The McGovern Report

Great post on Robb Wolf's site - if you are interested in nutrition, I cannot recommend his site enough. The USDA food pyramid is incorrect. If you want wellness and ultimately, fitness, talk to your trainer about how you should be eating!



In the video we see Dr. Robert Olson make a plea for more data before sweeping recommendations are made to the American public and beyond. We also see Sen. George Mcgovern make the point that “…we need to do SOMETHING” about heart disease. We picked the wrong path and billions of dollars and millions of lives have subsequently been squandered.

Fast forward to today, we still have the hand-wringing Malthusiast’s who are convinced we are all on a collision course with disaster unless we bocome low-fat vegetarians and export this lifestyle to everyone else on the planet. Much todo is made that a more meat based diet is unsustainable…but then again, modern farming practices rely on non-renewable fossil fuels, and as such plant based diets are apparently unsustainable also! Somehow the study authors find that a lacto-ovo diet is superior to alternative approaches…I’d like to dig through that study and see what they are using for numbers, but it just does not sit well. Interestingly, no one looks at the picture when we are talking grassfeeding and a more paleo type diet.

Perhpas counter intuitively, a meat, fruit and vegetables diet appears to kill FEWER animals than a vegetarian, grain based diet…this throwing the least harm notion on it’s head. Also, small scale grassfed meat production appears to not only be sustainable, but also highly profitable. Most of the energy production of meat is tied up in grain production. Shift to grassfed meat and you remove this expensive and dirty process from the equation while also increasing the health of meat consumers.

Can we feed everyone like this? Will global warming kill us all? The best way to control ALL these problems is some kind of population control and ironically, the best population control is prosperity. Rich nations have fewer children. The counter salvo from the Malthusiasts is that rich nations require a lot of energy…true, but we are only seeing the beginning of green, sustainable energy, and the main driving force here is an open market. India and China are bypassing decades of development the US went through and are comparitively much cleaner than we were. Speaking of sustainability…the US is headed for a serious problem with health/healthcare and the answer being bantied about is state funded healthcare…whcih has been a stunning failure everywhere else it’s been instituted, but we seem bent on this path…because in the words of Sen. Mcgovern “We must do something”.

My main point here is that we need to tackle these issues ONE AT A TIME. When the vegetarians start shifting arguments mid-stream this is BS and it obscures the topic at hand. This is also the classic ploy of someone who is loosing an argument. My secondary point is that the “sustainability” issue is anything but clear and history has shown that markets and innovation trump doomsayers…no matter how badly they want the end-days to be at hand.