Response to Article from Men's Health

The following is my response to an article published in the men's health section and posted on the Fox News website. Please read and respond. The article is inaccurate and unfair.

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I am a fifth generation rancher in the Flinthills of Kansas and I am also one of the small producers that the article speaks of. However, I feel the need to stand up and say that the article is both misleading and inaccurate and the facts must be set straight. The meat in the grocer case is both safe and nutritious. Most importantly it is affordably priced for all consumers.

I direct market a significant number of the beef cattle I produce locally. The beef I market is a premium product priced at a premium level. My customers are middle to upper class and can afford my product. However, many cannot and that is why we need larger farms producing a more affordable product.

The safety of meat is also questioned in this article. That is absolutely false. E-coli can simply be avoided through proper handling and cooking of meat. Consumers who properly handle meat making sure to clean utensils after each step in the cooking process and who cook their meat to the proper internal temperature are protected from e-coli. The truth is that e-coli were much more prevalent 80 years ago when production practices were more closely aligned to the ones supported by the article.

The truth of the matter is that there is a need both for locally raised, premium foods and for the products produced on a larger scale for distribution in larger stores. Small farms simply cannot produce enough food for the ever growing, ever more urban population.

We are incredibly blessed in this nation to have a safe and abundant food supply. Farmers and ranchers produce more food , cheaper, with fewer inputs in a more environmentally friendly manner, each year. The need for nutrition in this country has led to the creation of the greatest most efficient agriculture system in the entire world. All I ask is that the readers of this article take the time to get to know the great viagra cialis online pharmacy pharmacy and women who produce the food and fiber we all need. Do that and they will have a greater appreciation and trust in our shared food supply

Viagra online. Viagra Testimonial.

The following is in fact a true story:

A little less than six months ago, an older friend of mine (65 as a matter of fact), wrote a letter to me asking if I could find an outlet for him to purchase some online pharmacy viagra. The reason was because “The Blue Pill,” was not yet available in his country (China). But, just a few days after he sent me the letter, he notified me that I didn’t need to worry with it, because he had found a source to obtain Viagra through the internet.

Then, just today I received a letter from him telling me how well Viagra had worked for him. As a matter of fact he informed me that his new wife was already pregnant with child.

Just so you know his wife is 29 and Chinese. If you have ever been involved with a Chinese girl you know how wild they are and just how often they like to do the deed. It was totally crazy to me, how well the pill had worked for him.

The letter was just a short note that shocked me out of my shorts. Here is the letter that I received just today:

Mark,

I hope all is well with you. I would like to let you know that the Viagra worked quite well for me. I may need to do some extra work as I will soon have yet another mouth I will have to feed. My wife is now pregnant with my child! It is exciting and scary all at the same time! Once again I hope all is well, and I will update you throughout the pregnancy.

The Finnish Mental Hospital Trial

This diet trial was conducted between 1959 and 1971 in two psychiatric hospitals near Helsinki, Finland. One order cialis served typical fare, including full-fat milk and butter, while the other served "filled milk", margarine and polyunsaturated vegetable oils. Filled milk has had its fat removed and replaced by an emulsion of vegetable oil. As a result, the diet of the patients in the latter cheap cialis was low in saturated fat and cholesterol, and high in polyunsaturated fat compared to the former hospital. At the end of six years, the hospitals switched diets. This is known as a "crossover" design.

The results were originally published in 1972 in the Lancet (ref), and a subset of the data were re-published in 1979 in the International Journal of Epidemiology (ref). They found that during the periods that patients were eating the diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol, and high in vegetable oil, male participants (but not females) had roughly half the incidence of heart attack deaths. There were no significant differences in total mortality in either men or women. The female data were omitted in the 1979 report.

This study is often cited as support for the idea that saturated fat increases the risk of heart attack. The reason it's cited so often is it's one of a minority of trials that came to that conclusion. The only other controlled trial I'm aware of that replaced animal fat with polyunsaturated vegetable oil (without changing other variables at the same time) and found a statistically significant decrease in cardiovascular deaths was the Los Angeles Veterans' Administration study. However, there was no difference in total mortality, and there were significantly more heavy smokers in the control group. The difference in heart attack deaths in the V.A. trial was 18%, far less than the difference seen in the Finnish trial.

I can cite three controlled trials that came to the opposite conclusion, that switching saturated fat for vegetable oil increases cardiovascular mortality and/or total mortality: the Anti-Coronary Club Trial (4 years), the Rose et al. corn oil trial (2 years), and the Sydney Diet-Heart trial (5 years). Other controlled trials found no difference in total mortality or heart attack mortality from this intervention, including the National Diet-Heart Study (2 years) and the Medical Research Council study (7 years). Thus, the Finnish trial is an outlier whose findings have never been replicated by better-conducted trials.

I have three main bones to pick with the Finnish trial. The first two are pretty bad, but the third is simply fatal to its use as support for the idea that saturated fat contributes to cardiovascular risk:

1) A "crossover" study design is not an appropriate way to study a disease with a long incubation period. How do you know that the heart attacks you're observing came from the present diet and not the one the patients were eating for the six years before that? The Finnish trial was the only trial of its nature ever to use a crossover design.

2) The study wasn't blinded. When one wants to eliminate bias in diagnosis for these types of studies, one designs the study so that the physician doesn't know which group the patients came from. That way he can't influence the results, consciously or unconsciously. Obviously there was no way to blind the physicians in this study, because they knew what the patients in each hospital were eating. I think it's interesting that the only outcome not susceptible to diagnostic bias, total mortality, showed no significant changes in either men or women.

3) The Finnish Mental Hospital trial was not actually a controlled trial. In an editorial in the November 1972 issue of the Lancet, Drs. John Rivers and John Yudkin pointed out, among other things, that the amount of sugar varied by almost 50% between diet periods. In the December 30th issue, the lead author of the study responded:

In view of the design of the experiment the variations in sugar intake were, of course, regrettable. They were due to the fact that, aside from the fatty-acid composition and the cholesterol content of the diets, the hospitals, for practical reasons, had to be granted certain freedom in dietary matters.

In other words, the diets of the two hospitals differed significantly in ways other than their fat composition. Sugar was one difference. Carbohydrate intake varied by as much as 17% and total fat intake by as much as 26% between diet periods (on average, carbohydrate was lower and total fat was higher in the polyunsaturated fat group). The definition of a controlled trial is an experiment in which all variables are kept constant except the one being evaluated. Therefore, the Finnish trial cannot rightfully be called a controlled trial. This places it in the same category as other observational studies, in which variables are not controlled and one can only guess what factors caused the difference in disease incidence. The fact that the result has never been replicated casts further doubt on the study.

I could continue listing other problems with the study, such as the fact that the hospital population included in the analysis had a high turnover rate (variable, but as high as 40%), and patients were included in the analysis even if they were at the hospital for as little as 50% of the time between first admission and final discharge (i.e., they came and went). But what's the use in beating a dead horse?

The Finnish trial is still very useful, however. I use it as a litmus test to determine which papers are solid and which are desperate for data that confirm their biases. Any author who cites the Finnish trial in support of the idea that saturated fat causes heart attacks either isn't familiar with it, or is not objective.

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