies, aren’t changing the obesity rate. Early
onset osteoporosis, we’re seeing a huge jump in. Type two diabetes in children.
What are we doing to educate our kids on how to change? Isn’t that an effective
place to use taxpayers’ dollars?”


That’s one of the questions behind the Fruit and Vegetable Pilot.
It’s a year-long experiment, funded by 6 million dollars from the 2002 Farm
Bill.


107 schools in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa and New Mexico were
chosen. It’s a mix of schools: large and small, rural and urban.
The hope is that kids will learn to like fruits and veggies… and be
cultivated into new consumers.


Agriculture promoters hope one of the spin-offs will be a new market for
local farmers. With few exceptions, the pilot program requires that
schools buy only American produce, and local produce if
they can. Fourteen of the pilot schools buy directly from farmers.


Everett High School gave kids some locally grown produce. But Lynn Beard
says the kids still don’t know much about the food that grows where they live.


“Kids don’t understand seasonal fruits, they were so upset we weren’t
getting watermelon in January. ”


And Beard says just getting local produce at all was difficult.
Schools such as Everett High School buy from national food service
companies. The companies often sell these Michigan schools
Washington apples.


Marion Kalb directs the National Farm to School Program. It’s
part of a non-profit group that works to connect farms
and schools. Kalb says food service companies don’t make a
special effort to buy from local farms.
But she thinks schools can influence their suppliers.


“If there’s instruction on the school side to say, you know we’d like
to know seasonally what’s available locally, then that gives incentive
to the distributor to try and make buying from regional or local farmers a
priority.”


And it makes sense to most people to sell apples nearby rather than shipping
them miles away.


(birds twittering in open air market, people talking about flowers)


In a farmer’s market full of flowers, Dwight Carpenter is one
of the few farmers selling produce this early in the year. That’s because
he grows vegetables in a greenhouse.


He sells at two farmer’s markets and a store on his land. He says it’s enough to survive,
but he’d like to expand to places such as local schools.


“It’s kind of a difficult way to make a living, and if better markets were
established, such as schools and hospitals, and that kind of thing,
grocery stores, and if that were turned around, that would help the farmer too,
to be able to hang onto whatever he’s got, rather than to have to sell it off to subdivisions
or whatever.”


(birds out)


(sound up: cafeteria, “Let me know how you like the spicy chicken sandwich.
It’s new.” cash register beeping)


Although the kids at Everett High School are getting used to eating more
produce from the free program, you won’t find many fruits and vegetables
for sale at the cafeteria. That’s because the cafeteria competes with nearby fast food
restaurants.


You also won’t find many nutritious snacks in the vending machines. The school needs
the revenue it gets from the candy bars and chips.


Kids are still lining up at the soda machine today. But some students
think the fruit and veggie program is slowly changing their eating
habits. Wynton Harris is a sophomore.


“Last year everyone was eating junk and this year they cut down a lot. I
can tell, because I’m seeing less people at the machines, and more
people taking fruit. And I said, wow.”


And Everett High School’s nutrition teacher, Lynn Beard, has a vision: vending
machines that offer fresh produce instead of potato chips.


“If there’s nothing free, I think we’d have a number of kids who, instead of buying
a dollar pop, would buy a dollar pear.”


The free fruit and vegetable program ends with the school year. But some 70 schools
in the U-S buy from their local farmers even without special federal funding.
Even so, Lynn Beard doubts her school could afford to keep this program going
without federal money.


“I think next year I’m not going to want to be around here without this
grant, cause there’s going to be so many complaints. Where’s our fruit? Why
can’t we get some fruit? I’m dreading next year. I’m just going to have to keep a smile on
my face and say, “Talk to your government.”


But government support for the program is uncertain.


Congress will debate the future of the fruit and vegetable program. And whether
government should be marketing fruits and vegetables in the schools… and further
subsiding the farmers who grow them.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Farming in Age of Global Warming

For years, scientists have been studying what will happen to our environment in the age of global warming. A recently released report draws some conclusions about what may happen in the farm fields. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Bill Cohen reports:

Transcript

For years, scientists have been studying what will happen to
our environment in the age of global warming. A recently
released report draws some conclusions about what may
happen in the farm fields. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Bill Cohen reports:


More carbon dioxide in the air will bring larger crop yields, says
plant ecologist Peter Curtis of Ohio State University. He and other
OSU scientists have just finished reviewing 159 studies from the past
20 years on global warming. Their conclusion – by the end of this
century, some plants will produce more grain.


“Corn, for example, about 5%, wheat we’re lookin’ at about 15%, barley
a little bit more – maybe 18%, soybeans at around 20%, and then rice
all the way up around 40%.”


More food, says Curtis, but it might be less nutritious. That’s the
downside his study is predicting if global warming continues – the
crops will contain less nitrogen and that may mean less protein for the
humans, cows, and pigs that eat it.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Bill Cohen in Columbus.

Creating Healthier Red Meat

While red meat has taken a beating in recent years from the health industry, a number of studies now indicate that it’s also possible for even red meat to have some health benefits. Scientists and farmers have found ways to put certain important fatty acids in chicken and pig diets. Now chicken, pork, and even eggs can have lower than average cholesterol. An organic farmer from Northern Illinois is participating in a study that’s trying to get beef to catch up to its healthier counterparts. If he succeeds, farmers across the Great Lakes might start varying their grain crops. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Simone Orendain reports:

Transcript

While red meat has taken a beating in recent years from the health industry, a number of studies now indicate that it’s also possible for even red meat to have some health benefits. Scientists and farmers have found ways to put certain important fatty acids in chicken and pig diets. Now chicken, pork and even eggs can have lower than average cholesterol. An organic farmer from Northern Illinois is participating in a study that’s trying to get beef to catch up to its healthier counterparts. If he succeeds, farmers across the Great Lakes might start varying their grain crops. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Simone Orendain reports:

It’s feeding time on this sunny winter morning at Joel Rissman’s organic farm. Sixty head of cattle converge on the troughs that line the fence of their Northern Illinois cattle pen. The young cattle bob their heads in and out of the troughs that hold a mixture of pungent, sour hay and grain. They’re eating silage mixed with haylage.

“Think of sauerkraut, it’s along the same lines of sauerkraut.”

The dull yellow mixture of alfalfa hay and silage is made up of sorghum, cowpeas and soybeans that are mixed in the grain silo with an inoculant. The inoculant causes the silage to ferment quickly so it maintains its nutritional value. It raises the lactic acid content of the silage, making it easier for cattle to digest the food.

This silage-haylage mixture has a little extra in it. It has a pound of flax seed for each head of cattle.

Rissman says the flax seed will make the beef healthier than non-flax fed cattle. And it will taste better.

“What I’m striving for and my theory is that we can get the taste and flavor of a grain fed with the low cholesterol of a grass fed.”

Rissman is one of 10 cattle producers taking part in a study conducted by the Animal Sciences Department of Iowa State University. Researchers and farmers are looking at ways to raise healthy cholesterol levels in beef.

Grass-fed cattle produce healthy cholesterol called conjugated linolaic acid or CLA. The CLA is made up of trans-fatty acids. ISU Professor Allen Trenkle says increasing CLA in lab animals’ diets has protected them against plaque build up of cholesterol in arteries and certain forms of cancer.

But Trenkle, a lead researcher in the beef study, says consumers just don’t seem to like the taste of beef from grass-fed cattle.

“It’s just most of the beef that we have that’s been fed grain is bland. But that’s the taste that we’ve developed that’s what we want. They you introduce a different additional flavor and we say we don’t like that.”

Rissman explains his cattle were raised in a pasture from birth. He says by feeding them flax in the silage-haylage mix, he’s hoping to maintain the level of CLA that they produced when they fed on pasture. The cattle now feed exclusively on silage and haylage. Trenkle says flax seed has fatty acids that help increase CLA, but scientists are still learning why.

And Trenkle says there is a snag to the grain-fed experimentation:

“I would anticipate that it will be improved somewhat over conventionally fat animals, but the concentration of these fatty acids in beef’s very, very low. So feeding the flax may double it or increase it three or four times, but the concentration will still be low compared with the original oil in the flax seed.”

Trenkle says it will take a while to see if the experiment works. He says beef alone might not have a high enough CLA content to benefit consumers. Trenkle says it would have to be combined with a high CLA diet.

“I think just time alone will tell us whether the consumer is willing, how much the consumer is willing to pay for that. Will they want that product over the beef that has less CLA in it? We don’t know the answer to that question yet. In that sense, these farmers are pioneers.”

Rissman says he hopes it will work because he wants flax seed to be a prominent, viable grain again.

“Really the whole flax idea came from me wanting to find other grains. One of the big problems is, if you take food grade soybeans away from the organic farmers, probably 70 percent of those farmers would fail for lack of diversification, myself included. I wanted to find a way to diversify our crops.”

Trendle’s lab has its first batch of meat samples from grass-fed cattle. The team will begin analyzing the meat this month. Rissman says his cattle will be ready for sampling next year.

For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Simone Orendain.

Can Agriculture Keep Up?

As of this month (Oct.), there are six billion people on the planet and
the population will keep rising. It’s predicted the population will hit
eight-and-half billion by the year 2025. But some experts say the demand
for food will rise even faster. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Lester Graham reports… feeding the world will be one of the biggest
challenges of the coming century:

Nature’s Complete Food Source

Just in case you’re ever stranded in the wilderness, it’s good to know
how to forage for food. But many people are learning that you don’t
have to be in dire circumstances—nor do you even have to leave home—to
go scouting out a free meal. In fact, one of nature’s most complete
food sources may be right underfoot. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Wendy Nelson reports:

We Are What We Eat

The Food and Drug Administration has recently re-opened the issue of
labeling foods that have been irradiated. As The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Suzanne Elston points out, by focusing the debate on
labeling, were ignoring a much bigger issue:

New Study Disputes Mercury Risk

A new study from the University of Rochester has concluded that eatingocean fish with low levels of mercury doesn’t pose any serious healthrisks. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham has more:

Guide Educates Consumers on Food Additives

Americans are eating more and more processed foods. And that means that food labels are getting longer, as manufacturers add new ingredients to their products. But labels may not tell consumers much about those additives or how much the food was processed. To help educate themselves, consumers can now turn to a new guide to food ingredients. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Steve Frenkel has more: