I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how angry improperly used statistics make me.  Now, I know that this might seem like a really geeky thing to get upset about, but it’s a type of purposeful (generally, sometimes it’s just ignorant) falseness that upsets most people in other contexts.  Contexts like baseball for example.

Imagine you’re watching a baseball game, a really important one.  It’s tied in the 9^th inning of game seven in a playoff series between your favorite team and their hated rival.  Your best player is at the plate and fires a line drive way back into left field.  The batter takes off around the bases—he passes first and second base as the outfielder fumbles for the ball—he gets to third base and now it’s a race between him and the ball to home plate.  He’s racing forward, he’s almost there, he throws himself down, he slides in, and his fingers touch home plate just an instant before the ball thumps into the catcher’s glove.  He’s in!  But wait…the UMPIRE IS SIGNALLING OUT!

Whether you care about baseball or not, you know what happens now.  Every fan in the room leaps to his or her feet and start screaming at the TV.  That dirty bastard!  That looser!  That damn, cheating, moron!  Is he BLIND?  Is he purposefully tipping the game for the other team?!  I mean, really, how could he make that obviously false call!!!!!

This is how I feel when people manipulate statistics.  All the rage and injustice I feel when some official ruins a game for the Sox or the Steelers also wells up in me when someone makes the statement that more people get ill from pasteurized milk than raw milk.  Or that more Americans own guns than Canadians.  It makes me livid.

Let me give you a hypothetical example of how statistics can be manipulated.

Here are three made-up facts:

• A) Each year 100,000 Americans drink pasteurized milk and 200 Americans drink raw (unpasteurized) milk.
• B) Each year 20 Americans get sick after drinking pasteurized milk and 5 Americans get sick after drinking raw milk.
• C) Each year 2 Americans die from illness related to the consumption of pasteurized milk and no Americans die from illness related to the consumption of raw milk.

Once again, this is ALL MADE-UP.  None of the “facts” above are real.

So, with these “facts,” I can say many different things.  All of them true, but some rather misleading.

For example, I can honestly say that more Americans become ill each year after drinking pasteurized milk than do after drinking raw milk—in fact, I can say that four times as many people become ill from drinking pasteurized milk!  However, this statement fails to show how much more likely someone is to become ill after drinking raw milk.

A more honest way of comparing the stats on illness from milk drinking would be to use a percentage: only 0.02% of Americans become ill after drinking pasteurized milk as compared to 2.5% of Americans who become ill after drinking raw milk.  Now you can see that you are 125% more likely to become ill after drinking raw milk, something that does not come through with just a statement of the numbers 20 versus 5.

But even with percentages, we’re still not telling people the whole story.  I think another very important thing when reporting facts that revolve around numbers is to explain things that might not come through on a first glance.  What about the severity of the illnesses?  True, you’re 125% more likely to get sick from drinking raw milk, but how sick?  Are we talking sniffles or kidney failure?  This is also important.

In my made-up scenario, milk drinkers might still be better off with raw milk despite the higher incidence of illness.  10% of the people who became sick after drinking pasteurized milk died.  But none of the people who because sick after drinking raw milk died.  This would be another good way to argue for raw milk.  But it’s still leaving out the incredibly small sample size.  Only 5 people who drank raw milk got sick at all.  Can you get any significant (statistically relevant data that can act as a predictor of future events) data from just 5 people?

If I were going to write something about the relative safety of raw versus pasteurized milk based on the “facts” above, I would say something like this:

What does the science say about the raw milk safety debate?  The data is not exactly conclusive.  Each year many more Americans consume pasteurized milk than raw milk, however, the percentage of raw milk drinkers who become ill is over 100% greater than that of pasteurized milk drinkers.  It’s possible that the illnesses caused by drinking pasteurized milk are more serious, as the rate of death from pasteurized milk infections is higher than that for raw milk.  More data needs to be gathered and analyzed on illness contracted by raw milk drinkers.

I’d like to give a special Thank You to Andy Pyman of Truly Good Design for helping me with updating my site.  It had been so long since I updated WordPress that I was worried I’d lose all my archives if I tried, but he managed to salvage everything and give me a lesson on FTP uploads to boot.  Coming soon are bios for my fellow consultants, more Q&As, and clippings of my recently published works.  Stay tuned!

A coupe of weeks ago it seemed like every time I turned on my TV I’d see an ad for Sonic featuring a hamburger topped with jalapeno poppers and served with a side of tater tots.  At first it seemed too gross for words, but then Sam drew my attention to the KFC Double Down.  As you can see from the image below, it’s a sandwich where the bread has been replaced by two hunks of deep fried chicken.  Yum.

Apparently frightened that KFC might take the lead in the grease war, Friendlies came out with an equally disgusting monstrosity.  It’s a hamburger encased in two grilled cheese sandwiches.  It manages to make the jalapeno popper burger look positively healthful in comparison.

 I’d show you pictures of the Sonic Popper Burger, but I can’t seem to find it online.  I’d wonder if they got rid of it, but since the Ex-Long Chili Cheese Coney Combo (a footlong hotdog covered in chili and cheez wiz for those not in the know) still exists, I’m guessing it’s still around somewhere.

So what’s going on?  Why are fast food companies well, not reverting since their food was never great to begin with, but switching from 1st into 5th gear when it comes to the pace at which they run away from good nutrition?  I don’t think healthful foods like fruits and vegetables have gotten more expensive, nor do I think that meat and cheese have reduced in price.  I’d say that they’re trying to lure in people despite a bad economy, but fast food is the only portion of the restaurant industry that has experienced growth despite the economy.  I’d love to know your guesses.  And I’ll leave you with this:

 Friendly’s Ultimate Grilled Cheese Burger Melt – 1500 calories (75% of your daily needs), 870 calories from fat (145% of your daily needs), 38 grams of saturated fat (170% of your daily allowance), 180 miligrams of cholesterol (90% of your daily allowance), 2090 miligrams of sodium (91% of your daily allowance).

Oysters are filter feeders.  This means they open their shells and suck in water, filter out the plankton, nutrients, and algae in the water, and then release the clean water back into the ocean.  For an ecosystem this can be very handy because oysters and other filter feeders are essentially the biological version of those high-tech bubbling filters you see in aquariums.  When too much nutrient gets into a body of water (imagine a bunch of soil run-off from a big storm forcing nutrient rich soil down the Mississippi and into the Gulf of Mexico as an example) oysters can filter it out before it gets out of hand.

Unfortunately for oysters, being filter feeders also means that when something like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill starts polluting the Gulf, they are some of the first creatures to bear the environmental consequences.  The oysters suck in water full of oil droplets and filter out the oil and other yummy stuff like mercury or hydrocarbons along with the plankton, nutrients, and algae that they want.  The oil and the dispersants used by BP to break the oil up into droplets either kill the oysters outright or accumulate in the oysters and eventually show up in the aquatic creatures that eat oysters…or the people who do.

Apart from being bad news for oysters and the people who like to eat oyster po boys, this reduction in the oyster population could be bad news for the Gulf as a whole.  See, in the environment nothing lives in its own little bubble.  If something goes wrong with oysters then it’s going to effect other parts of the Gulf.  Here are some possible consequences:

1. A bigger “dead zone.”  Have you head of the dead zone?  It’s this big spot where nothing can grow because there’s been an over growth of algae.  Remember when I told you that oysters filter algae out of the water?  Yeah.  No oysters means more algae and more algae can mean bad things for the Gulf.  It’s essentially like pond scum that covers miles and miles of space and makes it so nothing else can live there.
2. Bad news moving up the food chain.  Welks, starfish, and seabirds all eat oysters and so whatever the oysters filter out of the water slowly moves up the food chain as these guys eat the oysters and other guys eat them.  As you may remember from DDT in the1960s, this can be very not good for creatures at the top of the food chain (seen any bald eagles lately?) because the concentrations of the nasty stuff in the oil dispersants can build up.
3. Habitat loss.  Oysters create reefs.  Basically, as they build up their shells and then die off oysters create these magnificent, craggy structures built of old and empty shells that act much like coral reefs in terms of providing homes for marine life.  When lots of oysters die all at once this means that no new shells are being generated and eventually the reefs will wash away due to ocean forces like tides and currents.  Loss of reefs means loss of the marine organisms who use those reefs as homes, including anemones, barnacles, and breeding fish.

On Tuesday evening President Obama gave his first Oval Office speech.  In it he addressed the BP oil disaster and told Americans that we had to do our part to reduce our energy usage.  He talked about alternative energies like wind turbines and solar panels.  Since cars don’t actually run on wind or sun at this moment, I’m pretty sure that this was a way for the President to turn a rotten situation (oil spewing into the Gulf and destroying a delicate ecological system as well as the economics of the region) into a window of opportunity for his stalled Climate Legislation.

This legislation is a great plan moving forward (well, maybe, we’ll see what it looks like once it’s finished making the rounds in the House and Senate) but it doesn’t do anything at this exact moment when so many of us are pumped up to make a change and help out.  However, here in our own homes there are many ways that we can heed the President’s “call to arms” and reduce our oil dependence.  The kitchen is a good place to start.

Eat less processed food.  Processing food takes energy, AKA oil.  The more steps there are in processing, the more energy is wasted in between you and the food.  In an ideal world you’d grow an apple on a tree in your backyard, pick it at perfect ripeness, and eat it.  Low energy!  But we don’t live in an ideal world–we live in a high-fructose-corn-syrup-sweetened sort of world.  In our world we grow corn in a far away place; transport it to a factory also far away; mash it, smash it, and chemically alter it into corn syrup; and then use that syrup to sweeten dried apple chips that are shipped to your local grocery store in shelf-stable packaging.  Hi energy!

Listen, when you take corn, or any type of food for that matter, and mash it and grind it and chemically extract the things from it, you’re using a lot of mechanical and chemical energy.  Every extra processing step is another place where energy, and therefore oil, is wasted.  The closer your food is to what Michael Pollan would call “real food” the more oil you’ve conserved in getting your meal together.

Keep in mind, I’m not talking about the energy you’re consuming.  I’m not saying processed foods will make you fat.  I’m simply talking about the fossil fuels that are wasted at each step in the process of creating processed foods.  It takes a lot more energy to make processed foods that have the same number of calories as whole, unprocessed foods.  That’s actually one of the definitions of processed food, how much energy goes into making it compared to how much nutrition you get out of eating it.

In short, processed food is wasteful.  You save energy and conserve oil by eating whole foods.  A fantastic side benefit is how delicious and healthful they are.

Two or three years ago ( I should really know when, but I’ll just be honest and admit that I don’t) the rules changed to allow people enrolled in SNAP to spend their food stamps at farmers’ markets.  However, in 2004 the program switched from real food stamps to EBT or “Electronic Benefit Transfer” cards, basically cards with a magnetic strip that work just like a credit or debit card.  This was a problem because most farmers’ markets aren’t set up to accept any type of electronic payment.  Legally, SNAP was accepted at farmers’ markets, but in fact the infrastructure wasn’t there.

The terminals that can be used to swipe credit, debit, and EBT cards cost over $1000 each, a hefty fee.  You can learn more about the problem from this New York Times article.  People like my boss and friend Jeff Cole at Mass Farmers Markets and the good folks at The Food Project have been working tirelessly to make sure that despite the cost, every market in the Greater Boston Area can accept EBT.  They’ve recently partnered with Mass General Hospital further that goal by introducing Mass General Nutrition Dollars.

There are many reasons I think this is fabulous:

1. It can mean much more healthful food choices for low income folks.
2. Food dollars can stay local and help build up the local economy.
3. Foods at farmers’ markets aren’t pre-packaged, so in a way the government is funding less waste.
4. I’m involved, so of course I want to write about it.

Let’s talk about the healthful food choices first.  SNAP already limits your food choices a little; you can’t buy hot foods, restaurant meals, alcoholic beverages, or vitamins with food stamps; but you can still buy any number of other foods that might not be the most healthful.  You can buy soda and potato chips and candy with food stamps, most of which you’re not going to find at a farmers’ market.  What you will find at a farmers market are lots of fresh vegetables and fruits.  Some markets carry meats and seafood, both of which are covered.  Another fun one is “seeds and plants which (sic) produce food for the household to eat.”  You catch that?  You can buy seedlings at the farmers’ market, plant them at home, and enjoy the most local of foods, using your SNAP benefits.  Ed Murietta talks about this in today’s Talk of the Nation.

Building the local economy is something I like a lot, although I mostly stick to sustainable food and let my friends at Slow Money be the experts when it comes to economics.  However, here is my The Idiot’s Guide to the Local Multiplier Effect.  The term ‘local multiplier effect’ refers to how many times a dollar is recirculated within a local economy before leaving through the purchase of an import (something not local).  The general idea is that when you spend money in a grocery store that is owned by people who live outside your community, the money you spend there mostly leaves your community.  Not only that, but it leaves your community right away, without recirculating at all.  However, when you spend money at a farmers market with all local farmers, those farmers will then spend those dollars on something else in the local community.  This multiplies the effect of each of those dollars on the entire community. Good stuff.

Let’s talk un-eco-friendly.  Last time I went into a grocery store I saw baking potatoes individually wrapped in plastic.  In accordance with Country of Origin Labeling laws, each apple had a little sticker on it.  The mushrooms came in styrofoam containers with cellophane on top.   Now let’s talk eco-friendly.  Last time I went to the farmers’ market every patron had their own bag and when I bought a pint of strawberries the vendor asked me to give her back the little wooden container they were sitting in if I didn’t think they would stain anything.  Less packaging means less waste, and I’ve never seen a farmers’ market yet that creates more trash than a grocery store.

How am I involved?  Through Mass Farmers Markets.  This Saturday the Boston Health Expo will be happening at the Hynes Convention Center.  Mass General Hospital has an exhibit there where it will be talking about health and nutrition and it has kindly invited folks from both Mass Farmers Markets and The Food Project to talk about food and farmers’ markets.  I’ll be there from 12-2, so stop by to chat and learn more.  I’ll also be doing EBT outreach at Copley, Central, and occasionally Davis Square market, so don’t be shy about locally multiplying your dollars!

The United States of Arugula by David Kamp.  An interesting overview of the story of food in America from WWII to the present, complete with a rundown of celebrity chefs, talking heads, top restaurants, and the must have ingredients of each food era.  It focuses on the gourmet without being snooty, gives details on the lives and integrations of the main players in the food world without being gossipy, and is a great primer for those who love food today but wonder what it was like back in the day.  Especially interesting are the bits about Craig Claiborne and James Beard, contemporaries of Julia Child who have been left behind in the fervor surrounding her life of late.

The End of Overeating by David Kessler.  A self-help book that could really work.  Kessler is a medical doctor who has spent years researching how the food industry creates its tempting treats and how consumers’ brains react to them.  However, unlike most people who pen a book about food and diet, The End of Overeating contains no silver bullet.  After laying out the science behind why so many people eat too much Kessler gives tips for using behavioral psychology, similar to the advice you would give someone trying so quit smoking, to permanently change habits and each more healthfully.  While not glamorous, the book rings true and could be very helpful to many people.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis.  Just to prove I don’t always read books about food.  I first discovered Lewis when I picked up The Blind Side for a bit of light, pre-finals reading and devoured the whole book in one day.  I figured that anyone who could make the offensive line of football comprehensible to me would be the person I could turn to for insight into the world of finance.  Sure enough, this book made sub-prime mortgage based CDOs make as much sense as any elaborately opaque Ponzi scheme could.  I recommend it to anyone who wants to be horrified by the lack of prospects for the economic recovery of our nation.

Seeing a nutrition article on the front page of the Times is always nice, I like knowing that I just invested two years and several thousand dollars in an area that’s attracting lots of interest.  What really surprised me was the size of the article.  When I flipped to the continuation expecting to see a column or two, I was amazed to see a whole page dedicated to the science, politics, and economics of salt in our food.

While I love to think that people want to learn about nutrition just for the sake of increasing their knowledge, I still had to wonder why such an article would merit such a large word count.  I started thinking about the politics of salt and food and what’s going on in nutrition right now that would cause such a broad article to be useful.  Because this article was really more like a primer on the politics of sodium in food than anything else.  It explains things I’ve learned from reading Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, David Kessler’s The End of Overeating, Harold McGee’s Science and Lore of the Kitchen.  An article that distills this information is interesting, yes, but why is it pertinent?

I did some searching and discovered that the 6th and final meeting of the advisory committee for the Dietary Guidelines for Americans took place on May 12th, which means that the final Guidelines will probably be released soon (although despite my searches of the USDA website I can’t seem to find a release date for them).  The New York Times article states that the commission, “includes two studies commissioned by ConAgra suggesting that the country could save billions of dollars more in health care and lost productivity costs by simply nudging Americans to eat a little less food, rather than less salty food.”

If the Guidelines really end up saying “less food, same salt” that would be amazing.  Previously industry, who has always had a financial finger in the pie if only by funding most of the research that is reviewed by the committee, has always been against the statement “eat less” in any form.  Saying no to less sodium was a heard sell for them though, because the science has consistently shown lots of sodium in the diet can lead to high blood pressure and many chronic diseases associated with high blood pressure.

I don’t think that there’s a big conspiracy among the makers of processed foods to give everyone high blood pressure, it’s just that salt tastes good and also acts as a preservative, two things that are very important in processed food.  Once the news came out about how bad sodium was for us companies like Campbell’s even tried cutting down on salt on their own.  First they started with new lines of Low Sodium products, but they quickly realized that when something is labeled Low Sodium that everyone expects it to taste cruddy and no one buys it.  Then they began quietly retooling their regular products lines and reducing the sodium behind the scenes, sometimes by dramatic amounts.  According to a Wall Street Journal article by next summer, ConAgra Food Inc.’s Chef Boyardee canned pasta will have decreased its sodium by about 35% over the course of five years without a word on the package.

The thing is, you can only reduce the salt in processed food by so much before you lose the flavor, texture, color, and preservative properties that you need in shelf stable products.  At this point industry has been backed into a corner.  They can’t reduce salt content in their packaged foods much more without having to either replace it with something more expensive (don’t ask me what, I’m not a food chemist), or start sacrificing in the flavor department.  Neither of these options are good economically.

To me this means that we might finally see something interesting in the newest addition of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.  Or maybe I’m just reading a little too much into a interesting New York Times article.

I’ve been interested in seafood and sustainability for a for a while how, but I’ve never really dug into the issue (let alone written about it) because, and I’m ashamed to admit this, it’s really complicated.  We don’t know a lot about the ocean.  It’d deep, it’s dark, and it’s a little scary.

How little do we know about the ocean?  Well, there are entire, very large,  species of animals  (giant squid) that live in there that we only know about because there remains wash ashore every once and again.  Also, some of the best scientific knowledge we have about ocean currents comes from, and I’m dead serious here, mapping where a shipment of hockey gloves swept overboard in a storm eventually washed ashore (one of those cases where it’s science because we did it while wearing lab coats) .  Basically what I’m saying is that the ocean is a mysterious place that we know surprisingly little about, and yet we utilize a whole heck of a lot for our diets.

Both global and national demands for fish as food are increasing hugely.  According to the World Health Organization, the average per person consumption of fish has just about doubled in the past 50 years (keep in mind that the number of persons has increased as well) and this trend shows no signs of slowing down or stopping.  In fact, the opposite may be occurring.  World wide, as populations increase in wealth they add more protein to their diets and fish is a popular protein.  And on top of that, in nations where protein is already abundant in the diet (such as the United States) fish is seen as a more healthful alternative to meats like beef or pork.  Here fishy fishy.

It’s time to stop complaining that seafood is hard to understand and to start looking for resources to help me figure it out. Here are three resources I’ve found that I’d like to share:

First is Green Chefs, Blue Ocean by the Chefs Collaborative and the Blue Ocean Institute.   It’s designed for chefs and restaurateurs, but the information is useful for anyone who wants to know more about seafood, where it comes from, and whether their choices are sustainable.  I completed the introductory lesson (there are about 6 lessons altogether) and found it very informative.  It had good sources for its facts and a nice, broad definition of sustainability that addressed not only both farmed and wild-caught seafood, but also sustainability in terms of the fishing communities, which is something that should be considered but is frequently excluded from dialogue on sustainable fish.

Next is the Monteray Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Site.  While I know most people skip straight to the seafood recommendations, I ignored those for the moment and focused on the background information the site provided.  I particularly found their Ocean Issues section to be helpful and informative.  This gives some nice background in wild-caught and farm-raised seafood, including information that might not be widely known such as the damage caused by underreported fishing or the effects of farmed fish that escape into the wild.

Finally there is the website of local freelance writer Jacqueline Church, who was one of the panelists at the Farm, Fish & Fowl discussion at Tufts last Monday.  Church is a lawyer by training, but has gone on to a career as a food writer with a strong sustainability bent and an interest in pigs and fish of all things.  Her blog and newsletter are great for keeping an eye on local events focused on sustainable seafood.

For example, Friedman is hosting a food an wine event next Monday called, “Farm, Fish and Fowl: Exploring Sustainability.” Doesn’t that sound cool?  And there’s still time to sign up if you’re interested.  Registration closes on Thursday.

The event is a cocktail reception with food from EVOO and Beacon Hill Bistro followed by what I am sure will be an intensely interesting panel discussion.  The panelists include:

• Peter McCarthy of EVOO (a restaurant in Cambridge featuring local and sustainable ingredients)
• Jacqueline Church, an independent food and wine writer with a bent towards sustainability
• Jennifer Hashley, Director of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project and co-owner of Pete and Jen’s Backyard Birds

The moderator of the discussion is none other than Tim Griffin, Director of the Agriculture, Food, and Environment program at the Friedman School of Nutrition.  He’s also my adviser and the guy who will be reading the rough draft of my thesis this afternoon.  Sign up, it should be a fun evening!