To add to adolph's comment, could you point a citation to back up this?
And while you're not a shill, I find your site misguided, in overly relying on equating natural, traditional diets with healthy, leading you to some recommendations that are orthogonal to healthiness, like fermented veggies and sprouted grains, and some that are unhelpful to health, like red meat and butter. The people of Finland drastically improved their health metrics when they transitioned to a modern mainstream European diet away from their natural, traditional Finnish diet of lots of red meat and butter.
Additionally, how does a "modern mainstream European diet" compare to a traditional Finnish diet?
I've been reading Kristen's blog for a long time. I don't agree with everything I read, and I tend to be skeptical of strong opinions on either side of an equation. That said, I can't help but agree with the basic premise of the post: food producers are not entirely truthful about what's in the stuff they produce and we put into our bodies. And our health and producers' bottom lines do not always line up. For example, did you know that factory farmed chickens are fed arsenic, and that often ends in the meat you purchase from the supermarket[1]? And this went on for many years before the FDA put a stop to it?
I was thinking of a scientific study I read a couple years ago, the citation for which escapes me at the moment. How I long for the day when I can install the Google brain history page implant beta. But five seconds on the present-day Google uncovered both: (1) a Wikipedia page on Finnish cuisine that shows a picture of a butter-slathered pastry and mentions stuff about hunting, red meat, buttermilk, and fruits and vegetables being unavailable nine months out of the year until recently; and, also on the first page of results, (2) a scientific review paper in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons by an M.D.-Ph.D. Yale professor indicating that Finland has both the world's highest consumption of saturated fatty acids and the world's highest ischemic heart disease mortality rate, and the highest rate of myocardial infarction of any of the countries surveyed in another study; and that "it is generally established that the Finnish diet of fatty red meats, butter, and bread, is highly conducive to heart disease." The best part is, it's a review article that cites 64 other scientific articles, so you can follow up with those to learn more. Here you go, with my bonus url cruft:
The study I had remembered reading, which I'll track down this weekend sometime when I'm not on Hacker News while getting ready to go to work, was more recent and shows new improvements in Finnish health metrics as they have moved away from their traditional diet and begun eating a lot more food from the rest of Europe.
And I share your agreement with this particular post on Kristen's blog.
My sense, from following Kristen's blog, is that she might be a bit appalled by the traditional Finnish diet, too. She pushes a lot of grass-fed beef and butter produced from the milk of grass-fed cattle, but she also pushes lots of vegetables, among other things.
The red meat, butter, and buttermilk that abounds in the traditional Finnish diet are from moose and reindeer whose own diet in the Finnish woods is at least as all-natural, wholesome, and organic as the grass grazed by Kristen's cattle, but that didn't stop the Finns from being the world leaders in heart attacks. The LDL cholesterol in your bloodstream doesn't care what the cows you ate were eating when they were alive. Kristen's brand of feeling good for rebelling against the food-industrial complex and folksy pattern-matching of traditional must mean good are no substitute for the scientific method, and in this case it's (on average and over the long term) a life-or-death distinction.
Am I? Are you sure? The Finns, not the Sami in particular, have been observed to be the world's foremost eaters of red meat in general, as noted in my other post. To the degree that non-Sami Finns dieted on pork and beef instead of moose and reindeer, they have tended to consume all the more saturated fat.
At the same time, moose and reindeer are not cattle, and they are cold-weather animals, which means they have a lot of extra body fat. Extrapolating conclusions about moose and reindeer to cattle is not necessarily correct and there are reasons to believe it isn't.
There is a significant difference, but it works the opposite way, so that beef is worse for you. Cattle have been bred under ten thousand years of domestication to have fattier meat, whereas undomesticated sources of red meat are much leaner. Off the top of my head I can point you to the index of Guns, Germs and Steel for citations.
>Cattle have been bred under ten thousand years of domestication to have fattier meat, whereas undomesticated sources of red meat are much leaner.
I can see that applying to deer, elk, rabbit, etc -- but moose? Furthermore, there's a considerable market for lean beef especially in the modern era, and I know that pigs have rather recently been selected for leanness. My current knowledge of the health effects of red meat as a whole is that the data are conflicting:
The fact that Finland's diet was confounded with lots of butter and other fatty things makes the whole thing rather unconvincing as a data point saying that red meat is any more unhealthy than ordinary nutrition labeling (x grams of fat, y grams of carb, z grams of protein) would lead you to believe. I can buy a pound of 90/10 beef at the store with 12 grams of fat, ~3 grams of carbohydrate, and 23 grams of protein "per serving", which really doesn't sound terribly unhealthy next to e.g. a bag of potato chips.
Breeding for leaner red meat is a phenomenon of the last few decades, compared with breeding for fattier red meat which has been going on among domesticated cattle and swine for the last 10,000 years. Relatively leaner and relatively less processed red meat are relatively better for you, and there are various data about how relatively healthier the relatively better red meats are. But there are also clear and unconflicted data that vegetarians have far better health outcomes than omnivores, and that pescetarians, like Steve Jobs, who eat seafood and plant-based foods but no other meat, have still significantly better health outcomes than vegetarians.
And while you're not a shill, I find your site misguided, in overly relying on equating natural, traditional diets with healthy, leading you to some recommendations that are orthogonal to healthiness, like fermented veggies and sprouted grains, and some that are unhelpful to health, like red meat and butter. The people of Finland drastically improved their health metrics when they transitioned to a modern mainstream European diet away from their natural, traditional Finnish diet of lots of red meat and butter.
Additionally, how does a "modern mainstream European diet" compare to a traditional Finnish diet?
I've been reading Kristen's blog for a long time. I don't agree with everything I read, and I tend to be skeptical of strong opinions on either side of an equation. That said, I can't help but agree with the basic premise of the post: food producers are not entirely truthful about what's in the stuff they produce and we put into our bodies. And our health and producers' bottom lines do not always line up. For example, did you know that factory farmed chickens are fed arsenic, and that often ends in the meat you purchase from the supermarket[1]? And this went on for many years before the FDA put a stop to it?
[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=13793945
EDIT: Fixed italics.