The Dietary Health Crisis

Thursday, June 4, 2015, 10am to 11:30 in the Meeting Room (behind the fireplace)

Every five years, the USDA Dietary Guidelines gets updated; 2015 will be the latest update. The scientific recommendations have been submitted and is awaiting approval. However, past recommendations have not halted the nations decline in health due to poor nutrition. What went wrong?

One possibility is that past guidelines did not clearly delineate refined carbohydrates from whole grains. HERE is a talk by the Walter Willett, the chairman of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which has dominant influence on the interpretation of science used by the USDA Dietary Guidelines.

Another possibility is that current dietary science is flawed. The unhealthy person is blamed for not following the guidelines, but at least for some people the guidelines is the cause of the problem. In THIS TED Talk, Peter Attia relates how he blamed obese people for their poor health habits, but later had his own problems and had to shift to a fat based diet, not recommended by the dietary guidelines, to regain health. Attia is now leading a foundation to bring integrity in dietary science.

New discoveries in microbiology suggest that past dietary guidelines have been unsuccessful because they underestimated the role played by gut bacteria. HERE is a TED Talk about this promising line of research.

Polyface Farms

Thursday, May 28, 2015, 10am to 11:30 in the Meeting Room (behind the fireplace)

We will continue with food sustainability by looking at Joe Salatin's of Polyface Farms, made famous by Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma, HERE is an excerpt. Salatin has employed the methods of using cattle grazing to enrich the soil and capture carbon. He also uses other animals, chickens, turkeys, rabbits and pigs in a symbiotic "dance" to improve the yield of his farm. Salatin is a colorful speaker of is farming methods and his philosophy of life, HERE is an example. He definitely has a conservative libertarian bent, but he believes that climate change is real.

We will also show the TED Talk that we did not have time for last week, on us eating insects. While we may not be ready to eat insects, insects can be used as animal feed as is being on on Salatin's farm.

No Cows, More Cows and Insects

Thursday, May 21, 2015, 10am to 11:30 in the Meeting Room (behind the fireplace)

In the last meeting, we learned how GMOs can address the sustainability crisis. In the next meeting, we will review three TED Talks which offer other solutions for sustainability, two of them involving cows. There is a movement to eat less or no meat, primarily beef, to promote health and improve sustainability. This theme has been incorporated in the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, DGAC, report, and is its most controversial recommendation of many controversial recommendations.

The primary argument against the DGAC recommendation is that the issue of sustainability was outside its charter and expertise. Focusing just on the efficiency of plant based diets ignores the role that animals, especially cattle, can play in soil management. The real problem are the concentrated feedlots, not animals in our diet. Many believe that grazing animals will play a major role in food sustainability and removing carbon from the atmosphere.

The third solution for sustainability, eating insects, is really a serious suggestion but is often considered a joke. Rather than explaining it here we will let the TED speaker make his case.

Environmental Heresies, Redux

Thursday, May 14, 2015, 10am to 11:30 in the Meeting Room (behind the fireplace)

We will revive our March 5th meeting that was snowed out about the environmental heresies of Stewart Brand. Brand was a famous environmentalist known primarily for the Whole Earth Catalog, but has since changed his opinion on long standing environmental beliefs. His TED Talk covers four such heresies about third world urbanization, nuclear energy, genetically modified crops and climate engineering.

Norm will be leading the discussion, but there is a lot of material. So please take the time to study the material presented by Brand and tell us at the meeting if your agree or disagree with him.

Commencement Address

Thursday, May 7, 2015, 10am to 11:30 in the Meeting Room (behind the fireplace)

We typically send our college grads into the world with words of optimism, but is this really a wise choice. Since the world is cold, wouldn't it be better to tell them what really to expect. Here are two talks which take opposite approaches. The first talk is Steve Jobs'  address to Stanford during his fight with cancer. He explains how his closeness to death made him only settle for excellence. This is considered to be one of the most inspiring commencement addresses ever given. Yet we know that Jobs eventually lost his battle with cancer.

The second talk is from TED, and takes a more pessimistic tone. This is not a real commencement address, and after you see it you will know why. So in your opinion, which talk would be more useful to college grads?

In the Pan portion of the meeting, we see a TED Talk by our old friend Hans Rosling. He will answer Al's question of why the world population will level off.