Ah, the intersection of medicine, nutrition, archaeology and other stuff. Recently published studies from a team at Manchester University have revealed that priests in ancient Egypt suffered heart disease as a result of scoffing the sacred food offered to the gods. But it’ll take more than a pinch of salt to persuade me. OK, so Egyptian toffs ate loads of fatty goose. Clearly they didn’t drink enough wine. Either that, or perhaps they weren’t susceptible to the Gascon Paradox. Probably they just didn’t get enough exercise.
Corn-fed is grass-fed
See if you can spot the problems with this line of reasoning:
- Grass-fed beef is good for you, the environment, and everything.
- Corn (maize, and barley, and wheat) is a grass.
- Corn-fed beef is grass-fed beef.
- Corn-fed beef is good for you, the environment, and everything.
Over at Muck and Mystery Gary does a fine job of unpacking all that logic. Sample:
[T]his would make some sense if they fed the whole corn plant to their cattle rather than just the seeds, and did so while the plant was still alive and vegetative, so that then cattle would get some green with all of that yellow. Better still, grow corn varieties bred for grazing (they exist) that produced more leaf, more nutritious stalks, and less seeds.
There’s more too, on how exaggerated claims from one end of a spectrum call forth exaggerated claims from the other, rather than the nuanced interpretation they really need. Gary talks about backlash. I suspect anyone trying to make sense of the arguments, in beef as in just about anything, would suffer whiplash instead.
Research on healthier food systems
Food Systems and Public Health: Linkages to Achieve Healthier Diets and Healthier Communities is a special edition of the Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition. Scads of research papers and articles, all free to download, at least some of which almost certainly will have a bearing on one of our main interests, the use of agricultural biodiversity to feed into dietary diversity, with all the benefits that can bring.
So many papers, so little time …
Nibbles: Irrigation squared, Saffron, Chickpeas, Coastal trees, Cucurbits
- Wanna grow plants in the Jordanian desert? Invest $250,000.
- Wanna grow plants in the Maharashtra summer? Invest $20.
- There’s a world saffron crocus collection. Who knew? A review is coming.
- Coloured chickpeas contain more antioxidants. Well, yeah.
- SciDev.net says scientists say coastal trees not much good against tsunamis, and may be bad news generally.
- Rhizowen crosses species barriers, develops ficifoliaphilia, poor chap.
Nibbles: Patents, Wheat value, Maize, Perennial crops, Mango killer
- US, Brazil patent gene from Tanzanian sorghum. What could possibly go wrong?
- How much is wheat diversity worth? CIMMYT book tells you.
- More corn colour stuff from James.
- The promise of perenniality.
- Mango killer fungus on the rampage in the Gulf. Any resistant varieties? We’ll soon find out, I guess.