Disclaimer
• Your life and health are your own responsibility.
• Your decisions to act (or not act) based on information or advice anyone provides you—including me—are your own responsibility.
We’ve been bombarded for years with the evils of trans fat…
…and for once, the mainstream advice appears to be mostly correct. Trans fats cause coronary heart disease, they’re strongly associated with obesity, depression, infertility in women, and breast cancer, and they interfere with critical liver enzymes. (More.)
However, an alert commenter (Steven) pointed out that beef contains a significant amount of trans fat. And while his estimate was a bit high, it is absolutely true that one ounce of beef fat (28.3g) usually contains 0.5g-1.4g of trans fat.
In fact, the meat and milk of ruminants contains a significant amount of trans fat—roughly 2-5% of the total. Even worse, grass-fed milk and meat contains even more trans fat than grain-fed milk and meat!
“Cows grazing pasture and receiving no supplemental feed had 500% more conjugated linoleic acid in milk fat than cows fed typical dairy diets.”
What’s going on here?
Trans-Vaccenic Acid and the Conjugated Linoleic Acids
No, I haven’t just named an obscure prog rock band from the 1970s. I’ve named the culprits: vaccenic acid and rumenic acid (a conjugated linoleic acid). Though vaccenic acid comprises most of the total, our bodies convert vaccenic acid directly to rumenic acid (just as they convert stearic acid directly to oleic acid), so nutritionally, we only need to investigate the effects of rumenic acid.
(This conversion is not reflected in American nutritional labeling—which requires stearic acid to be counted as saturated fat and vaccenic acid to be counted as trans fat, despite the fact that our bodies immediately convert them to different forms.)
A Short Biochemistry Excursion
Rumenic acid is known formally as (9Z,11E)-octadeca-9,11-dienoic acid, and informally as cis-9, trans-11 18:2. Vaccenic acid is known formally as (E)-Octadec-11-enoic acid, and informally as 18:1 trans-11.
Interestingly, the enzyme that converts vaccenic acid to rumenic acid—delta-9-desaturase—is the same enzyme that converts stearic acid (a saturated fat, 18:0) to oleic acid (a monounsaturated fat, 18:1 cis-9). That’s because delta-9-desaturase creates a cis-handed double bond at the 9th position. If you look at their informal names (or their chemical structure), you’ll see that the difference between vaccenic and rumenic acid is a cis-9 double bond, just the same as the difference between stearic and oleic acid is a cis-9 double bond.
Rumenic acid is part of a family of fats known as conjugated linoleic acids. “Conjugated” means that it contains both cis- and trans- bonds, just as its name (cis-9, trans-11 18:2) says.
Where Do The Trans Fats In Beef and Milk Come From?
Multicellular animals create only cis-handed fats with their enzymes…so where do trans-rumenic and trans-vaccenic acid come from?
Answer: they come from bacteria.
Cows, and other ruminants, can’t digest grass any more than we can. However, they have extra “stomachs” that are basically big microbial fermentation vats, in which bacteria digest the grass for them. (Whereupon they burp it up again, “chew the cud”, and finally swallow it into the regular digestive system once the rumen bacteria are done working.) Trans-rumenic and trans-vaccenic acid are created by these rumen bacteria via biohydrogenation of polyunsaturated fats (link).
To learn more about the ruminant digestive system, click the picture.
When Trans Fats Are Good For You: Our Friend Rumenic Acid
As with most rules of thumb, “trans fats are bad” is an oversimplification. “Molecules found nowhere in real food are bad” is the correct statement. People have been eating ruminants for millions of years, so one might expect that our bodies might have a nutritional use for rumenic acid.
This is, in fact, the case. The health benefits of rumenic acid are well-established—to the point where conjugated linoleic acid supplements (usually labeled “CLA” in big letters) are found in every vitamin store!
Conjugated linoleic acids (CLA) are a group of positional and geometric isomers of linoleic acid with proven beneficial influence on health. They show e.g. anticarcinogenic, antiobesity, and antiatherogenic effect. Milk, dairy products and meat of poligastric animals are their most valuable dietary sources, with cis-9, trans-11 CLA (RA – rumenic acid) being the predominant isomer.
…
This group of fatty acids has been extensively studied for recent years, in both in vivo and in vitro models, because of their beneficial biological effects: protection against cancer [7-10], prevention of atherosclerosis [11-14], reduction of obesity [15-17] and hypertension [18].
–Bialek et.al.
Since vaccenic acid (which becomes rumenic acid) and rumenic acid comprise 2-5% of beef and milk fat, this gives us yet another excellent reason to consume fatty meat and butter. Sign me up!
CLA Supplements: Not The Same As Real Food
It’s easy to get trapped in “nutritionism”: the idea that we can eat whatever junk we want, and take supplements to replace the nutrients we’re not getting from our food. This rarely works…and in the case of CLA supplements, we know why.
Recall that “conjugated linoleic acid” can mean a whole host of different fats, depending on the positions of the double bonds. Most CLA supplements are derived from safflower oil—
—and they contain equal parts rumenic acid (cis-9, trans-11 18:2) and an unnamed trans-10, cis-12 18:2 isomer.In other words, half of a CLA supplement is an entirely different chemical than what you’re getting from meat and butter.
Unfortunately, trans-10, cis-12 doesn’t have all the same beneficial effects. While it still seems to have anti-cancer properties in mice, it doesn’t have the same effects on human metabolism as rumenic acid:
“The significant increase from baseline in 8-iso-PGF2α, 15-K-DH-PGF2α and CRP after t10c12 CLA was 1.04±0.7 (578%), 0.30±0.31 (77%), and 2.89±3.66 (110%), respectively.
…
This randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial demonstrates that dietary supplementation with t10c12CLA causes isomer-specific oxidative stress that is related to induced insulin resistance.”
“This randomized placebo-controlled trial has revealed unexpected metabolic actions by conjugated fatty acids in humans—actions that seem isomer-specific. The t10c12 CLA isomer, but not a CLA mixture, significantly increased insulin resistance, fasting glucose, and dyslipdemia in abdominally obese men.”
[I can’t resist an editorial comment at this point: why did neither study test rumenic acid alone, the way it occurs in real food? Might it have actually reduced oxidative stress and decreased insulin resistance, when not forced to fight equal amounts of the imposter t10c12?]
It’s important to note that many of the studies that claim benefits for t10c12 are on mice or rats. As Risérus et.al. note:
“Conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) is a group of dietary fatty acids with antiobesity and antidiabetic effects in some animals. The trans10cis12 (t10c12) CLA isomer seems to cause these effects, including improved insulin sensitivity.”
Unfortunately, as their experiment proved, the safflower-derived t10c12 doesn’t have the same benefits for humans as it does for rodents. And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that ingesting a chemically extracted fraction of a seed oil doesn’t produce the same benefit as eating real food.
Conclusion: Keep Eating Like a Predator, Keep Eating Real Food
Our conclusions should be obvious, but I’ll restate them:
If we’ve eaten something for millions of years, the odds are very good that we’re adapted to eating it.
Be skeptical of studies that feed fat to mice—herbivores that naturally subsist on plants and seeds.
Whenever possible, eat real food, not supplements. You might not be getting the same benefits…or even the same nutrients.
Most importantly: keep eating delicious fatty red meat and butter!
Spend money on vitamins...
...or prime rib?
Live in freedom, live in beauty.
JS
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In previous installments, we’ve established the following:
Hunger is not a singular motivation: it is the interaction of several different clinically measurable, provably distinct mental and physical processes.
In a properly functioning human animal, likes and wants coincide; satiation is an accurate predictor of satiety; and the combination of hunger signals (likes and wants) and satisfaction signals (satiation and satiety) results in energy and nutrient balance at a healthy weight and body composition.
Restrained eating requires the exercise of willpower to override likes, wants, and the lack of satiation or satiety; the exercise of willpower uses energy and causes stress; and stress makes you eat more. Therefore, a successful diet must minimize the role of willpower.
A lack of satiety will leave us hungry no matter what else we do to compensate. We fail to achieve satiety by not ingesting (or not absorbing) the energy and/or nutrients our body requires, and by an inability to retrieve the energy and/or nutrients our bodies have stored due to mitochondrial dysfunction.
Satiation is an estimate of future satiety based on sensory input. As with satiety, we fail to achieve it by not satisfying our nutritional needs. We can also bypass satiation by decreasing sensory exposure to our foods. Some common enablers are eating quickly, eating while distracted or on the run, and eating calorie-dense packaged and prepared foods.
A Disclaimer
I’ve put off writing these next few articles because they’re likely to cause some controversy, which I don’t enjoy. My objective with the articles I write here at gnolls.org is to organize, distill, and summarize the bewildering variety of nutritional information into succinct, helpful articles, to share them with my readers, and to improve them as new information comes to my attention.
(An aside: I thank you, my readers, for continuing to provide references, intriguing leads, and constructive criticism. Please continue to do so.)
Please note that I have no horse in any of the current races: I am neither selling diet books nor defending a career-building hypothesis, and my current series of articles started long before the AHS and any still-simmering disputes.
Finally, and most importantly, I am not proposing any new theories of hunger or obesity. The current literature is both comprehensive and, I believe, more than adequate to explain and understand observed phenomena.
That being said: let’s get started!
Endless Arguments Are Often A Sign Of Murky Definitions
When, after innumerable posts and presentations on the subject, we see very smart people unable to articulate exactly what is meant by fundamental concepts like “palatability”, it’s quite likely that the hypothesis in question is poorly specified.
Therefore, I will briefly summarize the current state of scientific knowledge, as I understand it, on the subject of hunger and reward.
Though the terms “liking” and “wanting” seem reasonably self-explanatory, we must be careful when using them in the scientific sense.
When we speak of “liking” something, we’re consciously predicting our future reactions. (“I like eggs.”) However, in the scientific literature, “liking” refers only to our actual reactions of pleasure, both conscious and unconscious—the hedonic impact of an experience.
Similarly, when we speak of “wanting”, we’re consciously predicting our future likelihood of seeking out an experience. But again, in the scientific literature, “wanting” refers only to our actual motivation to do so—the incentive salience of an experience.
In recent years significant progress has been made delineating the psychological components of reward and their underlying neural mechanisms. Here we briefly highlight findings on three dissociable psychological components of reward: ‘liking’ (hedonic impact), ‘wanting’ (incentive salience), and learning (predictive associations and cognitions).
The concept of “palatability” can be understood as the hedonic reward of food:
For most people a ‘reward’ is something desired because it produces a conscious experience of pleasure — and thus the term may be used to refer to the psychological and neurobiological events that produce subjective pleasure. But evidence suggests that subjective pleasure is but one component of reward, and that rewards may influence behavior even in the absence of being consciously aware of them. Indeed, introspection can actually sometimes lead to confusion about the extent to which rewards are liked, whereas immediate reactions may be more accurate [1]. In the extreme, even unconscious or implicit ‘liking’ reactions to hedonic stimuli can be measured in behavior or physiology without conscious feelings of pleasure (e.g. after a subliminally brief display of a happy facial expression or a very low dose of intravenous cocaine) [2,3].
–Ibid.
And when most of us think of “food reward”, we are thinking purely of “wanting”—specifically “incentive salience”:
By ‘wanting’, we mean incentive salience, a type of incentive motivation that promotes approach toward and consumption of rewards, and which has distinct psychological and neurobiological features. For example, incentive salience is distinguishable from more cognitive forms of desire meant by the ordinary word, wanting, that involve declarative goals or explicit expectations of future outcomes, and which are largely mediated by cortical circuits [34–37].
By comparison, incentive salience is mediated by more subcortically weighted neural systems that include mesolimbic dopamine projections, does not require elaborate cognitive expectations and is focused more directly on reward-related stimuli [34,35,38]. In cases such as addiction, involving incentive-sensitization, the difference between incentive salience and more cognitive desires can sometimes lead to what could be called irrational ‘wanting’: that is, a ‘want’ for what is not cognitively wanted, caused by excessive incentive salience [39•,40•,41]. [emphasis mine]
–Ibid.
That explains quite a bit right there, doesn’t it?
I’d love to quote more of Berridge et.al.—but as the full text is available for free, I’ll just recommend that you read it if you’re interested in digging into the details.
It should now be clear that “food reward” has three distinct components which we must distinguish and define if we hope to understand it:
The hedonic impact of eating food: its palatability.
Incentive salience: the drive to consume more food.
The process of learning, in which both hedonic impact and incentive salience are modified by experience.
If we fail to separate these components, we find ourselves creating tautologies. For example, it’s obviously absurd to say alcoholism is caused by “alcohol reward”—but if we distinguish the hedonic impact of alcohol from the incentive salience of alcohol, suddenly we have a handle by which to grasp the issues and make headway.
Intermission
Some Important Observations About Liking, Wanting, and Learning
Here are what I believe are some important takeaways from the literature as they apply to hunger:
Reward is not a concept limited to food. Common sources of reward in everyday life also include social approval from parents, friends, co-workers, and strangers; legal and illegal drugs; physical activities, such as recreational sports; successful accomplishment of tasks; and media consumption, including television and the Internet. Anything we “like”—anything with hedonic impact—is capable of creating and reinforcing a “want” for more—incentive salience.
In fact, much of the literature studies drug reward (legal and illegal). These are easier cases to study, since the human body has no nutritional requirement for nicotine, alcohol, or cocaine, and reward is not tied up with other motivations.
Taste is not the only determinant of hedonic impact. The circumstances surrounding consumption, such as social approval, are also powerful determinants…and they don’t even have to be associated with consumption!
For example, beer is generally an acquired taste: most of us instinctively dislike its bitterness, and only ‘develop a taste’ for beer as we associate beer drinking with intoxication and positive social interactions. Note the universal context of beer commercials: beer = fun times with friends. Also note that advertising can drive consumption, despite having no association with the actual action of consumption.
Another example: many Muslims and Jews are repulsed by even the thought of pork purely due to social context, despite having no intrinsic inability to ingest or digest it.
Incentive salience (“wanting”) is not an intrinsic property of food, or anything else. Unlike our instinctive aversion to spiders, humans have no instinctual knowledge of Pringles, Twizzlers, or Cinnabons. Incentive salience is a learned property.
Therefore, incentive salience (“wanting”) is not a static property. It is created and reinforced by the hedonic impact (“liking”) of food consumption itself, by the positive experiences of satiation and satiety that consumption of nutritious food can produce, and by its associations with other rewarding factors and experiences (as enumerated above).
We must distinguish experiences that modify hedonic impact (“liking”) or incentive salience (“wanting”) from incentive salience itself. For instance, the fact that the satiety response can modify incentive salience does not make satiety part of the reward response.
It’s even easier to understand this error when we understand that social context affects hedonic impact: it’s clearly silly to call social relationships part of “food reward”. This error has been a major source of confusion in the discussion so far.
Conclusion
In order to understand the role of “food reward” in hunger, we must define and distinguish its constituent motivations:
The hedonic impact of eating food: its palatability.
Incentive salience: the drive to consume more food.
The process of learning, in which both hedonic impact and incentive salience are modified by experience.
Further, we must understand that reward is not limited to food, is neither static nor an intrinsic property of the food itself, and is modified by many experiences besides its taste during the act of consumption—most of which are not themselves reward pathways.
Did you find this article helpful or illuminating? Hit some of those “share” buttons below and spread it around! And if you have questions or further information, please leave a comment!
This article should, by rights, be an entire book: the consequences of agricultural commoditization are profound and far-reaching. By necessity, I am concentrating on a few key points.
Where’s The Real Food?
One of the largest movements in 20th century agriculture was the commoditization of food.
In 1900, 41% of the US workforce was directly employed in agriculture, and each farm produced over five different crops for sale—not counting food consumed on the farm or sold locally, outside the commodity system. Furthermore, 60% of Americans lived in rural areas. (Source: USDA.) This means that the majority of Americans either grew their own food, or had direct access to the producers of the food they ate.
In 2000, just 1.9% of Americans were employed in agriculture, farms produced an average of just over one crop for sale, and less than 1 out of 4 Americans lived in rural areas. The number of farms has fallen 63%, while the average farm size has risen 67%.
All charts above from the USDA Economic Research Service:
In other words, we no longer have direct access to the food we eat. How did this happen?
As usual, the answer is simple: follow the money.
A Silly and Far-Fetched Scenario
Let’s consider a silly and far-fetched scenario for a moment.
The US government decides that Hollywood’s dominance of the world entertainment industry should be encouraged at the creative end as well as the financial end, and offers the following incentive:
“We will pay $100 for every new song of two minutes or longer, recorded in English by an American citizen in America, upon registration with the Copyright Office.”
(Subject to a raft of rules and red tape, of course.)
Right away we can see the problem: there is no incentive to write a song that anyone else wants to hear! The only incentive is to write lots and lots of ‘songs’…and it would probably take about six hours for enterprising programmers to write song-generation programs that put together random chord progressions and random sentences off the Internet, automatically play them with a synthesizer, and send them into the Copyright Office as quickly as they could record the vocals.
In other words, such an incentive would not result in more entertainment: it would result in a tsunami of unlistenable crap.
Commoditization: What Does “Fungible” Mean?
The definition of a commodity is “a good supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.” This property is called “fungibility”.
Sadly, the term “fungible” has nothing to do with either fungi or dirigibles. A fungible good is capable of mutual substitution: one unit is defined to be just as good as any other.
We can see that fungibility is a necessary property of money. If I loan you 100 dollars, I don’t expect to get the same $100 back I loaned to you…any $100 will do, because dollars are fungible.
Similarly, we can see that fungibility is a necessary property of commodities. If I contract to deliver you 1000 pounds of copper in March of next year, you shouldn’t have to care where the copper comes from.
Fungibility also applies to agricultural commodities: if I contract to deliver 100 bushels of corn in September of next year for a set price, it’s clearly impossible for you to inspect or evaluate corn that I haven’t even grown yet! So certain minimum standards for delivery are defined—and beyond that, all corn is the same.
Like most commodities, grains are mixed without regard to source: the producers sell their corn, whereupon it’s transferred via an elevator to a silo and mingled with all the other corn from the area, and anyone who buys corn simply gets whatever comes out of the elevator first.
We can see that an attempt to make non-fungible creations (songs) into a fungible commodity, as in the silly example above, would result in both an oversupply of unlistenable songs and an economic catastrophe.
Problem #1: Real Food Is Not Fungible
The alert reader will see several problems with this “fungible food” scenario right away. The first problem is that real food is not fungible.
For instance, when we go to buy onions, tomatoes, melons, or other produce, we don’t just choose them at random. We choose the variety that will taste best in our recipe, and from that, we choose the ripest, least damaged, best-looking, best-smelling ones available. We may even reject all the choices as unsuitable and visit a different store…or the farmer’s market.
A grain elevator.
Unfortunately, when a food becomes commoditized, we no longer have that choice. There’s no such thing as artisanal corn syrup, soybean oil, or textured vegetable protein: they’re made from commodity crops, and you’ll get whatever came out of the grain elevator.
Problem #2: Fungibility Begets Mediocrity
The second problem, which is a consequence of the first, is that fungibility begets mediocrity.
Consider: if you are a farmer, and the only standard for corn is that there be as many bushels of it as you contracted to deliver, are you going to care about nutrition? About taste? About pesticide contamination?
No. You’re not going to care about anything but producing the maximum quantity possible for the least cost, because it doesn’t matter. You can produce the most nutritious corn in the world…but you won’t be paid any more for it than your neighbor who’s just trying to cut costs.
Furthermore, we can see that agricultural price supports make this problem far worse. Think back to the songwriting example above: if you’re absolutely guaranteed to get paid by Uncle Sam as long as your ‘song’ is two minutes or greater, why bother creating anything meaningful? You’ll make far more money by creating unlistenable crap as quickly as you can.
Similarly, if you’re growing a crop (such as corn, wheat, cotton, or soybeans) that receives price supports, you’re not going to care about taste, nutrition, or any other measure of quality—let alone topsoil depletion or groundwater contamination. You’re paid by the bushel, and all that matters is how many bushels you can grow.
Is it any wonder that these “commodity crops” are so devoid of nutrients that products made from them must, by law, be “fortified” with vitamins and minerals in order to avoid massive outbreaks of deficiency disease?
Follow the money. We get what we reward.
Problem #3: Fungibility Impoverishes Farmers And Enriches Middlemen
The next problem I’ll discuss here is a consequence of the first two. It’s less obvious, but more far-reaching: turning a crop into a fungible commodity impoverishes farmers and consumers, while enriching middlemen.
Wagyū beef. To get this much fat inside your own muscles, make sure to feed yourself a similar diet of whole grains!
When selling your goods outside the commodity system, you can receive a better price for goods of better quality. To choose an extreme example, the highest grades and best cuts of Wagyū beef sell for well over $100/pound in Japan. More realistically, grass-finished beef sells for a 1.5-3x premium over feedlot beef, so individual producers can make a living selling quality meats.
However, if you’re forced into the commodity system, where you receive the same price for your crop regardless of quality, that means you can no longer differentiate your crop from anyone else…
…which means that you’re competing directly with everyone else, and your profit margins drop to nearly zero.
Processors and other middlemen benefit dramatically from this arrangement: they use these cheap commodity crops as raw materials to produce a bewildering variety of packaged pseudo-foods, which they differentiate and sell at the markup that used to belong to producers of actual food.
Most products in the snack and breakfast aisles are made from disassembling artificially cheap corn into its constituent parts, adding some artificial flavoring and coloring, and reassembling them into something that costs more per pound than pork, chicken, or hamburger. Cheetos, Fritos, Doritos, Tostitos, Corn Flakes, Corn Pops...
Furthermore, this allows the financial industry to profit by “making the market” (inserting themselves as middlemen in all transactions, e.g. “futures”), taking another slice of income out of the farmer’s remaining profit margin, and increasing prices to us at the supermarket.
All this fun doesn't come for free.
Here’s an illustrative example: since eggs are not completely fungible, an egg farmer—even a giant industrial egg farmer—makes over fifty cents per dollar of eggs sold. A corn farmer makes about four cents per dollar of corn syrup.
Problem #4: Fungibility Causes Environmental Devastation
The final problem I’ll discuss here is the environmental devastation wrought by commodity agriculture.
When commoditization prevents anyone from earning a margin on their crops by differentiating theirs from everyone else’s, and the market is further distorted by artificial incentives to produce as much as possible without regard to quality, we can expect that an unsustainable exploitation of resources will quickly result.
This is, in fact, the case. As I previously wrote in this article:
…Industrial grain production impoverishes our farmers, destroys our soil and our water, and leaves barren land, salt flats, and dead ocean deltas in its wake. It demands unimaginable amounts of fossil fuels to create nitrogen fertilizer, toxic herbicides and pesticides, and giant sowing and harvesting machines, and to transport the grain from the Midwest to where people actually live. It demands giant, river-killing dams to fill irrigation canals. It strip-mines fossil water, pumped from underground aquifiers that took millions of years to fill—all to grow corn, wheat, and soybeans on land best suited for grazing livestock on perennial grasses. And 3-5% of world natural gas production—1-2% of the entire world energy supply—is required just to make ammonium nitrate fertilizer.
In short, industrial agriculture is an unmitigated environmental catastrophe.
(Follow the links for more information about each issue.)
Conclusion: Eat Food, Not Commodities
Unfortunately my silly and far-fetched example above isn’t far-fetched at all: it’s become the foundation of our nation’s food policy.
The problems of industrial agriculture are primarily caused by a combination of commoditization and the broken farm policy that subsidizes it, leading to massive overproduction of corn, wheat, and soybeans that generates profits for middlemen and the financial industry at the direct expense of farmers and the consumer…
This article only begins the discussion of agricultural commoditization. Richard Manning’s “Against The Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization” not only covers these issues in depth—it goes much farther into the consequences of agriculture in general, not just the modern industrialized version. I highly recommend it.
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