Mindfulness Mondays 26: Trials & Tribulations
November 23, 2009 by dr. lam · 5 Comments
Many times we are very much fearful of the future trials and tribulations or we are held in the grip of remorse and regret about our previous trials and tribulations. I oftentimes work with my patients who are ravaged more in their heart than on their faces with previous cosmetic surgery work. Yes, truly sometimes the work is obviously unfortunate that the individual looks quite distorted and unnatural. However, more often than not, the scar that is left is more of an emotional one than anything else. These patients continue to live in their past and fret about what they can do about their future.
Instead of seeing the trials and tribulations through which you have gone as a terrible experience that hurt you, see it as one of the best things that could have happened so that you can grow as a person in whatever capacity, professional and/or personal. I remember speaking with a friend of mine who said that “only the trials and tribulations you experience in life can make you a better person.” I would agree in many respects. Without them, we live life placidly on the surface and never become “broken open” as my previous blog series talked about. We don’t need to break down or break open to grow, but we can relinquish the past and allow ourselves to be nurtured from it. This week see your life’s challenges as beautiful instruments toward your own personal self growth, a growth that you can then spill forward to help those around you.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 4 of 10: CAFOs
November 20, 2009 by dr. lam · 5 Comments
Where does all that cheap surplus corn go? Well, as mentioned, it goes to feed our livestock. 60% of the cheap corn is used to feed the 100 million heads of cattle that we have in America. In fact, in the past farmers would grow their own feed corn to be fed to their steer. Today, farmers can’t compete against CAFOs, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, that corral steer among other animals into tightly packed feeding arrangements to grow fat on cheap corn. Subsidized feedlot corn sold to CAFOs is so cheap that the corn is actually sold to the CAFOs at less than it costs them to make it. Accordingly, farmers are out of business raising cattle. They can’t afford it.
In the old days, farmers would feed the cattle the waste grain and the cattle would fertilize the land with their waste, creating a closed ecologic loop. Today, CAFOS herd the steer stacked almost on top of each other creating indescribable quantities of their own toxic waste that has no exit strategy. The waste piles up, damaging the environment, the soil, the water supply, and the animals. Simply put, the waste just keeps piling up and wreaking havoc everywhere. Not to mention the terrible conditions that these animals are mired in during their lifetime.
These CAFOs and the cheap corn that has fed the CAFOs have permitted meat to be cheaper than ever. What in the past was a rare delicacy can now be afforded by all and even eaten 3 times a day at a pittance. Chickens still cost less than cattle because they require much less feed per pound of flesh. The USDA rewards cattle for their marbling, a direct result of the ingested corn. Of course, the saturated fat and the high omega 6 content in corn-fed beef may take the heavily marketed concept of “corn fed” as being a good thing to be revealed for its truly negative impact. The hunter-gatherers that live today have very little heart disease despite subsisting on a high beef diet because their beef is almost all grass fed. As you may know, all Argentinian cattle are raised on pure grass. We just have too much cheap corn that we have to get rid of. Might as well fatten the cows so that we can get even fatter.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 3 of 10: The Story of Fritz Haber
November 19, 2009 by dr. lam · 1 Comment
Who? Fritz Haber won the 1920 Nobel Prize and without his invention of nitrogen-impregnated fertilizer we would not have modern agriculture as we know it. Further without his fertilizer system, we would not be able to feed the world the way we currently do, and it is estimated that 2 out of 5 people on this planet would not be around without Haber’s invention.
Why have we not heard of Haber? Most likely because Haber had a very ignominious life that is not particular cause for celebration. Haber’s invention of bonding nitrogen to the soil was used during World War I on behalf of Germany’s war effort when nitrates used for explosives were both in short supply and cut off by the British. Haber’s synthetic nitrates helped Germany prolong the war campaign, and Haber served relentlessly on behalf of his motherland, even creating the infamous Zyklon B gas that would later be used by Hitler in the concentration camps. His wife, a fellow chemist, sickened by her husband’s promotion of the war effort, killed herself with her husband’s army pistol. In the 1930s, Haber, a German Jew, who later converted to Christianity, was compelled to flee his native land with the rise of the Third Reich and died a broken man in an obscure Basel hotel in 1934.
Although Haber’s process defines the modern fertilization process that has literally supported our population boom, Pollan calls what we have gained from his knowledge a true “Faustian bargain.” In order to get the nitrogen and hydrogen to meld with the soil, we need a ton of non-renewable fossil fuel to accomplish that end, as compared with the free energy of nitrogen that certain bacteria living at the base of legumes would otherwise create in small quantities. In addition, fertilizers can obviously pose health risks and further pollute the land and the water supply when there is spillage and oversupply of it. In short, fertilizers support our human growth and appeal to our big-scale industry of farming but has darker, untoward consequences of which we must also be cognizant.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 2 of 10: We are Corn
November 18, 2009 by dr. lam · 12 Comments
If we are what we eat, then we are corn, spoonfuls, gallons, and tonnage of corn. When the Europeans came over to settle North America, they considered themselves wheat people, as a more glorified expression of their stock; juxtaposed against the Native American folk and Mexicans who were truly corn people. Even today, many Americans may believe that they are of wheat origin, except of course our proudly corn-fed Midwesterners who hail from a different breed. However, that is simply not true anymore. We are corn.
Corn expressess a very strong DNA footprint of carbon 13 given its unique molecular structure that carries 4 carbon atoms compared with many legumes that only have 3 atoms. We can actually scan a person’s hair and other body parts to see how much we are made of what. Mexicans today who consume corn but not in the radically superabundant quantities that we do actually have much less carbon-13 corn in their systems than we do. We are filled with corn. High-fructose corn syrup colors our daily lives as opposed to the pure cane sugar that the Mexicans still heavily rely on. Further, their meat still oftentimes graze on grass, whereas our cattle, chicken, lamb, and even fish eat corn. So we are not only what we eat but we are what we eat eats and again that is corn.
The story starts in Iowa, the epicenter of corn manufacturing. How did we get to where we are? First, corn provides abundant calories owing to its unique possession of a carbon 4 (C4) structure, alluded to earlier. Second, corn is mass produced in Iowa owing to what George Naylor, a corn farmer featured in the book, calls “the Naylor Curve”. Farmers, believe it or not, actually lose money on every bushel of corn they make. In order to actually feed their families when the price of corn drops, they have to squeeze out more corn in marginal land using more heavily fossil-fuel laden nitrogen fertilizer (we will discuss this tomorrow) to try to make ends meet. Of course, this further drives corn prices lower, which compels farmers to make even more corn. The $5 billion a year in corn subsidies that the Federal Government supplies further supports this non laissez-faire economy.
All this cheap corn continues to be more and more prevalent owing to this vicious cycle, burning up heavy fossil fuels (estimated at 50 gallons of oil per acre of corn and not even a 1:1 calorie substitute of fossil fuel for food), plaguing the water supply with contaminated nitrogen from over-fertilized, marginal lands, and burning up the quality of the land year after year.
Stephanie Smith
Today, a quarter of the foodstuffs in our flourescent-illuminated grocery aisles contain corn. Is corn all that bad for you? First, it is filled with omega 6s as compared with omega 3s that could otherwise enter our food by way of grass-fed animals. Not to mention that animals that graze on grass are not used to eating corn so that their digestive systems are in absolute turmoil, necessitating antibiotics and also escalating the risk of e.coli exposure. It has been found that feeding cattle grass even for the last few days of their lives could reduce the risk of toxic e.coli that grows in the cows’ normally pH neutral stomachs (acidified by corn), by over 80%. However, we live in a world driven mainly by money not by thoughts of how food could actually benefit our environment and our bodies.
As an update to this blog post, here is an article about Stephanie Smith, a dance instructor, who is paralyzed for life at the tender age of 22 from eating contaminated e. coli meat, that I read from the New York Times on October 3, 2009. Here is also a frightening video about how we get our meat that appeared in the New York Times that I also posted on my Twitter account on November 3, 2009.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma Part 1 of 10: Introduction
November 17, 2009 by dr. lam · 2 Comments
For my faithful blog followers, you will recall that I covered Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food that literally changed my life and perhaps prolonged it in both quality and quantity. Since then, I have backtracked to read his seminal work on exploring how food gets to our table entitled The Omnivore’s Dilemma. This prodigious work attempts to explore 3 pathways of how food arrives at our table: the industrial, the organic, and more directly from the forest itself. These pathways as Pollan explores are actually quite a bit more complicated than what we esteem to be our food sources when we append romantic terms like “organic” to what we eat. Is it truly organic? What does that mean anyway? It definitely means higher price. I truly enjoyed his exploring ideas like “beyond organic” that gets closer to the third pathway of food, which is beyond a falsified notion of organic that is mass produced through major chains like Whole Foods. Nothing wrong with Whole Foods but let’s not glorify anything too much simply because we can throw fancy words that we don’t even know what they mean like “organic”.
The omivore’s dilemma as the eponymous title reflects concerns the age old question, “What shall we have for dinner?” The term comes from University of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin who coined the phrase and posed this existential question. Unlike a koala bear who simply eats eucalyptus leaves, we have a diversity in our menu selection that is bewildering and potentially fraught with risk. Pollan exposes the back end of what we are eating because what sits on our dinner table may be more than we bargained for. We should know how did what we got get there and what can we do differently in our lives to be more educated consumers of foodstuff. I think you will enjoy this intellectual and highly pragmatic journey into the world of food, yet again. Bon Appetit!