Calories

Fewer calories = healthier?

Just before writing this post I had some ice cream, and I noticed that on the carton was a little label claiming that Edy's french vanilla ice cream has 1/3 the calories of other ice cream. Presumably, Edy's chose to advertise that fact so more people would pick their ice cream. After all, it has less calories, so it must be healthier, right?

Lately, it seems that more and more people see calories as the enemy to weight loss and believe they must be avoided as much as possible. Various studies have shown that when given the choice people tend to choose lower calorie meals in favor of higher calorie ones, regardless of what's in the food. In the simplest terms, a calorie is simply a measurement of heat, or energy. As most high school students who have taken a health, chemistry, or biology class know, a calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree celsius. A kilocalorie, or Calorie with a capital "C," is the energy needed to raise one kilogram of water one degree, and this is actually the unit we see on nutrition labels. That being said, calories are essential for proper body functions because they power everything from the beating of our heart to the firing of neurons across our nervous system.

So if calories are really a neutral term and integral to bodily functions, how come they have such a negative connotation in our culture? Eating fewer of them is associated with losing weight and being skinny and attractive (body image is a whole other discussion), while eating lots of calories is associated with being heavier and unhealthy. People who are trying to lose weight are advised to "balance their calorie intake", making sure that the calories they take in are less than the amount of calories they would use in a day. This system would put them at a calorie "deficit", forcing their bodies to turn to stored energy, or fat (which also has a horrible reputation) in order to start depleting those stores.

Both meals have the same calorie amount, but the one
on the left is nutrient dense. 

I'm not a nutritionist, but after plenty of research I think it's safe to say that the calorie counting approach, as well as how our culture views calories as a whole, is quite misled. In fact, counting calories can lead to other health risks, such as orthorexia nervosa. Though not recognized as a clinical disorder by the DSM-5, it is characterized by an obsessive fixation on healthy eating that can be fueled by meticulous calorie counting. And if a dieter considers only the amount of calories in a food, then it would seem that 500 calories of cookies is the same as 500 calories of carrots, and we know that's not true.

The fact is that not all calories are created equal, and so calorie counting oversimplifies concepts like weight gain and obesity. Weight loss is subject to a slew of other factors, from stress level and lack of sleep to genetics and the kind of foods you're eating, which means that it actually does matter in which form a calorie is ingested. Empty calories, or those that come from the simple sugars in a cookie, can actually lead to fat retention, while calories from the carrots are nutrient dense and beneficial. Unfortunately, the American diet today is permeated with empty calories contained in processed foods and refined carbohydrates. Cutting the discussion off at the shallow calorie level ignores nutritional requirements and complex chemical interactions inside the human body.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter how many fewer calories my ice cream has compared to other brands. Ice cream will be ice cream, and will probably never count as a healthy choice. Of course, that might not stop people (such as myself) from enjoying it, but at least when we do want to make a healthy choice, we should understand the need to be looking beyond just calories.

Feedlots

WARNING: some pictures in the following post may be graphic and/or offensive.

One of Saud Hunter's controversial pictures on Instagram

A week or two ago, I was surfing my Instagram feed and I stumbled upon a very interesting page owned by a Saudi man in Africa, named Saud Hunter (I’m not sure Saud is his real name, and I wasn't able to find his last name). I was drawn to his page because of the pictures he posted, pictures of him playing with lion, black leopard, and cheetah cubs. But he also posts pictures like these:

Yes, I know. That’s gross. And he’s received tons of heat for posting these pictures, and for hunting altogether. But I'm going to talk about Mr. Saud and why we should hold off our criticism later on. For now, let’s take a look at some pictures that are even more concerning than a dead antelope.

Aerial view of Coronado Feeders, Texas, by Mishka Henner

This is a bird's-eye-view picture of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), commonly known as feedlots, taken by British artist Mishka Henner. These are the facilities in which cows are kept before taken to the slaughter; the animals are fed grains (mostly corn) and usually antibiotics, because they live on top of their own poop and their abnormal diet doesn’t make for the strongest immune systems. If you can see them, the tiny specks within the squares are the cows and the giant form suspiciously resembling a dissected kidney is a waste pool of blood and other cow refuse.

This informational video seems to paint feedlots in, at the very least, a neutral light. But in my opinion Henner’s pictures speak the truth: feedlots are bad for so many reasons. Most of these reasons can be placed under two categories, since feedlots are damaging to the environment's health and to the consumer's health, not to mention to the poor cow.

Let's first look at another of Henner's pictures and consider the environmental impacts of a CAFO. (This source from the CDC is even better for more information.)

Tascosa Feedyard, Texas

That sulfur-green manure pool can't be good, can it? Usually, on smaller-scale farms, manure can be a very useful and healthy soil fertilizer. However CAFOs produce so much manure (about 500 million tons according to the USDA) that it can't possibly be spread around neighboring farms, and so it's left in dumps such as the one above where the manure liquefies, producing a number of toxic gases. These gases include hydrogen sulfide, methane, and nitrous oxide, which account for about 20% of greenhouse gas emissions due to human actions and contribute to local air pollution. 

So the pool looks disgusting because it smells disgusting. But the liquefied manure can also seep into groundwater or run off during heavy rains to pollute rivers and wells, contaminating them with bacteria like E. coli and killing fish populations. As we know, water is becoming an increasingly more valuable resource in our world of nearly 7 billion people. Water is not something we can afford to sacrifice to the unhealthy practices of CAFOs. 

Next, I'd like you to consider the effect that beef from a feedlot might have on the consumer (i.e. you and me). As you can see, the cows have no access to grass, living close to each other and walking around in their own manure. Because this lifestyle tends to lower their immune response, the cows are also given antibiotics. Sustained use of antibiotics presents the risk of creating antibiotic-resistant foodborne bacteria, like Salmonella, that may be transmitted to humans. Also, I'm willing to bet that the cows are fed GMO (genetically engineered) grains, which is a story for another day but is also a point of contention when it comes to consumer health.

In all honesty, it's not really known whether or not meat from feedlots is unhealthy in itself, excluding the possibility of foodborne diseases, or even if antibiotic-resistant bacteria poses a significant public health risk. But even so, I'd like you to look at the pictures above and think about whether or not that looks like the origins of delicious, natural meat in comparison to sustainable, smaller, free-range farms. 

So which is grosser now? Saud’s antelope or a Texas feedlot? 

Please keep this post in mind when I examine Saud Hunter's situation soon. 

Adah + Cerebral Palsy

A gorgeous cover byPhoebe Kirk

When I was little, I couldn’t pronounce my full name (Ruxandra is pretty tough for a toddler to swallow), so I called myself “Ada”. And since then, even though I use a nickname by which most of you know me, Ada stuck and that’s the name my family uses. So you can imagine that at first glance I felt a certain kinship to Adah from The Poisonwood Bible even though she spells her name the Biblical way.  

Adah, in many ways, isn’t anything like me. She has hemiplegic cerebral palsy, and she’s often quite emotionless. But the deeper I got into the book, the more she fascinated me and the closer I felt to Adah; at one point, she says she’d rather be “Ada” with no “h”, to satisfy her palindrome penchant. The fact that Adah spent her entire youth physically limited by cerebral palsy fuels her lifelong craving for symmetry and balance, which she quenches through palindromes and a career in epidemiology.

In fact, Adah’s experience can be applied to many disabled children. I’m not going to go as far as to say that Kingsolver was trying to send a message that disabilities should be viewed in a certain aspect (because I don’t know her purpose exactly) but Adah’s story may provide some healthy advice by showing how Adah was able to maintain a sense of self-worth while dealing with the stigma of being seen as handicapped, unintelligent, and inferior.

An article from the Canadian Medical Association discusses two mindsets meant to eliminate the stigma altogether. One of the mindsets may actually be a little harmful in the long run (you might be able to guess which one and why).  

1. This mindset emphasizes person-first language, meaning that disabilities are disregarded on the premise that disabilities don’t define a person. When you take away the disability, the person is still human.
2. This mindset acknowledges the disabilities, but recognizes that disabilities are a collective human experience. All people, even if they haven’t been diagnosed with a physical or mental disorder, struggle at some point in their lives. It would be unfair to judge people based on what they can’t do, so we should appreciate people by what they can do.  

The article makes the claim that person-first language ends up suggesting that a) disabilities are inherently negative, shed a dark light on people, and must be overlooked; and b) a true “person” is able-bodied (i.e. a person with disabilities isn’t a true person). Of course, it’s important to remember that the purpose of this person-first definition is well-meaning; it seeks to ensure that people with disabilities aren’t looked down upon, because at the end of the day they’re as human as all of us.

I think Adah would definitely prefer the second option, because that’s how she constructed her life. Adah was able to accept herself and recognize her self worth, both when she had cerebral palsy and when she was healed. In a way, she actually felt that she lost a part of herself she had grown to like. She didn’t appreciate that people felt more open to her once she was healed, because she was no longer disabled, saying: “any man who admires my body now is a traitor to the previous Adah” (532).

Adah understood that her cerebral palsy was a reality, something she couldn’t deny, and she wouldn’t be the same person otherwise. Her condition didn’t make her weak, but rather stronger, as she was fiercely resolute and intelligent. I hope all children (and adults) with disabilities can take a page from Adah and embrace her empowering ethos. But more than that, I think the most constructive result of making a character like Adah is to expose people without disabilities to a brilliant teenager who happens to have cerebral palsy, but who isn’t held back by her physical limitations. That way, Adah engenders a sense of empathy that hopefully, little by little, will help break the stigma that disabilities are curse of inferiority.

Thank you, Barbara Kingsolver, and thank you, Adah.