Chewing The Cud

After a long absence, I will be back shortly with some new posts featuring the new direction my blog will be taking. Please stay tuned.

Here is an interesting article that I just read about the connection between red meat and breast cancer:

Red Meat Increases Risk of Breast Cancer -- or Does It?
By: Ruth Kava, Ph.D., R.D.

Should women stop eating red meat to avoid or lessen the risk that they'll develop breast cancer? Taken at face value, a new study suggests that might be a good idea -- but a more careful consideration does not support this interpretation.

A report in the November 14 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine indicates that premenopausal women who regularly consume large amounts of red meat have a 97% increased risk of hormone-positive breast cancer. Although this sounds like a frightening increase, a couple of caveats are in order. First, this increase in relative risk is borderline for the level of risk epidemiologists consider real. Anything under a doubled risk (i.e., a 100% increase) would be termed moderate or weak, although if the population at risk is very large, moderate risks could theoretically affect a large number of people.

A second reservation is the nature of the data on which these statistics are based. The women in the study didn't actually measure the amount of food they ate. While this may not be very important for foods and beverages that are purchased in discrete quantities (e.g., a bottle of soft drink, or a fast food hamburger), red meat can be purchased and consumed in a wide variety of forms and sizes. Thus the accuracy of the data depends on how well participants can estimate the quantities of the various foods they consumed, as well as how accurate they are when they recall how often they ate or drank particular items.

The movie Fast Food Nation is out today. Are you going to see it? If you do see it, come back here and leave what you thought about the movie in the comments section. For now here is a review of the movie from Spero News.

Movie Review: Fast Food Nation
Ostensibly, the movie is about Greg Kinnear playing an executive at Mickey's, a McDonalds clone who investigates the problem of fecal coliform bacteria in their meat

Thursday, November 16, 2006
by John Mark Butterworth

Tendentious movie making at its worst (or would that be at its best?), Fast Food Nation is the kind of sophomoric nonsense you get when you turn a Berkeley teach-in into a fictional film. Made by the folks at Participant Productions, funded by an idiotarian eBay billionaire who has given us such tedious, coprolitic goodies as Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck, and North Country, this movie does have a few surprises in it. Such as -- what's Bruce Willis doing in this thing? I thought he had some adult sense.

But a number of celebrities make cameo appearances in order to demonstrate their Hollywood solidarity in this low budget, even worse than Al Gore lecture. We get Ethan Hawke, Kris Kristofferson, Patricia Arquette, Greg Kinnear, and pop tart Avril Lavigne pops up to lend her weight to the role of serious college student who will save the world from the evil, white male, corporate bad guys.

This cinematic polemic was like strolling through an anti-war demonstration and catching snippets of conversations expressing righteous indignation at the Man, man. Like, see man, the Man is raping the planet. Cutting all the trees, having their cows pooping all over the ground so we can eat their feces laden burgers that the Madison Avenue Man made us want to eat by making us conform to the uniform straightjacket world, man. And the Patriot Act. That's really out to get us. . . . . man!

It seems to me that there is alot of hype surrounding this new movie fast food nation. So much of this hype seems to be stemming from one radical group, PETA. This organization will stop at nothing to end animal agriculture. They pull stunts to use as propaganda. In this case, PETA has chosen to use Hollywood to spread vegetarianism across this great Nation. PETA distributed an alert announcing the creation of its special “Fast Food Nation” page on GoVeg.com. The page includes an interview with Richard Linklater, a behind-the-scenes look at the movie, a description of the movie, a link to a feature article on Eric Schlosser’s book “Chew on This” and a link to an interactive game to promote the movie. I visited this page, and it not only disturbed me but made me chuckle as well. The game consisted of crawling up a ladder and hitting parts of a burger down to the bottom. If you hit one of the "adorable pigs" you either caught ecoli, killed an animal, or had a death by heart disease. Does this seem like fact or fiction to you?

Well, if any of you haven't guessed, I LOVE BEEF! and I LOVE AGRICULTURE! Imagine the problem I have with a movie that misrepresents my rural lifestyle, spreads lies to promote vegetarianism, and tries to kill my agricultural livlihood. The movie, Fast Food Nation is representing with a pun on words, Do you want lies with that? These "lies are directed at the beef industry". As a beef producer myself, the only lies I see are the ones being told by this fictitious movie.

My earliest memories of living on a farm would be picking blades of grass and sneaking it to the bulls through the fence, or carrying an icecream bucket half full of corn to feed it to the calves, or sitting in the hay feeder and letting the curious heifers come to "check" out the new girl in the pen. As I grew older, I became more involved in the family operation. Helping to select which sires we should breed the heifers to, talking with customers looking for a bull to buy, taking pasture tours with my dad and I on the 4-wheeler, or having waterfights with my little sisters in the washrack when working on the show calves: all these things became a part of my life. These wonderful memories haven't come without sacrifice though.

I was reading through some buzz surrounding this new movie, Fast Food Nation, when I fell upon an interesting article. The Oregonian posted an interview with Richard Linklater about “Fast Food Nation.” Linklater discussed the making of the movie and his own political beliefs.

If reading the article isn't enough to discredit this movie all together, let's further examine this director. He has directed some doozies in his day: School of Rock, Dazed and Confused. Ring a bell? Sure, School of Rock, had a good message in questioning authority and thinking for yourself, but it lacked in promoting education and learning as roads to success. The same story is told in Dazed and Confused, a movie about students ditching class, getting high, and worrying more about initiating the freshman and getting women than homework. Its ridiculous to say that someone who clearly dislikes education and the American dream should be taken seriously in a movie about animal welfare.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I know that turkey is the traditional protein of choice gracing the tables of most Thanksgiving celebrations, but I hope that beef might still be part of your day. Turkey isn't just bland and dry, it doesn't carry the bang for the buck like beef does. Beef, juicy and delicious, is nutrient dense! Beef has got zip!

Did you know that beef is the number one source of zinc and protein in the diet? Protein is essential to metabolism regulation and can be used as a source of energy. In addition, protein can provide protection from disease by enhancing the body’s immune response. Also, zinc plays a critical role in growth and development, maintenance of the body’s immune system and resistance to infection, wound healing, taste acuity and appetite control.

Did you know that beef is the number three source of iron in the diet? The type of iron found in meat (heme) is two to three times better absorbed than non-heme iron found in plant foods.Also, when consumed at the same meal, meat has been shown to increase the absorption of plant iron two- to four-fold. Meeting iron needs is important for cognitive development, intellectual performance, pregnancy outcome, immune defense and work performance, including intense exercise.

Beef is a nutrition powerhouse. When compared to a skinless chicken breast (or turkey!), beef’s 19 leanest cuts have, on average:

6 ½ times more vitamin B12
6 times more zinc
2 ½ times more iron[22]

So for some extra ZIP in your day, choose beef!

It's getting cold in South Dakota. Now not cold like last year during the ice storm where my family and I lived without electricity for eleven days, and not cold like the Blizzard of '97 where my family and I were snowed into our farm for over a week. That is cold. It's getting to be the kind of cold that in a couple of months when it is this temperature, all the frozen South Dakotans will come out of hibernation to thaw out. With the weather changing, I'm starting to miss cooking steaks on the grill or sizzling kabobs with fresh green peppers and onions. I miss camping trips with beef brats and lazy nights after chores with cheeseburgers. Then I realize that with winter brings a whole new way to cook beef! With the holidays quickly approaching, beef can be made in a variety of festive way: prime rib, philly steak sandwiches, meatballs with pasta, stromboli, cheese dips, and cassaroles can decorate a table for any occasion! I heard once that the average American consumer gains five pounds over the holiday season, but I guarantee you its not from the beef.

Read on and learn how beef is a great meat product to incorporate into your diet for a healthy lifestyle!