Tufts University Hopes to Take Meat Away from School Children
0
0
Read Time:8 Minute, 36 Second
Tufts University School of Nutrition and Science Policy has a bone to pick with Americans eating meat. Over the last few years, a variety of absurd, agenda-driven initiatives varying from food nutrient scores like the Food Compass to a think tank powered by Tufts alumni, are all aiming towards finding a way to convince politicians in America and elsewhere to make it harder and harder for Americans to get their hands on meat.
Alexandra Stern, a researcher from the Tufts School of Nutrition and Science Policy, has targeted America’s children in the recent paper this Ivy-League adjacent school has released on meat consumption in school lunches. Predictably, this is done in the name of preventing Climate Change, or other harmful environmental impacts.
In the paper recently published by Stern, a Ph.D. candidate, she presents the argument that the United States National School Lunch Program (NLSP) could cut “40% of the environmental impacts of US school lunches,” by reducing meat options for children and replacing them with whole grains.
In her introduction Stern explains, quite accidentally, why no rational human should consider her compilation of precise calculations and published references as anything other than madness when she writes…
“the NSLP is regularly assessed for cost and nutritional quality; however, the aggregate environmental impacts of producing the food for this program are not known. Baseline estimates of the environmental impacts of food served in the NSLP are needed to design menus and make policy recommendations, which will reduce the environmental impacts of the program and help students develop preferences aligned with sustainable dietary patterns.”
Yes, school lunches are assessed for cost to the taxpayer, and nutritional quality for their kids, but instead, environmental impacts should be estimated in order to remove an unknown level of abstract harm from them, and to try and control students’ future dietary patterns, rather than letting them form their own opinions.
What are Stern’s findings? “the environmental impacts of the US National School Lunch Program could be reduced by serving less meat and more whole grains”.
This comes at a time when meat, widely proven to be the richest source of bioavailable amino acids, choline, calcium, and other key nutrients, (more on that later) is not only becoming more expensive, but needed now more than ever as Americans, including the most economically-vulnerable groups, are suffering from a double nutritional whammy of abundance of empty calories, and key nutrient deficiencies.
PICTURED: It’s always the bloody cows. Photo Credit Alex Proimos CC 2.0.
Facts and figures
Stern used a group of environmental impact statistics to measure the impact of more than 2 million lunches served in 1,207 schools, including the “global warming potential” of emissions, land-use, water-use, and marine and freshwater degradation resulting from phosphorus runoff.
Aside from the so-called “global warming potential” of cow-produced methane being refuted as a measuring stick for climate change impact by a chair of the IPCC, the idea that emissions need to be tackled by reducing meat from the school lunch industry just seems absurd.
2.5% of America’s total greenhouse gas emissions come from enteric fermentation, meaning ruminant animal digestion, the same measurement Stern used in her impact assessment. That 2.5% must be cut down somewhat, since horses, farmed bison, donkeys, goats, and sheep, all produce methane through enteric fermentation. What’s left is to estimate the share of this already-minuscule figure that’s attributable specifically to the proportion of cows whose meat enters the NSLP.
PICTURED: Stern et al.’s research. PC: Alexandra Stern / Tufts University. Released.
“It is true that U.S. animal agriculture emissions are a small proportion of total U.S. emissions based on the EPA inventory, but this does not consider the extent of U.S. emissions. The US is just behind China in total global emissions,” Stern argues in an email. “Further, the estimates [cited by the USDA] do not include upstream emissions associated with production which were covered in our research”.
Another exaggeration is the land-use impact of beef in her paper. The vast majority of America’s beef herds are pastured on land that is not farmable for two reasons. The first is that it’s public land, such as is held by the Bureau of Land Management, and/or second, it’s in an arid climate like Utah, Nevada, Arizona, or the Great Plains.
Stern, unlike other beef opponents, admits that water-use is minimal, since it’s rainwater, and it returns to the land when the cows urinate.
Attacking the most vulnerable
Too much has been written about how much more than recommended America’s intake of protein is without first clarifying why it sits at 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight.
This is the minimum requirement to prevent deficiencies in 97.5% of the population, and it was established in 1941 while trying to figure out how to feed hundreds of thousands of young men, with an average body weight of 145 lbs., who were getting ready to go to war in Europe.
It’s indeed very rare to find amino-acid deficiency in otherwise healthy American children, but reducing meat in school lunches as Stern suggests is taking an awfully large risk of making that not so rare, and almost inevitable for lower-income children who depend on the NSLP for their only sure meal of the day.
When COVID-19 lockdowns closed schools, CNBC published a story claiming that 30 million kids could miss breakfast and lunch as a result of losing out on the NSLP meal(s), meaning that at least some proportion of that relies on the NSLP for a substantial part of their calorie and micronutrient intake. And it’s not like they’re eating like the LA County paleo community already.
Choline deficiency is affecting a jaw-dropping 90% of American adults and children, with the most significant effects of which being seen in children and infants, and the most significant sources being animal-sourced foods.
Zinc deficiency probably affects 17% of the global population, and perhaps as much as 12% of Americans, with beef, pork, oyster, crab, and lobster being the richest source, and plant sources like spinach and nuts actively blocking the absorption of zinc due to their phytate contents.
Nationwide recommendations of prioritizing non-heme dietary iron sources have left many in the country with iron deficiencies, as many as 10 million. Again, children are among those at greatest risk.
Protein itself, i.e. amino acids, has had to be re-examined as being more necessary than it was previously believed, as the continued high rate of stunted children with low-circulating amino acids in the poorest corners of the world proved previous protein targets were not enough.
The answer to these challenges would be, according to the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, to work to cut emissions from more emissions-heavy industries in order to boost the dietary content of animal-based foods like choice meats, organ meats, dairy, shellfish, and other seafood.
In a study published in Frontiers, Beal et al. took into account bioavailability of nutrients in foods, their individual food matrix effects, and their baseline content to create an index of nutrient-dense foods ideal for global targeting of a variety of nutrients of concern, including iron, zinc, folate, vitamin A, calcium, and vitamin B12.
The highest-rated foods for micronutrients and bioavailability were almost all animal products, barring only dark leafy greens. Moreover, they were all ruminant meat, i.e. beef, goat, and lamb/mutton. Moreover, while Stern claims that serving more whole grains, nuts, and seeds could be beneficial for nutrition, Beal’s findings are very different. Regarding iron, for example, just 259 calories of beef provide the adequate daily amount of iron, whereas 700 calories of whole grains, or almost 1,000 calories of nuts, would have to be consumed to get the same intake.
Try to get a child to eat 700 calories of whole grains. To reach full requirements for the other five nutrients mentioned, one need still only eat that amount of beef, while 1,500 calories of whole grains, and 1,600 calories of nuts would be needed to equal it.
This is hardly Alexandra Stern’s fault alone, her faculty colleagues are even more guilty of putting out ridiculous claims about the nutrient values of beef and other meats. In Dariush Mozaffarian’s “Food Compass,” an attempt to rank the healthfulness of foods from best (100) to worst (1) found beef at 24. Even more egregious was his placement of organ meats below “condiments” and “sauces,” legumes, and others.
One of the largest meta-analyses done on the topic found no correlation between better health outcomes and lower red meat consumption, and since then, many countries now no-longer attempt to tie in red meat and cancer.
“We make our recommendations based on the available science and the fact that the NSLP reaches millions of children as they are establishing habits for the future,” Stern says, defending her work. “It is of the utmost importance that the NSLP provides nutritious lunches to children, and this can be accomplished while limiting the environmental impacts of the program, and promoting diets more aligned with environmental sustainability”.
When asked to comment on Beal’s findings, Stern made no comment.
This is no time to be taking the most nutrient-dense food sources away from American children, not for the sake of the environment, and especially not for the sake of nutrition. Parents may consider packing lunches to some degree, as this kind of policy-proposal science isn’t going to stop anytime soon. WaL
Over 700 stories were transferred here from the previous domain of World at Large. You may experience irregularities with formatting, multimedia, and source links in this piece.
0
0
