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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Remember Red Meatgate last week?
http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/03/21/women-eat-red-meat-to-lessen-anxiety-depression/36348.html
I've seen it all over the news today that a new study shows that women who do not eat red meat are more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression.
So while the other study said red meat eaters are more likely to die earlier, this one says that at least we'll be happy doing it 
::pulls out a package of beef to thaw for dinner::
Re: Remember Red Meatgate last week?
Not really:
Jacka also added that it probably wasn?t a good idea to eat too much red meat either.
?We found that regularly eating more than the recommended amount of red meat was also related to increased depression and anxiety,? she said.
This article doesn't say what the recommended amount actually is. It also doesn't go into what about the red meat was the issue. It's already well known that iron and omega3s helps you to evade depression/anxiety. Obviously you can get those from other sources too.
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Regular recommended servings of meat is 2-3 servings a week. So again, aw, this article is just reinforcing that eating too much red meat is bad for you (causing depression and anxiety). Thanks for the link! :oD
Isn't this also the site that posts a lot of pseudo-psych news?
I'd be curious to read more about the study as well as it's methodology, esp since the article also said this:
Jacka also added that it probably wasn?t a good idea to eat too much red meat either.
?We found that regularly eating more than the recommended amount of red meat was also related to increased depression and anxiety,? she said.
Also, it's interesting this was done in Australia where this article says it's more common for the animals there to be grass fed. It's possible their meat supply is likely to differ in quality/nutrient levels compared to other countries so it may be difficult to generalize across the board.
This is my problem with all of these types of studies, but especially with the one posted last week. There is such a difference in diet between the average person eating grass-fed meat 4-5 times a week and the type of person eating hamburgers from McDonalds 4-5 times a week. Eating fast food red meat every day is probably going to shorten your life - it may be due to the red meat, but it could also be due to the diet in general.
How did they control for the increased likelihood that anxious women will restrict their diet due to anxiety? Vegetarianism is the most common orthorexia.
ie, anxious women are less likely to eat red meat.
I think people eating real, whole foods of good quality that have stood the test of time can feel pretty confident in what they're feeding themselves and their families. Doesn't anyone find it odd that such a basic human food would be problematic? Then again, these studies don't differentiate between plain meat, meat pizza, burger/fries/soda and a lunchmeat sandwich.
If we're going to pick on individual foodstuffs we should really examine the things that are more novel to our food supply. What have we done since food production became more mechanized and dependent on petrochemical-based farming?
I think there's a world of difference between the lifestyle of someone living today and someone living a century ago, aside from the differences in meat and other food production.
When my maternal grandmother was a little girl, she would go visit her grandparents who lived on a farm "out in the country" about an hour away. Her grandmother would get up before dawn and make a pie. A PIE. With lard, of course. She would also make raised donuts and her husband would have a slice of pie and a donut for breakfast. Every day. (And you can imagine the whole pie was polished off by the family daily.) Prior to heading outside for 12-16 of working on a relatively large family farm. The guy lived well into old age and was quite lean/physically fit until he turned the farm over to his son full time, when he was in his 60s, at least.
We're not talking cavemen, here. We're talking about people with access to milled flour, sugar, salt, animal fat, and canning techniques. But, also, people who walked 3 miles to school as children, and people who spent a 10-12 hour day washing and ironing their family's clothing. I'm lucky if I walk a block to get some processed lunch during my work day.
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I meant I think it's difficult to generalize from their country to ours. The diet, quality of food, and culture appear to be vastly different.
I think the wealth of research on this issue, for me, has convinced me to strive for a diet low in red meat.
So I guess you are making the same point? It's all a balance. Your grandparents could eat daily donuts and pie (lard and butter from pastured animals are nourishing, traditional foods, btw) with their increased activity level. While my family isn't a complete bump on a log, our needs for calories are much lower. And so we don't eat donuts and pie.
See, I thought your original point was that as long as we eat what people have always eaten (i.e. wild caught fish, non-GMO corn, grass-fed beef), our diets will be fine. Or we should just eat like people used to. Because sailors used to eat hard tack and salt pork and then they got scurvey.
When you think that way, we know a lot more about nutrition and diet-based medicine now than at any time in history. We eat MORE than we have at any time in history (we literally eat more calories than we need - surprise, surprise.) I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I don't doubt that our processed food culture contributes greatly to obesity, but processed food is also a symptom of a society of convenience. When I go to the gym, sometimes I think about how crazy it is that I PAY money to work hard and burn calories. This is a very, very new thing in the history of humanity, and certainly doesn't exist in less developed areas and nations. Aaaand it's because I sit at a desk all day and will be getting a sub for lunch tomorrow.
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I keep seeing this "yeah, but grass fed" defense. Are there any studies that show there is a difference in how our bodies process and respond to grass vs corn fed beef? Or is that a claim based on an assumption?
Sure, I absolutely prefer grass fed if I'm going to eat beef, but I'm skeptical of the claim that corn fed primary reason people are all fat and cholestol-y heart attack prone.
I think it's an assumption based on the idea/fact/whatever that grass-fed beef is leaner than corn-fed beef. Therefore, if you eat grass-fed beef, you're eating slightly less fat than you would if you ate corn-fed.
I don't remember if there's a difference in the TYPE of fat, whether grass-fed beef also has less saturated fat or whatever.
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After red meat gate I went to the googler b/c I wasn't familiar with the differences at all. It appears as though grass fed animals yield meats that are lower in saturated fat and higher in good Omega 3 & 6 fats b/c their diets are more natural to what they would normally eat. Supposedly they're also not being force fed grain based foods to fatten them up quickly and they have more of an opportunity to range so they have lower amounts of fat in their body.
It was enough to make me give at least grass fed ground beef another look.
I think we'd be less prone to damage from other lifestyle factors that we have less control over. To varying extents, what we put into our mouths is one area where we tend to have more freedom than the pollutants in our environment or our working conditions (which hamper activity and exposure to sunlight). I wouldn't be looking to that sailor diet for guidance, though there are plenty of other traditional foodways that we can model our own diets after. A lot of the "healthy food" recs I run into don't seem too far off from what my great grandparents ate - kefir and other fermented dairy, fermented vegetables, lots of cruciferous vegetables, potatoes, pastured meats/lard, pastured butter and so on.
Grass fed animal fat especially has a different nutrient profile than that from grain fed; I don't think it affects the lean tissue as much (though they are leaner in general).
http://www.eatwild.com/healthbenefits.htm
Eat Wild itself is biased, but these benefits are well-sourced. The benefits are so varied, it's kind of difficult to summarize.
Ha! Me, too! In fact, all my brain heard from the first line on was "Steak! It's steak night!"