Caustic Commentary, Spring 2024

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Sally Fallon Morell takes on the Diet Dictocrats

VE VILL MAKE YOU FEEL GUILTY

“Greenhouse gas emissions from the way humans consume food could add nearly 1 degree of warming to the Earth’s cli­mate by 2100, according to a new study,” writes Drew Costly for the Associated Press. The study, headed by Catherine C. Ivanovich and carried out by the University of Florida and Environmental Defense Fund, fingers meat and dairy for con­tributing to methane in the atmosphere due to animal farts, along with rice, which grows in swampy, methane-emitting fields. So if you eat these things, feel guilty, very guilty. Then there’s breathing. According to a new study led by Dr. Nicholas Cowan, an atmospheric physicist at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh. “Exhaled human breath can contain small, elevated concentrations of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), both of which contribute to global warming.” So, hold your breath, folks, or you’re a global warming villain. Well, at least we can all agree that babies should be breastfed—oops, maybe not. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, “Medical and public health organizations recommend that mothers exclusively breastfeed for at least 6 months. This recommendation is based on evidence of health benefits for mothers and babies, as well as developmental benefits for babies. A spate of re­cent work challenges the extent of these benefits, and ethical criticism of breastfeeding promotion as stigmatizing is also growing. Building on this critical work, we are concerned about breastfeeding promotion that praises breastfeeding as the ‘natural’ way to feed infants. This messaging plays into a powerful perspective that ‘natural’ approaches to health are better, a view examined in a recent report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Promoting breastfeeding as ‘natural’ may be ethically problematic, and, even more troublingly, it may bolster this belief that ‘natural’ approaches are presump­tively healthier. This may ultimately challenge public health’s aims in other contexts, particularly childhood vaccination” (Pediatrics, April 2016). All you breathing, meat-eating, breastfeeding moms out there—prepare to be stigmatized!

STIGMA

Speaking of stigma, French entrepreneurs Eugenie Peze- Heidsieck and Eden Banon “have observed the pressure to breastfeed and the stigma negatively impacting friends and family. ‘Sisters, cousins, and friends have had a lot of challenges breastfeeding their babies, or have decided not to breastfeed and felt a lot of guilt. . . Added complications occur when babies are found to be allergic or intolerant to infant formula.’” Their solution: create artificial breast milk in a lab using cell culture technology! Numi, their startup company, aims to recreate “the mammary gland environ­ment. . . for human cells to develop and produce said milk

. . . [aiming] to produce as many of the 1,500 constituents of human breast milk as possible, in order to bring a really new alternative to the table.” They are backed by a three million Euro “pre-seed round” funded by Heartcore Capital and other financial companies. Raise your hand if you think Peze-Heidsieck and Banon will be successful.

GAG-WORTHY

Meanwhile a company called Bored Cow is producing a fake milk containing a whey protein called ProFerm produced by “precision fermentation.” Perfect Day, the company that produces ProFerm, calls itself, “a consumer biology company on a mission to create a kinder, greener tomorrow by develop­ing new ways to make the foods you love today—starting in the dairy aisle.” Health Research Institute (HRI), a nonprofit independent lab based in Fairfield, Iowa, analyzed ProFerm’s “animal-free whey protein”—already used by more than a dozen food brands sold in common grocery chains—and discovered ninety-two unknown molecules and a fungicide in the product. The fungicide, benthiavalicarb-isopropyl, is probably introduced into the fake milk during the produc­tion process, to prevent contamination. The product also lacks many important micronutrients found in natural milk, such as omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin E, some B vitamins and carnitine. In March of 2020, FDA conferred Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status on ProFerm, which Per­fect Day insists is not GMO, even though the fermentation process uses high fructose corn syrup, a GMO product. In addition to “animal-free whey protein,” Bored Cow’s fake milk contains sunflower oil, sugar, citrus fiber, dipotassium phosphate, acacia, gellan gum and calcium potassium (mary­amHeinein.substack.com, January 12, 2024). This product is nothing to get excited about. . . it’s just boooring.

3D PRINTED

Not to be outdone, a couple of entrepreneurs in California are developing “cow-free dairy milk from GMO yeast and 3D printed milk proteins”!! With forty million dollars in startup money, the developers are aiming to produce proteins identical to those found in cow’s milk. The company claims that lab-created milk produces 84 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions and uses 98 percent less water, 91 percent less land and 65 percent less energy compared to traditional dairy (althealthworks.com, February 24, 2023). But a recent study found that the carbon footprint of lab-grown beef is “orders of magnitude” higher than traditionally raised beef (www.ucdavis.edu, May 22, 2023)—why would dairy foods be any different?

MORE

You just can’t make this stuff up. Chemical engineers at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea have developed a lab-grown “meat” product that merges rice grains with cow cells. “The rice acts as a scaffold that supports the growth of fat or muscle cells. Together, the ingredients form “a rice-meat hybrid that steams up to a pinkish-brown mash.’” Why? Why do this? Say the publicists, “. . . to offer a more sustainable way to eat meat” since farming cattle “requires vast expanses of pastureland and emits more than 100 mil­lion metric tons of methane into the atmosphere each year” (sciencenews.org, February 14, 2024). (Rice production also produces vast amounts of methane but why let inconvenient facts interfere with your marketing campaign?) And there’s more: Moolec, a “food science” company based in Luxem­bourg, has been experimenting with inserting genes from pigs into soy plants in order to give the soybeans “a meaty taste.” And the process seems to work! “In some of the soy­beans, over a quarter of the soluble proteins were identified as pig” (wired.com, January 2, 2024). But publicists aren’t revealing whether these products are actually edible.

ULTRA-PROCESSED FOODS

You have to wonder about the sanity of those investing mil­lions into all these new fake foods because the new phrase that’s sending shivers though the food industry is “ultra-processed foods.” The Wall Street Journal reports that “op­position to ultra-processed foods—your frozen pizza, potato chips and other mass-produced goods made with industrial ingredients and additives—is gaining steam worldwide. . . The foods are facing rising scrutiny as concerns grow over their outsized role in American diets” (January 11, 2024). The big food companies are fighting back by touting the benefits of processing to regulators and policymakers, “arguing that it has made food safe, convenient, accessible and affordable.” Nick Fereday, executive director of food and consumer trends for agricultural lender Rabobank notes that “With ultra-processed foods, it’s not one or two items, or this line of macaroni and these. It’s 90% of the portfolio and counting.” Growing consumer resistance to processed foods may explain the poor performance of food stocks in 2023, with stock prices of Campbell Soup, J.M. Smucker, General Mills and Conagra Brands all down 20 percent or more (The Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2023). Ana­lysts give lots of explanations for the decline in sales, such as higher prices and changes to the food stamp program, but perhaps the real reason is that the people who buy this junk are either wising up or dying off.

INDUSTRIAL SEED OILS

“Industrial seed oils” is the other phrase that’s giving the food industry headaches. It’s not just alternative health writers like Joe Mercola and Chris Knobbe who are on the attack. Even conventional sites like clevelandclinic.org are sounding the alarm; “[o]ften found in ultra-processed foods, these oils can cause inflammation and diseases,” says the website. “Collectively, the people of the internet are always looking for the next big food trend, the next magic bullet, whether it’s something to add to or remove from our diets to make all of our health problems disappear. Nowhere is that tendency more intense than on TikTok, where food-related topics go viral in an instant (and oftentimes, disappear just as quickly). But one of them seems to have some staying power: Warnings of the risks of seed oils.” So the problem for the food industry is how to prevent consumers from returning to butter and lard. A company called Savor is proposing to make fats out of water and air! The process involves “taking carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, heating them up, and oxidizing them to trigger the separation of fatty acids and then the formulation of fat. The result is real fat molecules like the ones we get from milk, cheese, beef, and vegetable oils. The process doesn’t release any greenhouse gases, and it uses no farmland and less than a thousandth of the water that traditional agriculture does.” The folks at Savor aren’t saying how much energy is used to heat and oxidize, nor what kind of catalyzing chemicals are involved (www. savor.it). Another company, C16 Biosciences, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is developing a process to produce the C-16 fatty acids found in palm oil through the fermentation of wild yeast. “It’s as ‘natural’ as palm oil—it’s just grown on fungi instead of trees.” Best of all, it’s “entirely agriculture-free,” produced by a lab in midtown Manhattan. The website www.c16bio.com describes the new “palmless” oil with the familiar buzz words: “The new natural, enabling health, wellness, and sustainability.”

MORE REASON TO REFUSE STATINS

Cholesterol-lowering statin drugs are supposed to keep your arteries clear, but a review, published in Expert Reviews in Clinical Pharmacology (2015 Mar;8(2):189-99) suggests they do just the opposite, accelerating coronary artery calcifica­tion instead of providing protection. They do this by poison­ing you in several ways—first by depleting coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10), which is vital for muscle function and the production of ATP, the energy carrier in the cells. The result is an energy deficit that “could be a major cause for heart muscle and coronary artery damage, leading eventually to heart failure.” Statins also damage selenoproteins, carriers of the mineral selenium, which is important for heart health. Finally, statins deplete vitamin K2, the key nutrient for keeping calcium out of the arteries while putting it in the bones and teeth where it belongs. There are more than one million cases of heart failure per year in the U.S. The authors conclude, “. . . the epidemic of heart failure and atherosclerosis that plagues the modern world may paradoxically be aggravated by the pervasive use of statin drugs. We propose that current statin treatment guidelines be critically reevaluated.”

VITAMIN K2 AND CANCER

The inhibition of statins on vitamin K2 status may explain why statin use is associated with increased cancer. According to a review published in Oncology Letters (018 Jun; 15(6): 8926–8934), both animal and human studies indicate that vitamin K2 is effective in arresting cancer cells for numer­ous types of cancer, including HCC, leukemia, colorectal cancer, ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer and lung cancer. The authors suggest administering vitamin K2 along with “established chemotherapeutics,” but why not just treat cancer with a diet rich in vitamin K2 from grass-fed butter, cheese, eggs and poultry fats?

4G DANGERS

We have all been justly concerned about the dangers of 5G radiation, which was rolled out in Wuhan in 2019, but what about 4G? Introduced in 2009, 4G operates at between 400 and 6000 megahertz and is considered safe—at least com­pared to 5G, which operates in the microwave range, from 2 gigahertz (Wi-Fi) up to 300 gigahertz. But a study released in December 2023 indicates that 4G carries its own dangers. Rats were exposed to a 4G frequency of 2350 megahertz for two hours per day for fifty-six days at a power density of 0.2488 mW/cm2, which is about one fourth of the FCC’s wireless radiation exposure limit of 1.0 mW/cm2. The ani­mals experienced a significant decrease in sperm viability with alterations in the tissue of liver, kidney, testis and other reproductive organs. Other observed effects included reduced testosterone, reduced total antioxidant capacity, decreased sperm mitochondrial function and a significant increase in red blood cells (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38102429/). Of related interest is a report indicating that incidence rates for head and neck tumors have increased significantly since the year 2000 (Environmental Health Trust, February 24, 2024). This includes glioblastoma (53 percent increase), menin­gioma, a non-malignant tumor on the outer covering of the brain, and cancers of the salivary (52 percent increase) and thyroid glands (132 percent increase)—all areas exposed to significant radiation with cell phone and cordless phone use operating at 4G frequencies.

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