new research debunks trad views on nutrition

[U_Stormcrow]

In my country brown, white and red beans are cheap if you buy them in larger pots. If you mix them with an egg, spices and breadcrumb you can make tasty burgers, cheaper than any meat. They have lots of proteins.
Fresh and cheap vegetables are carrots, onions and cabbage.

Fine to imagine if you believe beans, carrots, onions, and cabbage can be grown anywhere.

For all its inefficiencies and loss, it is more productive to grow grass on my crap soils and raise cattle on that than it is to try and grow feed crops directly.

And we won't even get into the math of what it would require in acreage to support current populations on a vegan diet, or the transportation costs associated with the increased mass and bulk to bring those foods from productive agricultural areas to population dense metro standa areas wih millions (or tens of millions) of population.

Humans are adapted to be meat-favoring omnivores, and the extra time we get not spent eating low value high volume foods as result has allowed us to do many great and terrible things.

There is no perfect solution, only trade-offs of greater or lesser acceptability.

 

[Perris]

Please take those arguments elsewhere @3KillerBs @BDutch and @U_Stormcrow . Focus on the microbiome. If you want to contribute, read and comment on some of the papers that have been linked to in earlier posts.

 

[Perris]

Your comment also reveals the falsehood of the idea that giving antibiotics 'can't do any harm' (which I have read more times on BYC than I care to remember), which is especially egregious when the poster has no clue what is actually wrong with the bird, and probably made them sicker by so treating them.

further to this, and shifting the focus from the individual bird to all of us everywhere, a relevant quote from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psj.2022.102463 :

"The use of antimicrobials to promote growth, as well as to reduce the amount of feed required to bring broiler chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) to market weight, dates back to the mid-1940s (Moore and Evenson, 1946; Stokstad, 1950). Seventy years later, it was estimated that 73% of all antimicrobials sold globally were used in animals raised for food (Van Boeckel et al., 2017). It is therefore not surprising that the intensive use of antibiotics in livestock production has accelerated the evolution and dissemination of antibiotic resistant genes and bacteria that threaten modern medicine (Endtz et al., 1991; Smith et al., 1999; Dutil et al., 2010; Ward et al., 2014; Liu et al., 2016; de Vries et al., 2018; Carson et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2020b).

 

[glib]

Please take those arguments elsewhere @3KillerBs @BDutch and @U_Stormcrow . Focus on the microbiome. If you want to contribute, read and comment on some of the papers that have been linked to in earlier posts.

You focus on the microbiome because chickens are (due to economic constraints) fed a diet of food they only eat marginally in the wild. A more natural diet will benefit minimally from playing with the microbiome. You are strictly talking about confined birds.

 

[Flair1239]

It’s almost like they somehow instinctually know how to survive…

This is an excellent comment. They figure it out. I see so many people making this harder than it has to be.

Chickens thrive on any reasonable diet. They don’t instantly keel over if they happen to eat an onion or an apple seed.

Food, water, shelter, and common sense go a long way.

 

[Flair1239]

But my single experience isn't meaningful.

I disagree. The more I see one study after another be disproven and with so many people having some sort of political agenda that affects their judgement, the more I value anecdotal evidence experiences from reliable people.

As I approach my 50s I can honestly say that stereotypes, cliches, and folk wisdom have been some of the most reliable information in my day to day life.

Science and studies have their place, but are frequently not exactly driven by the desire for truth.

 

[Perris]

You focus on the microbiome because chickens are (due to economic constraints) fed a diet of food they only eat marginally in the wild. A more natural diet will benefit minimally from playing with the microbiome. You are strictly talking about confined birds.

I don't fully understand what point you are trying to make in the first line, but I don't think the distinction between free range and confined birds is necessarily so clear cut. In an article in (open access) poultry science journal, it is stated "Minimal comparisons have been made between conventional poultry GIT [gastro-intestinal tract] structure and function with birds raised on nonconventional, free-range environmental conditions. It is not clear whether substantial differences would occur, but the differences in diets and the ability of free-range birds to forage would suggest that there could be some impact on the GIT microbial activities and function. Likewise, the genetic line of bird may also have an impact as Lumpkins et al. (2010) noted differences in intestinal development between a modern multipurpose broiler strain, a high-yield strain, and a historic strain of bird...Before overall conclusions can be drawn on whether GIT differences may occur in birds grown and maintained under alternative poultry production conditions vs. conventionally raised birds, more studies with a greater number of birds will need to be conducted. This is in part due to the fact that the choice of bird genotype appears to be essential for alternative poultry broiler and egg-laying production." And then the type of forage varies, and that has an impact, and the age of the bird has an impact too, amongst other things. The article is here https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psj.2019.12.017

I agree with you that 'a more natural diet will benefit minimally from playing with the microbiome', but I am not talking only of confined birds. Most of these papers are comparing conventional with alternative, by which they mean modern industrial indoors production versus smaller scale free range or pastured.

 

[Perris]

(And I certainly don't want to derail this thread again but I believe food, ours and that of the animals we are responsible for, has a lot to do with politics and religion actually, and a bunch of other things. It's not easy to keep to a strictly scientific approach to nutrition as so many other factors play a role in how we deal with and think about food. That's what makes it an interesting and controversial subject.)

It would appear from this short article, linked below (open access, M Lawrence 'Ultra-processed foods: a fit-for-purpose concept for nutrition policy activities to tackle unhealthy and unsustainable diets', co-published with permission in British Journal of Nutrition and in Public Health Nutrition 2022) that you are correct, at least on politics and economics

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980022002117

I note that a number of the sort of counter claims against the concept of UPFs made by a few people, that he highlights on pp.3-4, have appeared in this thread too.

 

[glib]

Perris, I agree that with grains a combination of biome/sprouting/fermenting outside the gut will help. Grains are so damn hard to digest, specially protein breaking bacteria will help. But even those that remove excess carbohydrates (which are still excessive after that) can help. Evolutionary principles will however predict natural and automatic optimization of the microbiome in a natural setting with diet close to a chicken evolutionary diet.

 

[ManueB]

I disagree. The more I see one study after another be disproven and with so many people having some sort of political agenda that affects their judgement, the more I value anecdotal evidence experiences from reliable people.

As I approach my 50s I can honestly say that stereotypes, cliches, and folk wisdom have been some of the most reliable information in my day to day life.

Science and studies have their place, but are frequently not exactly driven by the desire for truth.

I can agree in part with each of your individual sentence but certainly not with the implied conclusion that anecdote has more global value than science..but that is another derailing debate that I can't even see myself getting into.

It would appear from this short article, linked below (open access, M Lawrence 'Ultra-processed foods: a fit-for-purpose concept for nutrition policy activities to tackle unhealthy and unsustainable diets', co-published with permission in British Journal of Nutrition and in Public Health Nutrition 2022) that you are correct, at least on politics and economics

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980022002117

I note that a number of the sort of counter claims against the concept of UPFs made by a few people, that he highlights on pp.3-4, have appeared in this thread too.

It's an interesting article but it leaves me with more questions than answers. What exactly are those chemical compounds caused by UPF's that are bodies may not be able to process ? And how can their effect be studied at a smaller level than that of a country, let alone an individual ?
I don't think anyone will doubt that ready made pasta box or pre cooked meal are not very healthy ... especially you eat them every day . How about vitamin enriched yoghurt or tofu ?

Nova was given quite a highlight in France when it lost the fight against Nutriscore for food labelling, resulting in some of Mac Donald's sandwiches getting a better score than a camembert .
But if I read this article correctly it doesn't really make sense to apply it to one specific food, you would have to take in account everything a person or a chicken eat.
Still, however important the notion of processed vs unprocessed food could be, I don't see how it could be the only or even the main approach to judge how healthy is my diet and that of my chickens. You would need to take into account the degree of variety, as has already been much discussed.

And sometimes a degree of alteration like cooking or soaking or fermenting actually makes food possible to digest when it's not otherwise, or more healthy.

As for politics and economics... I think food touches at something that's at our very core, not only because it's necessary for survival, but because it's linked to family, how we grew up, how we've been raised, and our deepest principles. I believe the saying you are what you eat goes far beyond a nutritional analysis.